A Child's Book of True Crime (7 page)

After Ellie’s chest was examined for rib fractures, a thoracic-abdominal incision was made from shoulder to shoulder, crossing down over the breasts. Goodness! Kitty found it hard to keep up with all the doctor’s procedures. It made her dizzy as next the ribs and the cartilage were cut through to expose the heart and lungs. Then, the heart, lungs, esophagus, and trachea were removed en bloc; each organ was weighed, its external surface examined.

She sighed. On and on the postmortem went, until eventually, the assistant put all Ellie’s organs into garbage bags to prevent seepage. While he sewed the bags inside the body, Kitty scratched her furry head, deep in thought. It was unusual for a crime of passion to turn into such a brutal case of mutilation. Whoever had killed Ellie wanted to eradicate the girl’s physical beauty even in death. And another thing was certain, the koala realized: the murderer was strong to gouge such deep cuts.

S
TILL SHAKING,
I locked myself inside my car and just started driving. I had visited Black Swan Point before. I knew that the Georgian buildings turned into brown brick houses; that empty play equipment in people’s yards looked like lost children metamorphosed. Rural Australia was full of perfectly tended ghost towns: a war memorial, bearing all the same family names, stood surrounded by stumpy rose bushes. Each bush had been too lovingly pruned or else stunted by this heat, heat that sits on your shoulders. Three teenage boys rode up and down the main street on their mountain bikes. When they saw me they wouldn’t meet my eye; they raised first their arses, then their front wheels into the air; colts proving they could buck. And just on the outskirts of the town, yellow road signs warning of schoolchildren and kangaroos had been shot full of bullet holes. The kangaroos, their paws held up in rigor mortis, lay like forgotten crime victims by the edge of the road. Pray for rain to wash it all away. Imagine feeling like you’re living at the very end of the earth, and also knowing that you are.

Nearby was the street where Ellie Siddell had lived in the year before her death. “We don’t like that road,” a local woman had told me. “We call it Murder Road.” Murder
Road was long and thin. You started off on high land then descended down a dusty dirt track until you hit her family’s house. People said if it were their daughter they would’ve hired a bulldozer. The house was very plain and symmetrical, with a wide veranda and one little window set high up: I had decided that was the window of her bedroom. It must have had a slanting roof.

The crime photographs in Lucien’s careful drawing were included in his mother’s book. What was uncanny was how familiar each interior seemed. The living room had every era of sturdy furniture represented: squat armchairs upholstered in autumnal fabric; a sound system the size of a couch; an oak dining table with thick, carved legs; and one painting—a landscape. The bathroom, fitted with postwar amenities, had a basin with square lines in the mint green of Australian art deco. The kitchen had a frill of gingham curtain over each window; and high stools surrounded the aging linoleum benches. Did she sit on these kitchen stools, her feet not reaching the floor, feeling incredibly grown up? At dinner parties did she squash peas into the table’s crevices before taking flirty sips from the avuncular guest’s wineglass?

Since none of Ellie’s family or close friends had spoken to Veronica one had to read between the lines. This was what I imagined: on family drives to the Black Swan Point house, Ellie would deep-breathe on the window, then, in the fogged-up glass, draw pictures of women with pronounced erogenous zones. She’d fall asleep in the car and have to be carried to bed. And in the morning, wearing plastic gold Barbie slippers, she’d tiptoe down the gnarled driftwood steps
onto the sand. All the boys were on old surfboards, paddling out to the sandbank. The littlest boy paddled with a rake, dipping the stick end in the water, then the fingers; just moving round in circles. She was one of the girls with skinny legs doing synchronized swimming in the shallows; she and her cousins collected jellyfish in buckets and buried each other in the sand. They were being protected from bad things so strenuously that the slightest irregularity—like the tattooed woman once seen bathing—could overwhelm. Or else it could underwhelm: walking her new puppy along the shore Ellie let a man pat the dog. He asked her if she ever put her hands in her underpants at night. “No, how silly!” she told him laughing, dragging the dog away.

Ellie attended a private school in Hobart, where girls sang the same hymns their mothers had sung. On the oval she did stretching exercises with her class. The girls leaned back. The sky seemed a most daring blue. A violin, like a rusting swing, sounded from an open window in the music school. They leaned to the right, their ponytails synchronized. The French mistress in her academic gown walked her two tiny dogs around the oval, her finger conducting the music. Was she searching for smokers behind the art room? Could dogs develop gout? Would she rile the gym teacher by calling imperiously, “Young ladies do not run!” The gym teacher, an enormous woman with red nose and cheeks, defined the word
ruddy.
She wore tracksuit pants instead of a tennis skirt, which was just as well. There’d been hilarity when, demonstrating how to hurdle, she’d lifted up her leg, revealing dark pubic hair crawling halfway down her thigh. “Show us again, show us again!” cried an elfin bad girl, with buckteeth
and a pageboy haircut. “Could you please show us how to hurdle one more time?”

Ellie was not a bad girl: a girl whom the flute teacher, with his dirty turtleneck, might ogle. Those girls hitched up their skirts on the lawn, during lunchtime, to work on their tans. It seemed they understood the secrets of alchemy, but weren’t telling. With their neat bodies, they’d rise at the bell linking arms as if, lightheaded, they had to lean on their best friends’ shoulders. They realized history only happened in textbooks, and read magazines behind their Bunsen burners. Nothing would really go wrong—the worst thing was when a girl’s father died of cancer, but everyone took the afternoon off school, and at the funeral clutched each other, all weeping more vigorously than any team of widows—girls with lovely upbringings who don’t understand disaster.

Standing in the locker room, pungent with sneakers and spray deodorant, the bad girls whispered loudly about boys. The film in Science, explaining there was no bone in the penis, had not surprised them. Neither had the slide show, organized by the school nurses, which demonstrated in passing that an erection did not jut out of a man’s body, horizontally, at a ninety-degree angle. All Ellie’s friends were reaching for their protractors, amazed. But the bad girls smirked. The way they’d smirked when the nurse came to class and put a tampon in a glass of water. They stripped off their gym uniforms brazenly, showing off flat, tanned stomachs. But Ellie dressed and undressed so no one could see this new body she didn’t know what to do with: put your track pants on under your school dress; unbutton your dress; put your gym shirt on over the dress; pull the dress down.
Still, you could never guard against the shock of seeing a newly developed breast. The first girls to develop were, naturally, sluts. But if the breasts came at the right time you could be extremely popular. The worst fate was a “pyramid tit,” something conical, and frankly ineffectual, in its shiny white trainer bra.

After graduating, most of Ellie’s friends moved from Tasmania onto the mainland. She just wanted to leave home. She’d grown up in the most beautiful house in Battery Point. Walking up the road she could smell the flowers, great fleshy camellias, spilling over the fence. The ceilings rose high above her and below were wide floorboards of Huon pine from the rain forest. Cedar, resembling mahogany, had been transported from New South Wales for mantelpieces and joinery. Every chair had been exquisitely turned. Each painting was another new town’s violet sunset. Eleanor Siddell had been loved to the gills. But in Hobart she knew every street intimately: all the stories of every corner, and of all the people in all the houses. Hobart was probably the most stunning city in the world. Boats came up the wide blue Derwent and docked right in its center. From her window she counted each white sail, remembering a Grimm’s fairy tale her grandfather had read to her, “The Prince Afraid of Nothing”; “Once upon a time there was a prince who had got tired of living in his father’s house, and as he was afraid of nothing he thought: I’ll go out into the wide world and I’ll see plenty of strange sights.”

She moved to the peninsula, and started her new life working for the vet. She went to the supermarket by herself. She bought food with the money she’d earned. She took the
grocery bags to the car thinking, The girls from school should see me now. I am the last person they’d expect to have a lover.
Lover
: even the word sounded so adult, straight from a movie. And she was the star, running back to her job with dried semen between her legs. Just the thought of his mouth on top of her mouth was thrilling. When they’d writhe, she’d think, We’re two sticks trying to make fire. She wanted to learn everything straightaway. Teach me all the little tricks to fucking. How do people do this great, big sex thing? I want to get good at it, quickly. What should my face look like? Was that too loud? What do I do with my hands? It was strange to have all this delicious attention, for him to touch her and for that alone to make him shiver. Had he made some mistake? The struck-dumbness he affected every time she undressed and lay on the bed; all his sighing and eyes rolled back—was someone beautiful standing behind her? Everyone should have one great secret to carry round as a talisman. Then, when people look at you, thinking
she’s like this
, or
she’s only this
, they’ll always be wrong.

 • • • 

I sat in my car outside the Siddells’ house. The aftermath of the girl’s murder was nightmarish for her parents. After it became clear an outsider wasn’t responsible, some local people felt Ellie had brought this on herself through recklessness. She had done the wrong thing and justice had been savage.

When Veronica Marne tried to investigate the twelve-year-old crime as a local, her neighbors were tight-lipped. The old story kept coming to the fore: no one could believe Margot Harvey capable of such a brutal crime. She was an
incredibly kind woman, practical and generous. If someone was having a hard time and needed help with their kids, she’d organize people to take the children for a few hours after school. If someone were sick, she’d prepare food. In newspapers, after any unexpected disaster, people stand around, a fist to the air, howling:
Why this town!
It was the same at Black Swan Point.
This is a quiet place
, people said.
This is a good quiet place, we don’t even lock our doors.

No car was now in the house’s driveway, but the lawn was freshly mowed and a bird feeder full of seed. The curtains were drawn, although I felt I’d already seen inside: Ellie’s bedroom, according to the crime photos, was incredibly messy. She had twin beds; one she slept in, one stacked with stuffed toys. Her clothes carpeted the floor. Lipsticks and perfumes were spread over each inch of the dressing table. On the wall were snapshots of her school friends: girls in dance dresses; all of them at school camp pulling spastic faces. It was hard to believe she’d brought her lover here, but she was still only nineteen. And I bet every time Graeme Harvey led her to the single bed, and pushed away a layer of debris, Ellie wished she’d remembered to tidy up. When first he stood in the doorway, and noticed the clothes and junk in such a mess all over her floor, I bet there was something in his expression which made her jump on him and kiss him wildly to divert his attention.

The police bagged nearly sixty items from the house, and over half came from off her bedroom floor: a pair of pink underpants; a sports bra; a T-shirt; a bathing costume; a face-cloth; two towels; magazines; candy wrappers; tissues; more underwear; a nurse’s uniform; a cigarette packet; a nightgown;
a box of matches from The Sand and Waves Tudor Inn; a polyester Snoopy toy; a white tennis shoe; a pair of women’s tracksuit pants . . . The list went on in excruciating detail, but also included brown matter labeled “blood scrapings”; samples of Ellie’s blood, her hair, her nail and muscle tissue; scrapings from under her fingernails; and the knife found lying next to the body.

I started the car and drove away. I understood Ellie because I gave her my own story. I didn’t understand Margot. She hadn’t just killed the girl in a brief bout of madness, this supposedly meek woman had mutilated her enemy horribly. I turned out of Murder Road—and call it superstition, or a knock-on-wood—I proceeded toward the Suicide Cliffs.

The ride should have taken around twenty minutes, but I was driving my grandfather’s old blue car: the biggest Mercedes-Benz ever made and you couldn’t have paid anyone to take it off your hands. I drove slowly, and tried very hard to imagine what Margot would have been thinking. It was not as though
Murder at Black Swan Point
shed any light. Veronica had described this last drive in a style which swung between the melodramatic and the faux-clinical:
her
Mrs. Harvey slipped and slid all over the road, Ellie’s blood still staining her hands. The woman had freed herself from a life spent in Goodness, and lit a cigarette with almost postcoital pleasure. But just as Veronica was really starting to enjoy herself, she pulled back out of respect for readers with less liberated sensibilities. The true-crime writer’s ethical stance was inherently false—Veronica acted as an intermediary between evil and the reader, positioning herself as above reproach. But how could she get inside the criminal mind, while bending
backward to then show her horror at the deed? In every chapter she’d tried to cloak her fascination as social responsibility. Her own perversion as research.

Suddenly, my car started making a strange, high-pitched whistling. I slowed down a little, hoping to calm the engine. The road was dirt. Pine telephone poles rose out of the dust, and as I drove further there were fewer signs of life. I passed farmhouses, long abandoned, collapsing under wild ivy: cottages with sunken verandas and broken windows. In each paddock, fence posts lay in the grass like old bones. A rusting bathtub functioned as a water trough, but only broken-down motors grazed in the sun. I’d heard it said that, long ago, when Port Arthur closed down, the convicts settled here, on the opposite side of the highway to the free settlers. The settlers had previously been given land grants and convict labor. Their descendants, now our community’s rural gentry, still live behind their forefathers’ hedgerows. Once when a man fell down drunk outside a grand neighbor’s house, my mother watched the neighbor get a shovel and turn the man over to see if he was all right—noblesse oblige.