Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  One of my first memories was that smile I’ve seen tens of thousands of times. It comes with: Asians are so good with numbers. Asians are obsequious. Asian ladies will make you a cup of tea and massage you. Asians are well, you know –

  – they’re not like us.

  Billy had gently nudged my foot, under the table with a, yet again: stay groovy. I put on my happy face; yeah, we’re not like you, we are subservient and thanks for reminding me of that.

  ‘This little Asian girl was just great with maths and her family had recently moved from Singapore and this little girl, Frannie, well, her parents were rather horrified because Frannie, who would have only been eleven, started going home and swearing at the dinner table: f-this and f-that and we quickly discovered it was Jen, her mentor, who thought it highly amusing to teach Frannie to use the f-word at home. She is so intelligent. Jen. I teach her English, and her grasp of the novel is quite extraordinary. Aside from her obsession with Kafka – at least it’s not Nietzsche – she is the most talented student I have taught; I mean, she can recite Chaucer! Who has even heard of Chaucer these days?’

  Billy raised his hand. I followed.

  She laughed. ‘So, I suppose what I’m saying, detectives, is that she is terribly bright, quite dark, and –’

  ‘Tell us about the knives,’ I asked.

  ‘Oh. Yes. The flick-knife?’

  —

  SHE TOLD US her name was Hortense and that she was from the Seychelles. She had been teaching English at this very exclusive all-girls school for decades. We were sitting in her office, which was large and had massive windows with plantation shutters and glass louvres with a view over the tennis courts, a lawn and, as this school sat atop Ascot Hill, a sweeping panorama of the river below and the city beyond. Her office must have been, when the school was built out of hardwood back in the 1800s, part of a veranda and, on the lawn below, girls would have played croquet and worn long dresses.

  There was a black and white photo, framed, on her wall, of a Chinese man, in a Mao suit with girls all around him, staring up at him as if he had come from another planet; it must have been taken in the early 1950s. Soon after mum as a little girl and my grandmother fled the mainland. In the photo, the girls were all standing under a massive jacaranda tree, in full bloom; and I could, looking out through the louvered windows, see the same tree towering over the lawn, in full bloom again, its purple flowers both in the tree and on the ground, a carpet of purple.

  What was the Chinese man doing here? I wondered.

  He was smiling, the Chinese man. Was he here with a delegation of some kind?

  Where is he now? I wondered. He must be long dead. I wondered what his name was, if he had been married and had kids and if he did, where they might be, now? I thought back to growing up in Cairns, as a kid, walking to school with a plastic ice-cream container on my head because the magpies would swoop down to nut me, thinking I was a threat to their babies, kicking through the floor of purple flowers, like the boys liked to kick through puddles. Swish swish with cold noodles in my bag, which I would eat in private, sometimes in the toilet because it was Asian food and I couldn’t be Asian because if I was Asian, I was The Chink.

  Mum, just make me a sandwich! Please! Or money for a meat pie! No more noodles!

  —

  ‘I SUPPOSE THE first time we realised there was an issue with the flick-knife was about a year ago. One of the girls in Jen’s class, Lucy, came to me and said she felt … what’s the right word? It’s not as if Jen had actually threatened her, but the knife scared her, so I spoke to Jen and I confiscated it and I got her parents in and we all, including Jen, had a chat and she agreed not to bring it in again. Mum and dad were somewhat startled that she actually had a flick-knife, and that was pretty much that.’

  ‘Sorry. You said the first time,’ said Billy.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Well. After that there were some other incidents.’

  ‘Being?’ asked Billy.

  She started to fidget. ‘Would you mind telling me what this is all about?’

  —

  ‘OH, FOR FUCK’S sake; didn’t you close the door?’

  Turning around, I followed Billy’s gaze to see Space-Cadet-Mum on our floor, walking from desk to desk, the brand-new Blackberry in her hand.

  ‘I thought you did!’ I barked back at him.

  The other crews were looking bemused as, having now spotted us, she was quickly striding towards us, holding out her phone.

  ‘Can you talk to my husband? He wants to ask you some questions.’

  We both got up and began to shepherd her to the interview room.

  ‘Sorry darlin’, it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘But he’s in Dubai.’

  ‘Good for him,’ said Billy as we ushered her back into the interview room and shut the door behind us. Jen was sitting upright and hadn’t moved.

  ‘Have you made a decision regarding a lawyer?’ I asked while she whispered into the Blackberry: ‘They won’t talk to you. I know, so rude. All right I will.’ And she hung up.

  ‘Yes, we have. My husband is calling someone now.’

  Exit Strategy

  IN MY FIRST WEEK AT HOMICIDE, I HEARD AN OLD JOKE ABOUT criminal defence lawyers. One of them is talking to her client behind bars and says: ‘Okay, you stabbed him fifty-three times, then you ran over him twice; your DNA’s on the victim and you did this in Times Square, so there are ten thousand eyewitnesses. Here’s my plan to get you off.’

  I laughed then, like every Homicide detective who hears it for the first time, but also like every Homicide detective I stopped laughing after my first murder suspect was charged and then, three months later, walked free from court. Not only does a cop feel a sense of anger that a guilty person has got off because the law is fucked, but a failure of conviction blows back on the cop’s reputation. One too many failures, Billy told me, and the floor starts with the quiet rumblings about the colleague who’s cutting corners, not being diligent enough, not caring, and soon you’re not on a crew anymore. Then the rumblings stop being quiet, and the other crews not only refuse to work with you but agitate to get you off the floor for good, aware that their reps are also getting tarnished.

  It’s all well and good for the Dutchman to tell us we just have to charge someone to get the press off our back, and to leave the rest of it, the actual conviction, to the prosecutor. What happens, as Billy said to me, if we hand a brief to the DPP and then, hallelujah, another bloke gets killed in the same way a week later?

  ‘I’ll tell ya what happens, girlie. What happens is that everyone from the Dutchman down calls us idiots, throws us to the wolves, kicks us out of Homicide and blames us for the new death.’

  —

  JEN AND I glanced at one another as her lawyer entered the interview room and introduced himself by handing out his business card.

  ‘Hello, my name is Bruno Albanese and I am representing Ms White. What, please, is the reason for her to be here?’

  I looked up from the business card, which told me that Mister Albanese was a solicitor from a small suburban firm. Most likely he’d done the family wills and some contracting work for them. Jen’s mum was a manager at a Honda dealership on Breakfast Creek and her dad was a wealthy art dealer. In my very narrow experience with wealthy people who travel the world, they fret about frequent flyer points more than anything and hate spending money, assuming that life is a triumph and they, therefore, shouldn’t have to throw good money anywhere, certainly not at a lawyer because if you’re not careful, they could bankrupt you, because the only person who cares about you is you.

  Jen was staring at me.

  —

  I WAS STARING at Lara, who had just scanned the business card of my lawyer, dad’s old school friend who, I’d overheard dad say, does a good ‘mate’s rate’ because lawyers ‘charge like wounded fucking herds of buffalo’. I don’t think dad or mum or mister lawyer understand that I am actually in Homicide. Being interviewed in Homicide. B
ecause I am a suspect in a murder. Or murders. We haven’t even got to that bit yet. But what is abundantly clear is the word, the deed, the threat, the reality of Homicide. Dad, I would have thought that’d be justification enough for you to get, like, you know, a barrister, or someone with criminal expertise.

  But no. Dad is in Serbia and mum is on Saturn.

  It is up to me. To deal with this.

  —

  ‘IF WE COULD just return to this,’ said Billy, indicating the image of Taranis, which was face-up on the table. ‘Can you tell us what the god of thunder means to you?’

  ‘I want to invoke the fifth amendment, as anything I say may incriminate me,’ said Jen.

  For the first time Billy sat up, eyes wide open, and stared at her with a What the fuck? And I looked at her and wondered if this is just kid-dumb or a tease.

  ‘That is relevant solely to American law, Jen. There is no fifth amendment in Australia. You can choose to remain silent and not answer our questions, that is your right, but you cannot invoke the fifth because it does not sit within Australian law.’

  —

  FROM THE TIME they led me to the cop car out the front of the house with the street watching, Lara’s claws digging into my flesh and Anthea looking horrified, to now, I had started to think this was all a big stupid fucking joke. I am not angry anymore. I am fucking over it. I wanted to go to the movies but instead I am sitting in an interview room with an old guy who smells of cheap lolly water and wears brown shoes that look like mirrors.

  I am my own worst enemy. Who isn’t? Well, I take the prize. Sitting in the interview room in Homicide, it started to feel like this was all simply ridiculous. At some point, soon I hope, the world of topsy turvey will return to its axis.

  —

  ‘LOOK,’ SAID THE lawyer as he leaned forward in his chair, ‘what’s going on here? My client has come here of her own volition and is co-operating but you need to tell us exactly why she is here. I mean, for God’s sake, we’re in an interview room in Homicide. You think my client killed someone? Please, elucidate us.’

  Before Billy or I could respond, Jen began to weep. Deeply. Alarmingly. And then she slid off her chair onto the floor and began to heave with pain and anguish. We called off the interview. After all, she was, legally, a kid.

  They went home.

  Was it an act? Was it real?

  —

  ‘WAS THAT DESIGNED to make us feel sorry for her? Throw us off the scent?’

  Kristo had called us into his office after Jen, her mother and lawyer left. He, along with everyone else on the floor, had heard a teenage girl’s distress from behind the door and then watched as she was led out of the interview room, sobbing, staring at us like we were Inquisitors from medieval Spain.

  Or that’s how it felt to me.

  Was it just theatrics? Whatever it was, it told Billy and me that we needed to tread carefully with her.

  ‘Give me an update. Tell me what you’ve got. Is she at all a realistic suspect? Because having a teenage girl weeping in my office makes me feel decidedly uneasy.’

  ‘Guv, she is as good as the other two blokes. Which, truth be told, ain’t no spring day of sun, as those two geezers are certainly violent and are into knives and have been seen in the proximity of the killings – Miles even lives smack-bang in the middle of where we found all three vics, on the river, in his yacht. Nils, he’s a walking advert for death and mutilation. But the girl, she’s a Goth, she’s also into knives and the Celt thing, not as much as old mate Nils, but still, and she’s recently been to Stradbroke Island for a school trip, and she rides a skateboard and we know there’s been numerous sightings of a girl on a skateboard when the vics got done. So, you tell me, ’cause this ain’t no slam dunk, this serial-killing thing.’

  ‘The motive?’ asked Kristo.

  ‘We have to look at it a different way,’ I said.

  ‘Which is?’ asked Kristo.

  ‘The motive for the killer is different to anything we’re used to; this motive comes from a deep psychological aberration. The killer wants to prove something or wants to show off with the arrangement of the bodies. It means something specific to him. He wants power over his victims and then, I guess, over his life because his life is empty. Or else none of that: he wants to kill just because he gets off on it, because it’s a thrill.’

  It’s a serial killer. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing because the traditional leads are worthless. He is, as Damon said, a ghost.

  —

  THIS IS WHAT Billy taught me in my first week. These were the essential requirements we needed to take a brief to the Director of Public Prosecutions, to consider whether a case was strong enough to proceed to court; in other words, to get a conviction. Before we arrest someone.

  One: A confession. We all love a confession, because that nails it; I am guilty. Slam dunk, says the DPP. Done and dusted, case over even before I walk into the courtroom. Well, almost – as long as the confession is not rescinded and as long as the Homicide Squad can corroborate it with evidence.

  Two: No confession, okay; is there hard physical evidence that connects the accused to the crime? Hair, fibres, semen, DNA. No? Okay; moving on.

  Three: Eyewitnesses testimony? Dodgy, because most eyewitnesses are unreliable, but don’t worry about that, because the jury will be transfixed by the little old lady who says, ‘Yes, it was her that I saw.’

  Four: None of the above? Guys, you’re killing me. No DNA, no eyewitnesses, no evidence but all this circumstantial stuff about a freaking daisy from North Stradbroke Island, weird creepy shit with the victims’ mouths and a god of freaking thunder? And she’s underage? And she goes to maybe the most expensive school in the city and – hang on …

  —

  ‘HANG ON,’ SAID Billy as he stared at Kristo. ‘Perhaps we could give the cage a bit of a shake.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about. But it seemed as though Kristo did.

  ‘She’s pretty,’ he said.

  ‘Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?’ I asked, now realising. They ignored me, the two men.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Billy said as he turned around to face me in his chair, ‘you gotta let the tide run and see where it takes you.’

  I was seven months into the job I had always dreamed of. I was sitting with the Officer-In-Charge and the most experienced Homicide cop in the state of Queensland.

  I stayed quiet.

  Jen Black

  TOUGHEN UP.

  In the interview room I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or stare at the cops or stare at the wall or put my arms around my chest or shoulders or lie on the floor and maybe try to sleep so that when I wake up it will have been a dream, all a dream, a bad dream but a dream. But it wasn’t a dream, and I knew it wasn’t a dream, and I kept on thinking: Why am I here? What have I done wrong? Homicide? That’s dead people. That’s murder. That’s another universe. Surely, surely, surely, someone will come in and say: Oh, this is all a huge mistake, you have the wrong Jen, you wanted Jen Black, she’s in the next room and she’s the one who committed murder, not our Jen White, not her. But they didn’t, they didn’t come into the room and save me and the cops, Lara Ocean and the old guy, they are so driven; Jesus, when was the last time either of them laughed? Like, two decades ago?

  —

  I’M BACK HOME, on my bed, staring at my poster of Madonna on the ceiling, which Anthea and I struggled to put up – you try sticking a poster onto a ceiling. Her poster is of Satyricon, a black metal band from Norway. I’m trying to process what happened to me today and I’m thinking: What do they imagine I did?

  Anthea walked in and sat at the end of my bed.

  ‘What’s happening? Has this got to do with those three guys who almost had their heads cut off?’

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t you read the newspapers or watch the news?’

  ‘No. What three guys?�
�

  ‘One at Kangaroo Point Cliffs and two in the Gardens. Someone killed them by sawing into their necks and almost decapitating them.’

  ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

  ‘Nup. Why would they think it’s you?’

  She reached out and held my foot, and I began to cry. Is this really happening to me?

  —

  I LOVE MY little sister, I hate her. She makes me laugh and she drives me mad. She is so selfish but so caring. We love different things and we hate different things. She loves heavy-metal music and sometimes sneaks out at night with her fake ID and comes back at three in the morning smelling of vodka and slips into my bed and says: Can you tell mum and dad that I’m really sick, when you get up in the morning? and I say, Yep, and she snores as she slumbers in my arms and I think: Where will we be, you and me, in ten or twenty or thirty years’ time? Will we still be alive? Will we have kids? After mum and dad have gone and it’s only you and me.

  Deluge

  (I)

  I LIVE IN A SMALL TWO-BEDROOM HOUSE IN HENDRA, CLOSE TO the racetrack, in one of the many streets where, in 1999, it was still legal to have horse stables in your back yard and chickens in the front. It was a wide street with jacaranda trees along both sides of the grass footpath, which formed a canopy of branches, where most of the buildings were old wooden Queenslanders, small, compact, with a tiny veranda out the front and a patch of grass with a frangipani tree out the back. And then, peppered between them, were the larger wooden homes with the stables out back, which have been there since maybe the late 1800s. In the dark of pre-dawn as I lay in bed, my room facing the street, I listened to the click-clack of the horses being led by their owners, the trainers, down the centre of the street to the track at the end. They were my neighbours, old guys from another era with hopes and dreams of their horse winning big and them cashing in, who every weekend come back home, leading their horse down the middle of the street again, resigned but hopeful that next week will be the one. If I happened to be out on my balcony, I would wave, with a smile, and they would wave back to me.