by Sue Williams
WHEN THE MAN HEARD A sudden crunch of gravel, he wheeled round to see what it was. He couldn’t see anything in the inky black behind his ute but he immediately strode over to the canopy and ripped it aside. Empty. He could now hear the girl blundering through the grasses on the side of the road, and he cursed bitterly to himself. He should have been more careful. He should have hit her harder, then tied her ankles like he’d planned. Now he’d have to go after her.
But it wouldn’t take long to catch her. She couldn’t get far with her hands tied like that. But it’d be a pain if she injured herself. That’d make everything more awkward. And, besides, he planned on doing the hurting.
He raced around to the front of his cab, opened the door and reached inside the dash for a torch. ‘Good boy,’ he said to his dog, still patiently sitting there. ‘Stay!’
This was a hell of a nuisance but then again, a little chase made it all the more exciting. He was the hunter, she was his prey. He’d show her who was in charge.
LYING UNDER THE BUSH, HER heart pounding with terror, Joanne tried to curl up even smaller and put her head on her knees and covered the white of her legs with her hair. She could hear the man’s footsteps crunching through the gravel, then thudding through the undergrowth, getting nearer each second. The dried grass smashed under his weight, and branches cracked and fractured. But she couldn’t run any more. Her legs were shaking too much. She’d just have to stay where she was, and hope, and pray. She could see the light from his torch, sweeping the tops of the long grassy clumps. She closed her eyes. He couldn’t fail to find her.
The man edged closer and Joanne could hear his muttered curses. She tried not to breathe. He must be looking right at her. She tensed, waiting for him to spot her and the blow to fall, but he appeared to be looking the other way. The torch light was near, but not directly on her. He walked right past her another three times — he could have reached out and touched her he was that close — but then he turned and walked away, back towards the highway. Joanne felt her body turn to jelly. But she mustn’t relax now. He might be back. And he might bring his dog next time.
WHERE THE HELL WAS SHE? The man was getting increasingly frustrated, trying to peer through the scrub to find his quarry. She couldn’t be far, but he couldn’t see a thing. He couldn’t believe his bad luck. If only he’d tied her legs. None of this was going to plan. He was worried too about the body and the two vehicles still back on the road. If anyone drove past, they might get suspicious and stop to see what was going on. He’d then have them to deal with too.
The whole thing was lurching more and more out of control. By now, the girl’s van should have been hidden and he should have been driving far away, with her tied up in the back of the ute. Instead, he was rummaging through the scrub and having to get rid of a body he hadn’t bargained for. He made a sudden decision: he’d better see to the body first. She could wait. After all, she was in handcuffs; she wouldn’t get far. He’d do the business, and then he’d find her. No-one would think there was anything odd about a single vehicle on the side of the road. She would be the easy part.
JOANNE REMAINED HUDDLED IN A ball, too scared to move. What was the man going to do now? Would he come back with his dog? If he came back and found her next time, she wondered if she’d have the strength to keep on fighting. Now the fear had seized her, she felt absolutely wiped out. The odds seemed so overwhelming in his favour. What hope would she have? The tears were starting to come now, too. She could feel them well up in her eyes. She blinked and tried to control them. She couldn’t let go now. Once she’d started, she might not be able to stop. She made herself concentrate on the only other human presence in this lonely landscape. Where was the man now, and what was he doing?
She heard a vehicle door slam, and an engine start. Maybe he’d given up. She heard the gravel crunching again as the vehicle pulled off, but then saw the powerful headlights of the ute flash over the scrub and blind her where she was lying. Oh my God, had he seen her? What chance did she stand now, if he was going to use his spotlights to light up the bush?
But then, just as suddenly as the headlights had come, they swerved away and she realised, to her astonishment, that the man was driving off. But still she didn’t dare move.
THE MAN HAD BEGUN TO panic. He had been planning to leave the girl tied up in the ute while he dumped her Kombi in a little hidden turn-off he’d scouted out earlier further north along the road. But now he had to get rid of the body as soon as he could. He finished heaving it into the back of the ute but then realised he didn’t want to get caught with a dead body in his truck. He’d get the ute off the road then run back to get the Kombi.
While he was climbing into the ute, he had another idea too. He fired the engine, switched on his powerful spotlights, then reversed back into the road. Suddenly, the scrub was lit up like a stage. He reversed a little more and swung to the right, so the lights danced over the scrub where the girl had disappeared. He peered into the light. But it was no good. The bushes and clumps of spinifex dotted over the ground were like a solid wall when you looked straight into them, and the light reflected off them made it impossible to see anything beyond.
Then, off to the right, a long way north up the road, he saw the first flash of distant headlights. He cursed silently to himself, and glanced quickly into the floodlit scrub again. But as the other car’s lights got closer, he swung back on the road, and pulled away.
Now he was going to have to do something with that body. And then he’d think about the girl.
JASPER JIMBAJIMBA HAINES AND HIS wife Pamela Nabangardi Brown were driving south along the Stuart Highway, going home after a pleasant day spent visiting family in their home town of Ali Curung, 80 kilometres north of Barrow Creek. The Aboriginal couple didn’t get the chance to visit very often, since they had to rely on other people for a lift, so it felt like a rare treat.
Now, however, they were feeling flustered. Having driven there with their niece, a friend, their thirteen-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old girl, plus three grandchildren under the age of ten, they’d intended to leave straight after an Aussie Rules football game between two local sides had finished on the radio. But they’d taken too long saying their goodbyes. Then, at Taylors Crossing, half-an-hour into their journey, their Holden Commodore stationwagon had a flat. They didn’t have a jack, so they approached a group of tourists camping near the creek and asked them for help. The tourists were happy to oblige, and Haines changed the tyre. By the time they set off again for their twenty-strong Nturiya community, west of Ti Tree, night had fallen.
They were driving slowly, around 80 kilometres per hour, to avoid another flat. There was hardly any traffic on the road, but about 30 to 40 kilometres south of Taylors Crossing, they saw another car. That seemed odd. It didn’t look like a tourist vehicle, and country people don’t generally drive in the dark unless they really have to. ‘I saw this car come on to the bitumen road on the right-hand side in front of us,’ says Brown, ‘just a glimpse of it. It was white, a high vehicle. It sort of looked like a tray top.’ Haines added, ‘It had a canopy on the back.’
A little farther on, they noticed an even more unusual sight — parked up by the side of the road, was an old orange Kombi van with a white roof.
THAT CAR APPEARING OUT OF the dark really unnerved the man. It felt like an extremely close call. What were all those Aboriginal people doing out here packed in a car like that anyway? And why were they driving so slowly? Were they suspicious? What did they see? Did they see his face? He wasn’t concentrating. He hadn’t even thought to pull his cap low over his eyes.
If they’d driven by just a few minutes earlier, they would have seen everything: the boy lying dead on the ground, him lifting the body up into the ute. His hands were shaking. He had the beginnings of a headache. He wondered if they’d noticed the Kombi on the side of the road, and somehow connected him with it.
Things were going from bad to worse. He’d better hurry up in case they�
��d thought something strange was going on, and came back for a second look. That’d be all he needed. A little way up the road, when he saw the lights in his rear view mirror had safely gone, he pulled over on to the verge again. He then jumped out of the ute, locked the doors, and half-ran back up the tracks, then down the highway, back to the Kombi, and the girl.
JOANNE WAITED TO HEAR THE rumble of the vehicle coming back, but it didn’t come. This was a chance for her. The electrical cable was biting into her flesh, so she twisted her wrists. She then had an idea: with the two cuffs tied with 10 centimetres of cable between them, she wondered if she’d be able to move her hands to the front. That would make it easier. Still lying on the ground with her knees up to her chest, she brought her wrists down her back and then under her backside. She passed first one leg through, then the other. That felt much better, and she chided herself silently for not thinking of it sooner.
She tried to pick at the ties, but they were fastened too tightly to budge. She raised them to her mouth and chewed at the tape, but only managed to bite off a corner, and spat it out on the ground. That wouldn’t work.
Her hair kept falling in her eyes, and she realised her hairband must’ve fallen off at some point, maybe when the canvas bag had come off her head in the front seat of the man’s ute, or when she’d been thrown into the back. She tried to push her hair back out of her face with her tied hands, and felt tape still in her hair. That could wait. The most important thing now was to free her hands. She tried to ease her wrists from the cuffs, but she couldn’t quite get them over her hands. Think, think. How could she do this? It was then that Joanne remembered the stick of lip balm in her shorts’ pocket and she moved both hands towards the pocket and pushed it up through the material. As it popped out, she grabbed it with her right hand, lifted it to her mouth and pulled off the cap with her teeth. She then spat it out on to the ground, and wiped the stick over the ties and on the skin of her left hand, hoping she’d be able to slide her wrist from the cuff. No, it was still too tight. She swapped the balm between hands and tried to grease her right wrist and the ties. She was almost weeping with frustration by the time she realised they weren’t going to budge.
But then she heard footsteps on the gravel. He must have come back on foot to try to find her. She felt her body start trembling again. ‘I thought, “He’s going to be so mad when he finds me, and he’s going to be really determined to find me this time”,’ she says. She could hear him clearly on the hard shoulder, making that same dragging noise again, pulling something or digging something into the gravel.
Then, just as abruptly, the noises stopped and a car door slammed.
THE MAN LOOKED OUT INTO the scrub where he knew the girl must be hiding. He itched to get his gun and go back out there again after her. But he knew he couldn’t risk it. He’d been seen and now he had to get out as fast as he could.
He finished covering the pool of blood with dirt and stones to hide it, and got into the Kombi and started it up, sneering at the distinctive clatter. He then drove back up the highway, past his ute. Eighty metres along the road, he turned left up the dirt track he’d checked out earlier and stopped another 100 metres in, by a large white gate to his secret little road. He then pulled into the bush a way, just so the van wasn’t too easy to find.
He slammed the door behind him, and trudged back down the track to the road. When he got there, he looked back. Yeah, you could barely see the van from the road and that was even if you knew what you were looking for. It’d be a long time before anyone found that. He turned right into the scrub near the road and half-ran towards his vehicle. He clambered in, gunned the engine, did a three-point turn and drove back to the girl. He slowed a little when he drew level with where she must be hiding, felt a pang of regret that he didn’t have more time, and then roared off. Still, she’d never survive, a silly little English girl out there on her own.
JOANNE LAY SOBBING QUIETLY. SHE heard a vehicle return before thundering off south down the highway. She felt confused. Had the man really gone? Or was it a trick to get her to come out of her hiding place? If only Pete were here, he’d know what to do.
‘I really wanted to come out but I didn’t know what to do,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d better stay there. I was hidden so well. I felt safe in my little hiding place.’ So she stayed exactly where she was, awaiting the man’s return.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I HAVE TO BE BRAVE
JOANNE LEES LAY MOTIONLESS UNDER the mulga bush for hours. She had no idea how long she lay there. She was just waiting for the man to drive back to her, to resume the hunt. She didn’t dare risk believing he might have gone. He could be laying a trap and had parked up the road, and walked softly back. He could now be out there somewhere, waiting silently for her to emerge from the safety of her hiding place. And then he’d pounce. As she lay there quietly, however, hearing only the odd scuffle of a bush animal in the scrub, the cry of a bird and the rustle of the grasses, she realised she’d have to move sometime. She’d actually been in the same spot for over four hours and it was cold, with the temperature plummeting to 11 degrees. While earlier she must have been sweating with the fear, now she felt chilled to the bone. More than that, though, she felt anxious about Peter. If he was still alive, she’d have to fetch help quickly. ‘I was too scared to get out of the bush I was hiding under,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think it was safe. But I thought I would have to be brave and get some help for Pete.’ It was a superhuman effort.
She uncurled her body slowly, careful not to make much noise, and stretched out her legs, and then her arms. She sat up gingerly and then, putting her hands face down on the ground, crawled a few metres back towards the road. It was painfully slow, and the sharp spinifex kept whipping her face, and the spindly branches of mulga catching in her hair. This was crazy. They could have her eye out if she didn’t get up. Tentatively, she got up to her feet and stood stock still, waiting to see if anything would happen. The black night with its faint smattering of stars and no moon at all remained as quiet as a graveyard.
Slowly, very slowly, she walked towards the road. When she reached it, she looked nervously both ways. It was a long straight stretch of road and there was absolutely nothing, and no-one, in sight. Where she was standing, though, there was no cover. She felt exposed and vulnerable.
She noticed long grass on the other side and she darted across and lay down. From this position, she could see any approaching vehicles, but they wouldn’t be able to see her. After lying there a short time, she saw headlights dancing in the south, and realised a car was approaching. She decided not to try to stop it. It could be the man again. Maybe it would be better to stop a big truck. At least she would know that wasn’t him, and the driver would be out at night for a legitimate reason. A while later, she heard the unmistakable roar of a road train approaching from the north. She took a deep breath, stood up and got ready to run alongside it. When it was about 30 metres away, she took a couple of steps onto the road so the driver would be able to see her, and held her handcuffed hands in front of her so he’d see them too, and realise she needed help. ‘I was next to the road train,’ she says. ‘As close to it as I could possibly be without being run over. I was trying to get in the view of the lights.’
The road train thundered past in a blast of warm air and, for a moment, Joanne thought he wasn’t going to stop. But then she heard the howl of the air brakes being applied. She jogged down the road and as she reached the road train, the driver was already out of the cab and calling to her. Joanne felt relief flood through her body.
BULLS TRANSPORT ROAD TRAIN DRIVER Vince Millar was bringing a three-trailer, 90-tonne load down from Darwin and had been driving since just outside Tennant Creek, when he’d swapped over with his co-driver Rodney Adams. Adams had gone to lie down on the bunk behind the seats after his stint, so Millar was alone in the front. It was 12.35 a.m. and he was travelling at a steady 90 kilometres per hour, looking forward to Barrow Creek, when it would
be his turn to rest up for the long journey ahead to Adelaide. Then, out of nowhere, looming up in his headlights, he saw the ghostly figure of a woman holding her arms outstretched towards him.
‘She just jumped out from the spinifex on the side of the road,’ he says. ‘I swerved to miss her but I thought she probably would have gone under the second or third trailer, because I didn’t think they would have moved out of the way as quick as the cab … I swore. I was just thinking maybe she might be stuck under the axle at the back. I was a bit worried.’
Adams woke up when Millar cursed and asked what was wrong. Millar told him everything was okay, he was just going to do a tyre check, and Adams lay down and went back to sleep. When the road train finally came to a stop about a kilometre up the road, Millar rummaged for a torch and couldn’t find one, so walked back down the length of his vehicle instead, peering under and in between the trailers. ‘I was looking for a body,’ he says. ‘Whether it be an arm or a leg, or her clothes.’ When he reached the second trailer, he heard footsteps and a woman’s voice shouting for help. He bent down and saw a woman, pale and wide-eyed but most definitely alive, on the other side of the truck. He told her to calm down and duck under the coupling to the second trailer to get to him. When Joanne emerged, she launched herself at him, sobbing. Millar was caught off guard, then prised himself free and pushed her away from him to get a better look.
