The waterhole, p.28
The Waterhole, page 28
‘The man was a monster. Serial killers usually act alone but they don’t always. Two bodies got buried in that creek.’
‘I don’t know about anybody helping him. I don’t know any of that.’
Marley could have cautioned Bill. He’d thought about it several times. Bill Ross, it’s my duty to tell you that anything you say could be used in evidence against you. Part of him wished the old guy would stop talking.
But God, he wanted to know. They’d covered up a murder for a quarter of a century. Because of what they’d done, all the parents of the other missing girls kept on living, not knowing …
‘Do I need a lawyer?’ Bill asked him.
‘Whoa. Whoa. Whoa,’ Jack said, waving his hands.
‘It’s your right if you want one. I can recommend one if you don’t know of one. If you ask for a lawyer we’ll get you one and we’ll take you down to the station and make a formal record of this interview. For the moment, you’re just helping us with our enquiries.’
Bill stooped to kneel in front of the fire, fussing with the wood, laid in a fresh log. He didn’t resume his seat. He crossed toward the bookshelf and stood there, his back to them, as if trying to choose what he’d read.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Jack said, unable to contain himself. ‘What’s all this about lawyers? It’s Tracey who needs a lawyer!’
Bill put his hand on the spine of a thick book, faded with age, pulled it out. ‘Shut up, dickhead,’ he said to Jack.
‘Now, gentlemen, that’s not helping anyone,’ Brigit said.
Marley was about to suggest they all cool it when a square something in a plastic bag smacked on the kitchen table with a thud and skidded toward Brigit.
Marley and Brigit reacted instinctively, rocking back.
The skidding package flipped off the other side of the table, into Brigit’s stomach. She snatched at it, holding it against her tummy.
They all looked at Bill.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and his eyes flicked to the ceiling. ‘I know what you want me to say, Netty, but I’m not saying it. I wasn’t there for you yesterday but I’m here for you now. I’m always here for you.’
‘Fair dinkum, will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?’ Jack burst out.
Marley held out his hand for the packet and Brigit passed it to him.
The plastic was thin and transparent, knotted tight at the top so that it rustled as his fingers worked to open the seal. The bag held a pack of photographs the same size and shape as those the Irvines found in Greg Day’s van.
He worked the knot loose and tipped the photographs onto the table without touching them. They were clumpy, sticky with age. Brigit leaned closer.
‘We don’t have gloves,’ Marley warned and she pulled her hand away.
Using the handle of a teaspoon, he nudged the top half of the pack, breaking them up, spreading them wider.
The top photograph was more than twenty years old, but it took less than a second for him to know it was a younger Tracey Saeed in a pale blue bra and matching knickers.
He slid the teaspoon into the edge, carefully worked it along the length to make a crack. The paper peeled stiffly to show the photograph beneath.
Tracey’s lips had been drawn over and over again in a blood-red lipstick, or maybe a crayon. Exaggerated like a clown’s. Her eyelids were shaded glaring blue and her cheeks had baby-doll dots drawn on the bone, like in an amateur cartoon.
‘I’ve had these since that day. Didn’t want anybody else to ever find them,’ said Bill.
‘Annette found them on the body?’ Marley asked.
‘I found them in the creek.’
‘Looks to me you should shut up now, Bill,’ Jack said.
‘I’ve shut up for more than twenty years,’ Bill growled. ‘I found Netty’s sunglasses caught up in the bedspread after she left me that morning. Don’t make that face at me, dickhead. You’ve had plenty of time to work out we were sleeping together in 1994.’
Whatever Jack had been about to say, he swallowed it.
‘The sunglasses?’ Marley prompted, quietly.
Bill’s focus came back. ‘I found them. I grabbed them and ran after Netty to give them back but I got as far as the lookout and I looked down at Tracey’s place like I always did. I saw a bloke I didn’t know—but I knew it wasn’t Mohammed. I saw Sky fly from the woodshed and just about bite this bloke’s leg off, and I saw Annette run out from the woodshed wielding a lump of wood like a baseballer. She hit him and I didn’t wait after that. I ran to help. I ran like hell.’
‘From the top of the lookout?’ Jack asked Bill.
‘Yep.’
‘Quickest way would have been through the old track in the creek.’
‘That’s the way I went.’
‘Did you think to arm yourself? Grab a stick?’ Marley asked.
‘Didn’t need a stick. If he’d have hurt either of my girls I would have ripped his throat out with my bare hands.’
Bill’s tone was flat as wet cement. Marley didn’t doubt he could have carried through that threat.
‘Then what happened?’ Brigit prompted.
‘I could hear Annette yelling at Tracey to pack some clothes. I would have called out … but I heard a man’s voice.’
Marley’s skin tingled. His gut tightened into a fierce knot, spinning.
‘It was a grown man crying for his mum. Crying about waking up a goddamn baby. He was bent over the waterhole. He had his hand in the water, trying to get a drink but it was like he couldn’t line his mouth up properly. The water just slipped through his fingers. I remember feeling sorry for him. I think I was about to go and help him up.’
The flow of words stopped.
‘Then I saw something fluttering by his boots. I thought it was rubbish from the creek, but it was face up. It was a photograph … and it was Tracey.’ Bill’s voice cracked like splintered ice.
Marley nudged the next photo from the pack.
Beside him, Brigit saw the picture and slapped her hand over her mouth. She pushed up from the table and ran for the door.
‘I’m telling you,’—Bill’s eyes hardened—‘there was a time in Vietnam I thought I’d seen every nightmare a man could see, but then I saw those.’ He indicated the photos.
Jack moved closer but Bill stopped him. ‘You don’t want to see those.’
Jack sat back.
Marley looked. It was Tracey, bent face down over the back of the couch. Her hands were tied behind her back. She’d been forced to hold the shoe behind her back, and …
Marley closed the photographs tight like a pack of cards.
Outside, he heard Brigit retch.
‘What did you think I would do?’ Bill said to Marley, even as his eyes flicked to Jack. ‘What did you think I would do to someone who did that to my daughter?’
Marley looked at both the brothers. He saw Bill’s shoulders pull proud. He saw Jack’s brief knowing nod, and it all tumbled into place in Marley’s head. Bill, Annette, Jack, Tracey … pip, pip, pip, like rain falling.
‘I picked him up by the boots and I dumped his head and shoulders under the water and I held the prick there ’til he stopped kicking.’
45
‘You knew Tracey was yours?’ Jack said hoarsely to Bill. ‘Since when?’
‘Since Mum told me you were going to be a daddy in 1972. I checked for sure years later with a DNA test.’
‘Does Tracey know?’
‘Not from me,’ Bill said, his gaze drifting to the fire.
‘Did Annette know?’
‘She suspected. At the time, she was married to you. Things were different. The ’70s. ’80s. Marriage vows meant something.’
‘Clearly not enough,’ Jack grumbled.
‘You two weren’t divorced. Children born out of wedlock … people talked. I was away anyway a lot of that time, with the army. I tried everything I knew not to love her, and to leave her to you. Turns out you can’t turn it off. I’ve loved Netty since 1966.’
Jack rubbed his chin. ‘When Annette said she wanted a divorce after she picked me up from jail, I told her I knew her dirty little secret. I knew she’d been sleeping with you. I knew you two done the deed way back when you came home from Vietnam that time. Nine months later, Netty pops out a kid?’ Jack laughed. ‘I was drunk a lot of the time and I’m not the biggest brain going around but I was never that stupid. When she wasn’t up the duff after those first few years, I did a test and it turned out I didn’t have any swimmers. I didn’t want everybody knowing Jack Ross didn’t have swimmers so it suited me when she had a kid to look after instead of another bloody kangaroo.’
Brigit returned to the room, pale but resolute. She took her chair beside Marley and picked up her pen. ‘What did I miss?’
‘Tracey isn’t Jack’s and Annette’s daughter. She’s Bill’s,’ Marley told her quietly.
Brigit’s eyes widened.
Jack glanced about the room, locking eyes briefly with Marley and Brigit before returning his focus to Bill. ‘Annette promised me she’d never tell a soul Tracey wasn’t mine, as long as I left the title to the cottage to you. I wasn’t going to. I didn’t want you to get Annette and the cottage as well. I thought it was fair if you lost something too.’
‘I lost her for all those years when she was married to you!’
‘I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but I came out of jail dry. I wanted to make a go of my marriage. I said I’d start AA sessions and I’d stick to them this time. I wanted her to give me a chance. Give us a chance. And she wouldn’t.’ He twitched his still-meaty shoulders. ‘It was always you she wanted.’
The room quietened. Two old men contemplating more than fifty years and some spot on the furthest wall.
Annette had said Alan West had done terrible things to the Ross family.
Marley knew his grandfather had used Jack, preyed on his addictions, manipulated his weakness. Because of Alan West and the Syndicate, Annette hadn’t trusted the police in 1994. Maybe there was a way now for Marley to put things right.
Brigit picked up the notebook she’d shoved across the table. Her fingers found her pen. She cleared her throat. ‘Where were we, Gentlemen? I’m sorry about that. My stomach …’
‘I’ve seen blokes with weaker stomachs than yours, Constable Winger,’ Bill said. ‘There’s no shame in puking. Those pictures have kept me awake some nights but I guess I learned to compartmentalise in the army. I never threw them away.’
‘Why not?’ Brigit asked.
‘Against a day like today. If anybody ever dug up that body, people needed to know that bloke deserved dying.’
‘Did Annette know you had the photos?’
‘Some things a mother never needs to see. That is one of them.’
Marley turned to Brigit, thinking hard. ‘You heard Bill say Day was alive at the waterhole, trying to get a drink. He was going to help him. You heard him say that?’
Brigit glanced at her notebook.
‘Ah, yes. I noted that.’
‘Were you here when Bill said Day pitched forward into the pool unconscious?’
‘Like an aneurism? He fainted?’ Doubt clouded Brigit’s features. She checked her notes and shook her head. ‘I must have been outside.’
‘Day drowned. We can’t do an autopsy to prove it,’ Marley said, catching Bill’s eye, willing him silent. ‘But he’d been whacked with a hunk of wood in what was clearly self-defence. He would have been dizzy. Concussed. He might have fallen. He could have hit his head on a rock. Hell, he could have trod on a snake in the creek for all we know, been bitten, passed out in the water. Drowned.’
For a moment Marley thought Bill might be about to interrupt. Jack, with the barest twitch of his lips, nodded agreement.
Brigit’s gaze flicked to Jack, then Bill, then back to Marley as he continued. ‘Even if forensics find damage to his skull consistent with assault … you find me any defence lawyer who couldn’t convince a jury that the damage came when they filled tonnes of earth and rock into that creek?’
‘But who disposed of the body?’ Brigit asked. ‘Tracey thought Annette weighed the body down with an eighteen kilo bag of dog food. She was certain there should be a plastic dog food bag in the dig. She told us to keep digging, remember?’
Bill cleared his throat. ‘I did it.’
‘Jesus, Bill,’ Jack sputtered.
‘Shut up dickhead.’ Bill took a breath and faced them, hands on his hips. ‘I hid when Netty came into the creek.’
‘Why?’ Brigit said. ‘They were so scared, the women. Knowing you were there, it would have helped them.’
‘He panicked, obviously,’ Jack said.
‘He’s a Vietnam Veteran,’ Brigit shot back. ‘He’s not going to panic.’
Bill scrubbed his hand up the back of his neck.
‘I didn’t want Netty to see the photographs. I didn’t want her to live with what I know she would have done. She would have come to the same conclusion I did once she’d thought it through. Sink the body. Tracey might have argued that they call the police but I knew Netty wouldn’t do that.’
‘Because she didn’t trust Alan West,’ Marley said.
‘Because of West. So I hid when she came into the creek with Sky. I think Sky saw me, she whined, but Annette was only focused on the body. She saw the guy floating. His body was in the water. His boots were on the ground. She must have been thinking then how she’d get rid of him. She drove Tracey and Lani up to The Big House, and while she was gone I sunk the bastard.’
‘How?’
‘I got a water container from the shed and cut off some of that rope. I tied the rope around his waist and the end of it to the container. I shoved him and the container out as far as I could, and I just let it fill with water ’til I couldn’t hold it anymore. I screwed the lid on and I let go. For Netty to see his body sink every time she closed her eyes—I didn’t want that. I couldn’t let her do that. Getting rid of him was the least I could do.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Jack breathed.
‘And after? For all these years? You never told her you sank the body?’ Brigit asked. ‘You two never talked about it?’
‘We talked about it … but not for weeks. You need to understand at the time, Jack was three days from getting out of jail. Tracey was a wreck. Annette spent most of those next few weeks making sure Trace and Lani were okay. She thought he’d sunk from his own body weight. She thought his clothes got waterlogged, or his boots filled, and he just sank to the bottom. Then the developer came in with excavators and bulldozers, and they filled it all up. I couldn’t see the point chiming in with the tiny part I did. It wasn’t worth it. I think it was good for her to think she’d seen it through.’
All four of them lowered their eyes as if they were watching the body sink.
Disposing of a body.
As long as he stuck to that story, that’s all they could get Bill for.
That’s if any prosecutor would think a seventy-something Vietnam Vet who sank the body of a serial killer in a waterhole was a person to pursue.
Still … there was a process. If Annette and Tracey and Bill had come clean all those years ago, the police would have found the missing girls’ photographs sooner. They would have torn that van apart.
Or would they? Could he have trusted his grandfather to do the job right way back then?
Brigit flipped her notebook closed.
‘Is that it, then?’ Jack said.
‘Sit down, Jack,’ Bill said. ‘Stop fussing.’
Brigit moved toward the photographs on the wall, shifting her weight gently side to side between the military pictures of Bill and the historical photos of earlier years on the farm. Marley got up to stir the fire, both of them giving the Ross brothers some space.
Brigit stiffened. She beckoned Marley, saying softly. ‘Come look at this.’
She pointed at the picture of Walter and Morag Ross and the young boys around the hay bale. She tapped at Walter Ross’s shoulder with her fingernail. ‘Recognise that or do those old eyes need a magnifying glass?’
‘What am I looking for, Winger?’
‘We thought it was a belt buckle, that rusted metal piece they dug out of the creek. But what if it’s not from a belt? What if it’s a buckle. You check the shape of it. What if what we’ve got in the dig is the buckle off a pair of dungarees, just like this.’
‘Walter Ross’s dungarees?’
‘Yeah.’
Marley squinted at the photo, and thought about the rusted piece of metal they’d pulled from the dig. It was the right shape. Long, thin.
‘Hudson wants us tracking down relatives of Howard Honch. He thinks it’s Honch down there.’
‘We can still do that,’ Brigit said. ‘But this could be something, right?’
‘They said the DNA from the bones in the creek isn’t any relative to Jack. If Walter is Jack’s father, that can’t be Walter Ross down there. Bill says it’s ridiculous to think it’s Walter in that creek. We’ve got an eye witness says she saw Walter catching the bus out of town.’
‘Dare I say, she wasn’t the most reliable witness,’ Brigit said.
‘Give the poor love a break. She’s ninety-eight.’
‘She wasn’t ninety-eight when she said she saw Walter catch the bus in 1951.’
Brigit and Marley turned to face Jack and Bill Ross. They were deep in conversation, Jack’s arm over Bill’s shoulder.
‘What if … ’ Brigit said. ‘Nah.’
‘What?’ Marley said.
‘The only way that could be Walter’s buckle and Walter’s bones is if he isn’t Jack’s dad, right?’
‘Right.’
‘We could test Bill’s DNA.’
‘We could.’
‘What are you two whispering about?’ Jack said.
Brigit shifted her weight to the other foot and addressed Bill. ‘You said you tested your DNA when you suspected Tracey was your daughter. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘The thing is,’ she began and stopped. ‘Well—’ she stopped again. The skin about her cheeks pinked.
‘Spit it out, Constable Winger. There’s really nothing that would surprise me now,’ Jack said.
‘I don’t know about anybody helping him. I don’t know any of that.’
Marley could have cautioned Bill. He’d thought about it several times. Bill Ross, it’s my duty to tell you that anything you say could be used in evidence against you. Part of him wished the old guy would stop talking.
But God, he wanted to know. They’d covered up a murder for a quarter of a century. Because of what they’d done, all the parents of the other missing girls kept on living, not knowing …
‘Do I need a lawyer?’ Bill asked him.
‘Whoa. Whoa. Whoa,’ Jack said, waving his hands.
‘It’s your right if you want one. I can recommend one if you don’t know of one. If you ask for a lawyer we’ll get you one and we’ll take you down to the station and make a formal record of this interview. For the moment, you’re just helping us with our enquiries.’
Bill stooped to kneel in front of the fire, fussing with the wood, laid in a fresh log. He didn’t resume his seat. He crossed toward the bookshelf and stood there, his back to them, as if trying to choose what he’d read.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Jack said, unable to contain himself. ‘What’s all this about lawyers? It’s Tracey who needs a lawyer!’
Bill put his hand on the spine of a thick book, faded with age, pulled it out. ‘Shut up, dickhead,’ he said to Jack.
‘Now, gentlemen, that’s not helping anyone,’ Brigit said.
Marley was about to suggest they all cool it when a square something in a plastic bag smacked on the kitchen table with a thud and skidded toward Brigit.
Marley and Brigit reacted instinctively, rocking back.
The skidding package flipped off the other side of the table, into Brigit’s stomach. She snatched at it, holding it against her tummy.
They all looked at Bill.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and his eyes flicked to the ceiling. ‘I know what you want me to say, Netty, but I’m not saying it. I wasn’t there for you yesterday but I’m here for you now. I’m always here for you.’
‘Fair dinkum, will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?’ Jack burst out.
Marley held out his hand for the packet and Brigit passed it to him.
The plastic was thin and transparent, knotted tight at the top so that it rustled as his fingers worked to open the seal. The bag held a pack of photographs the same size and shape as those the Irvines found in Greg Day’s van.
He worked the knot loose and tipped the photographs onto the table without touching them. They were clumpy, sticky with age. Brigit leaned closer.
‘We don’t have gloves,’ Marley warned and she pulled her hand away.
Using the handle of a teaspoon, he nudged the top half of the pack, breaking them up, spreading them wider.
The top photograph was more than twenty years old, but it took less than a second for him to know it was a younger Tracey Saeed in a pale blue bra and matching knickers.
He slid the teaspoon into the edge, carefully worked it along the length to make a crack. The paper peeled stiffly to show the photograph beneath.
Tracey’s lips had been drawn over and over again in a blood-red lipstick, or maybe a crayon. Exaggerated like a clown’s. Her eyelids were shaded glaring blue and her cheeks had baby-doll dots drawn on the bone, like in an amateur cartoon.
‘I’ve had these since that day. Didn’t want anybody else to ever find them,’ said Bill.
‘Annette found them on the body?’ Marley asked.
‘I found them in the creek.’
‘Looks to me you should shut up now, Bill,’ Jack said.
‘I’ve shut up for more than twenty years,’ Bill growled. ‘I found Netty’s sunglasses caught up in the bedspread after she left me that morning. Don’t make that face at me, dickhead. You’ve had plenty of time to work out we were sleeping together in 1994.’
Whatever Jack had been about to say, he swallowed it.
‘The sunglasses?’ Marley prompted, quietly.
Bill’s focus came back. ‘I found them. I grabbed them and ran after Netty to give them back but I got as far as the lookout and I looked down at Tracey’s place like I always did. I saw a bloke I didn’t know—but I knew it wasn’t Mohammed. I saw Sky fly from the woodshed and just about bite this bloke’s leg off, and I saw Annette run out from the woodshed wielding a lump of wood like a baseballer. She hit him and I didn’t wait after that. I ran to help. I ran like hell.’
‘From the top of the lookout?’ Jack asked Bill.
‘Yep.’
‘Quickest way would have been through the old track in the creek.’
‘That’s the way I went.’
‘Did you think to arm yourself? Grab a stick?’ Marley asked.
‘Didn’t need a stick. If he’d have hurt either of my girls I would have ripped his throat out with my bare hands.’
Bill’s tone was flat as wet cement. Marley didn’t doubt he could have carried through that threat.
‘Then what happened?’ Brigit prompted.
‘I could hear Annette yelling at Tracey to pack some clothes. I would have called out … but I heard a man’s voice.’
Marley’s skin tingled. His gut tightened into a fierce knot, spinning.
‘It was a grown man crying for his mum. Crying about waking up a goddamn baby. He was bent over the waterhole. He had his hand in the water, trying to get a drink but it was like he couldn’t line his mouth up properly. The water just slipped through his fingers. I remember feeling sorry for him. I think I was about to go and help him up.’
The flow of words stopped.
‘Then I saw something fluttering by his boots. I thought it was rubbish from the creek, but it was face up. It was a photograph … and it was Tracey.’ Bill’s voice cracked like splintered ice.
Marley nudged the next photo from the pack.
Beside him, Brigit saw the picture and slapped her hand over her mouth. She pushed up from the table and ran for the door.
‘I’m telling you,’—Bill’s eyes hardened—‘there was a time in Vietnam I thought I’d seen every nightmare a man could see, but then I saw those.’ He indicated the photos.
Jack moved closer but Bill stopped him. ‘You don’t want to see those.’
Jack sat back.
Marley looked. It was Tracey, bent face down over the back of the couch. Her hands were tied behind her back. She’d been forced to hold the shoe behind her back, and …
Marley closed the photographs tight like a pack of cards.
Outside, he heard Brigit retch.
‘What did you think I would do?’ Bill said to Marley, even as his eyes flicked to Jack. ‘What did you think I would do to someone who did that to my daughter?’
Marley looked at both the brothers. He saw Bill’s shoulders pull proud. He saw Jack’s brief knowing nod, and it all tumbled into place in Marley’s head. Bill, Annette, Jack, Tracey … pip, pip, pip, like rain falling.
‘I picked him up by the boots and I dumped his head and shoulders under the water and I held the prick there ’til he stopped kicking.’
45
‘You knew Tracey was yours?’ Jack said hoarsely to Bill. ‘Since when?’
‘Since Mum told me you were going to be a daddy in 1972. I checked for sure years later with a DNA test.’
‘Does Tracey know?’
‘Not from me,’ Bill said, his gaze drifting to the fire.
‘Did Annette know?’
‘She suspected. At the time, she was married to you. Things were different. The ’70s. ’80s. Marriage vows meant something.’
‘Clearly not enough,’ Jack grumbled.
‘You two weren’t divorced. Children born out of wedlock … people talked. I was away anyway a lot of that time, with the army. I tried everything I knew not to love her, and to leave her to you. Turns out you can’t turn it off. I’ve loved Netty since 1966.’
Jack rubbed his chin. ‘When Annette said she wanted a divorce after she picked me up from jail, I told her I knew her dirty little secret. I knew she’d been sleeping with you. I knew you two done the deed way back when you came home from Vietnam that time. Nine months later, Netty pops out a kid?’ Jack laughed. ‘I was drunk a lot of the time and I’m not the biggest brain going around but I was never that stupid. When she wasn’t up the duff after those first few years, I did a test and it turned out I didn’t have any swimmers. I didn’t want everybody knowing Jack Ross didn’t have swimmers so it suited me when she had a kid to look after instead of another bloody kangaroo.’
Brigit returned to the room, pale but resolute. She took her chair beside Marley and picked up her pen. ‘What did I miss?’
‘Tracey isn’t Jack’s and Annette’s daughter. She’s Bill’s,’ Marley told her quietly.
Brigit’s eyes widened.
Jack glanced about the room, locking eyes briefly with Marley and Brigit before returning his focus to Bill. ‘Annette promised me she’d never tell a soul Tracey wasn’t mine, as long as I left the title to the cottage to you. I wasn’t going to. I didn’t want you to get Annette and the cottage as well. I thought it was fair if you lost something too.’
‘I lost her for all those years when she was married to you!’
‘I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but I came out of jail dry. I wanted to make a go of my marriage. I said I’d start AA sessions and I’d stick to them this time. I wanted her to give me a chance. Give us a chance. And she wouldn’t.’ He twitched his still-meaty shoulders. ‘It was always you she wanted.’
The room quietened. Two old men contemplating more than fifty years and some spot on the furthest wall.
Annette had said Alan West had done terrible things to the Ross family.
Marley knew his grandfather had used Jack, preyed on his addictions, manipulated his weakness. Because of Alan West and the Syndicate, Annette hadn’t trusted the police in 1994. Maybe there was a way now for Marley to put things right.
Brigit picked up the notebook she’d shoved across the table. Her fingers found her pen. She cleared her throat. ‘Where were we, Gentlemen? I’m sorry about that. My stomach …’
‘I’ve seen blokes with weaker stomachs than yours, Constable Winger,’ Bill said. ‘There’s no shame in puking. Those pictures have kept me awake some nights but I guess I learned to compartmentalise in the army. I never threw them away.’
‘Why not?’ Brigit asked.
‘Against a day like today. If anybody ever dug up that body, people needed to know that bloke deserved dying.’
‘Did Annette know you had the photos?’
‘Some things a mother never needs to see. That is one of them.’
Marley turned to Brigit, thinking hard. ‘You heard Bill say Day was alive at the waterhole, trying to get a drink. He was going to help him. You heard him say that?’
Brigit glanced at her notebook.
‘Ah, yes. I noted that.’
‘Were you here when Bill said Day pitched forward into the pool unconscious?’
‘Like an aneurism? He fainted?’ Doubt clouded Brigit’s features. She checked her notes and shook her head. ‘I must have been outside.’
‘Day drowned. We can’t do an autopsy to prove it,’ Marley said, catching Bill’s eye, willing him silent. ‘But he’d been whacked with a hunk of wood in what was clearly self-defence. He would have been dizzy. Concussed. He might have fallen. He could have hit his head on a rock. Hell, he could have trod on a snake in the creek for all we know, been bitten, passed out in the water. Drowned.’
For a moment Marley thought Bill might be about to interrupt. Jack, with the barest twitch of his lips, nodded agreement.
Brigit’s gaze flicked to Jack, then Bill, then back to Marley as he continued. ‘Even if forensics find damage to his skull consistent with assault … you find me any defence lawyer who couldn’t convince a jury that the damage came when they filled tonnes of earth and rock into that creek?’
‘But who disposed of the body?’ Brigit asked. ‘Tracey thought Annette weighed the body down with an eighteen kilo bag of dog food. She was certain there should be a plastic dog food bag in the dig. She told us to keep digging, remember?’
Bill cleared his throat. ‘I did it.’
‘Jesus, Bill,’ Jack sputtered.
‘Shut up dickhead.’ Bill took a breath and faced them, hands on his hips. ‘I hid when Netty came into the creek.’
‘Why?’ Brigit said. ‘They were so scared, the women. Knowing you were there, it would have helped them.’
‘He panicked, obviously,’ Jack said.
‘He’s a Vietnam Veteran,’ Brigit shot back. ‘He’s not going to panic.’
Bill scrubbed his hand up the back of his neck.
‘I didn’t want Netty to see the photographs. I didn’t want her to live with what I know she would have done. She would have come to the same conclusion I did once she’d thought it through. Sink the body. Tracey might have argued that they call the police but I knew Netty wouldn’t do that.’
‘Because she didn’t trust Alan West,’ Marley said.
‘Because of West. So I hid when she came into the creek with Sky. I think Sky saw me, she whined, but Annette was only focused on the body. She saw the guy floating. His body was in the water. His boots were on the ground. She must have been thinking then how she’d get rid of him. She drove Tracey and Lani up to The Big House, and while she was gone I sunk the bastard.’
‘How?’
‘I got a water container from the shed and cut off some of that rope. I tied the rope around his waist and the end of it to the container. I shoved him and the container out as far as I could, and I just let it fill with water ’til I couldn’t hold it anymore. I screwed the lid on and I let go. For Netty to see his body sink every time she closed her eyes—I didn’t want that. I couldn’t let her do that. Getting rid of him was the least I could do.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Jack breathed.
‘And after? For all these years? You never told her you sank the body?’ Brigit asked. ‘You two never talked about it?’
‘We talked about it … but not for weeks. You need to understand at the time, Jack was three days from getting out of jail. Tracey was a wreck. Annette spent most of those next few weeks making sure Trace and Lani were okay. She thought he’d sunk from his own body weight. She thought his clothes got waterlogged, or his boots filled, and he just sank to the bottom. Then the developer came in with excavators and bulldozers, and they filled it all up. I couldn’t see the point chiming in with the tiny part I did. It wasn’t worth it. I think it was good for her to think she’d seen it through.’
All four of them lowered their eyes as if they were watching the body sink.
Disposing of a body.
As long as he stuck to that story, that’s all they could get Bill for.
That’s if any prosecutor would think a seventy-something Vietnam Vet who sank the body of a serial killer in a waterhole was a person to pursue.
Still … there was a process. If Annette and Tracey and Bill had come clean all those years ago, the police would have found the missing girls’ photographs sooner. They would have torn that van apart.
Or would they? Could he have trusted his grandfather to do the job right way back then?
Brigit flipped her notebook closed.
‘Is that it, then?’ Jack said.
‘Sit down, Jack,’ Bill said. ‘Stop fussing.’
Brigit moved toward the photographs on the wall, shifting her weight gently side to side between the military pictures of Bill and the historical photos of earlier years on the farm. Marley got up to stir the fire, both of them giving the Ross brothers some space.
Brigit stiffened. She beckoned Marley, saying softly. ‘Come look at this.’
She pointed at the picture of Walter and Morag Ross and the young boys around the hay bale. She tapped at Walter Ross’s shoulder with her fingernail. ‘Recognise that or do those old eyes need a magnifying glass?’
‘What am I looking for, Winger?’
‘We thought it was a belt buckle, that rusted metal piece they dug out of the creek. But what if it’s not from a belt? What if it’s a buckle. You check the shape of it. What if what we’ve got in the dig is the buckle off a pair of dungarees, just like this.’
‘Walter Ross’s dungarees?’
‘Yeah.’
Marley squinted at the photo, and thought about the rusted piece of metal they’d pulled from the dig. It was the right shape. Long, thin.
‘Hudson wants us tracking down relatives of Howard Honch. He thinks it’s Honch down there.’
‘We can still do that,’ Brigit said. ‘But this could be something, right?’
‘They said the DNA from the bones in the creek isn’t any relative to Jack. If Walter is Jack’s father, that can’t be Walter Ross down there. Bill says it’s ridiculous to think it’s Walter in that creek. We’ve got an eye witness says she saw Walter catching the bus out of town.’
‘Dare I say, she wasn’t the most reliable witness,’ Brigit said.
‘Give the poor love a break. She’s ninety-eight.’
‘She wasn’t ninety-eight when she said she saw Walter catch the bus in 1951.’
Brigit and Marley turned to face Jack and Bill Ross. They were deep in conversation, Jack’s arm over Bill’s shoulder.
‘What if … ’ Brigit said. ‘Nah.’
‘What?’ Marley said.
‘The only way that could be Walter’s buckle and Walter’s bones is if he isn’t Jack’s dad, right?’
‘Right.’
‘We could test Bill’s DNA.’
‘We could.’
‘What are you two whispering about?’ Jack said.
Brigit shifted her weight to the other foot and addressed Bill. ‘You said you tested your DNA when you suspected Tracey was your daughter. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘The thing is,’ she began and stopped. ‘Well—’ she stopped again. The skin about her cheeks pinked.
‘Spit it out, Constable Winger. There’s really nothing that would surprise me now,’ Jack said.
