A Child's Book of True Crime (3 page)

A series of cracks, like tiny lightning, streaked across the ceiling from the plasterwork rose. What about a little drink? Why wasn’t there a heritage bar-fridge stocked with absinthe and gruel? The water was turned off abruptly. “I’d better check my messages,” a still-dry Thomas announced. His clothes were hanging neatly over the armchair, whereas mine had been bombed around the room. He knew exactly where his phone was, and picked it up to dial some numbers. I loved when he did his lawyer-talk, all stern, in a very nuts-and-bolts way. I loved this, when he called into the office and spoke to everyone like they were imbeciles.

His brow furrowed. “There’s a message from Veronica.”

I made a face at him.

“Listen, I’m sorry, Kate, but it sounds like there’s been an emergency.” He went into the bathroom to speak with his wife. The door was open a few inches. “Sweetheart,” he whispered loudly. “Sweetheart, what’s happened?” A pause. “Hey? Is Lucien okay?”

I stretched. I arched my back and it was then I really noticed the sepia photograph above the bed. A small boy with a bowl haircut stood by a penny-farthing bicycle. The boy suddenly looked exactly as Lucien would, if he were wearing a lace collar and knickers. Lucien was Thomas and Veronica’s nine-year-old son, a sweet, complicated child. It was probably true he’d been my favorite before I’d even met his father. Listening to Thomas, I realized I was still slightly upset. That morning Lucien had come to school and all the other fourth-graders had laughed at him. He’d just had a growth spurt and, wearing short shorts and a blazer over his T-shirt, he’d looked like a visiting dignitary with very white
thighs. “I like being different!” he’d called out theatrically. “Wearing clothes that don’t match.” It was staggering how clearly his character, including eccentricities, had been etched. I worried for him. He was very sensitive, and the sensitivity was intelligent: he had an excellent radar.

“Oh no!” Thomas groaned. “Oh no! They had no right. No right! . . . But you’re in the hotel now? . . . Hey, hey, stop crying.”

I tried to piece the conversation together: Veronica must have also been in a hotel room somewhere. And hopefully Lucien was safe; sitting, reading science fiction, in the half hour before class.

“Why don’t you try to rest?” There was a pause. “All right, sweetheart, I’ll call you later.” Another pause. “Me too,” he murmured.

Thomas waited a moment before walking back into the room. He sat roughly on the edge of the bed. “Veronica was speaking on a panel about her book. Someone stood up during question time and abused her.”

“How awful.”

“Some vigilante,” Thomas spat. “On about journalistic truth!”

Buoyed, I got out of bed. My clothes were in a flurry of rude postures all over the floor. Inside-out sleeves strangled each other; a skirt was hitched up, in flagrante delicto. I found my panty hose, and wriggled one straight leg in, then, rocking, the other straight leg.

Thomas watched me, sighing. “You look like Charlie Chaplin.” He reignited. “I don’t know what these arseholes want! The book is published with a disclaimer!” He put his head in his hands. “It is so damn controversial. Just yesterday
journalists were around the peninsula muckraking, asking any old fuck for their opinion.”

“And what do the old fucks say?”

“They say:
we hate this!”
He waited a beat. “Et cetera.”

I knew how they felt. Thomas was sitting on the edge of the bed in the brown dressing gown, waiting for some response. I stayed silent, wondering how he’d feel if something happened to me. According to
Murder at Black Swan Point,
the morning after the girl was killed, Dr. Graeme Harvey woke slowly and realized his wife was missing. His head ached. He’d arrived home the previous night, late, and they’d fought badly. Margot had pushed him into admitting the truth; then, rageful, she’d struck at him with a bottle. “Not everything has to be so momentous,” he’d told her stupidly, the blood streaming down his cheek. And she’d stood there weeping, harder, for seeing him bleed. The next morning, Dr. Harvey, unaware of what he’d slept through, probably lay in bed angry. When his wife decided what was bad, when she decided
he
was bad, she claimed every inch of moral ground, and there was now not a balding shrub to cling to, not a single slapstick face-saver. He lay still, listening for his daughters, then listening for Margot in the kitchen. The television was on. His daughters were not supposed to watch television first thing, but as the cartoon’s tune rang through his bedroom, he realized they must have been sitting there, spooning sugared cereal into their mouths: impressions of the brain-dead. He heard the stupid music and lay there for one more minute, not yet ready—I bet part of him was too tired, already. In the act of getting vertical, it was settled: he was a prick.

I watched Thomas, his head in his hands, but imagined
Dr. Harvey. Loping to the bathroom, the man must have groaned. There was a trail of blood on the bedroom carpet. Blood, far more than he’d remembered, was also on the bath mat and on the tiled floor. It was on the taps; and the basin; and flecked on the mirror. “Margot!” He strode out into the playroom, and his daughters rushed to turn off the television. “Where’s your mother?” The girls saw his face, all cut. They whimpered. He looked out the window: the car was gone. The girls were whimpering. He walked back to the bedroom and called the police.

 • • • 

Eventually Thomas glanced at his watch and sighing, stood up. Taking my skirt from my hands, he knelt before me. In his act of special prayer, he eased down my panty hose.

“We don’t have time.”

Thomas pressed his mouth against my thigh. I was trembling. His kisses began to escalate. My legs buckled and I lay down on the prickling rug. I could see the sturdy slats of the bed; I could see under the frill of the chair. Now we were both concentrating. But I’m like an old record—
Be my guest
is the signature song;
Please go away,
always on side B. Dumbness arrived in a series of shudders. I lay moaning and inside my head felt the spinning of a reel. The grainy black-and-whites of Ellie Siddell’s body slid behind my eyes. I winced. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face; some of her teeth were found scattered round her on the blood-soaked carpet. And the nauseating detail that’s always mentioned in tones completely hushed, an inverse fanfare: her throat was cut so viciously she had been beheaded.

• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •

Scouring every hidey-hole!

K
ingsley Kookaburra flew high over Black Swan Point. He saw the beach clotted with piles of leathery seaweed; he saw the yellow dunes rising to meet the cliffs. In the search for Margot Harvey, Terence Tiger had requested the bushland gang scour every hidey-hole for a bread crumb of a trace. There was Wally Wombat analyzing tire prints. Higher! There was Percy Possum questioning a witness. Higher! Higher! There were the swans, black specks on the shimmering horizon, still singing their dirges . . . Could Kingsley fly high enough to avoid Graeme Harvey’s grief? It lurked like a mushroom cloud over the peninsula. Oh, it was jolly awful losing someone for whom one felt love.

“I did this,” the girl’s paramour must have been thinking. “I did this to you.” He probably wished he were the one who’d been killed, Kingsley imagined. He would wonder, “Were you sleeping? Were you awake? Did Margot steal up on you? Did you fight? Was it dark? Did your eyes have time to adjust?” When studying a crime, the kookaburra was not shy in peeling back the surface to uncover a protagonist’s most basic emotions; psychiatric profiling provided rich ore indeed—“I should have known this would happen,” Graeme Harvey would think as his children cried for their mother. He’d want to hate his wife, oh certainly, but silently that man would scream: “Why couldn’t she have taken the knife to me!”

Kingsley began his graceful descent. With his keen eyes he noticed the mise-en-scène of a silverbark leaf far below. A male phosphorescent insect offered a female of his species food, then took it back after copulation so as to gain energy for another sex partner . . . . All through nature there were such stories of deceit and betrayal. Watching animals at their best and worst had taught the kookaburra a great deal. It was difficult to admit our core desires were hammered out long, long ago in the ancestral environment, and Kingsley could not easefully align himself with evolutionary psychology. Still, he’d recently read a study of working-class Germans, which found that 72 percent of the men expressed a desire for extramarital sex, compared to 27 percent of the women. Kingsley laughed slyly. “Bloody Huns!” Could one conquer one’s instincts? Perhaps it was innate to men’s sexual psychology to be so disposed toward seeking variety. Women’s desires and fantasies simply didn’t seem as intense.

But wait, down, far below, there was a snake! Kingsley was hungry. It was getting ever harder to eat well round here—his relatives had even taken to raiding suburban goldfish ponds. In a grand flutter of wings, the kookaburra swooped and grabbed the snake from behind, smacking its poisonous head again and again against a rock. He laughed his maniacal laugh. “Merry, merry king of the bush is he!” Kingsley, his belly now full, flew over the cliffs, past rock—bruised purple, bruised red—swollen with history. Through the mad blue of sky, he soared. “Oh, why can’t we just love each other!” the kookaburra cried.

T
HOMAS RETURNED
the key to the receptionist while I waited in the low silver car. Without the air-conditioner in operation, there was a sauna feel, and I sat in the hotel’s staff parking area sweating out my sin. Thomas had parked next to a rust-eaten Dumpster. Soon enough a young guy with a long shock of fringe and a loping walk came out to throw away some cardboard boxes. He stared at the expensive car quizzically, and I ducked down as if I’d lost something. Opening up the glove box, I rifled through Thomas’s stash of postcoital products—a comb, some cologne, a hip flask—until I found a packet of mint breath fresheners. Three for me, and when Thomas finally opened the door, I leaned forward and placed one on his tongue.

“Fucking in a hotel?” he lisped, adjusting the seat belt. “How many stars?”

“Three.”

“That’s not so bad.” He turned the key in the ignition.

“Three out of a hundred.”

The tires ground against the pebbles. We drove too fast down the manicured driveway. Trees bent back as we sped by. Lining the road, these gnarled tea trees and banksias—writhing, mournful—made me nervous. They always reminded
me of thin-limbed performance artists pretending to be ghosts.

Thomas smacked the steering wheel. It was impossible to see around the next corner, the highway was one-laned, and a logging truck crawled ahead. Bark and wood chips flew toward us. “Jesus, Kate. Why didn’t you turn on the air-conditioner?” We were so close we could count each log’s concentric rings. “I’ve got to get this young lady back to school!” he complained. “For the sake of my boy’s education!”

There was some truth to this statement. The Marnes had moved to Endport the previous year so Veronica could work on
Murder at Black Swan Point
. Thomas commuted, spending the week in Hobart, the weekend with his family. After the book’s release, in June, his wife had wanted to return to town, but he’d convinced her it was unfair switching Lucien’s school midyear. Also, as he liked pointing out to me, it would have been more difficult setting curricula at a Hobart private school.

At first Thomas and I had promised not to discuss End-port Primary, but after a while our meetings took on the charge of a highly exclusive Parent-Teacher Association. Thomas had realized this was a good way to monitor his son’s progress. Instead of love letters, he sent me detailed notes proposing different lessons for the children. He felt strongly they should be told the truth about their local history. I agreed: yet at the beginning of the year I’d skirted around the issue of genocide, by only asking the kids to write their own versions of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories. The results had been cute, but hardly unflinching:
How the kangaroo got her jump. How the kookaburra got his laugh
—soon enough the
children’s efforts became slanted toward their own ethnic preoccupations—
How the white man was created.

It seemed difficult bringing it home that this white man was a convict; that Tasmania was basically conceived as a jail girt by sea. Thomas was undeterred. Due to his campaigning, the children learned that the state’s main penal settlement, the nearby Port Arthur, was named in 1830 after the state’s lieutenant governor, Sir George Arthur. Sir George—an evangelist who believed his calling was to make men moral—had visions of a prison to end all prisons and geology conspired. The Tasman Peninsula, where the children had all grown up, where Thomas and I were now driving, was a thin strip of land, connected to the rest of the island by an isthmus, less than one hundred yards wide, named Eaglehawk Neck. Port Arthur, where convicts were ground into God-fearing citizens, was built at the south of the peninsula. Most of these men were unable to swim, and, to counter fantasies of overland escape, the neck was lined with vicious dogs; white cockleshells to highlight trespassers; and offal. The guards were said to dump offal on the surrounding beaches to encourage sharks. The same year that Port Arthur was established, over two thousand settlers and soldiers marched through the Tasmanian bush in a closely packed line, trying to force the Aborigines through the neck, where it was figured—incorrectly—they could be rounded up and captured.