Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(71)

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.

It’s all gonna come out.

It’s all coming to an end.

‘I had no proof. I couldn’t find the photographs. He’d hidden them too well. All I had was my story. I told one of the girls who’d been out there with me in the desert on one of the camps.’ Bella’s eyes had glazed over. ‘Mara. I saw her at uni, in Sydney. We got drunk together. She didn’t want to know anything about it. It was too many years ago. She was happy and she didn’t want some weird story from back home, about something she didn’t even remember and only half believed, ruining her great new life. They were just pictures, right?’

We both looked at Dez. His eyes pleaded with his daughter.

‘I believe you, Bella,’ I said, showing her the photographs at my feet. ‘I believe you, OK? I can help you. I’ll take these photographs and your testimony and we’ll prosecute him. We’ll send him to prison for a long, long time. And he will suffer in there, I guarantee it.’ I thought briefly of Sam. The kind of threats a man received when his crime was against women and children.

‘I think I’ve given this town enough chances to stop what’s coming,’ she said. ‘You read the diary. You know I’ve been looking into other people who have done what I’m going to do. The consistent thing among all of them is that they gave people chances to turn things around. I left the diary at the fucking rest stop. I was begging you to do something. Do something!’ She sighed. ‘And then here you were, sitting with him, lapping up his words over roast fucking chicken. I can’t let this go on.’

Bella picked up one of the mobile phones on the counter and looked at her father, lazily, the weary teenager tired of Daddy’s bullshit.

Dez writhed in the chair.

‘It’s time to go,’ Bella said.

She pushed the button.





Chapter 115


‘OH MY GOD,’ Whitt said as he walked down the hill from where he’d parked his car haphazardly across an alleyway. The street was blocked by police cars, ambulances, even a fire truck trying to find its way through the mess. Officers were redirecting traffic down a dead-end street and back up the hill towards Kings Cross. There were blockades being put into place. Officers trying to keep the crowds back from the entrance to Harriet’s apartment building.