The Silent Inheritance Read online

  The speed limit was a hundred k’s. He moved over to the left-hand lane, got his speedo needle sitting on sixty, then, the road clear ahead and behind, he reached across the garbage bag to his passenger-side door to release its catch. And more lights glinted in his rear-view mirror. And to hell with the traffic.

  He was sweating, could feel it trickling. The protective clothing he wore allowed no perspiration to escape. Winter nights were better for the deliveries, wet winter nights better still. One hand on the wheel, he adjusted his corner window, directing air to his face. Back when this old vehicle had come off the assembly line, air conditioning in cars was unheard of. The makers had done what they could to make the HG Holden driver friendly.

  They’d put good motors in them, and as a modern sedan zoomed by, he considered putting his foot down and burning it off. He had the power to do it, though maybe not tonight. Didn’t need to be pulled over for speeding. There’d be a break. There was always a break in traffic for those patient enough to wait for it. He’d wait his chance, be Lupine, the wily one, his every sense alert for the hunters.

  A heavily laden truck roared by and out of sight, and the road his, he braked, just a little, just enough, then reaching across the garbage bag he opened the passenger door, and as it swung wide, he pushed.

  Memory in the release, the ache of that final letting go. It passed – and quickly tonight. There was another bastard coming up on his tail. He grasped a nylon rope he’d attached to driver and passenger-side armrests and yanked hard on it, needing to close that door and put distance between him and that truck’s many lights. Too eager, the gloved hand gripping the wheel slipped, and the old wagon swerved hard to the right.

  Forgot the rope and the door and, two hands gripping, his foot asking for power, the old girl corrected, then replied to his foot’s urging with a surge of power. She’d been built to fly, and with her door still swinging wide, she left that truck for dead.

  FINDING MONICA

  Sleep was something Ross Hunter had learnt to take as required. He could take it while watching television and frequently did. Six hours of solid sleep in bed was party time. On rare occasions he doubled that, but woke with a head, neck or backache.

  He’d clocked up four hours when his mobile disturbed his dream, and he was awake and grabbing for the oblong of light on the bedside table.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We’ve got her, Sarge. A truckie just called it in. Hume Freeway, nine kilometres west of the Ring Road exit.’

  ‘Christ,’ Ross said, hitting the light switch then closing his eyes fast against its too-sudden white glare.

  ‘It gets better, Sarge. He got a look at the vehicle that dropped her, a late sixties or early seventies Kingswood, he says.’

  ‘Rego?’ Ross asked, juggling both phone and trousers. He hadn’t worked out yet how to put his new phone on speaker.

  ‘Not that close. We might get lucky with a speed camera. He’s dead certain it was a Kingswood and probably white.’

  Ross was pulling on socks. He needed new socks. He got his feet into his shoes, zipped his fly, buckled his belt while Roy continued.

  ‘He swears that he recognised the tail-lights. He restored one three years ago and spent months chasing around swap meets looking for those same tail-lights.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Chap by the name of Collin Wallace. He’s got a wife and three kids in Albury. Brings a load down from Sydney twice a week and takes one back.’

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘Lily white – and shocked to buggery.’

  ‘I’m out the door,’ Ross said.

  ‘Do you need a car?’

  ‘Got my own. Hold the truckie.’

  ‘He’s not going anywhere. The poor bugger is walking in circles. He thought he’d run over the bag.’

  ‘Didn’t?’

  ‘He managed to straddle it – in an eighteen-wheeler.’

  Ross’s unit was in Southbank, a one-bedroom unit on the seventh floor, high above the world he liked to escape when he could. It was convenient, a bare five-minute walk from his St Kilda Road headquarters. The lift was conveniently situated diagonally opposite his door, and at this time of morning empty. It delivered him to the underground car park where he had a designated space – all very modern and convenient, but not home. The old house in Hawthorn had been home.

  He lived alone, was free to take a phone call at four in the morning and not disturb a wife, free to eat what he felt like eating, smoke when he felt like smoking – as long as he did it beneath his kitchen exhaust fan or on his handkerchief-sized balcony.

  He’d almost had a wife – twice; one had got sick of waiting, the other he’d cut and run from. Some managed to balance a wife and kids with the job.

  We’ve got her, Sarge. Roy Bull had been on Ross’s team since Wall Johnson put it together. A good reliable bloke, Roy. He balanced marriage and a couple of kids. Johnson had been married for thirty years.

  They’d got her – or found her dead, twelve-year-old Monica Rowan, missing since mid-December.

  Thrown everything they had at finding that girl. They’d studied hours of videos confiscated from security-conscious residents, had checked out sightings of blonde twelve year olds from Hobart to Cairns, and come up with nothing because that child-murdering bastard gave them nothing. And he was getting better at what he did, and keeping those girls alive longer.

  The media had named him the Freeway Killer. They liked labels, and had come up with that one after little Penny Matthews, his second victim, had been found like his first, double-bagged in heavy-duty green garbage bags then tossed out to the side of the Monash Freeway. Monica was his fourth.

  Back when the first of them, ten-year-old Nancy Yang, had been reported missing, Ross had been living with his mother in Hawthorn and stationed at Parham. He hadn’t been involved in the Yang case. He’d transferred to St Kilda shortly after Penny’s body was found. Johnson had asked for him.

  Soon after, Heidi Jasper, an eleven year old, had gone missing from Chadstone Shopping Centre in mid-January, in the middle of the school holidays, kids and shoppers everywhere.

  They’d locked that centre down. They’d had more police out there than shoppers but found no trace of Heidi. To this day they didn’t know how the child-murdering bastard had spirited her away from a crowded shopping centre.

  Found her emaciated little body six weeks later, bagged and dumped like so much rubbish beside the Eastern Freeway, near Ringwood.

  That bastard always double-bagged them, always used identical heavy-duty dark green bags with orange ties, always knotted the bags in the same way.

  Monica had disappeared from a residential street at around eight o’clock on a December evening, somewhere between her friend’s home and her own, a bare block and a half between the two houses. The sun had been in the sky. Folk would have been out watering their gardens, walking their dogs, jogging for their health, and not one had seen Monica, her abductor, or his car.

  He gave them no specific area to work in, no fingerprint, not a hair from his head. He’d taken those girls from Footscray, Caulfield, Glen Waverley and Doncaster. To date they’d found no motive, nor any connection between the families of the girls. His killing spree seemed random, and random was … random.

  Maybe they’d got lucky tonight. There weren’t a lot of seventies Kingswoods left on the roads. A classy set of wheels in their day, weighty enough to pull a van, solid enough to become a tradie’s workhorse, now collector’s items – and they’d been lucky enough for one of those collectors to find that girl.

  The Commodore had replaced the Kingswood. Ross drove one, a 2002 model he’d bought new. It kept going so he’d kept it. It hadn’t done a lot of kilometres. He worked and when he wasn’t working, he slept.

  He checked the time on his dashboard and hoped he wasn’t called in today to testify in the Swan case. Had expected to get it over and done with last week. It had been going for over a week and fat Freddy had been de
laying. Ross knew his tactics well.

  He’d come up against him when he’d arrested the ice-crazed little bastard, had him locked up on a Wednesday and fat Freddy’d had him out on bail by Thursday, and he’d been out since. Frederick Adam-Jones might resemble an inflated balloon with legs, but he was a tough little bastard who’d do what he had to do to get his client off.

  Ross hadn’t known who Swan was the day he’d searched his hovel. He knew his life story now. Michael Swan was the only grandson of Lady Cynthia Swan. His father was a neurologist, his mother a practising GP. At nineteen young Michael had been living at home, studying medicine at Melbourne University and dating the daughter of one of his university professors.

  She’d smashed up Daddy’s car one night and walked away from it. Swan, not so lucky, had cracked a couple of vertebrae in his neck and had got to spend the next few months with a metal cage screwed to his brow.

  His mother blamed the professor’s daughter for Michael’s addiction. She’d ended the relationship. She’d blamed his friends’ derision. They’d called her boy Frankenstein. His father, who charged a couple of hundred bucks for fifteen minutes of his diamond-studded time, blamed neurological damage. Lady Cynthia blamed an addiction to the painkilling medication prescribed for dear Michael during his months of treatment. She was no doctor but she may have got the diagnosis right.

  He’d healed. The cage had been removed, the painkillers withdrawn, but young Michael, accustomed to getting what he wanted when he wanted it, had stolen one of his mother’s prescription pads and self-prescribed for twelve months.

  Twice they’d booked him into rehab. Twice he’d walked out. Two years after the accident, Michael Swan had drifted down to the bottom of the dung heap – a sad story to those of the bleeding hearts. Ross’s heart bled buckets, but not for poor little rich boys. It bled for the tiny bodies he saw lying in mortuaries. Kids, hard to come by to some, were expendable items to others.

  Ross was dogged, and he knew it. He had a one-track mind too, and a psychic nose that could sniff out guilt at twenty paces. Five minutes after meeting the bereaved mother’s boyfriend, Ross had been sneezing his brains out.

  He’d harassed Swan and his parents and Lady Cynthia, who had trouble closing her watermelon mouth, but hadn’t opened it to him. Then he’d started on Cory’s grandparents, a pair of congenital pensioners who may not have had ten years of education between them. They’d known how to work a video camera.

  They’d shown him their home videos that afternoon, and when he’d seen enough, he’d arrested Lady Cynthia’s grandson.

  THAT MONDAY

  Sarah, her bag over her shoulder, was reaching to turn off the television when it showed a bank-up of traffic on one of the freeways. Her hand stilled while she read the subtitles.

  … exit to the Hume Freeway closed …

  The cameraman must have been in a helicopter. They were showing a curved, never-ending line of cars and trucks.

  The body of a young female, found this morning …

  Monica, Sarah thought, and she placed her bag on the table, catching that bus now a secondary concern. She’d followed Monica Rowan’s story since her abduction, a too-personal story because of Monica’s age and her date of birth. She would have celebrated her thirteenth birthday on the eleventh of July, the same day as Marni, who walked home alone from her friends’ homes, walked to school alone, shopped alone at Forest Hill if they ran out of bread or milk.

  She watched that screen until the news broke for a commercial, when she crept into the bedroom where Marni lay flat out on her stomach, sound asleep. Five mornings a week Sarah left her sleeping, and today she didn’t want to leave her.

  The Freeway Killer didn’t steal into bedrooms, or he hadn’t yet, which didn’t mean he wouldn’t. He’d taken Nancy Yang from out the front of her parents’ corner milk bar.

  Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know, Sarah warned often. If a strange man tells you he’s lost his dog, his wife or himself, don’t talk to him.

  Marni liked to talk. As a tiny kid she’d become Sarah’s voice and ears. As a four year old, Sarah had lifted her high enough to speak to a dental receptionist.

  ‘Mummy broke some of her tooth,’ she’d said.

  Typewriter telephone and the relay service for the deaf had been around back then. She could have bought one; instead she’d continued to relay her problems through Marni until she’d bought her laptop. Emails had freed Sarah, but once that phone had been connected, it had became Marni’s new toy. She’d been seven and had learnt to handle phone calls like an old woman.

  She looked very young this morning, her arms spread, legs spread, no blanket, no sheet, childlike and vulnerable in her singlet top and pants. She could have been born deaf. Deaf would have been normal. A baby with perfect hearing had made Sarah afraid, afraid her perfect baby would grow up embarrassed about her deaf mother’s speech, afraid too that her baby wouldn’t learn to speak like others.

  She’d been the reason Sarah had applied for the job at Crows, so she could make enough money to pay for a crèche where her Marni would hear other voices. She’d learnt. She’d learnt early that her mummy was different, that she couldn’t hear her when she cried. She’d never sat crying where she’d fallen. Always crawled to Mummy’s feet first.

  As a two year old, her little mouth had worked hard so Mummy’s eyes would understand. At six she’d said she was going to be a doctor when she got big so she could fix Mummy’s broken ears, and since she’d been old enough to know about cochlear implants, she’d been nagging about them.

  Loved her. Lived for her. Worked for her. Would have put up with ten Barbara Lanes for the next twenty years so her beautiful girl could have the best, the safest life she could give her. Would have cleaned Crow’s toilets—

  Marni must have sensed her nearness. She rolled onto her back, moving in an instant from deep sleep to wakefulness. ‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’

  ‘Be careful,’ Sarah said, brushing long sleep-tossed hair back from Marni’s face, kissing the cheek she exposed. ‘I think the police finding Monica.’

  ‘Alive?’ She was up, her feet on the floor.

  ‘No.’

  Marni nodded, then pointed to the clock on the narrow chest of drawers between their beds. ‘You’ll miss your bus.’

  ‘You be careful,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You know I always am. Go, Mum.’

  Kissed her again, then left her, left her locked into a granny flat behind tall gates, Mrs Vaughn playing watchdog at her lounge room window, and she ran up to the pipeline, through it to the school grounds and diagonally across, a shorter route to the bus. Out of breath when she got there, but she caught the bus and took a seat opposite two women who rode with her five days a week to the station. They didn’t speak.

  Barbara Lane didn’t speak. All of last week she’d sat, bored, at Sarah’s elbow, and was untrained because she didn’t want to be trained. She wasn’t waiting at the station. Had been last Friday. They’d sat in the same carriage, but at different ends.

  Two deaf girls boarded at Box Hill. Sarah had seen them before, but this morning they sat directly opposite. Her book was open, but watching them was more interesting. They spoke with their hands, spoke fast.

  She could sign but rarely did it. She didn’t mix with the deaf, not in Melbourne. It would have been easier. Every word she spoke she fought hard for.

  Easy isn’t always best, baby, her mother used to say. The world is full of people who can’t sign, and if you’re going to find your own place in it, you need to talk.

  She’d never found her place, not in Melbourne. She may have in the deaf world. There were clubs, activities. She’d looked them up on the internet but hadn’t joined. The deaf asked too many questions.

  Watched those hands asking questions. Brisbane? Watched the reply. Next weekend. Cheap flight.

  Sarah had gone to a school for the deaf in Brisbane, for almost eight months. Wondered if that girl had gone to the same schoo
l. She looked younger, late twenties maybe.

  Uncle Bill used to have a caravan in his backyard. For those almost eight months Sarah had called it home. Then they’d moved on again.

  Always moving. One of her earliest memories was of being picked up from a bed and waking in a moving car. She could remember being carried from cars into a cold tent then, come morning, watching that tent packed up and off they’d go again. Spent most of her early years between one place and the next, between town and city, between states, because Daddy had only been happy when he was chasing rainbows and it had been very important to keep him happy.

  She’d turned nine in Brisbane, had been big enough, old enough, to work out for herself that when Daddy had stopped chasing rainbows he’d started bringing home bottles.

  A shudder, starting in her neck, passed through her to the train floor. She moved her feet to release it down to the wheels, down to the rails and away. Always felt that shudder when she thought about those bottles.

  Turned ten in Adelaide. She’d gone to a school for the deaf there. Her mother had taken her to school on a bus, taken her home on the bus, until the day they’d picked her up in the car and kept on driving. He’d driven that old car all day, all night, until it died.

  Nullarbor, baby. Null-ar-bor. It means no trees.

  No trees, and no shade, other than beside the car, until a truck driver stopped.

  The kid’s deaf and dumb. We need to get her into school.

  The truck driver had unloaded them and their tent and cases at a Perth caravan park, and for weeks her father had caught a bus to work to get money for another car. Sarah had caught a special minibus to and from a school for the deaf and her mother had ridden another to the Clarks’ suburb where she’d looked after twin girls. They’d paid her well, but instead of giving her money to him for a car, she’d rented a cabin.

  We’ve had enough, Joey. We want to stop.