Russell shook his head, walked away, into the room, stood looking at the scene. ‘The mess you’ve made of your life is not my problem, Evan.’
‘Mate, please—’
‘No.’
‘Ple—’
‘It’s your son’s birthday, for Christ’s sake. If you cared that much about him, you’d be doing something with the kid.’
‘You remembered.’
‘He’s still my nephew, even if his dad’s a traitorous piece of garbage.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Yep.’
‘Russell, I would love to be out right now with my kid,’ I continued. ‘And I’m … I’ve been fighting with Delle for a good long while about being stuck out here. It’s not so bad for me, because I’m always working. But she’s … you know … She’s got to see people in the town. And Chris has got to go to school. So, regardless of what you think of me, and what happened between us—their futures are riding on this.’
Russell said nothing. All the fire had gone out of him. He was like that, I remembered. Like a volcano. Explosive, then worryingly calm.
‘I’d appreciate it if you at least left me on the books for this. I don’t have to be in your face the whole time. I can be off doing sideline stuff.’
I stood behind him, watching Russell’s profile as my brother surveyed the room. I saw him walk further in, turn in a slow circle, taking it all in. The blood on the floor. The hole in the wall. The window to the beer garden. On the bench beside the little television set, Chloe Lutz’s duffel bag was upturned, clothes scattered along its length. I took a step back into the room. We were both here now. Two brothers, steeped in the raw, electric awfulness of a fresh and violent death.
‘Walk me through the scene,’ Russell said. ‘And then you can get the fuck out of my sight.’
He didn’t need to be walked through the scene. It had been pretty clear to me before he’d even joined the police at age eighteen that Russell was going to be a better cop than I was. Because Russell was just made that way. Better. He was older, taller, faster, stronger and smarter. He had our father’s face, had been named by him: the ridiculously puerile Gunther ‘Gun’ Powder, a nod to Arthur’s alleged German heritage and a ham-fisted attempt to position Russell as he grew up as a dangerous, masculine weapon of a person, his father’s dream child. Me, on the other hand: I looked like our mother. I was leaner, reedy when I was stressed and forgot to eat, with eyesight that had almost disqualified me from joining the jacks at all. From pictures I had of her, I knew I had my mother’s dark, deep, emotive eyes. Russell would have seen everything critical in the room already, even before I walked in and gestured to it, and it wasn’t because he’d been a cop for four years longer than I had, or that he’d sat and passed his detective’s exam with flying colours. Russell was good enough. And I had never been good enough, as a son, or a husband, or a father, or a cop.
I shifted past my brother, walked around the side of the bed closest to the window. Russell moved naturally back to the doorway, so he was as far away from me as he could physically get. He stood there for a good minute or so after I’d finished my debrief: silent, thinking, staring at the hole in the wall beside him.
‘Dodge is thinking it’s a punter from downstairs,’ I said.
‘Wrong,’ Russell said.
I waited.
‘It wasn’t someone from the pub.’ My brother took out his phone and fired off a text, typing with two thumbs. ‘At least, not a random admirer who came up here wanting to beg his way into her room, failed and got violent.’
‘No?’
‘The killer knocked on the door. Said something. It wasn’t a come-on, or she wouldn’t have taken the chain off. Whatever it was, it disarmed her. She dropped the chain and opened the door fully. As soon as she did, he shoved her into the wall, stabbed her in the diaphragm two or three times so she couldn’t scream.’
I nodded.
‘There was no interest in rape,’ Russell continued. ‘He didn’t put her on the bed. Didn’t fight with her on the floor. Once she was incapacitated, he forgot all about her. She tried to drag herself to the window, unimpeded, while he went on with his business.’
‘What business?’
‘She’s been robbed,’ Russell said. He pointed. ‘Two chargers, still plugged in. Both on this side of the bed. One for a phone, one for something bigger. A laptop or an iPad.’
‘Spur of the moment thing.’ I shrugged, feeling stupid even as I said it but having no choice but to plough on. ‘Must have been. He’s come up here to confront her about … about something. He’s lost it. Stabbed her. Panicked at the sight of what he’s done. Grabbed the electronics on his way out.’
‘Wrong again.’ Russell sniffed. ‘He wasn’t panicked at all. This was completely organised.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He searched. He didn’t just grab the valuables that were on display. He went looking in the bags. The make-up bag, here, in the bathroom. It’s been emptied into the sink.’
