by John Dale
My daughter Kerryanne is a senior police officer now, team leader with the forensic services group. She’s among those called out to any major crime scene around the eastern beaches. A lot of crime scene work can be undertaken by specialists who aren’t sworn officers, though murder is always handled by the police forensic teams. Murder in Australia is not a common crime, averaging a fairly stable sixty-odd per year. Around Clovelly and Sydney’s other eastern suburbs it is extremely rare. Cops fight to get onto a team investigating a homicide; it’s so infrequent and everyone wants a part of it. Most of the time round here, it’s routine work—hoons who race down the hill in stolen cars, the occasional brawl at closing time at the pubs, and drug arrests. They do district patrols around the beaches and keep a lid on alcohol-fueled antisocial behavior.
Kerryanne often drops by to visit us. She knows that with Tim away in the west, and our Anthony gone forever, she’s the only one now who can do that. Over a cup of tea, we chat. Last time she dropped in I said, “You’ve got soot or something on your face.”
“Oh, have I?” she said, looking at herself in the mirror in the hall and rubbing the smear, making it worse. “I’ve just come from a job with the fireies. Fire investigation unit. Arson job, with the shop burned almost to the ground. The owner thought he’d get away with it because there he was, thirty kilometers away, sleeping the sleep of the innocent beside his loyal wife.”
As we walked into the kitchen, she put her bag down and pulled out her camera, switching it on. “See what he used as a wick? We lifted a bit of masonry from a corner and look what we found. He thought it would all be destroyed by the fire. But part of the collapsed roof had covered this corner and kept the ash intact.”
I looked at the screen on Kerryanne’s camera and saw the outline of a perfect spiral in ash. “Ha! He used a mosquito coil!”
“That’s right. A nice slow burn. He lights it, and it burns away for hours until it reaches the middle of the spiral where it was linked to combustible material and containers of petrol. The place would’ve gone up like a bomb. And he thought he was being very clever, buying hours and hours for himself to establish an alibi.”
“He was very unlucky that it wasn’t destroyed in the general fire mess,” I said, looking at the fragile damning evidence.
“Sometimes the angels give us one like this, Dad,” she responded, smiling.
I nodded, remembering a rapist who’d dropped his wallet at the crime scene. We’d driven around the corner and arrested him.
Kerryanne put the camera away, washed her face and hands in the bathroom, then joined me for a cuppa and one of her mother’s famous Anzac biscuits.
After she left, I leaned back in my kitchen chair and thought about what I’d just seen. The slow burn of an arsonist’s wick which had exploded into a destructive fire. I’ve been burning for nineteen years, I thought. And all this time I’ve been just waiting for the explosion that will destroy Ronald Leslie Twigg.
* * *
My daughter has known for years about the man I’ve been fishing with lately, and she looked at me with her wide gray eyes when I told her he’d moved into our area and said, “Dad, this is good news, but we still need one more factor—and that’s the tough one.”
She was right, but if the gods are with us, she’ll alert me when the right conditions arise and then we’ll have the duck trifecta. Maybe they never will, and I might have to change my mind about murder; a quick shove one day when the seas are treacherous—Old Testament style, a life for a life. My fishing companion got away with murder, cutting that young man’s throat nineteen years ago. How do I know? I have an old acquaintance—can’t really call him a friend, but for many years he was one of my most trusted informants. Although I don’t see much of Stanley these days, seventeen years ago, not long after the end of the trial that resulted in my fishing companion’s acquittal, he asked to meet me. He told me he’d been drinking with a group of men at a pub in Glebe—ex-jailbirds from a halfway house in the area—the night young Twigg was celebrating his acquittal.
“The bastard was bragging about it, Chief Inspector,” Stanley had said. “And that’s not right. Gloating, he was. I got away with murder, he was saying with every drink. Cut the bastard’s throat like a sheep. He spent the whole time boasting. Big-noting himself. Little prick. If my situation wasn’t how it is,” he’d shrugged, “I’d swear it in court. But you understand, given the work I do . . . I can’t do that.”
I did understand, and that was when I swore I’d get this bastard one day. Stanley’s moral code has always been ambiguous, but even a gig has his standards. And the deliberate murder of a defenseless man, already bashed into unconsciousness, was obviously something that offended his particular standards.
* * *
My fishing companion is a piss-weak swimmer; sadly, we’ve lost several rock fishermen along this stretch of coast over the last few years—and it would be easy to just shove him into one of the big swells we get along here when the weather rolls in with powerful waves, but I have other plans for him. Murder meant nothing to him; in fact, he was a gratuitous murderer, cutting his victim’s throat just to show his brothers how “tough” he was. To me, as to the law, murder is the ultimate crime—the taking of a life and all its potential, the young man’s future, the wife and kids he never got to have, the grandchildren—a whole family tree cut off. So I have other plans for Ronald Leslie Twigg. The Latin motto on the New South Wales Police Force badge underneath the sea eagle translates as, Punishment swiftly follows crime. My companion’s punishment has not been swift because it’s taken almost two decades for a suitable incident to arrive, yet punishment will certainly follow. The vengeance I’m planning isn’t simple revenge; it’s applying the law. Belatedly, because the law failed nineteen years ago.
* * *
“Fuck!” shouted my fishing companion. “Bastard!” The flathead he thought he’d hooked had bitten through his line, which now drifted around as he reeled it in. He swore some more over the loss of his flathead rig and I suppressed a smile.
As far as he’s concerned, I’m just a retired bloke who likes to fish. I was not involved in the investigations or the following trials, which sent his brothers away for life, yet acquitted him. I saw him once or twice in court, but I was just one face in a packed public gallery.
The evidence of the eyewitness to the attack was hazy. She’d only seen the two older brothers in the streetlight near her window. Nor was there any physical evidence to link him to the crime. None that couldn’t be explained away by the defense lawyer as transfer DNA from the other two men, his brothers. Nothing conclusive to put him at the murder site. The grub wore gloves. Didn’t want to get blood under his fingernails.
* * *
My companion was clearly calling it a day. Or at least a morning. He packed up his gear, grunted about the poor fishing—“Not enough to feed the bloody cat”—and started walking away, toward the beach and the parking area. I packed up too. I already had everything I needed, and unlike my companion, I’d caught two nice-sized bream.
I was making my way back to the car when I took a phone call from my daughter.
“I’m calling from Pigling Bland’s phone,” said Kerryanne. Immediately I knew she was speaking from a public phone, which she always did when she wanted a secure line; in fact, I even knew which public phone. When the kids were little, there’d been a fading advertisement on the wall of the long-gone corner shop for Pinkerton’s Brand Dyspepsia Mixture. Kerryanne, as a little one, had thought the sign was about the character in a Beatrix Potter book.
“We’ve got one, Dad,” she said. “Reported earlier this morning. And it could be the one we’ve been waiting for. The story should break within the next few hours. So far, the press isn’t onto it. But that won’t last. I’ll be going out there shortly.”
“What do you need from me?” I asked, adrenaline shaking my hands.
“Anything helpful. I’ll be searching the exhibits and doing some of
the analyses. I’ll report on what I find. That’s my job. And the people at Lidcombe will do the rest,” she said, referring to the government laboratories. My daughter’s sharp intake of breath came down the line. “Dad, we’ve been waiting for so long. We might never get another chance.”
“I know, honey. I know. Okay. I’ll gather up the doings and leave it in the designated spot.”
This was in the boot of my daughter’s car. I held a spare key to that as well as a key to her house.
“I expect to be called out any time now. The local uniforms have called in the homicide people and they’ll call me. It’s down on Vale Street. I’m just finishing another job but I’ll take my car home and pick up some extra gear on the way there.”
I could barely speak. “Yes,” I finally croaked. “You do that.”
Over the time I’ve been fishing with Twigg, I’ve gathered up a bloodstained rag from when he’d cut himself on his knife while gutting a fish, and I also have an old chisel that he’d used on his catch, whacking them on the head with a killer blow. He thought he’d lost the chisel when a big wave broke over the rock ledge we were fishing from. He doesn’t know that I dropped it into my tackle bag.
Over the years, Claire, Kerryanne, and my surviving son Tim, now away in the west with his wife and family, had discussed the plan with me until there was no further doubt in anyone’s mind that what we were formulating was morally acceptable, if not legal. There is a higher law, as Claire had once said. “So we’re all agreed?” I asked, last time we got together to talk about it.
They’d all nodded and Claire wiped away a tear. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said, and I put my arm around her.
I turned to my daughter. “Kerryanne, you realize the risk to you? You could be prosecuted. You would lose your job and you’d never get another job anywhere in your field. You could face prison for perverting the course of justice. You’re the one facing the biggest risk.”
“No one will find out, Dad,” she’d said. “How could they? No one here will speak about it, and no one else knows. And I won’t be conspiring to pervert the course of justice. I’ll be doing the opposite.”
* * *
Back home, I washed up, cleaned the two bream I’d caught, and put the bream, minus their heads, loosely covered into the fridge. Claire was making my favorite, macaroni and cheese, for lunch.
“Kerryanne called,” I said. “I need to duck out now.” I took a deep breath. “Today’s the day.”
Claire looked up from grating cheese, fixing her brown eyes on mine as the significance of what I’d just said hit her. “What will I do if you two end up in jail?”
“Not going to happen, love,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “Kerryanne knows her job. She’ll do the job and do it well. And she’ll make sure she does it in a way that’s undetectable. I’ll suggest to her to make sure the items are in situ when the video unit people start. Or she’ll do the photographic work herself.”
“But what about the other one? The real perpetrator?”
“Kerryanne and I will work something out.”
I had wrapped the bloodstained rag and the small chisel very carefully without touching them, using my fish-scaling gloves. I knew that I’d need to be quick now.
* * *
The drive to Kellyanne’s only took nine minutes. Her station wagon was parked in her driveway and I quietly opened her boot, putting the items in their paper bag safely inside. She had a lot of gear stacked neatly in the boot: heavy-duty exhibit bags, reels of security tape to seal these with and sign, and several large cases with cameras and other equipment. I closed the boot and looked around. There was no one about and my daughter’s driveway is shaded by interlocking trees. I drove home and washed up.
The story broke on the evening news. A man had been found murdered in a house in Clovelly. Channel 9 cameras showed a neat little 1920s bungalow with crime scene tape sealing off the area around it and several uniforms and a detective standing nearby. Police had cordoned off the area, the newsreader said, and were talking to local residents. Little detail was released. Police were “continuing with their inquiries.”
I couldn’t sleep that night. I wondered about the victim, who’d killed him and why, though that was no longer my job anymore. I lay awake, hoping that everything was working out as we’d planned. That Kellyanne had been able to do her sleight of forensic hand and that she’d come away from the crime scene with two separate exhibit bags, one containing what she’d found at the scene of the crime, the other containing the material I’d given her. I felt I’d lit the wick and now I just had to wait.
* * *
The following morning, Kerryanne came over for breakfast. Claire had cooked grilled tomatoes and sausages and I poured tomato sauce all over mine.
My daughter grimaced. “That reminds me of yesterday’s crime scene.”
“So what was it? What happened?”
“A guy with his head bashed in, in his kitchen. The back of his head completely stove in, like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer from behind and a little to one side. Most of his brains were on the floor.” Then she smiled at me and added, “Curiously, there was an old chisel with a rag around it, which wasn’t the murder weapon from the look of the injuries to the skull. But Jeff down at the morgue will no doubt let us know more about what kind of weapon was used. And it’s possible that the chisel could have been used to break in.”
“It’ll have to be accounted for,” I said, grinning back, spearing a sausage, while Claire looked first at me and then at her daughter.
“So it appears to be two offenders,” Kerryanne said.
“What do we know about the deceased?”
“Name is Dudley Russell O’Dea. Released from the Bay about a month ago after doing time for GBH. He was living with his elderly sister on Vale Street.”
“And the sister?” I asked.
“She didn’t hear a thing—she’s deaf and she’d gone to bed early. Poor old thing, she’s very shaken up. The kitchen was accessed through the back door. There’s some indication of a forced entry. Could’ve been that chisel,” Kerryanne said, glancing over at me as I stabbed the last bit of sausage. “Two killers, eh? Could be something to do with payback for a jail altercation.”
“Nasty,” I said, getting up and clearing my plate away.
Claire looked at me and asked, “So it’s in the bag?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Kerryanne responded, “but it’s in the trap, Mum. There’s a ways to go yet. Once the DNA analyses are processed, things will be clearer. Whoever did this will almost certainly have form and they’ll be in the database.”
I kissed my daughter on the cheek as I removed her empty plate and stacked it in the sink with mine. “See,” I said, turning around and leaning back against the sink, “my fishing companion has kept out of trouble for the last few years, but he’s got previous violent form. And he got away with murder nineteen years ago.”
“And he’ll never plead guilty to this crime,” said Kerryanne. “He’ll be screaming blue murder how he didn’t do it! The judge won’t like that at all.”
“And he didn’t do it,” I said. “Not this one, anyway.” I was smiling as I washed the dishes. I was determined to be there when the warrant was served. I wanted to see this for myself. And then I wanted to go to the trial and hear the sentence. I hoped it would be long. I wanted that man in prison, somewhere tough, where he could stew about the terrible miscarriage of justice that had sent him there. But it wasn’t a miscarriage of justice. It was the rectification of justice delayed. He’d pay a debt that he owed the state and the society he lived in. Not to mention his debt to us, murdering our eldest son. That dreadful night is burned into my memory, the cops coming to the door. From their faces, I knew it was death. I’d delivered those death notices myself years ago, and it was the most difficult part of the job. I knew before they spoke that it would be Anthony because the other kids were safely here with their mother and me. I remember
my legs buckling and how I had to lean against the wall before I could let them in. Then Claire’s terrible screams.
“Better get to work, Dad, Mum,” Kerryanne was saying, kissing us both. “I’ll let you know what’s happening.”
* * *
A week later, the story was all over the evening news again, with more detail. Police were now searching for two men whom they hoped would, help them with their inquiries. I wondered if an anonymous tip-off might be in order concerning the whereabouts of my fishing companion, but I decided against any further involvement. The plans that I’d been making for almost two decades now were coming to fruition and I whistled as I tended the veggie garden, pinching out the laterals on my young tomato plants and staking them to keep them upright and healthy. I felt that I could enjoy my retirement more now that justice was about to be done. My whistling stopped as I approached the Banksia serrata we’d planted in memory of Anthony, a huge gnarled tree now where lorikeets and honeyeaters feasted when the banksia cones were fresh and green. “We’re getting justice for you, son,” I whispered to the tree. I stood a moment in the garden, watching a lone bee zigzag around the basil plants, then went back inside.
* * *
Kerryanne dropped by briefly on her way to her boyfriend’s place and I made her a cup of tea. “Twigg’s DNA and his fingerprints were found at the O’Dea crime scene, Dad. The other accused has latched onto the notion that someone else was involved, and he’s screaming that he’s innocent of the murder, that it was the other guy who swung the murder weapon. Which hasn’t been found yet. Probably chucked into the ocean the same night.”
“Couldn’t have wished for a better outcome, darlin’,” I said as I poured her tea into her old bunny mug that she still liked to use.
“Me neither. It’s very satisfying.”