The Plot – Chapter 14
Not Quite Right
Hand on tap, about to let the shower run warm while she had a pee, she remembered that the new bottle of conditioner was still in her handbag on the chair. Honestly, where was her head these days?
Not bothering with the robe, she stepped out into the bedroom. Neil would be downstairs, getting his breakfast.
‘Oh.’
He was there, bent over the chair. His gaze slid over her body. Lingering on his favourite bits.
Involuntarily, she covered herself with her hands. She’d grown shy in front of him.
Then she realised what he was about.
‘What are you doing with my phone?’
‘I uh …’
‘Well?’
Knuckles on hips now, outrage overcoming embarrassment. It was almost comical, the struggle for the upper hand. She naked and defiant; he cross-eyed with the effort of looking her in the face, not the tits or pussy.
He straightened, her phone in his hand. Still flushed, but confident now. So calm and reasonable.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Court. I just need to run an update, love. What’s your PIN these days?’
Standing over her. Close enough to touch.
I daren’t refuse, she thought, mind racing through the phone’s contents: WhatsApp chats? … on twenty-four-hour delete, nothing since Friday … address book? … ‘Nico (Donna’s friend)’ innocuous … anything else incriminating? … fuck knows …
‘Three six four nine eight three.’
‘Cheers.’ He tapped it in as he turned away, left the room.
In the ensuite she locked the door, leaned against it as the nausea hit.
The way he’d keyed in that six-digit number, having heard it just once.
He already knew the PIN. He’s been in my phone.
Still, what could he have found? She was careful. Though Nico wasn’t always. She’d scolded, but he was cheeky, liked to push his luck.
Arrived on the ward, she ducked into a toilet cubicle, sat on the seat and took her phone out. After a moment’s thought she changed the PIN. Then she checked that location sharing was still disabled. Finally she opened WhatsApp and locked and hid Nico’s chat thread behind an access code.
Just as she was wondering what else she could do, a message from the man himself:
Mornin’ Nectar Nipples 🍒 Just back from Sydney – usual drama with the ex 🙄 How are you? Soz about Friday, had a sook on. Good thing you cancelled – check this out: …
She’d been pissed off when Donna had asked her to fill in for her. It was a bloody cheek, actually, last minute like that. But she owed her friend several favours; now it was her turn to take one for the team.
Nico had been narky about it, short. Actually their whole chat had been odd that day, confusing. As if they were at cross-purposes, some vital piece of information were missing …
Shit. Her shift was about to start.
She skimmed the linked article, a short piece about a man killed by a falling tree branch. Sad, but so what?
Their gardens, she realised on a second read. Their tree.
It was a place so still and dark of an evening, yet public enough to feel dangerous. Cars passing on the busy street, the occasional dog walker or gaggle of teenagers walking by, oblivious to the sneaky, furtive, delicious sex going on in the shadows. The gardeners locked the main gate at dusk, but never the side gate, the one down the laneway.
The man died on the very spot they would have met.
The article said that the police were ‘still conducting enquiries, but not treating the death as suspicious at the present time’.
At the present time. What did that mean, exactly?
It meant they were reserving judgement. That it might not have been an accident.
Neil? If he’d been snooping, had turned up at the rendezvous and thought this Dmitry was Nico …
No way. He didn’t have it in him.
Did he?
Frowning into her computer screen, DS Mel Hanrahan reread the forensics report. None of this felt quite right.
The autopsy was undecided: one blow, or two? There was the possibility of a stunning blow with a blunt weapon, likely wooden, then a crushing coup de grâce with the heavy branch as the victim lay on the ground. But the branch had made such a mess of the man’s skull, it was impossible to be certain. Disappointing.
No prints other than those of the witnesses and the ambos. No fibres, no unidentified DNA that couldn’t be contamination from the immediate environment.
Did the branch fall at the time of the incident – or earlier? If the branch were already on the ground, that would clinch it: clearly, it didn’t leap up and batter the poor bastard of its own volition.
Infuriatingly and to her surprise, there was no precise science to determine this. All the forensic botanist could offer was a tentative two-day window for when the branch had detached itself from the tree.
Note that limbs may become cut off from the phloem and xylem (sap-transporting layers) of the parent tree and begin to wilt and die long before they finally detach and fall, especially in instances of moisture stress, fungal or pest attack, or mechanical trauma. (Barth, Slorach et al. 2003, p.213)
Yeah, thanks for that, mate.
Interviewing other community gardeners had brought no eyewitnesses to the fall of the branch. One thought that maybe she’d heard a thump while tending her patch, then maybe seen a mound of leaves on the ground shortly before leaving the gardens at dusk, so just before eight. Maybe, maybe.
If it was assault, where was the perpetrator? Patel had seen no vehicles other than the deceased’s Tesla stop outside the gate, no other pedestrians enter. A teenage dog walker thought that perhaps he had seen a man in a dark jacket walk by the entrance at about ten fifteen, heading away from the main road. Or perhaps it was a tall woman. Or perhaps he or she was heading in the opposite direction, towards the main road. He’d been on his phone, see? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Russo and Smith were nearby at the time of Kapanadze’s death, by their own ready admission. Could one or both have attacked him? Could Patel also be involved? Could the three witnesses be colluding? Then why call triple zero at all?
Attacked with what motive? The dispute over the gardens? The deceased was the main driver of the redevelopment plan, CEO of the company. Feelings were running high: she’d read about it in the newspaper. There had been a small, sedate demo at the developer’s head office. Tea and home-baked biscuits had been passed around: it was hardly an armed uprising.
Was Kapanadze known to Russo or Smith, though? Well enough to recognise him in the dark? Mel had seen for herself that it was pitch black under that tree. Neither had even attended the demo.
None of the potential suspects had a history of violence; none was known to hold extremist views. There was that Hughes man, of course, but he was just a petty troublemaker with half-arsed notions about personal sovereignty. Appeared to be.
There was no sign of a robbery or an altercation. The deceased seemed to have stopped by the Patch on impulse, without prior arrangement – and quietly, suddenly died. If there was an assault, then surely opportunistic, not premeditated?
All the indications pointed to ‘wrong place, wrong time’. Shit had chosen that particular moment to happen, and a man was dead as a consequence.
And yet.
She was going around in circles, needed a fresh pair of eyes on this. And none in her unit were fresher than the wide, blue, twenty-five-year-old eyes of DC Gabi Papadakis.
Mel sighed, rose from her desk, opened the door of her office.
‘Step in here for a moment, please, Gabi.’
‘Yes, Sarge?’
Next week in The Plot:
Chapter 15: Not the Culprit
Jorja puts Vince straight on a misapprehension.
Disclaimer: The people, organisations and events described in this story are entirely the product of the author’s imagination; they bear no intentional resemblance to real-life people, organisations and events. Some locations are based on real places, however the City of Corymbia and its localities are inventions of the author.
The tree has confessed:
"At first I thought it was just an innocent hug. But she kept coming back, the hugs got longer, and she began to sit on my exposed roots, and suggest I just drop in on this guy."
"She played you for a sap, Woody."