Slaughter Park

by Barry Maitland

  Horn looks at his watch. ‘You have less than an hour to give me answers to my questions.’

  Harry says, ‘Why should I tell you anything, if I’m going to die?’

  ‘Because it’s the only way you can save your wife Jenny. If you don’t give me true answers, she will be the star of the next show here.’

  Harry stares for a moment at the fouled tiles below his feet, then whispers, ‘Go to hell.’

  Horn lights up another cigarette, draws deeply on it. ‘Think about it. Take him back inside.’

  94

  ‘Oh, Harry,’ Kelly murmurs. ‘Harry, what have they done to you?’

  She had been looking for a good vantage point, and managed to haul herself up through the limbs of a tree to a fork where she could safely perch, high enough to give her a view over the clearing. She had just pulled her video camera and a long-range microphone from her backpack when the first two men emerged from the shed on the far side of the paddock, hauling a third between them.

  As two others followed, Kelly had switched on the camera and scrambled for the earphones that went with the microphone, to try to pick up what the men were saying, but in her haste she fumbled and they fell to the ground below. She aimed the microphone anyway and pressed record, hoping it would pick something up, though she couldn’t hear it.

  And it’s only now, as the men are carrying their victim away again, that she can make out the battered features of Harry Belltree.

  ‘Oh, Harry,’ she groans again. She has no idea what’s happened to Bob or if he’s been able to see this. She pulls out her phone and dials triple-O. ‘Please,’ she whispers, ‘tell them to come quickly.’

  Half an hour passes, three-quarters of an hour. No sound of howling sirens. No police megaphones. It’s quite dark now. She tries triple-O again. ‘Are you sure they’ve got the right place?’

  ‘I’ll tell them again,’ the operator says. ‘Don’t worry.’

  There has been a steady stream of vehicles arriving and the crowd around the bonfire pile is much larger now, men laughing, shouting, drinking. Then a great cheer goes up as two men appear down the path from the kennel area, each with a huge Rottweiler. The dogs react to the noise, howling, straining against their chains. The men get them to the edge of the pool and push them over the edge. Another man appears with a bucket, throws bits of scarlet flesh down to them.

  95

  As the minutes pass, Harry feels despair grow like a slow, cold death inside him. He is sitting on the concrete floor of the shed, wrists bound behind him with tape. The two body-builders are sitting over at a side table counting money and betting slips that Kylie’s son brings in to them. The sounds of the crowd outside grow louder all the time, joining the barking of the dogs in a hellish chorus. He has tried everything to wriggle and tug his wrists out of the tape, but has made no progress at all.

  From a side door an unlikely looking figure in this setting, portly and somewhat ungainly, comes in and has a word with the two men, handing over money and receiving a slip. It’s Bernard, placing his bet. He ambles over to Harry and squats down beside him.

  ‘The consensus seems to be eighteen seconds, Harry. The more optimistic ones hope you’ll last longer, but you’re not exactly starting in good shape, are you?’

  He makes a funny little lip-smacking sound, like a fat baby at the teat. Sighs.

  ‘Oh, Harry, be a sensible fellow, dear chap, please. Tell me what you know.’

  ‘Bernard, there’s nothing I can tell you that will satisfy them. Not a thing. If you won’t help me, at least get word to the police to save my wife and baby.’

  Bernard shakes his head. ‘They don’t trust me, Harry. Horn has ordered them to take my phone away. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry.’

  Harry feels Bernard’s warm breath against his cheek, as if he’s stooping to kiss or bless him. Then he gets up and walks away.

  Harry tries to struggle upright, feels a sharp stab of pain in his palm, the stickiness of blood. He investigates carefully with his fingers and discovers a razor blade.

  After five minutes the McVea boy comes in and whispers something to the money-counters, turns to look at Harry with a glint of excitement, trots away again. The men finish what they’re doing and get to their feet. One picks up the machete and they walk over to Harry, lift him to his feet. Harry says, ‘What’s the machete for, mate?’ and the man smiles. ‘Gotta give the dogs a little taste of ya first, mate.’ He grins, and Harry slashes him across the throat with the razor blade. As he reels away with a scream, blood spurting from his severed artery, Harry turns and chops the second man with the edge of his hand at the base of his throat, on the bulb of the carotid sinus, sending a massive shock to his brain which abruptly stops his heart. His knees fold and he falls to the ground. Harry picks up the machete and heads for the door.

  He thinks of Afghanistan—rising before dawn, pulling on the gear and going out to face who knew what. Why did we do it? Let the bastards have their way. It’s natural selection, evolution.

  An image comes into his head: Amber, her poor body used as a business ploy, a bargaining chip. He reaches the door, ahead of him a dazzle of lights, a dense crowd in a horseshoe staring his way, expecting him. But not like this. Several men stand in front, looking at him in surprise. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. They turn to each other, and in that moment Harry sees Ryan Nordlund among them, Amber’s nemesis. Who do you think I am? He raises the machete and charges at him with a roar, sees a muzzle flash, hears the bang as Ryan fires. A jolt in his left hip, his momentum carries him on and he brings the blade down.

  96

  From her eyrie in the tree, Kelly sees the melee on the far side of the pool. Chaos, screams, bodies falling into the pit, scrabbling for a grip, dogs howling. Then two loud bangs and a voice: ‘Police! Step back! Hands in the air!’

  From the shadows of the bonfire tower a lone man walks through the crowd, which parts in front of him. She recognises the figure of Bob, holding a pistol, marching towards Harry, whose assailants get slowly to their feet and back away. But where are the troops! she screams silently to herself. Where are the black ninjas!

  Bob has reached Harry’s side. Kelly watches him in close-up through the lens, saying something to Harry, a silent movie in slow motion, trying to get him to his feet. But something is wrong. Harry’s trying, but he can’t get up. As Bob reaches down to help him Kelly sees a movement behind him. Hayden Nordlund has picked up the machete. He steps forward to stand over Bob, raises the blade with both hands above his head. A rumble of anticipation passes through the crowd as Bob, unaware, struggles to lift Harry. And then something strange happens—a point of brilliant red light glows briefly in the centre of Hayden’s chest, there is a gunshot, and he is hurled backwards.

  And now armed figures in black are running in from all directions, shouting, herding the crowd.

  Kelly gives a whoop. At bloody last! She recognises Deb Velasco among the police, giving orders. This is her operation, Kelly realises, not Bob’s. She films for a little longer, zooms in on Deb, then switches off, stuffs the equipment into her backpack and begins the tricky descent from the tree. She’s about halfway down when she hears a crashing through the bush somewhere nearby. She peers down into the gloaming and sees a bobbing light, makes out a figure, a woman, desperately fighting through the tangle of undergrowth. As she gets closer Kelly recognises her—Karen Schaefer, making her escape.

  No way. Kelly grits her teeth and jumps, landing with a crash on Karen. Gasping, she rolls off and struggles to her feet. ‘Got you,’ she says, then notices the strange angle of Karen’s head across a fallen branch. ‘Come on,’ she urges. ‘Get up.’

  But Karen isn’t moving. Kelly drops to her knees beside her and reaches gingerly for her throat, feeling for a pulse. Absolutely nothing.

  Kelly sits back on her haunches, mouth open. She looks at Karen, then at the backpack, containing the scoop of the year, of the decade. She reaches forward and turns Kar
en’s flashlight beam towards the paddock, gets to her feet and sets off through the bush. After twenty minutes she emerges onto a road, looks around and sees the filling station they passed on the way in. A couple of men are standing in the forecourt, watching ambulances and police cars racing past.

  Kelly goes up to them. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks.

  They turn to her in surprise. ‘Something at the kennels. Sounded like guns firing. Always knew that was a bad place. What are you doing out here?’

  ‘Car broke down. I’ve got a family emergency in the city. Have to get there fast. Can I get a cab around here?’ She rummages in her bag and pulls out her purse, shows a bunch of banknotes.

  ‘No worries,’ one says. ‘Raj can take you, can’t you, Raj?’

  ‘Sure, no worries. I drive like the wind.’

  ‘You’re very kind.’

  97

  In the following days Jenny Belltree does what she can to contain the damage, physical and psychological. Around her the whole state seems to be going through the same process. Each day new revelations in the Times under Kelly’s byline stoke the flames. The remnants of the Nordlund family have gone into hiding; the minister for infrastructure and planning has resigned, as has the premier and half the government front bench; ICAC has announced urgent new corruption investigations; the police commissioner has revealed a string of arrests arising from the work of Strike Force Spider, including that of Sydney legal identity Nathaniel Horn, following the shocking film and audio clips released by the Times online; Detective Inspector Deb Velasco, head of Spider, has become a celebrity, pictured raiding Horn’s offices in the CBD and a meat-processing plant in western Sydney owned by a subsidiary of one of the Nordlund group of companies. She is equalled in public esteem only by Detective Superintendent Bob Marshall, hero of the hour.

  On Tuesday there is a report of a light plane owned by Nordlund Resources and piloted by Konrad Nordlund taking off from a small airfield in the Hunter Valley and tracked by RAAF radar crossing the coast and heading out across the Pacific. The following day it is confirmed that it has not landed on Lord Howe Island, the only seaward destination within the plane’s range, and an ocean search is begun; it appears that more than one passenger was on board, though their identities are in doubt.

  Among the extensive research material recovered from Bernard Nordlund’s office and transferred to the university archives is a thick file dating back over a year on the history of the Slater Park Hospital for the Insane and its notorious inmate, Cador Penberthy.

  Several well-known authors confirm that they are racing to bring books on the Nordlund family tragedy into print in time for Christmas.

  But Jenny’s concerns are more personal. There is the house in Surry Hills to put right, but more importantly, Harry is in hospital with the bullet wound to his left hip, among other complications. It isn’t only the physical damage that worries Jenny; it’s as if the accumulation of blows and setbacks over the past two years, coming on top of earlier traumas in the army and police, have finally knocked Harry flat. He’s become withdrawn, hardly moving, locked inside a troubled shell she cannot penetrate. Only Abigail, all budding life and innocence, seems to make an impression on him, and Jenny hurries to prepare the house for his discharge so that the three of them can retreat there together, and she can coax him back from his dark places.

  Towards the end of November, when the first serious heatwave has the east coast in its sweltering grip, Harry is released from hospital. He walks with crutches, and is a pale shadow of the robust bushman who came out of the Queensland rainforest ten weeks before. Bob Marshall is with him, and together they go out to Bob’s car and head for Surry Hills. When Jenny opens the front door to them she is struck by how Bob too has been transformed, now fit and full of energy, revitalised by his rapid promotion to assistant commissioner in charge of state crime command. While she and Bob talk in the kitchen, making coffee, Harry sits on the living room floor in silent communion with Felecia the dog, while Abigail crawls around them with her toys. Later, when Bob has gone and Abigail is down for a sleep, Jenny and Harry sit outside in the small yard, beneath the shady Japanese elm, together in silence.

  It’s another month, the run-up to Christmas, before Harry refers to what’s happened. He’s been to the gym, abandoned his crutches for a walking stick and seems finally to have some energy. He joins Jenny in the kitchen, helping her chop garlic for the evening meal, when he suddenly says, ‘So, after all that, we never solved it, did we? We still don’t know why Mum and Dad died, and we don’t know who Joseph was.’

  She looks at him, trying to gauge if he’s really up to this, then says, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  She wipes her hands and they go upstairs to the attic, his father’s study. ‘After the break-in I had to go through everything, every broken book and scattered bit of paper, and try to put it all back again as it was. And I found something. Look.’

  She shows him a photograph, a formal group portrait of a couple of dozen people standing together on the steps of a building. ‘I’d seen it before, but it meant nothing to me. It was in a frame, behind glass, and the glass had been broken by the intruders. So I took it out of its frame, and when I looked at the back, I saw this…’ She turns it over and shows him.

  Family and staff at Kramfors Homestead on the occasion of Carl Nordlund’s 80th birthday, 5 May 1990.

  Jenny points to one of the names set out beneath, in rows corresponding to the individuals in the photograph: Joseph Doyle. She turns back to the photograph and points him out, a young Aboriginal man.

  Harry studies the image carefully. ‘It must be him, don’t you think? But what was this doing in Dad’s study?’

  ‘I found something else. Joseph’s letter was postmarked Moree, and that made me think of the 1965 Freedom Ride for Aboriginal rights that your parents took part in. Moree was one of the towns they went to. I tried to find any references to it in your father’s papers here, but there was nothing except a note about a speech that he gave to the Law Society in 2005, on the fortieth anniversary of the ride. So I talked to their librarian, and she found a copy of it in their annual record of proceedings for that year. I’ve got the whole text, but the relevant bit is this…’

  She shows him the document, turned to page three:

  After the success of Charlie Perkins and the others in gaining access for the Aboriginal kids from Soapy Row into the previously segregated town swimming baths, we broke up to prepare for our planned public meeting in the Memorial Hall that evening. Although it was a very warm February day I decided to take a walk to become more familiar with the town of Moree. Not far from the thermal baths lay the railway station, a modest little brick building beside the tracks on a wide, barren, flat area, baking hot, and there, standing outside, was a strange sight, a solitary little Aboriginal boy dressed in his best clothes, white shirt and socks, clutching a small suitcase.

  I went up to him and introduced myself and asked him if he was lost, for that was how it looked. He said that his name was Joseph and he was aged seven years. As he told me his story I realised that he was one of the stolen children, as I had once been, taken that morning with other children from their families living on a mission out west of Moree with much confusion and tears, and sent off in a bus to this station for transportation to the white families who had agreed to take them in and turn them into white fellas. Except that Joseph was bound not for a family in Sydney or Newcastle like the other children, but for the Kinnerlee Boys’ Home near Port Macquarie.

  Now I had heard of this institution and its reputation as a dark, brutal place, and I remembered how fortunate I had been to avoid such a fate and instead be taken in by a warm, loving couple such as the Belltrees. It appeared that the people who were escorting the other kids had somehow overlooked little Joseph, who was now abandoned here. So I straight away went to the public phone there in the station and telephoned my adoptive father, Len Belltree, and told him of the situation.
He told me, in his usual calm way, to feed the boy and put him on the next available train to Sydney with some sandwiches and water, and he and Ruby, his wife and my adoptive mother, would collect him at Central. So that’s exactly what I did.

  When I returned to Sydney, my parents told me they had indeed met Joseph and taken him home with them. After staying a few days he was taken to the family they had arranged would adopt him, who lived up-country in New South Wales. I don’t know if any of this was legal, nor have I ever heard from Joseph again. But I like to think that our intervention gave him a better life than was in store for him and that it was a positive footnote to the greater events that were taking place in Moree on that historic day.

  When he’s finished reading, Jenny says, ‘Len and Ruby Belltree, your grandparents, took care of Joseph and found him a family somewhere up-country.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now look again at the names on that group photograph, the family members, there…’

  Harry reads them: Carl Nordlund, in 1990 the patriarch of the family, with his second wife, Trixie, and his three sons, Martin, Bernard and Konrad. Martin and Konrad are with their wives, and nearby a nurse is standing with their young children, Amber, Ryan and Hayden. The other staff member present is named as Joseph Doyle, holding the bridle of Carl’s champion horse Bucephalus. There is also an elderly couple, Len and Ruby Belltree.

  Harry looks at the photograph again. ‘I really wouldn’t have recognised them. They were already middle-aged when they adopted Dad, and elderly when I was born. I have some memories of them, white-haired and kindly, on a beach somewhere, and in the big dark old house in the eastern suburbs where Dad grew up. He was always very respectful towards them, very grateful that they’d given him a privileged life when so many other Aboriginal children had much less happy outcomes. He was very young—less than a year old—when they took him in, and he had no memories of his Koori birth family, from somewhere out west beyond Cobar, Ruby told him.’