by Candice Fox
‘So you can’t drive, or you won’t drive?’ I asked.
‘I guess I probably could drive. If I tried.’
The bike was an ancient racer she’d kept immaculately clean and oiled, mustard-yellow with salmon-pink wheels. She didn’t wear a helmet. A lion on her elbow glared at me as she rode. The car was an old sedan Sean had presented me with on my second day out of prison, a loaner car to move my stuff from my marital home into the motel I was staying in at the time. Kelly had our family car, the Corolla she had waited six months to be returned to her from Forensics. Sean had never asked for this loaner car back. It had come to me filled inexplicably with newspapers, warped and dried by the sun.
‘You won’t even ride shotgun?’ I glanced at the seemingly harmless empty seat next to me.
‘It’s one of the ground rules. Number five, I think. Rule five: I strive to never drive as long as I’m alive.’
‘This is a ridiculous rule, Amanda. Can I appeal it? It’s going to put a real weight on our operations, you getting everywhere by bike.’
‘There is no appeals process in place at this time. I don’t do cars.’ Amanda shot a glance at me, made a huffing, growling sound, maybe in frustration at the rocks, probably not. She twitched. ‘Not since that night.’
That night was the night Amanda had apparently butchered her young friend, Lauren Freeman, in a car on Kissing Point, just outside Crimson Lake. Amanda and Lauren had been on their way to a party on the mountain and had parked the car down the road, along a dirt path in the thick rainforest. They’d never made it to the party. The police had found Amanda thirteen hours later, helpless, naked, yet suspiciously unscathed, in the cramped boot of the vehicle. Lauren had been curled in the back seat, her back pocked with stab wounds. There were no footprints around the vehicle to indicate another person had come to the spot where the girls had parked. Amanda’s clothes were nearby, saturated by the overnight rain.
I watched her as she rode, tapping the side of the car with my palm to the beat of the radio. I’d done more googling of my new partner that morning, and what I learned was troubling me. Amanda had initially claimed that someone else had murdered her friend while she listened from the safety of the boot. But the lack of explanations for what had happened started quickly piling up.
For her presence in the boot of the car, she had no explanation.
For her nudity and her lack of injuries, she had no explanation.
For the total lack of physical evidence indicating a single other person at the scene of the crime, she had no explanation.
In her initial interrogations, Amanda seemed to test the waters of her own innocence carefully. She’d started by suggesting that she hadn’t committed the crime and didn’t know who did. Then she’d come around to the idea that she did know who it was, but wouldn’t say. She’d made a brief foray into explanations that involved her blacking out or dreaming about the murder, or seeing it through the eyes of someone else. After a few days, she gave all of this up.
The idea that someone else murdered Lauren Freeman didn’t make sense. Why would someone approach two women in a car on an isolated mountaintop, brutally slaughter one and leave the other untouched? But what were they doing up there in the first place, these two? Why did they park two hundred metres or more from the party, away from all the other cars, when there was plenty of room further up the mountain? Why park so deep in the bush, and not on the wide, bare roadside? Who else could have known they were there? Where the hell was the murder weapon? I realised after some time I was trying to decide if I thought she’d done it, if I thought the woman I was looking at was some kind of fiend, the type of person who could snuff out a young life for some sick, maybe sexual, thrill. I tried to shake the line of questioning, but it returned.
The irony of fixing my sceptical gaze on Amanda Pharrell was twofold. First, I had only surface knowledge of the murder, and an entire nation had decided I was guilty with only surface knowledge of my own case. I knew what it was like to be condemned by the readers of newspapers. I didn’t want to do the same to her.
I’d also spent eight months in the company of murderers, child molesters and rapists in the Silverwater Correctional Complex, and none of them had looked like fiends to me. Some of them were cuddly teddy-bear men who cried at night because they missed their mothers. I’d encountered the same thing in my time as a street cop and in the drug squad. There was no ‘killer look’. There was no ‘killer behaviour’. I couldn’t see the truth of the matter in Amanda’s face, and the logical Ted was telling me that. But I found myself still staring at her. At her downcast eyes. Why did she do it?
Could she do it again?
‘How is it that someone with your kind of conviction can secure a private detective’s licence?’ I asked.
‘By applying for one, hon.’
I squinted at her. She bumped over a large rock.
‘There are disqualifying offences,’ she said. ‘Homicide is one of them. But if the offence occurred more than ten years ago, you can still apply, and they consider things on a case-by-case basis.’
‘And they approved yours,’ I snorted. ‘Incredible. Was there a public outcry?’
‘There’s a public outcry every time I do anything. I turned up at the public pool in Smithfield a year after my release, it made the paper. Amanda Pharrell Goes Swimming. I was the bikini-clad butcher.’ She laughed to herself. ‘I like that. I like it when newspapers get colourful like that.’
‘You don’t take all this very seriously, do you?’
‘You can’t, after a while. If you don’t develop a sense of humour about your own situation pretty damn quick you’re going to knock yourself off.’
I thought about the night I found Woman.
‘And then who’ll listen to my rhymes?’ she continued, grave. ‘No one, that’s who.’
‘Your rhymes are true crimes … against humanity,’ I said. She nearly laughed herself off her bike.
‘Seriously, though,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a healthy public outcry as soon as the local papers get wind of your presence.’
‘I look forward to it,’ I lied.
Amanda pulled ahead of the exposed rocks and zipped in front of me without warning, sailing down the hill. I moved to catch up and noticed red and blue lights in my rear-view mirror seconds before the patrol car blipped me.
I wasn’t surprised to find the two pork chops who had ruffled my feathers at the corner store hitching their belts as they lumbered out of the vehicle. I got out and looked for Amanda, but she’d disappeared, probably into the tall, yellow sugar cane. The bigger one, Lou, slid his baton out of the sheath on his hip.
‘No one told you to exit the vehicle, sir,’ he said. I noted their name badges. Hench and Damford. Damford had the misfortune of being covered in acne scars from beneath his slitted eyes right down into the collar of his shirt.
‘There’s no speed limit on this road,’ I said. ‘The vehicle’s in good working order. You’ve got no reason to stop me.’
‘We don’t need a reason,’ Hench said, smiling. ‘Routine inspection.’
‘You want to conduct routine inspections, you’ve got to set up a road block. You can’t stop random –’
‘Hands on the roof!’ Hench jabbed me hard in the ribs with the tip of the baton. Pain ripped up through my chest. I was winded for a second, unable to lift the arm on that side up on top of the car.
‘I’ll have a nice bruise from that,’ I wheezed.
‘You want some more?’
I really didn’t. Their car was parked at an angle, the dash camera looking out over the field towards the highway. Hench took my wallet from my pocket and started taking all the cards out, flipping them into the mud. He turned it and shook the coins out, pocketed the only note, a twenty, while Damford popped open the car boot.
‘What were you doing in town, sir?’
‘Visiting a friend.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘Vicky.’ I wat
ched Damford break the rear-view mirror off its housing on the windshield. ‘At the diner.’
I sighed as he took my phone from my pocket, scrolled through the recently received calls and texts. He sniggered at something.
‘What?’
Hench held up the phone for me to see. There was a picture of Lillian on the screen. My daughter.
‘There’s a baby on here.’
‘There is,’ I said.
‘I know you liked ’em young,’ Hench said, smiling, ‘but not thi–’
I tried to snatch the phone. He anticipated it, landed the baton square on my kneecap. The pain was blinding. My ears rang with it. I gripped the bone and went down. Like all cowards, Hench relented to the terror of being caught for his crime as soon as the steel cracked against the flesh. His bravado was only momentary. He tossed a glance around the field and then motioned for Damford, dropping my phone in the mud.
‘See you round, mate!’
Amanda took long minutes to emerge from the cane fields, and when she did she was still looking after the police car as it rolled away, her head-twitch short and sharp like she was trying to discourage a fly from bothering her face. She made no move to help me up.
‘It’s fine, really,’ I said. ‘Don’t overexert yourself.’
I sat in the driver’s seat and bent and flexed my leg, felt things crunch and grind. I knew it was going to be worse tomorrow.
‘I know those two cops. You’ve got to watch out for them.’
‘Really? You don’t say.’
Amanda rubbed her hands together, making the rings clink.
‘Hench and Damford. Those guys are the power around here. They’re the law.’
I’d never seen Amanda scared before. She rubbed her hands furiously, like they were covered in ants.
‘They’re a bit old for patrol, those guys, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘They must be my age. What are they doing still out on the road?’
‘I think they like it out here. They get around a lot. You see them everywhere. Watching.’
‘How do they feel about you being the local private dick?’ I asked.
‘About the same as they feel about you being the local paedophile,’ she said. ‘Just try to stay out of their way.’
Amanda twitched her way over to the bike and mounted it, still looking around for the patrol car. I wiped the mud off my phone, off the picture of Lillian on the screen. I stopped myself from looking at her eyes.
We took a moment outside the house in South Crimson Lake, Amanda stretching her quads and staring at windows on the third floor, their reflection of the blue mountain range.
Crimson Lake and the houses that bordered it were hideaway hollows for people who wanted to live alone, cane farmers on properties that stretched so far that people were kept at bay by the sheer inconvenience of visiting, and tiny houses like mine buried in outcrops into the wetlands. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I wasn’t the only runaway in town. The land here was incredibly fertile, so most of the houses I drove by had their own personal gardens, allowing their residents to stay in for days at a time with homegrown food before having to brave it out in the company of other people. There would be moonshine stills in back sheds here. Marijuana crops nestled in the undergrowth. These were not streets that rumbled with garbage trucks in the early morning, kids laughing on their way to the bus. You came to Crimson Lake for the quiet. The shadow.
As a tourist destination, it was too far out and too wild, and the locals weren’t welcoming. No one ran tours here, and the rickety wooden docks were populated with unsmiling men with hand-held fishing lines who dangled their hard, blackened feet in the water. More than once in these parts the adventurous tourists have braved Crimson Lake for a summer dip, relenting under the pressure of the humidity, figuring that crocs couldn’t move from lake to lake. But the backwaters here are linked by tiny dark creeks snaking between the eucalypts that wash all manner of slithering things between the water bodies, and all it takes is a brush of something scaly against a bare shin to send the tourists packing with their tales of survival in tow.
Rich people liked the quiet and the solitude of this place. South Crimson Lake distinguished itself from Crimson Lake proper and its skulking population of shut-aways with a noticeable decrease in roadkill left lying on the asphalt to be picked at by the crows. There were paved driveways here, and a posh little cafe on the corner with alfresco dining and sprawling canvas shades. The broken-down houses, porches littered with old beer bottles, fell away. A single row of mansions bordered the national park. Huge yellow-and-red signs warned the public not to feed cassowaries crossing the road from the park to the wetlands at the end of the street, and to beware of the man-sized birds while driving. I sat in the car and fancied I could hear them deep in the jungle behind the towering houses, the yelp of something ancient in there.
Stella and Jake Scully’s house was the pride of the row, a collection of blazing white blocks cut through with tinted glass walls, an infinity pool in front. I looked up and saw a teenage boy loitering at the edge of a second-floor balcony, elbow clutched into his ribs and cigarette hanging from a flopped hand. He appeared, from my vantage point, to be wearing a frayed denim vest and a beanie. I gaped at the beanie. My upper lip was sweating in the morning light.
‘So you’ve not met the lady of the house?’ I asked Amanda.
‘No. It’s all been over the phone until now.’
‘Does she know you’re bringing me in?’
‘No,’ Amanda said. ‘Oh, I mean I called her and told her last night I’m bringing a partner with me today. But not you, specifically, no.’
‘One ex-crim was enough, huh?’
‘If she’s prepared to accept me, she should accept you,’ she mused, turning her watch around and around her wrist like she was trying to unscrew her hand. ‘I’m the sexual sadist and murderer, after all. You’re just some kiddie-fiddler.’
I felt a pain behind my right eye, short and sharp, like I’d been punched.
‘Wow. Okay, can I suggest a ground rule to add to the list?’
‘Suggestions are welcome.’
‘Can we make a rule that you never use that term around me again?’
‘What do you prefer? Rock spider? Bad daddy? Teddo the Peddo?’
‘I prefer no casual referrals to me being a paedophile whatsoever,’ I said, wincing.
‘Right. Got it.’ She clicked her heels and saluted.
‘Just stop referring to my case in every sense.’
‘I’ll try. I mean, I’m typically not good with rules. And I’m dead fascinated with your case. I’m so fascinated, someone should pin me in their hair and wear me to the races.’
I massaged my eyes. My brain was a lead ball rolling around my skull, bashing at the sides.
‘Let’s get this over with.’
I limped out of the car, deciding that if Stella Scully or her son recognised me straight off, I would leave. It was better than trying to defend my involvement this early in the game.
‘So we’ll go with … what?’ Amanda asked as we got to the door.
‘Collins,’ I said.
Stella must have seen us approaching the house on the CCTV cameras perched all over the place like birds. She opened the door and held it for us. Her eyes followed me briefly and then settled on Amanda. I was pleased for Amanda’s colourful appearance, the sun hitting the blue streaks hidden in the black of her hair and her awkward gait towards the door like the approach of some fantastic human insect. I couldn’t hold a candle to her.
‘Glad to finally meet you, Ms Pharrell.’ Stella Scully offered her hand. Amanda stuffed her hands in her jeans and looked away. Stella was wearing a sort of white cotton shift, somewhere between a loose dress and a poncho, tied here and there to hint at her tiny waist and bony, caramel shoulders. Blonde curls and flawless skin dusted with freckles. She had the cheekbones and sculpted nose of an ex-model turned plastic surgery addict. She let Amanda pass her and I took her flaccid hand
in mine, saving the rejected handshake.
‘Ted Collins.’
‘Pleasure.’
The foyer was enormous. Light from the windows on the second floor filtered in across the staircase, criss-crossing at a variety of angles, picking up chrome and marble fixtures. I had the distinct impression that I’d dirty the place somehow before I left, bring some of my clumsy brutishness into it without meaning to, knock something over or cover something with my greasy prints.
We walked through a sitting room, across a kitchen as big as a cruise-ship galley and into a sunroom. I took refuge in the corner of a cane lounge, away from a massive red glass sculpture on a black marble pedestal that dominated the right hand side of the room. Above towering bookshelves, the walls were lined with framed book posters. The cover of the first book of the Last Light Chronicles, Burn, caught my eye. Two teenage silhouettes held hands before a city in flames.
Amanda went to the bookshelves and looked at the volumes there, strummed her finger along their spines.
‘So you’re a new partner in this venture, are you, Mr Collins?’ Stella arranged herself on the armchair adjacent to me, preening her cotton shift.
‘Ted. Yes.’
‘He’s going to be a real hound, Stella. I can tell,’ Amanda said. ‘He’ll sniff out that dead husband of yours before you can say “postmodernism”.’
‘Oh Jesus.’ I shielded my eyes.
‘I’ve found Ms Pharrell to be very direct,’ Stella said. ‘It’s not altogether a bad thing. Most of the time.’
‘I’m sure you realise she’s just speculating that your husband has passed away,’ I said. ‘There’s always a chance.’
‘Well,’ Stella said, ‘if it does turn out that this is some sort of game, he’ll want to wish he had died, I can tell you that much.’
Stella Scully picked up a glass she had hidden from my view on a small table beside her armchair. Like a trained dog, I smelled Wild Turkey. She picked up the change in my expression and raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow, jiggled the glass, made the ice sing.
‘Apple juice, Ted?’