‘You’re going to accept my thanks, Detective.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes.’
I shook my head, thought about Bridie and my promise, felt vicious words rush up my throat and meet my lips and dissolve before they were spoken. ‘Good,’ I finally blurted. ‘Great. Thanks accepted, Fry. Thanks accepted. You happy now?’
Fry smirked and walked away.
Dodge picked me up at the roadside, and we drove to the Special house. The cockatoos in the gumtrees around the property started screaming their heads off as soon as I stepped out of the car.
Dodge hobbled up the verandah steps, and I waited for him at the door. He had just learnt from me that there was no physical evidence to speak of in Linda Special’s and Marian Richley’s cases,which, as my brother had pointed out, wasn’t an unusual occurrence for such old cases. Retired coppers taking home case materials or files as a hobby or a souvenir had been standard practice for many years, as well as boxes being lost to floods or fires, or pilfered from evidence holding by corrupt officers on the request of scumbags. That was the reason for the tight security at the forensics holding facility today. Cameras, supervised access to the boxes, sign-ins.
John Special let us in, and I stood there dejectedly in his inner doorway being hysterically shouted at by his daughter’s dog while I tried to get a grip on what to do next. I noted that what I was experiencing wasn’t just disappointment, but an off-balance feeling I recognised as being tied to this place. It had started the first time we’d come here. When the cockatoos started screaming at me.
Atme? Yes, I realised: that’s how it felt. But that didn’t make any sense. Why did I think that?
‘You two look like someone’s stolen your last zac,’ John commented, nudging the dog out of the way with a slippered foot. ‘More coffee, I suppose?’
‘That’d be nice,’ Dodge said. To me he murmured, ‘What if we could give them something new?’
I almost laughed. A sad, angry laugh welled up in my throat, at the idea that someone could tamper with or accidentally lose evidence in murders as vicious and callous as this. At the idea that there was still a chance the killer had left his mark here, on the house, half a century later. I shook my head again, deliberately tried to knock that purely insane thought out of my skull. It made no sense. ‘What the hell could we possibly give them,fifty yearslater?’
‘We could do an exhumation.’ Dodge shrugged. ‘See what’s under her fingernails.’
‘That’ll take a year to get approved, and she’d have been scrubbed clean for redressing and burial.’
‘Uh, Mr Special?’
‘Don’t tell him.’ I grabbed Dodge’s forearm.
‘I’m just thinking’—Dodge nodded, following the old man into the kitchen—‘Do you remember what police took at the time of your wife’s murder? The original investigating officers?’
‘They took a bunch of stuff.’ John shook his head. ‘A doorknob. The broken glass. Bits of the shower drain. Her clothes. Some floorboards.’
‘They lifted up the floor?’ I asked.
‘Yup. Took three sections from the hall there.’ He pointed. The little dog followed his owner’s finger, sniffed the floor and looked suspiciously at me. ‘Linda was lying right there when she was found. Bled right through the floor. They didn’t exactly know why they were taking the floor, the original guys. They just felt like it made sense. I think maybe they knew something like DNA was coming, in the future. They were right. They tested the boards in the mid-eighties. Didn’t get anything, though.’
‘Would they have been looking for his blood?’ Dodge wondered aloud. ‘Did they think he’d probably cut himself while he stabbed her?’
‘More likely sweat,’ I said. ‘Sweaty business, killing someone, in my experience.’ I felt both men staring at me. Scratched my brow to hide my eyes. ‘I don’t mean in my experience ofdoing it, I mean of working murders.’
‘Although, last ni—’ Dodge started.
‘Shut up, Dodge,’ I finished for him.
I looked at the spot on the floor between me, in the front entryway, and the men in the kitchen. I went there. The dog moved aside for me. Dodge stayed in the kitchen, talking to John. ‘So they replaced those three floorboards, obviously.’
‘Yup.’
I bounced on the floorboards in the hall. Heard them creak. Had a flash of being under the floor at Stephen Branch’s house, the dirt at my back, pressing upwards with the sole of my boot and hearing those boards groan. I remembered the boards pulling against their nails. Dry, steel nails embedded deep in the joists and reluctant to shift.
‘John?’ I called.
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you have a saw?’
