Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(72)

Dez squeezed his eyes shut and burst into tears. The stuff in the water bottle at his throat washed back and forth to the rhythm of his sobs.

‘It worked so very well with me,’ Bella said, watching him cry with disinterest. ‘I was the spectacle. The measuring stick. Everyone would wake up the next day and talk about how dazed and tired they still were. And how they couldn’t remember anything after the camp fire. I’d be there to reassure them everyone fell asleep so quickly – we all must have been so tired. When we got back to Last Chance Valley I’d prance around and tell all the parents what a great time we had. What choice did I have but to be his accomplice? I was a kid.’ She looked at her father. ‘I was a kid when he started this.’

‘Bella,’ I said, ‘I can understand your anger.’

‘Can you?’ she asked. She took a seat at the dining-room table, by her little pile of equipment, and looked at me. ‘I guess you’ve probably seen stuff like this before, doing what you do. You’ll know that sometimes the boys and girls who have been drugged, they start to remember. It’s not like they’re completely unconscious. You can’t give them too much, or you might snuff one of them out. So sometimes they’d recall things. Someone pulling off their pants …’ She looked at Dez. Her lip curled in a snarl. ‘Someone pushing up their training bra.’

‘Bella –’

‘But I was there,’ she said. ‘I was the alibi. I’d wrestle the genie back into the bottle. You were dreaming. You were having nightmares. It wasn’t real. After a while I got so good at it I’d have them believing they hadn’t even dreamed it. Especially the littler ones. You just make them feel ridiculous. And then they never mention it again. Not even to their parents.’

I could hear the distant music from the town pub. A bass beat, the occasional cheer. The big windows that looked out onto the fields were pitch black. What I would have given for someone to arrive unexpectedly, Kash or Snale, someone who would know instantly what to do. Even if it was just to distract her so that I could grab my gun back. But she followed my glance, smiled a little, pitying. We both knew no one was coming.





Chapter 113


IT HAD BEEN her plan. All of it. She’d taken great pleasure in the planning, relishing as she counted down the days. Day Seventeen of the countdown to oblivion. Day Ten. Day Zero. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had counted down to their Day Zero from more than a year out. They’d woken up on the day of the massacre with the excitement of Christmas morning buzzing in their brains. No one had listened to them before. But they would now.

‘The first time I ever told someone outright, it was Chief Campbell,’ Bella said. ‘I thought about going to Sergeant Snale first but I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach her pity. She’d have been so … understanding. So gentle with her questions. You know? I couldn’t deal with that. So I marched right into Soupy Campbell’s office one day and just told him outright.’

‘He didn’t believe you,’ I said.

‘No, he didn’t,’ Bella said. ‘And then I knew Snale was off limits, even with all her sickening fucking sympathy. The Chief would have told her to disregard anything I said. She’d have listened. He was her mentor, and he thought I was lying.’

Of course he did. She’d picked exactly the wrong person to try her first sexual abuse confession on: an older man in a position of authority, someone who didn’t know her, someone obviously more than willing to get involved in serious illegal activity himself. Theo Campbell would have been well-versed in the angsty drama of the teenagers in his town. They were trapped. Futureless. And here was the daughter of one of the most upstanding men in town making a ridiculous claim with no evidence and no witnesses. Admitting to having been complicit, herself, for years. He’d have fobbed her off as the angry daughter of a selfish dad who didn’t want to pay her university fees. She was the hot young student who flirted for top grades and made sexual assault claims against her professor when she didn’t get them. The girl next door who undressed before open windows, pretending she couldn’t see her neighbour watching, until she was caught, pleading ignorance. She was a dangerous temptress, beautiful liar, the scourge of middle-aged men.

I knew her from my work. She was the unbelieved. Shamed and guilted into keeping quiet or hammered quietly with undermining reasoning until she just couldn’t believe herself anymore. She was the one who kept quiet. Waited until she couldn’t stand it anymore, then wrote a note and killed herself.

But Bella wasn’t going to kill herself. Her gesture was going to be on a much grander scale. A spectacle. Terror we would have a good long while to think about before we all died, cut down by her bullets, running for our lives. She was planning a Carrie-style showdown.

And no one would be laughing now.





Chapter 114


‘I TOLD REBECCA Greene, my old teacher,’ Bella counted on her fingers. ‘She promised she was going to do something. A week later she transferred out. Took a posting in Darwin. I never saw her again. When Brandon Skinner overdosed last year, I tried to tell his mother, Mary.’ She thrust her arm out again, to the north of us. ‘She insisted it was an accident. Nothing had happened. He was a happy boy.’

I lost a child, Mary’s words came back to me.