‘I won’t be long.’ She turned her attention back to the phone as Vivienne returned.
‘Boys playing up?’ Glenda joked.
‘It’s okay now,’ said Vivienne.
From her experience with dozens of phone conversations over the years, Glenda knew that Vivienne was a bit awkward on the telephone. Glenda always felt it her role to make the conversation. But today she didn’t have time.
‘Is there anything else you want, Viv?’
‘Why no... I don’t think so.’
Just before hanging up, Glenda remembered the list of materials they both needed for patterns they were working on. She asked if Vivienne wanted her to read it out.
‘Oh, don’t bother now. Bring the list with you to patchwork lessons next week and I’ll get it then,’ Vivienne said.
There was another awkward silence.
‘Well I’d better get back to my sewing now, Viv. See you next week at class.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Vivienne Cameron.
As news of the murder swept the small Island community, people were shocked by Beth Barnard’s murder. Glenda and Pam went for a coffee at one of the local cafes in Cowes. It was there they learnt the terrible news. Neither of them knew Beth, but like most residents of the small community, they knew of her. It made Glenda think of her own safety – a woman living alone.
Glenda and Pam made no connection between Beth’s murder and Vivienne Cameron. That wasn’t until the 6 o’clock news when Glenda turned on the television to see if the crime had made the news. It was one of the leading items.
The reporter said that police were searching for a missing Phillip Island woman, Mrs Vivienne Cameron, in connection with the savage murder of a 23-year-old farm worker, Elizabeth Katherine Barnard. Vivienne Cameron’s car had been found on the Phillip Island side of the San Remo bridge, according to the news, and it was believed Vivienne had jumped from the same bridge to her death.
The reporter said the car had first been seen at 5am on Tuesday although it wasn’t positively identified by police until about 4pm the same day. It was Vivienne’s sister-in-law, Pamela Cameron, who identified the car for detectives.
Glenda froze in horror when she realised she had spoken to Vivienne some five hours after the car was first seen parked near the bridge. She was staring at the news report when the phone rang.
‘Glenda? It’s Pam. Have you seen the news?’
Glenda could hardly speak: ‘Yes...’
‘Wasn’t it Vivienne Cameron who you spoke to this morning on the phone? How could she be jumping off the bridge at 5 o’clock in the morning when you spoke to her at 10? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘No. What am I going to do?’ Finding herself suddenly caught up in a murder investigation, Glenda was scared.
‘You’ve got to ring the police,’ Pam told her firmly.
‘No. I can’t.’ Her voice trembled.
‘Glenda, this is vital to the police. You have to tell them now. They think Vivienne has got something to do with Beth’s murder, but she can’t have – not if she was talking to you on the phone about... what was it?’
‘Patchwork patterns,’ said Glenda, lost in thought.
‘Let’s face it,’ said Pam, ‘nobody’s going to discuss patchwork if they’ve just killed somebody. Are they?’
‘Oh my God, Pam! I can’t believe this.’
Once off the phone to Pam, Glenda called the police immediately. She gave a statement to Jack McFayden, and then later to the Homicide detectives who arrived to double-check her story. Glenda assured the police officers that it was Vivienne on the phone, but she felt their doubt. They tried to suggest that it might have been Monday when she called, not Tuesday. But Glenda was certain. And Pam was a witness. Pam wasn’t even there on the Monday morning.
Glenda’s information was explosive. Was Vivienne alive at 10am? Was she still alive now? And, more importantly, if there were voices in the background, who else knew where she was? While Glenda assumed it was Vivienne’s children in the background, it couldn’t have been her older child as he had been taken to school. The younger one was picked up by Don Cameron on Tuesday morning.
Detective O’Connor had spoken briefly to Fergus Cameron before giving time to regain his composure. It was also his decision that Jack McFayden should conduct the formal interview on Thursday – two days after Beth’s murder and Vivienne’s disappearance.
When Jack McFayden visited him to take his statement, he found Fergus propped up in bed in his pyjamas, saying that he was feeling the after-effects of his injuries. He had been staying with his sister, Marnie, and her husband, Ian, since Monday night.
Despite losing both his wife and his girlfriend, Fergus was calm and able to give his account of what happened.
He and Vivienne had been married 10 years, he explained, and had two children. They had been having marital difficulties, compounded by Fergus’ affair with Beth Barnard. He had met Beth when they both worked at the Penguin Parade and he had then employed her as a farmhand. It wasn’t long before the two began having an affair that had lasted until her death.
Fergus described his strained relationship with his wife. He said Vivienne had noticed he gave Beth favoured treatment. He told the detective that several times in their relationship, he and Beth had decided to stop seeing each other, but their resolutions had never lasted.
In December of 1985, Vivienne had caught Fergus in the shearing shed with his arm around Beth. That, according to Fergus, was the first time his wife had accused him of having an affair. He told her that he and Beth were just good mates. Nonetheless, Beth had been shaken by the confrontation, and quit working at the Cameron farm.
A short while after that, Fergus explained that he’d come home in the early hours of the morning from a Christmas party at Beth’s. He said that Vivienne had attacked him, punching him in the face and back.
Despite Beth’s resolve to leave the Penguin Parade job and the job at the Cameron farm, Fergus said that the pull of their relationship was stronger and she was soon back working at both jobs. He said that Vivienne had questioned the wisdom of having Beth working on the farm.
The tension between Vivienne and Fergus culminated in a fight around shearing time.
‘We had all been drinking, including myself, and when we’d gone up to the house, Vivienne became violent with me over Beth. She said that Beth was a scheming little bitch and in general criticising her to the point of hatred. She was very disparaging as to my admiration for Beth, but did not to my knowledge accuse me of having an affair with her but I think she assumed I was.
‘During this argument, she punched me half a dozen to a dozen times around the face, arms and chest and at that time I was sitting on a stool in the back porch. I feel that she had every right to do what she was doing, not because of my association with Beth but because she deserved some answers and I wasn’t giving her any.
Although Vivienne was drinking on this occasion, she wasn’t drunk but probably had enough to drink to say what she had wanted to say for a long while.’
McFayden reflected that this was the second time in several hours that Fergus had spoken about his wife’s allegedly violent nature. He wondered too, how Fergus could have sat on that stool without falling off or protecting himself, while his wife beat him about the head.
From about May 1986, Fergus told McFayden he had become less concerned about protecting his family. Vivienne and Fergus had discussed their marriage and its problems and