Dishonour

by Gabrielle Lord

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction; Mystery; Female Sleuths; Thrillers; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Australia's queen of crime fiction is back with a chilling new story that taps straight into the issues of our times. Detective-Inspector Deb Hawkins has domestic violence in her sights. But as head of a new police unit that targets violence against women within cultural enclaves, she is battling a wall of silence. How can she win the trust of Rana Al-Sheikly, the distressed young woman she encounters during the investigation of yet another gang-related drive-by shooting? And what is the connection between the al-Sheikly family and the crime gangs that are running rife in the suburbs? A series of anonymous emails has Deb following her own domestic secrets, too - back to her childhood in the country town of Garralong, and the tragic shooting murder of her police sergeant father in the line of duty. Someone is digging up the past - threatening Deb's hard-won career, and even her life. Dishonour is a gripping and timely new novel from one of Australia's most respected crime writers.

Release date: August 26, 2014

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 400

Sample

I heard later that 16 April 1992 was the coldest April night in Garralong since records began. It was the Thursday before Easter, and the northwest section of the state of New South Wales was shrivelling in drought.

It was the night my father, Sergeant Peter Hawkins, aged forty-four, was murdered. I was twelve years old.

It was the night that God and I parted ways.



That day, after school, I’d walked to the Convent of the Holy Family where Sister Mary Aloysius taught me piano in the nuns’ parlour, beneath a painting I loved which hung on the wall above the piano. Sister Mary Aloysius told me it was a reproduction of Raphael’s Tempi Madonna and Child. The sister, who’d been at the convent for years, was famous for knowing everything about everyone in the district and surrounding towns, Catholic or not. We were in-betweens – my father was Catholic and my mother came from a Protestant family.

After my lesson I headed to my best friend Kiera’s place where we raided the fridge.

Instead of doing our homework, I taught Kiera the new dance moves I’d learned from Miss Kimberly last Thursday night and then we watched television. Later, I headed off to the library where it was warm. I changed into my dance gear – my short-sleeved black leotard over the pink tights with the hole behind the left knee – and then put my school tunic on over the top, ready for my father to pick me up. I realised I’d left my jacket back in the front parlour of the convent, hanging over a chair. Funny how I can remember all those little details, as if that night were imprinted on my mind.



Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the front seat of the car beside my father. We were driving to the older part of town, to the Soldiers Memorial Hall where Mrs Rita King played the piano while her daughter Miss Kimberly taught dancing.

‘Dad? I’m freezing.’ The car heater wasn’t working.

‘Where’s your coat?’

‘I left it at the convent.’ There was no way we would go and pick it up now; it would be unthinkable to disturb the nuns in the evening.

Dad frowned across at me. ‘You can’t walk around dressed like that in this weather,’ he said, his voice irritated. ‘Now I’ve got to drive you home so you can pick up something to wear. I’m already running late as it is.’

‘Sorry, Dad,’ I muttered. I knew he was really tired. He’d been called out in the morning to a car crash on the highway and now he had to go straight to work because there wasn’t anyone to cover his shift. I also knew that something at work was worrying him, something to do with a visit by his boss from Newcastle; this morning I’d overheard him say to Mum, ‘It has to be done, Claire. And if it’s not done tomorrow, it’ll be too late and an innocent man could be convicted.’

Dad slowed then swung the car around, the tyres crunching on the gravel at the edge of the road. He drove back to our house and pulled into the driveway.

‘Just run in and grab my jacket. I might need it later. In the kitchen,’ he said, his voice softer now. ‘Or I might have hung it on the back of the door. Make it snappy – Gavin’s away on a job and Fonzy can’t leave till I get there.’

With Gavin Bailey, my father’s friend and partner, away in nearby Derby investigating a suspicious fire, and Fonzy – Alfonso Delgarno, the detective senior constable – leaving for Sydney this evening for his rostered days off, Dad would have to be at work all night on his own. There were only four police officers at Garralong, and the only female, Constable Carleen Gilder, a quiet young woman, was on some kind of special leave, which meant the station was understaffed. They were a tight-knit group, and occasionally got together with their partners for picnics along the river and barbecues (when the fire bans permitted), burning sausages and talking shop.

I ran up the drive and through the front door – we only locked it late at night – and looked for Dad’s jacket hanging on the hall stand just inside the door. ‘Mum?’ I called. There was no answer; she must have been out, maybe doing some last-minute shopping before the shops shut for Easter. The jacket wasn’t behind the door and it wasn’t in the kitchen. I noticed Mum’s shopping list on the kitchen table. She’d be annoyed that she’d gone out without it.

Then I spotted Dad’s dark blue jacket draped over the banister near the foot of the stairs. I gratefully wrapped it around myself and ran back to the car.

We took off again, heading back to town and my dance class, Dad driving faster than usual.

‘Have you been using perfume?’ I asked, sniffing the collar as I tugged the jacket closer around me. It had a pleasant woody fragrance.

Dad glanced across at me, his heavy eyebrows drawn together in a frown. ‘Perfume?’ For a second he looked puzzled, staring at me sitting there all rugged up in his jacket, and then something weird happened to his face. Maybe it was only the streetlight falling in wavy streaks across his features as he stopped at the red light making the dark shadows around his eyes and mouth, but I was suddenly aware of the change of atmosphere in the car – the air felt different, hard and even colder.

On the rare occasions when my father became angry, he would go quiet and still, as if he were crouched down, just waiting for the best moment to pounce. It was frightening. ‘Dad?’ I said uncertainly.

But the light changed and he drove on in silence, gripping the wheel.

The drive back into town seemed to take a long time. Something had happened that I didn’t understand, that I didn’t have the words for. The silence between us grew wider and deeper. All I knew was that I had angered my father and I felt very bad about it.

I was relieved when we finally pulled up outside the Soldiers Memorial Hall and saw the sandwich board that announced: Kimberly King – Modern Dance Academy – jazz ballet – ballroom.

I took off the jacket to leave it behind for him and opened the door. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, trying to make things better between us. ‘Sorry I held you up. Hope all the criminals have the night off tonight, eh, Dad?’

He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at me. The minute I stepped out of the car he took off, heading for the police station.

That moment too is frozen in my heart – a sharp, glassy ice splinter that will never melt. It is the last memory I have of my father – his stern profile as he pulled away from the kerb.



My memories of that night and the following days come in horrible jagged shards as if that section of my mind had been dropped and had shattered into dozens of pieces. Although I’ve tried lining up the broken bits, they never quite fit together properly. Some of those memories may not even be mine but rather fragments of what the neighbours told me, or they might even have been created from crazy things my mother said in her grief and pain.

On Friday morning my mother’s friend from next door, Jenny Trainor with the amazing woolly golden hair, the retired principal of Garralong High, came in with the police officer from Mount Margaret, and they sat my mother down and told her what had happened. My mother jumped up and ran out of the house, screaming, ‘No no no’, running onto the road in the direction of the police station. The detective and Jenny Trainor ran after her; they eventually stopped her and half-carried her into the front room of a kindly stranger’s house nearby, some streets away from our place. I don’t recall where I was during all this. I have a memory of someone giving me a glass of milk and a biscuit – it might have been the kindly stranger – but other than that, all I can remember from that morning is seeing my mother, watching her shocked and contorted face, and wondering what would happen to us now that my father was dead.

I remember Gavin, his face grey and drawn, his fiancée, Amy Sheffield, waiting in the car outside, coming around over the Easter weekend looking for my father’s appointments to take back to the police station, throwing things in a box – Dad’s webbed belt and handcuffs, his baton. With my mother upstairs, unable to see anyone, he turned the house upside down looking for my father’s sidearm. Gavin found a box of ammunition with four rounds missing on the top shelf of the walk-in pantry. But Dad’s police-issue .38 Smith & Wesson pistol, serial number 67823, was nowhere to be found. The police station too was turned inside out, I heard later, but the gun wasn’t there either.



I hated the funeral, people I didn’t know staring at me or trying to be nice to me while I stood close to my mother and tried not to cry. The long, polished box heaped with flowers and messages in the centre aisle near the sanctuary and my father’s police cap; Father McElroy raving on about how we should thank God for the gift of Peter’s life and me bursting with tears I would not release, wanting to jump up and yell, ‘Thanking God for his life? God’s just taken his life away – away from us! Away from him! I hate God!’ But of course I couldn’t do that at my father’s funeral. And especially not in a church.

Despite the honour of a police funeral for an officer KODed – killed on duty – I overheard snippets of conversations concerning my father, quickly hushed if people noticed me standing nearby; some man I’d never seen before hinted at Dad’s stupidity in walking straight into a hot incident without sufficient cover, while another gossiped about the mysterious loss of his firearm. I wanted to scream in rage and pain, ‘You people didn’t even know my father but you’re tearing him down! And he can’t say anything because he’s lying dead in that polished timber box.’ But I was only twelve, and good little kids such as I was kept such thoughts to themselves.

Four local men, plus two police officers from the neighbouring town of Derby carried the coffin out past a straggly guard of honour of whatever police personnel had attended from other stations in the local area command. People stood around the entrance to Mary Immaculate Catholic Church, built in 1898 and officially dedicated by Monsignor Eamon McManus a year later, according to the faded gold lettering on a granite stone which was at my eye level and at which I stared fixedly while my father’s coffin was slid into the back of the black hearse.

The adults thought it best that I didn’t go to the cemetery with my mother and Jenny and some locals for the last dismal service at the grave. I was determined not to cry in public and my throat ached with the effort. I stood pressed close to my half-collapsed mother, held up by Jenny. I wondered where my father had gone – that loving, funny, sometimes stern man who had always been there, a huge presence every day of my life. We rode together through the bush on his trail bike, we camped out and swam in the river while my mother relaxed on the bank with a book and billy tea, waiting for us to come out of the water to grill sausages and toast bread over the campfire on a toasting fork made of twisted wire. What would I do now without him?

Some big fat senior sergeant from Altona patted my head and told me I would have to be brave and look after my mother. But who, I wanted to ask, will look after me?



The following days blur in my memory – trying to entice my mother to eat something, watching her shrink from a healthy size twelve into a tiny, hunched eight. Anything she did eat she immediately threw up again. I sat by her bed as she lay prone and silent, staring at the ceiling. Trying to interest her in something, anything, I dragged the television set into her bedroom and set it up where she could watch it. She wouldn’t see anyone from the police, not even Gavin Bailey.

One day when he rang I heard Jenny say to him over the phone, ‘That child needs to know the truth. It’s important she be told exactly what happened. She shouldn’t be left in the dark.’

So a detective from Newcastle called Gary came around to our place, and while Jenny held my hand, Gary told me what had happened at the Davidsons’ farm that night. Old Frank Davidson had shot his wife, Gary said, then he’d shot my father, who’d arrived at the scene, and then, sometime later, himself. It was a dreadful, terrible business, he said. I just sat there, blank-faced and listening.

I was bewildered. My father would never have gone into a dangerous situation unprepared, I knew that. He was the type of man who noticed everything. He was the one who always knew where things were or when they’d been moved. He knew when I’d helped myself to one of his favourite chocolates, which came in large boxes, five rows of ten. He noticed the first shoots in spring, the sound of a bird new to the district. Whenever I’d lost something, I’d always ask my father – not my mother – where it might be. On top of the pain of losing my father was the knowledge that he had lost the respect of the township he had served.



A card arrived from the cousins in England a few weeks after the funeral, from the only relatives we had, with grey doves and white and green lilies on the front and, inside, flowery print saying, Deepest sympathy to you, signed by two people with indecipherable names.



Towards the end of the second week after my father was murdered, Jenny called Dr Phil Burgess, who visited and spoke to my mother in a loud jolly voice about how we couldn’t have this sort of thing going on. My mother had lost seven kilos already from the vomiting. He gave her a thorough examination and that’s when she discovered she was seven weeks pregnant. Dr Burgess told her she had to pull herself together for the sake of her unborn baby. Jenny held her while she wailed over and over, ‘I don’t want this baby. I don’t want this fatherless baby.’

Dr Burgess left a prescription for some tablets for my mother, and I ran down to the chemist and ran back with them. I brought Mum one with a glass of water and then waited eagerly for the result, hoping that in a short while the tablet would make her better, that my kind and loving mother would be restored to me. But the tablets only seemed to make her sleep.

I lay awake worrying. How would my mother cope with a new baby? The thought of a new brother or sister arriving should be exciting. But not now. Not this way. The worry about my mother compounded the grief for my father. I felt as though I had lost both parents.

Then one morning, about a fortnight after the doctor’s visit, Jenny said quite loudly – and, I realised later, quite deliberately – in my mother’s hearing, ‘If this goes on any longer, Dibs darling, you’re going to have to go into care, and so will the new baby when it comes. I’ll call Community Services about this.’

These words filled me with terror. I couldn’t be sent away from home and live with strangers. Jenny saw my distress and hugged me. ‘Could I go next door and live with you?’ I asked. ‘I’d be really good and I could just run in here and help Mum and the baby every day. Don’t let anyone take me away.’

Jenny hugged me tighter, kissing the top of my head. ‘Hold on, Dibs,’ she whispered. ‘Just hold on. I will never, ever let that happen.’

Although my mother showed no response to Jenny’s words at the time, the very next day she got out of bed and showered and had some toast and Vegemite, which she managed to keep down. I was so happy to see her out of bed and eating something. Once, she put her arms around me and said, ‘I had a bad dream, a nightmare, about what happened out there at the Davidsons’, and I think my dream was telling me the truth.’

‘What, Mum?’

My mother hesitated. ‘I can’t quite remember,’ she said at last and took her arms away from me. I knew then that she did remember the nightmare and didn’t want to talk about it with me. Perhaps she was protecting me.



Gradually, over the months and years that followed, my mother returned to something resembling her old self. But she was never the same. Something in her had broken. I think even back then I understood that.

I had changed too. I dreaded going out anywhere. I’d hear the whispers: … father murdered. Shocking really … poor kid … mother completely devastated. He walked into a killer … unprepared … People turning to stare at me in the street, the girls gossiping at school. The artificial attempts to be kind to me. I knew they meant well but I wanted to scream, ‘Just stop it! Just go back to how you were with me before it happened. When I was just another daggy kid.’

Once, just outside the supermarket, I came face to face with Craig Davidson, Frank and Betty’s eldest son. For a few moments we stood in shocked acknowledgement of each other. Craig was a big man with a red face, powerful, thick hands, and thin ginger hair on a sunburnt scalp. After what seemed like a long moment, he shook his head helplessly and hurried away. I think I knew what he was feeling.

Later, it seemed that the grief over my father had been so completely eclipsed by the fear of losing my mother as well, and by the need to stay strong against the gossip of the town, that as my mother partly returned to me, the loss of my father moved further away, ungrieved and fading. But one thing never disappeared. It stayed with me in the bedrock of my memory – the sense that something else happened at the Davidsons’ farm on the night my father died.

Brad’s birth in October brought some happiness, and for a while Mum seemed calmer and more like the mother I knew before my father’s death.

When I topped the district in chemistry and maths in my final year of high school, my science teacher, Mr Heffron, visited our house waving a copy of my HSC results. ‘You must go to university and do a science degree. You have a fine mind, Debra. You’re up there with the best. And you’ve got that quality that makes for a good scientist. I’m sure you know what I mean.’

I nodded, smiling. ‘There are facts and there are presumptions …’ I began quoting.

‘That’s right,’ Mr Heffron said. ‘You’re a doubter, Debra. A born doubter. That’s what a good scientist needs to be. Believe nothing, question everything. That’s why you must do something in applied science.’

I nodded again, not wanting to contradict him. But all I’d ever wanted to do since I was a little kid was join the police force. That was my first priority. Maybe later I’d do a science degree. I’d told the careers adviser at school, ‘I don’t want to marry and have a family. I want a career. I want to join the police force.’ My mother wasn’t at all happy about it, wanting me to do science or law – anything except policing. But my mind was made up.



A few days before I left Garralong to take up my first posting, there was a knock at the door. A heavily built man with thinning ginger hair stood there holding a bunch of yellow tulips from Melinda’s Florist in the main street. For a moment I didn’t recognise him. Then it dawned on me who it was. I hadn’t seen him since that awful time we’d bumped into each other outside the supermarket.

Craig pushed the flowers at me. ‘These are for you,’ he said finally, his face reddening even further. ‘I’m really sorry about it.’ Although he didn’t say exactly what ‘it’ was, I understood that he was expressing deep regret over his father’s behaviour and the resulting death of mine.

We sat together on the old cane chairs on the veranda with the flowers lying on the table in front of us. Despite the huge differences between us, we were bound by the violent loss of a parent – in his case, parents. I offered him a cup of tea but he shook his head; however, the offer seemed to loosen him up and he started talking.

‘I never thought my old man would do anything like that. Well, he was a real tyrant at home but sweet as pie everywhere else. He used to go fishing with your father sometimes … I couldn’t have known that one day my father would – would kill your father. He was a cranky old bugger, and Tim and me were scared of him. He used to get stuck into us when we were kids. But he’d never picked up the gun before except to put down injured animals. He bullied and yelled and swung the leather strap on us until we got too big. Tim left to work in Canada not long after the shootings.’

‘Where’s your brother now?’

‘Not sure. We don’t really stay in touch. We’re not a close-knit family.’

Obviously, I thought.

‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I still blame myself for not doing something to stop the old bastard going whacko with the .303.’

‘What could you have done?’

‘I could’ve shot the old bastard myself.’

I looked hard at him. He was dead serious.

‘I used to go to sleep thinking that one day I’d come back when he least expected it, and shoot him. And our bloody mother, too. For not protecting us kids when we were little. Tim and I used to talk about it.’

A memory from my Goulburn Academy days flashed into my mind: a fellow student had confessed that his main motivation for joining the cops was to get hold of a weapon and go back to his home town of Dorrigo and shoot his brutal father dead.

‘That night I was supposed to go over and have dinner with them,’ Craig went on, ‘but I had to cancel at the last moment.’

‘I’m surprised you wanted to see him at all. After what you’ve said he put you and your brother through.’

Craig grunted. ‘He was an old man by then. I could’ve picked him up with one hand. He couldn’t threaten me anymore.’ He paused. ‘I should have gone over. They mightn’t have had that last fight if I’d been there.’

The if onlys again. I thought of the pain I still carried: If only my last memory of him had been happier.

‘I don’t think those sorts of thoughts are helpful, Craig. Not to him. Not to us. At least, that’s what I tell myself.’

Craig looked away, blinking. Along the fence line of our front garden, the climbing rose was going crazy, the pink and white clouds of flowers. ‘I’m just so very, very sorry for what happened,’ he said again.

We made awkward conversation for another half hour or so, connected by feelings of helplessness and sorrow, both of us haunted by the events of that night.

‘I liked your father,’ Craig told me. ‘My old man was always in a better mood if he had company when he went fishing. Once your father brought that young constable with him, Colleen or Carleen somebody or other. And she fell in and couldn’t swim. Your dad had to do the hero act.’

‘I don’t remember it. I wish I did.’ Any additional memories about my father were precious.

‘I heard what he’d written on his running sheet that night – that someone called from the public phone box at the little post office shop near my parents’ place and said they’d heard a man yelling and a woman screaming.’ Craig’s face crumpled and quivered until he managed to still it once more. ‘That was the pattern. My brother and me hated it. Sometimes we’d hear them as we walked up the drive from school, and instead of going home we’d go to a friend’s place. I used to want to live there, at my friend’s house.’

After a long silence I said, ‘It was good of you to come and visit.’

I watched him walk down to the roadside and get into his dusty Holden. ‘Good luck in the big smoke,’ he called and drove away. I took the tulips inside.



A couple of days later, I drove to where my father was buried in the local cemetery, four kilometres out of town. It was a warm day, the air fragrant with eucalypt vapour, bees buzzing in the flowering gums and ants busy along trails in the baked, dry soil. The cemetery dated from the 1860s, and the names and dates engraved on some of the earliest headstones had been completely obliterated by weathering.

My father was buried at the northern edge, near a clump of eucalypts, next to several Websters from my mother’s family. I leaned against a tree, looking at his black granite headstone: Peter Abel Hawkins, 1948–1992. Killed on duty. Beloved husband of Claire, loving father of Debra.

Whether it was seeing that phrase loving father of Debra, or the fact that I was leaving the town I’d grown up in and everything I knew to move out into an unfamiliar world, sudden grief hit me in a shocking, dumping wave. Harsh sobs shook me. Eventually I managed to push down the tears, angry at the intense return of a grief I thought had been put away a long time ago. I snapped off a spray of creamy flowering gum blossom and laid it on top of the headstone, then I stood back, rereading the words.

Silently, I addressed my father. I’m sorry, Dad, about everything. I wish your life hadn’t ended as it did. But I do know this. I might never know exactly what happened that night, but I’m making this vow at your grave that I’ll be the best cop the state has ever seen. I’ll do it for you, for both of us.

I sprawled on the floor in my living room, a gin and tonic on the rug beside me. My boyfriend, Mark, was away in Western Australia and wouldn’t be back until next week, so I had the place to myself. Mark had a two-bedroom unit in Mascot, but he mostly stayed at my place when he was taking a break from his job out west. I leaned back against the black leather lounge, my legs stretched out with my drink in easy reach. During the day, sunshine fell through the floor-to-ceiling window in the sandstock brick wall opposite me; the geometric wrought-iron bars over the window had been added recently. Now, backed by the darkness of the night, the glass reflected the living room with its warm timber tones and bright red wool rug. The books I’d collected over the years stood in coloured ranks along the southern wall, arranged in the old cedar bookcase I’d taken when the Garralong home was cleared out and my mother had finally moved to Sydney. On one wall hung a painting I’d bought on impulse from a nearby gallery.

I’d been slowly renovating the small, old inner-city terrace since I’d bought it six years earlier. ‘Two up, two down and a horror show out the back,’ was how my best friend, Cecile, had described it when I bought it. It now had a new bathroom, polished Baltic pine floorboards, and exposed sandstone on one wall. An almost identical house next door was home to a family with two boys and I often heard them playing in the backyard. Sometimes I heard family quarrels, but mostly they were good neighbours; I’d watched the boys grow from toddlers into fourth and fifth graders.

When I came downstairs in the mornings, on my way to the kitchen beyond the staircase, and saw the sun making slanting shapes on the timber floor and filling the living room with light, it always lifted my spirits. Just as it did hearing Mark singing in the kitchen as he made the tea or coffee, or cooing over his seedlings in the built-up garden beds out the back. Even my brother’s drawing of my mother, me and himself, a happy pi. . .