Before the crash she was a researcher for a big law firm in the city. Her work mostly involved computer searches, and she was very good at it. She’d done a part-time computer science course and developed programs and search tools of her own. For over a year after the crash she was unable to access her beloved computer, until a friend from the course put her on to a new voice interface. For six months she worked at it until she was almost as proficient as she had once been, whispering to the machine, listening attentively in conversations that were incomprehensible to Harry. The law firm has started giving her work again, which she does at home, with her electronic best friend over there in the corner. She is slower than before, but she claims that now she has to visualise the data in her head instead of seeing it on the screen her thinking is clearer and more creative.
Harry would like to believe it, because he feels guilty about what happened too. It was his suggestion that she go with his mother and father on their trip up to New England. They took the scenic route north of Newcastle across the Barrington Tops on Thunderbolt’s Way to Uralla. It was on that beautiful road, winding and lightly trafficked, that the crash occurred.
6
Kelly missed the stabbing and police chase last night. The young lad who normally listens in to the ambulance and fire brigade radios (not the police since they went digital) was sick and didn’t pick it up. She hasn’t got anywhere with the son of Phoebe Bulwer-Knight’s friends either, but she has left a message on his phone saying she hopes she can meet him to check a few facts before she publishes her story about his parents’ tragic ending and their relationship with Mr Crosstitch. Perhaps that’ll get a response.
And now she’s daydreaming through three hours of local council planning committee tedium. She misses the beginning of Councillor Potgeiter’s item but when she does tune in she is startled. Apparently he is proposing a new sculpture to celebrate Aboriginal reconciliation in the civic precinct. A replacement for the old monument in Bidjigal Park, which is in a bad way and rarely visited. Kelly blinks. Hearing Councillor Potgeiter showing an interest in Indigenous affairs is like listening to Genghis Khan making an appeal for the widows and orphans. Kelly wonders if she can use that line in her column. She’s never heard of Bidjigal Park or its substandard monument, and when she checks on her phone she finds that it is a small pocket in the north-west corner of Crucifixion Creek, not far from the siege house. The Creek seems to be cropping up a bit these days, and she wonders if she could do a piece on it. When she leaves the council chamber she calls in to the library next door, the local heritage section, where she finds a slim monograph, The Grim History of Crucifixion Creek.
The name comes from the activities of a Lieutenant Walter Perch, she reads, sent out from the settlement at Sydney Cove in December 1790 at the head of a company of marines on a punitive expedition, carrying hatchets and sacks with which to collect the heads of five adult Aboriginal men, following a series of attacks on settlers.
After several days sweating through the bush in their thick uniforms, they finally saw smoke rising from a wooded knoll in the middle of a low-lying area of reeds and ferns. It turned out to be a swamp, into which the heavily laden redcoats began to sink. A number of Aboriginal men carrying spears appeared on the knoll to watch them struggle, and Perch ordered his men to open fire. When they finally floundered up onto the knoll, covered in stinking mud, they discovered the bodies of three men and Perch ordered their heads to be cut off and their spears broken, and declared that that would have to do. On the marines’ return to Sydney Cove a rumour spread that they had also nailed the three victims to the trees, and despite Perch’s denials the name stuck. Crucifixion Creek.
That’s a good start, Kelly thinks—murder then and now. She flips forward. Forty years after Perch’s expedition an Englishman called Roger Grange bought the land around Crucifixion Creek with a view to farming sheep. Cleared the bush, drained the swamp, built a house on the knoll. Then the price of wool collapsed and Grange, ruined, took to drink. In 1842 he and his family perished in a fire that consumed their house. He’d tried to change the name of the place to Grangeville, but it didn’t take.
During the 1870s a family of Chinese immigrants turned the Creek hollow into a flourishing market garden, but in 1888, during the racial panic that engulfed the country, a mob attacked and hanged them from the trees on the knoll.
Kelly begins to feel depressed.
In 1919 a builder returned from the Great War and laid out Mortimer Street in the eastern part of the Creek, and began to build modest villas. He was wiped out by the Great Depression, the street only half-built. After the Second World War Italian migrants moved into Mortimer Street and restored the market gardens, until drought in the mid-1960s dried up the stream that had fed the Creek. Their crops failed and they moved away, giving Phoebe Bulwer-Knight’s benefactor Charlie his first big break with his light industrial development which, for a while, went quite well. In the 1980s a group of local citizens persuaded the council to turn the undeveloped north-west corner of the Creek into a small public park, and raised some money to build a memorial to the victims of Lieutenant Perch’s little massacre. By the turn of the century, however, the area was run down, the poorly built concrete roads of the industrial estate cracked and broken on the unstable ground. Then the Crows moved in.
Kelly, finished with her notes for the article she has in mind, feels she needs a drink. She drives around the perimeter of the Creek on her way back to the office. Takes photographs of the park and its monument and of the industrial estate, seeing with fresh eyes just how derelict the whole place has become. She turns into Mortimer Street and takes pictures of the little villas, still in reasonable shape, and of the most modern and well-maintained structure in the whole area—the Crows’ clubhouse.
As she is leaving she sees Phoebe walk slowly into the street, a shopping bag hanging from each hand. Kelly stops and gets out to say hello, and the old woman looks startled, then accusing.
‘I got into trouble for talking to you.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. Justin telephoned me. He said a reporter had contacted him about Charlie and Grace, and threatened to say bad things about what happened to them, and it was all my fault and I had no right to talk to you.’
‘I left a message on their answering machine. I’m sorry he took it that way. He hasn’t got back to me.’
Phoebe drops her bags to the ground and wipes her brow.
‘He’s probably right. I am an interfering old fool. I think it upset me more than I realised, discovering them like that. I expect Justin’s ashamed of what they did. The young don’t understand.’
Kelly carries Phoebe’s bags to her front door. The sun has come out and she notices for the first time the profusion of pot plants, flowers, shrubs and herbs. She makes a comment and Phoebe says, ‘They grow better on this side of the house. I love them all. They’re so optimistic. Soon the jonquils will be out, and the bluebells.’
As she gets back into her car, Kelly’s phone rings. Justin Waterford, sounding stiff and formal. He says he can’t imagine why his parents’ death could be of any interest to her, but if she is thinking of publishing anything she should certainly come and talk to him first. She says she’ll be right over.
The apartment has a wonderful outlook over Rose Bay. It is very modern, very stylish,
with no signs of children, pets or clutter. Justin and Jade are dressed in weekend clothes, and Kelly wonders why they aren’t at work. They sit, Jade very alert and focused, Justin wearing an air of puzzled indifference.
‘We’re extremely distressed by the deaths of Mum and Dad,’ Justin says, ‘and frankly find your interest inappropriate and intrusive.’ He has an educated drawl. Jade, leaning forward, is giving Kelly the death stare. Kelly has taken an immediate dislike to both of them, but is trying not to let that influence her.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Waterford. I do appreciate what you’re saying. The thing is, their unusual deaths have aroused a lot of public interest and sympathy, and also a good deal of misinformed speculation. I just want to set the record straight.’
‘Look.’ Justin sighs wearily. ‘My parents were both suffering from dementia. Now is that the sort of thing that you would like to see published in the newspapers about your parents? I think not. It developed very rapidly in the last couple of months, and much more severely than any of us realised. I was shocked, actually, to see the state they were in when they were found, truly shocked.’
‘Oh dear.’ Kelly scribbles her notes. ‘And is that why they had no money? I understand they had no money at all on them, not even enough to pay for the glasses of wine they ordered at the café.’
Justin eases himself upright at the word ‘money’.
‘And presumably they would have been in no fit state to enter into financial arrangements with Mr Crosstitch?’
Justin and Jade both begin to speak at once, then stop abruptly. Justin starts again. ‘What do you know about him?’
The truth is that Kelly knows nothing; her searches have thrown up no one of that name. ‘What can you tell me?’ she asks blandly.
Justin stares at her, no longer laid-back. ‘Not a thing. All we know is what Phoebe told us, and that seemed pretty vague. But if you know something—anything at all about my parents’ financial affairs, you’d better tell me right now.’
He is lying, Kelly is almost sure of it; there is only one thing she needs to be certain.
‘And our lawyers have advised me to tell you,’ he goes on, ‘that if you publish one word that isn’t true, or misrepresents us in any way, we will sue you and your paper for every penny you have.’
And that’s it, the threat.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘let me give you my card. If there’s anything more you can tell me about your parents, do please get in touch.’
She gets to her feet. At the front door she says, ‘Who is your lawyer, by the way?’
He gives her a nasty smile. ‘Let’s hope you don’t have to find out.’
7
Harry wakes after a couple of hours, thinking about Jenny in that difficult house, banging her knees against unfamiliar obstacles. She hates him being overprotective, but what else can he be? He wonders about her dreams. Have the images become more vivid, now that her waking life has none to feed on? Does her sleeping mind work overtime, creating the scenes and faces she can no longer see? And will it one day remember the last moments before the crash, when she must have seen the unknown vehicle that tipped them down that hillside?
He gets up and makes coffee, and goes to his own computer—he doesn’t like to touch hers. He logs on to the police intranet and his appointment with the police psychologist that afternoon is flashed up. His access to the [email protected] case files has been blocked.
He phones Jenny. She tells him she’s hungover; she and Nicole sat up drinking, and she is now making something to eat. Nicole is still asleep. Harry’s heart thumps. ‘You’re in that kitchen alone?’ He imagines her pouring boiling water on herself or straightening up suddenly and cracking her head on an open cupboard door. ‘Don’t fuss, darling,’ she says. ‘Anyway, the girls are helping me.’
‘How are they doing?’
‘Oh, you know, in shock, like we all are. It still doesn’t seem quite real.’
‘I know.’
‘Anyway, Mum’s coming over. She’ll stay here for as long as Nicole needs her. A couple of weeks anyway.’
‘Good.’ Bronwyn is a capable, sensible woman, just what they need.
‘She’ll be here in time to look after the girls while we’re out.’ Jenny doesn’t say where.
He gives them a couple of hours to get ready, then goes over to pick up the two women. They drive in silence to the mortuary at Glebe, where Jenny and Nicole are taken to see Greg.
While they’re away he asks if Dr Roberts can spare him a couple of minutes. They know each other from the post-mortems Harry has attended, and the pathologist puts his head around a door and waves him into a small office. He is dressed for his next case. They shake hands.
‘Sorry about your brother-in-law, mate.’
Harry nods. ‘Just wondered if you could fill me in.’
‘Not a lot to tell. Two clean, deep stabs to the heart. Death instantaneous. He would hardly have felt a thing. Banged his head on the concrete when he fell, but that was post-mortem.’
‘Defence wounds?’
‘No. No bruises or cuts to his hands. No traces under his fingernails.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘He’d had a fair bit to drink. Whisky. A big slug just before he died.’
Harry thanks him and collects the women to take them back to Nicole’s. Bronwyn gathers them in and he leaves for his appointment at the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills, not far from home.
*
He has had a couple of meetings with the psychologist there before, at his annual weapons tests, but they had seemed like a formality. This time it’s different, his credibility on the line, his fitness for duty.
She shows him in with a friendly smile, making out like it’s no big deal.
‘Harry,’ she begins, ‘I’m so sorry about your brother-in-law. That must have been a terrible blow.’
‘Well, yes. But for his wife obviously.’
‘Your wife’s sister,’ she prompts. She seems well informed. ‘How is she?’
And suddenly, despite his earlier warnings to himself to say no more than necessary, he finds himself telling her about the visit to the mortuary, and his mother-in-law coming to help.
The psych nods sympathetically, letting him finish. ‘If you feel she needs professional help I can suggest some people. And your poor wife, how is she?’
Jenny would hate being talked about that way. ‘She’s been great.’
‘This was your second homicide in two nights.’
‘Yes.’
‘That first night you saw someone shot dead in front of you.’
‘It wasn’t the first time.’
‘In Afghanistan, do you mean?’
He nods.
‘Want to tell me about that?’
‘Not really.’ Pause. ‘It’s not relevant.’
‘Was it someone you knew well?’
‘Someone in my platoon, yes.’
She seems reluctant to let it go, but decides not to press him. ‘So with that in your mind from the previous night,
you’re then called to another murder scene where you go to examine the victim and realise that it’s your brother-in-law. Can you tell me about it?’
‘It’s not such a freak experience,’ he says.
She looks surprised. ‘How do you mean?’
‘When I was at school, one of the other guys did work experience at a funeral director’s, and one day his girlfriend’s body was brought in. It’s the sort of thing we’re warned about, trained for. That you might know the victim.’
‘But still…When did you last see him—Greg, was that his name?’
‘Yes.’ He clears his throat. ‘Saturday. There was a family barbecue at his house.’
‘A special event?’
He looks at her. How would she know that? Did Marshall tell her? How would he know? ‘An anniversary.’
She waits, sympathetic, and it works. ‘Of my parents’ death.’
‘And of your wife losing her sight. I noticed the date on your file. Is it possible do you think that with these traumatic things coming on top of each other, that you’ve linked the two things, your parents’ and your brother-in-law’s deaths?’
‘What? No, of course not.’
‘The mind does funny things under pressure, trying to make sense of coincidence.’
‘Did Superintendent Marshall suggest that to you?’
She has the grace to look embarrassed. ‘He’s concerned about you, and so am I. I know you’re a very resilient person, used to handling stress, but anyone experiencing what you’ve just gone through would need time to absorb and deal with it. I want you to take leave on health grounds—one week to begin with, then we’ll see. How do you feel about that?’
Crucifixion Creek Page 4