A Child's Book of True Crime

by Chloe Hooper

  “Fucking in a hotel?” he lisped, adjusting the seat belt. “How many stars?”

  “Three.”

  “That’s not so bad.” He turned the key in the ignition.

  “Three out of a hundred.”

  The tires ground against the pebbles. We drove too fast down the manicured driveway. Trees bent back as we sped by. Lining the road, these gnarled tea trees and banksias—writhing, mournful—made me nervous. They always reminded me of thin-limbed performance artists pretending to be ghosts.

  Thomas smacked the steering wheel. It was impossible to see around the next corner, the highway was one-laned, and a logging truck crawled ahead. Bark and wood chips flew toward us. “Jesus, Kate. Why didn’t you turn on the air-conditioner?” We were so close we could count each log’s concentric rings. “I’ve got to get this young lady back to school!” he complained. “For the sake of my boy’s education!”

  There was some truth to this statement. The Marnes had moved to Endport the previous year so Veronica could work on Murder at Black Swan Point. Thomas commuted, spending the week in Hobart, the weekend with his family. After the book’s release, in June, his wife had wanted to return to town, but he’d convinced her it was unfair switching Lucien’s school midyear. Also, as he liked pointing out to me, it would have been more difficult setting curricula at a Hobart private school.

  At first Thomas and I had promised not to discuss End-port Primary, but after a while our meetings took on the charge of a highly exclusive Parent-Teacher Association. Thomas had realized this was a good way to monitor his son’s progress. Instead of love letters, he sent me detailed notes proposing different lessons for the children. He felt strongly they should be told the truth about their local history. I agreed: yet at the beginning of the year I’d skirted around the issue of genocide, by only asking the kids to write their own versions of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories. The results had been cute, but hardly unflinching: How the kangaroo got her jump. How the kookaburra got his laugh—soon enough the children’s efforts became slanted toward their own ethnic preoccupations—How the white man was created.

  It seemed difficult bringing it home that this white man was a convict; that Tasmania was basically conceived as a jail girt by sea. Thomas was undeterred. Due to his campaigning, the children learned that the state’s main penal settlement, the nearby Port Arthur, was named in 1830 after the state’s lieutenant governor, Sir George Arthur. Sir George—an evangelist who believed his calling was to make men moral—had visions of a prison to end all prisons and geology conspired. The Tasman Peninsula, where the children had all grown up, where Thomas and I were now driving, was a thin strip of land, connected to the rest of the island by an isthmus, less than one hundred yards wide, named Eaglehawk Neck. Port Arthur, where convicts were ground into God-fearing citizens, was built at the south of the peninsula. Most of these men were unable to swim, and, to counter fantasies of overland escape, the neck was lined with vicious dogs; white cockleshells to highlight trespassers; and offal. The guards were said to dump offal on the surrounding beaches to encourage sharks. The same year that Port Arthur was established, over two thousand settlers and soldiers marched through the Tasmanian bush in a closely packed line, trying to force the Aborigines through the neck, where it was figured—incorrectly—they could be rounded up and captured.

  Thomas suggested, in early July, that the children practice their letter-writing skills by sending postcards to the Tasmanian parliament, urging that the Aboriginal Land Acts be passed. Prime Minister Keating had just unveiled his plans for a republic, and Thomas was feeling reckless. Afterwards the children came to school crying because their parents had reeducated them. They were going to lose their backyard, and therefore the new swing set or trampoline. “Why do people tell each other stories?” I’d asked the class. I’d figured we could analyze the motives of storytellers such as their parents. No one had spoken. “Why do you think the Aborigines made up tales about how the kookaburra got his laugh?” The children agreed it was because things were really boring in the old days and everyone was bored. “Why do we use the expression a cat has nine lives?”

  Henry: Because if it jumps off a building it has a better chance.

  Danielle: Cats always land on their legs. Dogs always land on their backs.

  Darren: But if you just come up and shoot your cat it dies.

  Anaminka: Its spirit would come out, only it might turn into a mouse.

  The exercise had perhaps been slightly abstract. I’d decided to be more straightforward: “When do you think it’s appropriate to lie?” I’d asked, standing still to bear witness. Each inquiry I made was like throwing a pebble into the sea. The children’s answers were rough but brilliant, vast in meanings unrelated to the pebble.

  Henry: I don’t exactly lie, but sometimes I hide my sister’s stuff and she says, “Henry, have you seen my stuff?”

  Billy: And you go, “No.”

  Henry: And I go, “Have you looked in the lounge room?” But it’s in the bedroom.

  Billy: You could do that, but you wouldn’t hide anything serious. You wouldn’t hide your sister’s dress on a Sunday night.

  Darren: She’d have to go to school with no clothes on!

  “This is a fucking farce,” Thomas muttered.

  The logging truck still crawled ahead. We passed a turnoff to Black Swan Point and continued on to Endport. These two towns, only fifteen kilometers apart, were both seedlings of Port Arthur. In the late 1870s, after the penal settlement was closed down, Endport’s newly righteous settlers painted the convicts’ unmarked gravestones white. In the cemetery they now lay around shattered; kids—maybe even the dead’s direct descendants—had nothing better to do. Once in the town pharmacy I heard the chemist bellow to a patient, “You might think depression is embarrassing, but there are streets full of depressed people out here!” Endport’s most exciting event was a competition raising money for the local hospital. People raced hospital beds down the Main Street with somebody in each bed. It couldn’t be a child under twelve in your bed; perhaps for the child’s safety, or in case another contestant had a very fat person in their bed.

  Thomas’s briefcase was on the backseat. “Will you have to work this weekend?” I asked.

  “Not too much.”

  “You should try to have some relaxation.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I stared out the window. Every house was a front for some auxiliary service. If there was an old nag in a paddock, there was also a placard reading “Trail rides.” A chicken: “Fresh eggs” or “Manure.” Off-season these coastal towns flaunted the fact that no one loved them—pavements were sprayed a blotchy gull-shit gray; a few letters in every neon sign switched off; and roadkill deposited around each bend. “It’s just grotesque,” I announced. “If you were a tourist you wouldn’t need to go to a wildlife park; our fauna is all displayed by the side of the road.” It was like dipping a toe in the water to test how cold: Thomas said nothing. He was thinking of his wife’s phone call. “My grandmother,” I told him, “had a recipe in her cookbook for wallaby stew.”

  “The Roadkill Cookbook.” He sounded unimpressed.

  I laughed. “‘Don’t count on finding roadkill for those last-minute occasions when friends drop round. Always keep something in the freezer, so you’re not left red-faced.’” Ahead of us the truck inched up the hill. The air smelled of diesel fuel and freshly cut eucalypt. “The Roadkill Cookbook would stress, ‘Don’t be foolish retrieving the kill.’” I waved my arm leisurely out the window. “‘We don’t want you to get hurt too.’”

  “This is a farce,” Thomas repeated, but I had regained his attention. He turned on the car’s CD player. Sometimes when I was contrary he would choose a piece of music which he thought described my ill temper. I knew nothing about music, but at first had taken slight offense at what I perceived in his selection to be a lack of intensity: often a coltish joy was too close to the surface. Didn’t bearing the moral weight of th
is affair call for more gravity? Some jarring notes? I waited as Thomas found the right track, and made a pledge to be better behaved. Perhaps the music’s giddiness had not been indicting me. It was him saying, “You make me light.” A string of notes now sounded from the car’s speakers, and Thomas turned to catch my expression. I listened: it was slippery. Behind every loveliness was something harsher. I thought of a swimmer too far out; then a force that kept pulling him further. The music spoke of an undertow.

  The way Veronica told the story: after Graeme Harvey sounded the alarm, the police drove immediately to the Siddells’ property. All the curtains were drawn, but they found the back door unlocked, and walked into the dark house. The bedroom had been vandalized and the girl lay on the floor—a blanket covering her head and torso. The warning was immediately broadcast that Margot Harvey was homicidal and possibly suicidal. Airports were notified; boats to the mainland; all investigated. In the days after Margot’s disappearance, Graeme Harvey stayed in his bed, deep in shock. He was apparently not the type of man one expected to see shattered. With his perfectly regular demeanor he’d always seemed unshakably confident, but in just one night he’d lost everything. I suppose relatives cared for the Harveys’ children elsewhere, while pathologists scoured the house. Another team was tending to the murder site. It was imperative the police establish which of the protagonists had bled and where. Routine scrapings were taken of the blood in the kitchen, the site of Mrs. Harvey’s bottle attack; scrapings were taken of the blood on their bedroom and bathroom floors where she had tended her husband’s wound. In the living room Dr. Harvey was interviewed, but was barely able to speak. After the police were finished, he probably had to lie, dosed out, in the bed he’d once shared with his wife.

  Eventually the Harveys’ station wagon was found abandoned near the edge of the Suicide Cliffs—a treacherous stretch of coastline surrounding the ruins of another old penal settlement. A park ranger discovered the car thirty-six hours after Margot’s disappearance. No one could be sure how long it had been there. The ranger was doing a routine check, and had noticed the car where parking was not permitted. He opened the door carefully. There was a woman’s handbag on the passenger seat. He radioed the registration to the local police. A crime squad searched with dogs; volunteers combed the area. No trace of the missing woman was ever found. It was presumed Margot must have driven straight from Ellie Siddell’s house to these cliffs, that she had then jumped into the backbreaking waters below.

  • • •

  An overtaking lane appeared and Thomas, his foot flat on the accelerator, passed the truck with an expression of great triumph. The music surged. It grew into something horrible. And then there was more roadkill. A terrible spray of red across the bitumen was somehow connected to the long, furry tail of a wallaby. I gave a girlie screech. Amidst the gore I could recognize something solid like we once dissected in high school science. “I’m sure I just saw that animal’s heart, or at least one of its vital organs!” I shuddered. “Thomas, I felt so ugly in that hotel room!”

  “You certainly didn’t look ugly.”

  “Be serious!” I covered my eyes. “I can’t stand this much longer.”

  Thomas said nothing.

  I waited. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, Kate,” he said calmly, “but I don’t particularly want to.”

  “Well, I don’t want to say it, but all this sneaking around, the lying.” I watched him from behind my hands. “Oh Thomas, I’m crazy about you, but you know . . . I just don’t want to be dragged into something awful.”

  “Lovely, you already have been.” He swerved into the right-hand lane. “You’re right in the middle of the something, and it’s not so awful. It’s called cinq à sept, five to seven, or in your case le dejeuner; it’s when half the unmarried women leave the office to sleep with one of their married co-workers.”

  “Stop speeding.”

  He didn’t slow down, but grinned. “Kate, in the old days adultery was de rigueur. They say drunk women lay all over these roads; poor hopeless women of a fertile age sent down to screw the convicts.” He paused. “It would have been sensational. Just imagine this island like a swinging cruise ship. Everyone surrounded by water, unable to leave.”

  “Maybe,” I thought aloud, “we should tryst on a boat.”

  “I don’t really like boats.”

  “Seasickness?”

  “Imagine being in prison,” Thomas said, “except you could also drown.”

  Outside small tenacious plants—pigface and beard heath—clung to the sides of the cliff. We were on the edge of town, and I went to work straightening myself. Pulling up my skirt in a businesslike manner, I tried again to put on the panty hose. Thomas glanced over at my bare thighs, and shook his head. “This would be your report card: ‘Miss Byrne started the date with great promise. Within a very short time she’d impressed the class with her willingness to undress.’” He raised an eyebrow. “ ‘Not very wise when someone’s at the wheel, but we commend her spirited performance. Especially,’” he stressed, “‘since despite her excellent practical skills, and vivid imagination, she has a poor attitude toward her studies.’” I struggled with the hosiery. “‘Consideration of the group: poor. Her ability to play cooperatively: borderline. She does work well with her hands.’” He paused. “ ‘She would make a good clay student.’”

  I flicked down the sun shield. In the mirror I now looked wild. There was a hairbrush and lipstick in my handbag, but I felt a sudden apathy. The land outside was swampy, built up with holiday houses on stilts made of prefabricated board. By the start of January, everything would be decorated with wet beach towels. There would be people flip-flopping everywhere, laden with inflatable chairs and giant umbrellas; refugee clowns carrying everything primary-colored they’d ever owned.

  Nausea lodged low in my belly. I wished we could lock the door and speed straight through this town. Endport’s main street, designed by convict architects and built of local stone, according to the strictest classical principles, seemed slightly asymmetrical. Dotted in between the government buildings were simpler versions of what was fashionable in rural England two centuries ago: little four-room cottages with low doorways, built close to the street; their windows sometimes still barred against bushrangers and Aboriginal raiding parties. There was a gift shop in the prison warden’s cottage. A painted wheelbarrow sat outside, full of miniature lavender. His sitting room was the main display area; the mantelpiece now showing off plastic ball-and-chain key rings, and little chocolates marketed as koala turds.

  I slunk lower. “Someone is still calling me and hanging up.”

  Thomas took a deep breath. “Prank-calling teachers is practically on the syllabus.”

  “I’m getting scared.”

  He was silent a moment too long. “Don’t be.” He reached for my hand. “Don’t be scared, Kate. You’re in no danger.”

  Out the car window, people moved as if in their own dream. This town was an experiment in slow motion—a man waved to his friend like a character in an old flipbook; the friend stopped still, returning the greeting only as an afterthought. We passed the thrift store House of Welcome, with its hand-painted sign, fastened to the window: “Closing Down.” No danger left there. We passed Carnival Take Away, where two girls, with beards of acne, were frying food, while outside, teenagers sat on the concrete pavement, eating their 2 P.M. dinner of fish and chips. Was that safe too? Would I be safe on the foreshore covered in tea tree? Or down the cliff, by the sand and rocks and sea? We passed the pier. The fishing boats’ masts were swaying in the wind, their anchor chains sounding like bells. “I wouldn’t swim in this crappy place if I was a fish.”

  “But you’re a smart fish.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve made a mark on me, Miss Byrne. You’ve certainly made your mark.”

  I stared straight ahead. “Will you keep Lucien in my class if she’s found out?”

  “Do me a favor. Go to work this afternoon and teach your
class.”

  “And then what?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  He parked down a dirt side road, around the corner from the primary school. “And then twenty-three, and twenty-four, and twenty-five, and you’ll have more adventures.” He took a deep breath. “It would seem you’re growing up, my friend.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He said nothing. I started to get out of the car without any kiss or fond words. This was the time to prove I didn’t have separation anxiety; that I didn’t care he was driving back to his real life. “Give me your little mouth,” Thomas said, reaching for me. “I need your little mouth.”

  “No.” I slammed the door and gave a Girl Guide salute. All along through the tea tree it sounded like a playground. Wattle birds seesawed, high note, then low note. Bright lorrikeets giggled like girls playing tiggy; and magpies, slightly awkward in black-and-white choir gowns, warbled their madrigals with gusto. I walked a few paces, then turning, watched the car drive away. Wait! I wanted to run after it. Wait for me, I don’t want to go to school! Can’t I stay home and watch television? Dust was rising from behind the wheels. I was standing still, and then I had to run in the opposite direction, because I’m a naughty girl, late for school.

  I SAW THE PRIMARY school, the red brick building with its network of portable classrooms, and ran out of breath. It was dread winding me, not this sudden burst of exercise. Stumbling briskly through the empty playground, I passed wobbly hopscotch grids drawn over the concrete in colored chalk. Seagulls were milling around the Lilliputian drinking fountains and bins full of rejected lunches, holding court. The birds glared at me. I felt certain I was in trouble.