Beware of Dogs

by Elizabeth Flann

  The police have had me go over and over again my first meeting with Matt and Dave in the St Kilda pub, and questioned me repeatedly about a prior relationship, because Matt is insisting I’d been Dave’s girlfriend in the past. He probably believes it. I have no doubt that Dave is crazy enough to have invented a romantic history with me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he now believes it himself.

  It’s a serious worry. Because of this I cannot persuade the police to take my fear of Dave seriously, although the hospital has been very good about it and is carefully monitoring all my phone calls. Just recently a call came in from a male voice who would not leave his name. They didn’t put it through but it still gave me the shivers.

  I didn’t tell Kathryn about this when she came in to visit, despite the fact that she has proved to be a truly excellent friend (or perhaps because of it). When someone at the hospital had the good sense to google my name, it came up with my place of work. There they were directed to Kathryn, who arrived, unfamiliar without makeup, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt like a normal person. She sat with me for the next two days, sleeping and showering at a local bed-and-breakfast, and only leaving me during the day to grab meals and takeaway coffees.

  ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I managed to ask her in one of my waking moments.

  ‘Compassionate leave,’ she said. ‘I don’t have anyone dependent on me, so the boss managed to stretch the rules. I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, suddenly nervous that she may have overstepped, knowing how much I valued privacy.

  ‘Of course not, Kathryn. I’m really grateful.’ And to my absolute shame and embarrassment I burst into tears. ‘It’s been – so horrible, so awful.’ Kathryn put her arms around me and held me, as a mother would embrace a child, and I felt safer in this unfamiliar comfort than I’d felt for a very long time.

  She stayed for a further two days after I was moved to rehab, and then had to go back to work, but she came down every weekend, and accompanied me when she could to my sessions with the doctors and the physio, because even a week later I was still having trouble remembering things.

  I was very relieved to find that the rehab wing had the same security measures as the main hospital, and could only be accessed through a keypad-protected door. I could watch the TV news and read the daily newspapers, so I was able to keep up with what was happening outside.

  I thought there would be something in the papers about my confinement in the cave and ultimate rescue, but it was days before anything at all appeared. Even then it was just a tiny paragraph in one of the local papers, tucked away on page ten, and all it said was that a woman had been rescued from a local island and that police were investigating.

  I hoped this was not the beginning of a total whitewash orchestrated by Matt’s and Dave’s family lawyers. I discovered that Matt belonged to the Pentecost family, who were not only rich and powerful, but who owned most of the area and were considered to be local gentry. Dave’s mother and father were both on the local council, so between them the parents were in a position to put a lot of pressure on the police and the law to protect ‘the boys’.

  ‘Those two were always in trouble,’ the physio, who’d gone to school with both Matt and Dave, told me. ‘Small charges at first but when they left school they moved up to car theft and drug dealing. It got harder for the families to bury the charges, but they still managed it. You know how those born-to-rule people are: “Boys will be boys”, “Don’t want to ruin a promising future”, “Those girls all lie through their teeth anyway”.’

  ‘Sexual harassment?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We all knew to keep away from Matt and Dave when they were out on the town.’

  ‘Didn’t their parents try to pull them into line?’

  ‘All that mattered to them was that their sons wouldn’t have a criminal record,’ she said. ‘And it’s worked. There’s not an official word against either of them.’

  I felt a sudden jolt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. Does that mean they might get away with it again? Surely not with some of the dreadful things they’ve done. To Lana. And to me. But I guess it’s only my word against theirs, and mine has been well and truly compromised.

  The next surprise was a visit from Lana. After completing all the protocols, including being issued with a Visitor Pass, she was escorted into my presence by two uniformed members of the hospital’s security staff. ‘This is nearly as bad as the airport security to get into Australia!’ And for the first time I saw Lana smile, a little lopsided grin that made her look younger and much, much prettier.

  There was another difference too. ‘Lana. Your voice. You sounded different on the island.’ Her voice was now soft but firm, with a slight accent, but not a hint of the little-girl voice I remembered.

  Lana frowned and bit her lip. ‘Matt has this obsession with Marilyn Monroe. He wanted me to talk like her. He even made me dye my hair to look like her.’

  I felt myself go cold. ‘Lana, that’s really creepy.’

  She nodded gravely. ‘Every single thing about Matt is creepy. He is a total creep.’ Then she brightened. ‘Because of what was in your diary the police got a search warrant for the cabin and the boat and they found all kinds of dodgy stuff. They took Matt’s laptop, and all that gear they used when they made movies.’ Lana’s expression darkened for a second, then brightened again. ‘Most of the drugs were still there, and all of the weapons he’d bought through the Dark Web, because smart-arse Matt never thought he’d get raided.’

  I was pleased to hear that the diary was now helping to move things along, and that the police were at last taking the matter seriously, but I was worried about Lana. Although I can’t see how I could have done anything to help her while we were on the island, I have a sense of guilt and a feeling of responsibility towards her.

  ‘Where do you go from here?’ I asked her. ‘Will you go home?’ Then I paused. ‘Where is home?’

  ‘I grew up in Ukraine, but I got moved on to Estonia. I don’t really have a home anywhere.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘There’s no-one left. All dead.’ She smiled a little, twisted smile. ‘Do you have family?’

  ‘I have a brother. He lives in Canada.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said, so softly I could barely hear, and we both sat quietly for a moment, thinking about lost families and lost lives.

  Then, an absolute bombshell: a newspaper article referring to other lost lives, discovered and reported while I’d been sequestered in my cave. The news took me completely by surprise, and made it horribly clear why what I’d seen and experienced on the island had made me so afraid.

  THE COURIER

  ISLAND OF NIGHTMARES

  By Elsa Vajda and Simeon Cornish

  Shockwaves are pulsing through South-east Gippsland as the son of one of the area’s first families is being interviewed by police after detectives, following a tipoff in a seized diary, conducted simultaneous raids on a fishing boat and a cabin on Muttonbird Island, known locally as Pentecost Island.

  After removing a number of suspicious items from the cabin, including illegal weapons and a commercial quantity of drugs, the police undertook a wide-ranging operation to investigate a possible connection with two young women’s bodies that had washed up along the coast in the previous month. The bodies have now been identified as those of two young backpackers, Hanna Lerberg, 17, from the Czech Republic and Daria Savluk, 19, from Belarus, who had been staying in a St Kilda hostel and working as waitstaff at a nearby cafe.

  Matthew Pentecost, 26, the son of local billionaire Niall Pentecost, and brothers Michael and Kelvin Duffy are currently being questioned by police in relation to these offences. Another local man, David Grogan, 25, is being sought by police for questioning in relation to these crimes, but has not yet been located.

  It turned out that when the police finally interviewed Lana, they mentioned the washed-up bodies, and to their amazement she knew immediately who they were. Not surprisingly, she came to see me
in a terrible state. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said, wringing her hands. ‘Matt never let me see the TV news, or the newspapers.’

  She looked at me imploringly. ‘I found them.’ She searched for a word. ‘I recruited them. Matt said it was for a movie about travellers from Eastern Europe, but I knew it wasn’t because they didn’t take me with them on the boat.’ Her voice sank to a whisper. ‘The girls thought they were going to get good money. And all the time . . .’

  For a moment we shared an appalled silence. Then she spoke again. ‘It wasn’t an accident or anything like that. Matt told me to look for girls with no-one who would come searching for them. And I did, Alix. I did.’ She was trying to hold herself together, not very successfully. ‘I should have done something! I knew it wasn’t right.’

  Although we both knew that if she’d tried to intervene she’d probably also be dead, Lana still looked wracked with pain and guilt. If Kathryn had been here she would have comforted her with a hug. The best I could manage was to reach out and hold her hand, and so we sat together, connected but not speaking, while her breathing settled and she gradually calmed down.

  After Lana left I had a sudden, fleeting vision of my parents’ bodies, mixed up with the unwelcome, devastating visions of the pathetic corpses of those young girls. But this time Moe and Vader were beginning to become misty and vague and amid all the grimness it gave me hope that the spectres would fade and I would soon be able to remember the living, and not the dead.

  The next time the police came they had been through the entire contents of Matt’s laptop, and were now much more respectful of my experience on the island. They asked if they could show me some of the footage Matt and Dave had produced to see if I could recognise anyone. Many, and some of these involved Lana, were strictly women on women, but for the others both Matt and Dave joined in. Most consisted of variations on sex and violence, utilising the whips, handcuffs and other horrors I’d glimpsed in the kitchen drawer. The gunlike object, I discovered, was a taser, illegally imported from overseas. When I saw it being used on film I recalled with a shudder the night I heard Lana crying, and the strange crackling noise followed by instant silence. The films were amateurish, graphic and very, very nasty. I can’t begin to imagine the type of person who would want to watch them.

  The police had to explain to me the concept of snuff movies. ‘They torture somebody to death, usually a young woman, and they film the entire process. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever seen.’ The cop looked at me apologetically. ‘It’s pretty rare.’ He paused. ‘Very rare.’ Then he put his head in his hands. ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve got teenage daughters. What kind of monster does things like this?’

  ‘Those movies are worth a fortune on the Dark Web,’ the other cop told me. They didn’t show me any snuff movies but of the ones I looked at I was easily able to identify Matt, Dave and Lana. No sign of the Duffy brothers. Perhaps they’re not photogenic enough.

  My next visitor was even more of a surprise. He looked both familiar and unfamiliar, like a waxwork figure of somebody you once knew. ‘Jonathan! Come in,’ I heard myself say, my voice steadier than I felt, and my ex-husband, large as life, came over and plonked himself in the visitor’s chair. ‘Your friend Kathryn sicced the cops onto me. Did she tell you?’

  ‘No, she certainly did not. What on earth could you say to them?’

  ‘That you’re the most honest person I know, so they could safely believe anything you’ve told them.’ He grinned, to indicate no hard feelings. ‘Anyway I knew you were telling the truth about not dating Dave.’

  ‘How?’ As far as I knew Jonathan had barely had a conversation with Dave.

  ‘I never told you, but he came to see me, all strutting and self-important, and announced that you and he were in love and wanted to be together, and that I should let you go.’

  I must have looked as horrified as I felt because he immediately reassured me. ‘Don’t worry. I knew he was talking out of his arse, and then he put the lid on it by saying he’d taken you to see Nick Cave and you’d decided he was the man for you. Even showed me the two ticket stubs as proof.’

  I stared at him, aghast. ‘He did ask me to go with him but I knocked him back.’

  ‘I know, Alix. I was able to tell the coppers that we were away climbing Mount Arapiles with eight other people who could attest to your whereabouts on that date. If they wanted to doubt my word.’ That was true. It was our last climbing trip together. I wonder if Jonathan was thinking that as well. I didn’t want to talk about the past, but I needed to know more details.

  ‘What happened with Dave?’

  Jonathan’s face hardened. ‘I told him to rack off and if he ever bothered you again I’d fucking kill him.’

  ‘You didn’t say that to the police?’

  ‘No, I do have some sense of self-preservation. I told them I made it very clear he wasn’t welcome at our place. He never came back, did he?’

  I thought about it. ‘No, he didn’t. I wish you’d told me though.’ You could have saved me from the risk of starving or dying horribly, mauled by sharks or dogs.

  Perhaps sensing my thoughts, Jonathan gave me an oddly sad look. ‘There’s quite a lot of things I should have done differently. Particularly the way I behaved when you went over to the west.’

  ‘We both have things we could have done differently.’ I paused. This was serious stuff to have to deal with out of the blue. ‘I should have discussed it with you.’

  He rubbed his chin and looked away from me. ‘I thought you were treating me with contempt. I couldn’t see that you were just being your own honest, practical self.’ It definitely wasn’t as simple as that, but if that was how he wanted to remember it I was willing to let it go.

  ‘You’re happy now?’

  He looked me in the face this time. ‘Yeah, I guess I am. You might say I’ve found my level.’ I stood up and he did too.

  ‘Goodbye, Jonathan. Thank you for coming.’

  And he laughed. ‘The way you always call me Jonathan, never Jon or Jono. You’re so . . . formal.’ He left, still laughing, and I couldn’t help wondering what Pauline called him.

  I’m grateful that Jonathan was willing to come to my rescue, but it makes me so mad that the cops and the legal people all believed Matt’s testimony that I had been Dave’s girlfriend, even though both Lana and I had told them that it was not so. It took the testimony of another man for them to fully believe our story.

  However, let’s hope that it’s a portent for a satisfying outcome to this dreadful case, with Matt now being questioned by the police without his father’s protection. When the suspicions about the young girls looked all too likely to be true, both sets of parents, as the police said, ‘washed their hands of the perverted bastards’. But what is hanging over my head is the big question no-one seems able to answer: Where is Dave Grogan and what is he up to?

  I’m terrified I’m going to find out only too soon . . .

  I’m glad I chose a very secure apartment when I decided to move out of St Kilda and leave the past behind. Apart from taking great care when entering and leaving the building, I’m not too worried about Dave coming out from whatever hole he’s been lurking in and trying to break in. Each apartment has an outer security door and a lockable safety mesh door. The front entry has all the bells and whistles you could possibly want: cameras, buzzers, triple locks. Even the lifts are password-protected.

  My only worry is the area at the back of the building where the rubbish bins are stored. It is also protected by a securely locked gate leading out to the street, which residents like to use as a shortcut to the local supermarket, although some of the residents seem to resent having to remember to take their key. This means that now and then I’ve found the gate rammed open, so when I go down there I make sure I’m carrying my hammer or my knife. Just in case.

  Tonight I have two exceptionally heavy rubbish bags to wrangle into the lift, so I almost decide to leave my weapons behind, since things
have recently been so quiet. However, caution gets the better of me and I shove the knife in my right pocket as I grab an oversized bag in each hand and lock all the doors behind me.

  There’s no-one else down there and the gate is securely latched, so I begin to relax, when suddenly one of my neighbours, Gabi, emerges from the lift to join me, carrying a pile of empty but fragrant pizza boxes. She drops them into a bin and then, without warning, takes out her key and opens the gate. ‘See you,’ she says, and slips out, oblivious, as a heavily booted foot stops the gate from closing and Dave Grogan comes in very quietly, shutting the security gate behind him with a decisive click.

  ‘Hello, Alix Verhoeven,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d come. I’ve been waiting here for you. I’ve been ready for this for a very long time.’

  And I realise that I am also ready, and that I am absolutely furious. I feel as if I’ve swelled to twice my usual size, filled and expanded with righteous anger at this man who has caused me so much pain and fear. Without taking my eyes off Dave, I find the emergency pager the police recently gave me, which I keep on a chain around my neck, and press to turn it on. How long will it take before someone registers my call for help? And how quickly will they respond?

  I look Dave over, and see that wherever he’s been hiding hasn’t done him any favours. He’s dirty, unkempt and a great deal thinner than when I last saw him, his black jeans hanging off him as if he’s picked them up from the Salvos, his T-shirt in dire need of a wash. Looking at this unprepossessing figure standing there, I ask the question that has been haunting me for so long: ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’

  His voice is thick with emotion. ‘We’re meant to be together, Alix. All I’ve ever wanted was to care for you and look after you. We could be so happy. Why won’t you understand?’ His emotion sounds convincingly real, as if he’s about to cry, but I’m not buying it. He may be able to fool himself with such a display of sentimentality but he’s certainly not fooling me. I’m way beyond that.