Read Online Bad by Michael Duffy - Free Book Online Page B

again and again, to always answer his phone calls, and to listen to his rambling paranoia over the long months. Fortunately, eachof the detectives could draw on experience that had equipped them with patience and empathy where difficult witnesses were concerned. Browne had grown up with a lot of people who went on to be criminals. As for Jubelin, he’d learned about patience at Bowraville.
    Strike Force Ancud had been big at first and Jubelin gained an education in major investigations from watching OIC Rod Lynch, a quietly spoken man with a great grasp of detail. One thing he noted was how Lynch would give a detective a job and expect him to do it but nothing else—Jubelin’s own natural tendency was to go racing off in pursuit of further information, but Lynch would say, ‘No. I just want you to do the task I gave you.’ Jubelin came to see how this was essential for control of a complex investigation, where only the person at the top had a complete overview.
    Once the publicity circus had moved on, Ancud lost most of its resources (as was to happen with Tuno a few years later). Lynch was promoted and left, replaced as OIC by a sergeant who had other jobs that distracted his attention. Jubelin became the de facto head of the investigation, which before too long had just one other officer, Jason Evers. Born in 1969, Evers was a rugby league player who worked as a bricklayer on leaving school. He joined the police in 1989 after it had rained for two months. He became a detective because it was a chance to use his mind more, and also for the challenge: he figured it was an opportunity to move up to a higher level of effort. He realised that Jubelin shared this ambition.
    The most obvious flaws in the initial Bowraville investigation were that the officers had failed to talk to some witnesses, and obtained much less detail than they could have from thosethey did speak with. History shows there has been a poor relationship between police and Aboriginal people for two centuries. Many cops, who have generally been white, have felt a sense of unease with black people living in different conditions, where parenting arrangements, partly because of an acceptance of more extended families, are far from the white ideal of the nuclear family. Many black people have been—and still are—wary of the police, for all sorts of reasons.
    In addition, there are fundamental differences in how the two groups communicate, with Aboriginal people often slow, hesitant, and with a tendency to agree with any proposition put to them, whether true or not. Some of their mannerisms, such as pauses before answering and refusing to look others in the eye, strike many whites as evasive—indeed, as possible evidence of criminality.
    Jubelin and Evers adopted a thorough approach, requiring far more patience than either man had used in previous police work. They spent a lot of 1997 simply turning up to potential witnesses’ houses and hanging around, sitting and lying under trees and waiting, waiting for an old man to decide he trusted them or for a young mother to remember what she’d seen on a certain afternoon years before. At first the people generally ignored them, either politely or by ‘growling’, to use a word Jubelin heard in this context for the first time. Elaine Walker, aunt of Colleen, told him, ‘Look, you’re a white copper, I’m black. Coppers took our children from us. Why would I want to speak to you?’ But eventually she did, and so did others. The detectives gained more evidence, and learned a great deal about slow detecting.
    It took a long time to convince Daley to agree to make a statement, longer for him actually to make it, and even longer before he signed it. The detectives sometimes discussed his motive among themselves. He’d just got out of jail and wanted to break away from his old world—by talking to the cops he’d made that move, at least in his own