Welter

By Tracey Lee

On New Year's Day, a young woman's body is found on a quiet beach. Her mother is devastated and denies the coroner's finding that her child died from misadventure. Despite her own personal tragedy, Lily O'Hara, with Mick Flynn, immerses herself in the case. In her search, she encounters a complex group of young people who have both loved and loa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shooting Star Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781925821352

Tracey Lee

Tracey grew up in the regional city of Launceston in Tasmania, the beautiful island state in Southern Australia. After graduating from university, she started a very rewarding teaching career, which has spanned thirty-two years. She has been married to her husband, Greg, for twenty-six years and is the mother of two adult children, Ellen and Patrick. While living in Hobart, she was a founding member of a writing group called the Aphorism Club. The writers published an anthology of their work in 1999. The group and the work they explored during those years remains an important part of her development as a fiction writer. In 2005, Tracey completed a master’s in creative writing at the University of Canberra. Both her teaching and writing are influenced by an appreciation of what motivates human behaviour, what maintains equilibrium, and how we cope with the disturbances that threaten that balance. Tracey predominantly writes adult fiction that reflects on ordinary people responding to extraordinary events. In 2015, Tracey and Greg moved from Canberra to the south coast of New South Wales. The milder weather and beautiful beach environment have been most conducive to fulfilling a life’s ambition to publish further work.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Alittle voice from somewhere called me by an unfamiliar name. I heard the urgency in the call but from under the weight that lay upon me I could not answer. I could not reach out and stem the fear in that plaintive sound. I was drowning in a turbulent sea but the water did not exist. I felt silenced by the spindrift that pierced me as the waves rolled me over and over but the voice persisted and I knew that I had to save myself.

I simply had to open my eyes. I would emerge from the raggedness of the unrelenting dream and know that I lay in my own bed, lying beneath clean white sheets; suffocated only by linen and sadness. The type of sadness that feels much heavier when you finally lie down and pull the blankets up and over the face. In that cocoon you can succumb to the pounding tide of grief and hear the bleakness of your own heartbeat and hope that at some time in the night you will be claimed by sleep and that voices that only serve to make the loss more painful will be stilled.

‘Mummy.’ She persisted. She was her mother’s daughter. She stood close beside the bed where I lay immersed in the fog of my night-time misery. She peeled back the sheet from my face. Stretching from the floor she used her sticky fingers to push one eyelid up which resulted in the inevitability of my response. I wanted to say go away; I can’t bear it. But the gentle features of my two-year-old, just recently awake herself, aroused in me the reserves of strength I needed to reach out and drag her into the bed with me.

She wriggled about giggling in a way that could only bring joy and never anger or rejection.

‘Audie, you had to let Mummy sleep.’ Now we were joined by her four-year-old brother Teddy. Audrey and Edward Swan were extraordinary replicas of their parents. Teddy had Phillip’s sandy hair and height, a blue-eyed steady gaze. Audrey looked more like me; ginger curls that could not be contained, pale as winter-tide foam and quite petite. She would never be tall like the Swan family. She had O’Hara written all over her genes.

Our beautiful babies had been born two years apart. Both, in the summertime. Phillip was thrilled with a son and daughter and had managed both times to be available to attend the births. We wrangled over names and finally settled on Edward Phillip Swan always known as Teddy. When number two turned out to be a girl I somewhat fancifully wanted to call her Billie after the aunt who raised me, but we wanted a name that had few associations with the sadness of my past. A name free of the O’Hara miseries and one that simply was her own. We named her Audrey Margaret. Phillip’s parents were so thrilled with the additions to the family. The other grandchildren were growing up and seemingly more independent and less interested in the great family gatherings that first drew me into the Swan world. So, with our two, along with the next youngest, Sarah, they were back in the thick of grand parenting.

Phillip continued to work for the Australian Federal Police so the children’s early years were spent between our Canberra home and our seaside cottage. They were beach babies though. Here, perched above the creek at North Broulee they felt most at home and took to the surf like seal pups. Phillip, and his best friend and brother-in-law Max, had the makings of their own surf school with the brood of nephews and nieces, sons and daughters. My favourite times were when Audrey was too small for the surf and we sat under an audacious umbrella on the beach and watch the two fathers herd small children into the water. Phillip with Teddy, Max with Sarah, and the others, mainly the boys, adventuring further and further out into the waves. We were a tribe. Rowdy, fearless and in tune with the world we called home.

Even with the noise of the two babies now in my bed I could hear the winter surf. The sea itself seemed to be pounding down the life I’d built and despite the noisy joy that Teddy and Audrey brought to me every day the burden of loss would not leave. The house had other visitors who spent time wandering in and out. Usually in the morning someone would arrive to let me rest, knowing that the nights would have been sleepless. I refused to take anything that might bring artificial rest. I was determined to ride out the tempest and conquer the darkness. This morning it was Peter Swan, my father-in-law who came to see, feed and water the children and let me lay in bed till my body could bear to move. He smiled as he looked at the three of us, ‘Sorry Lily. I did try to stop them waking you. They are fast.’ He easily hoisted the two of them into his arms and strode off to the kitchen where he had made them breakfast.

Phillip was so like his father and despite Peter having turned seventy in the January just past he remained fit and strong. Only his hair had lost its sandy colour and had gone grey. It almost happened overnight. Well, at least since January. It was now June and we were having a cold snap across the state. It had snowed in Canberra and while we would never reach the minus 6s and 7s of the capital, we felt the chill of mornings where the temperatures were in single digits. For us coastal dwellers, it was cold.

With the children now safe with Pa, as they called him, I lay back into the now tangled sheets and pulled the covers up to keep the chill out. I rolled onto my side and stretched my arms out to Phillip’s side of the bed and felt the slight indentation that his big body had left. His pillow had the same slight hollow where his head rested. With my eyes closed I could smell his hair and feel the warmth of his body but with my eyes open only emptiness remained. Phillip was gone. And I could not endure it. I had been felled by the news of his death. His murder had left me tattered and all that I could managed was a threadbare facsimile of the Lily O’Hara-Swan who lived before. On the outside I appeared to be me, functional but weakened, paler than anyone thought possible. But inside nothing felt normal. A screaming rage boiled inside me and all I could hear was the sound of my voice screeching for the injustice of the loss.

For five months I had floundered in the weltering. Max, Phillip’s family and my friends Helena and Mick had stood by me waiting for me to breathe again. But the injury had penetrated deep and I could not seem to come back into the light of their love and support. I functioned for the children, but I’d buried my heart with Phillip’s body.

Chapter 2

Women survive the loss of love; they overcome. It is built into us. Certainly built into the O’Hara women who rode out storms worse than the one I faced. I thought of my aunt, Billie, and her lost love and little baby. She progressed through the rest of her life as if she had not been wounded. Billie had never been a lay-down-and-die kind of woman. Even when faced with her own mortality and weakening body she did not complain. She had buried her brothers and parents and yet she maintained the dignity and stature of one untouched by grief. But Phillip’s ugly death was so unexpected and so brutal that I felt unable to rise above the pain. He had died at the hands of a selfish, drug-addled monster. Along with my grief rose my anger and bitterness that such careless people existed and that their actions left families bereft.

On the day he died Phillip and his partner Duncan Howell had driven out to a property near the tiny community of Hall. They had gone to question a young man, Joshua Cooper, and his mother, Melissa Burns. The pair had been arrested two weeks before on possession charges when they were found to have a small number of ecstasy tablets on them. The pair, and their extended family, were known to police and had ties to a local bikie gang. The suspicion was that they were either manufacturing or trafficking methamphetamine, also known as ice. The small farm that the family bunkered down in had been identified as a potential lab. Covert flights using infrared cameras showed images of bikes and utes coming and going at all hours. The several houses that spread over the four-hectare property seemed to have a fairly itinerant populace. Phillip and Duncan simply went to ask a few questions regarding the suspects' statements at the time of the arrests; it wasn’t a raid, no back up had been arranged. The partners were there for reconnaissance purposes. The police expected to initiate a full-scale incursion within a few days of the two detectives’ visit. Phillip and Duncan were simply trying to find out who and what might get in the way of the officers who would swarm the property.

The rest of the story had to be reconstructed from Duncan’s recollections of the minutes that preceded Phillip’s death. There was an official version accompanied by the story he told Mick. Mick had worked with Duncan when he started his career in uniform. Duncan said the entry to the property hadn’t been barricaded in any way. It looked like a normal rural driveway that wound around between shabby paddocks and a long line of trees. The compound behind the trees, houses, and sheds, however, was behind gates and a high wire fence. On the gates dangled a substantial lock, but it wasn’t attached to the thick galvanised chain. Phillip left the car well outside the gates, thirty metres from what seemed to be the main house. Duncan called out to any occupants in the house, identifying himself and Phillip as police and saying they were there to question Cooper and Burns. Both detectives continued to identify themselves as police and repeatedly stated their wish to simply speak to them. Two utes were parked beside the steps leading to the open front door. There were no apparent signs of life from the house and both men were alert to the worrying silence. Putting one foot over the step that led to the cluttered porch, Joshua Cooper appeared in the open doorway. Half-dressed and swearing, he threatened to kill the officers if they came any closer. He repeated, ‘I’ll kill you pigs! I’ll kill you!’

Seeing as the boy was unarmed, Duncan said Phillip tried to calm him down. He put his hands up to show that he was not holding his own gun and continued to try and pacify Cooper and calm his near-hysterical ranting. Phillip even took a step away saying ‘It’s okay son. If you don’t want to talk or if the time isn’t right, we’ll simply go back to the car and leave.’

According to Duncan, neither detective saw the machete stowed beside a pile of splintered furniture and damp cardboard boxes. The discarded beer and vodka bottles made the pile look like poor housekeeping rather than a weapons cache. But Cooper knew it was there and seized it. As Phillip stepped back, the boy hefted the weapon above his head and started making frenzied moves toward the stairs. He thrashed and screeched but posed little danger of actually hurting anyone. Duncan had unholstered his gun but Phillip had cautioned him to stop. The weight of the machete became too much for the weakling who wielded it. That said, with the drugs on board he was unpredictable. It seemed Phillip felt he could subdue Cooper without the need for shots to be fired. He was right and when the boy stumbled and dropped the machete Phillip literally hauled him off the porch and slammed him into the ground. With his considerable weight and height advantage Phillip had the boy pinned and cuffed without help from his partner. Duncan began to relax. This proved to be a mistake. But it was one he confessed only to Mick. He was too busy being amused at Phillip’s one-handed body slam and he let his guard down. With his weapon halfway back to its holster he did not see the flurry of movement behind one of the parked cars.

Melissa Burns had hidden when the detectives had called out. She moved too slowly to get inside but hearing her captive son’s howls of indignation and pain she responded. She had a large knife, a common long-bladed kitchen knife. A knife that when raised and slashed down into Phillip’s body stabbed deeply through his ribs. The attack startled him and if it had been a single wound, he might have survived it. But Burns was as drug-fuelled as her son and her second slash cut across his throat, through his white collar and the tanned flesh of his neck right up to under his ear.

Blood spurted, then flowed in torrents. The crazed woman had raised her arm again when Duncan shot her. Twice. Head and chest. She died instantly.

Leaving Joshua Cooper stunned and prone cuffed on the ground with his mother’s body a metre away and threatening to shoot him as well if he moved, Duncan had half dragged and half carried Phillip to a safer spot. From here Duncan could shoot anything that moved, call for backup and ambulance, and attempt to staunch the tide of blood that was soaking through everything. He kept saying, ‘Swanny you’ve got to breathe, settle down big man. Everything will be okay.’ Duncan was hyper-alert, so hypervigilant that he felt he would have shot at anything that stirred in the yellow dirt near them. But all that he could hear was the drone of blowflies, the whimpering of a stupid, selfish boy, and the shallowness of Phillip’s last breaths.

Despite all of Duncan’s cajoling Phillip could not survive the wounds Melissa Burns had inflicted on him. Immediately after the second blow, he was lost into unconsciousness, within two minutes his vital organs had begun to shut down. At three minutes his heart, his big generous loving heart, beat its last heavy thud. Duncan could not save him. The arrival of the paramedics and police could not undo what had been done. Joshua Cooper had finally stopped whimpering and even as disordered as he was, he knew that the world had stopped spinning. A collision, a catastrophe had occurred that rendered all protests futile. His mother lay dead, she had killed a detective, and he alone would have to face the consequences of the chain reaction that he had unwittingly kicked off.

It had been Mick’s decision to tell me the fuller details of the day. He remained stony faced and steady as he reeled off the facts. But his personal loss was not easily masked. Mick was a father who had lost his chance to be an effective parent. One daughter dead, the other bitter and far away. Phillip had filled that gap for Mick. They were brothers in arms, police officers with a deep respect for each other and the work they did. But they were also family. Phillip would always talk to Mick about his worries, his hopes, and his great love for his growing brood. Mick had become the other grandfather in our children’s lives, and I knew he was so proud of Phillip’s achievements, of Phillip himself, and the honour Phillip brought to all things. But in my grief, I could not help him through the worst of his heartbreak. I was far too wrapped up in my own.

After the first awful months, Mick suggested a most improbable thing. He had suggested that I should attend the court proceedings, along with the victim impact statement that would be presented to the judge in the case against Joshua Cooper. Mick suggested that over the many days of the trial I should be present to hear the evidence against and for Cooper. He believed that it would help me get some form of closure, to see that there were no monsters here, just desperate, weak people.

But I was still in the eye of the storm. If I remained closed down, I could simply avoid the chaos of the noise that whirled around me. Momentary safety existed within the unnatural stillness. I could stay there, untouched by the powerful destructiveness of the raw emotion and brutal reality. In that vortex, I could simply disappear. But I knew with every part of my being that I could not remain in that strange limbo; that eventually I would have to step through the buffeting tempest and force myself from the silent world of grief. Through the pain existed the only route to peace and the only road back to my family.

The court case would become my way through.

But before that, I had to survive Phillip’s funeral. No previous sadness could compare to the days that preceded it. I wanted to both delay and proceed with haste. I wanted it to happen immediately or never happen at all. Either and both felt unbearable. The week of waiting for Phillip’s body to be released to me was the strangest few days of my life. I went into something of a fugue, a blackness, where words and sensations abandoned me. The family urged me to make some contribution to the planning and decisions - how and where to bury him. But I did not want to utter any words that might confirm that he was dead. I wanted nothing to do with preparing a eulogy and the mere mention of music and singing seemed blasphemous. I wanted silence, cold stony silence. Music had always been my refuge and had filled my life - when loneliness prevailed, when joy was celebrated. Now no note, no lyric, no instrument could adequately convey the dreadful reality.

But the funeral proceeded nonetheless. Despite my broken heart, it was a decent send-off and filled with love and, of course, music. Max spoke of his deep connection to Phillip and the life they had lived as near brothers. Peter spoke about the pride he felt for his son and Mick about the abiding integrity of Phillip as an officer and his life as a husband and a father. Beautiful words about my big-hearted man. And despite my unreasonableness about the need for silence, we had friends who sang Flame Trees by Cold Chisel and then an acoustic version of Love of My Life to accompany a series of video clips and photographs of Phillip’s life. Max chose the Queen song because he knew it had a special meaning for us. It was not a particularly romantic moment but one that had been recorded when Phillip had committed some minor transgression and in order to appease me, he and Teddy had given an impromptu performance of the song. Max had videoed them and all of us had watched the clip over and over. It was ridiculous, tender, and utterly typical of Phillip. I could never be cross at him for long.

The NSW and Federal Police were there in numbers. Uniformed and formal in blue they spilled out into the courtyard of the church like a long wave. They formed a guard of honour for the pallbearers who carried Phillip away with reverence and calm. They joined in the singing of He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother and many of them gave personal condolences to me, the Swans, Max, and Mick. As police officers, they had lost not only a colleague and friend but had to face the awful reality of the consequences of the work they were called upon to do. A police officer who loses his life on the job is a clear reminder of the danger.

The wake seemed somber and yet a relief. More music played, and people reminisced and consumed the inevitable mountains of food and drink. I’d been given medication to make it through, so everything seemed a bit foggy. When I’d seek Teddy and Audrey, they were in one set of arms or another. Friends, family, officers, someone paid attention to them all day. Easing them away from the grief their mother could not conceal.

Only one face surprised me. Phillip’s sister, Sophie, who had been estranged from the family for years, appeared in the week after her brother’s death. At the funeral, she became the chief mourner it seemed. She cried and wailed and held onto her father and ex-husband, Max as if she had been beaten. She was too stricken to take much notice of her daughter, Sarah, whom she had also abandoned four years before. Sarah clung to me as much as my own two babies did. She was bewildered by this stranger who had appeared and claimed to be her mother. The Swan family and all of our friends found her behaviour a weird distraction from the awfulness that had brought us together. Sophie had not been back to the coast since she ran off with some unknown man. There had been requests for money and a generous settlement from Max but no talk of wanting custody of Sarah.

At the end of the day, and with only the family remaining Sophie announced that she would be returning home; that she wanted to be a mother to her child, and hoped that Max and she would reconcile. ‘It’s what Phillip would have wanted!’ she stated. This appalling declaration was too much for everyone. Margaret Swan, always beautiful and placid, but this day a grieving mother summed up the general reaction from everyone to such bloody-minded nonsense. She slapped Sophie so hard I felt the flecks of spit from her open mouth land on my face two metres away. ‘You are selfish Sophie, and you have NO idea what Phillip would have wanted. Not ever.’

In the fog of grief and medication, I found the accuracy of Margaret’s words and the resounding slap strangely comforting.

Chapter 3

Joshua Cooper had been remanded since his arrest on that day. In the maelstrom of police and paramedics that had descended on the Hall property and attended to Phillip, Cooper lay in the dirt for what seemed like hours. When the first responders finally gave in to the awful truth that Detective Swan was dead, they were able to turn their attention to the two responsible for the carnage. They confirmed that a second victim had been shot. Dead. Two shots from the surviving officer. The boy, the woman’s son, had suffered some minor injuries, including a broken collar bone, most likely from the forceful contact with the ground at the time of his arrest. He was in a heightened state of agitation due to his drug use and quite probably the trauma of his mother’s shooting. Paramedics established that his blood-soaked clothes had little to do with his injuries. The blood had poured from Phillip’s wounds, but they had to be sure that Cooper had not been seriously wounded before moving him to hospital. He lashed out at the female paramedic who spoke to him gently and respectfully. His foot connected with her hip and she fell backwards with a thud. His ill-conceived actions brought a thunderous response from the law enforcement officers who, regardless of potential injuries, pinned Cooper further into the dirt. The actions were probably unnecessary and potentially over the top given the limited physical threat the boy posed, but emotions were running high and shock and anger tended to lend themselves to overreaction. Much of this would be elaborated on in court.

Winter had begun before the case came before a judge. Mick, Helena, my dear friend from my days working at the National Museum, Max and Peter Swan accompanied me to Canberra. Margaret could not bear the thought of hearing about her son’s death, so she stayed with Audrey, Teddy and Max’s daughter Sarah. She would immerse herself in the children’s happiness to push away her grief.

I really did not think that I would be able to do it. That is, sit quietly and watch my husband’s life and death paraded before strangers. I thought nothing could stop me screaming at Cooper and making all kinds of threats against him. But, as with so many things the strength comes from somewhere deep inside. And in this case, it came from realising that the accused, Joshua Cooper, was not the monster I’d created in my head. He was simply a man, not much more than a boy, a waif of a thing, made ragged by the choices that had been made on his behalf by others who were heedless about what a child needs to be able to grow into a good person. I refused, however, to allow myself to see him as a victim of his childhood and the neglect he had undoubtedly experienced. I focussed on the fact that the only victims here were Audrey and Teddy who suffered because of his carelessness.

Joshua Cooper seemed quite pathetic. His lawyer gave a heart-rending description of his tattered childhood in which he had been exposed to all manner of malevolence, from his addict mother and a succession of equally uncivilised partners. His father, allegedly unknown, might have been anyone of the dozens she had been