No-one spoke as they watched it again. Then a third time, and a fourth. Head down, two small flicks of her hand.
‘I can’t tell,’ Raco said. ‘It looks a bit like she could be. But she could as easily be scratching her nose.’
They let the tape run on this time. Karen lifted her head, took what could have been a deep breath, then opened the driver’s door and climbed in. She reversed out of the space and was gone. The carpark was empty again. The time stamp on the tape showed she and her son had less than eighty minutes to live.
They stared at the footage, skipping over long stretches during which no-one came or went. The school receptionist emerged ten minutes after Karen, then nothing happened for about forty minutes. Eventually the teachers started heading to their cars one by one. Whitlam identified each as they appeared. The caretaker returned, put his bag back in the boot and drove away just after 4.30 pm.
Eventually Whitlam’s car was the only one left in the lot. They sped ahead on the tape. Shortly after 7 pm, Whitlam himself appeared on screen. He was walking slowly, his head down and his broad shoulders slumped forward. In the seat next to Falk, the teacher exhaled. His jaw was clenched tight as he watched the footage.
‘It’s hard to look at this,’ he said. ‘By then, the Clyde cops had called to tell me Billy and Karen were dead.’
They watched on as Whitlam slowly got into his car and, after a couple of false starts, successfully reversed out and drove away. They let the tape run for another ten minutes. Grant Dow was nowhere to be seen.
‘I’ll be off then,’ Deborah called from reception, handbag clutched over her shoulder. She waited a moment, but received only a vague grunt in response. Falk looked up and gave her a smile. Her manner towards him had thawed in the past few days and he felt they’d had a breakthrough when she’d brought him a coffee as she fetched one for the others. He suspected Raco had had a word.
Raco and Constable Barnes barely reacted as the station door slammed behind her. The three of them were each at a desk, staring at their computer screens as grainy images played out. They had taken all the available footage from both cameras at the school, then headed into town.
There were three CCTV cameras in Kiewarra’s main street, Raco had told Falk. One beside the pub, one near the council offices and one over the door of the pharmacy storeroom. They’d collected the footage from each.
Barnes yawned and stretched, his bulky arms reaching towards the ceiling. Falk was poised for the grumbling to start, but Barnes simply turned back to his screen without complaint. Barnes hadn’t known Luke or Karen, he’d confided to Falk earlier, but he’d given Billy Hadler’s class a talk on road safety a couple of weeks before his death. He still had the thank you card from the class, including Billy’s crayon signature, on his desk.
Falk stifled a yawn himself. They’d been at it for four hours. Falk was concentrating on the recordings taken from the school. He’d seen one or two interesting things over the hours. A pupil take a secret piss against the principal’s front wheels. A teacher scraping a colleague’s car with her own, then hastily driving away. But no sign of Grant Dow.
Instead Falk found himself repeatedly watching the footage of Karen. She had arrived and left three times that week – every day but Tuesday, which was her day off, and Friday, by which time she was dead. Each day was much the same. At about 8.30 am her car would pull up. She would get the children out, gather backpacks and sun hats and disappear off camera in the direction of the school. Shortly after 3.30 pm, the process would be reversed.
Falk studied her movements. The way she bent over to talk to Billy, one hand on the little boy’s shoulder. He couldn’t make out her face, but he imagined her smiling at her son. He watched the way she cradled Charlotte as she transferred her baby daughter from car seat to stroller. Karen Hadler had been a nice woman before she was shot in the stomach. Good both with children and finances. Falk felt certain Barb was right. He would have liked her.
He obsessively rewound the footage from the Thursday, the day Karen and her son had been murdered. He played and replayed the tape constantly, analysing every frame. Was that a slight hesitation in her step as she approached the car? Had something in the bushland caught her eye? Was she squeezing her child’s hand tighter than usual? Falk suspected he was jumpingat shadows, but he continued to watch over and over. Hestared at the image of his dead friend’s blonde wife and silently willed her to pick up her mobile and call the number she had scribbled on the receipt. He willed his past self to answer. Neither event happened. The script remained unchanged.
Falk was debating whether to call it a day when Barnes dropped the pen he’d been twirling and sat up in his chair.
‘Hey, check this out.’ Barnes clicked his mouse, winding back the grainy film. He had been combing through the material from the pharmacy camera, which was trained on nothing more exciting than a quiet back laneway and the door leading to their supply room.
‘What is it? Dow?’ Falk said. He and Raco crowded around the screen.
‘Not exactly,’ Barnes said as he set the footage running. The time stamp showed 4.41 pm on Thursday. Just over an hour before Karen and Billy Hadler were found dead.
For a few seconds the video looked like a still image, showing nothing but the empty laneway. Suddenly a four-wheel drive flashed past. It was there and gone in less than a second.
Barnes rewound the footage and slowed it down. He froze the image as the car reappeared. It was blurry and at an awkward angle, but it didn’t matter. The driver’s face was clear. Through the windshield, Jamie Sullivan stared back at them.
The light was fading by the time Falk and Raco got to the laneway, but there wasn’t much to see. They’d let Barnes call it a day after a job well done. Falk stood under the pharmacy’s CCTV camera and looked around. The small road was narrow and ran parallel to Kiewarra’s main street. On one side it backed on to the real estate agent, a hairdresser’s, the doctors’ surgery and the pharmacy. On the other, parcels of scrub land had been turned into makeshift carparks. It was completely deserted.
Falk and Raco walked the full length of the lane. It didn’t take long. It was accessible by car at both ends, and connected with the roads leading east and west out of town. In rush hour, it would offer a perfect rat-run to cut through town without hitting the main drag. But this was Kiewarra, Falk thought, and it didn’t have a rush hour.
‘So why did our friend Jamie Sullivan want to avoid being seen in town twenty minutes before the Hadlers were killed?’ Falk’s voice echoed off the brickwork.
‘A few reasons come to mind. None of them good,’ Raco answered.
Falk peered up at the camera’s lens.
‘At least we have some idea where he was now,’ Falk said. ‘He could have got from here to the Hadlers’ place in the timeframe, couldn’t he?’
‘Yeah, no problem at all.’
Falk leaned against the wall and tilted his head back. The bricks had soaked in the heat of the day. He felt exhausted. His eyes were gritty when he closed them.
‘So we’ve got Jamie Sullivan, who claims to be Luke’s great mate, lying about where he was and caught sneaking around on camera an hour before his friend was shot dead,’ Raco said. ‘Then we’ve got Grant Dow, who admits he couldn’t stand Luke, alibied to the back teeth while at the same time his name is in a dead woman’s handwriting.’
