by Megan Goldin
‘Thank you.’ Julie picked up the cup with her cuffed hands and bent forward to drink thirstily. When she was finished, she looked at me expectantly. Her face was thin and sallow from too little sunlight in the many months she’d been locked up here. Her eyes were wary, more fearful than defiant.
‘I read the transcripts you sent, of your sessions with your psychiatrist,’ I told her.
‘So you believe me?’
I shrugged. I’d come here out of curiosity. To hear what she had to say. That was all.
‘Matt said all the evidence points to me. It was the perfect crime, you see,’ she said.
‘He’s right,’ I answered. ‘All the evidence does point to you.’
On the drive over here, I had tried to reconfigure the case from her perspective. Since the night I shot Julie, I’d had an uneasy feeling. My gut instinct told me there was something unfinished. It was ridiculous. Even Will said so. The evidence was overwhelming. We’d rarely had such an ironclad case.
‘That’s exactly what bothers me about it,’ I had told Will.
Will said my doubts were residual guilt from almost killing her. I had been the first to reach Julie after I shot her. She was splayed on the slate pathway with blood gushing from her chest. I used the full weight of my body to press down on the wounds to stem the bleeding.
She barely had a pulse when they put her in the ambulance. My hands and forearms were covered with her blood. Will said the shooting was by the book. Nobody could fault me. I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps that’s what brought me here.
‘What is it exactly that you want from me, Julie?’ I asked. ‘I am not a defence attorney, or a private eye for hire. It’s my job to put you behind bars and make sure the jury throws away the key.’
‘I know that,’ Julie said, looking down at her hands. ‘But you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe there was at least some truth to my story. Would you?’
I looked into her bruised sky-blue eyes and said nothing. She was right. I wouldn’t have driven all the way across the state to see her if I didn’t have doubts about her guilt. I had the same doubts when I slipped into the back pew at the church to watch Matthew West marry his former research assistant, Kate. Her ivory bridal gown barely disguised her pregnancy. He inclined his head towards me as they left the chapel. It wasn’t so much a greeting as a cocky salute. It left me with a feeling of disquiet.
‘You claim you were with your boyfriend Alex on the night of Laura’s murder,’ I said to Julie. ‘Was there nobody else with you that evening? A friend who dropped by for coffee? Anyone who can vouch for you?’
She shook her head. ‘It was just Alex and me. Alex would have confirmed it if he was still alive.’
‘Except he isn’t alive,’ I pointed out. ‘Dead men don’t make good alibi witnesses.’
That morning, before driving to the prison, I had read a report prepared by the court-appointed psychiatrist after a session he conducted not long after Julie’s arrest. ‘The patient exhibits delusional and paranoid tendencies that are exacerbated at times of deep emotional stress,’ he’d written. The psychiatrist hired by her court-appointed defence attorney had submitted a contradictory report that described her mental health as normal. I wondered which shrink was right.
‘What you didn’t explain in the correspondence that you sent me is why you stalked Emily.’
‘I don’t understand it myself,’ Julie told me. ‘It was a compulsion. Whatever drugs my husband gave me made me manic. Made me fixate on Emily. I don’t believe I’d have abducted Emily if Matt hadn’t been feeding me pills.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But there’s no evidence he gave you anything other than your prescription medicine. The medication we found in your bathroom cabinet and next to your bed does not create that type of mania.’
‘Matt controlled my medications. He controlled my mood, my memory, even my personality, with all sorts of meds,’ Julie said. ‘He manipulated me for years.’
‘He says that you were the one manipulating him, Julie. He calls you a pathological liar and a sociopath.’ I sighed. ‘Look, the evidence is against you. Worse, you have no credibility.’
‘What do you mean?’ She looked hurt.
‘You kidnapped Emily at gunpoint and took her into the forest. Whether you meant to talk to her or to kill her is a moot point. To be realistic, I can’t see how any attorney could get you off the hook. Let alone convict Matthew for Laura’s murder, based only on your testimony and without any corroborating evidence.’
‘I’m fine now that I’m off the medication,’ Julie said, holding back tears. ‘I’ve remembered things that could help you investigate him. That might incriminate him.’
‘And then there’s the murder of Laura West itself,’ I continued. ‘There’s overwhelming physical evidence that you were involved. Your fingerprint was found on a torn piece of a disposable glove buried at the crime scene. You claim your husband planted it but there’s no way to prove that. Your alibi witness, a former boyfriend who may have been an accomplice in Laura West’s murder, was killed in suspicious circumstances. And there’s considerable evidence that you may have been the one who killed him. Your husband, the person you claim killed Laura, was two hours’ drive away having sex with a married woman. A woman who has since submitted an affidavit confirming his account, despite all the difficulties that may cause with her husband.’ I paused to let her digest the overwhelming case against her. ‘I’m sorry, there’s no evidence that supports your version of events.’
‘Yet here you are,’ Julie said.
‘Yet here I am,’ I conceded.
‘There’s evidence if you look hard enough,’ she said quietly.
‘What evidence?’
‘Matt thought he destroyed all the files on the memory research he did behind Laura’s back, but he didn’t. Alex kept copies at his aunt’s house. The files prove that Matthew manipulated my memory. And that Laura was opposed to his research. That would give him a motive. Wouldn’t it?’ Julie said hopefully.
‘Maybe,’ I shrugged. ‘I’ll look into it.’ I didn’t want to give her false hope. I shouldn’t even have been there. Despite my better judgement, I was there because something about this case had kept me up every night since I put two bullets in Julie West’s chest.
‘I have a question for you, Julie.’
‘Go ahead,’ she said.
‘Did you kill Laura West?’
‘No,’ she said in a voice that was more weary then emphatic. Her eyes never left my own. I’ve spent my adult life looking into the eyes of murderers. When I looked into her anguished face that afternoon I didn’t think that Julie West was a killer.
The guard opened the door. ‘Time’s up,’ she bellowed. She removed Julie’s handcuffs from the table with a loud metallic rattle.
‘Thank you,’ Julie said, turning her head in my direction as the guard guided her out of the room.
‘For what?’ I said. ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’
‘For believing in me,’ Julie said.
I was about to tell her that she was being premature. But the guard was already steering her towards her cell like she was a stray sheep being put back in her pen. When they reached the metal door at the end of the corridor, Julie turned to look at me one last time as if there was something else she wanted to tell me. The guard shoved her through the doorway before she could say a word.
She was right about one thing, I thought, as I drove along the state highway back home. If Matthew West did kill his wife then he committed the perfect crime.
Acknowledgements
It would have been impossible to have written this book if it had not been for my family, who gave me the time and space to immerse myself in my writing, and the fortitude to persevere through self-doubt and discouragement. The Girl in Kellers Way would almost certainly still be sitting in my desk drawer if not for Sarah Fairhall, who graciously read my manuscript and offered to publish the novel at a time when I was close to giving
up. To Johannes Jakob and Ali Watts, I wish to extend my deepest appreciation for the unsung and meticulous work of all great editors and publishers, and for their encouragement and guidance. Thank you to Chloe Davies, Louise Ryan and the rest of the Penguin Random House Australia team for championing my work. While writing this book, I delved into research on memory that was both fascinating and at times unsettling. Of note was the work into the malleability of memory by Dr Elizabeth F. Loftus, who has been a leader in memory research for decades.
About the Author
Megan Goldin worked as a foreign correspondent for the ABC and Reuters in Asia and the Middle East where she covered war zones and wrote about war, peace and international terrorism.
After she had her third child, she returned to her hometown of Melbourne to raise her three sons and write fiction, often while waiting for her children at their sports training sessions. The Girl in Kellers Way is Megan Goldin’s debut
MICHAEL JOSEPH
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First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2017
Text copyright © Megan Goldin, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Adam Laszczuk © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Text design by Samantha Jayaweera © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Cover photographs courtesy Shutterstock.com
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 9781743772317
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