Searching for Spiderman by Ally Chumley

Author:Ally Chumley [Ally Chumley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2020-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

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On Saturday 6 September, Bill took a phone call from an elderly woman from Kendall. He’d written down the address, noting that Benaroon Drive was a street just off Batar Creek Road. But he’d misheard the name and wrote down ‘Tar Creek Road’ in his work notebook. The next Tuesday, he called into a shop on his way through Kendall to ask about it when that name failed to register on his satellite navigation system. The proprietor set him straight.

Bill drove out to Nancy Wyndham’s house. She led him around the side pathway and they entered the laundry from an external door. He diagnosed the problem. The machine’s printed circuit board had failed and it needed a new balance switch. Nancy had mentioned she’d hoped to have the machine back up and running before her visitors arrived for the weekend. She didn’t specify who, but Bill assumed it was family.

Bill assured Nancy that he would order the parts right away and made an estimate on the cost for the repair work. As he packed up his tools, Bill arranged with Nancy Wyndham to call and let her know when the parts for the machine would arrive. They could then decide on a time to have them installed. Bill couldn’t recall precisely when he placed the order, but told police that it would generally have been in by 1.00 pm the following day.

At his first police interview, Bill could not remember whether the parts had arrived on Thursday morning or Friday afternoon. It mattered a great deal, because if they were delivered Friday afternoon, he would be in the clear. He could not logically have gone to Benaroon Drive to fit the parts unless he had them in hand. However, if they had arrived on Thursday afternoon at his Bonny Hills house, Bill would have been in a prime position to arrive at the Wyndham house unannounced to finish the job sometime on Friday morning, before or after the school assembly he had attended that day. Anna’s statements to police certainly seemed to float the possibility that her mother expected the repairman to just show up without calling.

At the inquest, Bill Spedding’s lawyer Peter O’Brien accepted the Coroner’s invitation to put some questions to William’s foster mother. Anna’s reaction to Mr O’Brien was defensive when he drew her attention to a portion of her police statement concerning the telephone call she’d made to his client, Bill Spedding. O’Brien explained that he knew Anna had placed a call to the whitegoods repairman at 9.03 am. He asked her why she’d made that call.

‘The machine had been left partially dismantled and unusable,’ she said, repeating what she had said to the police originally – that when she and Nathan first arrived, Nancy had told her daughter they couldn’t do any laundry.

‘I thought two weeks was an excessive time to have to wait, so I decided to check up on whether the parts had arrived,’ Anna’s statement reads. O’Brien wanted Anna to explain why

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