Prior to the anticipated release of my new mystery novel this year (no true; it is anticipated by at least four people that I know of!), I'm releasing this final version sample to give you a taste.
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The
Essence of Betrayal
by
Damien L. Malcolm
Two Chapter Sample
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| Cover Image - Essence of Betrayal - Damien L. Malcolm 2014 |
Thursday
May 16, 01:31
A
distant sound blared repeatedly from somewhere, bringing my mind
almost to full awareness.
On my way out of the dream I
realised it was a phone ringing. It jolted me awake, and one eye
pried open to stare at the glowing red numbers floating above the
bedside table in the dark.
One
thirty? Who the frig
could that be?
I
rolled out of bed and stumbled over to the desk. Despite my trusty
oil heater ticking away in the corner, the phone was incredibly cold
in my hand.
"Hello?"
"Oh
thank God. Jack, I'm so sorry, but I need you. Can you come over?"
She's worked up, crying and all. I thought I recognised her deep but
feminine voice though.
"Rachel?"
Rachel Gardener was a customer I'd had for a couple of years, under
both the handyman business, and my second, secret business as a
private investigator. She could seem a little unbalanced at
times-apparently suffered from a mild anxiety disorder-but most of
the time she was easy enough for a fella to get along with. Plus we
had a fair history, both personally and professionally.
"Yes,
it's me. Please Jack, I need help."
"Ok,
ok. Are you safe?"
"Yes.
I just need you here. I've got something to tell you."
"Righto.
Just give me a few minutes. I'll get something on and head over."
I
hung up the phone and shuffled into the bathroom. I've always slept
in the nude, and I'm a hairy bugger, so the cold had all my body
hairs standing on end. I looked like a furry echidna in the mirror
when I flicked the light on.
Draughty
damn house.
I
put on the work shirt and trousers that were lying on the floor, next
to the shower. I'd worn them the day before, but they didn't stink,
and right now there wasn't enough reason or inclination to find
anything else.
The
pants were black; the shirt tradie's fluorescent yellow, however
there shouldn't be anything at Rachel's that required night
camouflage. Then again, on second thoughts who knew what the heck I
was heading into. Perhaps being so obvious was not a good idea.
She
had sounded
pretty worked-up over the phone. How was I to know she didn't have
some crazy-man with a knife to her throat, or something? I'd been a
P.I. for long enough to know that things weren't always as they
seemed. And panicked ladies calling in the middle of the night was
enough to make anyone nervous.
Putting
yesterday's black work-jacket on over the top, just in case, I
glanced at the mirror again. I looked like someone just dragged from
a grave. Silver-streaked, dark-brown hair all over the place, hadn't
shaved for almost twenty-four hours and my light-blue eyes looked
glassy and tired.
Grey
lines, shadowed cheeks. At that point it was clear that while I may
have felt twenty-five at times, tonight I looked old enough to make
my real age of forty-three seem young. A voice told me I should tidy
myself, but I changed my mind. Stuff it; she wanted me out of bed at
this time of night, she could take me as I was.
Five
minutes later I was firing up the falcon and pulling out of the
garage. I thought it was a better choice than the work ute; quieter,
and more private with the tinted windows all round and matte black
panels. At night, it was almost invisible. Plus it had all my P.I.
gear in the boot, again just in case.
The
moon was full, with no clouds. Loved those nights. You could almost
drive without headlights... which by that stage I had done a few
times in the past. It was a good eight or so minutes back to town
from my place, country roads all the way. When I turned into Rachel's
drive, first thing I noticed was a missing car.
Her
hubby's 4WD wasn't there, which I had kind of pre-guessed with her
ringing in the middle of the night and all, but it still had me
wondering. The wind was blowing a freezing gale when I trudged across
the frost-bitten grass to the door. I could hear her dogs, a
four-foot rottweiler and a mangy little string-haired chihuahua,
barking their respective heads off from round back.
She
answered the door on the second knock, and shuffled me inside like
the road was littered with paparazzi. Rachel's dazzling green eyes
flared nervously against the mass of curly red hair flowing across
her shoulders. Panic, fear and something I couldn't put my finger on.
She
was wearing a kind of nightie thing, with a real silky thin fabric
that flowed ever so nicely over her short, slender body, and an open
dressing gown cast over her shoulders. At first I thought she was mad
wearing such a thing on this sort of night, minus-three degree winds
and all.
Her
nipples certainly agreed with me.
However,
when she closed the door behind us I realised the temperature of the
room was hovering somewhere between the centre of burning coal and
the surface of the sun. So in essence, she could have gone naked with
an ice-pack across her shoulders and been quite alright.
She
led me down the hall, passing the archway to the kitchen where the
kettle was already whistling, and I turned to see two mugs sitting on
the bench with tags hanging out. Obviously we were in for the long
haul.
This'd
better be good, I thought warily.
"Tea?"
She asked in a croaky voice as she left me in the dining room and
breezed back into her tiny kitchen.
Did
I have a choice? "Yeah sure," I replied aloud.
There
was a distinct air of tension in the house, like someone had died or
something. It made me uneasy. I looked around while I waited for her
to come back. From where I sat at the end of her oval table, I could
see out into the lounge and halfway up the hall to the bedrooms.
She'd
changed things around since I'd last been there. Some sort of African
cross New Guinean theme with red droopy things everywhere, beads from
the doorways, and waist-high brown-timbered statues of black fellas
with big penises. Bit odd.
Looked
like a lot of money had recently gone into decorating the place.
Interesting, considering she hadn't worked since marrying. Thought it
kind of funny too how, while it was her and
her bloke living there-and mostly
his money, it seemed-the decor was all her. Not even a big screen to
watch the footy on.
A
couple of minutes later she came in and placed the two tea mugs on
the table along with a plate of choc-chips and some sort of
cake-slice thing. Her normally attractive face was ragged and drawn,
bringing out every one of her thirty-six years, with black streaks
running down her cheeks where the hours of tears had liquefied her
mascara. Her red hair was now strung up in a haphazard ponytail.
"What
is this all about, Rach?" I queried as she took her seat across
from me.
I
took a couple of bikkies straight up. It had been a while since
dinner and I always got the nibbles around 2am. If I wasn't snoring
at the time, that is.
"It's
Jonathan I... I think something’s going on." She left a long
pause, seemingly straining to put her problem into words.
Jonathan
Gardener was her husband, obviously missing along with his 4WD. Big
bloke, about six-two and half that wide; hair everywhere but on his
head. He ran the main mechanic workshop in town, the one on Railway
St. I'd spoken to him a few times over my years in town, but since
they'd married the year previous, he had become kind of cagey around
me; not sure of my intentions or history with his missus, I guess.
"Something
like what, Rachel? Would you just let it out already? I gotta get
some sleep before starting on Harrison's deck tomorrow..." I
glanced at my watch as if I didn't already know how bloody late it
was. "I mean, later on today."
"I
know. I'm sorry, Jack. I'm just so scared I don't know what to do."
"Whaddya
mean? Has Jonathan done something to you?"
"No,
not to me. But I think he may have done something... to someone..."
She let that hang just long enough to have my mind reeling at a
thousand faces a minute. "You know that girl that's been missing
since last weekend?"
"Yeah.
Blake's got me asking around on my travels; see if anybody saw
anything the afternoon she went missing. Why? You don't think
Jonathan has anything to do with that, do you?"
Obviously
my last question was a little too direct for her. She immediately
shattered into a sobbing wreck. I'd seen this all before, couple of
years ago on the first and only night we had slept together. Only
this time there was no possibility it would end the same way. It took
her a while to calm back down.
"I
don't know... I..."
My
masculinity panged for a sec, and all I wanted to do was go and wrap
my arms round her and say it was all ok; protect her. But that had
been what got me in trouble last time, so I held back. Eventually she
pulled herself back together and wiped herself on a tissue she had
pulled from her dressing gown pocket.
"He's
been at that Holden tech thing in Brisbane for the last two nights."
She stood up and walked back out into the kitchen, still talking as
she moved. "I was sick and tired of tripping over his crap every
time I had to go in the shed to get the dog food, so I thought while
he's away I'd just do a bit of tidying."
"Shite,
love. You never tidy a man's shed."
The
joke was terrible, I know, but it was late, the tea was too weak and
I needed something to break the tense fogginess in my own head, more
than anything else. Besides, she didn't take any notice of what I'd
said.
"I
was shuffling some tools onto the back shelves," she continued,
"when I accidentally pushed a box off the top. And it had this
in it."
I
looked up from my fourth biscuit and took a good look at what she was
holding. It was a footy jersey from the local club; red with blue and
white horizontal bands. She flipped it round so I could see the name
stencilled across the back.
Becker.
As in Allison Becker, the girl who had gone missing. It looked clean,
with no blood, but it still took me a long while to swallow the
choc-chip caught in my throat.
I
looked her straight in the face.
"Well,
to make you feel better, I'd say that it doesn't mean much. But hell
Rach, I'd be lying. How the frig did that end up in your shed?"
"I
don't know." Rachel sat back down with a flop, tossing the
jersey on the table. Only one word crossed my mind as I watched the
thing hit the timber.
Evidence.
"Why
haven't you gone to the cops?" I asked firmly, hardly giving a
crap whether she broke down again or not. "That's some serious
evidence, Rachel. If they know you've got that and didn't go to them
straight away, you could come down as an accomplice when the crap
hits the fan."
"I...
I didn't want to start something I wasn't sure of."
"Have
you talked to Jonathan?"
"No,
I haven't called Jonathan. I only found it this afternoon, and I've
been stewing on it all night. I haven't slept, or even eaten. It took
me an hour just to pull together the courage to call you. I was
afraid that the police would swoop straight in and arrest me or him,
or something. And I knew you'd know what to do."
It
was childish and probably mean, but the way she said that gave me a
mental image of her huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth
saying "Jumper, scary. Jumper, bad," for the last eight
hours. In my defence, that is often the way crazy people are on TV.
But I knew she had a clinical illness of the mind... I really had no
excuse.
Lucky
I never smiled, or told her what I was thinking.
By
then though, my frustration had kicked in. "Bloody hell, Rachel.
That's one heck of a place to put me in."
Now
I did admit that at that point I had raised my voice just a little,
and the agitation that I was feeling from being dragged into such a
predicament that late at night could have pushed a slight accusing
tone into my voice. But I was in no way prepared for the reaction it
caused.
"You?"
she exploded, springing to her feet and driving herself across the
table at me. She was screaming like a banshee. "What about the
place I'm
in, you selfish mongrel? I've just found something that could very
well make my husband a fucking
murderer, and all you can do is sit
there and worry about you and your pretty
little world! At least you can go
home and sleep it off, go on tomorrow like nothing's bloody happened.
I gotta sit here and wait till the man I thought I knew and loved
waltzes in that door and says 'hi honey', like he hasn't just killed
some hapless teenage bitch!"
Right
about now, I wasn't really knowing what to think. I didn't know
whether to put on a calm voice and bring down the heat, speed dial
the cops or hit the freak with my pocket taser.
I'm
sitting there in the middle of the night with a piss-weak cup of tea
in one hand and half a chewed bikkie in the other, with a suddenly
psycho
woman screaming obscenities and thrusting her evil bloody eyes at me,
with a fire burning in them that looked set to cream me.
I
mean she had gone from a sad, pathetic, blubbering mess to full-on
crazy-town in two seconds flat. I was suddenly aware that I was
sweating like a duck underwater too, but I'm thinking that was the
result of the furnace burning at the far side of the lounge-room, not
my sudden fear and shock.
I
guess my surprise showed, because in a quick moment, Rachel calmed it
right off. Her face morphed back into a human's and she re-took her
seat. A second later when she spoke, her voice had returned to its
normal placid tones.
"I'm
sorry, Jack. I'm just real stressed, hey. All of this has freaked me
out. My meds don't seem to be taking the edge off any more. I'm real
sorry. Jonathan has been working such long days lately that I've
hardly seen him for weeks. Then this... I'm just..." And again
with the tears.
I
was still completely lost for words. Stressed, yeah fair enough. But
heck, I'd known Rachel a good few years by that stage; seen a few
meltdowns and slight tantrums. But I'd never seen her like this. This
wasn't stress—it was a chemical imbalance. She had mentioned her
medication too, which was unusual for her to do, and it made me a
little concerned. I just sat there and watched her cry for a minute,
trying to figure all this crap out.
So
her hubby had, supposedly, a missing girl's sports jersey in a box at
the back of his shed. Funnily enough, the very same jersey that she
had been wearing the day she disappeared. It was a massive
circumstantial coincidence, that was undeniable.
But
did it really prove anything? Yeah, sorta. How the hell else would he
have got a hold of that piece of clothing if not by pulling it off
the dead girl’s body? But was she even dead? Did he simply pick it
up off the side of a road?
In
the last couple of days, the cops had done some major searching of
the whole town using canine detection crews, bush land and all, and
turned up nothing. Not a single trace of her. Though they hadn't said
anything to the family yet, as far as their investigations were
concerned the trail was already cold.
From
witness reports that Senior Sergeant Walter Blake had showed me, it
seems that Miss Becker had left the under-seventeens footy training
at Patterson Oval on Saturday May 11th. She always walked home after
training. Apparently she liked to cool down from the session, and her
home was only eighteen hundred metres or so from the field.
Heck,
if her parents had been looking out the eastern window at the time
she disappeared, they'd have probably seen her go, or the car that
took her at least. But they didn't, till about a half hour after the
time she'd normally walk in the door, and of course by then she was
long gone. Not long after that, they called the cops.
All
the girls from the team, as well as their fifty-year-old grey-haired
coach, had said that they saw her walking down the road that
afternoon. Some even said they waved from their SUVs when their
parents drove past. But despite so many eyes on her at random
intervals, somewhere between 4:48pm and 5:15pm, she had simply
vanished, and not one person saw anything suspicious.
It
was certainly a mystery, one that that small town police force was
hard-pressed to deal with. I think that's why Blake had ended up
pulling me in. gotten to know each other a few years back, not long
after I rocked into town. He was one of only five people in the whole
district who knew about my new secret night job, and he sometimes
used my unique position, personal access and past military training
to his advantage.
We'd
collaborate on jobs, with him feeding me a bit of intel in order to
help get more information from possible suspects or witnesses. I
loved the arrangement, and despite making no money out of most of the
bones he threw me, it usually worked out even with all the free ID
histories, rego reports and background checks I was able to get out
of the force.
Not
that we told anybody about that
bit.
I
was brought out of my reverie when suddenly Rachel was standing over
me with my almost-empty cup in her hand.
"So
what are we going to do, Jack?"
"We?
Sorry, love, but there's not a whole lot I
can do
to help, besides put in a good word for you with the sarge. But you
are going to take that jersey down
the cop shop first thing in the morning and tell them exactly how you
found it."
"But
they'll just want to arrest Jonathan." She was a lot calmer than
before, but I could clearly see a spark of unbridled panic in her
eyes again. She was making me bloody nervous.
"Not
necessarily. Most likely they'll just have him in for questioning
when he gets back into town. Find out what he knows as to her
whereabouts. The missing girl case is technically still not a
homicide just yet. But they’ll ask you some questions too, where
you just need to lay out the truth, and they'll most likely want to
come and search the premises for anything else."
She
plonked herself back into her seat. "Oh no..." The crying
was about to start again. I looked at my watch. 2:30 really was my
limit; I had to get out of there.
"Look,
Rach, sorry to be harsh, but tears aren't helping you here. You've
got to just stay together, think rationally and don't go jumping to
any conclusions."
She
was nodding, soaking up some more saline with that sodden tissue of
hers.
"Just
to be safe, I wouldn't be calling Jonathan just now, either. He may
be perfectly innocent, but it'd be best if the cops talk to him
first, ok? And it might be a good idea, after you drop the jersey
down the shop, to just go stay somewhere else for a couple of days.
You know, till the cops have talked to Jonathan. Is your mother still
in that two bedroom place up by Harry's Hill?"
"Yep.
And Jonathan's only been there twice. He's never been able to
remember where she lives."
"That's
good. Best if you do that, I think. Just for a few days, maybe a
week."
I
started to stand up, making it clear it was time for me to go home.
She copied, and began hesitantly leading me to the door. I had the
distinct impression that she was about to beg me to stay on the couch
or something.
I
could understand her trepidation; fears her husband might come home
early or something. Either way, it would not have been a good idea.
Plus I really just
could not stand
her presence right then. Something
about her was giving me the creeps.
She
just went to open her mouth when I cut her off.
"You
should be ok tonight, Rachel. Take half a sleeping pill and make sure
you get a good bit of shut eye. In the morning, take that bloody
jersey into the cops."
I
was at the door now, just bracing myself to pass between the
enveloping heat and the icy cold. I was really wishing I'd brought my
darn snow jacket.
"Good
night, Rachel. Let me know how you go tomorrow, ok?"
"Ok,
Jack. And thank you so much. I didn't know who else to call. It means
so much that you believe me."
Shit
the air outside was cold. My toes almost curled up inside my boots
when that door opened. "Righto. Hear from you later."
She
stayed standing in the doorway while I walked down the drive to where
I'd parked the falcon. A key turn later, I was getting blasted by
warm air in my little comfort booth.
I
really felt at home in that car. I'd spent so many hours whiling away
inside it, into the darkest parts of many a night, that I was about
as settled in that seat as I had ever been anywhere else.
I
looked up from the glowing lights of the dash as I put it in reverse,
and noticed that Rachel was still watching me from the front porch.
Ordinarily, such a thing wouldn't bother me, but for some reason I
got a sudden chill down my spine.
Quickly
I backed the car out onto the dark road, put it in drive and pumped
the accelerator. Vivid flashbacks hit me of her face when she'd lost
it in that dining room. I just had to get the hell out of there.
It
wasn't till I was turning onto my road that I started to come down
off my nerves. It was then that it came to me how strange her last
words had been.
"It
means so much that you believe me," she had said. It played over
and over again in my head as I headed home, tossing up dust on the
gravel roads.
"Believe
me."
What
an odd thing to say. It had never even occurred to me that she may
have been lying. But considering that odd remark, was it possible
that she had something to hide?
Already
things weren't adding up. And damn
it, now I wasn't going to get any
sleep at all.
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