Slaughter Park

by Barry Maitland

  Harry frowns, shaking his head. ‘If she wanted to be found she’d let you know. I’m the last person she’d call for.’

  Silence.

  ‘Has Nicole spoken to the police?’

  ‘That was the worrying thing. While Nicole and her mother were debating whether to contact the police, the police came round to see them. They wanted to know where Jenny was, wouldn’t say why. They need your help, Harry.’

  She rummages in her bag for her pad and flicks the pages. ‘Here, this was the name of the cop that called on them—Detective Sergeant Anders. Maybe you could speak to him.’

  She shows Harry the note and he stares at it.

  ‘There was a woman in uniform as well, who didn’t say anything. They didn’t get her name.’

  ‘You have a phone?’ he says, his voice suddenly sharp. ‘See if you can get us on the afternoon flight from Cairns down to Sydney, will you?’

  ‘But…I’m booked in at the lodge for a couple of days.’

  He’s gone, striding over to O’Brien, who’s waiting at the gate. They talk, O’Brien nodding, checking his watch. Harry returns. ‘Let’s go.’

  O’Brien stops the boat briefly at Harry’s forlorn house for him to pick up a small backpack of belongings. As he returns to the boat Kelly takes a photo of him, thinking about a possible feature, ‘The Lost Detective’, for the Times’ weekend colour magazine. Marilyn in the foreground showing her teeth would be good.

  3

  On the flight back to Sydney, Kelly says, ‘You know the cop?’

  ‘Jack Anders, yes.’ Harry turns away and looks out over the clouds. ‘He’s in homicide.’

  ‘Oh shit…But surely if something had happened to Jenny they would have said?’

  ‘You’d think so.’

  It’s dark by the time they land and catch a cab to Nicole’s house in North Sydney, Kelly phoning ahead to warn her.

  They hear her feet running to the front door, it swings open and Nicole gawps for a moment. ‘Harry! It is you! Thank God,’ she says, and throws herself at him in a hug.

  She leads them down to the living room, with its views out over the dark hills of Middle Harbour, sparkling now with house lights among the native bush.

  ‘You found him, Kelly. Where?’

  Kelly explains and Nicole says, ‘You must be exhausted. Something to eat, a drink?’

  Yes, please, Kelly thinks, but Harry says, ‘Later. Just tell me what’s happened, Nicole, from the beginning.’

  ‘Well, you know about Abigail. After the doctors decided they couldn’t wait any longer—Christmas Eve it was—they operated and she was born and the bullet in Jenny’s stomach successfully removed. The two of them were kept in the neonatal ICU at Westmead for a month, then transferred to a private clinic in North Sydney, near our mum. When they were fit enough they moved in with her, and for a long while Jenny just wanted to stay there, in her old room, looking after Abigail.

  ‘Then finally the Ash Island inquest was held and she was called to appear at the court—the beginning of spring, it was, early September. She was very anxious about it. For almost nine months she’d isolated herself from everything, focusing on Abigail, and now she was forced to confront it all again. If only you’d been there, Harry. It was a disaster. Frank Capp’s sister appeared, in a wheelchair, and when they got to the part where Capp was killed, the sister went crazy, screaming threats and abuse at Jenny.

  ‘She changed after that, stopped breastfeeding Abigail and started drinking. She told me she was waking up in the middle of the night reliving the crash, seeing Frank Capp’s face staring through the car window as he ran them off the road, and she didn’t know if it was her memory come back or a dream. I tried to help, talk to her. One day she asked me to go with her to your old house in Surry Hills, to pick up clothes and some of her stuff that was still there. When we got there she broke down in tears, asked me why all this had happened to her. I asked her if she wanted me to try to find you, but she just shook her head and said it was all too difficult, with Mum so bitter about what happened to her sister Meri, and blaming you.

  ‘After a while I thought she pulled round a bit. She seemed more composed, more her old self. We went out together, a movie, a concert, and I thought she’d settled down.

  ‘Then a couple of weeks ago she said she wanted to have a few days away on her own, and would I look after Abigail, to give Mum a break. I said that was fine, and she dropped the baby and her stuff off here—that was the ninth, Thursday. She said she’d rented a cottage in the Blue Mountains and would be back on the following Tuesday but on Monday she phoned me, sounding in a bit of a state. I asked her what was wrong and she said she was sorry, but something had come up and could I look after Abigail for a while longer. She wouldn’t tell me why and she hung up. Then the following day the police came round looking for her.

  ‘The detective, Anders, did all the talking. He asked for a list of Jenny’s friends and associates, and I didn’t know what to tell him. I gave him a few names, but I asked why, and he just said they had concerns for Jenny’s safety and it was imperative I contact him if I got any word of her. It was maddening—he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. He mentioned a man’s name, asked me if I knew him. I made a note…’ She pauses and goes over to the notepad beside the phone. ‘Palfreyman, Terry Palfreyman. I’d never heard of him and told him so.’

  ‘You’ve tried to contact her?’

  ‘Of course. We call her mobile all the time, but there’s no reply, and I’ve been to your place in Surry Hills. Mum had a key for emergencies, and I went in, but there was no sign of her. The policeman, Anders, had been there too—he’d left his card in the postbox with a note to Jenny to call him urgently.’

  ‘And Abigail is here with you?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, Harry, I’m sorry, of course you want to see her. Come on.’

  They go downstairs and are joined by Nicole’s two girls, Clare and Helen, who regard their uncle’s transformation with some awe. They lead him to a cot in the corner of the next room. Harry goes over to it, and for a long moment father and daughter look at each other, studying each other’s features for the first time. Then Harry lowers his hand and carefully strokes the baby’s cheek, and she gives a little kick of her legs. He lifts her up and she reaches out to his face and clutches his beard. Clare captures the moment on her phone.

  ‘She’s bigger than I expected,’ he says. ‘Heavier.’

  Nicole smiles. ‘She’s almost ten months, Harry, though she was fifteen weeks premature. She’s doing really well, considering—weighs almost six and half kilos.’

  Then Harry says, ‘I need to speak to your mother, Nicole.’

  ‘She won’t see you, Harry. She blames you for Meri and for what happened to Jenny. She said…’ Nicole looks down, embarrassed.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘That you were a menace and a curse and she never wanted you to come near us again.’

  ‘All the same, Jenny stayed all that time with your mother. I need to search her room, check her computer if it’s still there. Did the police do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to persuade her, first thing tomorrow. Will you stay here tonight?’

  He looks down at his clothes, the worn jungle-green shirt and shorts, the scuffed boots, as if realising for the first time how incongruous he looks here in the city, the wild man from the bush. ‘Thanks, no. I’ll go to Surry Hills. I should find some fresh clothes there.’

  4

  He opens the front door of the little house at the end of the lane in Surry Hills, his parents’ house until they died, then his and Jenny’s. When he reaches for the light switch he hesitates—on or off? Either way it’ll be a sign. He presses the switch and the lights come on. Someone has been paying the bills. Someone reluctant to make a final break.

  He closes the door, drops his bag and looks around the living room, breathing in the smell of old timber and over a century of habitation. He remembers dancing here with Jenny in the d
ark, when she was blind and he made himself sightless, to be closer to her. The table in the corner is still there, but her computer is gone.

  He continues through to the kitchen. Everything is clean, orderly. There is beer and a bottle of white wine in the fridge, an unopened packet of biscuits in a cupboard. He sits himself down at the round table and eats and drinks and tries to slow down. So strong is the presence of the house around him that it almost feels as if he’s never been away, as if the past months in north Queensland have never happened.

  He goes upstairs and hesitates again at the wardrobe and chest of drawers in their bedroom—cedar pieces as old as the house. Some of her clothes remain, but many are missing, clothes bought before she became pregnant. He imagines her opening the drawers and seeing their colours for the first time. Picturing her here is intensely painful. She’s all around him. What’s happened to her?

  5

  Angophora Way, Frenchs Forest, in Sydney’s northern suburbs. Large gardens, large houses, large trees and no one around. Harry sits in Nicole’s car while she crosses the street to a solid brick house overarched by a huge Sydney red gum. He waits. After half an hour the front door opens and her mother Bronwyn appears with a yellow Labrador on a lead. It is Felecia, Jenny’s seeing-eye dog, now retired. Bronwyn pointedly avoids looking in the direction of the car and they walk away down the street as Harry’s phone rings.

  ‘Mum’s taken Jenny’s dog for a walk, Harry. It’s okay for you to come in if you want.’

  Nicole closes the door behind him as he steps inside. He remembers the house when Jenny and Nicole’s father was alive, a large genial man with a booming voice, generous with the gin. Now it’s deathly quiet.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Mum won’t speak to you, but she said you can check Jenny’s room. She said the police were in there for ten minutes or so when they called, but didn’t remove anything as far as she knows. Apparently Felecia kept a close eye on them.’

  They go upstairs to the bedroom Jenny had as a girl. There is a cot now standing in the corner, and a moist baby smell in the air. ‘It seems Jenny went back to your house several times after I took her there to get her clothes. She brought stuff back here.’ Nicole points at the pinboard above Jenny’s table, covered with notes and old photographs. ‘Mum asked her what she was doing and she said she had just collected a few family mementos.’

  It was more than that, Harry thinks, more like the material for a family history. There is a picture of his father in school uniform, standing grinning with the white couple who brought him up, whom Harry called his grandparents. Another monochrome snap, faded and creased, that Harry hasn’t seen before, of a young Aboriginal woman. And a photocopy of the picture of his mother and father before they were married, university students on the 1965 Freedom Ride across inland New South Wales, which hung in his father’s study in the attic of the Surry Hills house. A scanner sits on the end of the table, but no computer.

  ‘Yes,’ Nicole says, ‘Mum said Jenny had a laptop that she took away with her to the Blue Mountains.’

  Harry takes photos of the pinboard, then searches drawers and the wardrobe, nothing significant. He picks up an empty wastebasket. ‘The garbage, when is that collected?’

  ‘Tuesdays, I think. Anyway, it’s over a week since Jenny left, so it’ll be gone. Except perhaps the recycling bin—that’s only collected every second week.’

  They go downstairs and out to the back of the house where the colour-coded bins stand. The recycling bin is almost full, and Harry starts to empty it, layer by layer—newspapers, wine bottles, plastic containers—until he reaches a swatch of torn A4 pages at the bottom. He recognises Jenny’s handwriting on some, scribbled notes of dates, train times, a shopping list. Among them he pieces together three torn-up pages of printouts from her computer: one for a brand of baby clothes, another for a company dealing in bitcoins and the third a receipt for the purchase of a single share in Nordlund Resources Limited.

  6

  Kelly bustles up to her desk on the third floor, throws down her bag, puts the coffee mug beside her computer and starts to go through her emails.

  ‘You’re back early.’ Hannah, her trainee assistant at the next desk, has returned to her seat, also nursing a coffee. ‘I thought you were taking a week off.’

  ‘Hmm, got bored. What’s going on?’

  Hannah briefs her on the latest office rumours and the research she’s been doing for one of the other crime reporters.

  ‘Have we heard of someone called Terry Palfreyman?’ Kelly asks. ‘Will you take a look?’

  ‘The body in the Blue Mountains,’ Hannah says immediately. ‘His name was released while you were away. Fifty-four-year-old white male stabbed to death in a cottage on the edge of Blackheath. The body was found last Tuesday, remember? We talked about it the day you left.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course.’

  ‘Why, you heard something?’

  ‘Maybe. Do we have a picture?’

  Hannah brings it up on her screen and Kelly downloads it to her phone, a blotchy lined face with an angry frown. Kelly says, ‘If they ever find my body I hope they use a more flattering picture of me. What do we know?’

  ‘Sounds as if he had a lady friend. The police are anxious to speak to a white woman, mid-thirties, slim build, 165 centimetres, who was seen in his company in Blackheath.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who’s been following this?’

  ‘Brendon, I think.’

  Kelly calls up the report that Brendon filed, then goes over to his desk. He’s one of the veterans, feet up on his desk taking a call, arguing with someone. She waits till he slams the phone down.

  ‘Kelly, hi. Take a seat. Thought you were on holiday.’

  ‘I came back. I wanted to ask you about Terry Palfreyman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The murder in Blackheath last week.’

  ‘Oh, him, yeah. The troll.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘A serial pest. One of those obsessed people who turn up at company shareholder meetings and ask curly questions about executive salaries and unethical work practices. Our business desk knew about him. Bit of a character. Sometimes he’d turn up in fancy dress or stark naked. He’d been arrested as a public nuisance a couple of times.’

  ‘So he made enemies.’

  ‘Lots. Heavy drinker, argumentative, prone to getting into fights with people. Probably went too far and got stabbed.’

  ‘What about the woman the police are looking for?’

  ‘No idea. A witness?’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe she did it.’

  ‘Did you go up there to look around?’

  ‘No chance. That was the day Slaughter Park broke. All hands on deck.’

  ‘Slaughter Park?’

  ‘Jesus, where have you been?’ He laughs and reaches down to a drawer under his desk and pulls out a copy of the paper. Kelly glimpses a pile of identical copies beneath it.

  She reads the front-page headline, Slaughter Park, byline Brendon Pyle, senior crime reporter. The report begins: Police have revealed the discovery of multiple human body parts scattered in Slater Park, in inner west Sydney.

  ‘Oh, Slater Park,’ Kelly says. ‘I get it.’

  ‘Slaughter was my tag.’ Brendon taps the headline. ‘Now everybody’s using it. Even the police commissioner, by mistake, at the last briefing.’

  One detective, who asked not to be named, described the dismembered corpses as ‘fresh’, and the carnage as the most gruesome crime scene he had witnessed in many years on the force.

  ‘Christ,’ Kelly murmurs. ‘How many bodies were there?’

  ‘Two, it turned out. Chopped up and the bits suspended from ribbons tied to the branches of trees.’

  ‘Ribbons?’

  ‘Pink ribbons, yeah. The victims were two girls who’d attended evening classes at the Slater Park Art School the previous night. The police haven’t a clue. It’s caused panic in the inner west. W
asn’t this on the news where you were?’

  His phone begins to ring.

  ‘Well…congratulations, Brendon. I’ll get up to speed.’

  ‘Luck of the draw, Kelly,’ he says smugly. ‘So if you want to follow up on the Blackheath business, be my guest.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Talk to Lou Reid in business. He’ll tell you more about Palfreyman.’ He snatches up the phone and turns away.

  Kelly looks at him with a smile. Brendon, the oldest reporter left at the Times, was in need of a break. Good on you, she thinks.

  She takes the stairs up to the next floor where Reid has a desk over by the glass curtain wall looking across Pyrmont Bay to the towers of the CBD.

  ‘Yeah, Terry was a character. We’ll miss him. Thing is, for all his stupid antics, he often had a good point to make.’

  ‘What kind of companies did he target?’

  ‘Banks and resources companies mainly—Rio Tinto, Xstrata, BHP, NRL—particularly NRL. He’d been some kind of mining engineer in the past, had a company that went bust and he got bitter.’

  ‘NRL, that’s Nordlund Resources?’

  ‘Right, his favourite target. He’d worked for them at one stage. They had their AGM a couple of weeks ago and Terry was there. He kept his clothes on this time. You can download the video and see him.’

  ‘The company releases a video of the meeting?’

  ‘Yes, the bigger companies do that.’

  Kelly goes back to her desk thinking, Nordlund, Nordlund. The big mining company. Ash Island all over again. What have you got yourself into, Jenny?

  She tries to phone Harry, but he’s not answering. She leaves a message.

  7

  Harry calls police headquarters at Parramatta and asks to be put through to Detective Sergeant Anders, who answers immediately.