Before It Breaks Read online

  They started off, buzzed to be part of a murder inquiry. Clement couldn’t help himself.

  ‘I guess they put the dog down?’

  The last he’d seen of it they were taking the wretch to the pound. Jo di Rivi looked guilty. Clement figured the poor thing had died in transit and they were trying to spare his feelings. Restoff smiled and jerked a thumb at his female colleague. ‘She adopted her.’

  ‘She was for the needle otherwise,’ di Rivi said defensively.

  ‘Didn’t she need surgery?’ Clement was still grappling with the idea the dog was alive.

  ‘Angela, the vet, is a friend. She did it for free. I needed a dog. They’ll keep her at the surgery for a while.’

  ‘You got a name?’ Same dumb question everybody asks.

  ‘No. I’m going to wait till I get her home. See what evolves.’

  Clement couldn’t think of anything to say so he made do with, ‘Find me the gun.’

  He hadn’t quite made it into his office when his phone rang. It was Lisa Keeble. He asked her to wait, entered the office and shut the door. Its starkness condemned him; only Phoebe’s drawings gave it life. They showed the same subject three times over, two stick people of almost equal size holding hands on enormously long arms. Phoebe had designated herself by long hair. He liked to think he was the other figure. They’d been done years ago. He apologised for keeping Lisa waiting. She was unfussed.

  ‘I’ve got Briony heading over to Macdougall Street to take a look at that scene.’

  ‘Don’t get too excited. I think our chances of a print anywhere are unlikely.’

  ‘They climb over a fence?’

  ‘No fence. But maybe you might find some soil or vegetation samples you can compare with Jasper’s Creek.’

  They both knew that would be a long shot. If anything was to come of the scene, it would more likely be from a doorknock.

  ‘How you doing out there?’

  ‘I found fingerprints on the drawers and in other places inside the shack. Besides yours, one set, Schaffer’s.’

  ‘You know that already?’

  ‘Printed his corpse, dabbed his vehicle yesterday, I recognise them.’

  ‘DNA?’

  ‘Found some skin in the shovel handle that could still be viable for DNA. If we’d have got it last night …’

  ‘I had a slight headache.’

  ‘If Rhino can pull DNA we eliminate Schaffer’s, see if it’s somebody else’s.’

  ‘No outboard, no computer?’

  ‘No.’

  And yet there were printouts, so either he had a computer, or a friend who had one, or he used internet cafés.

  ‘Is there an internet café here?’

  ‘Yes. At least two I know of, one next to the real estate agent, the other opposite The Dolphin. The Honky Nut.’

  Clement now recalled the one next to the estate agent. It was little more than an office with computers. He was aware of the café opposite The Dolphin restaurant but had never been inside. He thanked Lisa, told her she could wind up and get back to the creek when she felt ready. As he ended the call, the image of a computer and printer leapt into his head. He had seen them recently in relation to the case. Where? It took him a moment to locate the objects in the right space, Osterlund’s kitchen. He tried to remember what he’d done with the card Osterlund had handed him and eventually found it in his wallet. He debated whether to call the mobile or the house and settled on the house. The phone rang for some time. He was about to hang up when Osterlund answered in his clipped German style.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Detective Daniel Clement, Mr Osterlund.’

  ‘You’ve made an arrest?’

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘How can I help, Detective?’

  His head had started throbbing again. ‘Did Dieter Schaffer own a computer?’

  ‘No idea. Sorry. I never saw him with one.’

  ‘Did he ever use yours or talk about using one?’

  ‘Not that I remember. He didn’t seem the computer type. I’m sure I would have recalled if he talked about it.’

  Which, Osterlund, being an IT type, had nudged Clement to call him first. He thanked Osterlund and was about to hang up.

  ‘Do you have any leads you can talk about?’ Osterlund was trying to sound casual.

  ‘Nothing concrete. Thanks, Mr Osterlund.’

  He hadn’t checked Osterlund’s alibi with the neighbours and made a note to do so. He clicked on his computer and stared at Phoebe’s drawing while it loaded, trying to convince himself that this made him a great dad. Once the computer was ready for action he went to his search engine and typed in the address for the OIC website. It conveniently asked which language he wished to use. Clement chose English but may as well have picked Mandarin. OIC offered services for IT solutions, streaming and ‘The Cloud’. It seemed to be involved in advising firms with expensive abstract artworks on the walls of their foyers. At least that was the image Clement conjured. It offered a full range of Net publishing and marketing services too. Like a man who finds himself in the women’s toilet by mistake, Clement exited quickly. Next he did a search for Broome Anglers, found the club phone number, and typed that in to a casebook master sheet while he dialled. Jill answered in her effervescent manner.

  ‘Anglers, Jill speaking.’

  ‘Hi Jill, it’s Detective Daniel Clement.’

  ‘Oh hi, Dan.’

  Years of being a confidante to bar flies meant Jill immediately adopted first name familiarity.

  ‘Jill, do you know if Dieter Schaffer had a computer?’

  ‘A laptop. Don’t know what make, looked pretty old. He asked me once if he could print off some pages using our printer. I said I was sorry but I couldn’t let him. We’re only a small club.’

  She seemed worried Clement would think her a tightwad. Clement thought Schaffer had a cheek asking. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Few months ago. Said he wanted to print out some soccer stuff. Any idea what happened yet?’

  ‘Working on it.’

  ‘Pop in for a drink any time. First one’s on the house.’

  He thanked her for the offer. He’d established that Dieter Schaffer had a computer. Whether he had one forty-eight hours ago was a different matter. He could have sold it, it could have stopped working. Clement needed a coffee and he could walk to either of the internet cafés Lisa had mentioned in under ten minutes. He left via the back door.

  Getting his legs moving somehow lessened the pain in his head. He tried to run through where he was on things and felt discouraged. He still knew very little about Dieter Schaffer. Perhaps he should have tried to track down the sister first thing? He’d get Earle onto that. Then again, if Dieter had been a cop in Hamburg, the police there might be a good way to locate his origins. So far Clement had no motive or suspect. The one odd thing that he’d turned up was somebody had put a clean t-shirt on the body; why? Surely that indicated a close relationship.

  A technique Clement fell into almost naturally on these more elusive cases was to imagine himself conversing with the dead man. It brought the victim home, made him real, made the way he thought of the case more diverse and complete. Clement projected Dieter beside him right now, hunched over a can of beer, smoke from a reefer curling between them. Everybody said you were a loner, so there was some secret life to you, Dieter, wasn’t there? All of us have those dark, trembling secrets too frightened to emerge into the light, so you were hiding something, even if that’s not what got you killed.

  Sometimes he almost expected the victim to answer and furnish him with details of the murder. Today was not that day.

  Clement decided he’d try the Honky Nut café first. From the little he had learned of Dieter Schaffer it seemed this would be more his style than the antiseptic office tone of the café up the road. The Honky Nut took its name from the large external seeds that adorned gum trees. Hard and heavy as small rocks, they dropped and littered th
e ground. As kids you could collect them and pelt them at enemies or throw them on an open fire generating surprising heat. Florists sprayed them gold or silver and used them decoratively but there was no gold or silver in the café which was themed by cheap odd lots of furniture, not unlike Schaffer’s own kitchen. A couple of surfer, dope-smoking types sat out front on a narrow wooden veranda sipping milkshakes under vines. Clement stepped into a room that boasted laminex tables and an old sofa up front, and half a dozen work-station cubicles beyond with computers. Two backpacker girls were hunched over one of the computers. Clement guessed they shared the cost. For a while he’d forgotten those days when every cent counted but lately, with the split, they had returned. A large blackboard directly over the counter displayed a menu creatively drawn in coloured chalk. An attractive, dusky young woman with perfect skin and a head full of beautiful dark curls stood relaxed behind the counter reading a magazine. She turned a pleasant smile on him. He felt guilty depriving her of an expected sale, and got the bad news over with, explaining who he was.

  ‘I’m investigating the death of a man named Dieter Schaffer. I think he may have been a customer.’

  The young woman looked puzzled and a little afraid. Clement realised he hadn’t brought the snap of Schaffer and cursed inwardly. Now all he had was a photo of the dead man he’d taken with his phone. He tried to reassure her.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m just trying to confirm if he used his computer recently. Do people do that? Bring their laptops in here and connect to the Net.’

  ‘Yes they do.’ There was a hint of an accent which he couldn’t identify. ‘What was his name again?’

  ‘Dieter Schaffer.’ It clearly meant nothing to her. ‘He was German.’

  At first nothing, and then a light in her eyes. ‘Around sixty? He checks soccer results.’

  ‘That’s him.’ Small mercy. He wouldn’t have to show her the photo after all.

  She was nodding now. ‘He’d go on the Net and print out some pages. He’s dead?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes he is. When was the last time he was in?’

  ‘Last week sometime, I think. He liked his coffee black, strong.’

  ‘Did you ever see him with anyone? Did he ever meet anybody here?’

  ‘Not that I remember. He used to come in, have a coffee and use our Net for a while. What happened to him?’

  ‘We’re trying to establish that. How did he pay you?’

  She frowned as she thought. ‘Cash I think. It was never very much.’

  ‘If you recall anything else at all about him please let me know. Clement.’

  He pointed in the direction of the station, thanked her for her time and left.

  The sun was heating up. He had planned to buy a coffee from The Dolphin after he left here but now that seemed a betrayal to the Honky Nut. He started back towards the station picking up on what he had been mulling over before. Somebody had rifled through those drawers at Schaffer’s and probably taken the computer. Maybe it was whoever killed Schaffer, either looking to steal or attempting to remove something incriminating. But he could not rule out that it was simply somebody who’d learned Dieter Schaffer was dead. People figured the dead had no need of their possessions, or at least told themselves that to justify their actions. His phone rang. It was Jo di Rivi. She was clearly excited, speaking faster and in a higher pitch than usual.

  ‘We might have got lucky.’

  She quickly ran through the story. As requested, she’d called the other Kimberley stations and mentioned the missing outboard and gun. A young uniform in Derby, Luke Byrd, had got a call from a mate who’d been approached by a young aboriginal man about buying an outboard motor ‘for cheap’. His mate reckoned the young bloke could have been a glue-sniffer. He was driving an old Ford station wagon and there was a girl with him who looked nervous. The whole thing seemed suss so he called Luke. Luke had a fair idea who the young fellow was.

  ‘I told Byrd to wait until I called you,’ said di Rivi.

  Clement was already jogging to the station.

  ‘On my way.’ He called Graham Earle and Shepherd as he ran and told them to meet him at the Derby police station.

  ‘Vests, weapons. If you’re there before me, wait.’

  10

  It was around two and half hours before they assembled at the Derby police station. Cutting straight across from Dieter Schaffer’s shack, a mixture of dirt roads and open scrub, Earle had managed to arrive ten minutes ahead of Shepherd. Even though starting at Jasper’s Creek made him geographically the closest, he had faced the worst terrain. Clement had simply hammered full-bore down the highway. Constable Luke Byrd might have only been fractionally taller than Shepherd but his mass was far greater, and it was all oak. Policing outback Western Australia, size mattered. Byrd ran them through what he knew as the detectives strapped on protective vests.

  ‘Your suspect is Sebastian Kilmorley, seventeen. He’s from Fitzroy Crossing. I did a stint there last year and picked him up a couple of times; usual shit, sniffing petrol, bit of break and enter, stole a car. Nothing big-time though, I wouldn’t have thought he was hardcore. His girlfriend is Diana. I don’t know her second name. Everybody called her “Princess”. I think she was from one of the settlements north.’

  ‘How sure are you this is the guy?’ Earle was struggling to get the vest to sit over his expanding gut.

  ‘Sebastian drove an old yellow Ford station wagon, exactly like the one the kid with the outboard had, at least as my mate described it.’

  ‘He could have sold it.’ Shepherd establishing a bit of pissing room. Clement almost groaned.

  ‘Yeah but the girl sounds just like Diana.’

  Clement checked his pistol. ‘There’s no chance Sebastian could legitimately have an outboard?’

  ‘Some mate might have given it to him to flog but none of Sebastian’s mates would have it legitimately either.’ Luke Byrd put his hands on his hips, almost defying them to disagree.

  Clement had no inclination to. ‘So where do we look for him?’

  ‘Fifteen k that way.’ The answer came not from Byrd but his sergeant, a dark haired stocky man who introduced himself as Dave Drummond.

  ‘Sarge has eyes and ears all over,’ said Byrd.

  ‘Costs me a slab twice a year, best investment ever. Soon as Luke told me, I leaned on a couple of contacts. They said the boy and girl are camping at a place they call Smooth Rock.’ There was a large map of the region on the wall. Drummond stabbed a location to the east. Like a body surfer in a wave’s aspic, Clement allowed the momentum to carry him; he felt his speech quicken.

  ‘We’ll take two cars. Constable, you ride with me. Shep, you’re in with Sergeant Drummond.’

  Earle drove, Byrd in the back. It was five degrees hotter here than Broome, sparse, primitive. We’re like an old-time posse heading after the outlaw, Clement thought as he stared through the bug-smeared windscreen. He had been in this kind of situation before. Confronting a young psycho with a weapon was never routine. Logic might tell them to put down the weapon but logic did not camp in the minds of young stoners. An image of Phoebe mourning her dead father barged its way into his brain. He dismissed it but not before reminding himself he was supposed to get her this evening, which would not be possible now, whatever happened. He dialled.

  ‘Yes, Dan.’

  Did Marilyn save the world-weary tone especially for him or was Brian subject to it too?

  ‘I’m in the middle of this thing. I can’t get Phoebe today.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. She was invited to go on Ashleigh’s boat anyway, but didn’t want to hurt your feelings.’

  He knew she was waiting for him to ask who Ashleigh was thereby confirming he wasn’t really part of the family unit only an interested onlooker.

  ‘This might be done by tomorrow sometime.’

  ‘That’s not going to work. I just told you, they’re sailing.’

  She hadn’t explained it was for the whole weekend but
what did that matter? She had the high moral ground.

  ‘I’ll call her when this is wrapped up.’

  ‘Okay. Good luck.’

  His relationship with Marilyn had devolved into a series of skirmishes that were never decided in his favour. And yet he sometimes felt she could have been a more ruthless foe if she really desired. Clement was aware the other men were staying studiously deaf.

  ‘Up here,’ said Byrd, pointing at a turn-off.

  Earle turned down the narrow, rutted dirt track. The usual savannah-style topography gave way to something dense. Clement checked the rear-vision and saw Drummond and Shepherd follow. A couple of minutes in, Drummond flashed his lights. Earle read the signal and pulled over.

  The men clambered out of the vehicles and were instantly desiccated. There was no breeze and the smell of bush grasses was strong. Drummond pointed at a grove of trees.

  ‘Likely just down through there.’

  The words were no sooner out of his mouth than two shots rang out, blended with a volley of screams.

  ‘Shit.’

  Clement couldn’t even be sure which of them had said it. He was already running through the bush, changing direction to home in on shrill shouts. The others were either side and behind him. They emerged into a small clearing. A yellow station wagon was parked under a gum tree. A bare-chested young man, really only a boy, was pointing a rifle at a girl. He turned, confused and half-dazed at the commotion.

  ‘Sebastian, put the gun down.’ Byrd put his hand out in a calming manner. Earle and Drummond already had pistols drawn. The girl let loose a stream of invective at the boy.

  ‘You dumb shit. I told you. You’re fucking dumb.’

  The boy’s eyes were white bubbles. They darted between her and them. Clement could see it was a Ruger 22 he was holding.

  ‘Put the gun down, Sebastian.’