“Don’t ask me how I know, or even if the dream I had was real, but when I see this lady in the video, I know without a doubt, that she was the person in my dreams. It was her, filled with terror, who saw the crocodile cause her lover’s destruction beside the billabong. The problem is that I don’t know what is real and what is just her fear and imagination. I thought I saw her tied up at some stage, I think I even told you that on the night of the dream. But now I do not know if it is real; the images all blur into one another.
“I cannot think of her as a killer, inside her mind is only terror and confusion, seeking escape. Maybe she pushed him into the water in an act of desperation as she tried to get away from him beside the river and then a crocodile got him, perhaps it was some sort of self defence. But inside her mind she is not a murderer, just a terrified girl.”
So now Alan had a psychic certainty of the man and the woman being together at the billabong on that fateful day. But it was not proof. It was not even a shred of something which would lead to proof. And, more importantly, he had no idea who this lady was. And, despite having the name of Mark Bennet for the man, he had no real idea who the man was either. If anything the man was even more mysterious than her. He had lived in Alice Springs for at least three years, but he appeared to have no friends, no one had even properly spoken to him except the mail collector three years ago. Yet he had to be a real person, he definitely had a real body; that is, of course, if the body was in fact his. The Toyota was linked to the billabong, and the Toyota was linked to him. But there was nothing to link him to the billabong, or anywhere else, except the Toyota. And that link was only because Mark Bennet’s name and photo was on his driver’s license. All these links to links were starting to do his head in. So he must get some real evidence to join all the links together.
He had already tried and failed to get any other links back to the man around Mary River. So now he would work his way south, back towards Alice Springs. He would work back towards the last known location of the man at Yulara. He would follow down along the Stuart Highway and other main roads, seeking to find someone who remembered him or the girl. While the Toyota was well set up for cross-country travel, it would still need to follow main roads at some points, and take on fuel. So, taking their pictures with him and asking at road houses for anyone who remembered them, seemed an obvious way to go.
The next Monday he started his trip at the very top, visiting all the roadhouses once beyond the outskirts of Darwin. He began at Adelaide River, then on to Hayes Creek, Emerald Springs and Pine Creek. When Alan came to Katherine he decided it was a bit hard, it was a big town. So he made a cursory effort there and continued on down the highway stopping at Mataranka and Larrimah, still nothing. He was starting to feel a bit discouraged, but would push on. At Daly Waters his luck changed, not much, but a glimmer.
The bar tender at Daly Waters had no real memory of Mark, but the picture of the pretty dark haired girl had woken him up. He looked at it long and hard for a minute before saying. “Well, I would not want to swear on my mother’s grave but I reckon she stopped here for breakfast with a bloke who could be your man. It was a couple months ago. I remember her because she was a looker, and nice at the same time. She and the man were sitting up at the bar, each eating a big plate of bacon and eggs, about ten in the morning. She seemed really hungry. When I remarked on this she said ‘they had got up and left early without breakfast’. I said, “Did you come from Katherine?”
“She said, ‘No, from Heartbreak Hotel, such a funny name for a lovely place.’
“It is those words that made her stick in my mind. Wouldn’t have exactly called Heartbreak Hotel lovely myself, but it was obviously special for her”.
So Alan continued out to Heartbreak Hotel. Here he got a similarly vague description of a man and a slightly clearer description of a girl; “a lovely lass from overseas, very pretty and affectionate to the man”. Someone else remembered she had talked of driving across the huge grassy plains of the Barkly, and seeing all the cattle. So Alan thought, really just an educated guess, that they were most likely to have come up the Tablelands Highway, from Barkly Homestead, the roadhouse at the corner of the main road to Queensland.
Next morning he headed on down there, arriving mid-morning. Here he felt he had hit another jackpot. He found a girl who had worked there for the last few months and normally did the day shift. She remembered serving them, the man and woman in the photo, one morning a couple months ago. He had bought fuel, more than 100 litres, as his Toyota had long range tanks.
She said, “It was around this time in the morning” and she remembered them both well. “We call the man Mark B. He fuels up here from time to time and always pays cash which is different from most other travellers. I have heard from others that he does a bit of work around this area, though I don’t really know him myself.
“But I do remember the girl. She looked just the same as in the photo. I remember because we had a chat while Mark B was giving his vehicle the once over, you know - checking oil, water, tyres – all that sort of thing. So Susan, that was what she said her name was, asked me what the time was. She said she needed to work out the time difference to England because she needed to talk to her Mum. She had not spoken to her Mum in more than a week, not since before she came to Alice. She worked out it was the middle of the night in England and that was no good, she would leave it until her next stop.
“You could tell she really liked Mark from the way she watched him work. He was an OK looking bloke, strong and tough, but a bit hard around the edges. He seemed like a real bushie but I had seen him a couple times before with other pretty girls which made me curious. She was much classier than him and they seemed a strange match.
“So I asked her how she met Mark. She told me she had met him just after she had flown into Cairns. They had been on a reef tour together and were diving buddies. After that they had just sort of hooked up. And now they were travelling through the outback together for a couple weeks before her plane flew out of Darwin. I could tell she was really keen on him. And he came up in the end and put his hand on her in a way that showed he felt the same way. That’s it really, we chatted for five minutes, but that is pretty much what she told me.”
Alan asked, “Did she say she was English, or just that her mother was there?”
The lady thought for a minute, “Well she definitely talked about the time in England and ringing her mother there. She did not actually say she was English, but you could hardly mistake her, that lovely plummy accent, you know. Not quite upper crust but definitely well brought up, in that English sort of way.”
Alan felt like he was finally getting somewhere. He was well on the way with identifying the girl in the photo. Her first name was Susan, she came from England, she had flown into Cairns perhaps two or three weeks earlier and she had gone diving on a boat tour to the outer Barrier Reef.
He rang his boss in Darwin and got his permission to go to Cairns. There was a direct flight from Alice Springs tomorrow and he could be on it if he got a wriggle on. It was over seven hundred kilometres from where he was now to the Alice, so it would be a long drive today.
Mid afternoon the next day he was in Cairns. He called at the local police station and, to ensure that he had the required authority for his inquiries, they offered him the assistance of a local constable for the next morning. Most of the tour shops were now shutting down for the day. So he decided he would hit them early next day, along with the boat companies who ran the tours, he would start with these as they would have passenger lists for each day.
He had two names to look for, a Susan, surname unknown and a Mark, probably Mark Bennet, though the person who had checked the Katherine mailbox yesterday said a letter had turned up in the mailbox for a Mark Butler. It could just be a mistake but he would also look out for any Mark Butler while he was at it.
Next morning they struck lucky at the first visit. Alan remembered a tour on a Quicksilver boat he had done to the outer
reef a couple years ago, and knew it had diving included, which sounded like the best way to narrow the numbers.
So he and Constable Davey started with Quicksilver Tours. They provided him with a booking person to go through the records with him. He picked a three week period, from just before the night in Yulara and worked his way back. It was slow work and they had gone through a couple weeks of booking sheets before they found something. There it was, a Mark Bennet, booked on the 8:30 am departure to the outer reef.
He looked for the name Susan and found four instances of the name and another three with only S initials for the first name. So they went to the diving group records and there they both were, Susan McDonald and Mark Bennet, both divers in the second group of the day. They also had ages, 24, and 33, and diving ticket numbers which they could probably track in due course but it would take some time.
Alan was in a hurry; he could see the end in sight and wanted to wrap this case up.
So next they tried checking the international airlines, as the tour bookings had been paid for with cash. They decided to check international flights into Cairns on the previous days. There were quite a few so they started with the airline arrivals of the day before. Here there were lots more people, but now they had a surname it was much easier.
In five minutes they had an arrival match. It was on a flight out of Tokyo which got in mid-morning of the previous day. Now all they needed was a passport number and they would have an English identity. Sure enough another half hour on the telephone got them this record. Alan thanked Constable Davey and agreed he could take it from there. He asked if Constable Davey could send through official copies of all these documents to the Darwin office. There was a midday flight back to Darwin and Alan was on it.
The next day he prepared an official request to go via the Federal Police for the assistance of the UK police force in locating and questioning Susan McDonald. He also wanted to see a photo, though he had no doubt he had identified his mystery girl. He now had a good brief of evidence to show she was a significant person of interest in the investigation. On the one hand she may be able to assist with putting together the picture of what happened. On the other she may be a genuine suspect in the murder herself. For now he would keep an open mind and see where the evidence led him.
After this was done he called to the vehicle workshop where the car was stored. Everything had been pulled out of it now and lots of samples had been taken for analysis. He found the workshop foreman and asked him to give a run through of what had been found, he wanted to cut to the chase rather than read lots of reports.
The foreman described how the vehicle had definitely been carefully cleaned, at least for the tray and the cabin. The only significant fibres in these locations came from common cleaning cloths. In these areas the car had been effectively stripped bare and nothing of value remained, except for three small exceptions. The first was a lipstick container which had fallen below the passenger seat and rolled under the seat mounting rails. It had been sent off for fingerprint testing and DNA checking. These results were now in, a finger and thumb imprint on the lipstick case and some DNA on the lipstick. The second was a trace of human DNA which had been found in a corner of the cooler box. It was only found when they had removed the box and cut it apart. The third was what looked like a single spot of blood. It had dripped between the passenger seat and the side door. It sat on the floor in the small gap at the edge of the vinyl floor covering, next to the bottom door sill.
The DNA from the blood spot, the cooler box and the lipstick were all a match, but different from the DNA of the recovered body. No DNA which matched the recovered body had been found to date in the vehicle. Now they needed to get a DNA and fingerprints from Susan McDonald and see if it was a match for the samples from the car.
The other significant finding related to the tyre tracks and mud found. The mud on the number plate and traces of mud found on the under-body and tyres were a good match for the soil types around the billabong. This was not conclusive but supportive evidence. But the track of the tyre which showed a piece of missing rubber, found near the billabong, was a perfect match to the rear passenger tyre. It had both an identical tread profile and an identical place where rubber was missing. This fact alone gave at least a 99% certainty that the vehicle had been at the billabong around the time period.
Alan returned to the office and worked on his report. He prepared a series of questions for the UK police to ask Susan McDonald. Alan had tracked her definitely to Barkly Homestead and probably to Daly Waters, but after that she had vanished.
So the UK Police should ask her about where she had first met Mark Bennet, her relationship to him and where she had gone with him. If nothing else it would give a sense of her truthfulness. They should also ask for DNA and fingerprints. They knew she had travelled with Mark in the car. So if they matched her DNA and fingerprints to the car samples it would be supplementary evidence of this, though some locations were strange, particularly the cooler box. However if there was no match it meant that they were looking for another car passenger as well.
His judgement was that they should name Susan as a person of interest, not as a murder suspect at this stage, and they should ask for her cooperation in tracking their movements and determining what happened to Mark. The police were already under strong pressure to release the information they had found about the vehicle and the identities of Mark and Susan to the media.
Rumours were circulating about a girl, an overseas traveller having been with this Crocodile Man and being involved. He did not know how such stories got out but it was getting increasingly hard to keep a lid on it. For now they were on the trail of a double story of a Crocodile Man and a Mystery Girl. Soon the names would be out.
The Police could justify tightly limiting the information released if she was cooperating, on the basis that she was giving them new leads that they were following through.
But otherwise they would have to make a statement to the press in the next couple of days seeking public assistance to gather more information on who these people were and where they went. Once they did this the story would go ballistic. It had all the ingredients, crocodiles, murder, sex, a backpacker alone with a man in the outback.
He hoped the girl would cooperate, he felt pity for her if the media hounds were loosed. Still it was out of his hands and he could only give her a couple days to respond.
In addition he would have liked to get a footprint from her, to see if it matched the one found at the billabong, because that would then place her at the location. But the moment he asked for this she would become highly suspicious; it was much more than routine exclusionary evidence. So they would just sit on this for now and see what more they could find out.
He finished his report and cleared it with his boss, then submitted the official request form requesting help from the UK police, to the Federal Police, with a big urgent sticker on it. He would now follow up the hundred other loose ends that surrounded this case, but he knew he had found the key, the Mystery Girl, Susan McDonald. God help her when this was all through. Whatever she had done he would not want to be in her shoes. He felt a strange affection for her, as if he already knew her from Sandy’s dream.
Even though the evidence was not in, in his heart he believed that she was the murderer. But why, what could have motivated her to turn on and kill this man who she had been so affectionate to? Why was she so frightened of him? What was the secret that was hidden at the core of this? That was what he really wanted to know. But for now he would be content with solving a murder.
Chapter 12 – From Beyond the Grave
Susan had looked forward to a relaxing trip back to England; 22 hours of laid back travel in her business class seat, gold class service, enjoying movies, good food and comfortable sleep, as this metal and glass bubble in the sky transported her across the world.
But her hand held this message from beyond the grave. As she read the first few lines she knew her life would nev
er again be the same.
Five minutes ago she was dreamily planning for a comfortable life with David. She saw David, her and a brood of tousled haired children, living in a comfortable house in Sydney. She saw views out over the beautiful harbour and occasional country trips in his sports car, blasting along winding roads with the wind in her hair. It was a lovely mind image, and she was as much in love with the image as the person who could bring it to pass.
Yet, in the space of a minute, this life plan had become a smoking ruin. This other man could not and would not let her go. No matter where she went and what she did he would find his way back into her life, yet again and yet again.
First he had taken over her body and mind. Then, when she excised him from these, he took over her subconscious and her dreams. He had placed his seed within her so now it was not just himself but the new life he had created which lived on in her.
She thought she had managed to put a distance between herself and all that, she had found a new man who loved her and she had promised herself to him. When David held her close in the night the dreams of the crocodile spirit were kept at bay. She had barely dreamt of them in David’s Australian bed.
But the moment David had left her side Mark had reclaimed her. This time his claim was different, it was clearly stated, it was his love. She had searched for love in words from the living man and they had not been spoken, she had looked for love, even for a fragment of affection, in the eyes of the living man. They had been hidden from her. Instead they had now been declared by the dead man’s spirit as words on a page, “I have loved you utterly since first I glimpsed you.”
Crocodile Spirit Dreaming - Possession - Books 1 - 3 Page 36
