by Candice Fox
I placed the doll back on the shelf. Beyond the head of black woollen curls I spied a familiar face and locked onto it, grateful for the instant pull away from the edge of a dark place. The face was on a book cover. It was Amanda.
Murder in the Top End: The slaying of Lauren Freeman.
I put my books down and plucked the paperback from between two stacks of gangster anthologies. The cover shot of Amanda was in profile as she was led from what looked like a courthouse, wrists cuffed to a belt at the waist of her royal-blue prison tracksuit. The collarbone that peeked through the neck of the oversized jumper was untattooed. Amanda’s hair was longer, blow-dried for court into a conservative bob under her chin. She had the stricken-girl, on-the-edge look of a young Joanne Lees heading towards the media circus after the disappearance of Peter Falconio. The same strangely distant eyes. I ran my fingers over the embossed lettering and felt guilty.
I turned the book over and found a picture of Lauren Freeman, Amanda’s victim, on the back cover below the blurb. She was a very angular girl, a collection of sharp points to her face – the chin, the tips of the ears, the upward tilt to the corners of her eyes. She looked almost wolfish. Platinum-blonde hair dead flat on the shoulders of her white school blouse. A stark white smile offset by gorgeously sun-kissed skin. She looked like she belonged in a Surf Life Saving Queensland video, running in slow motion along a Gold Coast beach, trailing a red and yellow flag. Organic. I turned back and looked at the pale and sullen Amanda and wondered how the two girls could ever have been friends.
I put Murder in the Top End on top of my pile of Jake Scully books and went to the counter.
Dear Jake,
I’m not sure if you got my last letter. I wrote to you on the tenth. You’re probably busy with all the fanfare around your most recent movie option. I’ve cut out all your interviews from the papers. Nice review in the Times! Woo hoo!
I’m sort of putting a scrapbook together of your writing career and have been looking back at the first articles about Burn. You were so excited to finally have a book out there. I read the one saying you’d written four books before Burn and none of them were published. Even though I’m only on my second, I share your heartbreak. My first novel was rejected by twelve publishers, and I didn’t get so much as a scrap of feedback. Sometimes I wonder if they even fucking read them! I read about Stella telling you back then you’d never make it, that you needed to focus on your degree. I hear you, man. People laugh at my obsession with writing all the time. But I know I’ve got it. My muse is like a whole other person. So persistent. So needy. My work is great – and I’m not tooting my own trumpet. I know I’m good. I’m sure you knew you were good, too, back then.
I’m a lot like you used to be, Jake. I’m just mad to be who you are right now. Signing books and chatting on the radio. You really are an inspiration to me. That eager little Jake Scully from the GenreCon panel on YouTube is gone now, and you’re a lot more confident. But I can see a twinkle in your eye sometimes when I see you on BookWeek. I know you’re not taking it all for granted. I know you won’t sell out and let them make crap CGI-filled Disney movies out of the Chronicles.
I love everything about you. I taped that session you did in your house for The Morning Show. Sick pad! You’ve really made it, man. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you.
If you get this letter, and the other one too, I’m wondering if you might have time to take a look at my writing. I’ve attached it again, just in case. I know you’ll be impressed by my work. You can’t fake natural talent, am I right?
When you write back, a signed copy of Burn would be awesome, if you don’t mind. It’s still my all-time favourite. I’ve read it seven times. I think I need a new copy, and one that’s been in your hands would be a gift this young writer would treasure for all time.
There was a woman on the steps of Amanda’s shop when I arrived. A potential new client, I guessed. I was more curious about the inside of the little place, so I looked past her at first through the glass panels in the door – the blinds now rolled up to reveal what lay within. On a mat just inside, two very overweight cats lay basking in the sunlight pouring in from the street, one flopped on its side, its huge belly sagging against the prickly straw of the mat. The other was curled in a roll the size of a stuffed backpack. I looked up and spied another cat sitting just outside the open upstairs window, a long ginger tail lying over the edge of the sill, twitching gently in the breeze. The rain above the distant mountains was gathering, deep blue and ominous, but it was sweltering here. I glanced at my watch as I rolled up my sleeves, my forearms already tacky with sweat.
‘She doesn’t come in until ten,’ I said to the woman on the stoop. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Actually, it’s you I’m looking for, Ted,’ the woman said. Her red lips turned up in an unfriendly smile.
A reporter. I stopped in my tracks.
How had I not seen ‘reporter’ written all over this woman from the moment I stepped out of the car? The immaculate pencil skirt, the manicured nails on strong, keyboard-worn hands – one gripping a mobile phone, the other hooked around the handle of a heavy handbag. Heels. High heels in Crimson Lake.
The fact that she was waiting for me at Amanda’s office was even more bad news. It wouldn’t have been hard for a reporter to track down where I live. Kelly might have told her. But only Amanda and Sean knew I was working here. Or so I’d thought.
The kids on the corner across the road were watching me with interest. I took a step backwards, made a mental note to ask Amanda for a key to her cattery so that I could hide in there if I ever needed to in the future.
‘I’m Fabiana Grisham.’ She held out a hand. ‘People call me Fab.’
‘I’m busy, Ms Grisham,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’
I turned, walked down the porch. I heard her heels coming after me.
‘I just want to talk,’ she said. Here it comes. Here it comes. The dirty great storm of public recognition whipping the palms, slashing at the cane. I gripped the front of my shirt and twisted it in my fingers as I marched towards the car. I got there and changed my mind, made an awkward sort of half-turn, looked up the street. Amanda would protect me. I imagined she’d explode into a fearless, excited ball of weirdness at any kind of threat, and I could use whatever she did as a distraction to get away. That, or pick my partner up off her feet and hurl her at the reporter before dashing away to safety. Yes, I had to find Amanda. The Shark Bar was only two blocks up.
‘Are you staying in Crimson Lake, Ted?’ the reporter asked. ‘Are you trying to rebuild your life here?’
‘How did you find me?’ I asked.
‘I’m from the Herald. We have good reach. How do the people of Crimson Lake feel about your situation, Ted? Do they know you’re here?’
I wiped sweat off my brow and got into the car. Slammed the door, making the old side-view mirror rattle in its casing. Fabiana stood back and turned the recorder off on her phone, defeated, as I drove away.
Amanda skidded in the dirt on her yellow bike, kicking up a cloud of dust she seemed impressed with. She was wearing a purple sequined singlet and pale blue jeans torn at the knees. Barefoot, her toenails painted lime green beneath tattoos of hibiscus flowers. I’d had her meet me behind the town pub, one street back from the Shark Bar. She had a newspaper rolled into a tube under her arm.
‘Where’s the trouble, Lassie?’
I found I couldn’t inhale properly. I coughed, trying to mask my terror.
‘I’ve got a reporter on me.’ I looked back towards the end of town, the post office, at the edge of the cane field. ‘I don’t know how but I’ve got a fucking reporter on me.’
‘Oh.’ Amanda put her newspaper down in the dirt and came over to me. She rubbed my arm too slowly, like she was feeling the strange bark of an unfamiliar tree. ‘Dearie me, we’ve had a scare, haven’t we?’
‘I’m not scared, Amanda. I just don’t know how she found me out.’
�
�Someone probably spotted you. Never know who. I mean you’ve had vigilantes, right? Could have been one of them. Could have been whoever told them you were here. Could have been anyone. Don’t panic, Teddy Bear, one reporter is –’
‘I’m not panicking.’
‘One reporter’s not panic-stations.’
‘This is bad,’ I moaned. ‘This is bad.’
‘Well, it was always going to happen. How long did you expect to stay on the lam? You’re not Dr Richard Kimble. You were always going to get found out.’
‘Stop patting me.’ I shoved her hand off. ‘Stop it.’
She was right. I was panicking. Gulping air. I hated that she was seeing me like this. I turned away and leaned on the car, put my chest up against it and tried to focus on the feel of the outline of the window against my sternum, the heat in the roof under my palms.
‘Was she print or television?’
‘Print,’ I said. ‘The Herald.’
‘Gah. Who reads the Herald?’
‘About five million people, I think.’
‘Next time you see her, tell her she’s got something on her face. That’ll get rid of her.’
‘What?’
‘Tell her, “Hey, sweetheart. Hey, I don’t mean to interrupt you, babe, but you got something just here.”’ Amanda stuck out her jaw and tapped the corner of her mouth. ‘They hate that. Women. Totally undermines everything they’re saying.’
I shook my head. Nothing was certain anymore. I needed to get my reeling thoughts in order. Forget about it all for a second.
‘You’ve got eighteen thousand cats,’ I said, hoping a swift right-turn in the conversation would bring my breathing back to normal.
‘Eleven,’ she said.
‘Who has eleven cats?’
‘Me.’
‘I mean why? Why the hell do you have so many cats?’
‘Why do you think? I rented the shop last year. A cat turned up, and it was raining, and I took her inside, and she started shooting smaller cats out of her vagina one after the other like little red cannonballs.’ Amanda’s face became pinched. ‘It was like something from Alien.’ She slid her fist through a circle she made of her thumb and forefinger, opened her hand and made it attack her face. ‘Blargh! Disgusting!’
I stared at her. Her hand was spread on her own face, one eye peering between two fingers at me.
‘So then you had eleven cats.’
‘So then I had eleven cats, yes,’ she confirmed.
‘And you just kept them all.’
‘What else was I supposed to do with them?’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged, widened my eyes. ‘Give them away?’
She looked at me for a moment, then leaned in close.
‘Do you think,’ she whispered, ‘that if anyone around here wanted a cat, there’d be one walking about in the rain, waiting to spew ten wet pink Jelly Babies onto the first dry scrap of carpet it could find?’
I sighed. She reached up and tapped my temple with her index finger.
‘Get it together, Conkaffey.’
I brushed her off again.
‘Come on.’ She slapped my arm. ‘Enough messing around. We’ve got a case to solve. Did you get onto the medical examiner? Is Jake dead?’
‘He’s dead. Yes.’
‘With dread, Ted said, Jake Scully is dead. He has all the lively vigour of toasted raisin bread.’
‘Stop.’
‘All right. Jump in the Ted-mobile and we’ll go break the news to the family.’ She swung a leg over the bike and turned the thing in front of me, cutting a nice groove in the dirt. I heard thunder over the mountains as I slid into my car.
Amanda raced ahead of me down the Scullys’ street, as though we were two kids trying to get somewhere and she’d declared it a race just as she saw the finish line and stepped up her speed. It wasn’t far along the palm-tree lined, wide avenue before she spotted the police car and slowed. It was a Cairns patrol car, and its brake lights were still on. I pulled to the kerb behind it and watched Amanda as she came to the driver’s window, ducked her head and shamelessly checked out who was inside.
A chief super got out and adjusted his belt, said something to her. She grinned and walked the bike backwards. Then Damford and Hench emerged from the car. I felt a sudden tugging at my chest to get out and intervene, a fear that they might hurt her, so small and colourful as she was, like a little chameleon being set upon by dogs.
‘… big lump of a man over here is my partner Ted,’ Amanda was telling the chief. The old man’s deeply lined face turned towards me. He recognised me. I was used to the lowering of the brows and downturn of the mouth when people took in my face.
‘Can I ask your business here today, Amanda?’ The chief ignored me.
‘We were just about to deliver the death-o-gram to the Scullys,’ she said brightly. ‘We got the scoop from the medical examiner this morning. I guess you did, too, huh?’
‘I’m going to ask you both to leave.’ The chief looked me over once again, disdain oozing. ‘I really think it would be best for everyone.’
Lou Damford and Steven Hench had their eyes locked on me. I knew I was safe from them as long as we stayed in the company of their boss. But the hunger was there. We examined each other, schoolchildren behind the teacher’s back. Again I noticed how old they were for their rank. They had to be in their forties. You only stay a patrollie in your forties because you’re completely incompetent, or you want to. I didn’t think they were incompetent. They were too malignant. They’d have spent their careers doing what they did to me – chasing down society’s outcasts and roughing them up, feeling powerful. I knew the lure of that feeling. There was nothing like standing in the middle of a busted-out crack house in full riot gear, kicking stuff over, picking up the shattered pieces of young men’s lives while they wept and rolled on the floor in their cuffs. I’d never been a genuine thug as a cop. I didn’t carry the role very well. But sometimes you were required to look and act tough, scare people, make them cooperate. It could get addictive. I’d known people who let it change them.
I shifted my eyes to Amanda, wondered how old these two thugs would have been when she’d committed her murder. They were probably fresh cadets. Had they been involved? Had they been the patrollies called out to check up on a car parked in the bush on Kissing Point?
‘I really think it would be best for everyone if a pair of nice, friendly looking chums like us went in there and gave them the bad news,’ Amanda was saying, the slap of her hand against my arm bringing me back to myself. ‘You guys bashing in there with all your guns and funny hats like a bunch of storm troopers is going to make the news ten times worse.’
‘Amanda,’ the chief sighed.
‘Aman-duh,’ she mocked, mirroring his hands-on-hips stance. ‘Amanda what? Chief Doherty, you hate the knock-and-shock. Come on, old boy.’
‘You two know each other?’ I said.
‘Chief Doherty was a prosecution witness at my trial,’ Amanda said. ‘All the cops know me. I’m a star. Notorious gangster. Smooth criminal.’
We started walking as a group towards the Scully house, Chief Doherty’s voice low and unfriendly despite Amanda’s playfulness. Damford and Hench’s eyes were still trained on me. I cleared my throat.
‘So you two know Amanda, too, then,’ I said.
They didn’t answer. I felt the hair rise along my forearms.
‘Were you around when she was arrested?’
Still nothing. They were good at this intimidation thing. I felt sick to the stomach, kept the distance between our slow, ambling paths behind Amanda and the chief nice and wide.
As it turned out, none of us got full credit for landing the news on Stella Scully that her husband was dead. As our group turned onto the path running through the manicured front garden to the door, she opened it, and I knew the face she wore. Grave acceptance. She licked her lips and looked at us all, finally settling on me off to the side, trying not to look at he
r. When she spoke, it seemed she addressed her words to me.
‘How did they know?’ she asked.
‘Hip bone,’ I said. I thought it best to give it to her straight. It seemed to me like that’s how she wanted it. Chief Doherty turned and gave me the kind of look that wilted killers in the interrogation room. I actually felt a pain in the middle of my face, between my eyes, like he’d punched me.
‘Mrs Scully,’ he said to her, ‘these people aren’t here with us. We did not invite them. Nor did we invite them to deliver the terrible news of your husband’s death in such a callous and heartless manner.’ He shook his head, glanced at me again. ‘Jesus Christ, I don’t know. Can we come in?’
Stella turned and wiped her eyes with her hand, then padded off through the huge foyer in her bare feet. Amanda got through the doorway. But Damford and Hench swivelled in front of me just as I stepped up, and blocked my path.
‘Nice one, kiddie-fucker,’ Hench sneered.
‘You know, there’s a bit of a ceremony to it,’ Damford, the fatter one, said. ‘A romance. You sit ’em down. You make ’em tea. You take your hat off. It’s like foreplay.’
