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The Stalk Club
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The Stalk Club
Neil Cossins
Lloyd Williams
Craig Thoms is a likeable rogue who is never far from trouble. He is part of a small group of friends that meet regularly to play a stalking game. Follow a stranger, picked randomly from the people walking by on the street and find out as much as you can about them without being discovered. It seemed like harmless fun until Craig witnesses the person he is stalking commit a cold blooded murder.
Detectives Nelson and Robards of the Homicide Squad are appointed to investigate the murder of underworld figure, Emilio Fogliani. The evidence trail is strong and within 24 hours Craig is arrested and charged with murder.
Everything seems to be against Craig, except maybe the tarnished Det. Nelson who will confront his partner, Police hierarchy and his own past as he searches for the truth about who killed Emilio Fogliani and why.
The Stalk Club
By Neil Cossins and Lloyd Williams
Text copyright © 2012 Lloyd Williams and Neil Cossins
All rights reserved
Chapter 1
10 June 1997
The mist gathered on the quiet Clyde River, curling and twisting in gentle eddies on the breeze. It moved up the bank at a low point and billowed across the land, an invasion of fog that would remain until conquered by the sun later in the day. A battered old Bedford tow truck gently backed down the slope toward the river’s edge, its burbling V8 engine the only man-made sound interrupting the dawn cacophony of lonely frog and bird calls.
The tow truck driver was old and tired but had dragged himself away from his warm bed and come down to the river nonetheless. He had always found it hard to say no to a job. With engine still running he tugged a lever at the rear of the truck, reversing its winch and playing out the twenty millimetre diameter cable that was tipped by two large battered steel hooks. When he gauged that he had enough length coiled around his still thick arm he passed it over to a diver in full wetsuit with a single tank strapped to his back.
The diver, a local tourist instructor who occasionally moonlighted as a recovery diver for the police, positioned his face mask and took the coil beneath the steamy water, its weight dragging him down. His ripples quickly faded, his bubbles the only telltale sign of his sub-surface movements to those who watched from the bank. A couple of minutes later he returned to the surface and gave a wave to the tow truck driver who stood plain-faced by his truck with arms crossed. He threw the lever forward and the winch whined into life and started to take up the slack. When the cable stiffened, the tow truck, despite weighing nearly four tonnes, lurched backwards from the strain and would have been dragged into the river but for the large wooden wedges that had been placed under the twin rear wheels and spiked into the ground with steel pegs to hold them fast. The tow truck driver had done this sort of work before.
Very slowly the winch and the truck started to win the battle of inertia and began to wind in its heavy weight. A car eventually broke the surface of the smooth water and mist and sent a small bow wave towards the bank before it. As it came up onto the bank, water poured from the door sills and an open rear window. Two occupants with white skin, bulging eyes and contorted faces could be seen still occupying the front seats.
A young girl wrapped in a blanket watched on silently, her face an impassive mask. Her forehead had been bandaged, but a small spot of blood seeped through undeterred. The ambulance paramedics tried to shield her from the sight with their bodies but she pushed them aside with hidden strength, her gaze fixed on the car.
Holiday makers from the nearby campground came out of their tents and Winnebagos to see what had awakened them at such an ungodly hour and stayed to watch, morbidly transfixed by the gruesome scene playing out before them. It would be something newsworthy to share with their relatives and friends upon returning to their mundane lives.
Constable Fred Carey had been the first to arrive at the scene at the beckoning of the campground manager. Initially Carey hadn’t believed that there was a car in the river because apart from the quiet word of a traumatised young girl there were no obvious signs of an accident having taken place. It wasn’t until he noticed the set of tyre marks leaving the road and heading towards the river that he began to piece together what had happened.
Batemans Bay Police Station senior officer, Senior Sergeant John Soward arrived at the scene at about six-thirty a.m., looking and feeling every bit of his fifty-seven years. Constable Carey quickly briefed him. He explained that he had been working on an alcohol breath testing operation five kilometres down the highway for most of the night when he’d received the call for assistance at approximately two-thirty a.m..
“Did you get many on the breathalyser last night?” asked Soward. He was a large country copper with a proud silver mane of hair swept back from his forehead and a lined brown face which contrasted with his keen blue eyes.
“Yeah we got a few. Big night for a Thursday.”
“Not surprising, seeing it’s a long weekend. Plenty of people knocking off early and hitting the sauce. Let’s have a look at the car then.”
Soward made a quick inspection of the inside of the car and its two occupants. He noted the deep cuts and abrasions on the heads that seemed consistent with a car accident. Their faces had been leached white by the cold water and the river creatures had already begun their recycling assault on the bodies. Some continued unabashedly with their feast despite their new found audience.
As he chatted with Constable Carey about the accident, Senior Sergeant Soward noticed the rear passenger side window was wound down and glanced at the slender teenage girl still receiving treatment in the back of the ambulance.
“Why is she still here?” asked Soward.
“Paramedics only got here about thirty minutes ago. They’ve had a busy night apparently.”
Soward made his way towards the girl in the ambulance, silently cursing the ogling campers who stood transfixed, men with arms crossed, women with their hands over their mouths as they whispered to each other. They weren’t locals and they didn’t have the sense to mind their own business. He waited beside the paramedics with his notebook in hand until they gave him a nod and stepped back. They knew him well enough to know he was a family man with his own kids. It would be a gentle inquisition. Soward looked down at the girl. He seemed to dwarf her. He correctly guessed she was about fifteen years old, but small and petite for her age. Her face, which was probably attractive under normal circumstances, was marked by shock and sadness and involuntary shivers racked her body beneath her bandages and a silver thermal blanket.
“Hi honey. My name is John. What’s your name?”
“Kylie. Kylie Faulkner.” she said in a barely audible croaky whisper.
“Kylie, I know you’ve been through a lot but I just want to ask you a few questions if it’s alright.” She looked toward him and tried to focus on his face but the image refused to sharpen. She blinked repeatedly until she could see him more clearly.
“Kylie, can you tell me what happened?”
She opened her mouth but it took a few seconds before the words arrived.
“We...we were coming down to the coast for a break, school holidays. It was late. Dad wanted to avoid the Friday traffic before the long weekend.” She stopped and Soward waited a little before prompting her.
“What happened?”
She tried to focus but the memories wouldn’t come. She grimaced as if trying to force out the pictures in her mind but they only came in pieces, shattered glimpses.
“We were driving. Then there were lights, really bright lights. We couldn’t see. They were right in front of us. We thought we were going to crash. Dad had to swerve to miss them and…”
&n
bsp; Kylie grimaced as if in pain. “That’s all I remember.” Tears flooded her eyes and she buried her head in her hands and quietly cried, her body shaking. Soward put an arm around her as if she was his own daughter.
“You’re doin’ real good honey. You’re being real brave. Can you remember anything about the other car?”
“All I could see were lights,” she replied in between sobs. “Lots of lights. It was big, maybe it was a dark colour. I don’t know.”
“Did you see the driver?”
She continued crying and shook her head. Soward decided to give up for the time being. She’d had enough, more than enough. He hoped she would remember more when he visited her later at the hospital.
Her description of events made sense to Soward. Constable Carey had pointed out the two sets of tyre marks to him upon his arrival. He walked up to the road for another look, noticing the arrival of another squad car. The skid marks from girl’s car started in the left hand lane, travelling east toward the coast, and then veered onto the gravel shoulder of the road. Soward surmised that once the tyres hit the shoulder the car would have lost traction, speared off the road and become briefly airborne before crashing through bushes and reeds and into the cold, dark river. The bushes and reeds had disguised the accident almost completely to the casual observer as they had flexibly bounced back into place with little damage after the car passed through them.
Carey explained to Soward that the girl had somehow managed to escape from her parents’ tomb, swim to shore and crawl up the riverbank. He had found a pool of blood where she had apparently rested or blacked out for a while after which she then managed to drag herself another two hundred metres to the campground to raise the alarm.
The diver, who was a personal friend of Constable Carey’s, had said the car came to rest on the bottom of the river, almost fifteen metres out from the bank in water that was over five metres deep. Soward shook his head in amazement that the girl had managed to escape at all.
Soward noted the other set of tracks on the road which were headed inland, in the opposite direction to the girl’s car. The skid marks straddled the double centre line and then veered left, coming to rest in soft mud on the side of the road. When Soward first arrived at the scene, Carey had been taking measurements of their length and width. He told Soward they measured around fifty-seventy metres in length which indicated that the mystery car had probably been travelling at a speed in excess of one hundred kilometres per hour, depending on the type of car and what condition its brakes were in. Either way, it was a lot of speed to be taking into a fairly tight corner which was speed rated at seventy kilometres per hour by a road sign a short way up the road.
Soward listened in silence and then turned to watch as the ambulance, with lights flashing but siren quiet, slowly headed into Batemans Bay to take the girl to hospital. In a career which had already spanned nearly thirty-three years, he had attended hundreds of traffic accidents and although the circumstances differed a little each time, the results were inevitably the same. In a few careless seconds a girl named Kylie Faulkner had her life turned upside down.
Chapter 2
Present day
Sarah Rayner looked at her watch as she skipped along the sidewalk as fast as her heels would carry her. “Shit. I’m late. Eight-fifteen already! If Ivan catches me coming in late again he’s going to kill me. I’d be able to walk faster if I hadn’t worn these damn shoes.”
Sarah looked down at her feet that were wedged neatly into her four inch heel, red Manolos. They’d cost her three hundred dollars, on sale, about half a nights work at the club, depending on the generosity of the patrons, but she considered them a bargain and all her friends told her they looked fabulous on her. They were right of course.
As she made her way down Goulburn Street she stopped momentarily in front of Cypress Lane and peered into its interior. Despite being poorly lit and with an unpleasant smell wafting out of it, she reasoned that it might shave a couple of minutes off her journey and at that moment that was a bargain she was prepared to strike.
She turned in. It was dark, with the only illumination provided by the occasional shafts of light from the windows of the buildings that backed onto either side of the narrow one way road. Even during the day it was a dim and cool place as the sun struggled to penetrate. By the time she was twenty metres within its grasp, the sounds of the city were reduced to a distant hum.
Cinching her coat about her waist to ward off the rapidly cooling evening she forged ahead and looked toward the small square of light in the distance. The lane appeared to be deserted and she quietly wished for a crowd to accompany her. She had always been a people person. The only sound was her shoes and she listened to them for company. Before long however, in between the tapping sounds her heels made, she heard a small noise behind her. She’d just come from a bar where she had downed three daiquiris with friends and her mind was feeling their effect, but the noise behind her focused her attention and sobered her up instantaneously. She listened intently without stopping or looking behind her and again the noise came to her. It sounded like a shoe scraping against the pieces of gravel on the bitumen.
She looked behind her and despite the dim lighting thought she saw a shape move behind a large dumpster forty metres back down the lane. She stared intently at it and listened for sounds but heard and saw nothing. The movement she had seen, or thought she had seen, had only been for the briefest of moments and she began to wonder if she’d imagined it, but at the back of her mind a cold and certain fear began to grow.
She assessed her options in a matter of seconds while her heart beat heavily in her chest. She considered walking back down the road to confront whatever lay hiding behind the dumpster. Normally she liked to confront her fears, but here, alone in the deserted laneway, her feet remained rooted to the spot.
She continued walking down the lane, more briskly now, counting down the metres until she would escape into the light. She could see people there, and traffic whizzing by. She would be safe when she was amongst them and yet, she kept hearing the sounds behind her. They became less furtive as her follower kept pace.
She shouted over her shoulder, “Look, I know you’re back there, so stop fucking around ok?” She had hoped to sound bold and fearless, but her voice betrayed her and sounded like a nervous schoolgirl.
As she got to within fifty metres of the end of the lane her confidence started to return, however she heard more noises behind her, closer now. The sound scraped over her nerves like fingers down a blackboard. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around again and her hand went inside her bag and gripped the can of capsicum spray within.
“No, please God no,” she whispered frantically.
Within metres of safety, her eyes firmly fixed on the end of the street, she stepped in a small pot-hole. The left heel of her beloved Manolos snapped off with a crack and she fell heavily to the ground. She tried to get up quickly, but pain lanced through her ankle and she crumpled to the ground again. She looked around frantically for her bag. It had been flung from her grasp as she had desperately tried to cushion her fall with her palms, which were now bleeding and jarred from taking the brunt of her impact with the grimy road.
She looked back down the laneway and almost gasped as a figure appeared from the dark, moving quickly towards her. By some trick of the dim light, its shadow billowed up enormously behind it giving the appearance of some super-sized spectre.
Sarah scrambled the couple of metres that separated her from her bag, tearing holes in her stockings and scuffing her knees in the process. A full panic consumed her and her hands tore at her bag as she reached it, frantically searching its cluttered contents for the can of spray which eluded her grasp for a mad moment. After what seemed an eternity but in reality was only seconds, she grabbed the can and ripped the lid off it. She turned to face her assailant and was just in time to see a figure loom large over her.
“It’s a girl?”
Chapter 3
In the front left corner of the bar a group of five sat around a table. Through trial and error they had worked out that this was the quietest and most private spot in the place. Four of the group had just spent the last two hours stalking a stranger.
They meet at Nero’s every Friday evening to play their game. They choose their stalking victims, or marks, as they refer to them, at random from the people who walk past the bar in the early evening. They look for someone interesting, someone who stands out from the crowd, someone who looks like they have a secret. They stalk their victims for two hours and the winner of the evenings hunt is the one who finds out the most information about the person they have followed. Their keenly contested prize is merely free drinks for the remainder of the night courtesy of the losing stalkers.
Grant McKinlay was thirty, solid and short, however his mundane appearance, coupled with his sharp mind made him a natural at stalking. Tonight had been his turn to choose the people in the street that the group would stalk, while he stayed behind and waited for their return. He had filled in his time by becoming lubricated with several beers and trying a few well rehearsed pickup lines on some of the ladies in the bar who passed him by and then passed him up.