by Candice Fox
“Nanna doesn’t mind all the noise?” I asked.
“She’s deaf as a post,” the man said.
“Funny. Our bar manager seems to think she’s made a bunch of complaints in the past about noise from the bar.” I jerked my thumb behind me at the bar. “The two seem to have an old-lady rivalry happening. She’s asked me to come have a word with you about the jackhammering.”
“Oh, right.” He stopped with the concrete pile and stretched his back. “I guess it’s not about the noise for these lot, though, is it?”
“No, it never is.”
“They just like to stir up trouble. Get bored in their twilight years.”
“Yep,” I said. “I’ve seen it before.” Most of my first years as a young copper were spent going around parties and worksites, passing on noise complaints and writing citations where they were needed. A lot of the time it wasn’t about the noise. It was about a perceived insult that happened years earlier, maybe someone’s dog crapping every morning on the neighbor’s front lawn. The amount of dust a worksite caused in someone’s living room. Noise complaints were just the simplest and most anonymous form of neighborly vengeance. All it took was a phone call.
“Try to just keep it to the council hours,” I said. “Eight to five.”
“You got it, chief.” The young man saluted. “How’s everything over there? You catch the guy?”
“Not yet.”
“The coppers came round but we couldn’t help.” He glanced at the old woman in the chair. “Should she be concerned, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t worry her,” I said. “Just keep the doors locked at night. All the usual stuff.” He stood back and squinted as he spied something over my shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw Amanda walking carefully across the rooftop of the Barking Frog, setting her feet between vine-covered tiles before taking each step.
“Amanda!” I ran back across the creek, shielding my eyes from the morning sun. “Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”
“Getting a new perspective,” she called, then pointed. “Oi, there’s a snake up here! A big green one!”
“Get down before you kill yourself!”
Sweeney arrived at my side. Amanda wobbled as a clump of vines gave way under her foot.
“Uh-oh!” She grinned. “Close one!”
“What the fuck is she doing?” Sweeney groaned.
“Probably looking for the gun,” I said. “Did you send anyone up onto the roof?”
Sweeney blushed. I guessed she hadn’t. I looked down the creek to where the officers were picking through the rocks with sticks. If Amanda brought down the gun right now, it would be a real coup. Typical Amanda.
“You find the gun?” I called.
“Nope.”
I felt disappointment tug on my shoulders. Amanda came to the edge of the roof and leaned over. “But here. Catch this.”
She hefted a cloth bag down toward me. I caught it against my chest.
“What is this?”
“I found it up here.” Amanda pointed to the corner of the roof. “There’s all sorts of stuff up here. Look! A bunny!” She held up a stuffed toy bunny, filthy and dripping. “I might wash this and give it to your cat-wife!”
“What’s in the bag?” Sweeney asked, leaning over. I loosened the drawstring and opened it.
“It’s cash,” I said. I drew a wad of yellow fifties tied with an elastic band out of the bag and showed it to Sweeney. Her eyes grew wide. “The bar’s takings.”
Dear Diary,
I learned about her. I learned more than my mind could contain, so that for the next few days I was wandering around in a dream, trying not to count off the seconds until she got home from school and came back onto my screen, my little telephone pet appearing again from outer space. I did the best I could to hide it from Chloe, but of course she noticed me glued to the thing, smiling to myself, holding it up to my ear so that I could hear Penny’s mumblings as she narrated the dismal lives of her dolls.
I learned that Penny was just on the cusp of giving up on those impossibly long-legged beauties. Sometimes, in the midst of play, she’d stare fixedly at their painted eyes, give their rubber faces an experimental push. I knew how she felt. I’d stood and watched Chloe in the bathroom mirror caking on her evening war paint before a night out with the girls, smearing over pocked skin, an instant tan that made her older and harder at once. Penny’s dolls were dying in her hands, withering and wilting the way real women did. I lay in bed and listened to Chloe coming home, snickering with her friends, filling the house with the smell of smoke. Using words Penny wouldn’t even know. Blistering assessments of their lecturers, their parents, their bosses. The oppressors. When would the little girl next door become one of these cracked, sagging dolls?
Through the nanny cam, I watched her dress. I watched her sleep. One night, in sickening joy, I watched as she took the bear from the shelf and brought it into the bed with her, her mouth blurred, too close to the bear’s eyes, falling open as she drifted away, her breath fogging the camera. I’d long since given up any hope of not finding myself in love with Penny. I was in deep. Not sinking but sunk, consumed by the weight of the ocean, the pressure squeezing my brain. I wasn’t fooling myself anymore—I knew that I was watching, wide-eyed, straining to listen all the time, every moment, for my way in.
Nothing had worked so far. I’d picked up tiny details about the boy band she liked, and her favorite shows, and the girls who were picking on her at school, and bounced them back to her over the fence during our little conversations. She must have thought I was ultra-cool, being into all the things she was. I was turning the dial, microscopic movements, trying to find the right signal all the time. Now and then there were flickers and blips, but she remained distant from me, a wary bird who’d come to peck a few seeds before fluttering away.
Life was excruciatingly mundane without her. I didn’t know how I’d survived it before she arrived in my world. Bills had to be paid. Sports games watched and beers drunk. The car died. I should have gone and bought another one without Chloe, but she wanted to spend quality time with me, turn the whole thing into an adventure. I spotted an old white van, and I wanted it. I told myself and Chloe that it was because of the extra space—it would make our next rental move easier. I tempted her with the escapades she so loved—we could throw a mattress in the back, go camping. Hooray! What a nightmare. A van would make shopping easier too. Practical lies. We fought. It was all I could do to hide my passion for the idea. Stay hidden. Stay hidden. Force it down. We compromised on a ute bought from an ad in the paper. Pale blue. I put it in her name, just in case.
The air seemed full of tumult. Penny had got the idea from her mother that there was a puppy in store for her birthday, and though her birthday had come and gone she was convinced still—must have overheard something about a surprise and misinterpreted it. She’d drawn a bunch of pictures of herself to try to move the puppy-surprise along, cheeky suggestions, a pointy-eared thing she couldn’t bear to waste time coloring in before she presented them to her mother. I paused the feed on the image of her, stick-figured and grinning grotesquely, a red lead encircling the neck of the equally ecstatic-looking hound.
When Penny had had enough of her not-so-subtle games she’d asked her mother. Mum said no. She’d entertained the playful suggestions long enough. There would be no dog—there had never been plans for a dog. Penny protested, said she’d heard her mother talking on the phone to another mother about a surprise. She was wrong, and was scolded for listening in on private phone calls. The hurt. It was almost unbearable to watch. I knew what it was like to take something small and whip it into a huge, all-consuming, deeply convincing fantasy, only to be let down. I’d sat in the bathroom with my headphones plugged in and listened to Penny crying on her bed, watching the sobs racking out of her on the screen, making her small body shudder.
This was it. I’d found my way in.
I didn’t stay away from home for long. A heavy drea
d had settled in my chest. I needed to know what Dale Bingley wanted from me, if anything at all, and make decisions about the problem when I had more information. Compartmentalizing. Coping by overanalyzing the situation, micro-focusing. I’d done plenty of it in drug squad. Trying to cope with difficult or traumatic cases by thinking of one thing at a time, dealing with one small problem and ignoring the tornado swirling around me. See to the Barking Frog investigation. Now see to Dale Bingley. Later, think about all the other horrors. The Melanie Springfield allegation. The press. The vigilantes. The old, weary hurt that came from missing my family. All that could wait.
When I walked into the house and found it quiet and empty, I felt a rush of exhilaration. He was gone. Then a crushing downward dive as I spotted the top of his head through the kitchen window, his daughter’s white-blond hair turning as he heard me walking through the house.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge, resisted the temptation to take the Wild Turkey bottle on the counter by the neck and sink it all.
He was sitting on the couch where I’d left him. There was a glass of whiskey at his elbow, the crumpled papers from the envelope in his lap. The geese had all gathered in the shade at the very end of the property near the fence, seemingly more comfortable sitting within meters of croc-infested waters than wandering anywhere near the stranger on the porch. I followed their lead, stood in the corner of the porch furthest from him, the beer tasteless and painfully cold.
Neither of us spoke. I watched him shuffle the papers, settling on each for a second or two before putting it at the back of the pile. I got the impression he had been sitting there doing this for hours. I knew the papers by glance.
A photocopy of an ad from a Mount Annan newspaper, advertising a white dog free to a good home.
A screenshot from CCTV footage of a blue ute not far from Claire’s abduction site on the day she went missing.
A screenshot from CCTV of a man with a blue ute and a white dog outside the Yagoona RSPCA.
“Claire spoke about a white dog,” Dale said suddenly, jolting me from dark thoughts. He sipped the whiskey. “I heard it, in the beginning, mixed in with all the other stuff she was saying. The gibberish. She said it again in counseling afterward. And she drew a picture of it. When they made her do those … those art therapy sessions.”
“Did she ever…” I cleared my throat. “Did she ever say what it meant?”
“No,” Dale answered.
We fell silent for a long time. Leads about the white dog had always been perplexing for me. Claire talking about a white dog in the days after her attack was the only thing that connected the man with the blue ute and the white dog to what had happened. Maybe it was nothing—coincidence. Claire talking about whatever fluttered through her traumatized brain, and a man, a random, unconnected man, simply obtaining a white dog from a pair of British people on the same morning of the abduction. Except that the man had injured the dog somehow, accidentally or intentionally, and then dumped it at the Yagoona RSPCA. His actions seemed unusual and cruel. But maybe they were not connected at all to Claire’s abduction.
Or maybe they were. Maybe the man obtained the dog with the specific intention of luring a girl with it somehow. Inviting her to pat it, or asking her to help him find it, telling her it was in the area somewhere, lost. When Amanda had presented me with the white dog angle I hadn’t wanted to do anything with it. I had passed on information about the blue ute and the dog to Innocent Ted. But I had not told anyone the dog was injured when it arrived at the RSPCA. It seemed one of those strange details that I needed to keep to myself, in case we ever found the man who’d dumped the dog, or a man saying he was him.
I still didn’t want to do anything with the lead. I’d passed it on, and it was now someone else’s responsibility. I drew a breath and prepared to tell Dale in the politest way possible to leave my house.
“I don’t believe you’re innocent,” Dale said, before I could speak.
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing.
“I can’t believe in your innocence,” he went on. He shrugged a little, helplessly. “It’s not something my brain is ready for, I guess. I’ve hated you for so long, so intensely, that I can’t…” He glanced at me. Wary. “I can’t…”
“I understand,” I said.
“But I have to know what this is about.” He lifted the papers. “If this man has something to do with it.”
“Okay.” I realized I’d finished the beer. I was waiting for him to tell me that he was leaving. That he’d take the papers to the police, maybe involve Amanda, get her to explain in detail everything she’d learned about the man with the white dog, point investigators down in Sydney in the right direction. But he didn’t move. I became aware that he was waiting for me to speak. Then, with a shock, I realized what he wanted.
“I can’t help you,” I said.
“Yes you can.”
“I don’t want anything to do with this.” I held my hands up. “I’m trying to put my life back together here. I’ve got new problems to deal with. I mean, you’ve heard about the new accusation…”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, then, you understand, my life is shit right now,” I struggled for words. He hardly seemed to be listening. “I mean, this woman is saying that I—”
“I can’t think about that.” He shook his head. “I need to think about this.” He lifted the papers again. Compartmentalizing. Trying to get through it, one problem at a time.
I held my head. Reminded myself that I was dealing with someone very traumatized. Maybe not in his right mind.
“The police will—”
“I’m not going to the police.” He took a long sip of whiskey. “If we find him, I don’t want them getting in my way.”
I scoffed. I shouldn’t have. He looked at me, and I felt a stab of pain in my chest, my body recognizing the pain this man had inflicted on me, the power and strength his rage had inspired in his body the night he attacked me. This is a dangerous, unhinged man, I told myself. A man on the edge. There was a right and a wrong way to get him out of my life. If I didn’t handle this situation carefully, he might hurt someone. Himself. Me.
“Where do we start?” he asked.
I struggled to answer. Leaned on the railing and tried to focus on my geese, my safe zone, the mottled shade where they sat preening themselves and snoozing, beaks tucked into feathered backs. As I stood watching, their corner of the property seemed further and further away. I was being sucked back into the horror of my past. Into the wild, painful world of what had happened to Dale’s child, the storm brought down upon her that had accidentally swept me up.
“There are things you could do,” I reasoned, trying to sound as noncommittal as I could. “I mean, I could start you off, and then you could go. Go pursue the case by yourself. We could try to find out the make and model of the car in the picture. Get a list of registered vehicles that match the color, the type. Check it against a known sex offender list. Look for cars bought or sold around the time. But I’m not taking it any further. I give you some stuff and you go away and you don’t come back…”
My words trailed off. I wasn’t convincing anyone. I’d opened the door a crack on a world of half thoughts I’d tried not to pursue as I lay awake, night after night. I was a detective. I knew how to pursue Claire’s attacker. I’d always known. I slammed the door shut on those thoughts, closed my eyes and tried to drive them away. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t go backward into my case. There was too much at stake. If I failed to catch the guy, I’d never be free of the accusation. I’d never get my life back.
But who was I kidding, thinking I could ever get my life back?
I didn’t realize Dale had stood until he spoke.
“Where’s your computer?” he said, almost to himself, opening the door to the kitchen. He was moving quickly. Invigorated. He’d left the whiskey on the arm of the couch. “I’ll get the computer.”
“You can’t stay here
,” I called. “You’ll have to get a motel room.”
He didn’t answer me.
* * *
In prison, I’d met a guy who was charged with the crime of prostituting a minor, his fifteen-year-old nephew. The guy and his nephew used to sit in the hallway of a local motel and wait for men to inquire over a website about meeting with the boy and paying for his services, at which point they’d go up to one of the motel rooms and prepare to meet with the client. Though of course I’d not wanted to hear stories like this, sometimes people talk at you in prison and don’t care whether you’re listening or not, and moving away from the conversation can be seen as an aggressive act. The guy was remorseless. He’d been complaining to me about what a waste of his time this activity had been. He only regretted that he’d sat in the hallway for hours upon hours with the boy, days upon days, just waiting, staring at the bare wall across the hall from where they sat.
“And now I sit in here,” he had said, gesturing to a wall near where we sat. “And I stare at this wall. I wasted my time on the outside. I should have … I should have…”
He’d struggled to articulate his dismay. I’d waited, watching, trying not to imagine what depraved activities he missed about the outside world. When he finally reached a decision, I was surprised.
“I should have walked,” he said.
I didn’t get it at the time. But I understood soon after my release. On the inside, you know exactly how far you can walk anywhere. Five steps to the end of the cell. Fifty steps across the cell block. A hundred and fifty steps from the cell block to the chow hall. You walk far enough and you’ll run into a fence. There are limits all around. The cage is only so big. It took me a while to realize when I was released that I could traverse the country on foot if I wanted to. No one could stop me. There were no bars anymore.
