by John Marsden
Hi, just wanted to tell you how much I’m missing you. It’s a bit of a madhouse here and the trial has been totally nasty so I can’t wait to get home and see you again. We’ve been going to court every day waiting to be called as witnesses and today it finally happened. It was a pretty weird experience but I guess it went all right. Gavin wants to stay and see whether his stepfather gets convicted. I think he hopes the jury will come in with a guilty verdict and then the horrible Mr Manning’ll be taken straight outside and hung from the nearest tree. Come to think of it I wouldn’t be too sorry myself if they did that. I’m crapping myself a bit over the chance that the guy might get off. I know there’s no way in the world he should, but God knows how things happen in courts and everyone keeps telling me stories about criminals who got away with murder, which isn’t very comforting.
We’ve seen quite a bit of Rosie, Gavin’s little sister. I don’t know whether you remember but she lives with people called Russell who are really nice, even if Mrs Russell is the main one who tells me about court cases gone wrong. But we took Rosie to the park yesterday and had a game of daylight Capture the Flag, which I made up on the spot. They’re still kind of awkward with each other, Gavin and Rosie I mean, but it’s sweet to see them together and it gets better every time. Rosie’s even bossier than Gavin, if you can believe that, but he’s starting to give her as good as he gets, which I think’s probably a good sign.
I’m lonely, Jeremy, and I want to be home and back at Wirrawee High and sitting next to you and listening to your soft voice. You do things to me that I can’t describe, but all I know is that with your arms around me I feel safer than I’ve ever been and I just hope you’re not cheating on me while I’m away, with Jess or anyone else. Just kidding. But think of me all the time, OK. We should be home by the time you get this, so ring me, or I’ll ring you,
Lots of love, Ellie.
I posted that on the way to court, but I didn’t know then that we’d be able to go home the same day. Turning up for the last day of the trial was Gavin’s idea. I wouldn’t have come back for any money, now we were no longer needed. When we’d been waiting to be called as witnesses we weren’t allowed to watch any of the case. I think that’s because they don’t want you to hear what the other witnesses are saying in case you change your story. Bit like Mrs Gilchrist when she’s interrogating students to find out who really did assassinate the lollipop lady or rock the roof or get a preview of the questions for the science test.
It was better as a spectator though. The pressure was off us. I soon realised that things were moving faster than I’d expected and the jury was going to be sent on their way pretty soon to decide the result. Mr Manning hadn’t been charged with murder, the murder of Gavin’s mum, because the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. Well, the police said there was enough but the prosecutor apparently disagreed and told the cops they couldn’t run that one, so it was only knifing us that put him in the dock.
I thought that was outrageous, but of course the only evidence about the murder was from Gavin. They’d found a couple of old neighbours who said Mr Manning was violent and a liar, and no-one had seen Gavin’s mum once the war started, but there was nothing else that could pin the actual murder on him. They never found her body. And I could see that Gavin in a witness box wouldn’t necessarily be enough to persuade a court to lock up an adult and throw away the key.
Anyway, this being the last day of the case there were no more witnesses. It was just the lawyers trying to convince the jury. We got there late and it turned out that the prosecutor, whose name was Mr Lucas, had already had his turn and Mr Manning’s lawyer was on the job. He looked like a really nice man, like anyone’s grandfather, kind face, glasses, friendly voice, but I didn’t trust him after the questions he’d asked us. The stuff he told the jury was outrageous, about how Gavin and I had pestered and harassed ‘the defendant’, how we’d exaggerated the whole thing; but as he went on, something told me that his heart wasn’t really in it, and I started to see him differently. Gradually the mask slipped and I saw him as an old guy who had this nasty client who he probably knew was guilty, but he’d been given the job of going through the motions and making sure he seemed to be getting a fair trial. At the end of the day it was pretty hard to argue with the fact that Gavin and I had both been taken to hospital in an ambulance, and it was because we’d been knifed by Mr Manning.
The judge made a speech to the jury, mostly about how in murder you can be convicted if you set out to give someone a severe bashing and they die of it even if you didn’t want that to happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can be convicted of attempted murder if you set out to give someone a severe bashing and they don’t die of it. Or in our case a severe knifing. She said the jury had to be sure that Mr Manning meant to inflict grievous bodily harm on us, and she added, ‘You may well be of the opinion on the evidence you have heard that he did,’ which seemed to me like she was telling them what to think. But even if they agreed with her on that one, by itself it still wasn’t enough. They also had to be sure that he was reckless. ‘You can make up your own minds as to that,’ she said, but it seemed pretty obvious that she’d come to her own conclusion on that as well.
Then she went into a bit of a spiel about ‘present facts’ and ‘future facts’. ‘If someone in a country town batters another person with an axe handle and a bystander calls the town’s only ambulance and the ambulance is involved in an accident on the way to the scene and never arrives, and the victim subsequently dies, then the attacker is guilty of murder. But if the same circumstances occur, and the victim does not die, the attacker is not guilty of attempted murder. He is not expected to know future facts, only present ones. If a person points a gun at the head of another, knowing the gun probably has rounds in one or two of its chambers, and he pulls the trigger and the gun goes off, wounding the victim but not killing him, then the person is guilty of attempted murder, because he had present knowledge and failed to act appropriately in relation to it.’
So apparently if Mr Manning knew that plunging a knife into us was very dangerous, the jury could convict him of attempted murder. I thought the judge was making the whole thing a lot more complicated than it needed to be. But what would I know? And maybe I didn’t understand it properly anyway. I actually thought it was quite interesting and I did listen more attentively than I do at school.
The jury shuffled out, looking a bit embarrassed at all the attention, and I talked to the police prosecutor for a while, who was a really nice guy, and then Gavin and I went for a hot drink. Chocolate in his case, flat white in mine. Mr Lucas said to hang around as he didn’t think the jury would take long, although then he added, ‘I’m usually wrong.’
After an hour nothing had happened so he put us in an office where Gavin could play on a computer and I could read my book, which was called Sing, and Don’t Cry, and which I liked because it took me far away from Stratton and Wirrawee into the exotic world of Mexico, where guys sit in the back of a ute and serenade their women at midnight, playing guitars and singing achingly and lovingly and warmly and mournfully . . . it made Jeremy look pretty boring.
Then suddenly Mr Lucas put his head in the door and said, ‘They’re coming back’, and Gavin and I joined the little rush of people heading into courtroom number 4.
After that it was pretty much like on TV. The jury came in, and none of them looked at Mr Manning, except one woman who gave him a quick nervous glance, and I knew then that they’d gone for guilty.
They handed a bit of paper to the judge and she read it and said, ‘Is this the verdict of you all?’ and they all nodded, and she then announced that they’d found him guilty of attempted murder and that she agreed with them. She leant forwards and said to him, ‘Mr Manning, you are basically a complete asshole,’ perhaps not quite in those words, but she did let him have a pretty good blast. She said he was a coward and a person of no conscience and no integrity, who was quite prepared to kill children if they
got in the way, and who showed absolutely no remorse. She then hit him with ten years on the hard rock pile and they took him away, Gavin and I waiting till he was out of sight before we highfived each other. I hoped they put him in a cell with Sideshow Bob, or with a couple of six foot four, two hundred kilo bikies who found him irresistibly attractive. I hoped they left him there to rot.
For us, it was back to the farm, back to school, and back, I thought, to life as normal.
CHAPTER 4
THERE ARE NO prizes for guessing what I did when I realised Gavin was missing. Went a little crazy, ran around in circles for a few moments with my hands to my head like I was trying to keep my brains from exploding with all the different thoughts rioting in there, then headed for the phone. I called Homer’s place first and when Homer answered I screeched, ‘Someone’s taken Gavin,’ then hung up. I rang Lee and got Pang, so I asked her to find Lee and have him call me straightaway. I didn’t want to upset Pang. I wasn’t very rational, because I then rang Fi’s boarding house at her school and went through that whole annoying thing of having the phone ring for ages and then a girl answers but she’s kind of lazy and she says, ‘I don’t know where she is,’ and when you say, ‘Oh will you please find her, please, please, it’s really important,’ she says, ‘Oh all right, she might be in the TV Room, I’ll go and have a look there.’ And you wait and wait and you can hear people laughing and talking as they pass the phone and you think you’ve been forgotten until the girl comes back and says, ‘Sorry, can’t find her,’ and you say, ‘Well can you please tell her Ellie rang, and it’s totally important and urgent,’ and you hang up wondering if the message will ever get through.
God, I had an anger-management problem at that point.
I realised I’d rung the old gang first, all except Kevin, and he was still in New Zealand as far as I knew. Old friends are the best friends. But I rang Bronte then. There was something about her calmness and strength that I needed right then. And at least she was home.
‘Have you called the police?’ she asked.
Duh, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Shows how far I’d come since the war. In other words, nowhere. I still hadn’t adjusted to this world where, if I killed someone, like I’d done at the Youngs’ when enemy raiders attacked them, the police had a major investigation. I was now living in a world where a man who tried to stab Gavin and I to death actually got arrested and put on trial. Where if hostiles grabbed the kid you were meant to be looking after, you could call the cops and they might do something.
So I took a deep breath and called the cops.
The deep breath was because I had a feeling I’d be in for a lot of complicated explaining, namely about my illegal trips across the border, plus something I wasn’t used to: having a problem taken out of my hands and being told to go and sit in the waiting room and ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.’
Bronte was right, of course I had to ring them, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence in what they might do.
‘Constable Brickwater.’
Funny name. ‘This is about a kidnapping. The little kid I look after, who lives with me, I think he’s been –’
‘Whoa, whoa. What’s your name?’
‘Ellie. Ellie Linton.’
‘OK. And where are you from?’
I told him. I realised later how clever he was. He’d taken control of the conversation, and that calmed me down and put everything into some kind of order. Otherwise it would have been a huge mess, with me yelping and stammering and sounding like a whole mob of cockatoos in the last light of day trying to settle in a gum tree.
‘Now who’s been kidnapped?’
‘This little boy, Gavin, he lives with me, he’s lived with me since the war and he’s deaf and this afternoon when I got home from school he’d gone and the TV’s been smashed and there’s a magazine full of bullets in the hallway.’
The bit about the bullets got his attention. ‘They’re not your bullets? They don’t fit any of your weapons?’
‘No way. He’s been abducted or something. We did a lot of stuff during the war, and seems like we’ve been targeted since then. My parents got killed here earlier in the year . . .’
‘Ah, OK, yes, now I know who you are.’
From then on things went into serious mode. I found myself talking to a detective sergeant and when I got impatient and said, ‘But you should be doing something, they could be a hundred k’s away by now,’ he said, ‘There are three cars on their way out to you,’ and not much more than five minutes later they arrived, pretty much one after another.
In the meantime I made a quick call to Jeremy, and he was home, thank God, and he said he’d be right out here too. That was good. Sometimes I needed a guy with me. And Jeremy was quite a guy. I had big-time feelings for him. I spent most of my spare time at school with him now, and we’d been to two parties and a barbeque. I loved being with him and lit up inside when I saw him at school each day. I scanned the crowd for his face every morning, and felt restless and empty till I found it.
I hung up when I saw the police cars. Coming out of winter there was enough dust for them to raise a bit of a cloud as they came down the driveway. I don’t know if they took any precautions against being ambushed but I didn’t notice any. Homer, Lee and I, coming into a situation like that in cold blood, I think we would have.
There is something stirring and terrible and exciting about having three police cars parked in your front driveway. There were probably more than three when my parents and Mrs Mackenzie were killed, but I was in the kitchen most of that day and don’t remember too many details. Now, seeing them all lined up, with their headlights on and their blue lights slowly turning, the police labels and logos all over them . . . Gavin would have loved it.
I answered their questions but in a kind of blank state. What could they do? If he was dead, find his body. If he was over the border, they might take a year to get him back. It would all have to be done through official government channels. Investigations, denials, negotiations, I knew that script. I’d read about it in newspapers, with other cases of kidnappings. The man we’d gone over the border to find, Nick Greene, was a typical example. My only chance was for us to do what we had done all through the war, and since the war for that matter. Take charge. Act for ourselves. When the tsunami hit south-east Asia I saw a guy on TV who’d lost his brother. He said to the camera, ‘Where’s the government? The government should be over here looking for him.’ I felt sorry for the guy – and for his brother – but I did think that he was asking too much of the government. If Gavin was dead it didn’t matter who found him, and when and where. If he was alive the person who had the best chance of finding him was standing in the kitchen wasting her time helping the cops to fill in forms. This realisation dawned on me gradually as I answered their endless questions, but after a while I felt an impatience for them to be gone.
Some of the cops had been searching the sheds and the paddocks but as darkness dropped over the house they drifted back in, shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders. The cop in charge was a guy called Henry, who seemed pretty important. He was quiet but efficient. I think he was an inspector at least. He talked to a circle of other police for a few minutes then came back and sat me down at the kitchen table. In front of him was a little pile of plastic bags. Evidence. The magazine full of bullets, Gavin’s ug boot, a grubby red cap that they thought might have belonged to the terrorists but I knew was an old one of my father’s that Gavin wore occasionally. Henry gave that back to me and dropped the bag in the kitchen waste bin. Then he came back to the table and sat down again.
He went through the options. He thought Gavin was probably alive. ‘If they’d wanted to kill him they’d have done it here.’ I’d already thought that, but it gave me more hope to hear an adult in uniform say it. It was the only encouraging thing he did say though.
‘These acts are nearly always carried out by groups of renegades who, as you know, have no supp
ort from their own government. No official support anyway. They have different agendas. Some are just out-and-out bad, men who come here to rape or plunder. Some are politically motivated and they carry out assassinations and terrorist attacks to try to soften us up. Some have personal motivations. I’m guessing that the people who came here might fit into the last group. The only reason I say that is because the attack on your parents didn’t seem to have any obvious motive, and the abduction of a child is unusual too. I believe you published a book about your guerrilla activities during the war?’
I nodded. ‘Three books.’
‘And you described various attacks you and your friends carried out?’
‘Yeah, only a few. But there was a lot of publicity for a while . . . Some of the other stuff we did got written about in newspapers and magazines. There was some stuff on TV too.’
‘I wonder if someone who read your books or saw you on TV formed the belief that you were responsible for something they felt strongly about. The death of someone they were connected with, for example.’
I nodded again. ‘Probably. I got a tip-off not long ago that we might be a target.’
‘How did you get that tip-off?’
I went red, wondering how much I should say. ‘It’s a bit awkward. It came from over the border. Someone saw a map that had our house marked on it, like they had a special interest in us.’
He frowned. ‘I hope you haven’t been involved in anything you shouldn’t. I hope your guerrilla activities ended when the war did.’
I sat there in silence, wishing I hadn’t started down this path. Guerrillas. All I could think of was an old joke of my father’s. One day when Mum was away we were working in the machinery shed, close to the house, and it was getting quite late. Eventually Dad said he’d go into the house and turn on the griller, to heat it up so we could chuck a couple of steaks on it when we knocked off work. He came back a minute later, looking shaken.
