SHOCK HAD HIT Bruce Dunlop hard, but he was functioning. In fact, he couldn’t stay still. O’Neil had seen it before with loved ones and knew his detectives had to move fast: Marguerite’s father wanted to help, but they needed to get everything out of him before they lost him to grief. The mother was a different story. Beverley Dunlop could barely stand up.
The Dunlops had landed at Mascot at eight a.m. and been brought to the school. O’Neil wanted them to take a look at the house, but for now they were being interviewed in a classroom block nearby. It was Friday morning and no one had slept since the body had been found.
They separated the parents in adjacent rooms. Their alibis were watertight. They’d left for Noosa by car on Boxing Day, Monday. They had made calls to their daughter and exchanged texts until things went quiet on Wednesday morning. They’d assumed she was busy, or just needed some space. About a month ago, Marguerite had got a job at a shop in Westfield Parramatta. She was to have been there for the post-Christmas sales until the end of January, when she’d have left for Canberra and university. Philosophy and religion. According to her father, there had been no recent changes in her behaviour. He and his wife didn’t just think their daughter was a good kid, they knew it. She was positive, organised, civic-minded, well-meaning, kind. No drugs, no alcohol, no boyfriend. She hadn’t gone to schoolies because the party scene made her nervous. Bruce and Beverley had taken her to Fiji instead, a trip they had promised to mark the end of her schooling. The family had missionary friends on the islands.
O’Neil moved between the two classrooms, closing the doors behind him, as the parents gave their statements to separate pairs of Satyr detectives. Farquhar sat silently behind the father. O’Neil had no doubt the Dunlops were telling the truth, but there was no way it was the full picture. No parent knew everything about their seventeen-year-old child. Marguerite was a teenager from a closeted upbringing with sudden access to freedom. Had she been taking risks? Had her lifestyle got her into trouble? Toxicology would take a week. They had her phone, her laptop, her Opal card, her debit card, her driver’s licence, the rego of the Mazda.
Looking from room to room at the Dunlops, O’Neil wondered at their marriage. Would it survive? He felt a wave of fatigue … he didn’t want to think about marriage. Beverley Dunlop appeared to be slipping further away, her face a hideous grey.
When the mother’s statement was done, O’Neil led her from the classroom to the house. There was a spot on the carpet in Marguerite’s room about the size of a fifty-cent piece. Someone had scrubbed at it, trying to clean it up. Crime Scene had run the lights over it and confirmed it was blood. O’Neil withheld that detail from the mother but wanted to know how long it had been there, and Beverley Dunlop, when she saw it, said it was new. O’Neil asked her to look around the room to see if anything had been stolen. Nothing had been taken, as far as she could tell.
In both the victims’ rooms in Gladesville, things had gone missing: shoes, one earring from a pair, underwear, holiday snaps, Jill Sheridan’s driver’s licence. It sounded like Hollywood bullshit, but Gladesville was taking trophies.
The house was now the primary focus of the investigation, and a second police gazebo had been set up on the front lawn. They were working on the hypothesis that Marguerite had been killed in her room, left on the floor on her front for a few hours and then moved somewhere unknown to be washed and wrapped before being moved again to the dump site.
O’Neil’s head throbbed. He left Beverley with a female constable and headed back to the classrooms. Bruce Dunlop was finishing his statement, and O’Neil pulled up a chair beside Farquhar to wait. He stared at the father from behind—the man looked like he couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. O’Neil snarled the thought away: looks could be deceiving. The school chaplain. What did he know about new religious movements, Satan worship, wizards in the suburbs? What did he know about Gladesville? O’Neil growled at himself again. He had to be careful in pushing for links that weren’t there. He’d done that before and left ruined lives in his wake, innocent men he’d destroyed with his blind, righteous fury.
The Satyr detectives taking the statement left the room and Farquhar stood and took a seat next to Dunlop, placing a piece of foolscap on the desk. O’Neil stayed put.
Farquhar had made a sketch on the paper, the figure that had been cut into the foreheads of the Gladesville victims—a skewiff t-shape, an inch-long vertical line with a wavy crossbar.
‘I need to know if this symbol means anything to you?’ Farquhar said. ‘Have you seen it anywhere?’
Dunlop sounded vacant. ‘What is it?’
‘It appears to be a religious sign. Christian, or perhaps pagan.’
‘You mean witchcraft?’ Dunlop spoke softly.
‘Marguerite was to have studied religion. Is it something she was interested in, the transition from paganism to Christianity?’
Dunlop stared at the drawing. ‘She’s interested in the history of religion, yes, but purely as a student. She’s High Anglican. It’s not possible she would veer into that.’
The psychiatrist nodded. ‘Why isn’t it possible, do you think?’
O’Neil moved down the side of the room and perched on a desk where he could see the father’s face.
‘Theology is what fires Marguerite,’ Dunlop said. ‘It’s a philosophy for her. But she does also have faith. She’s not a lost soul, searching for meaning. Nor is she evangelical.’
‘I see,’ Farquhar said. ‘She had no interest in the occult, and no glossolalia?’
‘No, nothing like that. She’s very humanist in her thinking. Evolution for example—she accommodates it with ease.’
The psychiatrist gave a doleful smile. ‘Was your daughter’s thinking something you accommodated?’
Dunlop considered for a moment and turned to O’Neil. ‘I hope this is not some witch-hunt, the backward Anglicans and their odd customs. That’s not Marguerite.’
O’Neil pushed off the desk and went to him. ‘It’s alright, that’s enough. Your wife is waiting.’
He took the chaplain by the elbow.
Farquhar stayed in his seat. O’Neil guided Dunlop out into the hall to a waiting constable and watched the chaplain shuffling away.
‘This school is Sydney Diocese.’ Farquhar didn’t look at him. ‘Have you come across them?’
O’Neil kept quiet.
‘They’re everything Marguerite was not. They’re Low Anglicans, evangelical.’ Farquhar stood and walked to the door. ‘Fundamentalist. Let’s just say they don’t accommodate evolution with ease.’
Bruce Dunlop had stopped under an exit sign at the end of the corridor. He couldn’t have killed his daughter, he hadn’t been here.
‘He’s the chaplain.’ Farquhar said. ‘The diocese would only hire in its image.’
A father–daughter religious war? ‘Understood,’ O’Neil said. ‘But you need to consider his alibi. It’s what we might call—’
‘Omnipotent?’
‘Yeah, that’ll do.’
They took Dunlop to his house. O’Neil felt the weight of the grief and wanted to help shoulder the load. It was impossible, but you had to try. A uniformed constable brought Beverley Dunlop from the gazebo and the couple were packed solemnly into the back of a waiting patrol car, to be taken to Beverley’s sister’s home in Beecroft.
O’Neil needed Panadol, a shower and a ten-minute kip. A combat nap, he called it, and Chrissie had always given her reply: a nanna nap. The repartee had been the first thing to dry up, then talking at all, and finally the whole marriage had been wrung out. That was the nub of it: he lost the ability to talk with his wife. He took his work home but he didn’t discuss it, and he didn’t think to ask her about her day. The house was hers, she’d been paying it off before they’d met. O’Neil had considered moving in with his widowed father, but he wasn’t there yet—a man had to have some pride. He’d found a flat in Redfern and taken a six-month lease. That had been five months ago. He still couldn’t sleep properly in the empty bed.
Beverley Dunlop stared straight ahead as the car pulled away. The Dunlops’ vehicle was in Noosa. The analysts would run the plates. Bruce Dunlop mightn’t have killed his daughter—but they had to cross him out for Gladesville.
O’Neil looked at his watch: 10.30 a.m. Riley would be finished at the Spratts’. O’Neil texted her to pick him up and waited in the shade, running through lists in his head. There were divers in the creek, and more than a hundred blue overalls walking the line across the terrain between the house and the dump site. The headmaster, Philip Preston, had given a statement to Satyr detectives at the Hay Stand last night and then been sent home. O’Neil read the statement on his phone. No sleep, no shower—not yet. They needed to see Preston.