She almost succeeded in avoiding the bakery—until she caught a whiff of delicious pastry and fattening goodness floating along the street, luring her towards it like a powerful siren.
The bell over the door dinged and a few moments later the same woman who served her last time emerged from the back room, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
This must be Jan, she thought absently, as she recalled Anne telling her how she’d found out about the Knight case.
‘Morning,’ Pip said cheerfully, letting her eyes roam the delectable delicacies in the glass cabinet before her. ‘Can I get a vanilla slice, please?’
‘You’re that reporter,’ Jan announced.
‘I’m a reporter, yes. I’m not here for work, though,’ she added.
‘You’re Nev’s niece.’ Again, the staunch woman didn’t seem to be asking her. She also didn’t appear to be in any hurry to get her vanilla slice either.
‘Yep.’
The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘I heard you found the body.’
‘Ah, no. I just hired Bob to clean out the dam.’
‘So you didn’t see it, then?’
‘No. Not that there was anything to see—just some bones.’
‘I heard they found her tied and gagged inside the car,’ she said, folding her arms across the top of the glass cabinet and leaning forward eagerly.
‘What? No. I don’t believe that’s how they found her.’
‘That’s what I heard.’ Jan seemed to warm to the story as she continued. ‘Old Bert had slit her throat and rolled her into the dam.’
‘I really don’t think there’s any way the police could have determined that.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me. Crazy old bastard,’ she muttered.
Pip thought back to Bert’s records from his time in New Guinea, anger rising at the woman’s outright distain. ‘You know he was away fighting a war and went through hell before all this happened? I’m fairly sure we all owe a debt of gratitude to Bert Bigsby and all the men like him who came home after that, damaged.’
‘Other men came back after war without turning into murderers. You can’t blame the war for everything.’
‘There’s no proof that Bert killed his wife. Until there is, I don’t think it’s fair to judge him. Besides, there can’t be that many people left in town who were even around when all this happened. So all this speculation is just gossip.’
‘I heard you were writing a book about it,’ the woman said, narrowing her eyes. ‘You wanna make sure you ask the locals for their opinions before you go and gloss everything over. Don’t be fooled just because he looks like a sad old man in a nursing home. He had a temper on him back in the day—a mean one. That don’t just go away overnight.’
‘I’m simply looking into the story at the moment.’
‘I’m just saying, make sure you get all the facts before you start throwing your big-city accusations around here,’ she said, pushing away from the counter.
Big-city accusations? Seriously?
‘Heard you made a bit of a scene up at the nursing home the other day.’
‘You hear a lot of things,’ Pip commented sceptically.
‘My daughter works up there. People don’t take too kindly to outsiders coming in and laying down the law.’
‘People also don’t like it when they see someone disrespecting the elderly in their care.’
‘Seems like we’re all sold out of vanilla slice today,’ the woman said sharply.
Pip held her tongue and forced a brittle smile to her lips. ‘That’s okay. Thanks anyway.’
She left the shop with as much dignity as she could muster, despite the fact that inside, she was fuming. This had to be some kind of record: being kicked out of not one but two places since she’d arrived.
What was wrong with these people? Why was there still so much animosity surrounding such an old incident? It was a serious crime, yes, and likely grisly, but these people were the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the locals who were alive when it had all happened, and yet they seemed to be holding onto their anger like it only happened yesterday.
Maybe it was a case of hand-me-down prejudice? Family folklore that just passed from one generation to the next. But what if Bert had been innocent all this time? She understood better now why Anne was so distraught over Bert’s history of treatment from his fellow neighbours. If Bert had simply been a grieving husband, innocent of murdering Vernon Clements and beside himself with worry over the whereabouts of his missing wife for close to seventy years, the injustice of the whole situation would be completely unacceptable. After having just been on the receiving end of local animosity herself, she could only imagine how much worse it must have been for Bert.
Why hadn’t Bert packed up and left? Instantly she knew the answer: he’d been waiting for Molly to come home. In that moment, any remaining doubt in her mind over Bert’s innocence had just been eliminated. No one would put up with decades of abuse and ignorance unless they had a stronger reason to stay. Well, maybe Pip would reconsider writing that damn book after all … once she had the evidence to wave under this town’s collective nose that proved Bert’s innocence once and for all.
Pip walked up to the counter inside the police station and nodded a greeting to the young female constable who’d been at the dam, now sitting across the room behind a computer.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked in her no-nonsense tone, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Pip couldn’t help but wonder if this was the woman’s normal personality or just a persona, put on to give people a sense of professionalism they may otherwise doubt in someone so young. Pip remembered well what that felt like as a rookie, just starting out in her field.
‘I was hoping to see Detective Jarrett for a moment, if possible.’
‘The detective isn’t in today. Can I help you instead?’
‘Oh. Ah, no, that’s okay. It wasn’t important. I’m sure I’ll catch up with him some other time.’
She was fairly sure they wouldn’t be interested in a photo of the car, anyway. She also didn’t want to have to acknowledge—or worse, examine—the fact that she could have simply called the detective again instead of dropping by the station to see him. She was definitely not disappointed that she hadn’t got to see him today.
Pip almost felt bad at the woman’s despondent expression and hesitated before leaving. ‘Are you from Midgiburra?’ she asked, curious about the constable’s oddly militant style. ‘Originally, I mean?’
The personal question appeared to surprise her. ‘Not exactly,’ she said awkwardly.
She didn’t seem as though she fitted in here, and yet there was an innocence about her that didn’t seem big-city either.
‘My mother’s family came from here.’
‘Is this your first posting?’
The constable nodded a little jerkily as she busied herself shuffling the papers on her desk. ‘My family have a long history in the police force. My mother started her career here, before she got married and moved away.’
‘So you’re following a family tradition?’
‘I guess so,’ she said without much enthusiasm.
‘Is your mother still in the police force?’
‘She retired last year.’
‘Do you still have family in town?’ The constable eyed her almost suspiciously. ‘Sorry, force of habit—I get interested in something and tend to ask a lot of questions.’
‘That’s all right. Sergeant Nielsen says I need to work a bit more on my public relations skills,’ she said quickly, then lowered her eyes once more to her computer screen. ‘My mother was a Maguire,’ she said, ‘so I guess you could say I still have a few relatives in town.’
‘Yeah, I’ve noticed that name on quite a lot of signs around the place. It must be a big family.’
The constable looked up briefly before nodding. ‘I don’t really know them. We didn’t visit my grandparents very often.’
‘Oh,’ Pip murmured, as the conversation dried up. ‘Well, I better let you get back to work,’ she said, glancing about the small, quiet office. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of anything happening to interrupt. ‘I’ll see you around.’
She received a sharp nod in response as the woman went back to scrolling through whatever she was reading on the screen before her. What she lacked in personality, she certainly made up for in dedication to the job, Pip thought as she pushed open the screen door and left the station.
She made a quick stop into the supermarket and bought some consolation chocolate, then in a spur-of-the-moment decision, she googled a vanilla slice recipe and tossed in the ingredients before heading back to the farm. Take that, cranky bakery lady. I’ll make my own.
The library at Coopers Creek was a cool sanctuary to escape the heat outside. The soft hum of the air conditioner provided a soothing background for Pip as she sat at the old microfiche machine. She’d pulled the film for the local newspaper from back around the time of Vernon Clements’ murder, looking for as much information as she could find.
It took longer than she’d anticipated, which shouldn’t have been a surprise; she always found herself getting distracted by research, especially when it came to old newspaper archives. She found everything about them fascinating—the history, the language they used, the unapologetic sexism in their cringe-worthy advertisements—and often discovered herself reading articles not even remotely relating to what she was originally researching. Today was no exception. The Midgiburra Gazette was a wealth of local information.
The Clements murder had been covered near and far. Pip found accounts of it mentioned in major city and regional newspapers all across the country, but it was the local paper, understandably, that followed the case in more detail.
The initial report filled a whole front page and most of page two with the discovery of Vernon’s body, detailing exactly how he’d been discovered, by whom and what they saw at the scene. They described in excruciating detail every aspect of the murder scene, including that Vernon had been found slumped over the steering wheel, his shirt covered in blood and a deep wound to his chest that looked to have been caused by a sharp knife or some other instrument. The murder weapon, however, was not located at the scene.
In a following article, they covered the inquest into the murder, which also included the disappearance of Molly Bigsby and the suspicion that foul play had been entered into.
Pip noted that Bert had been interviewed briefly, but due to the fact he had an alibi—his visit to his doctor—there wasn’t a lot he could be questioned about. He was asked if he knew his wife and the deceased had been having an affair, and he’d said he did but he believed that it had been over. Pip could only imagine the humiliation involved for anyone having to sit in a courtroom and have their personal life played out in front of the whole town like that.
He had also been questioned about his temper and a number of incidents he had been involved in since returning from the war, one of which was a fight in the bar with a man named Frank Maguire. There were a couple of other altercations mentioned at the inquest that involved mostly drunken behaviour. They hadn’t resulted in any charges against Bert but were clearly being brought up to perhaps cast a shadow on Bert’s reputation.
The police had no evidence that Bert was responsible for Vernon’s death, but clearly, they had no other suspects to link it to, and the fact it was public knowledge that Bert’s wife had been having an affair with the deceased would have made him a prime suspect … if he’d been in town that night. Interestingly, Pip noted, the surname of the police sergeant who was interviewed by the coroner at Vernon’s inquest was Maguire. In a town where everything seemed to include the name Maguire, it probably wasn’t unusual, yet the names of the witnesses to some of Bert’s altercations after his return from the war also shared the same surname.
Still, there was nothing that had directly linked Bert to the murder of Vernon Clements or Molly’s disappearance. As far as Pip could tell, Vernon and Bert hadn’t had any public run-ins—at least, nothing that had been recorded.
So when on paper there was no evidence that connected Bert to Vernon’s murder, why would a town have such a steadfast conviction that Bert was a murderer?