Five minutes later, Isobel finally threw the bat on the bed. 'Where are you going to be while I'm hitting this home run?' she asked.
'Don't worry about me. Hopefully, it won't come to this. If they come, with any luck, you, me and Charlie will be on the roof.'
As soon as she'd arrived home from work, Joss had again tried to persuade her to take Charlie to her mother's home in Cairns. She'd turned him down without waiting to listen to his argument. As though he'd known that would be her response, he'd insisted she come up to their bedroom and practise climbing out of the window and onto their roof.
'Can we at least wait till it's dark?' she'd wanted to know. 'And I'm not teaching Charlie to climb out a window onto the roof!'
'Fine,' he'd capitulated. 'We take her only if necessary.'
So, when evening had fallen, Isobel had climbed out of the low bedroom window onto their tiled roof. Joss had followed her out.
'Move around to the side a bit.'
He'd spoken softly, thank God. Isobel couldn't imagine trying to explain this to Mrs Wilkinson next door.
Isobel had inched her way around on the tiles; the slope here was gentle, and it was not difficult to move along. Fortunately, the rain had cleared up just after lunch, and the tiles had been dry and still quite warm.
'What the hell's this?' she whispered when she'd come across a dark shape wedged into a corner on the roof.
'The ladder, of course. How did you think we were going to get Charlie down?'
On her haunches on the roof, Isobel had found herself worried far less about a potential home invasion than about her husband's grip on reality. Was she right to humour him in this way? Should she just insist he see the counsellor, refuse to go along with his paranoid plans? Was all this making him worse? What was she doing squatting out here? She'd studied Joss from behind as he negotiated the roof, moving assuredly across the tiles, considering every angle. She determined to try to talk to him again tomorrow.
Back in the bedroom, Isobel put her hand on Joss's shoulder.
'Come on, babe, I'm tired. Let's have a shower and go to bed early.'
Joss picked the bat up from the bed and handed it to her.
'Remember, we're in a confined space,' he said. 'You don't want to have to try and swing it. And you don't want him to get closer to you than a metre. Show me again.'
17
'DO YOU WANT to get out of here today?' Jill asked Gabriel as they sat at their desks in the communal detectives' office in Liverpool. The taskforce meeting had just concluded and Jill was not looking forward to chatting with her colleagues this morning. As Gabriel's smiling eyes met hers over the rim of his coffee mug, she continued, 'It's that bloody current affairs show from last night. I don't want to hear what Derek Reid and his mates have to say about it.'
'You looked pretty tough handcuffing the dangerous assailant in the suburbs,' said Gabriel.
'Don't start, Mr Door Job.'
'Yeah, well,' he said, 'maybe we should go out and do some more interviews.'
'Who's up next?' Jill flicked through the folder in front of her.
'Um, that couple in Balmain,' Gabriel answered. He spoke without looking up, absorbed in the statements in front of him.
'Yeah, that's right,' she said. 'Isobel Rymill and Joss Preston-Jones. That was the Wu case, right?' She didn't really expect an answer and got none. 'Poor bastard, they couldn't save one of his legs, you know. Surgery didn't take.'
'Are you gonna eat that?'
Jill looked down at the banana on her desk. Morning tea. What the hell. She slid it over. He grinned, more at the fruit than at her. He peeled it with his thick fingers and ate it in three huge bites.
'So are you ready to head over there?' He arced the banana skin through the air, and it dropped into a garbage bin on the other side of the room. Reid's bin.
'Yeah, I guess.' Jill thought about the long drive to Balmain, the trip back here to Liverpool afterwards, and then at five or six tonight, the trip back to her unit on the beach. She took a deep breath and stood. God I miss working at Maroubra, she thought.
When they got down to the carpark, Gabriel walked straight to the passenger side and got in, still reading from one of the files he held in his hand.
'So, I guess I'm driving again,' she said to the roof of the car before she climbed behind the wheel.
'You know, these first interviews on the home invasions aren't that great.' Gabriel hadn't heard her. He spoke with his head down, still reading from the case files.
She didn't respond, trying to picture the best route from Liverpool to Balmain. 'Do you know a better way to get to Balmain than the M5?' she asked, tired already.
'Huh? Nuh.'
'So, we'll just take the M5 back into the city, and double back to Balmain?' I could use a little help here, she thought. New girl, remember?
'Okay,' he said.
'Off we go then,' Jill said dryly, making her way back into the traffic she'd sat through not an hour before to get there.
It wasn't until they were at tollbooths that he spoke again. Jill had already worked her way through half a litre of water from a bottle by her side.
'Reid and Tran did most of these victims' interviews,' he said.
Jill waited for his point. Finally, she said, 'Yeah, so?'
'There just seems to be a lot of information lacking. Like Rice and Temple. It didn't take us long to get more information, extra evidence from them. Some of the most important evidence in the case so far.'
Jill thought about the two kids, Justine and Ryan, and wondered how they were doing today. She wondered how Narelle Rice was coping with having her home trashed again by crime scene. In the group meeting this morning, Superintendent Last had told them that the analysis of the towel Justine had kept would be back tomorrow at the latest. She frowned; it was pretty sloppy that Reid and Tran had not discovered the sexual assault. Still…
'Maybe Justine just couldn't tell two men about the sexual violence,' she said. 'Maybe they interviewed her while Ryan or her mum was there with her. It's not easy to talk about that stuff you know.' God, she knew.
'Exactly.'
'What, exactly?'
'Well, that's Interview 101, isn't it? There just seem to be a lot of holes in all of the statements. Maybe we should tell Last that we'll reinterview all of them?'
Jill choked on a sip of water. 'Are you serious?' She could just imagine what the rest of the detectives would say: Yeah, she's been here less than a week, and already she thinks she can do it all better than us. 'It would take forever for just you and me to interview all the witnesses. There's other stuff to be done on this case, Gabriel.'
'Yeah, but the single most important determinant in successfully resolving a case is the quality of information gathered from the interviews with victims and witnesses.'
She looked over at him. His trucker cap hid most of his eyes.
'Anyway,' she said, changing the subject, hoping that he wouldn't try to insist on this, 'what do you think of that anonymous call that came though yesterday afternoon?'
Lawrence Last had mentioned the call in the morning meeting. It was from a woman, identifying a male who might be involved. It had been just one of many calls from the public since their work on the case had started. None of them to date had thrown up anything useful.
'What do I think?' he said. 'I think someone's feeling guilty.'
'Why do you say that? It's not like she was confessing to anything.'
Gabriel kept reading. Jill was getting used to these one-sided conversations. At the moment, she just felt bored and sleepy. The sun beamed in through the windscreen and her cheeks felt hot. She cracked the window a little. The exhaust fumes from the motorway blew in with the breeze. She had found it difficult to sleep last night, waking from a blood-soaked dream in which huge, biting spiders chased her. She'd lain in her bed for an hour afterwards thinking about Eugene Moser's final moments and Justine Rice's horrific confession. Who was this lunatic? It was horrible to imagine him out there somewhere, planning another attack. What could he be capable of next time?