Larrimah, page 15
‘We want to know what happened to our mate,’ they tell us. ‘We want justice.’
After the break, we all settle back into the air-con and a man we’ve never seen before is called into the courtroom. He’s bald on top with a large, white moustache that droops down both sides of his mouth and threatens to spill off his chin. His short-sleeved button-down shirt is checked with bright orange, pink and purple, and his rust-coloured shorts look too small for someone appearing in court.
His name is Maurice Darby and for four and a half years he occupied the strange hinterland of being both Paddy’s friend and Fran’s employee. Maurice was Bobbie’s replacement and Owen’s predecessor. His duties ranged from preparing pies and pastries to mowing the lawn and doing the teahouse dishes.
He lived in the bungalow next to the kitchen, and every day, around 4 pm, he’d see Paddy drive his quad bike home from the pub. Once Paddy pulled up around the back of his place, Maurice would jump the fence and go in for a beer.
The questions move on so quickly you could easily miss it, but it’s there for all to hear: from Fran’s teahouse it’s impossible to not see, or at least hear, Paddy come and go between his home and the pub.
But there’s no time to linger on this because Maurice is straight into Paddy and Fran’s relationship. Mr Currie asks if Maurice knew about the ‘kangaroo incident’—not the one just before Paddy disappeared, the one that boomeranged between the two properties.
‘Yes,’ says Maurice.
‘There was a telephone box on the corner, which is no-man’s land. And at some stage during the evening a large kangaroo was knocked over by a road train or a ute and it’s … gone to no-man’s land.’
According to Maurice, Fran immediately accused Paddy of dumping it there and demanded Maurice throw the carcass over Paddy’s fence. He told her to do it herself. And she did. The next night, when Maurice was having beers with Paddy, the subject came up.
‘Paddy said, “I’ve got a kangaroo over my fence.” I said, “Yep, Fran threw it there.” So he said, “What am I going to do with it?” Now, if you look at the back of the teahouse, your Honour, it’s got louvre windows. It’s easy to lift a couple of louvre windows up and back the rear end of the kangaroo in. And the first thing that Fran does is turn the lights on and then turn the oven on. So the first thing that she’s cooking with the oven backed onto the wall is the kangaroo’s bottom that’s been dead for a couple of days.’ Maurice finishes with a casual: ‘Now, that created a little bit of drama.’
This is a version of a version of the kangaroo story we’ve heard before, but in the one we were told, Fran paid Maurice to chuck the kangaroo over Paddy’s fence because she couldn’t physically do it. Someone told us Maurice then used the cash to buy him and Paddy some beer, which they drank while plotting to throw the marsupial under Fran’s kitchen window. Which version is true, we can’t know.
Even though Maurice maintained friendships with both Fran and Paddy throughout his teahouse tenure, he left the job on bad terms. Maurice says he wants to set the record straight.
‘In fact, I wasn’t sacked,’ Maurice tells the inquest. ‘I left her in a bit of a quandary … Fran was getting a little bit greedy and a little bit money-hungry at that stage towards customers and the way she was preparing food … She was starting to rip people off and I said, “Fran, the time’s come for me to move on. You can’t keep telling people they’re homemade pies when you buy them at Coles/Woolies and put the top back on and charge them at thirteen dollars fifty when it’s costing you seventy-five cents a pie.”’
Despite all his other revelations, this feels like Maurice’s defining speech. The reason he came here. With that done, he’s dismissed.
We’ve almost forgotten about Richard until he walks in. He talks about the fight he witnessed between Owen and Paddy right before Paddy disappeared. ‘I couldn’t hear the exact words, but I could hear the raised voices and whatnot,’ Richard says. ‘And that’s all the incident involved at that stage.’ He says that at the pub later that day, when Paddy fronted up for lunch and beers, Richard asked him what happened.
‘I said to Paddy, “Hey, mate, you know, what’s going on up there?” So he told me about the fact that Owen had come out and told him to shut his fuckin’ dog up or he’d shut it up for him, and, as I said in my statement, I’ve said it a couple of different ways, but essentially he said, “You shut your mouth, you old cunt, or I’ll take your knees out from under you.”’
Then he denies any conflict with Paddy, says he ‘never had cross words with the man’. Never had cross words with anyone in Larrimah, he says.
‘How did you get on with Mark and Karen Rayner?’ Mr Currie asks.
‘Well, I reckon I picked Karen thieving out of the till so I confronted her about that behind the bar and she unfortunately took great umbrage to that and decides that she needs to completely walk out of the pub and have nothing more to do with the pub at all, even though she was morally contracted and bound to continue on.’
‘So you wouldn’t regard that as cross words?’
‘That’d be cross words, cross words with Karen, yes, for sure, yep.’
Anyone else? Mr Currie asks. Then Richard confesses he’d also had a run-in with someone who pulled up out the front of the pub recently. Richard went out and told him to get fucked.
Richard is asked about guns (yes, the pub owns one—they use it to shoot eagles and hawks, which they feed to the snakes and crocodile), drugs (he’s smoked a bit of weed over the years and was using OxyContin after his accident, but nothing now, except beer) and his dogs (no, they never interacted with Kellie). On the subject of the disappearance, he says he’s sure Paddy didn’t get lost. ‘I mean, this guy is an experienced bushman, you know. He’s not going to go out there and get lost, and even if he had have gone and tripped over a log, broke his leg, whatever, perished, you know, dehydration, bit by a snake, not only would the hawks have found him, the search would have found him. And where’s the dog?’
‘Now there are some people in Larrimah that think you might have had something to do with it,’ Mr Currie suggests.
‘Well, they would be goddamn fools, wouldn’t they? Paddy was my mate. Why would I?’
‘One of the suggestions is that perhaps you were a little bit jealous of the fact that Paddy seemed to be 2IC at the pub, and not yourself?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Another suggestion is that sometimes, either under the influence of alcohol or something else, you’d become a little bit erratic?’
‘Yeah, I’m hearing a few stories about this. Apparently, I yell out and that sort of thing, and I’d like to know what it is if I’ve actually done this, apart from going off my head [the other day]. I very, very seldom even drink too much. I have a couple of times …’ Richard trails off and Mr Currie asks what drinking too much in Larrimah looks like.
‘Drinking too much in Larrimah would be when you are losing control, you get drunk and you hit a customer, you know?’
Whether or not he was involved in Paddy’s disappearance, Richard was still front line on Paddy’s last night at the pub. He was the one serving the booze and hearing the stories. And that is important.
‘In the lead-up to Paddy’s disappearance, did you notice anything different about him?’ Mr Currie asks.
‘No, nothing. Just Paddy being Paddy, every day, the same thing, always happy, always telling good stories, and, yeah, just a good bloke to sit down and have a beer with, and he used to be fantastic with the customers, you know, just every customer that came in he’d greet them.’
‘Good for the pub?’
‘Absolutely, yeah, and good to watch too, you know, he was just a good man to have around.’
15
A rejected gardening book, a lover (not a fighter) and a case of osteoarthritis
Fran arrives the next day looking neat, if a little casual, in white shorts and a white singlet with a pale, striped blouse over the top. But it’s obvious she is out of her comfort zone. Plus, she’s the first person to bring legal representation: barrister Tamzin Lee.
When she first speaks her voice trembles, but after sharing her fifty-year legacy of Territory pie and scone-baking, Fran warms to the crowd. Mr Currie does his best to wrangle the dialogue into something approaching a chronology, but it’s clear he’s not the one steering the ship as Fran takes the packed courtroom audience on one sharp left turn after another.
Fran outlines the full history of her fractured relationship with Paddy, including the story almost nobody talks about: how they were not always enemies. She says she kept an eye on Paddy after his triple-bypass operation and would take meals across the road for him, or invite him in for a cuppa. But establishing how long the friendship lasted—or, at least, the neighbourliness; Fran won’t call it friendship—isn’t easy. In part, because Fran only wants to talk about the fallout, and in part because it’s hard for her to give the dates and times. Mr Currie establishes that Fran met Paddy at Daly Waters thirty years ago and she and Paddy probably had about five good years at Larrimah. And then, as Mr Currie puts it with characteristic politeness, ‘things went … sideways’.
To establish how sideways it all went, Mr Currie reads extracts from his pile of papers, which amount to a lowlight reel of civic dispute. Fran, when she can, adds or comments. She’s not evasive so much as easily diverted, but the effect is much the same: she doesn’t always answer the questions—and the answers she does give are often to questions that are not being asked. Mr Currie attempts, at least half a dozen times, to pinpoint a specific year something happened. ‘When was it, to your recollection?’ he asks. And then, ‘How long …?’, and ‘But when …?’ and ‘I’ve just been trying to work out when approximately that was …?’ He is unflappable. ‘But the question I want to know the answer to is, when approximately did that start to happen?’ His persistence pays off and the details begin to emerge.
Probably, the trouble started with a large red umbrella. It was bought on a Friday to spruce up the front of the teahouse, and sometime the next night, it disappeared. The police report about the incident reads: ‘The umbrella was new and cost $200. Taken overnight 22 May 2010. Believes Moriarty has taken it.’ Police drove the 75-odd kilometres to Larrimah to speak with Fran, who told them she thought the umbrella was over at Paddy’s house. It was a tip-off that turned out to be partly true. There was a red umbrella at Paddy’s. ‘Members attended Moriarty’s house,’ the report says. ‘He denied any involvement in the stealing of the umbrella and produced an umbrella he owned which was small and old … He did admit that he had heard [Fran] had been accusing him of stealing it from her, so to stir her up he got one of the red umbrellas from the pub and put it on the table out the front of his house to get back at her for allegations she was making.’
A little over a month later, July 2010, ‘Fran attended Katherine [police] front counter to report the theft of a quantity of books and folders containing memorabilia of the Northern Territory and Katherine area from her teahouse. She suspects that Moriarty is the offender. She believes this because he watched her leave her premises when she went out.’ But the police report goes on to say that when Fran got home to Larrimah, she called the station again to say she’d changed her mind—maybe tourists had taken the items, after all.
‘No, no, no,’ Fran says when the file is read out in court. ‘That’s definitely wrong.’ She tells the inquest she followed scraps of evidence over the road to Paddy’s place.
It looks like there was a year-long break in the hostility, then, in July 2011, Fran showed up at the Katherine police station with a petition. She’d been complaining about Paddy threatening tourists and badmouthing the teahouse, but the police couldn’t do much without evidence. So, she’d asked anyone who’d been threatened to write down their contact details and when she had about twenty names, she took it to the cops. ‘She wants something done before something bad happens,’ the report says.
Ten days later, Fran told Mataranka police Paddy had put a glass bottle under a customer’s tyre. Two months after, she accused Paddy of breaking a plastic fitting for the hose connected to her water pump. ‘Members attended,’ the file says, ‘inspected the water pump and found no issue with the pump. It was in good working order. Inspected the tap fitting and found there to be some damage and the rubber O-ring perished inside.’ The complaint was cleared because of insufficient evidence.
Mr Currie moves on with his feud timeline. There was another detente, and this one lasted until March 2013, he says. But then Fran told police Paddy and his dog, Rover, had entered her yard one night. Paddy claimed he was just getting his dog, but police served a trespass notice.
On 13 April 2014, ‘Fran reported Moriarty stalking her and deterring her customers away by his behaviour. Fran alleged Moriarty was sitting in his front yard looking at her teahouse with binoculars and telling customers as they called into her business not to eat there as the food was not very good.’ She told police she planned to get a protection order against Paddy.
Then, a week later, Fran complained to Mataranka police that someone had cut the hose running from the water tank to her teahouse and flooded it; it actually happened three times in two months, she said, but on this occasion she was sure her ex-husband, Bill, was the culprit. Police attended but couldn’t say whether the hose had been cut or just burst with pressure from a kink. And Bill had an alibi—he’d been drinking at the pub all day.
In October 2016, Fran lost the personal violence restraining order hearing against Paddy and was ordered to pay costs.
And then, on 23 September 2017, ‘Fran made a complaint to Mataranka police that Bill Hodgetts, her ex-husband, and Patrick Moriarty had tipped oil over her new plants to kill them. Approximately $500 in value. Believes both of them have destroyed her plants together. Believes their motive was because the settlement with Bill had been through court and he was unhappy with the outcome.’ Police attended and found insufficient evidence to proceed with an investigation.
The timeline of grudges stops a few days before Paddy’s disappearance. The last incident was also the last time Fran saw Paddy: Tuesday, 12 December 2017, the day Paddy threw the second kangaroo into her yard and then looked up and smiled at her. But it’s not the roo prank the inquest is concerned with. It’s what came after.
Owen got back to the teahouse around 4 pm that day, Fran says, but she didn’t tell him about the kangaroo until the next morning, by which time Owen already knew there was roadkill about—he could smell it. Fran was in a hurry to get on the road, so the conversation was short, she tells the inquest. ‘I said, “I’m going to Darwin now,” and I took off.’ But, it turns out, there was a bit more to it than that.
It takes a bit of putting together—Fran doesn’t remember all the details, but Mr Currie has transcripts of her initial police interviews. Fran told police then that she’d made it clear to Owen that Paddy was responsible for the carcass. In response, Owen had told her he’d already had words with Paddy.
‘Did he seem upset?’ Mr Currie asks.
‘Pardon?’
‘Did he seem upset?’
‘No,’ Fran says, quickly. ‘No. Owen’s a very private man. When you talk to him you’d understand what I was saying. No, he didn’t—he was angry because he was upset—well, not that upset angry, but you know.’
‘So he was angry, you say?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would say, yeah. Not grr, grr, but angry upset, you know.’
‘Did it cause you concern that he was angry?’
‘No, no, no. He’s a very private man and no. Didn’t concern me. If it did I wouldn’t have gone away.’
Mr Currie refers to a transcript of Fran’s 30 December police interview. He reads Fran’s statement back to her—she told police she’d said something to Owen before she left: ‘Don’t do anything stupid because I’m going to Darwin and I don’t want to come back and bail you out of jail.’
Mr Currie asks why Fran was worried Owen might do something stupid, but Fran corrects. She wasn’t worried, she says, it was just because he was upset. As far as she knew, that day was the only time Owen and Paddy had spoken to each other. But, as Mr Currie clarifies, Owen did know about the years of trouble with Paddy. She’d told him everything when he came for the interview for the caretaker role.
Was part of Owen’s job to protect her? Mr Currie asks.
‘[Owen wasn’t there to] protect me, [but rather] to help me look after everything and keep everybody off my property, to stop people from doing things to my property … That was it. But not for anybody to hurt anybody.’
‘Okay, I accept that. But the person you wanted help with …’ Mr Currie starts.
‘The only person that had ever helped me is Mr Owen and he’s the only one who’s been honest, hasn’t taken anything, pinched anything. He’s an honest man.’
‘Okay.’
‘An honest man,’ Fran says. It’s like she’s on repeat. Owen wouldn’t accept food, wouldn’t even take a gardening book she’d bought him as a Christmas present. He’s an honest man. She says it over and over. ‘I only wish to God there was more like him around. He’s honest and he’s trustworthy.’
Having failed to pin Fran to a chronology that wasn’t documented via police statements, Mr Currie turns to the matter of her finances. Was it true that she had between $27,000 and $30,000 in someone else’s safe, around the time Bill moved out?
Fran admits she’d given the cash to Bobbie to look after—it was mostly from a Ford station wagon she’d sold for $18,000.
‘So where did that money go?’
‘Into the business and into paying the bills and I bought this car here. I paid it off, you know, monthly.’
Mr Currie clarifies. ‘His Honour heard that the twenty-seven to thirty thousand dollars in cash …’
‘I didn’t have thirty. It was twenty-seven or twenty-five.’
