Slaughter Park

by Barry Maitland

  So Kylie sets off down the ramp and shows Kelly the sheds, the howling dog pens and the fenced paddock for the breeding bitches.

  ‘Twelve active bitches,’ she says, ‘and over there the new litters.’

  Four pens each contain a bitch surrounded by squirming puppies, two of Rottweilers and one of greyhounds. The fourth one has a greyhound mother with unidentifiable puppies.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ Kylie says. ‘Greyweilers.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kelly is taking pictures as she goes, and now she points to a cleared area in the bush off to one side, the ground heavily chewed up by wheels. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just a car park.’

  There must be room for thirty or forty vehicles, but there are none there now. She notices cables running through the trees towards an open area on the other side of the house, in which she can make out lighting poles, and what looks like an empty swimming pool. Nearby is a tall pile of timber, as if for a bonfire.

  ‘I suppose you have big parties out here, do you?’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’

  ‘Oh, I just thought, your boys, this would be a great place to have their mates over for a Saturday night bush party.’

  ‘No, nothing like that. We’re very quiet here. You seen enough?’ Kylie leads the way back. When they reach her car, Kelly points to the solitary dog in the pen. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘Saw you lookin’ at Sophie when you arrived. Owners abandoned her. She’ll have to be put down.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘Yeah, shame. It’s an unusual breed, a Danish spaniel.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of that one.’

  ‘Rare. But she’ll have to go.’

  ‘How do you put them down?’

  ‘Quickly.’ Kylie grins.

  ‘I heard that farmers shoot their dogs.’

  ‘Not worth the cost of a bullet, darlin’.’

  Kelly reaches for the car doorhandle, then says, ‘Maybe I could take Sophie off your hands.’

  ‘Well, reckon you could. Cost you a few bucks, mind.’

  ‘You said she wasn’t worth the cost of a bullet.’

  ‘I was just saying that. She’s a valuable dog.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A hundred.’

  ‘Fifty.’

  They split the difference. Kylie hauls Sophie out by the scruff of the neck and throws her into the back of Kelly’s car.

  29

  ‘What happened on Maturiki?’ Jenny says.

  They are waiting in the pharmacy for Jim’s prescription. Shopping bags at their sides contain groceries and the phone Harry has bought for Amber.

  ‘Something bad,’ Harry says. ‘That she doesn’t want to talk about.’

  ‘But how can we help her if we don’t understand? She seems terrified of being discovered. I know exactly how she feels, cooped up in that little room, afraid to go out. You don’t know what a relief it is just to do something normal, like this.’

  They return to the house in Mont Street. The man on the front couch is talking to a young woman, who hurriedly stuffs something into her pocket. The man and his dog eye their bags as they go through the front door.

  Amber is overjoyed to see them. She unpacks the bags, eagerly reeling off the list of things they’ve bought to the man in the bed, who seems barely conscious.

  ‘And Jim’s medicine?’

  ‘Yes.’ Harry takes it from his pocket and hands it to her. She fills a glass with water and takes it to the bed, where Jim struggles to sit up.

  ‘I’ll help,’ Harry says, but she says no, quickly.

  ‘I’m used to this. You can boil some water if you like, and we’ll have coffee. They bought coffee, Jim.’

  They sit, Jenny and Harry on the chairs, Amber on the edge of the bed, and sip their drinks. Harry says, ‘How can we help you to sort this out, Amber? Your family are worried about you. Your uncle Konrad has hired private detectives to try to find you. His lawyer Nathaniel Horn even asked me to look for you.’

  She looks at him, alarmed. ‘You can’t tell him where I am!’

  ‘Okay, but won’t you tell us what happened? We might be able to help.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  They leave, promising to come back in a couple of days.

  As they get into their car, Harry’s phone rings. Bob Marshall.

  ‘Ken Fogarty’s left Newcastle, moved back to state crime command in Sydney. Organised crime squad. Why? What’s this about, Harry?’

  ‘There’s something I’d like to run by you, Bob. Can we meet?’

  ‘I’m about to give a talk to five hundred schoolkids, out here in Parramatta. I could meet you afterwards. Same place as before? Say four o’clock?’

  Harry rings off, explains to Jenny. ‘I’ll drop you back at Marrickville, then head out there.’

  ‘Are you sure you can trust Bob, Harry?’

  He nods. ‘Reckon so.’

  ‘Then I want to come with you. I’ll stay in the car or keep out of the way. No one will recognise me.’

  When they reach Phoenix Square Jenny is astonished. ‘I came here a couple of times with Nicole to Greg’s unit. I can’t believe how it’s changed.’

  Harry points. ‘His builder’s workshop was somewhere underneath that piazza up there with the palm trees. That’s where I’m meeting Bob.’

  He parks the car and they separate. Bob is already at a table outside the café, sitting in the sun. He’s changed out of his uniform and looks buoyant after his session at the school. There are two glasses of beer on the table.

  ‘How’d it go?’ Harry asks.

  ‘Great. Headmistress told me I had a knack of communicating with children.’

  Harry thinks that’s probably true. Uncle Bob. Harry wonders if it was a mistake involving him.

  Bob says, ‘So, what’s the mystery about Detective Chief Inspector Fogarty?’

  Harry runs his finger through the puddle of beer beside the glass. ‘Formerly of the drug squad, along with his good mate Toby Wagstaff.’

  ‘Was he now? I didn’t know that. And?’

  ‘I’d like to put a hypothetical to you,’ Harry says.

  Bob narrows his eyes at him, nods, leans forward. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Let’s say that Jenny went to the annual shareholders’ meeting of Nordlund Resources three weeks ago, in the hope of catching up with Amber Nordlund, one of the directors. She wasn’t there, but Terry Palfreyman, serial pest, was. He followed her afterwards and tried to get her interested in his feud against Konrad Nordlund. She brushed him off until he let drop that he knew that Nordlund was responsible for my parents’ death and Jenny’s injuries. He claimed that he had evidence of some kind of conspiracy also involving the death of Konrad’s brother Martin in an unsolved air crash back in 2002. It might just be his obsession with Nordlund, but Jenny felt she had to follow it up. He said he would show her the proof at the cottage he was living in out in Blackheath, and she decided to rent the adjoining house and go out there for a day or two and settle it, one way or the other.

  ‘On the afternoon of Monday, October thirteenth, Palfreyman goes back to his house to retrieve his evidence from its hiding place. Jenny gives him an hour then walks over there, and sees a car parked outside. She looks through the window and sees two men in forensic suits, searching the house and trying to force information from Palfreyman. Suddenly one of the men appears at the window in front of Jenny and immediately they recognise each other. When she was in hospital after Ash Island, this man, a police officer in Newcastle, visited her there. Now he and the other man leave Palfreyman’s house and chase after Jenny, who runs into the bush and hides. Sometime later she sees their car drive away. She goes to Blackheath station and gets a train back to Sydney and goes on the run because she knows that the man who saw her will kill her.

  ‘The man was Detective Chief Inspector Fogarty.’

  Bob sits back with a sigh. ‘And Fogarty
was a friend of Wagstaff, who tried to kill you here, on this spot, two years ago. Very neat. Very symmetrical. How long did it take you to dream that one up?’

  Harry says nothing, stares at him.

  ‘No,’ Bob says slowly. ‘Don’t tell me she dreamed it up? You’ve heard from her?’

  ‘You’re a serving police officer, Bob. If I said yes you’d be duty-bound to report it and I’d be arrested quick smart. Like I said, it’s a hypothetical.’

  Bob shakes his head. ‘All right, hypothetically, they didn’t torture Palfreyman. He had no other injuries apart from Jenny’s knife in his chest.’

  Harry nods. ‘So they didn’t leave any marks. Anything else?’

  ‘Anything else? These two men carry out a murder without leaving a single trace? The forensic evidence against Jenny is overwhelming, Harry. You know it is.’

  ‘The Slaughter Park murderer isn’t leaving any traces either.’

  ‘Oh, so Fogarty’s up for that too, is he?’ Bob roars with laughter.

  Harry feels his face flushing. ‘These two guys were experts, Bob. They knew exactly how to rig a crime scene. Remember, it was done to me, in Newcastle—Logan McGilvray’s death, my tyre marks, my murder weapon. And anyway, they did leave a trace at Blackheath—the broken window in Jenny’s house. They were in a hurry and they needed to get in for her knife and to plant a trail of her bloody footprints.’

  ‘You really believe this?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Bob folds his arms, frowns. ‘Well, I don’t. Not without hearing it from her mouth. I’ll know then if she’s telling the truth.’

  ‘She can’t do that.’

  ‘Forget the duty-bound business. If she’s telling the truth, I won’t betray her. If she isn’t, then I’ll arrest her on the spot. Tell her that.’

  Harry says, ‘That’s a tough one, Bob. I’ll put it to her. But if she decides not to speak to you, you’ve got to forget we had this conversation.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Harry takes out his phone and calls Jenny, explains Bob’s proposal, advises against it. She replies immediately that she’ll do it. He begins to explain where they are, but she stops him.

  ‘I know, I’m sitting across the other side of the square watching you.’

  Harry rings off and tells Bob she’s coming.

  ‘You carrying a gun, Harry?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re thinking how you’re going to stop me arresting her when she doesn’t convince me.’

  ‘True enough.’

  ‘You’re younger and fitter than me, but I’ll make a fight of it, and security’ll be here in seconds.’

  Bob looks puzzled as a young woman with black hair and big dark glasses approaches their table, then gets to his feet as she takes the glasses off and he recognises her. ‘Jenny. This is a surprise. You’ve been running rings around my friends in homicide.’

  ‘I had no choice, Bob.’

  She sits and he asks her to tell him what happened at Blackheath. She goes through it, and from time to time he interrupts with questions, demanding details.

  ‘You say one of them was torturing Palfreyman. How?’

  ‘I couldn’t see clearly. I think he was twisting his arm.’

  ‘Which arm?’

  ‘Um…the left one.’

  Bob takes out an iPad and taps away at it for a moment, pulling up a document. ‘Pathology report,’ he mutters. ‘Victim had bruising to left hand, torn and inflamed tendons. All right, the man standing over Palfreyman, what did he look like?’

  ‘I didn’t see his face. He had his back to me.’

  ‘Then how did you know he was a man?’

  She thinks about that. ‘His build—very tall. And the way he moved. I just immediately saw him as a man. I don’t think I was wrong—No! I heard his voice, later, when they were searching for me in the bush. It was definitely a man.’

  ‘Go on.’

  When she gets to the part where Fogarty suddenly appears in the window in front of her, the hairs rise on Harry’s neck.

  ‘I had the phone in my hand,’ she says. ‘If I’d only thought I could have taken a photo of him. But I was frozen with shock. I knew that face, and he knew mine. I couldn’t remember his name until Harry told me the senior officers he worked with in Newcastle. But I knew his face.’

  ‘From that one visit to you in hospital, soon after you were hurt, full of painkillers and goodness knows what else.’

  ‘Yes, I remember it very clearly. He was in uniform then.’

  Bob shakes his head, takes out his phone and begins flicking at the screen, scrolling through images. After a search he shows her a picture of a police officer in uniform. ‘This is him.’

  She looks at it. ‘No, it’s not.’

  Harry tenses, holds his breath. Then Bob flicks at his phone some more, shows her another image.

  ‘No.’

  A third time, and this time she says, ‘Yes, that’s the man. Ross Bramley called him Foggy.’

  Bob shows the screen to Harry. It’s Fogarty.

  ‘Well, Jenny…’ Bob says reluctantly. ‘You’re very convincing.’

  ‘Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Jenny takes a deep breath, reaches out for Harry’s hand. He feels hers trembling.

  Bob turns to Harry. ‘So what the hell is Fogarty up to?’

  ‘Trouble is, you get to think like Palfreyman, seeing conspiracies everywhere. Like, how Fogarty was in charge of Strike Force Ipswich to solve the Ash Island murders, which they didn’t. Like, how Nordlund Resources security staff were running a drug racket that didn’t get discovered. Like, how the person most threatened by Palfreyman was Konrad Nordlund.’

  ‘You think Fogarty is in Nordlund’s pocket?’ Bob asks.

  ‘I do,’ Harry says.

  ‘So how can we prove it?’

  ‘I was hoping you might put tabs on him.’

  Bob shakes his head. ‘Not easy. If I try to target him directly he’ll know. I’ll have to think.’

  ‘Me too.’ Harry looks around. Two security men are moving through the crowd in the square. ‘We’ve been here too long. Better go. Could you get me Fogarty’s details, Bob? Where he’s living, private email, phone numbers, family set-up?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, mate. Good luck to you both.’

  They leave Bob and head back to their car. On the way to Marrickville Jenny says, ‘What do we do now?’

  30

  Kelly taps at her computer, frustrated. McVea was a dead end. All around her there is activity, new people enlisted to help Brendon on Slaughter Park—graphic reconstructions, profiles of the victims, rumours circulating among the Friends of Slater Park about previous odd goings-on. But the Palfreyman case is dead, not a word from the police. She wonders what she can do to resurrect it. And at that moment she gets a call from Harry.

  She answers immediately. ‘Hi. Is your phone safe?’

  He says, ‘Mine is, but…’

  ‘We’ve all been given an encryption app, Harry. So this phone’s safe too.’

  ‘Good. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Nothing interesting. All the excitement here is about Slaughter Park. How about you? Any news of Jenny?’

  He says, ‘You sure your phone is safe?’

  ‘Absolutely. Nobody can unscramble this conversation, not the police, ASIO, nobody.’

  ‘I’ve found her, Kelly, and she’s told me what happened. She’s been framed.’

  ‘My God, Harry. How? What happened?’

  He tells her about Jenny returning to Palfreyman’s house and seeing him being assaulted.

  ‘But…why doesn’t she surrender to the police and tell them the truth?’

  ‘Because the men were police. Do you remember Detective Chief Inspector Fogarty who used to give the press briefings at Ash Island? He’s now in the organised crime squad here at Parramatta. He was one of the two killers. Jenny recognised him from Newcastle, and
he recognised her.’

  ‘That’s…incredible. Is she quite sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. She’s completely convincing, and terrified.’

  ‘This is dynamite, Harry. But the Times won’t let me print this without corroboration.’

  ‘Of course. I don’t want you to print it, Kelly, I just want you to keep it in mind. What I’d like to do is stir the pot a bit.’

  ‘How? I’d be happy to do a follow-up on the Palfreyman murder if I had any material to use, but at the moment the cops are keeping mum and I’m being told to forget it until they come up with something.’

  ‘There may be a way. The cops have been monitoring Jenny’s bank account, and have discovered that her credit card has been used recently in Darwin. If you printed that it might get them to talk to you. But there’s something else. Palfreyman told Jenny that he had got a member of parliament interested in his case for a while, and I thought if you talked to him he might give you more material on Palfreyman. The thing is, everyone assumes he was a joke, an accident waiting to happen. But suppose he really was on to something, a corruption whistleblower who was silenced because he was a threat?’

  ‘Yes, that would be interesting. Who was the MP?’

  ‘We don’t have a name, but he was an independent, and there aren’t many of them. Male, and he has a reputation for pursuing corruption issues.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll follow that up. Poor Jenny. How is she coping?’

  ‘It’s tough.’

  ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

  Kelly gets to work with renewed energy. In front of her on her desk she has two pictures of Sophie, before and after their extended visit to the vet to stitch up her ear, get rid of her parasites, inoculate and bath her and get a heap of medicines and special food. Kelly stares at the before picture and thinks again of Kylie McVea. There was something bad going on out there, but whatever it was, Palfreyman is what she needs to concentrate on now.

  31

  Harry rings Nathaniel Horn’s number, gets put through to Horn, who is in court.

  ‘Yes, Mr Belltree. Have you found Amber?’

  ‘I have a lead, but I need to know what happened on Maturiki Island to make her run like that.’