As if on cue, the big toe of her right foot began to tingle, exactly where the micro-surgeon had sewn it back on eighteen months earlier. At first, after the surgery, it had been numb and there was some doubt as to whether she would ever regain feeling in it. But now there was a worse problem, this irritating itch that drove her to distraction. It only ever seemed to itch when she thought about how the wound had been inflicted. Ed Brown had severed her toe with a scalpel during his bizarre ritualistic assault. He had no doubt planned to keep her toes—together with those of his other victims—in the formaldehyde jar that had been found in his bedroom. She wondered how Ed’s defence would try to talk their way around that piece of evidence.
‘You might not have been aware in Canada that there is considerable interest in the trial both here and in the UK,’ Bartel continued.
‘The UK?’
‘Because of Rebecca Ross, one of the last victims. She was in a soap opera.
Neighbours
, I believe. It’s quite popular over there.’
Great.
The responsibility of justice in this case was not just for Catherine, or for what Mak had endured herself, but for eight other women who had lost their
lives to Ed’s sadistic obsession. That responsibility weighed heavily on Mak.
‘We will do our best to protect you as you come in and out of the courts. Remember you are not required to speak to the media. In fact I would prefer it if you did not, at least until the trial is over.’
‘I understand.’ She wanted to get back to the issue of the trial itself. ‘Can I ask, did the defence push to have the cases tried separately?’
‘Yes they did. But they didn’t succeed.’
Good
, Makedde thought. A defence team sometimes tries to obtain separate trials for each individual crime, making it harder for the prosecution to prove its case. The accused might win a couple of the trials because of lack of evidence or due to an unshakeable alibi, and in subsequent trials the defence team can then say, ‘But your Honour, the same man must have committed all these crimes and our defendant has already proved that he did not commit a number of them, so he could not possibly have committed this one.’ It had been done before. It was highly unlikely that any defence team could pull off a stunt like that with the wealth of evidence stacked up against Ed Brown, but still, they would try anything. With the cases tried together, a great deal of damning evidence would be seen by the one jury, and if the prosecution could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Ed had murdered one or more of the victims, that should not affect the case in respect of the others. That, at least, was positive news.
‘And the insanity plea? Do you think they will try that?’ Mak pried. It was a strong rumour.
‘It is possible. The law stipulates, of course, that we must make full disclosure of our case—and how we will be presenting it—to the defence before the trial begins. But Mr Brown’s team does not need to disclose anything to us in advance. They only need to give us notice if they plan to call new expert witnesses in order that we may have our own experts on hand to refute the defence evidence. Other than that, they could have almost anything up their sleeves. And Mr Granger, well, he usually has a few good tricks at his disposal.’
Mak knew there would be a forensic psychologist on hand for the prosecution to state the Crown’s case that Ed was a psychopath,
not
insane, and thereby shouldn’t be able to plead not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He had known what he was doing to his victims—and knew it was wrong. He was warped and evil, but
not
legally mad.
Her toe began to itch harder and she bent down to pull off her shoe and scratch it.
‘Are you unwell?’ Bartel asked.
Mak felt herself blush. She didn’t want to flash her scarred bare foot but it was impossible to ignore the itch. ‘You can call it psychosomatic, but my toe itches when I, um…when I think about all this.’
‘Good. We’ll use that,’ he said, to her surprise. ‘Does the toe operate fully now? Is your walking or exercise ever impaired?’ He was taking notes.
‘Not any more.’
He seemed almost disappointed. Perhaps he’d pictured her hobbling up to the witness box, a twenty-seven-year-old woman using a cane. Effective.
‘Can I ask another question?’ Mak said.
‘Of course.’
‘How is it that someone like Ed Brown can inspire an advocate like Phillip Granger to put his hand up for the case? Who is this guy? Have you met him before?’ There was a distinctly cutting tone in her voice that took Makedde herself by surprise. She hadn’t intended to sound so bitter.
‘Oh, yes, I know Mr Granger very well,’ Bartel replied. ‘He is a first-class advocate, one of the most respected in Australia. He’s been practising since the sixties and is adept at handling high-profile cases like this one.’ He shuffled a few papers around on his desk, his face grim. ‘What you have to remember, Makedde, is that a man is on trial for extremely serious crimes here. For justice to be served, he must receive the best possible representation. That is the way the system works. It’s not personal, it’s legal. Mr Granger will try to find an alternate explanation for the killings, and he will present it. In the end, once the rival theories are presented to the judge and jury, justice prevails. It’s not the defender’s job to judge his client, only to represent him as best as he is able. And it’s not my job to judge either. It may not be a perfect system, but it is the one we have, and I have dedicated my life to being part of it.’
Mak nodded, feeling embarrassed to have inspired such a defence of the legal system. She
knew he was right, but it was hard not to feel angry that Ed Brown, sadistic and heartless killer of her friend Catherine and so many others, would get his day in court represented by the best. The killer’s defence would try to make the jury believe that Ed was insane, or that the forensic evidence against him was inconclusive, that Makedde was a poor witness, that Detective Jimmy Cassimatis was a bad cop, that Detective Andrew Flynn had acted unprofessionally and had a personal prejudice in the case that made him unreliable. It was not only Ed Brown on trial, but all those who had brought him to justice.
That’s
how the system worked, Mak reflected ruefully. A detective inspector’s daughter could not be naïve about these things. She knew too much.
It was the trial she had dreaded for a year and a half.
And it would all begin tomorrow.
Suzie Harpin sat at her kitchen table in fuzzy slippers and a pair of fleecy spotted pyjamas with a soft lace collar. She had the remains of a TV dinner growing cold on one side of the table and the
Yellow Pages
open in front of her to page 499, ‘Carpet—Carpet &/or Furniture Cleaning and Protection’.
A steam cleaner should do the trick
, she thought. There had to be someone who would hire one out, without demanding his or her own people do the work. She couldn’t have anyone coming to the house and poking around, that was for sure.
A good clean and it will be presentable.
Suzie frowned momentarily, thinking of the stains Ben had made on the hall carpet.
Just a good clean
, she tried to reassure herself. She did not have much experience with such things.
It was two in the afternoon, and Suzie was home from another long but enjoyable shift. She had needed a couple of pots of drip coffee to keep herself going at work, and now she was looking forward to the welcoming comfort of her fold-out bed. She hadn’t got any proper sleep since Monday, what with so many important errands to attend to,
and she had spent a lot of her time off fixing up her new house. Now she would sleep like a baby.
The curtains in her Malabar apartment were pulled closed, as always. If she opened them she would only have a stark view of the tall barbed wire fences of Long Bay Correctional Centre, right outside the door of her apartment complex. The closed curtains were how she managed to trick her body into sleeping during the day.
Suzie surveyed her humble abode unenthusiastically. Her pet bird was silent in the centre of the room, a dark cloth thrown over the cage for much the same purpose as her own closed curtains. Some daisies spread limply from the top of a glass vase on the kitchen table, needing to be thrown out. Her discarded prison guard uniform lay untidily over one of the chairs. She had never been the homemaker type before, never houseproud at all, but now the shabby apartment seemed beneath her. The dim single room, with its fold-out bed and kitchen nook, seemed bleak and claustrophobic. She never had much enjoyed coming home to it. It was just a room to sleep and eat in. But soon she would have somewhere else, somewhere so much better. The thought lifted her heart.
Despite a small space heater that blew warm air against her ankles, the sparsely furnished apartment was cold and Suzie had fastened the buttons of her pyjamas high on her strong neck. She managed a small smile. Her thoughts would keep her warm.
Ed.
Suzie had over a decade of experience in corrections, and had slowly edged her way up the food chain. Women had to work twice as hard in jobs like hers. And they had to be twice as tough. And now Suzie, with her strength and her determination and her constant battling through life, had finally found a ray of happiness.
Edward A Brown.
Their conversations excited her, especially their conversations on her recent shifts.
Wow!
She was enthusiastic about what they had planned together. Ed was an amazing man. He somehow remained so sane and focused and giving, even in the face of this horrible trial.
Amazing.
And sweet. Just when she thought he couldn’t be any more romantic, he would say something right out of
The Bold And The Beautiful
, just like Ridge. It was breathtaking how deep their bond had become. She had not experienced anything like it before. Not since she was a teenager anyhow, but that was completely different. That was not a time in her life that she wanted to think about.
Suzie turned her thoughts to the hardening blister on her forearm, wanting so badly to run her nails over the itch through the thick fabric of her sleeve. But she refrained. She had been sprayed with some body fluid during the clean-up—she had never done that sort of thing before and it took a few tries to figure out how to bag the body and fit it in the freezer, the best spot she could think of for now. During the ordeal she had got some mess on her arm, just above the protection of the rubber
dishwashing gloves. Despite her immediate and thorough rinsing under the tap, it had stung and become a disgusting blister. It horrified her that her brother’s blood had touched her bare skin, and worse, had disfigured it, even if temporarily. At first she wondered if the remaining poison in Ben’s blood would take her with him, but now she was not so worried. It was only a superficial blister and it was starting to heal. The real worry was if it got inside her body somehow.
There was a story she had heard about cantharidin, or Spanish fly, in which a fisherman had put it on his bait in the belief that it would make the bait more attractive to fish. Getting it on his fingers was fine until he stuck a hook in his hand and ‘dropped dead’ from absorbing the poison. After her little experiment on her brother, Suzie doubted that ‘dropped dead’ was the right description. But if she accidentally broke the skin on her forearm, the poison might absorb into her blood-stream like it did with the fisherman. She certainly wasn’t going to go to hospital for treatment, but she had to be careful not to touch the blister in her sleep.
I’ll bandage it up some more before I go to bed
, she decided. The bandage had come off a couple of times already, so she would double it up.
Suzie focused her thoughts back on the object of her affection, blocking out the unpleasant memories:
the body…the cleaning…the blood…the stench…
Ed Brown was one of the more high-profile inmates she had worked with, a tabloid celebrity of
sorts and someone with whom the virulent jail grapevine of gossip was frequently obsessed. As in the childhood game of Chinese Whispers, the stories morphed and twisted themselves and came back to her as full-blown fantasies. Sometimes it made her laugh.
‘He killed dozens that no one wants to talk about. Their bodies are buried under the church…no one ever wrote about that. He’d been working with the clergy. The church covered it up…’
‘Apparently he’s the one who killed Fredrick. He just spoke to him through the bars, like Hannibal Lecter, and Fredrick rammed his head into the cell walls until he died…’
There was not much else to do in Long Bay except gossip, Suzie supposed. The strength of the grapevine was unmatched on the outside. No Catholic girls school or small town rumour mill came close.
Then there was the tabloid press.
The Stiletto Killer.
Sydney’s Ripper.
The Stiletto Murderer Strikes Again.
Suzie had read the headlines and press coverage with some interest at the time, and then when they had brought in this sweet man, this mere mortal named Ed Brown, she couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t anything like the monster they’d portrayed. Of course Suzie put absolutely no faith in the reliability of the media and she certainly had no time for gossip, innuendo and the sensationalising of crime and its perpetrators. But still,
this man
was
the monster the public wanted to lynch in Martin Place?
This man
was the Nosferatu the nation feared?
This man?
Ed Brown was innocent until proven guilty, that was the way the system worked. Except the jail gossip and the cruel press didn’t play by the system. That’s why he was in the special wing of Long Bay. Ed was isolated for his own protection. Someone as gentle and sensitive and famous as he was would not survive with the rest of them. It was fate, really, that he should come under her care.
Ed.
My love.
I’ve made the perfect love nest for us.