Vanessa had probably been there, Jack thought, though he couldn’t remember seeing her. He remembered Ted, who had only gone because a rival network had paid him enough to film his reaction. The man who could get you on was there. So were the Wades: the sister, Lauren, and father, Vincent, leaning heavy on a cane. In retrospect, Jack could see the illness waning him. At the time, Jack had thought it was the stress, the grief of a parent struggling with his son’s guilt, but he could see it more clearly now. Cancer. Took him fast. Grabbed a hold and shook the bones from him. Five weeks later, he was dead. They’d only buried him a week ago. Jack hadn’t been there, but he’d okayed the network’s call to send a second unit. The family had gone with a clichéd headstone: Rest In Peace. A bit rich, Jack thought, seeing as he planned on interrupting the funeral footage with commercials. Thirteen minutes of ads per hour was both the legal maximum and the network minimum. Rest In 78% Peace would have been more apt.
That day at the prison, Lauren had seemed more grown up too. She’d been a teenager during the case (high school must have been a joy) but was now around twenty. Jack remembered her as a quiet sixteen-year-old, seated up the back of the courtroom with her father. The first day she’d been puffy-eyed and petulant, the second less so. Every day from there, there was a bit more of the world in her face. By the end of the case she sat stoically, as if the horrors of her brother’s crime had leaded her very skin. Though they kept away from everyone else, the Wades had two policemen with them.
He’d seen Alexis there too. She’d shaken his hand before heading into the throng to be interviewed. She didn’t command as high a fee as Ted or him, but she’d got plenty of bookings. They’d made her partner at the firm, too. Jack thought he’d even seen her on the side of a bus, wearing spectacles.
Vanessa Raynor shifted in her chair, and Jack slipped out of the memory and back into the room. After this interview, he was going to give Alexis a call. See what she was up to. She owed him dinner, after all.
On-screen, milling in the prison car park, was the same crew as at the trial, the appeals, the retrial. This ragtag group of journalists and producers, interns and camera operators had managed to become a strange little family themselves over the last few months. A travelling circus following the ghost of Eliza Dacey through the courts and jails of Sydney.
There had been a roar from inside. As if a football game had just been won. The prisoners must have been allowed out in the yard. Today was a special day. Then it was quiet, the wind picking up the cheer and whisking it away, as if the hope inside the walls was forbidden from escaping.
But the people outside the prison were quiet now too. Because there were two figures, behind the glass door entryway, talking. It was hard to see what they were wearing, but it appeared neither were in the green tracksuits of the inmates. Cameras were turned on. People craned their necks. Reporters started talking, variations of the same phrase – ‘first exclusive’ – crossing over each other. A ‘this-just-in’ lasagne.
We are live and seconds away from what we believe to be . . .
The figures shook hands. And then one of them walked to the side, held his pass against the doorframe, and the doors slid open. A few small raindrops began to fall.
Curtis Wade, in civilian clothes – cheap jeans and a plain hoodie – stepped into the dusk.
A free man.
He’d got fat.
People either get fit or chunky in prison and Curtis had opted for sedentary imprisonment. Maybe he’d been treated better the last few months, on account of the show, and that could’ve porked him up too, Jack supposed. Four years had aged him a decade. Curtis had gone to jail just north of thirty, but he’d come out with grey hair and a rough white beard. His eyes seemed set far back, sockets punched in like fingers in dough. He walked slowly, almost with a limp, but not quite. It was more a slow method of discovery, he was savouring new steps. Four years is a long time to run laps – or not, as seemed evident – in a yard.
After a few seconds of stunned silence, everything happened in a flurry. The cops, previously with Lauren and Vincent, rushed forward and fell into step either side of Curtis. Reporters broke ranks like kids at the starting pistol of an Easter egg hunt, running left and right, yelling instructions at the cameramen. One bypassed Curtis entirely and knocked on the door to the prison. Jack had a camera jammed in his face and was asked for his opinion.
‘No comment,’ he said, turning away.
‘Fucking hell, man.’ The operator lowered his camera, pissed he’d traded a better shot coming over. ‘Why are you even here?’
‘Make a path!’ one of the cops yelled as she guided Curtis through the pack. ‘Come on, you know how it works. Back up!’
Eventually, when they realised he wasn’t going to give any of them an interview, the pack thinned out, and Curtis was free to pick his way through to his family. (At the time, Jack found it odd that his sister and father hadn’t rushed straight up to him either but, on viewing the footage again now, he could see that Vincent was well past rushing anywhere.) But then Curtis changed direction. He pushed into the middle of the throng, looking left and right, scanning for something. Someone.
He locked eyes with Jack.
Fifteen cameras swivelled in Jack’s direction. Reporters scattered out of the way so as not to impede this reunion. If you could call it that. It was the first time they’d ever actually met in person.
Curtis walked over. Held out his hand.
Fifteen lenses and millions of eyes watched as Jack reached out and shook it. But Curtis wasn’t having that, and pulled him tightly into a hug. His beard was stiff and scratched at Jack’s neck, his nose wet against his ear. Curtis was crying. Jack put his spare arm around him and patted him on the back. Watching it again while Vanessa shuffled her notes and readied for questions, Jack remembered that image well. His slight frame dwarfed by a red-eyed bear hug: it had been blown up on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
But it was what Curtis said next that really stuck with him. Watching it again in Vanessa Raynor’s studio, Jack saw it play out again in almost sickening slow motion. Curtis pulled away slightly, then bent down and spoke, low and quiet, his breath hot on Jack’s ear, ‘Eliza Dacey thanks you for justice.’
Six perfectly chosen words. Essentially meaningless. But just odd enough to feel provocative. Chilling. And not whispered, but said with a quiet sincerity, just loud enough that the mics would pick it up. Clever. No, not clever: shrewd.
That was the first time Jack realised he had underestimated Curtis Wade.
‘So . . .’ Vanessa snapped Jack from his reverie, brought him back to the present. ‘Tell us how you got Curtis Wade out of jail?’
An easy start. That was one of the pre-approved questions.
‘To be honest, I didn’t think anything would happen, legally speaking. I wasn’t trying to get anyone anywhere. I was just interested in telling the other side of a story, the side that gets skipped, slips through the cracks. I wasn’t prepared for the public response; I don’t think anyone was. Australia set him free, I just opened up the conversation.’
He thought that was most of what his publicist had written down.
‘And what drew you to this story?’
‘I just found the circumstances around his sentencing so unclear. I felt someone needed to step in and sift through the evidence again. Try and have a clear view. Start again, from the beginning.’
‘That’s the detectives’ job though, isn’t it?’ Ted cut in. ‘You know, professionals.’
Vanessa made a small pat downwards with her hand. Settle, you’ll get your chance.
‘Normally, I’d agree,’ said Jack, ‘but Curtis was up against it, in a town that disliked him —’
‘Because of what he did to the Freemans’ winery?’
‘Yes, we can come back to that. But he was victim to a biased police force, a biased jury and, not to mention, a vitriolic prosecution campaign.’ Jack looked Ted in the eyes. ‘Set up by,
you know, professionals.’
‘So you wanted to give the little guy a voice?’ Vanessa said.
‘I think everyone deserves to be heard.’
‘And Eliza’s voice?’
That was not a pre-approved question. He faltered. Almost heard his publicist’s head thunk on the desk from the green room.
‘But Mr Piper’ – Vanessa switched the momentum – ‘you felt you had a pretty strong case?’
‘Of course we did.’
‘So where did it all go wrong?’
‘These guys – I want to say this now so it’s out in the open – are just a gaggle of filmmakers. They are not professional investigators, they’re not lawyers. They aren’t bound by chain of evidence, they aren’t bound by duty to the court.’
‘We had consultant —’
‘You had retired police detectives consult, that’s true. Retired. May I finish?’
Jack waved a hand dismissively.
‘It’s a TV show. I’m not denying you made some convincing arguments – you did. But you edited your arguments into existence, you moved things around. There’s hundreds of hours in the trial alone and your show was only seven. You’re not even a documentary crew.’ Ted directed his accusation at Vanessa, as if Jack wasn’t even worth the vitriol. ‘You know, these guys, what they’re making, it’s classified – in the network’s budget – as a drama. A drama. Fiction.’
‘That’s just a label for the number-crunchers. Everything we showed was true.’
‘It’s what you didn’t show that concerns me.’
A shoebox, pushed to the back of Jack’s closet, flickered in his mind. He shut it out.
‘So what you’re saying is . . .?’ Vanessa guided the accusation.
‘I’m saying you made it up. And you got lucky,’ Ted said.
‘Lucky? Your evidence didn’t hold up in the appeals court, I don’t need to remind you. On top of that, Curtis Wade was retried by a jury of unbiased peers.’
‘Unbiased? Everyone in the country has seen your show. Everyone has had your opinions beamed into their homes as facts. There’s not twelve people in this country I could make an unbiased jury out of.’
‘You’re just mad because everyone in the country saw you be an arsehole.’
‘Family show, Jack,’ Vanessa cut in.
‘Yes, of course.’ Jack tried to remember what his publicist had told him; he had to time it right. ‘You’re forgetting something. We didn’t actually present any evidence. All we did was show that yours was not up to scratch. You hack-jobbed him. Reasonable doubt is for everybody.’
‘You’re forgetting something too. You got a killer out of jail. You have to live with that.’
‘No blood, no matching footprints.’ Jack counted on his fingertips, becoming more animated. The exaggerated defence of someone who knows they’re wrong but hopes to get by on bravado. ‘No motive —’
‘We had motive,’ Ted cut in. ‘Eliza left a voicemail with a journalist at Discover! magazine. She had something she felt might be illegal, that could be newsworthy.’
‘She found something’ – Vanessa tapped her ear, fed some fact by a producer – ‘weird, I believe was her wording.’
‘Discover! is a tabloid,’ Jack said. ‘If it had been a severe enough motive for murder, she might have gone to the police. Or at least the Sydney Morning Herald.’
‘She wanted money,’ Ted said, comfortable in this area of discussion, ‘so she made a mistake and called the wrong magazine. That doesn’t mean she deserved to die.’
‘Of course she didn’t deserve to die,’ Jack sniped. Control, he reminded himself. Don’t be drawn into emotion.
‘But she knew something she shouldn’t. This much is clear.’ Vanessa stepped back in, switching sides again to whichever argument would stir the most drama. ‘We agree on this, gentlemen, correct?’
Jack nodded. ‘But that motive is all but useless without context, which you do not have. If I may return to my original point? There wasn’t a shred of physical evidence, and yet somehow you posited that she’d been killed on the property.’
‘And that was a contentious point?’ Vanessa asked.
‘Of the appeals? Yes. It came down to whether her body had been dumped or not.’
‘We proved that the cord used to strangle her was the same cord Curtis had spools of in his barn . . .’
‘My team tested the same cord at hardware stores across the country and got eleven identical fibre profiles to the one you used to convict him. Eleven serial killers, then, according to you. Better go round them up. All of them work at Bunnings – should be easy to find. Grab me a sausage while you’re down there.’
‘Explain’ – Vanessa pointed at the camera – ‘for the viewers at home?’
‘Simply,’ Jack said, ‘there was no DNA evidence on the rope in Curtis Wade’s barn. The brand of rope – quite a common brand – had matching fibres in Eliza’s neck, but that’s it.’
‘It all seems very convenient,’ Ted said. ‘That he even owns the same brand of rope. He got rid of her clothes, her shoes, he cleaned up her blood; it makes sense he would have got rid of the murder weapon. We weren’t positing that it was the exact murder weapon, just that it came from the same spool.’
‘Just like you can’t ascertain that the shoe prints were actually hers?’
‘Again, we proved that it was likely,’ Ted said. ‘I don’t know why it bothers you so much that a murder victim’s footprints are at a crime scene. That’s what happens, you know.’
‘I agree, a lot of the evidence was’ – Jack pulled his fingers into air quotes – ‘convenient.’
‘Easy evidence is more a sign of a sloppy killer than a corrupt police force,’ Ted shot back.
‘That might have been good enough the first time. The absence of evidence is not evidence. Your excuse that he cleaned it up is not good enough. There’s no blood on my car outside; how many people do you think I ran over on the way here?’
‘I hope you have a good libel lawyer.’ Ted was fuming. ‘You’re making it sound like I’m the one that framed him.’
Jack shrugged.
‘If I may,’ Vanessa came in again, ‘we have limited time left here, so let’s try not to get too personal. So, Jack, it’s agreed in the courts —’
‘We’ll appeal,’ corrected Ted.
‘It’s been temporarily agreed in the courts that the physical evidence wasn’t up to scratch,’ Vanessa said. ‘So, let me ask you, Jack – if Curtis didn’t kill Eliza, who did?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But the real killer is still out there?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Your documentary —’
‘Drama,’ said Ted.
‘Yes, Ted.’ Vanessa’s glare challenged Ted to interrupt her on this point again. She turned back to Jack. ‘Your docu-drama seems to imply that three million dollars of corporate espionage might be good enough motive for a frame-up?’
‘Corporate espionage are strong words for some spilt wine.’
‘Six hundred thousand litres.’
‘Point taken. Look, the Freemans and the Wades have beef. No doubt. And I’m sure it influenced the local opinion towards Mr Wade, in the end. But I wouldn’t read any more into it than that.’
‘Andrew Freeman is the local sergeant, too, is that correct?’
‘I’m not going to sit here on national television and accuse Andrew and Sarah Freeman of murdering someone, if that’s what you want.’
Vanessa looked at her notes. There was just a glimmer, but enough to know. He’d stumped her.
‘See, that’s how I know you don’t care.’ Ted had found the guts to pipe up again. ‘Because if you are right, then Eliza’s real killer is still out there. And you’re not doing anything to find them. And I think that’s either because you want them to kill again, for the press. Or,’ Ted paused and let it sink in, ‘you already know who it is.’
The shoebox flickered in his mind.
‘No, Ted. I just . . .’
‘You look tired. Thin too. Every time I see you, you look like you’ve halved. Stress? Trouble eating? Something keeping you up?’
‘Fuck off, Ted.’
‘Family show, Mr Quick,’ Vanessa cut in, but half-heartedly – she was loving it.
‘Yeah,’ Ted said. ‘Watch your language.’
‘I’ll watch my language,’ Jack said, ‘when you stop being such a cunt.’
Vanessa sliced a hand across her throat, and the red lights on all four cameras flickered out. ‘I think it’s time we all took a bit of a break.’
Jack felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Then again. Again. He checked it: fifteen calls in the last ten seconds. All missed, bouncing off each other. One text got through, from his producer. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?! It made him smile. He turned his phone off. Ted might have thought he’d got the better of him, and maybe he had struck a nerve somewhere there, but Jack felt like he’d regained some control. His publicist’s words rung in his head: ‘Ninety per cent of all interviews are disposable. Just get a few good soundbites. Go viral. Call him a cunt if you have to.’
In retrospect, she had probably meant it figuratively.
Before they came back from the commercial break, Jack knew something was wrong. The minions had mobilised, there was movement everywhere; people were talking into their radios and phones loud and fast. He heard Vanessa tap her earpiece and say: ‘Are you sure?’
Then someone stood in front of Camera 2 and whirled their finger above their head. He heard someone yell they were coming back early, and his life changed forever.
‘We welcome you back with some breaking news.’
Vanessa was talking, but she sounded distant. This definitely wasn’t in the pre-approved questions list. He risked a glance at Ted, who looked equally anxious. Breaking news? This wasn’t a bulletin type of show.
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