by Dave Warner
We stopped by the desk where he rooted around in a large cardboard box and emerged with two videos.
‘I knew where they were,’ he said.
‘When you got back you didn’t contact the police.’
‘Like I said. I wasn’t thinking about it. I was only thinking about damage to my traffic camera. I mean I really don’t think you’re going to find anything on there. I’m sorry but I just thought Don would have told them. It’s funny, though, normally I record over them unless we get something. These two …’ He drifted, contemplating things that can’t be explained by rational thought, then shrugged. ‘There’s probably nothing on it.’
‘You never checked the video you had running?’
‘My speed camera hadn’t been touched, so no need. After you rang I dug around and found them and popped them in the monitor to make sure they weren’t blank. They’re still good. Eight hours’ worth, eight pm to four am. We’ll be in and out. There’s a toilet back there, tea and coffee. You might be out of luck with the biscuits, I’m not sure. Just call me when you’re finished, I’ll come and lock up.’
‘You’re okay with me here?’
‘Anything goes missing, I know where to look.’
I slid the tape into the player. The usual grainy black and white video came up with a time code in the bottom corner and the date 17-01-98. The lens had been set up somewhere behind the middle of the front seat so it shot through the windscreen, pointing at the speed camera itself which was off to the side of the cemetery, that is the east side of the road, about thirty to fifty metres north. The speed camera was placed in clear view under a pool of amber light. Even from this distance there would be a good chance of identifying a culprit. Carmel had been attacked another fifty metres north of the speed camera, out of range of this covert surveillance. I could have fast-forwarded till 10.00 pm but figured it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility the attacker could have arrived five or six hours before Carmel walked past, just biding his time, waiting for the right mark. Within ten minutes it was obvious I was probably only going to get a rear view of anybody approaching from the south, that is, as they passed the van. Anybody crossing the road between the van and the camera would offer a better chance for identification. Time crawled. A couple of young guys, Santich’s employees I guess, maybe one the highly recommended Don, came into the warehouse around forty minutes in. They waved a greeting, loaded up with a camera and shuffled out. By 9.30 pm tape time I’d seen only one group of pedestrians – teenagers, a girl and two young guys – walk past the van heading north, and two cyclists who did not appear to slow, heading south. Later a couple of young guys walked north, past the van on the hard shoulder. They seemed to be in conversation, beach towels slung over their shoulders. I paused the tape and grabbed myself a coffee. I thought of calling Tash but decided against it. The rates were just too high on mobiles.
I returned to my post. The minutes moved like they held a grudge. More than once I was tempted to fast-forward the tape but I hung in there. Finally I got to the time around when Carmel Younger had been attacked. There’d been no pedestrian traffic visible within an hour, the last being a young guy and girl walking carrying skateboards heading south. The camera wasn’t angled to the road but slats of passing light designated vehicles on the road. I was convinced by now the attacker had not come in this way. Either he had come from the north, or through the cemetery. It was unnerving knowing that at this point as the camera rolled, just out of its range Carmel was being dragged away at knifepoint. If only the camera had a longer range.
And then, at 2.26 am, in the dark fathoms of background behind the speed camera, there was movement. I literally gasped. Something was heading towards me on the very rim of where light became dark on the border of the cemetery, a hunched figure moving steadily but not running, a man wearing a cap, long pants, face tucked down near his chest. He wore a t-shirt. He got steadily closer to the van until he was walking right past it. You couldn’t see his face but you could see part of his upper arm and a tatt with a pattern. I paused the video and tried to make out the pattern, the shape seeming familiar. It took maybe twenty minutes of staring at it before I got it: it was a dagger wrapped in wings, the logo of the SAS.
CHAPTER 7
‘You think it could be an SAS guy who raped Carmel?’
Straight back from work to more work, Natasha was folding baby clothes. I was still buzzing, getting in her way.
‘Not only that …’
‘Autostrada?’ She pushed past me. Grace was asleep in her cot. We’d tried to make her room comfortable but she wouldn’t be growing up noticing a pea under her mattress. I cramped Tash even more.
‘We’ve all been wracking our brains about who would they trust enough to accept a lift? You said they wouldn’t.’
‘Good memory.’
She reached up high, right in front of me to put the clothes away. I held her waist. She kissed me, broke off, started clearing up toys left on the floor. I joined in, haphazard.
‘We all thought it was too hard for somebody to abduct three different girls but what if that’s exactly what you were trained to do?’
She reasoned quickly. ‘Their barracks is about ten minutes away, right?’
‘Exactly. And SAS guys play pool in the OBH. A soldier with that training, he could manage any one of those girls.’
She looked at me and sighed, already mapping out my investigation and the problems ahead. ‘Where are you going to start? The police would have a hard time getting to interview SAS personnel, let alone some private eye.’
She was right, going through official channels would be a nightmare but I didn’t have to go through official channels.
A friend of a friend from the North Cott surf club knew a woman whose sister was married to a recently retired SAS sergeant, Tom Cornelius. Cornelius looked more like a surfer than a soldier, broad across the shoulders, sandy-haired, a coloured plastic necklet of some sort.
‘I grew up around Cobram in Vic,’ he told me over the top of his can of xxxx. We were on his balcony up Mullaloo way, the ocean visible in the distance, rippled, dark blue. It was around 3.00 in the afternoon but the sun hadn’t lost its punch and I found myself squinting with the glare. ‘I was stationed at Swanbourne for a while. Fell in love with the place. Met Lill.’ Aussie men admit to falling in love with places but rarely with their partner. I guess that goes without saying. We’d already had some small talk so I knew he now had a job working for an international company that supplied defence materials to the army.
‘You left about six months ago?’
‘February.’ He offered me another beer and I accepted. xxxx isn’t my favourite brew but I grew up on Swan, and anything, South Australian lagers aside, was exotic. ‘After Timor I’d had enough. Time to settle down.’
Via Lill, a delicate brunette who was somewhere indoors, he knew why I was here. It was time to get to it.
‘Tom, do you think it’s feasible an SAS-trained soldier could abduct these girls?’
‘Absolutely. I mean, I don’t think they’d be wearing camouflage paint and pants, they’d want to draw as little attention as possible but, as for the physical thing, yes, they could subdue a girl, and get her to a vehicle.’
‘Would they need help?’
‘No. We’re trained under very difficult conditions to infiltrate, negate, extract …’ he gestured with his hand to indicate numerous capabilities.
‘Please, I don’t mean to cause offence, but do you believe there would be somebody in the unit who would do such a thing?’
‘Mathew Carter.’ He hit me with the speed of a blackjack dealer, saw my surprise. ‘Ever since Lill mentioned what you wanted to talk about I’ve been thinking about it. He’s the one who came to mind first, and pretty much is the only one.’
‘Why do you think Mathew Carter could be the guy?’
‘I heard some stuff, rumours, nothing official, about his conduct in Timor with village women.’
�
��Rape?’
‘Nothing so bald as that. You hear things, they dribble down.’
‘Like what?’
‘Nothing specific. “Carter was giving the women a hard time”, “Carter got his rocks off”. Look, you make the SAS, you’re good, you have to be. You do a lot of tests, psych stuff not just some obstacle courses. You have to be able to depend on every guy out there. They have to be able to depend on you. You don’t have to all like one another.’
‘You didn’t like Carter?’
‘We didn’t socialise a lot. He can be good company but there is something about him, an edge of craziness. He’s not the only guy who has that, mind you. It can be an asset, but Carter, he’s always looking at women and going like, “That one I’d fuck from behind over the washing machine”, “Imagine those lips around your cock”. And there’s a look in his eyes when he says it.’
‘You know if he has a tattoo on his right arm?’
‘He’s got a few tattoos.’
‘One with the SAS logo, here?’ I pointed at the spot.
‘Yeah but I’m not sure which arm.’
It was the right arm. I knew because I was staring straight at it only ten metres away, sipping beer at the Swanbourne Hotel in the tin shed–like structure they’d tacked onto the Art Deco façade, probably back in the ’60s. This was the games room: darts, pool tables, concrete floor. For about thirty years this room had hosted a Sunday afternoon jazz session, then the music got retrenched. Word was the whole place was being knocked down for yet another retirement village but I wasn’t thinking about any of that, I was wondering if this was the guy who had raped Carmel Younger and abducted three young women. Carter would have been six foot, maybe six one, wiry. The guys he was playing pool with were housemates Dean Heaton and Stuart Filbert, also SAS, all twenty-five, give or take a year. They rented in Mount Claremont about ten minutes away, a modern white brick townhouse, small patchy lawn, a carport offering an old Corolla and slightly more recent Holden sedan, stacked surfboards and wetsuits left to dry.
Tom Cornelius had located Carter for me but had declined to get further involved. How could you blame him? If Carter was the man responsible, you didn’t want to give him cause to seek you out. At least not till he was locked up. I asked Cornelius if he thought the other two would be involved in anything criminal.
‘Heaton’s a bit of a puppet but I don’t see him getting into hurting women. Not willingly. Filbert’s new, transferred from Darwin about three months ago. You could speak to Luke Whitmore or James Feruggi, they used to be close with Carter. Whitmore shared a place with Carter but moved out. He was my Timor source. He’s still in Perth. Feruggi transferred out.’
‘Why didn’t these guys make an official complaint?’
‘Carter’s a good soldier. He’s got your back. And when you spend time facing live rounds together, you’re mates whether you like somebody or not.’
I understood what he was saying. I’d felt the same thing when I was a cop.
He continued. ‘Besides, you make some allegation, it doesn’t stick, you’re up shit creek.’
I’d tailed Carter and his mates from the house, Heaton driving the Corolla, no need yet to take a look around inside. About five hundred metres out, I guessed their destination as the Swanbourne. I gave them twenty minutes, then wandered into the bar. What Cornelius had said played out. Carter perved on the barmaid’s chest and when unaccompanied girls strayed in, he would turn to his friends and make some comment about their ‘tits’, audible even to me. The others offered embarrassed grins but shunned him with body language. I wasn’t convinced yet that this was the guy who had abducted Caitlin but I was more positive his DNA would match Carmel Younger’s rapist. After about forty minutes, I’d seen all I needed. They’d been going an hour, which I figured gave me at least another hour free and clear.
I finished my beer and then drove back towards their townhouse, parking two blocks away, walking past sprinklers and the sound of basketballs on concrete driveways. When I reached their place I walked straight to the front door like I lived there. I was conscious of a woman watering her lawn on the other side of the street but nobody close. There was one wooden front door, no screen, which made my job easier. I carried a set of master keys that opened most locks. This one didn’t prove too challenging.
The room I stepped into was an open-plan lounge–dining room, separated from the kitchen by the servery. There was a smell of recent toast, trademark to most shared male houses, but overall it was surprisingly tidy. Maybe the discipline of the army helped. I was on my guard but not expecting to find any girls captured or dead here. I slipped on latex gloves, checked the laundry and took myself up the short staircase. There was a bedroom at the front facing the street, one in the middle, one at the back. The one in the middle was the smallest and I reckoned that would be Heaton’s. Carter would pick whichever one he wanted, probably the front. I walked into a neat room and well-made bed. On the dressing table was an ANZ bank statement to Dean Filbert. Other than that and some small change, the dressing table was clear but there was a desktop computer and printer sitting at a small workstation. No office chair, just a kitchen chair.
I left the room and walked across tired but still thick carpet to the back bedroom. About the same size as the front room it was darker and smelled of BO. The bed was rumpled, a few socks and some running shoes, higgledy-piggledy on the floor, but relatively tidy. I carefully opened the walk-in robe. The doors slid easily. I guess that was the only time I’d tensed up. I don’t know whether I thought I might find a body or at very least a scary balaclava but all that greeted me were uniforms and a few casual clothes, shirts, body-shirts, one pair of Country Road slacks, and jeans. I dared not contaminate this scene. I carefully pulled the clothes apart, looked in the back of the wardrobe: no knife, roll of gaffer tape, anything like that.
That left the smallish dressing table topped by a digital clock, aftershave and hairbrush.
I slid open the top drawer first. There was some cash, a bank book plus a few bills, not the phone bill, though, which might have been of some interest. The second drawer was almost empty, old batteries, the small sizes, a Walkman and earphones, a pack of cards. The third drawer was way more interesting. At the bottom under a jumble of developed photos still in their wallets was a metal cashbox protected by a small padlock. The urge I had to take it and break it open then and there was almost irresistible. But I couldn’t do that. Inside could be evidence, jewellery from the missing girls or other trophies. I picked up a photo wallet, started flicking through. The first couple were recent and uninformative, showing Carter and various guys, including his housemates, at the beach, playing park cricket and drinking with young women at a beer garden. None of the young women looked familiar. I couldn’t place the pub offhand. It was a tight shot, not much to go on. I slipped one of the prints into my pocket. The next wallet I dug for revealed army shots, Timor I was guessing. While I hadn’t been to Timor, it had the look of Darwin, a town I had. Carter was no Max Dupain. The shots were pedestrian, mainly the guys hanging around camp. A couple of guys were in a lot of the photos, I guessed Whitmore and Feruggi. One snap showed Carter posing with grinning village girls. I kept it, picked up another wallet, started thumbing and froze.
I was staring at Carter in t-shirt and shorts leaning back against a maroon Commodore station wagon with one of the guys from the Timor shots – Whitmore or Feruggi? There was no station wagon at the house now. Had he sold it? The shot seemed to be around the same vintage as the Timor photos.
I must have been too engrossed in my discovery to hear the car arrive. The door downstairs opened and low voices swirled in. Shit. I dropped the photos into my back pocket with the other two and slid the drawer closed as quietly as I could. There was no way I would make it down the stairs. I pulled back the dull brown curtain covering the rear window. Below was a small backyard, devoid of cover. A picket fence separated the neighbours, back and either side. To my left was a gum tree that
rose up beyond the back roof. Maybe I could make it from the window? The windows were aluminium, sliding but clipped shut. The voices below bubbled for a moment then I heard somebody take the stairs. By now I was not worrying about finesse, just escape. I unclipped the window, slid it open – thankfully it moved easily – and was about to climb out onto the narrow sill when I saw the hairbrush sitting on the dresser. I pulled one of the small plastic bags I’d shoved in my pocket, just in case and pulled a clump of hair from the brush. I shoved it into the bag and sealed. Whoever was coming was already at the landing. I climbed up onto the sill. The closest branch was maybe five feet away. Normally I could make that but here I was crouched, my body twisted to the left. I’d have bugger-all momentum.
I stood up on the outside of the window, my toes pointing inwards to the room. I tried to reach the tree with my right leg. Nope. No alternative now.
I pushed off hard.
I didn’t so much sail through the air as slowly arc down. My eyes were locked on the looming trunk. For a split second I thought I’d make it. Then again, as a kid I’d thought Dawn Wells off Gilligan’s Island was going to meet me and fall in love with me. Where this might have happened I hadn’t thought through: the fish and chip shop, I guess, because that was the only place I ever experienced social interaction. What I’m saying is I’m an optimist: I was aiming for the trunk, I was dreaming. My nails brushed against it briefly as I plummeted. I got lucky, kind of. A wedge of branches forked out beneath me. My shin, then my groin, hit solid wood. I slid back towards the trunk and got jammed like a footy you have to bring down, shying rocks and half-bricks. Even as the pain in my leg competed with the pain in my balls, I kept looking up at the window. No face appeared. I wondered if I’d made too much noise, if somebody was going to appear in the backyard. Nothing. Carefully and painfully I extricated myself, putting my body as far as I could to the south side of the trunk, thereby camouflaging myself from anybody who happened to be looking out the back window of the ground floor. I tried to ease down but fell faster than an Italian striker milking a penalty. The grass offered some shock absorption but the landing still jarred. I thought I heard the back door open and hobbled for cover at the side of the house. A waft of music found its way from the lounge room. Finding myself in a narrow brick walkway confined by the wall of the house on one side and the picket fence on the other I pushed forward towards the street. A toilet flushed on the other side of the wall and scared the shit out of me. I squeezed past a pair of bins and emerged in the carport. Having memorised the number plates of the two cars, I then did my best to saunter casually out to the road though my ripped palms were burning and my joints throbbing.
