by Paul Cleave
Then, when there is nothing left to show, it cuts to the people nearby when it happened-“we heard gunshots and ran,” “we didn’t know what to do,” “seemed unbelievable it was happening right here,” “we were almost killed.” Then come the interviews from people who were inside the bank. I recognize some of them. “They came out of nowhere,” “it was so scary,” “those poor people, my God, those poor people did nothing and got shot anyway.” A photo of a man comes up, he was the bank manager, he was fifty-six years old and had worked at that branch for nine years. It shows the bank teller whose life apparently I saved, her name is Marcy Croft and she’s twenty-four years old and has worked at the bank for nine weeks, and she’s shaking as the cameraman zooms in on her, and she says “He was going to kill me. I know that as sure as I know I’m never working here again. And that man, oh my God, that man distracted him and saved my life, and his wife, his wife. .,” she says, and she breaks down in tears and can’t finish but the camera doesn’t break away from her, it focuses on her pain and relief and the country watches her cry for another ten seconds before it goes back to the anchor.
After the interviews a picture of my wife that I have no idea how they got-maybe from her work somewhere-comes up. Both victims have families, pain, and despair filling the spaces these people left. Then there’s me again, covered in blood, being led away from Jodie’s body. Edward Hunter, twenty-nine-year-old son of a serial killer. The anchorwoman mentions it.
The footage turns to a live feed from outside the bank. There’s still yellow crime-scene tape fluttering in the slight breeze. The spot where Jodie was killed has tape around it, and she’s been moved, and I have an image of her lying on a steel slab in a morgue, pale, grey, and blue and broken beyond repair, no longer covered by a sheet. The reporter has his sleeves rolled up, indicating he’s had a long day at work. He speaks for a bit, talking about me.
“And Jack Hunter, of course, was arrested after murdering eleven prostitutes, isn’t that right, Dan?” the anchorwoman asks, the feed going back to her, her serious face on display.
“Sure is, Kim. Of course that’s only eleven prostitutes that he admitted to.”
“Has there been any speculation that Edward Hunter may have been involved?” Anchorwoman Kim says.
“At this stage the police aren’t commenting on that, however from what I’ve learned it does seem unlikely. I think for Edward and Jodie Hunter, and for the rest of these people, it was a case of wrong place at the wrong time. As soon as we know more down here in Christchurch, we’ll let you know.”
Kim flashes her second expression at the screen, and then the image taken twenty years ago appears, of me in my school uniform by my father’s side. I almost throw the remote at the TV. The story gets to the climax-or, in this case, a punch line. The van was found. It had been stolen. No trace of the money. No trace of the people in it. The six men scattered into the city.
I turn off the TV and sit in the darkness, wide awake, angry, hurting, and alone.
chapter nine
A man walking his dog called it in. He saw the smoke and called the fire department who rushed out before the blaze could spread out of control, latching onto trees and then maybe houses in the area, but not before the van could be destroyed. The twisted and charred skeleton is still smoldering, and Schroder knows any evidence inside is gone. There’s still forensic evidence, but that’ll take weeks-and even then it may lead to nothing.
The road is hard-packed dirt leading into a pine forest. The sides of the road are breaking up in areas from tree roots, patches of it blanketed in pine needles. About two kilometers from here in one direction people go mountain biking and jogging and horse riding, and two kilometers in another direction is the ocean, but right here the world is abandoned, and the men who came here knew that. The ground hasn’t given way to any impressions from feet, or from another vehicle. The man with the dog doesn’t remember seeing any other cars coming or leaving, and there isn’t anybody else to ask. He can smell oil and gas and the branches that have blistered in the heat. Halogen lights have been set up, pointing at the van, lighting up the nearby trees and creating hundreds of shadows among them. There is no breeze at all, and every thirty seconds or so he has to swat away an insect about half the size of a fly.
Schroder can’t stop thinking about Edward Hunter. He thinks about the dad, just your normal everyday average family man. All through the trial Jack Hunter with his smiles, his neat but cheap suits, never once appearing cocky or arrogant and certainly nothing like the insane person his lawyers wanted him to be. The defense told the jury that the dad heard voices, that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, that he could barely control what he was doing, let alone remember it. They said the voices took over, and when they did there was no Jack Hunter, but something else, something inside of him that was sick and twisted and had gone undiagnosed for years. The jury didn’t buy it. The jury liked the prosecution’s story better. That story went like this: Jack Hunter loved to kill prostitutes and he hated to be caught. Jack Hunter wasn’t insane, because he got away with it for too many years. An insane man with no control over his actions would have been caught sooner. An insane man could not have covered up the crimes the way he did and lived the way he lived. The jury bought that story and Jack Hunter got life in jail. End of story.
He can remember the image of Edward hugging his dad on the morning. Since reaching into the bathtub checking for Edward’s mother’s pulse a year later, he hasn’t really thought much about Edward. He remembered him again a few years later when he heard the sister had overdosed on heroin, but not since.
For the last few hours he’s been talking to witnesses and reviewing the security footage from the bank. The footage is video without audio, and it’s clear but not clear enough to zoom in on any of the bank robbers’ features. They can tell height and sometimes weight, but nothing more. However, not just anybody can successfully rob a bank, and certainly there must be some experience in the team that pulled this job off. At a minimum, half of them will have a criminal record for armed assault-and in all likelihood all of them will have a record for something.
The next step is to talk to people in that world. Somebody somewhere has to know something-there’s no way these men won’t answer for what they did.
He watches the smoke spiral into the night for a while longer before getting into his car and driving back to the bank.
chapter ten
The funeral is on Monday. Jodie’s body was rushed through the backlog of bodies that were rolled in on Friday. They didn’t need to do much to her except take a hundred photos and go hunting around inside of her with a pair of tweezers searching for the shotgun pellets. Maybe they got it wrapped up since Christmas was coming. Maybe the funeral director freed up a spot so soon in his schedule because he’s heading to the Gold Coast for the holidays. Whatever the reason for the rush, I’m glad for it. The idea of Jodie lying in the ground isn’t what I’d call warming, but it’s certainly better than having her sliced up and exposed on a cold metal gurney in the bowels of the hospital morgue.
For everybody else, it’s a normal Monday. Others are off to work and the school holidays have kicked in, leaving thousands of unsupervised teenagers to drink beer and break into houses and steal big-screen TVs and game consoles. It’s summer and the world is moving on and Christmas shopping is in full swing with mall parking lots jammed full and parents fighting in line for the next best thing. It’s a stunning, bright sunny day, the kind of day I’m sure Jodie would have enjoyed, and if the choice was hers perhaps even the kind of day she’d like to be buried on. My bruises have faded. It’s been three days since the bank robbery, and all six men are still on the loose. The city is understaffed by police and overstaffed with criminals-the balance is out of whack and nobody seems able to correct it. Wednesday was to be my last day at work for two weeks, the same for Jodie. Instead she’s spending Christmas in a dirt plot and I’ll be spending it God knows where.
I h
ad to choose a dress for Jodie, and a coffin. Coffin shopping is something I never want to have to do again-different models have different specifications, the funeral director doing his best to guilt me into upgrading, as if a cheaper coffin would suggest to the world I hated my wife. Jodie’s parents took care of the flowers, the priest, the music, and the church, and everything else. There are probably a thousand things going on around me to make this happen and I wouldn’t know.
The cemetery is on the outskirts of town in a neighborhood where there are lots of trees and not so many houses and currently a large flock of seagulls circling above. There’s a church off to one side of the graveyard which has been abandoned since the priest was murdered there almost six months ago, but reopened in time for Christmas with the arrival of a new priest, Father Jacob. The church has one of those rare histories that few churches have, the history where nobody died in its construction. Love or hate religion, one thing is sure-it’s certainly leading the way in deaths. Religion takes more lives than cancer and coronaries and car crashes combined. A belt of trees form a barrier between the church and the closest of the graves; a couple of them have been cut down, fresh stumps surrounded by sawdust and bark jutting out of the ground, sun streaming between the gaps and hitting the stained-glass windows. A six-foot fence made up of iron bars with cobwebs and flaky paint stretches the distance between the cemetery and the road. Parked out front are a dozen media vans, nobody in them.
Father Jacob has a deep voice that sounds somber, the acoustics of the church helping him convey the depths of his words-which to me all sound hollow. He stands up at a podium a few meters from my wife, looking more like a wizard than a priest, his white hair in need of a trim, an outfit one might wear to a fancy dress party. He tells us about God, and Heaven, and I’m not real sure where I stand on those concepts right now. My grandparents raised me to believe in God, but these were the same people who raised my dad, and look how he turned out. I want to believe in something; it would mean Jodie is somewhere better than this world-and she is certainly somewhere better than Christchurch. And I want to believe in something to make it easier on Sam. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last few days, and I think it comes down to this-I want to believe in God, but right now I’m too damn angry with Him to do so.
It’s almost thirty-five degrees outside, but it’s cool in the church, and it’s obvious I’m not the only one who feels it. There is something bad inside this place, maybe the same bad thing that got the previous priest murdered, or perhaps it’s the ghost of that priest himself, still here, watching over us. I wonder if Father Jacob senses it, whether he wonders if he’ll be the next priest to come to a dark end.
A lot of people show up-I never knew that I knew that many people. They show up from the firm I work at. There are plenty from Jodie’s firm too, and of course it’s not like we were social lepers, which means all our friends and family are here too. There are people I don’t recognize, others I haven’t seen in a long, long time. No one really knows what to say-except for John Morgan, who shakes my hand and reminds me, when I get the chance, to head in tomorrow and Wednesday to finish off the McClintoch file. I smile at him and think about putting him in a coffin of his own.
I don’t have any family-my grandparents, who raised me and Belinda after Mum died, are both dead: a heart attack got my granddad; pneumonia and complications but mostly loneliness got my grandmother not long after. More than anybody, I wish Belinda was here. When we were young, before Dad got taken away, Belinda did her best to pretend I didn’t exist, and when she couldn’t pretend hard enough to make me disappear, she’d begrudgingly throw the occasional sentence my way. When we found out what Dad had done, she spoke to me more but her words were harsher. Then when we found Mum dead in the bathtub, she held my hand and stroked my hair while we waited for the police to arrive. She told me that day that she loved me, and that she would take care of me. Of course our grandparents ended up taking care of both of us, but it was a struggle for them. They were old and didn’t really have the means to support us that well, but they did what they could to keep us from being put into foster care. Belinda always saw me as her responsibility. She was four years older than me, a big sister and mum all wrapped into one person, but at night she was neither of those-at night she used to sneak out of home and work the streets for money, and she’d come back crying with her pockets full of dirty banknotes and she’d hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay. Eventually it wasn’t okay for her-she hated what she was doing, and the only way she could live with herself was to dull the pain, and that’s when the drugs took hold of her. She moved out of our grandparents’ house when she was sixteen but she came back every few days to see me. She always brought me something. Either a candy bar or a comic. She’d help me with my homework. She was always clean when she came visiting-or always looked clean-but sometimes she had the shakes, like she hadn’t had a fix in a few days. My grandparents were in the wrong generation to notice what was happening, and I was too young to know what caused it.
Then one week she didn’t come to visit. Then another week went by. Eventually the cops came. It was like that Wednesday morning all over again. They pulled into the street and knocked on the door and my life changed the same way it had every other time I saw them.
Sam is given a thousand hugs, almost all of them ending with the other person crying. Sam becomes numb to the tears. She’s adorable in her little black dress and makes me want to cry every time I see her. She knows what’s going on, but at the same time she doesn’t know. She’s been told Mummy has gone to Heaven, but a few times she’s asked if Mummy will be coming home over Christmas to visit. I wish I could cancel Christmas. I hate that the rest of the city gets something to enjoy.
Jodie’s coffin is covered in flowers. Most of the church is. The accountant in me is wondering how much all of this is costing, and thinking how death must be the most profitable business in the world since we all get around to doing it sooner or later. The father inside of me holds Sam’s hand tightly the entire time, drawing strength from her. The man inside me hurts, he’s screaming inside, he’s dying inside, he’s confused, and he doesn’t know what his future holds. The service lasts an hour. People come out of it saying it was “nice,” but it’s not the word I’d use. I don’t know what it is. Certainly not nice. “Devastating,” might be better. “Confusing” would work too. “Nice” seems to trivialize it.
Six people carry Jodie’s coffin outside. Her dad, her two brothers, and three friends. Their faces are strained but I don’t think it’s from the coffin being heavy. Her brothers had to fly in from different parts of the country and tomorrow will fly back out. I keep a firm grip on Sam’s hand as we walk behind them. Sam keeps a tight grip on her teddy bear with the other hand. The coffin is shiny and new and sure won’t be that way in a few hours from now. I wonder how heavy it is, what kind of percentage of the weight is from my wife.
We reach the hearse. It’s shiny and black, while death is dull and black. The rear door is open, waiting for her, waiting for the men to slide my wife inside as if they were furniture movers. The door closes, then we all seem to stand around for a minute or two, not really sure what to do next until we all kind of figure it out, and the hearse leaves and we follow it. We all drive in a row, our headlights on, Jodie leading the way. It’s about a kilometer of winding road between the church and Jodie’s new home so the drive is short and I’m not sure why no one walked. We find the missing occupants of the media vans about thirty meters from the grave, some with cameras set up on tripods, others on shoulder mounts. These people don’t have any respect for Jodie, or for Sam or for myself, and none at all for the situation. They don’t care about our loss, they care only about ratings, and the thing I know for certain in this world is that one day these people will become victims to their own stories. One day somebody, maybe some other son of a serial killer, will pick these vultures off one by one. But that day is in the future, and today Sam is the granddaught
er of a serial killer, daughter of a murder victim, and the media are already speculating about her too. They call her cute and adorable, they call her loss a tragic one, and they wonder what kind of woman she will turn into-her life has this dark blemish now, and combined with her genes. . they want to know what she will become.
The same men who loaded Jodie in the hearse go about unloading her. My wife has become cargo, her final voyage about to begin. They carry her from the hearse to the grave, lowering her onto some weird scaffolding erected over the top of it. Father Jacob thinks of more he wants to add, then, at exactly 3:27 on a Monday afternoon, the scaffolding moves and my wife is lowered into the ground, the six men who carried her standing silent among the crowd, hurting, while the six men who did this to her spend their money in the streets of Christchurch, enjoying the beautiful summer’s day.
chapter eleven
The bank manager is buried on the same day at a different cemetery. We don’t combine the events and hold one giant two-for-one funeral party to save money, or to make it easier on the media so they can save gas.
We pick up handfuls of dirt and throw it onto the coffin. It’s a tradition I’ve never really understood. I’ve done it four times in the past: my mother, my sister, both my grandparents. Now my wife. I don’t ever want to have to do it again.
