The House on Hill Street
| The House on Hill Street |
| Judy Nunn |
| Australia |
| (2012) |
Street - such a respectable address in a respectable suburb of West
Hobart - the perfect place of residence for Professor Jameson and his
wife and sons. But the neighbours are becoming concerned. Eileen Jameson and the boys haven't been seen for quite some time...
When
a gruesome discovery points the finger, quite literally, at the
Professor's house, Inspector Max Carruthers and Detective Sergeant Lucas
Matthews come knocking at the door. It's a day they will never forget ...
Hill Street - such a respectable address in a respectable suburb of West Hobart - the perfect place of residence for Professor Jameson and his wife and sons.
But the neighbours are becoming concerned. Eileen Jameson and the boys haven’t been seen for quite some time …
When a gruesome discovery points the finger, quite literally, at the Professor’s house, Inspector Max Carruthers and Detective Sergeant Lucas Matthews come knocking at the door.
It’s a day they will never forget …
Timothy Drew lived in Hill Street, West Hobart, a pleasant street in a pleasant, middle-class suburb in the postcard-pretty capital of Tasmania. Timothy’s house was one in a line of a half dozen or so single-storey terraces built at the dawn of the twentieth century, which now, in 1983, were regarded as fashionable. Brick-rendered and identical, the cottages were not as picturesque as the stone terraces that were a feature of ‘old Hobart town’, but they were attractive nonetheless.
Timothy didn’t actually own his cottage, he rented it from Henry Jervis, a real estate investor whose passion for restoring old houses had made him a wealthy man, but Timothy
felt
as though he owned his cottage. He’d lived there quite happily for the past decade and, apart from a biennial raise in the rent, he’d had no interference whatsoever from his landlord. It was not surprising – Henry Jervis only wished that all of his properties could be leased to introverted pharmaceutical assistants like the grossly overweight, meek and malleable Timothy Drew.
Timothy took great pride in his house and his garden, and the community in general. He considered it a privilege to live in Hill Street – such a respectable neighbourhood. Good heavens, there was even a scientist a few doors up the road. Professor Jameson and his family had moved into the end terrace just the previous year. The professor was a biochemist, employed by the CSIRO no less. In Timothy’s opinion, a person of such standing was a credit to the community and, although he hadn’t dared attempt to cultivate the great man’s friendship, he always kept a packet of sweets in his pocket for those times when he bumped into Mrs Jameson and the children. This was usually during the weekends when she took the boys to the park – always on her own. The professor was rarely to be seen, he was clearly a busy man.
Eileen Jameson seemed a very nice woman – late thirties Timothy guessed, quite a deal younger than her husband, who appeared in his early fifties. Good-looking, brunette and stylish, as befitted the wife of a scientist.
Lately, Timothy had taken to accompanying Eileen and her children on their stroll to the park. For Timothy it was more of a struggle than a stroll as he waddled beside them trying to keep up. When they got there he would push the swing for the youngest boy, Thomas, who was six. Nine-year-old Robert, fiercely independent, would eschew any form of assistance, swearing he could swing himself higher than anyone could push him. Eileen, seated on a bench, buried her head in a book and ignored the lot of them. Ten minutes later, when the swings had lost their appeal, the boys would gravitate to each other’s company and Timothy, his supply of sweets by then demolished, would be redundant altogether. That was when he would make his departure.
‘Cheerio,’ he’d say, and Eileen would look up from her book and give him a wave.
Timothy loved his visits to the park.
One chill autumn day, emboldened by the dreadful knowledge that, with the advent of winter, the park would soon be out of bounds, Timothy made a move that surprised even himself. He joined Eileen Jameson on the bench.
Clasping a knee with both hands, he heaved one hefty thigh over the other and crossed his legs in a clumsy attempt at nonchalance. ‘I’d be happy to babysit,’ he said a little too loudly.
Eileen glanced up from her book into the currant-brown eyes of his doughy face and the desperate plea that lay there.
‘You could drop the boys off at my house any time during the weekend,’ he said. ‘Or, if you like, I could call by and collect them. And I’m free in the evenings too …’ He tailed off lamely as he noticed that she did not appear particularly receptive to his suggestion.
Eileen Jameson supposed there was nothing sinister in Timothy Drew’s offer. He was just the lonely man she’d always presumed him to be, she told herself. But she found his bid for her children’s company repellent nonetheless. Her response was polite, but unequivocal.
She appreciated the offer, she said, but her mother would never forgive her if she accepted it. Her mother had shifted interstate to be near her grandsons and lived only ten minutes away in Lenah Valley. ‘Mum can’t get enough of the boys, I’m afraid,’ Eileen said apologetically.
‘Of course, most understandable,’ Timothy hauled himself to his feet, ‘just thought I’d make the suggestion. Well, cheerio then,’ he said.
Eileen waved goodbye and returned to her book
The subject was not mentioned again.
Over the ensuing weeks, there were two more visits to the park, after which Timothy saw little of Eileen and the children. Winter came unseasonably early, as it so often did, icy winds sweeping up from the Antarctic, and parks became the realm of only the hardiest Hobartians. But by that time Timothy had lost sight altogether of Eileen. He occasionally saw the professor arrive and depart the house at the far end of the terraces, but there was no evidence of Eileen or the children. He wondered whether there may have been trouble in the marriage – perhaps she’d left her husband and taken the boys to her mother’s. Timothy worried about Eileen.
Then, in August, he was confronted by something far more worrisome than a neighbour’s possible marital problems.
It all started upon a visit to the bathroom.
Timothy’s bowels had never performed well, but he’d come to accept constipation and a painfully chronic haemorrhoid condition as a way of life.
On this particular morning, after a more or less successful evacuation, he followed his customary procedure. He flushed the toilet, washed his hands and turned to check that the bowl had cleared – he was a fastidious man. But upon gazing down at the lavatory, he froze in horror. A sickening sight met his eyes. The bowl was a mess of blood. There were even pieces of something floating about that looked like intestines. He felt the bile rise in his throat. This was not the result of ruptured haemorrhoids. Something shocking was happening to his body. His very insides were falling out. He was a dying man.
He staggered from the bathroom to the lounge and sat sucking in air, trying not to faint. Then, when he felt strong enough, he took himself directly to the emergency wing of the Royal Hobart Hospital.
Over the next day or so there were others in Hill Street who suffered similar unnerving experiences. The common plumbing system shared by the conjoined houses produced alarming results in a number of lavatories. People were understandably terrified.
As the fretful residents of Hill Street wondered what on earth was going on, workers in the nearby sewage plant made a gruesome discovery. A severed finger was found amongst the sewage. They reported their find to the police, and a fingerprint of the digit was telexed to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Canberra. A match was found on record and the finger was identified as that of a woman who’d been convicted of a drink driving offence in Queensland in 1980. The woman’s name was Eileen Elizabeth Jameson. Further investigation revealed that she and her husband, Professor Bradley John Jameson, currently resided in Hill Street, West Hobart.
The inexplicable mystery of the bloody lavatories was about to be revealed.
Lucas Matthews, just turned thirty, had recently been promoted to Detective Sergeant. His senior partner, CIB Inspector Max ‘Curry’ Carruthers considered the promotion well-deserved: young Luke was a good cop, diligent and reliable, albeit a little overly academic when it came to the interrogation process. Luke was of the new breed who believed in the psychological approach. Curry, who had a good ten years on his partner, belonged to the old school. ‘Frighten the shit out of them,’ he’d say, ‘no point trying to reason with crims.’
Max Carruthers had always been a tough cop. The running gag amongst his colleagues for the past twenty years had been ‘give ‘em Curry’, and they weren’t altogether joking. But Curry himself was the first to admit that he and young Luke made an excellent team. They had the ‘good cop, bad cop’ interrogation routine down to a fine art.
It was late afternoon as the two plain clothes detectives approached the house on Hill Street. The street was deserted and, having parked their car around the corner out of sight, they made their approach on foot. Their demeanour was casual – people could be watching from nearby windows.
There was no sign of movement within the house – the front door was closed and the curtains drawn – so the officers made their way down the side path to the rear of the property, their plan being to check the layout of the place.
Away from prying eyes, they took stock of their surrounds. They were in a small garden with a potting shed; a head-high fence separated them from the adjoining terrace house. There were windows either side of the back door and, creeping to the nearest one, Curry peered into what was obviously the kitchen. The room was deserted, but there had clearly been a great deal of recent activity.
‘Holy shit,’ he muttered.
Luke joined him and, gazing through the window, his gasp was audible.
Both men drew their weapons.
They glanced at each other. The look in Luke’s eyes spoke multitudes, and Curry’s responding look said exactly the same thing. In all his years as a police officer, he too had seen nothing like this.
They crept to the back door. Very slowly, very gently, Curry tested the old-fashioned knob of its handle. He expected to find the door locked, but it wasn’t. The knob turned, the door opened, and the two men stepped into the carnage.
The walls, the benches, the floor, even the ceiling – all was awash with blood. Strewn about on surfaces were weapons and tools of every description, each bearing evidence of recent use: knives, meat cleavers, an axe, a hacksaw, and, most repulsive of all, sitting in a corner by the power outlets, an electric blender as bloodied as its surrounds.
Luke wanted to throw up, but he couldn’t – he was too terrified. The adrenalin was pumping through his body at an alarming rate. Who was responsible for this massacre?
Curry jerked his head towards the open door opposite that led to the hallway and the rest of the house. Revolvers at the ready, they started towards it.
Then, to their right, they heard the flush of a lavatory.
They whirled to face the sound, their .38s trained upon the door to the side, which they now realised led off to the bathroom. The seconds ticked heavily by, a full minute that felt like an hour. Then the door opened and a man appeared. In his early fifties, of average height and build, with thinning grey-brown hair, there was nothing remarkable about Bradley John Jameson.
‘Good heavens, what on earth are you doing here?’ he demanded. Nothing remarkable, that is, except his demeanour. Bradley John Jameson was not only unperturbed by the weapons trained upon him, he was plainly affronted by the presence of two strange men in his house.
‘Police,’ Curry barked. ‘Are you Bradley John Jameson?’
‘I am indeed.’ The professor’s face was a picture of outraged innocence. ‘What is the meaning of this invasion? I take it you gentlemen have a warrant?’
Word sped via the grapevine in typical cop fashion. The more grisly the case, the quicker news of it got around, and this case was undoubtedly one of the grisliest.
‘He what!’
‘He flushed his wife down the toilet.’
It wasn’t long before Bradley John Jameson became the talk of every police station in Tasmania.
‘You’ve got to be joking!’
‘Nope, it’s a fact. He chopped her up, boned her out, fed the meat through a blender and poured her down the bog.’
‘What did he do with the bones?’
‘They haven’t been found yet, but he put her head in the oven.’
Having immediately established that the children were safely ensconced with their grandmother, the police had interrogated Professor Bradley John Jameson. He had then been charged with the murder of his wife and incarcerated in Risdon Prison while a full investigation was mounted.
Police were brought in from across the state and a special task force was assigned to the case. The residents of Hill Street were interviewed, backyards were dug up and plumbers ordered to dismantle the common sewerage system linking the terraces.
During the days that followed, police reported to the morgue on a regular basis with pieces of human tissue in small plastic bags. Each offering was examined by the chief forensic pathologist and, once identified as a particular part of Eileen Elizabeth Jameson, it was pieced into the outline of the female body that had been drawn on the mortuary slab. An intensive search of the surrounding area was underway in an effort to find other remains of the body, most particularly the bones. The backyard of the Jameson terrace having revealed no evidence, the whereabouts of the bones remained a mystery.
Throughout the investigation, minimal information was released to the press, and the general public remained unaware of the gorier aspects of the case. There were enough civilians in the know for word to get around locally, however – the Hill Street residents and the plumbers were only too quick to spread the news – and the grisly story met with a common response.
‘You wouldn’t believe it possible, would you?’ Timothy said to old Mrs McGraw from number 95, ‘not
here
.’
‘It’s absolutely unheard of, Timothy,’ Mrs McGraw agreed. ‘This sort of thing doesn’t happen in
Hobart!’
Curry Carruthers was aware of the locals’ reaction, and he found their incredulity both naive and irritating.
This is exactly the sort of thing that
does
happen in Hobart you dumb shits,
he thought. Perhaps not in such a spectacularly grotesque fashion, he’d have to admit, but pretty little Hobart town had a very black underbelly. It always had. Christ alive, this town had seen madness and evil unlike any other – in its day it had been one of the most brutal convict colonies the world had ever known. You never got rid of a past like that. You could cover it with a veneer of respectability, but every so often the shit would rise to the surface – just as it had now.
The naiveté of the locals was not the only element of the Bradley John Jameson case that Curry found irritating. Bradley John Jameson himself was proving an ongoing cause of intense irritation and frustration to his interrogating officers, who happened to be Curry Carruthers and Luke Matthews.