Scrublands(103)

Jamie is no longer looking at the wall; instead, his eyes are cast down, looking at the floor.

‘Later, when we were drunk, we drove into town for some food. We saw them walking, offered them a lift, they got in. That was it.’

‘That was it? You killed them?’

‘We weren’t planning to. I told you that. We stopped by the river again, to drink, but they wanted to go to their hostel. Then it went bad. They’d been to university. They started laughing at us when they found out we left school at fifteen, like we were idiots or something. Then they were teasing Allen, because he’d never seen the ocean. So I hit one of them in the face, to stop her laughing. I splatted her good. She stopped laughing. The other one screamed, so Allen punched her. It just kept going after that. We didn’t know how to stop.’

‘You brought them back here? To the Scrublands?’

‘We didn’t know what else to do. They were going to dob on us, tell the police. They promised not to, but I knew they would.’ Landers looks up, meets Martin’s eyes, gaze unflinching. ‘And you know what? It felt good. I liked scaring them. I liked being the one doing the hitting for once. It felt good. That’s sick, isn’t it?’

‘So you killed them?’

‘Yeah. We killed them.’

‘You raped them first?’

‘Yeah. We raped them.’

There are no tears in Jamie Landers’ eyes; no tears for the dead girls, no tears for himself. No remorse. Martin knows he should probe further, extract the awful details, the timeline of depravity, the abominations that occurred in the Scrublands. Landers is ready to tell him, wants to tell him, and he knows the readers will want it too: a glimpse inside the mind of a teenage killer. It’s what journalists do, even if many of the details are too abhorrent to publish. It’s part of the job: witness the worst the world has to offer, then sanitise it for public consumption, make the events somehow explicable and twice-removed. But Martin feels sick in the stomach.

He takes a deep breath, considers why he’s interviewing Landers. He’s fallen so easily back into the habits of the journalist, homing in on the confessional. He knows his former colleagues would give their eyeteeth to secure it, but feeding the news cycle is no longer his priority. The girls are dead, Newkirk is dead, Jamie Landers is fucked in the head. Does he really want to wallow in such evil? It’s not going to help him and Jack Goffing—an exploration of Jamie Landers’ twisted mind will do nothing to advance their investigations.

So he changes tack. ‘Jamie, the priest, Reverend Swift—did you and Allen tell Sergeant Walker that he had abused you?’

Landers’ face lights up. A smile. ‘Yes. Ha. That was me. I made that up.’

‘You made it up? It wasn’t true?’

‘Shit no.’ A look of contempt. ‘As if Allen and me would let him touch us. No fucking way.’

‘And he didn’t abuse anyone else? Any kids?’

‘Not that I know of. But you know, he was a priest. They do that sort of shit.’

‘So why make the allegation? Did it have something to do with the girls?’

Landers nods. ‘Yeah, that’s it. You’re smarter than you look. He found them, or he found something. He was suspicious, but not of us. He warned us not to go out to the Scrublands, said something bad had happened out there. To be careful.’

‘He warned you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what was the idea? Were you going to frame him for the murders?’

‘Nah. We were going to kill him.’

Martin stares at the young man, struggling to comprehend this new horror, but Landers merely smiles back, as if he’s just said something very witty.

‘Can you explain that?’ asks Martin.

‘I tell you, it was my idea. Allen was never that smart.’

‘What were you planning?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? We’d set the scene, told the cops he’d abused us. We were going to lure him somewhere and shoot him. With one of his own guns. Then we’d tell the police he’d tried to molest us again, that we fired in self-defence. That way, if they found the bodies in the dam, they’d think it was him as well. We’d be home free. Beautiful, hey?’ The boy is smiling again, proud of his scheming.

‘You think anyone would have believed that?’

‘Everyone would have believed it. He was a priest.’

Martin considers that claim for a moment and surprises himself by concluding the scheme might well have worked. He continues, ‘There was a call to the police, Jamie. An anonymous call, to Crime Stoppers a year ago, not long after you killed the German girls. It was a tip-off that there were bodies in the dam at Springfields. The story was in the paper the other day. I thought it must have been Swift.’

‘Nah, that was us. Part of the set-up. Although we didn’t say the dam, just that the girls were dead and their bodies were somewhere in the Scrublands.’

‘Shit,’ says Martin, not knowing what else to say.

But Jamie is on a roll now, happy to talk, happy to boast, happy they’ve moved on from the torture and murder of the girls. ‘In the end, we didn’t need to do anything. He went mental, mad cunt, and killed everyone at the church. Then his copper chum shot him. So we let it go. We figured the longer the bodies were in the dam, the better. Less evidence. And if they did get found, then they’d blame him, or that old rapist, or both. We told ourselves we were in the clear.’