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  Concerned about what he’s heard that morning, Bowditch comes looking for Price that afternoon. The little fella tells him it’s been a waste of time. He’s been fobbed off. The young boss offers Pricey a place to stay. He has a self-contained flat up at his house that a lot of the blokes have used at different times.

  —No. I don’t want her to think I’m running away. If she can’t find me, she’ll go for my kids and I’d rather she got me than them.

  —Don’t put yourself in danger, John. If you’re worried, come and stay with me. I’ve got a big house up there and I’m in it by myself.

  —Mate, if a bloke can’t stay in his own fucking house …

  Of course it would be nice to escape, but he knows, as he’s told Dunning, she’s after blood and if she doesn’t get him she’ll get his kids. Katherine hates the eldest, Johnathon Price, who lives nearby with his fiancée. She is so bloody mad and vindictive that she even reckons his youngest, a 14-year-old girl, has sexually assaulted her two little ones. It’s absolute bullshit, but she will say and do anything, especially if he throws her out.

  —It’s gonna cost me $10 000 to get rid of her.

  That was her price. Bowditch repeats the offer of the flat but Pricey doesn’t want to think what would happen if he runs away. After their chat Price knocks off. It’s only 3 pm, earlier than usual. He heads for the pub. He’s a particular friend of the managers, Sharon and Jim Simmons. Sharon has had a soft spot for him and she can see he’s not himself. He’s mentioned to her that he has blood pressure problems and is seeing a doctor.

  He pulls up a stool in the corner and they chat.

  —Is work getting ya down?

  —Nah, it’s not that.

  He doesn’t know if he can go into it all again, but it’s a heavy weight to carry alone. Fuck, he’s depressed. A mate, Frank Heap, comes and joins them and notices something on Pricey’s face.

  —The Speckled Hen been at it again?

  —Yeah, congratulations. You’re the first to notice, mate. Sharon sees that Pricey has a scratch mark under his eye. It’s from Sunday’s blue. He tells them about all the shit that has happened and seems to get himself into a bit of a state. Heap suggests they change the subject. Sharon says she’s got to go upstairs to do some cleaning. Pricey doesn’t want her to go; he grabs her hand in his. She can feel it shaking.

  —Thanks for listening, love. Thanks for such a gentle time.

  The poor little bastard seems so down, she thinks as she trudges up the stairs.

  At 6 pm Pricey heads home for some tea. She isn’t there when he gets back. Thank God. It’s a hot night and he’s not in the mood for being alone so he takes a few beers across the road to young Keego’s place. Anthony Keegan was at school with Pricey’s son; he’s a truck driver and they became mates when he bought the house across the road two years ago. They often drink together in the shed or on the verandah. Pricey loves his kids and Anthony’s missus Jill. She thinks he’s one of the nicest blokes in town and is glad to have him as a neighbour.

  Price shows Anthony and his father, Larry, the court papers from Sunday’s incident. Can you believe they served an AVO on him and not her? They ask where she is. He doesn’t know, but he figures she’ll be back. Like Bowditch, Keegan is worried and says he can stay with him and the kids if he wants.

  —Thanks mate, but if a bloke can’t live in his own fuckin’ house…

  It’s becoming a mantra.

  He has to go, but pauses before leaving.

  —I love youse forever.

  He seems so bloody sad as he wanders back across the road.

  * * *

  At the same time Katherine has driven to her home and opened the side gate in preparation for a midnight return. She should be tired. It’s been a big day and she’s had a lot to do. There have been police, solicitors, doctors and family to see. And she’s taken back the video camera from her sister’s, the one he banned from the house after she used it to get him sacked from the mine, and she’s made a tape of her granddaughter. Nana’s gonna get ya… Nana’s gonna get ya. Then she shot some more footage with the camera sitting on the television. She got her two daughters in one shot and kissed and hugged them. Then, when they were all out of the room she sighed and turned to the camera. I love my children … and I hope to see them all… Somebody came back in and she stopped.

  Anthony Keegan has his tea and is in bed by 10.30 pm, but he can’t sleep. At 11 pm he’s sitting at the kitchen table when he hears a car pull up across the road. Through the window he sees Katherine’s red Lite Ace van. It’s parked next to Pricey’s work truck. ‘The Speckled Hen must be home,’ he says to Larry and then goes back to bed.

  Katherine lights a cigarette outside and prepares to go in.

  All hell is about to break loose.

  2

  Where is Pricey?

  1 March 2000

  Lisa Logan gets up and goes to the toilet. It’s about 3.30 am. On the way back she opens the front door to let the little Maltese terrier out so it can relieve itself on the front lawn. It’s a warm night and she wanders out onto the front verandah for some air. In the darkness Lisa sees a figure walking up from the railway tracks. Hears the slap of thongs against feet. She bends down to pick up the dog before it starts barking and wakes up everyone in St Andrews Street. Looking up, she sees a woman in a light coloured shirt and top walking towards John Price’s place. Despite the darkness she can see it’s Katherine Knight. Knight doesn’t see her; the verandah is shielded by a big shrub. When she’s gone Lisa lets the dog go. She goes back to bed thinking nothing of it.

  Katherine keeps walking. She has a job to finish.

  * * *

  John Price’s steel-capped work boots sit on the front verandah of 84 St Andrews Street like a pair of dogs waiting for their master. It’s after 6 am but the place is quiet and the curtains are drawn. There’s a stillness to the unremarkable little house. The thermometer climbs sharply in the valley that Wednesday morning and the air is already sticky and thick. The sort of day you’re better off watching from inside an air-conditioned office, although they don’t run to that sort of thing round here. It’s all coal mines, tanneries and dusty paddocks.

  Price’s house looks like it needs a woman’s touch. A bland, brick, modern-style house, it sits there like it’s been plonked on the block. A transplant that hasn’t taken. A halfhearted effort at a garden in the front does little to diminish the effect. If you look around the back you’ll find a Hills Hoist, a shed and a brick barbecue, but it all seems a bit barren. A range of cars lines the driveway.

  John Price wasn’t just punctual, he beat the clock. It was nothing for him to get to work at 5.30 am for a 6.30 am start. He liked the quiet of the morning to clear his head from the night before and plan for the day ahead. Everybody knew that and when he didn’t rouse, when the work ute stayed cold in the driveway and the boots remained unlaced on the verandah it was like a small cog seizing in a large machine, throwing everything else out of whack before bringing the whole damned factory to a stop.

  * * *

  Peter Cairnes arrives at work early. Pricey isn’t there. It’s not unusual for his co-worker to have headed out to a job before anyone else, but he gives him a call anyway, just to see what’s happening. He gets no reply.

  The first thing Geoff Bowditch does when he climbs into the work truck is pick up the radio and give Pricey a call on the two-way. The bloke has been on his mind all night. God knows it sounded silly, but…

  He sends out a call on the two-way.

  NOT HOME

  The company’s two-way radios have an LED display that spells out that message when the other radio isn’t on. Bowditch keeps trying.

  NOT HOME … NOT HOME …

  Then he tries again.

  NOT HOME

  It’s a little unnerving. Bowditch persists as he drives toward the depot.

  * * *

  Anthony Keegan gets out of bed around 6 am. He looks through the window and se
es Pricey’s truck still in the driveway. Pricey is always on the road before Keego. Something isn’t right. His wife Jill has heard about the troubles and says she’ll call Pricey and see if he’s okay. She’s concerned too. The phone rings, and rings, and rings. Like Bowditch, she keeps at it, calling and calling and calling. Fear rising.

  After a while Keegan goes out to start up his truck, thinking that its enormous engine will wake him up. If he’s still with us. He turns over the motor and looks across the road for a movement at the curtain, a figure at the door. He goes back inside and then decides he’d better go over. He’s been putting that off.

  Crossing the road is like walking towards a car crash; your heart thumps and your legs are like soft lead, as though they’re protesting against what you might find.

  Keegan bangs on the door and there’s no answer. Looking down he sees blood on the handle but doesn’t even want to contemplate what it means. Hopefully it’s from Sunday night when she scratched his face. He bangs on the bedroom window, softly at first, then louder. Nothing. He notices the work boots and then spots something else too awful to contemplate.

  By this time Bowditch has arrived at work and discovered Pricey isn’t there. He’s told Cairnes to try Price’s home number, then he gets him to find Keegan’s. Before Bowditch’s arrival Cairnes has already called the top pub, thinking maybe Pricey has got on the piss and stayed the night or headed off to someone else’s house. There’s no panic from Cairnes: blokes in the construction industry drink hard and mess up sometimes. His only real worry is that Price might have got a belly full and stacked his car somewhere.

  Bowditch gets Jill on the phone and she’s just saying that Keego is over the road when he walks back into the house. Keego is more worried than ever. Bowditch asks if Kath’s little van is there? It’s not. Which is strange. Keegan’s sure he saw it parked there the night before. Keegan says he’s going to pop up the road and get Ron Murray. Murray and Pricey are good mates—he might know something.

  Bowditch tells Jill he’s going to call the police. He hangs up and begins to look for the number for the Muswellbrook station. One of the drivers, Jon Collison, is a neighbour of Price’s. There’s been a mechanical breakdown with one of the trucks so he’s going home until it’s fixed. He says he’ll drop in and see what’s wrong.

  Ron Murray was up earlier to drop his son off at work and noticed Pricey’s ute at the house. It was 6.30 am and Ron had said to the boy that his mate must be having a day off. He’d never sleep in. Now Keegan’s at his door saying he’s worried about John. Could he come down and check it out? They both walk down to the house together. They again try knocking and yelling and peering through the windows. Ron thinks his mate is asleep, but thinks it odd that all the curtains are drawn. They’re never closed like this. Later he’ll thank God they are.

  Everybody fears the worst, but they can’t just stand around. Ron Murray goes back home to get his car and drives around to Kath’s house to see if her van is there. He can’t see it (it’s hidden behind the shed). He comes back and goes to see Kath’s twin sister Joy, who lives just up from Pricey’s, closer to Murray’s place. As he knocks on the door the school bus comes down the street as it does every morning around 8.15 am. He tells Joy they couldn’t find Kath or Pricey. Joy doesn’t know where they are, doesn’t seem that interested. Later she jumps in the car and drives off, apparently oblivious to the drama going on within eyesight of her home. Joy and her sister-in-law Val Roughan are taking Ken Knight, the twins’ father, to Newcastle for a doctor’s appointment.

  Jon Collison arrives from Bowditch’s and sees the others out the front of Price’s house. Pricey told him on Monday he was crook and he assumes he must have gone up to the hospital during the night. Still, he does the rounds of the windows like everyone else. He sees the blood on the door and starts to wonder. The police come around the comer just as Ron Murray walks back from Joy’s house. They arrive in two cars. Collison takes them around the house and they go through the same futile motions. Banging on the door. Peering through the windows. Yelling out.

  One of the cops thinks he’s seen a bunched curtain hanging in the archway from the kitchen to the lounge and makes a mental note of it. It doesn’t look right. The others haven’t seen it, or haven’t mentioned it if they did.

  Collo gets a crowbar from Pricey’s work truck and they pop the laundry door at the back of the house. He’s about to follow the cops inside, but for some reason doesn’t. It’s a decision he’s never regretted. He waits outside on the landing. The cops are inside for a few minutes, long enough for Collison to work out that something is wrong.

  There’s a small commotion, then they bring Kath out. She’s ruffled, but clean like she’s just had a shower. They’re supporting her and she looks out of it on drugs or something. She looks at Collo and seems to recognise him. He’s known her for nearly 30 years. The cops look pale and agitated. They ask him to move out of the way and the two lead Kath around to the side of the house, sitting her on the ground behind the police car.

  One of the police takes Collison aside. ‘Sorry mate, he’s dead. ‘ Collo looks over to Ron Murray who is watching from a distance. He turns a thumb towards the ground to let the neighbour know what he’s heard. He doesn’t need to say any more. Ronnie understands straight away. The little fella was gone. That was it.

  Cairnes gets onto Bowditch and tells him they had better head down to Aberdeen.

  —What’s happened?

  —The absolute worst possible thing.

  Keegan has called young Johnathon Price even before the police arrived and has told him there’s blood on his dad’s front door.

  —It was weird ‘cos as I was driving over I was thinking, God, I’ll have to organise the funeral… I drove straight in the driveway and they pulled me up to stop … By this stage Katherine was laying down on the ground on all fours, crouched down like a dog and I said to the copper, ‘He’s gone, hasn’t he.’ Graham Furlonger sat me down on the step and he said “Yeah, mate, yeah,’ and that was it.

  Somebody asks where the kids are.

  What kids?

  The two young ones always stay if she does.

  Oh fuck.

  3

  Bob Wells drives up

  1 March 2000

  Bobby Wells is belting up the New England Highway with Mick Prentice in the passenger seat. The older detective always drives when there’s a need for speed; he is a nervous passenger. Mick has to defer to his more senior partner and hangs on as they race up the road. Hurtling towards a horror they could never imagine. The pair started work in Singleton that morning when a call came through at about 8.30 am about a possible murder further up the valley at Aberdeen, a small town between Muswellbrook and Scone in the heart of the coal mining country. It’s an odd place.

  If you look at a map it’s hard to figure out what geographic-economic imperative led to the establishment of Aberdeen. It’s squeezed between Muswellbrook to the south and Scone to the north on a 30 kilometre stretch of the New England Highway and it is overshadowed by both centres. The nearest major town is Newcastle, about 120 kilometres down the New England Highway. Sydney is another world.

  Muswellbrook is big enough to be the place where the young migrate towards. It’s got drugs and parties—all the embellishments of the city right there in the bush. If that’s not enough they move down further to Newcastle. Scone’s a bit more pony club, what with Kerry Packer’s polo estate nearby and a lot of horsey types wandering around. It’s got boutique charm. Packer is Australia’s richest man. And Aberdeen? Well, it’s got an abattoir and a tannery, or it had an abattoir up until a few years back, and recently they got another coal mine.

  Aberdeen was first settled in the mid-1820s by white Australians hungry for grazing lands, only weeks after its discovery by British explorer Henry Dangar. The Great Northern Railway Line reached Aberdeen in 1870 but didn’t have any immediate impact on the population. After World War I the larger properties in the distri
ct were broken up and parcelled off to returned soldiers, who established dairy farms where once wool, cattle and sheep had held stead.

  Aberdeen really kicked on when the Australian Meat Cutting and Freezing Company built an abattoir by the railway line in 1891. The factory slaughtered sheep and sent the frozen mutton by train to the port at Newcastle. The population expanded rapidly after it opened—whereas only 36 people lived there in 1892, by 1894 the meatworks alone employed 200.

  The town struggled to accommodate the influx of workers and the company built barracks on the meatwork’s grounds to accommodate new arrivals. In the early 1900s its owners built a row of cottages on McAdam Street for young workers to buy on a hire-purchase basis when they got married. The strip became known as Honeymoon Lane and many decades later Katherine Knight and her family would live in one of the cottages on the strip.

  In the latter part of the twentieth century the abattoir became the main supplier of beef patties to McDonald’s and at some time you may well have eaten a burger prepared by one of the knife-wielding Knights. At its peak there were over 600 people slicing throats, skinning carcasses and scraping out foul smelling offal. More than a third of the town’s population spent their days like this.

  For a century Aberdeen was a slaughterhouse town and Katherine Knight’s people were a slaughterhouse family. Every local knows the Knights and their kin. They had some notoriety in the area for their rough ways, but an abattoir town is never going to be picket fences and cosy two-by-two families saving to put the kids through university. Meat-workers tend to be a little itinerant and the fact that most places will hire casual labour from a morning line-up meant you would get your fair share of drifters coming through to pick up a bit of work.