that toerag took over the pub.’
Toerag? Tess was beginning to feel like she was in an old episode of The Bill. She glanced at Don Rundle’s million-dollar view across the road to the Southern Ocean; yes she was still in Hopetoun, not Sun Hill. Don was off again pointing out his snapped wing mirrorand aerial. Tess was saved by the trilling of her mobile: Greg wanting to know if she fancied a ride out bush. She put a hand up to halt Rundle’s tirade.
‘Sorry Don, got to go. Urgent police business.’
Stuart Miller’s first call was to directory inquiries: Adelaide Police. He assumed Detective Tim Delaney would already be in WA but hopefully they’d be put in touch. They put him on hold; the hold music was AC/DC, ‘Highway to Hell’. He hadn’t heard that one for a while. A fragment of music trivia dislodged from deep in his cranium: didn’t AC/DC now have a Geordie for their lead singer? Then again, he was from Newcastle, not Sunderland, and there was a world of difference in those twelve miles. He used to sing a ditty called ‘Geordie’s lost his Leggie’ about a young lad losing his marble ‘doon the netty’, the toilet. Exactly. Miller wondered how the singer communicated to the rest of the band with a killer accent like that. Hand signals? Mind wandering on to anything but the task at hand, Miller felt rusty and awkward. This was no longer his world.
He’d left the police within two years of the Arthurs murders. As the case grew colder he felt less and less like staying. He drifted into private security, like many ex-cops, but didn’t have the lack of imagination required to do the job properly. One blustery northern winter’s day he was walking past Australia House near the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle and he once again saw the posters of Sydney Harbour Bridge bathed in sunshine. This time he walked through the door. Jenny’s younger sister Maggie, a nurse, had emigrated the previous year and kept on sending postcards peppered with words like ‘sunny’, ‘warm’, and ‘beach’. The last one, just a fortnight before, had two new bits of information: ‘boyfriend’ and ‘cop’. Jenny had rolled her eyes at that news. Anyway he and Jenny and Graeme, by then eleven, were on a plane to Perth within six months – landing on a cold, blustery Perth winter’s day. He’d laughed out loud that day and never looked back.
Somebody finally decided to answer the phone in Adelaide. Miller told his story to the uppity little wanker in South Australianhomicide who made it clear that he thought Miller was a crank; yes, the ULW promised, he would pass on the details to DSC Delaney as soon as he could. Miller slammed the phone down and glared at it. He looked at the clock on the wall, figuring out what time it would be in Sunderland. Four in the morning – wasn’t that a line from a song? He dialled another number.
A 1981 inquest found he electrocuted and bashed...
The same findings as in the Arthurs case.
Davey Arthurs had disappeared off the face of the earth. All they found out about him was that he was born in 1946, almost exactly nine months after VE Day, the original post-war baby boomer. He had worked in the shipyards as an electrician, had a couple of criminal convictions for drunk and disorderly, a self-drawn tattoo of the letters CK on his left forearm. His mother and younger brother were still alive and living in Sunderland and couldn’t understand why he would do such a terrible thing, and his mother-in-law thought he was a nice enough lad. Considering he’d slaughtered her daughter and grandson. Nobody knew who ‘CK’ was; maybe an early girlfriend?
Electrocution, it took a good deal of cold calculation to do that. Bludgeoning someone to death, even your own child, seemed to have somewhere in it the hint of reason, however remote, however mad. Even losing control is a reason of sorts. But fixing jump leads to your wife and child, positive and negative, negative and positive – was that
Toerag? Tess was beginning to feel like she was in an old episode of The Bill. She glanced at Don Rundle’s million-dollar view across the road to the Southern Ocean; yes she was still in Hopetoun, not Sun Hill. Don was off again pointing out his snapped wing mirrorand aerial. Tess was saved by the trilling of her mobile: Greg wanting to know if she fancied a ride out bush. She put a hand up to halt Rundle’s tirade.
‘Sorry Don, got to go. Urgent police business.’
Stuart Miller’s first call was to directory inquiries: Adelaide Police. He assumed Detective Tim Delaney would already be in WA but hopefully they’d be put in touch. They put him on hold; the hold music was AC/DC, ‘Highway to Hell’. He hadn’t heard that one for a while. A fragment of music trivia dislodged from deep in his cranium: didn’t AC/DC now have a Geordie for their lead singer? Then again, he was from Newcastle, not Sunderland, and there was a world of difference in those twelve miles. He used to sing a ditty called ‘Geordie’s lost his Leggie’ about a young lad losing his marble ‘doon the netty’, the toilet. Exactly. Miller wondered how the singer communicated to the rest of the band with a killer accent like that. Hand signals? Mind wandering on to anything but the task at hand, Miller felt rusty and awkward. This was no longer his world.
He’d left the police within two years of the Arthurs murders. As the case grew colder he felt less and less like staying. He drifted into private security, like many ex-cops, but didn’t have the lack of imagination required to do the job properly. One blustery northern winter’s day he was walking past Australia House near the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle and he once again saw the posters of Sydney Harbour Bridge bathed in sunshine. This time he walked through the door. Jenny’s younger sister Maggie, a nurse, had emigrated the previous year and kept on sending postcards peppered with words like ‘sunny’, ‘warm’, and ‘beach’. The last one, just a fortnight before, had two new bits of information: ‘boyfriend’ and ‘cop’. Jenny had rolled her eyes at that news. Anyway he and Jenny and Graeme, by then eleven, were on a plane to Perth within six months – landing on a cold, blustery Perth winter’s day. He’d laughed out loud that day and never looked back.
Somebody finally decided to answer the phone in Adelaide. Miller told his story to the uppity little wanker in South Australianhomicide who made it clear that he thought Miller was a crank; yes, the ULW promised, he would pass on the details to DSC Delaney as soon as he could. Miller slammed the phone down and glared at it. He looked at the clock on the wall, figuring out what time it would be in Sunderland. Four in the morning – wasn’t that a line from a song? He dialled another number.
A 1981 inquest found he electrocuted and bashed...
The same findings as in the Arthurs case.
Davey Arthurs had disappeared off the face of the earth. All they found out about him was that he was born in 1946, almost exactly nine months after VE Day, the original post-war baby boomer. He had worked in the shipyards as an electrician, had a couple of criminal convictions for drunk and disorderly, a self-drawn tattoo of the letters CK on his left forearm. His mother and younger brother were still alive and living in Sunderland and couldn’t understand why he would do such a terrible thing, and his mother-in-law thought he was a nice enough lad. Considering he’d slaughtered her daughter and grandson. Nobody knew who ‘CK’ was; maybe an early girlfriend?
Electrocution, it took a good deal of cold calculation to do that. Bludgeoning someone to death, even your own child, seemed to have somewhere in it the hint of reason, however remote, however mad. Even losing control is a reason of sorts. But fixing jump leads to your wife and child, positive and negative, negative and positive – was that
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