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FICTION
Either the wallpaper goes, or I do
by Jane Downing
by Jane Downing
My grandmother wallpapered the entire family home. This was in the 1970s, which must have been peak wallpaper, in Queensland at least. She later told me how to join up a new roll if the last only made it half way down the wall. Crisp, straight lines are obvious, their clean cuts too sharp against the eye – we clock them instantly in amongst the faux bamboo, the Spy Who Shagged Me psychedelic patterns, the twee swan-and-rose combos. (My grandmother had taken this enterprise seriously from the start and picked a different wallpaper for each room). However, almost nonsensically, a quick, slightly angled diagonal rip across the top edge of the roll unexpectedly solves the problem. The rough edge blends. Seamlessly.
For years, I’d visit and lie in the narrow bed in the backroom and scan the wall, especially in the late afternoons when the sun through the window had sunk too low to cast light and shade. This room was mainly blue in case I’d been a boy, several shades of it in a pattern evoking interlocking clock faces without hands to tell the time (which doesn’t exist in the same way at a grandmother’s house anyway). Head propped on a lumpy pillow older than myself, I could clearly see where each vertical strip met the next. The rolls of wallpaper transported there in the back of my grandmother’s Falcon station wagon had been about two foot wide. About the width of my partner’s bodybuilding back. The strips stood shoulder to shoulder across the plasterboard, the pattern painstakingly lined up. But, try as I might, the horizontal joins where one roll ended and another began indeed remained secret, disguised, camouflaged by my grandmother’s method.
She was a widow. She got by in the world by doing-it-for-herself. I hadn’t realised she was an object of pity in the town until later. When I was forced to imagine a future alone, that was how I saw myself too. Pitiful, pathetic, pathos leaking out of every pore.
Coincidently, as fate would have it, and why I mention it here, I was in the middle of wallpapering my lounge room when it happened.
So, it was a Sunday, that limbo day in the late stretches of a long distance run of a relationship. Saturday – chores, incidental sharing of anecdotes and gripes from the working week, a bottle of wine. But come Sunday, what to talk about now? Are there any ironed shirts? Will we watch another episode of Vera? Is this fucking it?
Which I suppose explains the flurry of DIY renovating more than any psychobabble. Something to do. Time for a baby, and in the absence of that, a new project. At least now there were, briefly, plans to discuss and trips to Bunnings to undertake to fill the gaps. We must have looked like a typical boring couple in the aisle calculating just how many lengths of wallpaper and how many tubs of Ready Mix paste we’d need.
All relationships are unknowable from the outside. Most relationships are pretty much unknowable from the inside too. How can I pronounce such wisdom and yet have remained so ignorant? And worse, there was even a hint of complacency in the way I’d touched my partner’s arm as a hardworking hardware store worker gave sage renovation advice. Without such smugness, the distance might not have been so far to fall.
I am being melodramatic. I did actually fall over though.
After return from Bunnings, I would soon be cowered up against the far wall of the living room like a wounded animal looking for a place to die. (That pathos writ large). This was on the spot where a lumpy green sofa had stood for seventeen years. The carpet was darker there: a shadow of the past. On hearing my partner’s blunt news, I hurled myself upon that spot – part of seventeen years of programming – only the sofa had of course been moved aside for the renovations and I hurt my butt on the final descent. Slumped to the floor, skirt hitched up, legs askew like an abandoned doll’s, I must have looked a nong. For starters, I really should have been wearing trousers when climbing up and down the ladder re-wallpapering.
I shouldn’t, but I can, go further with the heart-rendering imagery. The wall above me was half-scraped clean of the old wallpaper by this stage. It looked like a line of stringybarks on a forest walk. Strips of wallpaper hung down like the bark, limp, disheartened. To complete the picture, I was the lost woman in a McCubbin landscape.
My sobbing passed like the storm; could that possibly be happening to me? This isn't happening to me!
In front of me was the scraper. The flat piece of metal we’d bought to clear the walls of the last owner’s wallpaper so I could put up our own, which I thought was infinitely sophisticated, with ribbons of crimson satin running down the paper.
Frank Sinatra intruded at this time. His lyrics are worms that occasionally transform into butterflies. My partner having just announced there was another woman in his life and left, was replaced by old blue eyes crooning in my head about wallpaper clinging to walls, and less obviously, about seashores clinging to the sea. The chorus ended: You'll never get rid of me. My mind was leapfrogging right over the end of my relationship to a conviction that we’d signed up for till-death-us-do-part-whether-you-like-it-or-not-you-bastard.
Now there was a story in the scraper lying on the floor near my hand. He’d found it in the shed that morning with dirt along its sharp edge. Real dirt: moist soil.
‘It’s a paint scraper not a gardening tool,’ he’d spat at me. ‘That's what I’ve always hated about you. You make do. Close enough is good enough.’
I’d almost laughed. It’s true. It is one of my most endearing qualities. And violets need planting this time of year.
Then I’d seen the truth in his face. Always hated about you.
I’d been at the top of the ladder with a bucket and sponge, slapping water around to try and soften the wallpaper’s unexpectedly tenacious grip – Frank Sinatra hadn’t enlightened me with his insightful lyrics yet – on the wall underneath.
He’d thrown the fact of the other woman at me then. So I threw the wet sponge at him. One missile missed its target. He headed out the door dry. Treating me like I was nothing, like I was part of the wallpaper.
The scraper had more story in it still. As I sat against the wall where the sofa had long lived but did no longer, with the edge of the tool, I traced the line of a vein down from my palm, over my wrist. Held in my right hand, tracing the flesh of my left arm, harder now, assessing the tributaries, flexing the hand backwards to make the blue lines of the veins stand rigid like string. The sharp edge of the paint scraper leaving a white trail. A touch more pressure and the trail would be red. Dark, glutinous, crimson.
That is too dark a storyline. I climbed the ladder again, blinking.
I could of course continue the melodrama and fashion myself as the protagonist in the famous nineteenth century short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Mad or not, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s character, locked away by her husband, becomes lost in her obsession with the wallpaper, strips it from the wall, and sets herself free.
Here, this bright century, after my pathetic slump had become boring, didn’t I strip and strip and strip. Wet sponge in one hand, scraper in the other, muscles fueled by anger and despair, I pushed hard and coldly methodical against the plaster so the maypole streamers lengthened, each at a squint like the bars of a cage, smashed, the bars of a prison, broken. Singing a different song, to my own tune. Shake it off, rip it off, of yeh.
I still planned to put the new stuff up. Despite my marriage on the precipice of implosion, I resolved to absolutely and literally paper over the cracks. The alternative – I’d have to accept sad flowers and cold casseroles of condolence from friends. Endure sympathy and pity. Play the woman alone in the world. Hostage to online dating sites and social media platforms. No!
Fight for my relationship? Could I, should I, would I? Of course! Why do people have such a problem with papering over the cracks anyway?
And just how many cultural references and passing clichés in our language feature wallpaper?
My partner provided me with a final one, when he returned to the room a short time later. Proving beyond a doubt he knows me little. Time could have been a faithful friend, reintroducing me to memories of a softening nature, thus ensuring our ultimate survival. (Not remembered in this scenario: his lips on my neck as I chopped the vegetables; the warm cup of tea delivered to the bedside table whenever I felt poorly; that smile).
No matter my resolve to avoid the single status and cling like wallpaper to a wall, the seashore to the sea, my shock had yet to steam off when there he stood in the doorway again – that threshold he’d crossed once that morning, the liminal zone between us and not us. He stooped and picked a roll of brand new wallpaper from the pyramid pile. Held it in the pose of a Roman senator in the Forum, tap, tapping a scroll against his opposite, empty hand. Eyes from me to it, from it to me. ‘It really is crap,’ he decided to say.
It? He left me in no doubt to what he was referring.
‘Why did you choose this pattern? Crimson? Stripes? Satin sheen? What were you thinking?’
My gormless mouth guppied open and shut.
‘Either the wallpaper goes, or I do!’ he said.
Quoting Oscar Wilde was a joke to which I should, on script, laugh.
‘I’ll put you in the gutter and you won’t be staring up at the stars,’ I rejoined, in paraphrase of Oscar Wilde this time, from the top of my renovator’s freestanding ladder.
And there was that smile. The one that had, in the past, always let him get away with murder.
I was down. I abandoned my sponge for the Ready Mix, had the lid off in a jiffy, dug my fingers deep in the goo in the manner of applying face cream at the commencement of the day. Face-saving cream. He did not flinch as I smeared the paste across his face, heavy eyebrows to cupid lips to blunt, square chin. He took the pasting to the front of his trousers too and we had the best sex we’d had in years on a roller bed of wallpaper. As if thick clag would stick us back together.
So this is what renovations can do for a relationship. Or not.
Sated, I stretched out my arms and legs like a starfish. My left leg touched him where he lay, his expression angelic. He would have looked just like this as he drowsed beside this other woman... My right foot nudged the suggestively sharp-edged scraper where it’d dropped in my descent from the ladder.
The thing about the quote my partner had used as he maligned my aesthetic judgement in wallpaper – which I had not failed to notice in the recesses as my churning mind – is that the exclamation is reported as the deathbed last words of the famous wit. Oscar Wilde, dying, took in his surroundings and found the wallpaper ghastly, an insult to a great man of carefully weaned taste. Either the wallpaper goes, or I do, he said. Well he did. The wallpaper won the day. The wallpaper stayed. Wilde died.
Mess comes with renovations. Cleaning materials are expected, innocent, part-and-parcel of Bunnings’ purchases when renovating. There is always an old carpet that needs rolling up and carting away to the dump when renovating. Heavy, difficult to drag, but a doable disposal for any doing-it-for-herself renovator. And necessary to make way for new carpet to match the wallpaper.
I have now scraped the last of the stringybark loose and begun afresh. I am perfecting the invisible join. Enjoying the cry of the paper as I rip diagonally down. Appreciating the alignment of the satiny crimson bars down my wall.
My grandmother should never have been an object of pity in the town. Widows can look wonderful in black.
For years, I’d visit and lie in the narrow bed in the backroom and scan the wall, especially in the late afternoons when the sun through the window had sunk too low to cast light and shade. This room was mainly blue in case I’d been a boy, several shades of it in a pattern evoking interlocking clock faces without hands to tell the time (which doesn’t exist in the same way at a grandmother’s house anyway). Head propped on a lumpy pillow older than myself, I could clearly see where each vertical strip met the next. The rolls of wallpaper transported there in the back of my grandmother’s Falcon station wagon had been about two foot wide. About the width of my partner’s bodybuilding back. The strips stood shoulder to shoulder across the plasterboard, the pattern painstakingly lined up. But, try as I might, the horizontal joins where one roll ended and another began indeed remained secret, disguised, camouflaged by my grandmother’s method.
She was a widow. She got by in the world by doing-it-for-herself. I hadn’t realised she was an object of pity in the town until later. When I was forced to imagine a future alone, that was how I saw myself too. Pitiful, pathetic, pathos leaking out of every pore.
Coincidently, as fate would have it, and why I mention it here, I was in the middle of wallpapering my lounge room when it happened.
So, it was a Sunday, that limbo day in the late stretches of a long distance run of a relationship. Saturday – chores, incidental sharing of anecdotes and gripes from the working week, a bottle of wine. But come Sunday, what to talk about now? Are there any ironed shirts? Will we watch another episode of Vera? Is this fucking it?
Which I suppose explains the flurry of DIY renovating more than any psychobabble. Something to do. Time for a baby, and in the absence of that, a new project. At least now there were, briefly, plans to discuss and trips to Bunnings to undertake to fill the gaps. We must have looked like a typical boring couple in the aisle calculating just how many lengths of wallpaper and how many tubs of Ready Mix paste we’d need.
All relationships are unknowable from the outside. Most relationships are pretty much unknowable from the inside too. How can I pronounce such wisdom and yet have remained so ignorant? And worse, there was even a hint of complacency in the way I’d touched my partner’s arm as a hardworking hardware store worker gave sage renovation advice. Without such smugness, the distance might not have been so far to fall.
I am being melodramatic. I did actually fall over though.
After return from Bunnings, I would soon be cowered up against the far wall of the living room like a wounded animal looking for a place to die. (That pathos writ large). This was on the spot where a lumpy green sofa had stood for seventeen years. The carpet was darker there: a shadow of the past. On hearing my partner’s blunt news, I hurled myself upon that spot – part of seventeen years of programming – only the sofa had of course been moved aside for the renovations and I hurt my butt on the final descent. Slumped to the floor, skirt hitched up, legs askew like an abandoned doll’s, I must have looked a nong. For starters, I really should have been wearing trousers when climbing up and down the ladder re-wallpapering.
I shouldn’t, but I can, go further with the heart-rendering imagery. The wall above me was half-scraped clean of the old wallpaper by this stage. It looked like a line of stringybarks on a forest walk. Strips of wallpaper hung down like the bark, limp, disheartened. To complete the picture, I was the lost woman in a McCubbin landscape.
My sobbing passed like the storm; could that possibly be happening to me? This isn't happening to me!
In front of me was the scraper. The flat piece of metal we’d bought to clear the walls of the last owner’s wallpaper so I could put up our own, which I thought was infinitely sophisticated, with ribbons of crimson satin running down the paper.
Frank Sinatra intruded at this time. His lyrics are worms that occasionally transform into butterflies. My partner having just announced there was another woman in his life and left, was replaced by old blue eyes crooning in my head about wallpaper clinging to walls, and less obviously, about seashores clinging to the sea. The chorus ended: You'll never get rid of me. My mind was leapfrogging right over the end of my relationship to a conviction that we’d signed up for till-death-us-do-part-whether-you-like-it-or-not-you-bastard.
Now there was a story in the scraper lying on the floor near my hand. He’d found it in the shed that morning with dirt along its sharp edge. Real dirt: moist soil.
‘It’s a paint scraper not a gardening tool,’ he’d spat at me. ‘That's what I’ve always hated about you. You make do. Close enough is good enough.’
I’d almost laughed. It’s true. It is one of my most endearing qualities. And violets need planting this time of year.
Then I’d seen the truth in his face. Always hated about you.
I’d been at the top of the ladder with a bucket and sponge, slapping water around to try and soften the wallpaper’s unexpectedly tenacious grip – Frank Sinatra hadn’t enlightened me with his insightful lyrics yet – on the wall underneath.
He’d thrown the fact of the other woman at me then. So I threw the wet sponge at him. One missile missed its target. He headed out the door dry. Treating me like I was nothing, like I was part of the wallpaper.
The scraper had more story in it still. As I sat against the wall where the sofa had long lived but did no longer, with the edge of the tool, I traced the line of a vein down from my palm, over my wrist. Held in my right hand, tracing the flesh of my left arm, harder now, assessing the tributaries, flexing the hand backwards to make the blue lines of the veins stand rigid like string. The sharp edge of the paint scraper leaving a white trail. A touch more pressure and the trail would be red. Dark, glutinous, crimson.
That is too dark a storyline. I climbed the ladder again, blinking.
I could of course continue the melodrama and fashion myself as the protagonist in the famous nineteenth century short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Mad or not, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s character, locked away by her husband, becomes lost in her obsession with the wallpaper, strips it from the wall, and sets herself free.
Here, this bright century, after my pathetic slump had become boring, didn’t I strip and strip and strip. Wet sponge in one hand, scraper in the other, muscles fueled by anger and despair, I pushed hard and coldly methodical against the plaster so the maypole streamers lengthened, each at a squint like the bars of a cage, smashed, the bars of a prison, broken. Singing a different song, to my own tune. Shake it off, rip it off, of yeh.
I still planned to put the new stuff up. Despite my marriage on the precipice of implosion, I resolved to absolutely and literally paper over the cracks. The alternative – I’d have to accept sad flowers and cold casseroles of condolence from friends. Endure sympathy and pity. Play the woman alone in the world. Hostage to online dating sites and social media platforms. No!
Fight for my relationship? Could I, should I, would I? Of course! Why do people have such a problem with papering over the cracks anyway?
And just how many cultural references and passing clichés in our language feature wallpaper?
My partner provided me with a final one, when he returned to the room a short time later. Proving beyond a doubt he knows me little. Time could have been a faithful friend, reintroducing me to memories of a softening nature, thus ensuring our ultimate survival. (Not remembered in this scenario: his lips on my neck as I chopped the vegetables; the warm cup of tea delivered to the bedside table whenever I felt poorly; that smile).
No matter my resolve to avoid the single status and cling like wallpaper to a wall, the seashore to the sea, my shock had yet to steam off when there he stood in the doorway again – that threshold he’d crossed once that morning, the liminal zone between us and not us. He stooped and picked a roll of brand new wallpaper from the pyramid pile. Held it in the pose of a Roman senator in the Forum, tap, tapping a scroll against his opposite, empty hand. Eyes from me to it, from it to me. ‘It really is crap,’ he decided to say.
It? He left me in no doubt to what he was referring.
‘Why did you choose this pattern? Crimson? Stripes? Satin sheen? What were you thinking?’
My gormless mouth guppied open and shut.
‘Either the wallpaper goes, or I do!’ he said.
Quoting Oscar Wilde was a joke to which I should, on script, laugh.
‘I’ll put you in the gutter and you won’t be staring up at the stars,’ I rejoined, in paraphrase of Oscar Wilde this time, from the top of my renovator’s freestanding ladder.
And there was that smile. The one that had, in the past, always let him get away with murder.
I was down. I abandoned my sponge for the Ready Mix, had the lid off in a jiffy, dug my fingers deep in the goo in the manner of applying face cream at the commencement of the day. Face-saving cream. He did not flinch as I smeared the paste across his face, heavy eyebrows to cupid lips to blunt, square chin. He took the pasting to the front of his trousers too and we had the best sex we’d had in years on a roller bed of wallpaper. As if thick clag would stick us back together.
So this is what renovations can do for a relationship. Or not.
Sated, I stretched out my arms and legs like a starfish. My left leg touched him where he lay, his expression angelic. He would have looked just like this as he drowsed beside this other woman... My right foot nudged the suggestively sharp-edged scraper where it’d dropped in my descent from the ladder.
The thing about the quote my partner had used as he maligned my aesthetic judgement in wallpaper – which I had not failed to notice in the recesses as my churning mind – is that the exclamation is reported as the deathbed last words of the famous wit. Oscar Wilde, dying, took in his surroundings and found the wallpaper ghastly, an insult to a great man of carefully weaned taste. Either the wallpaper goes, or I do, he said. Well he did. The wallpaper won the day. The wallpaper stayed. Wilde died.
Mess comes with renovations. Cleaning materials are expected, innocent, part-and-parcel of Bunnings’ purchases when renovating. There is always an old carpet that needs rolling up and carting away to the dump when renovating. Heavy, difficult to drag, but a doable disposal for any doing-it-for-herself renovator. And necessary to make way for new carpet to match the wallpaper.
I have now scraped the last of the stringybark loose and begun afresh. I am perfecting the invisible join. Enjoying the cry of the paper as I rip diagonally down. Appreciating the alignment of the satiny crimson bars down my wall.
My grandmother should never have been an object of pity in the town. Widows can look wonderful in black.
NON-FICTION
The Gunnedah Sensation
by Marie Low
by Marie Low
Thursday, November 7, 1895
Noble Glass found Ethel Susannah Wright at his doorstep about 20 minutes after the sun rose.
It was November in Gunnedah - hot already, and the corellas were wheeling overhead like a school of shining fish in the sky. The sun was coming in slant-wise behind her and, at first, he saw only her silhouette, neat as a pin in her day dress, the calls of the birds raucous behind her.
The girl was upset.
“Uncle,” she said, “Mr Roberts has put strychnine in the flour.”
Noble stood, dazed by the early sun and the news, before putting on his boots and following his great-niece to the house 100 yards away. He could not muster his wits enough to ask her more. He just strode, knowing she would follow.
“Susan,” he called to the girl’s grandmother as he went through the door, not stopping to take off the boots,
“what is the girl talking about? Poison in the flour? What is this about Roberts?”
Susan Smaile, who was quite deaf, heard only the noise of his calling and came nervously into the hall, her hands and her head shaking.
Before noon, Noble was riding the three miles to Gunnedah Police Station, his white hair wild and his stomach still empty, the ground flying beneath him in a journey he would not later remember.
It could not be let rest. The girl was just 17 and she was a good girl with no mother.
He was surprised at Roberts, but poisoning a man’s family was a matter that could not go unpunished.
When the police arrived, Ethel led Constable Trevathan to the storeroom and showed him the flour bin, two matches Roberts had used to illuminate his crime and a pink substance both on the floor and in the flour. It was, tests by a chemist later confirmed, strychnine.
Had it been baked into bread for the household to share, they were likely to have died a death seasoned with convulsions and pain, their knotted muscles tiring and their throats constricting until breath no longer came.
A death usually reserved for vermin and nuisance birds.
Monday, November 11
The matter went to court on Monday, 11 November 1895, four days after Noble had ridden to the police station with the news.
The Gunnedah court was packed with those who wanted to dine that night on their news about the affair already known as “The Gunnedah Sensation”, and those who came to stand by 35-year-old Francis James Roberts, a neighbour of Noble’s who was a jack-of-all-trades. He had lost one of his children not long before when the child “fell into the fire and was roasted alive”, according to newspapers. He was a steady sort of man, and popular.
Ethel, small, calm and chatty, told her story in full. She talked for three hours and never varied in her details.
She had been woken by a sound at 4am, and went to investigate.
“There is a lace blind on the window of the storeroom,” she told the court.
“It was turned to the right, and I had only a small portion of the window to see through. When he [Roberts] came out of the dining room door, he had a rifle in his hand.”
The girl said she was standing beside the flour bin in her nightgown with a skirt fixed about her when she saw the man with a lighted match in his hand. He took out the strychnine from a piece of paper and rubbed it between his hands, then threw it into the flour barrel, saying, “Now you (name that was unacceptable in 1895 and may well still be so today), I’ll have my revenge!”.
In her fright, Ethel made to run out of the door, but tripped and made a noise.
Roberts heard her, raised his rifle and shouted, “Come back, or I’ll shoot you dead!”. When she turned, he took a vial from his waistcoat pocket and threw acid at her, burning her right shoulder. This had led to two charges against Roberts - inflicting grievous bodily harm and attempted murder.
The girl promised him she would not tell, and ran back to her room where she went to sleep. She told her grandmother and great-uncle what had happened the next morning. She had not told them earlier for fear Roberts would shoot them.
The evidence of the girl was peppered with other stories that threw quavering pools of light on the life she shared with her grandmother and Noble. She had, she said, quarrelled with her great-uncle earlier in the year because she wasn’t led to believe she would inherit a share in either of their properties. She had briefly run away.
She had bought and taken strychnine herself in her unhappiness but had never, as one witness had claimed, said that life was not worth living.
“I made no reference to the quantity I took, and never told anybody but the accused about this,” Ethel told the court. “I took no more than one grain. The reason I ran away was that uncle was always beating the cows. I looked upon the accused [Roberts] as a friend, and the last person who would attempt to maim me.”
She said there were things, including a shawl and home-spun brown petticoat, that had gone missing from the house, and the family had suspected Roberts, who had once been employed on the property.
A doctor told the court that Ethel was quite sane.
Roberts' house had been searched where police had found strychnine - but of the white, not pink, variety.
Roberts had been found that morning ploughing, and stated he had gone to a neighbour’s on the night in question and was in bed with his wife at 4am. A black tracker traced Roberts’ tracks and agreed this was most likely to be the case.
Roberts had told police Ethel had asked him if he had any poison and when he inquired what she wanted it for, had replied, “My life of misery since I ran away and have been cut out of uncle’s will”.
Noble, close to 80 years old, also took to the stand. It was another dark day in the life of the part-time preacher. He grew agitated and the avid faces of those watching swam before him. His niece, he remembered saying, was a truthful girl.
Roberts, Ethel, Susan, the crowded court, the dense air, the smell of the wood of the benches, it was too much and he fell in a seizure that mimicked the final stages of strychnine, his white whiskers splayed against the polished floor.
His statement was adjourned.
Sunday, November 17
On the Sunday after the The Gunnedah Sensation had aired in court, Noble could not find his niece.
He rode into Gunnedah to look for her, where he was stopped by police, arrested, charged with conspiracy, and deposited in a cell that was already stifling in the Gunnedah heat.
Police had heard a very different tale from Ethel the night before, who had come in to see them in the company of her young friend Frederick Edward Cantrell. Her first story, she told them, had been a fabrication and Roberts was innocent. It was her great-uncle who had made her tell the story.
These revelations spread the Gunnedah Sensation further than butter on hot toast across the country’s newspapers.
Ethel Wright is scarcely 17 years of age,” they trumpeted.
Nothing whatever is known of her parents. She left school when six years old; she is therefore practically uneducated, although her grandmother asserts that the grand-uncle did instruct her. The girl is of medium stature, quiet, unassuming, and her appearance and dress is neat and ladylike, and she is considered nice-looking.
“In court last week, when giving the evidence she now confesses was false, she appeared extremely calm and collected, and never changed countenance when the opposing evidence told against her. Her manner and speech were convincing.”
Ethel was very clear in her second statement to police.
“It was my uncle who put the poison in the flour,” she said. “I mean Mr Noble Glass. For spite he accused Roberts of taking the hobbles and girths. I ought to have said he got ‘narked’ with him. It was he (uncle) who made me swear falsely. He threatened if I did not, he would do some harm to me.”
Noble had poisoned the flour and Noble had burnt her.
Roberts was freed in police court amid cheers from the crowded court for the jack-of-all-trades.
Bail was refused for both Noble and the girl, who were remanded for a week to stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure with the flies and the boredom in Gunnedah jail.
Tuesday, November 19
Ethel’s sister, Ada Kachel, visited her in jail. Ada covered her head on the dusty visit to the jail and held her skirts high above the floor that had seen the tread of murderers and robbers, paupers and swagmen.
On a visit to her home some time ago, Ada had found Ethel in the company of Fred Cantrell and knew the young man was the Catholic at the eye of the storm of Ethel’s expectations of her inheritance. Marriage to a Catholic would not be acceptable to their Wesleyan great-uncle and grandmother.
And something, Ada knew, was sorely amiss with Ethel’s account. She urged her sister to tell a story that was wholly true and took Ethel to the jailer with the third version of the tale. Ethel had poisoned the flour, she now said. And she had burnt herself. "I never put any strychnine into the flour with intent to poison anyone,” Ethel told the jailer. “I never wished to poison anybody. Noble Glass knew nothing of it." Noble found himself, once again, a free man on the wide main street of Gunnedah in the November sunshine.
Wednesday, November 27
Francis James Roberts, the neighbour who had been cleared, was back in court with the boot securely on the other foot.
He gave evidence against Ethel with a second telling of her request for poison and of the day when he had been asked to find a way to open her grandmother’s trunk with a broken lock.
"Open it quick,” Roberts said Ethel had told him. “I want to have a look at the old woman's will."
Ethel had expressed “lively dissatisfaction” with her life and told him her great-uncle was cruel and had pushed her in the cow yard.
Fred Cantrell also made an appearance amid the dust motes and the murmurs of the Gunnedah courtroom. Fred shyly declined to tell the court whether he was “keeping company” with Ethel, but he had known her for some five years.
Noble, feeling all of his 80 years as he looked at his great-niece in the dock, said he forgave the unhappy girl for naming him as the perpetrator and said he was worried for her health. She was pale and thin, and not eating or drinking.
Bail was denied.
“In her present condition” it was feared Ethel might do herself an injury.
Monday, January 6
Ethel Susannah Wright took the mail train to Tamworth under police escort. It was rumoured the charge of attempted murder would be downgraded to one of perjury.
When asked by a reporter, she expressed herself content with jail food.
“Much sympathy is felt locally, principally because of her condition,” the newspapers reported. “It is rumoured authentically… authorities favour the prospect of her early marriage.”
Thursday, January 30
Ethel, her face hidden by a thick gossamer veil, pleaded guilty to perjury in Tamworth Court, trying not to look into the eyes of the public whose own eyes were drawn to the bulge in her middle.
After some public angst and to-ing and fro-ing by Judge Coffey who debated her youth, her situation and her crime, she was sentenced to penal servitude for four years.
In deliberations on the “remarkable case”, it was revealed Ethel and her sweetheart Fred Cantrell had “met clandestinely after nightfall, with the result that the girl found herself ‘enceinte’”.
The neighbour Roberts became aware of her condition and threatened to tell her great-uncle, leading Ethel to the plan to poison the flour and blame Roberts. She had not, it seemed, anticipated he would be tried for attempted murder, nor had she hoped for the death of her great-uncle or grandmother.
That had not been her intention.
Friday, February 7
Frederick Edward Cantrell and Ethel Susannah Wright were married in Tamworth jail.
Ethel, due to give birth in April, wore her own clothes for the wedding and it was announced she would be taken to Darlinghurst for her confinement.
Noble Glass watched as reporters struggled to find a suitable editorial slant about his troubled great-niece. Very possibly, one newspaper said, her crime had been caused by hysteria induced by her condition.
There was praise for Cantrell who in spite of all that had transpired, “had the manliness to give her the shelter of his name, a step which it may be safely said the large majority of men would have hesitated under”.
Her punishment, another reporter noted, would be made 10 times heavier for suffering “the long agonising crisis of a woman’s life in the genial shades of Darlinghurst, and, if she survives that exquisite torture, rearing her baby in criminal society”.
But Noble, a man who prided himself on his reading, would never again open the Sydney Truth:
“It may be that she is the victim of such hysteria as is near akin to madness; but this notwithstanding, the insanity is apparently of too dangerous a type to let operate upon society at large,” the Truth said. “Whether the prison or the lunatic asylum is the proper reservoir for the victim of her own infamy is a question about which there may be differences of opinion, but there can be little doubt that there was a very pressing necessity for the law to make an example of one of the many hysterical woman whose ideal of heroism is limited to the promulgation of false and wanton charges against the other sex.”
Noble thought sadly of the small girl who had once sat across the table from him, whose mother was gone and whose father had ridden away with the wind.
August, 2024
The Family Search website notes Ethel Susannah Wright and Frederick Edward Cantrell were the parents of at least three sons - one of them born in April 1896 - and two daughters.
Ethel Cantrell died in Gunnedah, New South Wales, on April 26, 1957 at the age of 78.
Nothing is known of the end of Noble Glass. Eighty years old was a ripe old age in 1896. It is unlikely he lived to see the silhouette of Ethel at his door again.
Newspapers references for this story have been sourced from https://trove.nla.gov.au/
Noble Glass found Ethel Susannah Wright at his doorstep about 20 minutes after the sun rose.
It was November in Gunnedah - hot already, and the corellas were wheeling overhead like a school of shining fish in the sky. The sun was coming in slant-wise behind her and, at first, he saw only her silhouette, neat as a pin in her day dress, the calls of the birds raucous behind her.
The girl was upset.
“Uncle,” she said, “Mr Roberts has put strychnine in the flour.”
Noble stood, dazed by the early sun and the news, before putting on his boots and following his great-niece to the house 100 yards away. He could not muster his wits enough to ask her more. He just strode, knowing she would follow.
“Susan,” he called to the girl’s grandmother as he went through the door, not stopping to take off the boots,
“what is the girl talking about? Poison in the flour? What is this about Roberts?”
Susan Smaile, who was quite deaf, heard only the noise of his calling and came nervously into the hall, her hands and her head shaking.
Before noon, Noble was riding the three miles to Gunnedah Police Station, his white hair wild and his stomach still empty, the ground flying beneath him in a journey he would not later remember.
It could not be let rest. The girl was just 17 and she was a good girl with no mother.
He was surprised at Roberts, but poisoning a man’s family was a matter that could not go unpunished.
When the police arrived, Ethel led Constable Trevathan to the storeroom and showed him the flour bin, two matches Roberts had used to illuminate his crime and a pink substance both on the floor and in the flour. It was, tests by a chemist later confirmed, strychnine.
Had it been baked into bread for the household to share, they were likely to have died a death seasoned with convulsions and pain, their knotted muscles tiring and their throats constricting until breath no longer came.
A death usually reserved for vermin and nuisance birds.
Monday, November 11
The matter went to court on Monday, 11 November 1895, four days after Noble had ridden to the police station with the news.
The Gunnedah court was packed with those who wanted to dine that night on their news about the affair already known as “The Gunnedah Sensation”, and those who came to stand by 35-year-old Francis James Roberts, a neighbour of Noble’s who was a jack-of-all-trades. He had lost one of his children not long before when the child “fell into the fire and was roasted alive”, according to newspapers. He was a steady sort of man, and popular.
Ethel, small, calm and chatty, told her story in full. She talked for three hours and never varied in her details.
She had been woken by a sound at 4am, and went to investigate.
“There is a lace blind on the window of the storeroom,” she told the court.
“It was turned to the right, and I had only a small portion of the window to see through. When he [Roberts] came out of the dining room door, he had a rifle in his hand.”
The girl said she was standing beside the flour bin in her nightgown with a skirt fixed about her when she saw the man with a lighted match in his hand. He took out the strychnine from a piece of paper and rubbed it between his hands, then threw it into the flour barrel, saying, “Now you (name that was unacceptable in 1895 and may well still be so today), I’ll have my revenge!”.
In her fright, Ethel made to run out of the door, but tripped and made a noise.
Roberts heard her, raised his rifle and shouted, “Come back, or I’ll shoot you dead!”. When she turned, he took a vial from his waistcoat pocket and threw acid at her, burning her right shoulder. This had led to two charges against Roberts - inflicting grievous bodily harm and attempted murder.
The girl promised him she would not tell, and ran back to her room where she went to sleep. She told her grandmother and great-uncle what had happened the next morning. She had not told them earlier for fear Roberts would shoot them.
The evidence of the girl was peppered with other stories that threw quavering pools of light on the life she shared with her grandmother and Noble. She had, she said, quarrelled with her great-uncle earlier in the year because she wasn’t led to believe she would inherit a share in either of their properties. She had briefly run away.
She had bought and taken strychnine herself in her unhappiness but had never, as one witness had claimed, said that life was not worth living.
“I made no reference to the quantity I took, and never told anybody but the accused about this,” Ethel told the court. “I took no more than one grain. The reason I ran away was that uncle was always beating the cows. I looked upon the accused [Roberts] as a friend, and the last person who would attempt to maim me.”
She said there were things, including a shawl and home-spun brown petticoat, that had gone missing from the house, and the family had suspected Roberts, who had once been employed on the property.
A doctor told the court that Ethel was quite sane.
Roberts' house had been searched where police had found strychnine - but of the white, not pink, variety.
Roberts had been found that morning ploughing, and stated he had gone to a neighbour’s on the night in question and was in bed with his wife at 4am. A black tracker traced Roberts’ tracks and agreed this was most likely to be the case.
Roberts had told police Ethel had asked him if he had any poison and when he inquired what she wanted it for, had replied, “My life of misery since I ran away and have been cut out of uncle’s will”.
Noble, close to 80 years old, also took to the stand. It was another dark day in the life of the part-time preacher. He grew agitated and the avid faces of those watching swam before him. His niece, he remembered saying, was a truthful girl.
Roberts, Ethel, Susan, the crowded court, the dense air, the smell of the wood of the benches, it was too much and he fell in a seizure that mimicked the final stages of strychnine, his white whiskers splayed against the polished floor.
His statement was adjourned.
Sunday, November 17
On the Sunday after the The Gunnedah Sensation had aired in court, Noble could not find his niece.
He rode into Gunnedah to look for her, where he was stopped by police, arrested, charged with conspiracy, and deposited in a cell that was already stifling in the Gunnedah heat.
Police had heard a very different tale from Ethel the night before, who had come in to see them in the company of her young friend Frederick Edward Cantrell. Her first story, she told them, had been a fabrication and Roberts was innocent. It was her great-uncle who had made her tell the story.
These revelations spread the Gunnedah Sensation further than butter on hot toast across the country’s newspapers.
Ethel Wright is scarcely 17 years of age,” they trumpeted.
Nothing whatever is known of her parents. She left school when six years old; she is therefore practically uneducated, although her grandmother asserts that the grand-uncle did instruct her. The girl is of medium stature, quiet, unassuming, and her appearance and dress is neat and ladylike, and she is considered nice-looking.
“In court last week, when giving the evidence she now confesses was false, she appeared extremely calm and collected, and never changed countenance when the opposing evidence told against her. Her manner and speech were convincing.”
Ethel was very clear in her second statement to police.
“It was my uncle who put the poison in the flour,” she said. “I mean Mr Noble Glass. For spite he accused Roberts of taking the hobbles and girths. I ought to have said he got ‘narked’ with him. It was he (uncle) who made me swear falsely. He threatened if I did not, he would do some harm to me.”
Noble had poisoned the flour and Noble had burnt her.
Roberts was freed in police court amid cheers from the crowded court for the jack-of-all-trades.
Bail was refused for both Noble and the girl, who were remanded for a week to stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure with the flies and the boredom in Gunnedah jail.
Tuesday, November 19
Ethel’s sister, Ada Kachel, visited her in jail. Ada covered her head on the dusty visit to the jail and held her skirts high above the floor that had seen the tread of murderers and robbers, paupers and swagmen.
On a visit to her home some time ago, Ada had found Ethel in the company of Fred Cantrell and knew the young man was the Catholic at the eye of the storm of Ethel’s expectations of her inheritance. Marriage to a Catholic would not be acceptable to their Wesleyan great-uncle and grandmother.
And something, Ada knew, was sorely amiss with Ethel’s account. She urged her sister to tell a story that was wholly true and took Ethel to the jailer with the third version of the tale. Ethel had poisoned the flour, she now said. And she had burnt herself. "I never put any strychnine into the flour with intent to poison anyone,” Ethel told the jailer. “I never wished to poison anybody. Noble Glass knew nothing of it." Noble found himself, once again, a free man on the wide main street of Gunnedah in the November sunshine.
Wednesday, November 27
Francis James Roberts, the neighbour who had been cleared, was back in court with the boot securely on the other foot.
He gave evidence against Ethel with a second telling of her request for poison and of the day when he had been asked to find a way to open her grandmother’s trunk with a broken lock.
"Open it quick,” Roberts said Ethel had told him. “I want to have a look at the old woman's will."
Ethel had expressed “lively dissatisfaction” with her life and told him her great-uncle was cruel and had pushed her in the cow yard.
Fred Cantrell also made an appearance amid the dust motes and the murmurs of the Gunnedah courtroom. Fred shyly declined to tell the court whether he was “keeping company” with Ethel, but he had known her for some five years.
Noble, feeling all of his 80 years as he looked at his great-niece in the dock, said he forgave the unhappy girl for naming him as the perpetrator and said he was worried for her health. She was pale and thin, and not eating or drinking.
Bail was denied.
“In her present condition” it was feared Ethel might do herself an injury.
Monday, January 6
Ethel Susannah Wright took the mail train to Tamworth under police escort. It was rumoured the charge of attempted murder would be downgraded to one of perjury.
When asked by a reporter, she expressed herself content with jail food.
“Much sympathy is felt locally, principally because of her condition,” the newspapers reported. “It is rumoured authentically… authorities favour the prospect of her early marriage.”
Thursday, January 30
Ethel, her face hidden by a thick gossamer veil, pleaded guilty to perjury in Tamworth Court, trying not to look into the eyes of the public whose own eyes were drawn to the bulge in her middle.
After some public angst and to-ing and fro-ing by Judge Coffey who debated her youth, her situation and her crime, she was sentenced to penal servitude for four years.
In deliberations on the “remarkable case”, it was revealed Ethel and her sweetheart Fred Cantrell had “met clandestinely after nightfall, with the result that the girl found herself ‘enceinte’”.
The neighbour Roberts became aware of her condition and threatened to tell her great-uncle, leading Ethel to the plan to poison the flour and blame Roberts. She had not, it seemed, anticipated he would be tried for attempted murder, nor had she hoped for the death of her great-uncle or grandmother.
That had not been her intention.
Friday, February 7
Frederick Edward Cantrell and Ethel Susannah Wright were married in Tamworth jail.
Ethel, due to give birth in April, wore her own clothes for the wedding and it was announced she would be taken to Darlinghurst for her confinement.
Noble Glass watched as reporters struggled to find a suitable editorial slant about his troubled great-niece. Very possibly, one newspaper said, her crime had been caused by hysteria induced by her condition.
There was praise for Cantrell who in spite of all that had transpired, “had the manliness to give her the shelter of his name, a step which it may be safely said the large majority of men would have hesitated under”.
Her punishment, another reporter noted, would be made 10 times heavier for suffering “the long agonising crisis of a woman’s life in the genial shades of Darlinghurst, and, if she survives that exquisite torture, rearing her baby in criminal society”.
But Noble, a man who prided himself on his reading, would never again open the Sydney Truth:
“It may be that she is the victim of such hysteria as is near akin to madness; but this notwithstanding, the insanity is apparently of too dangerous a type to let operate upon society at large,” the Truth said. “Whether the prison or the lunatic asylum is the proper reservoir for the victim of her own infamy is a question about which there may be differences of opinion, but there can be little doubt that there was a very pressing necessity for the law to make an example of one of the many hysterical woman whose ideal of heroism is limited to the promulgation of false and wanton charges against the other sex.”
Noble thought sadly of the small girl who had once sat across the table from him, whose mother was gone and whose father had ridden away with the wind.
August, 2024
The Family Search website notes Ethel Susannah Wright and Frederick Edward Cantrell were the parents of at least three sons - one of them born in April 1896 - and two daughters.
Ethel Cantrell died in Gunnedah, New South Wales, on April 26, 1957 at the age of 78.
Nothing is known of the end of Noble Glass. Eighty years old was a ripe old age in 1896. It is unlikely he lived to see the silhouette of Ethel at his door again.
Newspapers references for this story have been sourced from https://trove.nla.gov.au/
POETRY
A watchful blower addresses his prey
by Roger Vickery
by Roger Vickery
Dear one, forgive my appearing before you like this,
in a two-piece track-suit, welder's goggles
and a green cloth cap...
A Victorian Hangman tells his love
by Bruce Dawe
in a two-piece track-suit, welder's goggles
and a green cloth cap...
A Victorian Hangman tells his love
by Bruce Dawe
I would have preferred a Du Pont Hazmat suit,
plague yellow, to invest our fatal meeting
on your doorstep with an extra whiff of irony.
Instead, I chose a hide-in-plain sight look:
scuffed Blundstones, scratched sunnies
and a set of true-blue Bunnings coveralls,
right pocket slit wide for quick access
to a can of mace.
Not that I expect to need it.
When I bell your gated manor, low voiced,
leaf blower in hand, humble as a tithed hand
arriving to scythe your tussocks,
I will fill your intercom with chaff
about an arboreal review that will clear
the way for a felling, at last,
of the pesky native that stands
between you and a truly pristine view.
(Your appeals to council are public record)
I am confident you’ll buzz me in.
I would like to ask - when
you ski through fresh powder snow
does it remind you
of the layers of white lathering
the Caesar stone cutters’ floor
you saw when you looked down
from the windows of your occasional office?
But that might tip you off.
Afterwards, I want you to suspect
that bag of dust billowing
into your face was no more than a prank
in poor taste, a vacuum cleaner punking
by some pathetic let-go employee
you beat up in a Fair Work tribunal.
We don’t want you rushing to Macquarie Steet.
Night sweats, chest stabs, groin lumps...
will ferry you there soon enough.
Not that any lung gun maestro can help.
The silicosis clock will be ticking.
Once you cop a lethal dose of the big S,
you have five hard years at most.
I have made sure your portion is top quality.
I donned a plague suit and hoovered it
from my brother’s bench. You were
always masked when you ventured past.
Now we know why
For weeks I have watched you, like a hangman
through a peep hole. I know your habits,
your smile. You love your daughter.
You run with a rescue greyhound though Hyde Park.
When I jog beside you, catching snatches
of your hearty gym-hard puffs, all I can hear
are gasps and groans and the hack
and crackle of the ventilator pump
that starves my mother of sleep.
plague yellow, to invest our fatal meeting
on your doorstep with an extra whiff of irony.
Instead, I chose a hide-in-plain sight look:
scuffed Blundstones, scratched sunnies
and a set of true-blue Bunnings coveralls,
right pocket slit wide for quick access
to a can of mace.
Not that I expect to need it.
When I bell your gated manor, low voiced,
leaf blower in hand, humble as a tithed hand
arriving to scythe your tussocks,
I will fill your intercom with chaff
about an arboreal review that will clear
the way for a felling, at last,
of the pesky native that stands
between you and a truly pristine view.
(Your appeals to council are public record)
I am confident you’ll buzz me in.
I would like to ask - when
you ski through fresh powder snow
does it remind you
of the layers of white lathering
the Caesar stone cutters’ floor
you saw when you looked down
from the windows of your occasional office?
But that might tip you off.
Afterwards, I want you to suspect
that bag of dust billowing
into your face was no more than a prank
in poor taste, a vacuum cleaner punking
by some pathetic let-go employee
you beat up in a Fair Work tribunal.
We don’t want you rushing to Macquarie Steet.
Night sweats, chest stabs, groin lumps...
will ferry you there soon enough.
Not that any lung gun maestro can help.
The silicosis clock will be ticking.
Once you cop a lethal dose of the big S,
you have five hard years at most.
I have made sure your portion is top quality.
I donned a plague suit and hoovered it
from my brother’s bench. You were
always masked when you ventured past.
Now we know why
For weeks I have watched you, like a hangman
through a peep hole. I know your habits,
your smile. You love your daughter.
You run with a rescue greyhound though Hyde Park.
When I jog beside you, catching snatches
of your hearty gym-hard puffs, all I can hear
are gasps and groans and the hack
and crackle of the ventilator pump
that starves my mother of sleep.
NEW ENGLAND AWARD
Beneath a Blood Moon
by Jypsi Bennett
by Jypsi Bennett
Beneath the Bloodmoon
Under the blood moon's crimson light,
he vanished swift, into the night.
No scream, no cry, no warning sound,
Just footprints leading through the ground.
A missing girl, a silent street,
Her empty shoes, her stumbling feet.
The town is quiet, whispers low,
Where did she go? Where did she go?
The copper’s eyes are cold and hard,
He scans the trees, the empty yard.
A cigarette between his lips,
A secret hidden in his grip.
Her mother pleads, her father weeps,
But secrets in this town run deep.
The fields are wide, the forest black,
But none who leave have wandered back.
By the old mill, by the creek,
Where shadows shift and branches creak,
The truth lies buried, dark as night,
Beneath the surface, out of sight.
The copper knows, but won’t reveal,
The buried truth he’s sworn to seal.
He’s walked the bush, he’s seen the past,
But in the dark, the shadows last.
A broken watch, a piece of lace,
A single hand, a pale face.
They found her there, beneath the trees,
Her breath as still as winter's breeze.
But justice here is bought with blood,
The guilty hide beneath the mud.
The copper turns, his back to blame,
And life goes on, and just the same.
For in this town, the nights are long,
And silence hums a wicked song.
Beneath the moon, the whispers grow,
Where did she go? Where did she go?
Under the blood moon's crimson light,
he vanished swift, into the night.
No scream, no cry, no warning sound,
Just footprints leading through the ground.
A missing girl, a silent street,
Her empty shoes, her stumbling feet.
The town is quiet, whispers low,
Where did she go? Where did she go?
The copper’s eyes are cold and hard,
He scans the trees, the empty yard.
A cigarette between his lips,
A secret hidden in his grip.
Her mother pleads, her father weeps,
But secrets in this town run deep.
The fields are wide, the forest black,
But none who leave have wandered back.
By the old mill, by the creek,
Where shadows shift and branches creak,
The truth lies buried, dark as night,
Beneath the surface, out of sight.
The copper knows, but won’t reveal,
The buried truth he’s sworn to seal.
He’s walked the bush, he’s seen the past,
But in the dark, the shadows last.
A broken watch, a piece of lace,
A single hand, a pale face.
They found her there, beneath the trees,
Her breath as still as winter's breeze.
But justice here is bought with blood,
The guilty hide beneath the mud.
The copper turns, his back to blame,
And life goes on, and just the same.
For in this town, the nights are long,
And silence hums a wicked song.
Beneath the moon, the whispers grow,
Where did she go? Where did she go?
EMERGING AUTHOR AWARD
Remains
by Greg Tuchin
by Greg Tuchin
My father, Wally, first started in the Police Forensics unit in 1952. It was known as the Scientific Investigation Bureau back then. He had no skills as a photographer, but the man in charge of the Bureau, Inspector Roberts, told him that it did not matter. It was something he could learn on the job.
Wally got into the Bureau through his technical drawing skills. At that time the officers drew detailed drawings of every crime scene, using measurements taken at the scene. Wally had spent his first week doing exactly that. Drawing elevations and topographic maps of crime scenes. It was incredibly boring. He wondered why had had left his job on the beat, to join the Bureau. Inspector Roberts had teamed Wally up with an older technical offer, Eric, to show him the ropes, and eventually, how to shoot crime scene photographs.
Eric was not your typical policemen. To start with, he was only about 5 feet 9, way too short for the regulation intake in the 50s of 6 feet. Wally figured that he must have joined somehow through the mounted police, which didn’t have those kinds of restrictions. Wally himself had only just made the six feet tall requirement. When he went for his recruitment interview, he was measured at 5 feet 11. Then the recruiting sergeant came up with an idea. ‘It doesn’t say anywhere in the regulations that the recruit can’t wear socks.’
Wally recalled that the sergeant gave him the thickest pair of socks he had ever seen, and he passed the test. It helped that the police force was desperate for recruits. It was his first lesson in policing, the police changed the rules when it suited them.
Wally was well into his third, mind-numbing drawing when Inspector Roberts, called him into the office.
‘Tuchin. I want you to go out to Parramatta with Eric. We have reports of a suspicious death in a caravan there. Take the Bedford truck.’
The Bedford truck was Roberts’s idea. He had decked out a truck like a photographic, developing studio, so that the officers could develop their films in situ, right at the crime scene. It was a white elephant because no one wanted to develop their photos at the crime scene. There was no hurry. Most of the time the subjects were dead, or in hospital. So everyone brought their films back to the Bureau, and the truck sat unsued in the carpark.
It was a stupid waste of resources because all the Bureau staff had to get to a crime scene was the Bedford truck and an Indian motorcycle with a sidecar. Most of the time the technical officers had to take public transport, lugging their heavy camera and lights on the tram, the train or the bus.
At that time, the photographers used a Speedgraphic camera; a heavy, bellows type of camera used by the American press photographers. It weighed ten pounds, or five kilos, and used a single 5 by 4 inch negative, which was inserted into the camera by a slide, one negative at a time. The camera had an inherent problem with the slide mechanism, so sometimes nothing was exposed on the negative. Over the years this had caused a huge amount of grief, when the scientific officers returned to the Bureau and nothing from the crime scene came out. They had to quickly rush back to the crime scene to retake the photos. Sometimes it was too late.
Wally drove the truck. He had plenty of experience driving trucks during and after the war. It was a slow drive out to Parramatta. It is hard to imagine today, when you see all the high-rise buildings in Parramatta, that there could have been a vacant block of land there, with a caravan parked on it.
Using his street directory, Eric guided Wally to the crime scene. There, up on bricks, was an old plywood caravan. Innocuous enough. On the street, in front of the block of land an Austin 6 was parked, with the driver sitting on the front seat, reading a newspaper. He was a young fellow, of about thirty years, not much older than Wally, dressed immaculately in a double-breasted suit.
Eric knew who it was immediately. A local doctor called out to the scene.
‘Good afternoon gentlemen,’ he said, as Eric approached the car. ‘I’ll let you get on with your job.’ And he averted his eyes back to the newspaper.
Eric led Wally towards the caravan. About twenty yards from the caravan, Eric stopped Wally. ‘Have you got a handkerchief in your pocket?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘This one’s a real stinker.’
He showed Wally how to make the hankie into a triangle and tie it around his nose and mouth, like an old-fashioned bank robber.
The smell coming from the caravan was positively vile. Wally almost puked.
‘It’s a smell you never forget,’ Eric said. ‘A dead body. Nothing like it.’
Eric tried the caravan door. It was not locked but he could not get the door open.
‘Wally, can you give me a boost? I want to look inside the window’.
Wally held Eric by the foot and boosted him up. It was an easy job because Eric was so light. He held Eric up for about a minute while he looked inside the van.
‘What did you see?’
‘It’s as I thought. A dead woman’s body, probably been there a few days, and by the heat we’ve had the last few days, she’s blown up like a balloon She’s blocking the door. No chance of getting in.’
‘So, what do we do?’
‘You say nothing and watch my lead, son. You’re about to learn a valuable lesson in Forensics.’
The two officers walked back to the doctor’s car.
‘Doctor, we have a problem. The body inside has bloated so much, we can’t get into the caravan. ‘
‘Any suggestions?’ he replied casually.
‘Yes. I suggest that we break the side window, and Wally here, boosts you up, and you get a scalpel and puncture the woman’s stomach so that all the gasses can escape. Then we can climb in and determine a cause of death.’
The young doctor was appalled. ‘You’re not suggesting that I pierce the stomach with my scalpel. And.’
‘Why not,’ Eric said gruffly. ‘I’m sure you got a scalpel in that medical bag of yours?’
‘Certainly, but I’m a doctor. I shouldn’t have to do such a thing.’
Eric calmly looked the doctor straight in the eyes. Wally was waiting for Eric, to back down. Instead, he said calmly. ‘Suit yourself doc. We can leave it till Monday, when she’ll be blown up twice as big and smell twice as bad, and you’ll probably get called out again. Come on Wally. We’ve done our bit. Let’s head back to the Bureau.
They started walking away. Wally could not believe what Eric had said. In his world, doctors were unreproachable. You revered them like a priest. You would never speak like Eric had just done.
They had only walked a few paces when the doctor called out. ‘Just, just a minute fellas. Are you saying that all I have to do is use my scalpel?’
‘That’s it Doc. Then we can all be on our way.’
Reluctantly the doctor agreed. ‘All right then. Let’s do it.’
Armed with his medical bag, the three men approached the van. Wally and Eric put their handkerchiefs back on.
Eric said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to put a hankie on like us, Doc?’
He replied condescendingly, ‘I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant tasks in my time in medicine.’
‘Suit yourself. Wally, before you let the doctor loose with his scalpel, you boost me up and I’ll take a picture of the body as it’s lying in the caravan. That’ll be all we need for the coroner.’
After Eric had taken his shot, balancing the heavy Speedgraphic against the window frame, Eric went around the side of the van and found a brick. He then smashed the window and pushed the glass shards into the van.
‘Okay doc, we’re ready for you.’
The doctor took his scalpel out from the bag. He held it in his right hand, and Wally boosted him up through the window. It was a much harder task than before because the doctor was a more normal weight.
Reaching through the window, the doctor lunged at the dead body and drove his scalpel into the woman’s abdomen. Wally has told me this story many times. It’s one case that he never forgot. Perhaps because it was his first. The sound was like letting air out of a car tyre. It went on and on, and the smell. It was horrendous.
The doctor quickly motioned for Wally to put him down. He ran away from the van and promptly threw up. Eric winked at Wally.
‘I reckon now we’ll be able to get the door open and get inside. You use your shoulder to give it a shove.’
Under Wally’s weight, he gradually got the door open. He could now see the whole body, a woman, probably in her sixties, quite skinny, but what was appalling was how her skin had turned black, in the heat and state of decomposition.
‘Hey Eric, do we need to take a photo from the inside?’
‘No need to waste any more film. We’ve got a good angle from the window. Just one more thing and we can be on our way.’
Eric walked over to the doctor, whose face was an ashen grey. ‘There’s just one more thing to do doc. You have to sign the death certificate. Looks to me like death by natural causes. What do you reckon?’
The doctor was in no state to argue. ‘Where do I sign?’
Eric handed him a pen and pointed to the spot on the page.
‘Right Wally. Let’s get going.’
‘Don’t we have to remove the body?’
‘Nah, That’s the best part about working at the Bureau. We don’t have to do all that crap. We leave that up to the uniforms, or the morticians. It’s up to them to take the body to the morgue. We’re all done. We might even make it back to the Bureau by five. You know there’s no overtime in Scientific?’
‘Yeah, the inspector made that very clear.’
Wally packed the Speedgraphic back into its case. They were soon on their way back down Parramatta Road, heading for the city.
Wally was trying to process what had happened while he was driving. ‘Hey Eric. Do you often treat the doctors like that?’
‘Wally, What you’ve got to understand is that in cases like today, a medical examiner doesn’t attend. It’s just a local GP and they know nothing. So you have to lead them by the hand, or otherwise they’re too afraid to do anything. Once you get on a crime scene, you’re in charge. You tell everyone what to do.’
‘But I won’t know what to do.’
‘You’ll pick it up pretty quick.’
‘The other thing Eric, is how do you handle being around the dead bodies?’
‘Look, the way to do it is to not think of them as a person. That person, or their soul, some people call it, has left their body when they died. Think of them as remains. You are there to deal with the remains, in a respectful, forensic, methodical way, in case there has been a criminal action. Remember, anything you do may go to trial.’
Wally took his buddy’s advice and used it throughout his career, photographing murders, accidental deaths, rapes, suicides and the gambit of the appalling things humans can do to themselves or to one another. There were no psychologists in the police department to help, and no such thing as PTSD. You were told that if you can’t take it then there are a thousand others wanting your job.
Wally spent over a decade in the Scientific Investigation Bureau. When he had to photograph a young baby, the same age as my sister, who had been scalded to death in a bath, he kept repeating his mantra, ‘they are just remains.’ And when he had to photograph of a man, who had decapitated himself jumping out a hotel window, he kept repeating his mantra. But he never told his family what he went through. No until now.
Wally got into the Bureau through his technical drawing skills. At that time the officers drew detailed drawings of every crime scene, using measurements taken at the scene. Wally had spent his first week doing exactly that. Drawing elevations and topographic maps of crime scenes. It was incredibly boring. He wondered why had had left his job on the beat, to join the Bureau. Inspector Roberts had teamed Wally up with an older technical offer, Eric, to show him the ropes, and eventually, how to shoot crime scene photographs.
Eric was not your typical policemen. To start with, he was only about 5 feet 9, way too short for the regulation intake in the 50s of 6 feet. Wally figured that he must have joined somehow through the mounted police, which didn’t have those kinds of restrictions. Wally himself had only just made the six feet tall requirement. When he went for his recruitment interview, he was measured at 5 feet 11. Then the recruiting sergeant came up with an idea. ‘It doesn’t say anywhere in the regulations that the recruit can’t wear socks.’
Wally recalled that the sergeant gave him the thickest pair of socks he had ever seen, and he passed the test. It helped that the police force was desperate for recruits. It was his first lesson in policing, the police changed the rules when it suited them.
Wally was well into his third, mind-numbing drawing when Inspector Roberts, called him into the office.
‘Tuchin. I want you to go out to Parramatta with Eric. We have reports of a suspicious death in a caravan there. Take the Bedford truck.’
The Bedford truck was Roberts’s idea. He had decked out a truck like a photographic, developing studio, so that the officers could develop their films in situ, right at the crime scene. It was a white elephant because no one wanted to develop their photos at the crime scene. There was no hurry. Most of the time the subjects were dead, or in hospital. So everyone brought their films back to the Bureau, and the truck sat unsued in the carpark.
It was a stupid waste of resources because all the Bureau staff had to get to a crime scene was the Bedford truck and an Indian motorcycle with a sidecar. Most of the time the technical officers had to take public transport, lugging their heavy camera and lights on the tram, the train or the bus.
At that time, the photographers used a Speedgraphic camera; a heavy, bellows type of camera used by the American press photographers. It weighed ten pounds, or five kilos, and used a single 5 by 4 inch negative, which was inserted into the camera by a slide, one negative at a time. The camera had an inherent problem with the slide mechanism, so sometimes nothing was exposed on the negative. Over the years this had caused a huge amount of grief, when the scientific officers returned to the Bureau and nothing from the crime scene came out. They had to quickly rush back to the crime scene to retake the photos. Sometimes it was too late.
Wally drove the truck. He had plenty of experience driving trucks during and after the war. It was a slow drive out to Parramatta. It is hard to imagine today, when you see all the high-rise buildings in Parramatta, that there could have been a vacant block of land there, with a caravan parked on it.
Using his street directory, Eric guided Wally to the crime scene. There, up on bricks, was an old plywood caravan. Innocuous enough. On the street, in front of the block of land an Austin 6 was parked, with the driver sitting on the front seat, reading a newspaper. He was a young fellow, of about thirty years, not much older than Wally, dressed immaculately in a double-breasted suit.
Eric knew who it was immediately. A local doctor called out to the scene.
‘Good afternoon gentlemen,’ he said, as Eric approached the car. ‘I’ll let you get on with your job.’ And he averted his eyes back to the newspaper.
Eric led Wally towards the caravan. About twenty yards from the caravan, Eric stopped Wally. ‘Have you got a handkerchief in your pocket?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘This one’s a real stinker.’
He showed Wally how to make the hankie into a triangle and tie it around his nose and mouth, like an old-fashioned bank robber.
The smell coming from the caravan was positively vile. Wally almost puked.
‘It’s a smell you never forget,’ Eric said. ‘A dead body. Nothing like it.’
Eric tried the caravan door. It was not locked but he could not get the door open.
‘Wally, can you give me a boost? I want to look inside the window’.
Wally held Eric by the foot and boosted him up. It was an easy job because Eric was so light. He held Eric up for about a minute while he looked inside the van.
‘What did you see?’
‘It’s as I thought. A dead woman’s body, probably been there a few days, and by the heat we’ve had the last few days, she’s blown up like a balloon She’s blocking the door. No chance of getting in.’
‘So, what do we do?’
‘You say nothing and watch my lead, son. You’re about to learn a valuable lesson in Forensics.’
The two officers walked back to the doctor’s car.
‘Doctor, we have a problem. The body inside has bloated so much, we can’t get into the caravan. ‘
‘Any suggestions?’ he replied casually.
‘Yes. I suggest that we break the side window, and Wally here, boosts you up, and you get a scalpel and puncture the woman’s stomach so that all the gasses can escape. Then we can climb in and determine a cause of death.’
The young doctor was appalled. ‘You’re not suggesting that I pierce the stomach with my scalpel. And.’
‘Why not,’ Eric said gruffly. ‘I’m sure you got a scalpel in that medical bag of yours?’
‘Certainly, but I’m a doctor. I shouldn’t have to do such a thing.’
Eric calmly looked the doctor straight in the eyes. Wally was waiting for Eric, to back down. Instead, he said calmly. ‘Suit yourself doc. We can leave it till Monday, when she’ll be blown up twice as big and smell twice as bad, and you’ll probably get called out again. Come on Wally. We’ve done our bit. Let’s head back to the Bureau.
They started walking away. Wally could not believe what Eric had said. In his world, doctors were unreproachable. You revered them like a priest. You would never speak like Eric had just done.
They had only walked a few paces when the doctor called out. ‘Just, just a minute fellas. Are you saying that all I have to do is use my scalpel?’
‘That’s it Doc. Then we can all be on our way.’
Reluctantly the doctor agreed. ‘All right then. Let’s do it.’
Armed with his medical bag, the three men approached the van. Wally and Eric put their handkerchiefs back on.
Eric said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to put a hankie on like us, Doc?’
He replied condescendingly, ‘I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant tasks in my time in medicine.’
‘Suit yourself. Wally, before you let the doctor loose with his scalpel, you boost me up and I’ll take a picture of the body as it’s lying in the caravan. That’ll be all we need for the coroner.’
After Eric had taken his shot, balancing the heavy Speedgraphic against the window frame, Eric went around the side of the van and found a brick. He then smashed the window and pushed the glass shards into the van.
‘Okay doc, we’re ready for you.’
The doctor took his scalpel out from the bag. He held it in his right hand, and Wally boosted him up through the window. It was a much harder task than before because the doctor was a more normal weight.
Reaching through the window, the doctor lunged at the dead body and drove his scalpel into the woman’s abdomen. Wally has told me this story many times. It’s one case that he never forgot. Perhaps because it was his first. The sound was like letting air out of a car tyre. It went on and on, and the smell. It was horrendous.
The doctor quickly motioned for Wally to put him down. He ran away from the van and promptly threw up. Eric winked at Wally.
‘I reckon now we’ll be able to get the door open and get inside. You use your shoulder to give it a shove.’
Under Wally’s weight, he gradually got the door open. He could now see the whole body, a woman, probably in her sixties, quite skinny, but what was appalling was how her skin had turned black, in the heat and state of decomposition.
‘Hey Eric, do we need to take a photo from the inside?’
‘No need to waste any more film. We’ve got a good angle from the window. Just one more thing and we can be on our way.’
Eric walked over to the doctor, whose face was an ashen grey. ‘There’s just one more thing to do doc. You have to sign the death certificate. Looks to me like death by natural causes. What do you reckon?’
The doctor was in no state to argue. ‘Where do I sign?’
Eric handed him a pen and pointed to the spot on the page.
‘Right Wally. Let’s get going.’
‘Don’t we have to remove the body?’
‘Nah, That’s the best part about working at the Bureau. We don’t have to do all that crap. We leave that up to the uniforms, or the morticians. It’s up to them to take the body to the morgue. We’re all done. We might even make it back to the Bureau by five. You know there’s no overtime in Scientific?’
‘Yeah, the inspector made that very clear.’
Wally packed the Speedgraphic back into its case. They were soon on their way back down Parramatta Road, heading for the city.
Wally was trying to process what had happened while he was driving. ‘Hey Eric. Do you often treat the doctors like that?’
‘Wally, What you’ve got to understand is that in cases like today, a medical examiner doesn’t attend. It’s just a local GP and they know nothing. So you have to lead them by the hand, or otherwise they’re too afraid to do anything. Once you get on a crime scene, you’re in charge. You tell everyone what to do.’
‘But I won’t know what to do.’
‘You’ll pick it up pretty quick.’
‘The other thing Eric, is how do you handle being around the dead bodies?’
‘Look, the way to do it is to not think of them as a person. That person, or their soul, some people call it, has left their body when they died. Think of them as remains. You are there to deal with the remains, in a respectful, forensic, methodical way, in case there has been a criminal action. Remember, anything you do may go to trial.’
Wally took his buddy’s advice and used it throughout his career, photographing murders, accidental deaths, rapes, suicides and the gambit of the appalling things humans can do to themselves or to one another. There were no psychologists in the police department to help, and no such thing as PTSD. You were told that if you can’t take it then there are a thousand others wanting your job.
Wally spent over a decade in the Scientific Investigation Bureau. When he had to photograph a young baby, the same age as my sister, who had been scalded to death in a bath, he kept repeating his mantra, ‘they are just remains.’ And when he had to photograph of a man, who had decapitated himself jumping out a hotel window, he kept repeating his mantra. But he never told his family what he went through. No until now.
YOUTH
The Landmark Killer
by Asher Mclaughlin
by Asher Mclaughlin
West 122nd Street was midnight-dim. Countless stoops stood like black teeth along the street, fire escape ladders descending from above in jagged lines. Sirens wailed off in the distance; New York's Finest searching for a crime. Ghostly tendrils of steam rose from the dark bowels of the sleeping city.
It was raining. It was always raining in New York.
And it suited Tommy's mood.
He sighed, took a swig of whiskey from his pewter hip flask, squared his shoulders and entered the boarding house, kit in hand. Tommy was met in the foyer by the smell of rising damp and boiled cabbage. Ascending the stairs to the second floor, he caught a whiff of the all-too-familiar scent of death. On this floor, there were two apartments, both with doors open just a crack, dull light spilling into the hallway.
Tommy stopped outside apartment 221b and pushed on the door.
Inside, novels filled the straining shelves. Only patches of the floor were visible through gaps in piles of books that stretched up yellow scalloped wallpaper. In the centre of the room sat a green velvet reading chair.
A man was sprawled out next to a coffee table, blood pooled around his head, staining the floral rug. Spatters of red painted the floor. Tommy walked over to the coffee table and examined two lukewarm mugs of coffee
and a newspaper. The heading on the front page read, "The Landmark Killer Strikes Again: Body Found Dumped Under the Brooklyn Bridge."
Tommy sighed. They'd found another one.
And on the rug before him was yet one more.
He bent to dust the cups for fingerprints and came up with two pairs, one that he knew would match the victim. He meticulously jotted it down in his notebook, then raised his Leica camera to his eye and started taking
photos for later.
Curiously, he turned to walk across the hall - an almost identical space if not for the books and the dead man. It had a bed in one corner and a photograph of the victim in a frame. It was a black and white of the man with a young woman - a lover, perhaps. Tommy opened a bedside cabinet to reveal the dead man's identifying papers: Carl Ingram. Tommy wrote that down, too. He searched the remainder of the room for personal items and
came up with a stack of papers. All of it was written down and photos carefully taken.
Tommy walked back across the hall to the scene of the crime and crouched down to examine the body. It was clearly blunt force trauma, made even more apparent by the dented, bloodied copy of “The Big Sleep" lying next
to the man. Tommy could see it all in his mind. The killer had hit Carl in the head with the book multiple times. The dark stains of blood pooled next to Carl showed that he had fallen and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table.
Checking the door on the corridor side, Tommy found more fingerprints. He noted that down as well. Tommy then found the faint outline of wet, muddy boot prints on the rug. Noted.
Time to get to work.
Striding over to the front door, Tommy crouched to examine where all the fingerprints were, grabbed a handkerchief from his kit and dabbed it in a mixture of water and bleach. He wiped down the door knob, stopping briefly to make sure he had erased all of Carl's fingerprints, then moved back into the actual apartment. His next target was the floor. Tommy applied soap and bleach to the particularly messy areas and started scrubbing them with a towel. It took him nearly twenty minutes, but the floor was spotless afterwards. Crossing it off his evidence list, Tommy now glanced at the body and sighed.
What to do with Carl?
Tommy grunted as he started to roll the body up in the rug. Such a shame, too - it was his favourite rug.
Dragging the late Carl Ingram into the hallway and down the stairs, Tommy managed to haul the body into the back of his Model T Ford. He clicked the motor over and drove to his destination.
Upon his return to the boarding house, Tommy stood in his room and surveyed his work with grim satisfaction. There was not a drop of blood or fingerprint left that belonged to Carl. The place felt calm and quiet again,
with just an air of that same adrenaline that came after a kill.
Poor Carl. He had only come to New York looking for work a week ago. If he hadn't talked so much, he may have lived a little longer. Tommy just couldn't stand his incessant nattering and could never pass up the opportunity for a kill. He had been reading his new book, “The Big Sleep” - trawling its pages for hints on how to carry out the perfect crime - when Carl had come knocking for a twist of sugar.
Tommy couldn't stand being interrupted.
Now, in a small room at the back of his kitchen, Tommy flicked on a red light. Across the walls in this room were hundreds of photos, set up in a grid pattern - evidence of every kill he'd ever made. Articles outlining the exploits of the Landmark Killer were placed meticulously on a board in the centre of the room. The Statue of Liberty, the steps of the Empire State Building, Times Square... Tommy was a collector of evidence, just like the detectives he read about.
Tommy smiled as he prepared the developing agents that would allow him to add Carl Ingram's photos to his trophy wall. Tomorrow, a new article would be added to the wall with Carl's body draped across the steps of the
Belnord Apartments: "The Landmark Killer Strikes Again..."
Outside his little apartment, sirens wailed off in the distance; New York's Finest searching for a crime.
And Tommy Higgens finally sat down to finish his book.
It was raining. It was always raining in New York.
And it suited Tommy's mood.
He sighed, took a swig of whiskey from his pewter hip flask, squared his shoulders and entered the boarding house, kit in hand. Tommy was met in the foyer by the smell of rising damp and boiled cabbage. Ascending the stairs to the second floor, he caught a whiff of the all-too-familiar scent of death. On this floor, there were two apartments, both with doors open just a crack, dull light spilling into the hallway.
Tommy stopped outside apartment 221b and pushed on the door.
Inside, novels filled the straining shelves. Only patches of the floor were visible through gaps in piles of books that stretched up yellow scalloped wallpaper. In the centre of the room sat a green velvet reading chair.
A man was sprawled out next to a coffee table, blood pooled around his head, staining the floral rug. Spatters of red painted the floor. Tommy walked over to the coffee table and examined two lukewarm mugs of coffee
and a newspaper. The heading on the front page read, "The Landmark Killer Strikes Again: Body Found Dumped Under the Brooklyn Bridge."
Tommy sighed. They'd found another one.
And on the rug before him was yet one more.
He bent to dust the cups for fingerprints and came up with two pairs, one that he knew would match the victim. He meticulously jotted it down in his notebook, then raised his Leica camera to his eye and started taking
photos for later.
Curiously, he turned to walk across the hall - an almost identical space if not for the books and the dead man. It had a bed in one corner and a photograph of the victim in a frame. It was a black and white of the man with a young woman - a lover, perhaps. Tommy opened a bedside cabinet to reveal the dead man's identifying papers: Carl Ingram. Tommy wrote that down, too. He searched the remainder of the room for personal items and
came up with a stack of papers. All of it was written down and photos carefully taken.
Tommy walked back across the hall to the scene of the crime and crouched down to examine the body. It was clearly blunt force trauma, made even more apparent by the dented, bloodied copy of “The Big Sleep" lying next
to the man. Tommy could see it all in his mind. The killer had hit Carl in the head with the book multiple times. The dark stains of blood pooled next to Carl showed that he had fallen and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table.
Checking the door on the corridor side, Tommy found more fingerprints. He noted that down as well. Tommy then found the faint outline of wet, muddy boot prints on the rug. Noted.
Time to get to work.
Striding over to the front door, Tommy crouched to examine where all the fingerprints were, grabbed a handkerchief from his kit and dabbed it in a mixture of water and bleach. He wiped down the door knob, stopping briefly to make sure he had erased all of Carl's fingerprints, then moved back into the actual apartment. His next target was the floor. Tommy applied soap and bleach to the particularly messy areas and started scrubbing them with a towel. It took him nearly twenty minutes, but the floor was spotless afterwards. Crossing it off his evidence list, Tommy now glanced at the body and sighed.
What to do with Carl?
Tommy grunted as he started to roll the body up in the rug. Such a shame, too - it was his favourite rug.
Dragging the late Carl Ingram into the hallway and down the stairs, Tommy managed to haul the body into the back of his Model T Ford. He clicked the motor over and drove to his destination.
Upon his return to the boarding house, Tommy stood in his room and surveyed his work with grim satisfaction. There was not a drop of blood or fingerprint left that belonged to Carl. The place felt calm and quiet again,
with just an air of that same adrenaline that came after a kill.
Poor Carl. He had only come to New York looking for work a week ago. If he hadn't talked so much, he may have lived a little longer. Tommy just couldn't stand his incessant nattering and could never pass up the opportunity for a kill. He had been reading his new book, “The Big Sleep” - trawling its pages for hints on how to carry out the perfect crime - when Carl had come knocking for a twist of sugar.
Tommy couldn't stand being interrupted.
Now, in a small room at the back of his kitchen, Tommy flicked on a red light. Across the walls in this room were hundreds of photos, set up in a grid pattern - evidence of every kill he'd ever made. Articles outlining the exploits of the Landmark Killer were placed meticulously on a board in the centre of the room. The Statue of Liberty, the steps of the Empire State Building, Times Square... Tommy was a collector of evidence, just like the detectives he read about.
Tommy smiled as he prepared the developing agents that would allow him to add Carl Ingram's photos to his trophy wall. Tomorrow, a new article would be added to the wall with Carl's body draped across the steps of the
Belnord Apartments: "The Landmark Killer Strikes Again..."
Outside his little apartment, sirens wailed off in the distance; New York's Finest searching for a crime.
And Tommy Higgens finally sat down to finish his book.