He scratched at his fate line, as though committing her suggestions to memory.
‘You need to know about the stores? For confirmation?’
Dana nodded and opened a fresh sheet in her pad. ‘I have to, yes. If you could confirm what’s in the journal for the tape. To wrap up some things. Then we don’t have to speak about that again.’
She stopped and glanced at the mirror, her heart yelping. She shouldn’t say this – had no obligation to do so, and every reason not to . . .
‘I should tell you at this point that you don’t currently have a lawyer, but you have a right to one. Mr Whittler, I . . . I, uh . . . strongly suggest you get one before we go further.’
She could feel the heat from her face. She waited for the rap of knuckle on glass from a colleague: perhaps the double-double-tap that was Bill’s. She’d be prepared to ride the inevitable argument. When the sound didn’t come, she looked back at Nathan.
‘Mr Whittler, you need someone in here who has your best interests at heart.’
Nathan turned slowly. ‘But I’m certain that you . . . thank you. I know what I’ve done in those stores. And really, you have the journal. There’s little point arguing about it.’
There was a short screech as he turned the chair back again. The room was exactly how it had been before.
‘Will we find evidence of you gaining entry?’
‘I doubt it. I was pretty careful. I’d seen enough television before I left to know how to avoid fingerprints, footprints.’
He sat back a little, hands cradled in his lap and eyes fixed on the table’s edge.
‘When I worked at Pringle’s I used to build cabinets and armoires. They were a big seller. Everyone was building modern homes and they wanted something in it that looked old, established.
‘Anyway, Mr Pringle taught me about the locks we used on the armoire doors. I’d worked with wood, mostly, so I had to play with the locks to understand the device. Most locks are basically the same, Detective. You can tamper with them in a way that means when you turn the key you hear a noise and feel a click, but the mechanism hasn’t locked. It’s tumbled around itself and gone nowhere. The thing isn’t locked.’
Dana made a quick note to ensure the window lock at Jensen’s was forensically examined. She wrote it in Pitman so all Nathan could see were squiggles.
‘The shorthand,’ he observed. ‘For security?’
‘For speed, Mr Whittler. So I don’t interrupt your flow. The locks?’
‘I doctored particular window locks and door locks the first time I entered an establishment. Always more than one, in case one of them was discovered. Unless the person actually tried to open what they thought they’d just locked, they’d never catch on. If they did, they’d assume the lock was faulty, not rigged. It was pretty rare to return to a place and find they’d caught up. People are lazy, Detective Russo: especially when they only work there.’
‘So when they locked up they’d hear the lock click and think it was secure, but you could open it up from the outside?’
He took a swig of water from the mug. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip.
‘Exactly. They weren’t really high-security places, were they? Most had no cameras, except perhaps by the cash machine or the checkout, and I never went near money. And they’d never notice anything was missing.’
He put the mug back on the table and touched the cap on the water bottle. The outside of the bottle was covered in condensation. Dana continued in Pitman and passed a tissue to him without looking. He wiped the bottle fastidiously, then folded the tissue four times and palmed it.
‘Yes, Mr Whittler, I was particularly intrigued by that. I doubt anyone will turn out to have reported the stock loss.’
‘Oh, there’s an art to it, Detective. Firstly, people neither notice nor care if certain things go missing. They aren’t expecting someone to take cans of peaches but leave the cash. So you’re taking things that wouldn’t be spotted immediately, if at all. Just like, if someone entered your home but only took a pencil, and some kitchen roll from under the sink, would you even recognise they’d been there? I doubt it.
‘Computerised stock control, bar codes?’
‘Bar codes are usually only to get the correct price when you sell. Computerised stock control? Never saw any such systems out the back: I don’t think many places had anything like that. If they did, they’d count them when they first unpacked them, I suppose. And they’d count each one when they sold it, I guess. But in between, there’s a whole lot of nothing. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.’
Dana tried to think the process through from Nathan’s viewpoint; sneaking around a store in the darkness with a mental shopping list. ‘But sometimes you’d need something that was right by the checkout, or there were only two on display. Surely?’
‘Yes, occasionally. I tried to keep well stocked so I was only ever topping up. That meant I could afford to go without on one trip or another. Batteries, for example.’
He bit his lip before carrying on, as though betraying a confidence. ‘But if there were, say, only two of something: I took one and placed the other on a different aisle. That way, the store would think that one of their dumber staff had put both in the wrong places, but they could only find one. It wouldn’t occur to them that the other one had been stolen.’
She reminded herself that Nathan had had hundreds of hours to think this through in fine detail. ‘Ingenious. No wonder we had no idea this was going on in a regular way. Or at all, for that matter.’
‘It wasn’t simply to avoid detection. Please don’t get me wrong. I only took what I needed, when I needed it. I didn’t want to damage the store. I hoped one man’s needs, every few months, wouldn’t kill their business.’
They both paused. The room became heavy; the heat was beginning to bite. Nathan took bigger swigs of the water. Sweat was beginning to form on the back of his hands. He seemed aware of the glow of his skin but apparently connected it with his emotions, not the temperature.
‘You were ashamed of doing this, Mr Whittler.’
He pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes, and sniffed. ‘Yes, I . . . yes. I was. Very much so. Horribly so.’
More gulps of water, and a deep breath. The increased temperature was working; making him rush and blurt, and feel obligated. ‘The first few times, not so much, strangely. You might think I was mortified to begin with and gradually got used to it. In fact, it was the other way around. The first few times I was so focused on how to get in and out undiscovered I thought less about the morality. It was later on, when I was practised and somewhat skilled – when it was almost banal, usual – that I really felt the shame.’
He placed both palms on the table. ‘I’m . . . I’m so sorry. For those people, the people I stole from. I’d never done anything like that before in my life, Detective. Never. It was not nice, to be dragged down to that level. To drag myself to that level.’
And that was the deepest cut, thought Dana. The guilt wasn’t merely that he was robbing stores on a regular basis. It was the knowledge that he was deliberately leading a life that made that theft inevitable. It was the knowledge that he chose and continued to choose that life and never tried to change it: that would eat Nathan Whittler from
the inside.
Had done so.
She couldn’t allow this self-flagellation to continue. He would fall into a morass. Dana had seen that kind of spiral thinking, the circular drain of self-loathing. She’d seen it in a mirror. Felt it today, in fact. If he continued down this path, she’d lose his co-operation. Perhaps for the final time.
‘You never tried to fish, Mr Whittler? Or grow things?’
She wondered if she’d framed the question diplomatically enough; whether he’d see it as an implied criticism.
Three tears stopped at his jowl, fading. Nathan tapped his fingertips together. ‘Considered it. The main problems with fishing were being exposed, and actually eating it. I never saw edible fish in the pool by the cave. It doesn’t have any weeds in the water – I suppose that’s why. I would’ve needed to be out on the lake itself and I didn’t want to risk being seen.’
He shook his head, as though replaying that very debate in his mind.
‘Occasionally there were hikers; not just near the cave, but up on Dakota Ridge. Even if I wasn’t recognised or bothered, the fact someone was fishing on that lake might lead others to try their luck there. I saw a few people try to fish on the far shore, but they didn’t seem to catch anything and rarely came again.’
‘And eating fish? Don’t you like it?’ she asked.
‘Assuming I ever caught something. Well, for one, I’d have to gut a fish and prepare it properly. I might have acquired a book about that, I suppose. I would have been concerned about the risk of getting it wrong and poisoning myself. Disposing of the offal without attracting animals would have been one more chore. But mainly, I would have needed to cook it. I wouldn’t risk a fire. So no; no fish for me unless it was already canned.’
Dana could understand his reasoning in refusing a fire. Cooking, not so much. Without being an expert, she thought a small gas camping stove wouldn’t have made him more visible. At least it would have been warm food in winter. Clearly, once Nathan had a concept in his head, he followed through in a blinkered, linear fashion. All or nothing. According to Pringle, he’d always had that streak.
‘And you mentioned the fire. That struck me in particular. You daren’t risk any means of cooking?’
‘No. I periodically considered gas: maybe a barbecue, or maybe constructing some kind of hearth from stones. But by then I was sort of used to it – the cold food. Any smoke, out there, Detective: it can be seen. I worried the rangers would always investigate smoke, in case it was the start of a major bush fire. In winter, it would be a dead giveaway that it was man-made and not some lightning strike. And you could spot the smoke from a plane, no problem. No, it was too risky. I only had to get it wrong once for the whole thing to fall apart. I couldn’t experiment.’
‘But that also meant you had no heat. Ever.’
He nodded. ‘Pretty much. I’d made sure the sleeping bag was outstanding, though. And I did a decent job of stopping the damp rising to the mattress: raw wool is fantastic stuff, Detective, amazing. I did cheat a little: I had some pocket warmers for the very cold nights. I could use them if I really felt my hands or feet were in serious danger of frostbite. But generally, no; heat and cooking were non-starters.’
‘And no agriculture?’
‘I tried a little. I mean, I was worried that someone from the air might spot a garden, as such. You know, I thought it would stand out from random nature to have man-made furrows and vegetation. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to hike out that way. But I attempted little efforts under trees or bushes. They either didn’t take or animals ate them long before I could. Again, I didn’t want to encourage wildlife, especially animals that might attract predators.’
‘Thank you, Mr Whittler. I’m pretty certain we have everything we need on that score. I don’t think we’ll need to revisit it.’
‘Detective.’ Nathan gave no hint as to whether he’d found the latter admissions humiliating or cathartic. She realised she was too tired to read him well. She worried that, in the back of her mind, another panic might be forming. Sometimes, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
‘Some more water for you, Mr Whittler.’
She waggled a bottle at him and he passed the empty one to her.
‘Can I bring you anything else, when I return?’
He thought for a moment. ‘No, thank you, Detective Russo. I’m okay for now.’
She sensed that he was mulling something over, something vital. But he wasn’t ready to give it up yet. He needed to think through the ramifications, and she had to give him the space to do so.
Chapter 23
Mike stopped off at Custody when he returned to the station. He authorised Spencer Lynch’s release, but schlepped on some gloves and played Spence’s voicemail before releasing the lawyer’s phone and personal effects. Four messages: three were banal crap from the office about upcoming cases and a charity dinner. The last – left six minutes after Mike left her mother’s townhouse in Gazette – was from Megan Cassavette.
Hey Spence. Me. Just had that detective, Mike Something, here. I know he spoke to you before he turned up here. Uh, look, hang in there. Call me when you can. We need to talk. Miss you special. Bye.
Mike played it twice, listening the second time for the rhythm, intonation; what was said in the gaps. Megan had been deliberately neutral. There was no drama, no edge and no emotion in her voice. The last part sounded like the kind of saying two people shared. But she might have been ringing to arrange for a parcel delivery, the amount of emotion she put into it all. Very poised and very controlled for someone who became a widow nine hours ago, he decided.
Lucy was at the spare desk in Mike’s office, sitting up very straight and looking triumphant.
‘That’s one happy Delaney,’ said Mike as he came in.
She smiled. ‘I love adding new strings to my bow. In fact, my bow is getting heavy and cumbersome, it has so many strings.’
Mike carefully placed his jacket on the back of his office chair, smoothing out any perceived wrinkles, and rubbed his eyes. ‘You need a bow assistant to help carry your many and varied talents.’
‘Ooh, a talent monkey. Yes, please.’
‘Anything show on the employee interviews yet?’
‘We’re about two thirds through; notes are on the shared drive. Frankly, they’re a sorry bunch of misfits, never-saw-nothings and people who remain startlingly unaware of everything around them.’
Mike took out his notebook and re-read the last two things he’d written: ‘yes’ and ‘maybe nothing’.
‘Megan’s a catch, am I right?’ Lucy looked at him from below her fringe.
‘I’d say so. Did you see Lynch’s interview?’
‘I was behind the mirror the whole time. At least, until he mentioned the smart-meter thing. Then I had to get researching. He wasn’t quite as much of an idiot as I first assumed. Not that he gets a free pass, or anything.’ She mock-pouted.
‘I know what you mean. I think we can take it that he’s genuinely besotted with Megan. No mid-life crisis or quick liaison going on there.’
‘Yeah, disappointingly lacking in sleaziness. You said you’d let him know what his tell was. You follow through with that?’
‘Sure. Promise is a promise.’
‘Wouldn’t that compromise any future confrontation?’
‘When you say “confrontation”, you mean constructive dialogue? Unless we come up with something radical, there might not be another chat with the lovely Spence. Nah, it plants a double bluff. He doesn’t really have much of a tell as such. Now he believes that blinking is his giveaway, he’ll go absurdly over the top trying to hide it. Much as we try, it’s a natural instinct to overcompensate. He’ll think he’s hidden it but the remedy will be obvious: like a drunk person trying to act sober. All the advantage would still be with me.’
Lucy smiled. ‘What about his fingerprints in the store? What sayeth he on that score?’
‘Ah, well. He claimed he went there eight days
ago – had a mad moment where he wanted to see his rival. Then had an even madder moment where he contemplated talking to him. Some kind of man-to-man bull, or size him up, or whatever. Ended up realising how nuts that was, bought some chocolate and left.’
‘You believe him?’
‘I sort of do, actually. It’s the kind of dumb thing you do when you’re smitten. And I think when he stopped to think it through, and imagined Megan’s face when he told her, it brought him up short. That rings true. Most of my dumb ideas can be stopped by me picturing Barb’s face when I have to explain it. So yeah, in lieu of anything substantive against it – yeah.’
‘Not all your dumb ideas, Mikey. Even Saint Barb’s powers don’t run that strong.’
‘So show me the future, Luce. What can the brave new world of computerised billing tell us?’
Lucy eased her chair to one side, so that Mike could scuttle his across next to her. He checked the doorway before propelling himself across. ‘I nearly hit someone doing this last week.’
‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre.’
They did their little fake battle for pole position, and bumped chairs.
‘Okay,’ she began, ‘so this is a little freaky. That estate the Cassavettes live on? It’s got a smart meter fitted in every home. Apparently the plan was to fit solar panels on each house, then the market tightened and they cut corners. Unheard of – a property developer not following through.’
Mike placed his hand on his heart. ‘Once again, I physically cannot imagine that.’
Lucy grinned. ‘So, the meters were partly to show the lucky householders how much income their panels were generating. Obviously, no longer needed for that, but these meters do so much more.’ She opened a spreadsheet. ‘You can set them up to read each socket – how much electricity is running through it, for how long, and when. If you programme it to know that socket A is the fridge, socket B is the television, etcetera, then you can see which appliance is on, and when. It’s supposed to help you economise, and save the planet. But it’s a nosy person’s charter, if I’m honest.’