‘An impenetrable fortress, this.’
‘But busy,’ Dodge said. ‘On a Friday night, it’s pretty loose around here. You’ve got the beer garden, where a lot of people drink and have dinner, but there are only a few tables out there to sit at. So people who aren’t eating wander around, spread out. They go right to the edges of the road. Out there, into the trees. Sometimes people cross the road at the front and go stand drinking and looking at the river. A lot of eyes out here. I have a couple of people saying they saw Chloe come down for dinner. And we’ve got her on camera ordering at the bar.’
‘She speak to anyone? Sit with anyone?’
‘We’re working on that. So far the word is she was on her laptop while she ate, which was a bit of an unusual sight, it being mostly tradies and locals and people on holiday out here. We don’t know yet if she had interactions with anyone.’
‘When did she leave the bar?’
‘Around 8 p.m.’ Dodge heaved a sigh that lifted and dropped his shoulders by about four inches. The sigh of a man who hadn’t been this stressed, this busy, in many years. ‘She was seen going back upstairs by one of the other guests who was coming down atthe same time. Now, when Chloe went back to her room, she was the only person on the floor. All the other guests were out.’
‘How do we know that?’
‘We’re going off their accounts,’ Dodge said. ‘There are only four rooms total up there. It was a full house last night. We’ve got a guy travelling alone for work, a young couple on a dirty weekend, a pair of grey nomads making their way around Australia, and then there was Chloe in the furthest room along the hall. The lone guy and the young couple were at the pub downstairs until about one a.m., and the grey nomads were at a local friend’s place for dinner. They don’t know when they got back but it was at least midnight. They’re going to give me their car’s sat nav to confirm an exact time.’
‘Why was everybody out so late?’
‘It was a Friday night.’ Dodge shrugged. ‘And, look, there’s really no point in going to bed at this place until the crowd downstairs has cleared out. The exterior of the pub is sandstone, but it was gutted by a fire in the fifties and renovated cheaply on the inside. The floors are pine.’ He looked at the floor through the doorway beside us. ‘They’re like paper. You can hear people sneeze. My wife, Patsy, and I stayed here once for our anniversary and we could follow individual conversations as we lay there in bed. We weren’t trying too hard to sleep, though.’
Dodge braved a grin. I looked at him the way I look at the stuff I scrape out of my ear canals every couple of months. He dropped the smile and continued. ‘That’s why I’m thinking that by the time all the other guests arrived home, midnight and beyond, Chloe was already dead.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the grey nomads were in the room next door to hers, and the wife apparently can’t sleep unless it’s pristine silence. She’d have heard the knock on Chloe’s door. She’d have heard Chloe’s head hitting the wall. And her falling to the floor, and the guy rumbling around her room. The wife is telling us she heard diddly squat from the room next door from the moment she got home until Rob the publican started knocking on Chloe’s door the next morning.’
‘I don’t believe her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I shouldn’t.’ I narrowed my eyes at Dodge. ‘And neither should you. We’ve got nothing to back up her assertions. Maybe she thinks she’s got Superman’s hearing abilities. She thinks she can hear a cockroach jerking off two suburbs over. Whoop-de-fucking-do, lady. Until I can back up her claims with evidence, they’re useless.’
‘She was able to confirm for us what time the lone guy and the young couple came home,’ Dodge said. ‘Without consulting them.’
‘We put it in the maybe pile,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the lone guy. The one who passed Chloe on the stairs at eight p.m.’
‘He’s an electrician. He’s out here for work, doing something with the phone lines. Or the NBN, I don’t know which. But I’ve got eyes on him basically the whole time he was down here at the pub, because one of the bartenders was mad about him, trying to get up the courage to ask for his phone number. All three bartender girls made a game of it.’
‘I still want all his clothes, all his possessions from the duration of his stay. I want the forensics team to hit his room, and the other rooms too. I want their DNA and their criminal histories.’
‘Done.’
I thought for a while, staring at the distant river. Bridie had disappeared from her spot on the sandstone wall. ‘How’d the killer know Chloe was up there on her own?’ I asked. ‘And how’d he know which room was hers?’
‘The simple answer is it’s someone she knows. She texted or called to say she was up there alone, and what room she was in. We’ll know when we have her phone records.’
‘Too easy. What’s the alternative?’
‘He was watching,’ Dodge said. ‘Looking at the lights in the windows, maybe? Seeing which ones are turned on and which ones are off?’
‘Okay, so he finds out which room she’s in from watching.’ I said. ‘Then what? How does he get to her? When does he do it? He’s gone up there and killed her while there were still people in the beer garden, if Superman Hearing Lady is correct about the murder not occurring after midnight. Our guy would have had to watch to seewho was coming and going on the stairs, so he could be sure the other rooms and the hallway were empty when he went in for the kill. So, what, he’s sitting there, watching, not even knowing if he’s going togetthat moment he’s waiting for, when all the other guests are out and only Chloe is here? That’s a lot of watching. A lot of hoping. A lot of time standing around. A man standing alone in the beer garden watching the hotel windows for hours on end? With nobody noticing that’s what he’s doing? I don’t buy it.’
‘Maybe it was one of the punters. Standing there with his mates. Watching the windows for his moment but sort of … doing it casually.’ Dodge shrugged.
‘And then he comes down covered in her blood? He’d have had back-splatter on his pants legs, at least.’
‘It was dark. Maybe he was wearing dark clothing.’
‘Nope. Not convinced.’
