Chapter 22

MANOLIS HAD TO use all his powers of persuasion to get past the front gate of the detention centre. The security guards stared at him with pothole eyes. As employees of a private company, they did not take kindly to having their authority usurped and their kingdom invaded. Manolis was searched for contraband, a process that took an inordinately long period of time. He was given a laminated pass and signed in. As he was led through the checkpoint, he heard one of the guards joke about Molly’s stoning while the other laughed and mentioned ‘solitary’. From above, CCTV cameras captured every move.

The administration building had a newness about it, but also a sterility and sense of misery. There was a lack of natural light, and it was near silent. What little noise there was echoed through the bare corridors – footsteps on concrete, a slamming door, a ringing phone. It felt eerie.

Manolis was handed on to a second pair of bulky security guards and escorted to the facility manager’s office. Their tall frames cast long shadows across a dirt quadrangle in the late afternoon sun.

‘No photos,’ one of the guards told Manolis. ‘Photos inside the centre are prohibited.’

Manolis eyed his ID badge. It bore a single name: Deacon.

‘I’m a police officer,’ said Manolis.

‘Your badge means nothing here,’ Deacon barked. ‘You can still be prosecuted.’

Manolis again saw the outdoor basketball court, now empty. Beyond the court, makeshift washing lines sagged, heavy with cheap polyester and rayon. There were also rows upon rows of the same white underpants that had brought him there that day. The huts had been painted in parts, the detainees having tried valiantly to make their incarceration more tolerable. Their sketches included murals and foreign flags of origin. Gardens had been planted, airless rooms decorated. The detainees’ lives were monitored closely, their transitions between individual sections controlled by a phalanx of private security.

The guards themselves spoke in hushed undertones. They eyed their visitor with suspicion as his pupils darted to every corner of the common areas, examining holes in walls and broken windows and charred remains. Walking further, he overheard Deacon mention a ‘blindfold’ to his colleague. It was an offhand statement with an ounce of truth, and certainly would’ve kept Manolis from noticing what was in the next building: canisters of tear gas and boxes of rubber bullets and stun grenades and rows of batons and shields, all locked up securely in wire-mesh cages. Manolis kept looking for a children’s playground that wasn’t there.

In the mess area, the kitchen appeared derelict. There were signs of numerous maintenance jobs, including extensive patchwork. The floor was uneven and precarious in places, with insufficient storage space and old equipment piling up on benches.

They were now towards the very back of the detention centre, at its northern-most point. An aerial drone with camera hummed ominously overhead. As Manolis and the guards crossed a final patch of grass, a little girl ran across their path. Her mouth was sealed tight with sticky tape, an older woman in a black hijab in tow. Manolis instinctively went to the girl’s aid before her hand was snatched by the woman, who swiftly bundled up the girl and carried her away.

‘Her mum,’ said the second guard.

‘Keep walking,’ said Deacon. ‘Eyes front.’

The manager’s office was in a new building, up one flight of stairs. It was sparsely decorated, bland and functional, with two rubber plants contributing the only splash of green. Their glossy leaves shimmied in the gentle air conditioning. A poster-sized image of the Queen hung watchfully on the wall. Next to it, a suffering Christ melted from his cross. Manolis was offered a seat in a hard plastic visitor’s chair. He was not offered tea or coffee or water. The cool, crisp air stroked his hot sticky face.

The facility manager, Frank Onions, kept his visitor waiting. When the man finally appeared, his first words to Manolis formed a query tinged with irritation.

‘What took you so long?’

He eased into the cushioned seat of his ergonomic office chair, seemingly forgetting to shake Manolis’s outstretched hand. Onions was unsmiling and wore an expression that said: ‘My time is worth more than this.’

Behind the large mahogany desk, Manolis saw a prepossessing figure with strong cheekbones. Onions had broad shoulders but was thin, the sinews of his neck stretched to their very limits. His close-cropped hair was turning silver at the temples, and his long crooked nose looked like it had been broken a few times when he was a younger man.

‘Thank you for meeting with me,’ Manolis said politely. ‘You probably know why I’m here.’

‘I probably do,’ said Onions, showing teeth. ‘So why aren’t you out there doing your job?’ He had a steady gaze and spoke with a soft but self-assured delivery.

Manolis proceeded to detail the crime, the victim and the investigation so far, all in broad strokes. The more he spoke, the more the manager’s expression changed from disinterested to confused, and finally incredulous. His fingers, which had thrummed the desk with a military beat, stopped dead still.

At first, Onions spoke in great bureaucratic detail, words designed to bewilder and bore. He spoke about visa systems and processing times and advisory bodies and independent agencies and global population movements and budgets. He outlined infrastructure and resources and duty of care and bipartisan political support and nation-building. His speech sounded pre-written and well-rehearsed. When he finally took a breath, he fixed Manolis with striking blue eyes and showed a sharkish smile.

‘Of course, you do realise you’re only wasting your time here,’ he said. ‘Whoever you’re looking for isn’t here. Here in the facility, I mean. The culprit is beyond these walls, out there.’ He pointed over Manolis’s shoulder, back towards the town.

The detective cleared his throat. ‘Thank you for that, Mr Onions. I need you to realise I’m just doing my job.’

‘Your job is to restore law and order in this town. That’s why you were called in, to tame the wild animals that run rampant through Cobb and sort out the cowboy lawmen who are supposed to protect us.’

Manolis sat forward and stuck out his chin. ‘Mr Onions, I was sent here to solve a murder. I’m a homicide detective. That’s what I do – I solve murders, I catch murderers, I bring them to justice. I’m not a circus trainer of animals, and I’ve no time or patience for incompetent police.’

Onions paused, smiled. ‘I knew you’d be good.’

Manolis sat back, studied the manager. ‘Just doing my job,’ he repeated.

The smile disappeared. Onions narrowed his eyes. ‘But Fyfe put you up to this. You’re on a witch hunt, like all the others.’

Manolis’s glare was steely. ‘I’m a police officer,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m following leads.’

‘And what lead is this, what scenario are you proposing? That my English teacher was involved in a relationship with one of her students and that he stoned her to death when it went sour?’

Manolis took a moment to answer. ‘I was never told she’d been teaching English here.’

‘Figured you were a good detective. Well done on working that out.’

‘And yes, that is certainly one possibility, that she was involved with a student. There are many lines of enquiry that we, the police, are following. It would be remiss of us not to ask what happened here. She was, after all, a person in your employ.’

Onions considered the detective’s face, clearly searching for a sign of doubt, a hint of uncertainty, a chink in his armour. Something that told the manager that this was just some bureaucratic hoop that needed to be jumped through, a box on a form that needed ticking. This man from the city had been summoned to restore order to a lawless town ravaged by alcohol and racial tension, not to falsely accuse already distressed and persecuted people of crimes they couldn’t possibly commit.

The manager stood to his full height of nearly two metres, neatly buttoned his suit jacket and strode to his big office window. His step was heavy on the boards. The window was south-facing and overlooked the rest of the detention centre. He placed his hands on his slender hips and spoke to his view.

‘Do you know about the people who live here, Detective?’ His voice was resonant and rich with authority.

An espresso machine gurgled in the corner.

‘Let me tell you about the people here. These people are asylum seekers. They have fled persecution in their home countries and come here for a better, safer life. For asylum. Now, the practice of granting asylum to people fleeing persecution is thousands of years old. It was first implemented during the rise of empires in the Middle East, the Egyptians and Babylonians.’

‘No need for a history lesson, Mr Onions.’

Onions looked at him with minor irritation. ‘Very well,’ he said, smile tight. ‘Today, Australia is obliged to protect the human rights of all asylum seekers and refugees who arrive in our country, regardless of how or where they arrive, and whether they arrive with or without a visa. Our obligations to vulnerable people fleeing persecution arise from our commitment to international treaties and a shared sense of justice and fairness as a safe, prosperous and humanitarian nation.’

Manolis nodded his understanding.

Onions continued. ‘My job and the job of everyone here – the guards and cooks and doctors and psychologists and teachers – is to ensure the physical and mental needs of these current-day asylum seekers are met while their claims are being processed. We conduct full background medical checks for parasites, bacterial infections, typhoid, malaria, measles and hepatitis. We X-ray for tuberculosis, do blood tests for HIV/AIDS, check dental hygiene. Those asylum seekers who are approved become refugees and are offered protection under international law. So we’re a halfway house – nothing more, nothing less. And yet, I see myself as following in a noble tradition and continuing an ancient practice.’

Onions swung his head around, his neck joints creaking like weathered floorboards. Manolis’s eyes were down as he wrote his spidery notes, but he looked up briefly.

Staring him dead in the eye, Onions urged him to reveal his thinking, his agenda.

‘The accusation that we’re harbouring a murderer is utterly preposterous,’ the manager went on. ‘It’s the detainees who are the vulnerable ones – I’m genuinely more worried about them. They’re abused and attacked when they walk through town, and even in here, where they’re meant to feel safe, they’re firebombed from the outside. They’re the ones who need protection from the townsfolk, not the other way around.’

Manolis stopped chewing his pen. ‘But you do have riots here in the centre. People are angry, they’re violent, they’re protesting their incarceration. How do you explain that?’

Onions ran a finger across his forehead, collecting a thin veneer of sweat.

‘Well in this heat, people tend to go a little troppo. Look at the town itself if you want proof. Though, I admit that a lot of it in the centre is behavioural. If the detainees don’t get their way, they act up. I’ll concede that. And between you and me, I don’t blame them. The legal system and courts and bureaucracy in this country are all obscenely slow.’

The detective nodded sagely. Onions was humming a familiar tune. Manolis had seen criminal lawyers add extra storeys to their palatial homes with every extra year that a murder case was dragged through the court system. Defendants died before they saw their trials completed. Their defence teams blamed the prosecution, the prosecution blamed the judges, the judges blamed the politicians, and everyone upgraded their postcodes.

Manolis leant forward in his chair, cupped his hands. ‘Now, I understand that most of these boat people —’

‘They’re not “boat people”,’ Onions interrupted. ‘They’re not people “made of boats”. They’re people who come to Australia in boats. Officially, they’re referred to as “irregular maritime arrivals”.’ His voice was full of menace, of annoyance, of a history correcting people.

Manolis held up a palm in apology. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was merely being brief.’

‘If you must do that, be brief, please call them “IMAs”.’

‘These IMAs,’ Manolis said, starting again, ‘I understand they haven’t arrived by proper means.’

Angry red smudges appeared on Onions’s cheeks. He tightened his eyes into thin slits.

‘But that, Detective, is not breaking the law. As an enforcer of the law, you should know that. IMAs simply haven’t arrived with the right paperwork. If you ask me, when you’re fleeing a war zone that’s not really the number one thing on your mind, now is it? It’s an administrative issue. Arriving without a visa is not a criminal offence, and these people are not criminals.’

‘That’s not what I was insinuating. I meant to say —’

Onions interrupted again; he wasn’t having a bar of it.

‘I can tell you there are over two hundred people in this detention centre, which includes nearly a hundred children. I’ve met each one of them individually, I’ve heard their stories and I can assure you, they’re absolutely harrowing. I don’t for one second believe that a single person in this facility could possibly be responsible for what you’re investigating. It’s ludicrous.’

Manolis paused, waited. He wanted to make sure Onions had finished speaking before risking being cut off again.

‘With no disrespect,’ Manolis finally said, ‘people like the ones you describe sound like they’ve got nothing to lose.’

Onions turned back to the window, to the slowly fading light in the day. He chuckled to himself.

‘You’re wrong, Detective. Dead, dead wrong. These people have risked everything. They’ve survived torture and trauma. They’ve come here for help, which is why they’re so relieved to arrive, even if it’s aboard a rickety fishing boat. They made it, they survived.’ His voice was close to cracking. ‘They’re not the terrorists, Detective. They’re running from the terrorists. So we make a big mistake to fear them. If we fear them, we cast them out, and that’s precisely the moment they could be preyed upon by the people who we should truly fear. If we send them away, they’re more likely to be the victims of terrorism. Or, in worst-case scenarios, we gift criminals and terrorists a limitless supply of desperate people whose exploitation then funds attacks on us all. Put emotion to one side, Detective. This isn’t about emotion. This is about crime. As a man of law, I thought you might appreciate that.’

Manolis tapped his notepad thoughtfully with his pen. He did not like being dictated to.

‘Mr Onions, I do appreciate that. But a woman has been murdered in cold blood. I would say that a murderer among us is someone to fear, wouldn’t you?’

Onions’s face relaxed. ‘Of course they are.’

‘Then that’s all this is about. Gathering evidence for a prosecution, bringing a criminal to justice and ensuring the community is safe. No politics or agenda. As I said, this is one line of police enquiry, one of many, so I’d appreciate your assistance. Without it, I can’t close the book on all the people here.’

The colour in Onions’s face lightened a fraction, red to pink. He returned to his chair, posture ferociously erect, and invited Manolis to continue.

‘Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt Mrs Abbott?’ the detective asked.

Onions did not hesitate in replying. ‘No. I can’t remember hearing a single bad word about her. She was a well-respected teacher, did an excellent job, and will be sorely missed.’

‘Did she have a boyfriend or lover?’

‘I don’t know. I understand she was widowed, but I made no enquiries about her private life. That was none of my business.’

Manolis nodded. ‘Was her behaviour any different recently?’

‘No.’ Onions scratched his chin. ‘I can’t say that it was.’

‘What about the detainees?’

‘Nothing I’ve heard. I get daily updates from the guards if there’s any trouble, and weekly updates from our psychologist. Of course, their behaviour has changed since Saturday night’s fire, they’re all frightened, but that was to be expected.’

‘Hmm,’ Manolis said.

‘Problem?’ Onions asked.

The detective paused, considering how to reply. In the end, he decided to try and make an ally of the manager, who was clearly his only way in.

‘No killer behaves normally over time. If you look for what’s strange, uncommon, unusual, they’ll usually reveal themselves.’

‘I see…’ Onions said warily. Sweat pimpled on his upper lip.

Manolis again consulted his notebook. ‘Out of interest, what interactions do your staff have with the townspeople?’

Onions pressed his hands together, forming a steeple with his long fingers.

‘Well I encourage my employees to mix with local residents as much as they can. I think it engenders a sense of community, connection and belonging. But it’s always been difficult given the irregular hours they work, shifts and the like. And given recent events, I know that many of my staff now feel very uncomfortable socialising with the locals. They’re blamed for some of the events here.’

‘Events?’ asked Manolis.

Onions shifted in his seat, the chair squeaking beneath his weight. ‘Riots, protests,’ he said plainly.

‘And I understand the detainees are allowed to move around town.’

‘Only at certain times of day. It’s a way of gradually integrating them into the community, and the country. The children attend the local school, the parents shop at local businesses. Normal life, in other words.’

‘When is the curfew?’

‘Ten o’clock each night.’

‘Is there a record of exits and entries?’

‘Yes, a logbook, and also CCTV footage. We’ve got fixed cameras at the front. And in emergency situations, our guards wear portable cameras to cover all bases.’

Manolis sat forward, straightening his back. He had the manager on side now.

‘I’d like to see the logbook and security footage. I want to see if anyone was absent last Friday night.’

‘Of course, I’ll make sure they’re available ASAP. We do the daily muster and head count at seven o’clock, right before breakfast.’

‘Thank you. Are people often out all night?’

‘Not usually, but it happens. It’s a condition of their detention that they don’t break curfew.’

‘And what happens if they do?

Onions paused, his mouth as tight as wire. ‘Suffice to say, we restrict their freedom of movement. They also jeopardise their application for a protection visa to stay in Australia, which is, I imagine, a much worse consequence.’ His voice had zero emotion.

The manager’s words settled in the room a moment, dropping the temperature a degree. Manolis wanted to ask about the level of restrictiveness of movement, and what happened if detainees were caught rioting. He also wanted to ask if Onions or any of his staff ever borrowed or stole underwear from the laundry.

In the end, Manolis decided to curtail his curiosity and stick to the case.

‘Where were you the night Molly died?’

The manager looked at him with shock and disbelief.

‘This is a standard question I ask of everyone,’ Manolis added calmly.

Onions wiped a broad hand across his mouth before replying. Manolis was surprised to hear that he admitted being at the detention centre all night.

‘Last Friday was the end of a fortnightly roster, so the staff changes over,’ Onions said. ‘We usually have a few casual drinks here to celebrate – a happy hour, if you will. Last Friday ended up being a lock-in. It’s safer than letting people drive back to town drunk.’

Manolis scribbled. ‘I see. So, you were all here last Friday night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you had been drinking?’

‘Yes, I’d a few drinks to unwind with my staff. But I can vouch for them and they can vouch for me. We were all here.’

Manolis thought that was a rather convenient outcome. He finished drawing the last two lines on the stick body of a hangman swinging from gallows.

‘I need to ask one more thing. I know this is somewhat of an issue in the town, but do you at all have a problem with drugs here in the centre?’

Onions’s reply was unequivocal. ‘No. Searches are conducted daily, and whenever people return to the facility. Contraband is confiscated on the spot, while drugs are illegal and would risk visa applications. Even the children are searched when they return from school. That may sound harsh, but we are thorough and run a tight ship.’

The facility manager stood and showed Manolis out, walking swiftly and via the shortest, most direct route. At the gate, he shook the detective’s hand firmly and said he looked forward to his next visit. Manolis did not tell him that would be the very next morning.