I remembered. The time our father disappeared on us for six months, a period known as ‘The Time He Went’ in Powder Brother lore. Russell had been sitting his HSC, and I had been struggling with a minor weed addiction and a particularly bad bout of teenage acne. We’d woken up to find the old man and his Ford Fairmont gone from the driveway, which wasn’t unusual. Dad ran his own schedule. Was sometimes there, sometimes gone. But he hadn’t been back when we returned from school. And he wasn’t there in the morning. The relief turned to excitement, barely contained. The teenage Russell and me had felt it was safe enough to relax a bit in the third week, to truly celebrate in the fourth. Dad had taken off for a couple of weeks or a month at a time before without explanation, so we figured we’d better start enjoying ourselves, quick, before he popped up again. We’d gone fishing all that weekend, had a big fry-up, stayed up late watching TV, got into the liquor cabinet. We’d carried the guns out into the bush to take pot shots at tin cans. We’d lit fires, talked freely without looking over our shoulder, called people on the house phone, gone visiting with girls. We’d cleaned the house from top to bottom, mowed the lawn, lounged on the verandah steps with beers on our knees and sweat on our necks and watched the bats flying over. Russell took the books he kept hidden under his bed out and started reading them in the living areas of the house and leaving them lying around. I’d started playing music on the speakers in the lounge room and sang loudly along. Selling our services door to door and through friends at school as lawn-mowers, rat-catchers, junk-haulers and fox-hunters, we’d made a good living, kept the fridge full and both put on weight. My acne cleared up, and I’d given up the weed. Russell got taller and started sprouting a beard. It was like, with the old man gone, we were forgotten plants getting their first drink of water and sunlight.
And then he was back.
I drove my dead father through the dark back fields now and remembered that day. Hearing the Fairmont on the gravel drive. The dream dying the way everything died—without warning, without a chance to negotiate, to beg for one more day.
We’d refer to The Time He Went now and then, over the years, Russell and me. Dad would do something horrible, and one of us would say, ‘Remember The Time He Went?’ and the other would smile.
I knew then that I couldn’t give in. That I couldn’t let a connection be made between Arthur Powder and Chloe Lutz, or Arthur Powder and Linda Special, or Arthur Powder and Marian Richley. Because then people would come looking for my father. This wasn’t just about saving Chris anymore. It was about saving myself. I needed this to be The Time He Went and Never Came Back. Because I deserved that. We all did.
Sever the connection. The one Chloe had made. Then all they had was Chris and Arthur at the pub that night. Dad’s DNA was on the girl, yes, but nothing else. No reason for him to be watching her. No motive. No hidden secrets. The past staying in the past, and not becomingmy future. I’d take Chloe’s phone from the footwell now and head back to Redbelly with it, after I’d done what I needed to do at Pemulwuy. I’d put Chloe’s phone and laptop in the Branch house somewhere. Wait for them to connect the dots. It was all about connecting the dots, completing the circle, making it neat enough that the truth of it all would be carried away on the current.
I rang off with Russell and disposed of my father’s body in an unremarkable spot in the river that snaked through a patch of crown land not far from the old man’s house. I was determined to watch, as I rolled the car into the water, pushing from the rear, my dad’s shoes on my feet sinking into the mud. With all the windows cracked and the handbrake off, the vehicle slid easily into the deep and started spewing bubbles. I stretched my eyes, took it all in, the roof sinking away, the bubbles still rising and rising until they finally stopped. I was afraid to blink. Expected the man to comebursting through the surface. Like Jaws. Like Godzilla. I saw myself wading out to gather Arthur in my arms, pulling him back towards the shore. Crying my apologies. My promises. Because the tears that were streaking down my face now were coming from a brain screaming in that child’s voice,I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry.
It was an extreme act of willpower to turn and walk away. I managed it. Managed the few kilometres walk back to the house, to my car. I carried Chloe Lutz’s phone and laptop in my hands all the way there. I started the engine and pulled out and drove away, heading for Sydney.
RUSSELL
The road outside the Branch property was a zoo. It was a stupid decision to come into town that way, but I was distracted, and so was Dodge, it seemed, because he didn’t stop me. The mood in the car was sombre: the kind of embarrassed unease that comes from making promises to the victims of a half-century-old homicide that you’d be the one to finally hold the responsible party to account. I hadn’t said as much to John Special, of course, and neither had my partner. But the implication was there. What a claim it was. We were going to do something that probably dozens of officers before us hadn’t been able to do. In two days, I’d made that precious kind of promise to two broken-hearted men. The promise of vengeance, and justice. The sheer arrogance of it felt weighty in the air.
I wondered if they’d ever asked my father to take a look at the Special and Richley cases. That’s what they’d been doing, when they asked him to turn his hand to the missing woman Dominique Fine, and he’d shot and killed her husband. Had they ever asked him to consult on Linda and Marian, and would that mean I would have to speak to him? The thought filled me with horror. I wondered how bad the cancer was. Maybe it would get to him before I had to. I dared to dream, just for a few seconds, about solving a case that my father had been tasked with and had failed to resolve, and him hearing about that. It being one of the last things he everheard about before he promptly dropped dead of a terrible, painful disease.
How would I ever celebrate such a thing?
I wondered how much flights to Fiji set you back these days.
Press vans, forensic tech vans, and the private vehicles of journos crowded either side of the road. I stopped the car beyond the crowd and started making a three-point turn. A journalist I recognised jogged up to the car. Tiny blonde with wolf-blue eyes and great fashion sense. Amy Sail. She rapped on my window and I was worried about running over her feet, so I stopped.
‘Hey, Rusty!’ She grinned at me through the glass, jerked her thumb back towards the Branch property. ‘Was it him?’
If it had been anyone else, I’d have spun the wheels in the mud and racked off without saying anything at all. But back in Sydney, Sail had done me a solid once or twice, keeping quiet about homicides until I was ready for them to go public, and she called me ‘Rusty’ like she didn’t know that I regularly put people’s heads through walls for lesser infractions, so I locked eyes with her and shrugged and said, ‘It sure looks good.’
A frown crossed Amy’s features. She knew what that line meant. I drove away.
Dodge had to go home to get his pain meds for his leg, so with promises to reconvene at the houseboat in an hour or so, I dropped him there and drove across the unmown field towards the houseboat, hoping I wasn’t running over anything slithery that didn’t deserve to have its life end under car tyres. Bridie was sitting at the kitchen nook with a small red ball of fluff bundled into a knitted pouch resting against her belly. She was slowly dribbling water onto the juvenile ringtail possum’s lips from a syringe, and the thing was lapping at the liquid with its googly orange-and-black eyes, looking up at my daughter in quiet wonderment. This was a scene I had witnessed many times, something both my wife and my daughter had done over the years: rehydrating possums that had been flung aside by their mothers as they were attacked by cats, or found in the gutter, clinging to a deceased adult’s carcass. I sat and folded my arms and watched, and without even greeting eachother, my daughter and I enjoyed a quiet lack of awkwardness that had been five years or more in the making.
‘Where’s that going to go?’ I asked after a while, gazing at the little creature in her hands. The thing was holding on to Bridie’s pinky with a tiny, hairy paw. Witchy-looking, knobbly clawed fingers.
‘I’ll drop him to a carer later on today, when she gets home,’ she said. ‘Just want to get him settled for now.’
‘How’d you get it when I had the car?’
‘The job was only up the hill, actually, so I walked.’ She nodded towards the bow of the houseboat. ‘But I might take the ’Stang this time if you’re not using it. There’s a wallaby caught in a fence not far away.’
I clamped my mouth shut so I didn’t say anything about my beloved car and how I knew from long experience that the stink of a wallaby could hang around for days on end. I was also keeping quiet about my precious daughter and how much I worried about her getting kicked or clawed or knocked to the ground by an enormous, frantic wallaby. ‘Mmm.’
‘You could come if you want.’
‘Not this time,’ I said. ‘I just want to drill down on a couple of things.’
Bridie put her little possum friend away in her rescue cage and left, and I pushed open my laptop and started looking at Linda’s and Marian’s cases again. Marian was pictured in a crowded bar, pouring a beer, her mouth open as she spoke to a punter who was holding bills pinned against the countertop. The guy screamed ‘cop’ the way I had been advised that I did, all tight shoulders and rigid back and wary eyes. As I examined the photograph, I saw most of the gathering had the cop vibe. Deep in the background, I spotted a shoulder and a slice of ear and neck and hair that only the son of the owner could recognise. The shape of my father standing there, right at the edge of the frame, turned away from the camera. I looked at the date of the article. 1975.
A deep discomfort unfolded in my chest as I looked around the officers, their smiling, laughing faces, the slice of my father backthere among them. When I tried to get my hands around it, this eerie feeling growing in me, I felt that it was a suspicion of these men, which as a cop myself always felt traitorous. But whoever had killed Linda and Marian had been able to talk their way through their front doors while they were home alone at night. And when he’d sexually assaulted them, he’d had them wash his traces from their skin. Dodge hadn’t said it outright, probably not wanting to offend me, because my father was a cop in the area. But those two aspects of the crime hinted at someone in law enforcement. When the discomfort wouldn’t go away, I reminded myself that knowledge of trace evidence at the time would have been common among most types of career criminal, as well as law enforcement personnel. DNA hadn’t come into popular use by cops until the mid-eighties, but garden-variety dirtbags would have known about fingerprints and hair and fibre matching before then. I told myself it was the image of my father there on the screen that was also unsettling me. And the ground-shaking notion that one day soon he would be dead.
An email arrived in my inbox, telling me the ongoing collaborative file related to Chloe Lutz’s murder had just been updated. I opened the email and scanned down the long, long list of updates, seeing notifications of entries into the file from Fry, Kalowski, Lee, Dodge and Caplan. There were none from Evan, and none from me. I was without entries because as the lead detective it wasn’t my job to make entries, but it was my job to oversee them at the end of each day of the investigation, and I’d neglected to do that, for the simple fact that I’d got mildly distracted by killing a man. But it was weird that there was nothing there from Evan, who I knew to be a paperwork nerd.
I clicked on the latest entry, made by Gail Caplan, which stated that she’d sent out the request for the region-wide SMS blast of the image of the young guy at the pub, appealing for information from the public. Weird. I’d asked Evan to do that, not Gail. Another entry by Gail came through, which said that the forensic evidence lot delivered to the Pemulwuy lab the day before by Evan had beencategorised and was undergoing testing. I ran an eye down the itemised list and stopped halfway.
I took out my phone and dialled a number. The phone rang twice before someone picked it up. ‘NSW Police Forensic Services, Constable Jane Markwell speaking.’
