by Candice Fox
The three of us stood awkwardly together and looked at the media across the street, none having really determined where we stood with each other. The creaking leather of their boots and the coppery smell of their guns and equipment made me feel good, and for a moment I shut my eyes and tried to imagine I was back in Sydney in police headquarters, listening to young street cops clomp by my desk in their huge, heavy boots.
‘What’s with the silent witness?’ Sweeney said. Taylor slapped her on the arm, a reprimand. They’d obviously agreed not to get into my case with me, should I make an appearance that night. Maybe they’d been told specifically not to.
‘Fuller? He saw me at the petrol station. But they didn’t let him make a statement.’
‘Why?’
‘He was a drunk,’ I said. ‘A homeless drunk. Mental health issues. We were going to fight for his credibility as a witness but they ruled no billing before we could.’
Sweeney squinted, scratched her neck uncomfortably. For a while, we listened to the frogs croaking in the marshland at the back of the property.
‘Why didn’t anyone see you fishing?’ She persisted. ‘I read that no one saw you on the pier.’
‘I was there.’ I shrugged. ‘I was there for about an hour and a half. Maybe two.’
‘Hey, we’re not here to talk about this.’ Taylor put her hands out, double stop signs for her partner and me. ‘We’re here to make sure no one comes onto the property. Your guilt or innocence is not of any interest to us, Mr Conkaffey.’
‘It’s of interest to me,’ Sweeney said quietly. I gave her a grateful smile and started up the porch towards the house. There were five burst water balloons on the porch near the boarded-up windows. I smelled piss. That was a new one. I stood wondering about the mechanics of getting urine into tiny water balloons, the perils of transporting them to their target without them exploding and soaking everything with the fetid smell.
‘Detectives Damford and Hench,’ Taylor said suddenly, stopping me at the door. ‘Do you know those guys?’
I felt my fingers lock onto the doorknob, the keys painful in my other hand.
‘Know them?’
‘Yeah. Like, have you had dealings with them in the past? I know they’ve given you a hard time since you moved here, but was there something before that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve only come into contact since I arrived. Why do you ask?’
Taylor shrugged. Both cops turned back towards the road, hands on their belts.
‘Really.’ I let the door handle go. ‘Please, tell me. Why do you ask that?’
The two officers ignored me. I walked inside, a new sense of trouble stirring in my veins.
The night was full of voices. I lay on my side on the bed and listened to the rise and fall of the officers’ words as journalists and locals tested the boundaries of my property. Sometimes red and blue lights flashed against the windows and ceiling. I fancied I could smell the piss on the porch even from the back bedroom, but I seemed to get used to it after a while. At all hours, there were gawkers rolling past the property, stopping to look, chatting to protesters who stood out the front.
Officer Taylor’s question bothered me. It was likely she and her partner had been brought in from another jurisdiction to cover my house because Damford and Hench were unwilling to do it, or were too consumed with their other duties in Crimson Lake. Maybe Taylor had wondered why the two men hadn’t been assigned to me. How much other crime could there be in such a tiny town?
The voices continued in the dark.
‘Move along. Move along, sir.’
‘Is he in there?’
‘Get off the fence, ma’am.’
‘We don’t want that guy in our town.’
‘Move that car off the grass. This is private property. Return to your vehicle and go home.’
‘She was thir-teen! How do you guys sleep at night?’
‘You’re here protecting a fucking rapist pig. You should be out there chasing them down, not watching over them as they sleep.’
‘Return to your vehicle, sir, and go home.’
Revving engines. At midnight I thought about making the two officers coffee, but when I peered through the crack in the window boards it was two new officers, a man and a woman, and I didn’t know if they’d be as gentle with me as the previous ones. I was about to go out and cuddle the geese, then I remembered they weren’t there.
I was drifting back to sleep in the cool blue hours of the early morning when I was awakened by a sick feeling in my stomach and the strange sense that I’d heard a sharp noise, a metallic scraping. My thoughts turned to the back of the property. There wasn’t anyone protecting the back, and although any intruders would have to walk along fifty or sixty metres of unprotected, croc-infested land to get to my gate, I thought it wasn’t that much of a stretch for someone who was willing to come all the way out to my property to confront the police.
I grabbed a torch, crept to the back porch and pushed the door open quietly, holding my breath. Even the frogs were quiet. In the bushes, the low ticking of crickets and grasshoppers, and off in the distance that terrible sound – the cough-like barking of crocs calling to each other across the black water. I was listening to things so far away that when the cough sounded from near the car it jolted my whole body. I’d moved the vehicle around the back of the property at the request of the first set of protective officers.
‘Hey!’ I clicked the torch and blasted it into the dark. ‘Hey!’
Two figures rose from where they’d been crouching at the front wheel. I clutched at the back of my shorts.
‘I’ve got a gun.’
I didn’t. But I made a note to myself that if this happened again, it might be a good idea to be armed with more than just a torch. As I came around the side of the car, my light beam picked up two pale, youthful faces, one of them half-hidden beneath a black woollen beanie. Harrison shoved something into his pocket.
I gave a little bitter laugh. Harrison and his girlfriend Zoe stepped back, blinking in the light.
‘We were going to slash your tyres,’ the boy said. The admission came quickly, seemed to tumble out of his mouth. It was a weird thing to say. I put it down to shock.
‘I can see that. Is this about your dad, or is it about the news?’ I asked Harrison.
‘It’s about you being a monster,’ the girl sneered. This was the first time I was getting a close-up look at Zoe Miller. Under her pale foundation, I could see she was hiding a good spattering of dark brown freckles over her nose and pierced cheeks. Freckles weren’t very goth. She had all the confidence Harrison usually had, the cocky malice he carried around, which seemed to have fled completely in the torchlight. ‘We found out what you did, you sick fuck.’
‘And I found out who you are, Zoe Miller,’ I said. I drew a breath to continue, to ask her what her parents thought about her throwing firecrackers at people’s houses in the middle of the night, driving around with boys in the early morning hours. But the look on the two kids’ faces now was enough. They glanced at each other, and now both were genuinely scared.
I knew her name. Why was that so terrifying?
‘We’re going,’ Harrison grabbed her arm. ‘Zoe, go. Go.’
‘No way,’ I said, sidestepping to block their path. ‘You’re giving me the knife. Hand it over. You’re not leaving here with a weapon in your possession.’
The two teenagers stared at me. I took a step forward, backing them against the fence.
‘The knife.’ I gestured to Harrison’s pocket where I’d seen him stash the weapon. ‘Hand it over.’
‘No.’
‘Hand it over.’
‘Fuck you!’
I dropped the torch, reached out and grabbed the kid by the shoulder and hood of his thin jacket, my big hand gathering up so much fabric in one go that his shirt lifted over his belly, pulled up into his armpits. I dug into his pocket and grabbed the rubber handle of the knife.
‘Get off
me! Get the fuck off me, man!’
The teens lunged at me. I was shoved back into the verandah rail. They fled towards the back of the property. I heard the jangle of the diamond wire just as the two officers from out the front came racing down the side of the house, alerted to the commotion.
I picked up the torch and shone it on the tool in my hands. It wasn’t a knife.
Ormund Smitt lived with his mother in a wide, low house on the suburban outskirts of Cairns, the grass on the extensive property close-cropped to stop snakes traversing the lawn from the little clusters of palm trees between properties. I kind of loved Ormund’s shameless cliché ‘gamer’ lifestyle, the angry young man who remained pale and wan from sitting for long hours in the basement of his house when everyone else in Cairns was sun-scorched just from checking the mailbox. Young defiance seemed to be a regimented thing, the embittered scowl like a mask, the skilful touch-typing from years in chat rooms and forums a prerequisite for membership. Ormund Smitt’s pale, lank hair and Harrison Scully’s inexplic able beanie were part of a uniform that had a distinct message: an unapologetic ‘fuck you’ to everyone.
They knew themselves. Perhaps that was what I admired about people like Ormund Smitt. I’d known myself as a cop. I had a uniform. A skill set. A message. Who the hell was I now?
I sat in the car halfway down the block from Smitt’s house and watched Amanda hiding in the shade of the palms by the side of the road, her bike leaning against a tree. She was straight-backed, sitting in the lotus position, her eyes closed and her chin against her chest. Already, I supposed, I’d taken on some of the behaviours I needed for membership in the pariah clan. I wasn’t covered in tattoos, but I’d altered my appearance – the thick, dark beard was still a shock to me in the bathroom mirror each morning. I’d surrounded myself, albeit accidentally, with a brood of helpless animals – instantly becoming the commander of a group of lives simultaneously worse off than, and accepting of, me. While Amanda had her twitches and moods, I didn’t sleep, hardly ate, and was deeply paranoid.
As I was watching Amanda in the dappled sunlight, appreciating our strange kinship, she suddenly snapped out of her meditative state and crawled to the window of the car, kneeling on the grass.
‘I’m over this,’ she said. ‘Let’s spook this kook.’
She took a phone I hadn’t seen before out of her back pocket, an older-style flip phone which snapped open with a satisfying crack. She began typing, her tongue wedged between her front teeth, and when she was finished she looked up with a satisfied smile.
‘What did you do?’
She looked at the phone. ‘I got Ormund’s number from one of my contacts at Telstra. I just texted him: We know you’re talking to police and investigators about Jake Scully. We’d like you to understand that this is not a good idea.’
‘I like it.’ I made an appreciative face, glanced contemplatively into the distance. ‘It’s authoritative, stern, yet vague. What are you hoping for, exactly?’
‘I’m hoping he shits his pants thinking it’s the Illuminati, the corrupt government shadow masters who’ve driven Jake underground for revealing the secrets of the apocalypse.’ She watched her phone. ‘Maybe I should have encrypted it.’
We waited, Amanda twitching gently. She took a tissue out of her pocket eventually and bit off a corner, munched the fragment of paper with her canine teeth. When the phone beeped she gave a sharp laugh, rocking backwards onto her heels.
‘Who is this?’ she read, launching forward to reply.
‘Just back away, Smitt,’ she read out as she typed.
‘You’re going to give this kid nightmares,’ I said.
There was silence from Ormund. An hour passed. Amanda stared expectantly at the house. I wasn’t sure exactly what she hoped to see or hear, whether she expected Ormund’s terror at her prank to inspire any physical action. But she had been right about Sam and Ray, and she’d proved herself far more proficient in internet-based investigation than me. I was willing to sit by the side of the road with her for a few hours and hope for something. Part of me knew this willingness was made of things like fear of the men and women outside my house, and dread of the dark hours I would have to spend there that night.
When my phone beeped, Amanda jolted with excitement, only to flop on the grass morosely when she realised the message was mine. It was from Kelly.
60 Minutes called again.
I found myself actually gripping at my chest, the sharp pains in the muscles around my heart fluttering at the sight of her name on the screen. She hadn’t answered any attempt at communication from me since I left Sydney. The screen above her text was crowded with messages from me, most of them late-night and long.
Kelly had given a 60 Minutes interview in the dreadful last days of my trial, ignoring Sean’s pleas with her about jeopardising my case. The interview was legally approved on the basis that Kelly herself wouldn’t comment on the trial proceedings at all, but would answer questions on what sort of father and husband I’d been and what our home life had been like. But the program had been titled Married to Evil, and it was edited to catch her at her most vulnerable – when she didn’t think she was being filmed, staring off across an empty highway near our home, sighing while she rocked our crying child. Wife abandoned. Wife confused. Wife betrayed.
I don’t think the interview did anything bad for my image. I think at that time my image was as bad as it could possibly be, and the idea that what I’d done to Claire Bingley had also left my wife in the lurch wasn’t worth the hype.
Still, my fingers were shaking as I texted back.
Are you going to talk?
There was a pause, and then she replied.
I don’t know. I thought it had all gone quiet. But that video has stirred it all up again. People are always asking me if I knew. This might be a good chance to say I didn’t.
I’d seen an article on a crime blog in the early days after my release when I was still furiously googling my name every night to see what new horrors had been added to my personal history online. The headline had been Protecting a Predator?. The author wondered how any wife could not know her husband was a child sexual predator, and had used our marriage as its case study. It was pure trash and speculation, containing plenty of scary black-and-white shots of me being led into court. But it was perfectly timed, going viral right alongside news of my no-billing. People wondered, had she known?
When I didn’t reply, she texted again.
If you could stay out of the press for a while, that’d be great.
Kelly’s texts got the fire into me, a painful restless stirring my mother used to call ‘ants in the pants’. I had the unconscious inkling that if I just kept moving, somehow I’d stay one step ahead of what was troubling me. I left Amanda outside Ormund Smitt’s house, sitting in the shade peeling a twig down to strands. I told her I’d bring back lunch, but not where I was going or why I was going alone. She didn’t ask. Probably knew how I felt.
Here was the problem. Violent paedophiles were not like me. They didn’t look like me, and they didn’t act like me. And that made me even more frightening to the public than the ones who fit the bill perfectly.
I defied all the societal assumptions about the paedophile. The violent paedophile does what he does for a number of reasons, according to Joe Average. He’s old and broken, for starters. The stock-character paedophile is an elderly man whose wife has died or divorced him or gone off to residential care, leaving him alone in a small shadowy house adorned with all the trust symbols kids associate with their grand parents – the rosebushes out front, the glass jars of old-fashioned candies in the kitchen, the friendly dog he walks daily. The old man was probably stained with his unsavoury tastes six decades ago, serving as an altar boy at some nameless suburban church, pouring holy water in some deathly silent back room under the predatory gaze of a withered priest. Since then, he’s kept this trauma secret, and his dark desires have been sated by his wife. Suddenly she’s gone,
and the little band of neighbourhood kiddies that used to trail around behind her still come to visit.
Aside from his elderly, secretive and trauma-based aspects, the stock-character paedophile has plenty of poster boys who have added to his warning-sign list. Maybe he’s the greasy, hunched Dennis Ferguson type who horrifies the public with his angry defiance, licking his lips, twitching, batting angrily at the cameras outside the halfway house where he hunkers down. Maybe he’s the crazy-eyed Jimmy Savile type, chugging on huge phallic cigars and grinning with long teeth from behind the lenses of rose-tinted glasses, untouchable, rich, spidery in his movements.
He’s not me, that’s for sure. The picture I provided for the public was not any of those things. I had a nice upbringing in the Western suburbs of Sydney. I was never sexually or physically abused. The Ted Conkaffey who graced the front pages of the newspapers was tall, powerfully built, late thirties, and leaning towards handsome. I was gainfully employed, married, with a baby daughter. I’d passed psych evaluations to qualify as a police officer, so no secret underlying neurological misfire explained what I had apparently done. I didn’t have especially more or less to do with small children. I had one of my own, of course, but aside from spending time with Lillian I didn’t hang around parks or playgrounds looking at or talking to small children, and I had never had cause to invite any into my home, either while my wife was there or when she wasn’t. I hadn’t sought employment that would give me access to children. I hadn’t tried to charm my way into positions in which I got them alone in quiet rooms, caring for, entertaining, teaching or counselling them.
I bunked the paedophile trend in every possible way, and that frightened people. The Australian public had convinced themselves that they knew what child sexual predators looked and sounded and smelled like. They thought they had a handle on things. And then along comes Ted Conkaffey. A wholly new, and more sophisticated, breed of monster.
Who could possibly have seen through such an innovative disguise?