by Neil Cossins
“It went well. The suspect has been taken into custody and we’ve just begun to search his apartment.”
“That’s good news Detective. Well done.”
“Let’s not get too excited yet boss. It’s early days.”
“Of course. But I’d like to be kept updated on this.”
“Will do boss.”
For the next two hours, Nelson, Robards and the pair of SOCOs methodically searched the small apartment. It was five a.m. when they finished, by which time Nelson felt exhausted. He had managed a few hours sleep earlier in the night, but his body clock knew it had been badly shortchanged. Even the usually bullet-proof Robards was beginning to look worn around the edges. Dark circles had formed under his eyes and his whole body slumped from exhaustion. Nelson decided to go home and freshen up with a cat nap, a shower and some fresh clothes and he told Robards to do the same. They would let Craig Thoms stew in lockup until they were ready to put their questions to him.
Chapter 21
The rain continued to sheet down as two bodies erupted together in an apex of pleasure. Kylie Faulkner let out a banshee-like scream that startled awake several of Manuel Torres’ more immediate neighbours and he interrupted his own afterglow to laugh out loud and marvel at his obvious expertise.
They collapsed on the bed beside each other, bathed in sweat and temporarily unaware of the cold air inside the apartment. Manuel, breathing heavily, smiled at her wholeheartedly and completely. She smiled back, knowing that he had fallen hard for her and would do whatever she asked of him, he had proven that already.
It had been easier than she expected. When she first came into contact with Manuel Torres, a twist of fear had knotted inside her stomach. His face seemed so hard and implacable. It was rare for her to feel fear and it gave her a small thrill while it lasted.
However it hadn’t taken long for her to realise that his face was just a mask, similar to the many different masks she had worn over the years when she wanted or needed to be someone else. His was a mask worn for protection, developed during his seven years in prison where he learned to show little or no emotion, more specifically no weakness, so that the gaze of the lions that hunted in packs within those walls passed over him and turned their attention elsewhere.
It was a mask that she was soon able to remove from him once they were alone together. Beneath the tough exterior she found that he was gentle, inexperienced and an emotionally stunted young man. At that point her task became much easier. Using her mind and body, she sensed his needs and his desires and appeased them willingly and completely. He was soon overcome. It wasn’t the first time she had used men to get what she wanted, a promotion, a favour or just money. She understood men and considered them all to be simplistic creatures who never deviated far from a sameness that was easily exploited. Their attention was caught by a stare and a smile and their minds were like clay, to be moulded into the required shape after she had enticed them with her body. Sex was the tool of choice against all of them, something to even the ledger against their size and power.
Manuel Torres’ previous seven years had been filled with pain and emptiness which she now replaced with an intoxicating mixture of joy and pleasure, the likes of which he had never experienced before. It had taken just a few weeks to insinuate herself into his life and his mind.
He told her of his time in prison during their third week together. The stories saddened one part of her mind and excited another darker part. She watched as he choked back his emotions, deeply buried, as he told her harrowing stories of gang rape, savage beatings and other depraved human behaviour he had experienced and witnessed in jail. She contorted her pretty face to display sadness and understanding for him, while underneath laughed at his weakness.
In their fourth week together he told her of his secret plans, plans which she already knew about before they had even met. It was why she had chosen him in the first place. He had been sworn to secrecy, lives depended on it, including his own. But such was his devotion, and her control over him, he volunteered the information and willingly placed his life in her hands.
By then her own plans had been carefully formulated to blend seamlessly with his. She accepted it as fate that their paths had crossed. Fate, coming to assist her in her quest for justice, a quest that had begun many years before, but had only recently begun to form into an actual shape.
She remembered the moment when she knew he was completely hers, like a sixteen year old schoolboy in love for the first time.
“Do you love me?” she had asked him after a long and tiring session in his bedroom.
“I do. I love you.” She appraised him minutely, carefully weighing the tone of his words and searching his face and body language for any hint of male insincerity. She smiled when she found none. He was hers for the taking.
“I want to help you.” she had said. Then she had leaned close to him and placed a small seed of an idea into his mind. She nurtured it and grew it in him, gently directing it toward the fulmination of her own plans, and so artful was her manipulation, that in the end, he considered it to be his creation, his idea.
The plan had been unnecessarily complex, she knew that, but she had fallen in love with its symmetry and its deliverance of natural justice.
Chapter 22
As she lay on the bed beside Manuel, Kylie’s green eyes gazed out the window to the blue morning sky beyond which showed no hint of the previous night’s rain. Her mind reached back into the past and she remembered a time from long ago, the last time she could remember ever being truly happy. It was a simple weekend trip from Canberra to the south coast of New South Wales with her parents. It began with the singing of the usual road trip songs and ended when she awoke in complete blackness with water rushing into the car, already up to her knees and coming up fast. She screamed but her parents didn’t answer. She had instinctively known they were dead and that they could not be helped. While there was still time she rolled down her window. She gasped as the cold water flooded into the car and enveloped her body. She waited until the car’s cabin was almost full and the inflow of the water had slowed before sliding her slim teenage body through the opening and blindly searching for the surface in the dark waters.
Misery touched her life that day and would remain a regular companion thereafter. After a week in hospital she was visited by her Aunt Maggie, who despite being her only living relative she had met only twice some years previously. Although her mother and her aunt were born of the same parents, their indifference toward each other had grown through the years and was sufficient to overcome their blood ties. Her mother had rarely spoken of her sister and on the rare occasion that she did, she maintained they had simply drifted apart over time and neither had made the effort to bridge the gap.
In the ensuing days in hospital Kylie Faulkner came to understand that arrangements were being made for her to go and live in Cooma with her aunt and her defacto Lester after she was released from hospital. She didn’t want to move to another town and live with people she barely knew but as she was still a minor she was given little choice in the matter.
In time, her physical injuries from the accident, which included a fractured ankle and several deep lacerations, healed to become only thin white scars on her pale skin, but the scars that couldn’t be seen, the ones in her mind, remained open and infected. She was traumatised by her parents’ deaths and was troubled by nightmares and flashbacks of the crash, and would break out into a cold sweat whenever she travelled in a car. In addition to her problems she was uprooted from her comfortable middle class life in Canberra to the seemingly perennially frost bitten and fog laden Cooma.
Although Aunt Maggie had similar facial features to Kylie’s mother, unfortunately that was where the similarities ended. While Kylie remembered her mother as being a slim, pleasant woman with an easy going soul, Maggie was a short, dumpy and taciturn woman who rarely smiled because she found little in her life to smile about. Her hair was cut boyishly short, she wore
no makeup and dressed in clothes of a style that helped to date her ten years beyond her forty-seven years.
Her defacto Lester, who for some reason she had put up with for thirteen years of her life, was a fifty-five year old semi-functioning alcoholic who somehow managed to hold down a part time job as the local broker for an insurance company. He was overweight, slovenly and his predilection for gambling and consuming enormous quantities of alcohol managed to keep the small family poor, despite Maggie earning reasonable money as a nurse at the local hospital. The more they earned the more he spent. Despite his habits, Maggie complained little and Kylie often wondered how the pair had come to be together. She thought that perhaps it was an example of a relationship between two people who had stayed together for lack of anything better immediately on offer.
In the first few months of living with them, Lester had maintained a cool indifference towards Kylie in the presence of her aunt. But when Maggie was absent, Kylie soon felt his eyes upon her, feeling their way over her young body and resting on certain places that are unique to a woman and strangely enticing to a man. In time, as his boldness grew, the glances turned to stares and then in turn to lascivious leers. Even though Kylie was still at the fledgling stage of her development to womanhood she reminded Lester that he still had the same urges of a younger man.
Once a month, as part of her duties at the local hospital, Maggie travelled with a doctor to conduct regional clinics in some of the many small settlements dotted throughout the Snowy Mountains. It was an arduous, whistle-stop, two day tour and required an overnight stay at Cabramurra if all went according to plan on the first day. It was during the third road trip since Kylie came to live with them that Lester made his big move.
Kylie awoke to the sound of keys being fumbled at the front door at around two a.m.. She had heard it all before as Lester went out drinking at least three nights a week and stumbled home, either at closing time or when he had run out of money, whichever came first. It was a bitterly cold night of around minus seven degrees Celsius and Kylie groaned at being woken and pulled her doona tight around her. After several unsuccessful attempts to identify and insert the correct key, Lester eventually made it inside. Kylie listened to him take off his shoes and go to the toilet where he noisily urinated in the only bathroom in the ten square house. The wooden floorboards creaked involuntarily as he then shuffled his way around the house but then stopped and silence prevailed. Kylie wondered what he was doing as she hadn’t heard him go to his bedroom which was down the hall from hers. She waited for him to move again and betray his position in the house but heard nothing. Her nerves began to prickle and she raised her head from her pillow and looked at her door. Through the one inch crack under it she could see the shadow of two feet and her breath caught in her chest as she realised he was standing outside her door. Her heart raced and pounded like a drum up in her throat as she heard her door silently and slowly swing open. She pretended to be asleep in the hope that he would go away but in he came, confidently staggering straight to her bed.
“Kylie? Kylie, I’ve got something for you,” he whispered. He lifted the covers and ran his freezing cold hand up her thigh and between her legs.
She gasped with shock from the touch and was slow to react.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy? Get out of here.”
“C’mon, don’t be like that. You know you want it. I seen the way you been looking at me,” he said chuckling.
“Please leave me alone,” she pleaded, but Lester ignored her. She gathered her wits and tried to push him away as he continued to run his hands slowly over her body, but despite his obvious drunkenness he easily overpowered her, for although he wasn’t a strong man, he still outweighed her by over forty kilograms. She fought harder and struck out at him with her nails but this angered him and he slapped her several times. The blows jarred her head, blurred her vision and were enough to force her to submit to his will.
As Kylie stared sightlessly out Manuel’s apartment window at the thin and wispy cirrus clouds that she could see starting to form high in the sky she could still vividly remember Lester’s stale smell - a combination of body odour, stale beer and cigarettes - as he lay on top of her and rutted furiously. She had screamed in agony as pain arced through her abdomen but he clasped his hand over her mouth, not that there would have been anyone within earshot to come to her assistance anyway. It was over in two painful minutes but the memory of it would remain with her to her final day. Lester left without a word and Kylie had curled into a ball and quietly cried and hoped for the pain to subside. It was her first sexual encounter.
She spoke to no-one about that night, hoping that it was a one-off moment of madness and perversely wanting to give Lester some benefit of the doubt. But sure enough, a month later when her aunt went on her next road trip, Lester returned to her bedroom. Again she tried to fight him off but again he hit her, always with an open hand. There would be no obvious marks to alert anyone or add weight to any claims she might want to make.
After several months of abuse she finally raised the courage to tell her aunt. She wasn’t sure what reaction she expected to receive but she certainly hadn’t expected her to fly into a blind rage and accuse Kylie of trying to drive a divide between her and Lester.
“After all the things we’ve done for you. No-one else would have taken you in. If it weren’t for us you’d be dead.”
“But he’s been hurting me.”
“Look Kylie, I don’t know why you’re saying these stupid things, but if you cause us anymore trouble, or if you say these things to anyone else, I swear I’ll turn you over to the foster care people where things will be a lot worse for you.”
It was a vacant threat because unbeknown to Kylie, Aunt Maggie was being paid thirty thousand dollars per year from the solicitor who acted as trustee for Kylie’s dead parents’ estate to house and care for Kylie. Although they had little to show for it, it was money that Maggie and Lester had become accustomed to spending.
Kylie desperately wanted to call her aunt’s bluff and take her chances in the belief that things couldn’t get any worse for her, but fear of the unknown held her back. She also contemplated running away, but apart from a life on the street there was nowhere to run to. She considered going to the police but argued reasonably that if her own aunt didn’t believe her then they might not either. And so she decided to stay, not from choice but from a perceived lack of options.
After that she never mentioned Lester’s nocturnal visits to anyone. Lester took Maggie’s defence of him as a sign of consent and continued his monthly visitation rights, becoming more confident and acting out all of his sexual fantasies with the fifteen year old Kylie.
In time, Kylie learned to become numb to his visits and an uneasy and unholy truce of sorts was arrived at. He did what he wanted with her and did it quickly, inflicting as little discomfort as possible. And in return she didn’t fight him and didn’t complain. On one occasion as he penetrated her from behind she had seen him in the mirror which sat in the corner of her room. The look of primal atavistic joy on his face scared and disgusted her and from then on she would close her eyes, pretend she was somewhere else and wait for it to pass.
She thought about her parents often to keep their memory alive in her heart and mind, and in an effort to honour them, vowed to survive and triumph over her current circumstance.
She locked herself away in her room as often as she could and concentrated on her secondary school studies. In the process she became a better student than she had ever been at the private school she had attended in her previous life in Canberra. She found casual employment at a local outlet of a fast food chain and welcomed as many shifts as she could get which kept her away from the small house several nights a week and weekends. She saved her money and even stole a little from the register to supplement her hourly wage and planned for the day when she would have enough to make good her escape and start a new life.
Her big break came just a month
before she was due to finish her secondary studies. While cleaning the house she came across a letter from a Canberra based solicitor. The official looking letterhead seemed out of place amongst Maggie’s other papers and piqued her interest. As she read she came to understand something of the financial arrangement that had brought her to live at her aunt’s house, an arrangement that had never been explained to her. Something snapped in her head and a cold rage swelled inside her as she realised the irony of her situation. She laughed aloud savagely in the empty house as she realised that her dead parent’s money was being paid to the people who had made her life into a living hell. She thought of Lester drinking and gambling away the money, her parents’ money, and then coming home and molesting her in anyway that he saw fit. She thought of her aunt who had provided her with basic clothing, food and shelter but had never bothered to extend her an ounce of kindness or belief. Kylie had known nothing of her parents’ assets at the time of their deaths and to that day had wrongly assumed they left little behind. From the moment she read the letter however, she realised some options were open to her. Her plans for escape began to accelerate and she smiled grimly to herself as she made them.
Chapter 23