Blood Ties (31 page)

“That woman scares me,” he admitted.

I giggled guiltily. “She scares me too. All that psychic rubbish. It’s so crazy.”

He smiled at me. “Not a believer in the supernatural?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s just say when it comes to the supernatural, I need more proof,” I replied. “Like personally seeing a ghost or being warned about a Bycraft attack by Lavinia well in advance.”

“She’s never exercised her ‘special powers’ to help you that way?”

“Never. She just wants to tell me in gruesome detail about my horrible, violent death at the hands of a Bycraft.”

“Tess! Don’t say that!” he protested, genuinely shocked.

I laughed at the expression on his face. “Why not? It’s true. She’s obsessed with the Fuller family. She’s been predicting my murder since she got here. She’s hoping to be proven right eventually and make her reputation. But I refuse to play along and I won’t let her read my fortune.”

He regarded me gravely for a long while. It was warming up uncomfortably in the car in the day’s heat. Just when I could feel sweat trickling down my back and was about to crack open a window, he started the patrol car and the air con blasted out a welcome wave of iciness. But he didn’t drive off.

“What are you afraid of hearing if she did give you a reading?”

I laughed again. “That I’m going to meet a horrible, violent death at the hands of a Bycraft. What else?”

He was lost for words at that and nosed the car silently into the street. We didn’t engage in any further chat except for me reminding him where Lola Bycraft lived with her youngest children. Often she had other people living there as well, assorted family members who needed somewhere to kip for a while, and usually one or two of her oldest children who had broken up with their partners or who had just been released from jail. Sometimes there could be fifteen people living in that rundown three bedroom, one bathroom house. Jake never complained to me about the cramped conditions during the odd times he stayed there overnight, content to find any spare corner of the house to bunk down in. And that only served to convince me further that the Bycraft family was more a pack of wild animals than humans.

The seven teens had returned there, hanging around on the front veranda, smoking and hastily hiding a bottle of something as we parked. We stepped out of the patrol car slowly and I reminded the Sarge to lock it. After all, Chad Bycraft was only six metres away.

We sauntered up the path and the teens snarled silently at us.

“Put out those cigarettes and hand over the bottle, Kristy,” I directed, holding out my hand. The Sarge looked at me in surprise. He mustn’t have noticed their furtive movements.

“What bottle, piglet?” she asked with a sneer.

“What did I tell you about addressing the Senior Constable?” yelled the Sarge, startling both them and me again. “You want to be the first in the lockup, little girl?” She turned her malevolence from me to him.

“Don’t you fucking call me that! I’m not
little
,” she said, provocatively pushing out her chest, making herself stagger in the process. The others giggled, stupidly drunk. She looked up at him, her lips pouting. “You want a feel of my tits? Only cost you five bucks. Thirty for a head-job.”

“Give me the bottle, Kristy,” I repeated patiently, ignoring her vulgarity. “And don’t go offering to sell yourself to a man again. You’re better than that.”

I don’t know why I tried, but it really bothered me to see yet another generation of Bycraft girls heading down the same slutty path. Surely one of them could rise above her birth curse, have a career, maybe even go to TAFE or university, and not get knocked up when she was fifteen, living off welfare for the rest of her long, fertile life. I had high hopes for Larissa. She was in her last year of school, doing okay in her studies despite her repeated truancy, and had reached the advanced aged of seventeen without becoming pregnant. Yet.

Kristy, only fourteen, was confused by my supportiveness, not experiencing much of it in her short life. Despite the protests and scornful swearing of the others, she reached behind the smelly, mouldy lounge that had sat on Jake’s family home’s veranda since he was born, and held out the half-empty bottle of bourbon to me.

“Who nicked this off Abe Stormley? And what happened to the rest of the bourbon and the beer?” I asked, taking it from her.

“We fucking drank it, didn’t we?” slurred Mikey and laughed so hard that he fell off the lounge. The others ragged him and kicked him gently as he rolled on the veranda, laughing.

The Sarge stepped over him, disgust on his face, and banged his fist on the door. “Mrs Bycraft. Police,” he yelled.

After a long wait, Lola Bycraft opened the door a crack and peered around, the smoke from the cigarette clamped between her lips obscuring her face.

“What the fuck you want?” she demanded. “My shows are on.”

“Step outside please. I want to talk to you about your truant children. And the fact that they’re all clearly intoxicated,” the Sarge said firmly. When she hesitated for one moment too long, he grabbed her by her scrawny, sun-spotted arm and dragged her outside.

“Get your fucking hands off me, arsehole!” she screeched, struggling frantically against him.

In a flash, he had her up against the house, bending her arms behind her, forcing her to drop her cigarette or risk having it shoved down her throat as her face pressed up against her wall. He yelled in her ear loud enough not just for her children and nieces and nephews to hear, but the entire neighbourhood to hear. “Address me like that again and you’ll spend the rest of the day in the lockup. You call me Sergeant and nothing else. Got it?”

She nodded and so he let her go, thinking he had subdued her. His mistake, because the harridan immediately turned on him and spat a glob of saliva into his face.

“I’ll call you whatever I want,
Sergeant
Arse-licking Shit-sucking Motherfucker,” she screamed at him, incensed at being challenged. Her offspring and relatives showed their support with ear-splitting enthusiasm.

He was instantly furious himself, his nostrils flaring, lips pinched together until they were thin and bloodless, taking everything too personally. He grabbed her viciously by her arm again, wiping her spittle off with his sleeve, his face a study in raw anger. He slapped on his cuffs and pushed her down the stairs.

“Open the car!” he yelled at me and I hurriedly reached in my pocket to unpop the locks, thinking that this was a really bad idea. He roughly shoved Lola into the back of the car, slammed the door hard enough to make the car shake and threw himself into the driver’s seat.

The teenagers stopped cheering and began yelling at us, picking up whatever they could get their hands on to throw, Larissa and Mikey running down to bang on the patrol car.

“Let Mum out!” Larissa screamed, pounding her fist on the driver’s window of the patrol car. Mikey picked up a broken loose brick lying in a pile, the detritus of a long-abandoned handyman job, and smashed it against the side. I ran to the car.

“Let my mum go, you fucking pigs!” he shouted, denting the patrol car relentlessly.

“Get in!” the Sarge bellowed at me, and I jumped in the passenger seat and we screeched away, the brick that Mikey threw after us landing with a thump on the boot.

“You’re
dead
, piglet!” he screamed after us and I didn’t doubt that for a second.

“Sarge,” I started in a low voice so that Lola couldn’t hear in the back. Not that she’d hear anything over her angry screaming and frenetic seat kicking. “This isn’t a good idea. You can’t lock up Lola. There will be terrible consequences.”
Especially for me
, I thought desperately.

“
Nobody
talks to me like that, Senior Constable!” he roared at me. “And may I remind you that
I
am the senior officer and
I
will make the decisions around here. And you ought to know that spitting on a police officer is serious assault.”

“Sarge –” I kept trying to puncture through his incredible rage to reach his commonsense. The Bycrafts were tribal. No matter how much damage their mother had inflicted on them psychologically, emotionally and physically as they grew up, they would defend her with their lives.

“Shut up, Fuller! You’ve been too soft with this bunch of savages. I’m not interested in what you have to say,” he dismissed, face hard, eyes fixed on the road. He squealed around a corner, frightening poor Freda Johansson who was about to step out onto the road to cross with her baby in a pram and her toddler clutching her hand.

That certainly put me in my place
, I thought unhappily and leaned back against the seat, my stomach churning with dread. Maybe I didn’t know much in life, but I knew without a doubt that this wasn’t going to end well.

Chapter 16

It took both of us to manhandle Lola Bycraft to the cell. For a tiny woman, she had the fury and strength of a titan. While he struggled to restrain her, I quickly rushed around to find the mattress for the bed. We weren’t well prepared for someone to occupy one of the cells so quickly after I had cleaned them out. Luckily though, the smell of bleach had dissipated in the fresh air, not that Lola could probably smell anything after so many years of smoking.

The lockup’s two cells were very basic, erected in the late 1880s when the station itself was built and nothing except the lighting and a primitive alarm buzzer had been modernised in them since. And the lighting merely consisted of the addition of glaring fluorescent tubes that dangled from the ceiling by rusting chains and flickered annoyingly, their wiring inexpertly tacked to the timber walls and painted over at least twenty times since then. The wiring led out to two round and clunky cracked Bakelite switches located outside on the veranda. The cells themselves were bare squares, furnished with only a metal bunk bed firmly bolted to the wall and floor, normally covered by a thin, lumpy ancient mattress.

One of those mattresses was possibly even the same bedding lain on by the lockup’s most notable inmate, roguish Theodore Bycraft, a local boy turned bushranger of some infamy, who once terrorised the road from here to Big Town. He was known as Mountain Ted because of his regular and notoriously slippery escapes from the police into the thick bush and rugged ground of Mount Big.

Ted had enjoyed an overnight stay in one of the lockup’s cells in 1894 after being captured by Little Town’s sole constable while naked, drunk and asleep at his temporary camp at the base of Mount Big. Humiliatingly, the constable’s own young wife had been happily and firmly clasped in Ted’s arms at the time of his arrest, also naked, drunk and asleep, her petticoats strewn around his campsite with shocking abandon.

Somehow, Mountain Ted had managed to escape from custody the next day. I’d read the station’s observation book in which the poor constable had noted nothing in his elaborate script that very day but the forlorn words:
Bycraft – disappeared again
. He’d moved on himself from Little Town soon after, so there was no record of how his marriage had fared. But out of curiosity I’d researched the good constable and his wife on the internet and discovered on a government database that they’d had seven children together after they left town, so I guess they soon made up from her indiscretion.

Eventually, Mountain Ted was recaptured and hanged for his many crimes in Big Town in 1897. His execution drew the biggest crowd ever documented for a public hanging in these parts. All the contemporary accounts of his death by male journalists not only noted the extraordinary number of weeping women in attendance, but also reluctantly admired him for the sheer cockiness he showed at meeting his death. His final words to the public were allegedly shouted in a loud, ringing voice:
I don’t regret one moment of my life and I thank you well for the fine adventures, my good ladies
. He’d received a deafening ovation from the crowd as his neck had broken on the hanging rope, but had left a lot of husbands eyeing their wives with unhappy speculation afterwards.

In a compilation book of bushrangers, I had once seen a photograph of Mountain Ted, taken by an accomplice or family member. He was posed in one of his campsites, feet spread wide, a pistol in each hand ready for action. A self-confident grin showed his white teeth. Framing his beautiful face were the wild waves of his golden hair, complete with mutton-chop sideburns and an impressive moustache. He was wearing well-filled breeches and a homespun vest over a loose cotton shirt that showed an enticing glimpse of his hard chest muscles. I’d noticed with an unnerving jolt the first time I’d seen the photo that he had been the spitting image of his descendent, Red Bycraft.

And
that
, Lavinia Knowles, was truly spooky.

There were some blankets for the beds stored somewhere as well, but we didn’t currently need them in this warm weather. There were no other facilities in the cells. Any toilet breaks the prisoner needed involved one of us escorting them to the station bathroom on the back veranda. There was nowhere for them to bathe except up at the Sarge’s house. Not ideal conditions by any means. I don’t know if the Sarge had really thought it through, but one of us would have to be present at the station at all times while we had someone in the lockup, to check on them regularly. That cut our crime fighting force in half straight away.

We pushed Lola up the stairs and he flung her into the nearest cell, slamming the door behind her. She immediately banged on the barred door, screaming obscenities at him in her shrill, raucous voice.