Justice In Jeopardy Page 2

  Tonight, on top of feeling unwell, Nugget’s head is still sore from when he tumbled over and gouged out a chunk of his temple after a monumental binge on the rum. Now, distracted by a slight movement outside his window, he rubs his temples and readjusts his gaze to peer through the curtain. The light is on in his bedroom and it is dark on the veranda, but he has no doubt what he can see. The dim outline of a person, crouching underneath his windowsill. Someone is lurking outside.

  He thinks it is Arthur Borcherts’12-year-old son, Paul. Nugget looks again: whoever is outside appears to be between 18 to 20 years old, 172–174cm tall and about 10 stone. Slender build, broad shouldered. Nugget would be specific about the hair colour and length in depositions he would later make to police. The person he saw on the veranda had hair that was ‘brown to fairish and about collar length’.

  Nugget knows it is pointless to call out. No one in the house can hear him over the din of the music and TV. He grumbles as he hauls himself out of bed and rummages in the suitcase that doubles as his wardrobe, putting on his scuffs and adjusting the elastic of his pyjama pants before he shuffles up the hallway to the kitchen.

  ‘There’s a bloke hangin’ around on the veranda.’

  Arthur has had his fair share of grog, drains his beer glass and stares up at Nugget through blood-shot eyes. ‘What? Whaddya mean?’

  ‘There’s someone outside me window,’ Nugget repeats. ‘Snowdropping stuff off of the fucking veranda.’

  Arthur and his mate weave slightly as they scrape back their kitchen chairs and walk outside with Nugget. They thread their way through the washing on the right side of the veranda, opposite the RAAF flats, and walk across the front landing onto the left side of the veranda. Peering over the railing into the darkness for a few seconds, they then head back to the kitchen.

  ‘There’s no one there, Nug,’ Arthur shrugs, picking up his beer bottle and refilling his glass. ‘No one.’

  The beer has now run out and it is getting late. Arthur’s mate has left, Nugget has gone back to bed and it’s time to turn in for the night. Arthur would later recall, when talking to police, that his son from a previous relationship, Paul, had just returned home from a barbecue and had headed straight in to watch TV. He would be adamant: he wasn’t that drunk that he couldn’t remember small details.

  Arthur pulls the kitchen window shut and idly watches a fellow walk down the cement path of the RAAF units opposite his house, toward the end unit furthest secluded from the road. He only just gets a glimpse of him: about 170cm or something, maybe 18, 19 years old. It is dark, except for a light on outside one flat. The bloke is heading down that way and appears to know where he is going. Either toward Unit 3 or 4. It’s hard to say.

  He tumbles into bed and is asleep within minutes. Arthur Borchert won’t hear another sound all night.

  4

  Stephanie and Deidre, freshly bathed and hair neatly slicked down, giggle as they dance around in the new pyjamas Grandma bought them in Longreach the day before. Stephanie leads the way, and Deidre copies her. It is usually a floorshow: doilies on their heads and tea towels over their shoulders, but tonight, after their long bus trip, they are too tired for a performance.

  The family had spent most of the day at their unit, 3/12 Short Street, apart from when they went grocery shopping and looked at the new house assigned to them by the RAAF. Deidre, eager to show that she could walk, tottered around a while with Faye as she hung the washing on the line outside the unit.

  Faye is glad that they will soon be moving into their new home and is grateful that the dishevelled family who live in the shabby house near the units haven’t yet appeared today to notice that they are back. More than 30 years later, she still remembers them as peculiar. ‘They were the oddest people. The woman who lived there used to really bother me; she would just stand and stare at us. Not doing anything but standing there. I’d acknowledge she was there but that was all; kept my back door shut as often as I could so she couldn’t see us. The kids used to come to the fence and it was difficult for me to explain to Stephanie why I didn’t want her to play with them, without me sounding snobby. One of the girls was starry-eyed with dirty, dark, long hair, and she always wanted to play with Steph. But they were an unsavoury lot. The kids ran around the streets at all hours and they always had grubby noses. The little boy, who was about seven years old, would wander around in a dress any old time and the youngest would drink water or milk out of a beer stubby. It was just awful. As soon as we drove in, over they’d come. They were all ages and there was always someone sitting outside having a beer.’ The police, regularly called to the household to sort out domestics, were well acquainted with the family. They reckoned that if they lived in Alabama, they would be called hillbillies.

  Deidre wriggles wildly as Faye puts on her night nappy and pilchers under her pyjama pants. ‘Keep still, you rascal,’ Faye chides. It doesn’t take much persuasion: exhausted from the trip back from Longreach, she is almost asleep by the time she is carried up the passage and put into bed around 7.30. Stephanie follows an hour later, tucked up in her bed under the window.

  Soon after nine, Faye switches off the lounge-room light. Barry finds moving around on his crutches awkward, and swings up the short passage and straight into bed while Faye checks the unit. There is no need to lock the back door: Ipswich, no more than a big country town despite being called a city, is as safe as it is in Longreach where she and Barry had both grown up.

  An hour later, Faye makes a final check of the children. Reaching over Stephanie’s bed, she pulls the window shut and slides the curtain before gently tucking the blankets around the shoulders of both sleeping girls. Deidre is in a makeshift bed, on a mattress inside a playpen, closest to the door.

  From his vantage point on the veranda of the old Queenslander, hidden by shadows and clothes on the line, he peeps through the chink in the curtain and watches as Faye tenderly kisses her sleeping daughters. He caresses the panties, women’s step-ins and a silk half-slip he has just stolen from the line, feels the familiar arousal that always follows his pilfering of underwear. It’s not just the risk of stealing without being caught, though that heightens the thrill; it’s also naughty, forbidden, which makes it irresistible. A woman’s crotch, warm and moist, has actually been inside these panties. They bring back erotic memories.

  He had to have it. Had to steal the underwear, had to take it. No matter how great the risk, it is an overwhelming compulsion. He has to. Has to. Has to.

  He closes his eyes and shivers, giving in to the sensuous rush that flows through his body as his fantasies take over. He is a naughty boy with stolen underwear. It is his little secret.

  Suddenly on high alert, shaken from his fantasies by a noise in the bedroom behind him, he knows he can’t afford to hang around here any longer. It seems someone inside the house may have spotted him. He’s got to go. Now.

  He jumps over the railing, landing softly as a cat in the garden of the RAAF units. Crouching, still before making his move. If the parents don’t wake and if the girls don’t make a sound, nothing should go wrong. He figures he can be in and out in less than 50 seconds.

  He has banked on the unit not being locked, on being able to move stealthily, silently, to where the children are sleeping. The toilet light is on, the only illumination in the darkness. Fifty seconds. That is all he should need to get in and out of there.

  There is no sound from the parents’ bedroom opposite the passage where the girls are sleeping. He is in the girls’ room now, his breath labouring with fear and excitement. Stephanie is deep in dreams, her hair splashing over the pillow. Deidre is at his feet, on the mattress inside the playpen.

  Not a sound in the room but the children’s gentle breathing. He hovers above Deidre’s makeshift cot, swooping down and lifting her out of the blankets and into his arms in one seamless movement. She doesn’t stir, her blonde hair falling over his shoulder as he sharply inhales, listening intently to check he has not disturbed th
e parents. Exiting the same way he came in, he skulks out into the night.

  He needs to go somewhere private, where they will be undisturbed. Just him, and his precious possession. Somewhere private.

  Only he would know where he took her. It would be his secret. When the pandemonium started, he would quietly gloat at the chaos and grief. The police could wonder all they like about how he entered the unit. Whether he quietly turned the handle of the unlocked back door and crept along the passage with his back to the wall, moving sideways with soft tread, careful not to trip in the darkness. Entering the girls’ bedroom and exiting the same way, this time with Deidre in his arms. Or whether he climbed into the girls’ bedroom after noiselessly sliding the aluminum window on its tracks, loping in one long stride over Stephanie’s bed and picking up her sleeping sister from her cot. Let them wonder if he carried her away on foot, bundled her into a car, defiled her in a caravan or took her straight to the park. Let them ponder. It would be his special secret.

  Lurking now at the park’s entrance, he glances furtively behind to make sure no one has seen them. It is dark and late and Limestone Park appears deserted. Perfectly deserted. In the distance he can make out the silhouette of the toilet block, used during the day for sporting groups and families enjoying the sunshine and open air. He shifts Deidre higher on his shoulder and plunges into the park, half running under the canopy of trees that sprinkles them both with a wet confetti of leaves. Huddling deeper into his jacket to avoid the shower, he looks at the ground as he quickens his pace into a sprint. He will leave no tracks, no footprints, their absence leading police to the inexorable conclusion – but one they would never be able to prove – that this person seemed to know where he was going.

  Stephanie opens her eyes as the first light of day filters into her bedroom, and looks across to her sister’s cot. Slipping out of bed, she patters in bare feet across the passage to her parent’s room, her small forehead puckered in a frown. ‘Mummy, wake up,’ she says, tugging urgently at Faye’s shoulder. ‘Dee Dee’s not in her bed.’

  5

  The lines are blurring between night and day, dawn nudging out the moon, and light peeking through the trees in Limestone Park. The quiet call of migratory birds echoes through the crisp Saturday morning air. It is Westy Mill’s routine to exercise his horse early, but the trotter is frisky this morning, trying to shake off his harness.

  Something has caught Westy’s eye. He turns the reins to manoeuvre his skittish trotter closer to the toilet block, trying to get him to keep still. ‘Whoa, boy,’ he says, peering up at the roof. ‘Whoa.’ A right shoulder, arm and head are hanging limply over the guttering. It is a rag doll, identical to those that Westy’s three young daughters own. He moves closer, unsteady in the back of the gig.

  It is as though she was arranged there, like an obscene Harlequin. Arranged as casually as a pornographic piece of art. Westy’s stomach heaves. This is no rag doll. He turns in the gig to see who else is in the park. A man jogging alone on the far side of the oval. Two men training a greyhound less than 6 metres away. And suddenly they are standing next to him, answering his panicked cry that has reverberated through the park. There’s a baby here! A baby! Come over and help!

  Westy is trying to scale up onto the roof, unable to get a grip on the guttering and slipping back down with the dew and damp from yesterday’s rain. Climbing the lattice, he straddles it precariously as he leans over and touches the baby. Her head is partly lying on a lady’s silk half-slip. Westy has recently completed a first-aid course and feels her tiny wrist for a pulse. Nothing. He wrestles with what he should do. It doesn’t appear that rigor mortis has yet set in; the tiny girl may still be alive. But, if he moves her, he could make it worse. He has to do something. Westy turns the baby over, lifts her into his arms, and gently lowers her to the people standing around below.

  It would always unsettle them, this memory. Numb with shock, shaking and shuffling from foot to foot. The baby’s damp hair clinging to the side of her cheeks, her face a tapestry of bruises where a large hand had run from her forehead to her chin. Diffused marks on one creamy dimpled thigh. Pink pyjama coat with bunny motifs covering the top of her little body, and her nappy, still inside her matching pyjama pants, hastily discarded on the ground outside the toilet. But it is what she is wearing that makes Westy lose all composure, makes him want to heave. Below the waist, her body is grotesquely arranged in women’s step-ins and blue panties that come halfway to her chubby knees.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Westy blurts, his face ashen. ‘Get a doctor, fast!’

  ‘What’s up, darling?’ Faye is half-asleep, reaching out to Stephanie to snuggle in with her under the blanket. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Stephanie repeated what she has just told her mother. ‘Dee Dee is not in her bed.’

  Stephanie can’t be right. Deidre has only just started walking, tottering uncertainly on her little legs and reaching out her arms for Faye to pick her up when she falls down. It is not possible that she has climbed out of the playpen on her own. ‘She has to be there, darling,’ Faye says. She is startled, now wide-awake. Deidre is too little to open doors on her own. ‘Of course she’s there.’

  Faye crosses the passage and switches the light on in the girls’ bedroom. The cot is empty; Deidre’s bottle of milk lies abandoned on the floor. Barry is standing behind his wife now, leaning on his crutches and gently quizzing Stephanie. ‘You sure Dee Dee wasn’t in bed when you woke up, Steph?’Deidre’s blanket is pulled back, but everything else is as it had been the night before.

  The little girl shakes her head, looks solemnly at her sister’s cot. ‘No, Daddy,’ she says, her bottom lip starting to tremble. ‘She wasn’t there.’

  Barry opens wardrobe doors while Faye searches under the beds. Bile is rising in her throat and she is struggling to control her panic. ‘Deidre,’ she calls, her voice shaky. ‘Bubby, answer me. Where are you?’

  Opening and closing cupboards, searching behind the couch, frantically pulling back the blankets on their bed in case she is somehow hiding in there. Around and around the small unit, up and down the pathways outside. Stephanie is crying now, scared her little sister hasn’t been found and shaken by her parents’ panic. A cry catches in Faye’s voice. ‘You stay here with Daddy, Steph, and I’ll go and talk to the man next door.’ She looks at Barry, his face parchment white and he nods in agreement. They don’t have a phone and Faye can move much faster than he can on crutches.

  Banging on their neighbour Ian Lay’s door with the balls of her fists. Hyperventilating, her breath steamy against the early-morning chill. Frantic now, begging him to please hurry up and open the door. He is tying the belt on his dressing-gown as he groggily answers her knock. ‘What’s up, Faye?’

  Ian works with Barry at the RAAF base, but he doesn’t know the family that well. The Kennedys haven’t been in Ipswich very long. ‘Deidre’s missing. Deidre’s gone. We’ve looked everywhere for her.’ Faye’s voice sounds disconnected, hollow, rattling in staccato sentences. ‘Deidre’s missing. We need some help to look for her.’

  Ian stares dumbly at her for a brief moment, as though she has gone mad. ‘What?’

  ‘Deidre’s missing.’

  He has finally absorbed what she is telling him. ‘Oh God, Faye. How long has she been gone?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wasn’t in her cot this morning.’

  Ian throws on some clothes and retraces Faye and Barry’s steps in and outside the unit. It doesn’t take him long to realise they are wasting valuable time. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he tells them. ‘I’m going to get the police.’

  Barry and Faye stay behind. Opening kitchen cupboards, looking under the beds, calling out their daughter’s name. Deidre has to be somewhere.

  Detective-Sergeant John Reynolds yawns and looks up at the clock. It has been relatively quiet for a Friday-night graveyard shift: the usual drunks spoiling for a stoush after they have pissed their week’s wages up against the wall, and t
he odd domestic, nothing too serious. Just under two hours to go and he can clock off at 8 o’clock, go home to his family for a leisurely Saturday-morning breakfast.

  He snaps his head up from his paperwork as a bloke charges through the front door, planting the palms of his hands on the front counter to steady himself. He is babbling incoherently. ‘Take it easy, mate,’ Reynolds says. ‘Slow down and tell me what’s happened. First of all, what’s your name?’

  ‘Linklater. Ian Linklater.’

  Reynolds leans in closer. The bloke obviously hasn’t been drinking but something has badly unnerved him.

  He takes a shaky breath before he continues. ‘There’s a dead baby in Limestone Park. All bruised and dressed up in ladies’ underwear. A bloke found her and yelled out to us to help. She was on top of the toilet block. You’d better get down there, quick.’