I turned my face into the detective’s coat and uncontrollable sobs shook my body. He steered me away and out to the street where his partner, someone I’d seen once before, was waiting behind the wheel. I crawled into my safe space in the back and we left.
I would have liked to have curled up and gone to sleep in the security of the police car, but the detective had other ideas. We pulled up instead at a restaurant which had a separate room at the back, and after passing a few words with the man behind the counter, he ushered me there. His partner remained at the counter, chatting, and eventually he came in carrying cups of tea.
I was grilled, though not harshly, about my activities that night and the reasons for my being where they’d found me. Towards the end of my story, the detective put his face down in his hands, his elbows on the table, and slowly shook his head from side to side. When I finished, he looked up.
‘You didn’t do much damage to the fellow. Superficial wound. You’re lucky.’
I didn’t feel lucky, I felt robbed. I had put in so much effort, and thought I’d been able to rid myself of the central cause of my pain and stress—only to find out that I hadn’t been successful. The man was still alive, and still free to hunt me. I felt tired, too, as the long walk to the Institute had exhausted me because I hadn’t been having much exercise recently. I could feel my eyes starting to close, but they opened again quickly when the detective snapped at me.
‘They’re going to say you’re crazy, you know. We might have trouble keeping you here. I’ll have to speak to the lad’s parents, he’s only young, and see if they want to press charges.’
Charges? I was surprised. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d done something wrong. I’d got the wrong person, and I was really sorry about that, but I was even sorrier that he hadn’t been the right man. Then I wouldn’t have been sorry, I would have been glad, and I said so.
They took me back to the boarding house, the detective going into the building first to make sure the right man wasn’t laying in wait for me. He left me with a stern warning that I wasn’t to move beyond the front door. It was now early in the morning, close to dawn, and it didn’t take me long to drift back to sleep.
I don’t know when that detective ever slept, because when I next opened my eyes it was because he was tapping on my door. It was afternoon, he said, and we were to talk. He was alone and we sat in the car.
‘I hear rumours that “somebody up there” wants you examined. That little caper of yours last night got the wind up some people. Someone’s already spoken to the chap’s parents, and I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble there. We had to tell them a bit about your case and all this other stress you’re under, with this crim out and about looking for you and so forth. I understand they were very upset to hear it. And their lad’s okay, with just a few stitches and a pain in his side.
‘But tongues are wagging upstairs. There’s a very real possibility that someone thinks you should be committed. There’s talk, too, that a hospital, right now, would be a safer place for you than this boarding house, you know what I mean? Someone’s loading the dice.’
I didn’t know what he meant actually. But I knew what ‘committed’ and ‘hospital’ meant. It meant being in a place like Broughton Hall in Charters Towers, which I’d visited as part of my training, and to where patients with very strange behaviour had been taken.
I let him finish talking.
‘Now, my advice to you, and you can do with it as you like, but my advice to you is not to let them get to you. It’ll do your case against these animals no good at all for these chaps’ lawyers to be able to point their fingers and say to the jury that you can’t tell what’s real from what isn’t. Everything you’ve told us up to this point has been solid. You’ve walked through the identifications, which are often the hardest part, the part where cases start coming apart at the seams. We’ve got one more thing we want you to do, and when you’ve done that, you can go home to your mother in Townsville. I think it’s going to turn into a choice—either you go there, or you’ll probably end up being put into a hospital here. We’ve already had dozens of letters from your mother, saying she wants you and will look after you. You were here to help us with the cases, and you’ve done that, or you’ve almost finished doing it. lust one more thing to do. Can you hang on?’
I wished he would give me an order, not ask me to make a decision. So, I just nodded. He took that to be the answer he wanted, and he went on to make arrangements based on what he thought I’d wanted. It was all the same to me.
Later that afternoon, another policeman came by and took me to a maze of a building where we seemed to walk for miles, ending up at a little desk with another man sitting behind it. It seemed as if that man was guarding a door. The officer with me signed some papers, got me to sign my name on a form, then we were let in. After the narrow corridors, the room we entered felt vast. A bench at about hip height ran across one wall. The officer now explained that he’d been told to show me some basic things about guns. From the briefcase he’d taken from the boot of the police car when we’d arrived, he pulled out a gun and began to explain something about it. I was startled as I’d not been told what to expect from this outing, and much of the first part of his talk was lost on me as I stared at the weapon. I don’t recall what sort of weapon he said it was, and he went into a lot of technical details such as calibre bullets and so on. I then watched him load the gun with bullets. I already knew something about rifles from my holiday at Torrens Creek years before, when Reg and I had gone out after sheep, but my concentration on everything the officer was telling me was a bit scant. It kept running through my mind that this must be connected to the crim making threats against me, and I was confused, because I thought it couldn’t be that they were going to give me a gun to replace the knife, which had been taken off me the previous night.
Eventually, I began to suspect that this was something which had been set up for me some time before, and that orders to cancel it hadn’t made their way through the system.
The report from the shot was deafening, even through the earmuffs I’d been given to wear. The policeman fired all the bullets but one, then handed the gun to me. I shot the last one at the target in the distance, which he’d indicated to me. Then we left. The strong smell of burnt gunpowder lingered in my nostrils as we made our way back out to the car. The officer had been uncommunicative the whole time he was with me. He was either unfriendly towards me, or he didn’t approve of the task he’d been given. The gun, which he’d returned to the briefcase and put into the boot, remained there when he dropped me home.
On my return, the boarding house manager gave me a message that I was to be ready to go out early next morning, and to bring a swimsuit if I had one. I slept soundly that night, wakened only slightly by a now-familiar torchlight being flashed around my room and the quiet click of the door closing. Generally, the detective made these checks on me himself, but occasionally someone else, perhaps his partner, was behind the beam.
In the morning, two young officers whom I hadn’t seen before came to the front door. I was mystified, especially as we didn’t speak until we had driven a good distance up the road.
The officers were pleased with the job they’d been given, they told me. They were taking me to the beach. I found it hard to believe, but couldn’t think of any other reason why I’d been asked to bring my swimmers. Then they talked and laughed between themselves and gossiped about people they referred to by their initials.
It must have been more than an hour later—I nodded off now and again in the security of the car and the warmth of the sun streaming in through the windows—that we pulled up at an almost deserted beach. There were few houses about, and no other cars where we parked. They left me alone to change into my swimmers in the car, while they walked a little way along the sand. When I opened the door and climbed out, my shirt over my togs, they returned and took off their shoes and socks and put them in the boot. Then it was my turn to
walk along the sand while they changed into shorts. I was glad. I’d thought how strange we’d look with them sitting beside me, guarding me, fully dressed on the beach.
The three of us went for a long walk along the water’s edge, seeing only occasional figures in the distance, and they talked a bit about the sort of music they liked, films they’d seen, scenes from films which had stayed in their minds, funny lines from cartoons, everything except anything serious, and they kept trying to draw me into their conversation. But mainly we just walked along in silence. Then they took out sandwiches and soft drinks from the boot for our lunch.
Afterwards, I lay down on my towel, and they promised to wake me if I started to get sunburnt. I was already brown as a dark berry from having grown up in the sun in North Queensland, so we had a bit of a laugh about the differences in our tans.
The whole day stood out as separate from the rest of my life. It was the detective’s day off and he’d organised it. I don’t know if the two officers were supposed to be assessing whether I was crazy or not, it didn’t feel like it to me. After my nap, we walked along the beach a little way in the opposite direction to the path we’d taken that morning. The tide had changed and they picked up little shells and other flotsam and jetsam from the shore. I was sorry when they said it was time for us to get going. On the way back, they laughed and joked that this was the hardest day’s work they’d been given since joining the force, and how they hoped they’d be given such a hard job again.
When they dropped me at the boarding house, I felt like we were good mates, but I never saw them again. On their departure they told me I had to be ready to go out again the next morning, but that they wouldn’t be the ones coming for me.
The sun and fresh sea air had stimulated my appetite, and that evening I had the first halfway hearty meal I’d had in months. I opened several of my cans, instead of just one, and made myself a concoction.
But instead of sleeping soundly, I was plagued again with bad dreams. It seemed that the day had served to heighten the difference between how I thought life should be—safe, out in the open and carefree—and how it really was for me. By morning, I had sunk back into my depression.
The detective and one of his partners came to fetch me, and we drove to an outer suburb. He kept asking me to say if I saw anything familiar. We pulled off the main road and travelled on tarred side roads, where a farm house could be glimpsed through the trees occasionally. Then we turned off onto a dirt road. I looked around but nothing appeared familiar.
Eventually, the car drove onto a rough path, travelled a few hundred yards and stopped. When we got out, I thought we were stretching our legs. I looked around and could see an old dilapidated building in the distance. Suddenly, I felt hot and cold, and leaned over because I thought I was going to be sick. I knew why they’d brought me here.
They were watching me, and when they saw that I’d made the connection, we walked single file through the bush to the shed. It seemed to be in worse shape than I’d remembered. In my nightmares it had also grown much bigger, and, even though it made me sick, I felt a sense of reassurance when I saw it in broad daylight, as it seemed to bring it, and the people, back to a size I could cope with in my mind.
The detectives had me go over whatever I could remember: where the cars had been parked, where I’d stood, where I’d woken up. We retraced my steps as far as the gate, with them making notes as we went along, then we got in the car and drove out. We had arrived from a different direction, and I showed them first where I’d walked to the road, then the direction of the milk truck and the route I thought the market gardener had taken.
The detective asked me why I hadn’t gone straight to the farm house we passed on the way to the tarred road. I told him about the dogs barking, and even as we paused at the driveway, we heard them again. They sounded further away than they had on that night, but he still seemed satisfied with the answer.
The property on which the shed stood, he said, belonged to an uncle of one of the men they had arrested. When the police questioned the man in custody he told them about the shed and had taken them to it.
On the way home, I looked out the window and blanked my mind as I felt very close to the edge. I was relieved when the detective said he would make arrangements for me to travel back to Townsville. Mum had even offered to come down on the train and get me. But he thought I’d probably be able, and happier, to make the journey alone.
I didn’t ask whether or not they had re-captured the offender out on bail, and since the random night visits continued, I assumed that he was free. This meant, of course, that I was still the prisoner, unable to walk out on the streets alone, day or night.
I didn’t tell the detective that I would like to see Aunty Glad before I left, although I knew Mum would ask me if I had, because I felt that I’d already been a lot of trouble to everyone. The whole process had taken months, and it wouldn’t end until I got on that train. Even then I wouldn’t know if it was really over. Would it ever be really over?
A few more nights of cruising around in the back of the police car, sitting alone in the dark while the detective and his partner responded to calls, went into houses and questioned people, and even picked up cartons of beer and parcels of big fish, which they stowed away in the boot. I’d wake up at times and sit up to find that we were driving slowly and quietly, the lights out, and I’d whisper, ‘Who are we looking for?’
‘Two youths, milk money thieves, stealing from their neighbours,’ was the reply once. Another time it was, ‘Anybody we find, we’ve got no description on this one. Break and enter. Keep your eyes peeled. Speak up if you see anything move.’
The detective took me to the train himself. He had come by the day before to tell me that Mum had made an inquiry about abortion some time ago, and that a magistrate was considering the request. I hated being reminded that I was pregnant. When I wasn’t forced to talk about it, I was able to ignore it, as I ignored everything else. No one had told me to go to the hospital for more tests or anything, so I was receiving no medical care. Perhaps all official concern had been directed at the pursuit of the criminals, or maybe they thought I knew that I was supposed to be getting medical attention and had decided not to seek it out.
Either way, this conversation about abortion was an alarming reminder that things weren’t going to sort themselves out when I got home. For me, at least, it wouldn’t be all over.
‘From my wife’s reckoning,’ the detective said, ‘you’re over four months pregnant. By the time you get home, and they get the paperwork done, you’ll be five months. The risk to your own life at that advanced stage would be great, even if you had the abortion the day you received the court order. If I were you, I wouldn’t go through with it. That’s my advice and my wife’s advice, and she knows about these things.’
There were no female officers in the Queensland Police Force at this time, no rape crisis centres. So, as the only contact I’d been allowed was with the police, it had all been with males. I don’t know if there’d been some tacit agreement not to discuss pregnancy with me, but I doubted it. Instead I thought that it was just men’s way not to bring up anything of a very personal nature.
I didn’t respond to the detective’s attempt to open this discussion, but he continued regardless.
‘It was wise of you not to have sought out an abortion yourself, they’re illegal, you know.’
I didn’t know. In fact, since I’d been in deep denial about the very nature of the conception and about the pregnancy itself, the notion that I might have even considered a termination was somehow shocking to me. I’d heard of them, of course, at Charters Towers Hospital—‘dilation and curettage, D & C’—but this was an abstract concept for me.
‘I think your mother might still have some ideas in that direction herself, and if she suggests it to you, you’d be wise to tell her it’s illegal. You hear?’
Yes, I heard. But every word seemed like a nail being driven into my coffin. My desi
re for relief from this nightmare, this situation not of my own creation, kept blood hammering through my head. His talk, which he probably regarded as fatherly advice, served only to make real my nightmares. When I couldn’t stand him talking any more, I wept. He then put his arm around my shoulder and pressed me to his side.
‘You’re a good girl. You’re a strong girl. You’ve already been stronger than any of us thought you could be. You’re even stronger than you think you are. It’s been a real pleasure working with you.’
His words made little sense to me. I was a snivelling weak person who couldn’t get through an entire day, barely even an hour, without tears streaming down my face, no matter how hard I tried. I cried when I was alone, I cried when people were trying to talk to me. He was just trying to cheer me up, I concluded.
He continued to be there for me, patting at his pockets and asking me if I had enough money for food on the train, and carrying my suitcase. He’d keep in touch through the Townsville Police, he said. They wouldn’t be like him, he added, but they weren’t too bad, I ought to start liking them.
11
Mum met me at the station when the train pulled in at about six in the morning. Although I’d slept almost all the way, for one day and two nights, I still didn’t have my wits about me. Mum looked more tired and a bit more haggard than when I last saw her. As I hauled my suitcase through the narrow door of the Sunlander, I realised her eyes were full of tears.
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