by Jean Bedford
‘Paddy ... yeah. I thought he was familiar. Paddy Galen, right?’
She’s slightly alarmed. It wouldn’t surprise her if Paddy has had his run-ins with the police. ‘How do you know him?’
‘We interviewed him over the Farrell thing.’
‘What?Paddy? What on earth for?’ She half spills her fresh cup of coffee, scalding herself. ‘Shit.’ She sponges her T-shirt off with the wettex and sits down opposite him. ‘What did he have to do with it?’
‘Nothing. We only spoke to him once. He worked in that wine bar in Glebe the kid used to go to. You know, the Carousel? But they all said she hadn’t been there that day.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ she says. ‘I could have spoken to him. Shit, I had a source right under my nose and I didn’t know.’
‘Well don’t glare at me. I didn’t know you knew him, either.’ He finishes his coffee and she waits for him to begin the awkward leaving conversation.
‘So, you coming back to bed or do I have to carry you?’ He sees the look on her face and says, ‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Tony, you were straight with me about all the Farrell stuff, weren’t you? I mean, you didn’t have leads that you kept from me ...’
‘Christ, Noel. I put my arse on the line getting you copies of those old files. There was nothing there, remember? Nothing. Waste of time. And therewere no other leads. You saw printouts of all our records of interview — your mate Paddy’s was among them. Why would I keep anything from you?’ He is exasperated; he shakes his head like a goaded bull.
‘Yeah, I know. Sorry.’ She puts her mug down and stands staring out of the window. It’s been hard for her to let this story go, and Paddy being some sort of witness has shaken her again. She had just flicked through the interviews with the wine-bar staff. It was her fault she hadn’t noticed Paddy’s name. She turns towards him. ‘Do you still want to go back to bed?’
He relaxes and stands up, putting his arm around her.
*
Later, when he’s gone, she gets out her folders of notes on the Belinda Carey murder. She makes herself a coffee and curls up in her deep armchair near the window, Bach’sWell-Tempered Clavier playing in the background. She still thinks there’s something too pat about the case; it feels staged, somehow, though she now believes the police couldn’t have framed Farrell. As Tony had said, he’d shown her most of what they had and it all led to the conclusion they’d come to. Now a jury has agreed with them.
She gets up to change the disc; more Bach, preludes and fugues, then rummages in her filing cabinet for the copies of the child-death case histories she’d collected. Tony had helped her go through them again, all the recent incidents of incestuous or abusive murder of children, and none of them had the same MO as the killing of Belinda Carey. They all seemed the logical consequence of past events of violence in the family. Now she wonders if they’d been looking for the right things. Perhaps there’s adifferentpattern, she thinks. She does word puzzles as a recreation, she knows how the mind can get stuck in one or two particular ways of interpreting information.Come back to it fresh, she tells herself.Look for another way of approaching it.
She kneels on the floral rug near the fireplace with cardboard folders strewn around her. After two hours she has extracted three files and put them aside to read again. She’s feeling stretched from all the coffee she’s drunk, and wondering whether her growing excitement is simply caffeine-induced. She leaves the mess on the floor and goes to make herself an omelette. She needs to eat something and have a couple of glasses of wine, then come back to it with her energies slightly blunted, free of any artificial exhilaration.
*
Sharon stares at her over the table at the coffee lounge. ‘You never give up, do you? You’re obsessed.’
‘But listen, in all these cases, there wasonly circumstantial evidence, just like Farrell. Nothing else — no eye-witnesses, no proof that the accused was there at the time. Just that he — or she, one of them was a woman — didn’t have an alibi. There was a history of abuse, and the forensics were overwhelming. It’s the same pattern, don’t you see that?’
‘So, what? You think we’ve got some serial killer here who’s so organised that he familiarises himself with all the background before he kills? Then he frames the obvious suspects with — what did you say?Overwhelming forensics?’
‘It’s possible, isn’t it? I mean, there are lots of cases of killers who stalk their victims for months, get to know them intimately before they strike. It’s an accepted profile of some of them ...’
‘Well, I don’t think you’ll find the elaborate framing of other suspects in many profiles. That feels just a littletoo organised to me.’
‘Come on Sharon ...’ Noel flicks her fingers on the table. ‘You’re the one who says you don’t trust that sort of analysis. You can’t have it both ways.’
‘But you can?’ Sharon swills her coffee dregs around the cup, frowning, trying to catch the remnants of froth stuck on the sides. ‘If you’re right — and it’s a huge if — then we’ve got a whole new ... mutation, here.’
‘Right. We could get into history. You could have the FBI begging you to take a million dollars a year to lecture at their academy ...’
‘And you’d get the Pulitzer or something I suppose. It really doesn’t seem likely.’ Her voice is flat, final.
Noel sighs and gestures to the bored young woman at the counter that they’d like refills. ‘Will you at least come round and go through the files with me? I’ll cook you dinner. I’ll buy proper wine in a bottle.’
‘Can you cook?’ Sharon smirks to herself and Noel wonders if she’s been talking to Tony Voulas.
‘Well, not as such. Not real food for other people. But I know how to turn on the microwave.’
‘How could I resist? But I think you’re flogging a dead horse.’
‘Another favourite of your dad’s? Tonight, then?’
Sharon laughs at her. ‘All right. Tonight. You can pay for this coffee, too.’
*
The first case they look at is that of Simone Churcher. Noel has used pink highlighter on various details in the notes, and she waits while Sharon skims these first, then turns back to read the file thoroughly.
‘Well, you won’t get a retrial on this one,’ Sharon says finally. ‘He offed himself in prison last year.’ She thinks for a while. ‘I don’t see it. I mean, I see what you’re saying about the similar ... set-up, if you like. History of abuse. The kid’s in and out of foster homes and institutions, then back with the family, during someone’s long lunch at DOCS.’
‘It’s exactly the same configuration, if you don’t look at the specific details of the crime,’ Noel says. ‘The father was never convicted for abuse, just warned. There were enough grounds to remove the child from the family, but then she went back.’
‘It’s not quite the same,’ Sharon argues. ‘This time there’s some hearsay evidence that puts him on the scene. He’d arranged to meet her after school; other kids heard him say what time he’d pick her up. We’ve only got his word that she wasn’t there when he arrived.’
‘And we haven’t got anyone else’s word to say she was.’
‘Noel, he didn’t get home till four hours later. That’s pretty weird, if he didn’t do it.’
‘Is it really? I mean, what if he did havesomethingplanned? Perhaps hewas intending to take her somewhere and fuck her. Then when she didn’t wait for him he got into a rage and drove around looking for her, and got drunk, just as he said he did.’ Noel leans forward out of the chair. ‘Look, all the real evidence is circumstantial. It’s full of Albert Spinks’ anomalies, too. I mean, the blood in the boot of his car — why wouldn’t he get rid of that? He was the first obvious suspect when she went missing. He’d have had time to clean the cat. And look at the medical report. Why did he need to use chloroform? This kid was used to being raped by her old man. He’d never had to knock her out before.’
‘How do you kno
w that?’ Sharon frowns as she thinks it over. ‘Chloroform doesn’t stay in the bloodstream all that long — they wouldn’t have tested for it the other times she was hospitalised or examined. Why would they? Her injuries were evident enough.’ She gestures towards the notes, making a disgusted face. ‘Broken arm, twice. Fractured pelvis, once. Cracked cheekbone, twice. Extensive bruising all the time. Concussion several times. And that’s about when the hospital finally thought perhaps little Simone was having a few too many “accidents’’ and alerted someone. They hadn’t even genitally examined her until then.’
‘Her records got mislaid when they moved the hospital,’ Noel says, wondering why she’s defending them. ‘They didn’t realise for a while that they’d treated her before.’
‘OK. What about the others? You tell me. I work with this garbage all day, I don’t really want to read all about it now.’
Noel picks up the next folder. ‘Just a summary?’ Sharon gives a tired nod and gets up to fill her glass from the bottle on the coffee table. She settles back on the floor, against the leg of the couch, and closes her eyes.
‘Terry Clancy,’ Noel says, skipping through her notes. ‘Ten-year-old boy. Typical background. Single mum. Again, no convictions, but heaps of suspicion. Counselling for the mother, who’d been an abused child herself. Four other kids, younger, by three different fathers. Malnutrition, bruises — one of his teachers reported it finally. He was falling asleep in class. Slow learner, cowered every time anyone went near him, no friends. Went straight home from school every day and wasn’t seen again till the next morning.’
‘OK, I get the picture,’ Sharon is speaking with her eyes still closed, her forehead bunched up as if in pain. ‘How was he killed?’
‘Suffocated. Sharon, there weren’t any fresh bruises on him — none that had been made at around the time of death. Isn’t that abit strange? The mother had beat the shit out of him the other times. She used an axe-handle or something.’ Noel stops, trying to imagine it, the boy’s terror, or worse, his apathetic acceptance.
‘Go on.’
‘She hadn’t done it for a while, as far as anyone knew. The counsellors thought she was responding to therapy.’
‘Had he been sexually abused as well?’ Sharon feels as if she’s at work, intoning the familiar questions.
‘No.’
‘So it doesn’t match up with the others there, does it?’
‘Shit. Perhaps not. But I’ve got a feeling about it, all the same. Anyway, the rest fits. No direct eye-witness evidence, all circumstantial. Found dead in his bed by one of his sisters who ran screaming into the street. His mother said she’d been zonked out on sleeping pills all night, but there were fresh traces of her handcream on the pillow used to kill him, and the indentations in the grease were aprobable match to her fingerprints.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘Well, except that she probably touched that pillow all the time. Perhaps she’d plumped it up for him when he went to bed. Anyway, want to hear the last one?’
‘Why not?’ Sharon sits up straighter. ‘Hang on. What happened to the mother?’
‘Unfit to plead. Psychiatric detention. She’s still in. The other kids have gone to relatives.’ She reaches for the remaining folder.
‘Shantelle Smith,’ she says. Sharon snorts. ‘Yes, I know,’ Noel smiles and goes on. ‘But it was a middle-class family all the same.’
‘Often is,’ Sharon says, stretching for the wine bottle again, then changing her mind. ‘What about some coffee? I’ve got an early shift tomorrow.’
While Noel is out of the room Sharon picks up the file and begins reading it. After a few paragraphs she lets it drop and gazes at the empty fireplace.
‘It’s all so predictable after a while,’ she says when Noel comes back with coffee and biscuits on a tray. ‘Sometimes I wonder if they don’t read some manual that tells them how to be a child molester. No, I don’t mean predictable. Whatdo I mean? Stereotyped or something. Hackneyed. Remember a few years ago when paedophiles and child abusers seemed to be swarming out of every crack? People got sick of reading about it. They turned off. They stopped believing or they just got used to it, they stopped caring. That piece of yours last month was the first time in ages anyone in the media’s looked at this stuff.’
They sit sipping their coffee in silence for a while. Noel doesn’t want to ask Sharon what she thought of the article.
‘It was good,’ Sharon says then, as if reading her mind. ‘Very thorough. But I don’t think anyone much gives a shit. This lousy government certainly doesn’t.’
‘Well that’s one of the points I was trying to make,’ Noel says lightly. ‘Overstrained support services, no networks in place. Anyway, can you bear this last one?’
Sharon nods and Noel begins to summarise it. It is, as Sharon says, almost predictable by now. Five-year-old Shantelle had been missing for six days when her body was found by a woman walking her dog. She had been anally raped and beaten and left in a scratched-out cursory grave in the Heathcote National Park, not far from the highway. Both parents had given hysterical television interviews, begging her abductor to return the child.
Painstaking police work had uncovered a probable history of abuse by both parents. Again, neither had ever been convicted, or even charged, but there were notes in Shantelle’s files at the Children’s Hospital, and police had been alerted on two occasions. There had been no proof that she was not, in fact, accident-prone. Scar tissue in her anus was explained away by her mother as the residue of bad attacks of piles, although there were no supporting references to that in the medical records. The little girl had gone missing shortly after a week in hospital for treatment of contusions and a sprained wrist, caused by her falling out of a tree, according to her parents.
‘It’s the same scenario,’ Noel says, ‘after that. No-one can actually place her father at the scene, but he kept a log book and his car odometer showed an unexplained distance travelled and there were traces of his hair at the grave site, caught in her fingers. Again, he says he was searching for her on the night she went missing, but the police drove over the route he said he took and it doesn’t account for the extra kilometres. A trip out to Heathcote does, though.’
Sharon is sitting up, listening carefully. ‘I’m surprised they got a conviction on that,’ she says.
‘It was a while ago, at the height of all the media stuff about the backpacker murders. Most people were really pissed off at what the jury wasn’t allowed to hear during Milat’s trial. There was a spate of convictions on fairly thin evidence for some time after that. Juries making sure.’
Sharon nods. ‘Look, Noel, I have to go or I’ll fall asleep on the floor. I still don’t know about all this. I need to think about it, let it jell a bit. But one thing ... She is standing up now, looking round for her coat and shoulder bag. ‘The time scale. These three cases go over what? About six years? That seems a long period.’
‘These are the obvious ones,’ Noel says, standing too and moving towards the door with Sharon. ‘There might be dozens, for all we know, but they’re not so apparently in the pattern.’
‘You and your patterns. Perhaps you should take up knitting.’ She puts her hand on Noel’s arm. ‘Don’t come down with me. I will think about it, promise. Have you talked it over with Tony at all? What does he think?’
‘No, I haven’t yet. You know what he’s like — a bit scornful of the feminine intuition scenario. I want something more concrete to go on. See you soon. And ... thanks, Sharon, for at least listening to me.’
‘Pleasure. The quiche was good, too.’
‘Dj’ s deli. Nothing to it.’ She shuts the door after Sharon and goes back into the living room. She pours the rest of the wine into a glass and sits with it by the window, staring at the lights of the city glittering against the bruised velvet of the night.
Belinda was easy—she knew me,I’d bought her lemonade several times.I’d sat in the little park near her house with
her while she ate chips and told me secrets.
I knew all about how she got out of her room,through the window and onto the roof of the shed,then clambering down the camphor laurel.I know it was a camphor laurel because I walked down their back lane and peered through the fence.I always prepare as thoroughly as l can.Sometimes it can take months.Wakeful months,avoiding the demons that come on the verge of sleep.
I hadn’t known it would be that night—I could only be there sometimes,where we met at the park,but when I saw her coming towards me I knew immediately it was the right time.The demons had been prowling at the edges of my mind for weeks.
It wasn’t entirely convenient for me—I had other things to do that night,something I couldn’t put off.I gave her the cheesy things and the small bottle of flavoured soft drink I’d already drugged.I’d had it with me the last few times I could get away,but she hadn’t appeared.As soon as she passed out I carried her to the car.It was only a few steps and no-one saw us.No-one ever sees me.
I took her home and locked her in my spare bedroom.When I had to go out I gave her a small additional shot of the sedative to make sure she didn’t wake up before I came back and get frightened.She would never wake up or be frightened again.
I knew him once,Gus Farrell,I knew what he was like.I knew he would keep doing it to Belinda.Nothing would ever make him stop.He had no morals,no sense of remorse.At university he was arrogant and stupid—people like that never change.He married Belinda’s mother when the child was a baby;he was in his forties,his first marriage.Some men watch and wait for years until they find a non-coping single mother with a child the right age.This is documented.Some men,like my father,only discover their raging need when they’ve got children of their own.
Planting the evidence was easy,too.It always is,surprisingly.People are careless—they leave their garages unlocked,they leave their spare keys under bricks or flowerpots,they keep a duplicate car key in a drawer or on a hook by the kitchen door.A few days watching them to find out their habits,then the first secret entry:the lifting of a few hairs from a brush,a tool with their fingerprints already on it to use as a weapon,the impression of their keys on wax—so easy.