Vanessa hesitated, but Penelope was looking at her with sharp, candid eyes that gave her nowhere to hide.
‘My second option is that I leave him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Before it comes out.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which will make him look guilty. The optics for him would be terrible.’ And it went without saying that without her financial support, Robert wouldn’t have the resources for a campaign of any kind.
There was silence for a moment. Penelope crossed and uncrossed her legs. She smoothed down her pants, considering.
‘Even the best run campaign will fail if he has dirt in his closet. The way I see it, you have to ask yourself two questions. The first is, do you believe absolutely that there is nothing here to be uncovered?’
‘And the second?’
Penelope’s eyes met hers. ‘The second is, do you love him?’
Vanessa couldn’t hold her gaze. She’d been married to Robert for twenty-six years. They shared two children, one of whom was the absolute heart and centre of her life. They shared a dining table and a bedroom and so much history. But somewhere over the past... five years? Could it even be ten? Somewhere along the way the love had died.
Chapter Six
On Tuesday morning Judith went to the station early. She swiped her ID card at the secure vehicle access point off Spencer Street, and parked her motorbike in the last available bay. The other three designated motorcycle parking bays were already gone, taken up by someone’s BMW 5 Series. It looked like a brand new car. Judith was tempted to scratch the gleaming bonnet, but she restrained herself, took the lift up to the tenth floor and made her way to Crime Command, and the Homicide Squad room.
Before she reached her desk, she passed through two more automated security checkpoints, both of which required facial recognition as well as a swipe of her ID card. The building at 313 Spencer Street was state of the art and highly secure. It was by far the most comfortable police station Judith had ever worked out of, and every day she was haunted by the conviction that it couldn’t last.
Judith took a seat and logged in to her machine. She had a lot of work to do. The truth was that taking on Alexis Turner’s case was going to put her under pressure. She had a number of active homicide cases, including the drive-by shooting of Samuel Haddad (a known drug dealer and occasional human trafficker) and his wife, Zara, outside their gym in Melbourne’s CBD. The fact that Samuel and Zara Haddad were career criminals did not make the solving of their murders any less urgent, and Judith had a day of interviews ahead of her.
She spent the early part of her morning reading through preliminary statements and planning out her questions. Then, with an hour to go until her first interview, she turned to the Robert Walker file. She read through the transcript of her interview with Alexis, looking for facts that could be verified by third parties. Pinning down as many verifiable facts as possible was an essential step in a case like this. Catching the accused in a lie—even one that might seem minor—was the first step towards undermining their credibility. Judith’s first aim therefore was to turn this case from ahe-said, she-said, into ahe-said, the-facts-saysituation.
When she’d finished isolating the facts from the interview transcript, Judith compared Alexis’s statement with her notes from her interview with Walker. She found a discrepancy. Alexis had said that she’d had a referral from the college health centre. Walker had said Alexis was a private patient.
A call to Walker’s clinic and a quick chat with Walker’s secretary Delores did not resolve the problem. The woman was flustered.
‘Are you sure I’m allowed to speak to you? Don’t you need a warrant or something like that?’
Judith took care to sound relaxed and friendly. ‘You can talk to me if you like, Delores. Let’s just clear up a few details. We won’t talk about anyone’s private notes or anything like that. I just need to confirm that Alexis Turner had a referral from the college health centre when she came to see you.’
There was a pause, and then the sound of keyboard keys clicking. Another pause, and then Delores came back on the line.
‘No referral. She was a private patient. A nice girl, I thought.’ She sounded doubtful.
Judith ended the call. The small discrepancy would have an explanation, no doubt, but she should resolve it quickly. She just had time before her first interview on her homicide case. Judith dialled Alexis’s number. There was no answer. She dialled it again. Again it rang out. Judith frowned. She sent a text message.
Hi Alexis, this is Judith Lee. Can you give me a call?
She waited ten minutes, finishing her coffee and re-reading her notes. Her phone didn’t ring.
* * *
The day didn’t go well. Judith interviewed the gym members who had witnessed the shooting of the drug dealer and his wife, but they’d observed very little that was helpful, and gave more than one conflicting account. After that, she was pulled into a two-hour-long interview with an inspector and a senior sergeant from Professional Standards where she was asked to go over the detail of her encounter with Luke Fraser again and again. At the end of the interview, the inspector—a stone-faced man she’d never met before—confirmed that Luke had been charged and released on station bail, that he was suspended pending a full disciplinary hearing, and that she was now expected to stay out of the case, and to keep her mouth shut about it.
At three o’clock, Judith took the lift down to the basement car park. She had an at-home interview scheduled in the Haddad murder case, with the victims’ daughter, Nadia. Nadia had been at school when the murders happened, but it was very likely that her parents had known that there was a threat to their lives, and therefore it was possible that they had discussed that threat in front of her. If Nadia did know something useful, the chances of her being willing to discuss it with Judith—or any cop—were small, but every avenue had to be explored.
As Judith walked across the car park she was thinking about Nadia Haddad, about how best to approach an interview with a grieving fifteen-year-old. So she didn’t see the damage to her bike until she was almost upon it. When she did, she stopped dead. The leather seat and both tires had been slashed. Judith swallowed, her stomach turning over. She took a step closer and crouched to examine the damage. Whoever had done the work had been thorough. They’d made sure her bike was completely wrecked. The brake lines and the main wiring harness had been cut in multiple places. And oh Christ. Was that smellurine? Judith stood and took a step back.
Who the hell had done this?
