by Leanne Hall
I stare at my phone. She doesn’t reply.
I want to see our photo, I want to get back that energy of doing something together. She listened to my ideas and opinions and I don’t think I was imagining that I was a good team player even though my school reports always say ‘Natalia is not a team player.’ We had that feeling and then it slipped away and I want it back.
It’s 7.30 a.m. and I have how many hours to fill until it’s not too sad to go back to sleep again and then start another day after that, and another, and then go back to school having done almost nothing all school holidays, other than doing a great impersonation of a dead person.
I check the news and there’s nothing about Yin that I don’t already know.
I put on some music, I take out my suitcase, I put on the crown I made for the photo shoot. I’m clearing out my schoolbag, old mandarins, tampons spilled out of their box, no less than seven chapsticks, and I find the piece of paper I pinched off Petra, her creepy list of Doctor Calm’s victims. Reading the list of the girls’ names, their ages, how long they were held for, has not gotten any better.
The words ‘Cold Crimes’ are written at the top of the paper, in my handwriting. I don’t even remember doing that, it’s scary the amount of things I must do on autopilot like those people who wake up and they’ve crashed their car into a tree without even realising.
I search the term on my laptop, and it transpires that Cold Crimes is a supremely ugly website for true crime enthusiasts and I don’t know why, but my heart starts beating fast immediately.
The front page is a hot mess—there are forum rules and information, lists of members and announcements, trending discussions, case folders, urgent cases, current legal trials and missing persons.
According to the sidebar there are currently 990 members online. At least half of them sound like conspiracy theorists and the other half sound like police trying not to sound like police.
I am sick to my stomach but I keep clicking, reading, clicking, reading.
Number one under ‘trending discussions’ is the brand new forum devoted to Doctor Calm.
When I open it there are threads upon threads about the police profile, various suspects, how the name Doctor Calm came about (according to Dtctv86 one of Doctor Calm’s victims cut her finger and he told her that he’s a doctor), summaries of supposed victims and linked cases and, at the bottom of the second page, the question: Why has Yin Mitchell not been returned???
I scroll through conspiracy theories about Yin’s father and the Chinese government, child brides, and a cover-up involving police at the highest level. The majority of people think that Yin must have figured out who Doctor Calm is, recognised his voice or accidentally seen his face, and when I read that, I can picture it. I can see Yin pulling at a mask, seeing the monster and dooming herself.
The forum seems to grow as I’m reading it, spawning more and more comments and information. There’s so much more available here than I’ve ever heard in the news reports.
BoardShorts77 suggests that Yin went willingly with a ‘much older boyfriend’.
Catsrfriendz thinks that Yin has been the victim of a global child-porn ring.
MaxwellSmarts provides a supposed map of the GPS positions for Yin’s phone on the night she was taken but then everyone piles on him for lying and he gets banned.
I find out the reason that the police cleared the guy on the CCTV in the convenience store is because he was interstate on the night Yin was taken.
I find out there was a scandal at Balmoral in the 1980s when one of the teachers married a student three months after she completed Year Twelve.
I find a list of reported sightings of Yin that spans from Tasmania to China.
Piratemajid114 says that aspects of Yin’s kidnapping remind him of a cold case from forty years ago and links to a podcast episode.
I’m torn between thinking the world is one sick place and taking heart from the fact that so many people care about Yin’s case, that they actually care about catching Doctor Calm or finding her alive. Who are these people? How do they have so much time on their hands? Why do they care? Is Petra one of them?
I imagine Chunjuan and Stephen reading this site and feel sick all over again.
Bugs crawl under my skin and my head is weird and empty like I might be getting a cold again and Mum won’t stop trying to make me talk and I have to get out of the house.
I almost make it out unseen but then Mum tries to derail me when I already have one leg out of the side door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Chloe’s house.’ The lie comes as quick and easy as snapping my fingers. I know I’m not invited to Chloe’s house despite all my gentle hints. I’m still surprised she met up with me on the holidays—she’s so hell-bent on remaining mysterious at all times. Would it hurt her to invite me over?
‘But—I thought we could have lunch together. I was going to suggest we go down to Sushi Nara.’
Sushi Nara is my favourite and very chi-chi and expensive and Mum knows all of these things, so it says a lot about her need to keep me within her sight, but we can’t have everything we want in life, can we mother.
‘I’d love to Mum, but Chloe is spinning out about her project. She desperately needs my creative guidance.’
Mum’s eyes narrow so maybe I overdid that a little bit.
‘But…’ she says and no one can put so much expression into one word and on one face than her, except maybe Liv. ‘I thought we could spend some time together.’
She’s terrible when she works from home, always procrastinating in the most blatant ways. I simply must not enable her and I have to make these bad bugs go away, somehow. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’ll try not to be too long. Maybe we can do girls’ night tonight?’
She nods and I try not to seem too much like a bird flying out of the cage and I open the back door and I’m free.
Of course I have nowhere to go at all because South River is an inherently boring place, that’s why people pay so much to live here, so that their boredom is assured for the rest of their lives and also so they don’t have to see nasty poor people in non-designer clothing.
I traipse to the reserve under skies that threaten rain and the playground is deserted and the oval is fenced off to coax the grass back so that as soon as summer hits the sun can fry it all back to dry husks.
I run on the cross trainer, I do crunches on the tilted bench, I dip on the bars and thank the lord that no one is here to see me use the public exercise equipment. All of that takes up around five minutes and then I’m alone with the bugs and my bad thoughts and the memory of my dream.
I sit in the big whirly teacup and tilt back to look at the clouds. I’ve even done all the homework I was assigned for the holidays instead of saving it for the last minute so it turns out Mum is probably right, I’m not myself right now.
The glum grey sky whirls into a spiral as I turn the teacup steering wheel faster and faster and my thoughts wander off into the washing machine spin cycle distance and then Yin is there again. She’s on the other end of the phone and she’s saying:
‘I can see if Milla can get a spare ticket?’
She’s off to see some amateur symphony orchestra at the university recital hall with her classmate Milla, who plays the French horn and is also in the junior wind ensemble. They are friends who hang out on a Saturday even though it’s only four weeks into Year Seven and Yin says nothing about the fact that we were supposed to go to the mall to buy me new swimming goggles and as much makeup as Mum will let me wear because she’s already forgotten that we always hang on the Saturdays that our families aren’t dragging us off to do something else.
I blink blink blink my way back into the cold metal present and my fingers itch and twitch to go back to the Cold Crimes website and my phone is out of my pocket before I even know what I’m doing. I scroll through some of the same stuff I read at home, then I click through to the Doctor Calm forum, that black internet spiderweb
that infiltrates my brain like a weed.
The top thread is about a tabloid article published in the last few days: ‘Secret Suspect Tops the List’. It’s behind a paywall but someone has copied and pasted the full text of the article into a comment.
The journalist has read a confidential police document, the ‘Echo Files’, that names the top twelve suspects in Yin’s abduction. Strangely, one of the suspects agreed to be interviewed anonymously by the journalist.
‘Steve’ was jailed for eleven years in the 1990s after pleading guilty to eight violent attacks on young girls and women during an eighteen-month period. The former gymnastics coach and father was convicted on aggravated rape and sexual assault charges after holding the victims at knifepoint in their own homes.
Steve admits that he is a key suspect in the hunt for Doctor Calm, but claims that police have wrongly accused him. He says that he was grilled by police for ten hours the day after the abduction of Yin Mitchell, and that his home in the Melbourne suburb of Stockton was searched.
‘Whenever there’s one of these types of crimes, the police come calling,’ says Steve. ‘They search my house and I answer their questions. But I did my time. I was completely rehabilitated after I was in jail, I raised a new family. I started my own business, I made something of myself.’
Good for you, Steve, I think. What a fucking great member of society you are. Congratulations on making something of yourself after you ruined eight people’s lives. The report goes on to say that he remarried and had more children, but what would you even do if he was your dad? Could you still love him after you found out about his past?
I’m so disgusted I have to lean over the edge of the teacup and spit onto the tanbark.
My heart starts thumpety-thumping all over again.
There are pages and pages of comments after the article, and people are still commenting even now. You can’t top these true crime nerds for detail and going the extra mile, and it makes sense how Petra of all people got sucked into this world.
There are replies with the precise details of Steve’s convictions: locations, victims’ first names and ages, charges. Details of which prison he served his term at. Someone has provided a blurry photo of a man, well-built, wearing a tracksuit. It’s hard to see his face, but he’s good-looking, sporty, not at all what I expected.
Thump thump thump.
I’m about to abandon the thread when I see a new comment: Aceventura*666 thinks they’ve cracked ‘Steve’s’ real identity. As evidence they have posted a scanned original court document, and right there at the top is the name of the accused: Samuel Pulpitt. I scan the document but it’s sixty pages long and full of incomprehensible language and I’m not my mother the lawyer so I quickly give up.
I re-read the article.
Samuel Pulpitt. The name burns a bright scar in my brain.
I start searching, trying every combination of words possible using the details from the comments.
Samuel Pulpitt gymnastics coach/Samuel Pulpitt Doctor Calm/Samuel Pulpitt suspect/Samuel Pulpitt 1996 convictions/Samuel Pulpitt sex crimes/Samuel Pulpitt Warrawood/Warrawood rapes 1990s/Warrawood Milltown crimes 1990s/Gym coach sex crimes/Pulpitt prison sentence release/ Pulpitt gymnastics/Pulpitt rapist court case/Serial criminal Warrawood Milltown…and on and on and on.
Somewhere along the line there’s a click in my brain and I return to the original article where they describe ‘Steve’ outside his Stockton home that has been searched dozens of times over the years and Stockton’s not so far from school, so then I google ‘Pulpitt Stockton’, and I find Samuel Pulpitt in the Australian Business Registry, located in Stockton, and then I click on the next search result which happens to be the plain old telephone directory and all of a sudden my heart is leaping out of my chest and I have this: Pulpitt, S. 316 Mewling Road, Stockton.
What the hell.
What the hell.
Could it really be him?
There’s a phone number, so I could just call and ask, but what if he has caller ID and then he has my mobile number?
I’m so pumped full of adrenaline that I might fly off the play equipment and shoot into the sky. I’m so sick of doing nothing. I’m so sick of sitting still.
‘Samuel,’ I boom, scaring a nearby pigeon. ‘I’m coming for you.’
I get a reply from Chloe while I’m on the train but I don’t read it because I am a laser now, every part of my being from my heart to my fingertips focussed to a pinpoint of energy that says: Samuel Pulpitt of Stockton, I’m coming to get you.
Chloe has been spending her holidays in productive ways and she would approve of my sleuthing and I don’t need a European trip to be exciting because I am finally doing something for Yin and all the other women and girls that have been hurt at the hands of men. I keep reading on the train. Pulpitt’s oldest victim was thirty-three and the youngest fifteen. It’s hard to believe you could do things that horrible to eight girls and women and only get eleven years in jail.
Eleven years versus always being scared, always looking behind you.
My fists itch to hit someone.
I get off at Stockton station and follow the blue line on the map towards Mewling Road. I am exactly like Senior Detective Hillary Burns from Devil Creek in that my outfit is terrible and also I can be an ice-cold bitch. I imagine I’m an assassin on the way to my target, a Wingdonian assassin with extra-sensory perception perhaps, who can fry man-brains to a crisp with one point of her finger.
Houses in Stockton are welcoming and well-kept, even if they aren’t nearly as fancy as those in South River. There are trampolines in several front yards, natives growing on the nature strips, four-wheel drives in driveways.
What will I do when I get there?
On the train I thought about writing a letter about Pulpitt’s crimes and sending it to everyone on his street, or putting up posters around the neighbourhood so everyone could share in making his life hell. I guess I can still do those things if I want to but I need to keep moving to feel all right.
What will I do when I get to the house?
I’ll just look. I’ll see for myself what the house of a sicko looks like. Maybe it will tell me something. Maybe if I look at it I will get a sense of whether Pulpitt has anything to do with Yin’s abduction, maybe I’ll just know.
The Mewling Road sign informs me that it is named for one of the town’s earliest councillors.
I am faint.
My boots make clomping noises on the footpath and I try to bring back that fizzy Detective Burns Wingdonian assassin feeling.
I pass two apartment blocks, a small park, and the local primary school. The kids have decorated the front fence with welcome messages in different languages, and there is a convicted sex offender living within walking distance from where they play so isn’t life wonderful.
And then, quicker than you’d think possible, I’m at number 316.
A narrow house, weatherboard, pale green, more rundown than some of its neighbours. A moulting paperbark tree on the nature strip, a beaten-up silver station wagon parked out front.
I keep walking past, on the other side of the road, while I figure out what to do.
The article said his house had already been searched. It’s not like Yin is in there, right now, that’s not possible.
On my return stroll I check out the red side gate, the front window. The curtains are drawn. There’s a caravan parked in the backyard, and a thick vine taking over the carport.
My mind is cold, clear.
I imagine reaching quickly into his letterbox, to see if there’s anything there.
I imagine knocking on his door and getting a glimpse into his house.
I imagine sneaking a look into his windows, seeing what’s in his backyard. I picture climbing in a window, getting a knife from his kitchen and using it.
As I stare, a man comes out the front door and shuffles down the driveway, past the wheely bins. He’s looking at me.
‘You! I see yo
u!’ He makes it to the letterbox and uses it to keep his balance. ‘Girl, I see you! I know why you’re here.’
I squint and it’s him. Paunchy and balding and much older than I expected. Samuel Pulpitt. He’s not a muscly gym coach anymore but an out-of-shape old man.
‘Yeah?’ I call back. ‘Why am I here then?’
‘You don’t think people have been gawking at me, spying on me all the time? I see through you.’
I can’t believe he is standing right here in front of me, less than ten metres away with only a thin strip of road between us.
‘I know who you are!’ I make sure my voice is deep and strong. ‘You’re disgusting, a rapist and a criminal.’
His mouth flaps open and shut, out of breath from walking up his own driveway. Power surges through me.
‘Do your neighbours know that there’s a predator living next door? What do you think they’d do if they knew?’
‘Listen, I went to jail for that. I did my time. It was a lifetime ago.’
‘You ruined lives. Those women will never forget what you did to them.’
‘Oh, you’ve asked them personally, have you? What you’re doing now is equally disgusting, you spoilt little brat!’ He coughs from the effort of insulting me. ‘This is my house, my life, my privacy!’
‘How can you say that?’ I’m outright shouting now, shouting my throat raw. I am a rage bomb, a firework going off, a nuclear mushroom. ‘What you did is unforgivable and you should pay for it for the rest of your—’
Out of nowhere my breath deserts me, my voice trails off. I’m breathing just as hard as he is.
‘Oh, I see.’ Samuel Pulpitt leans harder on the letterbox. He’s wearing a tracksuit with stains down the front. ‘You’re her age, aren’t you? The Mitchell girl. Do you know her? Is that it?’
A shiver runs through my whole body. ‘No.’
‘Is that why you’re so upset?’
I try to move my feet but I’m frozen. ‘You’re wrong. You’re delusional.’
But maybe it’s me that’s delusional. The man in front of me doesn’t fit the police profile at all and he’s not the sinister abducting machine that the media has painted. He’s old and sick and pissed-off.
