Blood River Read online

  ‘A knife was discovered.’

  ‘Where? Please?’

  ‘In her school locker.’

  ‘Which you had already searched?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so, Detective Constable Ocean, let me pre-empt my colleague from the defence: How was it that, having already searched the school locker belonging to the accused, you did not find the knife earlier?’

  ‘It was hidden.’

  ‘Hidden where?’

  At the back of the courtroom, the door opened and a person entered to sit and watch the proceedings. Damon. He smiled and winked at me. Since mum’s command that he and I go to dinner at the casino – the two for one special deal – which I put off, citing work and could we do it after the case was behind me, to which he said: Yes and good luck, Lars, since then, I had totally forgotten about him. He had fallen right off the suspect list, not that he was ever on it. He just had that morbid, childish curiosity about the salacious killings, that’s all, is what I had told myself.

  ‘Down the bottom, at the very back, hidden behind some gym gear,’ I answered.

  ‘And what did you do with the knife, after you found it?’

  ‘We took it to be analysed.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Fingerprints, DNA.’

  ‘Were there any fingerprints on this knife? And, if it might please the court, I will enter the knife into evidence now.’ He held up the plastic bag.

  ‘Noted,’ said the judge.

  As they went through the process of admitting the knife into official evidence, I turned back to Damon. He was staring intently at me. So was Jen. But I didn’t catch her gaze; that I kept away from.

  ‘Were there any fingerprints on the knife?’ I was asked again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘The accused.’

  ‘What else did you learn from the knife, from the forensic analysis?’

  ‘There was DNA.’

  ‘DNA from? DNA from the accused?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was blood – leading to another DNA source.’

  ‘And the blood, the DNA, this second contamination, if I may, whose was that?’

  ‘The victim, our first victim.’

  Reckoning

  WAS SHE GUILTY?

  The jury said so.

  They deliberated for three hours, about the same time a Darwin jury took to convict Lindy Chamberlain for murdering her daughter, back in 1982. In that jury room, there were no deliberations. They had all agreed, well before the trial was over, possibly even before it had begun, that she was going down. Presumably the same thing happened with Jen’s jury. Despite the horrifying imprint that Nils had indelibly put upon each of them, it was the pretty teenage girl who was going to be found guilty. Because there was also, of course, the knife with its blood match and, try though he did, her QC could not get the jury to express scepticism over the last-minute discovery of the evidence. The only actual evidence that tied her to the crimes.

  Lindy Chamberlain was found guilty through some blood tests – which were later revealed to be not blood but rust inhibitor and milkshake. The analyst had stated the tests were conclusive, at the behest of the investigating police, who were under extreme pressure from the government, who were under extreme pressure from the press, who were under extreme pressure from the hungry public to get the bitch behind bars.

  Like Jen, Lindy Chamberlain had no motive to kill. The prosecutor made one up and there was a lot of drivel about her baby being killed as a sacrifice in the wilderness, a bit like the blood sacrifice Jen made to her god of thunder, Taranis.

  And also, like Jen, Lindy Chamberlain was young and pretty. Subjugation rarely happens to a woman who is not and it certainly doesn’t happen to a woman who fails the meek-and-bashful test.

  —

  I DON’T REALLY talk about my criminology course and what I learned; cops don’t like it when another cop quotes facts and stats. Cops like blood and semen stains, body hairs and fibres, fingerprints, broken alibis and insurance payouts and, for the past ten years, the holy grail, DNA.

  For me to talk about the ‘she-devil’ complex or the ‘third wave’ and their impact on how male police and lawyers and judges behave when considering the possibility of a female killer would only invite derision, then anger and then push-back.

  I can speculate, as I did when I studied this, about the notion of an attractive woman, who is seen by men as a nurturing, loving, earth-mother, falling under the black grip of suspicious violent behaviour. The creation and then subjugation of a she-devil reaches back to the witch-hunts in Salem and even further back to Cleopatra, the wealthiest and best-known woman on the planet whom the Romans derided as a whore.

  But I won’t speculate, not to Billy, not to my colleagues, because I’d be dancing solo on a desert plain. I could quote them facts, about the huge spike in focus, from police and law courts, on the potential of women’s criminality whenever a wave of feminism grew. Like in the United Kingdom after women successfully lobbied to vote in 1918. Like in the United States after women were forced back into the kitchen following their 1940s wartime service, all because the men came home. Like in the 1970s after the publication of The Female Eunuch, when American cops were quoted saying that if bitches want equality, they will fucking give it to them; they were talking about jail times. Like now, in 2000, a few years after third-wave feminism appeared, after a black woman named Anita Hill was harassed by a group of older white men when she appeared in the US Senate to testify about sexual assault. But I won’t quote them these facts, all of which I kept on recalling, as I drank too much Chardonnay during that week, while the city around me burst out in celebration that Jen White had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Because what’s the point of dancing solo on a desert plain? Better to take control of my own life and chart my own trajectory. Leaving those who would reach up to pull me down, the men I have known and the men I will come to know, marooned in their own narrow, singular orbits.

  —

  THE LAST TIME I saw Billy was over lunch at the Breakfast Creek Hotel, his go-to restaurant. He ordered a T-Bone but didn’t bother asking for the tinned spaghetti or the pineapple slices. He had suggested we get together to celebrate the conviction of Queensland’s first ever serial killer because we would go down in the annals.

  It was a week after Nils attacked me. The bruising had gone down and my murder fantasies had gone away. I locked my doors and windows assiduously and I’d taken possession, illegally, of a Beretta pistol, hand-delivered to me by a local biker at the behest of my friend from Melbourne, a cop who had also recently joined Homicide, in Vic Pol. I kept the pistol in a shoebox under my bed.

  I had now clocked in twelve months with the Brisbane squad. The four months from arrest to conviction must have been a record in Commonwealth law, but that’s how the state government wanted to play it. Be tough with crime and get a speedy result from the jury, appease the people, call an election.

  ‘I heard you put in for a transfer? Out of Homicide?’ Billy asked as he took a long swill of beer. I was drinking peppermint tea. We were sitting outside, on the veranda, across from the creek which ran off the river. We were sitting in the sun and the river was moving slowly, back to its normal level, as if the tempest of 1999 was a chimera, as if it hadn’t really happened. I imagined the river as a beast, a blood river, which held not only secrets of those lives it had taken but which lurked as a silent and smiling reminder, running through the heart of the city, which at any time could turn on us and become a raging monster once more.

  ‘Yeah. I thought I’d get some training in the other squads,’ I replied.

  ‘Fraud?’

  ‘Yeah. I hear the crooks are charming.’

  ‘Was murder too much for you? It gets to some people. No shame in that,’ he said.

  ‘No. I just wa
nt to get experience with all sorts of crime. And, you know, I want to climb the ranks. Become an Inspector one day. So, have to do the boards, move around, one step back, two steps forward.’

  All of which was true. Over the course of the year and with an increasingly narrow focus on one series of crimes I had begun to feel the need to broaden my understanding of how Queensland Police worked. If I stayed in Homicide, I would be defined by murder, maybe eventually turn out like Billy. Cynical, ruthless, jaded. He and I had been lauded for the capture of a vicious serial killer. We had made the world news. He had grinned at the cameras; I had shunned them. That too was part of my reasoning for leaving Homicide after just one year: I was craving the normalcy of crime that did not involve such high stakes. There isn’t very much in police work that is nice; you’re dealing with people who rob a 7/11, abuse their child or partner, defraud a pensioner’s life savings, murder. But that was the world I had chosen, a byzantine world of human frailties. I was happy here in this world and I knew, after a year of killings, after more years in the other squads, that I would never leave.

  ‘Good move,’ Billy said and drained the last of his beer. ‘Do you think I planted that knife?’ he asked without warning.

  ‘Did you?’ I replied.

  ‘Of course not. We had enough to get a conviction without it.’

  ‘I’m not sure that we did, Billy.’

  ‘We used to fit people up in the old days, back in the seventies and eighties. Not anymore. Too hard.’

  ‘How come? How is it too hard?’

  I didn’t mean to be combative, although there was an angry Lara, the one with the dyed-platinum hair, ripping away at my conscience. Did we get it right? Or, more to the point, did I?

  ‘What do you mean by asking me that?’ he said, his eyes narrowing. ‘You think I did do it, yeah? Is that what you think? Me, Billy Waterson, plant the fucking knife to get a conviction? I didn’t do it. I didn’t need to. We had enough to get a conviction anyway.’

  ‘Billy, calm down for fuck’s sake. That’s not what I said.’

  He ordered another beer and stared at me. ‘But that’s what you think, isn’t it?’

  I didn’t answer. I had no answer. He found a knife, late in the investigation. It happens. Would Jen have been convicted on circumstantial evidence alone? The flower, the trip to North Stradbroke, the love of the Celtic world, the testimony of the school friends of her threats and stabbings, the skateboarding, no alibis and an anger that made her want to hurt men, as the prosecutor alleged without a shred of proof. Would she have been found guilty if she was an eighteen-year-old guy who fitted into all those categories?

  Who knows? Who can say? Not me. But as my mum had noted, the killings stopped after she was arrested.

  ‘I should go,’ I said and got up from the table. Our food hadn’t arrived, but he didn’t seem to care.

  As I walked away, cloaked in confusion and sadness, I heard him say:

  ‘You’re stupid, you’re naïve, you’ll get nowhere.’

  The Year of Our Lord

  2000 and, Be Praised,

  a New Millennium

  Has Arrived

  I CELEBRATED JEN’S CONVICTION WITH A KILL.

  I knew it was wrong, to go off and do one more, after all that my head and my heart had gone through, the great debate. But I did it.

  I succumbed.

  I left home. I had on my backpack and in it, my blade.

  —

  HE AND I had talked and I advised Him that this one had to be different. A sacrifice, yes, like the last three but not like the first, which was different and many years ago.

  This one would not be a fear but an aoife. A woman. Important, I told Him, that we choose a different type of victim, and unlike the last three, that this new one would never be found.

  So, with that understood, I set out, with my blade inside my backpack, to claim her.

  It was April in the year of our Lord 2000. Jen had been dragged before the courts just before the end of the last century and convicted shortly thereafter. Her trial didn’t last very long. Justice was swift on poor Jen.

  Since the rather shocking moment when I read the newspaper and discovered the cops were going to make her the killer, I had managed to deal with the feelings of guilt. It’s a terrible thing that has happened to her but I have to be selfish and think of me.

  I remember the morning of January 1 in the year of our Lord 2000 when I woke up and was terrified that all of the information on my laptop was going to explode into the ether of Y2K when I turned it on but, like everyone else on the planet, I had been tricked and deceived into thinking that a terrible event was going to occur. Just like all those Christians who often think that Jesus H, their Saviour, will return to earth on a certain date, time, day and place to embrace them and take them back up into the sky. Stupid people. And sometimes I think that people would find me and my musings with Him to be silly.

  I am not mad. I am not insane. I talk to Him and he talks to me and I follow His guidance. It’s no different than if you spoke to God in a church, and nearly everyone I know does that. They are not mad, nor am I. I just talk to another.

  To people on the streets, in real life, on the surface, I conduct myself as a regular, normal person. No-one is truly aware of what is really happening in my mind. As I walk along a footpath or through a park, casting my gaze upon people with a smile because everyone likes a person who smiles – it tells them that they are nice – I appear unthreatening. Safe.

  Which is why she smiled at me. Because I smiled at her. The aoife was young, barely in her twenties. She was, sad to say, homeless. No fault of hers, I’m sure. She had likely run away from home, perhaps due to some form of domestic abuse. She looked as though she’d been on the streets for a while, which was the point of me smiling at her.

  My target. My next kill. He agreed. A person who has been on the streets for a while is a person no-one really cares about. A homeless person like her is anonymous and has already chosen to absent themselves from normal life. So, when I kill and dispose of her, she won’t be missed.

  New type of victim. Young. Aoife.

  New type of kill. No head fold.

  New type of hunting ground. I have left my familiar territory of Kangaroo Point and the Botanic Gardens to venture where Miss Homeless is living. Still the Brisbane River but far away from before.

  Miss Homeless aoife has chosen to live in one of the last remaining abandoned wharves along the river, in Hamilton, not far from the mouth of the river and the ocean beyond. Most of the wharves have been torn down and apartments are being built but a few remain, giant husks of brooding buildings, warehouses that front onto wooden piers, all of which are condemned because the massive logs that make up the piers are cracked and rotting, pieces falling into the water below. The flood didn’t help. The river rose and covered the piers, the waters rolling through the old warehouses and out the other side, onto Kingsford Smith Drive, the four-lane highway that leads to the airport.

  The warehouse she was camping in was huge; a vast empty dark space littered with rusty machinery, massive hooks dangling from the ceiling and old conveyer belts, long ago abandoned. The wooden doors were incredibly thick and tall, intended to be bolted, locked with huge metal chains and padlocks, but after the flood one had come apart and presumably this was how she found her way in. This was how I found my way in. I have always cruised along the old wooden piers, ever since I was kid, at night. Last week, on a midnight haunt, I noticed the open crack and stepped in to find myself in this deep gloom; in the distance, on the other side of the warehouse, was a little lean-to and this person sound asleep.

  I crept up to her and peered down and said to Him: We have found the next victim. Let’s come back, You and me, next week, and cut her up.

  —

  HERE I AM.

  Two in the morning. She was sound asleep as I stood over her. Knife in my hand. I could hear the swell of the river beneath me. No moon tonight.


  I knelt down and sat on her. She woke up straight off and stared at me but not really at me because the tip of my knife was at the tip of her nose. My knife is very, very sharp. Razor-blade sharp. I said:

  ‘Open your mouth.’

  And she did. She was really scared. I could see it. I could feel it. I could smell it. I liked it. Her fear gave me a thrill. I could feel the rush, as it was beginning to come, the endorphins. I fought against it, though, because I needed to remain in control. Maybe later. Maybe after We have dispatched her.

  ‘Pretend you’re going to kiss me,’ I said and she duly obeyed and slowly pouted her lips.

  I cut them off.

  She screamed, but I was prepared. I stuffed a tea-towel into her very bloody mouth. She tried to writhe, trying to buck me off her, but I was prepared. I held the dagger up high and plunged it down. Then I sat back and opened up her top, a dirty flannel shirt, and dragged the tip of my knife down her chest, from just below her neck to just below her belly. Not deep but deep enough for a warm flow of blood to spill out, onto the concrete floor. She was panting, breathing hard, in-out, in-out. She had the confused look on her face they all get. Why me? is what they are thinking. She was in great pain and unable to move, pinned as she was to the ground. I pulled out her canine tooth with a pair of pliers. To be added to the trophy board. Wrapped it in tissue and placed it in my pocket.

  I had noticed a large piece of metal, part of some old machine, possibly an engine. It was just sitting on the ground, covered in dust, a relic from the days when the factory was active. I thought I could use it. The finale. Before I disposed of the body. I crossed the floor and picked it up. It was very heavy. I carried it back to her, lifted it up high and dropped it.

  The old warehouse was full of valuable things. I wrapped her bloody body in some old chains, rolling her into them and then dragged her by her feet across the dusty floor towards the big old roller doors, through the open crack. Out onto the wooden pier and towards the edge, the river. She was heavy and the chains got caught in the splintered edges of the old wooden beams along the pier, but I got her to the edge, and I was about to roll her in when I heard: