The Tower Mill (21 page)

TOM

Dad wasn’t the only one who held things back from me until I was ‘ready’, although in the case of the dog-eared letter Susan finally showed me after Paris, it would be more correct to say, until
she
was ready. The trip to France had changed things for her, I think. My birthday was the excuse for the gift of an airline ticket to Sydney.

Did she fly me down for the sole purpose of showing me the letter? She didn’t produce it like ‘Exhibit A’ while I was still fresh from the airport. Thinking about it later, I recognised how she steered conversation and invited questions more openly than during my earlier visits.

I had things on my mind, too, questions I wanted to ask, but until then had lacked, not so much the courage but a pathway into my mother’s complexity. I knew all I needed to know about Terry Stoddard by then, but far too little about Susan Kinnane and the decisions she had made fifteen years earlier. Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to ask, straight out, why she had let Mike Riley raise me as his own. Instead it seemed better to broach the matter in the way she always seemed to do: I asked why she hated Queensland so much.

‘I don’t,’ she responded, in honest surprise.

‘You did once. Dad told me. You were adamant about it. You weren’t going back there, you were never going to set foot in Queensland ever again. He says it like he’s quoting you.’

‘From a long time ago, Tom. I go there now to see you, to see Terry. You can love a place, but dislike the people who live there, and it’s only some of them, anyway. There was a time, in the ’70s and ’80s, when there seemed to be too many who got my goat. I couldn’t stand the politics. Had to get out.’

Had she skilfully nudged me towards that question and I simply hadn’t noticed? Whether that was true or not, I had created the perfect opening for her, and she took it up seamlessly.

‘You’re nineteen tomorrow, aren’t you, Tom?’ Without waiting for me to respond, she said, ‘I was nineteen when I met Terry. There’s something you need to see. It will answer the question you just asked better than any explanation I can give.’

She rose and went along the hall to the bedroom she shared with Robert, who was off with clients that night. She didn’t immediately emerge, and I’ve since sketched a scene in my mind where she stands considering what she holds in her hand. Until that moment, only a friend she had once lived with and a journalist named Obermayer had ever seen the letter, and neither could have experienced the personal connection that it held for Susan. Only I could share that.

When I looked up to watch her approach along the hall, she was carrying the kind of plastic sheaf that clips into a ring binder. Seating herself beside me, she placed the sheaf on the table, more in front of me than her, where I quickly saw it contained a handwritten letter, a rather grubby, much-folded letter.

Without a word, she waited while I read it.

Dear Mrs Riley,

I seen your face in Queensland Country I reconnise you from a picture in the Brisbane paper a few years ago and your name is the same except your last name is different. I kept the page from that paper so thats how I know you are the same one. I am sending this to you because of the man who got hurt during the trouble over that football team. The paper said you were his girlfriend even if you must have married some teacher in Bindamilla since then. I was the one who went back afterwards and called the ambulance because it wasn’t right the way we just left him there like that. I didn’t want to but the one who hit him was senior to me and I had to do what he said. He made me help him to carry him to the path. He knew he had hit him to hard and might get put up on a charge for it when the Inspector found out. If we left him next to the path, it would look like he hit his head on the railing and that would be an accident. I did not want to leave him there like that. He looked bad to me, even though there was no light to see him by. He did not move the whole time. When I came out into the street afterwards, there was blood on my uniform. I told
him we should get an ambulance but he said no. Let other people find him so it doesn’t come back to us. After that we were ordered back into ranks. I could not do anything then and he was watching me. When we got back to the barracks, it was after midnight. He went to have a drink with some others and I went out through the gate and found a taxi.

Your boyfriend was still there. No one found him after we left. That is why it was me who called the ambulance. I feel very bad about this because the paper said he got brain damage. I did not hit him but I seen it happen. He hit him to hard and he should face up to it.

You should know what happened because the paper said you were his girlfriend. Then I saw you in Queensland Country. I feel sorry about what happened. I cannot tell you his name because we don’t rat on anyone no matter what they did. But you should know what happened.

The letter lay inside its plastic sleeve for good reason. The original folds were almost worn through and the edges fraying.

‘You carried this with you?’ I said.

‘In my handbag. Yes, for a long time. After a while I knew it by heart, pretty much, but I still opened it, held it in my hands.’

There were other creases, a drunken spider’s web that meant the letter didn’t quite sit flat, even in its cocoon of plastic.

‘You crumpled it up.’

‘More than once. That mark, there –’ she pointed to a smudge that had darkened like a liver spot – ‘is from when I threw it into the kitchen rubbish.’

I pictured her doing it, and just as clearly saw the frantic retrieval.

‘Who sent it?’

‘I spent years trying to find out. That was the reason I left Bindamilla, only it was impossible to get even a list of the policemen who were brought in from the country for the State of Emergency. They blocked me at every turn and I was a novice, anyway. I tried again once I had a few journo tricks up my sleeve, but Joh was at the height of his reign by then and the police were his private army, contemptuous of the media. It was hopeless.’

She leaned forward, bringing her face down close as gawpers do over a museum exhibit. ‘Sometimes I don’t know who I hate more – the bastard who swung the baton or the coward who sent me this.’

‘Coward?’ I said. ‘It would have taken—’

‘Oh, bullshit, Tom. He was drunk, wanted to ease his conscience. See these smears? They were already on the letter when it arrived. I’d say he wrote it one night, when he was pissed and feeling guilty because he’d seen my picture in
Queensland Country.
Once he was sober, he couldn’t bring himself to post it, I’ll bet. God knows how many times he flip-flopped until he was off his face again and finally shoved it in a letter box.’

‘He called the ambulance.’

‘Four hours too late! If he’d called for help straightaway, he might have made a difference, but instead he covered his mate’s arse. Terry was bleeding inside his skull all that time. It was the build-up of pressure inside his brain that did the damage.’

The full meaning of the letter came then, by stealth. ‘He was bashed,’ I said.

‘With a thirty-six-inch baton.’ Susan held her hands apart to show me the length. ‘Swung by an average man, the tip can reach a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour. Do you want to know how many pounds per square inch that equals? I worked it out once. Your father’s been as good as dead since that night, Tom, clubbed to death by a Queensland copper who’s never had to answer for it.’

‘What did Dad say about this?’ I said, touching the plastic lightly with my fingertips, then lifting them instantly as though it had given me a jolt.

She sat back, making me turn and look at her while she kept me waiting. Her face had hardened. She was disappointed – no, more than that, she was annoyed with my question.

‘Nothing. He’s never seen it.’

‘Why not?’ I looked down at the juvenile scrawl with its spelling mistakes and clumsy grammar. ‘He calls you Mrs Riley, mentions Bindamilla. It must have come while Dad was still out there.’

‘Before then. It was sent to me care of Bindy post office.’

‘And you didn’t show Dad?’

‘It wasn’t addressed to him.’

I took her answer at face value, that night. Only later did I want something less evasive. I looked back at the letter.

‘There are no names, just what happened,’ I said. I was beginning to see what a torment it must have been, to offer evidence of a crime and at the same time deny any chance of catching the culprit. ‘There are no names . . . It would have been better—’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Susan calmly.

I checked the bottom of the letter. Definitely nothing. ‘The envelope?’

She shook her head, eyes for the letter only. Slowly, reverently, she took it from the plastic sleeve and with the blunt end of a pen touched the letter where a word had been blocked out.

I read the context and saw that
him
had replaced a name.’

‘He started writing the man’s name, then saw what he’d done and scribbled it out. Looks like he did, too, doesn’t it?’ said Susan, raising the letter up to the overhead light.

I stared at the letter closely. ‘Barry,’ I whispered. ‘Jesus, you got a name. Could be a surname, though.’

‘I thought of that, too,’ she said, ‘but it’s not. I couldn’t identify the letter writer, but with help from a reporter at the
Courier-Mail
, I got the surname for our friend Barry.’

She stopped speaking to concentrate on her hands, returning the letter to its plastic sleeve with the care of a conservator. This only heightened my anticipation, although she hadn’t intended it that way.

‘Well?’ I urged.

‘Dolan. Barry Dolan. He was one of the brown shirts brought in from regional stations to make up the numbers at the Tower Hill that night.’

‘But you had his name. You must have gone after him.’

‘I wanted to. I tried, but without the evidence of the letter writer, it was pointless. Dolan had got wind of what I was up to by then, as well. Warned me off. Best I could do was keep tabs on him. I was still doing that when I went to Washington.’

‘Where is he now? Are you still keeping tabs on him?’

Susan couldn’t resist a teasing smirk. ‘Don’t you recognise the name, Tom? Detective Senior Sergeant Barry Dolan. He did quite well for himself, you see, rose in the ranks.’

I could only shake my head, making her laugh out loud with a freedom that seemed almost manic in the circumstances. Didn’t she hate this guy for what he’d done to my father, for what he’d done to us?

The letter was suddenly a snake ready to strike and I stood up, knocking over my chair and making Susan reel sideways in surprise. It was a moment or two longer before she realised what was happening.

‘You’re shaking,’ she said, hugging me.

My chest was heaving. A panic attack, I recognised later, but at the time I’d never had my body play tricks on me this way. I held on to her for dear life, a full head taller and strong enough to crush the air out through her ribcage if I wasn’t careful.

‘Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would hit you this way. I thought you were ready. I’m so sorry.’

‘No, no, you did the right thing.’

And as quickly as it had gone into spasm, my body relented, leaving me weak and in need of her support just to remain on my feet.

Afterwards, while I longed for sleep in the spare room, my thoughts overshadowed the letter. I must have hugged my mother as a child, when I was afraid or, like tonight, simply cattle-prodded by emotions that defied analysis, hugged her with my three-year-old strength and felt her arms around me, comforted and with never a thought that it would ever be different. She must have said soothing things to me and called me
darling
with a mother’s tenderness.

I wished so much I could remember it.

I didn’t know who Barry Dolan was until Mum laid it all out for me after Paris. He was in gaol by then, and, because receiving corrupt payments gets you five years at most, he was released not long after and went off to live under a rock somewhere.

Perhaps he’d found salvation, but, for all the Christian charity endlessly impressed upon me at Terrace, I didn’t give a fuck if he saved his soul or not. The man smashed my father’s head open with a thirty-six-inch baton and left him in the darkness, dead in all but the details.

Later, my lawyer’s training told me Dolan would never be tried for murder. Where was the body, the defence would demand. Terrance John Stoddard was still breathing, still ate three meals a day and still squeezed out a healthy shit every morning with the satisfaction of one whose bowel movements were an important marker in his daily routine.

Fucking Queensland.

At least Dolan was made to face a guilt of some sort; he was made to experience that moment in the dock when the people cried, ‘Look at what you did, you bastard. The evidence is out there for us all to see. You
did
take the money, you
did
betray the public trust.’

Joh Bjelke-Petersen never suffered such a moment. Susan hoped that he would. So did I, once I knew the story. Without Joh, there would have been no Barry Dolan.