Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  But for you. You stayed quiet.

  And now here we are. The girls have given their mum a hug and she has said they can have ice-cream after dinner and suggested that maybe we could all go out to the upmarket burger place down on Racecourse Road, as a special treat, because Aunty Jen is here. And they shouted, as they always do when excited, Yay!

  —

  I PLACED THE knives on the dining table. Unmistakable. Unmissable. A fucking cleaver. No need for a highly awkward, ‘Guess what I found in your office today?’ moment. The defiant approach. Hey, look at this. Got an answer for this? Nothing said, the blades say it for me. Now, bitch, you fucking speak. Because I have nothing to say.

  Then I thought of the girls and how they were due home from school before Anthea was due home from work. That wouldn’t do. I couldn’t bring them into this. Jesus, Anthea, did you fucking-think about the ramifications of what you did? Aside from me and twenty years gone. What about a future? Like, kids? Like, a career?

  I picked up the knives, careful not to cut myself, and put them on her desk in her office. There I stood. Staring at them. Then I picked them up and walked downstairs and into her bedroom and placed them neatly on her pillow. There I stood. Then I picked them up and walked back upstairs and placed them on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, where the girls wouldn’t pay close attention to them because they were just big knives, among the other kitchen knives. There I stood. Waiting.

  The girls came home. Then, later, Anthea came home and walked into the kitchen, as she always did, to place her bag and briefcase on the breakfast bar, and as I was rambling about the high and unfair cost of tertiary education, I watched as she calmly took them and placed them in a drawer. Then suggested we all go out for burgers. She couldn’t help a sideways glance at her trophies. The five teeth.

  Five. Who are the other two victims, Anthea?

  Not I

  I HAD A DREAM. I HAD INVADED A DREAM. WE HAD, THE girls, my sister and I, gone to the burger place. We sat outside, on the footpath, under the sloping branches of jacaranda trees which hung low, so low that Maxi could jump up and touch some of them, little Jen trying but not reaching. A shower of rain swept along the street, coming in off the river nearby, where the old wharves used to be, where Anthea and I would play sometimes, creeping in through the wire fence.

  She and I did not speak. The girls did not notice. Little Jen never got to touch the low branches of the tree.

  I had a dream. I had invaded a dream. I was lying in a soft, warm ocean, at the edge of the water. My arms were splayed out and I was a starfish. The tips of my fingers trailed through the surface of the water. I heard the door to my room open and I felt the press of a person on the edge of my bed.

  Listen, she whispered and I thought I could feel a tear-stained face upon mine. Is it you, Rosie?

  Listen:

  It was accidental, the first kill. I didn’t mean to do it.

  It was her fault.

  She was in the scrub, across the road from the Sea World resort on the Gold Coast, that time mum and dad had sent us there on our own. The second time, or was it the third time? You were sleeping. I got up, left our bed, our room and went along the corridor and down in the lift and out through the foyer. Before dawn. I couldn’t sleep. The people at the desk were worried that I was alone. I was twelve. You were thirteen. You were sleeping. I said: I’m okay, I like to get up really early and have a walk before dawn. They smiled and laughed, the people at the desk, as I walked out through the revolving front doors. I jogged along the road, turning into the bush and scrub of dry tea-tree. No butterflies. I was looking for butterflies. How can it be that, a hundred metres from the Sheraton and the Versace, there is a wasteland of scrub and sand. C’est la vie. Sayonara, bonsoir.

  Little hills. Scrub in the sand, the sound of the waves on the beach nearby, and there she was.

  She had long grey hair tied into a pony tail and she was sitting cross-legged with her back to me. Meditating. I guess. The dawn was far away but I could hear the sounds of barking. Dogs. Somewhere off. Along with the sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand.

  I crept up behind her. Sat behind her. Watched her. Thinking:

  She doesn’t know I’m behind her.

  Nobody knows.

  I have total power. She has no idea I’m behind her, watching her. I can strike any time.

  And I did. There was a tree branch next to me. Not too big, not too small. Big enough to hurt and small enough for me to wield. I cannot tell you why I did it. I just did. I picked up the branch and struck her, on the back of the neck, as hard as I could. She fell, of course, to the ground, sideways, and lay with her eyes fluttering like a butterfly in its death moment. Staring up at me as I stood over her and brought the tree branch down on her head.

  And then another. And then another. By the time I finished, her head was a smashed, pulpy mess of blood and gore. With every blow, as her head got flatter and flatter, I got more and more excited. I just wanted to pummel it. There might have been thirty or forty blows to her head before it was just mush. There was a tooth. The daylight came and I could hear the sounds of birds, loud, from all around me.

  I stepped into the ocean. In my clothes, I strode out into the surf. No-one was on the beach. No-one saw me. It had begun to rain. The wind was hard and strong.

  I came out of the water and sat on the sand and dried off, which took a little time. Some blood and gristle had lodged in my hair, and some of her spray, blood and gunk had splashed across my face and seeped into my mouth. I swallowed some of her mushed head. Don’t be disgusted, big sister, because it tasted like power and strength. I had tasted life. It tasted good.

  While you and I went to Sea World and screamed on all the rides and ate too many chicken nuggets, I saw the police arrive and then an ambulance and saw her body being carried out of the scrub, all covered up. The police were there for days. They were still there after we left a week later. I read they arrested a man, sent him to jail. I didn’t know it at the time but the area of scrub across the road from the resort was a famous gay hangout. So, the cops got a gay guy. They would never have considered me. I was too young and I was a girl.

  Being a girl was the best disguise.

  —

  I WAKE UP early. That’s prison for you. I got out of bed and walked upstairs, softly. It was Saturday. The girls get to sleep in.

  As I made coffee, I tried to order my thoughts. My memories. Did Anthea come into my room last night, talk to me? Did she confess to a killing when she was twelve? Or was that a dream?

  I looked across to the wall of butterflies. The box of teeth, the trophy box; in its place was another cabinet of butterflies. The blades were also gone. Not in the drawer and not back in her study.

  The killer had covered her tracks.

  What was I to do?

  Be silent, acquiescent, say nothing, do nothing. That she knew I knew would keep her compliant. That she knew I knew would keep her from committing another murder.

  I was certain she had planned another murder. Because she could. Because I was free, the perfect fall-woman, the last hit of an addiction strong but put on hold. Our secret, my sister’s and mine. Never spoken of. But ours.

  I would leave. I would go back to Southport and the job at Bunnings and just shy my eyes away as the throngs tried to capture me with their phones and viral me on social media. Those eyes would keep me safe: the killer would not kill again because I knew her secret and I would be in the spotlight of social media, my every move followed, recorded. My notoriety would be my alibi.

  I wasn’t sure what to do about the Attorney-General and his campaign to put me back inside. There wasn’t anything I really could do but hope the #JenIsInnocent movement gathered enough momentum to turn public opinion. Maybe I should start a YouTube channel.

  Gelignite

  OVER THE YEARS I HAD BECOME A CAUSE-CÉLÈBRE FOR A number of well-meaning but strident women, and some men, who supported my innocence and opposed my lon
g stay in prison. #JenIsInnocent. I figured that any prisoner with a profile would get that sort of attention while incarcerated, especially a woman and when the case was as salacious as mine, so I had mostly ignored it. I was not allowed internet while inside, so most of the flames blew past me. But I knew it was there. Just like I was aware of the TV shows about me. I knew there was a small band of followers, agitating for my release, convinced of my innocence.

  But I was not prepared for the storm that would follow once I got out.

  —

  On November 18 1999 James Gibney was murdered in Brisbane. Shortly after, two more men were killed. By the same person, who became known as The Slayer. Very recently I, in my capacity as the president of the parole board, allowed the release of the person known as The Slayer.

  Her name is Jennifer White and I believe she is innocent.

  I do not believe she committed these crimes. Our Attorney-General, Ray Conway, is determined to put Ms White back in prison, for the rest of her life. He is wrong. He is acting illegally, and while he stokes the fires of public anger – a public that has not been fully informed – an innocent person is being threatened.

  Nobody wants to hear that a person who has been demonised is innocent.

  She is.

  The Slayer is still at large.

  I am writing this to inform the public that Ms White was wrongly convicted and that our Attorney-General is acting outside the law.

  Yes, I was removed from the office of president of the parole board. No, I am not writing this out of anger. All I care about is honesty. Truth. Justice. My record speaks for itself. I have always spoken out for truth and justice, no matter how inconvenient it may be.

  —

  AND ON IT went.

  Thanks, Ms Jones, but I think my life just got a lot more complex because of you. Thanks, Courier Mail, yet again, for poking another knife into my life, with your front page Saturday news story. Along with the headline: Calls for a New Inquiry into the identity of The Slayer.

  Twenty years after baying for my blood, which they got, the media is now baying for the blood of the real Slayer and feasting on a new story: Is Jen Innocent?

  Shot of Love

  NILS WAS ALREADY ANGRY. HIS SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD girlfriend, Iris, had left him overnight, run away. He’d thrown her to the floor, towered over her and pulled off his clothes and invoked one of his mad bullshit Celtic rants which freaked her out. She kicked him in the dick and skedaddled quick smart out of the grimy apartment, ignoring his wails.

  And then he saw the front page news from the Courier Mail and, tucked into the two-page spread on pages seven and eight was a photo of him then, leaving court and a photo of him now, lizard man. Do the math. Nils was, he knew, going down.

  He knew where Lara lived; he knew she hadn’t moved out of the small house in Hendra, close to the racecourse. There had been a profile on her, after she became the first Asian woman police commissioner in the country. In the anywhere. Except for Asia. She was special, she was unique, a trail-blazer and, after the detritus of Iris and this new media gaze, she was in his sights to cut and kill.

  Remembering his promise, that he would stick his knife into her and slice her to the neck or do to her what the Japanese soldiers did in China, in that competition between the two swordsmen, cutting Chinese men and women in half in one fierce swift blow to the head, down to the waist.

  He put his sword – his favourite – into a sling, on his back. He admired himself in the mirror. He was the illustrated man. On his forehead was Ogmios. On his tongue was a bolt of thunder. On his left eyebrow were drops of blood. On his right eyebrow was a vagina. On his nose was a clitoris. On his chin was an AK-47. On his left cheek was a bleeding corpse, a woman whose chest had been ripped open, blood falling to his neck. On his right cheek were four blades, crossed over, forming a swastika. He sucked in his breath and remembered back to when he, another Nils, and Lara, lived in the caravan, when he was scared and confused and she gave him solace, lifting him away from the abuse of his father and mother who would stick pins into him. And then more. And more, until he ran.

  Running still, as he stepped out of the apartment above the motorcycle shop and rode up to Brisbane.

  In anger.

  He didn’t get far.

  —

  BILLY HAD TASKED Ranger Paul, an old mate from CIB back in the nineties, to stay close to Nils. Ranger Paul was driving a Subaru and pulled out of the kerb as the illustrated man rode off, sword slung over his back as if he didn’t give a shit about anything.

  Nils rode his Harley too fast. But that was how he liked it. He always thought he’d go out in a James Dean burst of flame. The end befitting the life.

  Nils gunned the ton.

  The last snapshot Ranger Paul saw of Nils’s life was a Harley careening off the side of the highway, a few kilometres south of the Logan turn-off. The last snapshot Nils saw, as he lost control of his 750, as he hurtled towards the barriers along the highway, gripped with anger and having been distracted by an incoming call from Iris, was water. The creek below, as he smashed through the barrier and sailed to his death, the inky brown of the creek rising up to greet him.

  He sank. The bike on top of him. Unable to wrestle himself out of its metal grip, he sank. The sword came loose and floated to the surface.

  The Tensile Grip

  SIMON WAS SHOWING IN THE MEDIA LIAISON TEAM WHEN I received the call from Billy telling me that Nils was finally on his way to eternally meet his god of thunder.

  I had called a crisis meeting for six a.m. to discuss my strategy in response to Karin Jones’s explosive newspaper piece.

  To add further inconvenience to an already-irritating situation, Nils, the second serious suspect in the case, has just died. Once the media got hold of Nils’s death, a new burst of energy would hit the story. Media stories like this are like fires: they need oxygen. I fully understood this and it was my job to take control and manage it. Like a firefighter, get ahead of the flames.

  ‘Okay, this is the press release,’ I told them. Recent grads from the Griffith University course in Media, they each had a tablet, hands poised, waiting for the spiel, staring at me. Anxious but determined to prove their worth. Just as I had been when I stood in the same spot, on the other side of the desk between Kristo and Billy as The Dutchman told us to get our goddamned acts together and find The Slayer who, in a turn of unexpected (or was it, I wondered, remembering back to the knife and its sudden discovery) events, is back in the headlines after twenty years.

  ‘Following recent commentary in the media regarding a twenty-year-old case involving the tragic murder of three men in the Brisbane area, the Commissioner of Police has today ordered that a new investigation be opened to analyse whether any new evidence has come to hand which may lead to further action. Queensland Police asks that the privacy of the families involved be respected and that unwarranted media speculation be avoided, particularly if this case is to return to the courts.’

  In Billy’s day, media liaison was done with a fist or a beer.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Samuel. ‘Send?’

  I nodded. ‘Send. And, in response to all the calls, just remind them of the inappropriateness of comment regarding an ongoing investigation.’

  ‘What if they ask who’s leading the investigation?’

  That was the next item on the agenda, but I needed some clean time to think. I was more rattled than I cared to admit. Not by Karin Jones’s piece in the newspaper; I’d dealt with firestorms before, that was part of my job.

  It was Nils’s death.

  —

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER and he still had a grip on me. I never imagined that news of his death would affect me. But guys like Nils, they never completely go away, not even in death. I ran from him, twice, but it was I, in the first instance, who followed him. He was my first lover and my first real teacher. If it hadn’t been for Nils and his abuse, I might never have stood up to find the woman I had now become.


  —

  SINCE 1999 WHEN Damon had last texted me, I have had many different phones with many different numbers. And none of those numbers had I given to Damon.

  So, it was both a surprise and not a little eerie when I got a text from him after the media team left the office to spread the good word of the Commissioner’s control of the Slayer situation. The text simply read:

  Would you like to explain?

  And, attached was a photo. Of Billy. In Damon’s house, last night, after he had broken in. Clearly Damon had security cameras in his house and clearly Billy had not spotted them.

  Why is it I keep stumbling with this guy? It’s not as awkward as pretending I was gay, which he obviously knew was a lie, but it was awkward and here am I, forty-six years old and the person in charge of the entire police department, yet again caught out and feeling defensive.

  I texted him back.

  The Long Goodbye

  ‘I THOUGHT I’D GO DOWN TO THE GOLD COAST, BACK TO Westaway House and the job at Bunnings,’ I said to Anthea. It was early, the girls were still asleep. ‘It was good of you to come and rescue me but, you know, I’ve got to stand on my own two feet. Can’t go crying off to my little sister every time there’s an issue.’

  I couldn’t stand the sight of her, and though I wanted to stay a part of my nieces’ lives, I wanted nothing more to do with my sister. I would never forgive her. I would stay quiet, erase her from my life and build anew. I would never speak to her again. Maybe the girls would come to see me when they were older, when they could do things on their own.

  I had wondered about the safety of the girls. After all, they were living with a serial killer, albeit one who had last killed when she was a teenager. I assumed. But Anthea appeared to genuinely love them and I remembered, when I became her, the killer, The Slayer, about the serial killers I’d studied who loved their kids: BTK (ten kills) or The Happy Face Killer (eight kills) or The Green River Killer (forty to seventy kills). All happy dads. All monster killers. Empathy this direction. None the other.