The fall between, p.8
The Fall Between, page 8
Black? Mr Rickard’s cattle were Herefords – a rusty brown, deep rich red and white – and his horses were chestnut. There were no other animals on the property that were black that she could see.
‘Did Ava own a dog?’ Giles called out over her shoulder.
‘What?’
‘A dog. Did she own a dog?’
‘Yep.’
It’s like pulling teeth.
‘What kind of dog?’
‘Border collie.’
‘What colour?’
‘Black and white.’
‘Did she bring it with her on her rounds?’
‘Not really. Sometimes. Not seen it for a while.’
‘Hmm.’ Giles looked over the fence. The buffel grass on the other side had been flattened as if something had pushed its way through it. Had something come through the fence, its fur getting caught on the barbs? Running up from the gully, or carted down into it? Giles looked back to the splatter of guts around the mill. Maybe some were from Ava’s border collie?
She pulled out her phone and fumbled with the screen, then took a few snapshots of the hair in the barb.
She was speculating, re-imagining how the crime might have taken place. In the heat, waiting for the other units to arrive, she had the time to muse and ponder. Maybe the dog got in the way of the murder? Tried to protect its owner? She left the fur caught in the fence for the ERU to bag and seal. They had all the equipment, no point risking it – it wasn’t going anywhere.
Giles wandered back towards the windmill, where Mr Rickard now stood under the tower, trying to steal some shade while rolling a smoke. ‘Want one?’
Do I ever!
‘Nah, I’m good,’ Giles said, as she tried to hide the disappointment at her near lapse of willpower. ‘Thanks anyway.’
Mr Rickard rolled the smoke slowly. Giles watched. She could almost taste the nicotine hit and craved a whiff of tobacco, though she knew his cigarette would blow downwind. Gawd, I’d love a smoke. Mr Rickard searched his hip pocket for his lighter, then stooped and rubbed his calf.
Giles spotted dark specks next to a tiny tear in the cuff of his pants. Was that dried blood? The hairs on her arms bristled.
‘What happened to your leg?’
‘Caught it on one of the fences a few days ago. I was climbing through.’
‘Don’t always come through the gate?’
‘Nope.’
‘Hmm.’
Yeah. What if the dog tried to take a bite out of his leg. Maybe he kicked it? Or killed it, gutted it, then dragged it through the fence and dumped it down in the gully. Would fighting off the dog have given her enough time to start scrambling up the road to get away? Or get back on the quad bike and tear off to safety? Maybe she was knocked out already? Or dead? That would explain the signs of a scuffle and drag marks she noticed earlier at the edge of the mud. After getting rid of the dog, maybe Rickard dropped her in the cattle trough and held her under the water to make sure she was dead. But then what? He tried to make it look like some crazy maniac was wandering around the property? Out here? Fourteen kilometres from town? On foot? Pig’s arse.
‘Any visitors the last few days? Anyone passing through the place?’
‘Nope. Got an empty biscuit tin, detective. Been empty for thirty years.’
Giles wanted to say, Yeah, I know your miserable story. Instead she asked, ‘How’d you find her again?’ She’d heard his account already, but she was killing time until the ERU arrived. It shouldn’t be taking them this long, not with their sirens blaring.
‘Eh?’ Rickard still hadn’t lit his smoke, and Giles was aching for a drag. Just a sniff of nicotine would help her aching head and give peace to her hangover.
‘The girl, how did you find her? What made you look in the water trough?’
‘Saw me cattle standing around the windmill, pawing at the ground, bellowing and not drinking. These beasts drink a lot of water a day, especially in this heat. So I came over to see what the matter was. Thought it might be a brown snake in the grass, or a broken pump. But nope, found the girl floating on top of the water.’
That understatement again. Not many people find a dead woman with rusted barbed wire around her thighs and knotted between her crotch and call it a ‘possible drowning’. As soon as Giles had seen the girl sewn up like a blind grandmother’s cross-stitch, she’d called the station and asked for immediate assistance of a suspicious death, and then called in the Evidence Recovery Unit.
Giles flipped open her notebook, making sure she hadn’t missed anything. She noted the weather – hot, bloody hot. On the morning radio, there was an extreme fire danger warning given the occasional gust of high wind, meaning there was a total fire ban. The wind was starting to pick up and the blades of the windmill spun, but the pump rod stayed stationary. With the high humidity the wind was far from cooling.
Giles had scribbled down a quick diagram of the scene, labelling Rickard and cattle as possible prints, the wallaby and dog print, the drag marks, the scuffle marks near the thistles, and her own prints close to the metal frame of the windmill. She noted what she’d touched, what Rickard had touched, and what she believed to be dog hair in the barbed-wire fence. She desperately wanted it bagged, but she had to let ERU process the scene from the ground up. She’d have to be patient.
It wasn’t quite midday. The heat felt like it was cooking into Giles’s skull. She’d do anything for a hat on her head and a bit of shade.
‘Well, it wasn’t a brown snake that spooked your cows.’ Giles kicked at the ground and grinned, trying to keep the mood light.
‘Nope,’ said Mr Rickard. ‘Found her looking like a mermaid.’
‘What?’ Giles’s ears pricked up. ‘What did you say?’
‘The way she’s tied up and floating. Like a mermaid.’
‘That’s an odd comparison, Mr Rickard.’
‘No more odd than finding a corpse in your bloody cattle trough, detective.’
Giles kicked at the ground again, only harder, like one of the cows. She watched the dust puff under her feet. Then she spotted something. On the ground, a few feet away, close to a small stack of rocks was an ash-pink rose and a sprig of baby’s breath. Leaning over them, she could see they weren’t real but rather made of plastic and silk.
Geez. Why did that feel familiar? She couldn’t quite place the feeling, but she could have sworn she’d seen this artificial rose before. But how could that be?
Giles went to her police vehicle. From the boot of the Sonata she grabbed a small fluorescent orange traffic cone and dropped it over the fake flowers. Close by, under the pile of rocks, a section of woven straw was poking out. It looked like the brim of a hat, but she was reluctant to draw attention to it in front of Rickard.
‘What’s the cone for?’
‘Just left my own print, so I’m marking it,’ Giles lied. ‘We’ll need your shoes too, when the Evidence Recovery Unit arrives.’
‘When will that be?’
‘Got somewhere else you need to be?’
‘Just hot standing out here, that’s all.’
‘Yeah. It is bloody hot,’ said Giles.
‘Yep,’ said Mr Rickard.
‘I could toast out here in the sun.’
‘Could,’ said Mr Rickard.
‘I guess we could do with some rain.’
Now there was something the town hadn’t seen much of for a long time. And the less they had of it, the more it consumed their thoughts and talk. But Giles was searching for a different reaction. It was a loaded comment – she was looking for a response. A glint in the eye.
‘Could,’ said Mr Rickard again, and he started to scratch his neck. Giles couldn’t help but smile. Got yah!
‘Yep,’ Giles continued. ‘Guess some rain’ll come soon.’
‘Maybe.’ Rickard looked over at Giles and scrunched up his face. It was a smile of sorts, but there was something hidden behind it. It felt like she was back at the pub, drinking rum, her head starting to spin.
Rickard shooed away the flies buzzing about his face.
To the farmer, Giles would have been just another blow-in. But she knew him. She knew him alright. Because Mr Rickard and Rebecca Giles shared the same miserable story.
Every country town has its disaster, a catalyst, an event that becomes the yardstick to measure just how bad things really are. For the country town of Denman, it was the 1955 floods. Fourteen people died, and more than five thousand homes were lost. Then, in 1984 and 1992, the floods hit again, with waters rising nearly to the same level as 1955 – nearly.
In the following years, when the rains came and washed away roads and bridges, the people of the town would say, Could be worse – could have been like the floods of ’84 and ’92. It was only the older generation who would say, Could have been like the flood of ’55. In 1992, the heavens had seemed determined to set a new benchmark, but the people of the town thanked God it was not broken.
Giles was just a newborn baby when the downpour hit the town for days on end, the Hunter River and Muscle Creek swelling up. People along the river evacuated while their homes filled with water. The deluge turned the main road of Denman into a flowing river, and in the most unbelievable and unfortunate circumstances, it also washed away Mr Rickard’s wife and Giles’s mother.
Muscle Creek had been a torrent and the Hunter River a lake. The flood gouged out the surrounding farmland, stealing territory. It plucked up fence poles, tore down trees, horse stables and hay sheds. It discarded Mr Martindale’s wheat silos 7 kilometres downstream and deposited Daisy Noel’s cows, bobbing like corks in a thick stream the colour of tawny port.
Everyone in town remembered the night it rained cats and dogs, and chooks, and wheat silos, willow trees, barbed fences, and fucking cows.
Two days later, Mrs Rickard had been found dead and bloated amongst a dozen Poll Herefords, twisted up in barbed wire and fence posts. The crasser locals had commented that Mrs Rickard had been a bit of a cow herself, so maybe she had bobbed up and down in the creek with the rest of Daisy Noel’s herd and simply gone unnoticed.
After the rains, the familiar smell of the town slowly returned. Barbed fences were replaced, so cattle once again knew their boundaries. The debris flowed away, or was hauled to the dump, and the riverbanks were restored. The town readjusted and a new order was established.
Mr Martindale never re-erected his silos. Daisy Noel quit cattle and switched to goats – she figured they’d have more brains to jump to higher ground next time the rains hit. Mr Rickard and Benjamin Giles became widowers.
Rickard went on managing his farm, alone. He never held a funeral for his wife. Or if he did, nobody was invited to the service.
Benjamin Giles did hold a funeral for his wife, and the town pitied the local cop who had just become a single dad.
Neither Benjamin nor Rickard ever found new wives.
Christ, that was thirty years ago. Giles remembered the stories well.
Years later, in primary school, the older kids spoke of the day they woke up to find the landscape around them changed. Giles always thought it must have been frightening for a child to find their whole environment instantly unrecognisable.
The townsfolk whispered, too. About Mrs Rickard. They were afraid to utter the word murder aloud.
Mr Rickard had testified that, as the flooding began, he saw his wife leave the farm in the ute. She had raced off to get to higher ground. Maybe she turned around to get something she’d forgotten? Maybe, when she did, she had struggled to get back out or reach safer ground. Then the water had gushed towards her from all directions, the banks spilled over, and a landslide of farming material and machinery tumbled straight towards her.
Some suggested she may have heaved herself up onto the top of the hay shed, standing wobbly-legged on the pitched roof. A witness attested to that, but their story was discounted, because how could anyone see anything through the white sheets of rain that fell? If she had called for help, her voice would have been drowned out by the sound of water tumbling from the sky and the cracks of thunder.
Rickard was not there to save her. Mr Rickard was . . . where? Where was he when all this happened?
Giles often wondered if Mrs Rickard had seen Daisy Noel’s cows float by. Seen the whites of their eyes, the horror on their faces, before the hay shed folded up like a wet cardboard box. Mrs Rickard would have been dragged down in the undertow, along with the cows and farming equipment, and simply been swept away.
When the water levels subsided and the farmers returned to drag the dead carcasses of cattle out of the creek, that’s when they’d discovered her body caught up in barbed wire.
Giles knew all this because it had been an epic story in her youth. At night she would sip her Milo and shiver, not because she was cold, but because one of the things that scared her most was the creek at the bottom of the property behind her house. Every spring holiday, when pools of water formed deep enough to swim in, no kid in town would venture in for a paddle. The kids all said the ghost of Mrs Rickard walked the creek.
‘She’ll grab your ankle and hold you under.’
‘Her face is a rotting skeletal smile.’
‘Yeah, a walking stiff.’
‘She was murdered, you know.’
‘Yeah, murdered, it’s true. That’s what you do to wives you don’t want no more.’
‘What do you do?’ a nine-year-old Giles had asked.
‘You drown them.’
‘Yeah! Like cats. When people don’t want cats no more, they drown ’em.’
Giles had listened carefully to the childish banter and thought, That can’t be right. A wife isn’t a cat. There must be a law about drowning your wife.
Over the years Giles had heard all the stories of the ghost of Mrs Rickard. Suburban kids might have had a witch living in an old house on their street, but the country kids around Denman and Muswellbrook had invented a wife-killing farmer and a ghost that walked the riverbanks. Even the adults didn’t help quash the rumours. They’d whisper, He always was a cantankerous old geezer; she was always beautifully put together, so involved in the community – but him! Couldn’t spare an egg! Those who weren’t too fond of Mrs Rickard said, If she was my bloody nagging and interfering wife, I’d hold her under the water too.
Once, Giles thought she may have seen her. She’d noticed a woman on the creek bank lacing up her shoes. At first the young Giles paid her no attention, as bushwalkers often stopped along the Hunter River to yank off their shoes and rest their feet by the edge of the creek. Only this woman stood and then stepped deeper and deeper into the water until she disappeared. Giles had convinced herself her eyes were playing tricks on her. What else could it have been? It was the limbs of the willow trees, the shadows, maybe even a kangaroo. It was too far away to be certain. Except she could have sworn that, before the woman disappeared, she had turned to Giles and smiled.
The town all talked about the drowning of Mrs Rickard, but not once did anyone mention Giles’s mother, who had been taken that same night, by the same rains, the same flood. It was as though Emilia Giles had never existed.
As she grew, Giles had asked her father why her mother had died. She had accepted his vague description, that it was simply ‘a terrible tragedy’. But by the age of twelve she began to ask, How? That’s when she was shipped off to boarding school.
Bugger, isn’t life a laugh. Now here she was, all these years later, back where she grew up, trying to police the place.
Bloody Falkov knew Rickard’s history, he knew her history. Surely he would have known this would be a trigger. Falkov was great mates with her dad; they had worked alongside each other for thirty years. But he had sent her out to a drowning, on her own. A bloody drowning. On Mr Rickard’s property, of all places. Was he testing her? Maybe pulling her down a peg or two after cracking two cases the other day, then walking away like she was a bloody hero? Except she hadn’t cracked either case – the next-door neighbour’s savage dog did.
Giles wondered if Mr Rickard was getting bored waiting for the rest of the team to arrive or if he was starting to fret. She also wondered about the possibility of him wanting to see how his wife was found all those years ago, and maybe, just maybe, he’d tried to re-create the scene with Ava Emmerson and the barbed wire.
Or had he really murdered his wife and then dumped her amongst the cattle and debris, and he was re-creating that? Rickard only had to make people believe it happened the other way – it would be easy to say that he’d seen his wife leave in the ute and that she must have turned back. Easy enough to start a rumour that his wife was seen standing on the roof of the shed. Giles had witnessed how you can start any rumour in a country town, then stand back and watch it spread.
Giles still needed to think through her theories – she didn’t want to jump too quickly to conclusions, she wanted all the evidence laid out in front of her first. The facts. Not just speculation, or a story she had made up to distract her from the hangover pounding in her head. The ERU and her team from the station would be arriving soon. It would take days for the scene to be processed, but she wanted to make sure they were pointed in the right direction when they got started.
And what about the fake flowers and that hint of a straw hat under the rocks? It troubled Giles like a dull headache, in the background, but still there nevertheless.
Giles thought about the jillaroo. She knew how quickly someone could get heat stroke. Ava might have poked around and found a straw hat in the tool shed.
Giles sniffed. In the heat her head swam with possibilities.
Ava would never have had a chance to run away, she probably wouldn’t have even seen the blow coming. Rickard probably hit her from behind, then dealt with the dog. To make sure she was dead, he went back and held her under the water. Then, to hide his crime, he made it look like some psychopath had done it, some nutter with barbed wire, a dead wallaby and a sick imagination, not an old man with arthritis in his hips. Then he’d sewed her lips shut in a figure-of-eight knot to . . . what? Keep his secret?
