by Chloe Hooper
No car was now in the house’s driveway, but the lawn was freshly mowed and a bird feeder full of seed. The curtains were drawn, although I felt I’d already seen inside: Ellie’s bedroom, according to the crime photos, was incredibly messy. She had twin beds; one she slept in, one stacked with stuffed toys. Her clothes carpeted the floor. Lipsticks and perfumes were spread over each inch of the dressing table. On the wall were snapshots of her school friends: girls in dance dresses; all of them at school camp pulling spastic faces. It was hard to believe she’d brought her lover here, but she was still only nineteen. And I bet every time Graeme Harvey led her to the single bed, and pushed away a layer of debris, Ellie wished she’d remembered to tidy up. When first he stood in the doorway, and noticed the clothes and junk in such a mess all over her floor, I bet there was something in his expression which made her jump on him and kiss him wildly to divert his attention.
The police bagged nearly sixty items from the house, and over half came from off her bedroom floor: a pair of pink underpants; a sports bra; a T-shirt; a bathing costume; a face-cloth; two towels; magazines; candy wrappers; tissues; more underwear; a nurse’s uniform; a cigarette packet; a nightgown; a box of matches from The Sand and Waves Tudor Inn; a polyester Snoopy toy; a white tennis shoe; a pair of women’s tracksuit pants . . . The list went on in excruciating detail, but also included brown matter labeled “blood scrapings”; samples of Ellie’s blood, her hair, her nail and muscle tissue; scrapings from under her fingernails; and the knife found lying next to the body.
I started the car and drove away. I understood Ellie because I gave her my own story. I didn’t understand Margot. She hadn’t just killed the girl in a brief bout of madness, this supposedly meek woman had mutilated her enemy horribly. I turned out of Murder Road—and call it superstition, or a knock-on-wood—I proceeded toward the Suicide Cliffs.
The ride should have taken around twenty minutes, but I was driving my grandfather’s old blue car: the biggest Mercedes-Benz ever made and you couldn’t have paid anyone to take it off your hands. I drove slowly, and tried very hard to imagine what Margot would have been thinking. It was not as though Murder at Black Swan Point shed any light. Veronica had described this last drive in a style which swung between the melodramatic and the faux-clinical: her Mrs. Harvey slipped and slid all over the road, Ellie’s blood still staining her hands. The woman had freed herself from a life spent in Goodness, and lit a cigarette with almost postcoital pleasure. But just as Veronica was really starting to enjoy herself, she pulled back out of respect for readers with less liberated sensibilities. The true-crime writer’s ethical stance was inherently false—Veronica acted as an intermediary between evil and the reader, positioning herself as above reproach. But how could she get inside the criminal mind, while bending backward to then show her horror at the deed? In every chapter she’d tried to cloak her fascination as social responsibility. Her own perversion as research.
Suddenly, my car started making a strange, high-pitched whistling. I slowed down a little, hoping to calm the engine. The road was dirt. Pine telephone poles rose out of the dust, and as I drove further there were fewer signs of life. I passed farmhouses, long abandoned, collapsing under wild ivy: cottages with sunken verandas and broken windows. In each paddock, fence posts lay in the grass like old bones. A rusting bathtub functioned as a water trough, but only broken-down motors grazed in the sun. I’d heard it said that, long ago, when Port Arthur closed down, the convicts settled here, on the opposite side of the highway to the free settlers. The settlers had previously been given land grants and convict labor. Their descendants, now our community’s rural gentry, still live behind their forefathers’ hedgerows. Once when a man fell down drunk outside a grand neighbor’s house, my mother watched the neighbor get a shovel and turn the man over to see if he was all right—noblesse oblige.
If Establishment Man and Establishment Woman were sold as action toys, the girl doll would come with a wardrobe of flat shoes and tartan skirts of unflattering length. Sold separately would be the old dictionary and gold pocket watch passed down from her Scottish paternal great-grandfather. For Establishment Man one could buy a set of golf clubs and some street signs named after a forebear. Tasmania’s place-names gave a fine insight into our settlers’ sensibilities. Wander around the game board from Cape Grim to the Never Never to Nameless Lake, perhaps skip Sympathy Hills, head toward the Suicide Cliffs and dine at Purgatory Hill, or more likely the Devil’s Kitchen.
Margot Harvey was born, just after World War II, into a respectable Tasmanian family with good Christian values. Margot, I’m sure, would have been encouraged to be a nice girl, not too clever, not too opinionated. She’d have grown up wearing hats and gloves wherever she went; and, like my mother, might not have heard anyone utter the word shit until she was in her twenties. Tasmanians held fast to colonial decorum, and Hobart was a small town. Everyone knew everyone else; everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Be a good girl. There was a keen sense of right and wrong. Margot would be a good girl, so she would be safe.
From my grandparents’ bookshelves and from gossamer, I had tried to cobble a picture of her: before bed my Margot read an English story about Mrs. Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By and Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did. Other children borrowed better books from the library—one fiction, if two nonfictions were also read. She was not allowed to borrow books; her mother thought she might catch tuberculosis. Once her father bought her a beautifully bound set of Dickens from an estate sale, and her mother gave him a real dressing-down because of the potential for germs. All the books were left out in the sun for the day before she was permitted to even look at them. Later, in boarding school, the girls drank coffee made from the water in their hot-water bottles, and read under the blankets with torches. Some of the girls got into each other’s beds. One girl was said to use the new plastic wrap on her fingers; she claimed it was hygienic. Margot willed herself to sleep. Some girls climbed out the window to smoke with boys in the lane. If they got into trouble they’d leave school, and maybe come back the next year. Margot would stay asleep and she would get everything she deserved.
What Murder at Black Swan Point left unmentioned was that Margot’s parents had divorced: Margot’s father had abandoned her mother. None of the other girls at school had divorced parents. No one else had a stepmother who was an adulteress. In the wood-paneled dining hall, as Margot’s classmates tried to converse in French, she stared down at her table setting. She’d always presumed the knife and fork were married, and the spoon was their daughter. Now she realized the knife and spoon weren’t family, they were actually lying on the linen serviette having an affair. That was why the fork, on the other side of the place mat, was always fuming, alone. People crossed over the road so as not to speak to Margot’s mother, the divorcée who was always crying. Margot wanted to pick up her fork and throw it through the window. She had to concentrate all her energy not to do the bad thing. And in that second, the whole scene played out: the shocked faces turning slowly toward her, the hot wash of shame. But I’ve always been a good girl, she thought, staying still. Even reaching into this fruit bowl, I will pull out the bruised fruit.
Margot sailed on the boat to London in 1966. She was twenty. She met a boy from home and they married three years later. Her main goal was to make her husband happy. After their second anniversary, the couple returned to Tasmania and they had a daughter. Hobart didn’t agree with the young mother. Her husband worked long hours, and she was often left alone with the baby. Maybe she was worried this handsome man had a wandering eye. She gave birth to two more girls in the next four years, and later her family bought them a piece of land with a new farmhouse on Black Swan Point, two hours outside the city. She set to work decorating the house. (It was very much of its period, mid 1970s, low, brown-brick, and surrounded by casuarinas with spindly leaves, spider’s legs, screening it from the street.) Graeme set up his veterinary practice. Things were going well. He employed a girl to take care of so
me secretarial work. And at first Margot thought Eleanor Siddell was sweet. She came from a similar background, but she was fifteen years younger, so it was a slightly different world, a slightly more permissive world that she had inherited. Ellie was full of life, a jumping jack of a girl. Sometimes Margot dropped the children at the veterinary clinic when there was shopping to be done. It was helpful Ellie was so good with her daughters. Ellie let them draw with the fluorescent markers. She let them lick the envelopes, or staple invoices. Sometimes, at home, the girls drew pictures of their friend with ribbons in her hair and frills on her skirts; with bow lips and dimples—all the twinkling features of the cheapest plastic doll.
Try to be nice to that girl, she’s away from her family, Margot thought. Try to be kind to that girl with her big, brown eyes. “She’s oddly bovine,” Margot told her husband, “with those big brown cow eyes.” He just laughed. Graeme was working late and working early. Margot watched how he lied; how he modulated his voice before relaxing into the lie. He was smart. Rather than tensing up, he’d stretch out his shoulders as if to say, “I’ve nothing to hide.” But Margot watched the way the girl gazed at him. She watched the way the girl swanned round, arching her back. Ellie blocked the sun. Had she grown up promising, “I will not marry a man who looks at me as though I’m drowned. Who starts staring at a girl with the top button of her shirt always open. Who probably tells her, like he once told me, you’re my beauty queen, you with the Ferris wheel eyes . . .”
• • •
The Mercedes continued to whine. I didn’t know this side of the highway very well, but people always joked there were a lot of village idiot types here, where I was about to break down. “It is a little inbred” was all my father would say discreetly. Some people in the hills had never even driven the two hours to Hobart. In the northwest of the state, only twenty years ago, if a small town knew a salesman was driving through, parents would apparently chain up their children, because these kids didn’t have good road sense. Their ancestors had probably got caught for slapstick misdemeanors—they stole a roll of ribbon and it unraveled all the way home.
Smoke started rising from the car’s bonnet and I remembered reading about a town in America which formed in the late nineteenth century around a psychiatric hospital. In the 1960s, a combination of funding cuts and liberalism led to all the patients being released, and now they all lived in the town with the unemployed hospital workers. Probably in the 1870s that was pretty much what it was like here, although divergent groups still coexisted today. The state’s rally car speed tests were conducted upriver on the grounds of the local asylum. It was not as though the insane just observed from their cell windows. Apparently there were little circles of people outside. They were standing in their nightgowns, watching the cars speeding past, almost like human pylons.
My car was screeching. The smoke became thicker. I thought of Margot’s headlights on high beam; the stolen cigarette and the road’s white lines leading her on. The screeching became harsher still. I had to pull over, but when I tried to brake nothing happened. A blind corner loomed. I pumped the brakes. Nothing happened. The car only picked up speed. I screamed around the bend, scraping the side against the tea trees. I caught a flash of blue. A little postcard of bay. To my right there was a sheer drop. I pulled on the handbrake: nothing. The car sped down the hill and I stopped breathing. Swinging the wheel from side to side, I tried to slow the car. I tried to slow the car using a skiing motion, praying all the while no one would come speeding toward me. Further down, the road dipped. There was a patch of green. I drove straight toward it closing my eyes, flinching before I crashed into shrubbery.
Dark smoke rose from the bonnet. I sat hyperventilating, my hands still gripping the wheel. On the other side of the road, up a little way, a spatter-work chair was covered with bags of apples—people left their excess produce by the side of the road and other people stopped to pick up that produce, leaving money in the empty jam jar. I sat, unable to inhale enough oxygen, staring at the chair. Once when my parents took a bag of apples, forgetting to pay, they realized what they’d done and drove the half hour back, only to be told by the man at the orchard that since they’d been so honest he wouldn’t dream of charging. We live here because nasty things don’t happen. We live here because people are good. We have homemade honey at the local store, and lovely bed-and-breakfasts.
I put my head in my hands, howling. The smoke was dark gray. Throwing open the door I propelled myself into the undergrowth. I lay there, my mouth full of grass, waiting for the car to blow up. Then I just lay there. “If I buy a bag of apples, and I put one dollar fifty in the jar,” I whispered finally, “please let the car be all right. Please let the car, and me, be all right.” I stood up and walked toward the Mercedes. The smoke was thinning. Shaking, I took my handbag from the passenger seat. I took coins from my purse, put them in the jar, and walked back to the car with a bag of apples. Having fulfilled the terms of my contract, I locked the car door and turned away. I was in the middle of nowhere.
If I’d told my parents this was happening, they would have come speeding down, thrilled to be called, huffing and puffing with love and worry. When they arrived I’d have had to tell them the truth. “I can’t do that,” I whispered. “I can’t do that to them.” They’d have been heartbroken. Rather than taking me by the hair and calling me a little slut, there’d have been doleful glances and deep sighs. I was concerned for them enough already—their skin seemed thinner lately; they couldn’t read cooking instructions without their glasses. In the winter, my father had written me a letter, claiming, “Life here is as it always has been, and never was. Battalions of ants are marching through the kitchen. Your mother and I are having trouble seeing them.”
An apple in my hand, I started walking. Waves, slow but persistent, were not far off. They sounded like a huge animal drawing breath. I felt for my own pulse, but my hand trembled too much. A car was approaching. I darted into the bushes and silvereyes fluttered out of my way. Under the trees, the air was still. Every branch lying in my path wished no ill, nor any luck; and the dirt smelled rich with its own fertile plans. The car passed and I choked back a sob. Only hours ago someone had stood up and attacked Veronica for her lack of integrity. This must have been incredibly humiliating; as good a reason as any for turning psychotic. And on this curving road, it would have been impossible to tell if it was the Marnes’ silver car, or a mechanically minded Samaritan, until the bumper was upon you.
I was dressed for a motel room, not the backcountry. Suddenly my knee-length skirt seemed too short, my heels a fraction high. Some people claimed that the day Margot Harvey cracked was the day she saw her husband and the girl together. People said Margot had started following him. One day she looked in a window and saw him with his lover. How would Lucien’s mother have told her “short adult” about this? Of course, she’d have had to soften it a little; but children are potentially the true-crime novelist’s ideal audience. Children understand tragedy in a way adults are unable to: atom by atom. Untainted by a hundred other learned horrors, they are haunted for the appropriate length of time. They ask a thousand unanswerable questions. The story stays with them; they dream of it. I kept walking under the trees, and I imagined Murder at Black Swan Point, a version for Lucien to read. A book for little clairvoyants which told the truth.
• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •
“That old pussycat’s seen it all.”
Terence Tiger reckoned Missy Pink-Princess, the gregarious three-legged tabby who roamed the peninsula’s hotels, could well have witnessed something crucial. Sources had revealed that on the afternoon of the Harveys’ bottle-breaking altercation, at 13:30, Margot had noticed her husband’s forgotten lunch. She had immediately driven to the veterinary clinic. Pulling up, Margot saw Dr. Harvey drive off, the girl in the passenger seat. Where were they heading? Would he want his sandwiches there?
A faux Tudor motor inn is a sad place to imagine a bright young girl spendin
g her last afternoon. As Terence approached the dilapidated structure, lumpy, stained mattresses were airing against the masonite walls; perhaps, the tiger thought, one of these had provided a screen upon which the girl could project her dreams . . . Sometimes, during detective work, the naive tiger found out things he would rather not have known. But the pure science of his profession, the jigsaw puzzle nature of crime, led him ever on.
Terence rolled his whiskers and waited. His bushland gang were a nimble crew. They could search small spaces; had a superior sense of smell; and most important, they knew this land, or an informant who did. With impeccable timing, Missy Pink-Princess sashayed from behind one of the box springs, purring. That scarlet kitty, that old painted pussycat’s seen it all, thought Terence. Perfumed with the scent of musk and disinfectant, she had a husky meow he couldn’t help but find arousing. She was big, a little rounder perhaps than she’d like to be, with huge green eyes.
Grrr! thought the tiger. She can make me extinct any damn way she likes!
Missy pointed her tail toward the room in which the couple had spent their last afternoon. Standing at the window, staring through the slit of open curtain, what gruesome sight did the distraught wife see? Once her eyes adjusted, what tangle of hot flesh, what writhing animal acts, did the beam of gritty light illuminate? Terence imagined Margot turning from the grimy motel window, destroyed, then driving home. He imagined her running inside her house, slamming shut the fly wire door, and pouncing on the telephone. She needed help. She needed someone to talk to, and so she dialed a help line.
Lifeline counselors are kindhearted volunteers wanting to give something back to the community. But they often have limited life experience themselves, and can be completely ill equipped to deal with emergencies. Following is the transcript of a conversation recorded the day before Margot Harvey disappeared: