But David was at his eloquent and persuasive best, he said, they had decided, why delay and it would be just as easy to get married quickly as slowly.
So she agreed. She would return to England to pack up her things and spend just over a month with her family and friends before she and her family came out to Australia for the wedding.
Even though tradition would have had the wedding in England they both agreed they wanted it in Sydney, at the church at Watsons Bay, the place where they had really started to get to know each other and first really enjoyed each other’s company. There was a lovely sandstone church a few hundred yards from the restaurant and it felt like the right place to get married. Their reception was to be only a short walk from there, with beautiful afternoon and evening views out across Sydney Harbour looking towards the city skyscrapers and with vistas of sailing boats sweeping by in front of them.
She knew her own family could well afford the trip to Australia, and Anne had promised to come out as her bridesmaid. And she knew they were all looking forward to a holiday in Australia. So the wedding date had been set for December, the church and reception had been booked and most of the guests had been invited.
On her final weekend in Australia there had been a big family and friends’ engagement party up at David’s family’s place. It had been really lovely, with so many well-wishers; all the neighbours came from around the farm and local village and lots of David’s extended family, some from across country NSW, others from a mix of Australian cities.
Susan charmed them all and enjoyed their company, she realised she liked the charm and courtesy of Australian country people, they lived at a slower and more polite pace than their city cousins.
They had both agreed to say nothing of the baby at this stage. Most of the time Susan was barely conscious of it and it was not showing, in fact there was a good chance that it would be barely evident at the wedding, though Susan had chosen a loose fitting dress just in case. Time enough for everyone to know this piece of news when the time came, it was of little importance right now, she thought.
Almost before Susan knew where the time had all gone she was boarding the plane back to England, proudly wearing her engagement ring and giving David a last hug and promising to ring him every day, “at least almost always,” she qualified. Then the door closed and suddenly she was back in her own world again.
She settled into her seat and picked up her passport, now with another visitor exit stamp. She would need to sort out some more permanent residency arrangements, it was something they had both largely forgotten about in the rush of the last three weeks but she must get onto it as soon as she was back in England. She should probably begin with a trip to the Australian embassy next week, no doubt endless form filling and proofs of their relationship, perhaps she could return on her existing visa which was valid for the year.
As she was thinking about this Susan began to aimlessly flick through the various pieces of paper which were in her plastic travel wallet. She realised it was the same one that she had used when she first came to Australia about four months ago; it seemed that was in another life time.
Sure enough there was her boarding pass from London to Tokyo and another to Cairns. She decided that, as she had many hours to kill, and lots of arranging to do once back home, she would start by going through this wallet and discarding the rubbish, it was symbolic of her moving on, this cleaning away another part of her life. Then, when she had done that, she would make a list of things she had to do once back in London, that way she could hit the ground running.
She discarded the boarding passes from her first trip to Australia, then she pulled out the other scraps of paper that sat alongside them, there was a folded sheet with the name Janet Davison, and below it Maggie Richards, two London addresses, phone numbers and emails.
At first it did not ring any bells then it came to her, Maggie was the girl she had met on the boat in Cairns and gone to Kuranda with, Janet was Maggie’s best friend that she travelled with, but that Susan had not met. When they parted Maggie had given her this slip of paper to get in touch once she returned from her holiday. She could not remember any reason for Janet’s name being there, but maybe it was already on the paper that Maggie had torn out of her notebook. Thinking of Maggie brought a smile to Susan’s face, they had a great night out in Cairns and it would be great to catch up in London, if she could manage it, in the next month.
She put this slip of paper aside to keep and picked up the next bit. It was a double folded piece that she had no remembrance of. Perhaps she had picked it up by mistake. Then it came to her, this slip of paper had been handed to her by the man behind her in the queue at the passport checking place. It was just before she left Darwin on her last flight out of Australia. She had slipped in here without looking, fully intending to check it later and had promptly forgotten it.
Perhaps it did not really belong to her. It also looked like a sheet torn from a notebook, with one jagged edge and faint ruled lines. Its origin was certainly not something that triggered her memory. She turned it over as she looked at it.
There, on the other side, was her name, “Susan”, written in small neat writing; so it was hers. There was something about the writing of her name that set alarm bells jangling in her brain. It was not her writing, but it was familiar writing.
She opened the sheet, and almost dropped the paper. It felt like it was on fire and was burning her hand.
It began,
Dear Susan,
If you are reading this it almost certainly means I am dead. I know now that is the only way forward from here. One of us must vanish and I could not bear for it to be you.
I have written this because I wanted to say goodbye. It seems important to me now to tell you that I love you and not just vanish with those words never said.
They are words I have wanted to say to you ever since that first day on the boat when I met you face to face, though I had already been entranced by your image, glimpsed distantly on the Cairns shoreline, feet in the shallow water and hair flung back embracing the sun. It is that I have loved you utterly since even before I first met you, and it was only when brought to a place of no other choices that I could say it honestly.
A page of close spaced dense hand writing followed and at the bottom was a signature she knew so well,
Mark B.
Chapter 9 - Identification of a Body
Alan had been racking his brains for two weeks about how to identify this person of the billabong, really just a forearm and a skull. He had picked Sandy’s brains for all her ideas and he had done the same with many of his work colleagues. But really it was the same ideas, check for missing persons, follow all the leads he had and wait for a lucky break.
He had tried all the dentists in Darwin and Katherine for dental records which matched, but nothing. In reality there was not much to match, a couple of minor fillings which could have been done anywhere and a complete set of teeth which on X Rays looked normal and unremarkable. So, while the experts told him that each person’s teeth were unique and distinctive, there was hardly a database of teeth images that a computer could search. And without any other identity clues going through hundreds and thousands of dental X Ray images in a range of surgeries, and seeing if they had any which resembled his specimen, was thoroughly unrewarding. So now he had now almost abandoned this idea though he had left a copy of the image with each dentist just in case something should jump up. But he suspected it was a waste of time.
The forearm was slightly more interesting. They had evidence of a healed forearm fracture, and also evidence of an associated gunshot injury in the form of several small fragments of lead present in the adjacent tissue. They looked like they had come from a projectile, which disintegrated when it smashed into the bone. But all the big pieces were gone and the pieces were only 1-2 mm in size. They would have been easy to miss, but Sandy had picked up the white flecks on the X Ray and gone digging, after taking pictures from a range of angl
es. Three pieces had been retrieved and analysed. All had a metal profile of lead with traces of other specific metals in a combination which suggested Soviet military ammunition. There was also some scar tissue around the injury which indicated that the wound had been surgically cleaned, and perhaps sutured up, but without internal surgical fixation of the fracture. So it was likely that this operation was done in a third world country because in a developed country such an injury would normally have been repaired with a plate and screws, according to a surgeon that Sandy had talked to in Darwin Hospital.
So what the identity information they had to go on was a Caucasian male, of medium to strong build, based on lower arm bone shape.
The age range was 25 to 45, on the basis of full growth plate closure but without evidence of the degenerative changes that accompanied advancing years.
Isotopic bone and tissue analysis also suggested that the person had predominantly lived in Northern Australia with some time spent in Africa and or the Middle East, but this was not definite.
The level of healing of the bone injury suggested that it had occurred when the person was an adult but at least 3 years ago. This injury had broken the mid ulna bone and that this had been repaired by wound cleaning and probably a plaster cast such as might be applied in a field military hospital.
Thus an occupation such as a mercenary in a conflict where one side was using Soviet military ammunition, with an African or Middle Eastern location also seemed a reasonable surmise.
But while these were interesting facts they brought Alan no closer to knowing the person’s actual identity. In reality he felt a bit stumped at this juncture, and had now largely moved onto other cases, while waiting and hoping that something would turn up.
Sandy had completed all her tests, analyses and reports. It was definitive that all the tissues, blood, forearm and skull belonged to the same person, death from a fractured skull, following a blow by a piece of broken timber to the side of the head seemed the likely cause.
The police had also made a cast of a back left tyre missing a distinctive piece of tread and of two human footprints, one of a likely mid-sized female and one of a medium to large man, whose size appeared consistent with the victim.
They also had good evidence that the site had been deliberately cleaned up after the event, including dirt scraping and brushing, fire-ash deposited in the billabong with a few interesting but minute fragments which they may yet identify, an MB monogram and broken lock from what looked like a leather briefcase, with its make yet unknown. The tarnish on the brass monogram and lock fittings suggested a 1-2 month period in the water.
There were also other odd snips of information which may or may not be relevant, such as a report from a local fisherman who routinely came to fish further along this billabong most weekends of a person unknown driving a white Toyota, around the billabong campgrounds in a way which suggested they were unsure where they were going at about 8 pm on a Saturday night around the likely time period of this event. The description of the vehicle was imprecise, though it was probably a tray back and the man thought he had seen something white on the back, like an esky box.
So it was possible that this was a description of the vehicle used by the murderer to leave the scene, particularly if they were unfamiliar with the locality and were searching for a way out. Alan well remembered how confusing all the tracks around the billabongs were in the daytime let alone at night.
Unfortunately the man was not absolutely sure which weekend it had happened, as he had been out there almost every weekend since June, but he thought around mid to late August. So all these things may help tie a person or persons and a vehicle to this location. But first they had to make an identification of the victim, for the other information to become useful.
However the case fascinated and challenged Alan and he worked on it every minute he could spare, as well as spending hours discussing it with Sandy, though since the night of her crocodile dream she had withdrawn a little from her desire to catch the killer.
She told Alan that she had felt such a terror coming from the lady who was in her dream that she did not want to do anything to harm her further and that, if she had killed the man, she was sure it was for a good reason.
At first Alan had teased her a bit about this, saying it was only a dream, how could she know anything real from it. But Sandy said she was as sure as she could be that she had seen inside the mind of a women, in this place, who was intended as a victim of the crocodile.
Then Sandy challenged him back about the sense of loss he experienced coming from the crocodile that day; “how could a dumb predator communicate with him?”
As Alan relived this memory he found he was no longer so sure it was all rubbish and stopped his mocking of her dream. So, after this, they called this a truce and, while they still talked a lot about the case, it was about any ways he could find to identify who this man was.
Outside of work he and Sandy were getting on wonderfully, still in that first delicious period of loving infatuation when all they wanted to do was go to bed together, and any time and place was good. The sex was great, but more importantly they really liked each other and enjoyed doing things together. So days were hard work where they saw little of each other, just an occasional quick hello call. But evenings and nights were wonderful, and they spent them together almost always.
They still both kept their own places but now it was just for the purpose of deciding which would be their joint abode of the night. He liked Sandy’s place best to sleep in. It was full of her feminine nick knacks, smells and mess. Even when she went out and left him alone there it still felt like her. His place was more masculine and ordered, with better furniture and a longer term feel. Sandy said she preferred it, both for the better creature comforts and also because of something similar in reverse, that “it was imbued with him”, and she liked the sense of him that pervaded the place.
In reality their living was about a fifty-fifty split between both places and now they were having conversations about getting a larger place to share. He was sure it would happen as it made sense to only have the one place, both for money saving and convenience, but it was not a burning priority.
Everyone now knew they were an item and the novelty gossip value was fading. It felt good to have this part of their life settled and they were even planning a short Christmas trip south to meet both sets of parents. He felt really good about being with Sandy and thought, maybe, on New Year’s Eve he should pop the question; if she said yes that really would be something to celebrate. The only question was how to manage both their careers if any babies came, but they did not need to go there yet.
Alan was doodling on his pad, part of his mind still on Sandy and last night, as he scanned some reports on a series of break and enters around Nightcliff. He was trying to get a feel for whether there was any common pattern or just some random delinquent larceny, but his attention was only half with it. His phone rang, startling him.
It was Eddie from the Vehicles Section. He said, it may be nothing but I have had a call from a patrol car out near Marrara. They were called to investigate what appears to be an abandoned Toyota, parked in the service road alongside Macmillan’s Road. It has been there for quite a while and nobody has really paid it any attention, though one of the house owners opposite was starting to wonder who owned it.
But the night before last someone smashed the windscreen and it has just sat there since. So the owner of one of the houses opposite rang to report it. Anyway the patrol car is there now looking at it; it’s a Land Cruiser tray back with a cooler box and cage on the back. We have just run the plates and it shows up registered to a Mark Bennet from Alice Springs, just a postal address. I have looked up this person and can’t locate him on our systems, no phone number or other contact details, though the address is valid. So I have just asked the Alice Springs police to call round and see if they can locate him.
Then, just a minute ago, I remembered my conversation with
you, over a drink last Friday, that weird crocodile murder victim where you recovered part of a briefcase with a monogram, and you said it was an MB. It may be nothing but who knows.
Alan could feel the excitement surge through him. It was both the initials and the way the vehicle description matched that given by the regular fisherman. Could this be the break he had been waiting for?
He brought himself back to the phone, “Definitely of interest Eddie, and many thanks. Is the patrol car still there?”
“Yeah sure, I asked him to stand by for five while I ran a few checks. I was just about to tell him to leave and say we would call a tow truck to take it to a garage. Then your conversation popped into my mind. I will call the patrol car back and ask it to hang around if you want to go straight there.
Alan replied “On my way as we speak, and thanks again. I owe you one. This could be the big clue we have been waiting for.”
He called the constable from the desk beside him, “Are you good to go? We have an abandoned vehicle that may be linked to our Crocodile Man, out near Marrara.”
In five minutes they were there and looking from the outside at the Toyota as described. Judging from the accumulation of dust it had been there for a couple months, though inside, other than a shower of glass scattered across the dashboard, seat and floor it looked remarkably clean, too clean for a bush vehicle.
He peered through the side window into the gloom. It was hard to see clearly but, as best he could tell, the interior looked spotless; not what one would expect from an abandoned bush basher. He climbed up on the back, also clean except for a few leaves and a film of dust. He opened the cooler. It was spotless too and it had a faint aroma of cleaning chemicals, as if it had been closed up after being cleaned, while not quite dry, and the smell still lingered even though all moisture was long gone. It was this cleanness, more than anything, which set the bells ringing in his brain. There was such a similarity to the way the campsite had been systematically cleaned. He felt almost sure this was the real one, they break they needed. He looked at the back passenger side tyre. He could not see a piece of missing tread, but it was on the inside and most of the tyre was hidden up in the under-body. That was something to check once the vehicle was on a hoist.
Crocodile Spirit Dreaming - Possession - Books 1 - 3 Page 33