by Wendy James
‘You don’t have a list of . . . potential suspects you can investigate?’
‘Not really. I mean we do have some what you’d call regular offenders, but most of them are only kids. Bored on a Saturday night, looking for kicks. And there are a couple of idiots who see themselves as serious “artistes”. But I’d say in this case it’s probably a little bit different.’
‘What do you mean, different?’
‘Well, first, it doesn’t look like kids. Kids don’t usually stray too far from town; most of them don’t even have cars. And if they do go out of town it’s for a good reason. You know, something highly visible, like silos, billboards. That sort of thing. They don’t tend to deface isolated farmhouses.’
‘Oh.’
‘This is obviously a bit more . . . personal. You’ve been targeted for a reason.’
‘But doesn’t that narrow things down?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What do you mean.’
‘Well, it could be anyone, couldn’t it?’ Both men looked grave. ‘You’ve made a lot of enemies out here, Miss Wells. Half the town thinks you should be locked up for good. There’d be a lot of people wishing they had the guts to do it themselves. A lot of people who’d say this is no more than what you deserve.’
SUZANNAH: DECEMBER 2018
I HAD SPENT THE LAST FEW MONTHS IN A STRANGE STATE OF suspended animation, with my life put on hold indefinitely. Time blurred; each day had little to distinguish it from the one before or the one to follow. Chip left at the crack of dawn every morning to do what had to be done to maintain his livelihood. I envied him his escape into a world that seemed simple in comparison to mine – farming might be physically harsh, brutal even, but it could be understood and negotiated. I envied, too, the fact that he could direct his focus elsewhere, even if it was only for a few hours a day.
I had decided early on that if I was to avoid going mad I would have to pretend that I was simply enjoying a well-earned break, taking early maternity leave. Every morning I set myself some routine domestic task – catching up on bills, gardening, unpacking boxes, rearranging furniture. But by the afternoon, my (clearly inadequate) imaginative reserves were exhausted, and I would slump on the sofa beside Mary, half-watching whatever program she was currently obsessed with and sharing her dry Froot Loops. Somehow I still managed to keep the anxiety at bay, pushed it to the furthest recesses of my pregnancy-fogged mind, and focused on the one bright point, the only certainty of my current situation: the child that was growing within me. I was well into the second trimester, the baby was kicking, and the nausea had all but disappeared. I tired more easily, but had yet to develop any of the expected aches and pains. We hadn’t asked to find out the sex, but all the tests indicated a healthy foetus.
In early December, with only six weeks to go before the hearing, Hal came over to go through the prosecution evidence with us. Most committals were simple paper committals, with evidence supplied to the magistrate in the form of written statements, but Hal had asked for a physical hearing to garner more time, and in the hope that he might discover evidence to dispute the prosecution’s evidence, or even better, find a witness whose story would make Canning’s fall apart. If at committal the magistrate wasn’t convinced that the prosecution’s case could satisfy a jury beyond reasonable doubt, the charges would be dropped, the case dismissed.
Media interest in the case had moved on – mercifully Ellie Canning seemed to have become the focus of the story, rather than me, or even the crime itself – but a small contingent of reporters (a motley bunch representing mostly oddball online sites) still gathered at the end of our drive, so it was easier to meet Hal here than in his office in town. Chip had made the trip into town to pick up our week’s groceries and arrived home just before Hal. He too had increasingly kept clear of Enfield Wash over the past months, not so much because of the media, who didn’t seem to worry him, but because of local attitudes towards us particularly after the night of the graffiti. He hadn’t said much – not wanting to worry me more, I guess – but he had made vague noises about certain people having too much time on their hands.
The three of us sat down at the dining room table, where we had a good view of Mary, who was out on the verandah with the dogs. I tried not to laugh as Hal did a double-take. This morning, Mary was dressed in what she’d taken to calling her hairy-wear – an old pair of orange fluoro work overalls supplied by a thoughtful Chip when I complained about the endless washing that Mary’s canine obsession was creating. She was sharing Rip’s doggy-bed, lying curled up against him, one arm caught underneath, the other stroking his nose. She muttered constantly, and sometimes quite heatedly, but the dog seemed happy enough, eyes closed, tail thumping sporadically. Ned was nowhere to be seen; he either had his nose badly out of joint or had gone into hiding.
There were far too many documents for us to get through in a day – interviews, witness statements, scientific reports, photographs – but Hal had provided a precis of the critical elements. It was mostly what I’d expected. All of it nonsense, all of it fabricated.
And all of it completely irrefutable.
I read the girl’s statement again, went through it slowly, made notes, trying to find anything – some little error that might be expanded into a gaping hole – that would cast doubt on her testimony.
We went through the list of physical evidence that provided proof of Ellie’s incarceration. The paintings, the underwear, the cup with Ellie’s DNA and drug residue, the hairbrush. Read through the witness statements that the prosecution had provided. Everything added up – but not to the truth.
Most of what was here wasn’t a surprise, but the accusations, documented so officially and authoritatively, made the craziness real.
There were so many lies, coming from so many directions, it was impossible to know how I could even begin to refute them. The accusations were so lunatic, so preposterous. They made the small implausibilities (drugging a potential surrogate, for example) seem irrelevant.
Suddenly the reality of what it all meant, and what it might come to mean, crashed down on me like an all-encompassing black cloud. Years in prison, the removal of my child, the end of this burgeoning relationship with Chip. And Mary, what was to become of Mary? I wanted to curl up and howl.
‘I don’t get it. It feels like someone’s just walked in and turned my life into something insane. Something hellish.’ Chip, who looked as desolate as I felt, squeezed my hand mutely.
‘There must be something we can do, some way to show it’s all lies.’
Hal looked thoughtful. ‘The problem is that it’s just so much easier to prove that something happened than to prove its opposite, its negative – to prove that something didn’t happen. What we need is something that casts doubt on her, on Canning herself. Any doubt at all.’
‘But the girl is squeaky clean – no one’s got a bad word to say about her. She’s practically a saint.’
‘But if she wasn’t here, where was she? Someone must have seen something, know something.’
‘But who? And how would we find them? You’re talking about needles in haystacks.’
Chip stated the obvious. ‘What about her phone records? I know she said it was out of power and that she hasn’t seen it since she got in the car . . .’ He looked at his brother hopefully.
‘Yeah. That’s all been checked. Her records are completely consistent with her statement. The last call she made was from somewhere near Broadway, just after her interview at St Anne’s.’
‘Do you have a copy?’
Hal dug it out of the teetering pile of documents and handed it to his brother. Chip looked at it briefly, then passed it over to me. No calls had been made from her phone after the date of the alleged abduction. And no calls had been made to her phone, either, just half a dozen texts – one from her mother, a couple of group texts between classmates, her foster mother hoping she was having fun in Sydney – but not many. I felt a moment’s pity for Ellie. She�
�d gone missing from her life for almost a month, and there was no one to notice, no one who cared. There must be some sad story, some hidden pain behind all this.
‘Pity we can’t check her actual phone and look at her photos. I’d like to see if she’s really the virtuous little thing she says she is.’ Chip looked at his brother hopefully. ‘Surely you know some dodgy techie who can find out that stuff for us? I thought no information was private these days?’
‘I’m just a country barrister, not James Bond. Anyway, even if a techie found something on her phone it’d be inadmissible – and completely illegal. But, barring a witness, that’s exactly the kind of thing we need. A photo. A phone call. CCTV footage. Something dated, verifiable.’ Hal sighed. ‘But you’re right – we’re talking needles in very deep haystacks. At this point only Canning herself knows wh—’
He paused. ‘Actually, maybe that’s it. Maybe we need to look at it another way. Maybe there’s no point searching for the gaps in her story – maybe we need to consider what she knows.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, what does she know about you? Your past? The house? Mary?’
From her evidence, it was clear that Ellie knew an awful lot. More than was possible without having been here, without having met me.
‘What if you make a list of all the things she knows, the things she shouldn’t know, or couldn’t possibly know? That might tell us something about how she knows. Maybe there’ll be a clue. Something that will help us make sense of it all.’
‘But what’s the point,’ I asked, ‘when there’s still all that DNA evidence? How can we refute that? It’s all impossible.’ I could feel my voice thinning out, a wahhhhh developing. ‘It doesn’t make sense. We can discuss what she knows – and the impossibility of her knowing it – until the cows come home, but it doesn’t tell us how she knows. She’s made her accusations and we can’t disprove anything. We can make guesses, but we can’t prove anything.’
Even I could hear the tinny shrill of desperation, the despair. I laid my head down on the table, overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion.
‘Or maybe everything she’s saying is true and I’ve just gone completely mad.’
After that night’s Trouble, which took us longer than usual to successfully lose, Mary was adamant that she wasn’t ready for bed, insistent that she needed something yummy, something chocolate. We were all out of chocolate, so I made her a cup of warm cocoa, which was too pale for her liking, added more cocoa to make it darker, which made it too bitter, added sugar, by which time it was too cold and needed to go in the microwave again. Finally, everything was just right, and Goldilocks sat slurping noisily in front of the box.
Chip was sceptical about his brothers’ idea, but I was keen to follow his suggestion.
‘Do we have to do this? I’m not sure that writing a list is going to help anything. And I’m bloody tired.’
I sympathised, but at this point I was ready to try anything. ‘Come on. It might just, you know, shake something loose.’
He sighed, looked longingly at the television.
I handed him a pen and a pad. ‘She’s watching cartoons, Chip.’
‘I know,’ he said glumly. ‘It’s a Looney Tunes special. I was kinda looking forward to it.’
Once we began, the list of things the girl shouldn’t know wasn’t really as long as I’d imagined; in fact it was quite limited. There were, naturally, all the things anyone could know about me, or that could have been discovered easily by the careful questioning of locals:
That I existed.
That I lived where I lived.
That Mary existed.
That Mary had dementia.
That we lived alone here together.
Then there were the other things that might take a bit of research: reading old newspapers, talking to people . . . but who?
The layout of the house.
That I’d been married and had a child.
That my child had died.
Then there were the things that couldn’t be explained, the things that Canning could only have known by being here:
That I owned the Alice Neel and Margaret Preston prints.
That there was an old metal bedhead down in the basement.
That I’d kept my daughter’s sippy cup.
These things couldn’t be invented – they were all too specific. The girl, or an accomplice, had to have been here. She, or this accomplice, had to have seen these things – and scratched initials in the basement wall, planted the DNA samples, the hair and the underwear, and stolen the silk pyjamas while they were at it. None of this was completely implausible, of course. She could have broken in sometime when I was at work and somehow avoided Mary, or Mary could have seen her and forgotten all about it. But proving it was going to be difficult.
Proving it was going to be impossible.
There was one final thing that needed to go on the list: the one thing I knew Ellie Canning couldn’t possibly have known – that only two people in the world had known at the time of her escape.
‘There is one thing more.’ I was hesitant, not knowing where this might lead.
‘What?’
‘There’s no way she could have known about the baby. I’ve looked at the dates. I remember working out exactly how pregnant I was. It was the day the Year Elevens chose their performance groups: July eighteenth. And then I told you a couple of days later. Only you and I knew.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She didn’t know until that night when the police were here, remember. At that point – when the girl was meant to be here, the night she made her escape,’ I corrected myself, ‘the night she says she made her escape – it was still only you and me. And in order to know, the girl would have had to have been there, in your house. She would had to have heard me telling you there. We didn’t ever discuss it here, did we? And you weren’t around that following week. One of us must have told someone. Someone who told that girl. And I know it wasn’t me.’ It wasn’t a statement, but a question.
Chip was staring at me, stricken, his eyes wide, face pale. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’
HONOR: JULY 2018
SHE KNEW WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN THE MOMENT CHIP walked in the door. There was something about the way he held himself, his shoulders square, the tension in his jaw, the cool wariness in his eyes. Honor had seen this look before, long ago, back when they were both kids. And from other boys, other men too, so many times. It was always the same – that cold defensiveness that swamped everything, even pity, even guilt.
He had been Honor’s first, but she’d never tell him that. Never give him that . . . satisfaction, if that was the right word.
She’d gone with him that first time without pausing to even think about it, to worry about the logistics, what lie she would tell her parents. What else was she going to do when he’d asked, in that deceptively offhand way of his, giving that slow sideways smile, whether Honor wanted to go out to Freezywater with him and a few of his mates? It wasn’t going to be anything fancy, he’d said, a few of the boys had sleeping bags, but he was just going to sleep in the back of the old EH wagon he’d been doing up. He’d pick her up around six, would bring the steak, the sauce, the booze. She’d almost asked whether she should bring her own sleeping bag, but changed her mind at the last minute. Why tempt fate?
They’d half hooked up a few weeks earlier at a B&S at the Boyd place. Honor never really enjoyed those parties – they were really for the boarding school kids and their mates – and a drunken pash with the suddenly desirable Chip Gascoyne, who’d been her classmate through primary school, had been the highlight of an otherwise dismal night.
The crowd out at Freezywater was a different bunch of kids. Most were townies, blackfellas and whitefellas, and some were cockys’ kids – not graziers, but hardscrabble farmers who sent their kids to the local schools rather than to board in Sydney or Melbourne. She didn’t have to worry about anyone smirking about her too-broad
accent, her bad perm, her jeans that weren’t quite the right cut or colour, the fact that she wasn’t heading off to Women’s or Wesley or St Anne’s, but staying put and taking up a job as a cadet at the Clarion.
Honor had known these kids all her life – they were schoolmates, neighbours, children of her parents’ friends; it was like being with family. And Chip was comfortable there too. Unlike most of the other rich kids, he’d stayed mates with the local boys. He’d always had that knack, Chip, of getting on with everyone.
But no one else mattered, anyway. All she could really see was Chip. Those blue eyes, crinkling at the corners, reminding her of some old movie star – Paul Newman, maybe? – and that thing he did when he walked, a sort of saddle-shaped swagger that made her think he should be wearing spurs, packing a pistol, cracking a stock whip. His voice, that drawl that spoke of money, privilege, arrogance; and that deep dark laugh that promised something else entirely. Oh God, everything about him made her feel almost sick with anticipation.
All the things she usually enjoyed doing at parties seemed suddenly completely pointless: drinking, bonging, sitting in a stoned circle watching the flames leap and flicker, or gazing into the vast and glittering sky, listening to the boys tell their bullshit stories, because in the main it was always the boys who directed nights like those, who told jokes, strummed guitars, provided what passed as entertainment.
That night all Honor was conscious of was the way time seemed to stretch and shrink simultaneously, of wanting the night to move quickly and wanting it to never end. And she had been waiting all night for that one moment: the moment when Chip stood up, stretched slowly, and muttered something about needing to hit the hay. The moment when he looked down at her, curled at his feet, looking upward, expectant. The moment when he offered her his hand, and gave her that smile, that lift of the eyebrows. ‘You coming, Fielding?’
It had been a typical teenage romance, over almost as soon as it had begun. She and Chip had met up at the occasional Wash event in the years since, and if she’d been asked, Honor would have said that the adolescent spark had been well and truly extinguished. But they’d met up again in Sydney, a few years after the death of his wife. Honor was walking past a Woolloomooloo art gallery one evening after a work dinner, had noticed the small crowd and when she looked in, had been amazed to see Chip there. She knew a couple of the art-world types milling about, so had sauntered in. She went straight to the champagne, found a dim corner where she pretended to gaze admiringly at an origami display, all the while watching Chip. He was talking to an intense-looking girl, clearly an artsy type, with her sleek black hair, red-rimmed glasses, knee-length skirt, fine wool cardigan, her clumpy but expensive brogues. She wondered momentarily whether the young woman was a romantic interest, but then recognised Chip’s expression – his impatience to move on evident in the tapping of fingers against his glass, the slightly panicked look in his eyes. She sipped at the too-sweet-bubbles, watched him for a few minutes more, amazed that her heart still beat so fast at the sight of him even now. He was not the young god of her memory, but he was still the sexiest man she’d ever known. His wild hair tamed, grey at the temples, his toothy smile, his long strong fingers curled awkwardly around the delicate crystal stem of his glass. She despised herself for it, but she was breathless just looking at him.
