The Train Rider

by Tony Cavanaugh

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; International Crime & Mystery; Private Investigators; Traditional Mysteries; Noir; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

'Tony Cavanaugh brings new depth and dimension to crime fiction in this country' - The Weekend West One man pushed Darian Richards to the edge. The man he couldn't catch. The Train Rider. As Victoria's top homicide investigator, Darian Richards spent years catching killers. The crimes of passion, of anger, of revenge ... they were easy. It was the monsters who were hard. Someone was taking girls. At first he'd keep them a week then give them back. Darian warned that wouldn't last. It didn't. From then on, their bodies were never found. Girls kept disappearing. All they had in common was the fact they'd last been seen on a train. The ever-rising list of the vanished broke Darian. Forced him to walk away. Now, retired, watching the Noosa River flow by, the nightmares had finally stopped. Darian was never going back. Then three girls go missing from Queensland trains. Darian knows that the killer is playing him. He has a choice to make. But when the decision means a girl will die, there is no choice. He has to stop this man once and for all. Forever. Tony Cavanaugh is an Australian writer and producer of film and television. The Train Rider is his latest book featuring cop Darian Richards and follows on from the acclaimed crime thrillers Promise and Dead Girl Sing. The Darian Richards Series Promise Dead Girl Sing The Soft Touch (Short Story) The Train Rider Kingdom of the Strong

Release date: February 25, 2014

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 325

Sample

SOMEONE WAS WATCHING ME.

Parked across the road, on the other side of the street, with a clear view in through the open gate to my yard and ramshackle wooden house that fronted the river, was the same late model white Celica I’d seen the day before. I’m an ex-cop and I don’t believe in coincidences.

There was the shape of a guy sitting in the front seat. He was staring straight ahead, looking up the road, in the direction of the bridge which spanned the river and a massive lake that was surrounded by dense mangroves. The road took you up to Tewantin, a small town on the Sunshine Coast, a little north from Noosa, a dazzling community of beaches, cafes, resorts and rainforests. For just over two years I’d been living on the Noosa River, which snaked its way from the ocean, barely a kilometre away, past million-dollar houses and dump houses, communities and towns, deep into a remote and uninhabited forest of bush and white sand.

I’d come out to collect the bin. It was Tuesday. Bin day. I was dressed in a bright orange sarong. I don’t wear very much else these days. The detective’s uniform of a black suit, of which I had a few, had all been thrown away.

I followed his gaze.

There was nothing up there. The road was empty of cars and people. Cracked pavements on either side. Old houses, new houses. Frangipani and jacaranda trees, their branches bent over, forming a canopy across the street, which was littered with bright purple flowers.

The sun was intense. It’s always intense up here. It’s sunshine all year round, peppered occasionally with a massive tropical thunderstorm.

I turned to look back at him, to try and get a better view. He held his gaze, staring up at the empty road. Trying to appear all normal and everyday, he was as innocent as a guy walking towards me with a gun.

‘Hey!’ I shouted.

No answer. Even though his window was wound up he would have heard me. Still kept on staring ahead. Maybe he was deaf. Maybe he was lost. Maybe he was dead.

No, I didn’t think so. This guy, whoever he was, was stalking me.

I stepped out onto the road and walked towards the car. He started the engine and I could see his left arm jerking the gear shift.

I ran.

And stood directly in front of the car. Blocking him.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Who are you?’

In his mid thirties, he looked a little anxious. Short red hair, curly. A soft young face with big eyes. He had freckles. When he was a kid he would have looked like Dennis the Menace and I’m sure he got mocked for it. He wasn’t a crim.

Well, that was obvious: he was wearing a black shirt with a priest’s white collar.

He didn’t answer my questions but held my look.

Kept on holding it as I walked from the front of his car to the driver’s side, where I reached down and opened the door.

‘You’ve been out the front of my house twice in two days. What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. It was a mistake,’ he said as he turned off the engine. He had a deep, gravelly voice, the sort of voice you might hear on national radio reading the news.

‘Get out of the car,’ I said.

That seemed to disturb him, but he did what I asked. He was tall and well built, like he’d played rugby.

‘You’re Darian Richards?’ he asked. There was an edge to his voice. The guy had a toughness about him. Buried though, like he was intent on keeping it hidden.

I didn’t answer. It bothers me when someone I don’t know is aware of my name and where I live.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m Tom. Tom Ellison. You used to be a homicide detective? In Melbourne?’

I didn’t answer. Silence unnerves people and Father Tom was no exception. Silence is a hole that has to be filled. He filled it:

‘I’ve heard the confession of a man. He is sick. He’s dying. He asked me to see you and pass on a message.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘He wanted me to say he is sorry for what he’s done in the past.’

‘What has he done in the past?’ I asked.

‘I can’t tell you that. It was confession. I’m just passing on a message, that’s all.’

‘He killed someone? Now he’s about to die. He wants to apologise to the detective who was searching for him? That about sum it up?’

Now it was Father Tom’s turn not to answer.

‘Tell him no deal. Tell him to turn himself in. There’s a police station up around the corner. They’ll look after him. Tell him there’s no absolution, not unless he does the right thing. You might have given him forgiveness in the confessional booth but not me, and not whoever he killed, not their family who’ll still be grieving. Saying sorry to God doesn’t cut it, not in the real world.’

‘Like I said, I was just passing on a message,’ he said as he got back into his car.

‘Don’t come here again,’ I said. Then I turned and walked back across the street, through the open gate into my yard. A breeze had kicked in. Maybe it was going to rain. Out past the palm trees on the other side of the house, where the river ebbed with an incoming tide, I could see, on the far horizon, storm clouds massing, blue, dark, threatening. I heard the sound of his car fire up and a moment later I heard him driving away.

—

SIXTEEN YEARS WORKING Homicide in Melbourne added up to many, many murders and, additionally, a lot of murderers. Gangsters and housewives, businessmen and vagrants, school kids and teachers, bored people and angry people, killers who acted on sudden impulse or slowly built premeditation; I’d long ago ceased to be amazed by the spread and reach of the murderer demographic.

Remorse – a desperate, urgent need to atone and find redemption – quickly follows the act of murder for most who’ve pulled the trigger. God steps in to fill the space. Prison is full of God. He gives meaning to their actions and, most importantly, a way to deal with the guilt. The court might have found you responsible and sentenced you to some time behind bars but the old guy absolves you and, hey, He’s more important, right? The real deal. In my view, God’s a convenient succour for people who’ve fucked up big time.

A one-time killer blathering his confession to a local priest and then asking the guy to pass on his remorse to a homicide investigator didn’t warrant my interest, in any way. I went back to the serious business of river-watching. There was a new flock of pelicans in town and somehow they’d been told that I was the go-to guy for food scraps.

—

IT DIDN’T WORK. The priest had poisoned my mind. He’d dredged up the past and I didn’t like to think about the past. I liked to sit by the river and stare at its flow, at the narrow island on the other side, covered in mangroves and a dense thicket of strangler figs and palm trees, at the fishermen in their tinnies and the kids and families in their rent-a-boats. I liked to listen to the pounding surf from the ocean on the far side of the island across the river, to the sounds of the gulls as they hovered in the wind blowing off the surface of the water.

The past was a life of murder and chaos. When I arrived here, having resigned as Officer in Charge of Homicide, I was burned out, fucked up, shot up, a dead man in a living body. I’d done too many kills and they’d swamped me, haunted me, taunted me, the victims and the perps, the good and the evil; they’d all swarmed into a miasma of toxic quicksand from which I couldn’t escape.

Now I was living in the sunshine, lying in a hammock, reading, cooking and not doing too much of anything else. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no second acts in life; he was wrong, even when applied to life in Australia. My second act was pretty good. Aside from a few ventures when I had to don the cloak of my old life, my past identity, take out my gun from where I kept it hidden, life now was peaceful.

The past was buried. The killers and their victims, my successes and failures, all gone, swept away.

Until now. Who was the killer this priest was talking about? Who was his victim? Was I the investigating detective? Had I interviewed him? Had I then let him go, released him? Had I stuffed up?

These thoughts wouldn’t let go of me.

And then another emerged. Another part of the past, a more recent past from up here at Noosa.

I had hurt somebody, a person who was very close to me.

I’d been doing okay, forcing myself not to think about her and what I had done to her. The Father’s visit had stirred that up too. The remorse bit hard.

THE SHADOWS OF THE TOWERING GUM TREES WERE LONG AND twisted. They shifted form as the headlights from my car bathed them momentarily in white light, receding then into the gloom of darkness as I sped through dense bush, the narrow road cresting at the top of a mountain, a corkscrew of bitumen now falling steeply below as I gunned it, fast, faster and felt the wind and the first pellets of a tropical thunderstorm lash me through the open window. I didn’t wind it up. I drove harder, staring ahead as the road turned in on itself, as the overhanging trees seemed to reach down to the wet surface, as the wind began to lash the branches. My car was old, a red 1960s American Studebaker Champion Coupe. There weren’t many of them made and even fewer had been shipped as far as Australia. No power steering, no electric windows, not much in the way of modern, calm, reliable safety. It also had left-hand drive. I drove fast and hard not because I’m a maniac or was on a suicidal bender and not because I was going to be late for the band before they walked on stage, but because it felt good. I felt alive.

It was a week after the visit from the priest. I’d forced out all thoughts of who the repentant crim might have been – forget him, he was in the past – but stayed focused on the woman I’d hurt.

It was time to go back, see her and apologise for what I’d done. Or, at least, try to.

I wasn’t sure if she was going to be interested.

—

THE ROAD EVENED out and I drove under a wide canopy of branches from trees on either side, reaching the turn-off to the Noosa–Eumundi Road. I turned right and drove towards the lights.

Eumundi is a small town, anchored around the tourist trade more than country survival. If you want a hammer, you keep driving till you get to Cooroy, up the road; if you want a coffee-table book on the Sumatran rainforest or an antique Moroccan rug or a freshly baked baguette or a Thai or Greek meal or handmade chocolates, you go to Eumundi. With a population of maybe a thousand, the place explodes twice a week when a market is held, adjoining the main street, to which over ten thousand tourists turn up in buses and cars, squeezing the joint so tight that nobody can move between the stalls. At night Eumundi is dead but for a pizza place, owned and run by an angry Turk, and the pub, Joe’s Waterhole, which is where I was headed. With hard-beam wooden posts holding up an old verandah on the main street, Joe’s is one of those colonial pubs that were built sometime in the 1800s. Befitting the cosmopolitan buzz of the tiny country town, it’s now home to the best live music on the Sunshine Coast. Bands from across the country and around the world play at Joe’s.

I pulled up on the other side of the road, killed the lights and the engine. There was a park in front of me. Lining the footpath were huge, ancient fig trees with sprawling trunks and roots that etched out of the ground and long, low-hanging branches that swayed in the wind and rain, menacing, like something out of a Tolkien fantasy. I got out and walked across the road, which was wide and empty. Cars were parked out the front of Joe’s, guys and girls in jeans and shorts and singlets, holding beers and vodkas, stood on the footpath by the entrance. Music pumped from inside.

Tonight’s band was an old, almost-forgotten one from the US: Canned Heat. Back in the Woodstock days they were big. For some weird reason – their music didn’t seem appropriate at all – they were big with bikies and had been since the 1960s. They had a couple of hits nearly fifty years ago and since then had been on the road touring funky but B-grade venues like Joe’s, around the world. At least it wasn’t a bowls club or bingo night.

I didn’t like Canned Heat; never had.

It wasn’t them I had come to see.

—

HER NAME WAS Rose.

She came into my life two years ago as Angelique or, as I got to call her, Angie. These were her professional names as an escort. Angie. Nineteen. Sweet was how the classified advertised her attraction to male clients. I would see her on Tuesdays; that was our night for over a year.

At first it was just the sex and the shimmering erotic nature of her body.

But she also had a passion for life and a curiosity about all things, from why the hell didn’t Galileo just shut up about the sun not moving to an argument on how to make the perfect Caesar salad. I hadn’t met many people who ignited me, excited me. Who I wanted to talk to. In my travels I actually haven’t met many people I like at all. I pushed through the throng and made my way to a far wall where I could stand back and survey the crowd. Rose loved Canned Heat and I was gambling that she’d be here, seeing them live, which was something she’d rarely get the chance to do – the last time they’d toured Australia she was probably in primary school.

I saw her. Standing in the middle of the crowd, down near the stage, jiving on her own, mouthing the words to ‘Goin’ Up the Country’ as the band played. Still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Dark and languorous, sleepy eyes with high cheek bones, long, thin legs, golden skin and sinewy in movement – the sort of girl who attracts attention from swooning guys and anxious women.

I turned and walked away. I was unnerved. I was in alien territory. I was used to living in crime or staring at my river, complaining to the pelicans. I went to the bar.

‘Soda water,’ I shouted to the barman above the din.

Rose is in her late twenties. The nineteen-year-old Angie was a false allure for her clients. As those Tuesdays we spent in each other’s company turned from an hour together to two, three, five then the night crossing into the morning of the next day, we formed a close and caring relationship. Tuesday became the high point of the week for me and – she said – for her. We held one another and talked and listened to the rain and the surf and the flow of the river, we stroked one another and danced our fingers across our bodies. She made me feel boundless. For the first time ever I was excited about someone. Over that year of Tuesdays – initially a job for her as I was the client who paid – I fell in love with her, and maybe she fell in love with me.

And then I destroyed it all.

I had hurt her. I had abused her. I had taken her trust and love – maybe love, I wasn’t sure – and used it. I had been hunting a serial killer and knew he’d never be able to resist the temptation to hurt me by hurting the person closest to me – Rose – and so I put her directly into his line of fire. Here, take me, I’m Darian’s weak point, the only person he cares about, take me. It was a successful plan. He took her, and the GPS trace I’d hidden in a ring that I’d given her took me to him. It was tight. When I kicked in the door the killer had already begun to work on her, taking his saw to her neck. She’d seen a couple of his victims in his kitchen as he bundled her into his house, as I was still in my car, driving as fast as I could to save her; she knew what he was planning. She had survived, and the killer was dead, but ruin had set in. To her. By him. By me.

Maybe it was a vibe I’d sent out – who knows? – but she stopped singing and turned around, as if searching for someone or something she realised had arrived. Her gaze settled on me as I stood by the bar cradling my soda water. She held the look. Didn’t acknowledge me, just stared. It was the first time we had looked at each other since she was in Promise’s house. Then she looked away. And didn’t look back.

What had I been expecting? One of those across-a-crowded-room moments? Not really; I knew this was going to be hard terrain. This was wrong. This was not good. This was trespassing. I’d done enough damage and if there’s one thing about the past which is true and certain, it’s that you cannot recapture it. It’s gone. Nostalgia for me is like God: of no use.

I turned away, embarrassed, drained my drink, put the glass on the bar and pushed through the crowd once again, towards the exit. Time to go, to get on with my life and to let her get on with hers.

—

I LEFT BY the side doors and stepped outside, onto the footpath. I stood there, not moving for a long time, unable to go back, unable to walk away. The wet road was glistening, pools of warm yellow light reflected onto the bitumen from the street lights. Fat raindrops plonked onto the surface, rolling off the tree branches above, which were now motionless.

She was standing by my car, a shadow in the remnants of the rain. Staring. Her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of her jeans. Her hair was wet, clinging to the side of her face, a lone strand askew, plastered across her forehead. She had been waiting for me and watched as I stepped onto the road, as I tried to figure out: What the hell am I going to say? Everything I’d rehearsed swept out of me.

I like to know where I’m going in a conversation, I like to know what the end will be, or what the possibilities will be, before I start … and that works when you’re a homicide cop interviewing a suspect or a victim or a witness, but when it comes to emotions – well, then I’m lost. Made worse in this instance because to this girl I had been, in a word, awful. I’d told myself I would stay away from her, leave her in peace. And for over the past year I’d stuck to that. But I just couldn’t any more.

‘What are you doing?’ she yelled at me, from the other side of the road. ‘Are you stalking me or something? I don’t want to see you again. Ever.’

I crossed the road, slowly.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Fuck you,’ she said.

And then she started to cry.

‘YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT ME,’ SHE SAID, SWIPING the tears away from her face. ‘You were supposed to keep me out of that world. That’s what I expected from you, but you didn’t. You put me in harm’s way, you deliberately put me in harm’s way and then just sat and did nothing.’

Well, I did something but I didn’t think it was diplomatic to argue the point. The fact was I had caught a serial killer, but she could have been killed. She very nearly was killed. The problem was … it had worked. Catching Winston Promise, at the time, seemed more important than anything. I had to risk her life in order to save the lives of the countless number of girls he would have tortured and killed if he wasn’t stopped. That’s what I told myself.

But now Promise was long gone and all I could think about was what I’d lost with her. How I’d hurt her. Coming here tonight was a gamble. I had no clue how this would play out. I’m not particularly strong in the romance department.

In fact I’ve been tremendously bad in the romance department. So bad, in fact, that for the past ten years, I’ve been paying for it. A cash encounter to erase the loneliness, to feel the press of a woman’s flesh on mine. Not because I’m a twisted geek with an ugly face, hunchback or with a moron’s mind. No, I paid because I had always put the job first. Maintaining a relationship while running a Homicide office did not work. Companionship always seemed to be out of reach. So I took the best I could get: time with prostitutes.

I hadn’t fled Melbourne to fix this part of my life and find a companion. I never thought I could. But then I did. I thought maybe it could work.

I couldn’t erase the past but maybe I could make the lingering aftermath go away. If there was ever a chance of hanging on to a companion it was now, in my new life, by the Noosa River and if there was ever a person who I believed was the one, it was the woman standing in front of me. Wet from the rain, bedraggled, crying, the mascara running down her cheeks.

I stepped up to her.

‘I should have moved you out of my life, as soon as Winston Promise emerged and I knew I had to go hunt him. That was wrong. Me not thinking. All I was thinking about was him, how to get him. And in doing that I hurt you. I’m sorry.’

‘What do you want from me? Why are you even here?’ she said. Her voice was shaky. I wanted to reach out and hold her.

‘I wanted to see you.’

She stared at me, waiting. I took a breath and ploughed on. ‘I know what I did was dreadful. Appalling. And yes, I put you in harm’s way, but … I think about you, a lot.’

‘You ruined the Canned Heat concert for me.’

‘Sorry.’ I felt guilty about that too.

She started to walk away and I didn’t move to stop her. The thumping noise from the band inside the pub was pulsating across the street. Aside from the two of us it was empty of people. I recognised her car, a yellow Volkswagen, parked a little way up the hill. She stopped, caught in a bright glow from the street light above her and turned back to face me.

A look of pain and anger.

‘Did you even care? What was I for you? Sex? Then bait?’

Whoa. This was going badly and I was way out of my depth. A conversation with a serial killer would have been a lot more comfortable. Still, I wasn’t about to turn away. You want something, you gotta fight for it, no matter how awkward it feels.

I stepped towards her, just a few steps, not too close.

‘No – you were neither. You were someone very special. Someone I cared about. A lot. I wrecked that. I wish it hadn’t happened.’

‘You paid me for sex, Darian. I was an idiot to think there might have been something more.’

‘There was,’ I said.

She laughed, and it was full of pain. ‘You don’t fall in love with the hooker you’re paying to be nice to you. Surely you must know about that, being a cop. Surely you’ve seen that fantasy played out by a few train wrecks in your time.’

‘More times than you could imagine.’

‘Then why’d you play it with me?’

Jesus, why is it that I could grind a suspect into the ground with my questions, knew all the tricks to get them to talk, but when it mattered, I had to fight to get out every word? The phrase ‘emotionally retarded’ flashed through my mind.

‘I couldn’t help it. It’s simple, really: I fell for you, and I sort of thought or hoped …’ I left the last part hanging. Her face hardened.

‘That I’d reciprocate?’

‘Yeah.’

She stared at me. She didn’t move. She didn’t look away. I had no idea what was going on in her mind. I felt like a kid sinking in an angry river.

I plunged in:

‘Can I come and see you?’ I asked quietly. ‘We could talk. I miss talking to you.’

She held my gaze but said nothing. After a few moments she turned and walked slowly up to her yellow car.

I watched as she started the engine, reversed out and turned into the street. The band was doing an encore and the crowd was going wild. Smashing the rooftops, the raucous singalong reverberating across the street. I watched as Rose drove away, her little Volkswagen groaning up the hill. The car turned the corner in the direction I’d driven from, back towards Tewantin, and then it was gone. I didn’t think I’d see her again.

I was wrong.

I was confident that the dark world of murder which had so immersed me in another life had now passed and that I was a free man.

I was wrong on that too.

ALL SHE COULD SEE WAS BLACK. WHERE AM I? WAS THE FIRST thought that pulsed through Emily’s mind. And then, in a sudden rush of clarity, she realised she was strapped to a bed, that she was naked and that a man, also naked, whom she couldn’t see, had his erect penis inside her. It was still. He was still. Rigid. How long have I been here? How did I get here? she wondered. Who is this man? She knew she’d been taken captive and that she was in for big, painful trouble – that much she could process as her mind whirled like jolting spinning clockwork.

She could feel the man breathing, his stomach contracting. He was astride her, his arms holding him up. The only point of bodily contact was between her hips where she felt his legs and his penis, frozen, poised, hard, deep inside her.

Should I say something? she wondered. Should I pretend I’m still unconscious?

He didn’t move. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything. The room was entirely black.

She didn’t speak. Silence, she figured, was safer.

—

THAT WAS SOME time ago. She’d lost all track of time. She lived in the hot black room and only rarely would the man untie her from the bed. It felt like she’d been in his black space for a week but it might have been a month or it might have been a day. Tim. . .