‘I spoke to Ruth’s foster parents, the Giffords. They told me what happened with Steve’s finger. It sounds like Ruth got inpatient treatment for a while, after that. The Giffords thought that she probably went to a group home.’
‘She did,’ Lawrence said. ‘For a while. There were other attempts to place her with a foster family. Three that I know of. All of them failed. She spent most of her time in the system in a group home, and there were a lot of problems there too.’
‘You said she didn’t make friends easily.’
He paused, not, she thought, because he didn’t want to speak, but because he was carefully considering his words.
‘How much do you know about her history?’
‘I know that her father was Charlie Palmer,’ Judith said. ‘I know what she went through.’
Barr gave a sad smile, and shook his head. ‘I doubt that, Detective. You might know some of it, but you couldn’t possibly know all and I’m not going to get into it with you.’ He turned to look at her. ‘Why are you here? Is Ruth in some kind of trouble?’
Judith debated how much to tell him. ‘All I can say is that it’s a sensitive situation, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t extremely important. If lives weren’t at stake.’
He seemed unconvinced.
‘If I tell you anything more, I’m going to have to ask you to keep it private. You can’t talk to anyone about it at this time.’
He smiled again. ‘There’s no need to worry about that. My wife has banned all talk of my former patients from the house, for good reason. And I’m no longer in touch with the people I might have once shared this with.’
Judith nodded. ‘I think it’s possible that Ruth has murdered two people. A third—a child—is in hospital in a critical condition. You understand that this is a theory only. She may be entirely innocent. I wanted to talk to you, not only to try to track Ruth down, but to—’
‘You want to know if I think she’s capable of such an act,’ Barr said, cutting across her.
‘Yes.’
He nodded, his expression very tired, very grim. He looked away from Judith, fixing his eyes on something across the street. Traffic passed by and the noise of the city surrounded them, but it felt like they were in a bubble, separated from the world around them.
‘How did she do it?’ he asked.
‘The first was a gunshot at close range. The second was a poisoning. Someone sent the victim a jar of marshmallows laced with 1080. They were the victim’s favourite sweets. She ate half of them and gave a few to her young daughter. Ruth’s motive might have to do with taking revenge for her sister’s suicide.’
Lawrence blew out a long, slow breath, and shook his head. ‘That would be a difficult thing to do, I’d imagine. Poisoning food like that.’
‘Not as hard as you’d think, unfortunately. Ruth studied chemistry at university. She dropped out before the end of her second year, but perhaps that was long enough.’ Alison Gifford had mentioned that she’d heard that Ruth had gone to uni. After they spoke, Judith had applied for and been granted an emergency warrant, and had confirmed that Ruth had been enrolled at Deakin University for four trimesters. Her results had been erratic. In some classes she’d earned a distinction, others she’d failed. The university had had no record of where Ruth had gone after she’d dropped out. By now the team would be trying to track down Ruth’s classmates, to see if any of them knew anything useful, but all of that would take time.
Lawrence Barr clasped his hands together and rested them on his lap. He was silent for a long moment before he began to talk.
‘I don’t know if I can help you. I don’t know where Ruth is. I can tell you what I know about her, and you’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s relevant or not.’ He paused, as if gathering his thoughts, then continued. ‘Ruth experienced severe childhood trauma, terrible violence. She lost her mother, her primary attachment figure. She became hypervigilant, always watching, waiting for the next threat. She was an emotional outsider—she couldn’t form intimate relationships. Ruth didn’t bond with other people. She formed attachments, certainly, but they were not attachments in the normal sense of the word. Sometimes she would take an interest in people, befriend them for a short time, then drop them when she got bored. Occasionally, the interest would become a fascination. Ruth could be obsessional. She liked to watch.’
Lawrence’s words echoed in Judith’s mind. Judith had been to state-mandated therapy for years after she’d killed her stepfather. No one had doubted that she’d acted in defence of her mother. Equally, no one had doubted that she needed help. And through those years of therapy she’d heard many of those terms—severe childhood trauma... hypervigilant... emotional outsider—applied to herself.
‘What does that mean, she liked to watch?’
Lawrence sipped his coffee. A van pulled in and parked in front of them. Two women got out and opened the back doors. They unloaded a wooden archway, and carried it carefully to the church door, where they took their time setting it up.
‘Ruth was very possessive of her older sister. She ran away twice from inpatient treatment while her sister was still at their first foster home. You said you spoke to the Giffords? A nice couple. Ruth didn’t go to the house. She just camped out in the woods beside the house and watched. But she’d come closer and skulk around at night, stealing food and so on. Eventually the sister had to be moved to another home.’
‘The Giffords said something about that.’
‘It wasn’t just with her sister. Later, when Ruth was a teen, there were incidents. She would fixate on someone, and find a way to watch them. A camera, hidden in someone’s room, or she would just follow them.’
Judith thought about that. About a teenager who would hide cameras, follow someone.
‘I treated so many children who had been horribly abused, horribly neglected. So many of them were profoundly damaged by their experiences. Many of those kids survived and went on to become good people. And some of them didn’t survive, through no fault of their own.’
There was a sadness in his eyes, a darkness that made Judith wonder how many kids he’d seen over the years who’d suffered too much.