Craven (9781921997365) Read online

  To my husband Peter, this one’s for you.

  Cowards die a thousand deaths.

  The valiant taste of death but once.

  William Shakespeare

  PART I

  VENI

  PROLOGUE

  Cold air swirled around the woman’s damp shoulders sending her flesh into a pucker of goosebumps. She sank down into the warm, soapy water, making it slosh over the edge of the deep claw-foot bathtub and onto the black and white chequered tiles on the floor.

  ‘Shut the door, Geoff, you’re letting all the warm air out!’

  She turned to the man standing in the bathroom doorway and smiled. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of him. He was striking; his dark hair and eyes gave him intense, sulky good looks that she found irresistible. He was looking straight at her but he didn’t return her smile. Suddenly self-conscious, she pushed wet hair out of her eyes and smeared bubbles across her face in the process.

  ‘Geoff? Is something the matter?’

  ‘No, why would there be?’

  ‘You didn’t answer me.’

  ‘I was busy admiring you.’ He gave her a sultry smile that made her all hot and tingly.

  ‘Well, how about making yourself useful?’ She waved a dripping sponge at him.

  He moved over to sit on the edge of the bath. Grabbing the sponge he started to wash her back in slow, rhythmic strokes. She moaned, tipping her head forwards to expose the nape of her neck.

  ‘You shouldn’t use that so close to the water; it’s dangerous,’ he said, glancing at the digital radio she’d tuned to her favourite station. An eighties New Romantics tune was wailing out of its speakers.

  ‘It’s fine, I don’t touch it once I’m in.’ He’d given the radio to her for her birthday and she’d had the habit of plugging it into the socket near the sink when she had a bath.

  ‘You really should’ve had those circuit breakers put in,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going to pay an electrician to come out just for that. Next time we need something done I’ll do it, I promise.’

  ‘It’ll be too late then.’ With a swift movement he stood up and swept the radio off the vanity unit and into the bathtub.

  The woman’s back arched and she thrashed in the water, her teeth clenched and muscles wracked by spasms. The last thing she saw was his smiling face.

  My lungs were aching and my temples pounded. I opened my eyes and looked around the bathroom. The man and woman were gone. The bathtub was empty and the clutter of toiletries and towels was absent from the vanity unit. I took a few careful, controlled breaths, trying to bring my heart rate back to normal and shake off the vision. My muscles were still twitching from the memory of the pain of the electrical current.

  ‘So what do you think? It’s charming, isn’t it? I love these character places, and it’s very clever the way they’ve divided the house into separate apartments. You get all the charm of an older place without so much to look after.’

  The bright, chirpy voice of the real estate agent was like sandpaper to my frayed nerves. I turned to look at the woman. She’d wafted into the doorway behind me in a cloud of cloyingly sweet perfume. She was quite attractive, or at least I imagined she was. It was hard to tell what she really looked like under an inch of artfully applied makeup. Her hair was pale, winter blonde and her eyes were a pretty shade of blue. She was clutching the list of names she’d compiled during the open inspection in beautifully manicured hands, heavily laden with rings. I tucked my hands with their chewed nails into my jeans pockets.

  ‘It’s just been renovated too, the owner had it completely repainted and rewired,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, the apartment is lovely, but a woman died in this bathroom,’ I said.

  The agent blinked in surprise; her well-rehearsed expression of happy confidence wavered. ‘Ah, yes, yes, there was an unfortunate incident.’

  ‘An incident?’ I locked eyes with her.

  ‘The woman who lived here had an accident in the bath,’ she said.

  ‘You mean she was murdered by her husband.’

  The agent’s mouth fell open briefly before she managed to gather her wits. ‘No, I’m sorry, Miss …’ she consulted her list, ‘Lehman. I don’t know who told you that, but there was no murder. The woman pulled her hairdryer into the bath and was electrocuted. It was just a terrible accident.’

  ‘Digital radio,’ I mumbled, looking back at the bathtub.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It wasn’t a hairdryer.’

  ‘How do you …? Look, I think it might be best if you left, Miss Lehman. I don’t think this is the property for you.’

  ‘No, I don’t think it is either,’ I said, walking past her, down the hallway and out the front door. Shame. It was a nice apartment.

  With a sigh I wrenched open the door of my Mazda and slid onto the seat, carefully avoiding the tear in the upholstery that forever caught my stockings. I flipped down the sun visor and had a quick peek in the mirror. The sight that greeted me wasn’t pretty. My eyes were bloodshot, my skin was a pasty shade of grey and my hair … I groaned.

  Reaching into the glove box I fished around until I found a hair tie and wrestled my unruly locks into submission. It was a damp day, and with every passing hour, what had started as cascading blonde waves had gradually turned into a fierce bird’s nest of frizz. So much for my efforts with the hair straightener. There was forty-five minutes of my life I’d never get back.

  I rested my throbbing head against the seat and let the warmth of the car seep into my frozen limbs. The smell of the cold coffee sitting on the console made my throat constrict. I swallowed, waiting for the moment of nausea to subside. The physical symptoms were all typical of the way my body reacted after a vision and it was the second one in as many hours.

  I’d viewed three properties before this one. Two had been dumps and the third had offered a spacious lounge/dining, a separate laundry, modern kitchen and a suicide in the main bedroom. It was a hanging; not something I ever wanted to experience again if I could help it.

  Still, I was proud of myself. I was getting better at handling the visions. It was time I learned how to deal with them. I’d been grappling with my ‘gift’ since I was nine. For years I’d tried to shut it out, to the point where I’d turned into a virtual recluse. But all that had changed a year ago when my world had collided with that of Detective Ed Dyson.

  My heartbeat cranked up a notch as an image of him played across the back of my eyelids; messy sandy blonde hair that was always a bit too long, eyes that changed colour with his mood and a collection of worry lines and crow’s-feet that were testament to the toll his job and personal tragedy had taken. He was handsome in a seasoned warrior kind of way that turned my knees to jelly and made me forget the end of my sentences.

  The problem was, my vision did more than just raise thoughts of Ed. It gave me a crisis of conscience. If what the agent had said was true, there was a murderer somewhere who’d got away with bumping off his wife.

  If she was his wife … I didn’t even know her name.

  It had felt like they were married. For the few moments where I’d relived the woman’s death I’d felt all her emotions. She’d loved the bastard who’d killed her. The most awful part hadn’t been the pain of the electrocution; it was the shock and anguish she’d felt in the split second when she realised what he’d done.

  He had to pay and it was up to me to make that happen.

  Piece of cake.

  My phone chirruped into life, making me jump. I lunged for my handbag and rummaged through to find it before it stopped ringing.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Cass, are you all right? I had a funny feeling.’

  ‘Hi, Mum
. Yes, I’m fine. You’ve got to stop worrying so much. I’m a big girl, remember!’

  ‘Yes I know, but I can’t help it. It’s what mothers do. You wait, when you have children of your own you’ll understand.’

  ‘If I have children of my own, you mean, and you know as well as I do that most mothers don’t have the kind of feelings you do.’

  My mother also had psychic abilities and that made it very difficult to keep anything a secret. Normally she could only glimpse someone’s immediate future if she made physical contact with them, but when it came to me the rules seemed to change.

  ‘All mothers have a sixth sense when it comes to their children. Mine’s just stronger. Are you sure you’re all right? You sound tired,’ she said.

  ‘I am tired. I’ve been hunting for houses all day.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘No, not really. The one I just looked at was nice but there’d been a death in the bathroom.’ I decided not to mention that it was a murder or that I’d had another vision earlier in the day. I wasn’t exactly lying, just being economical with the truth.

  ‘Was it bad? You should go back to your hotel and rest. I can come to Adelaide if you want?’

  ‘No, you don’t need to come. I’m fine, really. I promise I’ll have an early night, OK?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I knew there was something. My feelings are seldom wrong.’

  ‘You can’t be ringing me every time you get a twitch in your big toe, and you certainly can’t come all that way every time I have a vision. I have to learn to deal with the visions if I’m going to cope on my own.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Mum went silent on the other end of the phone.

  She hadn’t wanted me to move to Adelaide. She thought I should have tried living closer to home first.

  ‘The new job is a great opportunity for me, you know,’ I said.

  ‘I miss you, that’s all. We all do. Shadow’s gone off his food. He only weighed nine kilos when I took him to the vet last week.’

  ‘That’s amazing! The vet must’ve been happy; another three kilos and he’ll be back in the average weight range for a cat.’

  ‘All right, Cass, promise me you’ll be careful? And call me if you need to.’

  ‘I will, I promise. Give my love to Gran, and give Shadow a pat for me.’

  I hung up and tossed the phone back into my bag. With a sigh I pulled my seatbelt on and started the car. I had one more place to see. With a bit of luck it’d be a home where anyone who’d died had gone peacefully in their sleep.

  CHAPTER

  1

  The streets leading into the city were deserted except for a few hopeful taxis cruising around with their vacant signs lit up. Parked cars were already frosted over and there was no one walking along the footpaths. Restaurants and cafés were closed and the only tables left out on the pavement were the ones firmly bolted to the ground. Dave took a left turn and they started to head towards the western side of the city.

  The complete desolation made Ed realise that Adelaide couldn’t really be called a big city. It was more of a large country town in disguise. The absence of any other life was enough to ignite his already smouldering temper.

  ‘So tell me, Dave, why the hell have you dragged me out of bed in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning for an apparent suicide?’

  ‘The vic, Paul Jenkins, took a dive off his balcony. One of the neighbours thought she heard an argument last night.’

  ‘Yeah, and that means what exactly? Maybe that’s the reason he jumped.’

  ‘Yep, I hear you. I don’t know why Crackers wanted us on this one either. It sounds like either a suicide or a Tier One. Maybe we’ll figure it out once we get there,’ Dave said.

  Crackers, aka DCI Robert Arnott, wasn’t strong on communication skills. Ed couldn’t really blame Dave for not knowing more, but he resented the hell out of being dragged from a warm bed and the best night’s sleep he’d had in a month. Tier One cases were normally dealt with by regular police. They were typically ‘suspect with smoking gun in hand’ cases where there was little doubt about how the vic had died and who was responsible. Major Crime was only usually called in to investigate where there was doubt about the suspect, links to organised crime or worse, or there was a series of related crimes. To Ed this case sounded pretty straightforward. Guy jumps – cause of death: impact with ground.

  Ed glanced over at his partner. Despite the hour he looked perfectly groomed. His dark hair was swept back and nailed in place with product. His charcoal-grey suit was impeccable and his shirt looked crisp and white. How did he do it? Beside him, Ed felt like something the cat had dragged in. He missed his old partner, Phil. He’d never felt uncomfortable with her.

  After working with her for so many years it was taking him a long time to get used to someone new. He hadn’t realised how much he didn’t need to say to Phil. They’d understood each other and slipped into a natural rhythm when they worked a case. Phil had been easy to read, easy to understand and much less of a pain in the arse.

  She still hadn’t forgiven him for taking the twelve-month secondment in Adelaide. Why anyone would want to work with the Major Crime Investigation Branch was beyond her comprehension. She’d tried her best to talk him out of the move but here he was, heading out to what sounded like a complete waste of time with Teflon-Dave, who was so slick that shit didn’t stick to him. He didn’t trust the guy but he could handle working with him for a year, or the nine months left of it.

  ‘OK, Dave, so tell me, what do we know about the vic?’

  ‘Paul Jenkins, forty-three, couple of convictions for possession of narcotics over eight years ago, did three years in Yatala, suspected links to gangs back then but nothing current, lives alone.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘So far.’

  Dave eased the car into a parking space in the small visitors’ car park at the front of a modern multistorey block of flats. The building was the sort of sterile, vanilla architecture that left Ed feeling faintly depressed. All concrete and steel. Very little effort had gone into the aesthetics of the building.

  He flung the door open and stepped out into the chilly early morning air. It wasn’t as bitter as the mornings along the southern coastline, but it was still damn cold.

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ he said.

  They walked over to the huddle of uniforms around the body, which was lying in the middle of the driveway leading to the residents’ underground car park. There wasn’t a lot to see. The guy looked like most jumpers Ed had seen: broken. Asphalt wasn’t kind to flesh and bone.

  He spoke briefly to the uniformed officers before heading over to the forensic team and the pathologist. She was a middle-aged woman with a severe iron-grey crew cut. Her expression was frostier than the morning air.

  ‘Anything out of the ordinary?’ he asked her.

  ‘Depends on whether you call someone falling from a fourth-floor balcony ordinary.’

  She glanced briefly in his direction. The corners of her mouth were turned down and frown lines creased her forehead. She looked like she’d sucked on a lemon. They’d met at one other crime scene since he’d been in Adelaide and he couldn’t remember her name.

  He missed the pathologist from Fairfield. He missed her smiling at him with her faintly alarming mouthful of teeth. He missed working with people he liked and who liked him. Hell, at this point in time he would have settled for a dose of the ones he didn’t like. At least their annoying habits were comforting in their familiarity.

  The woman must have read something in his expression. Her frown eased. ‘There’s nothing that stands out. So far it looks like he jumped but we need to do a lot more work before I’d go on the record with that. We’ve still got the scene upstairs to process, so gloves and booties if you’re heading up there.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Somewhere between 11pm and 1am.’

  He turned to ask Dave her name but his partner was MIA as usual. He sp
otted him on the side of the road, talking to an attractive female officer in uniform. With a sigh he headed over to grab him. The guy couldn’t stop thinking about his dick even at this ungodly hour.

  ‘Dave, when you’re ready …’ He didn’t try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. One thing he’d learnt in the last three months was that his partner was either too stupid or too full of himself to be bothered by criticism. Ed’s money was on the latter.

  With a smile that showed off his impressive dental work, Dave managed to drag himself away from the brunette. They headed over towards the apartment building. Ed’s jaw clenched as the wind whipped up, turning his face numb and sending icy tendrils crawling down his neck and back. Why couldn’t tragedy keep more civilised hours? He was getting too old for the late nights and early mornings.

  His mood didn’t improve when he discovered the lift was out of order and he had to trudge up the four flights of stairs. There were two uniforms standing outside apartment 12. They straightened up as they saw the detectives approaching.

  ‘Morning,’ Ed puffed. ‘MCIB, I’m Dyson, he’s Reynolds.’

  ‘Morning, sir,’ the one on the left answered.

  ‘And you are?’ Ed asked.

  ‘I’m Constable Davis and this is Constable Evans, sir.’

  ‘Has anyone been inside?’ Dave asked.

  ‘We had a quick look when we first got the call to make sure there was no one in the apartment.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Dave said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have you spoken to any of the neighbours?’ Ed asked.

  ‘We spoke to Mrs Randall next door, sir. She’s the one who thought she heard an argument.’

  ‘Good. Evans, you stay here while we have a look. Davis, start knocking on doors on this floor and see if any of the other neighbours heard anything. You’ll probably piss people off given it’s barely 4am but we want to know if we’ve got anything useful sooner rather than later. Dave, I think we should start by having a look inside and then we’ll go and see what Mrs Randall has to say.’