ADAM BOWMAN WALKED out of the newsroom to catch some air. Cabin fever on the late shift. It was after eight, the heat of the day still in the pavement and red dust blowing in like a veil on the fading summer light. He stood, the backs of his hands on his hips, reading the breeze. A bit of north in the westerly … it was worse out here than in the sick building.
Surry Hills, the end of December. The streets were dead, all the smug bars and cafes and restaurants shut for the holidays. Bowman didn’t mind that he was out of step, that he worked nights and weekends. But when it got like this, when everyone cleared out and melancholy sloped in, he saw that life did exist—and that it was going on elsewhere without him.
He’d filed his story, a wrap of the bushfires, but he was on four to midnight and it was too early to make himself scarce. He watched a couple of grey subs exit the building and torpedo downhill for the Aurora. The pokie pub sat across from Central, at Kippax and Elizabeth, a neon billabong of human flotsam. The Aurora never shut—not for the festive season, not even for the night.
His mobile rang. The newsdesk. Fuck. ‘Yeah.’
‘Have you heard? Brandy’s going feral.’ Justine, hyperventilating. She was fresh out of uni, armed with a doctorate and manning the phones. She was too smart to last long.
What Bowman heard was his night derailing. ‘Heard what?’
‘BMK. Out west—at your old school?’
Bowman couldn’t speak.
‘He said get your stuff and go. Plus take a camera. He’ll call you in the car.’
She hung up and he stared at his mobile. He swiped for The National and saw they had the story breaking, two paragraphs from the wires under a banner headline: GIRL IN PLASTIC BMK’S THIRD VICTIM. He read it and then read the second par again. ‘The body was found on the campus of Prince Albert, an independent boys’ school at North Parramatta in Sydney’s west.’
The police reporter Benny Diamond came through the revolving door with a photographer in tow. Diamond had never acknowledged Bowman and he wasn’t about to start now. The photographer rolled her eyes as she passed and Bowman watched them cross the street and load into a company Prius with a driver. BMK was Diamond’s story. They were going to the school.
Bowman went into the foyer and up the stairs. The newsfloor was denuded, ten years of redundancies and now silly-season empty. Through the glass wall of the editor’s office, Brandy Alexander could be seen on his feet on a call. Bowman hesitated and then went and stood in the editor’s doorway.
Alexander hung up and waved him in. ‘Beat-Up Benny’s en route. He’ll do the splash.’
Bowman glanced out the window. ‘And what—you want me to go too?’
‘Yeah.’ Alexander rippled with impatience. ‘Rumour has it you went to this school?’
Bowman didn’t flash his private-school credentials, they were worthless in a newsroom. But word got around. ‘Long time ago.’
Alexander scowled. ‘But you know the place—like, you could get in?’
‘I lived there in the eighties,’ Bowman said. ‘My father was a history teacher.’
‘Right.’ The editor paused. ‘Well, fuck—that’s gotta come in handy.’
‘But what about Diamond? He won’t like me surfing in.’
‘Forget Diamond. He doesn’t know you’re going—and he’ll be with the cops. The point is, if you sneak around, you might get something.’ Alexander shooed him. ‘Move. I’ll call you in a sec.’
Bowman went out. He took a camera from the picture desk, grabbed his bag and headed downstairs and over the road to his Nissan in the carpark. The driver in the Prius would take Diamond through Chinatown. Bowman went left on Elizabeth, down Cleveland onto Wattle and smelt the fish market as he flogged the Nissan up the ramp onto the Anzac Bridge. The radio had ditched the evening quiz and the announcer was cycling through the story, building as she went, a murder ballad on repeat.
Prince Albert … the name kept darting out at him and he turned the volume down to think. BMK at Prince Albert? His head shook, he couldn’t compute. There were things he could comprehend: he was forty-five, he was still kicking around on general news, Brandy didn’t rate him.
It was not just any school, Bowman knew that as well as anybody. It was four hundred acres fenced off in the suburbs—patrician, blazered and slap-bang in the centre of the western sprawl.
The site had been a colonial estate, hacked from the great gums of the plain. The Church of England had come later, turning the land into a boarding school for the sons of the sunburnt pastoralists: generations of indoctrination and conformity and bastardry had seeped into that earth. You conformed or it broke you—your spirit, your psyche, even your very bones. The school was a throwback: vast, gated, studded with sandstone buildings and hemmed by native bush. Bowman hadn’t set foot in the place in three decades, but he knew every gully and trail.
He loosened his grip on the wheel, scratching a red flare of eczema up the inside of his left arm. Fraudulence was stressful—he wasn’t cut out for this, for chasing the big stories. His mind linked to the school and other humiliations … Saturday sport, gangly under a high ball. He hadn’t been cut out for that either.
Ahead he saw the Prius and his loathing for Diamond evaporated. It took the pressure off, having the police reporter on the story—Bowman would play second fiddle while Diamond wrote the main piece and carried the can when they got beaten by their rivals.
The phone rang on the Bluetooth.
‘It’s just coming through on the wires,’ Alexander said. ‘The body was found at some place called the Hay Stand, up the back of the school.’
Bowman pictured it, on its own above the playing fields. ‘Jesus.’
‘What is it?’ Alexander said.
‘Literally an old feed store for horses. It’s ornamental now. Big sandstone columns, no walls. Like a rotunda, except square.’
‘Can you get near it? They’ve clamped the place down real tight. Media’s corralled on an oval. No drones.’
‘There’s lots of ways in.’
‘Good.’
Bowman saw flashing lights in his mirrors. Unmarked police car at full tilt. It belted round him and hit the siren through a red light up the hill to Drummoyne. Heading west. Everything was heading west.
‘The TVs have pooled, trying to get a chopper up,’ Alexander was saying. ‘The duty pilot’s taken a dive—salmonella. If you get through, we should have it on our own.’
‘What have the cops said?’
‘Not much … just he’s used the black plastic again.’
Bowman glanced in his blind spot, changed lanes. The moon was up, full, red-gold in the darkening sky.
‘Listen,’ Alexander said, ‘Diamond and the snapper’ll go in the front gate with the rest of the pack. You’re on your own. We need pictures. We’re pushing deadline back, you’ve got two hours.’
The editor hung up as the Nissan climbed the bridge at Gladesville. Bowman craned his neck left as he crested the arch, but the height of the kerb blocked the view of the riverfront real estate. BMK had killed twice here near the bridge, two nights a month apart. November first, and then November thirtieth, under a big blue moon. A tabloid sub on The Mirror had cherry-picked the lunacy and christened him: Blue Moon Killer. BMK. Crisp—good for headlines.
Bowman was past Gladesville and into Ryde, still fifteen clicks from the school. Rows of red-brick houses stunted by traffic grime. He replayed the conversation with Alexander. The editor was aware Bowman had history at the school. How much did he know? There were things on the public record if he looked. Ferret-eyed Brandy was good at looking. Still, he was backing him, trusting him to get through the police cordon and come back with a story. That made a change.
At Carlingford, he cut across to Kissing Point, turned right on Bettington Road and drove up past gauche commuter castles and the golf course at Oatlands. His heart beat fast. It was a long time since he’d been on these streets.
The two main gates to Prince Albert on Pennant Hills Road, two hundred metres apart, were both blocked by patrol cars with lights flashing. A television truck sat at the second entrance. Bowman didn’t slow. Rounding a bend, he passed the stone gatehouse to the original estate and braked left into a suburban street. He parked, grabbed his bag and got out. He stood listening for a moment and then jogged across the road.
The old boom gate, hidden by foliage, sat over a dirt track leading into the property. He ducked under it and began to walk. He knew where he was going. It wasn’t far.