A Child's Book of True Crime

by Chloe Hooper

  I moved around the room trying to seem natural and bright to those on the other side of the glass. Most of the mothers wore sneakers and track pants. They had sensible hair and sensible shoes. Except for Veronica. Pale Veronica with skin that held the light. Through the window, I’d long studied her looks; her trademark red lipstick confusing, or perhaps accentuating, all the orchid delicacy she had going for her. She reminded me of the prettiest girl at any party. She walked with a perfectly blank expression until she saw someone she liked—one of the vaguely comme il faut mothers—whom she might greet extravagantly. She’d guiltily smoke the other’s cigarettes, tilting her head, baring a long smooth neck as she exhaled. As soon as the bell rang, she’d stamp out her butt and offer around the mints from the glove box.

  I turned back to the class, but it was difficult to muster composure. I had not expected to see her. I’d thought she’d be away for the weekend, but the vigilante on about the ethics of journalism had driven her back. I wiped clean the blackboard, while sizing up her physical strength. If it came down to some sort of tussle, I would obviously have the advantage of youth; she was pushing forty and I was at least fifteen years her junior. Plus she was so thin, very thin and graceful; if I wasn’t badly stunned I could easily outbulk her.

  Veronica’s main advantage would be strategy. Ever since she was young she’d read these parlor detective stories where crime is so pristine, always conforming to a trusted formula: after the stableboy-with-ringworm finds the deceased under a pile of hay, everything is conducted in a most urbane fashion; interrogations take place during high tea. When the murderer breaks down and politely confesses, they all have gin and tonics on the lawn.

  One day Veronica had had I-could-do-that syndrome. Always canny, she discovered true crime sold better than fiction—and who could make this stuff up? A small-town American football star murders local girls using soda pop bottles. A wealthy British doctor kills his wife and her maid; then cuts off their identifying characteristics: fingertips, eyeballs (the maid had a bad squint), and teeth (his wife’s were bucked). By this stage Veronica was thirty-five. She was married to a lawyer, with one young child and, even though it was inappropriate for me to speculate, perhaps the marriage wasn’t going so well. Black Swan Point’s story was attractive because it was classic: nice upper-middle-class girl meets nice upper-middle-class boy. They marry young. They have trouble communicating. They have three babies in a row, and she gets fat. He starts fucking a pretty young employee. She gets more desperate. Most often this story ends with years and years of passive-aggression, or with the now middle-aged nice girl getting screwed over as her husband starts another family. This figure, Margot Harvey, had broken out of the mold, and went blazing into the night, howling, “No! No! I will not be civilized about being replaced! I will not retire gracefully!”

  “Okay, kids.” I clapped my hands. “It’s time to clean up. Quietly!” There was the scrape of their chairs as they all jumped up; then the fiddly business of packing one’s pencil case. Watching them prepare to leave made me the tiniest bit sad. “This weekend, as homework, I want you to finish your drawings.” They stuffed their pictures into their schoolbags. Then the bell rang, and soon their mothers were all standing in the doorway, helping to retrieve lost lunchboxes.

  Out the window Veronica stood alone.

  When Murder at Black Swan Point first came out I had been stunned. She and I were initially quite cordial, but after reading her book, I walked around my house as if visible from every angle; suddenly the walls were made of eyes. Like some primitive version of hell, every vase knew I was bad. Abruptly Veronica stopped waving in the mornings. She stopped entering the classroom. Then, at night, late, the telephone started ringing. My evenings were so silent that the sound could startle me at the best of times. I would answer and often there was a low rumble in the background. If it were just children, why were they still awake? The call was coming from a public place. At first I would hang up, but later I became more brazen; I’d stay on the line, waiting. To prove I wasn’t scared I would stay there, hoping someone might speak.

  I watched Lucien as he crept from the room, walking toward his mother—“When he says something smart you’ll be proud. When he mispronounces a word, you’ll be touched. When he’s crabby, when he yawns, when he laughs you’ll watch him, but you’ll see me.” Veronica quickly took her son’s bag and ushered him to the sleek silver car I’d traveled in only hours before. They drove away and I turned from the window, suddenly alone. All the other children had stormed outside.

  These Friday afternoons had the air of a one-sided game of hide-and-seek. The playground, the toilet cubicles, the locker rooms all appeared to be empty, but rather than searching out clever nooks and crannies, I’d count to twenty and walk—slightly too briskly—through the Cyclone wire gates. Quietly, I closed the classroom door. I bent to lock it, and a shudder ran through me. In the door’s olive paintwork, two words were now scratched in a maniac’s hand: I KNOW.

  • MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •

  Kitty spied the stainless steel instruments.

  I’m scared,” whispered Kitty Koala, peek-peeking through the window. Between her splayed paws, Kitty spied a naked fluorescent bulb illuminating stainless steel instruments, a shining metal trolley, and a refrigerator. The mortuary room of any country hospital, she realized, was bound to be minimal. Two policemen, a crime-scene photographer, a technical assistant, and the doctor performing the postmortem hovered about the drab room. Finally the doctor gave his assistant a nod. The metal trolley was wheeled over to the fridge, Ellie’s naked, blood-smeared body transferred.

  “Oh sweet Jesus!” the doctor appeared to groan, surveying the horrific wounds.

  The men spoke sadly amongst themselves. Kitty strained to understand what they were saying. After all these years she still found broader Australian accents difficult to interpret. It has been suggested that Australians’ pronunciation is due to a prevalent nose inflammation, caused by pollen in the air. Others say that a dry climate causes thinner mucous tissues in the nasal cavities, producing a harsher quality of voice. Kitty believed it to be mere lip laziness; “The Australian often speaks without obviously opening his lips at all,” she complained, “through an immobile slit, and in extreme cases through closed teeth.”

  “Oh well,” reckoned Kitty, “the crime’s brutality speaks for itself.”

  The men considered the girl’s every pore from every angle. It was always sad when a young person passed away, especially in such brutal circumstances. Kitty felt herself start to blush. Perhaps these men couldn’t help thinking of the petit dalliances they’d kept from their own wives, the trysts at conferences, the one-night stand on a hot night, late, legs spread . . . Oh dear! The lowermost parts of Ellie’s body were now a purplish red from postmortem lividity. The killer must have found the girl asleep in her room, and started the attack while she was prone. It made the bear so glum: Ellie had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen. At this point she had presumably woken and tried to defend herself; her hands and calves bore knife marks, traces of attempts to both push and kick her attacker away.

  After Ellie’s chest was examined for rib fractures, a thoracic-abdominal incision was made from shoulder to shoulder, crossing down over the breasts. Goodness! Kitty found it hard to keep up with all the doctor’s procedures. It made her dizzy as next the ribs and the cartilage were cut through to expose the heart and lungs. Then, the heart, lungs, esophagus, and trachea were removed en bloc; each organ was weighed, its external surface examined.

  She sighed. On and on the postmortem went, until eventually, the assistant put all Ellie’s organs into garbage bags to prevent seepage. While he sewed the bags inside the body, Kitty scratched her furry head, deep in thought. It was unusual for a crime of passion to turn into such a brutal case of mutilation. Whoever had killed Ellie wanted to eradicate the girl’s physical beauty even in death. And another thing was certain, the koala realized: the murderer was
strong to gouge such deep cuts.

  STILL SHAKING, I locked myself inside my car and just started driving. I had visited Black Swan Point before. I knew that the Georgian buildings turned into brown brick houses; that empty play equipment in people’s yards looked like lost children metamorphosed. Rural Australia was full of perfectly tended ghost towns: a war memorial, bearing all the same family names, stood surrounded by stumpy rose bushes. Each bush had been too lovingly pruned or else stunted by this heat, heat that sits on your shoulders. Three teenage boys rode up and down the main street on their mountain bikes. When they saw me they wouldn’t meet my eye; they raised first their arses, then their front wheels into the air; colts proving they could buck. And just on the outskirts of the town, yellow road signs warning of schoolchildren and kangaroos had been shot full of bullet holes. The kangaroos, their paws held up in rigor mortis, lay like forgotten crime victims by the edge of the road. Pray for rain to wash it all away. Imagine feeling like you’re living at the very end of the earth, and also knowing that you are.

  Nearby was the street where Ellie Siddell had lived in the year before her death. “We don’t like that road,” a local woman had told me. “We call it Murder Road.” Murder Road was long and thin. You started off on high land then descended down a dusty dirt track until you hit her family’s house. People said if it were their daughter they would’ve hired a bulldozer. The house was very plain and symmetrical, with a wide veranda and one little window set high up: I had decided that was the window of her bedroom. It must have had a slanting roof.

  The crime photographs in Lucien’s careful drawing were included in his mother’s book. What was uncanny was how familiar each interior seemed. The living room had every era of sturdy furniture represented: squat armchairs upholstered in autumnal fabric; a sound system the size of a couch; an oak dining table with thick, carved legs; and one painting—a landscape. The bathroom, fitted with postwar amenities, had a basin with square lines in the mint green of Australian art deco. The kitchen had a frill of gingham curtain over each window; and high stools surrounded the aging linoleum benches. Did she sit on these kitchen stools, her feet not reaching the floor, feeling incredibly grown up? At dinner parties did she squash peas into the table’s crevices before taking flirty sips from the avuncular guest’s wineglass?

  Since none of Ellie’s family or close friends had spoken to Veronica one had to read between the lines. This was what I imagined: on family drives to the Black Swan Point house, Ellie would deep-breathe on the window, then, in the fogged-up glass, draw pictures of women with pronounced erogenous zones. She’d fall asleep in the car and have to be carried to bed. And in the morning, wearing plastic gold Barbie slippers, she’d tiptoe down the gnarled driftwood steps onto the sand. All the boys were on old surfboards, paddling out to the sandbank. The littlest boy paddled with a rake, dipping the stick end in the water, then the fingers; just moving round in circles. She was one of the girls with skinny legs doing synchronized swimming in the shallows; she and her cousins collected jellyfish in buckets and buried each other in the sand. They were being protected from bad things so strenuously that the slightest irregularity—like the tattooed woman once seen bathing—could overwhelm. Or else it could underwhelm: walking her new puppy along the shore Ellie let a man pat the dog. He asked her if she ever put her hands in her underpants at night. “No, how silly!” she told him laughing, dragging the dog away.

  Ellie attended a private school in Hobart, where girls sang the same hymns their mothers had sung. On the oval she did stretching exercises with her class. The girls leaned back. The sky seemed a most daring blue. A violin, like a rusting swing, sounded from an open window in the music school. They leaned to the right, their ponytails synchronized. The French mistress in her academic gown walked her two tiny dogs around the oval, her finger conducting the music. Was she searching for smokers behind the art room? Could dogs develop gout? Would she rile the gym teacher by calling imperiously, “Young ladies do not run!” The gym teacher, an enormous woman with red nose and cheeks, defined the word ruddy. She wore tracksuit pants instead of a tennis skirt, which was just as well. There’d been hilarity when, demonstrating how to hurdle, she’d lifted up her leg, revealing dark pubic hair crawling halfway down her thigh. “Show us again, show us again!” cried an elfin bad girl, with buckteeth and a pageboy haircut. “Could you please show us how to hurdle one more time?”

  Ellie was not a bad girl: a girl whom the flute teacher, with his dirty turtleneck, might ogle. Those girls hitched up their skirts on the lawn, during lunchtime, to work on their tans. It seemed they understood the secrets of alchemy, but weren’t telling. With their neat bodies, they’d rise at the bell linking arms as if, lightheaded, they had to lean on their best friends’ shoulders. They realized history only happened in textbooks, and read magazines behind their Bunsen burners. Nothing would really go wrong—the worst thing was when a girl’s father died of cancer, but everyone took the afternoon off school, and at the funeral clutched each other, all weeping more vigorously than any team of widows—girls with lovely upbringings who don’t understand disaster.

  Standing in the locker room, pungent with sneakers and spray deodorant, the bad girls whispered loudly about boys. The film in Science, explaining there was no bone in the penis, had not surprised them. Neither had the slide show, organized by the school nurses, which demonstrated in passing that an erection did not jut out of a man’s body, horizontally, at a ninety-degree angle. All Ellie’s friends were reaching for their protractors, amazed. But the bad girls smirked. The way they’d smirked when the nurse came to class and put a tampon in a glass of water. They stripped off their gym uniforms brazenly, showing off flat, tanned stomachs. But Ellie dressed and undressed so no one could see this new body she didn’t know what to do with: put your track pants on under your school dress; unbutton your dress; put your gym shirt on over the dress; pull the dress down. Still, you could never guard against the shock of seeing a newly developed breast. The first girls to develop were, naturally, sluts. But if the breasts came at the right time you could be extremely popular. The worst fate was a “pyramid tit,” something conical, and frankly ineffectual, in its shiny white trainer bra.

  After graduating, most of Ellie’s friends moved from Tasmania onto the mainland. She just wanted to leave home. She’d grown up in the most beautiful house in Battery Point. Walking up the road she could smell the flowers, great fleshy camellias, spilling over the fence. The ceilings rose high above her and below were wide floorboards of Huon pine from the rain forest. Cedar, resembling mahogany, had been transported from New South Wales for mantelpieces and joinery. Every chair had been exquisitely turned. Each painting was another new town’s violet sunset. Eleanor Siddell had been loved to the gills. But in Hobart she knew every street intimately: all the stories of every corner, and of all the people in all the houses. Hobart was probably the most stunning city in the world. Boats came up the wide blue Derwent and docked right in its center. From her window she counted each white sail, remembering a Grimm’s fairy tale her grandfather had read to her, “The Prince Afraid of Nothing”; “Once upon a time there was a prince who had got tired of living in his father’s house, and as he was afraid of nothing he thought: I’ll go out into the wide world and I’ll see plenty of strange sights.”

  She moved to the peninsula, and started her new life working for the vet. She went to the supermarket by herself. She bought food with the money she’d earned. She took the grocery bags to the car thinking, The girls from school should see me now. I am the last person they’d expect to have a lover. Lover: even the word sounded so adult, straight from a movie. And she was the star, running back to her job with dried semen between her legs. Just the thought of his mouth on top of her mouth was thrilling. When they’d writhe, she’d think, We’re two sticks trying to make fire. She wanted to learn everything straightaway. Teach me all the little tricks to fucking. How do people do this great, big sex thing? I want to get good at it
, quickly. What should my face look like? Was that too loud? What do I do with my hands? It was strange to have all this delicious attention, for him to touch her and for that alone to make him shiver. Had he made some mistake? The struck-dumbness he affected every time she undressed and lay on the bed; all his sighing and eyes rolled back—was someone beautiful standing behind her? Everyone should have one great secret to carry round as a talisman. Then, when people look at you, thinking she’s like this, or she’s only this, they’ll always be wrong.

  • • •

  I sat in my car outside the Siddells’ house. The aftermath of the girl’s murder was nightmarish for her parents. After it became clear an outsider wasn’t responsible, some local people felt Ellie had brought this on herself through recklessness. She had done the wrong thing and justice had been savage.

  When Veronica Marne tried to investigate the twelve-year-old crime as a local, her neighbors were tight-lipped. The old story kept coming to the fore: no one could believe Margot Harvey capable of such a brutal crime. She was an incredibly kind woman, practical and generous. If someone was having a hard time and needed help with their kids, she’d organize people to take the children for a few hours after school. If someone were sick, she’d prepare food. In newspapers, after any unexpected disaster, people stand around, a fist to the air, howling: Why this town! It was the same at Black Swan Point. This is a quiet place, people said. This is a good quiet place, we don’t even lock our doors.