Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  —

  HE STRODE TO the stand. Long strides and a footfall that bit into the floor. He was wearing a hired black suit but even that couldn’t mask the tattoos which covered his neck, hands and fingers. He was the illustrated man, presented as your Freddy Krueger nightmare come alive. I watched Jen recoil and her eyes pop wide as she followed his walk through the court.

  I also saw that Nils was nervous. His hands were shaking and his gaze was darting around like that of a meerkat. He looked at the judge and quickly looked away. He looked at the jury and quickly looked away. He looked at Jen and quickly looked away. He looked at the prosecutor, as if for help, and quickly looked away. He looked at me. And held his gaze. As if I, sitting close to the back of the court, was a safe harbour, as if the days and times of subjugation would anchor him into, now, a place of strength and control.

  I smirked and shook my head, as if to say: Loser.

  He looked away.

  —

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to know if the prosecutor believed that Jen was guilty. His job, dismissive of any irritants like the truth, was simply to nail her – and he did so, going at her like a rabid brute. He knew all about Nils, and he knew that Nils would be a problem. The jury would freak out when they saw him and instantly think that a six-foot-something guy with abs and tatts, and with a history of knifing, would be far more capable of the killings than an eighteen-year-old girl.

  But Nils was all circumstantial, and Jen’s case was being driven by hard evidence, which had turned up at the last minute, allowing us to finally charge her with the three brutal murders.

  Still, with Nils on the stand, the prosecution took a hammering.

  —

  ‘THERE YOU GO again,’ said the QC, who spoke in a soft voice, mostly reassuring, sometimes with gentle exasperation. ‘Yet another lie to the court.’ He turned to the judge, turned to the jury. ‘Your Honour, good people of the jury, in all my time as a representative of the court – and that has been a long time, believe me – I have never come across someone who has such blatant disregard for the truth.’

  The judge let it go. The judge seemed to be happy to let pretty much everything go. He was the Ito of Brisbane but without the live broadcast. And, unlike the star-struck Judge Lance Ito, who eagerly presided over the OJ Simpson case in Los Angeles, keeping signed photos of movie actors in his courtroom desk, Jen’s judge, although preening in the glare of an international press focus and tabloid fascination, was constrained by the narrow confines of Brisbane, not LA and no movie stars. Still, word had it that he’d passed on the important message to the press photographers that the right side of his face was preferred to the acne-scarred left.

  The QC, Ian McDonald, turned back to Nils and smiled, as if seared by regret.

  ‘You seem not to be able to help yourself, so let me elucidate for you. In nineteen ninety, you were in Papua New Guinea, is that correct.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Hooray, an honest answer. How long were you in Papua New Guinea?’

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘Can you recall when you arrived and when you departed Papua New Guinea?’

  ‘I got there soon after Christmas and I left sometime in November.’

  ‘And which parts of Papua New Guinea did you visit?’

  ‘Port Moresby.’

  ‘And?’

  Nils flicked his gaze to me. Only I knew of this. Well, maybe he’d told some other girls in his inebriated bragging but only I could have revealed this to the legal teams. I had, of course I had; I was bound by my duty to tell the DPP all that I knew about Nils. He then had chosen not to reveal it to the defence. Which, technically, is illegal. But you know, it’s combat.

  Ian and his team had done their homework, and nothing the Irishman could do, alarmed and eager to object on any grounds, would stop it.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ asked Nils.

  ‘You arrived in Port Moresby on December the twenty-eighth. Is that correct?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so.’ As photocopy evidence from Air Niugini was tendered. ‘You remained in Port Moresby, staying at the Mountain View Lodge for three nights. Yes?’

  Nils started to jiggle his knee. He stared down at the floor.

  ‘And then you flew, on the first of January, to where?’

  Nils looked up and stared at him. A couple of moments passed before Ian repeated himself:

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Alotau.’

  ‘Alotau,’ repeated the QC. ‘And you stayed in Alotau until November that year, when you flew back to Port Moresby and then on to Cairns. Correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you recall the evening of August the fifteenth?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Really? You don’t recall that evening? The fifteenth of August?’

  ‘No. I might have been drunk.’

  ‘You were drunk. If I may read from the police record, from the evening of August the fifteenth, nineteen ninety.’

  He had the original police file, an ancient-looking, wide, green leather-bound book. PNG police didn’t have computers, not outside of Port Moresby, and all crimes and misdemeanours were laboriously written, in fountain pen, on every lined page. I was reminded of Billy’s Murder Book. The judge had a photocopy of the relevant extract. As did the prosecutor.

  ‘Three a.m.,’ started the QC, reading. ‘Constable Oscar Youngman and Sergeant Misto Laurie attended Sanderson Bay. Deceased man on the ground. By the water’s edge. Deceased man is local taxi driver, John Floyd. His head has been brutalised. Also at the scene of the crime and arrested by Constable Oscar Youngman and Sergeant Misto Laurie was an Australian man, Nils Marnell …’

  The QC paused, looked up at Nils.

  ‘That is you, yes? Nils Marnell?’

  Nils nodded.

  ‘Yes or no, please.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He continued reading: ‘… who was holding the death weapon, a long-bladed knife, which was covered in blood. Mister Marnell was drunk and told the arresting policemen that he had no idea how Mister Floyd had come to be killed. Ambulance arrived at four a.m. and John Floyd was taken to hospital. Mister Marnell was taken to the police station and has been charged with murder.’

  ‘I got off!’ said Nils. ‘I was innocent!’

  But it didn’t matter, not to the jury.

  Nod Once

  THE JURY LOOKED SUITABLY OUTRAGED BY NILS. JEN’S QC had done his job. Doubt established.

  Nils knew it. He wasn’t on trial but he knew that he had successfully managed to put himself into the cross-hairs of the gun and, if by chance Jen was acquitted, Homicide would be all over him to placate the public cry for the killer’s blood.

  I stepped out of the courtroom, passing Jen who was in her lonely box of hell. Out on the city streets the sky was blue and had been for some months, since the night the river burst its banks and black water ran through the streets, upending cars and flooding houses and shops. By the time of Jen’s trial, the city was still mopping up. A mildewed damp permeated like the smell of wet carpets, hanging over Brisbane. People had died. Dogs had been swept away, downriver, into the sea. Houses had been crushed like balsa-wood toys. Newspapers reported that the flood would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. People who had built along the river were desperate and homeless. The insurance companies were arguing the pedantic divide between ‘flood’ and ‘rain’, the latter being something that no-one had cover for. The government was outraged and vowed to force the insurance companies to grow a heart, which was as unlikely as imagining that Brisbane wouldn’t be flooded again. There was also a bit of a debate going on as to the wisdom – or lack thereof – of opening the flood gates at Wivenhoe Dam and releasing two thousand cubic metres of water, every second, into the river, causing the flood. I didn’t think that issue would be resolved for years.

  I went home, ordered a pizza with anchovies and olives from a joint in Hendra, opened a bottle of Chardonnay. I a
te, I drank and I fell into bed.

  Whereupon, in my slumber, I dreamed.

  Of that day by the beach, when my dad cooked the chops on the barbie and my dickhead brother ran around me in circles as I tried to build a sandcastle, sticking bits of tea-tree and broken shells into the ramparts so the enemy could not scale it, as mum lay on her back, in the shallows of the warm water, by its edge, little waves gently undulating beneath her, lifting her body up then down before they settled onto the sand, her arms outspread so that she resembled a starfish, or so it seemed to me, with her fingers softly tapping into the water like she was a pianist.

  I am a light sleeper. Well, I am now. I wasn’t, not when I was a kid, not until Nils, when I began to realise that angry strife in the way of an unwanted and forced fuck or a singular howl from the man in the bed next to me, followed by gin and vermouth, smack and smacking the caravan wall, that all of these things and more could erupt at a moment’s notice. When I began to realise that sleep was a landscape of potential outbursts.

  So, I heard the first footstep, as the intruder entered my house, very softly, through the back door.

  I froze.

  It’s easy to remember all the research about shutting down and freezing up when an assault occurs, it’s very much something else to break away and do something.

  But I did, I did do something. I got out of bed. And I stood there, next to the bed, hoping that what I had just heard was a possum on the roof, all the while knowing that I was deluding myself, thinking: Should I stay here and wait because maybe he might just steal my handbag and then leave, or should I open the bedroom door and confront him? (And why, Lara, are you still such a scaredy-cat that you sleep with the bedroom door closed?)

  Another footstep, getting closer.

  My police-issued Glock was in a secure locker at headquarters. Check it out at the beginning of shift, check it in before you leave, at the end of shift. I really like the hard, compact metal feel of my Glock pressed against the side of my hip. I haven’t used it yet and hope that I won’t, but I very much wanted to have it then.

  —

  MY BEDROOM DOOR opens inwards.

  As I reached out to the handle, it swung open, hard and fast.

  The force of it knocked my arm away and smashed into my forehead, blinding me in the dark and I lost my balance and stumbled backwards, falling to the floor.

  He ran at me.

  He was in the dark. There was no moon. All I could see was his shape. He was a tall man and was wearing black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black hoodie and black runners.

  As I reached up to whack him with my closed fist, ignoring the pounding in my head and trying to blink away the blood streaming from my forehead into my eyes, he reached down and put a massive claw-like hand around my throat. The grip tightened.

  He leaned in to me as his face was touching mine. I could smell him. Like I had smelt him night after night as he wrapped his oily body around mine, the smell of perspiration and blood and semen on his unwashed body and Juicy Fruit chewing gum tinged with cigarettes and vermouth and beer on his breath.

  ‘Get off me,’ I struggled to say as Nils lifted my head up off the floor with the grip of his hand and moved in closer to me and said:

  ‘If you ever make a move against me, or if any cop makes a move against me, I will come back and hang you from the fucking rafters, chop off your feet, your hands, your nose, your tits and then shove my knife inside your cunt and cut you up to your fucking chin. Nod once for, Yes I understand, Nils.’

  I nodded once. My eyes were bulging and I was about to pee through a greater terror than I could have ever imagined.

  ‘And you know I will, don’t you? Nod once for, Yes I understand, Nils.’

  I nodded once.

  ‘And if you happen to dob on me, like you dobbed on me to that English cop partner of yours about my past, if you happen to tell him or anyone of this little visit from your good old ex, then I will come back.’

  He reached around to the back of his jeans and pulled out a long-bladed knife.

  ‘Remember this?’

  He put the tip of the knife close to my eyeball. ‘Stay very still, Lara, because this razor-sharp flick-knife is about three millimetres away from you and some very nasty pain and a forever I-Can’t-See.’

  I was frozen.

  ‘I’m going to leave now, and I will never hear from you again. You will leave no further footprint on my existence.’

  And with that he released his grip from around my throat and climbed off me. He swiftly left the bedroom. I heard the back door close after him. As I struggled for air, as I reached out to the wooden bedframe for support as I stood, blinking the tears and blood from my eyes.

  The Knife

  I CALLED IN SICK. I TOLD THE BOSS I’D NEED A FEW DAYS, back on Monday, and he said that was fine, the jury had retired to deliberate and the odds were looking great. Jen was going to be found guilty, of that he was certain. ‘Take a week. Celebrate. You deserve it. We got the bitch,’ he said before he signed off.

  I hadn’t slept. After Nils left, I had a long shower and put on a clean set of pyjamas, but not before I took a carving knife from the top drawer in the kitchen and went through the house checking that all the doors and windows were locked (realising that I had left the back door open because it’s Brisbane and everyone leaves a door open because houses don’t get broken into; it’s safe in the suburbs) and that he wasn’t lurking out the front or in my back yard.

  I held the carving knife as I stood in the shower. I held the carving knife as I put my pyjamas into the washing machine. I held the carving knife as I sat on the couch in the lounge room waiting for the dawn to arrive. Dawn came. I didn’t move.

  I thought about different ways of killing him and getting away with it. I am, after all, a cop who specialises in murder. If anyone could get away with it, I reasoned, it would be me. I knew where he lived and I could easily surprise and disarm him, kill him, pile him into the back of my car and drive out west, a day’s drive, and dump his body down an abandoned mineshaft in the middle of the desert and no-one would ever know.

  It’s not that hard to kill and dispose of a person, but the problem is there would have been traces. There always are. CCTV perhaps, a motive, a couple of petrol receipts from the trip to the desert and back again, although I could have paid with cash. But then I had a very strong motive, what with our shared past and me having dobbed him in to Homicide. And how would I have explained the mileage increase on the car? And maybe there was some DNA in the boot, maybe some blood and gore drizzled through the plastic sheeting I wrapped him in, and did anyone witness a tall, lithe woman carry a very large thing wrapped in black plastic or maybe wrapped in a rug?

  And then, while I rolled with the fantasy of killing Nils – it seemed to be doing me good, resetting my equilibrium – I began to think about me.

  Is there a killer in me?

  No. I don’t think so, even though I’ve just been assaulted and terrified by the angry rant of violence of an old boyfriend who, incidentally, just popped his profile up to Suspect Number One in a triple-murder investigation, even though a teenage girl is about to be found guilty, because she is a teenage girl and pretty (and yes, yes, there is the knife, that damned knife) but let the fantasy slide, Lara.

  I did.

  I let go of the carving knife, got changed and drove around the corner, to Racecourse Road and sat on the footpath at one of the outdoor cafes. I ordered a glass of Chardonnay, which I sculled, another, which I drank at a more sedate pace and a chicken caesar salad and enjoyed the sunshine. It was hot.

  Here’s to me, with a week off from work. By the time I did return to work, Kristo had drawn a red line through the names of James, Brian and Fabio on our whiteboard, signifying that all three murders had been resolved with a conviction.

  —

  BILLY HAD RUNG and asked if I was okay, and I said I was. We hadn’t spoken much since he contacted me the night before Jen was arrested
and charged, to tell me about the knife.

  It just seemed too good to be true but, you know, it happens. And I was seven months in, compared to his twenty-one years in Homicide. He’s the legend, I’m the rookie. I had three murders to my career before this case. He had hundreds.

  He wasn’t very good on the stand, Billy. He was nervous like Nils but, actually worse: very nervous. Even though giving testimony in a court is a fundamental part of the job for a Homicide Investigator, some detectives can’t shake the stage fright. Kristo had suggested that Billy and a couple of the others who had the same problem take an acting class to get over their anxiety, but you can imagine how that went down.

  Even though Billy and I were essentially giving the same evidence, it was up to me. I had to not only reiterate the police case against Jen, I had to make the jury listen and pay attention because, as the prosecutor told me, they hadn’t heard a word that Billy had said.

  —

  THE CASE AGAINST Jen rested on a lot of circumstantial evidence: the swamp daisy, the flick-knife she took to school, the late-night skateboarding through the edges of the city, the Celtic world which led to the Taranis carving on the chests of the three victims and the sacrificial nature of the face and head mutilations, the upwards slicing of the mouth and the removal of a tooth. But there was the knife. Really, it was all about the knife.

  ‘Tell us about the knife that Detective Inspector Waterson found,’ asked the Irish prosecutor.

  Billy wasn’t in the courtroom. I tried not to look at Jen. The discovery of the knife was fortuitous, but that happens. Places which might have been overlooked the first time around, not searched properly, can yield valuable evidence. It happens. It happens a lot, Billy told me; he’d seen it many times during his career; lucky, last-minute stuff. The knife turned us around, from a case reliant solely on circumstance to a slam dunk.