by Wendy James
I watch her speech again and again, although not for the sisterhood feels. Even the second time round, the third, and knowing what I know, it’s compelling viewing. She’s so young, so lovely, so earnest. And so fucking believable.
There should be something that I can see, some sign, a flicker in those beautiful blue eyes, some moment when she falls out of character, when I can say, Gotcha. I’m trained, after all, to spot these moments: the random out-of-character licking of lips, idle hair twirling, random blinking, an unscripted step backward or forward, a tone that’s not quite authentic. But there’s nothing. Her performance is pitch-perfect.
Butter wouldn’t melt in this girl’s mouth, and I find myself wanting to believe every word that comes out of it.
I feel a vague lick of envy, too. If she’s not telling the truth, she’s missed her calling, because Ellie Canning is a much finer actress than I’ll ever be.
ABDUCTED: THE ELLIE CANNING STORY
A documentary by HeldHostage Productions © 2019
EXTERIOR
Camera pans across the valley town of Enfield Wash, Mount Waltham looming in the distance.
VOICE-OVER
In the early hours of the morning of August 1, 2018, John O’Brien, a dairy farmer from the New South Wales town of Enfield Wash, discovered an unconscious teenage girl in a disused shepherd’s hut on his property.
O’Brien immediately contacted the authorities, and the girl, who would subsequently identify herself as Ellie Canning, was taken to the local hospital, where she was treated for shock and hypothermia. On regaining consciousness, Canning told police she had sought shelter in the hut after wandering the countryside for a number of hours after escaping from a nearby farmhouse. Canning claimed she had been abducted by a middle-aged woman she’d met at a central Sydney café and that she had been held captive in a basement room for almost a month.
As the details of her bizarre and sinister experiences were made public, the Canning Affair, as it’s known, quickly became a media sensation . . .
SUZANNAH: AUGUST 2018
“It’s the pigs.”
Mary twitched the kitchen curtains across to peer out into the morning. I was too busy trying to find a pair of tights without a run, or a pair of trousers that didn’t need ironing, to respond. Not that there was any reasonable way to respond to this latest off-the-wall pronouncement from my mother. We didn’t have any pigs.
I was running late, hair unbrushed, still wearing pajama bottoms and UGG boots, and loath to take off more than I had to until the last minute in the hideous cold. It was a Tuesday, not one of Sally’s days, so I had to get everything ready for Mary before I left for work. I’d made sandwiches, cut fruit, poured some lukewarm coffee into a flask, filled a small Tupperware container with Froot Loops, turned the kitchen gas off and the convection heater on. I’d spent precious minutes of the morning forcing myself to eat dry toast and black tea between bouts of retching and now had precisely two minutes to pull it all together and get out the door, or my Year Eight drama class would be teacherless for ten minutes—a catastrophe beyond contemplation.
“The pigs, Suzie.” Mary gave a couple of reasonably convincing snorts. “I wonder what they’re saying I’ve done this time.”
She pulled the curtain across and turned back to look at me, her eyes bright with mischief. “Maybe it’s you they’re after. What do you reckon? I always knew they’d catch up with you eventually, Miss Dudley Do-Right. Excuse me—Ms.” Her cackling laughter turned into a cough.
“There’s no one—” I began, but then I heard the distinct sound of feet crunching over the frosty lawn and creaking across the veranda, the quiet murmur of conversation. Three sharp knocks.
“You were saying, dear daughter?” Mary gave me a triumphant glare and tripped down the hallway, arriving a moment before me and pulling the door open.
It was the police. A woman, uniformed, in her thirties, and a man, older, suited, clearly in charge. They both had their wallets out, IDs displayed.
“Miss Wells? Suzannah Wells?” The man’s words were accompanied by puffs of white cloud. The world outside was crisp and clear and covered in ice.
“It’s Miz Wells, not Miss. What century are you from, Mr. Pig?”
The officer blinked. “Excuse me?”
I pushed past my mother. “I’m Suzannah Wells. Is there something wrong?” The sight of the police at my front door had made my nausea return. I was suddenly unbearably cold, and it wasn’t just the weather.
“Ah, no.” He glanced at his companion. “There’s nothing wrong, not exactly. But we would like to talk to you.”
His companion stamped her feet. Her nose and cheeks were pink. “It’s a bit on the chilly side out here, ma’am. Do you think we might come in? It won’t take long. Just some routine inquiries.”
“Routine inquiries, my arse,” Mary muttered behind me. “The last time a pig told me—”
“Of course. Please come through.”
The officers paused in the entrance as Mary flounced off down the dark hallway, muttering. From behind, her silvery hair caught up in a loose topknot, long dressing gown trailing elegantly along the carpet, she looked like a grande dame in some Edwardian costume drama.
“Alzheimer’s?” the female officer whispered, her eyes all empathy, understanding.
“Actually, it’s—” I began to explain, then changed my mind, shrugged. “Yes. It’s something like that.”
In the kitchen the two officers introduced themselves as Detective Inspector Stratford and Senior Constable Moorhouse, then stood awkwardly until I offered them a seat and a cup of tea. They declined the tea but sat down. Constable Moorhouse took off her hat and eased out of her leather jacket. Her shirt gaped where a button was missing, and lacy white nylon underwear peeked through. Mary perched up on the kitchen counter, and although the true condition of her ancient polar-fleece dressing gown was now revealed in all its stained and threadbare glory, she still maintained an air of haughty disdain. The officers watched her warily.
“Will this take long?” I hovered, uncertain. “I should probably ring work first. I’m already running late.”
“You’re the drama teacher, aren’t you?” Constable Moorhouse asked. “At the high school?”
“I am. And I have a Year Eight class first up—they’ll need to arrange a replacement.”
“Year Eight, eh? That’d be my daughter’s year. I don’t envy you working with that lot.” She grinned, began to say something, but was interrupted by her boss.
“Probably best if you let them know—we’ll be as quick as we can, but you’re definitely going to be late.”
I made the call quickly from the next room and arrived back in time to hear Mary regaling them, in her special-occasion American twang, with the story about the time she was arrested in New York after a weekend of debauchery at the Chelsea Hotel in the company of Lou Reed, among others.
“You’re probably too young to know who I’m talking about, aren’t you?” She sighed at their failure to look impressed. “And too square. I guess you listen to—”
“Mary, that’s enough.”
She pursed her lips primly. “Well, no one ever accused me of talking when I shouldn’t. Not to the pigs, anyway. And I know you’re not going to take any notice of anything I have to say, Ms. Goody Two-shoes, but if I were you, I’d be getting a lawyer.”
“I’m sure a lawyer won’t be necessary, Mrs. . . .”
“Oh, I’m a Miss. Mary Squires. You may have heard of me.”
“I—er, no, I’m afraid I haven’t, ma’am. But you won’t need a solicitor, Ms. Wells. This really is just routine.”
“Of course I don’t need a lawyer.” I gave the officer a conciliatory smile, glared at Mary, pulled out a chair, and sat down at the table with them. Senior Constable Moorhouse looked as if she was trying hard not to laugh; her boss frowned at her.
“So how can I help?”
Stratford cleared his throat. “I assume you’ve
heard about the Ellie Canning case?”
My mother let out an excited squawk, and I answered quickly, hoping to forestall any further response. “The girl who was abducted? Of course.”
“So you’ll know that she was found not far from here?”
I nodded.
“We’re currently following up some leads, trying to work out where exactly she was held. We’re taking a look at some of the properties around here that fit with some of her, ah . . . some of her recollections.”
“I thought she couldn’t remember much? Wasn’t it dark when she escaped?”
“Actually”—his face relaxed into a not-quite smile—“it seems she’s remembered a few details now. They’re coming back, slowly but surely.”
“And what is it she’s remembered?”
“I’m not at liberty to tell you that, I’m afraid. But I can say that from our initial view of the exterior of your property, it does appear to have some surface similarities to what Miss Canning recalls about the property where she was held.”
“Oh.” That was not what I expected. “What sort of similarities?”
“Again, I’m not at liberty to give you that information. Let’s just say . . . the exterior has certain features consistent with Ellie’s evidence.”
“You mean you think she may have been held here? In this house? But that’s absurd.” I could control the pitch of my voice but not the sudden roiling of my stomach.
“No, we’re not saying anything like that at this stage, Ms. Wells.” His voice was gentle. “We’re just trying to gauge her movements on the night she escaped—seeing if we can work backward to find out where she was held. It may be that she walked past or through your property at some point. We were wondering whether you’d mind us having a bit of a look around your place.”
This time Mary’s squawk was triumphant. “You wanna do a search? You’re going to need a—what’s the word? A . . . a . . .” She went blank for a moment, then became increasingly agitated. “You know what I mean, Mr. Detective—a whatchamacallit.”
“We don’t need a warrant, ma’am. As I said, this is just an—”
Mary interrupted. “I think maybe you should give ol’ Chips Rafferty a call, Suzannah. Isn’t that fat brother of his a lawyer?”
“Mary.”
She rolled her eyes theatrically, clamped her lips together.
The detective sighed. “You’re welcome to get a solicitor, of course. But in my opinion, it’ll just be an unnecessary expense. And it’ll certainly slow things down. As I’ve said, this really isn’t an official search.”
“Don’t listen to him, Suzie. It’s always official—even when they’re screwing you. Actually, especially when they’re screw—”
“For God’s sake, Mary. Just stop.”
Constable Moorhouse coughed in an attempt to smother her laughter. Her superior gave her another quelling look before turning to Mary. “I understand your concerns, Miss Squires, but yours isn’t the only place we’re looking at this morning. We’ve got a list of, what—around half a dozen other properties to view, Senior Constable?”
She looked down at her notebook. “I think it’s actually nine, sir.” Her voice was glum.
I made a decision. “There’s no reason for us to get a solicitor. Feel free to look wherever you like. It’s not like we’ve got anything to hide.”
He gave a relieved smile. “Thank you. We won’t take up too much of your time.” The two officers got to their feet. “If we could have a quick look around the house first, and then we’ll check the home paddocks, the sheds, and so forth. We’ll probably take some photographs as we go, if you don’t mind—we’ll get you to sign some paperwork for that before we leave. We’re happy to just wander about if you’ve got other things to do.”
“There’s not going to be any wandering, Mr. Detective.” Mary’s voice was fierce. “We’ll be sticking to you like shit on your shoe. Isn’t that right, Suzannah?”
I gave a resigned shrug. I had already missed the morning’s classes, so there was no point in hurrying now. Mary slid down from her perch, her expression smug.
“So how about I take you straight down to the cellar, Officers, and show you where we kept that little bitch hidden.”
ABDUCTED: THE ELLIE CANNING STORY
A documentary by HeldHostage Productions © 2019
ELLIE CANNING: TRANSCRIPT #1
I’ve spent a lot of my life in foster homes. I lived with my mum until I was about eight, but since then I’ve been in care. Most of the time that’s been okay; I’ve been in some really good places, but they haven’t always been . . . well, I won’t go into details, but sometimes it wasn’t all that great. My mum . . . yeah, she’s got some issues with drugs and alcohol, and right now I think she’s back in rehab. I haven’t actually seen her for a while. Not since all this happened. We get on all right when we do see each other. I mean, she loves me and all that, but she can’t really be responsible for anyone else at the moment.
We moved to Manning when I was six, and I’ve been there ever since. I went to Manning High until I went to boarding school in Year Ten.
My life was a bit different from a lot of kids’ lives, I guess, being a foster kid, but I wouldn’t say I was massively deprived or anything. Most of the time I was able to do the usual things—I played netball for a few years and had guitar lessons for a while.
I’ve been pretty much independent since I went to boarding school. I was still legally in care until I turned eighteen, and I always went back to my foster parents for the holidays, but I’ve changed carers twice in the last three years, so, you know, I didn’t really know them all that well. I know there’s been a lot about this in the media, about the way I fell through the gaps in the system, and the fact that nobody really had a clue where I was. But I dunno, I do tend to do my own thing, so that was probably my fault as much as anyone’s.
SUZANNAH: AUGUST 2018
Of course I’d seen the news reports, had been as amazed as anyone else by the girl’s story and by the little we could make out about Ellie Canning herself. It would have been a sensation even if she hadn’t been picked up practically on our doorstep—only twenty or so kilometers to the south of town, and five from our place, on Wash Road. In fact, I drove past John O’Brien’s shepherd’s hut every time I made the trip to town.
The story was incredible—the brazen abduction, the month spent in captivity, the girl’s fortunate and brave escape. From the few details that had been released about her life, it was clear Ellie Canning was someone very special: a smart girl from a difficult background, a foster child who’d won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. At eighteen she was still astonishingly young-looking—I would have guessed fifteen, max—and she had a winsome blonde loveliness that was apparent even in the unflattering school photo the press had been using. That such a child could be lost for almost a month with no one knowing or caring was heartbreaking.
At school the story was an endless source of conversation, of sometimes laughter-filled conjecture. There’d been no information released about the kidnappers’ motives—and with no mention of either physical or sexual abuse, and apparently only women involved, speculations ranged from the sinister (enslavement, the occult) to the slightly more benign (custody issues). Since she’d been discovered locally, we’d wondered, too, about who her abductor could possibly have been and where they’d kept her. Even the native Washers agreed that there were so many new people in the area—city escapees, weekenders, Airbnbs run on local properties—it was impossible to know. Even Tania Jones, who ran the school office and whose family had lived in the Wash for generations, and who could usually be relied upon for an opinion on any local matter, wouldn’t hazard a guess.
Rachel Mott, the head of the math department, told us her son had delivered groceries to a clearly drugged-out older couple up near the Woolpack Bridge a few months back. The woman had been wearing very little, just a G-string and a sheer blouse, and the couple had tried t
o entice him in, offering booze, a joint, dirty movies. They were both really old, her son had said, at least in their forties, and the woman seemed to fit the girl’s description of one of her captors—dark hair, shortish, middle-aged. The couple hadn’t been threatening at all, according to the boy. If anything, they were over-the-top friendly. Even so, Rachel had made him go to the police with his story, and he had given them the address. But it was a dead end: the place was a holiday rental and had been leased out to three or four different couples over the period of Canning’s abduction.
“You know,” Phil Burke, the head of phys ed, said one morning, “that description of the woman could be you, Suzannah—didn’t the girl say the woman was dark-haired and short? And then there’s the crazy old lady. Doesn’t your mother live with you?”
“Oh, come on. There’d have to be at least a dozen women living out of town who could be described exactly the same way, surely? So many people here do live with their elderly parents.” Anna Brady, our resident peacemaker, spoke before I could respond, no doubt worrying that Phil had offended me.
“My mother’s definitely crazy, but she had me at sixteen, so she’s not exactly old.” I gave Anna a reassuring smile.
“Hmmm. But you know teenagers. They think twenty is over the hill.” As usual, Phil was impervious to Anna’s diplomatic efforts. “Is there anything you haven’t told us, Suze? You haven’t been keeping a teenage girl in your closet, have you?”
The room erupted.