BOWMAN ARRIVED AT the office in Surry Hills as O’Neil was speaking to the media at Prince Albert. Benny Diamond was with the pack at the school and would cover the press conference for the paper.
There were more journalists on deck than last night, but the cavernous newsfloor was still close to empty. Maybe thirty heads, where a decade ago there would have been three hundred. The room swept off into a graveyard of desks and broken chairs and filing cabinets, documenting a lost era. The broadsheet was on its knees and bleeding out, most of its staff laid off or having quit. All that were left were kids on the website, the odd boomer columnist bravely braying on, and a calcified seam of middle-aged timeservers grinding the paper out. Bowman had hung on because he was cheap and did the late shifts: the graveyard in the graveyard.
He put his bag on his desk and looked around. Across the floor, Alexander had stepped out of his office and was waving him over. Alexander was a case in point. He was the editor—he should have been out to lunch while the chief-of-staff herded the reporters and gathered the news. But the chief-of-staff was on stress leave and there was no one left to do her job.
Bowman had never been waved at by the editor, only screamed at and chased around the subs’ table. He hurried over.
‘Never run in a newsroom,’ Alexander said. He had a shoe off. Brandy’s gout was on the gallop.
The editor limped through his door and sat behind his desk, looking at the television that hung off the wall. Bowman followed. O’Neil was fronting the cameras on the Prince Albert oval. The detective identified the body and offered some details. The post-mortem would take twenty-four hours and toxicology at least a week. The school would be sealed for several days. There was a lot of forensic evidence. He finished with a plea for everyone on the campus to come forward: ‘If you live or work at this school and you don’t come to the police, I’ll be wondering why you haven’t.’
‘Poor bastard.’ Alexander turned the volume down and brought his shoeless foot onto the desk. ‘Trying to get on the front foot.’
Bowman glanced at a chair but didn’t take it.
‘So.’ Alexander eyed him like a ferret. ‘Do you know the girl—or the family?’
Bowman didn’t know the girl—or the family. But he knew where this was headed. Straight down the ferret hole. Straight to a death knock on the dead girl’s door.
‘No.’
‘You reckon you can get to them?’
‘What—death knock?’
‘Well … if we have to. Can’t you just ask to sit down with them?’
Bowman didn’t think Marguerite Dunlop’s parents would be feeling very chatty.
‘Good story if we get ’em,’ Alexander said. ‘And if we don’t, someone else will.’
‘I’ll ask for an interview. But if it comes to a death knock you can send Diamond.’
Alexander made a face. ‘Haven’t the poor people suffered enough?’ He looked at the TV. ‘Speak of the devil.’
The network was still carrying the feed from the school. O’Neil’s comments had in no way satiated the media, so the television reporters on the oval were doing what they always did: interviewing other journalists. Beat-Up Benny Diamond loved a chat to camera, oblivious to the fact he had a face for radio. Beat-Up Benny had a body for radio. The armpits of his white shirt were yellow, ambition leaking out of him in primary colour. He was overripe, running to fat, but his wardrobe hadn’t kept up. His clothes were too tight. His cheeks sheened with perspiration: byline fever. Bowman could smell the Dolce & Gabbana coming through the screen.
Alexander’s mouth had fallen open. ‘Fuck me sideways, I can’t even bear to look.’ He switched it off and winced at his toe. ‘People live at this school?’
Bowman explained the setup. Maybe a third of the staff lived onsite in houses and cottages and flats, while the rest commuted.
Alexander’s eyes narrowed. ‘And you couldn’t find anyone?’
‘Holidays it gets empty.’ Bowman neglected to say he’d walked straight into the Homicide squad. ‘I’ll hit the phones here.’
‘Who ya gunna call?’
Bowman had one number from the past, an old chalkie who had been at the school with his parents. It wasn’t uncommon for teachers from that generation to regard Prince Albert as a job for life. Some had arrived in their twenties and never left.
‘Alright,’ Alexander said. ‘You work up what you can on the girl, the family, the personal stuff. Diamond’ll do the straight news.’
At his desk, Bowman got lucky. One call led to another, and the teachers wanted to talk. He spoke with friends of the Dunlops from Prince Albert, people who had known Marguerite as a child and seen her raised. Then he snagged a number for someone at St Anne’s, Marguerite’s school, and a fresh cavern of agony opened up. Marguerite was pious, smart, principled—and yet proud and rebellious in her own way. She didn’t preen on Instagram or signal her virtue, she rejected the platform outright. She gravitated to the quiet girls, the humble, the plain, the normal. There was no hypocrisy and no cowardice, physical or moral. She could never have been a journalist, Bowman thought as he wrote.
His left eyelid was quivering as he filed right on nine p.m., the first edition deadline. The paper would be late off. He’d written four thousand words in seven hours. Adrenaline had got him through and now he felt it leach out of him. He slumped back, sucking at an empty can of Vanilla Coke. His phone rang.
‘Adam Bowman.’
‘Mr Bowman. Detective Riley. Rose Riley.’
He sat up. ‘Hi.’
‘I’m in Rozelle, have you got time for a beer?’
Another chemical released into his brain. ‘Nice timing. I’ve just knocked off.’
In a corner of The Bald Rock, Riley caught Bowman’s eye as he came through the door. It was cool inside and smelt good, pub food laced with vinegar. She watched him approach, confirming her impression from the morning: his shirt may be purple but his life was drab.
‘Long day?’ she said.
His chin inched up. ‘Yourself?’
‘Feel like I’ve got jetlag.’
She was halfway through a schooner and he went through the thinning Friday crowd to get two more. His jeans hung loose, no bum to speak of. Riley had a theory about Australian men and their tight arses. She’d seen enough of them now to consider herself an expert, and she’d peer-reviewed it with the girls in the squad. The lack of a backside came from boyhoods spent outdoors, roaming the suburbs, the beach, the bush, from morning until their mothers called them in for tea. It was a way of life lost now—Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had seen to that. The butt-end of the information revolution: fatbergs larded with Zucker-tucker.
Riley drained her beer as Bowman put down the new glasses.
‘Taken any more photos?’ she said.
‘Not today. Just wrote a long story though. Think I forgot to mention you.’
‘I thought Diamond was your police reporter?’
‘I’m helping out.’
‘I’ll bet he’s enjoying that.’ Riley sipped. ‘You know the lie of the land out there—the school?’
‘I grew up there. Till I was fifteen.’
She examined him when he wasn’t looking. His popping gut, his sleeves rolled between wrist and elbow, his pen-pusher hands. A boyhood spent outdoors—bindi eyes and a BMX. Not so far removed from her own childhood, Riley guessed, though Bowman had a decade on her and a rung up the social ladder. But he wasn’t very far ahead, the son of a teacher, part of the help at a place like Prince Albert. Riley had worked a big fraud case on her way out of uniform: it’d been full of slippery private-school stockbrokers, their greed and entitlement physical. They’d been coated in it. There was none of that on Bowman.
‘Yeah, so I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘If you can play by some rules, we might get along.’
‘What rules?’
Reel him in slowly. Riley waited while a table of three couples beside them stood and headed for the door. ‘This is stranger murder,’ she said. ‘An unknown serial offender. Very rare, hunts at night. The scary shit.’
‘Like, only in America?’
She ran a finger around the rim of her glass.
‘Are you talking to the Yanks?’ he said.
That was Farquhar’s job. Read the literature, Zoom with Quantico. ‘There’s a forensic psychiatrist on the strike force.’
‘What do they reckon?’
Gender neutral. She liked that. ‘Off the record?’
He nodded, a good head of marsupial hair, dusky streaked to eastern grey. She saw her father in twilight, shooting on the farm. His trigger finger steady, his oil-stained hands. She shifted in her seat. Time to chum up and bait the hook. Farquhar’s rape categories. People loved this shit. Until it came through their window at three a.m.
‘They classify four types of rapists,’ she said. ‘The ultimate category is anger excitation. That’s your sadist. Gets off on causing pain and looking at it.’
Bowman sat up straighter, took a gulp.
‘So our boy’s anger excitation,’ she said. It wasn’t strictly true. Gladesville was beyond rape, if that was where he’d even started. He was into pain though—that much was true.
She watched Bowman reach into his bag for his notebook and let him scribble something down. ‘Not a word, remember,’ she said. ‘Not even deep background.’
‘It’s just for me.’ He glanced up from the pad. ‘To do some research.’
Yeah right, a bit of research on anger excitation rapists. That’d look good in his search history when the tactical boys smashed down his door. Something told her she wouldn’t want to see Bowman’s search history. Still, she wouldn’t want anyone looking at hers either. She’d been horny early in the week—but Marguerite Dunlop had washed that away. One animal urge replaced by another. She was on the prowl now, but it was to fight and kill.
‘So why the school?’ Bowman said.
‘Dunno.’
‘There’s a creek—’
‘Listen.’ She wasn’t going there. ‘Steve O’Neil. You familiar with O’Neil?’
‘I know who he is.’
‘With a case like this, we can’t just be following along, so he’ll take risks, get creative.’
‘Sounds like a cliché machine.’
Riley drank. It was better than breathing and counting to ten, and smarter than smacking the journo in the mouth.
‘When it comes to talking to the media you’ll only see O’Neil,’ she said. ‘He’s the face of it—it makes it personal. He’s trying to goad the killer, get him moving.’
‘What if he isn’t listening?’
‘He’s listening. He’s staging—leaving his mark.’
‘Yeah? What type of stuff?’
She caught herself, tried to keep the stumble from showing on her face. She’d overstepped, given Bowman something real. ‘You can’t write that, you can’t even allude to it,’ she said. ‘Nothing on staging or marking. I never said it. You so much as think it, we’re dead.’
‘Circling the wagons?’
Oh sweet Jesus. She stared at the table. Circling the wagons? Of course the wagons were in a circle. She picked up her glass to glance over the rim. What was he, an imbecile? Or worse, the opposite? Had he reeled her in?
‘How much police reporting have you done?’ she said. ‘I’d never heard of you, neither had O’Neil. No offence.’
He didn’t like that, she saw. More male inferiority, another journo craving recognition.
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Bit of general, some courts.’
Maybe that was it, fingers crossed—he just didn’t know how the world worked.
‘We always hold back details,’ she said. ‘It’s standard. It weeds out the cranks for a start. The press, you call him Blue Moon Killer—that’s true north for the psychics, the winter solstice at Stonehenge. We’ve already had a dozen confessions, more, with Gladesville. Hundreds of calls to the hotline. None of them knew anything—except that there’s a two-million-dollar reward.’
He went to pick up his pen again.
‘Nuh uh,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s important.’ She leant in and lowered her voice. ‘The marking can’t be made public. The holdbacks are strategic. We release bits of detail for a purpose, to get some info flowing or push buttons. We can put things out there to play with his mind.’
‘So that’s where I come in?’
‘Yes—and no,’ she said. ‘If we want to use the media we can just shovel it in The Mirror, or O’Neil can front up and say it on Channel 9. With you we might be more … delicate.’
‘That sounds nice. You fuck me up the arse and I don’t notice.’
‘Well, you are a little private school boy.’
He held up a middle finger—and his empty glass.
She went to the bar, leaving him to tear at a beer mat. She came back and put the drinks down.
‘We bring you into the tent a bit,’ she said. ‘You work with us, we work with you.’
‘Don’t you mean use?’
‘If you like. We all know the score.’
‘I made a lot of calls today,’ Bowman said. ‘I heard who found the body. A kid called Tom Green—and a staff member, Craig Spratt.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Thing is, the boy’s parents wouldn’t talk to me. Neither would Spratt.’
‘Bit sad.’
‘How about you give them the green light?’
‘I’ll think about it.’ Riley needed sleep. She pushed away her middy and stood.
‘Also,’ he said. ‘Are you guys approaching Diamond as well?’
‘Benny Beat-Up?’ She scrunched her nose. ‘Nah, O’Neil can’t come at him, too sweaty. Says he’s got the look of a chronic masturbator.’
Bowman nearly spat his beer.