She was unconvinced. There would be fallout, she didn’t doubt that, but she also knew Bill would stand foursquare behind her.
Dana understood how Nathan could mistake Lou for Jeb in the dark, amid his rising panic. He would have been jolted badly by having seen Jeb a few weeks before – the first sighting in fifteen years, and a brutal recoil back to the darkest days and the insulin. But she hadn’t had time to process why Nathan hadn’t become aware of who was dead. Surely there had been some point where someone had mentioned Lou?
‘He didn’t know it was Lou,’ she pointed out. ‘I don’t mean at the time; I mean all day. How is that possible?’
Bill shrugged. ‘Well, Whittler never saw the body in daylight, or any light. He was dragged away in absolute darkness and held in the next aisle. He would have been put in the patrol car by uniform long before daylight, and they only turned on the store lights after they were sure Lou was dead – they needed to switch on the electric supply first. By then, the scene was filling up with people and Whittler was hunkered down in a car with tinted windows, and no direct view inside the store. Those guys never talk when they’re bringing suspects in, except to tell them to shut up. So no, he wouldn’t have known who he stabbed.’
Mike chimed in. ‘Yeah, and since he was never charged until now, except for the burglaries, we probably never spoke the name Lou Cassavette in front of him. We weren’t going to quiz him about the stabbing until we had enough ammunition. Don’t forget, we were building up to that final discussion all day. Whittler was so sure – and ashamed – that he’d killed Jeb that he never questioned us about who he killed. So no, he’d have no way of knowing. But it never actually occurred to me that he didn’t know.’
It made a crude kind of sense. Nathan had been focused on directing the discussion his way, giving Dana the background to understand why he’d killed. That kind of approach also precluded talking about the stabbing until the latest possible point. In fact, both Dana and Nathan had been working on the same strategy – for different reasons – without the other realising it. Both schemes precluded mentioning Lou Cassavette until the final moments.
Dana could feel the last of her energy slipping away.
Mike opened his arms and they hugged. She was crap at hugging; her arms hung around in the littoral next to Mike’s shape, never quite getting there. Bill shook his head, as though he never expected her to get better at it.
Bill tilted his head. ‘Now go home, sleep long, and we’ll sort out the details in the morning.’
She nodded wearily and sloped off.
Passing reception, she wished Miriam goodnight. The lights were dimmed for the evening; Miriam’s glasses reflected the fidgeting blue screensaver as she read her paperback and waved absent-mindedly. Dana had hoped there would be a message from Lucy, but there was nothing.
As the reception doors swooshed open she felt a blast of cold air. It was a relief to her skin, if not her psyche.
Her shoes clacked on the pavement as she ducked down a long path known as Deadman’s Alley. It was the quickest route between work and home: the alley where, decades ago, they used to store bodies before cremation. The remains of the original Carlton ice house and morgue were now a mound of temporary seating overlooking the sports oval. In summer, cicadas screeched all evening along here; now, it was silent.
The cold made her fingers tingle. She started to feel less stooped and less drained with every step away from people and towards the sanctuary of home. Poor Nathan, she thought: his sanctuary is no more, and he lost it all without even ridding himself of Jeb. And poor Lou Cassavette: simply trying to protect his failing investment.
It shook her that she still thought about Nathan far more than she did about Lou. It remained the Whittler case to her, not the Cassavette case. Thinking more about the killer than the victim was surely the act of a callous, selfish person. She had no doubt about that at all.
Home was a narrow terrace of clapboard, in sharp relief under the streetlight she’d paid the council to have right outside. A gunshot house, they used to call them; the corridor and stairs ran the length of one side of the home, each room off it to the right. Once inside, she snapped all the door locks and did a sweep of the ground floor by torchlight. Reminded by Nathan’s explanation of the window-lock routine, she tested every one on the ground floor.
Only then did she put her gun away in the lockable metal cupboard, take off her coat and turn on a light. She switched on the kettle and texted Father Timms.
Home. Got a confession from the suspect. Thank you.
The answer came in seconds; she’d seen Timms’ ham-fisted, chubby-fingered efforts at texting and was surprised by his speed.
Call if you feel you need to. Or should. Stay safe.
The clock said there were six and a half hours of the Day left. She wondered if this feeling of exhaustion would help her through it: perhaps she’d quickly fall asleep and drift through to morning. Or maybe her mind would push through the tiredness: drag her to a new place where she was too fatigued to think straight. She’d never done the Day this way: it worried her that she had no knowledge to draw upon.
Home was the counterpoint; the place where she didn’t have to work, in any sense. Here, she could simply be; without constantly having to intuit what people were thinking, what they meant behind what they said, what effect she was having on them. People were continually, relentlessly exhausting. Home was where none of that had to matter.
It hadn’t always been this way; in fact, until she was an adult the reverse had applied. School, the library, outdoors – anywhere was safer, easier and less chilling than home. The library was the place where the books were, and her mother wasn’t: that was the point and the appeal of it. It was when her childhood self stepped through the front door of the house that her fears began to solidify, when the pit of her stomach twisted and her legs buckled. It had taken her until the age of twenty-five to begin inverting her life – until then, the mere sight of home could make her choke on thin air.
She’d set the tea by the side of her chair when the telephone rang. She frowned. About six people knew her mobile number; maybe three knew her landline. She half hoped it was some hapless telesales person she could rip into without conscience.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Luce. Hope you don’t mind. This a bad time?’
Lucy had a honeyed tone down a landline. Like a long-loved radio voice, it sounded different to how the speaker looked. She sounded velvet and gold.
‘Uh, no. No, that’s fine.’ Dana was flustered. Lucy wasn’t quite inside her home, but was – sort of. It was a strange sensation that she’d never expected to face. ‘Did you hear we got Nathan for it?’
‘Yeah, Mikey sent me an email.’ There was a clatter, as if Lucy was moving around in a kitchen. ‘Mistook him for Jeb?’
Dana sank into her armchair but sat rigidly forward, a polite guest in her own house. ‘Apparently so. Nathan had seen Jeb briefly a couple of weeks before, so he was in the front of Nathan’s mind. Lou and Jeb had an identical silhouette: baldness, the bulk, the shoulders, the shape of the head. I remember now – Rainer said someone had called them “two peas in a pod”.’
‘Plus, he’d been fixating on Jeb for fifteen years in that cave. Anyone who looked quite like Jeb was going to be Jeb, in his eyes.’
That was a good point, Dana thought. Nathan hadn’t seen Jeb for a decade and a half; then a brief glimpse from a distance a few weeks ago. He’d still have been guessing a little at how Jeb had aged. Anyone with a pretty good similarity and a shiny bald head might be moulded by Nathan’s mind into an older Jeb. Plus, the feeling of being trapped – of having your future controlled by someone else – would have come flooding back in the store. It was the feeling Jeb had engendered for years at home: then a sinister muscle-memory in the dark for Nathan, shaping his other senses accordingly.