Girl in an Empty Cage

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 30 – Deliverance

  It was a crazy rushed drive to Darwin, even though they stuck more or less to the speed limits. As they drove they talked. They both felt in a great hurry but with three hours of driving there was no rush to tell all.

  As they started driving Alan gave Vic a muesli bar to eat, saying he looked like a starved Ethiopian and he could not afford the time to stop for a meal, so he would have to make do with that. Vic chewed it slowly, savouring every delicious morsel. It was not much food but he could feel more of his strength returning and his mind sharpening with each bite.

  As he ate Vic filled Alan in on his miraculous escape. He even told him about the crocodile and how it seemed to be giving him a message from Mark about helping Susan and at the same time protecting him. Alan looked at Vic quizzically a couple times as he talked about the crocodile. But Vic stuck to his guns.

  So Alan told him his own story about the huge crocodile out at the Mary River and how it appeared to be grieving as they took away the parts of Mark’s body. He said, “Sandy and I both saw it and we have told it to Charlie, the aboriginal fisherman who found the head. He gets it. But we have not told anyone else because we did not want to be called crazy.

  “So don’t worry, I believe you. I don’t know what it is about this Mark, your friend, but it is clear he and crocodiles have some deep affinity.”

  Vick laughed back, “Did you know he has a crocodile skin totem from east Arnhem Land, says the blackfellas out there kinda adopted him when he first went there to work. And now he carries a little carved crocodile as his totem crocodile spirit wherever he goes, Baru he calls it.

  Alan dug in his pocket and pulled out the carved crocodile he had found at the billabong. “It doesn’t look like this I suppose. I found this on the bank of the Mary River about a week ago and somehow I feel like it is guiding me forward too. “

  Vic nodded and laughed. “I suppose neither of us should admit it to the rest of the world or they will all call us nuts. To me it somehow seems like Mark is out there pushing and pulling the levers, the clever bastard. It feels like he and his crocodile friends are helping us. I suppose I should say that in a past tense, but somehow, since I met that crocodile out on the Fitzmaurice River, deep down I think of Mark as still alive.

  “I know the truth will be bad for what people say about Mark. But I am sure he wants the truth out; he does not want to have Susan carry the can for what he did. That was the message he gave me out on the river and he entrusted me to deliver it. So I made myself keep on walking, step after step, even when my body wanted to lie down and give up.

  “When we used to work in the bush together most mornings Mark would go off early and write into a diary. Once or twice he read stuff out aloud to me, like once he described me and my helicopter as a metal bird which the real birds laughed at for its clumsiness. It was really very funny, he had a gift to tell a good story.

  “Anyway I asked if I could read it. He said no, it told all the bad stuff about him as well as the good and that he did not want me to know the bad stuff. I knew he was a mercenary in Africa, that is how he took the bullet in the arm, and he killed people there, but there was obviously more bad stuff as well that he did not want me to know about.

  “But he said that, when he died, I would have his diary and I could read it all and know both the good and bad, like a brother should, and if I wanted I could tell the world his secrets.

  “It was like he had a kind of death wish. He knew he would not live to be an old man, he said he was like a cat with nine lives but one day all his lives would run out and he thought it would be soon. He was not afraid, just determined to live life until it was over and then that would be that. He was completely fearless you know. Something must have happened to take away all the fear and put a hard dangerous thing in its place. All of us, his friends, sensed the dangerous bit though we pretended not to notice.

  “But there was a good side too, kind and generous to his friends, good to bush people. He really got on with my mother, she told him she had adopted him even though he did not ask to be adopted, and he said he was pleased to have her as a mother as it really made me his brother. She said, having a brother was not so important, what he needed was a mother to take the place of the one he never had, most of all to give him some love inside, and that would be her job. I think she thought if only he was given enough love to replace what he had missed when he was little the bad part would go away. But it never did.

  “So I think Mark looked to the girls to fill that space. There were lots of girls over the years but most of them never stuck. If they tried to hold on too tight he pushed them away. Once or twice I thought he really liked one, but a lot were just good time girls out for their own pleasure too and soon went on their way.

  “He did not seem to mind a lot, “Easy come, easy go,” he used to say. It was like he was never prepared to invest much in them emotionally. So when they left it proved they were not worthwhile. Some were gorgeous and he could really charm them, but none seemed to go anywhere.

  “Deep down I think he was looking for someone special, sort of like the mother he never had. The girl he needed had to be strong enough to stand up to him but not too pushy. Any girl who liked him and wanted to stay there could not hang on too tight. He really hated people who tried to bully him, either physically or with emotion.

  “Then Susan came along and from the first minute it was different. He told me he saw her first on the beach at Cairns, before she saw him and right from then she somehow captured him, like by magic. So he went on a dive with her and made friends and the next thing they were lovers.

  “By the time he left Cairns he had pretty much made up his mind she was the one. But then there was all this bad stuff he had done and he did not want her to see it. It was like he was trying to charm her, be open with her, yet something inside him kept closing her out.

  “She was as captivated by him as he was by her. She was determined to find out who he was. I don’t know what the bad stuff was, but she must have found out something, something really bad, she as good as told me that. And that is when it went all wrong. Before that he had made a will which I witnessed, giving all he owned to her, not that she knew. And he made me an executor to the will, and made me promise, that no matter what, that I would look after her.

  “But then when I found out what she had done, that day you told me at the Paraway Hotel, I was real mad at her. I went and saw her in prison and made her tell me what she had done. At first she tried to pretend, but I slapped her, told her I needed to know if she had killed my best friend and brother.

  “She said ‘Yes, she had made a mistake and wished now she had not.’ She would not tell me why. But I knew, deep down, she had discovered something terrible about him.

  “Then I asked her for the diary. I said Mark had promised it to me.

  “So she gave it to me. Not the full sized thing. But she had made a copy, photographed it onto a tiny memory chip that fits in a phone. It was hidden in her shoe in prison. She said that it was given to me to respect Mark’s promise to me.

  “She told me it was mine to read but to be careful with what I did about it, that it had bad stuff inside it about Mark, and that she did not want to poison his memory through this, particularly so the child she would have did not know this about his father.

  “I think I knew about Mark’s bad stuff, deep inside me, before she said it, but then it was in my face. It made me responsible too. I knew then, that as I read the diary I would share her secret and so too I must share the decision about Mark’s future, to decide along with her what the world should know.

  “So I still have the chip. It is almost the only thing that I have from the crash. It was wrapped in sticky tape and I put it in my wallet, which is still in my pocket. The chip may be wrecked from the water for all I know. But, even if it is, the original diary will be somewhere and the story will be in it.

  “When Susan gave it to me, just befor
e Christmas, I did not want to read it straight away. I did not want to know the bad things Mark had done. I knew they must be very bad for Susan to hide them away, like she did. All I can think of is that, perhaps, he did something bad to some of those girls I met.

  “So I never tried to read his diary before I crashed. But when I got out of the water, and I knew Mark was helping me survive, I also knew that this tale had to be told and Susan would never tell it, it would mean destroying his memory and she will not do that.

  “Susan thinks her silence will protect him but she is wrong. It will only harm her without helping him and that is an even greater wrong. Even if she locks this secret away inside herself so she can never tell, someone will still find it out one day.

  “So I knew that when I got back I must tell what I know. And if I cannot read the diary on the chip I will make her tell me where the original diary is kept. I know that is what Mark wanted. Even she cannot be allowed to stop him from having his story told.”

  Alan nodded as Vic talked. It made sense and fitted with what he had found out. He saw too that this truth had sat before Mark’s friend’s eyes over years past but loyalty had made him blind. It was left to this slip of an English girl to summon the courage to search and find. But now her own courage was destroying her. If she stayed locked up or worse, her blood would be on Vic’s head too, as it would be on his and Sandy’s for their own role in her destruction.

  Alan told Vic his own discoveries; first about Mark’s real name and childhood; then about the suspicion of Mark’s role in a couple deaths as a teenager, but with no evidence they had never gone anywhere.

  Next, that Mark had just vanished when he was eighteen, except for a single record when he was twenty, leaving on a plane going to London. They had not been able to find him overseas and assumed he must have taken another identity.

  Then he came to the final piece of the puzzle, the text message from Susan to Anne asking her to investigate two names, and Anne’s reply. He told of the contents and how that message had been picked up in Timber Creek at 9.05 am on the last day anyone had seen Susan and Mark together, just at the time when Mark was seen driving out of town, with her asleep in the passenger seat. He told Vic how he had just found out this morning that the two girls were still missing. The American girl had taken a while to trace and the final phone call from the USA had not come in until ten am this morning.

  Now it was Vic who was nodding. “Yes she must have found out later that day when she woke up, and Mark must have found out what she knew. So it fits with what she told me, that she was frightened when she killed him, believing he would kill her.”

  Alan continued, “Yes she must have thought it would be the same for her as the others.

  Alan then told Vic that, on the basis of the evidence of the text messages, he intended to go to the judge and ask him to delay sentencing until he could make an investigation about what happened to these other girls. He would point out that this gave grounds for self-defence or a greatly reduced sentence, regardless of what Susan herself admitted to.

  So now, even though he had nothing directly against Mark, he had good grounds for a further investigation. And most importantly he had a story which made sense.

  The reason he was in Katherine was that he had been allowed a couple days to work on chasing up the leads to the Mark Butler identity which seemed to be centred in Katherine. He had convinced his boss that this was required once he had the Vincent Bassingham stuff. It was just luck that he had still been there this morning getting the final bit of information before returning to Darwin to go to the court.

  He had deliberately avoided telling his superiors what he had found out in the last day, because he knew they would want to do it all officially using the lawyers, media management and being super careful. But he knew there was not time and the publicity would be dangerous.

  He told Vic he was very fearful that Susan had become suicidal and that once the judgement was given she would find some way to end it all for herself. So he thought his best chance was to break it all open in court; ask the judge to delay sentencing, even release her on bail, while his own investigation proceeded.

  Vic said he would provide support by his evidence of the diary, he would tell the judge that and he would make his copy available to Alan or whoever was given the job of doing the investigation. It would support Alan’s story and give a further and better explanation of who Mark was and what he had done.

  They were both confident this would be enough to change the court decision. But for Alan the real worry was Susan. He was terrified of what she might do when the truth she had been so desperate to hide came out.

  Vic turned to Alan and said, “You worry about convincing the judge, let me worry about Susan. That is my real purpose in walking all this way here, to help her see the real truth. There is a truth that she has become blinded to, that Mark wants her to see. It is that she will betray him and his legacy if she seeks to harm herself or deprive her children of their mother, as Mark was deprived of his mother. I grew up with a mother, Mark did not.

  By the time my mother found him and adopted him, it was too late to rescue him from himself. Susan sees danger if her children know their father and the evil he did. Much greater is the danger to her children if they never know their mother’s love for them, never know the joy of being held in her arms and comforted.

  “This is what I must make her see; that of all the people here she is the best, the one who most deserves to live, the one who still has the most she needs to give.

  I was lost in an empty place but I escaped, with the help of my brother Mark. Now she too must escape from her own soul’s empty place. I will lead her out, as Mark led me. It will be enough to bring her to the place where she holds her own children. Once she holds them, as my mother held me, she will know a better love than what she had for Mark, and that love will hold her fast.

  So do not fear from here. In the moment of truth she will hate us both, she will fight to keep her secret. But there is a power in this truth that even all her will cannot stop. And, as the crocodile spirit protected me, his brother, from the river, so too will the power of this crocodile brother’s spirit protect her in her moment of danger”.

  They arrived at the Supreme Court building in Mitchell Street, Darwin. The time was 2.05 pm.