by Candice Fox
‘Bullshit.’
‘What are you doing up here, Ted?’ Fabiana walked beside me quickly, eyes locked on the road as her heels rolled over sharp stones in the clay.
‘I’m not doing anything.’
‘My sources have confirmed you’re working with Amanda Pharrell. You must know Amanda is a convicted murderer. What are you doing with her? Are you in a relationship with her?’
‘Is this what they teach you in a Bachelor of Journalism these days, Fabiana? How to find a non-story?’
She nearly tripped. If she went down, I was kind of glad I wouldn’t be able to catch her, with my hands full of reptile.
‘Oh, you’re not a non-story by any means, honey,’ she said as she recovered. ‘People want to know what you’re up to. Whether or not their town is safe from you.’
‘Everyone is safe from me,’ I said. ‘This town, the next town. No one was ever not safe from me, and that’s the point of having a trial – so you can determine whether or not someone is the someone you’re not safe from or if he’s just some regular dude everybody is safe from.’
‘But –’
‘My charges were dropped, Fabiana. You read the papers?’
‘I do.’
‘So right now you’re just following some totally innocent guy along the side of the road on the edge of nowhere to see what he’s up to,’ I said. ‘And the answer is nothing. Well, it’s not nothing. You want the scoop, Fabiana? I’m moving a snake. That’s what I’m doing. Ted Conkaffey, innocent man, moves snake. Great headline, babe. Top reporting.’
‘You’re getting quite upset.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘We both know you’re not innocent, Ted. Australia knows you’re not innocent.’
I stopped. My hard sigh came out less aggressive than I’d wanted it to. It sounded sad. Broken over a lump in my throat. I fixed Fabiana with a glare to try to patch up my masculinity.
‘You’re wrong,’ I said.
The reporter in her ridiculous heels stood looking at me. In my younger, more optimistic years, I might have thought her troubled gaze hid slowly darkening thoughts. That maybe something in those two words and how I’d said them, maybe something in my eyes knocked at all those closed doors in her mind and made her uncertain. But I snapped out of my optimism pretty swiftly. Journalists were never uncertain.
I walked away. She caught up.
‘I’d love to be swept up in the tragedy and the drama of it all but I’m afraid I’m just too experienced for that.’ She sniffed, her chin jutting. ‘I’m hard news, not features.’
‘I’m impressed. Really, I am.’
‘I read your court reports, Ted.’
‘All of them?’ I asked.
‘Yes, all of them.’
‘So impressive.’
‘The wrongly accused nice-guy act is a terribly romantic concept but I’m after facts, not fiction.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘The witnesses,’ she huffed. She was having trouble matching my long stride. ‘You can’t contest the witnesses. They were all consistent. They were all reliable.’
‘I don’t contest the witnesses,’ I said.
‘The analysis of your house? The supplementary material?’
‘You mean my porn and my books?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about them?’
‘They speak to your character,’ she said. I didn’t respond. She kept talking, listing things on her slender fingers as we walked along the road into a patch of rainforest. It smelled good here. Earthy. Possum crossings slashed the sky above us, net tubes that kept the animals safe from the road as they moved between the trees. I tried to spot one, but it was probably too late. We were about a kilometre from the house now. I looked back over my shoulder and tried to see it through the trees. Was it far enough for a scaly drop off? How well did snakes know their way around? I knew sucking in the details of the world around me was just me deliberately distancing myself from Fabiana’s words as she rattled off sections of my trial verbatim, quoted the prosecution. I’d drifted off this way plenty of times in prison when other inmates started confiding in me about their crimes. A gentle mental wandering, fleeing from distress, from the gory details of my personal nightmare. Psychologists probably had a word for it. When I did this during the trial, the press said I looked ‘bored’.
I stopped and she stopped with me, watched me crouch and place the heavy snake on the ground. I kept the beast’s head pinned by a single finger as I released the body, then lifted my finger and stepped back swiftly. The snake didn’t turn on me. Carpet pythons are like old men. Docile. Slow to anger. The animal tested the air with its tongue, then began slowly winding its way down towards the mangroves, cutting a path through the wet pillars of grass.
When I came back to myself, I realised Fabiana was still appreciating me. I didn’t know what she hoped to see, what of my ‘character’ might be revealed in my letting a snake go back into the wild. I didn’t care if it jarred with the character she’d read about in the court documents. Convincing her of anything wasn’t going to stop people splashing paint on my doorstep or hurling bricks at my windows. I saw suddenly the futility of talking to her at all. Maybe this was what Amanda had learned in the long months after her release. That there is just no convincing some people.
‘Don’t walk back with me,’ I told Fabiana. ‘You ruin the quiet.’
She looked mildly insulted by that. I gave her a polite smile and turned back towards home.
I’d been reading about Amanda when she came walking down the stairs of Cairns train station towards the car, leading the yellow bike at her side. I watched her with interest, trying to transpose the image of my strange, annoying new friend against the Amanda her classmates testified about in interviews given to the author of Murder in the Top End, Eleanor Chapman.
By all accounts the teenage Amanda had been a strange and frightening creature. Like most cliché high-profile killers, the book was full of assertions about her antisocial nature, and recounts of attempts to befriend her that ended disastrously. She would apparently sabotage any fledgling friendships that might have developed between herself and a classmate by ‘going off’ without warning and abandoning all communication just as interaction got comfortable, refusing to speak or make eye contact with the new friend and hiding in the playground so that attempts to fix the sudden, unexplained rupture could not be made. Amanda was the wild fox who came to hang around the house warily for a few days, snatching at bits of food and cowering curiously by the edge of the woods before becoming spooked and bolting, never to be seen again.
She was quiet, but very intelligent. She would excel at written work but would fail hopelessly at any performance or group-based tasks. A teacher in her first year of high school made the mistake of surprising her by beginning to read out one of her essays to the class, at which point Amanda allegedly flipped her desk and ran out of the room.
All of this I could believe as I sat watching Amanda at the bonnet of my car, stretching her quads and calves before her ride. Amanda was an intelligent weirdo, and had probably grown up an intelligent weirdo. Her quirky confidence was something she had no doubt gained in prison. You can’t go hiding and avoiding people in prison. There’s nowhere to run away to. They will come for you in your cell and drag you out into the common room, interrogate you for your story, make you participate if only to torture you with interaction you don’t have the stomach for. I knew this from trying to hide from my fellow inmates at Silverwater, trying to get away from their hideous murder and rape storytelling sessions on the moulded fibreglass couches in the TV room. Prisoners don’t like mysterious loners. It suggests you think you’re different to them. And, therefore, better.
But for all that I thought was true, there were accounts in the book that I couldn’t believe. As an ex-cop and a long-time true crime reader, I’d seen the same sort of stuff plenty of times accompanying the stories of big names like H.H. Holmes and John Wayne Gacy. Th
e obligatory childhood animal-torture story was there. A science classmate of Amanda’s had told of her horror arriving for class early one morning to find the girl burning one of the classroom’s pet mice alive on a desktop Bunsen burner. She was holding it by the tail and it was twitching. I’ll never forget the smell of the burning hair, the way the thing squealed. I had nightmares for years.
I didn’t believe that. It was very imaginative, very visual. I’d have given it an A in creative writing class. The Amanda I knew didn’t gel with the mouse-burning Amanda. This one was apparently accommodating a small army of felines she didn’t even seem to like, and from what I’d seen through the shop windows they all looked pretty well fed and cared for.
A man who had grown up in Amanda’s neighbourhood but not gone to her school had recounted Amanda attacking the local corner store owner for running out of Redskins lollies. Amanda was hooked on them, and there was indeed a picture of the detached teen sucking on one at a school carnival, sitting alone at a wooden picnic table. The witness, who didn’t want to be named in the book, had described pulling Amanda off the old man, whose face she had been kicking in. Amanda had apparently burst into maniacal laughter and threatened to come back and kill the guy. She’d rampaged through the store until minutes before the police arrived, knocking things off shelves and overturning baskets of fruit.
There was no account of this event from the police, however. Or the store owner, or anyone else. I didn’t believe it.
Amanda came around the side of the car when she’d finished her stretches and mounted the bike she’d left leaning there. She hung her bare arms over the handlebars, squinting in the sunlight. I’d tucked Murder in the Top End away in the glove box long before she’d arrived, but I still felt chills imagining her finding a reason to reach through the window and open the compartment before I could stop her.
‘All right, me hearty,’ she said. ‘Me scurvy dawg. Are ye ready to set sail?’
‘We’re pirates, suddenly,’ I said.
‘Aye.’
‘Where’d you cook up this address?’ I asked.
‘Well, I started with the phone number, which is private, so I couldn’t get details of an owner or an address. I called it a bunch of times with a genius telephone services ruse that I was sure was going to get Sam to tell me his full name, but he’s not answering. Probably doesn’t answer numbers he doesn’t know as a rule – I’m the same. But there are precisely four Sams on the parish registry at Jake’s church in Crimson Lake.’ She showed me four fingers. ‘I spent last night checking them out.’
‘Googling them?’
‘No. Three of them still live in Crimson Lake,’ she said. ‘So I went around to their places and snooped.’
‘Surely your private investigator certification course taught you something about not being an unethical investigator, Amanda.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘You can’t go snooping around people’s houses. That’s my point.’
‘Well, I did.’ She shrugged. ‘So if you want to stop crying about it like a little princess for half a minute, I can tell you I ruled those three out.’
I exhaled. ‘Go on.’
She puffed her chest out with the pride of a rookie detective. ‘I was pretty sure I had the winner on my first house when I opened the fridge and spied the almond milk and pomegranate–kale salad.’
‘What?!’
‘Almond milk and pomegranate–kale salad.’ She smiled ruefully, shook her head. ‘Some people.’
‘You went inside their houses?’
‘I just told you that. I’m sorry, I must have slipped into Chinese. Am I speaking Chinese?’
I covered my face.
‘Computer searches and phone searches revealed nothing. I went through the second guy’s filing cabinet. Very, very organised. He had a separate file for gardening-related expenses. Seed purchases and fertiliser and hoses. Look, it was a nice garden, but –’
‘Amanda!’
‘So the short version is we’re visiting Samuel Polson today. He joined Trinity Church a few years ago. All right? This is the guy. The Sam from the phone number in the cigar box. Jake’s former lover.’
I followed Amanda through the streets of Cairns towards the harbour and along the esplanade, watching for movements in the impossibly flat water that might indicate croc life. The lush city streets were overhung with palms and vines, bougain villea and jacaranda blossoming on every corner, flowers sagging in the midday heat that would spring to life again when the afternoon rains arrived. We pulled up at a block of fifties-style apartments, pale golden brick and white trim, the mosquito screens on every window ratty and torn.
Amanda seemed to know exactly where she was going, parked the bike on the glossy green tiles by the stairs and started trekking up. She had the quiet confidence of an experienced investigator about her, of someone who’d been doing this a lot longer than the two years she actually had. It was as though any dangers she might face when she knocked on the door would be in her catalogue of experiences, from which she would simply select the appropriate response. Fight or flight. I wondered as I followed her up the stairs how many cases Amanda had taken on since her release. How successful they had been. What mistakes she had made to come to this place of contentment with the uncertain.
Maybe it wasn’t experience that made her so confident. Maybe she was just crazy. It had been years on the police beat before I was that comfortable. Her fearlessness worried me.
She knocked on the door, and no one answered for a while. I decided I would let her lead – I had the feeling after we’d spoken to Ray at the church that she liked things to go that way anyway, and she was the one who had found Sam. We heard a chain being removed after a time, and the musty hall was filled with the smell of freshly cut lime.
‘Yes?’
The man before us was short, and older than I’d expected. He might have been in his fifties, with a broad face and deeply lined features. He was wearing a pristine white collared shirt that looked as though it had never been sat down in. Meticulously ironed pockets and mother-of-pearl buttons.
‘Mr Polson, I’m Amanda Pharrell, and this is Ted Collins.’ Amanda jabbed a thumb at me. ‘We’re here to talk about Jake.’
Sam’s ginger eyebrows met briefly in surprise. He seemed to consider telling us that he didn’t know what we were talking about, but the confusion was quickly replaced by a sad, resigned smile. The man looked at me.
‘So he’s dead, then.’
‘Why would you say something like that, Mr Polson?’ Amanda snapped.
‘Oh, cut the crap and come in.’ He pushed open the door. ‘I’ll let you stay if you don’t give me any of that police interrogation rubbish.’
I followed Amanda into the apartment. It was spacious and fifties-themed, in keeping with the exterior of the building. A mint green kitchen across a living room of caramel shag carpet. The last time I’d walked on any shag I’d been young enough to get away with rolling around on it, lying on my side in the woollen grass, playing with Lego. I felt a strange desire to do that now but resisted.
Mr Polson had been making himself a mojito. The thick wooden muddler was on the kitchen bench. He took the item back up again and started crushing slices of lime in the bottom of a stainless steel shaker. It was ten in the morning.
‘Can I offer you guys a drink?’
‘No.’
‘Ye– No. No thanks.’ I cleared my throat.
‘Did you say you were with the police?’
‘We’ve been hired privately by Jake’s wife,’ Amanda said.
‘Oh, right.’ Sam gave a couple of hacking laughs, poured his drink into a tall vintage crystal tumbler. ‘Right. I was sure you were cops. So you’ll be in a hurry then, if Stella’s hired you.’
‘Do you know Stella?’ I asked. We followed Sam to a cane lounge set by the open balcony doors. The breeze was refreshing and made the sweat in my shirt cold against my chest and sides.
‘
No, not personally. Just through Jake’s stories.’
‘What would you call your relationship with Jake?’ Amanda asked.
‘A complicated friendship.’ Sam smiled.
‘A long one?’
‘Yes.’
‘A sexual one?’
‘Yes,’ Sam laughed, looked at me. ‘This one here doesn’t mess around, does she?’
Amanda raised her eyebrows at me. Gave me a smug little wiggle of her head.
‘You and Jake texted a bunch of times on the night he disappeared,’ I said. ‘What was your conversation about?’
‘Oh, it was just a catch up,’ Sam said. ‘You know. How’s work? How’s the family?’
‘If you two were so familiar, why’d Jake keep your number in his cigar box?’ I asked. ‘Presumably if you were texting back and forth he had your number.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam shook his head. ‘A cigar box?’
I explained how we’d found his phone number. He stared at his knees, deflated.
‘I guess he must have kept it as a sort of memento,’ he sighed. ‘The first time I gave him my number, it was on a scrap of paper. I slipped it to him at a club. I came to learn later that he knew people that I knew.’
‘Amanda found you through the church registry, though.’ I glanced at my partner. ‘Did you attend Jake’s church?’
‘Hell no,’ Sam snorted. ‘Not for masses or sermons. But the church did a lot of promotional stuff for Jake, so I signed up so I’d get the notices about his appearances. He hated people he knew going to see him talk. I’d have to sneak in the back.’
‘You’d go and watch him talk?’
‘I cared about him.’ Sam shrugged. ‘I liked to hear what he had to say about his work.’
‘So yours was a romance, then?’ Amanda asked.
‘Maybe once. Briefly. At least, I thought so. Jake and I saw each other regularly but not exclusively.’ Sam sipped his drink. ‘There was a group of us. It was all very casual. When you’re a man who likes the company of men and you live somewhere like Cairns, you don’t get committed. You don’t want to burn the other person and find yourself one down in your collection of people who understand you. You get what I mean?’
