‘And Curtis?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Honestly.’
‘I haven’t figured him out yet.’
‘You defended him in court. You might take him to a retrial. You might get him out. And you don’t know?’
‘You made an entire TV show about him and it sounds like you’re not so sure either.’
Good point, Jack thought.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said, reaching for the yellow envelope and knocking over his beer in the process. Luckily, it missed everything on the table and flowed harmlessly onto the floor.
‘Shit, sorry.’ Jack righted the glass and dabbed at the table with napkins.
‘Top up?’ She lifted the jug, tilted it.
‘Still a third in this,’ Jack said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Not much of a day-drinker?’
‘Not much of a drinker.’ Jack tipped the envelope open. ‘I wanted to ask you about these again.’
Crime scene photographs covered the table. Shoe prints, in grass and mud, of various sizes. Some were zoomed in, black and white rulers lined up beside them. Only some. Sloppy. Things missing. Tyre tracks through others. Other prints were on a larger scale, press photos, taken from a drone, yellow vector graphics plotting points of significance. There, by the fence, the cluster of footprints. From the bird’s-eye view, he could see the parallel rows of vines. At the end of one of the rows, a higher density cluster of yellow. Lots of evidence there, where the body had been found.
Alexis leafed through them without interest; she’d seen them before.
‘Uh-huh. Ted’s magical’ – she cinched her fingers in quotes – ‘victim-placement. What do you want to know about them?’
‘How important are they? To any potential retrial.’
‘Well.’ Alexis pointed to the larger picture. ‘This is probably the most important. It shows that a woman wearing size 9 ASICS was at the perimeter of the property. Some time, and that’s important too, within a week or so of the murder. The driveway is gravel, so it’s hard to know if she came in from the car park, or the road, or the house itself – which is what Ted proposes. That’s a leap, though.’
Jack marvelled at her ability to switch off her cheery tone and dip straight into hard facts. She was, he reminded himself, a brilliant lawyer. No wonder the show had made her a semi-celebrity.
‘Will Ted use this again? To place her at the scene?’
‘Probably not. Yeah, the victim wears a size 9, but we don’t know what shoes she was actually wearing. There’s no way to match the prints. It’s a public winery, so all he’d be proving is that a woman wearing size 9 was on the property. Big deal.’ She slid the photos back to him. ‘Plus, as you said on TV at least a dozen times, it might be her brand of shoe. But there’s no way he can prove they’re actually hers.’
‘Why are they clustered?’ He pointed to a smaller photo. There the footsteps seemed to be jumbled around almost randomly.
‘The direction changes. If it was Eliza – which it’s not, by the way – she’s pacing back and forth. Deeper, too. Stamping her feet to keep warm.’ She slid a finger across the photo, back and forth, mimicking the footsteps, making them wander. Jack noticed she had long, slender fingers. Like honey hanging from a spoon. ‘My guess? She’s having a cigarette. No biggie.’
‘Okay, but because we made it look like the body was dumped, if he shows it wasn’t . . .’
‘We made it look like nothing, Jack. My defence was rock-solid. Your show is your show. But that was the challenge for both Ted and me – placing the victim at the scene.’
‘And you think she was dumped?’
‘I think it’s hard to find contradictory evidence to that theory, yes. Come on, you back that up yourself.’
‘And if, for some reason, Ted was able to match the shoes. Would it change the case?’
‘Has he got something?’ Her eyes lit up. That lawyerly passion for the chase, the pursuit. A battle begun.
‘Just asking.’
‘Okay.’ Alexis eyed him cautiously. ‘Well, it would prove that Eliza had been to the property. It wouldn’t prove where she died, because these prints are so far away from the body and look like a casual stroll. For example’ – she pulled the photo back and traced a finger in between one of the rows – ‘if the trajectory showed she ran down this aisle and then stopped’ – she planted a finger on the second red mark on the aerial photo, where the body was found – ‘that would be fairly damning. But it doesn’t. Or, at least, not with the patrol car driving through the middle of it.’
‘So all it would do is prove she’d been on the property. Not that she died there?’
‘Which is a fairly safe assumption anyway. Like I said, it’s a public winery. Eliza worked for the Freemans. It wouldn’t be unexpected that she was in Birravale anyway.’ She shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t put a huge hole in the case.’
‘And if she wasn’t dumped? And he knew it?’
‘Well, I mean if he had physical evidence, there’s DNA, fingerprints, the works to consider. But there’s no bare footprints of hers either, so someone definitely carried her, at least partly, but her resting place itself is a mishmash of prints and tyre tracks. Everyone but hers. You did a good job disproving this yourself. Why are you asking me this?’
Jack sighed. Looked into the dregs of his beer. A rat gnawed at his gut. Alexis was right; the prints themselves didn’t matter. The shoe didn’t solve anything. And yet there it stood, lodged in his mind. A symbol of the fact that his whole show might be based on mistruths. And now that Curtis was getting closer to a retrial and there was a very real chance that he could get out, it had played on Jack more each day. Public opinion was working for Curtis, and Jack had done that too. Eliza had followed him everywhere in the weeks since the finale. Her cold skin jumping out from TV sets and billboards, or the fuzzy family Christmas photo that the newspapers liked. Her smile, her silent pleading eyes. He might have butchered her chance at justice. He didn’t know how to explain this to Alexis.
‘I can’t sleep,’ he said simply.
Alexis, still holding his wrist, rubbed a thumb against the inside of his palm.
‘She’s just . . . everywhere.’
‘She’ll stay. That’s what they do.’
‘It doesn’t seem to bother you?’
‘Every case’ – she pointed to her temple – ‘is lodged in there somewhere. Grisly stuff. Wouldn’t even tell you. They just become a part of you. Don’t worry, they get nudged down, it fades – you forget about it.’
‘With time?’
‘Or when something worse comes along.’ She must have noticed Jack flinch. ‘Sorry.’
‘You can’t tell Woman’s Day this,’ Jack said, and Alexis gave him a gentle laugh, more out of camaraderie than humour, ‘but the show . . . I made some choices. Editorially. What to show, what not to show. In search of the neatest storyline, the best entertainment.’
Alexis said nothing. Took her hand off his wrist.
‘In the heat of the moment. You know? It’s a bubble, television, and this was a real career-maker. And then I stepped out of that studio and back into reality and Eliza is everywhere.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I guess I underestimated the real-world impact.’
‘You’re saying that you made a TV series petitioning Curtis’s innocence, and now you think he’s guilty?’
‘No, I don’t think he’s guilty.’ He didn’t know what he thought.
‘But you’re afraid he might be?’
Jack nodded. ‘What if he gets out?’
Alexis paused, as if considering whether to chastise or console him. When she spoke, her tone had softened. ‘I had a colleague once, we went to university together. She was a ruthless lawyer, coldly focused on winning cases for her clients. Family histories, sexual escapades, everything was on the table in her courtroom. She broke families but won cases. Single-minded. She’s in jail now.�
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Jack raised an eyebrow. Did she know what he had done? Alexis took a sip of her beer, quite relaxed. No. She couldn’t.
‘Prison witnesses are notoriously unreliable; they’ll give evidence against anyone if you offer them extra privileges: cigarettes, money, Foxtel. She had an unwinnable case, knew the guy did it but couldn’t pin it to him. She won it. Later they discovered she’d bribed an inmate to say he’d heard something in the yard. Forty packets of cigarettes. She ruined her life for that.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘You like winning. You’d make a good lawyer. No other reason.’ Her eyes said otherwise. Not quite an accusation, but she was sizing up how close he’d flown to the sun. ‘On the other hand, sometimes it’s enough to do a good thing in a bad way. A small lie for a bigger cause. That’s really up to you.’
Jack swirled his beer, took a sip, hoped that when he put it down she would have stopped assessing him. She hadn’t.
She broke into a smile. ‘But you’re not a lawyer. Of course you made concessions. Seven hours of TV. Pfft.’ She flicked a hand. ‘That’s nothing. You built a case for entertainment. Real cases aren’t linear, neat, easily solvable. They’d never fit a TV narrative. I think you put a good deconstruction of the prosecution’s flimsy evidence out there and, in doing so, made me look like a bit of a superstar. Got me a foot into the lucrative stationery catwalk industry, too.’
‘I still can’t sleep.’
She passed the photo back, serious again. ‘And there’s always one mistake that sticks with you. Let me guess. You simplified the shoeprint evidence, right?’
He’d told her too much. A timid nod.
‘If it wasn’t this it would be something else. You know what your biggest mistake was? Thinking you could do this at arm’s length. That you’re just an observer. A man on the sidelines. You’re not. Not anymore. She’s with you now.’ Alexis paused. ‘You regret it? The way you presented things in the show? You feel guilty?’
‘If Curtis is, I am.’
‘Bullshit.’ She surprised him with her sharp tone. ‘Regret. Guilt. They don’t exist. What you’re really feeling is grief.’
‘Eliza’s been dead four years. I never even met her.’
‘You’re not grieving her, Jack. Whatever decision you made, whatever you think you regret, you thought you were better than that. And then, when it came to the crunch, you weren’t. And you know that now.’
Jack understood: it was grief. But he was grieving himself. The person he thought he’d been. That better version of himself that he kept in his head, the one he thought would always rise to the occasion. His better self was gone now. Crumbled under pressure. Grief: for the dead parts of one’s own identity. How selfish.
‘A lesson like that only gets learned from experience,’ he said, tracing his finger through the remnants of spilt beer on the table. Not looking at her.
‘I’ve been around. Sorry, probably too dramatic for what you meant.’
‘If I’ve influenced the retrial, though —’
‘The retrial will be conducted by professionals. Don’t get me wrong – every piece of evidence is important. But we’ll assess everything on its own merits, not what some television series tells us is true. And we’ll double check the shoe prints, but they’ll have little to no play. No one got enough evidence four years ago. Not enough to put him away. That’s the strategy: not really whether he did it or not but whether they were able to prove it. We’ve carefully examined all the evidence.’
Not all of it, thought Jack. I can still place her at the vineyard.
‘Maybe I’m being too harsh on you. You told your story your way. That’s fine. I disagreed with some of it. Liked other parts. It was a good show, you made some money – probably a lot – but it’s just entertainment. Celebrity has gone to your head if you think people will take it that seriously.’
‘People seem to be taking it seriously enough to grant a retrial,’ he said.
‘That’s exactly it. They aren’t, but they’re taken in enough by the story of it. It’s doubt that makes them uncomfortable.’ Her phone rang. Again she ignored it. ‘Look, I think it’s like this: the world is in a state of unrest at the moment. Look at the US. The politicians in power, they make people unsure. Black kids getting shot by cops. Same here, but there’s less blood on the streets. But there’s still a sense of working against The Man. There’s an imbalance, a lack of a sense of justice. And do you know how the middle class responds to this?’
‘How?’
‘The only way they know how. By clamouring for the freedom of a white guy.’
‘Huh?’
‘This will sound cold-hearted, but there’s worse things going on in this country than a murdered woman. But that’s what makes the news. It’s about what we’re comfortable rebelling against. Imbalance, Jack.’
What had Curtis said on the phone? That he was a martyr. But he’d got the scope of it wrong. Curtis, the success of the show, was only the vicariousness of the middle class. Too uncomfortable to fight for any real change, but just comfortable enough to speak out from a couch or keyboard.
But he still felt guilt – grief, whatever – creeping through a hot lump in his gut every time he saw a newspaper and those smiling, alive eyes. He wasn’t an observer anymore, he was a part of it. And if Curtis got out, he was a part of that too.
Alexis picked up her phone, read a message and started gathering her things. ‘Sorry. I have to go.’
‘Of course.’
‘Two things worth remembering, Jack. The first is that the world is bigger than your show, bigger than any single court case. Any lawyer will tell you: you win some you shouldn’t, and you lose some you should. It’s okay to feel uncertain. Our job is uncertainty. I can turn a case on it just the same as you can spin a yarn. What Curtis did or didn’t do’ – she stood up – ‘that’s almost irrelevant. Now, I still owe you dinner. Don’t forget that either.’
‘A nicer place, though.’
‘A much nicer place.’ She sidled out of the booth. ‘I will tell you this. Eliza’s gonna stick with you. Some of them do. The guy my friend put away, he murdered a sixteen-year-old boy. Opened him up with a hunting knife. Cut him from neck to groin. Shit like that never goes away. You just do what you can to be okay with it. That’s why I told you about my friend. It’s about choosing between the lies you can live with and the lies you can’t.’
She laid her hand on Jack’s as she said this. Her honeyed fingers circled the small rough spots on the back of his knuckles, those tiny healing scars. Sometimes women knew those scars. Those lies you can live with. Her hands were soft and she was smiling. They had ceded the debate, friends again.
‘And the second thing?’
‘My friend. I lied. She’s not in jail.’
Alexis wrapped her scarf around her neck, leaned down and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Whispered in his ear. She had a late-night phone voice, husky with a slight rasp from the beer. A voice that told secrets.
‘Best case of cigarettes I ever bought.’
Piled up on one end of Jack’s kitchen table was the contents of his pantry, a meagre haul. A bag of flour. That would be useful. Five tins of tomatoes. Sugar. Mee goreng noodle packets. Salt and pepper shakers. Pasta taken out of the packet and sealed in a jar. A squeeze bottle of honey. A bottle of tomato sauce, which had barbecue sauce in it. A bottle of barbecue sauce, which had God knows what in it. To say Jack’s food supplies were skint would be understating it. The contents of Jack’s pantry had all the makings of a cookbook. Jamie Oliver: Depression in Fifteen Minutes or Less.
The crockery and cutlery were piled on one of his kitchen chairs. It was past midnight, but he couldn’t stop running through Eliza’s murder. The shoe, hidden in the back of his closet, played on his mind. He’d paced the house, room to room, but that hadn’t helped distract him. The house yawned open and empty. No doors.
That wasn’t true. There were seven of them, all white wo
oden single doors, stacked against the wall in his garage. His dad had taken them off the hinges years ago. Jack kind of liked the space, so even when he was allowed to put them back up he hadn’t. But that meant that in the middle of the sleepless nights he felt like he was walking through some abandoned place. Nowhere to hide away. He’d turned on the television, and in the very first commercial break there’d been an ad for his show, which was playing repeats on the digital channel.
Who really killed Eliza Dacey?
The shoe grew heavier in his mind every day. Jack knew what it was like to make a decision that you can’t take back, even if you want to. Some small, inconsequential choice that grows and grows into something monstrous when everyone is watching. Why had he been fine with hiding the shoe before? Because it was before there was hope for a formal retrial? Because it was before Jack began to doubt Curtis’s innocence? He didn’t need to know who killed Eliza, but he did need to convince himself that Curtis hadn’t.
Jack picked up the flour as a realisation thumped him in the chest. If the shoe was planted, then it was by someone who wanted to keep Curtis in jail by stacking up the evidence against him. Someone with access to the victim’s clothes. Only one person fit that criteria. Could Eliza’s killer, free and unsuspected, have put it there? It must have been planted to be found so late in the piece. Four years on. And, in that case, by helping free Curtis, Jack was doing the right thing. Because then the police might have a chance to catch the actual killer.
And turning in the shoe might be what the killer wanted anyway.
Jack dumped the flour on the table and spread it out to the edges with his hands. He needed to look at things from a new perspective. Then he poured half a bag of sugar in a straight, horizontal line, bisecting the bottom third of the table. That represented the main road running through Birravale. He evened out the flour in the top two-thirds and traced crude boundaries. One large paddock for the Wades, taking up most of the centre of the table. He took a bowl and placed it in the centre of the paddock, and a slightly larger plate next to it. The bowl was the domed glass restaurant; the plate was the homestead. In the top right, west geographically, of the flour he drew new boundaries: Andrew and Sarah Freeman’s property. Another bowl was their house, and two tins of tomatoes their wine silos. In real life, the silos had been repaired. He used more sugar to fill in the Wades’ driveway. Dotted along the main sugar-road, he dispersed cups and saucers. The old cinema. The bakery. The few houses clumped together.
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