by Candice Fox
‘Put her on the back seat,’ Lou said. ‘We’ll use the light of the car.’
Dynah couldn’t hold her tears in anymore. She went to the edge of the clearing, listened to Amanda’s cries of confusion and protest. The girl was frightened. Dynah had been frightened, her first time. She cried into her hands, and in time felt her sister’s hand on her shoulder.
‘It’s fine, Dy, it’s fine,’ Lauren said. ‘God, it’s not a big deal. They’re just photos.’
‘Why couldn’t they just have pictures of me and you and leave it at that?’
‘You’re too little to understand. The pictures are really important. They’re using the pictures to get very important people to do what they say,’ Lauren soothed. ‘And the more pictures they have, the more they can say, “Well, you’re in big trouble now, Mister. You have to do what we want.”’
‘Who are these people?’ Dynah said. ‘Why do they … How come they don’t …’
‘It’s called blackmail,’ Lauren said carefully.
‘I don’t like it!’
‘It doesn’t have to be forever,’ Lauren whispered. ‘They’re going to use the pictures to get some money. It’s a really good plan. No one gets hurt. They’re really smart, Lou and Steve. You’re too young. You don’t get it. It’s not a big deal. Lou says we might get married one day. You could be the bridesmaid. Would you like to be my bridesmaid?’
Amanda was fighting the two men in the open doorway of the car. All of a sudden the fight seemed to go out of her, and Steve grabbed the girl’s arm, pulled it across her eyes. Amanda’s right knee was shaking. The burst of the camera flash reflected off the dark trees around them.
The men came back to the middle of the clearing, and Lauren joined them. Dynah couldn’t seem to walk properly. All her limbs were stiff with fear. When she joined the group, Steve reached down and touched her ear, and the little girl reeled away from him.
‘Good shots,’ Lou said, putting his arm around Lauren’s shoulder. ‘She’s a skinny minnie. She won’t say anything, will she?’
‘No, she’s the school weirdo.’ Lauren took a packet of cigarettes from Lou’s pocket. ‘She’s a total freak. No one would believe her, even if she did.’
‘You’re not going to say anything either, are you, pretty one?’ Steve said, giving Dynah’s bicep a squeeze. His grip tightened until Dynah’s arm ached, but the ugly smile never left the big man. ‘You wouldn’t tell on us, would you?’
‘Listen, why don’t we go up to the party?’ Lou said. ‘I’ll take you up to the party. Dynah, you come with us. Steve will drive Amanda home.’
‘No.’ Lauren shrugged Lou off. ‘We don’t want to leave her alone.’
‘She won’t be alone. She’ll be with me. She’ll be fine.’ Steve adjusted his belt. ‘I’ll take care of her.’
Dynah grabbed at her older sister’s arm. ‘Don’t leave her alone with him, Lauren.’
‘What? What am I going to do? I wouldn’t hurt her.’
‘Come on, both of you.’ Lou took Dynah’s wrist, slid his arm back around Lauren’s shoulders. He winked at his partner. ‘She’ll be fine! He’s a police officer, aren’t you, Stevie?’
Steve took a pocket knife from a pouch on the back of his belt. He flicked it open in the light of the car with a snap.
‘I just want to show her my new toy.’ Steve flashed the blade in front of Dynah. ‘Pretty, huh?’
‘Come on.’ Lou tugged Dynah, pushed her sister along. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Lauren,’ Dynah begged.
‘Come on, Dynah.’ Lauren smiled uneasily. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Please.’ Dynah looked back at the car through the trees. She saw Steve approaching the car, Amanda’s feet still hanging over the back seat out the open door. ‘Lauren, we can’t leave her.’
Her older sister and her police officer boyfriend walked ahead up the dirt path towards the main road. Dynah followed them, hugging herself tightly, a light rain beginning to fall. The sobs rippled up through her. All she wanted to do was go home.
She stopped walking. Lauren seemed to sense it, and turned around. The sisters’ eyes met in the dark.
‘We can’t,’ Dynah said. She turned and ran back towards the clearing.
‘Dynah!’ Lauren was furious now. ‘Dynah! Fucking leave it!’
Dynah sprinted back along the path. When she got to the car, Steve was lying with his legs out of the open door, his arms on the back seat, Amanda beneath him. Dynah kicked him hard in the leg and pulled at his hips.
‘What the fuck?’
‘Dynah, leave them alone!’ Lauren grabbed at her sister, pushed her away. ‘You’re such a fucking drag! Jesus!’
‘Lou, control these bitches, would you?’ Steve grabbed at his open belt, pushed Dynah hard so that she fell on her backside on the dirt. Lou was there, grabbing at her. ‘Fuck! Get them out of here.’
Dynah wondered, for years after that night, if Amanda’s movements were soundless, or if she was just too frightened for her mind to register the noises that the stabbing surely made in those frantic last seconds of her sister’s life. Though she couldn’t hear, she did see Amanda rise up from the back seat of the car, a black silhouette against the gold interior lights, the knife in her hand. Lauren jolted a couple of times as the knife entered her back. Amanda hammered the knife in quickly, a few manic jabs, but when Lauren fell Dynah could see that Amanda wasn’t really aiming at the girl at all. She was just stabbing at the first thing she came into contact with, the first figure her body recognised. Amanda hadn’t meant to stab Lauren. She’d just taken Steve’s knife from the seat beside her, got up, and started stabbing.
There was a moment of blind terror before the sounds of those around her returned to Dynah’s ears. Steve was howling, gripping his hair, looking at Lauren on the ground lying flat near Dynah’s feet. Lou grabbed Amanda and threw her into the side of the car, knocking the knife from her fingers. He grabbed the bloody tool and looked up at his partner.
‘Go, Steve,’ Lou said. ‘Run! Take Dynah with you. I’ll clean up here.’
I knew I’d found Amanda when I started to see blood in the sand. I followed the trail until it became a long dragging smear, sideways along the waterline and then directly up to the edge of the trees. Amanda had collapsed there on top of a small log, her head and shoulder flopped back over it, eyes staring at the sky. I thought she was dead. The worst of her injuries seemed to be in her legs, long open gashes, one leg of her jeans completely torn off, exposing bloodied flesh. The blood was incredible. It soaked her from neck to waist. I rushed up and gathered her in my arms, folded her and lifted her against my chest.
To my surprise, one cold hand gripped at my chest hairs.
‘You’re shirtless,’ she breathed. Her head lolled against my shoulder. There was blood on her lip.
‘Hang on, Amanda,’ I said. ‘Hang on.’
‘Strip …’ she whispered. Tried to laugh. ‘Stripper.’
I ran towards the pier. There were two police officers there, seeing to Harrison. They saw me and pointed towards the hill. There were no paramedics on the trails. I’d have to run to the ambulance up on the road. My wounded leg was numb. I ran higher and higher through the bush, seeing glimpses of the road in the distance. My feet sank in the soft mulch. I knelt and rested against a tree for a moment, gathered Amanda up tighter against me. There were teeth marks in the arm beneath my fingers, a row of holes in the tattoos where the beast had clamped down on her.
‘I know about Kissing Point,’ I told her. If she was going to die in my arms, she was going to know that I understood what had happened. That I wasn’t going to let Steven Hench and Lou Damford get away with what they had done to Amanda. To Lauren. To Dynah. To all the little girls they’d managed to wrangle in front of their cameras, to snap in their impossibly innocent, naked forms.
I’d stood in my kitchen that day and looked at the six photographs. They’d removed the one of a frightened teenage Amanda from the collecti
on, thinking I’d probably recognise the back seat of Lauren’s car from the crime-scene photographs in Murder in the Top End. That maybe I’d recognise Amanda herself, her sharp jaw and spidery limbs. But they couldn’t have anticipated that I’d recognise Dynah Freeman. Dynah looked about twelve years old in the photograph. She’d been biting her lips, suppressing tears. I could almost hear her sister convincing her to just do this strange favour for her older boyfriend and not, under threat of violence, to tell anyone. They were only photos, she’d told the child. It was no big deal.
I’d sat with Dynah Freeman, now an adult, in the empty cafe and listened to her cries. Listened to her describe that night, when her older sister had asked her to come along, thinking Amanda was more likely to buy into the whole arrangement if Lauren’s goofy little sister was in the back seat. The promise of a cool party with a popular girl. A pretty new dress.
Dynah hadn’t ever spoken to Damford and Hench again. She saw them around town. They saw her. She saw Amanda, knew that the older woman was crazy. She didn’t know exactly what Lou Damford and Steven Hench had used those photographs for, but she could guess. They bullied powerful men. They blackmailed people for money. A handful of dirty pictures of young girls had probably opened hundreds of doors for the two men over the years. They planted them in men’s houses. In their bedrooms. In their offices. Then they turned up and discovered them and started making their demands. It wasn’t even about money, Dynah knew, though she could tell there was plenty of that floating around the two men. It was about power. The raw animal power they’d exhibited on that night, two grown men and three girls tangled up in the dark of the rainforest, the girls helpless but to do the men’s bidding. Dynah had grabbed Steve’s legs and hips, tried to drag him off Amanda’s tiny body beneath him on the seat of the car. He hadn’t budged. Dead weight. The adult Dynah knew Steve Hench was as unmoveable and untouchable to the men he manipulated as he’d been to her that night.
I sat against the tree in the storm and held my partner and told her I would get the men who had done this to her. Unconsciousness was threatening her. Amanda’s head rolled against my arm. But I wouldn’t let her sleep. Not yet. I needed to know.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?’ I asked her. I squeezed her body against mine, tried to shake her awake. ‘Why did you let them take you to jail?’
Amanda looked up at me. Her eyes were closing.
‘Because I was happy there,’ she said.
EPILOGUE
She pressed her shoe against the front tyre of the bike, dug her heel into the dirt and leaned forward. Pain rippled up through the scarred and lumpy muscles of her calf, receding slowly into a warm ache. She breathed, felt the sun on the back of her neck. Amanda swung her leg over the bike and pushed off, just as a light, misty rain began to fall.
Amanda watched as the raindrops began to catch in the fine hairs over her tattooed arms, stretched forward and gripping the curved handlebars tight. Her arms were unfamiliar to her. From the moment the policemen had snapped those pictures of her on the back seat of Lauren’s car all those years ago, Amanda had felt the desire to cover up her skin. She’d started getting tattooed in prison, hand-poke designs from another inmate, a woman swift with a sewing needle and ink collected from pens stolen from the administration office. She’d started with a crooked bluebird on her hip. As picture upon picture and layer upon layer of flowers and beetles and ladies and animals climbed up her legs and arms and chest, she’d felt her naked and vulnerable self covered, protected. The policemen had exposed her. Laid her bare. She’d never wanted to be bare again. Not an inch of her.
She’d gotten used to her coloured and shaded arms. But now the pink cracks and slashes the crocodile’s jaws had made in her had taken some of her protective layers away. She was still flesh underneath. Pink scar-tissue, the colour of the inside of a cat’s ear. There were rows of holes in some places, where the beast had clamped down on her. Other parts of her body were cracked with pale lightning where she’d been shaken by the monster, rolled in the water. She was a broken vase put back together, and the new pink skin reminded her of her old body, the one Damford and Hench had defiled. But that wasn’t so terrifying now. She’d had time in hospital to watch the cracks forming. She could accept them.
Amanda pedalled between the high walls of cane along the muddy road, glancing up at the swallows that marked her way on the wires, like sentinels against the grey sky. She remembered sitting in her hospital bed and watching Dynah Freeman giving a press conference on the television in the corner of the room, leaning around a group of nurses who had gathered to watch the coverage. She’d seen footage of Damford and Hench being arrested at their houses, seen Dynah crying as she sat at the table beneath a huge photograph of her dead sister’s smiling face. It had only been twelve hours since some police detectives Amanda didn’t know came to her bedside to ask her about the night in the rainforest. They’d told her Dynah’s version of the story, asked her if it was true. If Steven Hench and Lou Damford had taken those pictures of her. If Steven Hench had lain on top of her. If he’d touched her. If he’d raped her. They’d shown her a photocopy of a picture of her child self.
Amanda had looked at her scarred arms. Ran her fingertips along the new lines. Fault lines in the story she’d told herself all these years. That she was a killer. That underneath her skin, the truth would be forever trapped. It was out now. Dynah had let it all out.
Journalists had come to the hospital. She’d accepted their visits. They’d told her about Ormund Smitt, about the counselling he was getting now, the stuff he was still writing online about Jake and the government and the secret societies. They’d told her about Stella waking up from her coma on an upper floor of the same hospital, about the tests being done to see if she’d received any brain damage from the drugs her child had given her. The journalists had wanted to know about Lauren Freeman even more than they wanted to know about the two teenage killers she and Ted had put away. No one knew what headline to apply. Scully case solved, son behind bars. Teen lovers’ murder plot leaves two parents dead. Amanda had been so used to those scribblers and their funny little notebooks, how they looked at her like a dangerous predator. No one knew how to look at her now. Was she a victim? Was she a monster? Was she a crime-solving detective hero? Amanda didn’t mind the con fusion. She kind of liked confusing people.
She turned the handlebars and took a detour through Beale Street, past the Shark Bar, where Vicky was washing the front windows. Amanda let the bike roll through the gravel outside her office, where the new sign hanging above the door was gleaming in the fresh rain. Conkaffey & Pharrell. Ted had wanted to add ‘Investigations’, but Amanda had suffered enough adding anything at all to the shopfront. She didn’t like change. Announcements, proclamations, exclamations. ‘“Investigations” is a label,’ she’d told Ted as he sat at her bedside, showing her the sign design on his phone. ‘It’ll limit us. It’ll tell people investigations is all we do.’
‘It is all we do,’ her partner had said. God, the man lacked vision.
She rode through the cane fields and through the tunnels of rainforest made by the road, looking out for cassowaries, the wind in her short hair. In time Amanda turned onto the road that led to Ted’s house and rolled to the brick fence, hopped off and walked her bike along the side through the short grass. From the back of her jeans, Amanda drew an envelope folded in half.
When she reached the corner of the house she saw him. He was lying on the lawn, propped up on his elbows in the afternoon sun, his long legs spread before him. By the fence at the bottom of the property, six grey geese wandered in a loose pack, pecking at the grass. It hadn’t rained here yet. His eyes were closed against the golden light. It had only been three days since Ted had visited her at the hospital, but he’d changed again. Each time he’d appeared at her bedside, Amanda had noticed something different. He’d put on some weight. He’d spent some time outside, and his skin was darker. Today, the beard was gone. He’d
told her that the vigilante attacks had stopped. He sometimes heard cars driving by late at night, slowing as they passed, curious. But there’d been no more bricks, fireworks, piss. No more crowds. It was quiet.
The journalist probably helped. Fabiana was gone now. She’d taken what she wanted from Ted – a cause, a mission, something to write about. After the interview about the silent witness had appeared in the news, the Innocent Ted group had formed around a blog site, and Fabiana was now their spokeswoman back in Sydney. Amanda had watched videos of the woman online from her hospital bed, read through the hundreds and hundreds of reader comments. At first, Fabiana had received a barrage of abuse online for putting up the interview video, and things had got worse when the public realised that she and Ted were briefly lovers. People said she was ‘betraying all women’ by shacking up with a ‘monster’. They’d compared her to women who marry serial killers in prison. There were comments on the blog posts that begged her not to have children with Ted, because they’d surely be the next victims of his sickness. She’d appeared on a number of morning talk shows with a whole lot of stoic dignity. She didn’t respond to the death threats she received online. She said that her mission in life now was fighting for Ted, so she didn’t have time for that kind of rubbish, not with her increased obligations at the paper and her new part-time battle for justice. In time, the comments had started changing. The questions grew. There’d been no sign of Ted himself on the internet. The big man had let the journalist go about her business of rescuing his reputation. Amanda was glad. The woman owed him that. And more.
Amanda lifted the envelope to her lips now. Nibbled the corner thoughtfully. A large white goose had approached her from the side of the house and now stood taking her in, its beady eyes questioning, as Amanda was questioning.
Inside the envelope were printed pages, screenshots of her investigation into the white dog. Amanda had become interested in the mentions of the white dog in Claire Bingley’s interview tapes, which she had watched over and over again since Ted came into her life. The little girl who Ted was accused of attacking was deeply traumatised, and yes, she had said many strange things in the hours and hours she was recorded and questioned about what happened to her. But in total, Amanda had counted three times that a white dog was mentioned. The girl first spoke of a white dog in her hospital interview. She mentioned it next when she was interviewed by a trauma counsellor. And just once, in an interview conducted at the Parramatta police headquarters, Amanda swore the girl mumbled ‘dog’ when she was left alone in the room with the recorder.