Blood River Page 13

  That was my pre-dawn every day.

  That morning, though, well before the click-clack of the horses, I woke, abruptly, in shock, to the burst of a thunderous crack that might have tilted the sky and the earth, its boom reverberating across the landscape of the sky until, many moments later, it shuddered beyond the horizon. Then the downpour, rain pummelling the roof and the street outside.

  I had been dreaming.

  I rarely remembered my dreams, still don’t. My friend Didi once told me I should do a spiritual hypno-therapy course to recall them, write them down when I wake up and then meditate with white sage, but I didn’t want to; I like my dreams to recede into the mist of grey as I jump out of bed.

  I had gone to bed under the sound of light rain and now it was hard, relentless, like sheets whipping along the street. I got up, out of bed, stood at the front window. A phosphorus beam of yellow light, from a tall wooden pole, light arcing onto the gun-metal surface of the road, shimmered with the bluster of the wind and rain lashing down. I went down to the kitchen and made myself a jug of coffee and some noodles and sat on the couch, fired up my laptop and brought up Google, which Didi also told me about, breathlessly, earlier last year. Search:

  Retirement in Fiji.

  —

  HE DIDN’T HIT me.

  Well, only once.

  We were in the caravan, deep in the desert, not another human for hundreds of miles, and he rolled on top of me with bourbon-and-beer breath and said, Let’s do it, and I said, No, I want to sleep, and so he started to do it and I said, No, and sat up and he whacked me, not in the face, but in the stomach and I felt a tide of air leave me, exhaling through me and I managed to sit up, my hands gripping the side of the tiny little caravan bed, and I said, Don’t ever do that to me again, and he said, I will do what I want, and I said, I don’t think so, and as he scrunched up his fist for another shot I two-finger poked him in both of his eyes and he yelped like a dog and roiled back onto the bed and I thrust my knee into his balls and leaned into his ear and said: You ever touch me, you ever come within a hundred-metre radius of me, you ever reach out to me, you ever even think about me, again, I will kill you. Got it?

  He got it.

  This was Guido. He sat, in my shitty history of no self-esteem, the spiral of hate, between Nils Part One and Nils Part Two.

  I climbed over his insect-like body, coiled in pain, and put on my jeans and T-shirt and grabbed my hairdryer and my make-up and my few other clothes strewn across the floor of the caravan and I saw his gun, a .45, and I took that as well, knowing he would come after me, gun in hand and try to hurt me as I had allowed myself to be hurt by him because I thought I was shot, a dog, a half-caste with a place neither here nor there and as I stepped out of the caravan in the middle of a vast desert because that’s how we (you) like it babe, we are traditionalists, scanning a three-sixty of nothing but for a dim and thin red dirt road etching its way across a dusty flat landscape with the awk awk of crows circling about me in the sketchy rise of pre-dawn, my boot hitting the dirt, scuffs of red dust scurrying around me as I walked, never looking back, don’t look back, Lara. Do what it is you really want to do; be a cop, be someone, be a person, make a difference to the ones whose lives have been collapsed like yours almost was, by him, when he put the nozzle of the .45 into your mouth and his dick inside you and laughed and said: I am you; and you said nothing but quaked with a little fear and wondered when you would summon the courage to eviscerate him, cut him from head to toe.

  —

  BOOTS ACROSS THE desert. After the first day of walking, rains began to sweep across the arid land and the sky hung with gloom and sadness, crackles of grey and black, black and grey, blue, heavy onto the horizon, ripples of thunder, getting closer and closer, rolling across the ether towards me, pulsating me, twining around me, scaring me and then maybe dissipating but maybe not, and the threat of rain. Rain, deep in the desert. I see it now. I didn’t then, back then when I was seventeen. After Guido, between Nils, the first and second time, before I shocked my mum by telling her I’d been accepted to train as a cop.

  Eventually I made it home. Walking across the now-muddy landscape I reached an outback highway, empty and straight as a nail. But for the occasional dead tree, grey with branches sticking out like a mad woman’s hair, the land all around me was so empty. I turned east and walked until a lonely chicken farmer picked me up in an old Bedford truck. He might have noticed the .45 sticking out the back of my jeans; if he did, he didn’t mention it.

  —

  ONCE, A COUPLE of years later, Guido came for me with a Hey babe, I miss you, you miss me? And I said: Nup, go away and never come back.

  And he didn’t. The past is the past.

  And some of it you can keep away. Where it belongs. In the past. And some of it –

  —

  EVERY NOW AND then, when I pulled the doona up around me in my house in Hendra and heard the click-clack of the horses, as I heard the pitter-patter of rain that might become a deluge with water rising up from the drains into the street, every now and then, I thought back to that hard walk across the desert, the outback of Queensland, out of the caravan, deep in the heart of the desert leaving behind a brutal man, a .45 wedged into the back of my jeans and on, on, on. Eventually to Brisbane. Long before I became a cop. But not so long before I went back to Nils. And everything that came with him. The tatts, the blood, the cutting, the collapse. Why did I keep going back to crisis?

  Is that me, doomed to repeat this pattern of self-destruction?

  Flotsam & Jetsam

  BILLY WOULD SEND MONEY HOME TO HIS MUM. HIS Queensland Police pay cheque wasn’t much, not back in the 1970s but he always managed to find a few quid, once he’d done the conversion from dollars, to send back to her. She lived in a council flat in the East End, a tiny little place that he also grew up in, after his dad had gasped his last. Billy grew up at the end of the war years, in the mid to late 1940s and by the time the 1960s came along, he had amassed so many criminal charges for robbery, he’d become well known on the streets of the East. So much so that by the time he reached the age of seventeen, with a long playlist of infamy, he saw two choices: life inside the slammer, and he’d already been in and out a few times, or a clean break.

  With his mum’s blessing, he caught a boat as a Ten Pound Pom, one of the many who took advantage of the siren-call from the ex-colony, in need of white-faced migrants. This was during the days of the White Australia Policy when Lara’s Chinese family would have been turned away. As would have almost anyone not of European heritage.

  Billy moved into a small wooden Queenslander in West End. On a large block, off the dingy main street, Boundary Road, so-named after the boundary between whites and blacks, Anglos and Aboriginals, from back in the last century, and still home to many Indigenous people from Queensland. In the 1980s he had saved enough (and his mum had passed on) so that he could buy it in cash. In the 1980s West End was still considered a bit of a dump. By 1999 it had become very trendy with outdoor cafes and bars pumping US indie rock, not that he ever listened, always still going to the same old pub on the main drag and having a beer with his cop mates, walking down the memory lanes of crook-catching and regaling in the notorious local hookers, all gone now.

  Billy was always wily. You had to be to survive the streets of the East End. He carried his wiliness with him as he arrived in Brisbane, knowing that he wanted to be a copper. Better to be on the right side of the law with this new life even though, as he slowly rose up through the ranks, well liked and respected, he knew that any copper worth his salt could get some on the side. Influence, money, girls.

  Billy had always been gregarious, and his generosity at the bar made him quickly popular. He knew that to move up the ranks, skill and ability were important but being liked was much more critical.

  So, when he came to Brisbane and became a copper, he also knew enough to reach out to people who might be able to help him, like flotsam and jetsam passing the sh
ores of an island.

  Police union bloke, good. Old coppers, good. The madams in the Valley who kept a record of all the cops and politicians and businessmen who went into the brothels for some good old fuck-fuck, good. And then, the newspaperman.

  —

  ‘ALLO MATE.’

  ‘Billy, it’s four in the morning for God’s sake. What’s going on? Have you got a front-page headline for me? Are you calling me about The Slayer?’

  ‘I am, me old buddy. Got pen and paper?’ asked Billy, sitting on his lounge, in the front room of his little West End home, wooden floor boards, walls covered in tourist paintings of the Greek Islands, mementos from his numerous holidays abroad.

  ‘Hang on.’ He heard rustling, then: ‘Right, ready mate. Hang on. Let me get out of bed and get down to the study. I’ll hang up and call you straight back – oh God, can you hear that rain? When will it stop old mate?’

  Never. That’s the point: it never stops, thought Billy as he waited. Here comes the flood, the deluge; I ain’t not as much of a religious man as I should be and I think Noah, he ain’t probably real but after weeks of this rainfall, streets and footpaths awash, I am starting to think of The Doom which me old grandpa talked about when I was four, before I got packed away on a train to live with a family who didn’t want me, to escape them doodlebugs.

  ‘Hi Bill. Sorry about that. My missus is a light sleeper and it is four in the morning so this better be good.’

  ‘Got your pen and paper?’

  ‘Actually, I’m working on a computer these days. Gotta keep up.’

  ‘A person of interest …’

  ‘Hang on. I type on the keyboard a bit slow. One finger at a time. A person of interest …’

  ‘A young woman of seventeen years. Very beautiful, like Mata Hari …’

  ‘A young woman of seventeen years. Very beautiful, like … can you spell that for me buddy? Who is Mata Hari again? Sounds like a cocktail.’

  She-Devil

  THIS SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL REVELS IN GOTH CULTURE. We cannot name her because she is underage, but this newspaper has verified her identity and spoken to many of her school friends, all of whom are terrified because she carries a knife into the school grounds at the exclusive St Mary’s in Ascot. Parents, who pay a premium for the education of their daughters, told this reporter how scared they were that a killer, a teenage girl who would decapitate men’s heads in the middle of the night in the Botanic Gardens and the Kangaroo Point Cliffs, is still allowed to go to class.

  This reporter has it on good authority that police have all the evidence they need and will soon make an arrest.

  St Mary’s in Ascot could not be reached for comment despite numerous attempts.

  —

  THAT WAS THE story in the morning newspaper. Front page. I’d read it online before dawn. Delicately, the newspaper did not name her. Indelicately, they had a grainy, slightly fuzzy photo of her, blown-up from the Year Book class photo.

  Billy.

  How could you do this? She might be a person of interest, yes, but how could you allow the local tabloid to throw a hundred-thousand spotlights onto her, destroying whatever life she had before this morning?

  After we left Kristo’s office and when the floor was quiet and the others had gone for the day and it was only him and me left, as the darkness fell swiftly over the city and the rain began once more, I had brought it up.

  ‘This is so dangerous, using the press to start a witch hunt for a kid.’

  ‘What if she’s guilty?’

  ‘What if she’s not?’

  ‘We’ve got no other leads. Them boys, Nils and Miles, they’re taking us nowhere.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t want a conviction now, too? Do you think I don’t lose sleep because of the pressure to make an arrest? Do you think I don’t hear the DPP and the Commissioner roll out the drums of war? But until we are sure. If we are wrong … We can’t make this go away, not at the expense of a frightened, confused seventeen-year-old girl.’

  That girl could have been me.

  ‘Do not bring the drums of war onto her. If we fail, we fail. We cannot allow an innocent person to go down.’

  ‘She may not be innocent.’

  ‘Until proven guilty.’

  ‘That’s what the court is for,’ he replied, then walked away.

  —

  AND NOW HE’D gone and done it.

  I wasn’t stupid and I wasn’t naïve. I understood that every police officer above the rank of Sergeant was a politician. It’s not like I was shocked to the core and completely taken aback. I knew there was a culture in Queensland Police, corrupt, macho and arrogant. Even though it was yet to be a year, I had been in the toughest and most rugged Squad in the entire department. I knew how things worked. No-one had asked me to deliver a brown paper bag full of cash, no-one had asked me to turn a blind eye to some of the things that my colleagues got up to. Luckily I was in Homicide, where that stuff doesn’t really come through the doors, not like in Fraud or CIB or the two giant pinnacles of temptation, Drugs and Vice.

  I’d managed to stay afloat and just do my job.

  During the first month, Billy had told me, with a sense of pride, how he got into the Force: ‘I was in my late teens and had emigrated to Australia, pretending I was an upstanding lad with metal foundry work to me name and they didn’t ask no questions, nought like, Billy, you ever killed anyone? Or Billy, you ever been in trouble with police back home in the East End? I travelled from Darwin, where I landed, to Brisbane and, knowing that I wanted to be a copper, I found where coppers ate their steak and tatters and canned spaghetti with pineapple – at the Breakfast Creek Hotel – and I sidled up to ’em, especially the lad in the union, and said: Me name is Billy and I just got Australian citizenship (which I hadn’t but they never asked for proof) and can I buy you lads another round of beer, and by the way, I would like to become a fine, upstanding member of the Queensland constabulary. And I got accepted. Didn’t have to pass no test; just paid for a lot of beers, and some bloke, name was Cyril who was high up in the union, Cyril says to me one day in the bar: You is in, mate.’

  You is in, mate. Simple as that. The criteria was no criminal record, be a good bloke, a tough bloke, tell stories, drink a lot of beer and eat the T-bone with canned pineapple and spaghetti. This was during the late sixties, when the Queensland Police Force was unbelievably corrupt, and while those days had gone, they hadn’t. Not entirely. You don’t erase a culture. You adapt it.

  That was me, having to adapt. That was me, being quiet.

  That was me, feeling not so good. Feeling a little uneasy. That was me. Potentially fucking up the life of a seventeen-year-old girl.

  Ashes to Ashes

  DEAR MISS INNOCENT-OF-THE-MURDERS:

  Hello. I am so sorry that you have been targeted by the police for the killings that I have done. When I did the killings in November, I didn’t think that the police would come after an innocent person like yourself. I was very careful in making sure that I left nothing behind, nothing the police could track back to anyone, least of all me. Well, not careful enough because they have tracked whatever clues that were left behind, to you.

  So sorry. I did not mean for this to happen. I had such a great time doing the killings, I just didn’t think that an innocent person would get into trouble for them. I know you must be very scared about what might happen to you but if I could say that, generally speaking, an innocent person does not go to prison. Well, in Australia anyway. Not so much in America but lucky for you we live in Queensland and so I think you will be alright. The other thing is that it’s obvious the police are desperate and have nothing to pin on you like evidence or else this story would not have been planted in the local newspaper. As far as I can tell, it is an example of how desperate they must be so I want to say to you that while you must be feeling very scared at the moment, don’t be because I don’t think anything bad will happen to you.

  I was pretty careful at the pla
ces where I killed the men and no-one saw me, that’s for sure. So I don’t think the police have got anything. I don’t know why they have come after you. I think it’s really bad that they did, coming after an innocent girl. I think they should be ashamed of themselves. I think it’s got something to do with that Asian cop. I think she is just trying to prove herself or something.

  So, don’t worry, okay?

  I am not going to do any more killings now. I wanted to but it’s not like any of the three dead men were part of a plan. They just happened and I felt really good about killing them.

  I really wish I could show you how I did them, the killings, because I reckon you would be really impressed. Or maybe not. I think I might be a bit weird but nobody would know because I am really careful at hiding stuff like that.

  I did want to do some more killings because it gets pretty addictive, especially if you don’t get caught! But I don’t think I can now. I think I have to rest up and stop. I hope that doesn’t mean anything bad for you, like the police thinking the killings have stopped because you are a suspect in the public eye and that you would be scared they were watching you, which is how I would react if it was me in the newspaper this morning.

  I am not going to send this letter to you for obvious reasons and I am hopeful that you would understand. And I just want to say, one last time that I am really sorry that you have gotten caught up in my fun. Really, if I knew that this was going to happen, I would not have done the killings in the first place. You probably don’t believe me when I say that but it’s true.

  Yours Faithfully,

  Me.

  Sounds of Silence

  BILLY WENT TO SLEEP, AFTER HIS CALL WITH THE newspaperman. The heat remained intense. Even before dawn. It was Billy’s day off so he settled into slumber knowing he could sleep all morning. Outside it was wet. Dark. The black clouds kept the gloom in place. He liked to hear the sound of the rain on his tin roof. Everyone likes to hear the sound of rain on a tin roof. It’s one of those kid things that make you feel that all is okay with the world, is what he thought.