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Epub ISBN: 9781473539761

Version 1.0

Published by Arrow Books 2017

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Copyright © Candice Fox 2017

Extract from Hades first published in Australia in 2014 by Bantam
Copyright © Candice Fox 2014

Cover design: Blacksheep Design
Photograph © Depositphotos

Candice Fox has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Arrow Books
(First published in Australia by Bantam in 2017)

Arrow Books
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Arrow Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781784758066

Contents

About the Author

Candice is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.

Candice won back-to-back Ned Kelly awards for her first two novels Hades and Eden. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Fall and co-writer of the latest James Patterson blockbuster Never Never, set in the Australian outback. She lives in Sydney.

Find out more online:
www. candicefoxauthor.com
@candicefoxbooks
@candicefoxauthor

About the Book

12.46: 13-year-old Claire Bingley stands alone at a bus stop.

12.47: Ted Conkaffey parks his car beside her.

12.52: The girl is missing …

Six minutes is all it takes to ruin Detective Ted Conkaffey’s life.

Accused but not convicted of Claire’s abduction, he’s now living in the croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.

Where a high-profile local man has just gone missing …

Also by Candice Fox

Hades

Eden

Fall

PROLOGUE

I was having some seriously dark thoughts when I found Woman. The only company I’d had in a month was my gun, and they can start to talk to you after a while, guns, if you’re alone with them long enough. The weapon watched me with its black eye as I rattled around the bare house, saw when I failed to unpack the boxes in the hallway day after day. It lay on its side and judged my drinking. Halfway down a bottle of Wild Turkey one night, I started asking the gun what its fucking solution to everything was if it was so smart. A gun has only one answer.

The night before I found Woman, there’d been another brick through the front window. It was the third since I’d arrived in Crimson Lake, and I hadn’t bothered to patch it up this time. I’d looked at the glass for a while and then gone out to the back porch and taken up residence there as the sun began to set, watched it blinking red across the wetlands, dancing on the grey sand. The house was falling apart anyway, which was why I rented it so cheap. The previous inhabitants had done a good job on the back porch, though. There was a nice strong rail and sturdy stairs, and the wire fence at the bottom of the yard that kept me safe from the crocs was intact.

The fence was also very familiar. I was used to looking at the world through diamond wire.

I’d sat there in the evenings wondering if the former residents had been hiding from something too, relishing in the predictability of nightfall as I did. The stickiness. The swell of insect life. The crocs beginning their barking in the dark, hidden, sliding in the wet and smelling me up here on the porch.

Between the vigilantes out the front and the crocs out the back I felt like I was in prison again, which wasn’t so bad, because it was secure. I was free from the decision to run, because I couldn’t run anymore from my crime. Then the gun reminded me, sitting beside me on the dry, cracked wood, that I still had an avenue out. I was just looking at the weapon and agreeing a little and swigging the last remnants of the bourbon when I heard the bird down near the fence.

I thought she was a swan at first. The sound coming out of her wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard a bird make: a kind of coughing squeak, like she had a rock in her throat. I bumbled down the hill through the long grass and, incredibly, she approached me from the other side of the fence, so that I could see a mess of little grey chicks all swirling and scattering clumsily around her as she tried to walk. The goose seemed to rethink the approach and stumbled back, hissing and flapping one great white wing.

‘Jesus Christ, are you nuts?’ I asked.

I do that when I’m drunk. Talk to things. My gun. Birds. She was nuts though, clearly, waddling around wounded and plump on the banks of the croc-infested Cairns marshlands. I glanced out over the water and then opened the gate.

I’d never opened the gate before. When I’d moved into the rundown house thirty days earlier I’d asked the estate agent why the previous inhabitants had even installed one. Unless they had a boat, which it didn’t appear they had, there was nothing out there in the water but certain death. He hadn’t had an answer. I stepped out tentatively and my bare feet sank into the muddy sand, crab holes bubbling.

‘Come here.’ I waved at the bird, gripping the gate. The goose flapped and squeaked. Her babies gathered together, a terrified bundle of fluff. I looked out at the water again, seemed to spy a hundred black ripples that could have been croc eyes. The sun was down. It was their time now. ‘Come here, you stupid bitch.’

I sucked in a gutful of air, rushed forward and lunged at the bird, missed, lunged again and gathered it upside down in a tangle of bones and limbs and claws and feathers. It snapped at my nose, ear, eyebrow, drew blood. The chicks scattered, reformed, clicking and squealing an infantile rendition of their mother’s noise. I turned and threw the goose into my yard. The chicks followed, drawn along in a frantic row by some instinctive fishing line. I slammed the gate closed, ran up the yard and grabbed a towel that had been hanging on the verandah rail, leaving the gun sitting on the step.

On the way to the vet, the big bird and her chicks stuffed into a cardboard box, the squealing got to me. It was a heartbreaking distress siren. I yelled, ‘Jesus, shut up, woman!’

I guess her name was Woman from that moment on.

In the sterile light of the vet’s office, the bird seemed smaller somehow, peering from the bottom of the box at the man who had opened the door for me. She and the chicks were revealed united, a panting mound of crooked feathers in the dark. They were all silent now. I stood back so the vet couldn’t smell my breath, but from the disdain on his face as he’d watched my hack parking job and my bare sandy feet coming up the drive I was fairly sure he had me pegged. I folded my arms and tried not to take up too much of his tiny examination room with my hulk. The vet didn’t seem to have recognised me yet, so I took a chance and spoke up as he lifted the struggling Woman out of the box, wincing as she snapped at his collar.

‘She can’t walk on that foot there,’ I said.

‘Yep. Looks fractured. This wing too.’

I watched as he folded the goose into her natural shape, reassembling the barely contained terror-mess that she was until her feet were beneath her thick, round frame and her wings lay flat against her sides. The bird looked around the room, black eyes big and wild. The vet squeezed her gently all over, lifted her tail and looked at her fluffy rear.

‘So I’ll just leave her with you, I guess?’ I clapped in summation, startling the bird.

‘Well, that’s up to you, Mr …?’

‘Collins,’ I lied.

‘That’s up to you, Mr Collins, but you’re aware we don’t have the resources for unpaid treatment here?’

‘Uh, no. I wasn’t aware.’

‘No, we can’t treat this animal without compensation.’

I scratched my head. ‘I found her, though.’

‘Yes,’ the vet agreed.

‘Well, I mean, she’s not mine. Doesn’t belong to me.’

‘You’ve said.’ The vet nodded.

‘So that’s not my goose.’ I pointed to Woman, tried to tighten up my slurred speech in case that was why I was being misunderstood. ‘Neither are they.’ I pointed at the chicks. ‘They’re … dumped, I suppose. Abandoned. Don’t you people rescue abandoned animals?’

‘We people?’

‘Vets.’

He gave me a long stare. ‘This is not a native Australian goose. This is an Anser. A domesticated goose. It’s an introduced species in this country. I’m afraid a wildlife rescue wouldn’t treat it either.’

‘Well, what will you do with her?’ I asked. ‘If I just leave her here with you?’

The vet stared again. I blinked under the fluorescent lights. Their gentle humming filled the room like gas.

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Well, okay. This is a business, I s’pose. You can’t just go around rescuing everything for free.’ I took out my wallet and flipped through the red and blue notes there. ‘How much is it to fix a broken goose?’

‘It’s a lot, Mr Collins,’ the vet said, squeezing Woman again around the base of her long, lean neck.

Seven hundred dollars later I drove home trembling and sick and the new owner of a family of domestic geese. It wasn’t the fact that I now had exactly fifty-nine dollars to my name that gave me the shakes. The vet had noticed the name on my credit card was Conkaffey, not Collins. It’s an unusual name. People don’t forget it. And it had only been a month since it was all over the national news. I’d watched his face harden. Watched the lines around his mouth deepen, and then his eyes begin to lift. I grabbed the box of birds and left before I could see the look on his face.

I was sick of that look.

1

I didn’t know Sean was there until his shadow fell over me. I jolted, grabbed my gun. I’d fallen asleep in my usual place on the porch, spread out against the wall on an old blanket. For a moment I thought an attack was coming.

‘This is a sorry sight,’ my lawyer said. The morning light was already blazing behind him.

‘You look like an angel,’ I said.

‘What are you doing sleeping out here?’

‘It’s glorious,’ I groaned, stretched. It was true. The hot nights on the porch behind the mosquito netting were like a dream. The roll of distant thunder. Kids laughing, lighting fires on the faraway bank. The old blanket was about as thick as the mattress I’d had in segregation.

Sean looked around for a chair on which to place his expensively fabricked backside. When he didn’t see one he went to the step, put the coffees he’d been carrying and the bag on his elbow on the wood and started brushing off a spot. Even in the Cairns humidity there was some silk in his ensemble, as always. I sat up and joined him, scratched my scalp awake. I’d placed Woman and her young in the cardboard box turned on its side in a corner of the porch, a door made out of a towel. The big goose hissed at the sound of us from behind the towel and Sean whipped around.

‘Don’t tell me –’

‘It’s a goose,’ I said. ‘Anser domesticus.’

‘Oh, I thought it was a snake.’ The lawyer gripped at his tie, flattened and consoled it with strokes. ‘What the hell have you got a goose for?’

‘Geese, actually. It’s a long story.’

‘They always are with you.’

‘What are you doing up here? When did you get here?’

‘Yesterday. I’m heading to Cairns, so I thought I’d stop by. Got a sexual assault defendant who’s jumped bail. I’m going to try to talk him back down. Everybody flees north.’

‘If you’ve got to hide, it’s better to do it where it’s warm.’

‘Right.’ Sean looked at me. ‘Look, good news, Ted. Not only have I brought my favourite client a delightful care-package, but as of this morning your assets are officially defrosted.’

The white-haired man handed me a plastic bag of goodies. Inside were a couple of paperbacks and some food items. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about my fridgeless state. There was an envelope of forms as thick as a dictionary in the bag. He took one of the coffees and handed it to me. It smelled good, but it wasn’t hot. There wasn’t anything at all within twenty minutes’ drive of the house, certainly nowhere that made coffee. It didn’t matter. The scary forms and the cold coffee couldn’t possibly dampen my joy at seeing Sean. There were about twenty-one million people in Australia who believed I was guilty of my crime. And one silk-clad solicitor who didn’t.

‘I imagine there’s something in that envelope from Kelly,’ I said.

‘Adjustments to the divorce settlement. Again. Semantic stuff. She’s stalling.’

‘It’s almost as though she wants to stay married to me.’

‘No. She just wants to watch you wriggle.’

I sipped the coffee and looked at the marshlands. It was flat as glass out there, the mountains on the other side blue in the morning haze.

‘Any sign of …?’ I cleared my throat.

‘No, Ted. No custody inclusions. But she doesn’t have to rush, she can do that any time.’

I stroked my face. ‘Maybe I’ll grow a beard,’ I said.

We considered the horizon.

‘Well, look at you. I’m proud of you,’ Sean said suddenly. ‘You’re a single, handsome, thirty-nine-year-old man starting all over again with a rental house and a few too many pets. You’re not really that much worse off than a lot of guys out there.’

I snorted. ‘You’re delusional.’

‘Serious. This is your opportunity for a do-over. A clean slate.’

I sighed. He wasn’t convincing either of us.

‘So are they guard geese?’ he asked, changing the subject.

I had to think for a moment what he meant.

‘The Nazis used geese to guard their concentration camps,’ he explained.

‘That so?’

‘Can I take a look?’

I waved. He approached the box cautiously, squatted and lifted the towel with manicured fingers. He wore houndstooth socks. Probably alpaca. I heard Woman squeal from the gloomy depths. Sean laughed.

‘Wowsers,’ he said.

‘All still alive?’ I asked.

‘Looks like it.’ Sean glanced at me. ‘You looking for work?’

‘Not yet. Too soon.’

The little geese pipped and shuffled around in the box. Claws on cardboard. He left them alone.

‘Would you do me a favour?’ Sean said.

‘Probably.’

‘Would you check out a girl in town named Amanda Pharrell?’

‘Would I check out a girl?’ I looked at him, incredulous.

‘A woman,’ Sean sighed and gave me an apologetic smile. ‘Will you pay a visit to a woman in town?’

‘Who is she?’

‘Just a woman.’ Sean shrugged.

‘What do I want to visit her for?’

‘You’re full of questions. Stop asking questions. Just do what I tell you. She’ll be good for you, that’s all. Not to date. Just to meet.’

‘So it’s not romantic in any way.’

‘No,’ Sean said.

‘Then what the hell is it?’

‘Jesus, Ted,’ he laughed, before repeating an adage he’d used many times during my trial prep. ‘I’m your lawyer. Don’t ask me why. Just do it.’

I made no commitment.

We sat for a while talking about what he was doing in Cairns and how long he’d stay. Sean was sweating through his linen trousers. His poreless nose was burned already by the sneaky tropical sun, slowly cooking the unwary Sydney man through the wet air. I’d managed a nut-brown tan just trudging around the property for a month, walking to the nearest shops to buy Wild Turkey. I hoped I’d fit in eventually. That I’d grow safely unrecognisable from the man who had graced the cover of the Telegraph for weeks at a time, the broad-shouldered ghoul in a suit hanging his head outside the courthouse, pale from jail. A beard might do it, I thought. And time. I’d need plenty of time.

2

Here’s what I remember. And it’s a lie. It’s a composite memory, built from things I actually remember, stuff I heard during my trial, what I read in the paper and things whispered to me in my jail cell while I was on remand. Some bits and pieces I’m sure come from my nightmares – it’s possible that the storm wasn’t so foreboding, or her eyes so big and pretty. But the memory of those fatal moments is impossibly clear. More fabrication than history. The narrative is woven from many colourful strings. It cannot be snapped now, even if small fibres over the years will part and coil away. I believe it. Even if I know it isn’t true.

She was standing by the side of the road, exactly in line with the road barrier markers, which weren’t that much shorter than her. She was thirteen. She looked ten. The girl was so pale, and her hair was so doused in flaming afternoon sunlight coming through the clouds that she almost became one of those markers; a white sentry beside the isolated highway, still as stone. I didn’t see her at first. I saw the bus stop and the well-worn tracks of the great vehicles in the dry mud. I slowed, turned off the highway and pulled in to the bus stop area, parking my car somewhere between ten and fifteen metres from the girl.

A blue Hyundai Getz drove past on the highway going south, carrying Marilyn Hope, 37, and her daughter Sally, 14. They would testify to witnessing my car pull off the highway ‘suddenly’ and park ‘close’ to the girl. It was 12.47 pm. Sally Hope testified to the exact time I pulled off the road because she glanced at the clock in the car as they went by, and she remembered calculating that they had thirteen minutes to get to her dance lesson.

I got out of the car and spotted the pale girl standing there for the first time. She was looking at me, her pink Pokémon backpack sitting on the ground beside her.

My first thought was: Where did she come from?

My second thought was: Fix the noise.

The fishing rod had been tapping against the back window of my Corolla. I opened the back left-hand door of the car, climbed halfway in, and pulled the rod and the tackle box towards me across the seat so that the handle of the fishing rod slid down into the gap behind the front passenger seat, pulling the tip of the rod away from the window.

A red Commodore drove past on the highway going north, carrying Gary Fisher, 51. Gary was the third witness. He would testify to seeing my car parked by the girl, the back passenger-side door open. The door closest to the girl.

I spotted my car insurance renewal notice, open and crumpled, in the mess of papers and takeaway containers on the floor behind the driver’s seat. I picked up the pale green paper and examined it, still half-in, half-out of the door.

Truck driver Michael Lee-Reynolds, 48, drove past on the highway going south. Witness number four. He’d back up Gary’s claim of seeing me parked by the girl, the back passenger door open. A tall, broad-shouldered man fitting my description, halfway in, halfway out of the back seat.

I leaned out of the vehicle, righted myself, and tucked the insurance notice into the pocket of my jeans. I looked at the girl. She was still watching me. A light rain had begun to fall and it was caught by the gentle breeze, tiny droplets misting all around her in the sunlight like tiny golden insects. She kicked the dirt with her shoe and played with the belt loops of her jeans, then turned away. She was a thin girl. That’s about all I would genuinely remember about her, all I would tell the police I remembered in my initial interrogations. She’d been thin, bony, and white. The rest of my recollections of the girl who would ruin my life I would fill in from photographs at the trial. I’d see her big teeth in ‘before the attack’ pictures. The way her nose crinkled when she smiled.

I stood beside the highway on that terrible day and glanced at the dark purple horizon beyond the trees as I closed the car door.

‘Some pretty heavy rain coming,’ I said.

A red Kia drove past going south, carrying sisters Jessica and Diana Harper, 34 and 36 respectively. Witnesses five and six testified that they’d seen me talking to the girl. They were unable to agree whether my back left door was open or shut. It was 12.49 pm.

‘Yeah,’ the girl said.

‘Your bus coming soon?’ I asked.

‘In a minute,’ she said and smiled. Crinkled her nose. Or maybe she didn’t. I don’t know anymore.

‘All right,’ I said. Two more cars full of witnesses drove past, uncertain, between them, if when I waved at the girl it was with my right hand, palm flat, facing towards her, in a ‘goodbye’ type of gesture, or if in fact I was beckoning her, left hand up, palm open and turned towards me, in a ‘come here’ type gesture. Testimony about the exact nature of the ‘goodbye’/‘come here’ gesture would last three days.

All of them would agree, in the end, that I made some sort of gesture while I was standing by the back passenger door of my car. The door closest to the girl.

I walked around the front of my car, got into the driver’s seat, started it, and drove away. I didn’t look back.

At 12.52 pm, the girl’s bus drove past. The exact time would be recorded on the vehicle’s GPS. The Pokémon backpack was on the ground, the driver and passengers all agreed.

But there was no girl.

Claire Bingley was abducted from the bus stop at Mount Annan, on the edge of the highway, that Sunday afternoon. She was driven to a patch of bush about five minutes away along dusty back roads dividing cattle farms and vacant lots. In the dark of the woods, she was beaten, brutally raped and then strangled until she lost consciousness. Her attacker must have thought she was dead. But with the unexplainable tenacity and physical resilience possessed by some children, the girl, against all odds, didn’t die. Claire lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the bush around her for several hours, terrified that her attacker was nearby. Night fell and then the horizon lit again. The girl wandered out of the bush and walked in a zombie-like daze to the highway, reappearing some ten kilometres south of where she’d vanished. It was about six o’clock the next morning. Claire had been missing for seventeen hours.

An old man driving to Razorback to help his son move house spotted her crouched at the roadside, nude. Her face was so bloody he’d thought at first she was wearing a red mask. Her throat was so damaged she couldn’t explain what had happened to her.

Social media, by this time, was well into a frenzy that had begun the previous evening, about three hours after the girl disappeared. The eight o’clock news updates picked it up, right between The Project and MasterChef. The whole country saw it. Her parents whipped up the panic until it was on all news networks, and a quickly designed missing poster of Claire was shared online eight hundred thousand times, in places as far away as San Francisco. Claire had been abducted. They knew it. The disappearance was totally uncharacteristic of their daughter. Claire’s parents knew in their hearts that something terrible had happened. They were right.

The first time a suspect was ever mentioned was in the comments section of one of the social media posts. Under a picture of Claire, plastered with pleas to share the image of the missing child around, one of the drivers who had been on the highway that day wrote ‘I think I saw the guy.’

That guy was me.

3

I walked to the corner shop in the rain. It’s like that in Cairns sometimes. It will begin to rain without warning, hammering downward like bullets, and there will be no shelter on the road, a strip of bare earth between stretches of yellow sugar cane six metres high, running for kilometres, the walls of a hidden city. Grasshoppers in every earthly colour sprang and danced on the hot dirt in joy. Hundreds of swallows lined the sagging wires. I inhaled steam and watched the cloud bank pass overhead for an hour, plodding slowly.

It wasn’t that I’d chosen Crimson Lake as my hideaway by throwing a dart at a map. I’d simply headed north from Sydney with my belongings in the car and panic at the back of my throat, certain only that I couldn’t stay where I was, and with some vague notion that I’d stop running when I felt safe, when people stopped recognising me. The five or six days I’d spent in Sydney after I’d been released from prison had been a cat-and-mouse game with the press, who hung around any hotel I stayed in, annoying the owners until they threw me out on the street. Kelly wouldn’t have me at the house without a police escort, so I’d only been able to go home briefly to gather some things. The city people were fuming. I was being talked about on every television channel. Every radio station. I was on the front cover of every newspaper. I hardly ate. Half the times that I ducked into a fast food restaurant to grab something, the counter staff recognised me. The other half, I left without ordering anything, too afraid that they would.

Things were easier in the small towns I stopped in heading north. The more remote the location, the less people seemed to mind each other’s business.

When I got to Crimson Lake, not only were people disinterested in ‘city news’, but I seemed to have found a region stolen from the hands of time, a slice of bare-bones civilisation only just managing to fight back the rainforest trying to swallow it whole. Moss and vines grew on every surface they could manage. Along the rivers, broken-down houses with yawning doorways squatted in the bush, peering out, not a brick or patch of wood that composed them showing through their cloaks of lush leaves. This was a town where the bad things about a person’s life might be eaten up. The constant dampness, the regular rains, the rivers and lakes that swelled and grabbed at the roadsides could wash away histories, cleanse sins. It was a place that wanted to consume itself; a warm, green abyss. I fell into its arms.

The house I found was on the edge of the lake for which the town was named, a wide glassy mirror nestled in the tangled wetlands. The owners of the house had acquired it from an inheritance, but were too old themselves to go and live in it. It had been forgotten for years. When I’d been taken to view the property, I’d stood on the porch and looked out across the lake. The cane farmers had been back-burning on the distant shore and a heavy sun had been struggling through the smoke, a red eye making bloody patterns on the water.

Now, in sodden jeans, I stood for a while on the porch of my nearest store, examining Crimson Lake community notices. Chicken feed and wire for sale. Mobile butcher. Guitar lessons and pool cleaning services. There was a six-month-old funeral notice for a woman who’d died in a car accident. Teresa Miller, dearly missed mother and wife. A bell rang above the door as I entered and sat at the row of old, beige computers near the window. There were newspapers in a stack nearby. I avoided them.

I danced around without searching for Amanda Pharrell, the woman Sean wanted me to see, for about ten cents’ worth of internet time. I’d become paranoid about what I googled on my phone, and I didn’t know who she was, what ‘checking her out’ might mean. I hadn’t pestered the old man too much to know what the suggested meeting was about. Sean and I both knew how ridiculous anything romantic would be right now. So if it wasn’t that, then it had to be something I’d rather avoid. Was she a counsellor? Was she someone else who had been falsely accused, dragged off to prison for eight months and then spat back into the world? Was Sean thinking I’d bond with her, that we’d share stories about fighting off rape attempts in the shower block? Was she a sex-offender employment specialist who’d find me a nice, isolated job away from people who might target me for my alleged crime? I couldn’t think of anything that Amanda Pharrell could possibly be that I’d appreciate. The truth was, I didn’t want to interact with anyone unfamiliar, ever again. It was too dangerous.

Nevertheless, I was curious. I plunged in and googled her. There were only newspaper reports on the first page. I brought them up and flicked through them, telling myself I wasn’t interested.

Teen girl killed in Kissing Point tragedy.

One girl survives horror night on mountain top.

Police hunt Kissing Point killer.

Girl arrested in Kissing Point slaying.

I looked through the articles, minimised them, stared at the beach wallpaper on the desktop for a while, the dozens of icons. It was probably the headline font making me sick, I decided, and not the sharp snippets of a story of true terror flashing before me. The familiarity of it all. Teen innocence. Prison bars. Pleas. Families crying into their hands behind polished wooden rails. I rubbed my eyes with my palms, and it was only when I heard the creaking of the chairs on either side of mine that I stopped. The familiar smell of their leather hit me before I saw the two officers who had entered the shop. The squeaking and clanking of belts and buckles. The fattest one, hair plastered to his forehead in dark downward spikes, spoke first.

‘Got to keep myself informed on the town’s happenings, haven’t I, Lou?’

The conversation was apparently being carried on from outside. I let a breath sneak into my lungs and opened a sports page.

‘Don’t think you’ll find much, mate. Pretty slow around these parts,’ Lou replied to his partner. I looked at him in the reflection in my computer screen. Another porker on his way to a heart attack. A tired, peach-white face.

‘Well, that’s how we like it, isn’t it, Lou?’

‘Sure is.’

‘Like our town nice and quiet, nice and safe.’

I wiped at rainwater running down my temple, warm with sweat gathered in my hair. I clicked through to a sports photo gallery. Looked at cricket players, heads down, staring at grass.

‘Got to keep our little old ladies and our itty bitty kiddies feeling happy and safe.’

‘Don’t want no surprises for our people.’

‘That’s right, Steve,’ Lou said. ‘Especially the little kiddies.’ The cop gave up the charade, turned and looked at me. I cleared my throat and maximised the news pages about Amanda Pharrell, clicked them closed. One I hadn’t read flashed on the screen. I hit print and closed it fast as lightning, floundering now, just wanting to be out of the chair but not wanting to have left the house for nothing.

Convicted Killer Opens PI Agency.

I twisted awkwardly out of the double barrier of police bodies, tossed some coins on the counter and grabbed the paper from the printer.

4

The dreams come, and when they do, there’s no struggling out of them.

Morris and Davo in the tiny interrogation room, circling me like sharks. Frankie in the doorway, noncommittal, looking at her fingernails intensely like there was something on them she’d never seen before. Her eyes were anywhere but on me.

My colleagues. My work friends. These guys had drunk beers with me around my greasy backyard barbecue. We’d kicked down doors together. Hit pubs together. Stood guard over protests together, back when we were all patrollies. Frankie and my wife Kelly went out sometimes for coffee, texted each other. Our shared lives were slowly draining away. I was in the chair now, on the wrong side of the interrogation table. They were restless. Guilty. Horrified at the words they were saying, even as they came out of their mouths.

‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’ I pleaded.

‘Sunday afternoon,’ Morris said. ‘Mount Annan. The highway, just up from the tyre and auto place. You were driving your Corolla past there at about 12.45 pm?’

‘Yes. I’ve said this.’

My stomach felt like a brick. It had been three hours, maybe longer, of the same questions around and around and around. What had I done the morning of 10 April? What had Kelly and I said to each other? What had we fought about? How long did the fight last? Which way had I driven when I left the house? What had I seen on my way?

There was no clock, but I could feel the minutes creeping away. Two minutes for a fraud squad guy, Nguyen, to come and collect me from my desk, tell me the chief wanted to see me. Ten minutes of waiting in the chief’s office, alone, until the man himself came and silently led me to the interrogation room. Forty-five minutes in there, alone, sighing, the prank or whatever it was beginning to get on my nerves. An hour is far too long for a joke. It wasn’t my birthday. Was I being promoted? I’d actually sat there, imagined them all hanging bunting in the coffee room, getting an ice-cream cake out of the freezer. I’d known I was wrong when Frankie and Morris and Davo came in. Their faces had been grave. The kind of faces they wore when they did death-o-grams.

‘Can you just tell me what’s happening?’ I pleaded. ‘I don’t understand why I’m here.’

‘Were you driving your car on that day or not, Ted?’

‘Yes, I was driving it! How many times do you want me to –’

‘You didn’t lend it to anyone?’ Little Frankie, who’d only the last few weeks or so trained herself not to cry privately in the locker rooms after crims were mean to her during interrogations. Little Frankie, who got sore hips from the obscenely large police utility belt, the taser hanging off her, oversized, like a water pistol on a toddler. ‘Think, Ted.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Sunday afternoon I went fishing. By myself. I’d had a fight with Kelly and I wanted to be alone. I didn’t lend the car to anyone. I went through Mount Annan. That’s all I did. I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t know when I was on the highway, maybe it was twelve forty-five, maybe it was one o’clock. I don’t know! It was a Sunday, so I wasn’t paying attention to the time. If you tell me what’s happened I can tell you if I saw anything –’

‘Ted, you’re telling us you went fishing. We don’t believe you. We’ve got weather reports. It was pouring fucking rain Sunday afternoon.’

‘No. It poured with rain for about twenty minutes,’ I insisted, sweat rolling down my body. ‘I knew it would clear. You could see it.’

‘Right. You’re a fucking weather man now.’

‘Jesus, Davo.’

‘The fishing story doesn’t fit, Ted. Come on. You didn’t go fishing in the fucking rain.’

‘Look, to be honest –’

‘Oh, you’re going to be honest with us, are you?’

‘The fishing wasn’t really the whole purpose of why I was going,’ I said.

‘What was your purpose, Ted?’

‘I was trying to get away from Kelly,’ I groaned. This was embarrassing. ‘We’d fought. So I wanted to get out of the house. Go somewhere. Do something. Anything.’

‘So you left the house in an aggravated state. Is that right?’

‘Jesus,’ I said, seething. ‘What is going on?’

‘What’s going on is that you’re lying to us.’

‘Why would I lie to you? What’s happened?’

‘No one went with you?’

‘No.’

‘No one saw you.’

‘I just said that.’

‘I’m going to show you some pictures.’ Morris threw himself out of his chair. His energy was painful. I winced as he snatched the envelope up from the shelf beside the door.

‘Can I –’

‘You go fishing often, do you?’

‘I just said –’

‘Answer the question.’

‘Stop fucking interrupting me!’ I was starting to get angry now. My face was hot. I’d suddenly let go of the idea that this was some sort of prank by my colleagues and the seriousness of it, whatever it was, was rushing over me. Making me tremble from my fingers to my elbows, my feet to my knees. I felt cold and fever-hot at once. Morris with his fucking interrupting wasn’t helping. That was the way he talked to crims. Never let them get a word in. Cut them off whenever they open their mouths. Do it for hours, until they explode, until they’d kill someone just to finish a goddamn sentence. ‘I’m trying to answer the que–’

‘Did you park anywhere on the highway near Mount Annan before you reached your destination at Menangle?’ Davo asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I left the house, and went to Menangle. I bought bait at Menangle. At the petrol station.’

‘I’ll ask you again. Think about it carefully.’

‘I don’t need to think about it! I didn’t go anywhere that afternoon but Menangle. Was there an accident? Was someone hurt?’

‘Why are you asking if someone was hurt?’ Morris, with a picture in his hands, using the edge to score his wrist, an anxious gesture, making the skin run bright pink with false suicide lines.

‘I’m just –’

‘Did you park at a bus stop at Mount Annan?’

‘No.’

‘I suggest that you did. I put it to you, Ted, that at approximately 12.45 pm last Sunday, you parked in a bus zone at Mount Annan and exited your vehicle. Why are you lying to us?’

I was visibly shaking now. We could all see it.

‘No, no. Wait. Yes! Yes, wait, I remember.’ I laughed, absurdly.

‘You remember?’

‘I did stop,’ I admitted. ‘I stopped at a bus stop. You’re right. My rod was in the back. It was tapping against the back window. I stopped and shifted it away from the window, and then I got back in the car and drove off.’

‘So you admit now that you stopped off on the side of the highway at the 372 bus stop at approximately 12.45 pm?’ Davo and Morris glanced gravely at each other.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re changing your story.’

I thumped the table. Frankie jolted in the doorway.

‘Tell me what fucking happened!’

Morris put a picture of the child, Claire Bingley, on the table in front of me.

I woke drenched in sweat on the porch.

It was dark. The crocodiles were barking.

I was in prison for 241 days. The morning I was arrested, I kissed my wife and infant daughter goodbye and drove in to work, stopping for toast and coffee at the station cafe before I ascended the escalator to the third floor of New South Wales Police headquarters on Charles Street in Parramatta. It was overcast. Light breeze ruffling the hair of the ladies out on the smokers’ balcony. Exactly a week had passed since Claire Bingley had reappeared on the roadside after her ordeal in the bush near Mount Annan. I’d seen the case on the news, but no one in my department had been talking about it. I was on drug squad. My head was buried in the mobile phone chatter of a coke-importing Lebanese gang who may or may not have been waiting for a new round of drugs to go through customs. Davo, Morris, Little Frankie and I had been watching their activity for a couple of months, trying to decide when we should raid them. It was all pretty standard stuff.

The coffee and toast would be the last non-state-issued meal I’d have for months. I started noticing some whispering and some weird looks from people around the station at about ten. At eleven o’clock Davo, Morris and Frankie were called away to interview room five. I wondered why I hadn’t been asked to go with them, but I was on the phone at the time and couldn’t ask. Just before lunch, another colleague, Nguyen from the fraud squad, came to my desk and told me that the station chief wanted me to go to his office. He didn’t say why.

I couldn’t bring myself to eat during the fourteen hours of interrogation I endured. Davo, Morris and Frankie started the interrogation. It was a conflict of interest, but my friends were so upset by the whole situation that no one stopped them barging into the room and questioning me upfront. I guess everyone thought they had that right. A couple of hours in, when they weren’t getting the answers they wanted, they handed me over to homicide detectives because the charges, when they would eventually be drawn up, would include attempted murder. I slept that night in the cells at my own police station, after hours standing by the slot in the door trying to get the attention of officers I knew walking by, trying to get some answers. Everyone was ordered not to speak to me. In a single day I’d gone from friend to enemy.

I was never acquitted of Claire Bingley’s rape and attempted murder.

That might have been the hardest part of it all. I was committed to stand trial, which told the world that the Director of Public Prosecutions thought that there was enough evidence against me that I might be convicted. Then, halfway through the trial, the DPP withdrew the charges, stating that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to satisfy a jury properly instructed beyond a reasonable doubt. They weren’t saying I didn’t do it. They were just saying they’d changed their minds – they didn’t want to keep forging ahead with a trial with the evidence they had, and risk having me acquitted, never to be re-charged with the crime again. The charges were effectively being set aside, maybe to one day re-emerge when the evidence against me was stronger.

I didn’t know if anyone was still investigating Claire’s case. I was no longer a cop, and none of my old friends had ever spoken to me again. I woke up every day knowing that this could be the day I was rearrested and send back to prison.

There’s only one way to survive on the inside. Total physical and emotional submission. It’s the most efficient way to spend time. The only way to remain sane.

The inmate follows the routine. He reads the orientation handbook and acts according to it in all situations. He keeps his cell and uniform immaculate, his papers filed, his interactions with staff and other inmates courteous and professional. Any situation that arises, from registry to rape, is outlined in the rules of the prison. So the inmate is never required to enact his own judgement.

When a fight breaks out, for example, the inmate’s responsibilities are clear. He immediately drops to the ground, places his hands on the back of his head, fingers interlocked, and waits for further instruction. During a routine cell inspection, the inmate remains quiet, follows the directions of staff and makes available all personal belongings for review. The inmate stays up to date with regulation changes throughout the prison, and is accountable for his actions in accordance with changed or updated behavioural guidelines. Ignorance is no excuse.

There’s comfort in being organised. Up to date. Judgement free. The inmate becomes a gear in the ever-expanding prison machine. He fits and turns, a laser-cut cog.

It’s when you let your organisation slip that you start grinding, creating sparks. Some people come to prison and make a point of being a grinding cog as long as they can. But nobody lasts long that way.

I’d let myself slip since I arrived at Crimson Lake. I’d been free just over two months and didn’t have anyone writing my rules anymore. I’d taken up the drink, rented a beaten-up property on the edge of nowhere, and checked out of society. Sometimes I didn’t shower for days. Sometimes I just didn’t eat. Forgot all about it, until I was ravenous. I was tumbling, wheeling. But now was the time to cut the bullshit. Unpack my things. Stop sleeping on a blanket like a dog.

I sat on the porch in the warm morning light, took out my phone, and found the number for a furniture store in Cairns.

I didn’t order a television set. I was afraid I might see myself.

Beneath the house, a rusty Victa mower had been left by the previous owners, so I fired it up and tackled the lawn. By mid-afternoon I was drenched in sweat and the geese were traumatised, but I’d reduced every inch of the property around the house to tiny spikes of lush green carpet. I left Woman on the porch and gathered the little ones up in my hands, laughing as their webbed feed pedalled frantically between my damp fingers. They fell to pecking and plodding over the lawn. I went to Woman and tried to pat her head. She hissed and snapped at me. I didn’t take it personally.

By nightfall, I had a washing machine, a fridge full of food, a freshly made bed and a nice cane lounge for the porch. It wasn’t much, but it was all I’d proven to desire in my time at the house. I’d boarded up the front windows and swept away the glass. The geese snuggled together in their cardboard box for the night. I pulled the towel down in front of their box and stood looking with satisfaction at my lawn. Blessed organisation. I’d checked off the regulations of my own new life. Anything that came at me now would surely be covered by the handbook.

5

The newspaper article about Amanda Pharrell mentioned an office in Beale Street. I washed my face, brushed my teeth and arrived at the office at eight o’clock, wearing a neatly ironed light cotton shirt and grey trousers. It was already too humid for the town’s resident wild dogs, who lounged under trees by the Crimson Lake Hotel.

When I tried to decide what this was all about, I came up blank. Sean’s reasons for asking me to see Amanda were vague – the lawyer had learned during my trial that I over-worried about the small stuff and it was easier when he just told me what to do. I could only think that Sean had directed me towards this Amanda character because she was an ex-inmate, like me, and maybe she was having some trouble going about life as a pariah. Maybe he’d been involved in her case, way back when. Maybe he thought the two of us would have tips for each other on how to get through the day when nine out of ten people in the world would like to see you dead. Maybe, if she was doing worse than me (which I could hardly believe was possible), I might be spirited on in my own recovery and the two of us could get through it together.

Lying on my new bed the evening before, I’d been googling stuff about infant geese and read that if an injured baby bird won’t eat, it’s sometimes helpful to put it in the same box as another bird its age, so that it can be led by example. One orphaned bird cheers the other one on to survive. Maybe Sean thought that two public enemies were better than one. I didn’t know.

My punctuality was a mistake. I stood outside the small converted weatherboard house crammed between the bank and corner store, and looked at the drawn blinds. I thought I heard meowing behind the door. I took the article I’d printed about Amanda from my back pocket and examined it, checked the address. I found myself reading the words again, incredible as they were.