Slaughter Park

by Barry Maitland

  She stops at a stall and buys a hotdog with mustard and onions, moves away to find a quiet place to eat—and bumps into Charity.

  ‘Hi, Deb. You made it. Isn’t it a gorgeous day?’

  She’s wearing a light cotton summer dress, sandals, a ribbon in her hair—white, not pink, thank God.

  ‘Day off?’ Deb asks.

  ‘Yes, today and tomorrow. When did you last have a day off?’

  ‘What are you, my mother?’

  Charity laughs, bright lipstick.

  They wander, buy coffee, chat about Charity’s family in Adelaide, what brought her to Sydney. Then Deb checks the time and says she’d better get back to work. Charity is meeting some friends to go to a movie. She says, ‘Here, this is for you,’ and hands Deb a small envelope.

  ‘What’s this? Shall I open it now?’

  ‘Later. See you.’ She turns and walks away. As she watches her disappear into the crowd, Deb remembers friends she once had, girls like Charity, and thinks how long it’s been since she had friends, real friends.

  Her phone rings and she listens to the message, heads back to the main road. On the way she opens Charity’s envelope and finds a key inside and a small note: Entry code 9609.

  She has a frustrating afternoon and evening, achieving nothing: keeping track of hourly updates from the team dealing with incoming calls from the public; a new report from forensics; briefings for the premier, the minister for infrastructure and planning and the press; meetings with senior officers; a session on the task force budget; reports on forty-two persons of interest. Her boss, Dick Blake, is supportive, but when they meet with the police commissioner she senses an attempt to distance himself from the investigation, although that may just be her growing paranoia. She also meets with Jack Anders, back from two days off, for an update on the Palfreyman case, and advises him to forget Greyhound buses in the outback and concentrate on Sydney. She gives him the details of the taxi driver and shows him a still from the cab video.

  He looks at it doubtfully. ‘You reckon that’s her, Deb?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. She jumped in the cab at the junction of Marrickville and Illawarra roads. Lots of Vietnamese around there. That’s where she was hiding out—she’d dyed her hair, trying to blend in. Something spooked her, made her run. Maybe somebody recognised her.’

  ‘At three am? Okay, I’ll get onto it.’

  At ten she packs it in and calls a cab. When the driver asks for the address she hesitates. A drink and a bed. She tells him Newtown, King Street. ‘I’ll tell you where to stop.’

  She finds the apartment block in the back street and presses the bell. Charity’s voice on the intercom. The door clicks and she goes inside to the lift.

  The apartment door is open. A big smile from Charity that makes her heart lift. ‘Sorry,’ Deb says. ‘Couldn’t face home.’

  The glass of whisky is ready, a rich smell of cooking in the air.

  ‘Smells like you had a great dinner.’

  ‘Goulash. I kept some for you.’

  A hot meal, wine, a shower; she feels human again. She thinks of Harry in the mental hospital, wonders what he wanted to tell her with the recording machine turned off.

  44

  She wakes from a profound sleep, feeling enormously rested. The bed is wonderful, deep and soft. She turns and studies the head on the pillow at her side, the curls of blonde hair across the white cotton. She props herself up on one elbow, leans down and kisses the girl’s neck, her shoulder. Then she gets up.

  The hospital receptionist shakes her head. ‘I’ll have to check with Dr Lambert.’ She picks up the phone and dials. After a brief conversation she rings off and turns back to Deb. ‘Dr Lambert needs to speak to you. He’s coming in.’

  ‘Oh, is there a problem? Is Mr Belltree all right?’ She has an image of Harry being found hanged in his cell.

  ‘You’ll have to wait for Dr Lambert to get here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  The receptionist looks accusingly at her. ‘On the green of the second hole.’

  ‘Oh. He won’t be pleased then.’

  ‘I should say not.’

  ‘Isn’t there anyone else I could speak to?’

  ‘Dr Lambert wants to talk to you himself. You can get a coffee over there if you want.’

  Deb waits, thirty minutes, forty minutes, her earlier euphoria rapidly evaporating. Outside it’s a fine Sunday morning and this part of the hospital has few visitors.

  Finally a man marches in through the front doors and goes to the receptionist’s window, looks at Deb. ‘You’re Inspector Velasco?’

  ‘Yes. Dr Lambert? I’m sorry to—’

  He turns away. ‘Follow me.’

  They go to an office, where Lambert takes the chair behind the desk, waves Deb to another seat. ‘I had a long session with Harry last night. He told me things that I found frankly disturbing. You have him under arrest, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘He, a police officer, has crucial information about the identity of a murder victim, and comes to give this to you, and you arrest him for trespassing. Is that right?’

  ‘And interfering with—’

  ‘You are also hunting for his wife, I understand, on a murder charge?’

  ‘She’s a person of interest. We want to interview her, but so far—’

  ‘And then you have Harry sectioned. This sounds like some kind of vendetta.’

  ‘Dr Lambert, I don’t know what Harry’s told you, but you don’t know the whole story. Please don’t jump to conclusions.’

  Lambert gazes at her for a moment, frowning. ‘I knew his father, the judge. A fine man. A dreadful tragedy when he and Mary were killed. And now this. You don’t have a problem with Harry’s Aboriginal heritage, do you?’

  Deb gets to her feet. ‘Of course I don’t, and I deeply resent the question. I want to speak to Harry now.’

  ‘All right, all right, I apologise.’ Lambert waves his hand for her to sit down, which she does reluctantly. ‘I had to ask. Harry only told me those things when I pressed him, and there was obviously a lot more that he didn’t tell me. He’s had a hell of a trot, and I’d hate to think that his colleagues were undermining him.

  ‘Anyway, the point is this—he’s under great stress, but in the circumstances is handling it well. In my opinion he is not suffering from either a mental illness or mental disorder and is therefore not liable for admission under the terms of section C of the act.’

  ‘I see. So what happens now?’

  ‘The act says that where the second assessment contradicts the first, there must be a third assessment by an authorised medical officer. I have arranged for that later today. I believe Harry doesn’t need a doctor—he needs a good lawyer. For that reason I don’t think I should allow you to interview him in here.’

  Deb says, ‘Believe it or not, Dr Lambert, I am a friend of Harry’s, and I do regret what he’s going through. I think—I hope—that if he talks to me now, off the record, it will help me to get to the bottom of what’s going on. I guarantee that I won’t record our conversation or use his words against him.’

  Lambert sits back in his chair, makes a steeple with his hands. ‘Hmm. The thing is, inspector, he seems to believe that, despite all appearances to the contrary, you’re on the side of the angels. I hope to God he’s right.’

  He lurches forward and picks up the phone. ‘Ah, Agustina. Would you be so kind as to escort Inspector Velasco to see Mr Belltree? Thank you so much.’

  Deb gets to her feet. ‘Sorry about the golf.’

  Lambert checks his watch. ‘With any luck I’ll catch them up on the tenth tee.’

  45

  ‘Ah, Deb.’ Harry squints up at her against the bright sky. ‘What have you got for me now? Straitjacket? Lobotomy?’

  She sits down beside him on the bench. They are in an enclosed courtyard in the heart of the hospital. On the far side a young man is obsessively pounding a basketball against the wall.
r />   ‘There are no recording devices here, Harry. What did you want to tell me?’

  He looks at her, assessing. ‘This isn’t to go in your notebook, Deb. Or onto e@gle.i. It’s strictly for you to think about.’

  ‘Okay, okay. It’s about how Jenny was framed, is that it?’

  ‘Let me ask you something about Slater Park. The first two victims, the art students, they were butchered on the site where they were found, right? Blood everywhere?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How about Christie Florian, the third victim?’

  ‘No. She was killed and dismembered elsewhere. No blood.’

  He nods. ‘And Amber?’

  ‘Same, no blood.’

  ‘So why the difference?’

  ‘Because we were active on the site, patrolling, searching.’

  ‘You sealed the perimeter?’

  ‘No, not completely. It’s a huge site, sixty-two hectares surrounded by industrial, commercial and residential buildings, a school, streets. The perimeter is over four kilometres all up, and it’s largely unfenced parkland. It fronts onto the river, too. After Christie we got approval to install a perimeter intrusion detection system—microwave units on poles 200 metres apart. But it’s not easy—there are thick pockets of bush, adjoining structures with irregular shapes, all kinds of challenges. The system still isn’t functioning properly.’

  ‘So how did the killer bring those bodies in?’

  ‘That’s what we all want to know. Believe me, I’ve had every crazy idea thrown at me. The local historical society thinks there may be a tunnel from the old asylum to a nearby house that originally belonged to the senior doctor. Someone else suggested they were dropped from a helicopter.’

  ‘Why not the easy way?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Drive in with the body in the boot.’

  ‘No way. Every vehicle has to be authorised and checked in at the main gate.’

  ‘They’re all searched?’

  ‘Contractors’ vans, trucks, yes.’

  ‘What about police cars?’

  ‘They’re not searched, no—of course they’re not. What are you getting at?’

  He leans closer to her, lowers his voice. The other patient continues pounding his ball. ‘The reason Jenny can’t surrender to the police is that she recognised one of the two men inside Palfreyman’s house. A police officer. And he recognised her. That’s why she’s on the run—if she surrenders he’ll kill her.’

  Deb sits back with a jolt. ‘Who?’

  ‘She was framed in a highly professional manner, Deb, just as I was in Newcastle, and by the same person. You remember the officer in charge of Strike Force Ipswich? Detective Chief Inspector Ken Fogarty?’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t like you, did he?’

  ‘He’s transferred back to Sydney now, state crime command, organised crime squad. That’s who Jenny saw.’

  Harry watches the incredulity cross Deb’s face. She shakes her head. ‘And…what? He’s responsible for the Slater Park murders too? You’re crazy…’ She stops, corrects herself. ‘Sorry, but where’s the connection?’

  ‘Konrad Nordlund. Palfreyman was a threat to Nordlund and had to be silenced. And Nordlund wants to get his hands on Slater Park. He’s manoeuvring the state government into a position where it will be impossible to resist his demands that they sell.’

  ‘But Harry, his own niece!’

  ‘They hated each other. Amber was on the run from the Nordlunds, who were trying to find her. Now they have. It’s perfect, Deb. It makes Nordlund the victim in all this.’

  ‘No, no. I’m sorry, Harry. I know how hard this is for you, but you can’t protect Jenny with a wild conspiracy theory that can’t be proved or disproved.’

  ‘Maybe it can. Get someone to check the police cars and their occupants that came into Slater Park on the nights the last two women were killed. Say you need the information for strike force records.’

  She takes a deep breath, then gives a tight little smile. She’s going to humour him. ‘Okay, Harry, I’ll do it. Then we’ll see. Who else have you shared this idea with?’

  Harry looks down, doesn’t reply.

  ‘Bob Marshall, right?’

  Harry nods.

  ‘And he swallowed it?’

  ‘He believes me, yes.’

  ‘I’m surprised.’

  ‘I pointed out that Fogarty was a close friend of Toby Wagstaff when they were in the drug squad together.’

  ‘Wagstaff…who was killed that night you were shot at Crucifixion Creek?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I never understood what really happened that night. It was all hushed up.’

  ‘Yeah. But Bob knows what happened. He seemed to find that very significant. It was Wagstaff who shot me.’

  Deb stares incredulously at him. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘That’s why it was hushed up.’

  ‘Is that right?’ She feels her sense of reality slipping away again, as it always seems to do these days when she talks to Harry. ‘And you trust Bob?’

  ‘Yes, don’t you?’

  ‘To tell the truth, Harry, I’m finding it increasingly hard to know who I trust these days.’

  46

  ‘I am a pariah,’ Husam Roshed says with some relish. ‘An outcast.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kelly says. ‘Things got a bit out of hand.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be sorry. They hate independents anyway. A Leb independent most of all. I’ve done them all a favour—given them a legitimate reason to ostracise me. The important thing is that my constituents love me for it. The feedback on the Nordlund business is very positive.’

  Several people passing their table in the Lebanese café give him a friendly wave as if to emphasise the point.

  ‘I was thinking about your constituents.’ Kelly stirs her coffee, thick, sweet and black. ‘You said your family knew Maram Mansur’s. So you must also have come across Frank and Kylie Capp.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘An Anglo family lived next door to the Mansurs. The father was never around and the mother ran off with some bloke, so the Mansurs took the two kids in. Frank was a wild boy, and he stole a car with his sister and smashed it up, crippled her.’

  ‘Oh…yes, right, I do remember something about that. Why?’

  ‘Frank Capp became a big man in the Crows outlaw motorcycle gang at Crucifixion Creek. He hit the headlines last December when he was killed in a siege following the Ash Island business up in Newcastle. Kylie’s still around—Kylie McVea now, still in a wheelchair. Her carer is a niece of Maram Mansur.’

  ‘Is that right? Small world. Is this relevant to us?’

  ‘Maybe not. I just hoped you might have some inside scuttlebutt on them.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, but I can ask around. The Mansurs aren’t very popular around here. Maram got too grand for people’s taste.’ Roshed picks up a slice of sticky pistachio baklava. ‘What are people saying about Amber Nordlund’s death? It’s very weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s one more turn of the screw.’ Kelly tries to find the right way of putting it. It’s been her gripe with Brendon Pyle’s approach to the story in the Times—all very forensic and factual. But people’s reaction has been far more visceral than that. ‘I hear it among the people at work, in cafés and in letters to the editor. People are spooked. Slater Park has become a kind of bogey place, an evil heart of darkness in the middle of the city. The mood seems to be to purge it, exorcise it, get rid of it.’

  ‘Much the way they feel about me, I guess.’ Roshed munches happily.

  ‘It’s a pity Palfreyman didn’t leave anything incriminating about Slater Park,’ Kelly says.

  ‘As far as we know. Maybe your paper could apply to the information commissioner for records of Nordlund’s dealings with the government.’

  ‘That could take months, years. By then Ozdevco’s bulldozers will have moved in.’

  Kelly thinks about this as she travels bac
k into the city on the train. Her phone vibrates in her pocket—it’s Brad in Port Vila.

  ‘I’ve found someone you should talk to, Kelly. The sister of the shark attack victim I told you about.’

  ‘The victim’s been identified?’

  ‘Yeah. The Australian Federal Police have a post out here that helps the Vanuatu police with forensics and stuff. They identified the victim from DNA—Selwyn Tamata, from Pentecost Island. His sister is Pascaline Tamata. I’ve been told that Selwyn and Pascaline both worked out at Maturiki, and she’s very cut up about his death.’ ‘You’ve spoken to her?’

  ‘Nah, she’s not on the phone. Figured we could go up there together, if you were interested.’

  ‘Where did you get this from, Brad?’

  ‘Cop friend in the Vanuatu police. He’s seen the file and reckons she’s not telling everything she knows.’

  ‘Look, I’ll get back to you, okay?’

  ‘Sure. It’ll need planning—there’s only a couple of flights up there each week. Not many visitors. The high season is over now.’

  ‘Thanks, Brad.’

  She rings off. It seems like a lot of trouble for what may be nothing. She calls Harry’s number to see what he thinks, but can’t get through.

  47

  Deb rings the doorbell, waits, then hears the thump of a big man’s feet approaching. Bob Marshall opens the door.

  ‘Deb! This is a nice surprise.’ The warmth of his welcome doesn’t quite mask the initial disquiet on his face.

  ‘Hi, Bob. Is this a good time?’

  ‘Sure, sure, come in.’

  ‘Should have phoned, but I was in the area and thought I’d take the chance to call in.’

  A family home with a family no longer. Somehow it shows, clean enough but uncared-for, cardboard boxes filling one room. Bob leads her through to the kitchen with its view over a lush suburban plot. There are family photos on the fridge, faded now, of Betty, dead nine years, and the two boys both overseas.