Larrimah, page 6
He’s made it work by convincing truckie mates to drop things in on their way through and hijacking the occasional plasterer (his sister’s daughter’s boyfriend’s brother) to come do some work for him. ‘I used to be a heavy smoker and drinker and one had to go so I could finish this house, so I gave up smoking to keep drinking,’ he says. ‘They do say you have to have liquid in your body.’
He ushers us through room after room, limping on a strapped knee—he’s waiting for news about a replacement.
‘A lot of people think I’ve spent too much money on it but I haven’t really. I don’t think I have anyhow. Because if you want something to look nice, you have to be prepared to do what you want to do, you know?’
Anyway, he tells us, he doesn’t care what people in town say about the house. Because Larrimah is full of arseholes. That’s also what he told police when they came around asking questions.
Most people faced with what was rapidly turning into a murder investigation wouldn’t begin by telling the police how much they hated the bloke who was missing. But Cookie was not like most people. For a start, he wasn’t wearing pants.
He’d been out bush when he’d heard the news about Paddy. Not long after he got back into town, some cops appeared on his verandah with questions. He did his best to help—not that he knew much. A side effect of being banned from the pub was that, typically, information took a while to reach him.
‘Did you have anything to do with knocking him off?’ the police asked. They probably didn’t ask it quite like that, but that’s how Cookie remembered it.
Cookie was characteristically candid. ‘Sometimes I’ve felt like it, don’t worry about that. I’ll be honest with you. I felt like breaking the guy’s neck, sometimes, but it never happened.’
According to Cookie, Paddy was the kind of bloke who’d cause trouble in an empty house—he was also the reason Cookie had been exiled from the pub.
‘They reckon I stole Mars bars and all this shit and I’ve got sugar diabetes,’ Cookie told police. ‘Why would I want to sit here and eat Mars bars when I’ve got sugar diabetes? That’s why I don’t have sugar in my tea, I’ve just gotta watch what I eat around here.’
Cookie said Paddy lied to everyone about the Mars bar thefts. And he lied about other things. He told everyone he’d been a ringer at Brunette Downs, but Cookie had heard from a few people that Paddy was only the cowboy gardener. Paddy used to edit himself into other people’s stories, too. Once, Lenny had accidentally set fire to a tree, which then crushed Cookie’s car, and Paddy claimed to have been there—even though he’d been spotted in Katherine that day. He was always telling tall tales, Cookie said. They’d had confrontations about it.
‘I said, “You’re a lying arsehole, Paddy, that’s all you are.” I said, “Don’t tell me any more lies, Paddy.” I said, “I’ll finish up smacking you in the head.”’
But there’s a big difference between wanting to do something and doing it. On 16 December 2017, Cookie was out of town so he was quickly ruled out of the investigation.
He did have some theories about what might have happened, though. Paddy had probably been knocked off, he told the police, and the wild pigs would have got into him.
‘There’s not many pigs around here,’ the cops said.
‘There bloody is, further out,’ Cookie replied. He said it with the certainty of a man who’d encountered a lot of animal yarns over the years.
Cookie doesn’t feel weird about living in a town with a potential murderer, but he’s not renovating the house for himself. He plans to sell up, which will leave the town short another resident. His motivation for leaving is ‘because of people’s attitudes’. That, and he’s got a girlfriend back home in Tasmania.
‘She’s a bloody good woman,’ he tells us. Moving her to Larrimah is out of the question, apparently. She came up to stay once, but it didn’t go well.
‘She couldn’t hack it.’ Cookie laughs. ‘She said, “How the bloody hell do you live here?” She didn’t like it much because she couldn’t go to the shops. So I’ve been trying to get this place finished and on the market ’cos we’re not getting any younger. I just want to go home and spend a bit of time with her and bloody go places. And I’m sick of it here. They’re a bunch of lying arseholes.’
Over a second cup of tea, Cookie starts to fill us in on his list of local grudges: it’s approximately half as long as our list of town residents.
Take Barry, for example, over at the pub. Being one of two Barrys in a town of a dozen people has thrown up problems and, on more than one occasion, Cookie’s mail has been opened by the other Barry. Presumably, this is accidental, but Cookie’s not so sure.
‘He steamed a couple of my letters open,’ Cookie says. Barry also ripped open some mail—apparently thinking it belonged to him. ‘I said, “Well, how did he get Barry Sharpe out of Barry Burke? You tell him to fucking leave my mail alone or I’ll rip his head off.” I was pissed off with him, hey.’
Cookie also blames Barry for shutting down the town’s cricket matches, and his contempt extends to Richard. But he’s not offside with the whole town—he drops in on Lenny for a cuppa and would do just about anything for Karl and Bobbie Roth (including mowing their lawn for them, in his undies). He and Bill Hodgetts go to Katherine together sometimes and stop for a beer on the way home.
We ask who else he’s mates with in Larrimah. There’s a long silence.
‘No one.’ It isn’t a sad answer, or a mean one. Cookie just says it like it’s obvious.
What about Fran, we wonder. Are you friends with her?
More silence.
‘No, she’s taboo to me. Have you been over there yet?’ he asks. We confess we haven’t. ‘Well, I dread the day you go over there. We used to be friends, years ago. When you do go, have a look at that pergola out the back of her shop: I built that for her. Never got no thanks, no nothing for it. She’s getting to be bad news lately. She charges sixteen dollars, seventeen dollars for a pie. And anyone who pays that amount of money for a pie has got rocks in their head. ’Cos she makes them and then freezes them. And then she puts them in the microwave … You know what stuff’s like in the microwave,’ Cookie goes on, looking to us for confirmation. ‘You pick a pie up and the arse falls out of it and you finish up getting scalded with hot meat. I’ve had one pie off her, she gave it to me after working for a week on the pergola. It wasn’t even real good. I didn’t like it.’
Cookie tells us there used to be another pie-maker in town. Dianne Rogers—Bobbie Roth’s daughter. She’s long since left, but when she lived in Larrimah Di ran the pub before Barry and Ann, then she bought the caravan park, known as Green Park, and expanded the menu.
‘Di used to make the best pies and pasties and sausages rolls here. Just one of her pasties and pies were a meal. She had bloody everything in them. Geez, they were beautiful. They were beautiful.’ And just like that, Cookie’s face softens with the memory of pies past.
We knew the pies would come up, of course. For people who’ve seen the story of Paddy’s disappearance in the news, the pies are the most salient of all the case details, the image that seems to have stuck in the public imagination. If there’s anything the public likes more than a pie with mushy peas and extra tomato sauce, it’s a pie war.
It’s not easy to pin down the details, and we’re planning to try to get to the bottom of it while we’re here. But in broad brushstrokes, the crux of the historical pastry hostility is this: Fran was working as a cook at the pub and, as she tells it in the media, she put the town on the map with her specialty pies. Eventually she went out on her own, established the teahouse, and strengthened her baked-goods empire, selling pies to stations and businesses in Katherine, as well as travellers going up and down the Stuart.
Even though Larrimah is tiny, at one point it was home to four businesses. When Di began selling homemade pies at Green Park, it was an abrupt end to Fran’s stranglehold on the market, turning Larrimah into a pastry-oligopoly. When Barry took over the pub, he got in on the action, too. Things escalated. Pie-eating clientele are hard to come by in the middle of nowhere, and the obvious way to attract them was with signs. There are stories of billboards being taken down, painted over, moved. People started poaching each other’s customers. Fran made complaints about Di to the Department of Health. By the time Paddy moved to town, it was a full-scale war and he wanted in on it. He erected a sign out the front of his house directing people towards the pies at the pub and started telling tourists pulling up outside the teahouse that they’d get sick if they ate there. ‘Fran has the worst pies,’ he famously told the ABC in 2011. ‘I used to go over there and the dog wouldn’t eat me pie.’
From a distance, it sounds ridiculous, squabbling over something as trivial as a pie. But now we’re in town, we can see up close how hard it is to eke out a living from this forsaken landscape. A few dozen pie sales a week might be the difference between keeping the lights and ovens on over the wet season. In a place where industry is hard to come by, pies aren’t just good money—they’re one of the only ways to make a buck.
There’s a point in the afternoon when we realise Cookie’s pretty much interviewing himself. We’re not the least bit disappointed. There are some diversions to talk about the glory days of the trucking industry, Italian weddings and the kangaroos out the back, which he calls ‘mobile backhoes’. The stories never seem to have an ending and part-way through one incredible tale we find ourselves dragged—completely willingly—into an entirely different one. At one point, Cookie spends close to ten minutes regaling us with a series of escalating snake stories, beginning with a few pythons and some king browns over at Lenny’s shed, and working up to the time he and some bloke called Neil saw a snake the girth of Cookie’s mahogany tree and as long as the highway is wide.
‘Taipans are the worst ones because if they bite you they go straight for the nervous system and they paralyse you,’ he says. ‘Once you hit the nervous system you’re buggered—you can’t walk, you can’t talk, you can’t do nothing. They just sit there and hoe into you.’
It’s yet more evidence of how treacherous the landscape is but nobody in the search party mentioned taipans; we ask Cookie if they travel this far north.
‘You get taipans up here, shit yeah, it’s all blacksoil country.’
We wonder, aloud, whether that’s something that could have happened to Paddy.
‘No, if it had’ve been a snake, he’d have got to the pub or rung up. A snake bite won’t kill you straightaway. Usually you just wrap it up, like with a piece of cloth or something. Some people say you should suck it but they reckon if you’ve got bad teeth the venom gets into your teeth and you’re buggered then, because you’re dead. He never goes anywhere without his hat, anyhow.’
It’s getting late, and Cookie’s supposed to be getting ready to go to the doctor tomorrow.
We wish him luck with the house and ask flat out: what does he think happened to Paddy?
There’s the slimmest of pauses.
‘They’ve got a couple of suspects in town … but it’s like the old saying, you’ve gotta prove it, haven’t you? You’ve gotta prove what they’ve done.’
We knew the accusations would come up—anyone following the case would know about Fran: the pie lady over the road who’d had years of trouble with the missing man. She’d given media interviews in which she was frank about how much she hated Paddy, and colourful in her language. ‘I’ll take an oath on my life going to Katherine and back that I know nothing about the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty,’ she told ABC journalist Leigh Sales. When A Current Affair dropped in, she confessed that she hated Paddy’s guts. ‘But I’m not a fucking killer, I’m too busy to do that.’
Like a bushfire, the whole thing went from ember to inferno quickly. Suddenly everyone had a theory. After a while, it didn’t matter whether there was any truth to it. The story that an eccentric septuagenarian pie-maker had knocked off her neighbour had generated a mythic life of its own.
Everyone in town knew Fran and Paddy weren’t on good terms, and Barry tells us what he thinks happened between them. The story starts light-hearted, full of Barry’s characteristic suspenseful pauses and scratchy laughter. There were a lot of pranks, he tells us. The pair of them, Fran and Paddy, would rile each other up and then Paddy would come over to the pub and everyone would crack a beer and laugh about it.
‘I do know that Paddy had thrown a kangaroo under her window, probably more than once. If there was a dead kangaroo on the road, he’d throw it over her fence. One time, a donkey got run over. Paddy went and cut its penis off and threw that up her driveway.’ Barry laughs so much it becomes a wheeze and it takes him a few attempts before he gets the next sentence out. ‘And from then on Fran’s pies were called donkey dick pies.’
Paddy gave Fran the nickname the ‘Bush Pig’, Barry tells us. ‘And he used to call it to her, to her face. He would say of a morning, when there were customers pulled up on his side of the road, he’d say, “Don’t go over there. She’s going to rob you blind. You can’t eat the food, you’re gonna be sick.” He’d say, “She’s just a dirty old bush pig, don’t go near her.” And a lot of them wouldn’t. You can see how that would irritate you.’
There’s a long silence; we don’t know how to fill it. Paddy was pretty mean to Fran.
‘Yeah,’ Barry agrees. ‘But he was a larrikin. He’d come back here some days and say the things he’d done and we just couldn’t stop laughing.’ Barry concedes, looking back now, it’s not that funny.
Richard agrees; he’d also witnessed the tension between Fran and Paddy up close. But it wasn’t the only friction between Paddy and his neighbours. Fran also had a live-in gardener called Owen.
‘Him and Owen had a barney about a week before he went missing,’ Richard tells us. ‘Owen threatened the dog, Paddy threatened Owen.’
It was just on dawn, a few days before Paddy went missing. Richard had come down to the space between the campground and the highway to run his three staffies, like he did every day. They were proper bush dogs and not the nicest, so he kept them on chains for the rest of the day. As they enjoyed their moment of freedom, Richard sat and sipped his coffee, watching the peachy arc of the sun grow bigger on the horizon. It was a peaceful time of day; the temperature was still tolerable, the handful of tourists were sleeping and it was mostly quiet except for the birdsong.
Then he heard barking. It sounded like Kellie, that flighty new kelpie of Paddy’s. She was only a pup and was always barking, so, at first, he didn’t pay much attention. But then the yelling started and Richard’s dogs took off up the road towards the commotion.
‘Shit.’ Richard put his coffee down and called them back. Once he’d got them to heel, he looked through the dappled light up the highway and saw Kellie on the road outside Fran’s place, Paddy coming up behind her. Richard watched as his mate stopped in the middle of the road, hand on his hip, like he always did when he was trying to make a point. He could see he was shouting, but he couldn’t make out the words. And he could hear someone shouting back.
From where he sat, Richard couldn’t see the other person, but he was certain the second voice wasn’t Fran’s. Her voice was unmistakable and this one was deeper, more even. It had to be Owen.
For three months, Owen had been working as a gardener for Fran and living in the building they called the doll’s house or the bungalow—a sort of granny flat in Fran’s yard. But Richard would have been hard-pressed to recognise the bloke, even if he’d walked into the pub and ordered a beer. Owen had pretty much stayed on Fran’s property the whole time he’d been there. To Richard, he was just a tall, featureless shadow in the distance.
Their only interaction had been a few weeks beforehand. Richard used to walk his dogs on the dirt track between the back of the pub and Fran’s place, where they wouldn’t encounter anyone. But one day another dog had come hurtling towards them. In the distance, Richard could see Owen. He was sure the dog belonged to him and that he’d set it on Richard’s dogs but he couldn’t be bothered with an argument, so he’d just stopped taking his dogs that way.
Now, he listened to the confrontation between the mysterious gardener and Paddy. It was all over in less than a minute. Richard sat back down to finish his coffee and had a little chuckle to himself. At the pub later that day, when Paddy fronted up for beers, Richard would have to ask him what the hell had happened.
6
A suspicious croc, a drained septic tank and a landscape full of secrets
Within a week of Paddy’s disappearance, detectives had come to the firm conclusion he had met with foul play. They’d worked several leads: the barbecue chicken had come from some interstate travellers who’d given the leftovers to Paddy for his dog—they didn’t know anything; Paddy was originally from Ireland but didn’t seem to have any close family there and he appeared on no birth certificate for any Australian children; the Mitsubishi Delica that had been spotted in town around the time of Paddy’s disappearance seemed to be an innocent traveller who’d camped on the side of the road for a few days. So far, everything was a dead end. So, two days after Christmas 2017—eleven days after Paddy had last been seen—another group of searchers arrived in Larrimah. They were still looking for a body but, this time, they were looking for something else: evidence.
Sergeant Meacham King stood in Fran’s backyard watching the contents of her septic tank spill out onto the lawn. The smell of sun-heated human waste was overpowering, especially when combined with a black smog of blowflies. But it was a job that had to be done. Dr Luckin, the survivability expert, had told Sergeant King that if someone had thrown a body into a cesspit, decomposing fat would probably float to the surface and they’d be able to smell it from outside. Dr Luckin wasn’t sure; he’d never been asked that before. So they’d decided to pump the septic tank out just in case.
