He stepped back to examine his miniaturised bird’s-eye view of Birravale. Checked the helicopter photos. He had it about right. Forgot the grapevines. Laid down some parallel lines of spaghetti.
He walked his fingers back and forth near his artificial fence line in the north-west corner. Small divots in the flour. Eliza’s footsteps. Maybe her last ones. Maybe completely irrelevant, just a random cluster of her cigarette break. Maybe not even hers. He took the salt shaker and placed it on the plate-homestead. That would be Curtis. He allowed himself a chuckle. Salt, the embodiment of evil. He opened a pack of mee goreng and lifted the noodle cake out. That would be Eliza. Too big – bad for scale. He snapped her in half. Better. He placed Eliza-goreng at the end of one of his strands of spaghetti-vines. Near where the old restaurant, since knocked down, would have been, Jack observed from his new vantage point. Eliza’s final resting place.
He felt he must be missing something. But, sloppy as the police had been, they had searched the property. Hadn’t found blood. Hadn’t found much of anything. Neither had he. It was as odd as it seemed. And nowhere else to look. Why was she there? Where was she going? Unless she could fly or dig through the ten tonnes of concrete where the old restaurant supports had been filled in, it looked as if she’d just appeared.
Next, two tea bags on the plate-homestead. Peppermint for Lauren, Curtis’s sister. Earl Grey for Vincent, their father. Lauren and Curtis’s mother had died during Lauren’s birth, so it was just the three of them. He traced out the small patch of bush, unowned land, between the Wades’ and the Freemans’.
Finished, he admired his handiwork. He had a dead body, a cluster of footprints, and the place where he’d found the shoe. All so far away from each other as to be completely useless.
It was immediately evident that Eliza couldn’t have been at the fence, walked into the middle of the vineyard, severed two fingers, undressed, laid down and died, without anything happening in between. The prints tapered off from the cigarette stamping, Jack remembered, fading as the ground firmed and turned to gravel. The walk uncompleted. Ominously, fading out in the direction of the homestead.
So: Option One. She’d walked in off the road, up the driveway, walked along the northern fence, had a puff, and then gone inside the homestead. Once inside, someone had killed her, and carried her back out to dump her. The trick here was that the exact walk down the vineyard was what Andrew Freeman and Ian McCarthy had driven over on their way to the body. With that interference, it was impossible to prove someone carried the body down there. It was also impossible to prove they hadn’t. Ted Piper’s favourite, Option One. It had, in part, sent Curtis to jail.
But why would Curtis leave the body out in the open, pointing straight back to him? Why would he call the police first? Why was Eliza even there in the first place? And, still, even with the tyre prints, not a single useful footprint, boot or bare. The killer had got lucky with the sloppy police work but, still, it looked as if she’d been placed there without a trace. It had the actuality of a murder but the feel of a frame-up. Everything just felt out of place, like a bookshelf with a single book backwards. And behind every question, the fact that the initial evidence was gathered shoddily. Four years on, it was hard to pull the truth from that. This had been his line in the show and it would maybe, in part, get Curtis back out again.
Option Two, then. She’d come in off the road, walked through the property, had a cigarette at the only place muddy enough to leave prints, and walked back down the driveway safe and sound. Afterwards, someone had killed her and brought her back.
Maybe she had been there, and she’d tried to hitch from the road. He moved the noodle cake to the roadside, playing it out in his mind. If someone had slowed to pick her up and killed her right there, it seemed inefficient to haul her over the fence and carry her into the property. Not to mention difficult. Jack had rolled his ankle jumping the fence, and he wasn’t lugging a dead body at the time. Plus, in perhaps the only piece of real evidence the prosecution had, Eliza had left a voicemail message on a journalist’s phone – Sam Culver of Discover! magazine – the afternoon before she disappeared, saying she’d found something weird in Birravale. This seemed to point to motive but Eliza hadn’t been sure whether what she’d discovered was technically illegal, and had been looking to sell her story rather than go to the police. When Sam had called her back the next day, she hadn’t answered and he’d forgotten about it. Eliza had known something she shouldn’t – that much was clear – but no one could figure out what or who it involved. What’s more, Discover! was a trashy tabloid. Who kills over a puff piece next to My Ex-Wife’s Hamster Gambled Away My Inheritance? Still, predictably, the prosecution clung to this as proof of premeditation, that someone may have had motive. To their credit, they had to cling to something. If it was a random hitchhike killing, there was really no prosecutable case. She could have been killed anywhere, by anyone. Jack thought about this young girl hitching a ride. Bright halogen eyes approaching from the dark, slowing. A white girl in a car’s headlights looks just like she does on an autopsy table. Scorched. Colourless.
They had never found what cut off her fingers. What strangled her. Maybe they were in the boot of a car, thousands of miles away.
Hang on. Something wasn’t right. He took a mixing bowl and flipped it, placed the Freemans’ tomato-tin wine silos on top of it. Better – it hadn’t been right being flat. It was uphill. He got down on his knees, eye level with the table. He imagined the bush blocking out most of the silos from the position of the body.
Shuffling on his knees, he moved – used to kneeling, his knees clicked with familiarity – anticlockwise around the table, and now he could picture seeing the wine silos in full.
He stood up. He was directly in line with the clump of Eliza’s footsteps. At that point she would have been able to see the Freeman house. She’d been having a cigarette, stamping her feet from the cold, in full view of Andrew and Sarah Freeman’s homestead, up the hill.
Had they seen her? Minutes before, supposedly, she died? Disappeared from the earth and reappeared, barefoot, two hundred metres away.
Jack shook his head. Of course, this all assumed the footprints were made on the same night as the murder. And that they were even hers (he still clung to this doubt). And it still didn’t explain the dumping, the lack of physical evidence. Curtis’s house had been checked and there hadn’t been a scrap of evidence there.
Andrew and Sarah hadn’t mentioned seeing Eliza in their testimonies. But maybe they were asleep. Out. Maybe no one actually asked them. Besides, does a single glowing ember stick in the mind?
He looked at his playground of Birravale. There wasn’t enough there to prove a man innocent. But there wasn’t enough to prove him guilty either. Nothing he knew proved anything, and it wasn’t worth potentially burning his career by raising more questions. In criminal law, the onus of proof is always on the prosecution, not the defence.
Jack took the Eliza-goreng noodle and put it on the plate-homestead next to salt-shaker-Curtis. He covered them with a bowl, masking them from view. As if Curtis and Eliza were in the bowl-house together.
‘Did you go inside that house, Eliza?’ he muttered. ‘What happened to you?’
He whacked the table in frustration. Everything clinked. A small puff of flour rose up and tickled his nose. He was tired now. At least the mental exercise had done that. He’d clean up in the morning. The food would go to waste. He didn’t care.
He would keep the shoe quiet. It proved nothing. Nothing added up the way Ted Piper and his team said it did. And Jack couldn’t keep focusing on this. He had a new show to start working on, money to make, and his health to consider. He could feel the stress building. He didn’t want to get sick again. The only way to move through this was to accept his mistake – grieve for it, Alexis would say – and leave it behind.
Sure, Jack’s version didn’t stack up either. He still didn’t know who had killed Eliza. But looking at the table in
front of him – at the upturned bowl that hid Eliza and Curtis inside that house – there was doubt. Just a flicker. An ember in the dark. Just enough.
He took the bowl off salt-Curtis and Eliza-goreng, left to their hidden mysteries. He must have hit the table harder than he thought, because it was all disordered now. The salt shaker had fallen over and shattered the noodle cake.
Coincidence, thought Jack.
He walked back through his door-less house and finally into bed. Even still, he couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get the image out of his head of the mess on the plate. Of Eliza, broken into pieces.
Did you go inside that house, Eliza? What happened to you?
Eventually, sleep took him. Decision made.
The lies you can live with.
SEPTEMBER
Jack scratched his chest. They always put the tape right on the hair, and then the lighting made the sweat pool around it. The sound guy came over and whacked Jack’s hand, pointed at the lapel mike, poking through Jack’s top button, and then at his own ear. Jack nodded. He knew what that meant. Stop fucking up my sound, amateur.
Ted Piper sat across from Jack. They hadn’t sat in an official interview together since Jack had blindsided Ted on the original podcast. Ted had refused to take part in the TV show, so Jack had had to build his character through pre-existing interviews, courtroom footage and press conferences. The prosecutor wore a sharply cut blue suit. It fit him perfectly. Jack tugged at his own shirt. It was collared, but he’d forgone the tie, which he was regretting now – if only so he could neck himself if it didn’t go well. He smoothed his shirt over his stomach, which seemed inflated from when he’d chosen the shirt this morning. He felt ill. Live national television. He was never good at live stuff. Why had he had breakfast? Never eat before a show.
Ted’s smooth, professional beard was shaved in at right angles down his cheekbones. Jack toyed with where he’d cast Ted. Didn’t quite fit a drama, too smug to sustain a full hour’s attention. A deodorant commercial, Jack decided. Ted’s hair was slick, short-cropped and black, with a scatter of grey. Good lawyer hair. Black meant youthful enough to be energetic but grey meant old enough to be experienced. Looking at it, Jack became convinced his was too messy. He ran a hand through it. Before he’d finished, a woman with a can of hairspray appeared. She swatted his hand away and started spraying and pecking with her fingertips. She shot him a look. Stop fucking up your hair, amateur.
Ted smiled across at his discomfort. Damn it, thought Jack. His teeth were super-white too. But his pants were too tight. No bulge. Small victories.
They were sitting on a circular stage, in two padded semi-spherical chairs. The type that had no armrests, so your hands slid awkwardly into your lap or your arms hung over the sides. Jack fidgeted, couldn’t get it right. Both his and Ted’s chairs were angled at forty-five degrees to an opposing seat – which was currently empty. That one was leather. Host’s privilege.
Jack preferred interviews behind a desk. In the middle of a sound stage, he felt marooned. But this was less an interview, more an interrogation.
Cameras and lights were placed around the stage in quarters, glass eyes pointing inwards: tall hulking sentries. The stage floor itself was concentric circles: an inner brown rug, the outer circumference the exposed stage itself, a reflective black. It looked slick on-screen, but it was just shiny black plastic.
All this for three people talking. Words will make you famous, Jack supposed.
He wasn’t the only minor celebrity. Birravale, too, had quickly become infamous. Googling winery deaths even a year ago would only turn up a few hits: workplace safety accidents; an old Italian winery that tried to blend methanol with their sauvignon blanc and wound up killing twenty-three people and blinding dozens of others. Now, though, pages and pages of fingerless Eliza Dacey. Her death usurped the twenty-three haphazard Italians. Because Eliza was young. Eliza was pretty. Eliza was on TV. She mattered more. Her ghost was a soft cathode glow, now.
‘Gentlemen . . .’ Vanessa Raynor stepped onto the stage. Casting notes: prestige actress. That one was easy. She gave both Jack and Ted a double-clasped handshake. Her smile was warm, but the firm grip announced that she was in control. This was her show. Her stage. She strode back to her chair and Jack half-expected her to let out a battle cry. Instead, she crossed her legs and put her hands on her knees. Perfect hand placement. Someone rushed up and hen-pecked her straight blonde hair, ran a lint roller down her black blazer. ‘Thanks for being here.’
‘Thank you for having us,’ Ted said.
Jack just nodded. He was getting used to these shows, more comfortable in them, erring on confident. His doubts were now buried in a shoebox at the back of his closet and since the end of the series he’d been on enough panel shows, speaking for Curtis, that he’d managed to talk his way into believing in his innocence again. Besides, he wasn’t here to vouch for anyone; he was here to show his face, get a good soundbite or two, and use the increased profile to renegotiate his deal with the network. Vanessa would ask him the same old questions about the same old murder. As far as he was concerned, that whole case, and everything with it, had run its course.
‘This is perhaps a bit different to what you’re used to.’ She nodded at Ted. ‘Shall we put your hand on a Bible? Make you feel more at home?’
Ted crossed his heart, leaned over and smiled. ‘He’s the one you need to worry about. I always tell the truth.’
‘Mate, it’s fucking television,’ Jack said, scratching at his microphone and avoiding the glares of the audio crew, ‘the only thing telling the truth on you is how tight those pants are.’
One of the crew laughed. The hair stylist scurried off and an assistant holding a clipboard stepped in. Blonde, slight, mid-twenties. All production assistants looked the same, because they never made it into the middle-aged diversity of face and figure – once the glamour of television wore off, they realised how shit a job it was, and quit. This one bent and whispered something in Vanessa’s ear.
‘Okay,’ Clipboard-Lemming said, straightening. ‘Everyone, this is live TV. Once we go up, that means you can’t say “fuck”. But that was really good. We want to lead with that exchange, okay? Sets up the tension between the two of you. Can you do it again?’ She stepped off the stage and stood next to one of the cameras.
Vanessa smiled at them both. ‘Make it look natural. Just the start, then we’ll be live. Play nice.’
‘Live in five,’ called the Lemming, hand up, fingers splayed. ‘Phones off.’
Ted rummaged in his pocket, pulled his phone out, switched it to silent. ‘Sorry. Always forget,’ he mumbled, pocketing it.
The Lemming’s fingers surrendered one by one until she had a fist.
Before Jack could say anything, the music had started and Vanessa was talking. He knew that was key: to plunge them into it, catch them off-guard. On his left, a monitor showed the current framing. To his right, over Ted’s shoulder, Vanessa’s intro scrolled up the auto-cue in black and white. Jack found himself reading it rather than listening to her.
VR: I’M HERE TODAY WITH THE LEAD PROSECUTOR IN THE WADE CASE, MR THEODORE PIPER.
AND THE FILMMAKER WHO BLEW THIS CASE WIDE OPEN, JACK QUICK.
GENTLEMEN. THIS IS, PERHAPS, A BIT DIFFERENT TO WHAT YOU’RE USED TO.
SHALL WE PUT YOUR HAND ON A BIBLE, MAKE YOU FEEL MORE AT HOME?
*ELEGANT LAUGH*
All Jack could think about was how fast they’d been able to put their spontaneous banter into the auto-cue. That, and how terrifying an Elegant Laugh from Vanessa Raynor would be. Prime ministers have been eviscerated on this stage, he reminded himself. Better men than you. Worse men, too.
Then he heard Ted say, like the suck-up he was, ‘I always tell the truth,’ and realised everyone was looking at him. Clipboard-Lemming-Number-Two, by Camera 3, spun her fingers in a wheel. Hurry up.
‘Mate, it’s fucking television,’ Jack said. Forgot the rest.
Clipboard-Lemming sh
ook her head, mouthed at him: Don’t Say ‘Fuck’. He felt a scurry of activity behind him as people dived for radios to tell someone to hit the censor button.
Vanessa shot Jack the look he’d seen before from the techie and the make-up girl, but took it in her stride. ‘Excuse you, Mr Quick.’
‘Sorry. I’m a bit nervous.’ He laughed. Elegantly.
‘We do have a delay. Only seven seconds, though. We’ll have our fingers on the button, just in case.’ She smiled at the camera, not at Jack, reassuring the families at home. ‘But please do keep in mind that we are a family friendly show.’
‘Right.’ Jack nodded. ‘Noted. Let’s crack on with discussing the torture and strangling of Eliza Dacey then, shall we?’
Before Vanessa had even thrown to the footage, he knew where they’d start it. On a thunderous Sydney day, in the car park of the Long Bay Correctional Complex.
On the monitor behind Vanessa, the footage started to play. It showed a beautiful slowly setting sun, casting the gathered crowd in a gentle ochre. It looked serene, but it had been freezing, Jack remembered; he had worn a scarf and an overcoat. The wind had whipped off the sea and climbed the cliffs. You couldn’t tell on the screen, but a rolling mass of grey lumbered over the bay. It would have been colder still inside the prison.
It had been noisy, too. A large crowd, everyone chattering. Cameramen spat on lenses, reporters primped hair, shifted so the light wouldn’t ruin the shot, but the frame captured a smidgen of the high concrete walls, the guard tower over their shoulders. Hopefully, a man with a rifle would wander into shot. Add some gravitas.
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