by Candice Fox
‘Oh fuck!’ one of the teens yelled. I bashed the bonnet with my hands as the vehicle flew by, but the dust it kicked up as it roared into the night blinded me, so I couldn’t run after it. I stood coughing in the dark, the sulphur smell of the fire-crackers on my tongue.
I congratulated myself on my sleuthing skills as I sat in my car on a stretch of dirt on the east side of Crimson Lake, watching Harrison Scully and another tall, lanky boy wander into view at the exact moment I’d predicted. I’d made a few broad assumptions to find Harrison here in this moment. First, I’d assumed that, rather than attending the nearest state high school at Smithfield, up north, Jake’s heterosexual Christian charade probably required that the kid be enrolled at either St Agnes School or the Crimson Lake Christian College, both located south on highway 91. I’d assumed Harrison would catch the bus rather than get his girlfriend to drive him, being so wrapped up in his own angry masculinity that such a gesture would have been refused outright. I’d assumed that, rather than eating breakfast at home and risking having to engage in conversation with his mother, Harrison was the kind of kid who’d grab an Ice Break and a bag of chips on the walk to the bus stop, detouring through the town with a friend rather than going to school directly. And now here he was, walking around the corner of the Crimson Lake Post office, a beaten-up denim bag slung over his shoulder and iced coffee in hand. Genius.
‘Harry,’ I said as I got out of the car. The boy turned and looked at me, almost unrecognising, before telling his friend to go ahead. No sign of the gentle Harrison Scully again. This guy was all aggression. I walked up and stood in the wet grass, and the angular young man squinted at me from beneath his beanie.
‘Harry?’ he sneered.
‘Sorry. Harrison then.’
‘What do you want now?’ He started walking.
‘I actually wanted to know if you were with your girlfriend last night,’ I said.
‘What girlfriend?’
‘The girl with the shaggy hair. Pink pigtails. You know the one.’
‘Dude, what the fuck?’ he sighed. ‘Jesus, why are you so obsessed with me?’
I laughed. ‘I’m not obsessed with you. I’m trying to get a message to your girlfriend. And maybe to you. She’s been driving by and chucking shit at my house with a bunch of goons. It’s getting really boring.’
Harrison stopped and pulled a deeply sceptical face. I stopped with him.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Why would they be chucking shit at your house?’
I chewed my lips. Maybe this had been a bad idea. My stomach started to sink.
‘Her older brother was talking about this paedophile guy who lives down by the lake,’ Harrison said. ‘He heard the guy moved to town from Sydney to try to hide from the police. I know they were talking about going and scaring the dude. But they said he was, like, an old man or something.’
I rubbed my face, looked away.
‘You’re not –’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I might have the wrong crew of goons.’
‘That’s funny.’ Harrison cracked a rare grin. ‘People chucking shit at your house. Like is it literally shit, or –?’
‘No. Firecrackers. Paint.’
‘That’s hilarious.’
‘Yeah. Hilarious.’
‘What other people do in their own time isn’t any of my business,’ the boy said. ‘So you can fuck off with your messages for her. I suggest you stay away from her altogether.’
‘You suggest that, do you?’
‘Hell yes,’ he said and looked me up and down, mostly up. ‘Don’t be a fool, bro.’
‘I’ll try not to be,’ I said. ‘What’s your girlfriend’s name?’
Harrison twitched, just once, with tension. I suppose he might have thought I really would stick to my job, stay away from him and the girl. But all the bravado in front of his lanky friend, who was watching closely from afar, was completely lost on me. It was no longer a joke. I really was getting too deep into his secret little world.
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ he said. ‘I don’t know her name.’
The boy walked off, his head down and shoulders up. When he got to his friend, the other boy looked back at me with concern, like he knew I’d just given Harrison a good spooking.
Amanda rode her yellow bike down the wide stone stairs of Cairns train station, pulling it alongside my car and almost causing a homeless man with a shopping trolley full of bags to lose his load in order to avoid a collision. Her smile was spread wide, so I knew we were at another peak in the rollercoaster of her emotions.
‘Of all the places we could go to pursue a killer, a bookstore is probably one of the best.’ She grinned. ‘Right?’
‘There are worse places,’ I yawned.
We took the backstreets north through the city, pausing in our conversations to cross major roads, Amanda zipping between the cars as a colourful blur while I waited for traffic lights. She was very good on the bike. Bored waiting for me, she did wheelies and jumps in alleyways, impressing the men lying there on newspapers, stained with sweat and sun-bronzed in every shade of brown.
Our plan was to hit Cairns Books and talk to any of the staff who might have seen or known the attacker who attended Jake’s book signing. I’d gone through the fan letters again, discarding everything written by women, trying to find the rage and restlessness I’d seen in the man in the CCTV footage in the words on the pages. For the most part, what anger there was in the fan letters was of a spiritually righteous type. They were trying to teach Jake where he’d gone wrong by messing with the scriptures, trying to show him the ‘light’. It was a spitting-from-the-pulpit anger. Not the punching-women-in-the-street kind.
Amanda put a hand on the side of the car as I caught up to her, letting the vehicle’s momentum pull her along. I put an elbow on the windowsill.
‘The victim of the street assault,’ I said. ‘You think the fan hit her because she didn’t know who Jake was?’
‘First she asks the guy what the event is,’ Amanda says. ‘He’s happy to answer that. It’s only when she asks him who Jake Scully is that she gets clocked.’
‘Why would this superfan hurt Jake if he loved him so much?’ I mused. ‘I mean, let’s play it out. The guy loves Jake so madly he’s sent into a rage by anyone who doesn’t know who he is. Jake becomes a kind of obsession. He makes contact with Jake somehow and lures him out one night so that he can confront him. Things go wrong. Jake ends up as croc food.’
‘How does he lure him out?’ Amanda frowned.
‘Before that – how does he make contact? I’m not seeing him in the fan letters. I’m not seeing him in the phone records. Does he know him?’ I asked. Amanda was silent, weaving the bike around clumps of grass that had risen up between the cracks in the alley floor, the humidity bringing the insati able wild to the concrete sprawl.
‘I did think the hoodie was weird,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s Cairns. Who wears a hoodie? You’d only bear that kind of heat because you’re afraid you’re going to be recognised.’
‘By Jake?’
‘Maybe. What about Cary?’ Amanda glanced at me. ‘What about one of the bookstore staff? Jake’s publisher from Sydney was there. Maybe the fan was some kind of aspiring author. Those wannabe writer types are all fucking crazy.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘There was one in my dorm for a while at Brisbane Women’s. Frieda, think her name was. Or Freddie? Some publisher had taken an interest in one of her early pieces, and the girl got the idea that she was just sort of waiting for the woman at the publishing house to say yes to one of her manuscripts. You know what young people are like. She lets her imagination run away with her and she starts telling people she’s practically under contract. Then she’s got a verbal contract. Then it’s a signed contract. For years, this chick’s been writing, starting one novel after another after another. She sends the woman the first thirty thousand words of a book and the woman says, “Oh t
hat’s great, honey. That’s great. Not publishing quality, but you’re getting there.”’
‘How frustrating,’ I said.
‘Frieda sucks it up, tells her friends and family it was a misunderstanding – the publisher’s accepted her for a mentorship, not actual publication. Still bullshit, but it saves face, right? And it maintains the fantasy. She feels like she’s getting closer and closer all the time. After a couple of years, Frieda’s, like, seven or eight manuscripts in with this woman. They’ve been in communication since Frieda left high school. And then the woman leaves the publishing company. Snap, just like that, she decides to be a stay-at-home mum instead.’
‘Oh no,’ I said.
‘Yeah. She passes Frieda on to another guy at the publishing house, but the first manuscript the guy gets? He says it’s shit. “Naive hack-job with no real plot.” Frieda used to go around the dorm mumbling that to herself. Naive hack-job with no real plot. Naive hack-job with no real plot.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Make matters worse,’ – Amanda twitched – ‘Frieda’s still obsessed with the old publisher. Starts following her new blog about parenting. Ex-publisher turned yummy mummy is writing about one of her kids, how she encourages the kid even when he’s failing at something terribly. She says she used to do it when she worked in publishing. That sometimes people’s work was so bad, there was no point in trying to teach them anything. She just tried to make them feel good. That’s great, honey. That’s great. Keep trying!’
‘Frieda didn’t take it well?’
‘Not at all.’
‘So what happened?’ I asked.
‘Frieda went round to the yummy mummy’s house and did a hack job,’ Amanda said. ‘Lost the plot.’
‘Were the kids all right?’ I asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Jesus.’ I leant back in the car, looked at the road ahead of me. ‘Over books.’
‘Books are something else, I think,’ Amanda said. ‘They’re, like, your guts. You scoop out your own guts and you give them to someone on a plate and they turn their nose up. And then there you are. Hollow. Gutless. At least, that’s how I imagine it to be. I’ve never written anything.’
‘You’re very visual,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should write something.’
‘Ode to Ted!’ She raised a finger in the air. ‘There once was a man from Sydney …’
‘I think that’s a limerick.’
‘Whose lips! Were as red! As a kidney!’
‘I think you’re getting worse,’ I sighed. ‘Is it possible you’re actually getting worse?’
A car pulled in to the alleyway ahead of us, turning off the main road awkwardly between two parked cars. I slammed on the brakes, though there was plenty of distance between us, wondering if it was me who was going down the one-way street the wrong way. Before I could wonder aloud, Amanda had walked her bike back to my window and stood looking ahead, her lips pursed.
‘That’s Damford and Hench,’ she said, glancing behind her at the mouth of the alley. ‘Reverse back.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I can’t. Wha–… How do you know it’s them?’
The car rolling towards us was a white Jeep. But as I looked closely, I could see the outline of the two cops’ uniforms as the windscreen fell into shadow.
‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘There’s time,’ Amanda said.
‘No.’ I put the car into park and got out. ‘You go to the bookstore. I’ll meet you there. I’m not spending my life running from these fucks.’
I don’t know what got a hold of me, but it was something totally beyond logic. The sound of Amanda’s bike ticking away towards the road behind us snapped me out of that momentary violent fantasy, and I stood fully awake and afraid by the open car as the Jeep stopped a metre or so away. I glanced into the car to try to see if I had any weapons to my name, but there was nothing there – an empty cardboard box that had held some of my things when I moved, and some papers scattered about.
I’d known cops during my time in the force who would hound criminals like this. The first few appearances look like chance meetings, but after a time, the cops I knew would begin to pop up in the perp’s life at places and times they couldn’t possibly have known about. Finding me in Cairns, hunting me down in a non-police vehicle was a move meant to show me that I was on their minds. That whenever we met, it was planned, and there was nowhere I could go that they wouldn’t find me.
Try sleeping at night when you know that. When you know that they’re always over your shoulder somewhere. Watching.
Because I’d begun to think of them as ‘piggies’ from the moment we’d met, it was hard not to apply animal characteristics to their movements, to see as absurd the way they waddled unevenly, like they were accustomed to all fours. Lou Damford, with his deep acne scars, walked towards me with the familiarity of a friend.
‘Empty your pockets and put your hands on the roof of the car.’
‘No,’ I said.
His partner Steven laughed. ‘Don’t be a stupid fuck,’ he said.
‘Is that an undercover police vehicle?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of their car. ‘Does it have a dash camera?’
‘No,’ Damford said, smiling. ‘It doesn’t.’
‘Then you’re not on police business.’
Damford flicked out his baton, the one I’d copped in the knee a few days earlier. I felt the muscles in my legs tighten, my fingers tuck into fists.
‘You’re going to submit to a search, or you’re going to get hurt.’
‘I think I’m going to get hurt anyway,’ I said.
Damford swung the baton at me, missed as I stepped back towards my car. I put my hands up, frightened by the weight he’d put behind the swing.
‘I’m complying,’ I said. I put my hands on the car. ‘I’m complying.’
Hench popped open the front passenger door and started rifling through the contents of the car, grabbing papers and glancing over them before he threw them into the alleyway. Damford put his baton away and started frisking me, his hard, flat hands slapping at my shoulder blades.
‘What the fuck do you guys want? Huh?’ I said. ‘What do you actually want from me?’
‘We want what all real cops want,’ Hench said, patting down my sides. ‘We want safe streets, and happy women and children.’
‘Real cops?’ I said. ‘So you’re upset with who I am, but extra insulted that I used to be one of you.’
‘Murder in the Top End,’ Damford said, lifting the book from the glove box and showing his partner over the roof of the car. The two exchanged a meaningful look, as though finding the book only confirmed something they’d suspected all along. What it was, I didn’t know. The two knew I’d been working with Amanda. They’d seen her in my company. Twice.
‘What’s your problem with Amanda?’
‘What do you think, arsehole? She’s a fucking butcher.’
‘You knew she was a killer before I turned up,’ I said. ‘What’s your problem with her and me?’
‘Shut the fuck up.’ Hench jabbed me in the back, right in the kidneys.
‘Just search the car and fuck off then,’ I said.
‘See, the thing about your crime, Ted, is that your re-offence stats are out of this world,’ Hench murmured, working his way up my legs. ‘Untreated child rapists with a propensity towards violence, like you, have a sixty per cent recidivism rate.’
‘I had no idea you were such a scholar,’ I said.
‘Means you’re more likely to do it again than not,’ he said, his hands at my hips. ‘You have sexual stimulus in your life, the chances are even higher. Now, if we were to find you with material sexually stimulating for a man with your tastes …’
‘What are these, Ted?’ Damford asked from across the vehicle, holding up a copy of Rise, Jake Scully’s third book, with the teenage girl on the cover. He tapped the book. ‘How old’s this girl?’
‘I notice that Amanda Pharrell has an interesting s
ort of body type for a full-grown woman,’ Hench said, his hands still lingering at my hips. ‘She’s particularly … underdeveloped. Wouldn’t you say, Ted?’
I eased air through my teeth.
‘She’s got no tits, is what I’m saying.’ Hench slid his hands around my hips and gathered a handful of my crotch. He squeezed, his breath in my ear. ‘Does she get you hard, Ted?’
I tried to shift sideways, and Hench’s hands rose swiftly, tucked under my arms and pulled me back. I lost balance, turned just in time to cop his knee in my chin. My teeth sank into my bottom lip. I staggered, going down on one knee, trying to squirm away from him.
‘There’s no fucking dash cam,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing stopping me from fighting back.’
‘You go ahead and try.’ Hench smiled as his partner rounded the car behind me.
I must have been unconscious for less than an hour, because it wasn’t Amanda who found me. A waitress from a restaurant further up the alley had noticed me while she was emptying the bins, noticed my good pair of shoes sticking out from behind my car. I woke to the sensation of her pressing a tea towel to my face and calling back to her colleagues.
‘Get an ambulance!’
‘No, don’t.’ I reached into my mouth, touched a gap at the back of my jaw where a tooth had been. ‘Don’t call anyone.’
They’ll recognise you in a hospital. They’ll call the police if the injuries are bad.
How bad was it?
My head was swimming. I clawed my way up the shifting concrete and tried to sit, felt my ribs crunch. Could I drive? Blood rattled in my throat.
‘You need an ambulance, mate. You’re mincemeat.’
I examined my blood-soaked hands. The skin was off all of my knuckles. Had I got some good shots in? I hoped so.
‘Get my phone.’ I waved up the alleyway. ‘It’s … It’s up there somewhere. They threw it. Get it and give it to me. I know who to call.’
I had little memory of Dr Gratteur coming for me, or the ride in her car to Cairns Hospital. My first truly vivid memories were of lying flat looking at the wispy old woman as she sat sewing a gash on my forearm, the curved needle tugging at the flesh as she pulled the wound closed. I thought I was on a bed, but as I watched I noticed my numb fingers lay in a strange trench that ran the length of the table. I shifted my head and felt steel under me.