Sunlit Shadow Dance (12 page)

While she was
technically guilty of murder and out on bail, with the conclusion
of the inquest it was clear that she had no direct role in any
murder other than that of Mark and, in his case that she had acted
on the basis of a real fear for her life. So a retrial would almost
certainly find self-defence now that these facts were known.

But there
could be no retrial without her, and no useful purpose would be
served by one after all else that had passed.

It seemed that
the best legal option was to seek some form of pardon, which left
the conviction stand but agreed that, in view of the circumstances,
no sentence be imposed and she be free to resume her life in
whatever form she chose. However there were plenty of problems with
this option including her authorizing this request which required
knowledge and understanding of what had gone before. At some stage
it would need formal communication to occur between her and the
parties of the government to arrange this. A pardon was also
normally only exercised when an appeal had failed.

In this case
Susan had pled guilty of the crime, thereby agreeing with the
verdict, so it was hard to see what basis there was for an appeal,
and this was also made doubly hard when she now did not know what
her crime had been or about her first decision to plead guilty.

So it went on
and on, round and round. This afternoon he thought he might go and
see Rebecca, the personal assistant to the Attorney General. She
seemed a bright young thing, quick and smart, as well as vivacious
in a slightly boyish way, not exactly beautiful but with cute
charm.

She was a
lawyer in her own right and seemed to have the ear of the big boss,
the person who needed to cut a deal in the political world. After
all she saw Mr AG every day. She also seemed sympathetic to Susan’s
plight; both he and Sandy had casual conversations with her about
the case in the earlier stages of proceedings when they had both
attended meetings there.

And she must
be someone to trust; working in that high position she was privy to
all her boss’s confidential papers, so it should be safe to talk to
her off the record, just to see if she could use her legal brain
and some influence to try and get some new ideas on the table.

He wondered if
he should go off to University and study law to figure out all this
complicated legal manoeuvring properly. But that would take years
and would not help him in the here and now.

He felt like
the meat in the sandwich, the go between separating his own friends
from government. He had to walk carefully on both sides of the
fence. He liked his job as a policeman with the freedom it gave him
to run cases and investigations. He did not want to throw that away
through this event. Yet his strongest loyalty lay to this girl and
to trying to find a way out for her that let her quietly get on
with her life.

Well he would
just have to chance it, to see if Rebecca would meet him for a
drink after work so they could have an off the record chat about
where to go from here. He knew it should be handled by the
barrister David had retained but Alan thought his non-legal
background might help him be more pragmatic in finding creative
solutions, that would pass a reasonable level of legal scrutiny,
but most of all would work in the real world.

So he decided
that in half an hour, when he had finished the report he was
writing about a minor burglary, he would take an early mark and
head into the city and call to see Rebecca on spec. It would be
around 4 pm when he go there, nearly knock off time on a regular
day. He would see if he could get a chance to talk to her, hoping
it was quiet in her office. Alan knew her boss was away in
Melbourne at a conference about something legal. So, with a bit of
luck, she would be there on her own with not much to do.

He would ask
her if he could have an off the record chat about this case, just
to try and nut it out. Perhaps she would have time for a coffee
break or an ‘after work’ drink. While they were not exactly friends
they knew each other well enough for a conversation.

He arrived to
find himself the only person in the office apart from Rebecca. He
was not sure quite how to broach it,

She smiled at
him brightly and said, “So, my favourite police officer has come to
pay me a visit on a quiet afternoon, with my boss away and nothing
else happening. Perhaps he will offer to buy a drink in the local
in a few minutes once I have logged off my computer.”

As they walked
outside from her office she asked Alan to call her Beck, saying
Rebecca was too formal. He found she was easy to chat to as they
walked; she had a manner that set strangers at ease, not
flirtatious but earnest and interested.

Alan bought
them both a drink and they found a secluded corner in the bar which
gave privacy. They exchanged pleasantries for a minute as they
sipped their drinks.

Beck struck
Alan as a person with lots of intelligence who was used to thinking
outside the box. He had niggles of reservation about giving too
much away. But she would hardly be in her current job if she was
unreliable, he had high level security clearance and hers must be
even higher, considering all the sensitive ‘cabinet in confidence’
documents she dealt with.

Beck opened
the door to a more serious conversation with, “I am sure you did
not come to visit me to flirt or pass the time, you are too focused
for that, and I know that Sandy would cut your balls out if you
made a pass. So I suppose you should tell me what it is you want to
talk about.”

He explained
the nub of his problem, “I have been told by a friend of a friend
that a person has discovered where Susan is. But she seems to have
lost her memory and apparently she does not know remember anything
from before she vanished. She still has a murder conviction and her
bail was revoked when she disappeared though it is clear from all
that followed, including the coroner’s findings, that what happened
was self-defence. But still, if she surrenders herself she will be
returned to custody in the NT.

“
So it is unclear how this can be resolved. Her time for
appeal has long passed and, if she cannot remember what happened,
how can an appeal be made, even if she is willing. I am told that
when she disappeared she was in an extremely fragile emotional
state, even suicidal. Her current memory loss seems to be the
result of some sort of nervous breakdown.

“
So it is unlikely that she is in a fit state to stand trial.
But yet, without a retrial, it is hard to see how she can have her
guilty plea undone. To put her back in jail and let her conviction
stand, or even for the judge to resume the case for sentencing and
then release her, would mean that she would have to return to
Darwin. If this happened she would become a huge sensation again
overnight, the centre of enormous media scrutiny. That could be
extremely damaging to her current mental state. So the people I
have been talking to refuse to agree to any return by her to Darwin
at this stage. As we do not know where she is we do not want to
damage the current cooperation we have by acting in a way which
appears to threaten her. If we do so we may lose our connection
with her.

“
While we could seek to locate her independently and even
arrest her or have her extradited if she is interstate, this is
likely to be both harmful for her wellbeing and to cause extensive
sensational publicity which will arouse very strong sympathy for
her plight along with a bad public reaction to actions to bring her
in, particularly if any harm comes to her.

“
One or two people have floated the idea of a pardon. But I
don’t quite see how it could be done. And, of course, anything
which happens would need the OK of your boss. So, rather than have
lawyers talking to lawyers and going in endless circles, I thought
I should just try and get your ideas. Perhaps if we can think of
something that makes sense you could tell me how best to make it
work through all the official channels.

“
So what I am really asking is for you to use your legal brain
and perhaps use your contacts through your office and your boss to
try and help me figure out a solution to this mess.”

They talked
for almost an hour. Beck was as smart as whip. She knew about both
the politics and the two sides of public opinion, those who saw
Saint Susan and those who saw only the murdering witch. Her legal
brain quickly explored the various options and dismissed them in
much the same manner that others had. The retrial was fraught with
problems and the media sensation which accompanied it would be even
worse than last time, not to mention the futility of conducting a
trial when the defendant had no memory of the events.

Some sort of
commission on inquiry was also possible, leading to a
recommendation from a judge to the Attorney General for release.
Asking the judge to convene a private hearing for sentencing was
also possible. But they were all full of risks, loopholes and
problems. In all cases it seemed that Susan needed to return to the
NT.

Her ability to
give any useful evidence remained a big problem. It was not as if
she was mentally incompetent and needed to be put into mandatory
psychiatric care, just she had no knowledge of anything that had
happened from that part of her life. This fact had no bearing on
her guilt or innocence, only on her ability to testify.

The option of
having her psychologically evaluated was considered, but it came
with a high risk of disclosing her location. Therefore it was
doubtful that agreement could be gained by the other party for it.
And, if it confirmed she had no memory it took them nowhere;
whereas if it was considered she was scamming then that created a
whole new set of problems.

The only thing
that seemed to have some merit was the pardon option but the
administrator had to act on the government’s advice and so the
government needed a good basis for recommending this. Beck agreed
she would commission advice on this option and Alan agreed he would
float it with the other side.

As they talked
Alan grew more comfortable with Beck. She seemed to be on his side;
she had sharp intelligence and could see all the angles. After they
had finished their legal discussion Beck asked him about himself
and Sandy, saying she had heard a rumor they had first met on this
job and asking if it was true, also asking him what it was like to
be living with another serious professional who lived and breathed
their job and whether they planned to marry and have children.

He found
himself telling of his first meeting Sandy, him thinking she was a
bloke and being at first dismayed that a wet city girl was on the
job, then how she caught him out about the fish which Charlie had
hidden and how it led to his friendship with Charlie. Then he told
her of the huge and freaky crocodile who watched their every
move.

He thought
Beck would laugh at this and tell him it was superstitious
nonsense. But she said she was a Territory girl, born and bred, and
had seen too much to laugh at these things, she got the spirits of
the land thing; it made a strange sense to her.

He found him
telling Beck of his romance with Sandy leading up to their planned
wedding last Christmas and how they had ended up postponing it with
all the mess over Susan. He told of the strange mind link which had
seemed to exist between Sandy and Susan, a mind link which revealed
Susan’s terror on the day the murder had happened.

He told how,
at first, almost to outdo each other, he and Sandy had been
determined to turn this case into a murder, together working to
unearth the clues that made it so, the timber fragments in the
skull, the tyre track that linked the vehicle to the site, Susan’s
DNA in the vehicle, the CCTV footage of Susan, then an unknown
person, who was together with the murder victim at Uluru, then the
girl at the roadhouse who remembered Susan telling how she had met
this man while diving on the Barrier Reef, leading to the discovery
of her identity in Cairns.

But then, once
they had discovered that the person responsible was an English
tourist visitor, someone who had never done anything remotely like
this, it had stopped making sense and they knew there must be
more.

He told of the
weeks she had spent in England trying to get the story from this
girl as they went through the extradition process and how strongly
she had reacted when she felt she had been tricked into giving
something away, but then of her voluntary decision to return to
Australia for the murder trial and of her seemingly inexplicable
decision to plead guilty but tell nothing of what caused the events
to happen.

He told how
both he and Sandy felt responsible for what had happened, because
without their digging to open a murder case it would never have
begun. Yet, once they found the girl they knew it did not make
sense for her to deliberately kill this man.

Alan told of
his desperate search to find out about the texts before Susan was
convicted and sentenced to spend her life in jail. He even told
about Anne and Sandy’s premonition that she would try and commit
suicide rather than have the truth come out.

He felt as if,
in telling this story, he would make Beck into an ally who
understood what had led to this bizarre set of events. In doing so
he hoped she would feel sympathy for the situation which followed
where Susan was convicted of a murder, but the most reasonable
understanding of the events was that she had acted in self-defence
and had only pled guilty to stop damaging information about the man
she killed coming out, that she had done this out of a strange
sense of misplaced loyalty or perhaps to protect her children from
this knowledge.