STRIKE FORCE SATYR officers had delayed taking a statement from the boy who’d found the body until they’d brought in a parent. The boy’s mother and father had sat with their son on one side of a trestle table as he’d told his story to two detective constables. Now, the interview over, the family looked up as Riley and O’Neil came into the police gazebo.
Riley, who had spoken with the kid earlier, nodded to his parents and wrote down their names: Scott and Sarah Green. Scott Green was a science teacher, and they lived in a campus house not far from the scene. Sarah Green worked part-time in an office in Epping. Tom was heading into Year 11 at Prince Albert.
‘Tom said you were home this evening?’ Riley said.
Scott Green looked at her and then around at O’Neil, who was standing behind the table. Sarah answered. ‘Yes, watching TV.’
‘What’d you watch?’
Sarah told her. Riley hated musicals. She made a note and looked at the boy. Tom Green was awkward between his parents, in an Eels cap, shorts, thongs, T-shirt. He had acne around the chin and his top lip needed a shave. Riley had put him at seventeen and been out by a mile. Fifteen. She had no children, and teenagers did not make her clucky. ‘You alright, Tom?’ she said.
He mumbled and looked at the table. Riley turned to the detective constables. ‘Finished?’
They nodded. ‘Sarge,’ one of them said.
Scott and Sarah Green stood up. The husband was the same height as his wife, his thinning hair brushed back reached his collar, and he had a moustache. There was a diffidence to him that could have been shock, or affectation, or medication. His wife spoke again.
‘Who is it?’ Sarah’s face creased with pain. ‘I mean—a man or a woman?’
‘There’s a process,’ Riley said. ‘We need to think about the next of kin.’
‘We have a daughter,’ she said.
Riley’s eyes flicked to O’Neil’s. ‘Where is she now?’ she said. ‘Heading home, I hope.’ Sarah was holding her phone. ‘From work. She never answers.’
Riley kept her face blank. She didn’t want a family stampede, but she needed to get an officer over to the Greens’ house.
Scott Green took a step from the table and spoke for the first time. ‘I could look, if you like.’
Riley thought he meant at his house, for his daughter, but he tossed his head towards the scene. ‘If you need to identify the body,’ he said.
Sarah Green’s eyes lowered and Tom was busy staring at a spot on the side of the gazebo. Scott was smiling at Riley. She let the moment spool, swung all her focus onto Scott Green. Before joining the force, Riley had studied occupational therapy and then speech pathology. She’d finished neither, but in Scott Green she caught the whisper of a treated childhood lisp. Solicitude on his face, a quiver below the surface. Expectation? Riley felt she was looking at a full-grown boy scout, for whom this was an adventure.
‘It’s time you got Tom home,’ she said. ‘Detective Constables Hatcher and McCormack will go with you. They’ll need to talk to your daughter.’
Riley watched the family exit the gazebo with the officers and then turned to O’Neil. He was scrolling on his phone, reading an electronic copy of the kid’s statement. She had already heard how things had unfolded from both Tom and Craig Spratt. The boy had been out trying to fly a drone on the playing fields when the wind had picked up. He’d packed it in and was riding his bike home past the Hay Stand when he’d spotted the black shape on the wooden platform. He’d stopped to look just as Spratt was driving past.
‘Drone footage?’ O’Neil said.
‘We’ve got the memory card. The boy’s got a hard drive at the house, we’re picking it up now.’
‘Good. Where’s Spratt?’
Craig Spratt was still in a camp chair outside the gazebo. He stood as they approached. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector O’Neil,’ Riley said. ‘New South Wales Homicide.’
Spratt stuck out a hand.
Riley watched as O’Neil shook. Spratt was fifty, weathered, still some copper in his cropped hair. No fat, at ease, practical. No jail. Maybe not the smartest chook in the coop.
‘Not many people around at the moment,’ O’Neil said.
‘Nah, she’s dead quiet.’ Spratt pulled up and puckered at his faux pas.
‘We’ll need a list of who lives at the school normally, and who’s here during the holidays,’ O’Neil said. ‘You got kids?’
‘Yeah, two.’
‘Boys or girls?’
‘Boys.’
They needed a name for their victim, and it wasn’t Spratt’s child lying wrapped on the hard floor.
‘I’m sorry to ask,’ O’Neil said, ‘but we’re trying to identify the deceased. We were hoping you might be able to help.’
It took Spratt a second, then he nodded.
They gave him booties and went up the stairs in single file. In the blue tent, Spratt looked at the girl’s face and sucked in air. He dropped his head and ran a hand down his scalp to the back of his neck. ‘Margy,’ he said.
It was hot under the lights. ‘Margy?’ Riley said at last.
Spratt didn’t respond. Riley touched him on the arm. ‘Mr Spratt?’
He took a rag that smelt of diesel from a pocket and dabbed his eyes. ‘Sorry.’ He looked at Riley’s hand.
‘Can you tell us about Margy?’ O’Neil said.
‘Marguerite,’ Spratt said. ‘I call her Margy.’
‘And her last name?’
Spratt blinked. ‘Christ, sorry. Marguerite Dunlop. Her old man’s the chaplain. They live in the big place up there.’ He nodded south.
Riley’s eyes met O’Neil’s. Chaplain. Strike Force Satyr had run hard on the religious aspects of the Gladesville crimes—the carvings on the foreheads, the nails through the feet. Investigations that had led nowhere.
‘She was worried—about stayin’ by herself,’ Spratt said.
He wanted to talk, so they listened. Marguerite was seventeen, maybe eighteen, had just finished at St Anne’s, a smaller girls’ school adjoining the Prince Albert grounds. Her parents had a place at Noosa where they went every year. She hadn’t gone this year because she’d got a job, Spratt wasn’t sure where. But she had been staying at home alone—he was sure about that.
‘Any siblings?’ O’Neil said.
There was an older brother, Robert. Spratt called him Bob. He was at university in the US, again Spratt wasn’t sure where.
‘You said she was worried,’ O’Neil said. ‘About being on her own? She told you that?’
‘No. Bruce said.’
‘Bruce?’
Bruce Dunlop was Marguerite’s father. The chaplain. He had asked Spratt to install locks on some of the internal doors of the house, to create a secure group of rooms for his daughter while she was home alone.
They came up to the house, Ghost Gum, from the rear on a dirt track. Riley at the wheel of the Calais, Spratt in the passenger seat pointing the way, O’Neil in the back with a uniformed constable from Parramatta.
It was close to midnight, eerie and still. The homestead was lonely on its hill, no neighbours in view. A tennis court to one side had a crumbling surface and weeds coming through. There was a windbreak of poplars before a group of outhouses and lean-tos ran down a slope off the back lawn, then rusty gates and fences and a series of holding pens resembling sheep or cattle yards. The house itself was huge, a thousand square metres, Riley guessed, with a steep roof, four chimneys, two storeys and an attic. Tall trees stood sentinel, scattered and forlorn. There was a sense of sorrow, like the end of the road.
Spratt had a key to the back door.
‘You got a key to all the houses, Mr Spratt?’ Riley said.
‘Pretty much, yeah.’
O’Neil and Riley pulled on fresh gloves and booties and took torches from the boot of the Calais. Spratt handed Riley the key and moved off to stand on the lawn with the constable.
They entered into a modern kitchen, tidy in the torch beams, and touched nothing, not even a light switch. Gladesville had been hyper-careful, cleaning up and leaving nothing of himself behind, just the smell of ammonia and the victim’s blood on the floor. They couldn’t afford the smallest error, transferring or mixing DNA. A second forensic team was on the way.
There was a jute bag on the bench, holding groceries—fruit, nuts, milk, yoghurt, cereal, chocolate—and a receipt. Riley used a pen to unfurl the docket: Coles, North Rocks, 8.47 a.m., Wednesday, 28 December.
‘Yesterday,’ she said.
The house was divided as Spratt had described. A cluster of five interconnecting rooms—kitchen, lounge, bath, hall, bedroom—had been secured. It was simple but effective—any internal door from this suite that led elsewhere in the house was padlocked, cutting off the rest of the ground floor and access to the second storey and the attic.
Riley and O’Neil went down the hallway to the bedroom, stood at the threshold and played their lights around. They backed up. The side door was locked. There was no sign of forced entry, or of any struggle. Nothing was broken.
Spratt was still on the lawn. O’Neil clicked off his torch in the moon glow. ‘Has this place been on the market in, say, the last twelve months?’
‘No way,’ Spratt said. ‘Never. School owns it.’
Other vehicles were pulling up—forensics, shoe and tyre, fingerprint techs. Officers were starting to tape off the house to establish a second crime scene.
Riley moved away to the back of the yard. If you didn’t have a suspect, then all you had were the victims. First Lena Chatfield, then Jill Sheridan. And now Marguerite Dunlop. Lena had been twenty-three—two years older than Jill Sheridan. Marguerite was younger again. The killer had hit the Chatfield place, then he’d gone round the bend in the river and hit the Sheridan house. In both cases, the parents had been away from home. That fit with what had happened here.
But the Gladesville houses had been nothing like this. Both were nondescript from the street—fenced-off, windowless facades that gave nothing away. Then, out the back, they opened up, three-levelled glass cathedrals in worship to the gods of the river. Neither had blinds or curtains on the bottom two floors, they were completely open to the water views—and completely exposed. Farquhar was adamant the killer was obsessed with reconnaissance and surveillance, that it was part of his pleasure, and Riley agreed. Gladesville was a prowler and a peeper. He watched for a long time, until he had the household pattern of life, and only then did he strike—an ambush predator coming out of the river.
Riley stared down the slope, away from the property. You couldn’t see the creek from the house. Lake Parramatta was hidden too, a kilometre off as the crow flew. She turned and ran her eye over the hunkered rear of the homestead, a built-on extension all angles and shadows. The place seemed to drool into the earth. There was nothing open and inviting about it, no large windows or clear lines of sight. It wasn’t a peeper’s paradise.
Farquhar’s black Volvo pulled up, the druid in his hybrid SUV. Riley was conditioned to work from a practical standpoint, common sense and training harnessed to experience and instinct. O’Neil had brought Farquhar in to extrapolate. The forensic psychiatrist looked at the scenes and stroked his beard and postulated his theories. Riley was happy to listen. But she didn’t need Farquhar to tell her that Gladesville hadn’t happened in a vacuum. Gladesville was an escalation. But from what? O’Neil thought rape and Riley agreed—they had the strike force looking for unsolved violent sexual assaults. Farquhar wasn’t so sure. Gladesville was raping after he killed. It was controlled: no torn condoms and semen leaking out, no skin under the victims’ fingernails from scratching. For Farquhar, the rape was an addition, it wasn’t the motivation. The psychiatrist had Satyr looking for strange break-ins, peculiar ransacking, fetish burglaries where nothing of real value was taken. Being alone in other people’s houses, looking, going through their underwear—that was where the killer had started to build his fantasy and find his stimulation.
The Volvo’s headlights went out. Riley knew Farquhar would argue Marguerite Dunlop’s killer wasn’t their boy.
O’Neil came from the house through the back door and waved her over. She crossed the lawn.
‘Point of entry,’ he said.
She walked with him to a tiny room off the kitchen, a butler’s pantry, now home to boxes.
O’Neil pointed with a gloved finger to a small window, high on the wall. It had a lock on the inside, and the latch was open. ‘There’s enough room to wriggle through,’ he said. ‘Every other window is latched shut.’
There was a bench running the length of the pantry. Riley trod carefully to peer out the window. Everything locked down tight, and one latch open? She didn’t buy it, it didn’t look right.
The points of entry at Gladesville had been identical, glass sliding doors between the open-plan kitchens and the gardens down to the river. The doors had been unlocked and the killer had strolled right in. He knew how the families lived their lives and how they used their houses. Indoor–outdoor living was a thing. Wealthy people on the water, sashaying between the lawn and the patio and the kitchen, doors pushed back, bringing the outside in. They’d brought the outside in all right. The question was, had the killer gathered his knowledge of the layouts from sitting and watching, or had he been inside the houses before he’d hit? Both the Sheridan and Chatfield properties had been on the market last year, sold to the families who had now lost their daughters. Coincidences did happen, they happened all the time, but Riley was wary of them. Strike force detectives had upended the real estate agencies that made the sales and almost arrested one broker, a suave prick in a duck-egg-blue Bentley and a four-thousand-dollar suit, but in the end they’d pulled back. The bloke was a cokehead from the eastern suburbs who trawled Tinder and bars and got a bit rough with women. That made him a real estate agent, but it didn’t make him what Satyr was looking for.
The selling agents kept lists of everyone who had been through the properties on inspection, hundreds of names—and Satyr had looked at them all. There was plenty of overlap, the houses being so close, and a couple of men had been elevated to persons of interest, but in the end—nothing: every last name rubbed out. Still, O’Neil couldn’t shake the idea that the killer had spent time in the houses before the murders. Maybe he’d slipped through at an inspection without leaving his name at the door. Maybe he could operate like that, out in the open, without anyone taking notice. Maybe.
They kept Satyr looking closer to home: removalists, painters, locksmiths, plumbers, sparkies. Telstra, NBN, meter readers, tree loppers, couriers, taxis, Ubers, whitegood repairs, every dickhead on a scooter with a bowl of noodles. And then the canvass of the suburb itself: the street, the joggers, the dog walkers, the cafes. They’d gone to the phone towers, they knew every number that had been in the area on the nights.
O’Neil’s mobile rang and Riley watched as he listened and hung up. ‘The headmaster just turned up,’ he said. ‘He’s over at the first scene.’
‘Where’s he been?’
‘Roseville, having dinner. They’re taking a statement.’
‘He’ll see we’re here at the house,’ she said. ‘We don’t want her name getting out.’
‘They won’t confirm anything and they’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut.’
Dawn was hours off. Marguerite Dunlop’s parents had been woken in Noosa and would be on a plane from the Sunshine Coast at first light.
Riley looked again at the open window latch. Point of entry. It was easy to misinterpret a crime scene. Craig Spratt had spent time in the house. Craig Spratt had a fucking key.