‘Back up a bit,’ Jackie said. ‘Tell me in detail what made Monroe so crazy.’

  Nelson described the records he found, the photocopied pages of a ledger describing either Monroe or Bensimon lending millions to people including the premier and the developer, Richter. ‘There was also a videotape,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t have a player.’

  Probably a hidden camera, providing evidence of the transactions. Shit. What Nelson had seen, and told Belle about, was hard proof linking the great and the good to organised crime. A compelling reason for murder. A terrible thought crossed Jackie’s mind. Until now, she’d assumed her father had killed Belle in a moment of madness, a lover’s tiff gone wrong, say, an argument. But this pointed to something infinitely worse: premeditated, cold-blooded execution.

  Nelson was talking. ‘Of course, when the news broke about Russ selling out Bensimon, I realised why he lost his rag when he saw me with my head in his briefcase. They must have been Bensimon’s records, and Russ photocopied them to pass them on. But now that Russ and Bensimon are both dead, it doesn’t matter, does it?’

  Jackie asked, dreading the answer, ‘Did Belle say what she was going to do about it?’

  ‘She got excited, I remember that.’ Nelson looked out to sea again and Jackie followed his gaze, to where lazy waves built and broke and collapsed on sand. Nelson spoke slowly, reconstructing. ‘So long ago. We were sitting together on Gaz’s grotty couch and she must have said she’d do something, because I jumped up and told her not to. I even knocked over my tea. She said – I think she said – she was going to tell Trevor Curran about it. He was her ex, a TV journalist.’

  Trevor Curran. He was everywhere, every corner of this case. ‘Do you know if she did tell him?’

  Nelson shook his head. He removed his glasses and hooked them in the open neck of his shirt. ‘That was the last time I saw her. But I bet she did, and he must have passed it on, and that’s what got her killed. Or –’ He fell silent.

  ‘Or what?’ When he didn’t reply, she said, ‘Did you know about my father and Belle?’

  His body language told her that was what he’d stopped himself saying.

  ‘Please,’ Jackie said, ‘tell me.’

  There must have been something in her voice because Nelson turned to her, looked at her for a long moment. He said, ‘Russ Monroe told me he sent the cop Rosie Rose to sleep with Belle so he could keep an eye on her. Belle thought Rose was in love with her, but …’ His voice trailed off. Eventually he said, ‘She was so beautiful, you know. Even me, I’m queer to the core but I was totally head over heels in love with her. Everybody was.’

  ‘Everybody except the person who killed her,’ Jackie reminded him.

  ***

  Nelson could tell Jackie nothing more. She thanked him for his honesty and declined coffee. As they were about to part she gave him her card and told him to call her if he remembered anything else. He put it in his shirt pocket and said, ‘I have dreams about Belle, you know. All this time later. I feel I let her down. Maybe I should have said something, stopped her doing something silly? I don’t know.’ He put a hand on Jackie’s sleeve. ‘I don’t want you to think I kept quiet because I didn’t care,’ he said. ‘Belle saved my life, literally. But she was reckless. I gave her the St Christopher medal I got from my mother, to protect her, but it didn’t work. You have to find out what happened to her.’ He took a tissue from his jeans pocket and wiped his eyes, sighed.

  ‘I’ll try,’ Jackie said, her heart heavy. I already know what happened to her, screamed the voice in her head. She said, ‘I’m going to sort it out.’ They stood, uncertain, for a few minutes and Jackie realised that they had formed, somehow, an unspoken bond. Perhaps it was his openness about her father, or perhaps he did this with everyone. He reached out as if to hug her, drew back. ‘If anyone caught me canoodling a cop!’ He brought his fingers to his lips.

  Jackie drew her finger across her mouth as if closing a zip.

  ***

  She got the call just before she hit the M8 tunnel. Bennie Wang, with more information. ‘Boss, listen to this. Apparently Trevor Curran lost his job at Channel 9 because he had some sort of breakdown. Plus there was talk of drugs and alcohol as well. He cleaned himself up a couple of years later. Even wrote about it.’

  ‘Very interesting, Bennie. Helpful. It’s Friday and it’s late. Go home and enjoy the weekend, will you?’

  ‘You got it, boss.’

  Jackie drove on, thinking. Unsurprisingly, Nelson hadn’t given her the ammunition she needed to stop Curran, and it was time to front him herself and make him drop the idea of revealing the photos to the world. Not to mention dissuading him from including Stanton Rose’s affair in the book he was about to write. She checked the time. Daylight saving hadn’t yet kicked in so it was growing dark, but it wasn’t too late to pay Curran a visit.

  At the airport, instead of turning left into O’Riordan Street, she kept going, letting the GPS guide her through Mascot and on to Randwick. While she drove, she rehearsed her argument. So Stanton ‘Rosie’ Rose and Belle Fitzgerald had had an affair. So what? He wouldn’t be the first cop to have had an affair. Except, Jackie had to acknowledge, their sexual partners hadn’t disappeared and turned up decades later, murdered.

  Ignore that. Jackie forced herself back to her script. She’d tell Curran that while some would find the affair reprehensible, others would see it as part of the legend. Curran, meanwhile, would be exposed as a stalker, a weirdo. Especially – thanks, Bennie! – given his history of mental instability, which she would have to make public.

  It wasn’t enough. Even if Curran agreed to keep the photos to himself, they’d still be a threat. As long as he had them, her family’s future would be at stake. What to do? She didn’t know. But at least she was doing something, not sitting around waiting for the sky to come crashing down.

  ***

  Curran lived in Rainbow Street, Randwick, a wide tree-lined street of 1920s red-brick houses and long-established Moreton Bay figs. Here, residents kept their hedges tidy and their lawns mowed flat. Curran’s house was shabbier than its neighbours, the garden overgrown, the front gutter sagging. Jackie parked across the road. The windows were dark, but a streetlight showed a white Corolla, the car she’d seen at the Tramsheds, parked under a carport at the end of a short driveway. Curran must be home. Jackie gathered herself and went to confront him.

  No reply to the front doorbell, an old-fashioned key that let out a short, grinding rasp. A decorative pane of frosted glass, set into the door at head height, showed darkness. Jackie tried again, knocked hard. Still nothing. Now, too late, she remembered Barnett telling them he and Curran were meeting the TV team tonight. Damn. She’d wasted her time. Curran must have already left, probably by Uber. Nobody in Sydney took their cars into town.

  She returned to her own car, then looked back at the house through the driver’s window. Curran wasn’t there, but the photos might be. She didn’t take the thought further than that. She didn’t think at all. A need, a current stronger than logic, swelled inside her, urging her to explore Curran’s house, his lair. Even if the photos weren’t there, she’d be able to get into Curran the same way he’d got into her father, into her. She needed to breathe his air, rummage under his skin.

  She leaned over and opened the glove box. Took out a pair of evidence gloves and a zipped leather case. Put her phone on silent and crossed the road again, moving with purpose. Scuttling was suspicious. She headed down the driveway, edging past Curran’s car, out of the streetlight’s aura and around the house, where she found herself in a long backyard bounded by a high wooden fence. Any privacy the fence might have afforded was offset by the addition of a storey to the house in the street behind. Two aluminium-framed windows, like a pair of square eyes, kept tabs on the goings-on in the Curran world. Both windows were lit up, but as far as Jackie could see the rooms behind them were empty. Still, they spoke of people, and she needed to get a move on.

  She surveyed the territory. The yard was the sort where families played Christmas cricket on the lawn. On what had once been a lawn. Now, in the light from the windows behind, Jackie could see it consisted of patches of dirt and a few tenacious stands of grass, an empty Hills hoist standing forlorn in the centre of a lone square of concrete.

  The back of the house, like the front, was original. Not for Curran the ubiquitous Sydney renovation that opened up the back of the building. No wall-to-ceiling glass here, no patio, no barbecue area; only a dark brick wall punctuated by three evenly spaced windows and a door with an upended yellow bucket sitting next to it. Both door and windows were protected by flyscreens. No sign of cameras anywhere.

  Jackie felt an animal surge of excitement, a bowel-churning rush. She breathed deeply, willing her body to relax. Snapped on her gloves and unzipped the lock-picking kit she kept in her car. Strictly against the rules, but lots of cops had them.

  The flyscreen was unlatched, the elderly Yale lock on the door easily managed. Jackie was through in seconds. She was in the kitchen. Light from the house behind illuminated it very slightly, just enough to reveal the dark shape of a table ahead of her. She hesitated, then found the light switch. A saucer overhead blinked into dim life. As far as the neighbours were concerned, Curran was home.

  For a moment she hesitated, her nerve faltering. What if Curran wasn’t meeting Grant and Barnett after all? What if he was just walking his dog? Too late, she told herself, you’re here now. She stayed still, absorbing the atmosphere. At first she couldn’t place it, then she did. A metallic smell overriding the air of ashtray pervading the house. She’d been a homicide detective long enough to recognise it. She forgot about searching, moved quietly from the kitchen across to the dining room, formal and empty; the living room, dominated by book-filled shelves and a flat screen TV, and the pink-tiled bathroom across the passage. Facing the bathroom, an open door led to a bedroom. Jackie could see the end of a bed. She crossed the passage and, pausing at the door, switched on the light.

  Trevor Curran lay on his back on the bed, his head resting on two pillows. The pillows had been white. Now they, and the wall above them, were a mess of blood, brain matter and fragments of bone. Curran’s head was turned slightly towards Jackie, enough for her to see the entry point in the chin, the shattered jaw, the missing teeth. His right hand was flung towards the bottom end of the bed. The gun, an older version of the Glock she herself used, lay a short distance from the hand, its barrel skewed, pointing away from Curran and towards the door.

  Jackie’s homicide training kicked in. She walked to the bed and without touching anything else, lifted Curran’s arm, noting its position first. She tried to flex the wrist. It was rigid. The body was in rigor mortis, which meant Curran had been dead less than twenty-four hours. She replaced the arm exactly as it had been and returned to the door. Imagining a grid, she visually analysed each block, registering details. Starting with Curran. He wore an old long-sleeved T-shirt. The bottom half of his body was covered by blankets pooled around his hips, but at one point a Bonds underpants waistband peeped out. Bedwear. Behind his head, the pillows. Behind them, the splattered wall.

  Next to the bed, a bedside table, IKEA-style, its single drawer shut. It held a lamp, an empty ashtray, a mobile phone, its white charger cord snaking towards the skirting board, and a dog-eared book, a Lee Child thriller, topped by Curran’s glasses. On the near side of the bed a pair of thongs, toes touching, waited on a mangy oblong rug. Nothing beyond the bed except floral curtains, drawn. A small, matching floral armchair sat in the far corner. Draped over it, jeans and a shirt, socks; a pair of hefty sneakers discarded nearby. An old-fashioned wooden wardrobe faced the bed, its oval mirror reflecting the carnage opposite. Two pictures, Tom Roberts prints, hung by hooks from picture rails.

  That was it. The bedroom of someone who slept alone.

  Jackie tried to recreate the scene. So Curran had gone to bed, read his book, removed his glasses, turned off the lights, slept, woken, despaired, shot himself in the mouth. In the dark? Without turning on his bedside lamp? Without putting on his glasses first? Okay, she told herself, unlikely, but assume that’s what he did. He knew the room well enough to act in the dark.

  Next question. Where did he get the gun? The drawer of the bedside table? If so, why lie down again to commit suicide? Why not do it sitting up? Taking care not to step on the rug, Jackie moved to the lamp, tried it. It worked. She opened the drawer, grateful she’d chosen to wear gloves.

  The drawer contained a nearly empty pack of Winfield Reds and a cheap plastic lighter, a couple of used tissues, a bottle of nasal spray, an open box of Panadol Rapid and a box of Temazepam, a 20-milligram dose. The chemist’s label said This preparation aids sleep. No shit. The prescription was dated eight days ago. Jackie opened the box, saw five crumpled slots in the blister pack. So Curran took sleeping pills most nights.

  That raised another question. The drawer had enough room to hold a gun, but if you were going to kill yourself and you had most of a box of sleeping tablets, why not take those? Why take the messy, painful, awful route of a bullet to the chin?

  She looked again at the body, trying now to remember Curran as he’d been at their meeting. She pictured him holding the photographs. Right-handed, and the gun on the bed lay close to his right hand. Positioned as expected, allowing for recoil. She could see speckles of blowback on the gun, and that, too, was expected.

  Still, every instinct screamed something wrong. As Jackie tried to work out what, a phone, not the mobile but a landline in the passage, rang loudly, the shock nearly knocking her off balance. She froze, heart thudding. Heard the answering machine take the call. Trevor? Alan Grant here. We’re waiting for you, buddy. Left a couple of texts already. A short silence, then, We’ve ordered. Let us know your ETA, okay? Then the beeps.

  She made her way towards the front of the house. Curran’s bedroom was one of three leading from the same passage. The middle room was empty except for a vacuum cleaner and ironing board, a couple of wooden chairs stacked on one another. The front room, what must have been the master bedroom, was very much in use. It had been set up as a study. A long laminated desk fronted by an office chair sat under a window facing the street. The wall adjacent to it was lined with bookshelves crammed with books, papers and stacks of boxes. Opposite the desk stood a wardrobe, a twin of the one in Curran’s bedroom.

  Jackie took a look at the desk. It seemed cluttered, but she couldn’t tell if this was normal or the result of a search. A search? She realised she was thinking about Curran’s death as murder. Too many things not making sense. Why would Curran kill himself now? Only yesterday he’d crowed about destroying the man he claimed had destroyed him. He’d had something to look forward to. Suicide didn’t compute.

  Holding the thought, she brought her attention back to the desk. At one end a silver laptop, a black Anglepoise lamp bent over it. Pens and pencils were scattered across the desk and a red Moleskine notebook lay shut beside them. The notebook Curran had had with him at the Tramsheds? Further on, a clear glass ashtray full of cigarette butts trapped a pile of press clippings and printouts. And next to that, the leather folder Curran had brought to their meeting. It was shut, but the zip was undone. Jackie flipped it open. Empty. Had it been that easy? Had Curran kept the photos here, and had Stanton just taken the chemist’s envelope and left? Because, face it, if it was murder, it had to be Stanton. Who else could it have been? How easy for him to creep in, grab the hand of the sleeping Curran, force it around a gun, press it under his chin and pull the trigger before Curran had time to know what was going on.

  Jesus, Jacks. Talk about jumping to conclusions. It was far more likely that Curran, already mentally fragile, had cracked and shot himself. Yes, that was most probably it. Because Curran wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave the photos in the folder, would he?

  She had to think not.

  She had an overwhelming sense of the living man in the room with her. She breathed hard, trying to expel the ghost, concentrated on the job at hand. First the laptop. It was password-protected. She didn’t go further. She didn’t want to leave a trail. Then she tried the desk drawers. The top drawer was divided by plastic compartments holding everything from glue to rubber bands to keys. The drawer beneath it was neatly stacked with name cards, index cards, Post-it notes. No technology, hard disks or flash drives. Jackie shut the drawers, pocketed the Moleskine notebook.

  A small steel filing cabinet, topped by a printer, sat next to the desk. Its drawers held tabbed and labelled hanging folders. One drawer seemed devoted to personal files, the other labelled with subjects Jackie thought related to Curran’s work as a journalist. These were organised chronologically, the most recent in front. They dated from now back to 2015 and filled the drawer. He must have archived older files. She checked the boxes stacked next to the bookshelves. Yes, there they were. Each box labelled in thick black texta with a start and end date. The past, filed in date order. Curran might not be houseproud, but he was systematic. An image of the jeweller’s receipt books flashed into Jackie’s mind.

  She tried the wardrobe. Locked. She returned to the top desk drawer, remembering that one of the plastic boxes held an old-fashioned skeleton key. She used it to open the double doors of the wardrobe. And tried to come to terms with what was inside.

  The wardrobe was empty of clothes. It had been turned into a sort of photo-box, a massive memory album. Pasted across every inside surface, including inside the doors, were photographs, hundreds of them. Most were of Belle. A couple, of Belle and Trevor Curran, had been positioned on the back surface at eye level and were outlined with a red painted heart. Others were of Belle alone, in the street, in a restaurant, laughing, looking pensive. Belle in summer, in shorts and a T-shirt. In winter, with the orange coat belted around her. Hair up, hair down. In the centre of the floor of the wardrobe lay a dry, withered bunch of roses tied with a yellow ribbon, and a plain, dark-wood box. Jackie took up the box. When opened it smelled slightly musty. It held a muddled pile of trinkets: a menu, a champagne cork, a glove, a couple of unmatched earrings, a gold chain, a scarf.