by Sarah Bailey
I pause, feeling the potent charge of determination in the room crackling over the group. I can smell the raw desire to track down the person who has taken it upon themselves to disrupt the natural world order.
‘Where possible, refer any kids to Matthews and Dixon. I’m sure they’ll be happy to help.’ I smile sweetly at Matthews, who is industriously picking at his teeth with his fingernail and ignoring me.
Felix steps forward. ‘Work smart. Batch trips together so you don’t waste time in the car.’
I nod. ‘Okay. So before Thursday we want to have done all the main ones: friends, exes, colleagues, students, extended family, doctors and anyone who comes forward with a statement. We need to cover off the guy who found her and anyone who saw her last week and can vouch for her state of mind.
‘We need to pull any CCTV footage we can access, and I want every record we can get our hands on. We’ve made a start but we want everything. Dental, medical, psychological, phone, internet, financials, spiritual, whatever.’
One of the uniforms raises his hand slightly. ‘What are you guys thinking at this stage? Random or personal?’
‘Personal,’ say Felix and I in unison. We glance at each other and then quickly look away. Matthews smirks.
‘But nothing is really clear yet,’ says Felix, more quietly. ‘So let’s just get going.’
I’m not ashamed to say that I went after Stacy. It was cruel, but I figured she knew stuff about Robbie that could help me find an angle. She had the facts, as Jonesy had put it. In between my shifts and navigating my new relationship with Scott, I formed a plan. I could tell that Stacy was not overly intelligent, but she was shrewd, and while life with Robbie was originally exciting it had probably now reached a point where she felt trapped and scared; addicted to him, but not happily.
One Saturday morning, I followed her to work at Woody’s, a rundown-looking roadhouse between Smithson and Mt Lyall. I went inside and took a seat by the window, ordering a coffee which, when it came, tasted so much like dish-washing detergent that I could only manage a few sips.
‘Stacy,’ I said, when she came to check if I wanted anything else. In her black skinny jeans and tight black t-shirt, she managed to convey sex and fear at the same time.
She looked up at me, surprised. Light purplish crescents underlined her eyes.
‘Yeah?’ Her voice was soft in the middle and sharp around the edges, like a home-cooked pie.
‘Tell me about Warren Robbie.’
‘What?’ Her eyes shifted back and forth in quick little circuits.
‘Does he hurt you?’
‘What?’ Her voice turned to a hiss and she squinted at me.
‘Does your boyfriend hurt you?’
‘Who are you?’
She didn’t remember me from the tail-light incident. ‘I’m a cop. And I know your boyfriend is bad news and I think you know he is too.’
She scoffed at me and rolled her eyes, more confident now. ‘He might be bad news but he’s not scared of cops; he’s not scared of anyone.’
‘Are you scared of him?’
She didn’t answer me, just sort of dug her heel into the floor and rolled her eyes again.
‘I think you want a better life. You deserve to be treated better. He gets all this money by doing bad things, right? But you don’t see any of it, do you?’
Her jaw remained hard, muscles working furiously, grinding her teeth together.
‘What next? You end up having kids with this guy?’
Stacy spun around sharply and walked off towards the kitchen, the end of her plait so fine that the elastic band looked huge around the feeble strands of hair.
Stacy came to the station the next day asking for a ‘girl cop with light brown hair’.
I was easy to find.
‘Walk?’ I suggested.
She nodded. Her hands scrambled together as if she were putting on hand cream. ‘He’s been getting worse lately.’
I led her towards the skate park. There, I gestured for her to stand against the concrete wall and I did the same. ‘Worse how?’
‘Just worse.’ She bit her lip. ‘Angrier, I guess. He gets so mad sometimes.’
‘Was it his idea to report the car stolen?’ I said it calmly, as if I knew that it hadn’t been taken.
‘Yeah.’ She picked at a thread coming loose from her sleeve. ‘His cousin took it to the city and sold it. You know, win-win.’ She wiped her fist along her nostrils. ‘He gets bored and wants to do crazy things. Last night he woke me up to drive him out to Dwyer’s paddock so he could shoot some of the cows.’
‘He shot at someone’s cows?’
She nodded. ‘I told you. He’s always doing crazy shit.’
‘Does he hit you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Can you leave? Do you have family around here?’
‘No. I ran away from home years ago. We don’t talk. But I have a friend that lives in the city. I called her this morning and said I might come to stay soon. She’s at uni. I wanted to go to uni too but Robbie says we can’t afford stuff like that.’
In the end, Stacy did leave. I didn’t see her again until the trial. After she’d gone, I watched Robbie whenever I had a spare moment. I drove past the house, I spied on him at his worksites. I followed him to the pub and sat in the corner observing as he threw back beers and leered at women and threw darts with such frightening precision that I found myself swallowing nervously while I sipped my wine. I don’t know why I didn’t pull him in about the cows or the car. I think I just sensed that something bigger would happen. It had become important to catch him, to show everyone that I could do more than traffic offences and petty theft.
Two weeks after Stacy left, I watched Robbie drinking beers with several men on his front porch from my dark car. After an hour, I carefully followed when he jumped into his ute and drove to the Saloon Bar, a dive of a place that doubled as a half-hearted strip club. He’d been in high spirits at the house, laughing and animated. By the time he got to the club he was clearly getting drunk. He ordered more drinks, pulling the waitresses close to him as they walked past, whispering in their ears.
Another hour went by and I was about to leave—Scott’s missed calls were compounding on my phone—when suddenly, like a spider, Robbie struck out and grabbed a girl, yanking her onto his lap. There was a roughness to his movements, I could see it from metres away, and even though she was laughing, it was obvious she was scared. I gripped the stem of my empty wineglass as he whispered to her. Then suddenly they were on their feet and out the door. By the time I got outside, his ute was squealing out of the car park. With my heart in my throat, I jumped in my car and raced after him. I worried he was very drunk; I’d watched him knock back at least three beers and as many bourbons. I prayed he wouldn’t crash and kill the girl, hoped I wouldn’t round a bend and be confronted with her dead body, him alive, roaming the scene like a rabid dog.
Instead, I pulled up at the end of his street with my lights off and watched through the trees as he shoved the girl against the wall near the front door. She cried out. He grabbed her face and I realised he was gagging her, covering her mouth so she couldn’t scream, and I thought to myself, My god, he’s going to kill her, it’s actually happening, when he rammed her head hard against the wall. I saw it loll back, limp, and then he yanked open the door and they both disappeared inside.
I called for back-up then grabbed my gun and sprang out of the car. Lights came on inside, indicating his path through the house, and I stood just shy of the porch, trying to decide what to do. I knew I shouldn’t go in alone—I didn’t even know who else was in the house—but I was convinced that he would kill the girl and in the end that was all I could think about. I pushed into the house and followed the sounds, noting a shabby-looking wooden table in the kitchen with bags of white power on it. The air smelled like stale booze and sweat and fear, and I wondered how many girls had been brought here, powerless and terrified.
Whe
n I got to the bedroom Robbie was attempting to rape the poor girl, who was out cold. Her bruised lip was like a strawberry in the dim light and a black eye was just starting to show. Her bra was dotted with tiny smiling cartoon suns. I held up my gun and said all the right things and I wanted nothing more in that moment than to shoot him dead, but I held my stare and calmly directed him to get up, pull his pants up, and go and stand against the wall with his hands high.
‘You piece of shit,’ I said to his freckly back.
Robbie grunted and then laughed as he swayed slightly against the wall.
The girl didn’t move. After checking for a pulse and finding one, I carefully draped a sheet across her.
The house turned out to hold more of Robbie’s secrets than I had ever expected, though I am sure there are many more that we will never know. The drugs in the kitchen were just a taste of the fully operational amphetamine lab we found in the garden shed. Then there were the weapons: four unlicensed shotguns and an antique dagger. We turned up fake IDs and wads of money stashed away under the house. But it was the two bodies we found in an old well in the yard that really changed my fortunes. A runaway, just like Stacy, who had gone missing five years earlier, and an Italian backpacker who had been assumed to have suicided down one of the local gorges due to a carefully placed backpack, had died at the hands of Robbie. Several of his friends were fingered for the weapons and the drugs but only Robbie was linked to the murders. Annie Charleston, the eighteen-year-old student he’d attempted to rape that night, was battered and bruised but recovered in full, at least physically. Her family moved away after the trial. I don’t know whether Robbie would have killed her that night, but I know the part of me that had been dormant for a long time came alive as I stood in that room with my arm out, heavy with the weight of the gun, my body burning with the ability to make the badness stop. It felt incredible.
I did my interview with Candy Fyfe, up-and-coming reporter, the next day.
I had woken, feeling sluggish, just after 9 am, with Scott hovering nearby offering me water and telling me that even though what I had done was amazing, I really shouldn’t have risked my life like that. I nodded, knowing that if given the chance I would do it every day.
When I was sitting across from Candy in her boss’s office, her perfect dark skin glowing, she was all sisterhood and girl power, and I know I came across as cold and prickly. She was not a good enemy to make but I felt sick and anxious, increasingly panicked about what the last few weeks of my Robbie obsession had allowed me to ignore.
‘How does it feel to have virtually single-handedly taken down a serial killer? I mean, some cops will go through their whole careers never doing what you have done in a couple of years. You’re a star!’
She managed to make it sound like I’d put extra cinnamon in some already tasty muffins.
‘I’m just glad he was caught. He was dangerous, like a loaded gun.’
‘A loaded gun. Great, yes.’ She tapped her pen against her teeth. ‘That’s a good visual. I like to write as if I’m painting, you see.’
She smiled at me, her coal-dark eyes piercing. I couldn’t stop looking at her large white teeth exploding out from bright orange lips. Sitting next to her I felt flat and pasty, as if all the colour had been drained out of me. I wished I could disappear into my grey pants and shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt.
‘So are you going to become a celebrity cop now? You could probably write a book or something!’
I looked at her blankly. ‘No, no. I’m just going to keep doing what I’m paid to do, I guess.’
I disappointed Candy that day. I didn’t give her that fierce, feisty, girl-power cop thing she wanted. The article she wrote on me was vaguely condescending. She managed to flatter me, calling me a prodigal detective and Smithson police force’s best asset, while at the same time suggesting that this had all been a huge stinking pile of luck. Of course, deep down that was what I was worried about too.
Walking back into the station that afternoon, I felt apprehensive. I knew that I had done the right thing, a brave thing even, but I also knew that I had broken unspoken rules. I had gone rogue and it had worked, but in the process I had made everyone else look inferior and lazy. Jonesy beckoned me into his office. He was puppy-dog excited. No one else in the main room seemed to move. I stopped still too, and just stood in the middle of the open office for a second. The water cooler chose that moment to force a large bubble of air to the top of the tank, mirroring my choppy stomach. I felt completely exposed.
Once we were safely behind the glass, Jonesy said, ‘How’d you know, Woodstock?’
‘I told you, sir. I had a feeling.’
He whistled. ‘Well, it’s a good thing you did. This changes things for you, Woodstock. Won’t be easier, not at all—harder, I’d say—but you can tell them all to get fucked now. A fucking serial killer. I can’t believe it.’ He patted me on the back and swept a disparaging look through his glass wall as if the rest of the force were annoying toddlers who needed their nappies changed.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Okay, Woodstock, we’ll talk more tomorrow about what this means, but it’s good, I guarantee you that much.’
‘Sir, I need to tell you something,’ I said, riding a wave of nausea.
‘Yes, of course. Don’t tell me you have another feeling!’
‘No, sir. It’s just that I’m pregnant.’
Chapter Ten
Monday, 14 December, 8.37 am
Josie Pritchard watches Gemma Woodstock peer through the windows of the school library as the man with her takes a phone call. She hasn’t seen the Woodstock girl in years, except for that business with the Robbie boy in the papers a while back. It seems completely bizarre that she is a police officer—and a detective, no less! Josie narrows her eyes; Gemma looks much smaller and skinnier than Josie had thought she would. As a teenager she had the kind of figure that one expected would thicken. The charcoal suit she is wearing is doing her no favours though: badly tailored and set oddly across her shoulders. And those shoes! Josie’s eighty-year-old mother wouldn’t be caught dead in shoes like that. She hasn’t had a mother to guide her, Josie reprimands herself. Ned Woodstock renovated the Pritchards’ laundry a few years back and Josie had wondered how such a clueless man had managed to raise a teenage daughter. It’s really no surprise that Gemma looks like a bargain basement mannequin.
The tall, handsome man returns to Gemma’s side and they talk briefly before walking towards Nicholson’s office. Josie grabs the last of the Tupperware containers from her car and shuts the boot, then makes her way to the canteen. Huddles of parents are milling around the school today, clearly spooked by this Rosalind Ryan saga. Her own kids are off playing somewhere, curious but seemingly unaffected by the murder, which she loosely breezed over this morning while doling out Weet-Bix, juice and raisin toast.
Poor lost young girl, thinks Josie, clicking her tongue as she cuts across the quadrangle. Rachel, her eldest, was taught English by Rosalind Ryan last year but none of Josie’s other kids had been in her classes. Josie didn’t know Rosalind well but she had always found her mildly off-putting. Her suggestion, in the parent–teacher interview, that Rachel needed to ‘slow down’ in her essays and feel the words, didn’t inspire much confidence in Josie.
‘I’m not sure she’s all there,’ she said to Brian as they drove home afterwards.
‘Oh, she’s all there alright,’ Brian responded, laughing and shaking his head. ‘Damn, if I’d had an English teacher like that I might have actually read a book once in a while.’
‘Don’t be revolting,’ Josie snapped, turning away from her husband. Typically, he didn’t seem interested in discussing the shortfalls of their daughter’s teacher.
‘She’s always daydreaming,’ Rachel reported of Ms Ryan when Josie investigated further the next day. ‘But she’s pretty cool. And she’s so beautiful.’
Josie didn’t really know what to make of the young teacher, with her l
ong princess hair and strange old-fashioned clothes, always looking at everyone with that haunted wide-eyed stare. Men seemed to have no sense when it came to her. Those idiotic year twelve boys were constantly embarrassing themselves, slobbering after her like mindless dogs. And there were the problems with Kai Bracks a while back. Even John Nicholson, the boring-as-watching-paint-dry principal, appeared love-struck; he was always staring at her and promoting her silly plays. Rachel ended up doing very well in her exams, though, so the woman could obviously teach. Still, this murder business seemed to suggest something sinister was going on in her life, and Josie can’t help feeling a strange sense of satisfaction. She knew something wasn’t right with that woman: she tends to have a radar for these things.
‘Morning!’ Josie pushes into the canteen’s back room and hangs her bag on a hook by the door. The room is stifling, the air thick and soupy from the heat of the oven.
‘Oh, isn’t it terrible about Ms Ryan!’ Amy Parsons trills into a hanky as she grabs at Lucy Holbert’s hand. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Poor woman.’
‘Such a shame,’ agrees Lucy, patting Amy’s hand. ‘Especially after that wonderful play.’
Josie settles her heavy form into the spare chair and opens one of the containers. Chewing on an apple bran muffin, she looks at the two women in front of her. ‘Did you both go to the play on Friday?’
Amy stares at her hands, twirling the remains of the tissue between her fingers. Lucy reaches down to rustle through her bag. Amy nods quickly.
‘Hmmmph.’ Josie swallows the last of the muffin and pushes her irritation away. ‘I had my sister over for dinner on Friday. I cooked paella, one of Jamie Oliver’s thirty-minute meals. Delicious.’