Chapter 3
RUSSELL
There was a woman in the men’s locker room at Maroubra Police Station.
I heard a thrilled whooping coming from the direction of the showers, some generalised dickheadery I couldn’t quite make out, then the horse-clop of those awful court shoes Superintendent Gail Caplan wore everywhere ringing between the rows of lockers and the concrete walls.
I pulled off my stinking white business shirt and tossed it into my locker, a problem for Future Russell.
I was slipping on a black T-shirt as the short, sharp-edged woman in her sixties came around the corner of my row.
‘I heard you were still here.’ Gail looked me up and down. She was always looking people up and down. ‘Rus, we need to talk.’
‘Uh-huh. I know the drill,’ I said. ‘Your office, Monday morning.’
‘No, not Monday. Now. We’re talking about this now.’
‘I know you’re pissed at me, but we can sort it out later. I need to get out of here.’
‘Russell—’
‘The home invasion on the waterfront. Two bludgeoned to death. I just heard about it. That’ll be Paddo’s case. I’m leaving before he pins me down, wanting to know a strategy for it. I don’t have five hours to teach the guy how to run a crime scene.’
‘The waterfront situation isn’t the only murder case we took in overnight.’
I pulled on my shoes. ‘Huh?’
‘I just got off the phone with central command. They’re assigning us an out-of-area job,’ she said. ‘A girl in her twenties, killed out in the sticks. Place called Redbelly Crossing. It’s up past Wisemans Ferry.’
‘That’s miles away.’
‘Yes, and we’ve been landed with it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the victim’s got an apartment down on Maroubra Road, so she lives full time in our area command. It’ll be a joint thing. One team here, one team out there. There are no local coppers in Redbelly Crossing who are detective rank or higher.’
I rose to my feet. ‘Okay, look, before you go any further, Gail, it’s a no. I’m not doing it.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘Gail—’
‘Let me remind you of two things, Russell. First: it’s “Superintendent Caplan” while we’re at work. And second: you don’t get to pick your gigs; I do. And I’ve picked this gig for you, because less than twelve hours ago, you assaulted a member of the public.’
‘I’ve got Bridie this week! You know that!’
‘Yes, and you should have thought about that before you started swinging fists, shouldn’t you?’ Gail barked. ‘You punch-happy sack of shit!’
‘You’re telling me you’re gonna send me on an out-of-area homicide’—my voice was rising, echoing across the locker room—‘on my scheduled week off, just because—’
‘Because you punched a drug dealer in the mouth?’ Gail put her hands on her hips.
Her voice was as loud as mine. ‘Yes, Russell. Hell yes. And I’m well within my rights to do so!
You need to be seen being held accountable for your actions!
You can’t go around socking low-lifes in front of witnesses whenever the hell you feel like it! ’
‘Listen—’
‘No!’
‘Listen, please.’ I lowered my voice, told myself not to grab her by the shoulders. ‘I’m on leave. I asked for it months ago. And I don’t want to go out there. I’m serious. Gail, I’m serious! I’m from there, okay?’
‘No, you’re not. You’re from Maroota. That’s an hour from here, and Redbelly Crossing is, what—half an hour further again? Don’t try to give me that, Russell. I’m a Hawkesbury girl too, you know. I need you out there by midday.’
‘But my dad’s out there, and my brother’s out there, and I don’t want to run into either of them,’ I said.
‘Too bad.’
‘But Bridie—’
‘Too bad, Russell!’ Gail snapped.
We watched each other, fuming. It was starkly silent in the locker room now.
Gail Caplan and I were the two biggest, scariest motherfuckers in our command area, and we didn’t go toe to toe on much, because whenever we did it had the effect it was having now.
Earth-shaking. Our disagreements not only rattled people but news of them spread like wildfire, and inevitably the stories being told about the conflict needed to pick a winner.
Gail had me in a corner. Her eyes were telling me there’d be biblical levels of pain in my future if I kept on.
Punishments that far exceeded disappointing my already overwhelmingly disappointed child and possibly running into my estranged brother and father.
Gail walked off, so I lost by default. I slammed my locker and kicked over a bin to let the eavesdroppers know I wasn’t happy about it.
I don’t like delivering bad news to my teenage daughter.
Because over the past ten years, that’s all she’s got from me.
Towards the end of my marriage to her mother, as I started withdrawing from my family life and hiding in my work, I was the father too busy to come see her receive an award at school.
Too distracted to listen to tales of her friendship dramas.
Too tired to stay up late watching a new Netflix series with her.
I was retreating into myself, yes, but I was also using tiredness and busyness as an excuse to avoid being with her.
Because a part of me knew the end was coming, and I needed to soften the loss of her father for her somehow.
Just after Bridie turned thirteen, I delivered the news to her.
That while I loved her mother as a person, I didn’t want to be her husband anymore.
I was gay.
And I was leaving.
The five years since had been rocky. At eighteen years old, Bridie had spent almost a third of her life watching her mother grapple with the idea that I’d been lying to her for our entire relationship.
There was nowhere in the house to hide from Georgia while she weathered the surprise and humiliation and grief of being abandoned by a man who apparently had discovered all of a sudden, at the ripe old age of 48, that he was a homosexual.
It wasn’t fair, what I did to Bridie. Or Georgia. But I did it anyway.
I’d moved out of the house immediately but stuck near enough to my wife and child to witness their pain and explain what I could.
I tried to balance that with giving them space to recover from what I’d done.
No matter how close I lingered, a great crevasse opened up between us.
Them on one side, me on the other. Bridie and I were like strangers now, and Georgia and I were down to texts only.
This week had been planned as a radical bonding session between me and my kid—suggested to Bridie by her therapist. I’d been thrilled by the idea when she told me.
We’d organised for her to come and stay at my apartment in Newtown.
I was weirdly excited for her to see my place.
We were going to eat Thai food and go to the movies and make fucking eye contact for once.
Start trying to piece back together this utterly pulverised thing.
Now I arrived on the doorstep of my former family home in Eastwood, in Sydney’s north west, and stared at the welcome mat, preparing to tell my child that this week wasn’t going to be the end of the awkwardness, sadness and disappointment that characterised our relationship.
The door opened. Bridie was there, taller and older and more shockingly beautiful than she’d seemed when I last saw her, six months earlier.
She’d done something new with her hair, but I didn’t know if saying something about it would be odd, so I just said, ‘Hey.’
‘Hey,’ she said to my shoes. She pulled the door open and backed away apologetically, like I was a plumber there to remove a dead rat from the laundry drain. ‘Mum’s not here.’
‘Oh.’ I braced against the dual waves of guilt and relief. ‘She’s not?’
‘She caught a gang rape case last night.’
‘Big weekend,’ I said, for some reason known only to god.
I followed Bridie to the kitchen, looking around the house for changes to torture myself with.
The kettle was new. I liked the old kettle.
There was still a picture of Georgia in her police uniform in the hallway bookcase, but the one of me had disappeared since my last visit.
‘We’ve got two murder cases,’ I said. ‘Three dead overall.’
‘Jeez.’
‘Yeah.’
There was a duffel bag on a chair at the fucking dining room table. I wanted to cry. My daughter and I continued to stare at our shoes, then started to speak at the same time. Had it always been this hard?
‘Should we—’
‘Listen—’
‘Oh … you go ahead.’
I sighed. ‘I actually got assigned one of the murders, Bridie. And it’s out of town. Well, it’ll be half there and half here, because the victim’s got an apartment in Maroubra. But I’ll be in charge of the half that’s out there, in the country. So—’
‘So you can’t have me for the week?’ Bridie asked. I searched her tone too hard for relief, trying to decide if my child hated me as much as I feared she did. For the first time, our eyes met. Electric pain shot right down my throat and into my chest, coming from those unreadable grey orbs.
‘No,’ I said. But I couldn’t stand the pain for more than a second or two. Other words came bubbling up. ‘Uh, I mean, no, that’s not what I’m saying … exactly … I’m just trying to see whether—’
‘Whether I’m okay to go out there with you?’
‘Uhhh …’
Bridie was thinking. I should have stopped her but didn’t, because I’m a coward. ‘Yeah. I don’t mind, I guess. Where is it?’
‘A place called Redbelly Crossing.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s about an hour’s drive. Past Maroota. Past Wisemans,’ I said, watching the train hurtle down the mountain, brakes off, the only way to stop it to throw my body on the tracks.
‘That’s not too far.’
‘It’s not,’ I conceded. ‘But I’ll be working, Bridie. I’ll be running around conducting interviews. Making calls. A case like this, it’ll be a thousand and a half phone calls, you watch. You won’t see much of me.’
She thought. I drew a deep breath. Again, we started speaking at the same time.
‘If you think—’
‘You’ve g—’
‘Sorry.’ I gestured to her, my face burning.
Bridie gave another shrug, slow this time, only one shoulder lifting. ‘I was just going to say … You’ve got to eat and sleep some time.’
‘I do.’
‘I could see you then.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘Is it bushy out there?’
‘Yes.’
‘I could bring my rescue cage. Transfer my branch with the volunteer group. What region is that?’
‘The Hawkesbury.’
‘Right. Maybe if you have a minute now and then between, like, investigation stuff, you could drive me to some wrangles.’
We both looked out the dining room doors to the yard, across the lawn I used to mow, to the spot where Bridie kept her animal rescue cage.
It was by the hose reel, where she’d dumped it after washing it last. It was never more than a couple of days between rescues, from what Georgia had told me.
Bridie and Georgia had been deep into animal rescue for a wildlife group when the kid was small and Georgia was a constable working swing shifts.
The teen got back into wrangling injured animals when she started high school, seeking a distraction from the chaos of our divorce.
‘That could work,’ I said. She smiled. Actually smiled.
Bridie headed for the doors. ‘So let’s go then.’