CHAPTER A On a crisp November night, when this century was not yet five years old, fiendish cackles spat from a fire raging through a building. I harkened to those uncaring chortles. I whistled and sang as I watched forbidding flames consume the building. But that was not the only fire in a building owned by a man. One of several men whom I knew had slithered their way out of legal responsibility for immoral activities. Though their cleverness had removed them from the clutch

CHAPTER B But before narrating the incident of a fire and a murder, there is another incident I will get off my chest. This incident is about an encounter with a guy in a tyre workshop decades after that first named incident. I reached the tyre workshop, where crumpled food wrappers sprawled along the edge of the broken concrete footpath to either side of the entrance doorway. Greasy detritus, pockmarked with sprouting weeds, that rustled under the cold, poking stabs of a mor

CHAPTER C A warm afternoon breeze lashed greasy food wrappers, swirling them around my ankles, as I arrived at the glass door entrance to the tyre workshop. I held the backpack in one hand and pushed the door with the other. I stepped through the doorway and wended my way, past coils of electrical wiring and men on ladders, towards the back of the building. I didn't see the pasty-faced slimeball. Instead, a woman greeted me as I drew close to the back wall. 'Hi! I'm June,' s

Chapter D 'So,' Anne said, as we sat together sometime during the 1970s, 'the Eugenics museum is no more and the surgical theatre and other rooms on the ground floor are now derelict.' I paused before replying. 'Apart from that part which male nurses use as a brothel,' I whispered as I shifted my position on the stone bench we were sitting on. 'What! A brothel! Oh my God!' Anne exclaimed and shook her head. We sat in silence as the rays of the setting sun glinted off the du

CHAPTER E 'So, the bitches have buggered off? And you reckon you gave nothing away, eh? Am I right?' The man's menacing eyes raked the face of the woman sitting across a table from him. He leaned forward across the table as the dark green vinyl bench seat on which he sat creaked. The woman drew back. She pressed herself into the padded backrest of the light grey vinyl bench seat on which she tensed her nervous self. She squirmed, like a worm on a baited fishing line, as she w

Chapter F                             'Stuff happened at the farmhouse last night, crazy, nasty stuff,' Rebekah exclaimed as she walked out from behind a chrome edged Forest Green Formica counter. Her shoes clacked across shiny square black and white Lino floor tiles while high above her, four fans whirred along the length of a grimy pressed metal ceiling. The fans ruffled the hot, dusty morning summer air of a town on the North Coast of New South Wales as Rebekah strode towa

CHAPTER G Though dealing with Clare's incarceration in the asylum was straightforward, dealing with her brother Bill was something else. His febrile nature was challenging to address, no matter the setting or the occasion. A fact written about in Clare's journals and an issue observed by Rebekah when Bill met Clare in the milk bar. An encounter a couple of days back from where Rebekah was now, sitting in the front passenger seat of the Buggy. She sat alongside Clare on a sunn

CHAPTER H One over-time afternoon shift, about a week after my talk with Belinda, I walked into Banksia's Staff Room to make myself a cup of coffee. While making it, I gazed through the closed sliding glass door that opened onto a concrete courtyard. An open dusty wind-swept space that led out from the back of the Staff Room towards the black asphalt of a car park. After making the coffee, I thought about where to drink the brew, either inside or outside, where mucky newspape

CHAPTER I A glowing cigarette marked the stealthy movements of two figures as they emerged from the shadows of a spreading Moreton Bay Fig Tree. The dark-clothed figures, with cloth caps pulled low over their faces, moved through a full moon's gentle light towards a derelict building. Their shadows slithered along the tire tracks which scarred the ground leading to the ash-smeared ruins. The glowing cigarette fell to the ground as the figures drew closer to the blackened she

CHAPTER J 'Here's my uncle!' Anne exclaimed one afternoon in our house on Wentworth Avenue, Vaucluse a couple of weeks after we left the farmhouse on the North Coast. The newspaper she had been reading in the lounge room rustled as she carried the paper out onto the veranda. As she walked along the veranda, gusts from an icy wind blew onto the green and white striped canvas blinds. Like sails on a yacht, the blinds billowed out into the veranda. The cords holding them to t

CHAPTER K As I had read Clare's journals and had noticed Mike in action at the asylum where I worked, I had no hesitation in confirming...