Under the Cold Bright Lights Read online

  Auhl the retread, expected to run an experienced eye over unsolved murders, accidental deaths and missing persons cases thought to be suspicious. Identify those that might now be solved with the benefit of new technology. Identify those that had been mishandled or underinvestigated; those in which new information had come to light. Liaise where necessary with other squads, including Homicide and Major Crimes. Push for the retesting of old DNA samples. Have another shot at any alibi witnesses who might have fallen out with the suspects. Track changes wrought by time—a crime scene that was now a car park, for example. A key figure since deceased, disappeared overseas, suffering dementia or now married to the chief suspect.

  Piece of cake.

  Liz had urged him to take the job. ‘You’re made for it, darling heart.’ She still called him that from time to time. Out of habit, probably. She reminded him what he’d been like back in his Homicide days, a case dragging on. ‘Obsessive—in a good way.’ Meaning he’d agonise that he’d missed something. That a liar had sucked him in. That among the dozens of names he’d collected during an investigation, one was the killer’s.

  ‘We have every confidence,’ Rosie Elphick had said that morning as Auhl drained his breakfast coffee.

  ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘We know that.’

  ‘The coroner ruled it an accident, I seem to recall.’

  He didn’t, though. What he recalled was that Elphick, J. hadn’t been ruled a murder.

  There was a silence on the line, a subtle communication of disappointment. ‘Wrong,’ chided Erica gently. ‘The coroner was quite equivocal.’

  And Rosie said fiercely: ‘Read his findings again, please, Alan.’

  AUHL HEADED STRAIGHT for the file room when he reached the police complex.

  Hated that room. Thought they’d find his body in there one day, sandwiched somewhere in the massive compactus. Or stretched out on the floor tiles, one hand reaching, desperate fingernail scratches on the door. Back when he worked Homicide he’d rarely needed cold-case files. His cases were hot, or at least tepid. You solved them with shoe leather, phone work, computer searches and questioning. Now he seemed to spend half his time pulling files—and ancient paper files at that. Since the 1950s, two hundred and eighty unsolved murders on the books of Victoria Police. A thousand missing persons cases—of which a third were probably murders.

  Looking this morning for Elphick, J., 2011, he rolled four grim beige slabs of shelving to the left, creating a narrow aisle. He stepped in, grabbed the file box and stepped smartly out, half-expecting the shelves to abhor the vacuum. Would he even hear a warning rumble?

  He took Elphick, J. to the small tenth-floor room that was home to Cold Case and Missing Persons. The boss was on the phone in her glass cubicle at the far end of the open-plan room, door closed. One of the detective constables was in court. The other, Claire Pascal, was slumped at her screen with her back to him. Auhl was content to leave it that way. The first time he’d gone out on a job with Claire—a witness re-interview—she’d got in the car and threatened to blind him with capsicum spray if he laid a hand on her.

  Dumping the Elphick file box on his desk, he pulled out the contents item by item, scenting the air with a stale mustiness. A bulging file in a rotting rubber band, an envelope of crime-scene photos, crime-scene video. He eased off the rubber band. It broke.

  The overview crime-scene photos showed John Elphick on his back in thick spring grass at the rear of his Holden ute, parked beside a wire fence. Closer to, the dead man was heavyset with thick white hair, wearing faded jeans, a flannelette shirt and elastic-sided boots. There were gashes to his head and blood seepage on his forehead, cheeks, neck, shirt collar, down inside the shirt. Auhl thought about that: Elphick was upright when he received the injuries?

  Auhl read every report and statement, then turned to the autopsy findings. Elphick had died of massive head trauma. Blood and skin tissue had been found on the roo bar of the ute, which tended to argue against murder. But the pathologist had also noted the pattern of blood flow from head to upper body, and the presence of blood in the cabin of the farm vehicle: he couldn’t rule out assault.

  And for years now the victim’s daughters had politely, gently tried to convince Auhl that he’d dropped the ball back then. ‘Inclined to agree,’ muttered Auhl now.

  ‘Talking to yourself,’ Claire Pascal said, still with her back to him. ‘Sad old bastard.’

  Auhl ignored her. Name-calling by the youngsters wasn’t going to hurt him. He would do what he’d been hired to do.

  Next, he slotted the crime-scene DVD into his laptop. Photos were useful for close detail, but a video drew you into the scene. You walked through it with the videographer. When you worked a cold case, a video was the best alternative to having been present.

  Auhl saw a hill slope softened by dense spring grasses, a dam at the bottom, half-full, and four nearby gum trees. Distant hills rising to a mountain range in the north and a broad valley to the south—a vista of squares, stripes, dots and dashes that were roads, paddocks, hedges and rooftops. And now here was the wire fence, the ute and the body. At one point the videographer had stood on the tray of the vehicle, the elevation giving Auhl a clearer impression of the body in relation to the fence and the tailgate. Hope the guy cleared it with the techs before climbing aboard, he thought. Pressed pause.

  Another benefit of the elevation: he could see two sets of tyre tracks in the grass. Elphick’s Holden had arrived at the scene after coming through the gate beside the dam at the bottom of the paddock. The second set of tracks ran parallel to Elphick’s, but on the other side of the fence. Whoever made them had at some point U-turned and gone back down the slope.

  Auhl made a note: Check who owns or owned the land next door.

  He pressed play again. The video now lingered over the body, top to bottom, soles of the boots, trousers, hands, bloodied head and torso. Then it took him to the cabin of the Holden. Vinyl, the drivers seat sagging, black electrical tape on a couple of splits. Dusty dashboard, also split in a couple of spots. Worn floor mats. Frayed, grubby seatbelts. Air bubbles under the registration sticker, bottom left of the scratched windscreen. A roofing nail, a paperclip and a few coins in the open ashtray. Owners manual, a 2010 phone bill, matches, a pale blue towelling hat and a pair of pliers in the glovebox. In the console between the seats: more coins, Cancer Council sunglasses, a tiny spiral-bound notebook, a chewed carpenters pencil.

  Auhl re-read the reports. The investigating detectives had not mentioned the notebook. The crime-scene manager had. Elphick had used it to jot down rainfall figures, shopping lists, reminders: buy firewood, service mower, re-hang the front gate.

  Auhl went back to the video: the notebook was closed, the cover creased, faded, coming away from the spiral binding. He pressed pause and enlarged the image. Elphick had scribbled something on the cover of the notebook. Random letters. A number? The pencil strokes were indistinct on the shiny surface.

  He was dimly aware of Claire Pascal’s desk phone, Claire muttering and finally swinging around in her chair. ‘Oi, Retread.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The boss wants us to take a little trip to the country.’

  ‘Concerning?’

  ‘Come on,’ she said testily. ‘I’ll tell you in the car.’

  Auhl stood, shrugged into his jacket, checked for phone and wallet.

  Pascal wasn’t finished with him. ‘Don’t forget your Zimmer frame.’

  3

  AUHL SIGNED OUT an unmarked sedan and headed onto the Monash, directed by the encouraging voice of the maps app on Claire Pascal’s phone. That voice—he thought she sounded like a Sarah—was his only warm company. Pascal sat centimetres from him, radiating hostility, staring ahead. She didn’t want to work a case with him? Stiff shit. Josh Bugg, the other youngster, was in court. So unless the boss wanted to get involved, Pascal had no choice. Auhl felt inclined to wind her up further, keep it down to sixty on the freeway
like the old geezer he was. But one of them had to be an adult.

  The highway unfurled and then they were on EastLink and, grudgingly, Pascal was telling him where they were going and why.

  ‘Some bloke digging up a concrete slab near Pearcedale, found a body under it. Skeleton.’

  ‘Meaning old and cold,’ Auhl said.

  She shot him a look. ‘Meaning the hotshots from Homicide have handpassed it to us.’

  Auhl pricked up his ears, sensing an undercurrent. Personal? He didn’t know much about Claire Pascal’s home life. Married, that’s all he knew. To a cop? Anyway, it wasn’t as if he wanted to trade domestic chat with someone who’d warned him off on pain of a faceful of capsicum.

  He glanced at her. Young. Fit. Capable. Still staring ahead, her hair scraped back severely, accentuating the sharpness of face and manner. At the same time, she smelled pleasantly of freshly laundered clothes and a tangy kind of shampoo. He didn’t mind her. She did call him Retread, but fair enough, Auhl thought. These days he felt like a retread. Cheaply slapped together. Just about guaranteed to wear down quickly.

  The freeway spooled away beneath the car and eventually, by pushing, prodding and offering, he got Pascal to open up. They discussed the boss, the Elphick case, a case she was working on. Time ceased to drag.

  Then, after a long pause, she said, ‘How come you resigned and joined up again?’ and Auhl heard a tone.

  He had a pretty shrewd idea of the resentments that lay behind the name-calling and obstructiveness he got from the younger Cold Case and Homicide detectives. He was holding back their careers. He was expecting—and receiving—preferential treatment. He hadn’t kept up with technical and investigative advances. Slow, middle-aged, he’d be a liability in life-threatening situations.

  Not much of that was true but, in the six months he’d been on the team, Auhl had stepped on toes and asked hard questions. He’d also laid bare instances of laziness, ineptitude and inexperience in some of the original investigations.

  Claire Pascal was probably feeling sidelined right now.

  He said carefully, ‘I was approached. Police forces everywhere are rehiring retired cops to work cold cases. It frees up resources.’

  She dismissed that. ‘The company line. What I want to know is how come you retired in the first place?’

  ‘Truthfully? Ten years in Homicide, the crime scenes got to me. Awful, some of them. Most of them. You’re supposed to grow a shell. I couldn’t.’

  She didn’t call him a princess, tell him to man up—the kinds of rebukes he’d had levelled at him during his long career. She addressed the windscreen: ‘It got to you.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I guess looking at old crime-scene photos isn’t the same.’

  ‘Nope.’

  She lapsed back into moody silence. Then, near Frankston, as Auhl took the exit onto Peninsula Link, she said suddenly, ‘I was out of the force for three years.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I was on a raid. Ice lab in a house near Melton. I got shoved through a plate-glass window by one of my own team. One of the competitive types; hates to come last.’ She lifted her right hand from her lap, pulled back her sleeve and floated her arm in the space between Auhl and the dashboard. He risked a quick glance: forearm scarring, the skin ridged with threads and cords of mangled tissue.

  ‘Tendon damage. I’ve got full use back now, or pretty close. But the surgery and rehab took forever and I kind of…lost it. My nerve.’

  ‘Shitty thing to happen.’

  ‘The police medical officer more or less told me to resign on health grounds, which I did, but after a year I couldn’t hack it anymore. Rejoined, applied to go back on my old team—they wouldn’t have me—got sent to a suburban CIU, way out on the other side of the city, with a bastard sergeant who didn’t want a woman on his team.’ She paused. ‘I learned that the hard way.’

  ‘Uh huh?’

  Claire went on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Late shifts. A lot of late shifts. Meaning I was alone in the station at the dead of night. Filthy phone calls. Strange noises. Tyres slashed, on one memorable occasion.’

  Another pause.

  ‘And if I worked days he’d touch me up, come-ons and little put-downs the whole time. At least you don’t do that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want a faceful of capsicum spray,’ Auhl said.

  She looked at him blankly, then barked a laugh and blushed. ‘Yeah, well, you know, ancient history; no hard feelings.’

  ‘Deal,’ Auhl said. ‘So you applied for a transfer to Cold Cases?’

  ‘And the rest is history.’

  Not too much history yet, Auhl thought. She’d only joined a month before him. As they rode in silence, most of the tension gone, Auhl let himself daydream. His house, his daughter, his wife. The students and the broken men and women who sometimes stayed awhile. And niggling thoughts: old Mr Elphick lying on the ground between his farm ute and his boundary fence. The tyre tracks. The notebook between the seats.

  The notebook and the jumble of numbers and letters that Elphick had pencilled on the cover…

  ‘Numberplate.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Sorry. Note to self.’

  ‘Old people talk to themselves,’ Claire Pascal said. ‘I’ve noticed it before.’

  Auhl laughed and let Sarah take them to an address east of Pearcedale.

  THEY FOUND THEMSELVES in a land not quite flat, the horizon barely decorated in any direction. Two extremes of human habitation: older gum trees, broad paddocks and cypress hedges marked the original farm homesteads. Dusty razed lots sprouted the colonnades of Mediterranean mansions, cheap kit homes and low-slung tan brick places with broad verandas. Some shrubs and saplings here and there, a miserable replacement for the gum trees bulldozed to ease the creep of the young families. Boats on trailers, bloated SUVs, satellite dishes. Signs advertised grass slashing, yoga, dog grooming and horse agistment. Now and then a grazing goat, a horse, an alpaca. A guy tearing around in an ATV with a dog on the back.

  Finally Sarah told Auhl to turn left and he bounced them along a dirt road to an open gate in a white railing fence. At the end of a gravel driveway, several vehicles beside a new-looking house of outdated design, triple-fronted brick veneer with a tiled roof. Auhl made a mental note of the vehicles as he turned in: a small tradesman’s truck, a station wagon, a marked police car, a white unmarked like the one they were driving, a crime-scene van, two SUVs in a carport. Several figures came into view, gathered around a blue poly tent, the kind they always put up to preserve the body and conceal it from the media.

  Auhl slowed the car, bumped over the grass, pulled in behind the crime-scene van and they got out, taking a moment to scan the property.

  Not really isolated, Auhl noted. People bought five- and ten-hectare blocks out here, meaning they had a sense of isolation but often were no more than a horse paddock away from their neighbours. And this place had untilled land on all sides, with a hint of red tin roof above wattle trees three hundred metres further along the road. The only other nearby structures were an aluminium gardening shed with a lean-to for firewood and a shiny corrugated shed containing hay bales, a horse float, a trailer, a ride-on mower.

  Hay bales. Auhl scouted around again and saw two miniature ponies in a fenced enclosure behind the house.

  THE HOMICIDE SQUAD was represented by a pair of detective constables, Malesa and Duggan. Auhl knew them by sight, Pascal better than that.

  ‘How’s it going, Claire?’ Malesa said.

  He was a slight, strutting character with a strong stink of aftershave. Duggan, a gangly gum-chewer, slouched behind with hands in pockets.

  Malesa went on: ‘Old Retread here showing you how it’s done?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Claire said. She looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Left his Zimmer frame in the car?’ Duggan said.

  Auhl was tired of the Zimmer frame jokes. Maybe Claire was too. She said, ‘Yeah, thanks guys, hila
rious. So what have we got, et cetera, et cetera?’

  With Malesa outlining the circumstances leading to the discovery of a skeleton under a concrete slab, they wandered over to the crime-scene tent. A slight breeze flowed over the open fields. The tent walls billowed in, out.

  ‘First impressions?’ said Auhl.

  Malesa snorted. ‘A first-impressions guy. First impressions, the body’s been there for a lot of years.’

  They paused at the entry. Auhl watched a photographer at work, a videographer, two crime-scene technicians, the latter thigh-deep in a hole in the ground. All wore disposable forensic-examination suits and bootees. The skeleton had been lifted out and placed on a tarp, where another tech crouched over it, brushing dirt from the bones. Auhl could see a belt buckle and a scrap of leather. Scraps of rotted fabric on the upper torso, around the waist and on one leg. Running shoes, synthetic, mostly intact.

  Freya Berg, the crime-scene pathologist, knelt on the other side of the remains, watching the brush reveal the bones. She looked up. ‘Alan? You on the job again?’

  ‘For my sins.’

  That was enough idle talk. Berg peered back down and said, ‘Male, shortish, probably young, going by his teeth. By young I mean late teens, early twenties. Possibly shot. There’s a chip out of his bottom left-hand rib, a corresponding chip’—she craned her head—‘lower spine. So, maybe shot in the chest, the bullet going right through.’

  Auhl turned to the hole, the excavated dirt and bits of concrete piled beside it. ‘Metal detector find anything?’

  The technicians ignored him. Duggan paused mid-chew to say, ‘Nope.’

  ‘Shot elsewhere,’ Pascal said. She glanced around at the house.

  Malesa gave her a twisted grin. ‘Hate to disappoint you, Claire, but that gorgeous residence has been there less than two years. Same with the sheds.’

  Pascal pointed at the excavation. ‘What about the slab? Used to be, what? Floor of a shed?’