The ambulances were waiting, and the team was working fast. The weather was drawing in, and although no one was unprofessional enough to say so, it was Christmas Eve; everyone was meant to be somewhere else. Once Duke was satisfied that the scene had been thoroughly searched and photographed, he would havethe bodies of the Turner family transported to the West Terrace morgue, where Larry Smythson was standing by. Everything would be clearer when they knew what had killed them; until that time there was little Duke could do but wait.
Or so he thought. Suddenly, the young probationary constable came running.
“There’s one missing, sir.”
Sergeant Duke turned to face him. “One what?”
“One child, sir.” Jerosch pointed to a hanging basket in the lowest bough of a nearby willow. “There was a baby, but she’s not here now.”
Annie was in the kitchen when he got home, washing up a pile of dishes. It was late and, although she was facing the sink, he could tell from the set of her neck that she wasn’t happy. Peter stopped in the doorway; he took off his wet hat but didn’t hang it.
“Your dinner’s in the fridge,” said Annie as she dragged dirty plates through suds to the clean pile on the other side. “Along with the rest of your mother’s stollen.”
Mention of his mother so soon was not a good sign.
“Sam and Petey are in bed. Asleep at last, though they’ve given me the devil of a time.”
“Too much excitement? Too much sugar?”
“Too much everything.”
“I’m sorry about the dinner. Things took longer than expected in the Hills.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s a bad business what’s happened up there, Annie. You’ll see it in the news tomorrow. A mother, three children as well, all of them dead. A baby still missing.”
She turned around at that.
“Looks like dogs. We’ve been searching, but the weather’s no help.”
Something changed in her expression. “You’re drenched.” She came to him, pressing her hands against his wet sleeves, his shoulders. “You need to have a warm shower. Go on. I’ll heat your plate and you can tell me about it.”
Her voice had softened. She was still angry—he could only imagine his mother’s mood at the dinner table when he failed to materialize—but she understood that he’d had to stay.
Policemen grew tough skins. The job required them to confront the worst of humankind while somehow keeping enough of themselves tender to remain good husbands and fathers, decent members of society. Peter Duke was a first-rate policeman; he could run his eye over a murder scene and look beyond the loss of life to a cool list of evidence and possibilities. But since Sam and Pete Jr. came along, something inside him had changed. He could be professional about it, but dead kids were his Achilles’ heel.
They sat together, he and Annie, late into the night, wrapping the final Christmas presents as Peter described the scene that had met him when he arrived at the Turner place. Annie shook her head and frowned and asked him whether he had a theory. It was a bit early for that, he told her; they hadn’t even started their investigation—but at his core, in the place from which one’s instincts and assumptions rise, he was nursing something dark and troubling. As he’d stood there looking down at them, a mother and her children, her husband—their father—away, a word had come into his head:Kilburn.And with it the beginnings of a grim idea.
Kilburn is a suburb in Adelaide, once known as “Little Chicago,” situated about seven miles north of the central business district. For Duke, it had a different resonance, as the place where five years back a woman had tried to kill herself along with her two youngest children. She’d kept them home from school, given them each a capsule of sleeping powder, and turned up the gas in thekitchen. Luckily, the lad, though drowsy, had been able to wait for his mother and sister to fall asleep before getting up to turn off the gas and sound the alarm.
Peter had been sitting in the Adelaide Police Court on the day the psychiatrist gave evidence. Dr. Harper stated that in his view the woman had been rational in her day-to-day life but had suffered a bout of “sudden acute depression” leading to the attempted poisoning. Peter had listened as the assistant police prosecutor, Sergeant Randall, recounted for the judge the woman’s police interview: “Under questioning, she said that she’d just reached the end of the road.”
The case had got beneath Peter’s skin in a way few others did. He couldn’t comprehend how a mother could even consider doing such a thing, killing children she’d brought into the world. When he told Annie about the day’s hearing over dinner that night, he’d expected her to be outraged, but she’d surprised him. She’d seemed to understand, even to sympathize. “The poor woman didn’t want to leave her children behind,” Annie said, her choice of words a disturbingly close echo of the Kilburn woman’s police interview. “She couldn’t face going on, but she didn’t want to leave them without a mother.”
The rain that had set in on Christmas Eve continued as drizzle through all of the next day and the one after that, making for a wet, gray Christmas. Peter Duke’s Boxing Day was spent pacing the hallway and helping Pete Jr. build his new Space Station Morse Code Signaling Set while Sam put her Barbie doll, sent all the way from America courtesy of Annie’s sister, through a series of elaborate social paces. All the while, Duke kept an ear out for the telephone, waiting to hear from Dr. Larry Smythson. The call came through finally on Sunday afternoon: Larry had nothing conclusive to report.
Also regularly on the telephone were the police officers from Tambilla, who gave an update on the search—no sign yet of the baby, but a dead dog had been found in the field behind the Turners’ shed—and informed him that the man who’d discovered the Turner bodies hadcome back to the station to tell them he’d thought some more about it and now remembered walking past the crib as he arrived on the scene; he couldn’t say for certain, but he hadn’t noticed a baby in it at that time. They also reported a high degree of general concern in the local area. The telephone had been ringing off the hook, they said, with folks wanting to offer “suggestions” and “clues,” and others worried that there might be “a murderer on the loose.” After some consultation, it was agreed that a community meeting would be called for Monday morning so the citizens of Tambilla could be briefed.
Sergeant Duke drove up to the Hills early. He had timed his journey to take in traffic contingencies that hadn’t eventuated, and so he crossed the railway line and arrived in Tambilla with half an hour to spare. He found himself turning onto Willner Road and detouring past the entrance to the Turner property. Except for a bunch of cut Christmas bush that had been leaned against the gate, one would have been hard-pressed to guess that anything untoward had happened there.
The location for the town meeting was the stone Institute building in the middle of the main street. It is difficult to find a town, large or small, in South Australia that doesn’t have a building bearing the nameinstituteabove its large double doors, along with a date of construction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. These had been intended as places for community gatherings and further learning, arts and culture and civility. Sergeant Duke couldn’t decide whether it was the perfect site in which to conduct the meeting, or a desecration. In the end, he decided it didn’t matter; it wasn’t his decision anyway. He had a job to do, and the room that he did it in was immaterial.
In a small antechamber at the back of the Institute building, Duke and the local police officers were instructed by a busy woman named Maud McKendry, who was helping to organize the event, to wait until everyone had arrived. “There’s quite a crowd expected,” she said in a purposefully hushed tone, handing around cups of tea. “We’re all eager to do our bit. There’s no town without its tragedies,but here in Tambilla this sort of thing just does not happen. Not without someone knowing something.” She hesitated, before mentioning the journalists from Adelaide and beyond who had gathered at the back of the room. “I hope they understand that we’re not that sort of community. You’ll tell them, I trust, what a shock this has been for all of us.”
It had been agreed that Sergeant Duke would lead the discussion, seeing as the investigation was being run out of Adelaide, and so a few minutes after eleven, when Mrs. McKendry returned to give them the signal, he led the other officers out into the hall. He hadn’t given many of these briefings before, not to the public, and his palms were damp.
“Good morning,” he said. His voice, louder than usual, hit the walls of the room with a wash of importance. “Thank you all for coming. Our purpose here today is to give you an update on our investigation. We have not yet drawn any conclusions as to what happened, so I am going to limit myself to what we know: around lunchtime last Thursday, the twenty-fourth of December, Mrs. Isabel Turner set out for a picnic with her four children: Matilda, fifteen years of age; John, thirteen; Evie, ten; and a baby, Thea, six weeks old. They walked together across the paddocks of their property until they reached the water hole on the northern side. There, they laid out their lunch in the shade of a willow tree. The bodies of Mrs. Turner and her three eldest children were discovered around five in the afternoon. The cause of death has not yet been determined.”
