Long-serving Mayor Rex Pilbeam & he’s wife at Rockhampton

Ch⑤ The Case

“Senior Inspector Pierce is a widower, aged thirty-nine, with two small boys.. and has two full-time assistants. One of them, following on a petition to the Department from local women’s groups, is a woman.”

Ch ⑱ in full

“Now that the number of victims has reached the magic figure of a century there are seven identikit pictures, and the strange thing is that they are no longer the cliches of three months ago; each of them has now developed a distinctive character. What we are faced with, it seems, is seven prowlers, all working in the same strictly defined area and using the same methods.

“This surely is too much of a coincidence. The work of a prowler begins to look like the cooperative efforts of a gang; except of course that by their very nature these crimes are private and solitary. Or perhaps a club has been formed to act out the assaults as they have been described in the newspaper. A bizarre notion! Who would devise such an entertainment and why? Still, imitators there are, and more than one of them. Of this the police have no doubt.

“And how does the prowler himself feel about this, the original prowler, I mean, the initiator, whose integrity consists in his commitment to his own crimes? How strange if his path should cross that of one of the others, if they should meet face to face over the body of a victim; or stranger still, if two of the false prowlers should meet, each just sufficientltly like the original to be recognizable but each seeing in the other enough that is different to make clear how much of themselves they have allowed to creep in, to what an extent they are no longer imitators of the prowler but significant variants. If two of the false prowlers were captured would there be enough in common between them for the real prowler to be identified? And supposing all seven to be taken, would it be clear which of them was real? All seven, as the police know, would lay claim to the first attack, might even create a prior one, in order not to be deprived of the rest. (Perhaps one might guess that the least insistent of them, assured of his authenticity, would be the true original.) This is clear from the large number of men who have already come forth and confessed to the crimes. Men of all ages and occupations, from a fifteen-year-old schoolboy to a retired ship-builder of seventy-seven: widowers, pensioners, young men newly married, metho-drinkers, known homosexuals – all desperate, it would seem, to have the prowler’s acts define them.

“Some of these men simply want to draw attention to themselves. Others have become obsessed with the assaults and long to be their perpetrator, to appropriate to themselves the daring, the fierce aura of sexuality they believe the prowler must be possessed of, his deepest sense of relief when, returning to his own house, he stands naked before the mirror and says ‘Yes, I am the prowler’, or, concealing his violence behind a front of patient domesticity, slips in quietly beside his wife.

“There are those among these men who genuinely believe they are the prowler. Faced under the glare of the arc-lamps with indisputable proof they are not, they break down and sob, they plead with Senior Detective Pierce to examine the evidence again, to find something, some small detail, that will convict them; they resist, they fight, they clutch at straws. Senior Detective Pierce finds these men pathetic. Of all the men in the suburb, they alone are above suspicion,since the one thing they lack (what else does their behaviour mean?) is the courage to commit the crime.

“As for the others, the self-confessed prowlers who know they are lying, Senior Detective Pierce has begun to dread their arrival, more even than a new victim. Each of them has a bad conscience. Confessing to the prowler’s crimes is a kind of diversion tactic. It is meant to save them from confessing to the real crime they have committed – or think they have committed. They are the men who are laden with guilt, who hope that punishment and conviction for one crime, even if it is not their own, will be sufficient and will relieve them of
dread. the real crime, in some cases, is trivial, the anxiety is not. And it is the weight of all this secret guilt that Senior Detective Pierce finds so oppressive, since he cannot absolve the men of it, and could not, even if he were to extend to them the one thing in his dispensation, the recognition that the prowler’s crimes are theirs. Faces with the men’s despair when he declares them innocent, their deep sense of grievance, their sullen hostility, Senior Detective Pierce, on one or two occasions, has come close to breaking down. He has been trained to deal with crime – specific incidents – not with deep, unspecified guilt.

“Still, information about all these men is fed into the computer; thy become part of Senior Detective Pierce’s memory bank. Even if they did not commit the prowler’s crimes, they reflect them. Only when all the facts had been collated, and many things that are not facts as well, will some sort of pattern emerge.

“But when will that be? And what pattern?

“Senior Detective Pierce has come to believe, as the number of victims continues to rise and the identikit pictures top thirteen, that sooner or later the whole male and female population of the suburb will find its way into his files, every man a potential prowler, every female a victim. And then what?”

With thanks to Copyright © David Malouf, 1982 and the writer’s gift to the men and women of Australia helping them mentally grasp by reflection and listening to the other what the actual they’ve perhaps – well a few if us – not really had much idea they were actually on about since 1982 – except the Dick & Dora, Doctors & Nurses, “A Country Practice,” Summer Bay, Stan Zemanek, Bob Francis, Gretel Killeen, Pru Goward, Margaret Court, Israel Folau, Sabrina Hahn, John Olsen, Kerry Chikarovski, Eddie Obeid, Kelly Vea Vea, Damien Carrick, Antony Funnell, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Rowan Dean, Joyce Meyer, Joe Rogan, Greig Pickhaver, Indira Naidoo, Annabel Crabb Try-ball-aussie Thàng..

STUDENTS

Hopping mentally from the content to the formatting (micro to macro, sure) i would be very grateful if you were all to make some note of the so-called classical textual communication layout used in this exquisite statement ( commas preceding ‘and,’ deft use of semi-colons and even an entire stand-alone 19 word sentence Per.. to ..nal. enclosed by brackets like an 3250 to 394 years Before-common-era 🇪🇬 cartouche – some whopper thematics logic SET that, hooowhheeee, but techically true & fine).

Read to learn live heal grow and improve, all that

My dedication-of-document is to Alex i knew at the Glenelg Surf Lifesaving Club

• John the busted fruitgrower, food value adder, one-time exporter, marketer & establisher with his late partner-in-marriage RM Joyner who was from SEQ of OG retail July 1993

• Reform of 25k universities: immediate overhaul of neoclassical academia

• Thematics-maths (2-5set series Quantum-relations) post Socratic Logic

• DESTROYING so-called AI & the vile Dalle 3, 4 &c