Poison Orchids: A darkly compelling psychological thriller

by Sarah A. Denzil

  Rodney seemed pleased with her reaction. “You girls and me can have some fun here. You can be my birdies.”

  “I won’t be your birdie.” Gemma pressed her back into the metal bars.

  “You’ve got about as much choice in the matter as my cockatoos do. That is, none,” he said. “Anyway, Hayley’s my favourite. We’ve already gotten to know each other, haven’t we, little birdie?”

  Hayley shook her head, whimpering in terror. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He snickered. “Just because you don’t remember it, birdie, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  Hayley stared at him with huge, shocked eyes.

  A phone ringtone shrilled above the noise of the birds. Rodney dug in his pocket and fetched his phone.

  Stepping out of the cage, he grabbed a set of keys that were hanging on the wall. He locked the cage and walked out of the shed, whistling.

  Gemma heard him answer his call as walked towards his house. “Tate…”

  Part III

  NOW

  28

  Bronwen

  “I’m going to…” Bronwen squeezed her hands into fists. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.”

  “Take it easy, Bron,” Joe soothed.

  “Wait, rewind… a bit more. There. Pause it.” Bronwen leaned back on her heels and let out a low whistle between her teeth. She was standing behind one of the security guards at the hospital going over the recorded camera footage of the corridor outside Gemma’s room. “Is that Hayley?”

  “Same height and build.” Joe noted. “But who’s with her?” He scratched his chin and leaned closer to the screen.

  The girls’ disappearance was a monumental fuckup that Superintendent Jones was never going to let her forget. This case was getting to her. From the creepy shit in White’s home, to the freezer room on Denton Road, to the weird pharmaceutical guy at the mango farm, her mind was completely scrambled and frustration wasn’t strong enough a word to describe how she felt right now. She knew it was all related, but she couldn’t figure out how or why.

  Her chest felt tight as she stood there watching the security footage. She was leading an investigation that had grown and grown from the night the two girls had been found on the highway. A large team was waiting for her instructions on what to do next, and every night she found herself buried under the massive load of files generated by this case.

  She pressed her weight against the back of the security guard’s chair. “Go back and forth again. I want to rewatch them coming out of Hayley’s room.”

  So far what she’d learned from the footage was that a tall guy wearing a baseball cap and brown shirt had entered the room. After a couple of minutes, Hayley emerged with him in jeans and a T-shirt. Then they both went into Gemma’s room to fetch her. Gemma was walking but seemed visibly dazed from the way she stumbled along.

  “Is Gemma drugged?” Bronwen pointed her finger at the screen. “Have we got more footage of her walking through the hospital?”

  “We’ll have to look through every camera,” the security guard replied. “It might take a while.”

  “We don’t have a while.” Bronwen frowned. She’d put out a bulletin over the radio based on Hayley and Gemma’s appearance as they left the hospital. If only they’d been able to get a better look at this guy’s face, but he’d kept it angled down and out of view with the peak of his hat.

  Joe placed a gentle hand on her arm and led her to the back of the room. “Bron, what’s up? It’s not like the girls are suspects. They’re over eighteen. We can’t actually keep them in the hospital. I know they’re witnesses, but—”

  “You saw the CCTV, Joe. It’s a kidnap. Gemma has been taken by the guy on that tape, and I don’t know why or what Hayley is doing. Didn’t you see the way Gemma was stumbling around? She looked like she’d been drugged to me. When we spoke to her earlier, she didn’t seem groggy and out of it like she is in the video.”

  “Maybe she just woke up,” Joe replied. “We can’t spend too long on this, Bron. We have the press conference coming up that we need to prepare for.”

  Bronwen shook her head. “Yeah, and that’s going to go down well if we’ve lost our two main witnesses. No, this is important, and there’s something else going on.” She walked away from the security room. There had to be more to it than a sleepy girl and two friends helping her out. She needed to find those girls now.

  Needing a break from Joe and his well-meaning attempt to calm her down, Bronwen headed towards the cafeteria and ordered a strong coffee instead. As she tipped two sugars into the dark liquid, she thought about what her next move will be. There were officers out looking for the girls, but right now they hadn’t established what kind of vehicle they used—if there even had been a vehicle—not to mention which direction they went in.

  She took a seat and removed her mobile phone from her pocket. The last lead she’d been about to follow was a phone call between Hayley and her friend Alice that had taken place back in December. Maybe she should start there. It gave her something to do while the guard went through more hospital footage. She took out her notebook and returned to the details she’d written down for Hayley’s friend. She had no time to worry about what time it was in England right now. If she woke them up, so what? They’d live.

  It was five rings before someone answered. She asked for Alice and then waited.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Alice Marsons?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “My name is Detective Bronwen McKay, I’m a police officer based in Katherine, Australia. Do you know a young woman named Hayley Edwards?”

  “Yes, she’s my friend.” There was a hint of panic in her voice, and the girl spoke more quickly, as though she had suddenly become more focused. “Is she all right? I heard that there was some sort of accident there and she was hurt.”

  “She’s okay. But I’m investigating the incident, and I need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Okay. If it helps,” Alice said.

  “We have here that you spoke to Hayley via telephone sometime at the beginning of December. Can you recall that conversation?” It felt strange to be asking official questions over the phone. Bronwen had no way to verify her status, and she couldn’t be certain that the girl would even take her seriously, but it was either that or fly to England.

  “Yeah, I remember. We didn’t talk for long. It was strange to hear from her, actually. She’d been travelling, and we hadn’t really been in touch. But then she kept telling me I should go out there because it’s so beautiful.”

  “She wanted you to visit?” Bronwen asked.

  “I guess so. She said something about a mango farm, and a guy called Tate, and there were waterfalls. But it was long distance so she didn’t stay on the phone long.”

  “She called you on a landline? No texting, WhatsApp, or Snapchat?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I found it weird. She could have just sent me a message, but she called me, and it was like she called me just to brag about her holiday. Then she had to go.”

  “Did anything else about the conversation stick out to you?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line until Alice said, “Her voice had changed.”

  “Her accent?” Bronwen asked.

  “No. Hayley was always pretty uptight. She was quiet, you know. That’s why it was so weird when she flipped and ran away. She always seemed so together. But on the phone she sounded different. Spaced out. And she sounded really, really happy. Too happy.”

  “You think she might have been on drugs?”

  “Hayley? Hardly? I don’t know what it was. She just sounded weird. Not herself.”

  Bronwen made a quick note. “Thanks so much for your time, Alice.”

  “Will you tell her to come home?” Alice said, surprising Bronwen. “I don’t think it’s good for her to be out there alone.”

  “I don’t either, Alice. I’ll tell her, okay?”
Bronwen hung up the phone and took a moment to process the information Alice had offered up.

  The mango farm seemed connected to all of this. She just couldn’t figure out how or why.

  As she was tapping her fingers on the table, trying to connect the pieces, a red-faced Joe appeared from the corridor.

  “There you are,” he said. “The security guard has the rest of the footage pulled.”

  Bronwen took her coffee with her as they made their way back to that stuffy little room. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “There’s not much else to go on. The three of them walked out of the exit at the back of the hospital near the maternity ward. It looks like Hayley puts on a hat as she’s walking out.”

  “Any vehicles identified? Do we know how the guy in the baseball cap travelled to the hospital?”

  “It may be a transit van,” Joe replied. “The guy knew what he was doing. If the van does belong to him, he parked it under a broken light in the carpark, pretty close to the appropriate exit. The camera didn’t pick up any registration numbers.”

  “Let’s update the officers about the van,” Bronwen said. “I’m going to try calling Hayley’s parents again after I’ve seen the video.”

  Bronwen had called them almost immediately after the girls went missing, but neither parent was answering their phone. She was pretty certain that Hayley wouldn’t be going back to see her parents after what happened when they visited, but they had a right to know that their daughter had left the hospital. She opened the door into the security room and lifted her chin to the guard as an indication for him to press play. He did.

  She watched it. And then she watched it again. Joe was right about the fact that there was little to go in. The mysterious guy kept his head down. But she saw that he was tall, medium build, white, a little on the pale side. Maybe he was English too? The way Gemma’s head kept rolling down towards her chest, and the way the guy had his arm around her made Bronwen’s stomach lurch. What was going on, and why was this girl being coerced out of the hospital? This sorry event was yet another reminder that they’d never actually found Gemma’s family during the investigation. She could call Hayley’s family, but where was Gemma’s?

  They knew so little about the two girls. Hayley had parents and had a home, but she never acted in a way that Bronwen expected of a nice, studious, and quiet girl as described by most of the people who knew her before. Both of the girls were unpredictable and uneven. But then there was always one place Hayley always felt the same about. There was one place she consistently talked about in a positive light. There was one place she always expressed love for. The same place that she knew was involved in this investigation somehow.

  Everything leads back to the farm. Maybe it led Hayley and Gemma back too.

  29

  Megan

  A sense of urgency pulsed through Megan’s veins. Ever since the girls had vanished, she’d had a cold fear growing inside her. If there were other people involved in the cold room murders, then the girls were in danger.

  Last night, she’d told Bronwen that she’d found some secret client files that Leah Halcombe had been keeping on Clay Durrell. But in between the search for the girls and preparations for the police/media conferences today, Bronwen hadn’t had time to take a look or discuss it with her. Had Rodney murdered Leah because of what Clay was telling her about his nightmares? If so, how had Rodney found out?

  Megan shivered in the cold air-conditioning. She’d driven three-and-a-half hours through the roasting heat to Darwin, and she’d just arrived at the media conference centre. On the way in, she’d bought an icy drink to try to cool down. It was now sitting like a frozen pond at the pit of her stomach.

  She was here to give a report to the media about Gemma and Hayley’s states of mind. There had been a lot of wild speculation about the two girls in the press and that had only gotten worse since they went missing. She’d be clearing up the misperceptions. But first, Bronwen and Joe were to give their address to the media about the Cold Room Killings case.

  The room had been set up with the chairs in rows, facing the podium and a large screen. Journalists were jostling for the front seats.

  I don’t envy you two, Megan thought as she watched Bronwen and Joe enter the conference room. The detectives had already briefed a room of police in the morning. From what she’d heard, the room had been filled to capacity. Police from all over Australia and overseas had flown in to hear the details. This case had stretched far beyond their little part of the world.

  Now, in the afternoon, Bronwen and Joe were tasked with addressing the media. Whatever everyone in the room was about to hear would soon be ricocheting all around the world—as soon as the journalists had their notes ready. For the families of the victims, they would be hearing a lot of grisly information for the first time.

  As well as all of that, Bronwen and Joe would have to explain the disappearance of Gemma and Hayley. From the time they’d been found up until they went missing, the two of them had been painted as a good news story in the media. Young victims who’d experienced horrors but who had escaped. But now they were gone again.

  The address began without fanfare. Bronwen briefly explained the case in a matter-of-fact manner and asked that all questions be kept until the address had ended.

  Pictures began displaying on the screen. First, there were images of the fallen fuel tanker on the dark highway—flames still bursting skyward. These were accompanied by pictures of Rodney White’s car off the side of the road—later found to be owned by a woman named Wendy Williams. Next, photos of Gemma and Hayley filled the screen—hair tangled, skin bruised, and dresses covered in blood. These images had been snapped soon after they were rescued and taken to safety.

  A variety of images and video of Rodney White’s house, land and aviaries were shown next. The inside of the house was a pigsty. The land was bare except for junk. Two cages stood inside a large shed, each about two metres square and four metres high. Large, sad-looking birds—cockatoos—were huddled together in one of the cages. Dirty straw covered the floors of the aviaries. There was nowhere else for the girls to have sat or slept. It would have been itchy and prickly and uncomfortable to sleep on. The aviaries were dark. Not much sunlight getting in at all. The ventilation would have been awful. How did the birds survive, let alone teenage girls?

  Megan’s stomach tensed as the video camera display stopped for a moment on a crumpled pile of girls’ clothing in a corner of an unoccupied cage.

  Next came a catalogue of items belonging to Rodney’s rape victims. Six victims in total. Rodney had apparently been careful not to show his face to them, always wearing an old balaclava. The last rape had been years ago, and none of the victims had been held for longer than three hours, as far as police could tell. The victims had been identified, and their rape cases now solved. Rodney had been the perpetrator. The investigation was continuing, to discover if there had been additional victims.

  Joe announced that they were moving onto the cold room. His voice sounded drawn and flat—very unlike Joe.

  The cold room presentation began with photographs. Full colour. Dead persons sitting in a circle. Strapped to chairs.

  The faces had been blurred out, but images filled Megan’s mind anyway—faces drained of colour and eyes devoid of life.

  The victims were all young, as had been reported on the news. Megan caught a glimpse of the only older person—a woman wearing a floral blouse and pink skirt. Red hair in a neat bob. Sunglasses in her blouse pocket. Sensible shoes. Leah Halcombe. Most likely, those were the things she’d dressed herself in the day she died—not knowing those would be the clothes she would end her life in.

  The silence that blanketed the room was so thick it was almost smothering.

  The pictures were confirmation that serial killers existed, because here was their handiwork. It was something so far outside of the normal world that it was hard to grasp. It was a bucket of ice-cold water thrown on your
face while you were sleeping.

  Bronwen informed the media that they could describe these visions of the cold room, but they wouldn’t be provided with photographs, and out of respect to the victims’ families, members of the media were not to describe any of the victims personally. With that, she ended the media address.

  Question time came after that. The first question came in a brash tone from a journalist asking how Gemma and Hayley had been able to leave the hospital so easily and if the police had found them yet.

  As question time was ending, Megan slipped around to the backstage area. She came out and gave a brief address to the media about Gemma and Hayley. She spoke about two frightened but brave girls who’d been through the unimaginable, hoping her words would clear up some of the more ludicrous speculation that was being tossed about.

  With her part in the conference done, she hoped to catch Bronwen and Joe for a chat about Leah. But they were now in discussion with a roomful of detectives.

  She walked out of the hall and back into the furnace-like heat outside. Tourists in colourful summer clothing thronged everywhere as she drove through the busy streets of Darwin. It was a pretty, green city, ringed with ocean. The scenery was welcome after the dark images she’d just seen in the hall.

  She headed onto the Stuart Highway for the long drive back.

  Some details niggled at her. There was a very damning case against the dead Rodney White, but when and why had he graduated from raping women to murdering a range of people? The second type of crime was inherently riskier than the first. She knew that people who committed these terrible crimes sometimes started getting bolder and bolder and committing worse atrocities. But still, it wasn’t good practice to make assumptions about people’s motives.

  As soon as she was home, she stepped into the shower and washed away the dust of the highway. But she couldn’t clean the images of the cold room and birdcage from her mind.