The Darkening

‘Sugar?’ he asked, and placed a packet of cubes in front of his sister.

‘Given up,’ Suzette replied, taking the cup with a nod. She hesitated, then dropped three cubes into her tea. ‘Fuck it.’

Her gaze slipped down to Nicholas’s hand. He remembered her expression changing from mild cynicism to pale fear when she saw the puncture wounds in his hand. Right now, she looked ready to cry. And why not? He just piped her aboard the good ship Flip-out and set sail for Crazy Island.

They sipped their tea without speaking, listening to the ocean wash of distant tyres on wet road.

It had been about an hour since he’d heard the sharp rap on his front door. He’d hurried to hide away the papers he’d been laying out on the scarred and peeling coffee table, and opened the door on his drenched, dreadfully pale sister.

‘I believe you,’ she’d said.

He let her in, gave her a towel, boiled the kettle. He asked her what made her change her mind.

‘Quill had a little white dog,’ explained Suzette. That was when Nicholas felt the mug slip from his dumb fingers, and hot tea and shards of ceramic scattered everywhere. She was helping him clean up when she noticed the pile of papers he’d hurriedly hidden under the coffee table.

‘What are those?’ she’d asked.

He’d lied so badly that she simply walked over, picked them up and started flicking through them. Then it was her turn to be struck silent.

Now, on the coffee table, the A4 pages were spread out again: printouts of old black and white photographs from Nicholas’s search at the State Library. Bullock team and the abandoned water pipe. The funerals of the surveyors and auctioneers. The old real estate flyers. The unnerving image of the Myrtle Street shop in 1905, with the ghostly blur of Victoria Sedgely holding her white dog.

He’d talked her through them all one by one. The last printout was now face down on Suzette’s lap; on its hidden side was the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton laying the foundation stone of the Anglican church. When Suzette first saw it, her lips thinned and her eyes grew as wet and unfocused as the rain-smeared windows.

‘Quill,’ she’d whispered, then turned the image over so she didn’t have to look at it.

He’d made another pot of tea while she collected herself. And then they sat, brother and sister, trying to believe the impossible.

‘It’s. .’ Suzette shook her head.

‘It takes a while,’ said Nicholas. He watched her carefully.

‘Did you look up other records for Eleanor Bretherton?’

He nodded.

‘And?’

‘One paragraph in the Ipswich Times mentioning a donation for children with rickets from “philanthropist spinster E. Bretherton”. That’s all.’

Suzette fell silent. She turned her head and looked out the window in the direction of the woods.

‘I don’t know what to think.’

She put down her tea and delicately picked up the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton by its corner, stared at the old woman’s hard face. She was in her sixties, her brow furrowed, staring at the lens, trying to penetrate it and memorise the photographer for retribution later. This was the face they’d passed almost daily on their way home from school, coolly looking out from her gloomy shop over her tall counter or her sewing machine. Suzette handed the offensive image back to Nicholas and he placed the sheet with the others.

‘It is her, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Mrs Quill? Yes.’ She crooked her arm around a knee.

Nicholas nodded. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘You okay to see it?’ She looked at him and shrugged.

Am I okay, though? he wondered. He took a breath and reached into his satchel and produced another handful of A4 pages held with a bulldog clip. ‘I had to go into the microfiche catalogue for these.’

The printouts were of enlarged newspaper articles.

‘Two thousand and seven,’ he said, and laid down the first. The headline read ‘Confessed Killer Charged with Murder’. It showed thin, harried cleaner Elliot Guyatt stepping awkwardly from a police paddy wagon behind the Magistrates’ Court.

Nicholas laid down the next. ‘Nineteen eighty-two.’ The bold text read: ‘Missing Boy Found Murdered’. The half-tone black and white photograph was a portrait of Tristram Boye smiling at the camera, forever ten years old. Suzette let out a sad sigh like a tiny ‘Oh’.

‘Late fifties,’ Nicholas said. ‘Local Twelve-Year-Old Found Dead — Tragedy’. The photograph captured two distraught parents being comforted by police detectives wearing fedoras.

‘Early forties,’ sandwiched between an item on jungle troops and ration changes: ‘Young Girl Missing — Public Asked for Information’.

‘Nineteen thirty, 1912, 1905.’ He laid down three that were just paragraphs without pictures: ‘Western Suburbs Boy Missing’; ‘Oliver Girl Found Murdered, Killer Confesses’; ‘Police Lose Hope for Missing Child — Presumed Dead’.

He watched Suzette. Her face was almost white.

‘Third-last one,’ he said. ‘From the Moreton Bay Courier, 1888.’ The small paragraph was headed ‘Murdered Boy Had Throat Cut’.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The pile of papers sat between them, and Nicholas could almost feel their presence, as if something alive and poisonous was lying on the table. The rain drummed on the road, on the tiled roof of the flat, the window.

‘Mostly boys. Some girls. Average fourteen point four years apart,’ said Suzette.

Nicholas raised his eyebrows, impressed.

‘Economist,’ she explained. ‘Statistics are my thing.’ She lined up the papers, moving them around quickly like cups on the table of a sideshow swindler. She frowned. ‘Three of the child murders occurred in the same years as other events.’

Nicholas nodded in grudging admiration. It had taken him over an hour to make that connection. One child was murdered in the same year the auctioneer Thorneton died; another child had been found dead the year the pipeline was abandoned; another was killed the year Eleanor Bretherton funded construction of the Anglican church.

‘How far back does it go?’ she asked.

‘I checked back as far as I could, right back to the first year of the Courier in 1846. There were lots of gaps, sometimes weeks without entries, so any articles about child murders or missing children could have been in papers that weren’t archived. But I did find this.’ He placed down the last A4 printout. ‘It’s an excerpt from the captain’s log of a ketch named the Aurora.’ Nicholas read aloud: ‘“Monday, 24 April 1848. Posted notice to positively sail for Wide Bay from Kangaroo Point on 6 May. Discussed with First and agent an increase of charges to 30s per ton, agreed same. Commenced taking cargo this afternoon. Received news that William Tundall (cabin boy) missing. Raised volunteers from crew to search nearby bushland tomorrow.”’

He looked at Suzette. She lifted her chin and gazed out the window. No light was left in the day outside, and the rain fell steadily. He felt a sudden pang of fear.

You’re a fool for letting her in on this.

‘You can see why I wanted you to just go home-’

She cut him off with a glare.

‘I’d never have forgiven you,’ she said. ‘Where’s the last one?’

‘What?’

‘Before, you said “third-last”. There’s one more clipping.’

Nicholas nodded. From his pocket he withdrew the folded sheet of paper that had slipped out of the Tallong High School yearbook he’d found in their father’s suitcase. He opened it up and let her read about how young Owen Liddy never made it to his model railway exhibition in 1964. Suzette delicately picked up the old clipping, turned it in her fingers.

‘Where did this one come from?’