by Candice Fox
TED: Sean, do we …
LARA: Ted, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
TED: Well, my name is Ted Conkaffey. I’m a father. I have a beautiful daughter, Lillian, who just turned two. Um. I used to be a drug squad detective with the New South Wales police, and now I work assisting a, uh, a private detective.
LARA: But that’s not why we’re here today, is it?
TED: No.
LARA: Why don’t you go on?
TED: Well, I … Last year I was arrested and charged with a terrible, terrible crime that I did not commit. That I had nothing at all to do with.
LARA: You seem to be having trouble even saying out loud what that crime was, Ted. Is that because you’re ashamed?
TED: No.
LARA: You’re not ashamed?
TED: I guess it is hard to say it out loud. It’s a horrible thing. But, I mean, sure, I’ll say it. The crime that I was charged with was the abduction, rape, and attempted murder of a thirteen-year-old girl.
LARA: Claire Bingley.
TED: Yes. Claire Bingley.
LARA: Ted, you told police you were, as the old saying goes, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That somehow, on the tenth of April 2016, at exactly 12:45 p.m., you pulled over into a bus stop on the side of the Hume Highway for some obscure reason, and that—
TED: I’m not sure the reason was completely obscure.
LARA: Just let me get this out for the sound bite.
TED: Sure. Okay.
LARA: And that you saw and spoke to thirteen-year-old Claire Bingley at the roadside. You were witnessed there, talking to the child, by no less than twelve people driving by on the highway. You said that when the coast was clear, when the highway became empty, you simply drove off, leaving the girl untouched.
TED: There are a few problems with what you’re saying there, Lara.
LARA: Are there?
TED: Yes.
LARA: Why don’t you set the record straight for the people of Australia, then, if you can.
TED: I pulled over that day because there was a noise in the back of my car. A tapping noise. I wanted to stop it. And that’s a fairly reasonable thing to do, I think.
LARA: Uh-huh.
TED: I didn’t even see the child standing there.
LARA: Claire Bingley, you mean? She has a name, Ted.
TED: But you just called her “the child.” Earlier, I mean.
LARA: Please, go on.
TED: I didn’t even see Claire. One of the witnesses said that I turned off the road suddenly, suggesting that I pulled over because I saw her. I never saw her. I was just trying to fix a noise. I got out of the car and I spoke to her, yes, but, I mean, I hardly even remember what I said. The whole thing was just nothing. It was all very casual.
LARA: What happened to Claire was “nothing”? It was “casual”?
TED: No, Lara. Jesus. My pulling over my car was casual. My intentions toward Claire were nonexistent. Nothing.
LARA: And then you just drove away. At the exact same time she was abducted.
TED: No, just before she was abducted.
LARA: It seems like an incredible tale, Ted. Some people would say “unbelievable.”
TED: People say all kinds of things, Lara.
LARA: You must be the unluckiest person in Australia.
TED: I … No. Nice try, but we both know that what has happened to me pales in comparison to what happened to Claire Bingley.
LARA: Still, you’ve lost everything. You lost your job. Your wife left you.
TED: I’d appreciate it if we left Kelly out of this, actually, if you don’t mind.
LARA: She left you rather suddenly.
TED: I don’t think—
LARA: Did Kelly know something about you that Australia didn’t? Was she surprised by what happened? By your arrest?
TED: Of course she was surprised!
LARA: Because there are some things we know about you, Ted. Some disturbing things we’ve uncovered during investigations into your life.
TED: Um.
LARA: You have a penchant for pornography featuring extremely young women. You and your wife, Kelly, fought on the morning of the incident.
TED: See, those two things are not related. You’re trying to make it sound like they’re related.
LARA: I think I’d be upset with my husband if I found he was addicted to pornography.
TED: Addicted! I’m not. I wasn’t addicted. I owned a couple of DVDs.
LARA: Why?
TED: Because … I don’t know. Men watch pornography, Lara. Hundreds of thousands of men. When you’re married, sometimes you’re tired or your wife is tired and your sex life starts to suffer a bit. Kelly and I were both working, and we had a newborn baby, and life just gets like that sometimes. Look, this isn’t relevant to the case. It’s not relevant to anything.
LARA: You don’t think it’s relevant that your sex life was “suffering,” as you call it, and you argued with your wife the day of Claire’s abduction? That you left the house in an agitated, aggressive state—
TED: I was not aggressive. I don’t get aggressive when I’m angry. I never have.
LARA: You don’t?
TED: No. If anything, I sulk. Ask my wife. She’ll tell you.
LARA: Your ex-wife?
TED: The divorce is—we’re still doing the paperwork. Do we have to put that in?
LARA: But you can become aggressive? You’re lying when you say you’re not aggressive.
TED: What are you talking about?
LARA: Wouldn’t you have been trained in your job as a drug squad cop to be aggressive? Isn’t your job all about kicking down doors and roughing people up? Manhandling people? Reacting with violence?
TED: This is ridiculous. You’re drawing some pretty bizarre parallels here.
LARA: Bizarre? You were arrested, Ted. You were charged. These ideas aren’t bizarre. They were convincing enough to compel the police to arrest you.
TED:
LARA: Your case, and the amount of attention it has received, has brought some very interesting characters out of the woodwork. There’s a podcast that has gained subscribers from all over the world that expounds on various theories about who Claire’s attacker might be.
TED: The Innocent Ted podcast has been very good to me.
LARA: Including its founder, one Fabiana Grisham. How did you meet Fabiana, Ted? What was the nature of your relationship?
TED: Platonic.
LARA: Really?
TED: I don’t have anything juicy or titillating to say to you about Fabiana and I. She was a reporter investigating the case. She founded a podcast about it. She believes in my innocence. Her support for me has made her life very difficult, and I don’t plan on making it any more difficult here. She’s a good reporter. A good person.
LARA: A good reporter might be stretching it. I have a list here of some of the theories mentioned in the podcast for your innocence. That you were framed by your colleagues in the police. That a serial killer was responsible. That—
TED: I haven’t listened to the show.
LARA: Why not?
TED: The whole thing is rather distressing to me.
LARA: I guess you might feel like the podcast just spreads information about your case further and further across the world, when you just want to forget it. Move on.
TED: Mmm-hmm.
LARA: Because you never know who might pop up out of the woodwork next, right?
TED: I suppose.
LARA: Well unfortunately for you, Ted, someone has popped up.
TED: Excuse me?
LARA: I’d like to play you a small section of video on a laptop here, and I’d like you to comment, if you can.
TED: What is this?
LARA: Just watch.
TED: Okay.
MELANIE: My name is Melanie Springfield. I dated Ted Conkaffey in high school. I was fifteen
when we met.
TED: Oh my god.
MELANIE: Ted and I had a strange relationship. I guess you always do, when you’re kids. Like, it’s never normal. You’re trying to figure out what real relationships are all about, how to navigate them, I guess. But at the time, almost from the beginning, I knew what was going on with Ted was very wrong. I’m ready to tell the world what really happened with him and me, and my little sister, Elise. Ted Conkaffey had a predatory relationship with my younger sister. He used me to get to her. She was eight years old.
TED: Oh my god.
LARA: Ted, do you have anything to say about what you’ve just seen?
TED: I … I don’t. I can’t believe this. Sean? Can we—
SEAN WILKINS:
LARA: Just ignore them. Answer my questions. Do you remember Melanie Springfield and her sister Elise?
TED: I remember Melanie. The sister, no. Not … not really. I mean I knew she had a sister. Sean, should I? I don’t know what to say. Jesus. Jesus.
LARA: Can you explain Melanie’s allegations?
TED: No. I can’t. Absolutely not. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I don’t know why she would say these things.
SEAN WILKINS: Stop the interview. Stop it right now.
LARA: It’s fine. It’s fine. Let’s go back to the day Claire was abducted.
TED: What?
LARA: Ted, let’s—
SEAN WILKINS: Turn the cameras off.
TED: Sean?
LARA: You agreed to an interview in full. You’re under contract.
TED: Why would she say that? Why would she say that?
Pip was fifteen when he died. She remembered the feeling of the afternoon sun on her narrow shoulders as she stood at the doorstep, looking at the slim enameled door handle waiting for her grip. The trigger of a starting gun on her evening nightmare. Pip had been doing everything she could to stay at school later and later as his drinking grew worse, offering to clean up the classroom after the last period, chatting to the reception staff as they saw the last buses off from the front gates. On Monday that week she’d picked a fight with her math teacher and scored herself a detention that took her to seven in the evening, when her father was already well into the sleepy phase of his drinking ritual, when he would stop rattling around the kitchen, kicking things over in the backyard, yelling about the neighbors. When he would sink, like an angry guard dog, into the safety of his chair.
This afternoon, there’d been no cleaning to be done at the school. The receptionists had all brushed her off, and her math teacher had been in too good a mood to do more than roll his eyes at her taunts. She’d wandered the local parks throwing stones in the ponds and scratching up the dirt with her shoes. She couldn’t avoid him forever. So at five o’clock Pip walked into her house and heard him inside, slamming the door of the fridge.
Into the dark, cold cloud of his presence.
Pip put her bag on the hook in the hall and called out a greeting. He didn’t answer. When he was out of the recliner by the television he was at his most dangerous, so she held her breath, went to the bedroom, shut the door quietly.
She wasn’t naïve. Pip knew she had it lucky, as far as arsehole fathers went. One of her friends at school had told her how her father had dragged her into the backyard by her hair and kicked her in the ribs after he caught her stealing from his wallet. She’d read newspaper articles about fathers who sold their little girls to the sex trade, burned them with cigarettes, wiped them out one night after being sacked from his corporate job. Pip’s father didn’t do any of those things. He just grabbed her and squeezed her every now and then. Squeezed her until her muscles ached, growled something in her ear so low she barely heard it or so loud her eardrums pulsed. He shoved her sometimes. He’d left a bruise on her hip this week knocking her out of the way of the back door. She had a three-stripe purple band around the top of her arm from him yanking her out of the corner of the kitchen. It wasn’t much on the scale of things. And it hadn’t been happening long.
Her mother had only been gone a year. Pip had been spending her lunches at school touring the internet, trying to find her, like a detective. She saw glimmers of the drawn, pale woman she knew mentioned in the comments of her friends and workmates on MySpace, but never the woman herself. She’d scanned pictures of men and women at parties or on the beach for the outline of her, the long wispy hair, her pointed features. Pip didn’t know what she’d say if she ever found her. She supposed her first question might be why she never said goodbye. Why she didn’t take Pip with her. Why she left her here with him. They’d been wandering in the fog of anger and sadness that surrounded him all the time, holding hands, hoping, rather than knowing, that somewhere just beyond their reach the fog would clear and there would be a safe haven. Pip’s mother had dropped her hand and dissolved into the mist without warning. Without, it seemed, regret.
The questioning pulsed in her mind all the time, suddenly stopping time, causing her to sometimes find herself standing, staring at the floor, feeling the loss of her mother. Trying to make an absent limb move and function again, failing silently.
She snapped out of her dream. Pip knew she couldn’t lock herself away in the bedroom for too long. He’d feel neglected. She changed into a T-shirt and shorts and opened the door again, stepped back into the cold fog. He was at the window looking out, sunset lighting his bristly face. It was one of the last times she would see him alive. Red in his irises. Reflections of clouds.
“I don’t feel good,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, taking the empty brown bottles from where they stood lined like soldiers along the back of the sink.
“What the fuck do you think I mean? I mean I don’t feel good. I don’t feel well.”
“It’s been hot today,” she offered, wincing. There had been back-burning across the nearby national park. Cutting back, thinning the rainforest. Trains and trucks trying to shift the cane before the fire season began. She’d smelled smoke on the wind walking home.
She started on the washing up. Felt her father watching her. The memories of the first time he had grabbed her wouldn’t fade. He’d been standing by the table, reading the note her mother left, and Pip had come crashing through the front door of the house into his upturned world like a happy puppy. A year had passed, and she still remembered the feel of the bones in his fingers pressing into her flesh like it was happening in that very instant.
“You don’t fucking care,” her dad concluded when she had nothing more to add about his being unwell. She tried to think what her mother might have said if she were there, but came up with nothing. She was the child. She was the one who was supposed to go to him unwell, needing care, solutions, sympathy. The world hadn’t righted itself after her mother left. It was still backward, her father throwing a tantrum, she trying to focus on the dishes.
When he went to the recliner, she exhaled with relief. Rainbows on the bubbles at her fingers. His sudden yelp was like electricity, made her skin break out in little sparkles of pain.
“What is it?”
“I said I don’t know!” He rubbed his chest. “I don’t feel good!”
“What can I do?”
He seemed to be hiccupping. Or coughing. Grabbing at his ribs. She stood with her back to the kitchen counter and watched, frozen, every muscle taut. Pip knew what it was before he did. The confusion blazed in the whites of his eyes.
Only two weeks earlier she’d sat with her friends on the floorboards in the school hall while the PE teacher wrestled with the old television and DVD player, trying to make the blue screen flicker with life. She’d watched, halfheartedly picking rubber from the soles of her shoes, as cartoon people pumped on cartoon chests and breathed into gaping mouths, lips locking perfectly over lips while numbers flashed on the screen. The training video’s voice-over was strangely cheerful as its characters tried desperately to save the lives of children pulled from pools and elderly men fal
len from treadmills.
NEXT, observe if the patient is breathing. It’s important to LOOK! LISTEN! and FEEL!
The cartoon people in the CPR training video had remained pretty and happily smiling, even through unconsciousness. Pip’s father was not happy. He twisted toward her, out of the chair, still making those little hiccups of breathless pain, loose strands of his dirty hair shivering. His eyes went to the cordless phone on the counter beside her. The words wouldn’t come. Pip didn’t look. She knew what he wanted. Knew the phone was there. Knew she should grab it and dial.
But she didn’t.
Pip didn’t move. Her father crawled unsteadily toward her across the living room floor to the edge of the kitchen, reaching, the pain seeming to make him want to curl his body into a ball. His face flushed purple, then white, the dark cloud now inside him, swelling up and out through the surface of his skin. He collapsed within centimeters of her. Hand grabbing, fingers extended, for her foot.
She slid down the kitchen counter and looked at the top of his head. The bald spot. The unfamiliar shape of his face from above, still brows and dots of sweat on the bridge of his nose.
Seconds passed. Minutes. She imagined herself leaping forward, rolling him into the recovery position, checking for a pulse as an inappropriately merry voice narrated, Now Pip’s applying her hands to the STERNUM REGION!
She did not apply her hands to the sternum region. She had, in time, reached up, pulled herself into a crouch, her whole body suddenly heavy with fatigue, shaking as she moved. She took the cordless phone, fell back against the cupboards, clutched it at her chest.
Still, she didn’t dial.
She watched her father die of a heart attack on the floor of their little kitchen, and didn’t perform CPR, and didn’t call for an ambulance. Switches and dials inside him flipped off, one at a time. The lights going out along wide, empty hallways, death walking from room to airless, soulless room, shutting the windows and doors. Pulling the curtains. Closing time. Pip clasped the handset to her chest like a child’s doll and did nothing. A last red slice of sunlight lingered on the ceiling in the living room, narrow and long like a finish line. It faded and disappeared, and sometime after it was gone she pushed the spongy buttons on the phone and said the words she was supposed to say.
