‘Actually,’ Mum said, not unkindly, ‘it was only six months ago she did come out of the showroom.’
‘Well, I—’ Teddy was about to say something when that Duchess of Kent voice cut across the parking area.
‘You’re supposed to be waiting in the car, Edward, not bothering people with idle chitchat.’
As Mrs Curio sailed up, hands on hips, Teddy backed away from the car. ‘I was only…’
‘He’s no bother at all, Dianne,’ Mum said, coming to the boy’s rescue.
Teddy gave her a startled look. ‘See I…just…’
‘Car, please,’ Mrs Curio pointed ahead.
Mr Curio arrived, ending the discussion with a jovial: ‘Pull your socks up, Ted, we’ve got our marching orders.’
He gave a regal wave to the Humphries and anyone else in their orbit as his wife herded them towards the silver Mercedes. ‘G’night all, God bless, have a peaceful Christmas.’
Cradling the tartan esky, Teddy scurried after his elders. Hal’s dad clambered into the driver’s seat. It took him longer than usual to shift the Hawk’s finicky gears, but once out of the car park he drove like a demon, a drunken one, all the way home.
‘S’Chrishmass,’ he slurred, as the boys and their mum clung to the safety straps.
5
The last lights on in Goodenough’s street were the lounge-room light of his dilapidated weatherboard and the grey light of the television. Bing Crosby was parrump-a-pum-pumming as Mick stumbled into his guest room then stood staring at the freshly made single bed. It had been freshly made for six months. There was only one guest he was anticipating; only a slight chance she’d visit now. It had been arranged with her mother months ago that she’d come for the last week of school holidays, but the arrangement kept shifting and changing shape. And if Kerry saw the use the room was currently being put to, Cheryl wouldn’t be staying a minute. Let alone five days.
Mick lurched towards the desk. Just one of those mezcal shots could have been all it took to undo eighteen weeks of so-called progress. Not long after, feeling the hunger roar through him like a bushfire, he’d abruptly left the station. A block further on the warm Christmas lights of the Imperial Hotel beckoned. The siren’s song wailed in his ears as he stood outside, staring in. He reached slowly for the door and heard someone shout, ‘Wel-come!’
Somehow, he dropped his hand from the door handle. He wrenched himself away from the happy glow inside and fled, jogging the six country blocks to his house on the town’s outskirts.
Now, home safe, his shirt drenched in sweat, his brain was unclogging. He stood under the shower, cold tap on full, until his head was clear. Clear enough to think about the bottle of mandrax on his bedside table. Everything he needed for tonight in two little white pills.
Goodenough sank onto the bed and gazed at the green wall opposite, festooned with a grim mosaic of tacked-up newspaper clippings from February 1965. Lurid headlines: ‘Sex Murders’, ‘Teenage Girls Raped and Murdered’, ‘Bodies in Sand Dunes’, ‘On the Trail of a Killer’. Stark black-and-white crime scene photos: two bodies, in their sandy graves and out of them. Wounds too shocking for any newspaper to show. Men in hats and suits combing the dunes in the midday sun. Mad dogs and detectives. Interspersed with these were scraps of paper with names of suspects, all connected by marker-pen arrows radiating out like spokes of a crooked wheel from the happy snap. Two teenage girls, arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming into the camera just a week before, thinking they would be best friends forever and ever. And they were right.
His eyes drifted down past a magazine article, ‘New Findings about the Psychopathic Mind’, and stopped at a small newspaper item with a police sketch of a young blond man carrying a crab spear. The fine print was underlined in red: a detective sergeant from the investigation said, ‘He’s intelligent, cunning, secretive. There is no way he’s mad, he’s pure evil. And he’ll be back for more.’
Charlie’s killing had nothing to do with the Bardsley girls. But in a way it did: different perp, similar MO, violent, sadistic, liked to take a memento off the victim. Probably a psychopath: most of them start with animals. Once they kill a human they never go back, the article claimed. Was that a cast-iron rule?
It’s only a dog, he told himself. Get some perspective, detective. He flicked off the light and shut the door.
He asked the operator for a Sydney number, wanting to speak to his daughter.
‘Hello? Who’s speaking please?’
Kerry. Damn. It is late.
‘Who is this…Hello? Hello!’
He hung up. Then he swallowed the mandrax tabs and got under the covers while he still could. As limbs turned to jelly and tension melted away, she flickered on in his mind like a favourite TV rerun. The German girl. Her head caved in, her throat sawn with a serrated blade, just like Charlie’s. A blurred memory, one of her fingers…the nail missing? Torn from the cuticle. Middle finger, left hand. Did he dream that bit?…They never go back, do they? Then the fog rolled in and it was all one big. Soft…White…Cotton wool…Cloud…
‘I was not lying. I wasn’t!’ Hal heard his dad’s harsh whisper.
Still at it. They’d been at it on and off all night.
From the street the Christmas lights blinked red, yellow and green figure eights on the Humphries porch. A cardboard Santa twinkled peace and goodwill to all the world. Not so much as a breath of cool air blew across Burwood Street to disperse the heated voices from the Humphries house.
‘Oh, come on!’ Mum’s voice was sharp. ‘Tell me again, why don’t you. Big fancy desk job? Every night at home with your family?’
‘I was going to tell you—after Christmas!’
‘Why don’t you just tell the whole street?’
Even if they did, Hal wondered, would there be anyone listening apart from Mrs Next Door? They were all in their beds or glued to the set. She was right, though. His dad had brought them way out here to this hick town under false pretences—new friends, places to go in a go-ahead town with cafes, restaurants, cinema.
‘Come on, sweetheart, it’s supposed to be Christmas.’
‘Ho bloody ho.’ She said that so quietly Hal barely heard it. He pulled the wads of cotton wool out of his ears and heard her sobbing quietly.
‘Come and stand under the mistletoe,’ Dad said. Softly, like he meant it.
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
The front door opened. Hal heard her stepping out onto the porch, heard the crickets. He pictured her gazing across to the neighbours’ places. All the houses dark, apart from a few Christmas lights twinkling through the oleanders along the footpath.
He heard her pick up the watering can and sprinkle her drooping umbrella plant. She loved that plant, the one Aunty Lynn had given her last Christmas. It reminded her of home and…
Hal heard her stop. ‘Who’s there?’ she said.
No one replied. Somewhere across the road, the quiet shuffling of feet. The faint smell of cigarette smoke drifting under the bedroom door. Dad lighting up.
The footsteps faded away. Moorabool. Dull as dishwater, but safe. Safe, but boring as batshit. His eyelids, heavy as stone, slid shut.