Chapter 4
FOUR MONTHS. ONE hundred and twenty-seven days, to be exact. That’s how long my brother had been in prison for a crime he did not commit. I stood on the steps of the courthouse, ignoring my partner, trying to decide if my maths was correct. It was. As I waited, staring down at my ridiculous high heels, listening to the shouts of the crowd nearby, another day of Sam’s life was being lost. I drew hard on my cigarette, clutched the stupid pink handbag into my side. The passing seconds were agony. Waiting for the court to open once again on the circus that was the Georges River Killer case. Another day I would fail to bring him home.
I am a Sex Crimes detective with the Sydney police. I used to think I was pretty good at my job. Versatile. Adaptable. I had a keen sense for bad men, and I wasn’t afraid of bending the rules to make them admit what they were. A cracked tooth here, a broken finger there. I made men tremble in their seats. Harriet Blue: Terror at Five-Foot Two. While I was the natural enemy of the caged rape suspect, I could be also soft and gentle enough to coax a tiny, bruised child into revealing what his or her abuser had done, when no amount of coddling and bargaining by trained psychologists had struck paydirt.
But, four months earlier, my own colleagues had left the police station where I worked on their way to make the biggest arrest of their careers – a man they believed was a vicious serial killer who had tortured and murdered three university students. No amount of intuition, or skill, or training had prepared me for the fact that that man was my own flesh and blood.
Sam’s case was all the nation was talking about. The newspapers were calling him Australia’s worst serial killer, and that was no small claim – every article compared him with the fiends who’d taken up the mantle before him. Ivan Milat, the Backpacker Murderer. Arnold Sodeman, the Schoolgirl Strangler. Eric Edgar Cooke, the Night Caller. Now came Samuel Jacob Blue, the Georges River Killer, responsible for the prolonged, brutal deaths of three beautiful, young students.
For four months, I’d been determined to do everything right to help my brother go free. He was innocent. I was sure of it. The man who abducted, raped, tortured and strangled the three women I saw every night on the news was not the man who’d once been a boy snuggled beside me in the temporary beds at the offices of the Department of Children’s Services. He was not that terrified boy, whispering to me in the dark, wondering which foster home we were going to be shipped to next. He was not the teenager who’d defended me at various high schools when the kids came to pick on the shabby interlopers. The one who made me birthday cards when our new families forgot. Whoever he was, he did not have my brother’s soulful kindness. His never-ending generosity.
On the footpath nearby, the usual gathering of gawkers and court ghouls waited for the doors to open. One caught my eye and spat on the ground, spoke loudly to his friend in the queue.
‘She knew what he was up to,’ he said. ‘How could she not?’
‘Don’t listen, Harry.’ My partner, Detective Edward Whittacker, tried to take my arm and turn me away from the crowd. ‘You’ll only make yourself madder.’
‘I’m not mad,’ I lied, shrugging him off. ‘I’m cool. I’m calm. Today’s going to be the day. We’ll find it today. The key.’
I’d been talking about the ‘key’ to my brother’s case since his arrest. The thing that freed him. A piece of false testimony. A surprise witness. Something, anything. I’d been looking into Sam’s case, and I hadn’t found the key that proved he wasn’t the killer. But I had high hopes. Hell, my hopes got so high sometimes I had fantasies of the killer himself walking into the courtroom and confessing. Giving up was far from my mind.
I spotted my brother’s prosecutor, the enormous, broad-shouldered Liam Woolfmyer, strolling towards us with a colleague beside him. Whitt had my arm again, his other hand fumbling at his necktie.
‘Don’t say a word,’ he growled.
‘You keep pawing at me and it’ll be more than words you have to worry about.’
‘I’m warning you, Harry.’ Whitt glared over the top of his glasses at me. The gentle, fastidious detective had been mortified to hear me sneer a stream of obscenities at Woolfmyer the first morning of my brother’s hearings.
Sometimes there’s a wild Harriet in me, a woman I can’t control. She rears her ugly head without warning. The comment from the queue already had her twitching. But then I stole a glance at Woolfmyer, and the worst of all things happened. He locked eyes with me, smiled, and leaned over in mock confidence to his companion.
‘Samuel Blue won’t last a single night in Long Bay prison,’ Woolfmyer said. ‘He’s far too pretty. Someone will make him their bitch.’
The bad Harriet in me swelled, like white-hot steam, blinding and painful behind my eyes. As Woolfmyer passed I was already taking steps to catch up with him. I barely heard Whitt’s call.
The few metres between Woolfmyer and me closed in an instant. I was behind him. My hand reaching up, completely beyond my control.
I tapped him on the shoulder. Woolfmyer stopped and turned.
I punched him as hard as I could in the temple.