Blood Stain

by Peter Lalor

  She said this to me on a few occasions. She told me she was going to kill John but she said it so often I did not believe it. I thought of it as being like the boy who cried wolf.

  Wells chased down the other people who were at the kitchen table that day. He caught up with Jason Wilson, Charlie’s daughter’s 20-year-old boyfriend.

  I was living with my defacto, Tracy Knight, at Flat 3/60 Brentwood Avenue, Muswellbrook. At the time Tracy was pregnant with our daughter. We went to visit Tracy’s father, Charlie Knight, at his house. We were there a while when Tracy’s aunty, Kathy Knight, came to visit. Also there was Tracy’s cousin Natasha and her daughter [Kath’s daughter and granddaughter].

  After a while I was in the loungeroom watching a video when I heard Kathy Knight talking. I was not really listening but I heard her say something like she wanted to kill or ‘I’m going to kill him’; words similar to that. I do not know who she was talking about but I just heard her say it.

  I stayed in the loungeroom watching the video and did not go out and listen to what they were talking about.

  As you would. What could be interesting about somebody’s plans for murder? Tracy gave a statement at the same time. She and Jason had shifted to a new address in Muswellbrook and were both out of work.

  I remember that we were sitting around the dining table talking and Dad was having a beer. We were talking about all sorts of things when Aunty Kathy started talking about her defacto husband, John Price, who was known as Pricey to everyone. Aunty Kathy was complaining about Pricey and I remember her saying words similar to: ‘I’m going to kill him and I’ll get away with it because they’ll think I’m mad.’

  She was complaining about something, like if she could not have Pricey no one else could. After Aunty Kathy started talking like this I sort of switched off. I didn’t need to listen to Aunty Kathy and her problems with Pricey.

  Tracy Knight recalled a little vignette from the Kath Knight school of charm.

  My father and my Aunty Kathy were not particularly close and Aunty Kathy did not visit my father that often. She would mainly visit when she would drop Natasha off to visit me. Not long after this, Aunty Kathy and I had a falling out over her having a go at Jason and me for driving Natasha’s daughter around in our car without a car seat.

  I told her to get out of my house and she started saying to me that my father was not my real father. This is the sort of person that Aunty Kathy is. She can become very vindictive with people when they have a falling out.

  Issues of other people’s paternity pop up time and again with Katherine Knight. It was an obsession and a weapon.

  Wells was racing to get everything ready for a committal hearing in August. The deadline had him sweating even further.

  I was ratshit. I wasn’t functioning, I wasn’t sleeping, I was dragging my sorry arse to work, trying to start this new job, blue-ing with people over the cost of the investigation, blue-ing about my pay from the previous job and I needed some time off before the committal and that meant I had to work harder.

  I was seeing the psychiatrist regularly. He was trying to get me to take medication but I’m not a medication person.

  13

  Katherine and John Chillingworth

  1990-94

  David Saunders has vanished, but Katherine knows he’s got to come back for a drink at some stage. This afternoon she is waiting patiently at the Willow Tree Hotel. A crocodile at the watering hole. The pub, on the main street of Scone, is one of Saunders’ regular haunts. He’s in hiding, but she’ll find him. She always does.

  When Saunders did a runner Katherine was left alone to chart a course through the chaos of her own life. Time hadn’t healed any of the childhood trauma and the scars flowered into a violent and distrustful resentment of the men in her life: her father, her brothers, her first husband and Saunders. She didn’t need any radical feminist texts to come to the conclusion that all men were bastards and potential rapists. It was the world she was born to and the world she continues to perceive, regardless of the reality of the situation. Her mother knew these things and waits for her in a better place where there’ll be no violence or sex. Still, she wouldn’t have minded Saunders coming back. She hates separation, couldn’t sleep well when he was gone. In many ways Kath is a recidivist.

  That afternoon at the pub, another victim happened by and she moved in, just for the hell of it. A girl had to eat.

  John Chillingworth is tall, ruggedly handsome, recently single and often drunk. The sort of guy who would never walk past a pub. Like all of Kath’s men, he has a fierce passion for grog and cigarettes, and it seemed only appropriate that they meet in the pub. They were both on the rebound—he was finishing up a long-term relationship in Newcastle and had been down there earlier that day sorting things out. Johnny had moved back to Scone to be with his mum. He didn’t drive, so he’d caught the train back up the valley, enjoying a few beers along the way. He’d got to Scone at lunchtime and with a few under the belt he headed to the Willow Tree to keep up the momentum. There’s nothing worse than coming down in the afternoon. Chillingworth kept drinking for the next hour or four and noticed a couple of sheilas checking him out. One, ‘a red-headed piece’, as he puts it, came up to him. Nice arse.

  He was flattered by the cheeky approach and, although he didn’t realise it, had first met her ten or fifteen years earlier. At a pub lost in time. Chillingworth worked at the abattoir as a butcher. He was a Valley boy who had been living in Newcastle in a relationship for the previous fifteen years before moving back.

  John and Kath got talking and decided to head down to the Commercial Hotel in Aberdeen where he had a few more before going over the road to her place. She was a pretty easy going girl and good company for a drinker. She even drove him back up the road to his mum’s when they were finished.

  A few weeks later Chillingworth was putting in another early afternoon session at the Commercial and planning to hitch home, but he got a bit of courage up and popped over to visit Kath in the old shop and they took up where they’d left off. Two adults swinging out of one relationship into another. Kath was a handy bird to know, her place wasn’t far from the abattoir. She was happy to knock you up some dinner, take you to bed, get you some breakfast before work and then maybe drop you home to Mum’s a little later. She was a good time gal. She spun a comfortable web, filled the trap with warm honey. If Kath had learned anything from Kellett and Saunders, it was that a man can be manipulated easily once you find the right way to get a hook in.

  Chillingworth’s family are locals and they knew the Knights for long enough to be less than keen to see John hanging out with Kath. His uncle and Dad have known that mob from Aberdeen for 60 years and both let him know they thought there was a streak of madness in them and he’d be best to keep his pants up and move on. But it was too late. Later than Chillingworth thought.

  The couple had a great old time for a few weeks. She can fall in love as quickly as she falls out of it and so can he. And then Kath started to feel a little queasy. A little emotional. She was pregnant. Chillingworth was more than a little surprised. It was all so quick. There’d never been any hint of conception during the fifteen years of his previous relationship and this new girl was knocked up in a little over a month. He was happy though. The thought of being a father swelled his chest.

  Kath’s youngest, Saunders’ daughter, was only two years old; Natasha was 10 and Melissa 14. Another would be handy for her, in that at least it would be an anchor to the new dad and guarantee her another income stream, although she made no demands that he move in to the house that Saunders bought. Probably because she could get the single mother’s pension without a man around. She was already pulling in maintenance from Kellett and Saunders and before Chillingworth had even processed the news, she had gone and registered him with the authorities as the father of the unborn child, explaining to him that it was his and he had to be made financially responsible. Kath has always had a highly developed sense of ot
her people’s responsibilities.

  Hormonal changes can mellow a woman, but not Kath. She gets pretty stressed and argumentative. Chillingworth’s habit of arriving home from the pub full of drink, like every other man she’d ever shared a bed with, started to grate and then the fights began in earnest. There were not so many lifts to Scone any more and he was back to hitching. Almost from the moment she told him she was pregnant, Kath began to tell him the child wasn’t his. It was a particularly cruel form of psychological torment. She might have had a baby in her womb, but it was a fish hook in his gut and she was holding the line, playing him in and out at will. However, Kath did seem to have some honest concerns over who the child’s father was. Her dates were confused.

  One day Chillingworth arrived at the house and she told him she had got back together with Saunders over the weekend and they were going to try and make a go of it again. Chillingworth was devastated and begged for another chance. He got it, but Kath had the upper hand now and wasn’t relinquishing the power. She would play the paternity issue time and time again. She also started to tell him about how many men she’d been with and this was a new torment to Chillingworth, who believed that half the men he worked with at the abattoir had been with her or knew she was easy. For his part, Saunders denies that he and Kath ever got back together, so it appears that story was another attempt to punish Chillingworth.

  Still, the intensity of their arguments began to increase and Katherine would often resort to a trick she had found worked with Kellett and Saunders—if you can’t play the man then play his mother. It was strange, she was always nice to the older woman, but whenever there was a fight Knight would denounce her partner’s mother in the vilest language possible. John’s mother was called a whore and his siblings were bastards. It really hurt him to hear his mum described like this and Kath knew it. For her part, Mrs Chillingworth thought Kath kept a filthy house and often asked her son how he could stay in such a slum, but she was polite to this strange woman her son had taken up with. You have to wonder if Kath saw these men and the strong bonds they had with their loving mothers and resented what they had because she had never had it herself.

  News about the paternity issue started to get around town and found its way up to Scone where Chillingworth’s mum heard about it. His family were asking him what he was going to do. What could he do? Chillingworth was confused. He didn’t know what the truth was. He even drove down to his doctor in Newcastle to see if DNA testing could be done. Every day up to the birth he lived with the doubts. The baby was induced a few weeks early because Kath was suffering from hypertension or blood pressure problems. She gave birth to a boy on 3 March 1991. John Chillingworth was over the moon and by this stage believed the boy was his. Maybe he was too far over the moon because on at least one occasion when he called, Kath told him not to come to the hospital because he was pissed.

  Despite the arguments with Chillingworth, Kath was happy to have another child. It was a boy. She had always wanted a boy. She was looking forward to playing soldiers. Even after the birth, Chillingworth was not asked to move into the house at Aberdeen. Kath didn’t want to lose her welfare cheques. Anyway, it was her place and she didn’t have to share it. She owned it without any man. He wasn’t too fussed about it as generally he would stay between two and four nights a week and it suited him.

  I was living up the road. We were just going together and rootin’ I s’pose you could say. I would stay over there at night, go to work in the morning and she would cook me breakfast. It suited me. I got very deeply involved even before the boy was born. I thought it was love.

  Kath was never a clean woman and the house in those days was a pigsty. It was really not much more than a roughly converted shop space and the place was scattered with clothes and suchlike. She hated cleaning and if Melissa or Natasha didn’t clean up, nobody did. However, Kath continued to decorate the walls. It was an old saddlery and it seemed appropriate that she chose old saddles and farm gear to hang around the place, but it wasn’t just decorative to her. She would talk to Chillingworth of the dead uncle, Oscar, the rodeo rider, who was now, according to Kath, some sort of an angel. The walls became a shrine to him and other things that had crossed from life to death. There was a crystal cabinet in which Kath had preserved mementos of her mum. Nobody was allowed near that stuff. It was sacred to the memory of Barbara.

  The little house was developing the aura of a mausoleum and she liked that, liked the feeling of the relatives in these inanimate forms. Maybe it was because they couldn’t hurt her. She could talk to them at will and, perhaps even more importantly, nobody else could demand the attention of her mother. Kath had her all to herself. She often spoke of being together with Mum again, how she would be happy to live into her 50s like Barbara did, and then just step off to the world of the dead. Barb and her happy ever after, away from men and their sex and drinking and children and their endless demands. Dead and free.

  Chillingworth never held a licence for very long in those days but decided that he had better get Kath a decent car, now that they had four kids to drag around. Four weeks after the boy was born he took her down to Newcastle and bought a Mitsubishi L300 van for about $6000. Down in his old stomping ground he got on the grog with a relative and gave it a serious nudge. Kath’s youngest brother, Shane, had come down with them to drive the van back and he took it all the way out to her dad’s place at Rouchel Road, while she and Chillingworth made their own way back to Aberdeen in her old car with the baby in the back. Kath was cranky that he was drinking and around Muswellbrook she said she was taking him home to Scone, which started a round of bickering. He wanted to stay at her place at Aberdeen and she wouldn’t have a bar of it. The thought that he was being shunted off after just paying $6000 for a new car that was sitting at her dad’s got him worked up. As they drove through Aberdeen words turned to blows. Chillingworth says he can’t remember who threw the first punch, but at one stage she grabbed his glasses and screwed them up. She whacked him in the mouth. He gave her a backhander or two and it was on.

  —You cunt. I’m taking you to the fucking cops.

  —Ya wouldn’t be game.

  —Just fucking watch.

  Chillingworth was a prisoner in the front seat and sat there as Kath drove up to the police station and ran in. Too pissed to care, he stayed there. The next thing he knew, a cop had come out and told him to get out of the car because he was being charged with assault.

  —You’ve got to be fucking joking.

  Like Kath, the cop wasn’t calling anyone’s bluff and took Chillingworth inside the station, but even this wasn’t enough to make him pull his head in. The drunk abattoir worker mouthed off at the cop and found himself thrown up against a wall, his arm twisted behind his back. That stopped the chat for a second or two. The copper was pissed off and twisting so hard big John thought his arm was about to break off at the shoulder.

  —Don’t break me fucking arm, you smart cunt!

  Wrong thing to say. The cop twisted it harder and the pain was excruciating. After that, he gave the bloke the statement he wanted and got locked up in the cell for a few hours until he had sobered up. When they let him out he found that Kath had taken out an AVO and he wasn’t allowed to go near her or call. He headed back to the Willow Tree and got on the piss again.

  Meanwhile, Kath had made her way up to the Scone hospital, saying she had been punched three times on the cheek and chin. There was some swelling and bruising and they gave her an ice pack to treat it. Melissa says her mother made a video tape of the injuries and her face was swollen ‘beyond recognition’. She had to take a day off school to care for her. ‘She had a bruise like a golf ball on her cheek. He was a brutal man.’

  The next day Chillingworth tried to call and she wouldn’t speak to him. He kept at it and finally got her on the phone. She’d organised a christening for the boy the following weekend and he wanted to come but he wasn’t allowed to because of the court order. Anyway, she wouldn’t let him. Ch
illingworth didn’t handle it well, but he needn’t have panicked too much; they were back together by the end of the week.

  John thought it had all settled down, but he was at her place a day or two later when Ken and Shane arrived to do a bit of their blood’s bidding. The brother looked like a nasty piece of work and he talked the talk. ‘If you ever touch me sister again I’ll break every bone in ya fucking body.’ The old man seems to be of the same mind and Chillingworth thought it could get ugly. He used to work with Ken at the abattoir, where he got the impression that Kath’s Dad was a quiet, peaceful man. He has since learned that things are different in the bosom of the family. Ken started to mouth off. ‘You never hit women. Never ever hit my daughter or …’

  The hypocrisy launched Kath into gear and suddenly she was laying into her dad, telling him what a violent bastard he had been to her mum and how John had said sorry and they were going to make a go of it. This really got Ken going. He told them they could get fucked and he wanted nothing more to do with them. Bolstered by the support from Kath, John told the old man that he could take it out on him, but he didn’t need to be angry with his daughter. It got heated again and Ken called him a useless cunt.

  It wasn’t finished there.

  Ken was a regular at the local club on a Friday night, where the sausage sizzle, raffles and darts were about the biggest draw card in town. Everybody would go, kids included. That Friday, he and Chillingworth crossed paths after a few beers and after a few words punches were thrown. Neither landed with much impact but Chillingworth still regrets the incident. From then on, Ken and Shane avoided Chillingworth. If the old man brought eggs around and he was there he wouldn’t come in. It didn’t have a big impact on Kath though; she was always fighting with her father and around this period they stopped talking for a couple of years.