by Jean Bedford
She’d gone back into therapy herself after that, afraid he was right. It had taken painful months of analysis and self-analysis for her to be able to accept again that she was what she was, that her methods worked — when they worked — because they suited her, not because she was hiding behind them.
She opened her eyes wide and blinked them rapidly, counting to a hundred. Then she rotated her head from one side to the other and slumped her shoulders heavily several times. She took five deep breaths, holding the air in her diaphragm for as long as she could each time before exhaling strongly, emptying her lungs. No more thinking about Rosalind Larson, or of Mick; it was time for her next appointment.
I’ve been careless—for the first time.There’s a hint in today’s paper.I’m almost breathless with the shock,hut there is excitement,too,and anticipation.Will they be clever enough to take the next step,make the connection?Because this wasn’t the last one;there has been another one since.All it needs is some lateral thinker,someone who understands patterns and probabilities,someone who goes just that one step further.Then I’ll be in danger,for the first time,and there is something here that attracts me.There is a voice whispering softly:‘Yes.Yes.Make the connection.Come after me.’ I’ve read all the literature,the statistics that show that most want to he caught,most invite the capture,hut I’ve never believed it until now.Not that I want to he caught;not at all.That would defeat my purpose utterly.But the chase—yes,that has a sweet compulsion I hadn’t realised before.That they will hunt for me,not knowing who I am,hut knowing,finally, thatI am.That they will see my works hut never understand.That they will see me,hut not know it is me.That they will see me.
Noel was late, though not any later than she often was, so she was annoyed at the pursed disapproval on Rafferty’s face when she went into his office.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I was here till midnight fiddling with that gun law amendment thing. Isn’t it any good?’ She couldn’t think of anything else that would make Rafferty pissed off at her, but she had thought the piece was all right, herself.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Great,’ he added casually. He pointed at a chair and she sat down.
‘Then what are you on about? This is about the third time this century that I’ve got in later than you.’
He didn’t answer until he’d sat down himself, at his desk, in the boar’s-hide director’s chair that they’d bought him from an op shop last Christmas as an office joke. Typically of Rafferty, he’d taken it seriously, and regarded the chair with a solemn sentimentality. Perhaps he genuinely admired it. Noel gradually realised that he was irritable because he’d been wanting to speak to her, not because she was late, as such. But she’d kept him waiting. She relaxed; this was just Rafferty being a spoilt brat.
‘How’s that child abuse story going?’
‘What?’ She was surprised. ‘You know how it’s going. I told everyone about it on Monday at the editorial meeting. That’s two days ago. Then you sprang the gun laws article on me. Nothing’s changed.’
‘You seen theHerald this morning?’
‘No. I slept late and came straight in. Then Chris said you wanted to see me. Before I started farting around as usual, I think were the exact words.’
He almost smiled. His five o’clock shadow was well advanced, although it was still morning, and the too-tight knot of his tie was halfway down his chest, revealing a missing shirt button. Rafferty didn’t have to work at being a stereotype, she thought, he came from the original mould without seeming to be aware of it. His greying black hair was messy, already curling into the spikes and spirals that showed he’d been twisting his pencil in it. By the end of the day it would be mostly standing up, giving him the look of an ageing punk goblin. He was overweight and hypertense, and his idea of a working day was to come in at eleven, flick through his mail and anything his secretary thought was important, then collect as many of his staff as possible for a long drinking lunch. Black coffee and late nights were what made good stories, he said, not public service hours. His journalists protected him, knowing he was a mastodon in the new order, often working all weekend to make their deadlines because he’d dragged them across to the pub every evening in the week.
‘Read it,’ he said, and shoved the paper across to her, open at page two. She skimmed the headline: CHILD DEATH MURDER: CORONER’S REPORT.
‘So? I already told you the statistics show a lot of it ends in death.’
‘Keep reading.’ He picked up his rubber-tipped pencil and started winding it through his hair, waiting until she had finished the piece.
She looked up. ‘Jesus, Rafferty, sometimes I wish you’d start smoking again. I bet your barber does, too.’ She was nattering, making time while she absorbed the gist of the article, and he didn’t bother to reply. They were both silent for a while, Rafferty rotating his penal, Noel with her eyes unfocused, thinking rapidly, running herself through her copious interview notes.
‘I dunno,’ she said finally. ‘It seems a big ask, the implication here. That some ... deviate is masking his killing of kids under the guise of child battery by the parents. That is the implication, isn’t it?’
He gave her an approving look. ‘That’s what I read out of it. I wanted to see if you’d get it, too. I don’t think Shannon even saw what he was writing. It’s all in what the coroner says, and that journalism-school dickhead hasn’t got the wit to interpret it.’
‘But it’s a very wild assumption,’ she said. ‘Unless ...’
‘Unless they’ve got the same results in other situations.’
‘But they haven’t. At least, I’m pretty sure they haven’t. I went through the cases where habitual abuse had eventually led to killing the child. All the cases in New South Wales in the last ten years. I went through them with the cops involved. There wasn’t the slightest whiff of anything like this.’ She thought for a moment. ‘What there was ... well, the cops said there were some child deaths that they couldn’t hang on the parents. You know, babies drowning in the bath or the pool, or apparent SIDS events; major falling accidents, where they thought it was murder, but they couldn’t prove it. Just a suspicion. Where the family had a history with Community Services, or there’d been complaints or rumours. But this is different. This is a rape-murder. It’s a kid who’d been in and out of hospital with injuries consonant with sexual and physical abuse.’ She shrugged uneasily at her memory of the details.
‘There was nearly a court case against him last year,’ she went on. ‘Nothing came of it — the mother wouldn’t testify, though they split up for a while afterwards. There was talk of an injunction but she didn’t go through with it.’
‘Yeah, and then she let him back into the home. I know — it fits your patterns. But I also know when something smells like a story, and this does. Go and talk to that coroner. Find out if we’re imagining things or not.’
‘But ... is this part of my piece or is it a new one?’
‘Tell me when you’ve talked to him. If it’s a new one I’ll put someone else onto finishing yours and you take this over. OK?
‘No. You bloody well know it’s not OK. I’ve put weeks into that article. It matters to me. It’s nearly ready to go.’
‘That’s not what you said a minute ago.’ He gave her his boyish disarming grin.
‘Fuck you, Rafferty. I can make it ready to go.’ She stood, gripping the back of the chair. ‘That’s what you really want, isn’t it? You want me to wrap that story up quick and then start a manhunt for you.’
‘It’d make a good two-parter,’ he said, still grinning. ‘Something like, “Who’s Killing Our Children?” That’s for Part One. Run it over a couple of issues. Then Part Two could go, “Who Else is Killing Our Children? Noel Baker gives some disturbing answers.’”
‘You make me sick,’ she said, opening the door. ‘I hope the coroner tells me it’s all bullshit. That he was misquoted or something.
Rafferty let his grin die away. ‘You know something, Noelly? So do I.
’
*
Noel took the coffees over to the corner table where Sharon Beale was already sitting. ‘Senior Constable,’ she said. ‘Your cappuccino, double cream, ma’am.’
Sharon looked up from her notebook and smiled slightly. ‘Constables don’t get ma’am. Shithead’s more like it. Ma’am’s for female sergeants and above in English detective novels, and there aren’t many of those here.’
Noel was interested. She had an uneasy relationship with the police generally, but she secretly admitted their lives fascinated her. Doing what she did was a way of being a cop manque, she often thought. ‘But you have lots of seniority. There must be junior constables who should give you a sign of respect.’
Sharon laughed. ‘They shuffle their feet and avoid calling me anything. Sometimes I think my name’s “Um, excuse me ...’” She added three hefty shakes of sugar to her cappuccino and stirred, then took a sip. ‘Good. Fabulous coffee.’ She looked blandly at Noel, not asking what she wanted, waiting to be told.
Noel thought of trying to outstare her, then smiled. She wasn’t sure who’d win at this technique they were both experts in. She tried to keep herself distant from real friendships with the police she knew, realising that in the end they were a closed society, that such friendships would always be in proportion to her usefulness to them, and theirs to her. But she liked Sharon more each time they met, liked her small intelligent face and her energetic good humour against all the odds.
‘How do you cope with it?’ she asked, on an impulse, making her voice only half serious, knowing she would sound naive, but genuinely wanting to find out. ‘Working with damaged kids, battered women ... trying to treat their abusers like human beings ... ? Why aren’t you cynical and burnt out like all the cops in fiction?’Like all the other cops I know, she thought.
There was a faint tightening of the muscles around Sharon’s mouth, a slight but definite signal that Noel’s question was too personal, out of line, but her voice was pleasant when she replied. ‘You’re taught to detach yourself. We’re given special counselling before we take it on. Not everyone manages to get past the training. Anyway,’ she said, her voice brisk now, telling an outsider how things were, ‘cops are always dealing with the stuff no-one else could bear. It’s part of the job. Itis the job.’
‘I suppose so.’ Noel was doubtful. She had grown up in a culture antagonistic to the police, always ready to criticise them for weakness — bullying and corruption. She didn’t like her assumptions challenged, not when the challenge came close to her own internalised fantasy of being a sort ofgood cop herself.
‘Anyway ...’ Sharon said, looking at her watch. ‘I’ve actually just gone off an extra night shift. I want to get home and crash.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Well, it’s this Belinda Carey thing. I’m talking to the coroner this afternoon, Albert Spinks. The one who was interviewed in theHerald. I wanted to know if you’ve heard anything. If there’s anything you’re allowed to tell me, I mean.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Sharon’s surprise seemed genuine. ‘The stepfather’s been arrested. The stupid bitch of a mother got drunk with him one night a couple of months ago and took him back home. He was there for a few days, then Belinda went missing. They found her body in a vacant lot near the flat he’d been living in when the mother kicked him out. Strands of her hair, fibres from her clothing, the chain from her locket — all found in the boot of his car. The rope used to strangle her was cut off a coil in his garage. It’s one of the strongest cases I’ve ever heard of. He’s history.’ She leaned forward, suddenly pugnacious. ‘I haven’t seen today’s paper. What’s the coroner say?’
‘Well ... It’s not so much what he says, it’s what he insinuates. Here, read it.’ She got the photocopied page out of her bag and passed it across the table.
She watched as Sharon read it once, fast, then again more slowly, her sharp attractive features drawing into a frown as she took in its meaning. ‘It’s bullshit,’ she said. ‘I know this guy — Albert Spinks. He’s a bit of a weirdo, anyway. Thinks he’s a hotshot detective or something. Always hoping he’ll solve some major mystery, make the cops look stupid.’
She shoved the article back at Noel. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ she said. ‘It’s not just the circumstantial evidence, there’s a background there. There’s everything you amateur sleuths want — motive, meansand opportunity, as well as absolutely cast-iron evidence.’ She shook her head, her curly dark hair bouncing. ‘Jesus Christ, you must be desperate to fill pages.’
‘But I’m right about what he’s saying, though, aren’t I? The coroner ...’
‘Listen,’ Sharon said, not trying to hide her anger. ‘I dealt with this kid, Belinda, once. I helped bring her in after the neighbours rang triple-0. She’d been raped with a broom handle — we didn’t know that then, just a “smooth blunt object”, but we found it. The broom in question. In the family home. He hadn’t even bothered to wipe the kid’s blood off it. They had cleaners, you see. Posh solicitor, comes from family money. It didn’t seem to occur to him that anyone’d look at anything as ...low classas a broom. And the mother’s thick as a brick. Fucking vacant blonde, used to be a model, out of it on valium and slimming pills half the time. Probably didn’t even know they owned a broom. The kid was only three, then, too young to testify adequately and the mother went ape at the suggestion.’ She sat back and took a deep breath. ‘She said the kid was a problem — always playing with herself, shoving things up herself. She’d told the same story to several doctors before. And, as I said, the stepfather’s a posh solicitor — he knew all the right buttons to push.’ She shook her head again and laughed softly. ‘Sorry. My class prejudice rearing its ugly head. Jesus, Ilive with a posh solicitor myself.’
‘All right.’ Noel spoke carefully. ‘He sexually abused her. He’s an animal. But did he kill her? This bloke, this coroner, seems to be saying there are anomalies, that it doesn’t look like an incestuous rape gone wrong, it looks more ordered, more psychotically patterned ...’
‘The trouble with freedom of information is that any Joe Blow can set himself up as an expert,’ Sharon said with no apparent irony. ‘This fuckwit, Albert Spinks, he’s read all the FBI stuff on serial murderers, in thrillers, or on the Internet or some-fucking-where, and he’s got himself all excited.We read it, too, you know. We know all about organised and disorganised killers — all that computerised shit — and that the FBI itself has never actually caught a real live serial killer with all its patterns and profiles. But we also know when we’ve got real people committing real crimes, and the evidence to prove it.’ She stood up and gathered her coat and bag. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking to you. No, really.’
‘Sharon ...’ Noel sighed. ‘Look, you’re probably right. But I have to follow it up. It’s my job.’
‘How do you cope with it?’ Sharon mimicked her. ‘How come you’re not all cynical and burnt out like other journalists? How do you sleep at night?’ She smiled briefly, with no warmth, and walked out of the cafe.
*
‘I lost it a bit, today,’ Sharon said to Mick. They were in the bath together, late at night, the spa jets bubbling through the fragrant salts. ‘That Noel Baker, the journalist. I’d better ring her up and apologise. She’s not as full of bullshit as most of them, though she’s a bit gung ho. I actually quite like her.’
‘Do you? Actually?’ He leered at her through the steam, reaching for her breasts. ‘And how wasmy day, darling? I thought you’d never ask.’
‘I know how your day was.’ She stopped herself from sliding under the water by grasping his leg. ‘Briefing a barrister to get some slime off on fraud charges. Filing bankruptcy for some other sleaze, helping him hide his Swiss bank accounts. Our whole relationship is a study in conflict of interest.’
‘Except where it counts.’ He probed between her legs with his big toe. She ran her hands up from his ankle to his thigh, lightly cupping his testicles as his erection
grew.
‘I reckon I’m on a promise tonight, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Sure.’ She answered lightly, standing up and reaching for a towel. She climbed out of the giant bath and stood drying herself, watching him in the mirror as he wallowed in the foam. ‘Mick, this Gus Farrell. He is guilty, isn’t he?’
‘Who Gus Farrell? Oh, you have such a lovely bum. So firm, yet so plump. So ripe, so smooth, yet slightly furry ... Like pomegranates, etcetera.’
‘Get off. That was breasts, anyway.’ She flicked water at him. ‘You know quite well who he is. The Belinda Carey murder; the stepfather. You were in law school with him.’
‘Total nerd. Was then, always will be. Course he’s guilty, why do you ask? Even I couldn’t save him.’
‘Yes. I know. He’s guilty.’ She carefully shook out the towel and put it back on the rack. ‘See you in bed,’ she said.
Belinda’s stepdaddy used the broom handle in her vagina when she was very small.Later he would have preferred his own dick.My own father was more inventive;anything smooth and slim and rounded.The handles of kitchen utensils—egg slices and soup dippers;the wooden grips of an old skipping rope;the plugged and oiled long necks of beer bottles;occasionally the middle fingers of his right hand—all went up my arse at one time or another.Everything greased with butter or cooking oil.Nothing pushed in too far.Far enough to hurt,but seldom any blood.