Chapter 38
EVAN
‘I’m just going to come right out and say it all,’ Dad said.
He swept his hand over the room, the filthy furnishings and carpet.
‘Because the time had to come eventually. I figured if someone hadn’t seen me, then there was going to be DNA.
And if there wasn’t DNA, well, there was going to be the email.
The one she sent to me. If it had to happen sometime, it’s better now rather than later, so you can do what you have to do. ’
‘Dad, what are you talking about?’
‘I killed the girl. Chloe Lutz.’
All the breath left me at once. The box of photographs on my knees slid onto the floor.
I was left holding the picture of my father from 1976, the Ford Capri in the background, a slightly blurry but unmistakable shape.
I had to suck air through a closed throat and blow it out as hard as I could to make a sound at all.
‘What?’
‘Now, don’t do that,’ Arthur said, exhausted with my bullshit already, his eyes languid as they lifted to me.
He held up a finger and shook his head. ‘Don’t sit there saying what-what-what?
the whole time. I just want to get it out as painlessly as I can.
So, you’re going to have to shut up and pay attention and get all the details squared away into that meat-filled head of yours, and not get me off track by being all melodramatic about it. ’
‘You … You …’ I managed.
‘She was out here looking into some indiscretions of my past,’ Dad said.
‘Chloe. She was initially just interested in the two cold cases. Linda Special and Marian Richley. But then she decides to get clever, and in doing that, the silly nosy parker went and joined a couple of dots that no one in the whole Hawkesbury region had ever been smart enough to join before.’
I stared at my father.
‘The first I heard about it was through Herman,’ he said, taking his cigarettes out of the chest pocket of his flannelette shirt.
He lit one up. ‘Herman Grey. Old colleague of mine. For the past—oh, god—fifty years, I’ve kept my finger on the pulse of Herman and all the other Wisemans Ferry cops, the ones who worked on the cases back in the day.
I go down there, to the RSL, about every six months, and I let it come up naturally.
The old cases. The unsolved ones. Because someone’s always still bothered by that sort of thing, you know.
Mistakes they made during cases. I know I am.
I always wait until someone asks the question, or I ask it myself: whether anybody’s heard anything.
Three months ago, Herman says to me, Shit, you know what, Artie?
There has actually been something. This young girl from Sydney, she emailed me.
Wants to know about Special and Richley.
He showed me the email on his phone. Sure enough, there it is.
This girl Chloe Lutz wants to come out and interview him.
She’s got this big grand theory that the same perpetrator of Linda and Marian’s killings might have been the rapist who attacked that girl out at Womerah.
While there are basically no clues about the Special and Richley killings, there is a good clue about the rape.
Herman was all set to speak to Chloe. He was a show pony, Herman.
Chucked a heart attack before he got the chance. That was maybe two months ago.’
‘Wait …’ I said. Every muscle in my body was rock hard and trembling. ‘Who … Who were they? Special and Richley?’
My father smoked his cigarette. Took his time.
‘Women from out here.’ He shrugged eventually.
‘And you,’ I swallowed. ‘You … Chloe was looking at mistakes that you had made during those cases? That’s what you said. You made mistakes.’
‘I sure did.’ Dad snorted.
‘What did you do?’
My father looked at me.
‘I committed them, Evan.’
My mouth was already hanging open. Now a shuddering groan came out of it. Dad just watched me with a disgusted sort of expression on his face, the way he used to watch me when I’d cry as a child.
‘You killed those two women? You … you …’ I shook my head. ‘No you didn’t. That’s not what you’re saying.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘But—’
‘I came upon her for the first time riding along with Herman, actually.’
‘Who?’
‘Linda,’ he said. ‘Linda Special. She was an accident.’
I couldn’t speak.
‘I’d dropped over there to the station at Wisemans from my station at Maroota.
’ It was all just falling out of his mouth now.
The door busted down. ‘My boss had lent me. Just for the day. The Wisemans Ferry boys needed help clearing out their basement. Evidence stockpile. At lunch time, Herman said, “Why don’t we go for a drive?” because he had to see some woman at Redbelly Crossing, and they had nice food at the pub back then. ’
I listened, barely breathing.
‘Linda was at home alone for a month because hubby had taken a job at an oil rig,’ Dad said.
‘The idea was that he’d make enough money to come back and pay the house off entirely.
With the new baby, they needed the financial footing.
But she was scared, being home alone like that every night.
It was a remote property. Well out of town.
Bushy. And she was young. She was twenty-five, I think. ’
I tried to keep up. To accept what I was hearing.
‘She’d called the cops because her chickens were disappearing, and she had the idea that a prowler or a neighbour was stealing them,’ Dad continued.
‘She was a fool. There was a hole in the coop as round as your head. Fox tracks in the dirt. She might have just wanted a cop to put an eye on the place and maybe fix the hole in the coop without her having to pay for it.’
‘And you did? You and Grey?’
‘We fixed the hole and we gave her home security advice.’ Dad waved his cigarette.
‘Get a lock on that window there. Put curtains over this bit so no one can see in. Cut down some dowels, put them in the window tracks. I left a hole for myself for later, through the laundry window. In case she didn’t accept what I told her at the door to and let me inside.
I told her the window was too small to worry about. ’
I waited, shivering, telling myself not to throw up. It didn’t work. Before my father could start speaking again, I went into the bathroom off the spare room, crouched and vomited into the toilet.
‘Jesus.’ He shook his head when I returned and fell into my spot on the couch. ‘The dramatics.’
‘You knew that you were going to come back and … and … kill her?’ I asked.
‘You’re not real bright, are you, Evan?’ Arthur snapped. The fury was always right there, just below the surface. ‘I told you it was an accident, what happened to her.’
‘But you knew you were going to come back, though. You said it yourself, just now: you left a hole for yourself so you could come back later. Because you knew you would. You were determined to get in whether she let you in or not.’
‘Things would have been a lot different if she’d played along. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘Played along with what?’ I asked.
My father just stared at me.
‘Oh my god, Dad.’ I put my face in my hands. The sobs came, hard and painful: deep ones that ratcheted through my chest, seemed to hammer against the inside of my ribcage. ‘Oh my god, Dad. Oh my god.’
‘Oh my god what, Evan, you hysterical waste of space?’
‘What are you?’ I dropped my hands. ‘Are you … Are you … Are you a rapist, Dad? Is that what you’re saying to me? You’re a cold-blooded killer?’
‘It would be just like you to think of me that way.’ Arthur nodded, smiling. He looked me over, head to foot. ‘You always saw the worst in me.’
I almost laughed. I was so sick, so sad, so unsure if I wanted to go and vomit again or just sit here crying.
Arthur went on, ‘You have no idea how you got where you are in your life, do you, Evan? You think everything you have was just—just—bestowed upon you by god. You think the house, the wife, the son, the career, all these things just came to you out of thin air.’
Arthur waved his cigarette around, his hands raised to the ceiling. Smoke made a coil, whispered away.
‘I raised you to be who you are,’ Dad sneered.
‘I made you hard. Me. Nobody else. Your mother bailed out on us all. Her parents left us with nothing. You and Russell, you were like boulders chained to my legs. And what credit do I get for it all? Everything you have in your life is because of me, Evan.’
I just shook my head.
‘I’m sitting here telling you my deepest, darkest secrets.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Terrible mistakes that I have made. And your response is to call me the worst of all possible names.’
‘Dad—’
‘I’m a good man who made a couple of errors of judgement.
I’m a good man, who raised his sons well.
But you forget all that. You learn this one thing about me, and you’ve just decided I’m a monster.
’ Arthur tutted hard. ‘How long did it take you, just then, to decide it? That I’m unredeemable.
Three seconds. You didn’t even take a minute to think about it. ’
‘Did you rape that girl in Womerah?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Marian Richley?’ I gagged. Swallowed. Put a hand to my mouth. Had to speak through it. ‘Was she the same?’
‘She was a pub girl from Wisemans Ferry. We all used to drink there. I followed her home one night, watched her for a while. Came back a couple of weeks later.’
‘Dad.’ I heard my own voice. The voice of a child. ‘Dad.’
‘The ingratitude that you are showing me right now is staggering, Evan. It really is.’
‘No amount of gratitude is going to rub this out.’ I broke through my tenuous calm. My voice came up, high and, yes, hysterical. ‘Three women are dead! They’re dead! They’re dead!’
The old man nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘Oh my god.’
‘They’re dead, and you’re going to fix it all for me, Evan.’
‘What?’
‘That’s why I brought Chrissy along this time,’ Dad said.
‘As a failsafe. Because I knew this was all going to come out. As soon as I saw that first email from Lutz, I knew. The clock was ticking. Eventually, no matter how carefully I did it, I was going to need you to pay me back and help me through this. I’m an old man, and times have changed.
I knew I wouldn’t get it exactly right.’
‘You …’ I breathed. ‘You took Chris along?’
‘I needed to have someone there to throw to the dogs if it came down to it.’