An Isolated Incident

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE STELLA PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NED KELLY PRIZE FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL

When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm ensues. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm are Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, and May Norman, a young reporter sent to cover the story.

Chris’s ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, her suspicion of those around her grows. And as May attempts to fi le daily reports, she finds herself reassessing her own principles.

An Isolated Incident is a humane and beautifully observed tale of everyday violence, the media’s obsession with the murder of pretty young women and the absence left in the world when someone dies.

‘A harrowing, fascinating, compelling work from an accomplished and thoughtful Australian writer’

THE AUSTRALIAN

‘This hugely chilling and evocative story, mixing lyrical language and brutal events, is told with great psychological acuity’

ANITA SETHI

‘A murder mystery that deftly transforms the genre’

STELLA PRIZE JUDGES

First published in Australia by Pan Macmillan in 2016.

Published in 2018

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

ISBN: 9781785630835

Copyright © Emily Maguire 2018

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

To my sisters

Contents

Monday 6 April

Tuesday 7 April

Wednesday 8 April

Thursday 9 April

Friday 10 April

Saturday 11 April

Sunday 12 April

Monday 13 April

Tuesday 14 April

Wednesday 15 April

Thursday 16 April

Friday 17 April

Saturday 18 April

Sunday 19 April

Tuesday 21 April

Wednesday 22 April

Saturday 25 April

Sunday 26 April

Monday 27 April

Tuesday 28 April

Wednesday 29 April

Thursday 30 April

Friday 1 May

Monday 4 May

June

After

Acknowledgments

Monday

6

April

It was the new cop who came to the door, the young fella who’d only been on the job a couple of months. I thought that was a bit rough, sending a boy like him to do a job like that. Later, I found out that he was sent because he’d gone to pieces at the scene. That’s what we all call it now: the scene.

‘Miss Rogers?’ he said, as though he was about to confess to reversing into my fence.

I nodded, waiting for the blow I knew was coming. I knew it was coming because Bella had been gone days and because no cop ever came to anyone’s door to bring them cake or wine.

He rocked on his heels and cleared his throat.

‘You found Bella?’ I said, to give him a way to start. To show him it was OK.

‘Yeah.’ He blinked and I thought, Jesus, he knows her. ‘I mean, there’s been a body found. Matches her description. We need an official ID. Um, need you to come to . . . to do that. To confirm.’

Someone who’s been hit as much as me should’ve known that seeing a blow coming, asking for it even, doesn’t make it hurt any less. Probably hurts more, I reckon, because you’re thinking yeah, yeah, get it over with and you think you already know. So I stood there nodding, thinking how the poor kid knows my sister and what a rough job to give a new fella and then I was shaking so hard it was like a demon had got inside.

The whole way to the hospital I wanted to ask him what had happened. I was hoping she’d been hit by a car or had a brain embolism or something. I wanted to ask those questions I’d asked when Mum died: ‘Was it quick? Did she suffer?’ But I couldn’t speak. Never happened to me before, no matter what drama I’ve been chucked into. But there in that car it was like . . . It was like when you’re so sick with some damn stomach thing that you don’t even want to say ‘no’ to the offer of ice chips to suck, don’t even want to nod, because the tiniest movement will bring the spewing on again. Like that, but I didn’t feel like spewing. I just felt like any sound or movement would start something that would hurt and be impossible to stop.

The cop, Matt was his name, told me that he knew her from school. ‘She was two years ahead of me, but it’s a small school, ya know?’

I knew. I went there myself. Bella was twelve years younger than me, which made this boy twenty-three – so not a boy at all, technically, but his clenched jaw was dotted with pimples and his hands on the wheel were smooth and unscarred. I asked him if he’d seen her since school and he nodded, smiled like a love-struck dork and said he’d seen her a few times at the nursing home where she worked. ‘We get called there a bit,’ he said and it was clear he never minded being called to that stinking place by my sister who, even in that blue polyester uniform and those clunky white nursing clogs, was the prettiest thing anyone in this hole of a town was ever likely to see.

At school we had an expression: Strathdee-good. It meant that something was tops by Strathdee standards but not much chop compared to anything you’d get outside of here. So if you had a particularly good pie or whatever, you’d say, Man, this is good. Strathdee-good, obviously, but yeah. We did the same thing for people. None of the blokes at our school could compete with boys from Sydney or Melbourne, obviously, but there were a few who were definitely Strathdee-hot and so they were the ones we’d go for.

Bella was, if I’m being honest, Strathdee-pretty. I was always telling her she could be a model if she wanted, and I still think that was true, but it’d be modelling in the Kmart catalogue not Vogue or anything. I’m not putting her down. Like I said, she was the most beautiful thing anyone around here had ever seen in the flesh, but she was five foot nothing in high heels and had a size 10 arse on a size 6 body. Her skin was like fresh milk, and her light blue eyes so goddamn lovely it made me jealous as hell when we were younger. She could’ve done cosmetic ads, for sure, except they’d have had to do something about her hair, which was thick and frizzy and grew out and up instead of down. I used to tease her, saying that she was actually an albino African and that Mum had just adopted her because she felt sorry for this poor kid who all the other Africans thought was a freak. When she was twelve or so she started getting up really early to go through the rigmarole of oiling and flat-ironing her hair before school and then I felt bad for tormenting her. I told her that her hair looked hot, that it was way nicer than my bog-standard mousy-brown mop, but she never believed me.

One good thing about getting older is you make peace with the things you can’t change about yourself. Not that Bella ever got old, but she was always mature for her age. By nineteen or twenty she’d stopped straightening her hair every day and just let it frizz out over her shoulders. She had to tie it back for work, of course, and I loved it like that most of all; the front all smooth and sleek and out the back a giant blonde fuzzball.

I never had to make peace with my hair – it was never my problem. My problem was my tits. I was too young when they sprouted and then they grew so fast. Eleven, twelve, thirteen and becoming used to feeling naked, feeling rude because of the way that boys and men – old men, teacher men, family men, strange men, friendly men – looked at me and found reasons to touch me and press against me and every now and then go for a sneaky grope. It set me apart from the other girls and made their mothers narrow their eyes and suggest I put on a jumper when it wasn’t cold and made the boys my age laugh and call out slut and showusyertits as I walked past. These giant tits that told everybody I was a scrubber and easy and trash.

For the first few years I tried to ignore them. I mean, ignore the effect they had on people. The things themselves I packed into bras which my mum bought grudgingly (I kept outgrowing them and then wearing through the nylon). Once she said, ‘Try and slow down, Chris. I’m not made of money,’ as she tossed a Target bag on the bed, and although I knew she was joking I felt hurt and shamed like there might be some truth in the suggestion that I was growing these things on purpose.

At around fourteen I picked up the idea that I could diet them away, but a smaller arse only made them look more super-sized. I tried to keep them covered, but, you know, a mountain range covered in snow is still a mountain range. Then I gave in. Not to the men who tried to corner me, but to the name-callers and whispers. I pretended to be the thing they all thought I was.

And now, well, now, I wear low-cut tops and bend forward more than I need to if it’s been a slow night for tips and I barely notice when men speak to my chest, women shoot death-stares at it and people of both sexes treat me like I have brain damage. Now, I’ve learnt to live with the fact that most blokes who come home with me will be breast-men and that once in bed they’ll spend more time nuzzling and squeezing than getting busy down below. I spend a lot of money on good bras and keep my thigh muscles strong so I can bounce up and down forever. Give ’em what they want.

I didn’t choose to have an enormous rack, but you have to accept the things you cannot change, don’t you? So I do. I accept that having big boobs makes me a popular barmaid and an excellent root. Not excellent-excellent probably, but Strathdee-excellent for sure.

I’ve gone off the track. I do that. I have to, you know? This track is not an easy one to trudge down.

It was a quick drive. I mean, there’s no such thing as a long drive in this town – you can go from highway exit to highway on-ramp in the time it takes to drink a large takeaway coffee – but the drive from my place to Bella’s body seemed supernaturally fast. As we pulled out from my driveway I noticed that there was yet another stripped-down car on Carrie’s lawn, making it four in total. Then suddenly we were at the three-churches intersection downtown and a second later we were swinging into the staff car park behind the hospital.

Matt led me through a door I’d never noticed and into an elevator which seemed to take about as long as the drive had. When the doors opened there was another cop looking right at us. Senior Constable Tomas Riley, I knew, because he spent almost as much time at the pub where I worked as I did. He told me he was sorry to see me under these circumstances. He walked me and Matt through to a reception area where he said something I didn’t follow to a woman behind a desk. The woman asked me for ID and I was confused for a minute, started to say I hadn’t done it yet, the ID-ing.

‘No, no,’ Riley said. ‘Do you have some identification? A driver’s licence?’

‘I don’t drive,’ I told him, rifling in my bag for my wallet. ‘I’ve got Medicare. Bank cards. Responsible Service of Alcohol.’ I piled all the plastic onto the counter. The woman smiled and grabbed up a couple, scanned them through a machine, handed them back. She printed a form and passed it to Riley, who signed it and then touched my arm and led me down another hallway.

My skin tingled as the air-con dried my sweat. I hadn’t known I was sweaty until then. I don’t think it was even hot that day. It was grey out, I remember that much, but we do get those grey days so humid you can hardly bear to wear a stitch, don’t we? It might have been like that. I don’t know. I just know that walking down those empty blue hallways with a cop on either side, my skin started to cool and dry. I did a fake stretch and had a quick sniff under the arm. No BO that I could detect, so that was something.

‘Rogers your married name?’ Riley asked me, but in a making-conversation way, not jotting it down in his notepad or anything like that.

‘No.’

‘Oh. Your sister –’

‘Bella has a different dad.’

Bella’s father was a real classy bloke, which is how come she had such a pretty name. Me, I was named by our mother who was not of the soundest mind at the time, given how she was eighteen years old and newly delivered of a giant baby whose dad she’d not seen since he fled to Tassie on hearing he’d knocked up the checkout chick he’d been rooting behind his wife’s back. Mum was pissed off she couldn’t give me his surname so she gave me his first – Chris. When I was younger I pretended it was short for Christina, but now I don’t bother. Just Chris, that’s all.

We stopped outside a set of dull silver doors. ‘Chris, have you ever viewed a body before?’

I shook my head. He said some stuff I don’t remember. I couldn’t listen. I was suddenly sure that the dead girl through those doors wasn’t Bella. I was sure. I started practising in my head how to sound sad and sorry for whoever she was even though I was lit up with joy because she wasn’t mine.

‘Are you ready?’

I nodded. It’d all be over soon and I’d be back on my way home, trying her mobile again, leaving her another annoyed message about driving us all nuts with worry.

Funny thing is that even when they pulled the sheet back I thought for a minute it wasn’t her. I thought, Jesus, what has happened to this poor kid, this poor girl, someone’s darling girl, how do you do that to someone, someone’s precious beautiful girl, this poor little thing with hair just like Bella’s.

And I didn’t think of this right away, but later I realised how lucky it’d been I couldn’t speak on the car trip. Can you imagine if I’d asked that poor young cop whether Bella had suffered? I mean, Jesus. Can you imagine?

Matt drove me from the hospital to the police station back in the centre of town. He didn’t try to make conversation, just told me there were tissues in the glove compartment and asked a few times if I wanted to stop and get a cup of tea or something.

I didn’t cry or feel anger or anything, but I shook and shook so much that it made me giggle, which made Matt look at me like I’d screamed. Honestly, it was like I was on one of those vibrating chairs in the shopping centre. Like I was a vibrating chair.

At the station they offered me tea again. I said no and let them lead me to a room with a white formica table and a couple of sweaty vinyl seats. Riley was there, along with two men in suits; detectives from Wagga, they said. They wanted to know when I’d last seen Bella. I had to think a minute and then it took me another minute before I could say it.

‘Wednesday night. She dropped into the pub –’

‘The pub where you work?’

‘Yeah, the Royal. She dropped by as we were closing. She’d worked late to cover for a sick colleague and since she knew I was due to finish soon she thought she’d swing by and offer to drive me home, maybe have a hot choccy and a catch-up before bed.’

‘And how late did she stay at your house?’

‘She didn’t . . . I told her I had to stay back and do some admin stuff. Said we’d catch up on the weekend.’

‘Alright, Chris. Take some deep breaths. I’m sorry but we need to get a bit more information from you before we take you home. Deep breaths, that’s the girl.’

They asked me a bunch of stuff they could’ve found out from the phone book and then some stuff about my family, Bella’s family. They wanted to know about the men in Bella’s life, but there weren’t any. I mean, there were the men who worked at the nursing home with her and there was her seventy-eight-year-old neighbour whose dog she walked and there was her dad, who she’d not seen since she was twenty, but who she exchanged emails with every so often. But no boyfriend, not for a while now.

‘Girlfriend, then?’ one of the men in suits asked.

‘She’s not a lezzo if that’s what you’re asking. She’s got women friends, of course. The girls at work for a start. There’s a group of them who go out together when their off-shifts match up. And she still keeps in touch with a few mates from school.’

‘All women?’

‘I suppose.’

‘She didn’t like men?’

‘Bella liked everyone. It’s just that she didn’t trust men very much. They had to prove themselves first, you know.’

‘Why d’you reckon she didn’t trust them?’

‘Because she knew what they were capable of,’ I said, and then one of the suits said I needed a break.

You know, I’ve often been told I’m too trusting, too generous, too open. I used to think these were compliments, but recently I’ve come to realise that they are not. They say ‘trusting’ and mean ‘stupid’, ‘generous’ and mean ‘easy’, ‘open’ and mean ‘shameless’. All of those things are true and not true. It depends who you ask, doesn’t it? Ask old Bert at the pub if I’m easy or generous or any of that and he’ll say no. He’ll say, ‘The little bitch slaps me hand if it so much as brushes against her.’ Ask my ex, Nate. He’ll tell you a different side.

Look, what I’m saying is, sometimes I am trusting and generous and open and stupid and easy and shameless. What I’m saying is, who isn’t?

Bella. Bella wasn’t. She was older than me from the time she turned thirteen. I don’t know what happened to her then, maybe nothing important, but I remember she changed. She stopped being a kid and started being a proper adult. She’d come around to my place after school, find me still in bed, usually hungover as hell. She’d haul me up, make me coffee and eggs, give me an ear-bashing. At sixteen she moved in with me on account of a personality clash with Mum’s new boyfriend. I used to complain about what an anal, nagging little cow she was, but when she turned eighteen and took off on her own I missed her like you wouldn’t believe.

Sally Perkins, whose dad sat in the pub and drank himself almost into a coma the day his little girl graduated from the police academy, brought me some unasked-for tea and a couple of sugary biscuits. The suits watched me not drinking or eating for a few minutes and then asked if I was right to continue. I said yes, because while I’d been sitting looking at the tea I’d remembered this one man Bella’d mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It was my night off and I was about to get to bed when she turned up. After eleven it was. Unusual for her to come over that late and without texting first to see if I was home and awake. I opened the door and there she was, eyes all shiny. I thought maybe one of her favourites at the home had passed on – they’re not meant to take it personally, but that was Bella for you. Then I saw she was dolled up, cute little heeled boots and a bit of eyeliner and that, and I rushed her inside, feeling a bit worried about what might have happened.

It was nothing really. She’d been at a trivia night with some mates and when they announced the lucky door prizes at the end, her number got called. So she went on up to collect her prize – a basket of chocolate truffles and candied fruit and the like – and this bloke who’d won another one of the prizes started chatting her up. He asked her how she’d get the great big basket of stuff home and she said it was no problem, she had her car with her. He started in on a whole sob story about how he’d walked right across town to be there that night but now he had this great big basket to carry and taxis were so expensive after 10pm it would take most of his grocery money just to get home. Bella wondered why he’d come to a trivia night so far from home when every pub and community group in town held one seemingly every damn week, but she didn’t say that, she said, ‘Oh, dear’ or something, and went to carry off her loot. He stopped her though, a hand on her arm, and asked her which direction she was heading. She felt a bit scared then, she told me, and so she lied, told him she was going straight to her sister’s place which was around the corner. ‘It’s just I could really do with a lift, at least up the main road,’ he said, still holding her arm. ‘Ah, well, ask around some of the old fellas in there. I’m sure one of them can help you out,’ she said and then – her voice was kind of disbelieving when she told me this bit – then she tried to move away but he moved with her. She had to actually pull her arm away from his.

When she got to her car she locked all the doors and started crying a little bit. ‘Stupid, I know,’ she told me that night (because although she hadn’t planned to, she did as she’d told the man and came straight to my place, round the corner). ‘He was just an awkward bloke, didn’t know how to take a hint and nothing happened, but I just felt so rude and I hate that.’

I made her a hot choccy and we talked about other things and just when I thought it was all forgotten she said, ‘You know, if it’d been a woman I would’ve offered her a lift no question.’ I think she felt bad about that.

The older suit asked me if Bella had described the bloke at all, but she hadn’t. The younger one asked me if I thought she’d been upset over nothing and I don’t know why but I wanted to punch him then. No, I do know why. It’s because I had thought she was overreacting and I told her that. Gently, but still. What if she took it to heart? What if the next time she was approached she went against her instincts?

‘I mean,’ the young suit went on, ‘from what I hear, you yourself are known as a trusting kind of a woman. When it comes to men, I mean.’

‘Alright,’ the older one said.

I couldn’t speak just then. I couldn’t.

‘Alright,’ the older one said again. ‘Thanks for your time, Chris. We’ll keep you updated. And you call me if you think of anything else, yeah?’

Sally Perkins drove me home, warned me that the story would be all over the news soon.

‘I’ll keep the telly off then.’

‘If there’s anyone who you think should know . . . I mean, hearing something like this from the news is pretty tough.’

‘Her dad. I suppose I should call her dad.’

‘The detectives have his details, they’ll get in touch with him. And they’ve been to her work already. But if there are any other friends, distant relatives . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a think. Call around.’

‘Journos might try and talk to you. Probably not today. Your names are different, so with any luck it’ll take ’em a while to track you down. Anyway, you don’t have to deal with them, alright? We’ve got people to do that for you.’ Without taking her eyes off the road she pulled a card from somewhere down her right side and passed it to me.

We drove past the park where I used to take Bella when she was a tiny thing. I’d never take her there now. I mean, I wouldn’t take a little kid there now. The old fort she used to climb on was covered in graffiti and deliberately gouged splinters of sharp wood. The swing where I would sit and watch her disappeared years ago but the frame’s still there, FUCKING CUNTS scrawled