‘Mmm?’
‘You know I love you.’
‘Oh, get lost.’
‘You’re the best.’
‘Right.’ But Katy was smiling. Judith could hear it in her voice.
‘The absolute best.’ Judith started to sing, botched lyrics and notes that were broadly reminiscent of the theme fromThe Karate Kid.
‘I’m hanging up now,’ Katy said.
* * *
It was after ten when Judith left the station. The shitty scooter was still at her apartment, so she picked up a sixpack of beer and got a cab home. She ordered a Thai green curry and took it to the couch with a beer for company and the TV on for background noise. Food done, she put the plate in the sink, then returned to the couch with a second beer and her laptop in hand. She was tired. Her ribs were aching. She’d take some painkillers before she went to bed, but not just yet. She pulled the blanket across her knees and settled in to do some research.
If Ruth and Miriam Hall had been in the witness protection program when they went into foster care, the only way Judith could confirm that would be to file an information request with the Witness Protection Unit. Rocky would have to review the request and approve it, and it would have to go through two to three layers of sign-off before she got any information back.
If, on the other hand, they’d just been two kids caught up in some horror, then surely there should be some trace of that on the general internet. Judith pulled up the list of Gifford foster kids that Katy had given her. It told her that Ruth Hall had first gone to live with the Giffords in 2007. She’d start there. She didn’t have Ruth’s date of birth, but she had Miriam’s from the Walker murder file. Miriam Hall would have been about twelve or thirteen years old in 2007.
She ran a search:
Twelve-year-old 2007 Victoria Melbourne foster
She got a bunch of results—some hits for websites about foster care in Victoria generally, and a hit for a twelve-year-old ‘senior’ dog who’d been fostered by a family just before his time at a shelter ran out.
Okay. That wasn’t getting her anywhere. Judith tried again.
Murder family father mother child Melbourne Victoria 2007
This time she got hits about a gangland killing, and something about a cold case investigation into the possible murder of a wife by her husband. There were also a few hits on academic papers examining the phenomenon of filicide, the killing of a child by a parent or a parent-equivalent.
Hmm.
She still wasn’t getting anywhere. Judith took a sip from her beer. She needed to think big. A sealed file meant a story that was seriously newsworthy. Something so big that journalists couldn’t be trusted to stay away from two little girls in its aftermath.
Biggest crime story Melbourne Victoria 2007
Immediately, her page flooded with results.
POLICE ARREST SUSPECTED BACKPACKER KILLER
CHARLIE PALMER ARRAIGNED
FOUR MISSING, NO BODIES FOUND
Judith clicked on the first result and quickly skimmed through the article, before moving on to the second article, and then the third. Charlie Palmer. She remembered the case. She would have been, what, twenty-three? Two years into her career as a cop, she’d still been very much in uniform, working traffic with Bob Johnson, a fifty-six-year-old Queenslander with a drink problem and a deeply engrained resentment of ‘women, Asians and Aboriginals’. Bob had been an equal-opportunity hater and Judith had had her hands full. The Palmer case had also been way beyond her pay grade, but she remembered some of the details of the case, and reading through the articles quickly brought it all back.
Charlie Palmer had been a forty-five-year-old surf shop owner from Fairhaven Beach, a small seaside town near Lorne in Victoria. Palmer had been married to a woman named Anita Fournier, and they’d had two daughters. Anita was only eighteen when she first met Palmer, who was thirty-three at the time. She’d fallen pregnant and they’d got married, had a daughter, then another. From the outside, everything had seemed great. Anita had raised the girls and helped out with the surf shop, and Palmer’s business had boomed. Later, people said that he had a reputation. That he slept with young women who came to his surf programs, that he had a temper, that he was slow to pay suppliers and got violent, at least twice, with suppliers who had an issue with that.
But all of that only came out later. The truth was, no one thought there was anything at all wrong with the Palmer family until Anita took herself to the only police station in their small town late on Friday night, eighth of June 2007.
It never became clear exactly what Anita reported to the police that evening, but the officers she’d spoken to were later accused of negligence. People said that they should never have let her leave the station. That they should have taken Anita and her girls into protective custody straight away. People said that her evidence wasn’t taken seriously, that she was ignored because she was a woman, that it was assumed that she was after some kind of revenge for marital infidelity. Judith didn’t know how much truth there was to those accusations. Even parsing through all of the articles written in the months and years after it all went down, there were only a few ascertainable facts.
One. Anita went to the police to report her concerns about her husband. She said she was worried about two young women, both of whom had taken Charlie Palmer’s surf course, both of whom had then supposedly left town, neither of whom ever made it to their next destination.
The first girl was nineteen-year-old Susie Deacon. She was English, from a small town in Pembrokeshire. Susie was travelling alone, but she was due to visit her aunt in Sydney and she never arrived.
