Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘There’s a group on the internet called Innocent Ted,’ she said quietly. ‘They started up after the interview footage. They’re trying to get a written statement from Trevor Fuller to release on the blog. They’re also trying to see if they can access phone tower pings in the area on that day. See who else was around.’

  ‘Who are these people?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘They’re just people. Strangers who believe you.’

  I stared at the water, aware that she was watching me. She wanted me to tell her that I forgave her. But I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me at that particular moment. There was only panic. Only the rushing visions of what might come. The search. The discovery. The arrest. The cell.

  Right back where I started. Back behind the wire.

  Fabiana reached out and took my hand, gave it a squeeze. I looked down at it, unsure if I could meet her eyes. I hadn’t realised until that moment, but the chanting at the front of the house had stopped. I could hear quiet laughter now and then from the cops, but their soft voices were the only human sound. Fabiana and I might have been two normal people standing in their yard, enjoying the heat of the night. It was the first time I’d been so close to normality since my release.

  The panic eased as I fell into the fantasy. Yes, that was the answer. Forget completely about everything. Ignore what Fabiana had done. Ignore the people on the road. Ignore the undeniable idea that everything was about to end and grab desperately onto the illusion. I was an emotionless passenger calmly drinking scotch in the cruise ship bar, even as the floor tilted beneath me and the cold water rose around my ankles.

  ‘You’re not alone, Ted,’ Fabiana said.

  I let go of her hand, reached up and took her soft cheek.

  I pretended I was someone else and I kissed her.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: This is Detective Sergeant Anthony Leighton of the Crimson Lake Police Beat, badge number 477177. I’m sitting with Detective Sergeant Veronica Prince, and our interview is in relation to the investigation into the murder of Lauren Jessica Freeman, seventeen, of Crimson Lake. The time is 09.49 on the morning of 11 February 2004. Detective Sergeant Prince, would you confirm your presence.

  DT. SGT PRINCE: Veronica Prince, badge number 481911.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Amanda, would you state your name, address and birth date for the recording.

  PHARRELL: Um. It’s Amanda Pharrell. Amanda Joy Pharrell. Tuesday, first December 1986 was the day I was born. Um.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Your address?

  PHARRELL: 14 Possum Place, Crimson Lake. The white house.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Amanda, this is our second interview. At the end of our last interview, we had started talking about your relationship with the victim, Lauren Freeman. PHARRELL: Yep.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: I wanted to go back into that, and have a chat about why you accepted the ride from Lauren last Wednesday night, on the night she was killed. Can you tell me if you and Lauren were friends?

  PHARRELL: Were we friends?

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Yes.

  PHARRELL: Um. No. Not really. I mean we weren’t not friends. I don’t have many friends. I don’t –

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Maybe you could get into why you accepted the ride. Why you were headed to the party together.

  PHARRELL: Well, she said there was a party on. At Kissing Point. I don’t mind going to things, like parties and things, if I get asked. Some parties they don’t ask people, like there aren’t invitations and things –

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Amanda –

  PHARRELL: I mean, I think it must be lame to make invitations to things now. Maybe invitations are something only kids do. I’ve never had a party. I don’t know. I never know what’s right.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: But did Lauren ask you to come along to the party with her? Did she say something like, ‘Hey, come along with me to this night?’ That the two of you would go together?

  PHARRELL: Well, no, it wasn’t her party.

  DT. SGT PRINCE: Look, we’re trying to shed some light on why Lauren asked you to go with her in the first place, Amanda. People are telling us, and you’re telling us, that the two of you weren’t friends.

  PHARRELL: She threw a pencil at me once.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: I’m sorry?

  PHARRELL: In primary school. Year Five, I think. We both had Ms Grace. Lauren threw a pencil at me. I mean, everyone was throwing pencils at me, and she joined in, but I don’t think she’d have remembered it now, if you asked her. If she was alive.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Is that why you did what you did?

  PHARRELL: Did what?

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Is that why you stabbed her, Amanda? I’m asking if you stabbed her because there were things from your past, like when she threw the pencil at you in Year Five, that made you angry at her. Is that why you stabbed her?

  PHARRELL: (inaudible)

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: If we can just understand why this happened, Amanda, it would be so much easier on everyone. On Lauren’s family. I mean, there might be a reason why you did what you did. There might have been something –

  PHARRELL: When can I go home? I’m so tired. I’d really like to go home soon.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Is there someone else who might understand, and be able to explain better the relationship between you and Lauren? Did you ever tell anyone how you felt about Lauren?

  DT. SGT PRINCE: It’s okay to hate someone, Amanda. Everybody hates someone. Did you hate Lauren? Did Lauren maybe try to take you to the party as a way of saying sorry for whatever she’d done?

  PHARRELL: I’m sure she was a really nice girl.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: (inaudible)

  DT. SGT PRINCE: I might take a break, Tony. This is pretty heavy for me.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Interview suspended at –

  PHARRELL: Her family will probably miss her heaps.

  DT. SGT LEIGHTON: Interview suspended at 10.11 on 11 February 2004.

  We woke to the sound of a bang against the boards on the front windows. A hurled lump of brick, probably. There were plenty of voices outside, but cutting through them was the yelling of one of the protective officers.

  ‘Hey! Do that again and I’ll book you, mate!’

  Fabiana had been curled on her side, turned away from me. She rolled over and buried her face in my shoulder. I lay staring at the ceiling, barely remembering what we’d done. I’d gone away, recoiled into myself, let another Ted that was not Ted come out and take over my brain. I had the sense that I’d done this before, that there was another me in there who could handle trauma and terror better than I could. Maybe that’s how I’d dealt with my job all those years, with dead babies in drug dens and dealers’ wives lying on soiled mattresses with their throats cut. The Other Ted didn’t give a shit. He was an ordinary guy. A guy without troubles. A guy who wasn’t in danger. An invincible guy.

  Whoever he was, Other Ted was gone now, and all the hurt that the regular me felt panged through me. Fabiana held me. But I didn’t hold her. I hadn’t forgotten what she’d done. I sat up and scratched my scalp awake.

  Determined to stay asleep, Fabiana latched onto me as a kind of anchor to dreamland, her arm coming around my stomach and legs entwining with mine.

  ‘This is one committed mob,’ she sighed when none of her manoeuvres worked.

  ‘I don’t think there’d be half as many if A Current Affair wasn’t there,’ I said. ‘Angry mobs love that show. Coffee?’

  ‘I think I’m going to need it,’ she said.

  I padded into the kitchen and stopped to survey the yard, half-expecting some devastation from the vigilantes there. I’d chained the back gate, but it looked like someone had at least pushed on it experimentally, bent the top of the wire fence trying to get through. The cops probably chased them away.

  I took the coffee off the shelf and set two mugs on the counter. I felt generally wretched. I’d fallen into Fabiana and her attraction to me as a last-ditch effort to escape my reality. Now that the spell was broken,
I wanted to scream at her for feeding me to the dogs with that goddamn video. Images of the night before pushed at me. I thought I liked her. But I really didn’t like what she’d done to me.

  How to tell her that I never wanted to see her again, but that I didn’t want her to leave?

  When Fabiana entered the kitchen I had paused, staring at the dry brown grounds in the open jar.

  ‘Y’all right?’

  There was a tiny plastic triangle sticking out of the top of the coffee grinds, a translucent mountain jutting from chocolate-coloured boulders. I reached in and took the peak between my thumb and forefinger, pulled gently. The grinds shifted, collapsing, sinking. I pulled again, and the bag began to emerge from the jar.

  ‘Oh my god,’ I said. Fabiana pushed in beside me.

  The photographs in the little zip-lock bag were curled to fit into the jar. I tipped the jar into the sink and pulled the bag out, flattened the photographs on the counter. There was a stack of them, five or six polaroids. I knew what they were without having to look very closely.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Fabiana snatched the bag off me and held it up to her nose. ‘Jesus. Jesus!’

  There was a pounding at the front door. I recognised Hench’s voice above the crowd. I watched in numb terror as Fabiana shoved the bag with the photos in the front of her underpants, pulling down the T-shirt of mine that she’d borrowed to wear so that it hung at the top of her thighs.

  Damford and Hench didn’t wait for me to go and open the door. It made a good show for the crowd to kick the door in, again. There was a cheer from the front of the house. The two officers walked in and took in the scene before them.

  The coffee grounds all over the sink. Fabiana standing there beside me, her hair mussed and her fingers grabbing nervously at the neck of her T-shirt. This was not what they had planned. Hench took his baton out of his belt.

  ‘Hands up, Conkaffey. We’ve got a warrant for a site search.’

  He poked me in the belly, not hard. Not like he had on other occasions. The two didn’t know what to make of Fabiana. She was too clean, too beautiful to be a prostitute I’d brought home from Cairns. But what woman in her right mind would have anything to do with me right now? What the hell was I doing entertaining women when I had the mob at my door calling for my lynching?

  ‘Search the house,’ I said. ‘You won’t find anything.’

  ‘Not now.’ Hench looked distastefully at the sink. He slipped a finger into the waistband of my boxers and made the elastic snap. ‘Looks like we were seconds too late, eh, Ted? Get your shirt off. Put your hands on the sink.’

  ‘Does your warrant include a body search?’ Fabiana piped up. She went to the kitchen table and sat down. I winced, thinking the zip-lock plastic was going to crumple loudly in her pants. But it didn’t make a sound. ‘I bet it doesn’t. I bet it’s premises only.’

  They turned on her like dogs.

  ‘What’s your name, miss?’

  ‘I don’t have to give you my name.’

  ‘Huh,’ Damford sneered. ‘Spoken like a true criminal piece of shit. You know who this guy here is? This is Ted Conkaffey, honey. You heard that name?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Then you’ll know your boyfriend here usually likes ’em a lot younger than you. Like twenty years younger. That’s not a problem?’

  ‘Can you just get on with what you’re doing and leave?’ I stepped away from Hench, out of the swing of his baton. He pushed over the milk carton at his side so that it tipped and fell on the floor, vomiting milk under the fridge.

  ‘Whoops.’

  Damford was looking at Fabiana, trying to decide if she was hiding the photographs. It was clear we’d only just found the photographs mere seconds before they’d come in. They were either on me, or they were on her. Hench gave me an experimental nudge with his hip as he passed me while walking to the cupboard, trying to make the baggie crackle in my waistband or crotch. He opened the cupboard, looked around. Opened the drawers and shuffled loudly through the cutlery.

  ‘You won’t find anything,’ I repeated slowly. I caught the fat officer’s eye. ‘Believe me.’

  Damford and Hench knocked a few more things over on their way out, stopped and looked through the door at my bedroom. But they knew that this time, for the first time, I’d won. When I shut the front door behind them, the sickness in my stomach made itself known. I went back into the kitchen, where Fabiana had placed the pictures on the table, her role as my saviour now ended.

  I opened the bag and carefully laid out the six photographs, each of them curved from being inside the coffee jar. They were all the same pose, but the girls were different. They were each lying on their back on different surfaces; two on beds, one on the carpet of what looked like a cluttered bedroom, one across the back seat of a car, two on couches. Each of the girls had an arm raised and hanging over their eyes, an elbow jutting upwards, shielding their identities. They were naked, their knobbly teenage knees splayed and milk-white bodies stretched tight. Gaping grotesquely in the light of the flash.

  I found Fabiana standing in the bedroom, looking at her hands. The look she gave me was that of a woman who didn’t know if she’d done the right thing.

  I sat in the car outside the Starfish cafe, shifting through the fan letters from Jake Scully’s car in my hands. I could hardly concentrate on them. Until now, I’d been trying to leave my gun at home, but the journalists and the vigilantes were making me nervous, so I’d started carrying it down the back of my jeans. The storm seemed to be bringing with it all the terrible energy of both cases, Amanda’s and mine. Hard truths were coming. On the radio, every half hour a news brief mentioned that the police had found Jake’s car and were putting it through forensic testing. They mentioned Smitt, saying police wanted to question the young man in relation to the famous writer’s disappearance. The radio hosts kept directing people to the Crime Stoppers website, where pictures of Smitt were being displayed. His mother had already submitted herself to police. Didn’t know where the young man was. Didn’t know anything about the case.

  I didn’t doubt that the letters to Jake were from Smitt. They had his natural arrogance, his patronising eloquence. There was a fire crackling behind the words as I worked through the first five letters. A barely contained desperation to have the older man meet his eye, just once. And that familiar hurt when he wouldn’t. The wounded pride of an ignored child, confused when their uniqueness isn’t recognised. Face in the crowd, beaming, waiting.

  I watched the words slowly darkening, darkening. When Dynah arrived at the cafe, keys in hand, I had to wrench myself up out of that black and horrid world Smitt had created and into the light of day again. Smitt’s universe was so dark, and so deep, and I knew somewhere down there Jake Scully’s body was swirling. The animal that had taken him had just been the vehicle. I was sure there was a bottom to the swamp, but only Ormund himself knew where it was and what lurked there.

  I put down Smitt’s letters to Jake and picked up the photographs from the coffee jar in my kitchen. The little girls lost.

  Dynah stopped and watched me as I got out of the car. There was a flicker of a defeated smile about her lips as I came towards her. The beginnings of tears in her eyes.

  The wind was whipping the palm trees when I left the Starfish cafe, and as I pulled open the car door the handle was yanked hard from my hand by the approaching storm. I looked at the mountains and found the sky above them an angry dark blue, lightning flashing over the top of the range. There was no rain here yet but the ground seemed to know it was coming, the asphalt already steaming. Creatures in the gardens behind the buildings on the main street were calling out. There would be no customers for Dynah that afternoon. She’d stand in the dark kitchen looking out, watching the gutters flood.

  I sat in the car for a long time, staring at the letters in the passenger seat, wondering if I should go now and find Amanda and tell her that I knew everything. My head was pounding. I turned the car around and headed
towards Crimson Lake. Dynah’s words were ringing in my mind. My thoughts were tangled up in teenage voices, images of bodies sprawled, eyes hidden, horrified, downturned mouths as their images were captured.

  When I arrived at the small office in Beale Street there were two journalists standing on the wooden stairs drinking coffee from mugs I recognised as Amanda’s. She’d made our pursuers coffee, but not warmed to them enough to invite them inside. That was Amanda: halfway between one seat of logic and another. The two men looked at me as I locked the car and put the zip-lock bag with the pictures of the naked girls in the back pocket of my jeans. I didn’t worry about being caught with them now. They’d come out soon enough. The men at the door studied my face, tried to assess whether I’d respond to their questions even before I’d made it up the path.

  ‘Just one comment,’ the journalist on the right said, holding his mug out like a friendly hand. ‘Anything, Ted.’

  ‘No comment, mate,’ I said as I pushed past.

  Amanda was standing in the kitchen with her own mug of coffee, stirring slowly, her unseeing eyes settled on the chocolate-brown liquid going round and round. She seemed like the weather outside, a storm slowly building, and I wondered absurdly if she knew what I had just learned about her from Dynah. If she could somehow hear Dynah’s voice in my head, rambling away, the horrific web of images she spun there. I went to the desk and sat down, looked at the computer screen, which showed a live blog with updates on the search for Ormund Smitt. Police had attended the local hardware store where he worked as a cashier and were conducting interviews there. There were no signs of the young man. I shifted things around the desk, not knowing where to begin. Amanda was still stirring the coffee in the kitchen, her eyes glazed.

  ‘Amanda,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’