The second girl was Bianca Rossi, a twenty-year-old Italian who had also been travelling alone. Bianca had bid a cheery farewell to the friends she’d made at the hostel in Lorne, and had left the following morning, bound for Melbourne. But she was not seen boarding the bus, and, at the time of reporting, had never been seen again.
Two. When Anita Fournier came to the police station, she had a black eye. She said her husband had hit her. That he was frequently violent.
Three. Anita said that her husband had slept with both Susie and Bianca. That he was frequently unfaithful.
Four. After she had given her statement, Anita left the station and returned home to the house she shared with her husband.
What happened after that was disputed. Some said that Palmer had followed Anita to the police station, and that that’s how he figured out she had betrayed him. But others pointed to the fact that Declan Harrison, one of the two cops on duty in the station that night, was a friend of Palmer’s. They surfed together. They drank together. Harrison was a frequent attendee at the bonfire beach parties Palmer threw for his young surf course attendees. If you believed the other side—and Judith thought it had an ugly ring of truth about it—Harrison had called Palmer as soon as Anita left the station, to let him know that his wife was on to his many affairs, and that Anita had come up with a crazy story about Palmer being some kind of serial killer—maybe for revenge, or maybe just because she was losing it.
Whether Palmer found out because he’d followed his wife, or because Declan Harrison was a stupid prick, what happened next was not in dispute. That evening at nine p.m. Anita had tried to phone her parents in France. Her mother answered the call but it was immediately cut off. The following day, Anita’s battered, broken body was found on the beach. Her two girls, one aged twelve, the other eight, were sitting in the sand beside her, holding hands.
Charlie Palmer’s body was found lying on the kitchen floor with a shotgun blast to the side of the head. He’d tried and failed to kill himself. He’d survived and healed well enough to go to trial, to be convicted of Anita’s murder and sent to prison, but he’d died a year later from complications from his injury.
In the aftermath of Anita’s death, there’d been an investigation into her allegations about the disappearances of Susie Deacon and Bianca Rossi, but a search of Palmer’s house revealed nothing untoward. A prolonged police investigation identified three other young women who had, at one time, taken Palmer’s surf course, and had later gone missing, but no trace of the women was ever found, and no evidence was uncovered to prove that Palmer had had anything to do with their probable deaths. He had, predictably enough, denied everything. Still, it was widely suspected that Charlie Palmer had killed five young women and disposed of their bodies, probably at sea. And when Anita had reported him to the police, he’d killed her too.
Judith went down a rabbit hole. She read every article she could find—and there were many—describing the events of the eighth of June, 2007, and their aftermath. She searched for references to the daughters Anita had left behind, and found only the same rehashed information. The girls had gone to the local primary school. They’d been well-liked. The older girl had been a great surfer. She’d won an under-fourteens competition in 2005, and placed second in 2006. Charlie Palmer’s mother was dead, and his father was a hard-drinking labourer who worked in north Queensland. Anita’s parents lived in Lille, in France. Anita also had an older brother, Bernard, and a sister, Francine, but it seemed that none of them had wanted Anita’s daughters, because reporting made it clear that the girls had disappeared into the foster system.
Two girls. Of course they would have been renamed, and certainly their files would have been locked down. Surely this wasn’t a coincidence. The Palmer girls must have entered the foster system and become Miriam and Ruth Hall. Or maybe she was just tired. Maybe she’d been drawn in by the tragedy of the story, and was giving too much weight to what was, after all, only a theory.
Judith closed the laptop. She closed her eyes. It was late. Too late. She should have been asleep an hour ago. Tiredness pulled at her, dragging her down. She should go to bed, but she didn’t want to bring all of the horror into her bedroom. She put her empty beer bottle on the coffee table and lay down, adjusting the blanket so that it covered more of her body. The heating was off, and the temperature was dropping. Judith stared up at the ceiling. She couldn’t stop thinking about the lost years. Anita had been married to Palmer for over twelve years. He’d hit her, certainly, had killed her in the end, and very probably murdered five other women. What had it been like to live with him for all of that time? How much had Anita known? What had her daughters seen?
Five women had disappeared, and no one had ever linked them, let alone suspected Palmer, until Anita had come forward. Why? He must have been helped by the fact that the women were travelling alone in a foreign country, that there was confusion about when and where they’d each disappeared. People had had mobile phones in 2007—they were nearly ubiquitous even then—but they hadn’t had anything like the features they did today, that made tracking so much easier.
That was no excuse. Palmer should have been arrested years before Anita went to the police. Surely the disappearance of five women over eight years should have prompted the creation of a task force. Connections between them should have been found, including the fact that all five had stayed in the same hostel, that all five had learned to surf with Palmer. It was maddening that instead nothing at all had been done, and that, even when Anita came forward, no one had seen the obvious danger she was in. No one had taken steps to protect her.
It took Judith a long time to fall asleep. She thought about Anita and her daughters and Palmer’s horrendous crimes, but her last thoughts were of the lost women, still lost, their bodies never found. Palmer had access to a boat. He’d likely taken them far out to sea and sunk their bodies deep into the dark ocean.
The fact that he’d taken his own life, and left no answers behind for the families of those he’d killed, seemed to her like a final, painful injury.
Part Three
Dear Margaux,
I cut myself today. I got a knife from the kitchen, a sharp one, and I locked myself in the bathroom and cut a thin little line right up at the top of my thigh. It didn’t hurt much. Just a sting and then a kind of burn. I did a second one to see if it felt any different. I went deeper, and it still didn’t do anything.I didn’t feel any better. Some of the other girls here cut themselves a lot, or they try to. They try to get their hands on razor blades but all our shit is searched, all the time, so if they do get a blade they don’t hold onto it for long. Anyway, they told me it makes you feel better. That for a moment, just after you do it, you feel calm.
That was all bullshit. I didn’t feel anything at all.
I miss you. I hate them for keeping us apart.
I hate them, but I love you.
Renée.
Chapter Nineteen
At four o’clock on Sunday evening, at around the same time that Jack and Cameron were arriving at Balwyn Park for the school party, the last of the film crew were finally packing up and leaving Elsa Anderson’s home. They left behind half-eaten platters of food, along with approximately two dozen empty coffee cups, littered all over her marble benchtops. As Elsa closed the door on her favourite make-up artist, with air kisses and thanks, her wide smile dropped away. She raised her hands to massage her jaw, made her way back into the kitchen, and looked with strong dislike at the mess left behind. She should have arranged for the caterers to come back at the end of the day and pick up all of this crap. What was she supposed to do with all of these dirty glasses and plates, and the uneaten food?
Elsa started tidying up, sorting good leftovers from scraps. She should dump the sushi—it had been sitting out too long—but there were mini beef Wellingtons that were definitely still good, and the compressed watermelon with crème fraîche was still sitting on ice blocks. She tasted the chopped salad. Still good. Maybe. Christ, it was all so muchwork.Even making decisions about food was too hard. She wanted to cut to the chase and dump the lot but guilt wouldn’t let her. So she kept sorting and scraping, and stacking dirty dishes up by the dishwasher, which was, aggravatingly, already full. For a moment she felt like she might cry.
Fuck that. Feeling sorry for herself never helped.
Elsa went to fridge and poured herself a glass of white wine, then turned on some music. Her favourite playlist. A mix of eighties hits and Taylor Swift that always gave her a lift. She started to work faster. The music and the wine helped. Taylor was a real tough kid, and so was Elsa. She could handle her shit, even when that shit included a twelve-hour day and a wreck of a kitchen. At least the girls weren’t there. Celine had taken them to the park.
The clean-up took nearly two hours. When everything was done, and the plates of leftovers were covered and put away in the fridge, Elsa poured herself another glass of wine and took it upstairs to the bath. She double cleansed her face, applied a moisturising mask, and sank into the water gratefully. She set her iPad up on her dressing table and watched clips ofSchitt’s Creekon YouTube. At some point she heard Celine and the girls arrive home. Elsa thought about getting out of the bath, but figured if she lingered a little bit, Celine would probably bathe the girls and get them into their pyjamas and settled.
It was so hard to get good childcare. Elsa had a lot of trouble holding on to nannies, which was something she really couldn’t understand because she paid a good rate, Doris and Lola were far from monsters, and Elsa herself tried so hard to be considerate. Okay, sometimes she asked for a little extra help, a few hours thatstrictly speakingweren’t in the contract. But she always tried to make up for it! And then the last girl just took off with no notice. She’d met a guy, apparently, and hadn’t even bothered to tell them in person that she was off to Queensland with him. She’d packed up her stuff and left when they were out of the house, informing them by email. And the girl before that had been struck by an attack of homesickness so acute that she’d gone home three months early.
By the time Elsa eventually padded downstairs, damp hair tied up, dressed in her new favourite lounge wear—heavyweight jersey casual pants with a matching collared long-sleeved jersey top from her own label—Celine had taken the girls upstairs to bed and Elsa had the kitchen to herself. She checked her phone. She had a couple of missed calls from Jack—probably he wanted a moan about her not showing up for the park thing—but nothing else. She poured herself another glass of wine, and heard a key turning in the lock. Nathan was home.
