Crimson Lake Read online

  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.

  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 catand-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 s
ervices. 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.

  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, seeth
ing. ‘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?’