Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘Deep inside the dark, into the dark, he’s taking me into the dark, I can’t, I’m not, Mum, Mum, there’s a white dog, Mrs Anderson, I can’t … into the … make sure you take your homework with you … into the dark, the policeman is here, he’s taking me …’

  ‘What did you just say?’ The counsellor interviewing Claire had seized on the word. ‘Did you say he was a “policeman”?’

  Mrs Anderson was the name of Claire’s teacher. The girl’s interview with police, guided by a team of child trauma specialists, was all like this: little snippets of thoughts rushing through a broken brain. Her day with her friends. Breakfast that morning. Some of it was just fanciful mumbling about butterflies and dogs and colours. Now and then the child was lucid, and when her eyes settled and her face became composed, it was only for a few seconds before she burst into tears and collapsed into the arms of her mother sitting beside her.

  Sometimes, throughout the interviews, Claire repeated what the people around her said. A clip played again and again by the prosecution was the little girl parroting the counsellor, her words fast and slurred.

  Did you say he was a policeman?

  Did you say he was a policeman?

  Did you say he was a policeman?

  I’d lost it and cried in the third hour of interview tapes. Pictures of me with my head in my hands had turned up on the cover of the Herald the next day under the headline ‘Crocodile Tears’.

  ‘So you don’t have any real answers about why she would say that, Ted?’ Fabiana asked me now.

  ‘Is it possible she was talking about the policemen who were interviewing her? The same policemen had been doing so, in uniform, for some days at that point? Is it possible that at some time during the hours and hours she was talked to by investigators that was unrecorded, someone might have outright asked her if the man who did this was a policeman? Is it possible that the girl overheard her parents discussing me with investigators, maybe caught them saying something about me being a policeman?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Fabiana shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, either. I don’t know what the hell she was talking about. All I know is, she wasn’t talking about me when she was talking about her attacker. Because I’m not him.’

  She sat staring at me, turning her glass on the table top.

  ‘She picked you out of a photo line-up.’

  ‘Yes. She did. She had seen me,’ I snapped. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve said this. Claire had seen me that day by the side of the road. I’ve never denied that.’ I sighed. My face was burning.

  ‘You worked in the drug squad,’ Fabiana said. ‘That has been a point of interest for a lot of people watching this case. With drugs come drug dealers, and with drug dealers come corrupt police, lawyers, judges. Did working in the drug squad help you in any way in getting your charges dropped, Ted?’

  ‘How could it possibly have helped me?’ I asked. ‘I arrested drug dealers. Why would they do me favours? Why would they want me back on the streets? They’re not my friends.’

  That wasn’t strictly true. I did have friends who were drug dealers. You arrest people enough times, you begin to build a rapport. I had been arresting some of the men I encountered in my job since they were teenagers, and they’d stopped seeing it as personal after a while. When I caught them, it was because they’d fucked up, not because I was a bad person. When I’d been released from Silverwater, the first thing I had done was contact one of these wily underdogs to ask him to find me a gun. I wasn’t going on the run without a gun. But the journalist didn’t need to know that.

  ‘I didn’t do this,’ I told Fabiana, leaning forward, looking at her eyes. ‘I didn’t rape Claire Bingley. I’m sick of fucking saying it.’

  Fabiana was sitting back in her seat now. I looked around the bar. Luckily, we hadn’t drawn any attention yet, but I wasn’t going to stick around until we did. I sculled the rest of my beer.

  ‘You’re very convincing,’ Fabiana said quietly. ‘The way you talk. It’s very convincing.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. I slammed my beer glass down and got out of there.

  Amanda had texted me more nonsense when I looked at my phone in the car. More nonsensical bullshit. I called her. The background of the call was noisy, and she was already talking when the line connected.

  ‘No, no, shut up! It’s my partner. Ted? Ted! Teddy! Oh, I guess I shouldn’t call you Teddy. Only Stella calls you Teddy.’

  ‘What?’ I was so furious, I realised I had bitten the inside of my cheek, my jaw grinding. ‘What are you talking about? Where are you?’

  ‘Come to O’Toole’s, Ted!’ she said. ‘This place fucking rocks!’

  O’Toole’s bar was a student hangout south of James Cook University on the Captain Cook Highway. Not the usual hub of students, this was the place for the stoners and the dropouts, the booth tabletops free of textbooks and notebooks, the walls bare of special deals on jugs. I walked in and received a few looks from the bar staff and a pair of young ladies who were playing Uno over the counter.

  At the back of the great room a row of pool tables stood, and I was drawn there by loud laughter. I stood and looked at Amanda for a few moments, uncomprehending.

  She’d somehow metamorphosed into a teenage dream, her awkward clothes shed and her small, lean figure strapped tight into a midnight-blue dress. The dress was small, a darkness that ended in colourful tattooed fairies and temptresses and queens who cavorted over the entirety of Amanda’s thighs. I hadn’t seen her legs bare but they were taut from all that bike riding, calves straining in huge silver glittery heels that would have looked right at home either on the red carpet or the strip club stage. She’d tried to tame her wild black hair but it flicked and curled everywhere behind her ears and down the nape of her neck.

  She was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that made me immediately on guard. All around her, young men stood and watched while she leaned over the pool table and lined up a difficult shot. She was a practised pool player. They whooped and cheered but it was obvious that their appreciation was half for her skill and half that she was there at all, that she was near, this delicious little mystery that had floated into their world.

  Someone tugged my arm. The bar beside me was also crowded with guys turned on their seats to watch the gathering around the table.

  ‘Dude, do you know who that chick is?’ a kid asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘That’s Amanda Pharrell, man,’ the kid told me, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘She butchered some girl.’

  ‘Cut her fucking head off,’ another said, making cutting motions at his throat. ‘Crazy, man.’

  I’d had enough. I strode into the group and lifted Amanda’s pool cue before she could line up her next shot.

  ‘Ted!’ she said, her eyes wide and slow as she looked up at me. ‘You’re here!’

  ‘And we’re leaving,’ I said.

  ‘Nah, nah, stay, Ted. Stay. Meet my new friends. This is Johnno, and Bradley, and Mickey …’

  She plucked up a drink from a line of three short glasses on the edge of the table. She literally had a queue of drinks bought for her by the young hyenas. I grabbed her arm and she stumbled, fell against me. The one she’d called Mickey, a bronzed surfer-looking youth, pushed half-heartedly against my chest. He knew if I swung at him he was done for, and quickly backed out of my reach.

  ‘Fuck off, man. Leave her alone.’

  ‘She gets to decide if she goes or not,’ another kid sneered.

  ‘This isn’t Feminism 101, boys,’ I said. ‘Back the fuck up.’

  ‘He’s my partner! He’s my mate!’

  ‘Come on.’ I pulled at Amanda. ‘Say bye to everyone.’

  ‘Bye to everyone!’ Amanda cried.

  In the dim light of the parking lot, I realised just how drunk she was. I wondered if someone had put something in her drink. She stopped and gripped at her huge heels, seemed to want to pull them off, then thought better of it and stumbled on. She
was rambling. Losing tracks of her sentences.

  ‘In Brisbane Women’s there was this girl named Manni,’ she was saying. ‘We were like, a pair. She … We … Because she was Manni, and I was Mandy, and our bunks were … We …’

  Amanda stumbled. I tried to put an arm around her, but when my skin made contact with hers she shrank and twisted and brushed me off.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she snapped. ‘It’s in the rules.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked. ‘Do you want to stop and take those off?’

  ‘You gotta respect … the rules. Read the contract. Read the fine print.’

  I stopped and watched her go for her heels again. She fell and I caught her just before she slumped onto the gravel. I swung her up into my arms and carried her like a child.

  ‘What a mess,’ I said.

  ‘Messy messy mess,’ she murmured against my neck.

  I’d parked on the road just outside the parking lot. I hoisted Amanda up against my chest and popped open the passenger door, placed her gently in the seat and buckled her up. Her head lolled against the window as I shut the door, her eyes closed.

  I got into the driver’s seat and started the car, thinking I’d take her back to my place and put her on the couch on the porch. Or maybe in the bed. In the bed was more gentlemanly. I’d take the couch.

  I was starting the engine when I realised she was awake. Amanda was slowly coming to, her eyes widening as she looked at the dashboard.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. Her hands went to the seatbelt at her chest. ‘No. No. No.’

  All at once she bucked against the seat, her hands hitting at the dashboard, the window, the roof. She didn’t seem to know how to get out of the seatbelt. She started screaming.

  ‘No! No! No! No!’

  ‘It’s okay!’ I said, trying to grab her. ‘It’s all right! Amanda! Amanda! It’s all right!’

  She was fighting, twisting, clawing at the door in the dark, trying to find the handle. She tugged at it, found the door locked, fumbled at the window for the button.

  ‘God, please! Please!’

  She kicked at the windscreen, twisted out of the seatbelt, struggled at the door.

  ‘Please help me!’

  I got out and tore around to the passenger side. By the time I got there she’d thrown herself out the driver’s door and onto the gravel. She was crawling out of the light of the car, into the grass, her whole body shaking violently.

  ‘Amanda!’

  ‘Not in the car. Not in the car. Not in the car,’ she wailed. I tried to put my hands on her but she went into screams. ‘Don’t touch me! ’

  I slid down against the rear tyre of my car and watched her lying in the grass, her hands over her head and chin tucked against her chest. She lay like that, shaking and sniffling, refusing to answer me when I talked, pulling away when I reached for her hand. When she’d recovered enough to look at me I took a thin blanket from the back of the car and tried to wrap it around her, but she tore it from me and swung it over her own shoulders.

  Suddenly there was a fierceness to her. Her big eyes sparkled in the light of the street lamps, ablaze with orange orbs.

  ‘You touch me again, Ted, and I’ll kill you,’ she said. She pointed a finger at my face, and I felt my stomach twist.

  ‘Amanda,’ I said.

  ‘No, shut up,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve killed. You understand? I’ve killed. I know what it feels like to rip the life out of a body. And I’ll do that to you.’

  The words were hot in the air, searing on my skin. I’d never feared Amanda before, but looking at her now, she was nothing of the frail little butterfly woman I’d met for the first time days before in the Shark Bar. She was a ghoul standing before me, a hollow thing, and what I saw in her hard face made me sick in an instant. She’d turned all her dark power on me, like a spider rearing in a corner, and in just the way a threatened arachnid would, she curled in on herself, twisted and crept away into the dark.

  Perhaps out of a shared desire to stave off the awkwardness of the night before, neither Amanda nor I made phone contact the next day. I called Jake’s agent, Cary Minnow, and managed to get through to him just before he left for a meeting.

  It seemed to take precious minutes to describe to him my purpose, a speech through which he sighed and huffed.

  ‘Oh, there were always crazy fans, mate,’ Cary said. ‘The bigger the writer, the more crazies. Jake got a double-whammy: the writer nuts and the religious nuts. Mixed nuts.’ He laughed.

  ‘Anyone who you worried about? Anyone make any threats?’

  ‘Let me think. Look, the religious nuts were always upset about his mishmash of the great books. He picked and chose from here and there across a number of Christian texts. New and Old Testament, Leviticus, Genesis,’ Cary said. ‘Some Christians loved it. He was bringing the old, inaccessible stories to the youth of today. Some hated it, though. The characters are teenagers, so they confront all the major sins. Envy. Lust. Sometimes the characters are righteous, and sometimes they sin. We got a major global backlash when Adam and Eve had pre-marital sex in book three.’

  ‘What do you mean, backlash?’

  ‘Some arseholes hacked into Jake’s website and trolled it,’ Cary said. ‘Dumped child porn and graphic crime-scene photos all over it.’

  ‘What?’ I shook my head. ‘How does that –’

  ‘Make any sense? It doesn’t,’ Cary said. ‘These people are lunatics.’

  ‘When did book three come out?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  ‘Right,’ I sighed. ‘I think I’m looking for something more recent.’

  ‘The last thing I can think of was about this time last year,’ he said. ‘Some woman bought all the tickets to his book talk in Newcastle.’

  ‘Whoa.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cary said. ‘I think there were fifty tickets. Would have cost her a bit.’

  ‘Why did they sell all the tickets to one woman?’

  ‘They didn’t think it was just one woman,’ the agent said. ‘That’s the sick part. She bought all of them individually. Different credit cards. Different accounts. They said she called up and did voices, even. Pretty crazy. We only got wind of the scam an hour before the talk. Jake didn’t go.’

  ‘She must have wanted a private audience with him pretty bad,’ I said. ‘What was she? Aspiring author?’

  ‘Just a romantic, I think.’

  ‘Can you remember her name?’

  I got a piece of paper and wrote down Renee MacIntyre’s details as Cary quoted them to me.

  ‘You ever hear from Renee again?’

  ‘No, no,’ Cary said. ‘We checked the guest lists for a while after her failed attempt at a one-on-one, but she never popped up again.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Stella would have all the fan letters, too,’ Cary said. Someone spoke to him in the background of the call.

  ‘Yeah, I’m working through them,’ I said. ‘I’m not seeing anything very scary.’

  ‘All right, well I –’

  ‘Just before you go – I know you’re busy,’ I said. ‘Can you think of anything more recent than Renee MacIntyre? The last few months or so. Anything at all that might be helpful. An aggressive call? A strange gift?’

  The line was silent. I thought he might have hung up on me.

  ‘A fan attacked another fan at a book signing,’ he said. ‘Cairns, I think it was, or it might have been Brisbane. In a bookstore. You’ll have to go hunting for it. The papers reported that someone got knocked out, but I was inside with Jake. We didn’t hear or see any of it.’

  I spent some of the morning making other calls, my hands-free hooked up while I scrubbed goose shit off the porch with a broom and some soapy water. Renee MacIntyre was a strange character – she had multiple aliases and shifted jobs and apartments every six months or so. She ran a very basic website that seemed devoted to ruining Jake’s reputation, the page sprayed with m
ultiple ‘testimonies’ from other fans detailing everything from his rudeness at book events to apparent sections of plagiarised text in his books. It looked like Renee had been badly scorned by Jake’s refusal to turn up at the book talk she’d commandeered. There was a very angry paragraph written by a fan simply calling herself ‘Rosa’ that described Jake turning up drunk to a writer’s festival and trying to tongue kiss her at the back of the crowd. Rosa’s written style was suspiciously similar to Renee’s introduction to the website.

  The lead started to fail when I noticed that the Jake-hating website hadn’t been updated in a year. After about three hours I finally nailed down a current address for Renee – Koh Samui, Thailand. She hadn’t been back to Australia in six months. Dead end. Sometimes detective work is like that. You sit behind a desk for hours with a phone in your hand calling around in circles, putting on voices so you can call the same number multiple times and ask different questions, writing notes across your notepad. And then all of a sudden it comes to an abrupt end, and the excitement you didn’t even know you’d been holding in your throat and chest melts away. I was used to doing it in a crowded bull pen, surrounded by my colleagues, friends I could roll my eyes at or eavesdrop on between calls. There was nothing between the calls now but the sound of crickets in the field across the road, the tinkling of lorikeets in the trees. My own thoughts.

  As my life became more organised, I had begun to wonder about my future contact with my daughter. I wanted Sean to begin discussions with Kelly about some sort of custody arrangement. No court in the country was going to give me even fifty-fifty custody of Lillian. If the papers got hold of something like that, there’d be such a public outcry, Kelly and Lillian might be in danger. Before I knew it, they’d be standing outside the public places Kelly would let us meet, their cameras pressed up against the broad McDonald’s restaurant windows, trying to get that magic snap of my baby in my arms. The only publicly respectable thing the Family Court could do was give me supervised visits in-house, and even then, I knew, they’d be analysing my conversations with Kelly, their notebooks ready, ears pricked for an aggressive tone or a snide remark.