Thought Crimes (6 page)

There are things you don't see yourself doing. I've never seen myself abseiling, or identifying a body in the morgue, and I had never imagined flying to Queensland to visit my brother in remand. You do these things as a sleepwalker. Only the odd detail sticks. A Scottish accent over the intercom. The smell of institutional floor polish.

When sending that letter to Selma Roy, I could have said that I was coming, but she knew I would. Everything was part of her scheme. If there hadn't been a scheme, she would have told us the truth in Melbourne.

Dane didn't like the idea. All I'd achieve was a backlog of jobs that wouldn't clear before the Christmas holidays. Christmas just didn't seem possible in the tropics. The air was so thick you could have grabbed each end and wrung the water out, and the remand centre's air-conditioning was too feeble to cope.

But for his eyes, I wouldn't have recognised the man escorted into the visiting room. Greyer than when I last saw him, he had straggly hair and a beard, like Saddam when the Americans dragged him from the bunker. When I asked if he was all right, he shrugged, so I changed tack to ask if he was being well treated.

‘Sure.'

Even when visiting Michael at home, I didn't expect him to be thrilled to see me, or to enquire after Dane or his niece. He isn't like that.

‘Find out about Lucy for me. Can you do that? The landlady took her. I wrote, but haven't heard anything. I need to know she's being looked after.'

I told him to ask Selma to call.

‘I want you to do it. I'll give you the number.' Clearly, he and Selma had their differences.

‘Did Selma tell you that she saw us in Melbourne?'

‘She said she was going to phone you, and she thinks I'll pay for that trip, but I'm sacking her.'

‘Michael, she's doing all she can for you.'

‘She wants the court to think I'm crazy. Is that what you think?'

It was so uncommon for him to ask what I thought that I was taken aback. I said that he sounded rational now, but if he was sane when he killed Yvette Mitchell, he'd need to explain why a sane man would think his neighbour was the Devil. He answered this with the same glare he used whenever I'd said that trains were stupid. If he'd had a hammer, he might have smashed my skull.

‘Have you seen a photo of Yvette Mitchell?'

‘No.'

‘You wouldn't have. The police won't release one. I never said she was the Devil. They invented that to make me sound stupid, and to stop the truth from getting out … There's a copper named Lawrence. Sergeant Lawrence. Find him. He's the one who said he would've done the same thing. That the truth would bring the federal government down if it got out … You have to find him and make him testify.'

Was he trying to say that he'd signed a false confession? I asked him straight out if he'd hit his neighbour with a hammer.

‘I had no choice. Not once she saw I'd guessed who she was.

I'd know those eyes anywhere. It was Myra Hindley.'

Seeing my jaw drop, he said he didn't give a shit if I believed him.

‘Myra Hindley's dead.'

‘She is now.'

‘No. She had a heart attack in prison four or five years ago. It was big news.'

‘Hindley was overdue for release. But unless they faked her death and gave her a new identity, they couldn't let her out. So they sent Yvette Mitchell to Dunedin, only she couldn't stand the cold there. Second time we met, when I told her she was Myra Hindley, she said she didn't know who I was talking about. That made me certain. Every English woman her age knows Myra Hindley.'

When I asked him if he understood what paranoia does to a person's thinking, he sneered. The authorities would love for him to be found unfit to plead. That way, the truth wouldn't come out in court.

‘In all history, only one woman's had those eyes.'

I'd heard Michael speak strange thoughts before, but he'd rarely confused fantasy with reality.

‘You've got to write to the British papers. Someone will 'fess up. I only did what anyone there would've done if they had the chance.'

Even in this current state of mind, Michael knew there was no point begging me to promise.

‘You'll check about Lucy?'

‘I'll call.'

‘I don't mind if someone kind takes her in. But don't let her be put down.'

I said I'd do everything I could. Our time was up.

‘You think I'm mad, don't you?'

‘You are if you sack your solicitor.'

My footsteps down the passage sounded like head-punches. I was so angry, I didn't know what to do. Though one part of me wanted to throttle Selma Roy for not telling the whole truth, I'd already guessed that this was her strategy. I would only care about Michael and his fate – would only differentiate between this behaviour and the oddness I knew – if I saw it first-hand. She had to win a convert to her cause.

With a storm gathering, the afternoon was sumo-heavy. I could make calls about the dog from home. As I flew back to Melbourne on a half-full plane, I was as desolate for my brother as I was for Yvette Mitchell.

Though we're not wealthy, we do well enough. If my framing business collapsed, we'd be stretched, but I was ready to spend months in a Brisbane court if that was the best thing I could do for my brother. It was important to be sure that financial considerations weren't tilting my sense of right and wrong.

Though Dane took some convincing, I said we had to do all we could to stop Michael's case going to trial, even if that meant flying to Queensland to speak to the court's psychiatrists.

I was about to share these thoughts with Selma when I received an email from Amanda Jackman, manager of the genealogical research firm I'd approached in the UK.

16 January, 2007

Dear Helen,

We've had some luck with Yvette Mitchell, but we need to know if you still wish to proceed with a search for surviving family members.

Camden-born Yvette Rosalie Mitchell's details and birth-date coincide with the 21/11/1940 you supplied. However, it should be noted that both Yvette and her mother Rosalie Anne (nee Bannock), born Guildford 17/6/1918, perished in the V2 attack that hit New Cross High Street on 25 November, 1944. Yvette's father, Raymond Keith Mitchell (born 3/3/1917), had died in June that year, while prisoner of the Japanese in Burma.

We will delay further investigation until you indicate how you wish to proceed.

Yours faithfully,

Amanda Jackman

How did I wish to proceed? There was no clear answer to that.

I'd read about the V2s. They were the whispering death. You never heard them coming till it was too late.

Weeks earlier, I had asked Michael's landlady to care for his dog while the legal matters were being resolved. I now told her that I'd arrange to have Lucy sent to Melbourne as soon as possible. Dane and I had never spoken about having a dog, let alone one that had bonded with Michael and taken his quirks as a matter of course. But all that was before the missile hit, when the future was still best placed to take care of itself.

CLUB SELECTION

Even the sight of Norichi's name beside his on the roster sends Hizu's pulse racing, and now, with Nori at his elbow, and the transit coach pulling into the loading bay, Hizu finds himself searching for the correct phrase. ‘Welcome' comes to mind, but it sounds too formal. Though his tutor says that Australians aren't fussed about the odd word out of place, Hizu is fussed. He needs to be more Australian.

The door opens with a hydraulic vroosh, and the first guests greet him with outstretched hands.

‘Nice place,' one says.

Seizing this hand and shaking it vigorously, Hizu opts for the all-purpose, ‘No worries.'

‘Didn't think there would be, mate,' a huge man in baggy shorts replies. ‘Not after what it cost to get here.'

When another stupendously obese man emerges, Hizu, now more sure of himself, grasps his hand. ‘No worries, mate.'

Only after greeting twenty men and women does he see Nori squatting beside the driver, regarding him with rising disdain. Still six months away from qualifying to become a supervisor, Norichi is determined to behave like one.

‘Just say “G'day”, dickhead. Save “no worries” for when they ask to sleep with your missus.'

‘I'm not married,' Hizu says.

‘Mate, you don't know shit. You'll never pass.'

Several weeks earlier, Hizu would have apologised, but now he tells Nori to ‘put a fuckin' sock in it'.

He keeps meticulous notebooks. Most entries rehash instruction Missy has given at Language and Culture classes, but more recently, they have been dominated by his thoughts about what guests have told him, and what he's seen at the resort. Often they take the form of personal reminders.

Eliminate all sense of superiority, pity, or judgement. Your personality
must adapt to each individual guest.

Nothing troubles Hizu more than piss-taking, and the expectation that one should respond to a piss-take in kind. Australian culture is subtle, and reading nuance and irony doesn't come easily to him. Hizu flicks back to an early note, one of Missy's favourite jokes.

Never confuse taking the piss with taking a shit. Rarely is the
latter so pleasurable as the former.

Below this, he has yellow-highlighted Missy's observation that Australians love the illusion of social equality: first names, casual dress, jokes and unexpected intimacies. Only recently has he begun to understand the tension between this illusion and the complex underlying realities. After reflection, he makes a new note.

As one becomes more Australian, it is possible that one might
like Australians less. Why not set myself the task of becoming a better
Australian than those I meet?

As he lugs Ray's bag down Newton's third fairway, the old man tells Hizu that he's visited the resort three times a year since it opened. Before The Shark withdrew his endorsement, it was known as Shark Resort.