Death Delights, page 9
part #1 of Jack McCain Series
‘I reckoned she was lying,’ Chris had said just before he hung up, ‘as if her life depended on it.’
And now I was thinking, maybe it does.
•
Three days later, child-killer Frank Carmody was released from Long Bay and driven by his sister to her place at Camperdown. Ron Herring from Corrective Services had given me the tip so I was already waiting for them, my car parked discreetly opposite and up the road a bit from the address when they arrived in Miss Carmody’s Festiva. I’d already checked round the back of the property to see if there was another exit to the small terrace, in a row of eight similar houses, and found that a stout metal fence ran along the back boundary of the Carmody residence and three others. Unless he jumped the fence, and there seemed to be no reason for him to do that, there was no other way in or out of the place.
I watched Carmody go inside with his sister, a plump short woman in a striped skirt. He was in his fifties with thin, greying hair and a slight stoop, carrying an army kitbag. In his creased white shirt and dark trousers, he could have been a harmless accounts clerk coming home from work, and almost as soon as the door on the one-storey terrace had closed loudly, I rang Staro.
‘I want you to keep an eye on Carmody,’ I told him, giving him the address. ‘Midnight till dawn patrol is the crucial shift.’ I didn’t tell him I’d be checking on him from time to time. No way I’d trust Staro to do a good job of anything and lately I’d rather be out and about in the hours of darkness than sleeplessly tossing in my bed. But it’s always helpful to have an extra body on the job, even if that was only Staro.
‘Sure,’ said Staro, ‘I like working normal hours. Night fishing. Rock-spider bait to catch the shark.’
I looked at the time. It was too early for lunch although I was feeling hungry. Beside me on the passenger seat, I’d packed an expanding file full of papers and folders from my recent move that I planned to sort through during the hours of idle surveillance. I heard a door slam and looked up to see Carmody coming out of number 117. But I didn’t even need to start the car because he was only going down the street to the newsagent, where he bought a newspaper, then he crossed the road, went to the TAB, finally going home again after buying some beer on the way back. Again, he had to slam the door noisily to get it to close. I stared at the closed door for a long time and then turned my attention to the expanding file.
I pulled out the first folder. I’d started reading it before I could stop myself to find it was my own statement from a November night in 1975. I put the badly typed papers down and turned away, staring at Frank Carmody’s closed door. I was sitting here, watching the house of a convicted child-killer all because of the events of that night. I’d made a vow to find out what happened to my sister, to track down whoever had taken her. And when I was fifteen I’d had no doubt that I would succeed. For a long time, I even thought I’d find Rosie, too, and imagining our reunion as I freed her from her captor was an image that had sustained me through those dreadful days. But it faded. Nevertheless, Rosie was the reason I’d joined the New South Wales police in 1980, in the youthful belief that if I became a detective, I’d be able to solve my sister’s disappearance and bring the perpetrator to justice. It was also because of Rosie that I’d spent several years in the Child Sexual Offences Squad, becoming aware of the sorts of men that targeted kids for sexual use. I wanted to examine the physical evidence surrounding Rosie’s disappearance myself, with my own hands and eyes, so I’d taken up part-time study and eventually graduated in Science. Even though the evidence was old and stale, I’d gone over and over it. It was all recorded in various files and folders and I’d transferred much of it to my computer. And even though I knew it was completely unreasonable, I still found myself looking through the old files on occasion, just in case there was some thing, the one thing, that would make all the difference.
Rosie’s abduction had affected Charlie, too, even though he’d been only a baby when it happened. Although he can barely remember her, believing that his memories are mostly reconstructed from photographs and my recollections, his life, too, has been shaped by that event. When Jacinta ran away eighteen months ago, he didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking. That was when he changed his thesis to a wider investigation into the patterns and repetitions that occur in families. Like Charlie, and despite my hasty attribution of coincidence, I couldn’t help wondering, too, in what way the loss of our sister might have echoed through to the next generation. And I was certainly a bit shaken by Charlie pointing out that I, too, was living at the back of a big old house now, just like our father. I shivered. Since that summer night in ’75 and because of it, my life had followed a certain trajectory so that now, on this sunny afternoon a quarter of a century after the event, here I was, sitting off the house of another child-taker.
And there was something else. I knew why Rosie had been outside on the roadway on that evening twenty-five years ago, and not playing with me down the backyard like she normally did. Something that Charlie, for all his brilliant insights into human behaviour, doesn’t know. So it makes it all the more difficult for me to hear the things that he says because the parallels between Rosie’s loss and Jacinta’s disappearance are even greater than he suspects.
A feeling like nausea welled up from my guts to my head, and I got out of the car, going round the back, pretending to get something out of the boot, because the pressure was building up and I needed to move. Please God, I was praying, don’t let Jacinta be dead, too.
I’d been buoyed up by the recent tip-off, even if it had fizzled out. And I was determined to question Iona Seymour as to what had made her call the police. People don’t do things without reasons, even if those reasons are difficult for an observer to understand.
I walked down the street, constantly looking back over my shoulder to make sure all was quiet at number 117, and bought myself a chicken sandwich and a tin of fizzy drink.
I worked away through the boring hours sorting out the contents of the file and putting all the material relating to my lost sister in a large envelope. I knew I had other records concerning her in other boxes at La Perouse and I was determined to put it all in order again. Moving from the marital home hadn’t been a very organised retreat: I’d thrown things together. The information on Jacinta was more sparse and I separated that out as well. I sat there a moment, looking at the two files. My memories of Rosie were strong and vivid, but I wondered how much of that was because of constant reworking, like the too brilliant colours sometimes used to touch up the works of old masters. Then I thought about my daughter Jacinta and remembered how she would climb up onto my lap when she was tiny and put her arms around my neck, looking deep into my eyes as if she could find something there she needed. It had always made me uneasy, because I didn’t know what it was, and I remembered how I’d bear it for a while, then gently undo her arms and put her down beside me. Even then, she wanted something from me that I didn’t understand. Did she do the same with her mother, I wondered, and did she find the same gentle rejection? I closed my eyes against the pain of recreating something that could only hurt me. I tried making plans for my future, but couldn’t get anywhere with them. I opened my eyes again and stared at the closed front door of number 117. I had to confess I didn’t really care whether Frank Carmody lived or died. I got out of the car and stood there in the noisy road staring at the tiny terrace house. Phillip Street, Camperdown, is so narrow that cars can barely pass in opposite directions. That was why I didn’t realise Staro had arrived on the scene until he almost ran over me. I showed him the house and Carmody’s photograph.
‘He looks like my grandad,’ said Staro.
‘Just be thankful he’s not,’ I said. ‘You’d probably be even more twisted than you already are.’ Staro seemed to take the remark in good humour. ‘The only other person living there is his sister,’ I continued, taking the photo back and describing the stout woman in as much detail as I could remember. ‘Just keep on him,’ I said, ‘especially if he goes out tonight.’
Staro looked anxiously around and lowered his voice. ‘There’s really no wolf-man out there,’ he whispered, ‘is there?’
He was just like a kid, I thought, and wondered if I was dragging him into something way over his head. Then I remembered where Staro had come from, what he’d endured and survived. I shook my head. ‘I promise there’s no wolf-man.’ But that was hardly a comfort, I reasoned. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous than it is,’ I said. ‘You understand that?’
Staro nodded. I took a closer look at him. ‘You’re different,’ I said to him, noticing something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. His features seemed sharper somehow, and he was edgier, more fidgety. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one automatically. I declined, and Staro lit up with trembling fingers.
‘I’m straight. This is the only drug I’m using,’ he said, waving his cigarette at me. ‘And I haven’t been straight this time of day since I don’t know when.’
‘When you say “straight”, Staro, what exactly do you mean?’ I said.
Staro looked hurt. ‘What anyone means,’ he said. ‘That I’m not using.’ He looked at the cigarette. ‘Apart from nicotine.’
‘But methadone—,’ I started to say.
‘I’m off that, too,’ Staro said. ‘I want to come back to life.’
‘Are you getting some support?’ I asked. ‘A counsellor? Some sort of help?’
Staro shook his head. ‘Don’t need it,’ he said. ‘I can do this. I’ve got the willpower.’
‘Staro, Staro,’ I said, ‘willpower won’t work. Addiction is not amenable to willpower. You need to come at it quite another way.’ I meant by way of surrender but I didn’t think Staro or indeed most of the world’s population outside Twelve Step Fellowships would’ve had a clue what I meant.
He nodded vigorously. ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ he said.
I surprised myself by patting him on the shoulder as I got back into my car. ‘If you’re serious about this,’ I said, ‘you know you can’t drink either? Or use pills.’
Staro raised his almost invisible eyebrows at this. ‘I’m serious about this. I know that I can’t switch the witch for the bitch.’
His terminology gave it away. ‘You’re going to NA?’ I said, astounded.
Staro nodded, fiddling the cigarette between his fingers. ‘The meetings help a lot, but I keep getting these memories,’ he said. ‘They just jump out at me. Things I want to forget. The reason why I used drugs in the first place.’
I knew what he meant. ‘That’ll happen,’ I said. ‘Have you got a sponsor?’
‘There’s a bloke there who hasn’t been using anything for fifteen years,’ said Staro, holding up his cigarette. ‘Not even these. He said I could ring him when I needed to talk.’
I remembered how difficult it had been for me to let down the defensiveness that had become second nature. Staro looked at me with his bruised, grieving eyes.
‘You don’t think I can do it, do you.’
‘I was just thinking how hard it is to be straight and honest with another person,’ I said.
‘But you did it,’ he continued. ‘I was talking to a bloke who used to know you in the old days. He goes to both fellowships. Ross from Randwick.’
I nodded. I remembered Ross from Randwick.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I did it. But I only had one drug to deal with, not three.’ I paused a moment before starting up the ignition. ‘Take it easy, Staro,’ I said. ‘You can give me a ring if you can’t get hold of anyone else.’ His whole face lifted and lightened at that and I wondered for a minute if I’d made a serious error of judgment, changing up a gear from a purely business relationship to something more.
‘It’s the things I’m remembering,’ he said. ‘Things I’ve done. Things been done to me.’
I nodded. I knew what he was talking about and he knew I knew.
‘That happens,’ I said, ‘as the anaesthetic wears off. Talk to someone about it.’ I waved goodbye and drove home.
•
It was a beautiful summer evening and the drive back to my new home was a pleasure, with the sun warm on the sandstone walls of Long Bay and the water cerulean blue off Congwong Beach. I often had moments where I felt enormous gratitude that I was clean and sober and this was one of them. Sobriety had given me back my edge, my sight and clarity. In most areas. Grey-white piles of fair weather cumulus lined the horizon and the sliver of a new moon rose in the east. Wattlebirds swooped among the scrub and clucked and chimed as I looked in the mailbox, but there was nothing much today, just some toy shop announcing a pre-Christmas sale and something from the council. I screwed up the flyer and threw it into the rubbish bin, opening the other envelope as I walked in.
I couldn’t quite take it in at first. Les O’Neil from the council had pleasure in informing me that I’d won second prize in the local section of the art competition and this letter was my invitation to the official opening next week where I would receive my certificate and a cheque for $150. For a few moments I was absurdly pleased with myself and I stuck the letter up on the fridge where I could see it. I wanted to ring and tell Charlie, but felt too self-conscious about making such a boast. It was the first win I’d had in a long, long time.
With a lighter energy, I turned back to the job in hand, and put the two files, my lost sister’s and Jacinta’s, in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe in my little bedroom, picked up another box piled high with paper, cleared a spot at the table in the main room, and made a start on it. On the very top was a large folder containing glossy black and white police photographs of the white wooden railings that used to run alongside the roadway in Springbrook when we were kids. I knew these long shots and close-ups off by heart: the scraped marks on the posts, incomprehensible to a casual observer, were as clear to me as if I’d seen the whole incident. I hadn’t looked at them in many years. I studied the first one again. It showed gouge marks on a wooden railing where the metal badge on the fender of a car had collided violently with the timber of the railing —the gouge marks left by the suspect vehicle when it skidded and struck the railings of the fence. The car had then reversed into a tree on the rear passenger side and accelerated away. Rosie had been snatched off the street in front of our house by ‘a person or persons unknown’. Mrs Bower, the vicar’s wife, had run from the rectory on the corner of the T-junction at one end of our street when she’d heard the crash. It had all been too fast for her, she said in her witness statement, and she hadn’t seen anything. What was known was the fact that the height of the fenders back and front and the marks they had both left on the white fence and on the tree behind, were consistent with the suspect vehicle being a 1967 or ’68 Holden sedan. We knew for a fact that it was tan and white, with some sort of badge on the back fender and at least one decorative stud in the shape of a chrome-plated, five-pointed star probably fixed to the front fender. We knew this because the Crime Scene police found the fat silver star in the dirt on the roadway among the scattered paint flakes. It was likely to be one of several decorating the chrome.
Because of the contents of all these folders and manila envelopes, I’d come to know a great deal more about that Holden sedan. The paint flakes gave us more information: they told us that the vehicle had undergone several changes of colour from the time it had come off the assembly line. Like the levels of an archeological dig, microscopic examination of the paint layers gave us the history of the car’s colour changes. Starting off with one of Holden’s standard colours of those years—a pale blue enamel—it had later been spray-painted a dark blue and only after that did it acquire the two-toned tan and white of the top coat. In spite of a massive police search, that car was never found. It simply vanished, together with my sister, off the face of the earth.
I pulled out another of the photographs showing a flashlight photo of the tree the car had backed into, with a long indentation cutting transversely across its trunk, revealing splintered, sappy wood. In a smaller manila envelope were the earlier drawings I’d made from the photographs, showing possible interpretations of the marks left on the tree by the shield-shaped badge. I’d spent a long time trying to match this and had concluded that it was most likely a car rally badge. Car clubs and rally clubs are still popular and there must have been hundreds of different badges around in the ’seventies. These days, windscreen stickers are used instead. In the early days when I was first examining this physical evidence, I used to look at that star as if it were the mark of the Beast itself because I knew it came from that car, and in that car at the time of impact was my beautiful terrified little sister. I used to hold the star in the palm of my hand and close my eyes like I’d heard psychics did, willing myself to know where the car was now, where Rosie was. But all I ever saw was the darkness of my own failure.
Under my sketches were photographs of the tyre marks left near the roadside as well as pictures of the plaster casts made up from their indentations. Tyre marks are like fingerprints. Every little imperfection in the manufacturing process, every notch or cut created by usage, leaves a distinctive mark in the rubber, and a corresponding imprint in soft soil. No tyre, even those from the same batch, is exactly the same as any other. When that is taken into account, together with the tyre’s unique pattern of wear, a profile is produced that is unique. But I had little hope of ever deriving anything useful from those tyres now. After all these years, they would no longer be in existence.
I sat back, reminiscing. Thinking about the quiet leafy street I’d lived in back then had started a rush of powerful memories. On one side was the local headmaster’s residence. He had three children, several years older than me and Rosie. On the other side lived Snotty Kirkwood and I clearly remembered his freckled face and tufty hair and the dark hydrangea bushes that ran down the side of his house, perfect to hide in. I’d had a crush on his sister in Third Grade and I tried to remember her name. The only other kids in our street belonged to Rev Bower and his wife who lived down at the corner, but they were always away at boarding school and never a part of the kids’ community. Mrs Bower had a vague, anxious manner and was always looking at us as if she didn’t quite remember who we were, even though we lived only a few doors away.
