The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper Read Free Book Online

impish face and upturned chin running or riding his mountain bike around the island. Although he had “conducted minimal investigations … essentially none” before arriving on Palm Island, he was putting together evidence against the island’s suspected child abusers. He had bought magic tricks with his own money as aids to interviewing children who’d been molested. Kitching, who outranked Robinson, was a balding redhead with orange eyebrows and moustache, and the kind of bright, supernatural tan that comes over years to the very pale. He wore an onyx ring with a gold crucifix on it.
    The taped interview began at 4:04 P.M. and concluded at 4:36 P.M. In it the detectives focused almost exclusively on Cameron punching Hurley. A dead body lay nearby, a dead body with a pronounced black eye, but the officers did not ask Hurley if, when Cameron hit him, the senior sergeant hit back. In old-school policing, punching a cop was considered enough provocation to teach the offender a hard lesson.
    “I observed that he had a small amount of blood that was, ah, coming from a very small, ah, injury above his right eye,” Hurley said.
    “How did he receive that injury?” Kitching asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    Neither officer asked him to speculate. Instead, Robinson wondered whether Hurley had sustained any injuries himself.
    “Just a tiny scratch on my arm there,” Hurley replied, “probably from the ah … the little wrestle that we had. That’s the only thing I can see.”
    Then Robinson, perhaps giving his friend an out, asked, “And you didn’t fall on top of him?”
    Hurley could not have been more emphatic. “No, I landed beside him.”
    That night, Robinson and Kitching and Webber met Hurley at his house, and Robinson cooked dinner. Sergeant Leafe joined them afterwards and they all sat out on the balcony, talking, drinking beer. At the inquest, Hurley said he had no recollection of what was discussed. He was too distressed. Anyway, Robinson and Webber, he said, were barely speaking to him. “I wasn’t treated like a friend … I was treated like a leper.”
    Robinson was asked at the inquest, “Did you make an effort to console him, or to offer him support if not console, saying things like
don’t worry about it
?”
    Robinson responded, “Ah, no.”
    “Or,
don’t blame yourself
?”
    “No.”
    “He’s a good friend of yours, isn’t he?”
    “He is a friend of mine, but I’m not there to give him a pat on the back about what happened.”
    “But if a friend of yours is highly distressed, you usually do what you can to alleviate that distress, don’t you?”
    “Ah, not in this situation, no.”
    This was not the first time Webber had instructed Robinson to investigate Hurley. (In fact, Webber had once instructed Robinson to look into a complaint against his own conduct, to investigate himself.) Robinson had cleared Hurley of wrongdoing at least once—and he knew his friend could be quick to use his fists. Robinson had seen Hurley hit another Palm Island resident, a drunk schizophrenic who’d come into the station one evening and mouthed off at Hurley and five other officers who were sitting around talking. Hurley said he threw the punch when he thought the man was going to head-butt him. The punch put the drunk on the floor.
    At 8 A.M. on Saturday, the day after Cameron’s death, Darren Robinson went to Dee Street and found Roy Bramwell. None of the officers, including Hurley, knew whether Bramwell had witnessed anything. Robinson and Kitching interviewed him at the police station. Bramwell said he’d seen an assault. His view had been partially obscured by a filing cabinet, but Hurley was a big man with long arms: “I could see the elbow gone down, up and down, like that … ‘Do you want more Mister, Mister Doomadgee? Do you want more of these, eh?’” Roy said he’d watched Doomadgee’s feet writhing as Hurley’s elbow went up and down. Asked why he didn’t move, he told the officers: