Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  —

  BOOTS ON THE ground. It was raining hard now, harder, so we ran because neither Billy nor I had an umbrella.

  ‘Hello!’ Billy shouted as he rapped on the door, and I said to him: ‘Actually, maybe not quite so loud; we’re not here to arrest anyone.’

  And he stopped and said: ‘Yeah, sorry.’

  —

  ON MY FIRST day as a police officer, as I was heading off in my freshly ironed new uniform, as mum berated me for the thousandth time about my dyed hair, she passed on some advice:

  Don’t be presumptuous. Listen and learn. Smile in deference when they mention your height, your appearance and any part of your anatomy but never be deferential. Pee whenever you get the chance because sometimes you’ll be in the middle of nowhere for eight hours straight. This was after she vainly tried to elicit from me an assurance that, despite being a police officer now, I would not forsake every Chinese girl’s duty to get married by the age of thirty and provide her with a grandchild. In no way, ever, did she contemplate that I would end up in Homicide.

  Billy’s advice, on my first day with him, was simple: Always have a second and third change of clothes in the boot of your car. Just in case.

  Just in case you have been kneeling on sodden ground, hovering over a dead man, soaking up his blood and gristle into your jeans.

  There is a reason I wear only black.

  I had changed before we left the crime scene.

  —

  WE ALREADY KNEW her name. Her name was Lynne Gibney and she was born in Ararat, in Victoria, in 1968 and she went to La Trobe University and majored in Sociology and then got married and had kids, and the man she married, James … well, he was the man whose head I could have snipped free with a small pair of scissors. Now on his way to the morgue.

  The door creaked open. It was just before nine am. Lynne was still in a dressing gown, silk and pink, expensive, and her nails were immaculate crimson but no make-up and her hair was a little unkempt. She wasn’t expecting visitors. She held a bowl of corn flakes in one hand, a spoon in the other.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘Hello. My name is Detective Inspector William Waterson and this here is Detective Constable Lara Ocean. Can we come in?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a very hesitant way. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘When did you last see your husband?’ asked Billy as we walked into the house.

  She began to cry. She knew it. He hadn’t been answering his phone this morning. He hadn’t come home last night, and when she’d called Nick, his mate, who James said he was going to have a few beers with, Nick told her that James had left before midnight. He’d been pretty drunk, is what Nick said, and so maybe he had crashed in one of the cheap motels on the side of the highway, just up the hill from the Gabba, the cricket and football oval, close to the Story Bridge, is what Nick had said.

  And now there were police officers in the house. She had watched this scene in movies and on TV a hundred times. She just didn’t think it would come to her and she’d have a starring role in real life.

  We didn’t need to say a word. We could do it all in silence. Lynne could look the question, Billy would nod, sadly. Lynne would cry. Billy and Lara would look apologetic and take on the undertaker’s demeanour, shuffling out backwards, heads down.

  Slow dissolve to black, credits up.

  ‘Darlin’. We’re here to help you. You got the kids in the house? There’s Matt, yeah? And there is Diane, right? Where are they?’

  He had reached out and taken her hand and was holding it tightly. At the same time, he had taken her bowl of corn flakes and passed it to me. And she was staring into his eyes, and his eyes were dark but they spoke the truth.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re at school.’

  ‘Let’s get ’em back home, eh?’

  —

  LYNNE CALLED THE school and told them there was a family emergency and that her next-door neighbour was on her way to pick up Matt and Diane.

  The school wasn’t far. They arrived about fifteen minutes later. By that time Lynne’s mother and father had arrived and were consoling her. Other members of the family were also arriving. There was a priest. He looked uncertain, not knowing what to do.

  Because we had done our duty, there were looks of curiosity. Why were we still there?

  Because Lynne had asked Billy to do it, because she didn’t want to. Nor did her parents. Nor did the other family members or the priest. Only Billy. He was ready for it.

  It was November 19. Five weeks before Christmas. Their house had a Santa Claus cut-out on the front window. Great present they’re about to receive.

  We were waiting out the front as the neighbour pulled up and two frightened teenagers climbed out. They didn’t know what to make of us.

  Billy reached out and took Diane’s hand and held it like a vice, like he had her mother’s. I saw her wince as she looked up into his eyes, then to me, then back to him. Her brother was shaking. He began to cry. Not Diane. She was steadfast, as if daring Billy to say what she already suspected. If dad didn’t come home and mum had been on the phone before you went to school, frantically searching for him and then there were police at the house and grandpa’s car in the driveway, you would know. She knew.

  ‘Diane. Matt. I ain’t gonna lie to you: dad is dead. He got killed last night. It wasn’t a happy killing; as if there ever was. Matt, you hold my hand too, and grip it tight, all right?’

  Yes, sir.

  ‘You, Diane, you keep holding my other hand real tight, yeah?’

  Yes, sir.

  Into their eyes, he said:

  ‘All I can do is find the cunt – ’scuse my French – and kill him. Trust me on that. Yeah?’

  Yeah.

  ‘And I will,’ he says. ‘I will find him. And then I will kill him.’

  I Will

  THAT WAS FRIDAY MORNING. BY THE END OF THE DAY WE had asked Lynne if there was anyone who might have had a grudge against her husband: no. We had spoken to his work colleagues to see if there was a problem at work: no. We had checked his bank accounts for any suspicious deposits or withdrawals: no. We had tracked down his movements from working late in the office, to calling his wife to say he was going to Nick’s place for a few end-of-the-week drinks and not to wait up for him. At about ten-thirty p.m., he left Nick, telling him he wanted to walk along the cliff top, which was just around the corner, before hailing a cab on Main Street to take him back across the Story Bridge, through the Valley and up the hill, back to Ascot. Nick, a mid-forties primary-school headmaster who lived alone, thought James was a nut for going out into the night, which was about to be hit by yet another torrential outburst. But that was James, Nick told us, also shattered by the news; James loved to embrace the elements. Nick told us he gave James an umbrella. We didn’t find it. There was no umbrella at the crime scene. Maybe it blew away.

  We checked out Nick but he stood in line with everyone else we had already eliminated. As well as profiling the killer, Homicide Squads had also begun to profile the victim. It was called Victimology. James didn’t fit the profile of a premeditated target.

  He was fitting into the profile of a man who was randomly chosen in one of the great and unfortunate hurly-burlys of life that doesn’t make sense or conform to a satisfying explanation. His death was, we were starting to think, random. Like a Los Angeles drive-by shooting. Wrong time, wrong place.

  The ‘meteor moment’, as mum would say.

  —

  MIDNIGHT SATURDAY, TWENTY-FOUR hours after Billy and I had arrived at the crime scene, I got to sleep. In my little wooden house in working-class Hendra, at the edge of the Brisbane racecourse. I slept right through the rain and the noisy click-clack of the horses as their trainers led them down the street.

  Sunday dawn brought a brief reprieve from the wet. And the discovery of a second body. Two in three days.

  —

  BRIAN WAS THIRTY-SEVEN and,
as he did every morning before dawn, was jogging through the Botanic Gardens. He lived with his wife and kids on the edge of the city, not far away, in Spring Hill. His body was found on one of the pathways that spanned the edge of the river. He was discovered by an early-morning shift worker from the nearby Stamford Plaza hotel, on their way to the kitchen before the restaurant started serving breakfast at six. The hotel was directly across from where Brian lay, his neck sliced open with a deep cut, severing all but a thin flap at the side of his head, which had been folded onto his shoulder, his mouth slit and opened to create the grotesque smile. A tooth was missing, pulled out. By now we knew this tooth was called a maxillary canine, the longest in the mouth. It looked as though it belonged to a sabre-toothed cat.

  Across the water, on the other side of the river, were the cliffs of Kangaroo Point. Where, on Friday, James Gibney had also met the sharp force of a killer’s face.

  As I walked briskly through the park towards the crime scene, my phone rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Thirty seconds away.’

  ‘Turn around. Meet me on the street at the main gate. The Coroner needs to see us.’

  Taranis

  THE FIRST TIME I STEPPED INTO THE MORGUE I TOLD MYSELF: You were the one who wanted Homicide, you better get used to the territory.

  My brother, who had been making tons of money selling used cars, had already said: You will never survive an autopsy. He had been watching too much TV, the bane of a Homicide detective’s life with friends and family.

  I’ve yet to attend an actual autopsy and, frankly, the need to do so is limited. The Coroner determines the cause of death, and when there are blatantly suspicious elements, as there were with James and now Brian, the Coroner will give us a detailed brief which provides us with much of the science to plot our investigation.

  We drove to the John Tonge Centre, the mortuary for all of Queensland, south of the city, passing close to the suburb of Sunnybank where mum lives, in a brick home with a lot of concrete instead of lawn but also, weirdly, a side garden of topiary. Sunnybank is the hub of the Chinese community in Queensland. Everyone thinks it’s Fortitude Valley with its Chinese street signs and endless rows of yum cha restaurants, but that’s surface glitter. Mandarin and Cantonese are as common as English on the streets of Sunnybank.

  Memories returned. This was the landscape I ran away from. The flatlands of suburbia, strip malls, big malls, acres of brick houses built in the 1970s and few trees. The landscape of a tormented teenage girl.

  Rainwater gushed along the edges of the footpaths, too much water, moving too fast. The drains were overflowing and pedestrians ran like they were tap dancing, in order to keep their shoes and clothes dry. The sky was dark. These days it’s always dark. We haven’t seen blue sky since October. Most people were driving with their headlights on, even though it was morning.

  As I was his rookie, the student for his knowledge and wisdom, from murder to how to survive on the streets of London’s East End, Billy told me that the old morgue, which was built in the nineteenth century – ‘Fucking draconian, “House of the Dead” they called it, with the worst stench ever, a fitting monument to Calvary and the echoes of the damned, girlie’ – was situated on the Brisbane River and was flooded out in 1887 and then again in 1890. And then, in 1893, it was not only flooded a third time but washed away.

  —

  HOW MANY DEAD bodies have passed through this room? Thousands, each of their stories and closing moments clinging to the walls. If you believe in that sort of thing. Which I used to. But not anymore.

  ‘You need to see this,’ said the Coroner.

  She removed the sheet covering James’s body, and it was immediately obvious in all its ugly beauty: on his chest was a large circle, dug in, carved in, obviously post-mortem because it was pristine. Within the circle were eight spokes. Like a bicycle wheel. I tried to ignore the upward twist to both sides of his mouth, the frozen grimace.

  ‘Strike me fuck; what is this?’ asked Billy as he stared at the circle and its eight spokes.

  ‘You tell me,’ said the Coroner. ‘I’ve got no idea.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said as I stared at a part of my life I’d rather forget.

  —

  IN MY YOUNGER years, I did some crazy things, and one of those crazy things was to hang out with drug-induced Celtic Goths. I was, like, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Maybe it had something to do with finding my identity – am I Asian, am I Australian? Where do I fit? Because it didn’t feel, back then, that I was fitting into one or the other. I was half here, half there, all nowhere.

  I was thirteen when we moved from Cairns to Sunnybank, which was four months after I had come home from school to find mum and my brother sitting at the kitchen table crying. Mum couldn’t answer me when I asked what had happened, with that rising horror kids get when they know that something is really, really wrong and life was possibly about to change forever. Mum wept. It was up to my brother to tell me that dad had died. Car accident. Sudden. Some guy had been drinking all night and smashed into dad when he was on his way home for lunch. The drunk guy died too.

  I had always seen myself as a balloon in the sky, held to the ground by two strings. One was dad’s – my Anglo half – and the other was mum’s, my Chinese half. With his death, one of the strings came loose and I was adrift. Maybe I put too much stock in my kid’s simple image of identity, but at the time that’s how it felt.

  Life was a bit hazy after that. I remember the funeral. Sort of. Then life started to skid. I hit a few kids at school. Kids who called me Chink. We packed up and drove down to Brisbane in a blur and my brother was stoic all the way through and mum put me into a new school and on my fourteenth birthday I ran away.

  I guess in the wake of our collective trauma we all, individually, clung to something in order to survive: mum reached out to become more and more Chinese, and my brother embraced the notion of making a lot of money to keep him secure and me, I wallowed in the notion of being a rebel.

  We’re better now, me and mum, despite some Confucian issues. But back then, at that time, I was a fuck-up. Hanging with some dark, spooky Celtic-loving guys and girls. Spiking my identity crisis with grains of hate.

  —

  ‘THAT WHEEL IS identified with the Celtic thunder god, Taranis,’ I said. And I swear I could feel a thousand dead souls, plastered into the walls of this room of death, breathe outwards at me.

  There was silence. Broken by:

  ‘All right, then,’ said Billy. ‘Tarnis.’

  ‘Taranis,’ I corrected him.

  ‘God of thunder.’

  ‘Yep.’

  Silence. Broken by:

  ‘All right. Okay. Thanks for that, Miss Coroner.’

  ‘My name is Annette,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Yep. Annette. Thanks for that Annette. Sorry, I should have remembered. Ain’t no good with remembering names and you’ve been here for a while now so sorry about that. You’ve got a second body making its way over to you, Annette. Geezer by the river. Same head and face mutilation so give us a call as soon as he gets here and let us know if he also has the tarnis thing on his chest. C’mon, girlie, let’s get out of here.’

  —

  ‘WHAT DOES THIS fucking tarynas thing mean?’ asked Billy as we hurried across the car park in the rain.

  ‘Taranis,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Yeah, whatever. What does it mean? I saw The Silence of the Lambs, we’ve all seen The Silence of the Lambs where the geezer shoves a moth into the mouth of the vic. Is that what we have? Some deranged ritual thing?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied cautiously, ‘but at the very least, it’s a form of identity. Taranis, god of thunder; identifying with him makes you feel powerful, invincible. This also explains, or I think it might, the slicing into the side of the victims’ mouths.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘There is another god in the Celtic tradition, connected to Taranis. His
name is Ogmios and he is always smiling. His tongue is pierced with a chain, which is made up from the ears of his followers.’

  ‘You kidding me?’

  ‘Nope. I am not.’

  ‘And the tooth thing?’ he asked, as we climbed into the car.

  ‘I don’t know anything about Celtic relevance to missing teeth.’

  ‘So, he draws on these mythological gods to give him strength and power?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps. The whole Celtic thing is complicated, not to mention being twisted to suit twentieth-century beliefs and fears. But …’

  I paused, thinking back to my days immersed in this world.

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘But what? You paused on a thought. What?’

  ‘Well, according to today’s beliefs, if you follow Taranis, you’re also into sacrifice.’

  ‘Human sacrifice?’

  ‘Yep. Usually burnings, people tied up in wicker baskets and burnt alive but, you know, like everything violent, anything imaginative would work, as long as it causes death. It comes from old pagan stuff where people wanted to bring on rain for their crops to grow. Taranis, if he was happy, would blow his thunder and it would rain.’

  Billy looked up at the sky, out through the car windows. ‘Sure seems to be working,’ he said.

  Night Comes On

  BILLY AND I DROVE IN SILENCE, TOWARDS HQ. I APPRECIATED the think-space. For the duration of my time in Homicide, I was still learning and now I was in the heart of a case which, we both knew, was going to explode. I had to focus on the process, the work, and not on the adrenaline that I could feel building.

  I had fortuitously lucked out into the rarest of murder investigations. Generally speaking, and this was what they had taught us at the Academy, in that brief class on repeat offenders and serial crimes, Because, the chances of you guys (guys) coming across this sort of crook are very, very low, we need three bodies before we can make the determination that we have in fact got a repeat offender; a serial killer. Two can be a coincidence and sometimes is, but three? No.