Chapter One
When Judith Lee walked into the interview room early on Monday morning, Alexis Turner was waiting for her. Someone had brought the girl a cup of coffee from the machine in the custody suite, but it didn’t look like she’d touched it.
‘Alexis? I’m Judith.’
Alexis was wearing a grey hoodie that was two sizes too big for her.
The hood was up and pulled forward, hiding most of her face.
Judith put her own cup of coffee down on the table, pulled out a chair and sat, carefully.
The pain in her ribs was a constant dull throb and sudden movements turned the pain into something much sharper.
‘It’s toxic, the coffee down here. We’ll have to do better.’
‘Yeah.’
Judith leaned forward a little, trying to get a better look at the girl.
She caught a glimpse of brown eyes, smudged dark eye make-up, and a sharp little chin.
Tendrils of dark hair escaped from under the hood.
The desk sergeant had said that Alexis had asked for Judith by name, but Judith didn’t recognise her.
‘I’m told you want to report a crime. If you don’t mind, I’d like to record the interview.
I’ll press this button here . . .’ Judith gestured to the control panel installed on the table.
‘That will turn on the sound equipment in the room. Is that okay? If you’d prefer, for now, I can just take notes. ’
‘Doesn’t matter. Either way is fine.’
Judith entered her badge number and started the recording.
She checked her watch and cleared her throat.
‘This is Detective Sergeant Judith Lee. It’s nine forty-eight a.m. on Monday, eighth of July 2024.
I am in interview room three, Melbourne West Police Station.
Also present is Ms Alexis Turner. Alexis, do you understand that this interview is being audio recorded? ’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you give me your full name and date of birth for the tape?’
‘Alexis Turner. Tenth of May, two thousand and four.’
‘Thanks. And your address and phone number?’
‘I live at Merrill Hall. Room fourteen, floor two. It’s near to uni. I can walk to lectures.’
‘Okay, great.’ Judith wanted to ask Alexis to pull down her hood because she couldn’t see her clearly with the hood up and eye contact was key to reading someone.
She decided to leave it alone. Alexis gave Judith her phone number, then wiped at her nose with the back of her hand and mumbled something.
‘I’m sorry?’ Judith said.
‘I know you heard me.’
‘I’m sorry, Alexis, I really—’
‘It’s just so messed up. He’s the one who . . . and now I have to sit here in this horrible room. Why does it smell so disgusting?’
‘I don’t think it—’
‘That’s not even the point. The point is, he does what he wants, he’s done it for years, and now I have to come here. I have to be recorded, and I have to go through all of this song and dance while he sits at home in his mansion and what price does he pay for any of it? Answer me that.’
Alexis had small hands. Her nails showed the remains of chipped black polish and were bitten to the quick. She wore chunky silver rings on her fingers.
‘That’s why you’ve come here,’ Judith said. ‘Because you want me to investigate. You want to tell me what he did, so that he can pay the price. Right?’
Someone must have sent this girl. Someone who believed that Judith would do the right thing by her. And Alexis had trusted that person enough to come in, just about.
‘Can we start at the beginning?’ Judith said. ‘Start anywhere that feels right to you.’
There was a moment, a long pause.
‘I was having trouble.’
‘Trouble in college?’
‘It was just headaches, in the beginning. When I woke up in the morning, the headache would just be there, waiting for me. But then I started to feel nauseous in lectures. I thought I was sick, or something. I thought maybe I had a tumour. In my brain.’ Alexis laughed; a tight, unnatural chuckle.
‘But you didn’t have a tumour?’
‘No, but I didn’t know that, did I? I just thought, there must be something physical wrong.
My roommate, Beth, said I should get checked out so I went to the health centre, and I saw the doctor, and they sent me for all these tests.
Blood tests. All that. Even sent me for an MRI.
But everything was normal. And then I started to .
. . you know . . .’ Alexis gestured towards her chest and started to breathe in an exaggerated rasp.
‘You started to hyperventilate?’ Judith took notes. She didn’t need them, not with the sound equipment running, but some witnesses did better when her attention was one step removed.
‘Exactly. In lectures. I’ve never been claustrophobic but it felt just like how they describe.
Like the walls were closing in. Like I couldn’t get out.
So I stopped going to lectures completely, and my friend Beth said I needed to see someone.
Like, a shrink kind of someone. So I went back to the health centre. They sent me to a psychologist.’
Judith’s pen stilled.
‘Which psychologist?’
‘Robert Walker.’
The name washed over Judith like cold water over feverish skin. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She reached out and took a sip from her horrible coffee. Alexis must have caught the change in mood. For the first time in the interview, she looked straight at Judith. She took in Judith’s face and frowned.
‘What happened to you?’
Judith shook her head and took another steadying sip of coffee. The flavour was toxic but grounding. ‘It’s nothing for you to worry about. You said were referred to Doctor Walker?’
‘He’s not a doctor. He’s a clinical psychologist. Which means he had to do a degree, sure, but he’s not a medical doctor.’
‘Did you tell anyone that you’d made an appointment with Mr Walker?’
‘You think I wanted all of my friends to know that I was losing it? You think I want the people I care about to think I can’t handle my own shit? Of course I didn’t tell anyone.’
‘Except Beth.’
‘What?’
‘You must have told Beth. She was the one who said you should see someone. About your panic attacks.’
‘Right. I told Beth. She thought it was great that I was seeing someone. She thought it would help.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry, Alexis. I know this must be hard to talk about. But can you walk me through everything that happened at Robert Walker’s office?’
‘He calls them his rooms. Not his offices. And I’m fine to talk about it. His rooms are on Haines Street. My appointment was on Friday. I got there at a quarter past nine because his receptionist said I should come in ten minutes early, and then it was raining so I got the bus.’
‘Did the receptionist let you in?’
‘Yeah. She asked me to sit in the waiting room. After a while he came out with another patient. Client. And he asked me to go in and take a seat.’
‘He introduced himself?’
‘Yeah. All of that. He gave his name, I gave mine. Whatever. Did you think I had mixed him up? You think I came here to make a complaint about the wrong guy?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
Alexis had been at a slow simmer when Judith had come into the room.
Now she was more agitated, shifting in her seat, worrying at her sleeves, almost twitching with pent-up energy as her speech came faster and faster.
Was she on something? It was a possibility.
There was something a little manic about her.
‘He introduced himself. Okay? And we went inside his room, and he closed the door and he sat in a seat in the far corner of the room, and he had his notebook, and I sat on the other chair, and he asked me questions. It was all completely normal in the beginning. He asked all the stuff that you’d expect.
What I’d been feeling. What I’d been thinking about before I started to panic, all the usual shit.
The worst part of it is that I actually liked him.
He had a sense of humour. He made a couple of jokes.
I’m not saying he was like, hysterical, or anything.
I didn’t really laugh, but it seemed like he was a normal guy.
Down to earth. He didn’t seem like he looked down on me. ’
Memory is a strange thing. There are memories that you strive so hard to hold on to and the tighter you hold on, the faster they fade.
And others you try again and again to bury and they stay as they always have been, painfully clear.
For a moment, Judith experienced a profound sense of déjà vu.
Alexis was still there, still in the room, but she was overlaid onto another girl who had sat in front of Judith in a room just like this one, ten years before.
Judith knew exactly what Alexis was going to say. Every word of it.
‘He made you feel comfortable,’ Judith said.
‘It didn’t get weird until near the end.
I think about half an hour in, maybe forty minutes.
I don’t know exactly because I wasn’t looking at my phone.
My phone was in my bag, you know? But then he asked me if I ever smoked anything to relax.
He said I should try it. I said that it was a cliché, the idea that all uni students do is sit around, you know, punching cones or whatever.
My roommate is studying civil engineering, and she’s got like forty hours of lectures a week, plus study. She doesn’t have time to get high.’
‘And you? Do you have a similar schedule?’
Alexis laughed. The same twisted painful laugh from earlier.
‘He asked the exact same question. I’m doing a double major in Chemistry and Food Science.
I have twenty hours of lectures. But I also have tutorials and practicals and even if I didn’t, I’m not interested in baking my brain.
I told him that. And that’s when he said that he enjoyed a smoke sometimes.
That I should come by for an evening session, and we could smoke together. He said it would help me to relax.’
‘What did you say?’