Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘She did not ask me if I was married.’

  ‘She looked at your hand.’

  ‘You don’t …’ I sighed at the windshield. ‘You can’t even –’

  ‘There was a girl in Brisbane Women’s who was like that,’ Amanda said. She traced a finger along her bottom lip, dropped a hip. ‘Katrina. She used to flirt with the guards and get all sorts of treats. Ooh, your belt is so thick and shiny. I bet it’s heavy. I bet it cracks real loud.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘No sleeping with the clients.’ She stuck a finger in the air. ‘Don’t even touch the clients. Rule seventeen.’

  ‘There are seventeen rules?’

  ‘Pfft! At least!’

  ‘I’ve only heard one to five and seventeen!’ I scoffed. ‘What’s in between?’

  ‘In between five and seventeen are a bunch of mysteries yet to be seen. You’ll glean those rules from their smoky screen if you’re mean and keen and clean and –’

  ‘All right. All right.’

  She checked the bike all over, tested the brakes. Tugged her shoelaces tight.

  ‘You know, you’re pretty chipper for someone who spent ten years in prison,’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it. And it was only eight months.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be right, mate.’

  ‘Are you right?’ I asked. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I don’t feel like you should be.’

  ‘Should.’ She snorted.

  I pondered for a moment, looked at my own eyes in the rear-view mirror. I was not the same man I’d been before they arrested me. I would never be that person again. The underlying terror in everything would prevent that. The trial nightmares. I was never acquitted, so at any moment the Director of Public Prosecutions in Sydney could order that I be rearrested. I didn’t know if anyone was still working on Claire Bingley’s case. If some supersleuth was going to pop up one of these days with more evidence against me and inspire the state to take another run at me.

  Even if that never happened, they might pin me for something else. Come for me in the dark, take me, charge me with a local sexual assault just because I was in the area and, living alone on the edge of nowhere, I didn’t have an alibi for most of my time. If these sorts of thoughts weighed on Amanda, she sure hid it well. It didn’t seem like Amanda felt any lingering effects of her crime, her time behind bars. Sure, she was quirky. Bordering on annoying. The rhyming, Jesus. But she was clearly functioning – she had a good job, seemed to keep her affairs in order. Was it all a front?

  ‘I don’t get the feeling anyone really cares too much about this guy being found alive.’ I nodded at the Scully house.

  ‘His lover might.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘His lover.’ Amanda twitched, mounted her bike. She pedalled a few metres down the road before I started the engine and caught up to her. ‘Jake Scully’s got a lover. A man.’

  ‘You’re nuts,’ I said. ‘Where’d you get that idea?’

  ‘The golf clubs have never been used,’ Amanda said. ‘Not a nick on them. Not a blade of grass on the bag, inside the bag, on the wheels, inside the wheels. No paint worn off the handles. Nothing. They still reek of new rubber. Wherever he goes when he tells her he’s golfing, it’s not to the golf course.’

  I watched her.

  ‘The cigar box,’ she continued. ‘Very pretty box. Handmade. They’re a bit of an art form, popular in the seventies, coming back now with the hipster vintage thing. Pipes, too. If you don’t smoke cigars, you probably wouldn’t have much interest in them. The boxes.’

  ‘You smoke cigars?’ I scoffed.

  ‘I enjoy the occasional smoke on a Sunday afternoon.’ She was almost defensive. ‘That’s not the point. Cigar boxes can be very intricate. You pop open little compartments and slots. Keep things in there. Secret things, if you want. Bit of coke, some pills. But mainly stuff you need for the job – matches, labels. Your guillotine or your clippers.’

  She swung the bike close to me and pulled a scrap of paper out of her bra. Handed it through the window to me. I held it against the wheel as I rolled along.

  Sam.

  And a phone number.

  ‘This could be his landscaper,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not his landscaper.’

  ‘It could be Samantha.’

  ‘That’s a man’s handwriting right there, chump.’

  ‘These are some pretty extreme claims, Amanda,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s the truth.’

  ‘That’s the truth, huh?’

  ‘Yes, indeed! It is decreed: you must concede!’

  ‘All right,’ I sighed. ‘We’ll see.’

  I left Amanda so I could go home and read her Scully case notes, which proved to be a fairly useless venture. The words littered about the coffee-stained paper looked as though they’d been written with a tattoo gun. Tiny, some of them mere dots and slashes. The rain came, and the little geese wandered, pecking and foraging in the lawn until a puddle filled up by the fence. I sat watching them flutter and roll and splash in it, their downy feathers becoming heavy and grey and the bones showing in their pathetic nugget wings. They were just beyond the stage where they looked like ducklings – their necks too long and beaks too short. Woman settled on the porch quite near me, and when I reached over carefully to rub the top of her head with my index finger she didn’t flinch or snap. Maybe she remembered that I’d been kind to one of her children the night before. Maybe she was just tired. ‘We’re building a relationship, you and I,’ I said. She hissed.

  Beyond the case notes, Amanda had acquired all of Jake Scully’s phone records. There was indeed a bunch of contact between Jake and the ‘Sam’ from the cigar box, showing a flurry of texts three months before Jake went missing. I could see the time of the texts, their direction, but not what they said. Sometimes the responses were only seconds apart. Long conversations that lasted for hours. Few calls were exchanged between the two men. Jake didn’t want to get caught.

  On the night he went missing, 21 January, the texts stopped at 8.15 pm. Jake went to bed at 10 pm, according to his wife. There was nothing after the man went to sleep. Nothing calling him out of bed in the early hours.

  I examined the stills from the CCTV cameras outside the Scully house on the night he left. The tape itself had been taken into evidence by Queensland police, but we had plenty of stills. At 2.14 am Jake walked out of the house, climbed into the Jeep sitting in the driveway, and pulled out. He was a broad-shouldered man, big like me but far leaner, more tri angular about his torso. Forty-one pictures showed him walking the three or four metres from the house to the Jeep and getting in it. I flipped the pages. Jake stepping out. Stepping back. Stepping out. It was a long stride. A determined stride. The fist that held the keys was clenched. He was in a hurry.

  Night fell in a long, gentle stretch, the rain easing and the clouds parting onto white, then deep yellow sky. I pottered around, still getting used to the house, clearing old bricks from where they lay stacked in a pile against the side fence, shifting them around the back where they couldn’t be used as missiles by the vigilantes. Since I’d boarded up all the front windows I’d had nothing from those night-time warriors. I wondered if they were regrouping, planning something else. Something worse.

  The darkness found me wandering the clay roads not far from my home, following the curve of the moonlit lake between the trees, going nowhere and thinking about Jake Scully. My time in drug squad had made the rare homicides that popped up now and then pretty easy to deal with. Drug dealers invariably killed each other over three things – turf, debts and women. The big bosses killed their underlings because they skimmed off the top, got found out and didn’t pay their bosses back in time. The underlings killed the big bosses because they saw what their overlords had planned for them. And regardless of rank, these loudmouthed, showy men killed each other because
they rarely believed that the beautiful women who spent their time with them did so out of genuine romantic attachment. They were insecure. Short-tempered. They sat in clubs giving each other the wrong looks until someone snapped.

  Where the hell did I start, now that I was responsible for finding out who killed a completely different kind of man? Jake Scully didn’t have a posse of jealous, dark-eyed men following him around, opening doors for him. He wasn’t a loudmouth, and he didn’t seem overly concerned that his wife’s attachment wasn’t genuine anymore, at least by her account. Who kills a guy who lives and works in his own little world, a quiet guy, a man whose guilt and danger lay in big boys’ toys and yoga retreats? Maybe Amanda was right, and Jake’s books weren’t his only portal into an alternate life. Maybe there was a secret lover, and with that man or woman Jake had managed to pocket a whole collection of violent pleasures I just wasn’t aware of yet.

  I realised I was following a light in the rainforest long after I started doing it. It was joined by the smell of wood smoke, then laughter. I emerged carefully into the thinning trees around a clearing and stuck close to a tall ghost gum as the figures around the fire solidified.

  A group of teenagers swimming in the golden light, the boys knocking each other in the ribs with their elbows, shoving and snorting. Someone’s phone playing music I didn’t recognise. I watched, picking single words out of the chatter, amused by the painful self-consciousness of them all. Two or three sat on a log together watching their phone screens, unspeaking. Others cuddled, hands slithering between knees.

  The conversation seemed to be about death. These were those sort of teens. The weary existentialists, the moody budding philosophers. I recognised the mindset. Death was the worst thing they could imagine, so it fascinated them. Their own deaths. The deaths of others. Suicide, undeath, vampires, eternal life. They couldn’t possibly know how wrong they were. That so many layers of life had the potential to be worse than death.

  The girls were talking about funeral songs. The boys were trying to decide whether it would be worse to drown or be burned alive. Deep stuff. There was probably some sort of wonderful irony happening here, all these human beings at their most vivid and vital so romanced by the idea of death. I listened.

  And then a blonde girl stood up and threw a plastic chocolate wrapper into the flames. I backed up at the sight of her, the impossibly short shorts and long, waterbird legs. Suddenly I was back to myself, sucked into my body from the free-floating I’d been doing in the dark, back to Ted Conkaffey: child rapist. I couldn’t be found around young people ever again. Young people were like poison to me now. I started to back into the dark, and stopped when I heard Harrison Scully’s voice.

  ‘You know what a croc does when it’s got you? No wait, wait, wait, wait!’ Harrison cut into the chatter, spread his hands out, a young god in the firelight. ‘You know what they do? They don’t eat you right away. They tuck your body under a log and wait till later to eat you. Wait till you’re all juicy. That’s got to be the worst way, dude. Being eaten by something. Feeling teeth on you.’

  The teens fell silent. Snickers passed between some of the boys, determined to blow off Harrison’s obvious challenge to them – his desire for them to say something just as callous about his dead dad. Harrison had the monopoly on death, in the end. He was living it. Envy on the faces around the light.

  ‘You’re fucking sick, man.’

  ‘I’m not sick, I’m just being real. Croc took him, man. I’m telling you.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ the blonde girl whined. ‘I’m sad, Harry. I like your dad.’

  ‘Shut up, bitch,’ one of the boys giggled. ‘Shut up with your whiny bullshit. You sound like a cat.’

  ‘I’m saaaaad!’ she whined. ‘Harry, don’t say shit like that. No more crocodile talk. They’ll find him. He’s fine.’

  ‘He’s not fine,’ another girl said. She had her back to me, was a curvy lump on a rock beside Harrison. ‘He’s mud. He’s mud and dirt at the bottom of a river. Croc shit between someone’s toes. That’s what we all become, you know. Dirt. Circle of life, baby.’

  I turned my attention to the girl speaking as Harrison put his arm around her. A girlfriend. Probably who he was texting when I’d interrupted him in his bedroom, a quarter smile playing about the corner of his mouth, just a flash of it before he heard me coming. I felt a mild sort of relief, seeing the thin, lanky boy whispering in her ear, silhouetted against the flames. At least Harry had someone to support him in his grief, someone to tough-talk with him as he tried to come to terms with never seeing his father again, with never having said goodbye. The goon squad boys playing in the shadows didn’t look like the emotionally supportive type, and I didn’t know if Stella had anything like that in her. Harry’s plump little girlfriend had shaggy goth hair she’d probably cut herself, tied up in stumpy pigtails. The ends of the pigtails were a painfully bright pink. I wondered who she was.

  The trip back to the house was colder than my journey out into the night. I thought about a wild-eyed Jake Scully being tucked under a dark log by a monster crocodile. Still alive. Blind in the tea-coloured water, far from the surface.

  ‘Mr Conkaffey, do you watch pornography?’

  The sweat dripping down my jaw. Sean had told me not to sweat. Whatever you do, don’t smile, and don’t sweat.

  ‘Yes, I do. A lot of men do.’

  ‘Let’s just keep the focus on you, Mr Conkaffey. We’re not here about other men. We’re all here about you today. About what you’ve done.’

  ‘Objection.’

  ‘Sustained. Jury, disregard the last comment.’

  ‘Mr Conkaffey, do you recognise the DVD I’m holding here?’

  The sickness was right at the back of my throat, ready. Kelly, in the stands, covering her face. The journalists had all turned towards her, assessing her, as they had been since the trial began. A pattern had begun emerging early in the trial. The prosecutor dredged up some humiliating part of my life, and the journalists noted down how Kelly reacted. My porn. My internet browser history. My ex-girlfriends. What did she know? What was a surprise? What was front-page worthy?

  ‘Mr Con–’

  ‘Yes, that’s mine.’

  ‘Can you read the title of this DVD for the jury, please, Mr Conkaffey?’

  ‘Wet’n’Wild,’ I sighed.

  ‘And the girl here on the cover. How old would you say she is?’

  ‘Jesus.’ My throat closing, hot like a flaming pipe. ‘I don’t know. She’s an adult. Look at her. I mean, she’s … I don’t know how old she is but she’s an adult.’

  ‘If you don’t know how old she is, how do you know she’s an adult?’

  ‘I. You can. I mean, you can see she’s –’

  ‘Do you know who made this DVD, Mr Conkaffey?’

  ‘I bought it in a shop on George Street. A big … A shop, a proper shop.’

  ‘But you don’t know who made it.’

  ‘I didn’t look.’

  ‘So you have no idea who made this sexually explicit film, and how old its participants are – is that what you’re saying, Mr Conkaffey?’

  ‘Objection, your honour,’ my barrister said. He was a short, portly guy named Gregor. Someone Sean trusted, someone familiar with the courts. ‘The defendant is not on trial for child pornography. The DVD the prosecution is holding is not child pornography, in any case, even if he was. This whole line of questioning is a waste of the court’s time.’ Gregor’s hands are on the papers in front of him, white-knuckled and damp.

  ‘Your honour,’ the prosecutor throwing his arms open, pleading, weary. ‘Obviously I’m trying to decipher the defendant’s sexual interests.’

  ‘Overruled. Get to your point quickly, Mr Elba.’

  ‘Mr Conkaffey, by your own admission, you purchased this sexually explicit DVD and others like it without knowing who made the film, its legality, or how old the participants are. Am I right?’

  ‘They’re … It was clear to me …
It was clear to me when I bought the DVD that the participants were adults. They’re adults having sex with adults.’ I swallowed. ‘That is what my sexual interests are, sir. I’m sexually interested in adult women.’

  ‘Adult women wearing their hair in pigtails.’

  ‘Objection!’ Gregor’s face becoming pink, his eyes blazing. ‘The hairstyle of the girl on the cover of the DVD is of no consequence to this case!’

  ‘She’s an adult!’ I pleaded. My voice broke. He’d told me never to do it. Speak calmly, directly. Never give them anything. ‘You can see that, sir.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘She’s …’ I struggled. ‘She’s got breasts! She’s –’

  ‘So, if they’ve got breasts, they’re old enough for you, is that right, Mr Conkaffey?’

  ‘Objection!’

  The car behind me beeped, breaking the spell. I realised I’d been holding my breath. Lake Street, behind Cairns Hospital, was baking in the early morning sun. No wind stirred the palm trees lining the side of the road.

  Most of the parking spots were full. There was no shade. I got out and plucked my shirt from my chest, wondered how much sweat I’d bled out since the trial reliving those moments in the courtroom, the pot shots back and forth between lawyers, the sneering and snarling faces in the crowd. Don’t look down. It seems guilty. Don’t look people in the eye. It seems defiant. I’d tried to keep my eyes on the windows, the white sky above the city, and then I’d find my hands wandering, fingers pulling at each other, a tangle of aching knuckles.

  Don’t fidget. You’ll seem nervous.

  It was early, so the hospital cafe inside the automatic doors was closed. People moved in the dark of the kitchen, clattering things, opening fridges. I’d hoped to drop in and out quickly and get back to Amanda in Crimson Lake by 10 am. I wasn’t expecting to get much from the morgue staff. If they still had what little trace evidence was recoverable from the croc that possibly took Jake Scully, it was unlikely they would offer me a perspective on their analysis. I had no badge to wave anymore, no ID tag, no uniform. But I needed to ask. I’d lain awake in the dim morning hours listening to the geese stirring on the porch through the open bedroom window and promised myself that if I was going to take this job with Amanda seriously, I was going to have to apply all my police processes to it. All the rigour and the structure I’d learned in the academy. It would be so easy to slip into Amanda’s ways, to bumble around haphazardly on instinct, turning up for work whenever I felt like it, rummaging through the clients’ belongings while they watched. Drinking on the job with Stella Scully had been a mistake. I wouldn’t do that again.