Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  ‘I agree,’ he replied.

  ‘That’s not good enough,’ said Becky.

  ‘I agree,’ he replied.

  Whereupon there was a moment of uncertainty; these women, these widows had come to the meeting expecting a fight and no gain.

  He leant forward and said, ‘What say we hold a press conference where you three ladies can express your feelings? What do you think about that?’

  And all three said: ‘Yes.’

  ‘On air you go, then!’ he said and turned to his advisor, who had been sitting in the back of the office, discreetly, listening to his boss while swiping on Tinder. ‘Jimbo! Make it happen and make it happen within the next hour.’

  Jimbo ran off and Cowboy Ray smiled at the three ladies and said: ‘The Premier is overseas at the moment, in Guangzhou leading a local business delegation to explore investment into Queensland, so we won’t need to inform her.’

  The Gunfighter

  or A Serial Killer’s

  Mid-Life Crisis

  I’VE SEEN THEM.

  I know who they are. The widows. It’s not like I have been stalking them with a morbid curiosity about how they are coping or a morbid pleasure in seeing their grief and the grief of their children – grown up now with kids of their own, the grand-bubbies of my fears – no, nothing like that, just a bump or two in the supermarket whenever I happen to be in the same area that they live in, and happen to be in the Coles or the Woolies or the bottle shop, getting a bottle of vino or maybe a little vermouth or some voddy. In the aisle of the supermarket I occasionally see them with their trolley full of grief and sadness. I never let them see me.

  Never, ever.

  Ever, never.

  Stay hidden, stay in the shadows, like I did in 1999 and on that last aoife kill in the year of our Lord 2000 on the dawning of the new millennium.

  Hello.

  Did you forget me?

  Were you waiting for me to return? Do you miss my head-folds? What do you think might have happened to me? Since we last spent some time together, that time I took Miss Homeless and rolled her up in big industrial chains, and dragged her body to the edge of the river and threw her in.

  That was nineteen years ago and remember how we signed off? Back then?

  Of course you do.

  We agreed to meet up again. Now. Well, the now being defined by when Jen was to be released on bail. Free in the world again. Free for me to kill again, to pin yet another massive and climactic kill – the end of a career, a killer’s swan-song – on her.

  Jen.

  Free on parole and she kills again. This kill even more audacious than the last three, the trio of summer, ninety-nine.

  That’s how we signed off. With me vowing to return to the blade, to Him, Taranis and Ogmios, those twin gods who I adored and followed and spoke to, every day, back in the days when blood and pain were my beautiful friends.

  I’ve told you about my dad before. Remember? How he would take me to the Ekka and how I would get an endorphin rush on the rides. How I could relate that rush to the heart of my soul to the killing of the fears, that special trio in November ninety-nine. Punctuated by two aoifes. The first one, years earlier and the last one, Miss Homeless.

  My dad also used to take me to the movies, when he bothered to notice me. We can’t really call him the best dad in the history of the world, but he never hurt me.

  Well, only once.

  One night dad took me to a movie in a movie theatre in Brisbane which is long gone now because it used to screen old black and white movies and on this night we went to see an old movie called The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck, who played a very famous and very dangerous cowboy gunman called Johnny Ringo and he made his fame at the O.K. Corral. The movie had him as an older man and his fame preceded him. Everywhere he went there would be a young buck, eager to do a quick draw on him. But you see, and this was the point of the movie, he wanted to retire. He was over it. He’d done his killings in his youth and now he just wanted to settle down.

  He gets killed in the end. Sorry: spoiler alert.

  That’s me. The Gunfighter.

  I’m sort-of over it. I still have the blades, sharp and shiny, but they are hidden and I haven’t actually touched them, stroked them, let them pierce me, for a long time.

  It’s twenty years on and I am twenty years different. Ogmios and Taranis are for babies. Did I really believe in that? I’ve still got the trophies but I hardly ever look at them. They are from another life. Another me. A very immature me.

  You know – we do some fucked-up stuff when we are young. That’s what it’s all about, being young: fucking up. Or, that’s what it should be about.

  I have different priorities now. It’s not like my bones are aching or that I am old and fat and short of breath; I look after myself. I could jump a fear like I did twenty years ago, no problems at all.

  It’s just: could I be bothered?

  I was a little worried about this – about an ebbing of desire – about ten years ago. Stuff happened and I started to wonder when the fuck will she get out and how long does a person have to wait to do something which was super-exciting in 2000 but maybe not so much anymore.

  And the widows.

  At first I just laughed at them and wondered if I could break into their houses and chop them up, pubis to neck and chop up their kids, into quarters, like they did in ancient England and Viking-Land. Scatter their limbs to the dogs of Blood River.

  Then they started to haunt me with their canyons of gloom. I caused that. Maybe it wasn’t so cool after all. I keep guilt at bay. I’m strong in that regard. I won’t succumb for, to do so, will invite an encirclement of monsters that I don’t think I could corral.

  So I had moved on and let the past float back into the past, like tendrils of mist.

  —

  BUT.

  —

  I DID ENJOY it. Didn’t I? I’m feeling like the drinker who hasn’t tasted alcohol in twenty years. Self-enforced abstinence.

  When you go to AA, you’re told that even though you may have stopped drinking – he or she or it, being alcohol – is always there, a shadow to your every day and he or she or it, being alcohol, is just behind you, doing push-ups. Waiting for you to turn around and embrace yourself again.

  Have I ended up like one of those married couples who sit over dinner in a restaurant not talking to one another? Have I let twenty years of waiting turn me into a boring husk? Has the waiting emasculated me? It makes sense, doesn’t it? That after twenty years of waiting, you discover you’re no longer as interested as you thought you’d be. You’re like an old guy on the golf course or sitting on the deck of a cruise ship.

  I guess the question is, then, should I leave my blades where they are?

  Or should I not?

  Should I revisit the buzz and thrill of the blood-spurt and the ride to the victim’s last breath, sitting astride them, their face grinning up at me, their eyes fluttering to death as I grind myself into them as if we are entwined like lovers, me giving them the embrace of death? Or should I let it go, as a fond and warm memory of the person I once was?

  Guangzhou

  ALTHOUGH SHE HAD A SLENDER MAJORITY IN GOVERNMENT, the Premier decided it was important to take local business leaders on an official trip to China, even though one of her advisors warned her that, while away, as these things often occur, there might be a coup against her led by one of the maniac rednecks with whom she had formed her fragile coalition. The Premier heard the warning but, you know, what was she going to do? Stay there, in Brisbane, to ward off any threat, instead of doing her job by enticing Chinese investment?

  She went and took thirty-five leaders of business and they arrived in Guangzhou where, during their first official state meeting, a breakfast, one of her advisors came up to her with a phone and direct live-line link via WeChat to a feed and said:

  ‘You better look at this.’

  —

  ‘GOOD MORNING, MY name is Ray Co
nway and I am the Attorney-General of our great state of Queensland and I would like to introduce you all to three very strong ladies, strong because their husbands were taken, in the most horrific of killings, twenty years ago by a young woman, Jennifer White, also known as The Slayer. Not only did Jennifer White saw off the heads of her victims, she sucked their blood like Dracula. This beast of a killer has just been released back into the community and it is my wish that she be returned to prison immediately. I expressed this wish to the parole board but they ignored me because, it seems, they would rather have a dangerous killer on the streets than listen to the Attorney-General. I have expressed this wish to our great Premier, who is currently out of the country, in China, but she has not yielded to my concerns. Jennifer White is a grave danger to men, and women, and kids, in our state. Once a killer, always a killer. She needs to be returned to prison immediately.’

  He stepped back, took a breath, surveyed the media and tried not to smile.

  ‘Okay, that’s enough from me. Now I’m going to hand over to three of the bravest women I have ever met: Lynne, Jacinta and Becky. They will explain why they also believe that this convicted murderer needs to be incarcerated for the rest of her natural life.’

  Whereupon the Premier felt a deep sinking feeling. Ray had, in the most grotesque way, appealed to the mob, all of whom would rise up in anger and ignorance, and condemn her. If she did not act in response to appease this angry, ignorant mob whose drumming whispers were now, right now, becoming the banshee cries of retribution, she would be overthrown by the end of the week. And in politics, one’s ethics don’t mean shit when it comes to survival.

  Silence in Salem

  WARREN SAID TO ME: IT’LL BE FINE.

  I said back to him: No, I don’t think it will be. I’ll be sacked by nightfall.

  And I was.

  Sacked by lunchtime.

  —

  WARREN HAS A long-standing appointment tonight. It’s important for him, catching up with his footy mates at the clubhouse. He’s on the board of the team and they just played their way into their first grand final in almost two decades. I said, ‘It’s okay, you go. I’ll be fine. It’s not like it was a shock. Go. If you don’t it’ll look as if we’re cowering. So, just go, and make sure you get an Uber home.’

  The girls are asleep; they don’t know that mum’s going through a stressful time. I cooked them macaroni cheese and we sat on the couch and watched a funny movie, which we’ve all watched before, Les Fugitifs, a French movie, an antidote to sadness.

  Now it’s midnight. Warren texted me to say he’d be home soon.

  —

  IT DIDN’T COME as a surprise. The entire parole board was sacked. All twenty-four of us. Talk about a night of the long knives. We all knew the past. We all knew the precedent. I had told them, just so they understood the context of our decision to release Jennifer White.

  In 1986 a woman named Wendy Lange was found guilty after the court was told she’d paid two men to murder her husband. She became known as The Black Widow because a few days before they killed him she bought a black dress on special at a local clothes store; indeed, she got an extra ten percent discount because she told the shop owner that her husband had just died from cancer.

  She was eventually released on parole but the then Attorney-General started to generate pressure through the Courier Mail. Our state newspaper, one of Rupert Murdoch’s most profitable, is not known to refrain from sensationalism, and it went crazy with The Black Widow, a lot like they were now doing with The Slayer. That Wendy Lange was an attractive young woman only made the story more urgent for a frenzied mob. Tony McGrady told the president of the then parole board to put Lange back in prison. The president replied that he couldn’t. But she’s come out and started to work as a prostitute! shouted back the Attorney-General. Yes, replied the president, she has, but that is completely within the confines of the law, because prostitution is not illegal in Queensland.

  They argued back and forth until the Attorney-General sacked them all, two by two, until there was only one left, who then resigned.

  Lange didn’t go back to prison. She hadn’t broken the law, and O’Grady wasn’t able to enact a new law – one of the new and increasingly popular special-purpose laws drafted for the benefit of a single criminal only – that would allow him to put her back behind bars.

  In 1996 a new parole board released back into the community a man named Ray Garland, who had gone down for sex crimes. In April the next year, he broke into a house in Mackay, way up north of Brisbane, and kept fourteen people hostage; he raped three of them, two women and a sixteen-year-old boy. During the siege, he fired more than forty shots at police and is now in prison for the rest of his life, never to be released.

  That’s the special-purpose law: ensuring that a person will die in prison.

  That’s what our current Attorney-General, Ray Conway, will try to achieve with Jen.

  She will go back inside. She will never be released. She will die behind bars.

  And he will move as fast as he can. And, now, there is nothing I can do about it but stand by and watch. I hate being a passive observer. Nellie, from the parole board, suggested that we send a letter to the Courier Mail, that maybe all the others would sign it too. I told her I didn’t think that would have much sway. She sighed and hung up.

  I felt unclean. Could I really remain silent? Acquiescent? Was that the sum of these past years? Bending to the will of a fuckwit who’ll probably be voted out next election and die in the dust surrounded by cows. Is this the rally-car girl who raced the desert in honour of Gelignite Jack, a man who used sticks of explosive to solve a problem?

  I don’t think so.

  Billy

  I THOUGHT I HEARD RAIN ON THE TIN ROOF LAST NIGHT BUT when I woke to the comforting sounds of the horses being led down my street and looked out the back window as I made my first coffee for the day, I realised it must have been a dream. It hasn’t rained more than the occasional shower for more than six years. It’s all everyone talks about, if only for a passing moment. One day the drought will break, just as the river broke its banks twenty years ago.

  The daily newspaper had another front-page story, this time justifying the removal of the entire parole board ‘for the sake of justice’. They had yet to confirm where Jen was living but I noticed a reference to her Southport parole office. If the killer wanted to track her moves, he now had a place to start.

  My phone buzzed. Checking the ID, I saw it was my old partner.

  ‘Girlie,’ he said.

  ‘You’re up early,’ I replied, staring out at the darkness.

  ‘Did you get a phone call from the office of the fuckwit who calls himself our Attorney-General last night?’

  ‘I did, yes. You did too, obviously.’

  ‘Asking you to put out a media release supporting his decision to sack the parole board? To say The Slayer needs to be behind bars for the rest of her life?’

  ‘I told him to fuck off,’ I said.

  ‘You’re the Commissioner; you’re not allowed to speak like that, especially to a minister of the Crown. Good gracious me, girlie.’

  I laughed. ‘I told him that, in my capacity as the Commissioner, it would be inappropriate to make any comment, unless asked to by my minister. What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him to fuck off. But I like an embellishment and he can’t do no harm to me, not to Billy Waterson. So, I says to him, loud and clear: Fuck off. Cunt.’

  I laughed again. For a moment the rookie girl, a little uncertain of her step with her first big case, in the shadow of the mentor, returned to me.

  —

  AS I LEFT home, a vibrant red began to creep up towards a dirty sky filled with grey clouds.

  Lately I’ve been listening to edgy hard rock – Violent Soho, The Amity Affliction, Catfish and the Bottlemen, a distant cry from the old days of U2 – but this morning I plugged in the ABC news. The Justice Emergency was, of course, the news of
the day.

  There is a growing excitement with governments and some police commissioners – mostly the ones like the Dutchman: cops with a PhD and little if any footpath-walking – to embrace not just the prevention of crime but the anticipation of crime. Communities and individuals are encouraged to report suspicious activity. Terrorism, drug deals, domestic violence …

  The anticipation of crime is all about utilising new technologies to get ahead of the ‘crime harvests’ driven by 3D printing, drones, hacking, the placing of spyware in your washing machine or toaster, a chip no bigger than the tip of a needle embedded into the motherboard of your phone, allowing it and the crooks to download all your passwords, bank account and credit card details. To fight this, governments are working with universities and people like me to chart every person in the state – every person to whom, as Commissioner of Police, I have a responsibility, to ensure their safety and well-being – and to then essentially download everything they do, say and think and correlate this data in order to predict whether they might commit a crime. If they might hack a computer, bash their spouse, abuse a child or kill someone. And once the computer has made the prediction, we’ll send around the cops and incarcerate the citizen until the state is assured that they are no longer a threat.

  If this sounds like a Tom Cruise Minority Report approach, it is. The future is here. Most of us just haven’t seen it yet but, as much as the past walks alongside us, so too do the years to come.

  The push to return Jen White to prison is because the monster might kill again.

  —

  WHEN I GOT to work, Simon was waiting for me in the foyer with a black coffee, as he always does, around dawn, every morning. He had a hand-delivered envelope, dropped at reception yesterday afternoon. My name was written in pen.

  ‘It’s safe to open,’ he said. ‘I had it checked for anything nefarious. It’s just paper and ink.’