The Great Divide

by L. J. M. Owen

  ‘Vaguely. There were a lot of girls over the years. I didn’t bother remembering their names.’

  ‘So you’ve said before. But you remembered Charlotte’s and Amelia’s names at the hospital when I asked you and Mason Campbell if you’d like to see them.’

  ‘That’s different. They stayed in Dunton, so I see them about the place every now and then.’

  ‘Matilda—who definitely remembers you—was taken from the girls’ home and dumped on St Kilda beach approxi­mately eleven years ago, about a year before the home closed. Did you help your sister to transport her there?’

  O’Brien’s expression remained neutral, if somewhat strained. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘We’ve also learned that a number of local girls went to the home to give birth over the years and left their newborns there, expecting that they would then be adopted out.’

  ‘I don’t know about that either.’

  ‘Where did the girls who lived at the home come from?’

  ‘I told you before, the government.’

  ‘We’ve found no government records of the home ever existing, Mr O’Brien.’

  ‘I’ve told you—the only thing I did was mind the place for a few days whenever Ava took a trip.’

  ‘Was Ava transporting children each time she went to Melbourne?’

  O’Brien snorted. ‘Not unless she had one in her suitcase.’

  ‘The children left somehow, Mr O’Brien. And if your sister wasn’t the one taking them away from the home, then you are the next most likely person to have done that.’

  He shook his head, blue eyes wide in denial. ‘No.’

  ‘Were you the person who mutilated the girls? Cut their genitals to shreds and ripped out their fingernails?’

  O’Brien licked his lips nervously and glanced at the cameras in the corner of the interview room. ‘That’s sickening. No. I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘Were you the man who raped the girls?’

  ‘No, I’ve never! I never … I never … Why are you asking me these things?’

  ‘It was you who sliced off their genitals, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were the one who raped them and tore out all their fingernails, aren’t you?’

  ‘I said no!’

  ‘You practised on Ava when you were younger. And lately you were concerned she was feeling guilty over what you’d both done to those girls. You worried that you were finally going to be caught. So you took Ava to the girls’ home, killed her, ripped out her fingernails, and left her in the vineyard. Your own sister.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  Jake leaned in closely to O’Brien and whispered, softly enough that the microphones in the room could not pick it up, ‘Castlemaine.’

  Liam O’Brien jumped in his chair, tipping it over. He fell backwards on to the floor almost in slow motion, the shock on his face suddenly making him appear innocent and childlike.

  O’Brien and Campbell’s code word certainly had an effect. Jake was out of his chair, running around to the other side of the table to pick him up seconds after he hit the ground.

  The damage was done.

  Kelly opened the door and thundered, ‘Out!’

  Jake wasn’t certain which of them was more startled by Kelly’s appearance—him, or the prone Liam O’Brien.

  *

  Ava’s brother had dumped Lilith at St Kilda beach. He had known of and most likely perpetrated the abuse and torture of the girls. He knew where the missing children were. Jake was certain of it.

  Kelly didn’t disagree with him, but he annoyingly pointed out the lack of evidence for Jake’s assertions.

  ‘You’re not giving me anything I can base an application for a warrant on, Hunter. You have to see that. Kidnapping, child abuse, endangerment, abandonment—you’ve got conjecture, you’ve got speculation, and a little circumstantial evidence, but nothing to tie Liam to what you suspect went on at the home.’

  ‘O’Brien’s at the centre of it. I know it.’

  ‘The man’s a labourer, and a fairly good one by all accounts. I’ve had no complaints about him over the years. He never seems to go anywhere or do anything. He likes a drink, I’ll grant you that, but that’s no crime.’ Kelly winked at him.

  What did Kelly mean by that?

  ‘The case you’re outlining makes sense, but at this point in time you’re not giving me any evidence to hang the charges on. It’s all circumstantial, full of holes large enough for a defence lawyer to drive a truck through.’

  ‘There are too many indications to ignore …’

  ‘We have to be cautious here.’ Kelly said. ‘If we’re going to arrest him we have to be on solid ground. This began as a suspicious death, and suddenly you’re looking at a range of historical offences based primarily on the word of a couple of mixed-up girls.’

  ‘What of the local girls who were giving birth and leaving their babies at the home? Where are those children?’

  ‘Do you have any evidence that happened?’

  ‘A local source.’

  ‘What local source?’

  Jake hesitated to admit who it had been.

  ‘The woman who runs the local takeaway.’ He rushed on. ‘It does explain where the girls raised in the home came from, given the absence of records from the foster system.’

  ‘That woman at the chippie is a notorious gossip,’ Kelly said. ‘She’s started more than one neighbourhood grassfire with her rumourmongering.’

  ‘Do we make a public appeal for women who gave birth there to come forward, promise them anonymity?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Kelly said. ‘Discreet enquiries would be best. Maria could ask around town without ruffling any feathers. That might be best for now.’

  Jake had never come across a police officer so apt to press his own family members into service.

  ‘So you think Ava was keeping girls born at the home but adopting out the boys?’ Kelly said.

  ‘They had to have been going somewhere,’ Jake nodded. ‘Selling them on the black market would explain how she managed to stay financial. But she would have needed a partner to transport them.’

  ‘Not necessarily. If what you say is true, she could have arranged for the purchasing parents to meet her somewhere close by so she only had to leave the home briefly.’

  ‘Okay … and what about the genital mutilation of the girls?’

  ‘You said the girl in Melbourne and the one here both thought it was O’Brien’s sister who did that to them, not O’Brien.’

  Jake huffed. ‘Ava couldn’t have done it to herself.’

  ‘But her scars were decades old. It could have been done anywhere, anytime.’

  ‘She couldn’t have gotten Lilith pregnant on her own!’

  ‘There is that. But even if the girl is telling the truth and she was raped or impregnated without her knowledge, the man responsible wasn’t Liam O’Brien. You said pathology confirmed that.’

  Jake clenched his fists.

  ‘Look, Hunter, it’s my job to ensure that, as a unit, we get things right,’ Kelly said. ‘What I’m hearing is that all the abuses of the girls at the home could have been perpetrated by Ava O’Brien. And since we know the father of the Melbourne girl’s child wasn’t Liam, at the moment we have nothing to go after him for.’

  As much as it pained Jake to admit it, Kelly was right. He had nothing solid on O’Brien … yet. He couldn’t let anyone else know about the conversation he’d recorded between O’Brien and Campbell in the hospital, but it proved to Jake that they were guilty of something. O’Brien’s reaction to the sight of his sister’s mutilated fingertips spoke louder than any words could, and his reaction to the word Castlemaine was further proof he was hiding something. But what?

  Kelly sat ba
ck and sighed. ‘You’re doing good work here, Hunter. Keep going and I’m sure you’ll crack it.’

  Jake stood up. ‘Sir.’

  ‘And Hunter?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Take care of the paperwork on this from now on. It needs to be impeccable.’

  Jake had been expecting that. He wasn’t sure how his constable had passed the academy given his literacy deficit. Multiple choice questions, presumably.

  ‘I’ll keep Murphy looking through records of vehicles on the ferry during the time we’re interested in.’

  ‘He must be loving that,’ Kelly snickered.

  ‘So much,’ said Jake with a grin.

  Jake returned to his desk and spent a long, fruitless afternoon and evening searching records for any trace of other children from the girls’ home. Finally, he decided to turn in early.

  He had honestly thought this secondment would involve easy days policing a community where he was respected—more so than his previous posting at least—breathing glorious mountain air, and weekends spent climbing.

  So much for that.

  *

  It was pitch dark when Jake’s phone rang at stupid o’clock the next morning.

  ‘’Lo?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I thought you might have been an early riser.’

  ‘Meena?’

  ‘Some results came in overnight that I thought you’d want as soon as possible.’

  ‘K?’

  ‘There’s a significant level of consanguinity here.’

  Jake could not handle that many polysyllabic words before coffee. ‘Take a step back for me?’

  ‘The DNA I have for Lilith Haverstock’s child from the cord …’

  ‘Yes …?’

  ‘The results I have indicate a high level of consanguinity.’

  Jake fought to kick his brain into gear … together blood … ‘Do you mean inbred?’

  ‘For want of a better term, yes.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dunton, Tasmania

  Thursday, 6.32 a.m.

  ‘How good’s your understanding of this kind of evidence?’ Meena asked.

  Despite his aptitude for statistics, Jake had never come to grips with the results of DNA analyses. ‘Not fantastic.’

  ‘I’ll start at the beginning—you tell me if I’m going too fast or slow.’

  Jake pulled the covers up tighter around his neck. ‘Okay.’

  ‘First, we have XY chromosomes.’

  So, Lilith had given birth to a son. Jake wondered how she would react to the news.

  ‘Usually, people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on,’ Meena said.

  ‘And in this case?’

  ‘I’m seeing signs of fewer ancestors than normal.’

  ‘How few?’

  ‘If a woman has a child with her first cousin—meaning they share a set of grandparents—their child will have two parents and four grandparents, but only six great grandparents instead of the usual eight.’

  Jake switched on his bedside lamp, then squinted in the harsh glare. ‘So?’

  ‘So that’s not great for the child, given that doubling up of the same DNA increases the risk of genetic diseases. But it’s also not too risky if it only happens every now and then in any given family tree. At the severe end of the scale—where the parents are brother and sister—they’d be down to just the one set of grandparents and that could have dire consequences for them genetically.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘It’s a roll of the dice. One child in those circumstances could be fine; the next might suffer horribly.’

  ‘What are we looking at here?’

  ‘It looks to me like there’s a greater degree of inbreeding going on than first cousins, but not as severe as siblings for parents.’

  ‘Something as close as a father and daughter?’

  ‘No … more like uncle and niece.’

  Geez, poor Lilith. She had no idea who her blood parents were—nor who had fathered her child—but it was someone closely related to her nonetheless.

  ‘Liam O’Brien isn’t in the mix at all?’

  ‘No. Even though we know he isn’t the father, I ran an analysis of him overnight and he isn’t a close familial match at all, no more than the background for two people of generic British heritage.’

  Damn it. ‘Did you run Lilith’s DNA?’

  ‘Of course. She’s definitely the mother of the baby this piece of cord came from, and she doesn’t show any signs of consanguinity herself.’

  Jake thought hard and tried to find any way to use this information to help the case. Nothing came to mind.

  ‘Do you have any suspects at all?’ Meena asked. ‘Anyone we can test these results against to see if I can find a familial link?’

  The next suspect on Jake’s list was Mason Campbell. He lived just on the other side of the hedge from the girls’ home and had definitely been doing something untoward with O’Brien …

  ‘I’m not sure if he’ll agree to give a sample, but we could try Mason Campbell, the next-door neighbour.’

  ‘Campbell? He already gave me samples … No, wait.’ There was the sound of strokes on a keyboard as Meena looked something up. ‘It was Max Campbell who gave us samples.’

  ‘On the one hand, he’s not at the top of my list of suspects, but on the other …’

  ‘We may as well eliminate him and his father in one go.’

  ‘Testing Max would help rule Mason in or out?’

  ‘As long as Mason is Max’s biological father.’

  Jake pictured their almost identical profiles. ‘There’s little doubt of that.’

  ‘I’ll run it.’

  *

  Jake’s mobile rang again as he exited the shower wrapped in a towel. He had the heater running full bore to warm the godforsaken icebox of a shack they called ‘Police Accommodation’. Had these people never heard of insulation?

  He checked the caller ID and groaned. ‘Pete?’

  ‘It’s work, not personal.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  ‘I spent the last two nights running down what I can on your girls’ home.’

  ‘I … ahh … thanks. Did you pull strings to get the Haverstock DNA analysis expedited?’

  ‘I’m not the bad guy here, Jake. I want you to know that.’

  One thing had nothing to do with the other. ‘I appreciate you helping with this case, but it’s not relevant to—’

  ‘Anyway,’ Pete cut across him. ‘What I’ve found may or may not be useful. Either way, I’ll keep digging.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘Looking through the financial records of both the O’Briens and Campbell, I’m not seeing any transfers in or out from St John of God. In fact, I’m not seeing much at all. Not enough to cover the expense of running a children’s home, certainly. Which means everything was being run on a cash basis, I assume.’

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘Where would it come from then?’

  ‘I suspect they were selling babies,’ Jake said.

  ‘Fuck. I hate that shit.’

  Jake was reminded why he’d once respected Pete. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean Campbell is lying about believing the church was paying rent for the girls’ home cottage. But it does beg the question of why he said the transactions would be traceable in his financial records and they aren’t.’

  ‘So you at least have something to implicate him?’

  ‘Minor, but it’s a door to open when I question him again.’

  ‘Moving forward,’ Pete continued. ‘With little to go on I haven’t had much luck tracing any more girls from the home. Are you able to give me anything more? Possible dates, names, physical descriptions?’

  ‘I’ll
keep asking the three girls we have, but most of what they recall is vague.’

  ‘Understandable.’ Pete paused. ‘I am ringing with something concrete, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your suspect Liam O’Brien. Before he was a gardener in Castlemaine for one of the St John of God monasteries …’

  Geezus.

  ‘… he was a medical student at Royal Melbourne. Surgery.’

  Gotcha! ‘Now there’s something he failed to mention.’

  ‘He made it five years in before being thrown out of the course. I couldn’t get much detail from the administrator who found the file for me, but she could make out the words “inappropriate conduct”.’

  ‘Doesn’t that just cover a whole world of sins? Thanks, Pete.’

  So Liam O’Brien had been a surgical trainee who fell back on gardening once he was booted from the profession. He would definitely have been able to perform the genital mutilations on the girls—perhaps even on his own sister—and sew them up neatly. Whether St John of God were financially involved in the girls’ home or not, a tangible connection had finally been made.

  Jake lay out his clothes and began to dress.

  This gave him probable cause, at least in relation to the mutilation of Amelia and Lilith. Surely Kelly would approve of Jake arresting O’Brien on suspicion of the torture and abuse of children now? In Jake’s experience incarceration could work wonders on the tongues of all but the most hardened of criminals.

  Buttoning up his shirt, Jake reasoned that O’Brien might have freaked out and decided to silence his sister so she couldn’t reveal what he’d done to the girls at her home.

  A nagging memory tugged at the corner of Jake’s mind—the shock O’Brien had expressed when he first saw Ava’s fingers.

  He pushed it away. He needed to get somewhere on this case.

  Jake called Kelly, who didn’t pick up. Probably reason­able given the hour. He left a message.

  ‘It’s Hunter. I have confirmation that Liam O’Brien was a surgical resident before he became a gardener at St John of God. I hope it’s enough for a warrant, sir, because I’m going to his house to bring him in.’

  Jake was tempted to turn on his lights and race through the somnolent streets of Dunton but resisted. There was literally no traffic to impede his route.