Bright City Deep Shadows Read online

  I took out my phone, meaning to write down a few notes and it struck me that this was even easier than I thought. All I had to do was google “how to solve a murder”.

  As soon as I did, I was deluged in information. Most of it was about games and TV shows, there were books on forensic science, interviews with cops, tips on interrogation techniques, articles about surveillance equipment, hints on how to take a good plaster cast of a footprint, discussions of the law around citizen’s arrests, what to look for to spot if someone is lying, and on and on. It was hopeless – and, for the most part, extremely off-putting. Even so, I plunged into it. If six years at uni had taught me one thing, it was how to read through piles of crap, sifting it for the nuggets of information I needed. But chasing down ideas in a well-stocked library, filled with erudite and well-indexed books, is nothing at all like ploughing through the ocean of garbage you find on the Web. It was almost dark when I finally stopped. My phone’s battery was just about dead and my back was killing me from hunching over a little screen on a cemetery bench.

  “All right,” I told Chelsea’s grave. “It was a dumb idea. I’m not going to learn how to be a good cop by playing murder investigation games online. But I’m going to do this. I’m going to find out who killed you. And I may be a complete bloody loser, and I may have just wasted half a day, and I may be lacking in all the skills and experience I need to do this, but I know a man who isn’t.”

  * * * *

  As I reached the car, I got a text message from Stacey.

  “I am back in Sydney. The apartment is yours for now. But I intend to contest the will and my lawyers will be in touch. The police asked me if you could have killed Chelsea. I told them you were too useless to do anything so purposeful. Even so, in the light of her confused and erroneous bequests, I am keeping an open mind. I don’t expect we will meet again.”

  What the … ? I fought the urge to send back an appropriate reply like, “I see now why Chelsea moved a thousand kilometres away from you at the first opportunity.” But, on reflection, I decided that “Good riddance!” was what I truly felt and that any kind of response was a waste of time. Even so, I was edgy and irritable as I drove out to the motel to collect my stuff and check out.

  As I knew it would be, the unit was immaculately clean and tidy and several of Chelsea’s pictures and keepsakes were missing. I didn’t begrudge Stacey any memento of her daughter but to just take them like that suggested she thought I might try to deprive her of them. It was insulting and petty and so much in keeping with things Chelsea had told me about her. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the space where one of Chelsea’s favourite childhood photos had hung and let my anger subside.

  “If it makes her feel better,” I said aloud. It hardly mattered what Stacey did or what she thought about me. Even about contesting the will. I had no idea what the legal status of it was, or what kind of case Stacey would need to make to overturn it. It was only money. I had enough right now, thanks to Kazima, to see me through weeks of investigation and that was all that mattered. It would have been nice to be rich but some part of me thought that maybe Stacey deserved her daughter’s money more than I did, anyway. It was probably all for the best.

  I threw everything I had worn, including what I had on, into the washing machine and found myself some clean gear to wear. I called an Uber and was out of there in ten minutes flat. Stacey had actually done me a favour. I had been so annoyed by her and her passive-aggressive antics, that I had forgotten to be freaked out at seeing our unit again. I still had to face it properly, bag up Chelsea’s things, make decisions about what to do with pictures, face each chair and table we’d bought together, smelling her scent on her clothes… but coming back next time wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe.

  Arriving at the Jindalee Hotel once again, I went straight through to the bar.

  The old guy was there on the same stool, just as I knew he would be, nursing a glass of rum and scowling at the bar top. I took the stool next to him and caught the bar tender’s eye. “Toohey’s Old,” I said, “and another one of those for my friend.”

  He swivelled his grizzled head to look at me. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “I want to pick your brains.”

  He looked back at his rum and gave it a little swirl.

  “I don’t have a license any more,” he said.

  “What?”

  He sighed as if I’d irritated him beyond all endurance. “Look, mate, you only know two things about me. One is that I drink in this bar – because you’ve seen me here. The other is that I used to be a PI – because I stupidly told you. And I only know two things about you. One is that your girlfriend was murdered – because that came up yesterday. The other is that you probably didn’t do it – because you’re still walking around free, eight days later, and even a useless bell-end like Trevor Reid would have locked you up for it by now if he possibly could have. From those four things, I conclude that you’ve come swanning in here, shouting me drinks, because I’m the only real-life PI you’ve ever come across and you want me to help you find the real killer.”

  “Wow.” I was impressed. “You’re really good.”

  “I am so glad you think so. Now piss off.”

  For a moment I was taken aback, not just because of his openly hostile attitude, but because I’d forgotten what he’d opened with. “Right. Right. The license. No PI license, I get it. But, look, I didn’t want to hire you. I just wanted to ask your advice about how I should proceed.”

  “A hundred bucks an hour, or part thereof, plus expenses.”

  “What?”

  “If you want to hire me as a criminal investigation consultant, that’s what it will cost you.”

  “Who said anything about—?”

  He turned his pallid eyes on me in a hard stare. “Don’t fuck me about, kid. You think I’m bloody Santa? You think I’m going to give you everything in my sack just ’cause you’ve been a good little boy? What the hell planet did you come from? Here on planet Earth, we exchange goods and services for money. So agree to my terms, or go pester some other poor fucker.”

  I realised the bartender had returned with the drinks and had stayed to watch the show, a grin on her face. I took them from her and paid. When she finally sauntered away, I turned back to the old guy. “All right, you’re on.”

  He grinned too and put out a hand. Reluctantly, I shook it. To tell the truth, I expected some kind of macho bullshit like a knuckle grinding power-grip, but it was a perfectly ordinary handshake.

  “Right,” he said. He checked his watch, downed the rum he’d been nursing and picked up the one I’d just bought him. “Let’s go through to the food bit and get some nosh. They do a good feed here. You’ll like it.”

  He made me pay for the meal. “Expenses,” he said.

  “Alright, let’s start,” I said, as we sat down.

  “We started back in the bar when we shook hands,” he said, affably.

  Refusing to be wound up, I said, “My name is Lucas Kelly.”

  “I know.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t think I really only know two things about you, do you? Lucas Michael Kelly, born in Brisbane, aged twenty-six, parents Michael and Emily, went to Kenmore High, degree in philosophy at UQ, followed immediately by a PhD, also in philosophy, also at UQ. Met Chelsea Campbell about two years ago. Moved in together a few months later. You’re unemployed. She owned a small but fast-growing software company making tools for games developers. That was all easy. Got it from the Web. Why do the police think you killed her?”

  He fixed me with his stone-eyed scrutiny as I got over the fact that he could know so much about me so quickly and applied myself to answering the question. “It was the will. I inherited everything.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “I – I don’t know. I didn’t go into the detail. Millions, probably.”

  “Nice. What else?”

  “What else?”

  “What
else makes the police suspicious of you?”

  “Nothing. I wasn’t even there on the night Chelsea died. I was at Byron Bay.”

  “Convenient.”

  “What?”

  “If I was planning a murder, I’d make sure I was out of town, too.”

  “What? You mean having an alibi makes me a suspect? What kind of logic is that?”

  He ignored the question. “So what else?”

  “Nothing. Me and Chelsea were in love. I had absolutely no reason to hurt her. I didn’t even know what she was worth and, even if I did, I assumed her mother would get it as next of kin.”

  “You didn’t know about the will?”

  “No!”

  His eyes never left mine for a second. “Who did know?”

  “I don’t know. Kazima and the company lawyer, I suppose.”

  “Kazima?”

  “She does the finances for the company. Runs the office. She’s the new CEO now.”

  “How did she get on with Chelsea?”

  “They were fr— You can’t think Kazima’s a suspect.”

  “Why not? Did they argue? Was she skimming money from the accounts? Were you having it off with her? Was Chelsea having it off with her? Oh don’t look so bloody offended. Someone’s got to ask the hard questions. What about Chelsea’s mother? How were her finances? Jeez, mate, do you spend your whole life sleep-walking? All right, never mind the will. I’ll want to see a copy of it. You’ve got a copy, right? Christ Almighty! OK, well, get one. Tell me about the murder.”

  I don’t think I’d ever been so insulted, belittled, or made to feel so ashamed of myself, by a complete stranger, in my whole life. I wanted to get up and walk out but a part of me was saying, Suck it up, you dickhead. This is all gold. This is what you need to hear. This is how you’ll find the killer.

  “I – I don’t know much,” I said, hearing myself and realising how it would sound. “She was stabbed in an alley, near a restaurant. She’d met someone there and, afterwards, he killed her.”

  “Which restaurant? Which alley? Who did she meet? Did she often meet men in restaurants at night? Did he take her into the alley, or did she take him?”

  I stood up, outraged at the suggestion he was making. He sat back and watched me. I noticed his plate was half empty even though mine was completely untouched. “I’m not going to put up with this shit.” My voice betrayed my righteous anger by wavering.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “You owe me a hundred bucks.”

  “Fuck you!”

  I turned and left, feeling every eye in the place watch me go.

  Chapter Five

  I went over and over the conversation in my head as the cab drove me home, thinking of all the things I should have said, all the things I should have done, and all the many ways it had been a mistake to go and see that crazy old bastard. I stopped at my local Chinese takeaway on the way back and continued to obsess over the encounter as I waited for my meal.

  By the time I’d walked the rest of the way home and chewed my way through the lukewarm food, I was exhausted and emotionally drained. I went to bed and slept, not noticing until the small hours of the morning that I was in our bed alone for the first time.

  After that, sleep was impossible. I spent the best part of an hour, trawling through the menus on the various streaming channels we subscribed to, looking for something, anything, that might distract and entertain me. It was another complete waste of time.

  Whatever my other shortcomings as a human being, I seemed to be excellent at wasting time. It was now almost a full day since I’d been interviewed by Reid and I had achieved absolutely nothing – unless you counted sitting around in a cemetery, talking to myself, and letting some old freak con me into buying him a free meal.

  I was still angry about the old guy and his damned insinuations about Chelsea and everyone around her but not so angry any more that I didn’t realise there might have been some kind of method in his madness. Maybe he was like the René Descartes of old moochers in bars, applying systematic doubt to everything and everybody in some half-arsed attempt to get down to some universal truth. It was certainly striking how his questions had very quickly revealed my own ignorance about the facts of the case. It was also painfully obvious that he was willing to look at everyone I knew as a potential suspect, to look at people’s motives in a cruel and cynical way that I was completely incapable of.

  I felt a new energy stirring in me. Maybe Old Moocher had shown me the way after all. He’d asked about people. He was trying to build a list of suspects. And he’d asked about the crime, trying to establish the facts. I stood up, excited. I could do that. I remembered TV shows I’d seen. The police had big whiteboards on which they stuck photos of suspects, drew timelines, wrote down pertinent facts.

  I needed a whiteboard and I knew just where to go to get one.

  The Officeworks on Milton Road had been one of Chelsea’s favourite places. “It’s the Magic Kingdom,” she’d said. “It’s like a lolly shop for grown ups.” I’d been with her a couple of times, once to buy stationery and once in search of a cheap printer. Frankly, I had not seen the attraction.

  It was ludicrously early when I got there and parked in the empty car park. The clock on the dash said it was 6:03 AM A quick search on my phone told me the shop didn’t open until seven. Fortunately, I was in walking distance of the cafés in Park Road, so I went over there and had breakfast among the early-bird office workers while I read the Guardian online. The news was all politics and sport so I ended up reading opinion pieces about the UK economy going down the gurgler and Aussie farm lobby groups pushing a science denialist agenda. It all felt like despatches from a different universe; one where reality barely impinged on the minds of its narcissistic aliens, all self-obsessed to the point of solipsism.

  At last, my alarm pinged and I hurried back to the shop. Bizarrely, there were other cars in the car park by then and I was by no means the first customer. I left with a whiteboard, an easel for it, two packs of coloured felt pens, a pack of post-it notes, a selection of paper notepads and pens, some photo printing paper for my home printer, half-a-dozen file boxes, packs of plastic document sleeves in different colours, and a pack of chocolate biscuits because they were there. I stuffed it all into my car, fought my way through the swelling rush-hour traffic, and managed to get it all into my unit in only two trips from the car park.

  I set up the whiteboard, opened a packet of pens, tried one, opened the packet of photo printing paper and put it in the printer, made a cup of coffee and sat down with the chocolate biscuits to stare at the whiteboard, thinking, What would Old Moocher do?

  Jumping up, I grabbed my laptop and began searching for photos. Chelsea was easy, so was her mother, the delightful Stacey. I found one of Kazima on the company website. I sent them all to the printer. I put Chelsea’s picture at the top of the board and wrote “Chelsea” above it. Below it, I put Kazima’s picture and Stacey’s and wrote their names too. These were my suspects. There weren’t many and I knew damned well neither of them had done it but I set that aside. I was being Luke Kelly the hard-bitten, cynical detective, not Luke Kelly the useless prick.

  I drew a line under them and gave it the title, “Timeline”. I needed to fill this in, somehow. At the leftmost end, I made a mark and labelled it, “Last time I saw Chelsea alive.” That was at 1:30-ish on the Friday-before-last. At the right-hand end, I made another mark, labelled, “Chelsea’s body found”. I didn’t know when that was, exactly, but it was some time on Sunday morning. So I wrote that. I made a mark for “Chelsea stabbed”, one for “Chelsea leaves restaurant” and one for “Chelsea arrives at restaurant”.

  A wave of sadness hit me because I didn’t know exactly when she had been found, or who had found her, or how long she had been lying in that alley, or even which alley it was she had died in. I sat down, tears running down my face again. This was all such a waste of time. Such a horrible travesty. I wasn’t solving her murder, I was out eatin
g over-priced breakfasts and buying coloured pens. Everything I’d done since she died had been a farce, an insult to her, and now, with my file boxes and whiteboard, a mockery of her life.

  I curled up on the sofa and closed my eyes so I couldn’t see Chelsea’s face smiling at me from the photograph. What had she ever seen in me? Why would a strong, together person like her ever take up with a useless loser like me? It didn’t make sense. If I’d died and Chelsea had been left behind, she’d have been on top of the whole situation. She’d be chivvying the police, making sure she was informed of everything they did. She’d have been working closely with them, feeding them useful information, making sure they stayed focused. She’d have used her press contacts to get the public calling in with leads and eye-witness evidence. She might have offered a reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. There was no reason I couldn’t be doing all of that, too. And yet I’d spent the week hiding away like a delicate flower and, even when I’d resolved to act, I’d just done stupid stuff and wasted more time. If Chelsea could have seen me curled up on that sofa, she’d have been so ashamed.

  Or would she? There was no doubt, she had seen me in a funk many, many times. She’d helped me “defend” my PhD, even though I’d been a nervous wreck at the thought of facing the external examiner. And she’d helped me through the months afterwards as I slowly discovered that everyone had been right all along: I was practically unemployable as a philosopher in the anti-intellectual, austerity-driven world we live in, underqualified for anything that required actual skills and expertise, and overqualified for anything else. By the time I’d been through a dozen interviews for jobs I didn’t even want, seeing the same look on a dozen interviewers’ faces – the look that said “This guy’s a joke. Why am I even wasting my time with him?” – I was a basket case. But Chelsea helped me get up off the ground again. “OK, so those guys don’t want what you’ve got,” she told me. “But you’ve still got it. So take a bit of time, take a good long look around, and work out how you’re going to monetise it.”