I have heard that smell is the most primitive of our senses. It’s certainly the most evocative. The painful mess of my collapsing marriage seemed to have stirred up the two great losses of my life; the scent of privet and gardenias reminds me of the grief that’s never far beneath the surface. In the lingering light after sunset, when jacarandas glow like soft lamps, something happens to my vision. Sometimes it feels like twenty-five years ago and I see things that aren’t there. If I had my way, I’d re-write the calendar, and go straight from October to December.
•
Bob was waiting for me in the foyer at the Institute of Forensic Medicine on Parramatta Road, his rangy body leaning against the wall, a newspaper tucked under his arm. Dr Bradley Strachan had done the autopsy on the first murder victim, Gumley, and then again on the second one, Nesbitt, whose room and possessions I’d just inspected. Bob and I walked through surroundings that could’ve been the reception area of any successful corporation on our way to speak with Dr Strachan. I’d always presumed the word ‘morgue’ came from the Latin
mors
, death, but it comes from the French,
morgeur
, ‘to peer’, from the days when the bodies dragged from the Seine were displayed in the basement of the Petit Châtelet Prison in Paris and relatives of the missing peered at the corpses through grilles. So much of the work people like myself, Bob and Bradley Strachan spend our time doing was pioneered by the great European scientists of the nineteenth century, working closely with police and the judiciary. That is still how it goes today, although the tests are becoming more and more refined, with results that our scientific forebears could only dream about.
Bradley Strachan filled out the doorway as we followed him into his office and I remembered the time some years ago when he and I had found ourselves swept up in a pub brawl while we were having a drink and discussing a case. His powerful presence at my side as we made our way through the violence towards the exit was something I’ll never forget.
‘In my opinion,’ Bradley said from across his desk, ‘both men were killed by the same individual. There were five deep cuts on Gumley, four on Nesbitt, grouped in a very similar way. The knife used in each assault was identical.’
He pulled out his photographs and spread them on the desk. I could see the similarity in the knife work in both cases. Nothing fancy, just yawning wounds around the groin. And a meaty gap between the thighs on each corpse. It was very determined, very consistent work. The whole game, set and match had been removed, and again in both cases, the gashes on the right groin revealed the muscles and bone deep to the severed femoral artery. Bradley Strachan placed a large piece of drawing paper on the desk next to the photographs.
‘This is the sort of knife used in both attacks,’ he said as I studied his drawing of the knife. ‘Double-bladed,’ the doctor continued. ‘No wound was deeper than fifteen centimetres, nor wider than two and a half.’ He indicated the calculations he’d drawn beside the knife’s blade. ‘From the bruising around the stabbing injuries, I calculate a hilt of some sort, a little under seven centimetres in width and sloping away from the blade.’ In my mind’s eye, I was getting a picture of the winged dagger of the assassin, the one that appears on the patches of the Special Air Services.
‘What do you think?’ Bob was asking Dr Strachan. Bradley spread out the photos as he spoke. ‘It’s the sort of design that’s basic to many knives,’ he said. ‘My eldest son has a diving knife that could have made injuries of the same dimensions.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked, knowing how valuable an off-the-record opinion can be from someone who’s spent over thirty years examining every possible sort of injury to human flesh. Dr Strachan paused and then looked up from the sketch of the knife. ‘It’s the sort of thing,’ he said finally, ‘that I’ve come to associate with homosexual homicide. Simply because of the nature of the injuries.’ He paused. ‘But that’s only a personal observation.’ I knew what he meant. There’s a sixth sense developed by experienced investigators and it’s very subtle. It’s something like a shadow, or a non-physical scent, more like a feeling that permeates a crime scene and its victim. Like the mood that a painting or a piece of music can evoke, and as ephemeral. But somehow, it just didn’t feel right to me. The mood I was sensing in these murders so far didn’t match up to the mood my medical friend was suggesting. But then I hadn’t attended the autopsies, let alone either crime scene, so I nodded to Bradley, because his expertise was legendary and any investigator who doesn’t take advantage of that sort of thing and keep an open mind is not only a fool, but will never write up the paperwork on a successful case.
‘I wonder,’ said Bradley, ‘what the killer does with the bits and pieces.’
Bob and I had discussed this very point a day or so earlier. ‘We don’t know,’ said Bob. ‘It’s possible he just chucks them down a drain somewhere. He could have thrown them into the Harbour at Birchgrove.’
‘It’s also quite possible he souvenirs them,’ I said to Bradley.
The doctor nodded. Compared with the number of items American mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer souvenired and stored in his apartment—torsos, frozen heads, dissected shoulder muscles in vats and bins—our killer’s possible matching set of male genitals seemed almost modest. But I couldn’t help imagining how the wet specimens might look, bottled and suspended in formaldehyde like some unclassified marine coelenterate. Bradley Strachan’s face lifted in his guarded smile. ‘I’d introduce you to the deceased and emasculated Mr Nesbitt in person,’ he said, putting the photographs down, ‘except that when the coroner released him, he was finally claimed for burial. His mother read about him in the newspapers.’ Esme Nesbitt’s soft-edged and tinted image smiled faintly in my memory and I wondered briefly at how she would react, seeing the body of her son, knowing what he had come to all these years later. ‘She hadn’t heard from him,’ Bradley was saying, ‘in over twenty years.’
There’s something about morgues that always makes me hungry so Bob and I went across to the University for lunch. I used to be very familiar with the Science Department here when I was studying. Now, years later, the two of us sat under the trees with the students laughing and chatting around us, reminiscing about our time in the 1980s when we had to mingle with demonstrators and take photos for Special Branch. Among the jeans and flowing locks, our short back and sides, neat attire and professional photographic equipment stuck out like balls on a canary. The students confronted us and took photo after photo of us taking photos of them. We’d been pissed off then. Now, we smiled and shook our heads, thinking how young and naïve we’d been. Even more naïve, perhaps, than the kids we’d been delegated to check out.
‘How’s everything?’ Bob asked, after devouring his steak sandwich and stirring his tea bag around. I shrugged.
‘So-so. You know.’
‘I know you’ve moved out,’ he said to me. ‘Genevieve told me. When I rang about Nesbitt’s gear. She sounded pretty upset.’
Bob didn’t know my reasons for leaving the marriage and I didn’t feel like telling him now. I didn’t respond to the slight accusatory tone I felt in his voice. ‘It seemed the best thing to do,’ I finally said.
‘What about Greg?’
I didn’t answer him for a moment. My seventeen-year-old son had come round to my house four nights ago, very distressed and saying he wanted to come and live with me. I’d put him up for the night and rung his mother. It had only created more fuel for Genevieve’s fire.
‘I don’t know what to do about him,’ I admitted. ‘He goes into Year 12 next year. I thought that him staying put at home would be less upheaval than moving in with me. But I just don’t know.’
Bob must have seen something in my face because he stopped the interrogation. ‘Doing any painting?’ he asked. I’d been doing watercolours all my life, on and off. I also like working with acrylics in a more abstract way and Bob owns one or two of my wilder works. Genevieve never liked those. She wanted paintings to look like photographs.
‘Not lately. Maybe once I get settled.’ I took out the six photographs I’d found behind Nesbitt’s tinted mother and passed them under the table to Bob—old police habits die hard. He took my cue and reached under to take them, shielding them with his hands while he examined them. ‘I found them behind a framed portrait,’ I answered his enquiring glance, ‘among Nesbitt’s gear.’
Bob pulled the sealable fastening open and, holding them by the corners, frowned as he looked through them. Black and white stills from what looked like hotel rooms, perhaps in Bangkok. Overweight Caucasian men, doing ugly things to slight-bodied Asian girls with dead faces. They were shocking to see, even for me. Men like Nesbitt are constantly committing crimes even by purchasing or looking at such stuff because every piece of child pornography is a crime scene.
‘Looks like it was processed overseas,’ Bob said, examining them front and back. He resealed the pictures and passed them back.
‘I’ll take them down to Canberra and put them through the wringer,’ I said. Even though I hadn’t undertaken any new jobs in the lab for some time now, there were still a number of outstanding items that awaited my final report and I’d have to go back to complete those and any others that might have come back for my attention. We search our own items unlike some other labs where work is delegated out to skilled technicians.
Back in the lab, I could check for fingerprints, body traces, particles, fibres, anything in fact that might tell me its story. Every piece of information that I discover is like one tile of a mosaic. Get enough of them in different colours and a picture slowly starts to build. The profile I was getting of Nesbitt was of a preferential pedophile, a man whose only sexual interest lay in children.
‘What sort of pornography did you find at Gumley’s place?’ I asked, after a pause. As yet, I had no picture of Gumley, the first victim. Bob considered my question. ‘The usual stuff. Bondage, sadism.’
‘Featuring children?’ I waited while Bob recalled. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘It was adult stuff as I remember. Nasty but grown up.’
This presented a different picture from the sort of man who collected images of children. I had no doubt that the only reason I hadn’t found a lot more child pornography at Nesbitt’s place was that he was broke at the moment and couldn’t afford it. As well as their ‘conquests’, dedicated pedophiles create collections of child pornography. Sex involving children is the only interest they have. For men like this, every spare moment is taken up with their obsession with children as sex objects, and the recording of their encounters. Instead of seeing the sweet, rounded bodies so precious to parents and those adults who really love them, these men can see nothing but their own sexualised reflections. When they go on holidays, they don’t bring back videos of resorts, scenic tours and tropical idylls, but images of children. Their diary entries are all about children. They can only talk of their interests to others of like taste and so their friendships are also only about children. They reduce them to objects, referring to them as ‘she’s’ or ‘queens’. The only thing they fear is exposure. The law they treat with complete comtempt. I remember going through the files of a man who suicided shortly after we charged him. Many of them do this. I found boxes and boxes of exercise books crammed full of figures, but this was no ordinary accounting. He had recorded every detail of every child who had ever crossed his path. Each encounter was colour-coded: green indicated the sighting of a desirable child with masturbation following, mauve meant masturbation with the child watching, blue stood for masturbation with the child touching his penis, and red meant he’d been able to touch the child as well. Gold meant penetration or its attempt. The amount of energy that had gone into the recording, grading and colour-coding in these books was the work of a lifetime. Many, many children had been involved with this man. And there were a lot of red and gold stickers. We’ve come to learn that although investigators may only get enough evidence to charge these predators with one or two cases of abuse, as a general rule, their victims number in the thousands.
Knowing things like this meant I never took my eyes off my own kids on the rare occasions I took them to parks or other public places. And because of my training, it wasn’t only my kids that I kept under close scrutiny. I constantly scanned the people who sat around, reading or chatting. It was a rare day that I didn’t spot one of them, the men who sit alone, watching children. Maybe I overdid it. Sometimes, when the four of us were together on a rare family outing, I’d point out someone I knew from police records, or had simply noticed. ‘Just watch him,’ I’d say, ‘that nondescript man in the grey pullover and dark blue jacket. Let’s just wait here a moment and you just watch him.’ Genevieve would start arguing, saying I was turning what was supposed to be a family outing into a police lecture, and I suppose she had a point. But the two kids would watch. Pretty soon they’d see that the objects of the man’s interest were young kids. He might pretend to be reading the paper, but over the top of it, he was watching the little boys climbing the slippery-dip the wrong way, or the little girls as they squealed on the swings opposite him.
Genevieve said that I frightened our children, particularly Jacinta, with this sort of thing. My response was that I was protecting her in the only way a parent can—training her in the vigilance and prudence that replaces the presence of a parent and keeps a child safe in their absence. I was insistent that we always know where the kids were. Every minute of the day and night. Especially Jacinta. Without anyone knowing, I checked out the families of the girls she sometimes ‘stayed over’ with. Police records made that easy and although these days it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do things like that, it’s still not impossible. Genevieve always said I made too much of it. But she had never been called out in the early hours of the morning to a crime scene and the corpse of a small, naked body. Now Genevieve says I drove Jacinta away with my fear. That I drove her towards the very thing I feared the most. But then she would.