Underbelly 5 by John Silvester

Author:John Silvester
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742699356
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

JUST as southerners go north in winter, seeking the sun, northerners head south in summer to avoid it. One of the perks of working for the Queensland Government north of Rockhampton is getting five weeks annual leave instead of four – a legacy of when it took a week to travel to and from Brisbane by train or steamer.

But, by the 1960s and 1970s, with better roads and cars, a traveller could go a long way in a week – and five weeks was enough time to visit Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide. Relatives know that the Browns visited the youngest of his wife’s sisters and her husband in Victoria more than once. No-one willing to talk about it now knows if Brown ever went on to South Australia.

But Christine Millier has her suspicions. She believes the man she’s known all her life killed the Mackay sisters, and that the fact a jury did not reach a verdict in a murder trial proves only that its members could not be told everything the family and the police know. There are coincidences that intrigue investigators, though they would never be put before a jury. Judith and Susan Mackay’s bodies were found at Antill Creek at the spot where Brown had taken little girls to molest them. That place was only 500 metres from where the body of a murdered teenager was found in 1975.

Her name was Catherine Graham, and she was last seen selling encyclopaedia door to door, near Brown’s house. The last night of her life she had made a call to her mother in Brisbane from a public telephone box. The last thing Graham told her mother was that a man was standing near the telephone box, staring at her, and that she didn’t like the look of him.

Other things unsettle Millier and her sister, Merle Moss. They believe that around the time of Marilyn Wallman’s disappearance in 1972, the Browns were visiting Hester’s relatives nearby, in Mackay. His car broke down, causing them to come home by train. Brown returned alone to get the car, the story goes, and didn’t come back to Townsville for some time. All the police can confirm is that a ‘chalky blue’ Vauxhall was seen in the district around the time of Marilyn Wallman’s disappearance.

In early 1991, Christine was working as a carer with teenage wards of the state, at what had been the local orphanage, where Brown had once been a regular visitor as maintenance man. On Wednesday, 23 January, she wrote in her diary: ‘Kids (state wards) and I went for walk to Strand. Arthur Brown drove by and the kids called him “rock spider”, shouting it out. Eventually they told me what a rock spider was.’

‘Rock spider’ is prison slang, never used jokingly, for a child molester. Somehow, at 79, Brown had a reputation outside the family as a sex offender.

Some instincts die hard. In Brown, the reflex to boast about what he’d seen and done was stronger, at times, than his sense of self-preservation.

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