The Accusation

by Wendy James

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Suzie. It’s always official – even when they’re screwing you. Actually, especially when they’re screw—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mary. Just stop.’

  Constable Moorhouse coughed in an attempt to smother her laughter. Her superior gave her another quelling look before turning to Mary. ‘I understand your concerns, Miss Squires, but yours isn’t the only place we’re looking at this morning. We’ve got a list of, what – around half a dozen other properties to view, Senior Constable?’

  She looked down at her notebook. ‘I think it’s actually nine, sir.’ Her voice was glum.

  I made a decision. ‘There’s no reason for us to get a solicitor. Feel free to look wherever you like. It’s not like we’ve got anything to hide.’

  He gave a relieved smile. ‘Thank you. We won’t take up too much of your time.’ The two officers got to their feet. ‘If we could have a quick look around the house first, and then we’ll check the home paddocks, the sheds and so forth. We’ll probably take some photographs as we go, if you don’t mind – we’ll get you to sign some paperwork for that before we leave. We’re happy to just wander about if you’ve got other things to do.’

  ‘There’s not going to be any wandering, Mr Detective.’ Mary’s voice was fierce. ‘We’ll be sticking to you like shit on your shoe. Isn’t that right, Suzannah?’

  I gave a resigned shrug. I had already missed the morning’s classes, so there was no point in hurrying now. Mary slid down from her perch, her expression smug.

  ‘So how about I take you straight down to the cellar, officers, and show you where we kept that little bitch hidden.’

  ABDUCTED: THE ELLIE CANNING STORY

  A documentary by HeldHostage Productions © 2019

  ELLIE CANNING: TRANSCRIPT N1

  I’ve spent a lot of my life in foster homes. I lived with my mum until I was about eight, but since then I’ve been in care. Most of the time that’s been okay; I’ve been in some really good places, but they haven’t always been . . . well, I won’t go into details, but sometimes it wasn’t all that great. My mum . . . yeah, she’s got some issues with drugs and alcohol, and right now I think she’s back in rehab. I haven’t actually seen her for a while. Not since all this happened. We get on all right when we do see each other. I mean, she loves me and all that, but she can’t really be responsible for anyone else at the moment.

  We moved to Manning when I was six, and I’ve been there ever since. I went to Manning High until I went to boarding school in Year Ten.

  My life was a bit different from a lot of kids’ lives, I guess, being a foster kid, but I wouldn’t say I was massively deprived or anything. Most of the time I was able to do the usual things – I played netball for a few years, and had guitar lessons for a while.

  I’ve been pretty much independent since I went to boarding school. I was still legally in care until I turned eighteen and I always went back to my foster parents in the holidays, but I’ve changed carers twice in the last three years, so, you know, I didn’t really know them all that well. I know there’s been a lot about this in the media, about the way I fell through the gaps in the system, and the fact that nobody really had a clue where I was. But I dunno, I do tend to do my own thing, so that was probably my fault as much as anyone’s.

  SUZANNAH: AUGUST 2018

  OF COURSE I’D SEEN THE NEWS REPORTS, HAD BEEN AS AMAZED as anyone else by the girl’s story and by the little we could make out about Ellie Canning herself. It would have been a sensation even if she hadn’t been picked up practically on our doorstep – only twenty or so kilometres to the south of town, and five from our place, on the Wash road. In fact, I drove past John O’Brien’s shepherd’s hut every time I made the trip to town.

  The story was incredible – the brazen abduction, the month spent in captivity, the girl’s fortunate and brave escape. From the few details that had been released about her life it was clear Ellie Canning was someone very special: a smart girl from a difficult background, a foster child who’d won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. At eighteen she was still astonishingly young-looking – I would have guessed fifteen, max – and she had a winsome blonde loveliness that was apparent even in the unflattering school photo the press had been using. That such a child could be lost for almost a month with no one knowing or caring was heartbreaking.

  At school the story was an endless source of conversation, of sometimes laughter-filled conjecture. There’d been no information released about the kidnappers’ motives – and with no mention of either physical or sexual abuse, and apparently only women involved, speculations ranged from the sinister (slavery, the occult) to the slightly more benign (custody issues). Having been discovered locally, we’d wondered too about who her abductor could possibly have been and where they’d kept her. Even the native Washers agreed that there were so many new people in the area – tree-changers, weekenders, Airbnbs run on local properties – it was impossible to know. Even Tania Jones, who ran the school office and whose family had lived in the Wash for generations, and could usually be relied upon for an opinion on any local matter, wouldn’t hazard a guess.

  Rachel Mott, the head of the maths department, told us her son had delivered groceries to a clearly drugged-out older couple out near the Woolpack Bridge a few months back. The woman had been wearing very little, just a G-string and a sheer blouse, and the couple had tried to entice him in, offering booze, a joint, dirty movies. They were both really old, her son had said, at least in their forties, and the woman seemed to fit the girl’s description of one of her captors – dark hair, shortish, middle-aged. The couple hadn’t been threatening at all, according to the boy. If anything, they were over-the-top friendly. Even so, Rachel had made him go to the police with his story, and he had given them the address. But it was a dead end: the place was a holiday rental, and had been leased out to three or four different couples over the period of Canning’s abduction.

  ‘You know,’ Phil Burke, the head of phys ed, said one morning, ‘that description of the woman could be you, Suzannah – didn’t the girl say the woman was dark-haired and short? And then there’s the crazy old lady. Doesn’t your mother live with you?’

  ‘Oh, come on. There’d have to be at least a dozen women living out of town who could be described exactly the same way, surely? So many people here do live with their elderly parents.’ Anna Brady, our resident peacemaker, spoke before I could respond, no doubt worrying that Phil had offended me.

  ‘My mother’s definitely crazy, but she had me at sixteen, so she’s not exactly old.’ I gave Anna a reassuring smile.

  ‘Hmmm. But you know teenagers. They think twenty is over the hill.’ As usual, Phil was impervious to Anna’s diplomatic efforts. ‘Is there anything you haven’t told us, Suze? You haven’t been keeping a teenage girl in your closet, have you?’

  The room erupted.

  ‘OMG. What teacher would do that?’ Julia, the newest and youngest member of the English staff, looked appalled.

  ‘And you do have that connection to Manning.’ Phil was like a dog with a bone. ‘Didn’t you teach at some private school there?’

  ‘Manning College. It was a few years back now. I’m surprised you remember.’

  ‘I always like to know where people taught before they washed up here, in paradise.’ His voice had an edge of bitterness. ‘People don’t come out here for no reason, do they? There’s always something they’re running from.’

  I’d applied for the position at Enfield Wash on spec, after a couple of years of highly unsatisfying casual teaching in Sydney. I’d been shocked when I’d got it, but had said yes, even before visiting. Enfield Wash was a small inland town a couple of hours north of Sydney – too far from the city to be attractive to those who wanted to live close to the centre, but not isolated enough to be counted as additional rungs for those climbing the education department ladder. Enfield Wash High needed a teacher who had had enough experience teaching drama to
run junior classes, direct a school play every few years, and take the occasional small class of students through to their final exams. Rather like mine, the school’s expectations weren’t terribly high.

  From what I could glean on the net, Enfield Wash seemed a reasonable place to settle. The town, unlike others in the region, had somehow survived despite its small population. Perhaps because of its relative isolation it still had a reasonably thriving commercial centre, and the economic migration, youth unemployment, drugs, crime and general disaffection that had destroyed so many other once-prosperous inland towns hadn’t been quite as pronounced. It wasn’t exactly a buzzing metropolis, but there were enough flourishing businesses and families to make it a viable place to live. As well as the wheat and sheep and dairy farms that had once been the town’s backbone, there were wineries that attracted tourism, and a growing number of tree-changers buying up acreages. There were a respectable number of cafes, a library and a bookshop. The town had eight hotels, a twenty-four-hour manned police station, and a sense of community. It also had The Franchise, a large and very well maintained nursing home with a waiting list that was significantly shorter than any I could find in Sydney.

  Leaving Mary in the care of a respite nurse, I drove out in early Spring to scope out the town and find somewhere for us to live. I’d decided to bite the bullet and put my Bondi apartment, which I’d owned since the early 90s and had well and truly paid off, on the market. Sydney prices being what they were, I looked like coming out of the exchange pretty well.

  The local real estate agent, whose thirteen-year-old daughter I was likely to teach (‘Total drama queen, that girl. Just like her mother.’) couldn’t hide his excitement when I told him what I was after – space, privacy, a garden, something old that didn’t need renovating – and how much I was prepared to spend.

  ‘Well,’ he’d said, after the initial thrill had subsided, ‘you’ve got two options with that sort of money.’ He’d driven me to the town’s premier street – a wide, tree-lined avenue in an area known as Parliament Hill.

  The houses were grand: late-Victorian brick mansions with manicured gardens behind high iron and sandstone fences. Most had swimming pools and a few had tennis courts. They were elegant, welcoming, well looked after, homes where generations of children were born and raised, homes that weren’t really appropriate for a single woman and her mad mother.

  The agent had stopped out the front of one imposing pile. ‘This one’s been on the market for three years – takes a while to sell this sort of place. They’re asking six hundred and fifty thousand, but as I said I reckon they’d take six hundred. Maybe even five-eighty. You’d still have quite a bit of change. It could do with a bit of updating, but it doesn’t need too much. You could maybe refresh the bathrooms, the kitchen. Knock out a few walls and open it out.’

  I’d given the house no more than the briefest glance before shaking my head. ‘It’s so beautiful, but not really what I’m after. It needs a family. Kids,’ I managed to say it without self-consciousness.

  ‘Yeah. True.’ He’d given a regretful sigh, then almost immediately brightened up. ‘How about out of town?’

  I hadn’t really considered living out of town, but why not?

  ‘I don’t want anything too big; I don’t want too much to maintain. And I don’t want animals or . . . crops or anything.’

  ‘No. I s’pose . . .’ He paused, and looked at me closely. ‘Hey, I know you. You were that girl. What was her name? Queenie? From that show, oh, what was it? Surf something?’

  I laughed. ‘Gypsy. And it was Beachlife.’

  ‘Beachlife. That’s it. Gypsy. Wow.’

  ‘I’m surprised you recognise me. I’d have thought you were a bit too young.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, maybe. But I’ve got four older sisters, and they made me watch it. They had it all on video.’ His grin was sheepish, his cheeks slightly pink. ‘And you’re coming here to teach? The school must be stoked to have someone like you teaching drama. An actual celebrity.’

  ‘It was such a long time ago. I’d be surprised if anyone else even remembers the show. Anyway,’ I changed the subject gently, ‘you were going to tell me about some places out of town.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’ He cleared his throat, assumed a more businesslike demeanour. ‘I’ve got just the thing. It’s not quite an acre – so there’s not too much to look after. There’s a fair bit of lawn, I guess, but you can always get someone to come and mow it if it’s too much.’

  He’d driven out of the town then, headed west up one hill and then down another, around what looked like a small lake, but was actually the town’s old reservoir, the Lock, and then out into less hilly farming country. It had been a cold dry winter, and the paddocks were grey and not particularly appealing, but the surrounding countryside was beautiful: gently undulating land as far as the eye could see, with the peak of a heavily wooded mountain – Mount Waltham, apparently – in the distance.

  ‘The place I’m taking you, the old Gascoyne place,’ the agent said, ‘has been subdivided. It’s an old farmhouse; parts of it are more than a hundred years old, but the owner built himself a new place and is selling off a bit of land with the old homestead on it. Actually, it’s a bit of a sad story.’

  He was clearly eager to tell me, and curious to hear the local stories, I was happy to oblige.

  ‘Oh?’

  Yeah. Poor bastard. He started building it when he got married. His parents were in the old place. But then his wife got cancer and the house was put on hold . . . She died, oh, a while back now. She was a lovely woman – another teacher, actually. By the time he got back to work on the new house his parents had died, too. He probably should’ve stayed in the old place and sold the new one for a motza, but I guess he wanted a fresh start.’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘Yeah. He’s a typical grazier, tough as old boots, maybe a bit arrogant – but I think it really stuffed him.

  ‘The old place has been a bit of a nightmare to sell, to be honest. Most people who want to live out of town are after at least a couple of acres. And they don’t want these old places.’

  ‘No. I like the idea of its age, but I don’t know that I really need a homestead. There’s only the two of us.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a mansion or anything. Not like those places in town. The Gascoynes had plenty of money once, but it all went back into the land, so the house is nothing fancy. It’s pretty small. And it could probably do with some renovating down the track. The garden’s something special though. And the views.’

  The agent was right – it wasn’t anything fancy. The original house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, but there’d been various additions and alterations since. The house was tin-roofed weatherboard, in need of a lick of paint, with a wide verandah out the front. The three small bedrooms, dining room and dim lounge looked desperately in need of an update, but the north-facing kitchen and family room – added sometime in the 1970s – was warm and comfortable looking. An old breezeway with a corrugated-iron roof ran from the current kitchen to the original kitchen, which was now a laundry.

  A door in the hallway that I’d mistaken for a linen closet opened onto a stairway leading down to a basement. The basement had been divided into two thin-walled rooms, one with an ensuite toilet. Another set of steep wooden stairs connected the basement to the laundry. The basement rooms were cool and dank, and faintly whiffy.

  ‘I think they used these for guest bedrooms at one stage, or maybe storage,’ the agent said. ‘You could make a great wine cellar down here,’ he added wistfully. ‘The temperature is perfect. But the Gascoynes weren’t really a wine cellar sort of family, I guess.’

  The front garden, old Mrs Gascoyne’s garden, was beautiful. It was all a little wild and unkempt now, but its good bones were still in evidence. There were the remains of old flowerbeds, climbing roses and jasmine, camellias, an assortment of natives. An early blooming jacaranda scattered its blossom across the lawn.
The agent walked me from fence line to fence line, and then around the perimeter of the original home paddock, which housed an enormous tin shed – a three-car garage, apparently. All up, the property was just over half an acre. The surrounding land all belonged to Chip Gascoyne – the original homestead just a small sliver in the middle.

  ‘Chip?’

  ‘It’s Charles, I think, but he looked a lot like his old man as a kid, apparently – you know, a chip off the old block.’

  ‘So where’s his new place?’

  ‘It’s across that paddock, just behind that windbreak.’ He pointed to a row of tall trees behind the garage. ‘It’s actually less than half a K away as the crow flies, but you’d never know it. There’s a gate in the dividing fence just behind the shed. And there’s a rough kind of path between the two properties. Your only other close neighbour is Honor Fielding. She’s a bit further up on the Wash Road. She’s that celebrity PR agent, media person? I guess you’d have heard of her, being in showbiz and all that?’

  ‘Of course.’ I was slightly surprised. ‘What’s she doing living out here?’

  ‘She actually grew up in Enfield Wash, and she and her husband bought a weekender a couple of years back – five acres. They’re not here that often. They come up for a few days, maybe once a month, a bit more in winter. Her dad’s at The Franchise, so she comes up a bit to see him.’

  I looked back at the house. It was certainly no architectural marvel, but it was solid and cosy. There were views out to the mountain and across the plains, but the property was sheltered, relatively secluded. It was peaceful, a long way from the rat race, but not too far away from the comforts of civilisation. It was just what we needed. I paid a deposit that day.

  ***

  My students, too, were obsessed with the Canning case. When the story first broke it was almost impossible to keep them focused on any other subject. I had come to my Year Eleven drama class prepared for a tedious but necessary discussion about their woefully inadequate practice journals. Instead, when I walked in a few minutes late, the class – only fifteen students, but with enough enthusiastic extroverts to make it feel like fifty – was agog with the recent news: the girl found semi-conscious in the shepherd’s hut, her story of abduction, imprisonment, and escape. They were full of theories, too – why the woman had taken her, who they might be, was the girl making it all up – but then why would she? Why would anyone make up such a crazy story? The conversation was impossible to close down. Every time I tried there was a chorus of Oh, Miss, and someone added another unlikely fact. In the end I gave up.