by Candice Fox
“Oh you’ll have a devastatingly rugged scar.” She smiled. “But the ‘chicks dig scars,’ so they say.”
She gave my shoulder a few hard pats like a mother proudly testing the solidity of her grown-up son.
“So what’s so odd about a young woman wanting to see her dead boyfriend off? Aren’t you supposed to view the body for closure?”
“Just an odd tone to her voice,” Val said. “I thought it would be prudent to have someone else present, just in case. How are my birds?”
“They’re good,” I said. “I’m looking forward to having time to keep working on their house.”
“Once you get the ghost out of yours,” she said.
“Mmm.”
“Are they going to be safe in Mr. Bingley’s company while you’re away?”
“He doesn’t seem to mind them,” I said. I tried to explain what it was like living with a man who one minute was prepared to put his hand in mine, and the next minute threatened to kill me. Val stood with a palm on the steel autopsy table, hip cocked, watching my face with concern.
“When are you going back down to Sydney?” she asked.
“I thought I’d take off this afternoon,” I said. “I don’t want to be anywhere I’m known to frequent when the show goes to air.”
I’d told Val about my guilt at not being able to stay and continue the case with Amanda and Sweeney, that I had to head back down to Sydney to make an official statement on Melanie Springfield’s accusation. At precisely seven that night, Stories and Lives was going to air my interview, complete with the snippet about a “predatory relationship” with her eight-year-old sister and my response. I’d glanced at my watch a hundred times that day already, counting down the hours until the next chapter of my nightmare began.
In time Val wheeled out Andrew Bell’s body from a room behind two huge swinging doors. A couple of friends and family members who couldn’t make the funeral had decided to come and view the body, so Val had asked the funeral director to come in early and dress Andrew. He was dressed in a neat black suit with fine pinstripes, expensive. The tie was an oddly joyful floral print, pink and red. The director had done what she could with his head, but the back of Andrew’s skull had been obliterated during the shooting and she had been forced to shave the rest of it to document the injuries. In stark contrast to his suit, Andrew was wearing a Brisbane Broncos football team beanie, the rearing horse emblem pulled low on his smooth forehead. As per custom, Val took a white sheet from the shelves beside a rack of tools and spread it over the body only seconds before a buzzer announced Stephanie’s entry.
The receptionist brought her in. Stephanie walked weakly, her steps shorter than usual, the hesitant tread of someone struggling under the physical weight of grief. She burst into tears at the sight of the figure on the gurney, hardly seeming to question my presence in the room at all.
I went to her and held her. It seemed the only real option when I realized Val wasn’t going to. Val had probably realized long ago that hugging the families of her victims wasn’t worth the emotional toll it would take on her later as she lay awake at night, remembering their shoulders shuddering in her arms, the intimate feel of their gasping breath on her skin. They tell you not to hug victims in your initial training in the police. When you hug you cross the professional barrier, the one that’s supposed to keep you safe from the horrors of your job.
“Are you sure you need to do this?” I asked. “There are other ways you can say goodbye to Andrew.”
“He’s not going to look how you’re used to him looking,” Val said. “It might affect your memory of him when he was alive.”
“I want to see,” Stephanie said, drawing away from me. She let a few sobs escape her thin lips, pushed back a lock of sweaty hair. She was not taking care of herself, this girl, and that worried me. There had been no one supporting her at the crime scene except Michael Bell, and no sign that her parents were going to come from interstate to help her get through her loss. Here she was again, alone. I knew Sweeney had put two officers on Stephanie, but she’d likely not insisted it be twenty-four hours a day or involve more than parking in the street outside her house while she was inside.
Val pulled the sheet back to Andrew’s waist. Stephanie looked for a few seconds then turned and shoved her face into my chest.
“It’s okay,” I lied. I waved at Val and she covered the body again. “This is … This is all going to…”
What was there to say? This was all going to be over soon? This was all going to go away? Neither of those things was true. I was hardly focusing on the girl crying in my arms, trying to think back to when I was fifteen. My mother had died of breast cancer. There hadn’t been much to say then, either. Lots of uncomfortable looks. People turning away from me at school, going to play with other kids, leaving me with my weird, incomprehensible grief. I hadn’t even cried at first. It seemed impossible to accept, her being gone, for either my dad or me. We’d avoided each other for weeks afterward, neither of us wanting to be the one to break the standoff. I was so lost in these thoughts when Stephanie spoke that I hardly heard what she said.
“I did it,” Stephanie cried. I rubbed her back, my hand thumping up and down over pointy bones.
“You didn’t do anything. This was a horrible, horrible thing. It doesn’t matter that—”
“I did it, Mr. Conkaffey.” Stephanie drew away from me, wiped her face. She looked up at me, her mouth trembling, a downturned line. “It was me. I did it.”
Dr. Valerie Gratteur was at the head of the gurney, about to push Andrew’s body away toward the double doors. An unlit cigarette hung from her bottom lip, her mouth open in shock. I stared at the medical examiner, trying to put my thoughts in order. Stephanie’s hand came up to my arm, and with a weight that didn’t seem to fit with her tiny figure, she gripped me, as though hanging on against a terrible current.
“I was there that night,” Stephanie said. “I killed them.”
Val gave me a look that said “I told you so” and began wheeling the gurney with Andrew Bell’s body on it away to give us time. I took a chair from Val’s workbench and dragged it to where Stephanie stood. She eased into it like she was favoring fresh wounds.
“I’m going to turn on the recorder on my phone,” I told Stephanie. “Is that okay? I really think we need to … uh…”
“It’s fine. It’s okay.” Stephanie nodded, wiping tears. “I know you have to do what you have to do.”
The girl had become stiff, numb. Val crept into the room and stood leaning against a spare gurney near us. I brought up the voice memo app on my phone and started recording.
“You’re not obliged to say anything at all to me,” I said. “You’re here of your own free will. No one’s threatening you. No one’s pressuring you right now. Would you agree?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said, nodding.
The hand that held the phone was shaking. I tapped the screen, made doubly sure the seconds were being recorded.
“I’m Ted Conkaffey,” I said. I’d forgotten the old scripts I used to use for interviews, the ones that ensured the confession was useful to Sweeney and her team. My career as a police officer seemed a million years ago. “I’m in the presence of Dr. Valerie Gratteur of the Cairns Hospital’s Forensic and Scientific Services office, and Stephanie Neash. Stephanie, you’ve … you’ve just said something to me and I think it might be a good idea if you say it again for the recording.”
I stated the date and time, having almost forgotten to, struggling to decide if this was appropriate. She was over eighteen, legally an adult. I wasn’t obliged to wait until she had a lawyer or a parent or guardian with her. The recording I was about to make might not stand up in any courthouse. But exhilaration and terror were coursing through me, and all I knew was that I wanted to capture what she was about to say even if it meant it would be legally problematic.
“I killed Keema and Andrew,” Stephanie said. She blurted the words between sobs, eyes fixed on
the floor before her. “I was there that night. I knew about the affair already. I found out weeks ago. I was so mad I just killed them both. I was so mad, so humiliated. I’m so fucking humiliated.”
Stephanie held a fist to her eyes, seemed to want to beat at her forehead with it. Val lit the cigarette she’d been intending to have and started sucking hard on it, blowing smoke over her shoulder. I felt a sudden impulse to ask her for one, to do the same.
“Can you go back for me?” I asked. “When did you discover the affair, exactly? How did you find out about Andrew’s relationship with Keema?”
“I don’t know when it was exactly. You could look it up, probably. I sent her a message. He had been acting weird,” Stephanie said. Her voice was tiny. I held the phone toward her. “He was attached by a fucking string to his phone. It went everywhere with him. Even into the shower. My girlfriends said that that’s when you know—when they start taking the phone to the bathroom with them instead of leaving it hanging around the house. So I went through it. The only time I could get at the phone was when he was asleep. All the messages were deleted. All the texts. All the Facebook chats. I saw this girl I didn’t know in his list and I sent her a message.”
“Who this?” I said. Stephanie lifted her eyes to me.
“Yes. That was the message.”
“She didn’t answer.”
“No.”
“When did you know definitively that they were having an affair?”
“I went to the bar one night while they were both closing up.” Stephanie wiped tears from her cheeks, drew a long breath that came out shuddering. “I saw her get into his car. She should have left before him, but the two of them left together. He must have driven her home. He got back to his dad’s place an hour later. I was sleeping over, in his bedroom. He said they’d had a customer stay late.”
Val Gratteur eased a long stream of smoke through her lips. She tapped the end of the cigarette into a petri dish she’d taken from a refrigerator and folded her arms, eyes wandering over the girl in the chair.
“I was so embarrassed.” Stephanie’s voice rose high as the sadness crashed over her again. The humiliation seemed to be the hardest part. “I didn’t even tell anyone. Not Andrew. Not his dad. I just didn’t say anything. I pretended. Maybe I thought if I kept pretending, it…”
“It wouldn’t be real,” I finished for her.
She hung her head in her hands.
“I went there again,” Stephanie said. Her voice had lost all emotion now. It was cold and worn, a beaten thing. “That night. Tuesday night. I saw them together. They were laughing and singing as they packed up the bar. He grabbed her around the waist. They kissed.”
Val and I waited. Stephanie didn’t speak.
“Where did you get the gun?” I asked. “Where is it now?”
Stephanie struggled. She looked around her as though awakened from a dream, eyes wide.
“Maybe it was Andrew’s?” Val offered. “His dad’s?”
“Try not to suggest any information.” I raised a hand. “She’s got to give us these details herself.”
There was a growing unease in my stomach, something about Stephanie’s wandering glance, her restless hands. She looked distressed. Uncertain. Now and then I could see the anger crossing her face like clouds drifting across the moon, darkening everything, making her still. The tears were still rolling down her cheeks. She swiped at them too hard, stretched her skin as she did, a girl who’d known very little comfort in a long, long time.
“I don’t remember much before or after. The clearest part is being there, watching them. The gun—I think it must have been Michael’s,” she said. “I don’t know what I did with it. I was walking around in a sort of haze. I still am. I haven’t slept.”
She fell into sobs for a while. Val and I watched her rocking gently in the chair, one knee jogging, ankle tendons straining under her loose cotton pants.
“I’m so tired,” she moaned.
“Okay, we’re done.” I shut off the phone recording. “I’m going to make some calls. We’ll go see Detective Inspector Sweeney. She can get you a bed set up at the station and then we can talk about all this later.”
Stephanie stood, her arms clasped tight against her chest. She seemed to stand there wondering if I’d hold her again, if things had changed now that I knew that she’d taken two lives, that she was a damaged and dangerous creature. I wrapped an arm around her and held her to me. She was so small and cold, untouched by the warmth of my body.
“It’ll be all right,” I said, though I had no basis for knowing if that was true. “It’ll be all right.”
Dear Diary,
Even as I write this, I can see how futile words are. How impossible it will be to express what happened on paper, how I felt. I can describe physically what happened to me as I turned away from Andrea’s closed door and headed back toward the ute, tugging the dog along with me. My body temperature skyrocketed. My teeth locked together. A pressure swelled in my brain so fast and so heavy that my eyes were clouded with green exploding spots and splashes of red color. I almost forgot about the animal altogether. Got into the car without it, found the lead, yanked it up by the neck and threw it onto the passenger seat. The mutt’s howling made things worse. I couldn’t breathe. I drew the car away from the curb and roared down the road.
People talk about blacking out with anger, acting without knowing what you’ve done. Yes, there was some of that. I drove, going nowhere, faster than I could help but not fast enough, apparently, to attract any attention. I got onto highways. Got off again. But for the most part, I was there watching, as something, some black and swirling collection of smoke, another body, climbed into mine and I willingly let it take control. I surrendered, and the fury drove. I was helpless to do anything but crawl into a corner of my own being and scream about how perfectly it had all been about to be, and how viciously it had been stolen from me, my dream. My one.
Penny. Penny. Penny. Penny.
Did Andrea know how long I had been looking for Penny?
She was too stupid. People like that can’t comprehend that a soul could search for another soul beyond time, beyond physicality, beyond Earth. To get in between the meeting of two souls was the worst crime. The most vile and evil crime. I shook with it. Outrage. I was demented. The dog crawled into the footwell of the passenger seat and whimpered, panted. I ignored it. I drove and drove, my body hard as a rock in the driver’s seat, rigid with pain.
Only the sight of her drew me out of it. A flash, a shock of white at the corner of my vision. I reeled in my seat, glimpsed her out of the back window standing alone at the bus stop kicking dirt. Like a bubble bursting, the anger rose and split and I was flooded with relief. So fleeting, the distraction. All my muscles relaxed. I gulped air, turned the car down a side road and crept back toward where I had seen her. There was a strip of bush behind the bus stop, thick brambles, tangles of wild unflowering bougainvillea covered in thorns. I got out of the car and stood looking at her through the brush.
She could have been Penny with that hair. A hand curled at her side, slender white fingers picking at the belt loops on her jeans. When she turned and glanced up the road I saw that she was not Penny at all but a pointier, frailer version. Straight, skeptical eyebrows. Big lips. I hardly got the details. The fury was climbing again. Rising, rising. I was shaking. I watched cars whizzing past.
I was beginning to understand what I would do. Had known all along, really, from the moment I pulled off the road. Maybe it had been there longer, the plan. Maybe it was there when I wanted to buy the van. Maybe it was there when I was a teenager, dreaming. It was only fully formed now. The thoughts were coming clearer. Coming with words. With cautions. With whispered promises.
A car pulled over next to the girl suddenly. I watched, shaking violently, as a big man got out, balked at the sight of the girl standing there. The two examined each other. I crouched, gripped the trunk of a nearby tree with one hand, my mind screamin
g.
The big man fiddled with his car as more cars whizzed past on the road. Said something to her. Her voice tinkled back, too soft to be much more than baby-bird murmurs through the bush. The big man raked a hand through his black hair, waved goodbye and left.
The highway was empty. I went back to the ute, grabbed the leash and pulled hard. The dog fell, squealed, began limping on a front paw. Good. I had to move fast now. I tugged the dog toward the bush, grabbed it by two hanks of white fur and threw it into the bramble.
The dog yelped. Struggled. Limped.
I watched.
She’d turned away from the road. Blue eyes searching the bush, finding the dog there, trapped, injured, the bright red collar twisted up in the branches. I hid behind a tree. Listened as she neared, her soft voice coming over the screech of cicadas in the trees all around us.
“Oh, puppy!” she said. “Poor puppy!”
My ex-wife called me as I sat in the boarding lounge at Cairns airport, hiding behind a magazine. Whenever she calls these days I get a stab of pain in the chest, knowing it can only be bad news. Kelly doesn’t call to shoot the breeze. I answered, still shielding my face from the rest of the waiting passengers with a copy of Empire.
“What’s up?”
“Are you coming down to Sydney tonight?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my nose inches from some celebrity I didn’t know brandishing a laser gun. “I’m going to give a statement about the allegations tomorrow morning. I also said I’d drop in and talk to those people. The Innocent Ted people.”
“You didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“I didn’t really tell anyone I was coming. Last time I came down I had Khalid and his boys trying to take care of me. I’m hoping he doesn’t find out about the Innocent Ted thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have told him,” Kelly said. “Your secret would have been safe with me.”
“I thought it was probably too short notice to set up a supervised visit with Lil so I didn’t bother,” I said. “Unless you think we can sort something out? I’d love to see her.”
