Greenlight

by Benjamin Stevenson

  The truck driver was talking to someone. Jack heard him say ‘You sure?’, and then a few more mumbled words. A door slammed. The rumble of an engine starting. The truck pulled away and Jack saw a white HiLux ute with the door open behind it.

  ‘Fucking got away,’ someone said next to him, a deep familiar growl, ‘because of you.’

  Jack looked up at Curtis blankly. He remembered the noise of a car starting from back in Andrew’s vineyard. While Lauren had given chase, Curtis had waited around the bend for the intruder. Then Jack had staggered out of the bushes. Curtis must have seen the truck, grabbed Jack by the collar and flung him backwards. Jack, still reeling, slowly pieced it together. Curtis had saved his life.

  ‘Well, get up then,’ Curtis said, one hand raised in frustration. ‘You’re still sitting in the middle of the fucking road.’

  Jack hauled himself up. Curtis was already at the ute. He got in and slammed the door. He started the car and the brake lights lit up the skid of black rubber on the blacktop. That had almost been Jack. He stood on the double white line, not sure what to do. There was a whir of a window lowering, a bang on the door.

  ‘Fuckin’ hurry up.’

  Jack hopped in the passenger seat. Locked in the cabin with Curtis, Jack could smell his breath, a yeasty musk. Curtis looked at him with a mixture of confusion and pity, flicked on the overhead light, put a hand on Jack’s jaw and tilted his head roughly. Jack felt his neck grind in its joints.

  ‘Did you see who it was? When they did this to you?’

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I fell.’ Jack didn’t want to tell Curtis he’d had the shit kicked through him.

  ‘Here I was thinking you could take a beating. And turns out you did it to yourself.’ Curtis did a U-ey – there was a thunk-thunk as the wheels went over the reflective yellow humps that split the road – and revved it to get going on the hill. ‘What the fuck, man? What the fuck?’ Curtis was shaking his head. ‘You’re insane.’

  ‘They took your axe.’

  ‘And you let them get away with it, too. I’ll be counting on you to back me up. When the damn thing turns up again, doused in someone else’s blood.’

  He had a point. As much as Curtis liked crying wolf, this time, it seemed, he was actually victim to a conspiracy, someone picking around his property to find something incriminating. The problem for the framer, Jack supposed, was that now Curtis knew exactly what was missing it could hardly turn up again. Jack looked out the window as they weaved around a long sloping bend. The bush it cut through it was steep, with rocky drops several metres high in places. Jack was lucky to have ended up with just a bruised coccyx, and that wasn’t even considering almost getting blown apart by a semi-trailer.

  ‘I didn’t save you because I wanted to,’ Curtis said bluntly. ‘The last thing I need is the attention of a journalist getting squashed flat after snooping around my property.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist,’ said Jack. He was cold, his jeans sticking to his legs.

  ‘And you’re not squashed flat either.’ They were at the top of the hill now. ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I’m not complaining.’

  Curtis was massaging the leather on his steering wheel.

  ‘You make everything worse, you know that?’

  ‘I’ve been told.’

  ‘I mean it. Fuck, you’re still not listening. People die on that road all the time. Not to mention what you’ve done to yourself crashing through the bush. You almost got yourself killed. Believe it or not, that’s not what I want. I’d rather catch whoever’s trying to frame me.’ Jack noticed that when Curtis was speaking, even if obviously bullshit, he believed it so hard. As if he could conjure truth from sheer willpower alone.

  But something was still strange. The person in shadow, as they fled from the road, had turned and yelled as the truck bore down. If it was the serial killer, why give Jack a warning?

  ‘Who do you think it was?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Lauren didn’t see them. But who do you think?’ The accusation lay unspoken – Andrew Freeman. But he was on top of the tower. At least, he was when Jack had left, and he’d only made it halfway down the drive. No way.

  They were stopped out the front of the bed and breakfast. The engine hummed.

  ‘Listen, Curtis’ – Jack struggled with the words – ‘thank you.’

  ‘Go home, Jack. You don’t need to be here. Someone’s setting me up. You think I hated her because she sent me to jail? Someone bashed in the back of her head. With a single blow. And you think I hated her so much, because she sent me to jail?’ He leaned over and opened Jack’s door, gave it an extra shove so it swung wide. ‘You’re so obsessed with proving me wrong, you can’t even see when you’re actually right.’

  Curtis lowered his voice, almost reverential, the tone that should be taken when talking about the dead, but not from this mouth, not with these words. ‘Because I did hate that bitch. But if I killed her, I would have done it slowly. Go home.’

  Jack spent the next morning fast-forwarding through his old interviews. He could watch the interviews at speed, projecting himself back into his seat, clipboard in hand, to remember most of the conversations. He’d slow down when he needed to remember something better. The difference between the raw footage and the final cut was staggering. He’d interviewed Lauren and Vincent for four hours, and their cut had been a total of twenty-two minutes. Ian McCarthy had it worse. Jack was proud of the mise en scène on that one – they’d pulled over on the side of a dirt road, sun setting, Ian had sat in the boot of his 4WD, his RMs dangling above the dust. They’d talked for over an hour, but in Episode 4 Ian had been trimmed to a slim six minutes.

  Jack pressed play on the raw footage. Ian was in the middle of telling him how they’d moved the body, intending to take Eliza to the hospital.

  Ian: It was when we picked her up that we realised she was actually pretty dead.

  Jack: And then?

  Ian: It sounds stupid, but it didn’t seem real. I mean, yeah, she had her fingers in her mouth. That looked strange, but it didn’t look real. So neither of us were sure what to do.

  Jack: I’m not blaming you, Ian. It must have been hard to see whether she was alive or not. What did you do next?

  Ian: Andrew went up to the house, while I stayed with the body and called for back-up. When Andrew came back, he told me he’d arrested Curtis Wade. He said he’d cuffed him to something, and we had enough evidence.

  Jack: How did he know for sure?

  Ian: He said we had a witness.

  Jack: A witness? There was no witness at the trial.

  Ian: I know.

  Jack: So all you had to go on was Andrew Freeman telling you he had enough evidence, and that was enough for you to know that Curtis was guilty?

  Ian: Well, yeah. He’s the sergeant. I believed him.

  Jack: Even without any actual evidence? Just his word.

  Ian: Even without evidence. I guess. Now that you mention it, I don’t know what he actually meant. You’re right, but it’s a blur. I trusted what he told me, you know.

  Jack: So tell me how you felt, forget the trial and this show and everything. I just want to know your first impression.

  Ian: As soon as we set foot on the property, I had a bad feeling. And by the time we left, yeah, we were certain Curtis was guilty.

  Jack rubbed his eyes. Andrew’s witness had, of course, never surfaced. It was just an excuse to lay the cuffs on Curtis.

  The interview was a goldmine; Jack had got his mileage out of the inferred bias here. He switched the file to Episode 4, the final cut as it appeared in the show, and scrolled through to the scene with Ian. The interview started by zooming in on the stubby of Carlton beside Ian. Ian hadn’t even drunk it, but it had been a hot day and Jack hadn’t brought any water. (He had, but he didn’t tell Ian that.) Here, have this, Jack had passed him a beer. I don’t want to look like I’m drinking on the job, Ian had said.
We won’t film it, just hold it against your neck if you want, to cool down. Yet the shot lingered on the sweating can. Just to make Ian a little less reliable, a little more incompetent. That’s low, thought Jack, even for you.

  On-screen, they’d started to talk. Jack jacked up the volume.

  Ian: It was when we picked her up that we realised she was actually pretty dead.

  Jack: And then?

  Ian: Andrew went up to the house, while I stayed with the body and called for back-up. When Andrew came back, he told me he’d arrested Curtis Wade. He said he’d cuffed him to something, and we had enough evidence.

  Jack: How did he know for sure?

  Ian: He said we had a witness.

  Jack: A witness? There was no witness in the trial.

  Ian: I know.

  Jack: So all you had to go on was the fact that Andrew Freeman had told you that he had enough evidence, and that was enough for you to know that Curtis was guilty?

  Ian: Well, yeah.

  Jack: So tell me how you felt, forget the trial and this show and everything. I just want to know your first impression.

  Ian: As soon as we set foot on the property – even without evidence – we were certain Curtis was guilty.

  Jack had to close the laptop. He felt sick. He didn’t remember cutting it together that badly. He’d edited out every bit of footage that may have made viewers sympathetic to Ian. He came across as dim, a bit conniving – part of the grand conspiracy against the Wades. He’d kept in that Ian hadn’t known Eliza was even dead for the black comedy of it, ignoring his explanation that he would have been panicked, confused, and was just trying his best. But that didn’t fit Jack’s narrative either, so it had to go.

  But worst of all was the final sentence.

  Ian: As soon as we set foot on the property – even without evidence – we were certain Curtis was guilty.

  Jack had even cut away from Ian’s face to a shot of that stupid beer can, as he dubbed the words ‘even without evidence’ (kidnapped from a different line of dialogue earlier in the interview), and spliced them into a new sentence, dropping out half of the context in the process. Just like that, he’d created police bias.

  He felt sick. It didn’t feel like he was crafting a story anymore, as he had in the editing room, where he’d move things around only to achieve a better story. But this was so real. He was hurting people. Creating villains.

  By the time he’d gorged himself on enough footage, the sun sat high enough to sluice through the venetians, throwing prison bars of shadow across his room. Jack got up and went to the mirror in the bathroom. His left eye was bloodshot, broken capillaries flooding the bottom of the socket in a crescent, a half full wine glass. There was a slash on his cheek. Mixed with the only just recovering yellow of his nose, courtesy of Ted Piper, Jack had transformed into what the big-wigs call ‘off-camera talent’. He felt a sudden surge of tiredness, sat down on the side of the bath. The toilet was just next to him, the lid up.

  Andrew had lied to him about something, he was sure, but he didn’t know what. He’d lied on the night of the murder as well. He didn’t have anything worth putting Curtis in chains, apart from the coincidence of location and his own prejudice. There was no witness.

  Alexis’s funeral was tomorrow. He’d almost got himself killed yesterday. Why was he here? Who was he helping? He stood and spat in the toilet. Blood and mucus pirouetted in the water. He looked into the bowl. Not today, he thought. He sidestepped the speckling banana, still in his doorway, and went outside.

  Alan Sanders served Jack a child’s meal without complaint. Nuggets and chips. He rang it up as a scotch fillet, which was pricier than a parma.

  Jack hadn’t planned on coming to the Royal exactly, but the main street lacked attractions. Besides, he knew eating to a schedule was important, and it was lunchtime. He couldn’t start skipping now. His tightrope walker was wobbly enough as it was.

  Pecking at his meal between sips of a soda water, Jack thought about Andrew Freeman’s property, his cellar, his in-absentia wife. Jack’s documentary had painted the conspiracy against Curtis Wade as being mostly led by the Freemans, without ever directly accusing them of murder, no matter what he’d had to deny afterwards to prevent libel suits. What if his story was actually right, and Andrew had killed her and made Curtis the scapegoat? He shook his head. Maybe that was plausible for one murder, Eliza’s, but not two. Andrew had no motive to kill Alexis. Neither did Curtis. Sitting next to him in the car last night, too exhausted and broken to be terrified by the veiled threat purring from Curtis’s lips, Jack realised something else: he believed him.

  Lauren thought it was the same killer. But maybe he was chasing a new killer, someone who just used the opportunity to murder Alexis. He thought about the threats Alexis received. He assumed the police were sifting through them. He called Ted Piper’s office phone. If someone was going around threatening lawyers, that was the next best place to start. But he couldn’t get through. The line must be inundated with calls. The office phone rings endlessly, Alexis had told him, we’ve had to switch it off. No surprises there. It didn’t bother Jack. Even if he had got through, Ted would’ve hung up on him, he figured.

  Jack was getting used to the double-take you had to do when exiting a building in Birravale, the squint, flat hand raised against the sun. Outside the Royal, a woman was crouched in front of a Forester, back door open, picking up cans and jars from the gutter. A broken plastic bag flapped in the breeze.

  Jack walked over, knelt next to her.

  ‘Need a hand?’

  The woman looked up. Her light blonde hair was wisped with stress, from running her hand through it, strayed across her sweaty brow and cheeks. Sarah Freeman. She was swiping brown dust off her groceries, running a finger down a bottle of milk where the dust was gluggy with the condensation. Jack picked up an orange, brushed it. It wasn’t dust, Jack realised. There was a broken glass jar in the bag. She’d cracked a jar of cinnamon. They rescued the rest of the groceries: a few more escaped oranges, some lemongrass, and another bottle of milk that had thankfully kept its lid. Sarah shut the car door with a thunk. She turfed the plastic bag into the bin outside the Royal.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ Sarah said without looking at him, and hopped in the car.

  Jack walked back to the B & B. Fuck this town, he thought, lying on the bed. He picked his nose, and the cinnamon under his fingernail made him cough. He went to the bathroom to wash his hands. The toilet was beside him, the lid still up. He flipped it down. Nuggets were a bad choice. Fried food. Fuck. Jack lay on the bed, feeling it inside him. He tried to doze but couldn’t. He felt heavy, a snake lazily digesting food, a lump inside him. His head hurt. He got up, looked for Mary-Anne in the hallway, decided it was safe enough. He went out to his car and flipped the floor covering in the boot, pulling out a toolbox he’d never used. He went back to his room and sat the toolbox on the bed. He chose the right size screwdriver and set to work on the hinges. He did the bottom first, tiny bits of wood spiralling out from the frame like pencil shavings. When he’d finished the top hinge, the door fell inwards and he caught it, shuffled backwards, and propped it against the window. He lay back on the bed. The bathroom was open before him.

  It wasn’t much. A reminder not to lock himself away. A small touch of home. The back of a bathroom door, hooks and hanging towels and, sometimes, a handle jiggling, had been an image he’d lived with for too long. It was pointless, he knew, taking the door off the frame. There’s always another door to shut yourself behind. All the same, he felt a little more comfortable. The door’s new position blocked out the sun from the window, and the coolness of the bathroom tiles tempered the room. Jack didn’t remember falling asleep.

  He woke after dark. Looked at his watch. Lauren.

  The glass door to the Wade restaurant was ajar.

  Lauren was inside, behind the long rectangular service window that cordoned off the kitchen. She was cutting something. Meat, Jack caught a whiff. Sh
e had two out of eight gas burners going, blue flames in a grid, like a domino spotted with fire. She hadn’t heard him come in. Her black hair was pulled into a ponytail, her shoulders rolled as she chopped, and her hair flicked and swung like a horse’s tail. He noticed a string of knives across the back wall. They’d tested all of them. No matches. They hadn’t expected a match anyway. Jack had learned a lot about killing: knives meant you had to saw through bone. Mangled as they were, Eliza’s fingers came off quick. A meat cleaver, much more suitable, hung on the other side of the kitchen. It had also been tested. No match.

  Jack thought about calling out to Lauren, but decided instead to ding the silver service bell.

  ‘Four fish for table fourteen,’ he said.

  Lauren wiped a forearm against her brow. She smiled, cranked the gas knob nearest her off. Then she used the flat edge of her knife to scoot potatoes into her palm and flipped the potatoes onto two plates like a gambler rolling craps. She slid the first plate hard across the steel bench. Jack didn’t realise he was supposed to catch it until it was almost at the edge – part of him was tempted to let it fly – but he blocked it with his hip and grabbed it. A potato made a break for freedom, Jack returned it to the plate among the others. He looked at the food: steak, a nice cut. Boiled broccoli on the side.

  ‘Chef’s out. So no fish,’ said Lauren. ‘Fuck table fourteen.’

  She came through the swinging kitchen doors, her plate in hand. ‘Feels good to say that. The entitlement of some of these Sydney tourists that come up for a weekend in’ – she adopted a pompous tone, crossed her eyes and looked down her nose – ‘wine-country.’ She returned to normal. ‘The customer is always right, they say. Try thinking that after running a winery for two weeks.’

  ‘Vineyard.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She put her plate on the bar, went behind it and pulled on a loop in the floor. The wooden board lifted and settled back on its hinges. Beneath, there was a compact wine cellar, the wine all bottled and stored in latticed racks, like Andrew’s, but in units that looked like giant fridges, glass doors inlaid with LED lighting. It looked like the inside of a spaceship, four large humming units glowing gently. Tacky, the locals would say; Jack now realised that Birravale conflated that word with new. Buried in the past, this town, scared of the future. He imagined the people of Birravale milling around, scratching at lesions – did you hear Margery’s gone and got the smallpox vaccination? Pfft. Tacky. No respect for history. Lauren emerged with a bottle, eased the cellar door shut and retrieved her plate.