The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  Felicity followed her training. In the dark she found the man and knelt beside him, joining Strange. He was lying on his left side. There was blood and water on his face, blood all over his shoulder, a hole in his back. She rolled him onto his back. Pumped one, two, three, four, five times. Blood gushed from his mouth. He was dead. If she pumped any more, it would only push more blood out.

  UEBERGANG WAS TRYING BOTH torches in his car. He shook them, but the batteries were dead. He swore; he started his car and nosed it forward to shine the lights where Felicity was on the ground with the two men.

  Another car pulled up, making it four pale vehicles in the dark now. Scott Kennett and Robbie Maas got out. They stood and stared; then Kennett said they’d guide the police when they arrived, and drove off again.

  Felicity and the man were busy, so Uebergang stepped back a bit. He was scared, kept glancing around. Stood in the dark of the road with Robbie’s taillights floating away and the sound of two people gasping over one who wasn’t making any sound at all.

  ADAM BAXTER, A SPRAY-RIG operator, collected his car from a property west of the highway just after dusk and drove home eastwards along Talga Lane. He was most of the way down it when he saw lights ahead and three vehicles parked on the side of the road. There was a white dual-cab HiLux parked at 45 degrees, facing into trees. A white Toyota Prado, facing east. A white Landcruiser nosed in, with lights on. He knew Grant Turnbull’s property had had issues with land clearing; he guessed this was a chin-wag. But as he passed, the headlights revealed a body on the ground.

  He reversed and stopped. There was a woman kneeling over the body; he recognised Felicity. He recognised Andrew Uebergang. In Uebergang’s ute there was a man he didn’t know on the phone.

  Uebergang walked over. He was distressed, talking fast. He had come across a man in the road whose mate had just been shot, he said. Baxter began worrying that the shooter was still nearby or might return, and he turned back towards his car.

  Ian Turnbull was the shooter, Uebergang said. Then, ‘Have you got a shotgun?’

  Baxter shook his head. ‘Not here. Why?’

  And he understood that Uebergang thought Turnbull might return and kill them all. He could see the fear in the young man’s eyes – Uebergang didn’t want Baxter to leave.

  ‘Do you need help?’ Baxter said.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing,’ said Uebergang.

  And then Felicity rolled the body onto its side and walked away from it. ‘He’s cold,’ she said. ‘I can’t feel a pulse.’ She was crying. ‘He’s gone.’

  The ambulance service was calling Uebergang. He handed the phone to her. Lights were coming from both directions down the road.

  Strange folded Turner’s hands on his chest. It didn’t matter now how dark it was. He said to the silent man on the ground, ‘Glen, Glen. Alison and the kids need you. Glen? Glen, they need you.’

  SCOTT KENNETT AND ROBBIE Maas were out on County Boundary Road, looking for the police. Kennett rang Grant again and explained what he knew. Grant said, ‘This won’t be good. Do you know where Dad is?’

  THE AMBULANCE SERVICE WAS out there, bolting through the winter dark towards the GPS from Turner’s EPIRB, but unsure where exactly to go, calling Robert Strange as they went. The police radio was live, the police were ringing the ambulance supervisor at base; Tammy from the ambulance service was on the line to Australian Search and Rescue. The GPS signal from the EPIRB was slowly becoming exact. There was a discussion among emergency services of trying for a helicopter from Canberra. And in the middle of this, a call from the Croppa Moree Road, requesting an ambulance for a distressed elderly person.

  FELICITY BEGAN TO PANIC. Adam Baxter – she hadn’t noticed him arrive – handed her a phone. A woman’s voice from the ambulance service stuttered on the line, dropping out. Felicity clutched the phone: should she keep doing CPR? ‘He’s cooling down already,’ she heard herself say.

  She could see headlights coming from each end of the road. The police? The lights weren’t flashing. A scorch of fear came over her. The ambulance staffer told her to get in her car. ‘Get in your cars!’ Felicity screamed, and everyone leaped out of the dark into cabs, slammed the doors. Only Turner stayed, lying out there. ‘I was so scared,’ Felicity said later, ‘but I managed to hold it together.’

  And then there were more lights down the road, red and blue ones this time. There was the sound of tyres on gravel and the police and an ambulance arrived.

  THE ROAD HAD BEEN empty when the gun was raised at Turner. Now it seemed everyone in the world was pelting towards them. Robert Strange said later that he felt guilty for thinking it, but he was glad it wasn’t just him anymore, that there were others to look after Glen, that he wasn’t alone on the winter road.

  KENNETT AND MAAS RETURNED along with the police. The locals huddled as uniforms surrounded the body.

  ‘Ian said he shot him,’ said Kennett, ‘over the private channel on the two-way.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Uebergang said.

  Felicity was shaking. Uebergang insisted on taking her home. She didn’t want to leave Turner, but eventually agreed. He and Baxter dropped her off. She walked in the door and said to her husband in a strange voice, ‘The man is deceased.’ She didn’t even know his name.

  Her face wore her shock. She tried to describe how she’d tried to help him, but CPR wouldn’t work. Nothing would work.

  She calmed a little later that night, but she was frightened for a long time afterwards. She understood now how easy it was to die, how she too could be shot to death, could lie on the grass with blood on her face and a smudge of earth on her brow.

  HUNDREDS OF KILOMETRES AWAY in Dubbo, Arthur Snook was holding his phone, listening to nothing. It had rung less than an hour earlier: the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, with news that an EPIRB allocated to Glen Turner had been activated. Glen had told him, not long before, he was looking at the Turnbulls’ clearing. For ten minutes he’d tried Turner’s and Strange’s phones over and over again. He’d got onto Robert Strange finally. ‘Talga Lane, Talga Lane,’ the man had gasped. Then, a few minutes later, Snook, in his nice, normal, lamp-lit office far from the cold country lane, got through again.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Strange, from the cabin of Uebergang’s ute.

  ‘Who did it?’ Snook asked, aghast.

  ‘Ian Turnbull, and he’s gone.’

  Snook, left to picture what was happening, couldn’t do a thing. He rang triple zero again, made calls to colleagues, paced the office with the phone in his hand as he waited for news.

  IN THEIR HOUSE OUTSIDE Tamworth, Alison McKenzie arrived home with Alexandra and Jack. There was a message on the machine for Glen: it was search and rescue in Canberra, confirming that his emergency beacon had gone off. Could he please call as soon as possible.

  Alison rang the police to explain it was a mistake. Glen was in Moree that night, doing a job out there tomorrow. The police said, yes, there’s been a shooting. Glen’s been shot. That was all they knew. The police said they’d let her know when there was more information.

  Alison kept calm; she began to think of getting to Moree, to the hospital. She rang her sister-in-law to come over and take care of the kids.

  To the west, now the earth had turned away east, people were spinning into action. Phone calls were furiously seething in the airwaves. Cars were bolting all over the countryside. Only the trees were still.

  ALAINE ANDERSON AND HER husband, Lionel, were at home at ‘Strangford’, beside ‘Strathdoon’. A neighbour rang her; did she have an ecologist staying the night? Enough people knew that Alaine and Turner were in contact about clearing in the area. No, said Alaine, but rang her ecologist friend Phil Spark, who was working in the area. He answered, thank god.

  Wait till morning, Spark said, we’ll find out then.

  SCOTT KENNETT CALLED GRANT again on his way home a couple of hours later, around 8.30 p.m. Grant had located his father at h
ome. Cory had been there – he’d heard Turnbull on the two-way and gone straight from Roger’s property to the homestead to tell Robeena. Minutes later, Turnbull had walked in through the laundry, washed his hands and entered the kitchen. Cory had fetched him a chair. He had taken his shoes off, gone into the living room and sat down in his armchair. Cory had left his grandparents to have some time together.

  Kennett met Nicola at home and they went straight over to the Turnbulls’ place next door. Robeena let them in.

  Turnbull was sitting in his brown recliner in the lounge room under a doona, his socked feet showing. Kennett hesitated. It was a shock to see the old man just sitting there. Nicola knelt beside him and touched his arm. ‘Why?’

  Turnbull gazed at her. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. His arm was trembling beneath her hand. ‘He was ruining my family, and it was never going to end.’

  ‘You did have a choice,’ she said.

  He looked away. ‘I am sorry to all of you.’ He shivered under the doona. Scott took Robeena into the kitchen. Ian, the elderly woman said, was not sure if Turner was dead. ‘I hate to tell you,’ Scott said, ‘but he is.’

  And in that silence, everything changed.

  From the lounge room, Turnbull spoke again. ‘The gun is still in the back of the ute. It’s still loaded.’

  Nicola called an ambulance for Turnbull, saying there was a distressed person who needed attention. She helped Robeena make beds, to keep her occupied. Robeena asked, ‘Do you know what’s happening with the police?’ In the end, Nicola called them and talked with a detective, giving him Turnbull’s mobile number. The two men spoke.

  Scott knew by now that the police were at the gate. The ambulance hadn’t arrived. He went down in Robbie’s ute ‘to see what was taking so long’. It was now five hours since Turnbull had lifted his gun.

  The ambulance was waiting at a distance from the house. Beside it were police officers and detective senior constables, their sharp shooters stationed behind trees, and, in a police car, Robert Strange. He knew one of them and explained what was happening in the house. The police asked him to wait with them. His wife was still in there; Robeena; the gun in the car.

  AT 8.30 P.M., ALISON MCKENZIE rang the Moree police. She was put on hold for long minutes. Tinned music playing down the line as her heart churned, watching the kids’ anxious faces, trying to hold back her alarm as the reassurance that Glen was okay did not come.

  Then she was put through to a detective who told her that Glen was dead.

  The children saw her face, heard her voice. They rushed to clutch her. They all screamed. They wept and shrieked.

  OUTSIDE ‘YAMBIN’, ROBERT STRANGE knew he was probably safe in the car, with three or four other officers, but he didn’t feel it. And Glen was still out there, back in Talga Lane.

  Arthur Snook rang again. ‘I’m sitting out the front of the defendant’s house,’ Strange told him. He voice was strained; agitation was kicking in.

  ‘Whose house?’

  ‘Turnbull’s,’ said Strange. ‘I’m in the back of the police car outside his house. I don’t feel comfortable here. Arthur, get me out of here.’

  PARAMEDICS CAITLIN MURPHY AND Daniel Perram had been at Talga Lane, seen the body, confirmed Turner dead. Then they’d had a call to attend a man suffering emotional distress. It was only on the way they realised it was probably the killer; they rang the operations centre, and when they got to the address, joined the sharp shooters and the police cars waiting outside, until they were sent away again.

  NICOLA AND ROBEENA KNELT and put shoes on Turnbull’s feet. He stood and walked to the door.

  He stepped onto the porch, then onto the lawn. He turned around on the spot, to show he had no weapons. Detective Senior Constable Timothy McCarthy and Detective Brent Falkiner moved forward. ‘Ian,’ McCarthy said, ‘you’re under arrest for the murder of Glen Turner, which happened about 5.45 this evening.’

  The old man said only, ‘Yeah, well, just before dusk, anyway.’ Turnbull faced the wall as directed; he said ‘yeah’ when asked if he understood his rights. His hands were cased in paper bags, taped at the wrists, not too tight. They would be swabbed for gunshot residue.

  In the house, Nicola and Robeena were looking for his medication bottles. The pills were in daily dispensers, but the police couldn’t dose them without the information on the packaging. Detective McCarthy asked if he’d changed his clothes. He pointed at the pair of runners in the kitchen and told the women that they weren’t to touch them. There would be a search warrant for the house.

  It was nearly midnight. Eventually, Turnbull was taken off without his heart medication.

  Robeena’s brother Ranald came from North Star to pick her up. Scott Kennett was taken to Moree to make a statement; Nicola drove one of Robeena’s cars home. The police seized Robbie Maas’s ute, to test the pigs’ blood in the back.

  Robert Strange was now on his way on the hour’s drive to Moree. Ian Turnbull was in a police van on the same road, just ahead. Glen Turner was still lying in Talga Lane, where he’d remain until morning, as dew collected on the grass in the cold winter night.

  11

  The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’être, is to defend us against nature.

  —Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927

  Early hours. There was work to be done at the fluoro-lit police station. Robert Strange gave a statement at 1.00 a.m. Sylvester Joseph, the Turnbull family lawyer, arrived, talked to Ian Turnbull. At 2.00 a.m., Turnbull was briefly interviewed. At 3.00 a.m., he was swabbed. His clothes were taken off and bagged; he was put in prison greens. By 5.00 a.m., he was asleep, and when custody officers woke him two hours later he was calm and uncomplaining. A photograph was taken around 8.00 a.m.: that steady, shuttered gaze, that closed mouth.

  Turnbull’s daughter-in-law Justine, his son Sam’s wife, had rung Scott Kennett on his way to the station. Then Sam called. They urged him not to say anything without a lawyer. Grant was on his way down from Queensland. He got to ‘Yambin’ just before 2.00 a.m. to find police standing at his father’s door. Inside, Robeena was with her brother Ran and his wife. The three old people sat at the kitchen table. They did not discuss what had happened. A police officer was in the room. By 2.00 a.m., the elderly people left for North Star. Twenty minutes later, Grant watched as police searched the house and took photographs of a bloodstain beside the white basin.

  Roger, away in the United States with Annette, barely knew what to feel when he heard the news. He had gone to the police a few weeks earlier to report his father’s muttered threats about Glen Turner. But the police had believed him unreliable. They had just shrugged and made a note.

  Meanwhile, in Tamworth, Alison McKenzie was holding her children as they cried. Glen’s sister, Fran Pearce, had been away from home in a hotel when Alison called her. Now, at 3.00 a.m. Fran woke her parents in Port Macquarie to tell them Glen was dead. Glen’s mother, Coral, began screaming, ‘No, no!’ His father shook. ‘Who will look after the kids?’ he cried.

  The morning came too soon. In the early light, the coroner’s van came to get Turner, but the body wasn’t removed until nearly midday.

  Detective McCarthy took Arthur Snook to the Moree morgue. Snook had got in from Dubbo and not had much sleep. He had to be there: an officer of the OEH had been killed in the line of duty. They met the van at the entrance. The back doors were opened and an assistant unzipped the body bag from the top. ‘Yes, that’s Glendon Eric Turner,’ said Snook, and the body was taken inside.

  Records detail every movement of its handling, every location and pause. A Life Extinct Form had to be completed; a Report of Deceased for the coroner, a Certification of Search of Deceased Body, a Deceased Identification Statement. Ian Turnbull had not yet finished generating paperwork.

  In Armidale, eating breakfast in his kitchen, Chris Nadolny heard the morning news bulletin: an environmental officer had been shot dead near Moree. Nadolny knew immediatel
y who it was, and who had killed him.

  IAN TURNBULL WAS LED into Moree Courthouse that afternoon. His eyes were red: filled, the local media reported, with tears. He sat immobile in the courtroom as Sylvester Joseph said the family, after a sleepless night, wasn’t ready to discuss bail, but would reserve the right to apply for it another time. Ian Turnbull was charged with one count of murder. His lips were seen to tremble. He was taken away. Media outside the court clustered hopefully as Turnbull’s older sister and her husband walked from the courtroom without comment.

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, 31 July, Robert Strange did a walk-through for the police out at Talga Lane. Arthur Snook was there. So was Detective Timothy McCarthy and two colleagues. The crime scene was undisturbed, apart from the removal of Glen’s body. The OEH’s, Andrew Uebergang’s and Felicity Whibley’s vehicles were still parked; the little work camera, dropped to the ground. Strange felt bad that Uebergang hadn’t got his car back yet. He’d only been passing by.

  The police asked Strange to tell them exactly what had happened.

  ‘I saw a, a man raise his arm and what appeared to be a rifle in his hand, and then I heard a, a shot fired and I … Glen, I looked over at Glen and I could see him, and Glen was going, and said, “Ian, what have you done?”’

  The police filmed him for an hour. Later, they closed the crime scene, drove away the vehicles and left the road to the scrub and the fields.

  At the morgue, Glen Turner’s body was autopsied by Dr Rexson from the Newcastle Department of Forensic Medicine. The autopsy report lists Turner’s clothing. He was wearing: blue jeans (blood spatter on left thigh), blue underpants, brown socks, brown leather shoes. He was wearing: a white-and-blue check shirt with blood around the collar, chest and left shoulder; a white T-shirt with blood in the same areas; a brown leather belt. He was wearing: a police tag around his left ankle.

  There is a list of all the parts of his body. Hair, eyelids, eyebrows, ears, lips, gums, teeth, penis, scrotum, testes, anus, thorax, abdomen, upper limbs, fingernails, lower limbs. The report observes that ‘the toenails were long’.