Some evenings, I walk past the vacant house with its blinds pulled down as the interior lights come on automatically at six thirty p.m. and I head around the block to the back lane, and peer over the fence, noting the dim light in the shed inhabited by Twigg, hearing only the sound of a TV and the occasional clink of bottles as he drinks alone. Outside the shed in a sagging box, I’ve sometimes spotted a cat, tucked up in the dodgy shelter, with a bowl of curdled milk nearby.
I’ve followed this man now for nineteen years. Unlike his older brothers, he was acquitted of a particularly brutal crime, in which a young man was almost beaten to death and then had his throat cut. This young man had been on his way home after having dinner with his family to celebrate successfully completing the first four years of a pharmacy degree, when the three thugs jumped him, threw him to the ground, dragged him into an alley, and went to work — took his wallet and phone and continued bashing him until they were interrupted by some people who heard the commotion. But it was too late for the victim, who died of massive blood loss and a heart attack in the ambulance.
I try not to be too obsessed, but it’s hard. All we need, I’d say to myself, is a violent crime in the area. But realistically, how likely was that? That’s the really hard part in a place like Clovelly: quiet, gentrified, with constant renovations and rebuilding going on; artists and journalists moving in over the last couple of decades and almost no serious crime to speak of. We just don’t have violent crimes in Clovelly, with its family-friendly beach and village atmosphere, open football field and coastal walks. Until — but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Claire and I bought our cottage in Clovelly over thirty years ago from her parents when you could pick up a nice little place for a hundred and fifty thousand — a fortune to us then; you’d probably have to pay twice that as a deposit for anything in the vicinity these days. We liked the safe little beach with its breakwater where our kids could play and swim without fearing any dangers from rips or sharks. We also liked the ocean swimming pool — washed out and topped up by the tides every day — where Claire swims her laps most mornings. A couple of other retired cops live in the area and we sometimes get together to revisit our times on the job, sitting around on the concrete terraces and steps near the pool, swapping war stories, reminiscing about the crims we helped lock up. And, less frequently, of the flatheads and crims who got away. It’s a sad fact that a lot of crims do get away with crime. Our statistics might suggest otherwise, but then, as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Many crimes are never reported and policing is mostly bluff — just enough to keep a civil society behaving itself. Also, nearly 85 percent of crime is committed by around 10 percent of the population. The other 90 percent police ourselves.
Clovelly is a coastal suburb of Sydney and used to be called Little Coogee years ago because Coogee Beach is just around the corner to the south. It was also known as Poverty Point because back then it was mostly inhabited by battlers, Italian and Greek migrants trying to settle into Sydney after the war. In those days, the buildings were fishing shacks or humble semi-detached cottages. The surf life-saving club is over 110 years old and all our kids started their beach lives as Clovelly Nippers, racing in the sand, practicing with the old-fashioned line-and-reel surf life-saving equipment, learning how to bring a person in distress to shore. I think of those days a lot. Life was simpler and the job wasn’t so complex.
My daughter Kerryanne is a senior police officer now, team leader with the forensic services group. She’s among those called out to any major crime scene around the eastern beaches. A lot of crime scene work can be undertaken by specialists who aren’t sworn officers, though murder is always handled by the police forensic teams. Murder in Australia is not a common crime, averaging a fairly stable sixty-odd per year. Around Clovelly and Sydney’s other eastern suburbs it is extremely rare. Cops fight to get onto a team investigating a homicide; it’s so infrequent and everyone wants a part of it. Most of the time round here, it’s routine work — hoons who race down the hill in stolen cars, the occasional brawl at closing time at the pubs, and drug arrests. They do district patrols around the beaches and keep a lid on alcohol-fueled antisocial behavior.
Kerryanne often drops by to visit us. She knows that with Tim away in the west, and our Anthony gone forever, she’s the only one now who can do that. Over a cup of tea, we chat. Last time she dropped in I said, “You’ve got soot or something on your face.”
“Oh, have I?” she said, looking at herself in the mirror in the hall and rubbing the smear, making it worse. “I’ve just come from a job with the fireies. Fire investigation unit. Arson job, with the shop burned almost to the ground. The owner thought he’d get away with it because there he was, thirty kilometers away, sleeping the sleep of the innocent beside his loyal wife.”
As we walked into the kitchen, she put her bag down and pulled out her camera, switching it on. “See what he used as a wick? We lifted a bit of masonry from a corner and look what we found. He thought it would all be destroyed by the fire. But part of the collapsed roof had covered this corner and kept the ash intact.”
I looked at the screen on Kerryanne’s camera and saw the outline of a perfect spiral in ash. “Ha! He used a mosquito coil!”
“That’s right. A nice slow burn. He lights it, and it burns away for hours until it reaches the middle of the spiral where it was linked to combustible material and containers of petrol. The place would’ve gone up like a bomb. And he thought he was being very clever, buying hours and hours for himself to establish an alibi.”
“He was very unlucky that it wasn’t destroyed in the general fire mess,” I said, looking at the fragile damning evidence.
“Sometimes the angels give us one like this, Dad,” she responded, smiling.
I nodded, remembering a rapist who’d dropped his wallet at the crime scene. We’d driven around the corner and arrested him.
Kerryanne put the camera away, washed her face and hands in the bathroom, then joined me for a cuppa and one of her mother’s famous Anzac biscuits.
After she left, I leaned back in my kitchen chair and thought about what I’d just seen. The slow burn of an arsonist’s wick which had exploded into a destructive fire. I’ve been burning for nineteen years, I thought. And all this time I’ve been just waiting for the explosion that will destroy Ronald Leslie Twigg.
My daughter has known for years about the man I’ve been fishing with lately, and she looked at me with her wide gray eyes when I told her he’d moved into our area and said, “Dad, this is good news, but we still need one more factor — and that’s the tough one.”
She was right, but if the gods are with us, she’ll alert me when the right conditions arise and then we’ll have the duck trifecta. Maybe they never will, and I might have to change my mind about murder; a quick shove one day when the seas are treacherous — Old Testament style, a life for a life. My fishing companion got away with murder, cutting that young man’s throat nineteen years ago. How do I know? I have an old acquaintance — can’t really call him a friend, but for many years he was one of my most trusted informants. Although I don’t see much of Stanley these days, seventeen years ago, not long after the end of the trial that resulted in my fishing companion’s acquittal, he asked to meet me. He told me he’d been drinking with a group of men at a pub in Glebe — ex-jailbirds from a halfway house in the area — the night young Twigg was celebrating his acquittal.