‘Yeah. After the letter.’ She tilted her head, thoughtful. ‘How’d you get my letter?’
‘I found it in her bedroom.’
‘Before she…’
‘After. I found the body. Me and the woman next door.’
She nodded.
‘So she came to see you?’
‘In Cairns. Stayed for a week. Was going to be longer. Otto started playin up, so she left.’
‘You talked about what happened?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Someone called Ken was involved. Who’s he?’
Gaby looked down at the suckling. ‘I don’t want to get in any trouble,’ she said. ‘Had enough trouble.’
‘There’ll be no trouble,’ I said. ‘No-one’s going to hear anything you tell me.’
‘Well.’ She sighed. ‘We were pretty pissed when she told me. Don’t remember all that much. Couldn’t hear a lot of what she said anyway. Cryin and sniffin.’
‘Ken,’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’
‘The doctor.’
‘Dr Barbie?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why do you call him Ken?’
‘The dolls? Barbie and Ken. There was Barbie and Ken.’
‘Right. Barbie and Ken. How was Ken involved?’
Gaby sighed again. ‘Day Mel was leavin, he examined her. Said he was goin to Melbourne, he’d give her a lift, save her goin by train. Only she mustn’t tell anyone cause he’d get into trouble. She thought he was a nice bloke. We all did. Anyway, they took her to the station and dropped her and Ken picked her up. Gave her a can of Coke.’
She stopped and fiddled with her breast, shifted the baby. ‘Mel said she remembered drivin along, gettin dark. Next thing she woke up, she was bein dressed in schoolgirl clothes, y’know, a gym and that.’
‘Who was doing that? Ken?’
‘She wasn’t sure. Two men. They did all kinds of sex things to her. Not normal, know what I mean? Tied her up. Hit her with something. Made her do things to them. She cried when she told me.’
‘She saw their faces?’
‘Not properly. They didn’t hide their faces. That’s why she knew they were going to kill her. But she didn’t get a real good look at them. The room was dark and she felt dizzy. And they had a light in her eyes all the time.’
‘She couldn’t describe them at all?’
‘Not really.’
‘So one could have been Dr Barbie?’
‘Well, he’s the one gave her the Coke.’
‘How’d she get away?’
‘They went off. The one man goes, “Back soon, slut, with a friend for you. She’s been looking forward to this.”’
‘She?’
‘Yeah. She. Anyway, Mel’s in this room, stone room, bars on the window, it’s upstairs. There was a bed and she stood it up on its end, got on it and she ripped a hole in the ceiling. There was a small hole and she made it bigger. Got into the roof, pulled off some tiles and got out onto the roof and climbed down a drainpipe. Pretty incredible, hey? She’s just a little thing but really strong. Barbie liked the little ones.’ She stopped. ‘She was. Really strong.’
‘And she got away.’
‘She said she ran for ages, like through some kind of forest. Pitch-dark and she was dead scared they were coming after her. She got to a road and she hid from cars. Then it was so cold she thought she’d die, so she started walking along the road. Naked. Then an old man stopped and took her to his house.’
‘I know what happened from then,’ I said.
I went over the story with her. There wasn’t any more to tell. Outside, cold a shock after the warm house, Gaby said, ‘I don’t want any trouble. Really. I’ve got a good bloke now and the baby.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You won’t hear anything about this again. But if you remember anything else, ring me.’
I wrote my number on the back of an automatic teller machine receipt.
In the rear-view mirror, I saw her watching me go, standing in the universal stance of mothers, baby on hip, pelvis tilted, knees slightly bent. I thought, what right have I to give her any assurances?
The last person I had given assurances to was Carlie Mance.
Driving back, my mind drifted over what I knew and what I didn’t know. The two men who assaulted Melanie could be the killers of the girl in the mine shaft. Who were they? Ian Barbie and someone else.
Barbie the delivery man. Had he delivered other Kinross Hall girls? How could he do that without the girls being reported missing?
And that raised the issue that I didn’t much want to think about. Had my inquiry about Melanie led to her death? How could that be? I ask Berglin to trace someone and then I find the person shot dead. Melanie Pavitt, not shot dead in the messy way of domestic killings everywhere. No. Shot dead with fussy precision. One shot in the eye. Was this the work of her gentle unemployed builders’ labourer? This I could not believe. Then Berglin lies to me about Gaby Makin. Why? What conceivable interest could Berglin have in my inquiries? He was a federal drug cop and drugs didn’t seem to enter this puzzle.
Berglin lie to me? Of all the things he said to me over the years, when I thought of him, two sentences spoken in his hoarse voice at our first meeting always echoed in the mind: How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life.
In the shitstorm after the Lefroy and Mance killings, when all fingers pointed at me, Berglin had been impassive. He never said the words I wanted him to say, never patted my arm, never invited me to confide in him. You could read nothing in his eyes. One morning, suspended from duty, wife gone, unshaven, hungover, I went to his office. He looked at me with interest while I shouted at him: abuse, recriminations, accusations of betrayal. When I ran out of things to say, Berglin said, no expression, ‘Mac, if I think you’ve moved across, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll come around and kill you. Enjoy the vacation. Now fuck off.’
I left, feeling much better.
Now I’d have to see him, confront him with the lie he’d told me. I hoped very much that he could explain it away, but I couldn’t see how.