Underbelly 3 by John Silvester

Author:John Silvester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Evil that took an innocent

After six hours of horror she is to die … left in the bush for wild animals to devour what human animals have defiled.

This is a story of Gothic savagery from Tasmania, an outwardly peaceful island that has a dark soul. It begins in a Launceston suburb called Ravenswood. Ravenswood is perched on a hill, separated from the central city and other, more fashionable suburbs by the South Esk River, swampy flats pockmarked with factories, and a subtle class distinction.

It could be any public housing estate in any city in Australia, but it has aged better than most.

Its bulk order beige-and-cream brick veneers are clustered around tidy streets and courts and parks and playgrounds, almost as neat as the intentions of the nine-to-five social engineers who planned it.

A nice place to live, you can almost hear the locals say, and never mind anybody who looks down their nose from the other side of the river.

Even if there is a rough element in Ravenswood, there are plenty of decent people too … and at 3pm on a winter Friday one of them is washing her fiance’s car, a red two-door model. Because of what was to happen to her later that day, it would be wrong to identify the young woman.

She is eighteen, but looks younger because she is small and slight. She lives with her mother and younger brothers and sisters in a spick-and-span house in one of Ravenswood’s longest streets.

She is popular and cheerful. She has been engaged for nine months and plans to marry the following March.

She is the girl next door, savoring the happy lull between childhood and motherhood.

This day she is on holiday from her job at a local bakery. The weather is sunny, with a hint of spring; the wattles in the park nearby are blooming.

It is not suburban bliss, but it’s close.

About 5pm she drives her fifteen-year-old brother the few hundred metres to the Eastside Shopping Village to collect a prescription.

He could have walked but the girl drives him anyway, because she is generous and … well, because she is eighteen and newly-licensed and still enjoys the novelty of driving.

She parks the car outside the chemist shop. It is flanked on one side by a newsagent and milkbar, on the other by a supermarket.

But the most thriving business is the video-shop stacked to the ceiling with celluloid sex and violence for hire to tape on to blank minds.

The boy gets out of the car and goes into the chemist’s. He is inside just long enough to miss what happens outside.

So no one sees evil walk up the footpath in broad daylight. Except the girl. And for her, it is too late.

While the girl washed the car earlier that day, there were other, more sinister, activities in Ravenswood.

Early in the afternoon, Mark Andrew Miller had left his rented house just five doors away from the girl’s mother’s place. He walked through the winding strip of parkland to his father-in-law’s in nearby Rosny Street.

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