for a pen, you primate,’ Amos says. ‘The Penns. He wants to know what happened to the Penns, that family that disappeared in Oxley.’
‘Oxley?’
Neighbouring suburb to Darra. Home of the Oxley pub. Home of the Oxley laundromat. Home of the Oxley overpass.
‘No fuckin’ prizes on my fuckin’ newspaper for comin’ fuckin’ second!’ Brian screams across the newsroom, before marching to his office and slamming his office door so hard it wobbles like the brown boards Rolf Harris flexes on telly through ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’.
‘Veronica Holt scooped us again,’ Amos whispers.
Veronica Holt. The Sunday Mail’s chief crime reporter. She’s thirty years old and she only drinks Scotch whisky on ice and she freezes the ice cubes for her drinks by staring at them. She wears skirt suits in charcoal black and onyx black and jet black and soot black. Her news sense is as sharp as the points on her ink-black heels. The Commissioner of Police once demanded Veronica Holt issue a ‘public withdrawal’ of a story she wrote about Queensland Police frequenting brothels across suburban Brisbane. On talkback radio the following morning Veronica Holt responded directly to the commissioner: ‘I’ll withdraw my story, Mr Commissioner, when your men withdraw their weapons from Brisbane’s illegal brothel houses.’
I scurry to a row of newspapers from across Australia, a reference shelf for staff, found near the water cooler and the newsroom stationery cabinet. A stack of yesterday’s Sunday Mail newspapers rests on the shelf, tied with white twine. I cut the twine with a pair of scissors from the stationery cabinet and read the front page of yesterday’s Sunday Mail.
‘Brisbane Family Vanishes as . . .’ These words on the Sunday Mail’s front page are the set-up words to the cover’s banner headline: ‘DRUG WAR EXPLODES’.
A Veronica Holt power-slam page one about the mysterious and inexplicable vanishing of three members of a three-member Oxley family, the Penns, set indelicately against the backdrop of what Queensland Police are calling ‘escalating frictions between rival factions of clandestine illegal narcotic networks stretching across Queensland and Australia’s east coast’.
Through anonymous sources – largely her uncle, Dave Holt, a retired senior sergeant for Queensland Police – Veronica Holt has stitched together a thrilling crime yarn that doesn’t explicitly say the Penn family, prior to their puzzling disappearance, were long entrenched in Brisbane’s criminal underworld but gives just enough suggestive backstory to show Veronica’s loyal and often salivating readers how the Penns were as crooked as Dad’s toilet piss aim on single-parent pension night.
The father, Glenn Penn, was recently released from Woodford Prison, north of Brisbane, after serving two years for small-time heroin dealing. Mother Regina Penn was a Sunshine Coast surfer girl who waited tables for a time in a notorious Maroochydore bloodhouse hotel, Smokin’ Joe’s, known to be frequented by big-time criminals like Alex Bermudez – he’s mentioned in the story – and small-time criminals like Glenn Penn who want to be like Alex Bermudez. Glenn and Regina’s eight-year-old son, Bevan Penn, is the boy in the family picture on page one with his face obscured. He’s wearing a black Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt. The clean skin. The poor and innocent eight-year-old boy swept up in the undertow of his mum and dad’s poor thinking. The Penn family’s Oxley neighbour, a widowed grandmother named Gladys Riordan, is quoted in Veronica’s splash piece: ‘I heard screams coming from the house around midnight about a fortnight ago. But that lot was always screaming late at night. Then, not a peep. Nothing at all for two straight weeks. I thought they might have gone away. Then the police came around and told me they had been reported as missing persons.’
Gone. Vanished. Disappeared off the face of the earth.
I wonder for a moment if Bevan Penn has a mute brother who’s not in the photograph. Maybe the Penns have a gardener who is known as one of Queensland’s greatest prison escapologists. Maybe the Penns didn’t disappear at all, they’re just holed up in the secret room Glenn Penn built beneath the family’s single-level home in suburban Oxley where the boy is taking tips from nameless grown men on the other end of a red telephone.
Cycles, Slim. Things coming back around again, Slim. The more things change, the more they stay fucked.
I know Brian Robertson told me not to sniff around the crime desk but I can’t help it. It calls me. It draws me. Whenever I’m walking over to Caitlyn Spies I lose track of time. That is,