I thought about Larry Lutz. ‘They won’t be,’ I said. ‘We’re getting to the pointy end of things now.’
John’s eyebrows jolted a little but his eyes, which I could see through those glasses now, were empty. He put a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk onto a tray and carried the coffees into the living room, set them on a very retro coffee table inlaid with burnt-orange tiles. The dog went mental again as we entered and John gave an exasperated sigh. ‘It’s the same two blokes, for chrissake!’
We sat down. John Special seemed to know the drill. He began taking us through the hellish time of his wife’s murder, more than fifty years earlier, a collection of memories as sickeningly vivid in parts as they were vague in others, blurred by time and trauma. Dodge and I listened to him speak of the first moment, while overseeing a crew of men doing safety checks on the railing system of an oil rig off the coast of Newcastle, when an announcement over the PA system told him to report to administration.
‘That’s the first time I got any inkling that anything was wrong,’ John said. ‘People say, you know, that sometimes you can feel it in your guts. Something’s happened. But I didn’t. Not until they called me in. Then it just came over me like a … A fever, almost. This sense that I had to get home. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell me why I needed to get back right away. And I wasn’t asking, either. It was like I was being pulled home on a string.’
‘Who actually found Linda?’
‘The postman,’ John said. ‘She was friendly, Linda. Talked to everyone. Liked to take people on as a pet project sometimes. I think she felt sorry for them. This postman had just been widowed, so she was encouraging him to get back on his feet. He’d got into the habit of coming up to the house to deliver the mail so they could have a chit-chat. He heard Monny screaming inside, and was knocking and getting no response from Linda, so he went in.’
‘And he found her deceased?’ Dodge asked carefully. ‘No signs of life?’
‘He told police he didn’t try CPR.’ John nodded. ‘She was that cold. And her eyes … he could tell there was no bringing her back.’
Dodge and I fell silent. John sipped his coffee, took a few long breaths. The scruffy white dog glared at me from the end of the couch as though it was imagining what my jugular tasted like.
‘By the time I got home, it was chaos here.’ John glanced towards the front windows of the house. ‘The cars went right down the driveway and around as far as the neighbour’s property. Her parents were here. The coppers were here. The journos. There were people who went to high school with her just standing around on the lawn, crying.’
‘I assume the postman was looked at pretty hard,’ I said.
‘Every man and his dog got a proper look, except for me, because my alibi was the best you could come by,’ John said. ‘That was the only good part of it: that the cops didn’t put me on the rack. Because times were different then, and sometimes they did that. Roughed people up. They held the postman—Thompson, was his name, Hugh Thompson—for about two days, I think. Not under official arrest, just being questioned. I saw him later and he had that look like someone had ground him into the dirt like a cigarette butt.’
‘So there were no witnesses that night?’ I asked. ‘Nobody drove past, saw a car? Heard a scream?’
‘Nobody heard anything.’ John shrugged. ‘The neighbours at the back, they’re not far away. But they told police that the cockies were going off that night, like they are now.’ He pointed towards the back of the house where the birds were still going nuts. ‘You wouldn’t have heard anything anyway, over that racket.’
‘Do they do that a lot?’
‘No. Not really,’ he mused. ‘Especially not at night. They’ll make a racket if there’s an owl around. We get big ole owls here.’
‘Aside from the postman, there were no other major suspects?’ Dodge asked.
‘Oh, well, after telling me they were “working with several theories” and “looking at several people” for a few months, the cops were quoted in the local newspaper saying they had no leads,’ John said. ‘And then they were dead silent, at least until Marian Richley, up the road here, almost a year later. They told me flat-out it was the same guy. Because of the way he operated. No forced entry. Made them shower afterwards.’
‘He made them shower afterwards?’ I looked at Dodge.
‘Yuh. So there was never any DNA. They stook stuff. Ran tests at the time for fibres and hairs. This was before DNA. And then when DNA came in, in the eighties, they tested it for that. But they didn’t find anything.’ John licked his teeth, thumbed the corner of his eye. A phone trilled gently somewhere. ‘Let me just get that.’
The old man got up with difficulty and shuffled out. I scratched at the arm of the sofa where I sat, thoughtfully picking at the corduroy. ‘Mid-seventies. A bit early for civilians to be thinking about getting rid of trace evidence.’
‘If it’s the same guy who got the teenager while she was sleeping, we’re looking at someone who was smart enough to think not only about trace evidence.’ Dodge nodded. ‘But also about mixing up his MO to hide his crimes.’
‘Mmm. Because why were there only two murders?’ I said. ‘Why did he stop?’
‘Maybe there are others, but they don’t look like this. The MO is different.’
‘With Chloe he’s right back to his original style,’ I said. ‘Knock at the front door. The knife.’
John came back. Tried to sip his coffee. Found it was empty and set it back down. ‘Marian’s people moved away, afterwards. Went to Queensland. It was only her parents anyway, and I heardthey died promptly after. It puts a good dent in your life expectancy, burying a child. Especially if it’s your only one.’
‘Why did you stay here?’ I asked. I suddenly felt the shape of the house around me. Imagined it dark. The cockatoos had finally quietened, and I could hear cicadas out there in the trees now, and the ticking of the aluminium roof above us.
‘Ah, well, it was a financial decision, in the beginning.’ John rapped his knuckles against the empty coffee cup. ‘I would have had to sell the house at a cut price, because of what had happened in it. And I had to be home to take care of Monny, so the oil rigging work was over with. Then, after a while, I thought: Fuck you.’
I felt a small smile come to my face. Couldn’t help it.
‘Whoever did this?’ John shrugged. ‘Fuck you. You’re not going to take our house from us too. Linda loved this house. The breeze that comes through it, and the big gum trees out the back. She used to sit out there and look at the sunset on the mountain range. I still do that, and when I do, I feel close to her. If I’d sold the house, all I’d have is a grave somewhere.’
