Lozza clicked the back of her pen in and out. “Okay, let’s go back to that day Martin took you down the channel. Did you moor the boat somewhere?”
“Next to a dock. There was a path from the dock to an abandoned house. He told me that. We had lunch in the boat, and I passed out, then woke up in the bottom of the boat when it was getting dark. He was furious and he had protest banners which he said he’d found in the old house. He said the ‘greenies’ had been on our private property.” She glanced at the camera again. Lozza had a sense Ellie was playing to it. Perhaps she was playing all of them. Rabz’s words sifted into her mind.
“That kind of woman can be the most dangerous when betrayed or wronged, because you least expect it. They can be deadly.”
“Up until that point I’d never seen Martin so furious. He said if he got his hands on those greenies, he’d . . .” Ellie paled as she appeared to recall something. She cleared her throat. “He said he’d cut ‘those fuckers’ with a knife, stick his gaff in them, and feed them to the muddies.”
Gregg and Lozza stared at her. The air in the room grew thick. An invisible energy crackled around them. Very quietly, Lozza said, “You remember this, yet you can’t recall if you might have gone along that trail and into the old farmhouse with Martin?”
Ellie swallowed. “I not only passed out, I blacked out, Detective. With my blackouts I can be doing things, but I don’t know what I did. I have no recall because the events that occurred during a blackout-drunk period are not encoded into memories in my brain. My doctor told me this once. I blacked out on the boat, then I woke up on the bottom. That’s all I know. And that’s when Martin said those things. It shocked me . . . to think that the man I’d married had turned so mean. I’d not until that point in our relationship witnessed this very, very ugly side to Martin. He was one man back home in Canada, and another man entirely in Australia. It was like he’d hooked me, and he no longer had to pretend.”
“Your doctor told you this about the blackouts?” Gregg asked.
“My therapist.”
“Why were you seeing a therapist?” Lozza asked.
“I could tell you that’s personal, and privileged. I could also tell you it was because my daughter drowned when she was three years old, and I couldn’t bear the grief. It was killing me, and I was coping in all the wrong ways.” Her mouth tightened and her eyes turned shiny. “Look, I know you’re going to go digging up my entire life and you’re going to find out all the horrible things about me that are going to continue dogging me for the rest of my life, like how I was institutionalized for a while. So there you have it. Grief, loss, can all but kill you. It can drive you mad. But I did not kill my husband, Detectives, and I’d like to leave now.”
Lozza regarded Ellie for a moment, thinking of something else Rabz had said.
“Do you know the police in Hawaii thought she’d drowned her three-year-old daughter in the sea at Waimea Bay? Ellie took her out into waves that were too big.”
“Ellie.” Lozza leaned forward. “Can we go back to the clothes you said you were wearing when you first went out on the Abracadabra—the clothes that had your blood and Martin’s blood on them. You said you left them in your garage?”
She shifted in her chair and wiped her nose. “Yes.”
“And you don’t know how that jacket and cap ended up at Agnes Basin?”
“No. I left them in the garage with the cargo pants and shoes.”
Lozza made a mental note to check for the shoes and pants.
“And I don’t know what happened to them or how they got to Agnes.”
Lozza rubbed her chin. “So the blood on the—”
“It’s mine. And Martin’s. I told you.” The hot spots on her cheeks deepened. The atmosphere in the room was getting closer, warmer. Edgier.
Lozza said, “So there is a chance that you visited the abandoned house shortly after your arrival in Jarrawarra—you just don’t remember it?”
“Yes, that’s right. I might have. I don’t know. I can’t recall either way, but it’s possible.”
Lozza cursed to herself. Ellie had just driven a bus through any potential case to be made against her so far. If she’d been at the murder scene—inside that old house—she could claim that any DNA or fingerprints or hair or fiber evidence found at the scene might have come from an earlier time. Or from the earlier boating incident with the knife. She had a defense.
Lozza pushed two more photos toward her—the fishing knife and gaff marked with the boat’s name.
“Do you recognize these?”
Ellie drew them closer. “Yes, that’s the knife I used to cut Martin free of the fishing line when he got foul-hooked. And that’s the gaff I handed to him.”
“So you definitely touched this knife and gaff.”
“Yes, I told you. While I was cutting the line from Martin’s rod, the boat tilted and I slipped and cut his arm, plus the back of my hand.”
“How about this—do you recognize this?” Lozza showed Ellie another crime scene photo.
“That looks like the rope from the Abracadabra. It’s the
