by Gary Jubelin
Hopefully, they are already uncomfortable. The room has no windows. They don’t know what is coming next.
‘How are we going to carry ourselves this time?’ I’ll ask Jim.
Every time, our approach to the interview is different. Sometimes we’ll walk into the room in suits and other times in shirtsleeves. A proper crook might call for something different from a first-time offender, or someone who was driven by anger or who did something that was simply stupid. One person might need gentleness, another flattery. Sometimes Jim and I are good cop–bad cop, sometimes we’re good cop–good cop and at others we are bad cop–bad cop together.
‘I think I’ll wear my shoulder holster in on this one,’ Jim might say. Weapons on or weapons off is a conscious decision. If we have a softhead, a shoulder holster might just be enough to impress them. After all, it is what detectives wear in the cop shows on television. As Jim explains it, during an interview, we are not allowed to threaten a suspect, but wearing a pistol might be just enough to make them sit up and think, Shit, these are real policemen.
Time and again, we walk out with a confession.
Jim starts encouraging me to lead the interviews, which helps to build my confidence. He teaches me to trust my instincts, including what I learned from those veteran custody sergeants during my first weeks on the job – that empathy’s important. You don’t really have to feel compassion for your suspect but don’t act like you’re above it.
Sure, you can intimidate a suspect if you want to. A lot of cops will go into the interview room and not try to hide their disgust, like even talking to a crook’s beneath them. Jim says, ‘If a killer offers me his hand, I shake it.’ I might not want to shake his hand, I might want to spit on him, but what I want is not important. What matters is to solve the case, however much it costs us.
When somebody’s carried out a crime they’re isolated. They often want you to reach out. Sometimes a crook just needs a chance to unburden themselves of guilt.
Over the years, the rules around how cops conduct their interviews will tighten, but right now, they’re still pretty relaxed. We can take a suspect to the station, interview them formally or informally, and the courts will accept our notes of what was said as evidence, regardless of whether the suspect has signed our notebook entry.
But Jim teaches me to be proud of what we do as detectives, not to abuse the system. We don’t need to fake a confession or, worse, beat one out of somebody. There’s an old line about cops using phone books during interviews, because they don’t leave bruises. Under Jim’s guidance, I learn instead to love the contest between detective and suspect. My senses become heightened. It’s one on one and, like a boxing match, why would you cheat? Win by cheating and you will always know it’s not a real victory. Phone books would be the dumb approach.
* * *
I’m learning. While working in Hornsby, I’m also accepted into the Tactical Response Group (TRG), the police unit made up of heavily armed and armoured cops trained to deal with crowd control or violent offenders, which often involves dealing out violence in return. We dress in black and get sent in to deal with those situations thought too dangerous for normal cops to handle. It’s one way I’ve found to keep the promise I made to myself aged 11 when Trevor called me out, that I would never again back down.
Australia Day, 26 January 1988, marks the bicentenary of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia and we’ve been told the Aborigines are going to riot. On days like these, being in the TRG means I get called away from working as a detective, kitted out with shield, baton and helmet and sent out to wait for the fighting.
When our bosses tell us there’ll be riots, we don’t ask them any questions. Today, rattling around in the truck during our deployment, I don’t think too much about what the date means. Australia Day is just a national celebration.
As the sun rises over Sydney Harbour, we all jog down to the Opera House in step, chanting ‘Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut’, then line up and stand there in position, facing outwards.
Only, nobody turns up to fight us. It’s hot. There are thick crowds around the harbour and boats out racing on the water. Everyone seems happy, walking arm and arm, carrying flags and drinking. We listen to the car horns, cheering and loud music as the sun crawls across the sky, casting sharp, black shadows on the white sails of the Opera House behind us. The temperature rises. But no one seems to want a confrontation.
We are stood down, so I go for a beer. At the bar, I see an old mate, Peter, whom we all call Ekker, drinking on his own.
Ekker has a reputation as a street fighter. Some of the people he’s said to hang out with I know from work as being among Sydney’s worst, including Graham ‘Abo’ Henry, who’s mates with Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith, a violent crook who has himself been linked to several murders. But I know Ekker through a childhood friend. Sue and him had a baby together. Ekker and I also played touch footy together for a couple of years.
Ekker is Aboriginal and, inside the pub, he’s really low. It’s like he’s drinking to forget something. When I ask if I can join him, he tells me to get lost. He says he doesn’t want to talk.
I’m happy just having a cold beer after a hot day in uniform, so sit and wait. Finally, Ekker opens up.
‘What’s gone on today is really bad,’ he says. To him, today is not for celebration. To Aboriginal Australians, he says, the First Fleet was an invasion. The settlers were an occupying army. The anniversary I’ve just stood ready to protect, with violence if required, marks the day his people had their country stolen.
I’ve never heard anyone describe it like that before. They never taught us anything like that in school.
Ekker and I drink together into the night, unpacking our hearts onto the bar counter. He makes me look at who I am; a white cop who lives in a white suburb, works in a mostly white police force and plays soccer at the weekends, which I call ‘wog ball’.
I tell him that I’m grateful, that he has opened my eyes for me. I tell him that it isn’t right that I needed the lesson.
Looking back, there were other people who could have taught me all these things in my own childhood. I blame myself for never having learned.
Diving into Cool Blue Water
Late 1960s
Mum and Dad move us into our new family house in North Epping, which has one bathroom, three bedrooms and a yellow clay road leading to the front door. Heavy work trucks rumble along it every morning as the rest of the suburb is still being built. Two more kids, Michelle and Jason, come along to follow Karen and me, and Dad builds a series of extensions on our home to keep up with the expanding family.
Our house overlooks a thickly forested valley and what feels like wilderness beyond that all the way to the horizon. To me it’s a paradise. The bush gives me a sense of being part of something bigger than myself and bigger than my family.
Karen, my elder sister by two years, is Miss Perfect. She does nothing wrong. It’s good, because it means when I spend hours staring out the window when I should be doing homework, she ends up doing the work for me. It also means that, as the second eldest, I’m the first of the four children to get caught smoking and stealing. Retribution follows, hard and fast.
As children, we live only in the moment. Michelle is five years younger and we clash furiously at times. Her bedroom is next to the one I share with Jason and I complain to Mum and Dad that she plays her radio too loud. It’s like she is trying to annoy me.
Jason, who’s two years younger than Michelle, also tests my patience. When he’s a baby, I lie in bed with my hands over my ears, trying to shut out his crying. He gets better as we grow up, and even share a bunk bed, though I have the top bunk, which is right because I am the older brother.
Getting older, our family is always close. My mum has five sisters and one brother, while Dad has two brothers and a sister, so we have 30 or 40 cousins all together and most of them live near us. Either the four of us kids are at one of our cousins’ places, or they’re at our
s. We have a pool in the backyard, and spend our summers sitting round it with our aunties, uncles, cousins and neighbours, diving into the cool blue water then drying out in the sunlight.
Starting high school, I’m lucky that an older cousin on my dad’s side, Russell, has a reputation as a tough guy. He runs with a gang of kids who carry knives and wear mullets, which look like crewcuts at the front but with the hair left long at the back. The different gangs, like the Epping Sharpies and the Town Hall Sharpies, aren’t afraid to fight each other and there’s talk of Russell causing trouble, maybe even bashing people. When people at school ask if Russell is my cousin, I say yes and they leave me alone.
But, even with that protection, my first fight with Trevor ends up being one of many. I tell myself that I get picked on because I’m shy. That I end up getting into all these fights because I don’t like bullies, so will always stand up to them. The truth is that I’m always angry, deep inside. At school, someone will say something and I’ll take offence, which backs me into a corner, then I don’t have the wit to talk my way out of it and so my pride kicks in and soon I’m throwing punches.
Russell lives with us for short stints when he’s causing trouble at home, so he and I grow closer. I want to be just as tough as he is. Sadly, he later dies young, of a heroin overdose. I am a teenager by then and we’ve drifted further apart. I’m caught up in my own life. But I see the effect it has on other people and the sadness running through the family.
Growing up, my best mate in the truest sense is Anthony. He just turns up one day at home, adopted by the family who live opposite. He’s different: Indigenous, when all the other kids are white. When Anthony laughs, you can’t help but laugh with him, so we are often happy. He means I always have someone to escape from home with. Because Anthony is wild.
Each morning I wake up and hang around outside until Anthony gets up too. Or he comes over and knocks on my window. Then the two of us sneak off and set out on an adventure.
The suburb is still expanding, pushing back the bushland, so there are building sites everywhere for the two of us to break into. I’m smaller, so Anthony helps me climb up onto the roofs, where I can lift the tiles, climb down into the building and open the door. Then the half-finished home becomes a free-for-all in which the two of us will run around, play hide and seek or smoke cigarettes we’ve stolen from our parents. We walk down the unfinished roads, throwing rocks and shattering the windows, getting chased by angry builders or new owners, and always, always laughing.
He and I also spend time in the bush beyond the houses, trying to see who can climb the highest tree or cliff, or starting rock fights with the other kids. Once, Anthony jumps from a tree to a rock ledge and almost makes it but – to my horror – loses his balance and falls backwards. I see the fear in his face as he realises what’s happening. He doesn’t scream, but hits the ground with a dull thump. Edging closer to the cliff edge to see if he’s alive, I hear a roar of laughter.
One afternoon when I’m about 12, Anthony comes over to our house, and is crying. He’s fought with his adoptive mum and tells me he hit her with a frying pan. He’s got some things together and will run away. He wants to know, will I go with him?
I’m tempted, because he’s a mate, but also old enough to realise something serious has happened. Our lives will head in different directions now, I sense. He runs. I stay.
He gets caught and put in a boys’ home in Berry on the New South Wales South Coast.
From then on, we write letters to each other.
A Whale in the Bay
1988: three years in
I learn a different set of lessons in the cops when Jim takes a year off from the police from the middle of 1988, meaning I’m given another detective to work with as my partner.
Geoff (not his real name) is an older bloke, with maybe 15 years on me, a slumped, broken-down appearance and a lined, fleshy face. I see little of him. We often start our shifts together then Geoff will head off, saying, ‘If you need anything, I’ll be down at the RSL.’
Geoff used to work at Kings Cross, Sydney’s inner-city, red-light district where the narrow roads are full of drunks and blank-eyed junkies, with the buildings on either side occupied by pinched-face hustlers and grinning nightclub bosses. I figure he has picked up some bad habits.
Some nights, Geoff will wander back into the Hornsby detectives’ office to ask if anything is happening. I might have a suspect handcuffed to my desk and will look at him, incredulous. I’m not about to report him to our bosses – one lesson I learned in uniform is you make sure you’ve got your partner’s back, whether it’s on the street, in court, or if his wife calls the office at night to ask if you have seen him. ‘He’s out on a job,’ you answer.
I think it’s partly because each of you know what the other’s witnessed. The drunks, the fights, the fatal traffic crashes. The time you were called to a house because a neighbour hears a child screaming and an adult’s laughter. No one else can understand this world, certainly no one outside the emergency services. That’s why so many cops get together with nurses. So, you look out for your partner without question.
When I really need Geoff, I call the Hornsby RSL and ask if the barman’s seen him. As the months pass, I dial that number so often I can recite it from memory.
Sometimes, if work is quiet or before an afternoon shift gets started, I’ll go for coffee with Katherine (not her real name), a young woman I know from growing up who now works in a brothel a few hundred metres from Hornsby Police Station. Prostitution’s legal and, as far as most cops are concerned, accepted, as long as a brothel isn’t selling drugs or operating near a school. If anybody sees us, no one questions why she and I are sitting down together. All I have to do is tell my sergeant or make a note in my duty book that I’m meeting a gig, meaning an informant.
Still, I’m disappointed for the way her life’s played out. I know she had a hard childhood, her parents got divorced and her mum was a troubled soul. Katherine’s a year or two younger than I am and when she complains about having to work a double shift, I tell her, ‘I don’t even want to know what that means.’
‘I’m making money. Don’t judge me,’ she says. And I don’t. So much of life is luck, I reckon. I’ve also seen enough sexual assault and domestic violence cases during my time in the cops to wonder if what she does somehow ends up helping others. I’ll never excuse a man who harms a woman, but without this kind of release for some of those who need it, this might be a more dangerous world.
As cops, despite their legal status, we do keep an eye on the local clubs and brothels, just in case any of them get caught up in the drug trade, or employ underage girls. Katherine tells me that the local cops are on the take, demanding money in return for protection. I laugh and say I don’t believe it. She looks at me and smiles.
In late 1988, I mention to Geoff that I know someone working at the brothel and he asks me to organise a meeting. He says it’s just to gather intelligence and I don’t think much about it, so I line up a drink and on one Saturday at the Pennant Hills Inn, the three of us sit down to talk.
Katherine and I use it as a catch-up, talking about family and friends from childhood, while Geoff sits there uncomfortably and, when he talks, says that he wants to know more about the brothel operation, like the number of girls and clients, or anything about the madam who runs it. Later, during a couple of night shifts when he actually turns up to work, he wants us to sit outside the building in our unmarked car and watch it, as if he’s counting all the people going in and out. He never tells me what he’s doing and, being the younger man, I do not ask any questions.
In 1989, after his year out, Jim tells me he’s coming back. I tell Geoff that I want to work with my old partner.
Soon afterwards, the telephone rings in the detectives’ office. A male voice says: ‘Tell Geoff there is a whale in the bay.’
I don’t understand the message but pass it on and see that Geoff looks worried. He asks me a few question
s about the call, most of which I can’t answer, then walks out of the office. A few days later I ask Jim what it all means and he says the call was a coded warning. It means Geoff’s under investigation by police.
Eventually he is arrested and charged with soliciting bribes from the brothel. I could belt him, I’m so angry. Angry at the shame he’s brought upon us detectives. Angry because we’re supposed to protect people from bullies, not bully others. Angry because I could have stopped it.
Katherine was right. I should have listened.
Geoff ends up spending a few years in jail.
* * *
My work, the shift patterns and the things I see, begin to affect my life at home with Debbie. It feels like we are tipping out of balance. I realise I’m starting to dominate the relationship just like my father did, which makes me uncomfortable. But we’re still looking to the future.
Being in plain clothes doesn’t pay that well and Debbie doesn’t make a fortune working as a PA, so we don’t have much money, but we talk about having children.
For now, we get a cattle dog with two black patches on his eyes and call him Bandit. I take him running every morning. In the evenings, I have my soccer and kickboxing while Debbie plays netball and does her aerobics, so we don’t see that much of each other. At the weekends, or when my shifts allow it, we work together on the house in Dural, but run short of cash. We want to lay paving but can’t afford a compactor, so I spend two days jumping up and down on the underlay, damaging my knees so much they hurt for weeks.