by Gary Jubelin
In contrast, work is simple. It’s a place where everything is certain and I don’t have to think about whatever’s going on outside it. Most days, the work itself drives any thoughts of home out of my head, like on the Saturday when I’m hiding in the dust and dirt of the crawl space beneath a chicken coop, watching the back door of a house where we believe a hardened crook is staying.
How good is this? I’m thinking as I lie there, enjoying the feeling of excitement flowing through my system and stretching out my different muscles so nothing seizes up before I need to make a move. This is what I joined the cops for. Then our target walks outside. He’s a big bloke, he’s on the run and he knows that if we get him, he is going straight to prison.
I use my radio to quietly tell the other cops waiting in a car out the front, ‘I’ve seen the offender. I reckon I can take him.
‘I’m going to go in ten seconds. Ten seconds and you guys come in the front door,’ I say, then count to ten, crawl out from underneath the chicken shed and sprint across the yard. I’m on a high. I’ve found him. It’s like hunting.
He sees me and turns to go inside, I smash through the back door, grab him and we crash to the floor together. I come up with him in a headlock, thinking the others will be in here any moment, only no one arrives. Instead, my suspect’s mates are also in the house and now staring at me, stunned. There is an awkward silence. Then my suspect starts shouting, ‘Fucking belt him! Fucking belt him!’
‘Fuck off! Don’t come near me! He’s under arrest,’ I shout back, trying to keep the bloke in the headlock between them and myself. I can’t pull my gun because I need both arms to keep my suspect under control but all the adrenaline means I don’t feel fear and, while everyone is staring at each other, trying to work out what to do, I start to drag my struggling suspect across the room, his feet trailing behind him. At the door, I risk using one hand to tear it open and force the two of us through it, pulling him headfirst down the steps and out across the lawn.
The other cops are still sitting in their car. They see me and pile out to surround us. His mates won’t attack me now.
‘Where were you?’
‘Waiting for you to call. You said you’d call in ten seconds before going in.’ We laugh about it later.
When our suspect’s been booked and is in a jail cell, we go to the pub for lunch. I’m still on the high, enjoying myself, then start to feel sick. Telling the other blokes I’m going to the toilet, I shut myself inside a cubicle and retch. I’m sweating but cannot throw up.
I get some control of myself. I leave the cubicle, throw some water on my pale face and go back to the bar, where I don’t tell anyone what happened. These guys had my back – eventually – and need to know that, next time, if it’s them in trouble, I’ve got theirs. They don’t need to know that I felt so scared afterwards I came close to vomiting.
Every shift could finish the same way if you want to, having drinks with the other cops, most often at the Hornsby Railway Hotel across the road from the train station. We talk about work and what we did on that day’s chase. We make sure we have each other’s backs here also.
One of the Hornsby cops lives in Newcastle, a two-hour train journey north from Sydney, so we time our drinks around his train’s departure. If he misses it, we’ll order a beer and wait for the next one, then the next one. One night, he misses every train and when Debbie wakes up in the morning she finds a strange detective sleeping on our lounge.
Throughout 1989 and 1990, I study again, something I thought I’d never do when I left high school. I feel a sense of shame that I didn’t take my education seriously back then. I now find I am a keen student, doing an Associate Diploma in Policing, where we learn to analyse different investigations, about communication, the law and ethics. I do well enough, much better than in my HSC, but it takes time, and means another load on my shoulders while I sit up late at night in work or home with my head in a book. I write one assignment by torchlight while sitting in a cupboard at night, waiting for some suspects to break into a unit.
Outside of work in 1990, kickboxing leads me to try a kung fu class, the same instructors are teaching at the Dural squash courts. Immediately, I like it. If kickboxing is about straightforward fighting, the kind of skills I need on the streets as a policeman, then kung fu offers something deeper. It’s more in the mind. I like the calmness that it gives me because, right now, it feels like life keeps spinning faster. Exercise, and particularly my martial arts, becomes a quiet place at the centre of a hurricane of working, drinking, studying and trying to be a husband. When I am training, nothing matters. The harder I push myself, the more I find that sense of quiet.
Only I keep getting sick. It is as if each time I walk past someone with a sniffle I come down with a raging cold and, each time, it knocks me out of balance.
One of the sifus – masters – in my kung fu class takes me aside and tells me I am too focused on only the hard side of training. ‘Stop trying to put all your power into every kick,’ he tells me. ‘Stop being tense. Stop exhausting yourself.’ He tells me not to force the movement, but go with it. At first, I can’t work it out, but then I start to watch some of the other students doing qigong, a traditional Chinese system of slow-flowing movement, breathing and meditation.
Maybe that’s what he means, I think. I start going to the qigong classes, which start at six in the morning.
I come out of them glassy-eyed. A different person. I stop getting sick.
I keep it separate from the cops, though. Qigong’s the opposite of the police force’s tough-guy, don’t-talk-about-your-feelings attitude. If I were to tell them what I’m doing in those early-morning classes, the other cops will think I’m weird. They might wonder if they can trust me.
Instead, when work’s been hard, I go home, light a candle, put on some meditation music and practise qigong. It means another thing I have to fit into the day, but it does give me a way of regaining some balance. The cost, in terms of the commitment, is worth it. I can do without some sleep, or sitting in front of the TV after dinner. When the martial arts school I train at moves from Dural closer to the city centre, a half-hour’s drive from where I live, I also find time for the extra travel and keep going.
* * *
In March and April 1990, I undertake the six-week course to qualify as a designated detective, learning how to run investigations, prepare records of interview and what the law says is admissible and inadmissible as evidence. I know now that I never want to go back into uniform, where what you do and see at work is out of your control, like the succession of mangled, bloodied, burning bodies I’ve seen in traffic accidents.
I quickly learn detective work can also offer up fresh horrors. The course finishes on a Friday afternoon, 4 May 1990 and on the Sunday evening, two trains collide about five kilometres south of Brooklyn, north of Hornsby. The driver and five passengers are killed; three women, two men and a 14-year-old boy in total.
Ninety-nine other passengers are injured. I am called to the scene. Picking our way through the wreckage to investigate what happened, I look at the other cops, as well as the huddled bodies of the survivors, wrapped in blankets, and the paramedics carrying wounded people towards the waiting ambulances and realise you can’t escape these sights in the police. It’s how you deal with them that matters.
Some people never want to see these things. Others can’t stop looking. I don’t know what effect it will have on me, but I am prepared to face it. I do know that 30 years from now, I will not be able to forget what I am seeing.
Little more than six weeks later, on 19 June 1991, our son, Jake, is born. He arrives a fortnight early and I have to borrow my father’s car to drive Debbie to the hospital, as ours keeps breaking down.
We are wide-eyed new parents, and I discover it is all-consuming. Debbie’s given up her job as a PA to be a mum, while I do extra work on building sites outside my police hours to bring in some money. Coming home to them makes it all worth it. Debbie has a rea
l nurturing side, she would have been a great nurse or doctor, and Jake is simply perfect. Given what I have seen in the police, I know by now that my own dad was right to teach me toughness, but I will do things differently with Jake. I will make him tough, but I will also hug him. I’ll celebrate his achievements. I will tell my son I love him.
Molotov Cocktails
Mid-1970s
Growing up, I start to buck against the restrictions imposed on me at home. The little things I can rebel against, like when Dad tells me not to smoke, so I go into the shops with mates and buy Escort cigarettes. But the big things I can’t control. I don’t get a bike until I’m 12, when other kids had bikes at six or seven. And unlike my friends, whose parents seem to give them more freedom, I’m not allowed out after dark alone.
There is a gang of other kids, Mark, Andrew, Frank, Warren and Sue, all of them a few years older than me. We get up to trouble – though others might call it criminal behaviour. We like to roam the streets at night; I lie to Dad and tell him I’m staying at Frank’s, or I go to bed with one end of a piece of string attached to my hair with sticky tape and the other tied to a rock hanging out the window. My friends creep up in the darkness and pull the string to wake me up, then I climb out and join them.
We get into shoplifting. We take our dogs into a store, and while the shopkeeper’s distracted getting the animals out, we grab what we can – lollies, or even pocket knives. I discover the thrill that comes with breaking rules and risking being discovered.
Then I get caught trying to hide an ice-cream under my shirt and the shopkeeper calls Mum. When Dad comes home, he yells and screams, though by now I’m quite used to being thrown around. I have to write a letter of apology and afterwards I enjoy stealing less so we get into air rifles, trespassing and drinking instead. We shoot at birds, windows and streetlights, and on occasion at each other.
Dad and some of our neighbours bottle their own wine and store it under their houses. We steal some bottles and go down to a place we call the Pond, where there are carp swimming beneath the water. Andrew gets drunk and starts shooting at the rest of us with his air rifle. Frank and I make a run for it, and I feel a pellet penetrate my clothes and dig into my back. It’s dumb, but it’s exciting.
Another game is Molotov cocktails. We steal petrol from lawnmowers left in people’s gardens, bottle it then soak a rag in it and stuff one end of the rag in the bottle and light the other. We throw the bottles at a rock and watch the eruption.
When the nearby Terrys Creek’s in flood following a downpour, we jump in with foam surfboards. The current washes us all the way down past Browns Waterhole, a couple of kilometres away. One time I get pulled under, and my mates panic, running up to our house shouting, ‘Gary’s gone, he’s disappeared!’ Everyone rushes down to find me, then I walk up carrying my surfboard.
But the dumbest thing we do is throw metal rods onto overhead electricity wires, to make them crack and roar in fury. It’s fun, until one explosion brings down some of the heavy cables. We take off back to my house, laughing. Later, we worry someone might get electrocuted, so we make an anonymous phone call reporting the damage.
* * *
Eventually I have a run-in with the cops. I’m not in our neighbourhood this time, but in the inner city, sitting on the grass bank at Redfern Oval with friends watching the South Sydney Rabbitohs play rugby league.
An old bloke sitting near us with an Esky asks, ‘Hi boys, do you want a drink?’
When we say yes, he hands each of us a beer. We have another, maybe another two, but it might as well be 100, as we are quickly plastered.
I’m still a kid, around 13, and this is the first time I’ve got really drunk. I’m unable to stand up, and suddenly I’m falling down the slope, rolling towards the pitch, with sun, sky, grass and footy game all flashing past me in an orbit, and the old man with his Esky is laughing, and I have no idea what’s happening or how I can control it.
Then there are blue shirts and strong hands that grab us and drag us off to their paddy wagon. They slam the door and drive us to the railway station. Once there, they open up the van and tell us to fuck off, so we stagger onto the platform and start to sober up.
On the train home, I think those cops were looking after us. Maybe, thinking about the man with the Esky, they saved us.
* * *
My grandfather Charles still keeps his eye on me. He’s the general manager of a glass recycling plant, and when I’m 13, he finds me work delivering flyers for the business around the city centre. I always work alone because when I ask if my mates will come with me it turns out their parents don’t want them to go into those places. It feels strange, being the one with freedom, but I can’t blame them after what happened when we went to watch the Rabbitohs.
On my rounds I see the drunkenness, the shouting, violence and the sadness of the inner city. I never see that in the suburbs, and I learn from the experience. How to carry myself. How to deal with trouble.
A year passes, I’m 14 now, and the older kids who were my friends – Mark, Andrew, Frank, Warren and Sue – are into their later teens. It’s harder for me to keep up with what they’re doing. At that age, kids discover sex and start playing around with drugs, and maybe I’m not ready. But when I turn to the kids who are my own age, I find that I’ve outgrown them. They’re only just getting into the things my older mates have now grown out of.
I spend more time wandering in the bush near home and missing Anthony. I start to feel lonely.
On weekends and in school holidays, working for my grandfather, I graduate from delivering flyers to working in the tips and on the trucks, touring the city in the dawn light collecting glass bottles that have been left out for recycling. I work with men, and get paid adult wages, $40 a day. And I’ve found the perfect way to use all that money.
You Don’t Give Up
May 1992: seven years in
A boy playing in bushland behind the oval at Normanhurst Park, near Hornsby, discovers a shallow grave. A dog has dug down into the loose soil and pulled free something white, like leather. Moving closer, despite the damage done by the dog’s teeth, the boy sees it is the wrinkled, freckled flesh of a forearm.
The cops are called and the corpse is identified as that of 67-year-old James Kelly. A crime scene is set up with the blue and white tape running between the trees, behind which the forensic guys move in to photograph the body while uniformed police are sent to walk the surrounding streets, to knock on doors and ask people what, if anything, they’ve seen.
I get the call at home and meet Jim Williams at the oval. It is a Friday and, around us, people are out enjoying the beginning of their weekend. As we approach, the grave itself looks like a rushed, amateurish effort, though I imagine it would have been hard work digging through this tough earth, among the rocks and tree roots. The smell is bad enough to make me gulp with revulsion, but Jim says it could be worse. The body hasn’t been here long, he says.
I know this place, I think. I’ve played soccer here. This oval is a part of my life. In a way, it feels good, like Jim and I are local sheriffs in some old Western movie. This is what I’ve trained for. But I don’t have time to feel much emotion. I’ve been a detective for two years now, working mostly on robberies, street-level drug dealing and a lot of break-and-enters, but this will be the first murder case I’ve worked on.
Looking up, we see a fire trail running through the bush close to the grave site, and wonder if the killer drove along it to get here with James’s body. As the forensics officers uncover what’s left of him, we can’t see an obvious cause of death, although his face and head are bloody and it’s clear some badness has taken place.
‘OK,’ Jim says. ‘We’ve seen enough.’ He wants to go to James’s home, a small house down a cul-de-sac not far from where his body was discovered. I don’t question his decision. He’s the senior detective running the case, with assistance from the specialist North Region Homicide Squad. I’m the young detective constab
le and happy to still be his apprentice on this one.
When we arrive, James’s house has been broken into. It’s dark inside and cluttered, with stacks of yellowing newspapers piled up on different surfaces and dating back six months or more.
I watch Jim and the Homicide detectives work their way through the crowded property, entering each room and pausing to look about them, then moving slowly into it with a meticulous care, something I haven’t previously encountered on a case. That’s right, I think. This is different from anything I’ve worked on. The consequences are much higher than any break-and-enter. A life has been taken. Right now, to me, there can’t be anything more important than what we are doing.
From this moment, I want to be a Homicide detective. I’m hooked. It feels like a job in which I can lose myself completely.
Jim says that our first task is to understand the victim. We learn James drank in the Blue Gum Hotel in Waitara, so we go there and find the regulars who knew him. James fell out with his neighbour, the drinkers tell us. We speak to the neighbour at his house, who seems friendly enough, but has a strange over-confidence, as if he’s got an answer for everything.
Jim and I leave thinking he is hiding something from us. This feels personal, I tell myself. Like it is us and him. The Blue Gum, where James drank, is also our local, where the Hornsby police drink after finishing our shifts. I’m determined to do everything I can to find who killed him.
The autopsy report comes back and says that James was physically beaten – most likely, by whoever broke into his house. It also says his heart was weak, and what killed him was a myocardial infarction – a heart attack. That finding causes problems.
In short, James died of natural causes, even if the heart attack was brought on by the beating. Jim and I argue it back and forth between us but we both know that result will make it hard for us to say that this is still a murder. If it’s not murder, then our bosses won’t see it as a priority. The Homicide Squad are also going to lose interest. That means we will be given less time to solve it before Jim and I are thrown back into the whirlpool of other, minor crimes that make up a local detective’s work, which now seems so much less important.