A Child's Book of True Crime

by Chloe Hooper

  “Balderdash!” Wally Wombat growled. “If he had post-traumatic stress disorder, we all do!”

  The animals looked at one another. Unfortunately, the years since Ellie’s death had not been kind to any of them. They’d traveled around this fair isle solving human crimes, while so many of their furry brethren, their feathered cousins, and most reptilian relatives had had foul and bloody deeds committed against them. Wally’s family had had dreadful luck with feral cats and cars. Kingsley Kookaburra flew around and around, suffering some Lear-like delirium. That drunken wallaby, Warwick, had been shot through the eyes: for knowing too much, or for pet food. And poor Kitty, they never mentioned it, but like many of her species, she had a strain of chlamydia that had led to blindness and infertility . . . she was unable to have any little bears.

  Still, it was better to look on the bright side.

  “That’s a bit grim, Wally,” Terence Tiger said finally. “Frightfully grim, actually.” Waiting a moment for the tension to pass, the tiger cleared his throat and announced, “Chums! I’ve something else to show you.” With a flourish he pulled out a set of drawings, by Lucien Marne, after actual crime photographs. The bushland gang all gasped. How did the tiger always manage to sniff out such evidence? “It’s a funny thing,” Terence said in his dry way, “but when you’re extinct, people look you straight in the eye and assume they haven’t seen you.”

  All the animals, including the wombat, laughed knowingly. They studied the crayon drawings of Graeme Harvey’s wounded head, while listening to Terence. “Lucien’s fine sketches illustrate one of the case’s central dilemmas. The bottle, with which Margot was supposed to have hit her husband, never turned up. The police asked Graeme repeatedly if he had any idea how it might have been disposed of. No. The crime squad searched extensively. No success.” The tiger sighed. “Some people began to wonder if Graeme’s whole story about Margot attacking him was apocryphal. Could he have acquired those cuts in another altercation? Was there something he was hiding?”

  The animals turned, as if from the conversation, and through some shrubbery saw Miss Kate Byrne, walking down the Main Street. A wide-eyed young bear described to Kitty what the schoolteacher was wearing. “I’m glad she chose that floral dress,” said the older koala in her maternal way. But secretly, she felt worried. “Was the lass really so foolish?” Kitty stifled a groan. “Oh no! Did she actually believe that cracking the Siddell case would put her out of danger?”

  THE PUB’S WALLS, stained nicotine yellow, displayed a variety of mounted sharks’ jaws and the memorabilia of long-wrecked whaling ships. The whalers once sat in here waiting for the whales to spout, but if the seas were rough, they’d stay drinking for days. Now a row of old men clung to one side of the bar, as if, for them, the seas had been too rough for years. I sat opposite. Perhaps I had intuitively positioned myself next to the men’s toilets, although I preferred to think this was my default position: the teacher surveying her class. Men played darts. Men watched the flickering horses. Men smoked. Signals were rising from each mute drunk. I had expected to be leered at, but what I read was resentment. My presence interrupted their secret business. They could try to pretend they were alone, until nature called, then each man swung past me, indignant still, as he held himself close. Some of the fathers were amongst the drinkers. If they approached, I knew I’d breathe fire. A line had been crossed. Every molecule was now changing, and the knife was in my purse.

  “How’s your day been, love?” the barmaid asked. She was a plump redhead, sunburned on the back of her neck. No one in the pub had to order his beer. The barmaid just looked out the window, saw a patron’s truck approaching, and pulled him a glass.

  “My day’s been great.”

  “Take it easy?”

  “Yes, yes, nice and easy.”

  She walked away and I stared back into my drink. Unfortunately, Murder at Black Swan Point would offer no clues as to the Marnes’ plans. Each chapter ended with another unanswered question, right until the book’s end where Veronica, trying to be poignant, wrote of visiting Point Puer’s convict ruins, in search of Margot’s fate. Walking to the edge of the Suicide Cliffs, Veronica had thrown flowers into the sea, mourning a brave woman who’d been undone by her passion. “Perhaps within all of us,” Veronica confessed, “there is an island of the night, and on that island a castaway capable of deeds we’d rather not acknowledge.” Veronica’s castaway was certainly capable of being verbose. The truth of this finale was that its author had no idea what had happened—315 pages, but all she’d needed to scratch on each was I DON’T KNOW.

  I put my head in my hands. The Marnes’ collusion made me feel an old angry feeling. My imagination had hit a wall and, swerving down a dark corridor, I started thinking of my own parents. I started thinking of my mother and father standing in for the Harveys rather than Veronica and Thomas. Graeme Harvey was roughly my father’s age. A strange, stiff-upper-lip generation to be born into, because although everyone liked to regard Tasmania as an outpost of Britain—singing “God Save the King,” then the Queen, around the flag at school assemblies—they had to live with history in a way most people who consider themselves civilized do not. My father went to the same boys’ school as Dr. Harvey, but was three grades below him. This school was built on a graveyard. To construct the Junior Wing the ground had to be leveled. Bones poked out of the earth, and it was realized some of the coffins would need to be exhumed. When the chains of a crane accidentally broke, a coffin came crashing down into the school’s playground. One little boy was expelled for running up and trying to prod a wedding ring off a skeleton’s finger.

  The stories of the teachers’ brutality have always seemed like cartoon episodes. There was the black-eyed master from Wales who’d beaten the little boys with “daps,” or running shoes. One day, when someone had been bad, the man asked for a “dap.” Several of the boys ran out to get one, and were then beaten too, for not having asked to be excused. There was the little boy sent to the headmaster to show him Good Work. The headmaster turned apologetically to the mother, with whom he was taking tea, claiming, “I shan’t be long!” as he proceeded to give the child a quick caning. It was hard to believe that these children were my father and my father’s friends, that they were ever excited about losing their baby teeth, that their faces once trembled into bouts of tears.

  I surveyed the men around me. I imagined them learning to read, one word at a time, their index fingers leading them through an odyssey with shipwrecks and poisonous snakes: A Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia; Roughing It in Van Diemen’s Land; The Castaways of Disappointment Island. Learning to read just after the war, they probably had slightly older books, stories about an Antipodean Wild West with bushfires and escaped convicts exacting revenge. Hook-Handed Bill ripped up his victims with his hook. Boys with bows and arrows hunted emu. “With some difficulty, for the wood was still pretty wet, I got a fire kindled and roasted a parrot.” In the illustrations, stained brown with foxing, the kangaroos didn’t even look like kangaroos, they looked like horses with coarse, doggy fur. The Aborigines looked like American Indians, wearing togas, and red feathers in their hair.

  There were probably old photos of these drunks in cricket teams together. There were photos of my father and his friends; black-and-whites from the early 1950s. It was amazing to me that the children in these prints looked just the same as the nine-year-olds at Endport Primary; they seemed, in some way, more like a different race than a different generation. They were guys who hung around saying dumb things; you had to laugh at their jokes for the appropriate amount of time, before asking to be excused. One of my father’s friends, a surgeon, designed a dream house for himself and his wife but wouldn’t even let her contribute to the layout of the kitchen. Another invited all his mates around the day his wife graduated from university. They took her desk and all her papers into the garden and lit a bonfire.

  • • •

  During the day Graeme Harvey got by, runni
ng on a feeling that he was outside himself. On farms that were really junk-yards he couldn’t stop his own theater. It was disgusting he cared what these men with burned-out faces thought of him. I stay because my life is here. He would get out of his car, and compose his face in warning: My daughters love this place. It’s their home. Should I have to leave my home? I can look people in the eye. The farmers led him past their houses. Inside their wives hated him but made casseroles for his daughters. He and the farmers walked past fences that were really just a few slats that happened to be swaying together, giant gray drift-wood waves about to break. I stay because it’s too hard at the moment.

  On the worst nights, Graeme Harvey lay in bed wondering if he had made some dare-wish to God, asking to be a single man. Had he killed the girl, then forgotten? He could picture himself prowling around outside her dark house, finding the open back door, walking in. She would have been fast asleep, her head stocked with girlish notions—Ellie hadn’t realized that he’d have next to nothing if Margot divorced him. Margot held the purse strings. Her family owned their house. And Ellie? Graeme pictured her lying there. She had wanted so many things. All the things a girl from her lovely background thinks she deserves.

  Old windows and doors leaned against the farm’s aluminum shed; so did reels of rusted chicken wire. The animals inside seemed incidental; what was really being farmed were broken-down motors, pieces of engine grazing in the afternoon sun. I stay because there’s nowhere else I know. If I pack my bags I’m not sure where I’d head. In the shed it stank of lanolin and excrement. He’d squat and listen to the animal’s quickening heartbeat. If the farmer looked at him a certain way he thought of the girl with her throat cut. He thought of the time between the first stab and her losing consciousness. If the animal were dying he’d give it a shot quickly. Then something unspoken would pass between him and the other man. “I’m not thinking anything,” the farmer may as well have said.

  On the way back to the car, in the twilight, Dr. Harvey would see the sunset reflected in the dirty windows of the farmer’s house. All purple and orange, there was a riot in the clouds. And superimposed, his own tired face. He took the casserole gratefully, leaving just in time: just before the weariness could no longer be modulated. He’d leave before he realized the stealing around before was just training for this new life of always walking into a room to win somebody back.

  • • •

  The barmaid refilled my glass, and I thought of my mother. I thought of my mother and the women, like Margot Harvey, whose desks were burned. They finished school and went to London on the boat. The world was their oyster for two years while they did temp jobs and took little trips. They lived in flats with other girls from school and were courted by the boys from home. At parties, men still stood on one side of the room by the beer keg, women on the other. It was the swinging sixties—the medical students had told their friends if you slept with a girl a week before, or a week after, her period, everything would be fine. Some men had bets they could crack girls; those who were good only had intercourse if it seemed an engagement was within sight. Girls were looking for husbands who were in the top half of the bell curve in terms of intelligence and had pleasant personalities, nice manners. The boys acted much as they had at home: drinking a lot, and smashing cars. All their lives were bound up in Australia. They all knew they’d go back and carry on as before, and when they settled down it would be forever.

  Margot Harvey probably had other friends who returned home to find Life did not fit their plans. Their big adventure over, they settled down to the business of marriage and children. Then, just when they’d well and truly signed on the dotted line, the rules changed. All the things they’d expected, all the lessons they’d been taught, now counted for nothing. One woman my family knew had worked to put her husband through medical school: he ran off with his nurse. Another woman left her husband as she said she couldn’t stand him anymore. The social revolution hit Australia ten years late, and people now supposedly divorced without stigma. But Margot Harvey had watched how divorce had wrecked her own mother. Margot had done everything right, every good-girl trick to avoid the same fate. When she realized it hadn’t worked, she must have felt the old anger, starting like a wave, from far away and long ago, suddenly breaking inside her. And even then, after she had killed her husband’s lover, it seemed this woman still returned to check whether, with Ellie dead, she could claim back her old life.

  • • •

  Turning her key in the lock, Margot walked inside and found her house looked just the same. The half-cooked dinner was on the stove and the smashed bottle lay on the floor. Margot took the dustpan from under the sink. She kneeled and filled the pan with shards and grit. Looking for splinters, her head close to the ground, she laid her forehead down. For a moment she stayed on the floor, almost in a ball. I did this for you. I did this for our family. When she got up she wrapped the glass in newspaper, and put the bundle in her coat pocket. She didn’t want Graeme to wake and see the mess.

  Margot walked down the hall to check on her daughters. Their naughty little girl bodies were splayed in strange poses. They’d had to wriggle into sleep. Toys were all over the floor and someone could have tripped. She felt the weight of the knife although her hand was empty. Sleeping, her daughters looked as they would when they were very old, spittle around their mouths, thin hair over tired faces.

  Only hours ago she’d stood by the stove trying to make them dinner. She’d heard screaming: in the living room they were huddled in a corner while a bird, lost in the air, flapped its wings wildly. The bird kept stunning itself against a window. There’d be the dull thud as it hit the glass, then the girls’ shrieks as they channeled each hopeless blow. Margot opened the glass doors. Cool air came into the room and the bird could’ve flown out. The bird could’ve walked out if it didn’t want to fly. They willed it to leave like a guest no longer enjoying their company. It flew onto the couch as if settling in. Furious, Margot shooed the bird, and it tottered off on its little legs, not looking back at any of them. She had returned to the kitchen where again she heard the girls squealing. They’d found little pellets of shit everywhere. They now ran around finding the shit with glee. And in all this giggling and pointing they were living out some toilet joke. And this little, stubborn, unwanted bird was complicit in the laughing against her: Margot wanted to slap each of them. She wanted to give them each a good hiding. Instead she’d sent the girls to their rooms, turning off each pot boiling on the stove.

  Across the hallway her husband was sleeping. He used to tell her every day she was the girl for him. At a restaurant he’d hold her hand under the table. He’d read to her the dishes on the menu. Asleep, he too looked older. He was curled up, his mouth wide open. It was the pose she’d seen in a magazine of a man found in peat; one of those people who stay not quite dead. When Graeme moaned she knew who was visiting his dream. She’d done the right thing. It was supposed to be the adulteress doomed to fall, but nowadays this girl could have gotten his love and his children and it would have been Margot as the divorcée wearing the badge of shame. Graeme’s mouth was wide open like he’d been stunned. “Good.” She walked into the bathroom and closed the door. His blood was still on the floor. “Good.” She turned on the tap. She pulled up her sleeve and unpeeled the hand towel. Ellie had scratched at her wrist, breaking through the skin. Margot had had to turn on the overhead light in the girl’s room; find a towel and then make a bandage. In Ellie’s room of pretty things, she’d stopped her own bleeding, before taking a blanket from the twin bed to cover up the body.

  Margot now looked down at the bathroom floor and realized she was bleeding. She put her hands in the basin, watching the water change color. She didn’t want to see herself in the mirror. Already she would look like a ghost, pale and bloated, because the girl had blocked the sun. It made her start to cry. There was no point patching up the wound the way she’d learned at nineteen years old. There was no point. She was going to have
to leave her family again tonight and drive away forever.

  • • •

  I looked outside. In the golden hour, certain leaves had found their calling; a brick wall was illuminated like a sacred text. They say an answer is where the mind comes to rest. Without any explanation, all the possibilities branched off endlessly, each one ridden through with doom. Margot hadn’t left behind a suicide note; she’d left nothing. This seemed strange: our desire to “not get lost,” to leave a clue, is so strong. I had seen a small prayer book at Port Arthur. Robert Maxwell is my name was written carefully on the first page; Robert Maxwell is my name was written on every single page thereafter. People spoke so confidently of Margot having survived. Did she have a chartered boat waiting at the bottom of the Suicide Cliffs? Was there a lover at the helm? Did this couple sail away together?

  The hours between Ellie Siddell’s death and Margot Harvey’s disappearance were easily the most intriguing part of the Black Swan Point story. It was possible Margot Harvey came home, wounded, after killing the girl and that that was when she left traces of blood on her bathroom floor. But if you imagine Margot leaving her family and running away to sea, the story quickly descends into cliché. People had never managed to reconcile the rumor that Margot survived with the rumor that Graeme was Ellie’s murderer. If Graeme were the murderer, why would Margot have disappeared? The two stories were incompatible, but perhaps each one had an element of truth. Margot had not committed suicide, but then she’d also not run away. Graeme hadn’t murdered Ellie, but he was a murderer: he had killed his wife after realizing what she had done.

  • • •

  Graeme Harvey hadn’t had a dream for ten years, probably more. Not one damn dream for ten years; then, after Margot disappeared, often, he would fall asleep and she would visit him. He would dream that in the middle of that last night he had woken, hearing noise in the bathroom: Margot was shivering, washing her hands in the basin. Turning, she looked at him with the expression of a crazy person. She was pleased, proud, even, that she’d ruined his life. Suddenly she lurched forward, angry, trying to scratch out his eyes. She was scratching and clawing at his face. He stood still while she scratched him and then she told him what she’d done. Graeme couldn’t help it. He put his hands around her neck. Tighter, then tighter again—she’d looked so pleased with herself.