A Favour Called In

With Gladys Cramer cuffed in the back seat of the patrol car outside Luke Smith's house in Berriedale, Sarah Lahey stood beside the vehicle and rang Benny Salter. Gladys stared straight ahead through the windscreen and took in none of it.

Benny was in the shed at Salter's Garage in Glenorchy, working on an old Yamaha that had been giving him trouble all week, with a space heater losing ground to a frosty winter morning. When Sarah's name came up on his phone he stepped outside under the gum tree to answer, braced against the wind. Calls from Sarah tended to mean trouble he would sooner not know about. He owed her a favour, and she opened by telling him she was calling it in.

He asked what she needed. Sarah told him there was a smashed bedroom window round the back of a house on the corner, that he could not miss it, and that he was to fix it and clear all the broken glass off the floor inside. She would text him the address. Benny said he would be there within the hour. Sarah ended the call before he could ask anything else, then texted him Luke Smith's address.

Neither of them named what the job was for. The window was how Sarah and Karl Jenkins had got into the house the night before, and how Sarah had got in again that morning, and its glass could carry traces of both of them. With the pane replaced and the shards gone, nothing at the house would invite anyone back inside to the body under the stairs. Sarah knew a new window did nothing about that body, and made the call regardless.

Benny did not ask why a detective was arranging a quiet repair at a house she had been sent to investigate. He suspected it had little to do with a window and decided he did not want to find out. He went back into the shed and packed his toolkit.