by Candice Fox
“Whoa yourself,” Amanda said, locking the front door and slipping the key into a black sequined clutch. “What do you know, Sweeney Todd?”
“I’m, uh, I just—” Sweeney pointed absurdly down the street as though the answer lay that way. “Where the hell are you going?”
“Out.” Amanda shrugged. “The pub. I was thinking of going to Holloways Beach, maybe. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You mean you’re not meeting anyone?”
“Nope.”
“But”—Sweeney gestured to Amanda’s dress—“you … you look…”
“What?” Amanda frowned.
“You look a million bucks,” Sweeney admitted. “You’re just going to the pub? In that?”
Amanda glanced at the dress. “What do you go to the pub in?” she asked. Genuine confusion. Sweeney looked at her jeans, her boots. “This?”
Amanda assessed the other woman’s outfit, her chin jutting out. “You can come in that.” She nodded, the outfit passed.
“Oh, I wasn’t asking to—”
“Let’s go, Sweeney-Weeney.” Amanda waved her arm. “Before all the goons get there.”
When I was in prison, I was segregated to a block housing inmates who would be endangered if they were accommodated with the thieves, drug dealers, and murderers who made up the general prison population. I knew from my time as a cop that there were a number of offenses that could get you segregated. General population boys were expected to “bash on sight” anyone who’d committed a violent crime against a woman or child, so around me were pedophiles, wife killers and baby killers, rapists and child-porn distributors. There were real and suspected snitches, transgender inmates, and former corrections officers. There were also high-profile people, rich folk who might be extorted in the general population, and ex-cops or lawyers who might run into old quarries out there in the yard. Celebrities would appear briefly. Their hearings usually went through the system faster, and they more often than not made bail.
The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy applied there, so for the most part no one knew why anyone else was in remand. The policy was supposed to keep violence down within segregation, but the effect was the opposite. Like all humans with more time than things to do, the inmates would spread rumors. Rumors, once born, grow quickly on the inside. One day someone might be whispering to me that a man on the other side of the unit had thrown his wife off a bridge to her death. The next day, it was his six-year-old daughter, and he’d raped her and tortured her first.
Whispers. Meaningful looks. Signals passed across a room and quiet conversations conducted in huddles in corners. Sometimes I’d longed for the crashing, clattering, catcalling noise of the general population. Segregation was the quietest, tensest place on Earth. The air hummed with malignant potential. It was hard to breathe. When fights broke out there was no warning, no shouting or scrabbling in the lead up. The sound of playing cards sliding and slapping on the concrete table would be exchanged for a scream. Then sirens. The shouts of guards.
As I sat across my kitchen table from Dale Bingley, I felt that old segregation tension pulsing in the air for the first time since my release. I’d dragged a chair in from one of the other rooms and set up an old laptop, having given him the new one I’d purchased when I started working with Amanda. He was consumed by his work, sifting through online databases of images of cars, now and then glancing at the screenshots of the blue ute on the table beside him. I felt his eyes on me every now and then as I worked through Andrew Bell’s Facebook chat history, every movement of his body making my muscles tense. The sudden sound of his whiskey glass hitting the tabletop as he put it down sent a jolt of pain through my chest.
What was he going to do if we didn’t find Claire’s attacker? I wondered. He’d said he didn’t believe in my innocence. Was he planning on killing me?
If we found Claire’s attacker, would he kill us both?
I couldn’t focus. I’d been struggling with a heavy sense of guilt over the lack of attention I’d been paying to the Barking Frog murders as my own life imploded. At the end of the day, Amanda was paying me for my services on the case. Michael Bell was paying her. The first days after a homicide were the best time to follow leads and catch the killer, so whatever I could contribute was precious. And yet, even when I was working on the Barking Frog case, a part of my mind was absent. Half listening, I turned over and over my new situation, sought out potential solutions, tried not to dream of potential scenarios. Whenever I thought I was fully focused on Keema and Andrew’s case, my thoughts would wander back to Melanie. Kelly. Claire. Dale.
It was hard to forget Dale sitting there in my very kitchen. I gave up for a moment and went to the sink and poured myself a large Wild Turkey.
“Does your wife know you’re here?” I asked him. Dale took a while to answer.
“We’re separated.”
I drank half the Turkey.
“I’ve been hard to live with,” Dale continued. “She was planning to pick up Claire from her friend’s house the day it happened. I said she could catch the bus. I thought she was old enough.”
I’d been catching buses by myself at thirteen. I thought about saying so, but I didn’t know if it was appropriate. I looked out the kitchen window at the dark, listened to the squealing of bats in the trees at the edge of the rainforest. Feeding time.
“Where is Claire?” I asked.
“She lives with her mother.”
“Is she…”
“She’s being homeschooled. She has trouble going outside the house. She’s getting therapy. Lots of therapy.”
He was standing behind me. I stiffened as he grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle from the counter beside me and sloshed some into his glass, went back to his seat.
“I think it’s this,” he said. I looked at the laptop screen. There was a photograph of a Ford Falcon ute in a sunlit field, a wire fence in the background. I edged closer, compared it to the screenshot of the blue ute outside the RSPCA at Yagoona. It certainly looked like a match for the car in the CCTV footage. Two-seater cabin, low, flat bed, and the angular lines typical of an older-model car. “Ford Falcon XF, 1988 or thereabouts. I don’t think this blue would have come as standard, do you? You don’t see too many pale blue utes.”
“Might have been sprayed at some point,” I said. “If it was sprayed commercially, that could be a good lead. We find out what kind of car it was, then check the mechanics, I guess.”
“You go to a mechanic to get it sprayed? Or a specialist?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m not a car guy.”
“Neither am I.”
“Well. I guess we’re just two whiskey-drinkin’ single dads who don’t know anything about cars,” I said. He stared at me, trying to figure out why I’d said that, something I was trying to figure out myself. I poured more whiskey, drank it. Probably a poor choice.
My computer blipped. I looked at the screen. An email.
“I’ve just got an email from the couple who may have given the perpetrator the white dog,” I said. “I asked them again for a description of him. Give me your email address. I’ll send it to you. I’ve also got access from a colleague of mine to a database of car sales and registrations. Hang on a second and I’ll—”
“I’ve got it,” Dale said.
I looked up.
“Are you in my email?”
“Yes.” He clicked away. “You’re friends with Khalid Farah? How interesting.”
There was an email from Khalid wanting to know when I was coming down to Sydney next. I didn’t know how he’d gotten my personal email address, but Khalid was like that. He had his fingers in everything, everyone, a connection here and a snitch there. Somebody that owed him, somebody that wanted to curry his favor. It was an essential part of being a criminal overlord, being able to slither under closed doors like smoke into police stations, rival meetings, homes, and businesses. He was all seeing, all knowing. He had to both know when danger was c
oming and be the danger seamlessly infiltrating all protective boundaries.
I frowned across the table at Dale.
“Could you maybe get out of my personal fucking email?”
“You gave up your right to privacy when you got yourself accused of abducting my daughter.”
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly.” He glanced at me. “You’re upset that I’m all tangled up in your life? Too bad. There’s nothing you can do about it. Not until we catch this guy. Or we find out that he never existed.”
I exhaled hard. My face felt tight, the stitches in my cheek pulling at my skin. I cracked my knuckles.
“You know, I’m doing my best here, arsehole,” I said.
“So am I,” he replied. “Arsehole.”
The bike was a rickety blue racer, older than the one Amanda rode, the chrome brake levers spotted with rust. Sweeney gripped the handles with white knuckles, glancing now and then at her riding companion. Amanda looked absurd in the extreme in her glamorous dress, her bare feet straining on the pedals, the ridiculous heels hooked over the handlebars. It was all so incredibly unnecessary. Beautifully, whimsically unnecessary and unexplained, a long and mysterious expedition out of the town and along a bare dirt road between cane fields, their tires making patterns in the clay. Sweeney felt a weird sense of joy. Warm air fluttered past her, channeled down the alleyway between the walls of cane. Amanda’s dress caught the moonlight as her legs pumped the pedals.
“Have you thought about training yourself to get back into a car?” she asked, drawing her bike closer. Ted had told Sweeney about Amanda’s refusal to ever travel in cars. He’d warned her against trying to trick or coerce Amanda into one, saying only that it was a bad idea.
“Training myself?” Amanda raised an eyebrow.
“You mustn’t get into them because you’re afraid, right?” Sweeney said. “Because of what happened to you. In the car. That night.”
“I’m not afraid of cars,” Amanda snorted. “Cars can’t hurt you.”
“So why don’t you get into them?”
“Because I haven’t since that night.”
Sweeney tried to form an answer. It was like talking to a computer. The logic was at once completely present and completely absent.
“But wouldn’t your life be easier if you could drive?” she said, gesturing to the road before them. “For stuff like this?”
“Are you having a hard time?” Amanda asked.
“No,” Sweeney admitted. The moon blazed above them as they rolled up a sudden, small hill. She glimpsed the fields reaching out on either side of them, dissolving at the bottom of the faraway black mountains. “Not at all.”
Amanda pulled ahead, guiding Sweeney into an almost invisible crack in the wall of rainforest lining the road where two cane fields met. They were suddenly bumping over the struts of an old train line snaking through the bush, a sugar cane delivery system upgraded and abandoned, grown over with flowering vines. Sweeney kept her eyes on her companion, ducked her head when Amanda ducked under low-hanging branches. She was too slow, copped a slap of wet fingers, the smell of golden penda or something like it. They emerged and skidded to a halt in the lights of a roadside bar almost identical to the Barking Frog, this one free of the grip of the forest, its front porch crowded with people.
Snap, the sign above the door read, with a faded painting of a happy crocodile. Sweeney stood by Amanda as the tattooed investigator pulled on her enormous heels. Amazingly, there wasn’t a drip of sweat on her, despite the uncracked Cairns humidity, the bike ride through the dark. Sweeney was conscious of her own body odor. Amanda, somehow, smelled faintly minty up close.
“You’ll love this place,” Amanda said.
“How do you know?” Sweeney asked.
“I know everything,” the woman answered.
* * *
“A young guy,” Dale read the email from the British couple, sat back in his chair and scratched at his throat. He looked at me, but I wasn’t in the mood for talking to him very much. I had escaped into the online conversations of the dead bartenders, Andrew’s lengthy interactions with Keema after work.
ANDREW BELL: I think you were flirting with me that night. In fact, I know it. You might think you’ve got this subtle, refined British way about you, but I caught you a couple of times checking out my arse.
KEEMA DAULE: LOL as if, mate!
ANDREW BELL: It’s been so long since I felt this kind of excitement about someone.
KEEMA DAULE: I’m excited, too. I think we’re great together. I was smiling when I woke up this morning. I’d been having a dream about you.
ANDREW BELL: Oh really?
KEEMA DAULE: Yep!!!
ANDREW BELL: You should tell me all about it. Maybe we could act it out.
I scrolled through their flirting, their longing early-morning goodbyes, slightly guilty at the intrusion into their private conversations. It wasn’t all sexual. They were on their way to something meaningful, it seemed. She talked about how her parents’ expectations while she was at school had driven her into a deep depression only alcohol seemed to relieve, how she’d reached rock bottom when a friend dragged her out of a weekend party and berated her in the street for being a “drunken slag.” Andrew wasn’t the expressive type—couldn’t see fit to confess his vulnerabilities to her the way she did, with her long, flowy messages. He carefully selected ready-made pictures from the internet and sent them her way. Two kids standing on a mountain top holding hands, their hair swept by wind. A pair of dogs running free through a field. You lift me up. You help me see the way ahead. I’d be hopeless without you. They were cheesy, but they were him. He’d been a greeting-card kind of guy.
A strange interaction had caught my eye in the lists of dated message streams. Two weeks before the murders, Andrew had logged into his Facebook account at five in the morning and sent Keema a single message that read “who this?” It was odd for a couple of reasons, the foremost of course that Andrew clearly knew who Keema was, had been flirting with her intensely via chat since she began working at the bar. But I was struck by the lack of a capital letter for “who” and the missing “is” between the two words. All of Andrew’s dialogue prior to this single late-night message had been perfectly grammatically correct, perhaps an attempt to impress the British girl. A 5 a.m. interaction was also out of character for the two young people. Their usual pattern was to chat before and after work, at seven in the evening as they prepared to meet and briefly at 3 a.m. when they finished up, saying goodnight, exchanging smiley faces and hearts, making promises.
Had the “who this?” message come from someone other than Andrew? And why had they asked who Keema was when it was clear from the previous messages what she meant to Andrew? Was it possible that Stephanie had taken Andrew’s phone in the early hours and sent a message, trying to chat to Keema? I was viewing the messages through Andrew’s Facebook profile. The messages were plain to see. But were Andrew’s messages to Keema deleted or hidden on his mobile phone, where the “who this?” author accessed them?
Keema hadn’t answered the “who this?” message. She might have been asleep, and Andrew might have explained away the question when he saw her in person. I raked a hand through my hair, tried to stave off the sinking feeling I had about Stephanie and her knowledge of Andrew’s affair. She’d told Amanda that she had no idea he’d been courting the pretty British girl before his death. I’d seen shock and confusion still lingering in her eyes as she stood at the roadside outside the bar with the boy’s heartbroken father.
Was that all an act? Had she known? Was she shocked and confused not by the affair, but by what she had done to the young lovers?
“‘A young guy,’ I said,” Dale repeated, slapping the table beside my laptop.
“What?” I slurred. My whiskey glass was empty.
“Look, here.” He didn’t show me the laptop, just pointed. “The description of the guy who adopted the dog from the British couple. Young man,
maybe twenty-five. Neatly dressed, brown hair. Polite.”
“Yeah, that’s the one,” I said. “So if you look back in my email, you’ll see a message just now from a woman named Francine Robertson. There’s a list there of convicted sex offenders who lived in the area of Claire’s attack. See who’s in the age range and we’ll have a look at the mug shots, see if they have Ford Falcons registered under their name.”
“How can he be twenty-five?” Dale threw up his hands.
“Huh?”
“These people are telling me the guy who raped my daughter is twenty-five years old.”
“I guess…” I went to the counter, poured more Turkey. “I guess it’s kind of amazing that someone so young could do so much damage to so many people’s lives.”
“I can’t…” Dale gripped his neck, seemed flushed suddenly, out of breath. “I can’t understand it. Why do that? You’re twenty-five years old and you grab some kid off the side of the road and you—”
“You seem particularly shocked by the single fact of his age.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I was housed with a bunch of pedophiles at Silverwater.” I stared at the lights reflecting in my drink. “They were of all ages, colors, shapes, and sizes.”
He said nothing.
“Mate,” I said. “Look. You can’t be getting stuck up on the details here. You’re getting all emotionally fucking tangled up. You can’t do that. You’ve got to put that aside and push on. You can cry about it later, when you’ve caught the guy.”
He looked at me. I finished the bourbon, poured another. He gulped his, winced.
“Have you checked on Ford Falcon utes in the area?” I asked.
“No.”
“Go back to that. Finish that, then move on to the next thing.”
“You’re trying to teach me how to be a cop?” he slurred.
“You’re trying to be a cop!” I shrugged. “I’m not trying to teach you anything! Maybe how to get out of my house? I’ll teach you that. You wanna learn that? Here. It’s that way.” I pointed down the hall toward the front door.