1922132403 (N) by Peter Seymour

Author:Peter Seymour
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781922132413
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10:

Got ’em

I was sitting at my desk one afternoon when a uniformed officer walked up to my desk and handed me a yellow envelope. ‘Here, Pete, this came for you,’ he said.

‘Ta, mate,’ I said as I took it from him. I turned it over and saw that it was from the Coroner’s Court. I opened the envelope and retrieved the toxicology report from the post-mortem examination of Nick Hanes’s body. Hanes was clear of drugs, apart from alcohol, but I was surprised to find that his blood alcohol reading was 0.285! Damn, he wouldn’t have been able to swat a fly with that much alcohol in his system! I thought to myself, and then continued to read. It was Dr Little’s view that the assault, combined with the deceased’s enlarged heart and the alcohol reading, had all contributed to his death.

Knowing that Hanes’s blood alcohol reading was so high didn’t really help me. In fact, it made me feel incredibly sorry for him. All things considered, he never stood a chance. He would’ve had a hard enough time defending himself against two younger and fitter men if he’d been sober, let alone while he was paralytic. Still, this didn’t get us any closer to discovering the identities of the two suspects.

One night, we were having dinner when Susie said, ‘Pete, we’ve been having a few problems lately.’

‘Yes, dear, I know. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s alright, darling. I just think it would be a good idea if we got away for a few days. What do you think?’

‘Yeah, sounds good to me,’ I said.

That weekend, we packed up the kids and headed up to the Central Coast to spend a couple of days with Sue’s parents. Somehow, being geographically removed from the western suburbs helped me to recharge. The kids loved visiting their grandparents, and we walked on the beach and went fishing in a little runabout around Brisbane Waters. Sue’s dad, Ted, loved taking the girls for walks up the mountain near his house to collect gumnuts, and took them up there that weekend. As always, the girls came back dirty, and their legs were covered in scratches, but as always, they had big smiles on their faces after their little adventure with Poppy. Susie’s mum spoiled them rotten too.

A few weekends later, my parents took the girls off our hands and treated them to a day out at Featherdale Wildlife Park at Blacktown before going home to enjoy Mum’s home-cooked treats and special milkshakes.

Both the girls’ grandfathers were great men, and their grandmothers were, and are, great women. Sadly, both my father, John Seymour, and my father-in-law Ted Kneale are gone now, but their passing did make me realise one thing; no matter how unfair or unjustified someone’s passing may be, life stills goes on.

While I was up the coast, I had a good hard think about things, and realised that I might never find Nick Hanes’s killers. I had done everything I could, covered every lead, but perhaps solving this one just wasn’t meant to be, and so I resigned myself to that fact.

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