Death Delights (15 page)

‘Jack McCain?’ said a voice I didn’t recognise. ‘You don’t know me,’ he said, and for a moment, I thought the anonymous letter-writer was on the line, ‘but I was a young constable at Springbrook at the time your little sister was taken—’

‘Who is this?’ I interrupted.

‘Detective Inspector Colin Swartz,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been talking to Bob Edwards in Sydney. He thought you’d want to hear what I have to say.’ I waited, bewildered at the way Rosie was suddenly appearing everywhere, signing erotic letters to convicts and now remembered all these years later by a strange police officer. ‘It was my first big investigation,’ Swartz was saying, ‘your little sister and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. I’ve never forgotten.’

‘No,’ I said finally, bringing my emotions under control. ‘Neither have I.’

‘I went along with some of the young blokes to a suicide here at Blackheath yesterday,’ said Colin Swartz, ‘and, to cut a long story short, we found something out the back. In the car shed.’

I listened while he continued and when I heard what had been found I became very interested in what he had to tell me. We arranged to meet the next day.

•

Even though I was tired, I couldn’t sleep. As well as the sense that I was getting closer to Jacinta, there was the promise of what Colin Swartz had told me about the suicide at Blackheath. I was wide-eyed and restless. The second anonymous letter was worrying at me, too. And my mind couldn’t let go of those letters signed with my sister’s name. Rosie McCain is not a common name, I kept telling myself. But it could be nothing but coincidence. So round and round my mind went until I was almost considering trying to find the couple of sleeping pills I recalled lying somewhere at the bottom of one of the cartons. Finally, however, the mayhem between my ears stopped, so I think I must have slept. But then I was suddenly awake again. I sat up with a start. There was someone in the room. ‘Greg?’ I asked, ‘is that you?’ But I had a strong sense that it wasn’t him. Indeed, without knowing why, I had another equally strong sense that there was no human being in that room, and yet I continued to sit, bolt upright, aware of a presence that charged the atmosphere of the pitch-black room. Gradually, I could make out an almost undiscernible line of less dense blackness under the curtain.

That was when my disbelieving eyes saw her standing silently near the door. My breathing stopped. I think my heart stopped. She stepped closer from where she’d been, dressed in the yellow linen sundress I’d last seen her wearing in 1975. I could even see the blue and yellow enamelled silver necklace that I’d given her for her thirteenth birthday, three days before her disappearance. I shivered.

‘Rosie,’ I said stupidly, ‘you can’t be here. You’re dead.’

I checked that I really was sitting up in bed and that the dark contours around me were those of my bedroom. I knew that out through the doorway, past the impossible figure near the door, was the living area and, off that, another room, where my son Greg lay crookedly across a bed. I knew all this with perfect clarity. And at the same time I knew also that his aunt, my sister, presumed dead years before Greg was born, was standing in my bedroom near the door, here and now. The figure seemed to move closer to me. Her voice sounded different from the way I remembered it, yet when she spoke, the words seemed very familiar to me.

‘We’ve learned so much more about aberrant sexual behaviours in the last ten or fifteen years,’ she said to me and I was about to ask her where she’d heard this, but she went on. ‘Why aren’t you using everything to find me? Apply the new knowledge to the old. You promised me. Apply the new to the old.’

‘Jesus, Rosie,’ I said ‘tell me, are you dead or not?’

And then she just wasn’t there any more and I realised I must have got out of bed without noticing and was now standing in the dark in the middle of my bedroom. I stood there for I don’t know how long. Maybe it was only a few seconds, maybe it was minutes. I tiptoed over to the place where Rosie had stood. I even put my hand out, as if there might be something to touch. But there was nothing near the door that might have remotely resembled a human figure, no shirt hanging on the back of the doorknob, no towel. Nothing behind the door when I looked. I’d heard that sometimes the air is chilled at the time of a ghostly apparition, but the temperature near the door felt normal for the time of night and the month of November. And in my mind’s eye, I could still see her, clear as day, the way she’d stood there just a second ago, in her cute yellow dress.

I stepped back and nearly tripped, hitting the bed and falling back on it. I lay there. This was getting serious. I recalled the awful moment when I’d felt rage at my son and almost hit out at him. Now, on top of everything else, I was seeing things, hearing things. Had Rosie appeared to me, as a vision or a ghost, or was I going insane? For a few panicky moments, one of those two completely unacceptable positions seemed to be the only possible choice. I recalled my brother’s warning that I was going to have to ‘do something about myself’. If this was a stress response, things were a lot worse with me than I’d believed. Maybe I
would
have to do something. But what that something was, I had no idea. Then I recalled the phenomenon known as a waking dream, a projection of the unconscious, seen ‘out there’ as if it had a separate, solid, three-dimensional existence. Charlie and I had discussed this years ago in connection with a woman who claimed to have seen apparitions of the Blessed Virgin.

I went out to the kitchen and switched on the light, taking comfort from the mundane scene of the untidy table and my cartons of gear stacked around. Out here, with the little table lamp casting a friendly glow over familiar objects, my sense of what had just happened seemed to change, the clarity and immediacy of it to lessen. I made myself some bread and butter which I ate without tasting, sitting at the table among the files from the three investigations in my life—Rosie, Jacinta and the murdered sex offenders. No wonder, my brain rationalised, that I’m starting to see things in connection with my sister. Even without having any qualifications in psychology, I could see that my emotions and my mind had been stirred up by the conversation with Renee and Jacinta’s possible reappearance in my life. In the stillness of my kitchen, with my heartbeat returning to normal, it was starting to seem inevitable that Rosie might arise in such a visible way. Add to that the call from the Springbrook cop, and it seemed almost inevitable to me. I sat there and the world was hushed. I could have been in the middle of the bush, so quiet was it. In the stillness, the words Rosie had repeated to me—
‘Apply the new knowledge to the old
’—re-echoed in my mind. Did she appear to tell me that? It seemed platitudinous now, a bit like the brilliant instructions written down after a dream that turn out to be stupid and banal in the light of day. What did I know now that I hadn’t known then? Only just about everything, I thought bitterly. I looked around and the little green digital clock on the amplifier told me it was two fifty-one, the time when the human spirit ebbs to its lowest point and the darkness is at its most dense. And there I was, in the centre of it.

•

Greg was still asleep and the magpies carolling when I left him a note on the kitchen table saying I’d be back later in the day and that there were bacon and eggs in the fridge. Not that he’d need a note to track them down.

It felt like November hadn’t quite made it to the Blue Mountains yet, and a mist covered the distant mountains and ridges. I drove with the heater on, despite the bright sunshine, and when I arrived at Springbrook police station, Colin Swartz was out but he’d left an envelope for me with a note and a rough map. I was about to leave with these when a police Commodore pulled up and a portly man in his fifties got out and introduced himself.

‘I’ve actually met you before,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t expect you to remember.’ He patted a paunch. ‘There wasn’t so much of me then.’ He wasn’t tall enough to carry the extra weight well and the fat had also collected round his jowls and neck. ‘You gave a lecture years ago when you were still with us.’ I knew by that he meant the NSW police.

‘Must have been a long time ago,’ I said and complimented him on his memory. I followed him into his office, noticing how he’d unsuccessfully combed his hair over a bald patch. He pulled some black and white photographs out of a manila envelope, turning to me with them.

‘I didn’t notice anything till after we’d cut him down,’ Swartz said, as he passed me the photos. I quickly went through them, seeing the skinny dead figure, trousers almost falling off the narrow hips, bunched up in the rafters hanging from a rope, the other end of it looped over and fastened to an engine block that had been levered from a workbench to the floor.
Bevan Treweeke
, I read on the envelope in front of me,
DOB 29.8.43.
Now very dead over fifty years later.

‘That old engine block acted as the counterweight,’ he said. ‘It pulled him right up to the roof as you can see.’ The rest of the photos were different angles of the same scene. ‘He was one of our old pervs,’ said Colin. ‘We’ve always known about him. All the local kids were told to keep away from him but he’d been behaving himself for the last few years. As far as we know, anyway. I’m really puzzled that I can’t find any record of interview when your sister disappeared, but we must have it somewhere. He’d be on any shortlist.’

‘And it was definitely suicide?’ I asked, the memory of three murdered men large in my mind.

‘No doubt about it,’ said the paunchy inspector. ‘He left a note, and the way that engine block was rigged up shows he was taking no chances. I think the murder of those men in Sydney stirred something up in him. I couldn’t use the word “guilt” because I don’t think these pricks know what that means. But something wasn’t right for him.’

‘Or maybe,’ I said, ‘he recognised the style of the killer, knew that whoever it was would be coming after him next and was so frightened that he preferred to do it himself in his own way, rather than face the knacker’s knife.’

‘Can’t say I blame him,’ said Colin Swartz, adjusting himself awkwardly and then flashing me an embarrassed look. ‘But when I saw that car, I forgot about him. And I immediately thought of you. I remember the whole state was looking for that frigging car twenty-five years ago.’ Swartz passed me the photograph of an old Holden. ‘It’s beyond me why we wouldn’t have found it back then. We’d have searched any place belonging to a bloke like this bastard.’

The photograph in front of me seemed to waver, as if it were underwater. I realised I was just about to faint. I grabbed at the desk top, my fingers skidding past paper, until I had a grip on the edge of it. It was the 1968 Holden that took my little sister.

‘It’s okay,’ I managed to say to Swarz who stood beside me looking concerned, too awkward to say or do anything. Then I noticed the registration plates. In the same moment, Swartz spoke. ‘The last person it was registered to was’—he fished around on his desk and picked up a scribbled note—‘Bradley John Wheeler of 189 Allan Avenue, Blacktown.’ He passed me the piece of paper. ‘If he’s a friend of Bevan Treweeke, he’d be worth a bit of a look.’ I looked at the piece of paper.
Out of rego 25 years
Swartz had added underneath.

Shortly afterwards, he walked me outside. ‘Reckon this just about wraps it up,’ he said. ‘Bevan Treweeke must’ve taken her. Years later, the guilt gets to him.’ I got into my car, hardly hearing him. ‘She’s probably buried out there somewhere.’ I started up my car and Swartz stuck his head into my window, too close to my face. I started winding up the window. ‘Still, it must be some sort of relief,’ he said to me, withdrawing his head fast. I managed to say goodbye and drove away.

I followed the road to Blackheath, past the newer subdivisions and onto a dirt road where, after about five kilometres, I found what I was looking for. It was a property where the homestead was set back off the road with a large, dark garden of dripping trees. Blue and white checked Crime Scene tape decorated the front gates. I drove past the mailbox, noting the freshly painted name on it and up the corrugated driveway. The day was warming up but in spite of that I shivered. It seemed that everything was happening at once. Rosie, Jacinta, the murders and now the suicide of a man whose garage housed the car that abducted my sister. The house itself was in great need of repairs with broken boards in the veranda that ran around two of its sides, although a ladder was propped against the side of the house and the upper weatherboards had been scraped back, prior to repainting. I introduced myself to the uniform who’d been left to secure the scene of a suspicious death, and together we walked down the back towards the car shed. The dank gardens felt wintry and bleak, despite the sunlit dapples on the long grass. I saw that the old timber double doors I’d seen in the photographs were open and I peered into the cobwebby interior. The uniform walked back to his house-sitting job and I was alone in the place where Bevan Treweeke had spent his last living moments. I looked up to the rafters and could clearly make out the marks of the rope that he’d slung over a beam. On the floor on the other side of a dusty workbench lay the rusting engine block.

But I was hardly thinking of the pathetic man whose death had brought me to this place as I squeezed past another old car body. Behind this was the car Colin Swartz had noticed and photographed. An old canvas cover lay on the ground beside it. Now I just stood there, stupidly staring at the cream and tan 1968 Holden with the chrome bumper bar and the touring club badge that had left its imprint on the tree. It looked like it had been parked here forever and the scientist in me rejoiced. Sheltered here, the vehicle would have been spared the environmental conditions that can destroy evidence so quickly. DNA deteriorates rapidly in the presence of radiation. Automatically, I started examining the outside of the car. The four tyres were brittle and perished, crumbling away. I walked round to the rear of the vehicle where I could plainly see the indentation created when it had reversed into the tree during its getaway, and when I examined the front bumper bar, I could see the shorn-off place where once a fourth chrome star had been fastened in line with the other three, still safely fixed to their moorings. Rats had chewed the upholstery and thick cobwebs curtained the windows on the inside. But physical evidence, provided it is in a dry, cool environment, remains silently ticking away, waiting to be collected and analysed.