And Then the Darkness Read online

  For Jimmy,

  always a warm light

  even when the world is

  cold and dark

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  MAP

  PART ONE: Leaving Home, Sweet Home

  CHAPTER ONE From an English Country Garden

  CHAPTER TWO In an Australian Wilderness

  CHAPTER THREE Leaving Home

  CHAPTER FOUR A Bad Seed

  CHAPTER FIVE The Great Trip

  CHAPTER SIX A Shot in the Dark

  CHAPTER SEVEN Sex in the City

  CHAPTER EIGHT Fast Cars, Drugs and Guns

  CHAPTER NINE The City of Corpses

  CHAPTER TEN The Perfect Gentleman

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Long Road North

  PART TWO: The Blood Red Heart of Australia

  CHAPTER TWELVE To Go A’Stalking

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Dead Centre

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN A Maniac with a Gun

  CHAPTER FIFTEEEN A Town like Alice

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Dangerous Delusions

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Camel Cup

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN And Then the Darkness

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Taken Prisoner

  CHAPTER TWENTY The Hunter and His Prey

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE I Have To Be Brave

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO A Blow-in at Barrow Creek

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Where’s My Peter?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Hoping for the Best, Fearing the Worst

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE You Never Know Who’s Out There

  PART THREE: The Search for the Truth

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Strained Relations

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Gum Leaves to Remember

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT A Desert ShootOut

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE The Lindyfication of Joanne Lees

  CHAPTER THIRTY And the Dingo Didn’t Do It …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE A Dead Body

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO A Breath of Fresh Energy

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE That’s You!

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR All Quiet on the Northern Front

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Honour among Villains

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX A TV Confession

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN New Suspects … and Two More Killings

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Policing the Police

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE I Want to Have Sex with Your Daughter

  CHAPTER FORTY The Net Tightens

  PART FOUR: The Pursuit of Justice

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE A Tale of Abduction and Rape

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO A Glimmer of Light

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE The Price of a Life

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR Bradley Murdoch’s First Trial

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE The Committal of Sin

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX DNA and the Letters of the Law

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN The Final Reckoning

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Judgment Day

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  THE SUN WAS JUST KISSING the horizon when Joanne Lees suddenly jerked the Kombi van’s steering wheel to the left and jammed on the brakes. There was a yell from the back and a head appeared in the rearview mirror. ‘What’s up?’ asked the dark-haired young man who’d been sleeping on the back seat, pushed down to form a bed. ‘Why are you stopping?’ Joanne heaved the creaky handbrake and gestured through the window at the turquoise Australian sky, already shot with streaks of gold. ‘The sunset,’ she replied. ‘Let’s watch.’

  Joanne and her boyfriend Peter Falconio scrambled out the doors and leaned back against the old orange van. They’d been driving for two-and-a-half hours since heading north from Alice Springs and this was their first break. Joanne tilted a bottle of water to her lips, and Peter rolled a joint, then lit the end. They could have been anyone: just two more overseas backpackers doing the time-honoured trip around Australia; a young couple having a taste of outback adventure before returning to Britain to settle down to careers, marriage and kids.

  As the heavens turned a rosy pink and bronze against the fierce burnished ochre of the earth, Peter slipped an arm around Joanne’s shoulders and passed her the joint. She smiled at him. It was one of those rare perfect moments on this, their dream trip around the world. Joanne fiddled with her camera, lined up the sunset and took a picture.

  As soon as they’d finished, she slipped back behind the wheel and drove the Kombi across the road to the Ti Tree Roadhouse and service station. While Peter pumped the petrol, Joanne went into the cashier to pay and buy more cold drinks and snacks for the drive ahead. Their final destination was Darwin, some 1300 kilometres away, but Tennant Creek lay just 300 kilometres up the road, with its own wonders — the awesome Devil’s Marbles. They’d been told to try and see the massive rock formations at dawn in order to experience the full eerie impact. If they could, they would. Tonight they planned to pull over somewhere by the side of the road only when they grew too tired to keep going.

  By the time Joanne returned, Peter was sitting behind the wheel, ready to set off on the last stage of their journey. It was nearing 7 p.m. when they pulled away, back into the barren featureless landscape that stretches far beyond any horizon the eye can see. They’d only been driving for around twenty minutes when Joanne spotted two small rings of fire on the left, five or so metres from the bitumen road. Peter started to brake.

  ‘What are you doing, Pete?’ Joanne asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I just thought we should put them out. The fire might spread.’

  Joanne peered into the fading light. ‘They look weird,’ she said, shivering as she caught a chill through the open window. ‘They look almost as though … they’ve been started deliberately …’

  Peter laughed. ‘What — out here? But we’re the only ones here!’

  Joanne didn’t seem to hear him, and touched his knee. ‘Keep driving,’ she urged. ‘I don’t like it. It could be some kind of trick … or trap.’

  Peter noticed an edge of fear to her voice, and stopped laughing. This kind of lonely terrain with its mood of utter desolation was enough to spook anyone. He smiled fondly over at her, put his foot on the accelerator and moved smoothly back into fourth gear. ‘Okay,’ he said, gently. ‘We’ll keep going.’ He said nothing when they saw two more fires further up the road, and they drove past in silence.

  Less than an hour later, Peter noticed bright headlights behind him and slowed to let the vehicle overtake. As it drew level, however, it braked to the same speed as the Kombi. With the road so long and straight and empty of traffic, there was little danger. Peter looked to his right and saw the driver gesturing at him. He wound down the window and heard the man shouting something about sparks coming from the exhaust.

  Joanne glanced past Peter through the gloom of the gathering dusk at the other driver, and didn’t like what she saw. The man, in a baseball cap and check shirt and with his dog sitting up in the passenger seat beside him, was still jerking his finger towards the back of their vehicle. She saw Peter put his foot on the brake and suddenly, inexplicably, felt scared.

  ‘Don’t stop, Pete, don’t stop!’ she begged. ‘I don’t like it.’

  Peter looked at her quizzically, but kept the pressure on the brake. ‘We have to see what it is,’ he said. ‘It’ll only take a minute.’ He pulled up on the gravel shoulder, and the white four-wheel-drive ute with its green canopy stopped behind them. Peter got out and went to see what the problem was. He came back to ask Joanne to rev the engine, smiled at her, and returned to behind the Kombi.

  And then the darkness enveloped him, and Joanne Lees never saw her boyfriend Peter Falconio again.

  Map

  PART ON
E

  LEAVING HOME, SWEET HOME

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM AN ENGLISH COUNTRY GARDEN

  AS KIDS GROWING UP IN the historic villages on the outskirts of the teeming British Midlands town of Huddersfield, both Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees were always warned to stay close to home. Their early years were coloured by snatches of whispered conversations between adults about the horrors of the ‘Moors Murderers’ who tortured and killed youngsters out on the bleak, windswept hills nearby. Their childhood was spent in fear of the mysterious ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, who preyed on lone women. By the time that killer was eventually unmasked, thirteen women lay dead, and a whole generation had grown nervous about venturing far from home alone.

  ‘It had a real effect on everyone’s psyche,’ says a contemporary of Joanne’s from the same village. ‘You grew up being told never to talk to strangers, never to hitchhike anywhere, never to stop for people. It takes you a long time to un-learn those lessons.’

  Sometimes, it’s better not to try.

  PETER MARCO FALCONIO WAS born on 20 September 1972, and grew up in the nineteenth-century village of Hepworth, Holmfirth, 10 kilometres south of Huddersfield. A jumble of weavers’ cottages and old stone buildings clinging to the emerald hillside, it was once an idyllic place. Today, however, developers have marched in with their smart new housing estates and mock Victorian façades have steadily engulfed the original buildings. The Falconios’ two-storey, four-bedroom detached house is built of creamy stone and is neat and well-kept but is now encircled by newer homes. Where once Peter’s mother, Joan, used to look out over the washing-up to vast swathes of endless green, she now stares straight into the white brick of the end house of the new estate. ‘It used to be much nicer,’ she says sadly. ‘We were on our own with great views until they built that. But what can you do?’

  A few kilometres east lies New Mill, another small village scattered around a busy crossroads. It’s here that Peter Falconio’s father, Luciano, a short, nuggety Italian migrant, ran the local post office. A cheery man with silvery hair, a ready smile and a strong accent, he and his four sons — Nick, five years older than Peter; Paul, three years older; Peter; and finally Mark, six years younger — were well-known around the area, all helping, at various times, to deliver the morning and evening newspapers. ‘They were also noticeable because of their striking dark Italian looks,’ says neighbour Richard Ainley. ‘They really stood out.’ The lads hung around the town square, meeting friends and chatting to girls, rather than joining, like some of the other neighbourhood kids, the local cubs or scouts. ‘They weren’t goody goodies like me,’ says Ainley. ‘But they were all a really nice family.’

  Joan, not much taller than Luciano, with soft greying wavy hair, glasses, a strong Huddersfield accent and a permanently worried expression, was kept busy tending to the needs of four growing boys and a strong-willed husband who believed in raising their kids with old-fashioned discipline and respect. ‘I’ve known Luciano for fifteen to twenty years,’ says local councillor Donald Firth. ‘He’s been here a long time now. He’s a very forthright gentleman who speaks his mind, and his wife stays very much in the background. I’ve enormous respect for him and his family, as does everyone here.’

  Over the years, Hepworth’s become more a part of the neighbouring, and much bigger, village of Holmfirth which tourists used to visit for the quaintness of an older, bygone England, and the good walking of the Brontë Country in the heart of the nearby Pennines. Nowadays they’re more likely to come to see the sights made famous by Britain’s longest running TV sitcom, BBC TV’s Last of the Summer Wine, which is set in the village. Minibus tour guides point out ‘Sid’s Café’, ‘Compo’s bar’, ‘Clegg’s cottage’, and the church where Compo was buried. These days, the tours also include pointing out the house of Peter Falconio.

  BORN A YEAR AND FIVE days after Peter on 25 September 1973, Joanne Rachael Lees grew up just 7 kilometres away in the small village of Almondbury. Like Hepworth, Almondbury’s an uneasy hotchpotch of the old and the new — in one part of the high street stand original buildings like the old blackened weavers’ cottages and one of the UK’s last surviving blue police phone boxes, from the days before radio communications. The two-lane road, however, is choked with traffic, and around the corner are grim three-storey 1950s council tenements, with washing fluttering from mean balconies. Here, kids scream as they ride bikes up and down, and women glumly shuffle behind pushchairs with more squealing children. There’s one shabby pub, The Lion; a bottle shop; a newsagent and a Pop In Centre which people wait forlornly outside every morning waiting for opening time. At the end of the row of flats are two houses huddled together. The furthest one, a modest two up, two down, belongs to Joanne’s family.

  Joanne and her single mum, Jenny, who never stayed in contact with Joanne’s father much beyond their daughter’s birth, moved into the house after Jenny met neighbour Vincent James while helping him put up a garden shed. Joanne was devoted to her mum, but soon warmed to the pale, lean man with the tired eyes and habit of chain-smoking his own roll-ups. By the time Jenny and Vincent married in 1983, Joanne was calling him ‘Dad’, and was delighted when her half-brother, Sam, was born in 1986. The four lived together quietly in the house with their dog Jess. It was dingy, but homely, small and cluttered with ornaments and trinkets and photographs on every surface, and half-a-dozen noisily ticking clocks, with others chiming on the quarter hour. Holidays were spent in a caravan by the seaside.

  ‘We were very close from the start, and she and her mum were devoted to each other,’ Vincent James told Real magazine in 2002. ‘Joanne could have refused to accept me as her dad, but it was never a problem. My stepdaughter was the perfect little girl — she seemed to do everything right.’

  THERE ARE ASPECTS OF LIFE in this part of England that have changed little in hundreds of years. Although most of the great textile mills that fired the industrial revolution have long been driven out of business by cheaper imports, and the main shopping strips of Huddersfield are today peppered with loan offices, charity stores and one-pound shops, people born in these close-knit working-class communities still continue to live, love, work, raise their families, retire and die where they were born. Many have rarely travelled as far afield as London, let alone overseas, and most would see scant reason to do so. Staying close to family, friends, neighbours and familiar routines is the norm; a desire to travel is regarded with suspicion, and moving any distance away almost a betrayal. The pubs are the hub of social life, with Huddersfield having one of the highest numbers per head of population in Britain. There are still traditional, wood-lined lounges warmed by authentic log fires, but the sticky, plastic bars, noisy with the electronic bleeps and crashing of pokie machines, are steadily taking over. But they all have their place. Ask anyone the way to anywhere, and their directions — ‘Turn left at the Sycamore Inn, then go past the Lion and when you see the White Hart, go right there’ — sound more like a pub crawl.

  ‘Generations after generations live in the same place,’ says one local, Mark Koh. ‘When I moved from one village to a town 14 kilometres away, people were: ‘Oh God! What a shame!’ I left school twenty-one years ago now, and yet 90 per cent of the people in my school wouldn’t have moved more than 10 kilometres away.’

  Why would anyone leave anyway, when everything one needs can be found in Huddersfield? With a large influx of migrants post-World War II from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent making up the shortfall in the textile trade, even foreign cuisine is well catered for. In every row of shops there’ll be a curry and chip takeaway alongside the local specialty greasy Joe’s, selling liver and onions with gravy and chips. In Huddersfield’s high street, there’s even a fast-food Indian that locals have nicknamed ‘McSingh’s’.

  Homes are affordable, although wages are modest, and the kind of low-skill jobs offered by businesses like call centres are plentiful. It’s kept the area stolidly working-class and these origins are routinel
y celebrated, with a determination never to look above, or beyond, one’s station. Huddersfield is the home of British rugby league, for instance, after the tumultuous breakaway with the more middle-class union, and longtime Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was born there. The affection isn’t always a two-way street though; he moved at the age of sixteen to Liverpool.

  But most locals stay, and few seem to mind the relentless rain that leaves the washing flapping forlornly on clotheslines strung out even in the front gardens for days. Grey dreariness is only noticeable, after all, if you have something with which to compare it. But to be fair, it has its rewards, too. On good summer days, the undulating hills beyond the villages glow green in the sunlight with brilliant rugs of bluebells and dog roses; sheep graze contentedly and squirrels dart and play. Couples sit in parked cars playing loud music around the region’s highest point, the 270-metre Castle Hill, and the more adventurous copulate hurriedly in the scrub.

  JOANNE AND PETER MET IN 1996 at Huddersfield’s biggest nightclub, Visage, when she was twenty-two and he, twenty-three. With a large student following, the club down by the old converted mills was known for drinks that weren’t too dear, determinedly middle-of-the-road music and a relaxed atmosphere. Peter spotted Joanne with a couple of her friends standing near the bar and liked what he saw. With her black, glossy hair cut into a neat bob just above her shoulders, a flawless complexion, baby blue eyes, rosebud lips and a dazzling white smile, she looked like a porcelain doll. She seemed shy, but she danced well, and they soon fell into easy conversation.