Free Now You See Me by Jean Bedford Page A

evening, which was his first story.’ He pointed his cigarette at her. ‘You can’t use any of this, you know, it’s sub judice.’
    ‘Yes, I know. I just want to get it straight. What about the physical evidence? No anomalies?’
    He made a snorting noise. ‘Anomalies — now I know you’ve been talking to Albert. There’ s alway s anomalies. Always. There’s always stuff that isn’t cut and dried, stuff we never quite figure out. The perps tell you lies, for a start, that confuses the issue.’
    Noel sat forward. ‘Would you tell me what the ... anomalies are here? I promise it’s off the record.’
    He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. ‘I might as well. I wouldn’t be talking to you at all except Shar says you’re OK, so she’s responsible for what use you make of it. Understood?’
    ‘Yes. If I fuck you over, Sharon gets the blame.’
    ‘She gets the big shove.’ He looked at Sharon and she shrugged. ‘OK. We can’t put the whole chain of events together as neatly as we might like. We’ve got the kid going missing about tea-time, sixish, and the guy doesn’t get home from work till six-thirty. We’ve got him placed at work until six, and it takes him at least half an hour to get home to Glebe. Train and bus. We timed it — that plays. He gets home and finds the mother in hysterics because she can’t find Belinda. Around seven he goes out in the car to look for her. So he says.’ He took a long mouthful of coffee.
    ‘So, we reckon he either found her wandering around and just leapt at the opportunity, or he’d planned it. Told the kid to meet him somewhere and he’d pick her up. But he won’t admit to either. Says he was driving around, stopping at parks and playgrounds and calling her name and so on.’
    ‘Did he visit anyone’s place, Belinda’s friends?’
    ‘She didn’t have any friends, not like that. She wasn’t at school yet — only just turned five, and they kept her close to home. The mother’d already been to the neighbours. And that’s another little story on its own, too, what the neighbours had to say.’
    ‘What?’ Noel was starting to like him; he had a good narrative style. She thought he’d be convincing in court.
    ‘Apparently when the mother went out she’d lock the little girl in her room, but she used to escape, and she’d wander around to this wine bar a couple of streets away where she knew some of the regulars. They’d usually buy her a raspberry lemonade and some peanuts and then send her home. But she had other haunts, too. The fish and chip shop for one. On the night in question she hadn’t been seen in any of her usual refuges.’
    ‘Had she been locked in that afternoon?’
    ‘The mother wouldn’t admit it, but I think so. She didn’t know the kid could get out. It tends us to the prearranged meeting scenario.’
    ‘And the physical evidence? There’s no doubt about any of it?’ She was aware of Sharon frowning at her.
    ‘Nope. Not a skerrick. There’s more than we let out to the media, too.’ He gave her a stare and she nodded. ‘Traces of blood in the kitchen drain at his flat, for a start, Belinda’s blood.’
    ‘Well, what about what Albert Spinks says? The actual killing?’
    He looked up at the ceiling, remembering the details. ‘Yeah. Manually strangled to unconsciousness. Raped anally and vaginally with a wooden object, nature unknown, then apparently raped again bodily by a penis wearing a condom — traces of the lubricant, no semen. Laceration and bleeding apparently from the aforesaid unknown wooden object, splinters likewise. Then strangled to death with a rope and dumped half naked in a vacant lot. Panties found in a plastic bag in Farrell’s garage.’
    Noel thought for a while. ‘He was pretty careless, wasn’t he? I mean apart from Albert’ s anomalie s — the fact that there’d been no evidence of a condom or bodily rape before, only with objects, and the strangling was new, too; he’d usually