‘No, he didn’t,’ Bella said. ‘And then I knew Snale was off limits, even with all her sickening fucking sympathy. The Chief would have told her to disregard anything I said. She’d have listened. He was her mentor, and he thought I was lying.’
Of course he did. She’d picked exactly the wrong person to try her first sexual abuse confession on: an older man in a position of authority, someone who didn’t know her, someone obviously more than willing to get involved in serious illegal activity himself. Theo Campbell would have been well-versed in the angsty drama of the teenagers in his town. They were trapped. Futureless. And here was the daughter of one of the most upstanding men in town making a ridiculous claim with no evidence and no witnesses. Admitting to having been complicit, herself, for years. He’d have fobbed her off as the angry daughter of a selfish dad who didn’t want to pay her university fees. She was the hot young student who flirted for top grades and made sexual assault claims against her professor when she didn’t get them. The girl next door who undressed before open windows, pretending she couldn’t see her neighbour watching, until she was caught, pleading ignorance. She was a dangerous temptress, beautiful liar, the scourge of middle-aged men.
I knew her from my work. She was the unbelieved. Shamed and guilted into keeping quiet or hammered quietly with undermining reasoning until she just couldn’t believe herself anymore. She was the one who kept quiet. Waited until she couldn’t stand it anymore, then wrote a note and killed herself.
But Bella wasn’t going to kill herself. Her gesture was going to be on a much grander scale. A spectacle. Terror we would have a good long while to think about before we all died, cut down by her bullets, running for our lives. She was planning a Carrie-style showdown.
And no one would be laughing now.
Chapter 114
‘I TOLD REBECCA Greene, my old teacher,’ Bella counted on her fingers. ‘She promised she was going to do something. A week later she transferred out. Took a posting in Darwin. I never saw her again. When Brandon Skinner overdosed last year, I tried to tell his mother, Mary.’ She thrust her arm out again, to the north of us. ‘She insisted it was an accident. Nothing had happened. He was a happy boy.’
I lost a child, Mary’s words came back to me.
It’s all gonna come out.
It’s all coming to an end.
‘I had no proof. I couldn’t find the photographs. He’d hidden them too well. All I had was my story. I told one of the girls who’d been out there with me in the desert on one of the camps.’ Bella’s eyes had glazed over. ‘Mara. I saw her at uni, in Sydney. We got drunk together. She didn’t want to know anything about it. It was too many years ago. She was happy and she didn’t want some weird story from back home, about something she didn’t even remember and only half believed, ruining her great new life. They were just pictures, right?’
We both looked at Dez. His eyes pleaded with his daughter.
‘I believe you, Bella,’ I said, showing her the photographs at my feet. ‘I believe you, OK? I can help you. I’ll take these photographs and your testimony and we’ll prosecute him. We’ll send him to prison for a long, long time. And he will suffer in there, I guarantee it.’ I thought briefly of Sam. The kind of threats a man received when his crime was against women and children.
‘I think I’ve given this town enough chances to stop what’s coming,’ she said. ‘You read the diary. You know I’ve been looking into other people who have done what I’m going to do. The consistent thing among all of them is that they gave people chances to turn things around. I left the diary at the fucking rest stop. I was begging you to do something. Do something!’ She sighed. ‘And then here you were, sitting with him, lapping up his words over roast fucking chicken. I can’t let this go on.’
Bella picked up one of the mobile phones on the counter and looked at her father, lazily, the weary teenager tired of Daddy’s bullshit.
Dez writhed in the chair.
‘It’s time to go,’ Bella said.
She pushed the button.
Chapter 115
‘OH MY GOD,’ Whitt said as he walked down the hill from where he’d parked his car haphazardly across an alleyway. The street was blocked by police cars, ambulances, even a fire truck trying to find its way through the mess. Officers were redirecting traffic down a dead-end street and back up the hill towards Kings Cross. There were blockades being put into place. Officers trying to keep the crowds back from the entrance to Harriet’s apartment building.
He’d heard the call on the radio – possible sighting of one of the Georges River Killer suspects. One wounded, one missing, one dead. When Whitt failed to get Tox on the phone, and then heard the location of the incident come through, he knew. He grabbed his badge from his back pocket and started pushing through the people, approaching the police tape.
Upstairs, a broken window. Glass in the hall. Whitt was charging up the stairs when he was flattened against the wall by paramedics wrestling a stretcher around the tight corner. It was Tox, his blond hair slicked back, wet with blood, an oxygen mask clamped to his face. Blood all over his neck. He looked waxy, grey.
‘Get out of the way!’ One of the medics shoved at Whitt, leaving a big red handprint on his shirt. ‘Move!’
‘Is he alive? Is he alive? Oh God!’
One wounded, one missing, one dead. Whitt hadn’t prayed in many years. But he was praying now that this man, this strange creature he hadn’t even been sure he liked, wasn’t dead. Because he knew now he had indeed liked him all this time. He was badly behaved, callous, unpredictable. A lot like Harry. Whitt had taken a long time to realise he liked Harry too, and now he’d do anything for her. Further down the hall a big man in a polo shirt was sprawled out on the blood-soaked carpet, two paramedics pumping on his chest.
Whitt ran behind the paramedics carrying Tox’s stretcher.
‘Tell me if he’s alive!’
The paramedics were barking at each other, medical terms, directions. One of them seemed to be wrestling with Tox as they ran along, trying to pull his hands apart. Whitt caught up. Tox was indeed lying with one arm tucked tightly against his chest, the fist closed, holding the arm there with a tight grip on his own wrist. He was alive. Fighting for consciousness, unwilling to let his arm go. Whitt watched, his skin tingling with joy and relief, as Tox’s eyes opened, shifted to him briefly before rolling up in his head.
‘Sir, I need to get a line into that hand! Let go!’
‘Reverence!’ Tox moaned, the oxygen mask muffling his words.
‘What?’ Whitt shoved the paramedic on his side of the stretcher away. ‘What is it? What did you say?’
‘ Reverence.’ Tox was struggling to breathe. He coughed, sprayed the inside of the mask with blood. ‘Rev. Er. Ence.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Whitt struggled. ‘I –’
Tox let his wrist go, reached out and grabbed Whitt by his shirt. The other fist was still balled against his chest. ‘EVIDENCE!’
Whitt heard the word through the mask that time. He looked at the fist on Tox’s chest.
‘Oh God. Oh Jesus. OK! I get it! I get it!’
Whitt dashed into the street, wrenched open the door of the nearest patrol car and grabbed an evidence bag. He ran back to the ambulance just as the medics were loading Tox into the back. Whitt jumped into the tiny space.
‘Sir, you need to get out of this van! We’re trying to save a life here!’
‘No way.’ Whitt took Tox’s wrist and slid the evidence bag over his hand. He was passed out now. The wrist was limp.
Whitt grabbed a roll of bandages from the shelf beside him and began winding them around and around his partner’s wrist, sealing the bag around his hand. ‘He’s got forensic evidence under his nails. I’m preserving that evidence until we can get it tested.’
‘How can you be so selfish?’ one of the medics snapped as the doors shut behind her and the engine roared to life. ‘This man is dying!’
‘Not without reason, he’s not,’ Whitt said.
Chapter 116