In those days, and in the early days of my marriage, I’d turned out a few paintings a year. But it seemed that over time, my responses to life had become smaller and flatter. It was years since I’d finished my last painting, yet the smell of oils and acrylics, the canvases and pieces of masonite stacked modestly with their faces to the wall in the council warehouse where
Morning Mist
now joined them, ignited a long-dormant urge to paint again.
•
Goulburn Gaol is a terrible place, not so bad as it was in the old days when the Corrective Services vans had to be hosed out after the prisoners got out because men had soiled themselves in fear, knowing the reception beating that awaited them at the worst gaol in the state. Maybe that doesn’t happen any more, but Goulburn is still the hardest, and it takes prisoners no other gaol will house.
I walked past the rose garden with its magnificent display of pinks, golds, whites and mauves, thinking of the hundreds of men who were about to be locked up at four thirty until next morning in a small stone room with a solid iron door and a narrow, barred window way up near the high ceiling with just the walls for company. I announced myself on the intercom, was identified and permitted to climb through the little padlocked door in the great fortress double doors. On the other side of the gates is a large caged-off area containing the scanning section, the receptacle for bags and other items and, above it, the grey security video screens, keeping every section under electronic surveillance. This steel cage needs to be unlocked by another officer with a different set of keys before anyone can get into the next stage of the prison, the sterile area, a wide ‘corridor’ which, as its name indicates, is completely empty apart from the digital cameras and microwave movement detectors running along each side of it.
In an interview room, I talked to two of the Corrective Services officers who’d known the murdered men. They took me to see Ron Herring, the ex-army assistant superintendent with whom I spoke in detail.
‘Never a problem, either of them,’ said Ron. ‘Except to other people.’
‘That’s what I was wondering,’ I said, telling him about the conversation I’d had with Bob.
Ron shook his head and his face furrowed into a tight smile at the idea of some sort of prison vendetta extending outside. ‘Crims are very self-righteous,’ he answered. ‘Neither of them would have lasted long in the main yard so they were kept apart and served out their sentences in a strict protection area, a cage within a cage. We let them mingle among others of their kind, the rock spiders, the paederasts and child-killers. We tell them if there’s any trouble, they’ll all be locked up in their separate cells again. They get along all right. Probably entertaining themselves swapping fantasies and the details of their conquests.’
I thought about that for a moment and wondered if they also made up other fantasies, about how ‘rehabilitated’ they were, to seduce the parole board. We walked around the sterile area and sparrows chirped in the stone walls under a perfect blue afternoon sky. ‘Nesbitt spent a lot of his time drawing,’ Ron said. ‘He got quite good at it.’ I recalled the obscene drawings hidden in the Bible among the pages of Jeremiah. We waited while the officer in charge of the entrance area came with his keys to let us in. I asked him whether they might have incurred the wrath of some gaol heavy who wanted them dead. Ron Herring considered. ‘I know of several cases where there’ve been killings associated with gaol fights, but Nesbitt and Gumley just weren’t in that league,’ he said, ‘and the others were killed inside. It was because they were such model prisoners that Nesbitt and Gumley were both released in the minimum time.’
From somewhere high above me came the sound of a muffled yell. I looked up and around. It was impossible to see into the banks of narrow, fortress-style window slits. ‘They’re always calling out,’ Ron said. ‘They’re carrying on because they know you’re here. They know everything that goes on. The minute something different happens or someone new comes in, they know. They’re all watching us now.’ The way he said it reminded me of the way a father might speak of the exploits of his seriously wayward children, proud despite everything.
‘But those two, Nesbitt and Gumley,’ said Ron, returning to his earlier conversation, ‘were both grey little crims. Hardly noticeable. They knew it was best to lie low.’ He was supervising my way through the padlocked door of the steel entry cage and I was feeling I’d wasted the trip and a tank of petrol when he suddenly answered my question. ‘If anyone in our system had wanted them dead, they’d never have walked out of here alive.’
In the cage, I picked up my belongings, and stood waiting for the small door in the main gates to be opened by the supervising officer. ‘I heard from one of my mates out at the Bay,’ said Ron, referring to the old gaol at Long Bay whose high sandstone wall I drove past every day. ‘They’ve got an old sex offender due for release in a few days. He’s really starting to worry. When two old rock spiders get castrated and killed within days of going outside, it gives the others something to think about, even in different gaols.’
I was immediately interested and turned back. ‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know the name off the top of my head,’ said Ron, ‘but I can certainly find out for you.’ I shook hands with the assistant superintendent and as I stepped from the steel cage out into the sterile area, another voice yelled obscenities down at us. Abuse me all you like, you poor bastard, I thought, as I walked into freedom. You’ve got to stand on a table and squint sideways through bars. I’m walking out into the late evening sunshine and the scent of roses.
Before driving back to Sydney, I took a styrofoam cup of very bad coffee into the municipal gardens and sat on a green park seat. You can’t grow roses in Sydney the way you can grow them here. The deep clay soils, the cool nights and the dry inland air all combine to make Goulburn a heaven for rose-growers. A magpie picked over the soil to feed its two noisy, grey-collared offspring and I could hear the whispering of wrens in the dense hedges that ran along one side of the park. For a moment, I had a stupid fantasy that I could just leave my life, the mess, Genevieve’s hostility, my lost daughter, perhaps even the past, and settle into a country cottage in a town like this. Just turn my back on the whole sad mess, breed roses and improve my watercolour skills. But as I stood up, throwing the rest of the coffee away and headed back to my car, I knew that would never work. Wherever there was a deep green garden, or a camphor laurel tree, and enough empty time to just sit and be, there was always the chance that a little figure from the past might slip through in her yellow sundress, whispering my name. Reminding me of a promise.
•
When I got home, I dug out my easel, brushes and tubes of watercolour, taking them and a seat from the kitchen out onto the paved area. I set up and quickly, in the remaining light, I started wetting the paper, blocking in the dense green shadows of the cypresses down one side of the paper, and the brighter green and occasional red leaf of the camphor laurel tree. I worked quickly and stood back, examining the composition. Using a touch of black in the greens, I washed a background in and found a soft brown stain for the foreground. When this dried, I’d overlay another, darker one. But the light had gone and I left my easel and the damp painting there, going inside to make a bit more order in the stacked folders and the packed boxes until I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly eleven o’clock.
Before going to bed I took out the anonymous letter again, holding it with tweezers. There was a moment when I almost threw it out, but both my policing and my scientific training got the better of me. Instead, I copied out the words on a slip of paper and put that in my wallet, replacing the anonymous missive in its drawer.
My bedroom is at the back of the house, its window looking out over the back garden. It took me a long time to go to sleep and I kept waking, thinking I could hear someone walking around outside. Once I even got up and looked out the window. But I could see nothing except the line of tall cypresses that divided my eastern side from my neighbours.
•
Next day, Ron Herring faxed me the necessary information. I picked up the mug shot of the convicted pedophile with his dropped eyelids and compressed mouth from my in-tray and studied the details of his convictions and sentencing. Frank John Carmody, I read, fifty-one, due to be released next Wednesday after serving the minimum seven years of a ten year sentence for the killing of an eleven-year-old girl, Suzette Carter, who lived across the road from him. I remembered the case because our lab had worked on the physical evidence. I remembered that the girl’s body had been flung from the roadside down a steeply wooded mountain slope miles away from anywhere and accidentally found caught in the branches of a tree by two timber workers clearing below the road. I also recalled that Carmody was described as a ‘family’ man, with young daughters of his own. His blank eyes stared out of the mug shot at me. Most of us have children, I thought. But when it comes to the men who murder children, it doesn’t seem to make any difference that they have kids of their own.
I rang Ron Herring to thank him for his trouble. ‘He’s going to live with a sister at Camperdown when he gets out,’ said Ron, in response to my question. ‘She’s his only visitor. Nice old bird, they told me, who sees him once a month. The staff at the Bay think she’s a bit eccentric because she’s always lecturing them on her brother’s innocence.’ I remembered the saying that there are no guilty people in prison. No rich people either.
‘Carmody told the duty officer he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s getting out,’ Ron Herring was saying. I recalled the terrible stripped gashes between the legs of the other two men and found that very easy to understand. I thanked Ron, and rang off.
Then I rang Staro and asked him if he’d like to earn some honest money. It was about half standard rates, but he jumped at the chance. It’s not so much the money or the work that he likes, or doing something that’s a bit more legit than selling Eccies or Rowies, but I know he likes the feeling of working for me. He looks up to me. I wish he didn’t, but he does.
‘There’s a crim,’ I said, ‘due to be released from the Bay in a few days. I want to keep an eye on him. And I could do with a bit of help.’
‘Sure,’ said Staro. ‘Why do you want to watch him?’ I could hear the excitement in his voice. There are a lot of people like Staro who find this sort of fringe dealing with the law irresistible. Murderers even bring themselves undone because of it. They are usually people with no power of their own and it’s as if they need to rub up against those whom they perceive as having it in order to get a piece of it for themselves.
‘That’s confidential,’ I said, and Staro was hooked.
Frank Carmody had the trifecta that had proved fatal to two others: he was a convict, a sex offender and due for release. And if a Corrective Services officer had noticed Frank Carmody’s release was coming up, someone else surely had. And that someone, as we already knew, was very handy with a knife.
Later that morning, I went into the city and spent hours going through archived newspaper files. I read up everything I could on the murdered men, Gumley and Nesbitt. I noticed that their respective sentences had caused a lot of outcry and were considered far too lenient by both journalists and letter-writers to the papers. On a hunch, I looked up the references to Frank Carmody. Sure enough, the same thing appeared in the several stories around him. In fact, as I checked further, I found that Gumley, Nesbitt, Carmody and someone called Anton Francini, whose story I didn’t remember, were the four cases always trotted out whenever a story about leniency in sentencing appeared. Further checking revealed that Anton Francini had raped and killed a young girl and been sentenced to nine years with a non-parole period of five years, because he’d been drinking at the time of the killing, and was otherwise ‘of good character’. While I was making a note of Carmody’s details, the heading of another news item underneath the convicted men’s stories caught my eye.
‘
I will never forget
,’ I read,
‘No matter how long or how short his sentence, I will never forget. He will pay for this,’ father of murder victim Suzette Carter said today. ‘And when he gets out, he wants to watch his back. Men like this aren’t fit to live.’
The accompanying photograph captioned ‘Peter Carter outside court yesterday’ showed a stooped man in his forties. I made a note of his name and jotted down a bit more information, then stood up, feeling that at last, I was getting somewhere with this case. Here was the possible link—apart from their crimes—that connected these four men. Frank Carmody was right to be fearful. Had Peter Carter taken note of these four names and decided that their sentences weren’t enough? Or someone else with a similar brief? Bob had told me that the relatives of the dead had all been checked out, but I wanted to talk to this Peter Carter myself.
I rang Bob, told him what I’d discovered, how those four names and the relatively light sentences they had scored were the basis for several newspaper articles. Then I asked him about Peter Carter.
‘Carter,’ he repeated after my question. ‘Yes. I do remember him. We had to restrain him during the trial on a couple of occasions.’
‘I want to check him out again,’ I said. ‘He made threats that were reported at the time of Carmody’s sentencing. And I want to watch Frank Carmody. See where he goes, who he talks to. I want a surveillance team.’
‘Not possible. We haven’t got the manpower to keep tabs on someone like Frank Carmody. Nobody cares whether he lives or dies.’
I rang off. It had been worth a shot. And what Bob had said wasn’t quite true. Someone out there seemed to care very much.
•
I drove round to Charlie’s place at Little Bay after a quick phone call and found him hidden under the bonnet of his car in the driveway, shirt off, surrounded by tools. On the ground near him lay several intricate bits of gearing, a little fly-wheel, a tiny gasket and other small and delicate mechanisms. He looked pleased to see me and wiped his hands on his trousers before trying to grab me. Where I’m tall and solidly built, Charlie is narrow and whippy. All his energy goes into his brains. I pulled back from the bear hug he always tries on, and he patted my arm instead.