by Candice Fox
‘Thing belonged to an old farmer near here,’ Bruce said. ‘The old blokes can’t do it. Can’t take the sight of their eyes. So they bring them out to me. I don’t mind doing it.’
He turned the dead dog in his hand so that its profile was facing us. I saw the tumour hanging from the hairless flesh of the dog’s underbelly, a huge growth tucked along the inside of its leg. He tossed the dog into the water. The croc beneath the surface didn’t move. The corpse floated, almost on top of the creature. It was still as a stone.
‘Sometimes it takes ’im a while to taste the blood,’ Bruce said. He watched the croc, the dog floating. ‘They’re dinosaurs, these things.’
A sudden surge, a splash, and the white jaws opened and snapped at the corpse on the surface of the water. The other dogs barked and snarled. There was a flick of a tail, and then the water settled, and all clues to the savagery that lay beneath drained away. The creek was calm.
‘Jake Scully was killed by a crocodile,’ Amanda said.
Bruce tucked his hands into his pockets, a sliver of grey hair falling across his eyes.
‘Yeah? Well, wasn’t me. I take care ’a people’s dogs, and the foxes when I can get ’em. Foxes are nasty things. Scare a coop full of chickens to death if they can’t get through the wire. Just hang around barking till they all up and die. What a cruel thing.’
I looked at the bubbles rising from the water. The dogs watching in silence.
‘Have the police come out here and spoken to you?’
‘They have.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us that?’ I said.
‘Because you didn’t ask.’
‘So you’re already under suspicion.’
‘Son, the last time I wasn’t under suspicion for something it was 1952.’
We fell into silence. The wind whipped the rainforest around us.
‘Back in the old days,’ Bruce said, ‘people said I disappeared a coupla troublesome lads here and there by way of the old Wetlands Garbage Disposal. That might have been true. But not anymore. I’m not as angry as I used to be. It’s not as therapeutic.’
‘So what do you do now when your customers stop paying you?’
‘They don’t.’
‘What?’ I scoffed. ‘Ever?’
‘Because I spent so much time back in the old days getting bad clients in touch with the beauty of nature.’ He smiled, gesturing to the marshland around him, the deadly beasts hiding within it. ‘I don’t need to do that now. That’s how a retirement plan works, my friend. You do the hard work young, so you can sit back and smile when your ball hair starts to fall out.’
He gripped a handful of his crotch and gave it a shake. Amanda laughed hard.
‘What a fucking badass,’ Amanda said as she climbed back into the airboat.
I boarded and watched the dogs receding through the trees, the scruffy creatures having decided that we were on our way. They did not seem disturbed at all that their number was down by one. I wondered if they were clever enough, emotional enough, to contemplate which one of them was next.
‘You say “badass” like it’s a good thing,’ I said.
‘It is.’
‘The man killed a dog in front of us.’
‘It was a coup de grâce,’ she said. ‘You saw how the thing walked. It was in pain.’
‘He should have taken it to a vet and had it put down. Better yet, its owner should have taken it to a vet.’
‘Last time I went to the vet, I was taking Six to have her butt looked at. She had worms. The packet of worming tablets was twelve bucks. The diagnosis, which took three minutes, was eighty.’
I drove the airboat back along the mangroves, trying to penetrate them with my eyes, seeing only darkness. Amanda sat closer to me, quietly using me as a windshield now as the wind picked up, blowing the tops of waves over the tip of the bow.
‘So what do you think?’ I asked. ‘Worth pursuing him? His M.O. is exactly what we’re looking for,’ I said.
‘I don’t think it was him,’ Amanda called over the wind. ‘He’s a man who doesn’t waste time. Practicality is his game. Minimal effort. He didn’t make that dog suffer. The thing didn’t make a sound, Ted. It didn’t even know what happened.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is, that if we’re right about Jake’s books and the darkness that was following him, we can’t be right about Llewellyn, too. Llewellyn wouldn’t follow Jake. He wouldn’t make him feel afraid. I’d be surprised if he’s left that clearing in the last ten years.’
‘Well, I disagree. I like him for it.’ I shrugged. ‘I think there are plenty of indicators pointing right at Bruce. The money. The mode of death. Loan sharks are intimidating by nature. Just because Bruce isn’t the following and haunting type doesn’t mean Jake didn’t feel followed or haunted by some of Bruce’s threats. Maybe we’re reading too much into his books and not enough into the demonstration that man just gave us.’
‘You pursue Bruce further if you want to.’ Amanda waved at me. ‘You can have the afternoon to kick it around. I’m not wasting my time.’
I looked over my shoulder at the approaching rain. There were Aboriginal men waist-deep in the water by the mouth of the creek, fearless, pulling up nets from the muddy bottom. They paused as we passed. The water had turned a dark iron grey, dabbed with white tips as the afternoon storm followed us back down the creek.
I was bad. Sneaky, underhanded. Just plain bad.
I didn’t leave Amanda at the boat ramp to spend that afternoon exploring Llewelyn Bruce and his connection to Jake further. I drove straight home and sat out the front of my paint-splashed house reading Murder in the Top End, so desperate to get back to the story of Amanda’s case that I didn’t even get out of the car before plunging in. I knew I was being a terrible partner, but I couldn’t get the book out of my mind. Sitting above her in the airboat driver’s seat, looking at her gazing up at me with those big doll eyes, her colourful hands gripping the ropes at either side of her, hanging on. She was almost a bright little mermaid girl taking a ride on a fisherman’s boat. The patterns and shapes all over her skin made her unreal somehow. A painted, poison frog.
Was she a monster?
When the sun began to set, I found myself driving to Kissing Point, an overgrown parking lot halfway up a mountain overshadowing Crimson Lake, the slope lush with wet rainforest. I parked in one of the spaces marked with flaking, patchy yellow paint and looked at the mist rolling down into the tiny town, the creek winding through the yellow expanse of cane stretching as far as the mangroves, and then the sea. The book led me like a voice as I walked back towards the narrow road. I crossed the road and walked down the mountain until I found an overgrown side road leading into the dark.
In a small clearing approximately one hundred metres from the main road down the mountain, the popular and beautiful Lauren Freeman, seventeen years old, parked her 1989 Hyundai Sonata with the rear facing the road. In the passenger seat sat Amanda Pharrell, having been picked up by Freeman at the school that afternoon. It is believed that both girls consumed one 275 ml bottle of raspberry-fl avoured Vodka Cruiser pre-mix each. Freeman’s cousin’s bank account would show he had purchased the alcohol the night before on his underage relative’s behalf. Freeman’s autopsy would reveal a blood alcohol level of 0.02 at the time of her death.
In the back of the car lay a shopping bag from Myer, taped at the top, containing a folded woollen blanket. There were various items scattered throughout the car that one might expect to find in a vehicle belonging to a teenage girl – a tube of Rimmel brand mascara, some fast food wrappers, some receipts and an old black jumper.
Amanda admitted in her trial that the girls sat talking in the car for approximately ten minutes. It was not long after both girls exited the car that she began her attack. A light rain had only just begun to fall. Amanda took the knife and plunged it into Lauren’s back in the first of nine stab wounds she then inflicted upon her friend. She then undr
essed, leaving her clothes by …
I stopped reading. She then undressed? I flipped forward to the photos and looked at the pile of clothes the police found in the brush a few metres from the car, Amanda’s jeans and T-shirt, her crop top, panties, socks and shoes.
Had Amanda stabbed Lauren nine times, her clothes would have been soaked in blood. The T-shirt, spread out on a stainless steel lab table in the ‘exclusive photographs’ section of the book, was spotless. The book claimed that the blood was washed from Amanda’s clothes by the rain.
But the clothes were in a pile. Indeed, some blood, if it had fallen on the clothes, would have been washed away. However, the blood in those folds deep within the pile wouldn’t. Surely some droplets would have survived, even if the clothes were drenched with rain. To me, it would only have been possible for Amanda to completely spare her clothes from Lauren’s blood if she took them off before she stabbed the girl.
So what was Lauren doing while Amanda stripped buck naked in front of her, while she remained dressed?
And what of the Myer bag in the back seat? Why was it taped shut?
Where did the knife come from? And where did it go after the murder?
No witnesses at the party on Kissing Point testified as to having seen the murder or hearing Lauren’s screams for help. The music was too loud, and the gathering of sports kids and theatre kids and almost the entire school dance team was having too much of a good time to hear the agony on the wind. When she had discarded her clothes, a naked and shivering Amanda Pharrell stood in the rain until the blood had been washed from her skin, and then climbed into the boot of the parked vehicle, the music from the party drifting by her as she pulled the latch closed and sealed herself in darkness.
There was a blurred-out photograph of a naked teenage Amanda in the boot of the car, snapped at the very second she was discovered, her eyes squinting and a hand up against the morning light. There were no bruises or marks on her that I could see.
I sat down in the grass, let the book fall into my lap, and closed my eyes.
The popular and beautiful Lauren Freeman.
The nine stab wounds Amanda then infl icted upon her friend.
I flipped through the book to a photograph of Lauren Freeman. She was indeed very beautiful. Sun-golden, white-toothed, and with the chiselled cheekbones of a girl whose ancestry was full of beautiful people. There was a shot of her on a cliff top looking at the horizon, her fingers trailing absent-mindedly through the yellow hair of a Labrador standing by her side. Pretty girl on the edge of her wonderful, successful adult life. She would have been a good foot taller than Amanda.
What was this budding beauty queen doing with the socially dysfunctional teenage Amanda Pharrell? If the stories of Amanda cooking mice alive and throwing tantrums in class were true, Lauren Freeman had no business being in a car with her. Amanda couldn’t simultaneously be the scary misfit her school peers represented her as and a member of the in-crowd.
Someone was lying.
I sent an email to the author of Murder in the Top End, Eleanor Chapman, having found her address on her website. I asked her to call me, then drove home to feed the geese. When they were locked safely away in the bathroom for the night I headed out again to try to find a bar. I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of the geese having free rein over the decidedly insecure rear porch while I was gone from the house. They could sleep there while I was inside, but I felt like they were safer from the vigilantes in the bathroom, should anyone want to wander around the back of the property to see what damage they could cause.
They made me think about my baby daughter in Sydney. Were people targeting Kelly because of me? Or had filing for divorce been enough of a gesture to keep the vengeful at bay?
I told myself I could protect the geese, and that was all. I couldn’t start worrying about things I could not change. Kelly hadn’t answered the phone to me in months. I couldn’t call her and ask her if the two of them were safe. Strangely, I found myself hoping she had found herself a man, a new partner or boyfriend who might have come to her in the months after my arrest to try to comfort her. Then I laughed at myself for thinking that way. I’d really given up all hope of Kelly and I ever reconciling. I was already inserting macho human watchdogs into her life.
I got a strange text message on my way into Crimson Lake. It was from Amanda. She’d never texted me before. It read: Batten down the hatches, the rains are ’ere!
I frowned. More of her strangeness. It was indeed beginning to rain heavily, steam rising from the road. I sent back a smiley face to be safe and got out in front of the bar on the corner across from her office. I glanced at the newsagent windows before going into the bar, looking for any signs of myself. There was a little notice by the door, some hand-drawn hearts.
In memory of loyal customer Teresa Miller, sadly missed.
There were more people inside Merky’s than I expected. Groups of Aboriginal men crowded around wooden booths along the walls, some men playing pool. I felt a sudden sparkle of fear in my chest that I might run into Damford and Hench here, but a quick look around told me I was safe. I wandered to the counter and sat on a stool there.
I didn’t even look at the bartender. I was still staring at Amanda’s strange text message. I asked for a beer, and only glanced up when seconds passed in which the man in the corner of my vision didn’t move.
He was a hard-faced, elderly man, his wrinkled fingers damp with beer foam and a polishing cloth hanging on his shoulder. He just stared at me. The next customer along the bar was staring at me too.
‘Just a Carlton, please?’ I repeated, thinking he must have misheard me. Neither man moved. The silence and stillness behind the bar was slowly drawing the attention of other men in the room, the way that trouble will, sounding silently like a dog-whistle throughout the crowded space. In seconds, my face was burning. They knew who I was.
I was close to being sick, getting out of there and back to my car. The nausea swelled up fast. I fumbled with my keys, dropped them, climbed in. I hadn’t been ready to be recognised again.
‘Fucking idiot,’ I seethed at myself. ‘Fucking idiot.’
More and more people in Crimson Lake were going to learn about my presence in their town. I needed to remember that. Something like a violent child-rapist moving into a small town wasn’t going to stay quiet on the grapevine for long. These people lived on gossip.
I found myself driving to Holloways Beach, the tiny tourist resort nearby. The encounter at the bar in Crimson Lake had left me shaken, but a new determination I couldn’t ignore was pressing at me, challenges whispered from some defiant corner of my mind. If you can’t manage to find somewhere that’ll serve you a beer, what makes you think you’ll continue to be able to find places that’ll serve you food? What if people stop serving you petrol, Ted? What if you call an ambulance one night and they don’t come?
This beer was the marker of my very chances of survival. At least, that’s how it felt in the dark of the car on that lonely stretch of cane-lined road. Palm trees began to line the horizon, and I drove into the sleepy town with my jaw clenched tight.
I marched into the first bar and ordered a beer with all the barely contained fury of a boxer about to launch into the first round. The girl behind the counter began pouring it, completely unaware. She even smiled as she gave me my change. I walked, panting, to a booth in the darkest corner and drank greedily, a small victory ruined as Fabiana Grisham slid into the seat across from me.
‘I need you to get away from me,’ I said.
‘Dr Valerie Gratteur certainly likes you,’ she said, taking a coaster from the table between us and sliding it under her glass of wine. ‘She gave me absolutely nothing.’
‘She probably knew she was wasting her time.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Fabiana said. She was looking at me in a more appreciative manner than the way she had that morning at my house. Maybe something had broken in her resolve to persecute me. I did
n’t know or care – as many allies as I needed, I could afford to refuse this one.
‘Have you been following me?’ I asked. ‘I’m prepared to put in a stalking charge, if that’s what it takes.’
‘It’s a small region, Ted. There aren’t that many bars, and it’s beer o’clock.’
A text showed up on my phone. Amanda. You know, cat fur is glitter for lonely people.
Where are you? I replied.
‘In her interviews with police, Claire Bingley told investigators that the man who attacked her was a policeman,’ Fabiana said suddenly, all formalities put aside. ‘Do you have anything you want to say about that, Ted?’
‘I don’t want to talk about my case with you, Fabiana.’
‘Fab, please.’
I eased breath through my teeth and drank more beer. An uneasy silence passed between us, in which she waited for me to launch into my own defence, and I tried to resist doing what she wanted me to do.
‘Why would she say that?’ Fabiana continued. ‘There’s no way she could have known you were a policeman by looking at your mugshot, and you wouldn’t have been in uniform when you abducted her.’
‘Claire said a lot of weird things in those interviews,’ I said, relenting. ‘She didn’t say much that made any sense. If you’d seen the tapes, and not the edited transcripts printed in the media, you’d know that.’
I’d been made to watch the tapes of Claire Bingley, my supposed victim, in the courtroom alongside the jury. I’d seen them already, and hadn’t wanted to see them again. Claire was a shadow of the small girl I’d glimpsed on the side of the road that awful day. The tape was recorded not long after she was released from hospital, so her face was badly bruised. Her eyes flicked and rolled around the room like she was following the path of moths fluttering near the ceiling. The eye-rolling was a post-traumatic stress disorder symptom, the prosecutor told the court. She also had night terrors and trouble eating. She barely looked at the collection of photographs in front of her, I one of the men pictured. When she spoke, she rambled and whispered.