4308.279 · October 5, 1988 AD
Stories Are Harder to Bury
Four days of searching. Four days of hope fraying into dread. And then, at dawn, Constable Harris finds what everyone feared and no one wanted to believe. She's been arranged against the gaol wall like a message—candles in the dust, bruises on her wrists, her face turned toward the empty street. Detective Glasson's voice crackles through the radio: Keep it quiet. Just another runaway. But Harris looks at her and knows some names can't be buried. Some deaths become stories. And stories have a way of spreading.
5 October 1988. Dawn.
Constable Harris walks his morning rounds through Silverton's empty streets. The township lies quiet beneath the Outback sky—stone cottages, the old gaol, the pub, the hotel, all crouched against the desert like they're waiting for something.
His torchlight catches on a shape at the base of the gaol's stone wall. A bundle of discarded clothing, he thinks. A drunk's leavings.
Then the shadows shift.
She's been placed with deliberate, mocking artistry. Propped against the wall, wrists bruised, face arranged toward the street as though staring down anyone who might pass. Candles gutter in the dust around her. The gaol's barred windows stare blind above, pale stone bearing witness to a sentence no court delivered.
His radio crackles. Glasson's voice, flat and rehearsed: Keep it quiet. Accidental exposure. Just another runaway.
Harris looks at the candles. The bruises. The brutality.
Good luck keeping this one contained, he says. It's Violet Dallow.
The name travels. Back channels. Whispered warnings. By nightfall, every copper in Broken Hill knows. By week's end, the press has caught the scent. Within a month, mothers hold their daughters tighter on Argent Street.
The Silverton Strangler is no longer a rumour.
He's a legend.
