‘Late night or early morning?’ Jessica asked as Jack swiped his pass. The Perspex saloon-door partition folded inwards, admitting him into the ultra-modern foyer. Curvy and uncomfortable furniture scattered the harshly lit waiting room. Someone had told him early in his career that you had to have a strong back to work in television. Based on the furniture here, this had mostly proved true. The message was clear to TV dreamers: Don’t cold call.
Jessica was the day guard, the night-shift guards having just knocked off. Jack had made it back before sunrise, but only just. The breakfast producers, who he always liked to dodge, would be in. He handed her his ID.
‘Season finale,’ he offered.
In this building, if you looked scruffy it was either a finale, a premiere, or you’d just been axed. Jack knew his hair was too long – it hung down past his ears – and his beard was coming in patches. He tried to remember the last time he’d shaved. Episode 3? He measured time in production schedules now. Monday, Friday, Sunday: meaningless. Instead: picture lock, final cut, air date. Jack put his scratched hands in his pockets and shifted his weight to his good foot. Limping and bloodied hands were a sure sign of an axing.
‘You’re all good.’ Jess held out the ID, but just far enough away that Jack had to lean in to get it. Bait. She leaned in too, lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘I can’t wait for tonight.’
Jack nodded. He’d had this conversation with a lot of women. And a lot of men.
‘You know, my husband, he thinks he did it.’
‘Does he?’
‘Me, I’m not sure. You’re right, you know, about how they ganged up on him. I think . . .’ Jess had become distracted and put Jack’s swipe card down on her side of the counter. If he was directing their conversation, Jack thought, he’d film this scene for comic effect. Though he’d need to recast Jessica, whose sensible brown bun and buttoned-up navy security shirt wouldn’t cut it. No, she’d need to be younger. Not security, either. Pencil skirt, do something with a blouse. Pretty, too. Not for eye candy, but because mockery is easier comedy if the women watching are jealous. Gum, too. Rabbiting on like this, she’d have to chew gum. Jack blinked and fictional Jessica disappeared. He felt a pang of guilt for thinking about Jess that way, which ebbed quickly with the rationalisation that he was in a hurry and, besides, she was still talking. ‘. . . feel sorry for him, you know. Hard done by. So, do you think he’s guilty, then?’
‘I’m really sorry, I’d love to chat but I’m on a deadline.’ Jack nodded at his ID. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘It’s nothing. Just in a rush.’
‘Of course.’ She pressed a button and the next set of saloon doors gave way. The main office floor was huge, crisscrossed with felt-walled cubicles. The carpet smelled of instant coffee – ground in. During peak news hours, this floor heaved with scurrying journalists weaving from desk to desk, printer-ink coffee sloshing in stained mugs. The advantage of having a dedicated edit suite on the third floor: no powwows. Also, not having to use words like powwow. ‘See you tomorrow?’
‘Maybe. Might not need to come in here anymore.’ Jack hurried over to the lifts and stepped inside.
‘Season Two?’ Jess called from the desk.
‘Not unless someone else gets murdered, I suppose.’
The lift doors slid closed. Sanctuary.
Upstairs, the door to his editing room was still shut. Taped across the inset window was a piece of paper, hastily scrawled on in black marker:
IF YOU DON’T WANT CURTIS WADE TO CUT OFF YOUR FINGERS, FUCK OFF.
Jack held his card up to the reader and waited for the whir and click. One of the breakfast producers whipped past – tailored shirt, tapered in, the type Jack couldn’t wear – until he recognised Jack and reeled to a stop.
‘Mate, let’s talk about getting you on tomorrow.’
Jack had never met this man before. He didn’t even know what program ‘on’ referred to. Did this man chat up women this way? Babe, I’ll get you on.
For Jack, the attention had felt good up until around Episode 4, but he knew now no one just gave spots away. If he went on this bloke’s show, Jack would be doing him a favour. Not the other way around. Maybe it was ingrained from producing his podcast on his own, but he still preferred to work alone. A pat on the back, in this building, was because you had shit on your fingertips and needed to wipe it off.
‘I don’t think —’
‘We’ll talk. Rough trot. I hope he gets a retrial.’
And the man was gone. Cocaine must speed them up, thought Jack, pulling himself into the room and leaning against the inside of the door. He closed his eyes and breathed. Almost finished now.
The room was as he’d left it. The lights were off, and he’d made sure to kill the monitors, so the glare when he started them up again made him wince. There was the image he’d left on the monitor, paused. Six hours, five hundred kilometres, and one obstruction of justice ago.
Five more minutes and he’d have greenlit the damn thing. He already wished he hadn’t seen it.
That Eliza Dacey had been naked had been one of the cornerstones of the series. The evidence around Curtis Wade had been circumstantial at best – there was no blood, there was no murder weapon. Of course, his footprints had been everywhere, but it was his property. And he’d tried to help, got his DNA everywhere. Idiot. As for Eliza, she’d picked fruit for the neighbouring winery for six months, but then left to travel more. No one had heard from her since. That wasn’t particularly suspicious – obviously the parents had panicked, tried to get police to launch a missing person search, but no one ever took it seriously. She didn’t have friends in town – they’re transient, the pickers, and they tend to stick together. By the time it became a murder investigation they were either back home or on plantations elsewhere. Because a backpacker can’t really disappear. Everyone assumed she’d taken off – a new group of friends, a rusted van with a slur for a numberplate, and off they go – she could have been anywhere from Melbourne to Townsville. Not worth the police resources to chase. Not in this town. Until her body was found on Curtis’s property eight months later – and when you’ve pissed off a town the way he had, a young dead woman at your feet is an awfully hard thing to come back from.
So it was open and shut. Curtis in a cell before the pretty backpacker was even in the ground. The police, headed up by local sergeant Andrew Freeman, hadn’t given great thought to the mystery of the dead girl in the vineyard. Curtis was their man, they were sure. I always knew he’d do something like this, echoed the townsfolk. That was all the evidence they needed. So in those crucial first few days, they were sloppy. A country police force not used to dealing with homicides. The body was moved, put in the back of a police car that they drove right up to the crime scene. Forensic photos were sketchy, half-arsed. A few footprints at the fence line were used to place Eliza at the scene. They said they had a witness too, but no one ever came forward. No one asked why there was no blood where the body was found. No one asked anything, really.
Until, four years later, Jack had.
Before he’d even contemplated making a TV series, Jack had been sitting in a coffee shop with Theodore – Ted – Piper, the prosecutor of the original case. Ted’s cells might as well have been phosphorus, charged as they were by being in the spotlight. Jack had convinced him that the new wave of true crime documentaries would be a profile builder. Ted had taken the bait, even styled his short black hair in a wave, despite being fully aware that this was audio only. Jack’s khaki unidirectional recorder lay on the table between them, its orange screen a dull glow.
‘So,’ Jack began, after a short introduction, ‘you’re confident that Eliza was killed on the Wade property? And not taken there after her death?’
‘Yes,’ said Ted.
‘There was no blood at the scene.’
‘She may have been moved. From somewhere else. Inside the house.’
‘There was no blood in the ho
use.’
‘Find me her blood somewhere else and then we’ll talk,’ Ted said sharply, noticing he was in the middle of an interrogation.
‘Sure. Sure,’ muttered Jack. The crinkle of his notes as he ruffled through them, which was picked up by the mic, made him cringe when he listened back – such an amateur back then. ‘So you place her there. Tell me how.’
‘There’s a cluster of footprints by the fence line. They belong to her. It shows that she was there recently. Eight months after she was reported missing.’
‘They’re her footprints?’
‘Size 9. We matched the prints to a brand of shoe. ASICS. And the style of the runners, colour and design. We’ve had people verify that she wore them.’
More note ruffling. ‘Pink with silver trim?’
‘Yes.’
‘So how did she get’ – rustle – ‘two hundred metres to where she died without a single trace?’
‘They’re her prints.’
‘They’re her prints?’
‘Are you going to keep asking me the same question?’
‘You matched them to her shoes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me how you did that again’ – Jack leaned forward: even as an amateur he had an instinct for tone and drama, knew how to drop the bombs – ‘when she wasn’t wearing any.’
On the podcast, there was such a gigantic pause that listeners had initially thought the download was broken. Then, faintly, the screech of a chair pulling back, sliding across concrete. Footsteps. Fainter still, the jingle of a café door opening and closing. Jack let the pause go on a few more seconds before fading out, ending the episode.
In an industry of words, that silence had made him famous.
And that led him to here. Ted Piper’s prosecution weakened by the fact that a size 9 ASICS could belong to literally anyone. A groundswell of support, more media interest. Then the TV offers came in. And Jack’s thesis was suddenly in every home: Curtis had been set up, Eliza’s body had been dumped.
And that had all been convincing until they’d decided to go back out and shoot an on-location pick-up for a recap in the final episode. Which was what he’d been putting the final touches on last night.
Jack scrolled forward two seconds and watched the wobble of the camera change the angle, and it disappeared. He scrolled it back and there it was again. Scrolled forward. Gone. Barely a flicker, far in the background. But he knew some keen-eyed internet crime solvers would spot it.
If there was one key to true crime – and he took the word true with a grain of salt; it was television, after all – it was to solve the fucking case in the finale.
And everything they put on-screen had been, mostly, true. The prosecutor, Piper, was a grease-ball. No way had Curtis been justly tried. And wasn’t that the real question? It didn’t matter whether he was innocent or guilty, the point of the show was whether he got a fair trial.
And such an insignificant thing wouldn’t change that.
Jack wasn’t an idiot. He knew going out there in the middle of the night was the wrong thing to do. But there was a difference between a wrong thing and a bad thing. There was a difference between telling a lie, and simply not mentioning the truth.
He thought about Jessica downstairs. Her comments had summed up seven weeks of newspaper, radio, opinion poll and bar-counter courtrooms. If she was right, if Curtis was innocent, then introducing such visually damning evidence would do him a disservice. Especially without proper background research. It would be irresponsible – perhaps not as irresponsible as stealing from a crime scene, but irresponsible all the same. If Jessica’s husband was right, and Curtis had killed Eliza – because someone certainly had – then the killer was already in jail. No new evidence needed. Justice served.
Every way he looked at it, Jack came to the same conclusion. That what he had in the front seat of his car was not enough to prove anything, either way. No matter which way he spun it, his trumped-up puff piece wouldn’t be enough to get anyone in or out of jail. It didn’t matter if it was right or wrong; it didn’t matter at all. He wasn’t a detective. He wasn’t even a journalist. He had no responsibilities here. His job was just to tell a story. And that’s what truth was anyway, wasn’t it? Stories told.
And their story was supposed to be that Curtis Wade was a battler, four years deep into a life sentence for a crime he might not have committed. Jack’s team had spent seven weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an innocence narrative. It didn’t really matter if it was the truth or not. It was just a TV show.
No. It wasn’t just a TV show. It was his TV show. He’d slaved for years on the pitch, and only after his grassroots podcast had taken off did any network look at him seriously. This wasn’t Eliza’s story. It was his.
Sure, her image was plastered through the opening credits: milky stare, open mouth. Black tongue. The camera panning across photos of her, to the sound of soft strings, light drums peppered like heartbeats. A cheap trick, a true crime cliché – that lingering, haunting score – but an effective one. But it was his name on the billing. His whole career depended on this. He had emptied so much of himself into creating this show it was seeping out his pores, thinning him out. He’d had a bath last week and noticed his elbows and knees had gone from islands in the water to jagged shipwreck rocks. All that exertion, it had taken a toll on him. He had so much more to lose than she did.
Hell, she’d want his show to be a success. She’d understand.
He scrolled the cursor back and forth across the footage. The glow flicked across his face. What difference could it make? Two seconds of footage. Two seconds. Back; Forth. Guilty; Innocent. Alive; Dead.
Curtis Wade had been in jail for four years; what difference could two seconds make?
He pressed delete.
He’d left it on the passenger seat, in full view of the parking garage, an oversight he put down to tiredness. But maybe he wanted someone to notice it. Someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to stop. But out of context, his find was completely innocuous. Low risk.
The drive home was a quiet one. The jagged rectangular peaks of Sydney’s skyscrapers were silhouetted into one serrated clump: gunmetal into the lightening blue sky. Like the horizon was missing a final jigsaw piece. Every radio station was talking about Eliza so he had to turn it off. He called his dad hands-free, but his brother was still asleep.
‘Put me on speaker.’
‘Once I wake him are you going to come and look after him?’
Jack sighed. He had wanted to talk to Liam, even if Liam never talked back. ‘How’s the new bed?’
‘Makes things easier, lifting him, cleaning him. My back, you know.’
‘Lay it on thick, Dad. I’ll come by this week.’
‘Be good to see you,’ his father said. ‘In person, not on the telly.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘You’re working too much. I saw you on the news – losing weight?’
‘Some.’
‘Take yourself out to breakfast.’
He looked out the window. A drive-through McDonald’s. Too greasy. He just wanted to get home, turn off all the lights, and sleep through the show airing. Besides, you can’t be hungry when you’re asleep. An elegant solution. A single stone.
‘It’s TV, Dad. Must be the angles.’
‘I thought cameras were supposed to add ten kilos?’
‘I wish. This week sometime. I promise.’ It was always tough, but he’d visit. ‘Look, ah, can you just let him know I called? I know you hate doing it, but . . . just tell him. For me?’
‘I don’t know why you even bother with these phone calls,’ his father said, ‘but I’ll tell him.’ He hung up.
It was nice to go against the traffic for once; everyone else was returning to the hive. Upstream. Back in the city, people would be filling those buildings. Thousands of them. Answering phones. Taking meetings. Packed into rising elevators, filling the hole in the sky.
There was one more phone call he had to make. He dialled, the phone rang twice and clicked.
‘Mate, it’s Quick,’ Jack said.
‘It better be. He’s sleeping.’ The voice on the other end was young – male, mid-twenties. A tough age for that job. The phone line had an echo to it, as if the speaker was in a bathroom. ‘Everyone’s fucking sleeping. I was sleeping.’
‘Wake him up.’
‘Doesn’t work like that.’
‘He’s going to want to speak to me. Trust me. Wake him up.’
‘Hmmm.’ There was loud clang on the other end, a distant but muffled yell.
‘Okay. How about this?’ Jack realised he’d subconsciously raised one hand off the steering wheel and was waving it back and forth, as if trying to placate someone in real life. He felt like an outsider in the TV station, coming from his podcast to the big league in such a short amount of time. He didn’t fit in with those cocaine-buzzed producers. Yet it didn’t take long to catch the tics of confidence and aggression that came with presence on a television screen. His voice dropped a semi-tone. Platitudes peppered his words. The camera might not add ten kilograms, but it made you feel taller. ‘You know there’ll be a book after this. Lots of press. And listen, buddy, you know there’ll probably be a chapter or two about your establishment . . .’
‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’
‘Nothing of the sort!’ Jack had his producer voice in full swing now; if they’d been together in person, there would have been arm-around-the-shoulder back-slapping. Such false comradery. ‘I’m saying that if I write good things about you – how well you do your job, the way you treated him – you might be in line for a promotion, a pay rise. Right, pal? That’s what I’m saying.’
‘You said the same thing about getting me on TV.’
‘I know, and I tried. But the edit’s the edit. We could only fit so much.’
‘Well, I can only fit so much time on the phone, so —’
‘A hundred bucks?’
There was silence and Jack thought he’d blown it. Then he heard footsteps echoing – not a bathroom, a concrete hall. The man was moving.
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