Priors. Stuart Jackson E.
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doctor treated the question seriously and said, “I don’t know if that caused the problem. Sometimes these things are caused by a bad knock. He has a very bad bruise across the right side of his face. Cheekbone round towards the ear. Black eye. And there’s a contusion at the back of his head. Right side too.”
“Any idea how he might have got the injuries?”
“No. It’s the sort of thing you might get if you were hit across the back of the neck with something, as you were turning, maybe, and you catch a blow from the same instrument across the side of the face.”
“Could a shotgun do that?”
“Yes. Or an instrument like that. If I’m right it would have been wielded horizontally,” and he lifted his hands up in front of him, the fists clenched as if he was holding a pole between them. “Hit like this, as Christie turns, catching the side of his face as the assailant continues with the swing and getting the rest of the instrument on the side of the face.”
“A strong person?”
“Not necessarily.”
“A woman could do it?” Barron asked.
Malone looked at him.
“Who else could it have been?” And Malone nodded.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Yes, it could have been a woman. It’s also possible that the injuries were obtained in two different incidents.”
“You said ...”
“I said he might have got the injuries. Might. I wasn’t there. Were you there?” he asked Barron.
“No. But we were on the scene very quickly. There was nothing else there that could have been used as a weapon.”
“A fall? Could a fall have caused the injury?”
“Maybe.” The doctor looked at Barron. “But the strike by an instrument - like the shotgun - is more likely.”
Shotgun.
“So let’s hit him with the shotgun again,” Malone said, and smiled at Barron.
“Shut up, Barry.” Barron turned to the doctor and asked, “And what about prompting with something from the past?”
“It’s worked in some cases. I’m no expert on this. It’s not a common occurrence. Anything’s worth a try.”
“Let’s try. Barry, grab that chair and bring it over to the table near the window.”
Barron sat at the table and pulled a small collection of papers from his briefcase. He sorted them quickly and waited until Malone was seated across the table from him.
“What’s this?” Malone asked.
“I’ve just finished talking with Gloria Doyle.”
Doyle.
Barron lifted his voice so that it would carry to Christie on the bed. Malone nodded as he realised what Barron was doing.
“How is she?”
“She’s coping. She’s a solid woman, she’ll get over it.”
“So what did you talk about?”
“I ... I was trying ... trying to see what relationship there was - if any - with Barry’s .... with Barry’s death. After all, Christie was involved.” Barron paused, allowing himself a sideways glance at the motionless figure on the bed.
Barry’s death.
Christie lay there, motionless, his arms lying straight down the side of his body, the hands open. His eyes stared at the white wall on the opposite side of room, blank, unseeing.
“And?”
“Gloria said that Barry and Christie used to meet quite a lot prior to Barry’s death. She’d been worried about Barry for quite some time. He seemed to be worried about something and she couldn’t get him to tell her what it was. They’d had some troubles with money and she thought it might have been that, but he reckoned it wasn’t.”
“But that wasn’t true. The investigation uncovered quite a lot of gambling debts.”
“She didn’t know that at the time. She also thought there might have been another woman. This only became an issue because Barry had made friends with Dennis Hunt.”
“Hunt?”
Hunt.
“The truck driver. The one who was killed in a crash.”
“Oh, yeah. And that was where Christie came in.”
Barron nodded. “Hunt was quite the ladies’ man and Gloria was sure that when they were both out together, that Hunt was providing the women.”
“That doesn’t sound like Barry,” Malone offered.
“Who knows, mate? Who knows? Look, who would have thought that he was a gambler and that he up to his neck in debt. I knew him fairly well - we’d worked together for years. He never gave me any indication. We’ve all got our skeletons in the wardrobe. If he was the gambler that we didn’t know, he could just have easily been cheating on Gloria. This Hunt was a nasty piece of work by all accounts and maybe Barry was easily swayed.”
“Where did Hunt get his money from?”
“Not clear.”
“You said he was truck driver. Doing what?”
“Some ... some contract work on the .... on the farming side of things, I think.”
“A gambler too, then?”
“Yeah.”
Gambler. And a ladies’ man. Not right. He drifted back to sleep.
Malone looked to one side and saw that Christie’s eyes had closed. He nodded to Barron and cast his eyes to the bed. Barron looked at the man in the bed and sighed.
“Uphill battle,” he said resignedly.
“I don’t think so, Dave,” Malone said. “We’ve got the evidence. Christie was caught at the scene.”
“And motive?”
“We might never know. A domestic. Maybe she was playing around.”
“We need that background to make it sound right.”
“And if Christie never gets his memory back? What then? There’s no way we can get that background. The priors get to be a little thin, but that’s no reason for us to say it can’t be done.”
“You’re right,” Barron admitted. “We will have to make a case. If Christie can’t contribute - because of this amnesia business - then we have to go with what we’ve got. No matter how thin the priors are.”
“It doesn’t really matter if we don’t discover the motive. Whatever the reason, he killed her. And how bloody long do we wait to see if his memory returns? We could keep saying, wait a week, wait a week. It might happen next week. It also might never happen.” Malone paused and looked over at Christie, sleeping in the bed. “Let’s wrap this up and get on with some more serious stuff.”
Barron was studying his colleague with interest. He finally, said, “Okay, wrap it up. Go on the basis of us getting nothing out of Christie. I’ll talk with the boss.”
“Done. Hey, look who’s here. How they hanging, Greenie?”
Sergeant Green stood at the doorway and beckoned both men out of the room.
“What is it?” Malone asked.
He walked away from the doorway, saying nothing, drawing them further from the room. He stopped and turned to face them, leaning back against the balustrade.