‘It’s no big deal. I shouldn’t have called. Sorry.’
There was a long silence. Then Katy said, ‘Don’t overthink it. It’s just a dream. It doesn’t actually mean anything.’
Judith’s phone started to buzz with an incoming call. She checked the screen. A blocked number.
‘I’m sorry, I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you back.’ She ended the call to Katy and answered the incoming one. ‘Judith Lee.’
The quality of the line was bad, but the words came through clearly. The voice was young and female.
‘He’s dead. Robert Walker’s killed himself, and you’re getting the blame.’
It took Judith a second to process what she had just heard.
‘Who is this?’
‘Walker’s dead at his house, right now.’
‘Whoisthis?’ Judith said again. ‘Is that Claire?’ There was an accent. She thought she’d caught a hint of Yorkshire.
But there was no answer, just two electronic beeps, and then a dial tone.
Fuck.
Judith stared at her phone for a second, then grabbed her jacket and left. It was a fifteen-minute drive in traffic from Judith’s apartment in Footscray to Hawthorn, where Robert Walker lived. On the shitty scooter it took nearly twenty.
When Judith pulled up at the house, there was no one there, and no patrol cars to be seen. Just a young man in his early twenties sitting on the kerb outside, head hung low, clearly sobbing. As Judith got off the bike and removed her helmet, a car pulled up, and Vanessa Walker all but fell out of the driver’s seat. She rushed to the young man—her son Lachlan, presumably—and pulled him to his feet, then hugged him tightly. Judith took a pair of nitrile gloves from the storage compartment of her bike, and put them in her pocket before approaching the family.
‘Mrs Walker,’ Judith said.
They turned on her. Lachlan was pale and shaken. He had his phone clutched in his hand.
‘What happened?’ Judith asked. The sound of sirens was coming nearer.
Vanessa was very pale. ‘Robert... he killed himself.’
Lachlan looked at Judith with no recognition. She introduced herself, and his eyes widened.
‘You. You shouldn’t be here. My dad’s dead. He killed himself. Because you wouldn’t leave him alone. Because you wouldn’tlisten.’
‘You found him?’ Judith looked towards the house. The front door was wide open.
‘I was supposed to come over last night. But he was drunk... I didn’t want... I came over this morning and I found him.’
The sirens had arrived. Judith turned and saw a patrol car. She didn’t recognise either of the officers inside, but they seemed to know who she was. Both stared at her with grim focus. Something felt off. She could hear Rocky’s warning, echoing inside her head:Eddie Fraser knows what he’s doing. You’re not going to see him coming.
No. That was paranoia talking. She hadn’t slept enough. She wasn’t thinking straight.
‘Stay here,’ she said to Lachlan and Vanessa. She put her hand on the gate.
‘You can’t go in there,’ Lachlan said.
Judith ignored him, pushed the gate open and walked quickly towards the house. She took the gloves from her pocket and slipped them on. Even as she mounted the steps to the front door, she could hear another car arriving, car doors opening. She had moments, only moments.
‘You can’t go in there,’ Lachlan shouted after her. ‘This is all your fault! You wouldn’t leave him alone, even after he proved that it was all bullshit.’
Inside, the flowers on the hall table were dying. When she entered the living room she could smell stale beer, and under that, a slight ferrous tang. She found the body in Walker’s study. Robert Walker was sitting behind the desk. Half his head was missing.
Judith closed her eyes and opened them again. She had a moment of intense disorientation, a brief dislocation of reality as she saw a flashback of the shooting of Robert Walker from her dream, when hers had been the hand holding the gun. She felt dizzy, and reached out to grab the back of a chair to steady herself.
