Call Me Cruel by Michael Duffy Page B

for something she’d done. Smiling but knowing she doesn’t really deserve to be happy.
    After Christmas, Sean found her distant and increasingly aggressive. It was as though she’d had some sort of personality change. She was often angry, yelling and swearing. On 19 January, on the Captain Cook cruise on Sydney Harbour to celebrate his birthday, he told her he might be posted interstate. It was just another piece of navy news, another move in a job full of them. But this time her reaction was very different to before, when she’d been excited about the prospect of change. She refused to contemplate leaving Sydney, saying she had family and friends here. When he asked who these friends were, she didn’t reply. She talked about a police officer she’d nursed at Sutherland Hospital recently, and she seemed to have acquired an increased interest in police work. He asked if the new friends were police but she denied it vehemently.
    Kylie began leaving the house suddenly in response to text messages. It might be during the day or at ten at night. When she returned, Sean would ask where she’d been and she wouldn’t tell him. She’d just sit down and have a meal or jump into the shower and get changed for bed, as though nothing had happened. She also took up smoking, something she’d never done before. In fact, until then she hadn’t even liked being around people who smoked. But now she began to light a new cigarette the moment the last one was out. Sean didn’t smoke and didn’t want the smell in the house, so Kylie would be outside most of the time, in the back yard with a smoke and her mobile phone. In the period of not much more than a month, their marriage had turned upside down.
    Sean began to press harder for an explanation of why she’d changed. At one point she told him she’d seen her old boyfriend Troy Myers recently. He asked if she was having an affair with anyone. She denied this and became even more angry. Finally, she told him she’d become friendly with a group of undercover police officers and was helping them with their work. Sean told her this sounded unusual and said he’d have a word with a cop he knew. Kylie exploded and insisted he say nothing, because that would get the officers she was working with in trouble: they reported directly to an assistant commissioner under a secret arrangement.
    Today, Sean thinks Wilkinson must have seen how interested Kylie was in police work and lied to her about his own involvement in order to attract her to him. This, he believes, would have lured her ‘hook, line and sinker’. In the days when she’d first been attracted to Sean himself, she’d developed a similar fascination with the navy. He suspects the stories she told him were based on a genuine belief that Wilkinson was engaged in some sort of important secret police work.
    Sean, who seems to have been the most patient of men, decided not to make the inquiry. He didn’t have much understanding of how the police worked and says he didn’t realise at the time just how implausible his wife’s stories were.
    Some time in January 2004, Kylie rang her friend Maxine Cahill and asked if she could come over. When Kylie arrived she seemed agitated and was continually receiving and sending text messages. She said she wanted to catch up with her old school friends but after only twenty minutes announced that she had to go.
    A fortnight later she turned up at Maxine’s house again, wearing the volunteer ambulance uniform she’d had at school. Maxine asked about this and Kylie said she’d wanted to put it on because it made her feel good. On this occasion, Kylie stayed with Maxine for a couple of hours, and she came back in early February for another chat. This time she said she’d developed feelings for a guy who worked in the police service; he was the person who was always texting her. They were planning to go away