The Swan Island Connection Page 5

  Chris wondered who else Ferguson would be meeting in Melbourne, and why the post mortem was being done there instead of Geelong.

  The station felt like his place — and not his place. The corridor smelt faintly of aftershave. Chris was glad none of the detectives smoked. He didn’t recognise the brand of aftershave, but felt he ought to, and this small, silly detail almost undid him. He stood leaning with his head against the door jamb, aware of his wet, clammy hands against the wood. Anthea came up silently behind him and put her hand on his arm.

  Three hours spent knocking on doors and asking questions produced nothing useful. Olly’s neighbours looked worried and shook their heads. None wanted to be involved; all wanted to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the murder. No one had heard a dog barking the night before.

  ‘Catching worms, Blackie,’ Sergeant Shaw said when Chris and Anthea returned. ‘Where were you this afternoon?’

  ‘Not catching worms,’ Chris said.

  He thought that Shaw must know they’d been to Winchelsea.

  Anthea made a plate of sandwiches. Though it was well past dinner time, Chris did not feel hungry, and he knew she didn’t either.

  Sergeant Haverley came to the door of the back office.

  ‘They look good,’ he said with an attempted smile. ‘It’s a nice place you’ve got here.’

  Chris wondered if his enthusiasm for gardening had reached the detectives, and in what form. He’d seen the inspector and Sergeant Shaw exchanging smiles over the beds of lavender and roses, but Haverley had not been with them.

  Haverley said to Anthea, ‘You’re Parkinson’s next door neighbour. I hear he plays the piano.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘This is a small town.’

  ‘You don’t need to remind me.’

  Haverley’s smile vanished. He took a few sandwiches back to the front office.

  ‘There’s no milk,’ Chris said, standing in front of the open fridge.

  ‘They drank it all.’

  ‘I’ll have extra sugar then. You?’

  Though Anthea did not respond, Chris leant across and spooned sugar into his assistant’s mug.

  He told her about the elite soldiers who came to Swan Island for their training, talking to fill the silence, knowing Anthea was afraid to go home, and feeling it was important for her to know as much as he did, which wasn’t much at all. The SAS received special training before being sent to Afghanistan, South Africa, and all war zones in between.

  Even when the soldiers got drunk and caused a ruckus, they were out of bounds to the local law enforcement.

  Anthea frowned over her tea then took a tiny sip.

  A mild ticking off for drunkenness you could get away with, but no more than that. Chris said he’d learnt the limits of his authority a few years back, when a carload of trainees had lurched off the causeway straight into the bay and three of them had drowned. They’d been sozzled and definitely out of bounds. He added that the townsfolk probably knew more about the recreational habits of the SAS than he did.

  Anthea pushed her mug away.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ Chris said. ‘On second thoughts, would you like to stay the night at my place?’

  ‘No.’

  Anthea offered no explanation for her curt refusal, and Chris knew better than to ask for one.

  Queenscliff was changing fast. Not that long ago, about the time those soldiers had drowned, Chris reflected that he could have claimed to know, or know of, everybody in his district, apart from two months in the summer when the population quadrupled. Now every Saturday, with the exception of June and July, a couple of hundred drove down, mostly from Melbourne, for the Blues train that started off at the harbour and puffed its way to Drysdale and back. They paid through the nose for the privilege. He couldn’t understand it. Then there were the gangs of bikers who, every three weeks or so, made Queenscliff part of their round trip from Melbourne through Sorrento and across on the ferry. They favoured the beer garden of the Esplanade as well.

  When Chris returned from Egypt, he’d left behind a country in turmoil, a people at each other’s throats. Queenscliff had seemed a haven to him, and Australia a country blessedly free of violence on a national scale.

  He hadn’t realised until he pushed the gate open, and Anthea ran out and hugged him, how much he’d missed his young assistant. What a change she’d made to his life. Anthea had managed the station on her own for four months, admittedly over quiet times, but she’d done well. He was proud of her.

  If he’d also come home to find that Anthea and Olly were a couple, well, that was good news too. Anthea was an attractive young woman; he couldn’t have expected her to remain single for long.

  Chris persuaded Anthea to accept a lift home. She turned towards him from the passenger seat, in the semi darkness, her skin so pale as to be almost blue.

  ‘Sharon knows her brother was doing something illegal.’

  ‘Running errands for the soldiers,’ Chris said. ‘I doubt he told her what they were. But yes, I agree. Sharon knows that it was both illegal and dangerous.’

  ‘And she knows where he hid the money.’

  Chris gave Anthea a sharp look. In spite of her panic and distress, she’d been listening carefully all day, asking questions of herself, even though her rank prevented her from asking them of anybody else.

  It was late, but the Esplanade would still be open for another hour or so. In his short walk to the hotel, along his street and then a narrow footway to the next one, Chris felt blame circling like a raptor looking for its next victim. For a moment, he envied the young soldiers, and everybody else who sought oblivion through alcohol and then fell into bed. He noted that the curve of the footpath meant that it was hidden from the streets at either end, and that this was one way a light body could be carried from a parked vehicle to the railway yard.

  He’d changed into jeans and a checked shirt. Paradoxically, taking off his uniform made him feel as though he was acting on a stage.

  It was an open secret, though it had never been admitted by the government, that SAS troops, once they’d completed their training on Swan Island, were sent to Afghanistan on combat missions. Most of the townsfolk accepted Australia’s involvement in the war. But every so often, there was some kind of protest; placards at the bridge, candlelight vigils, anti-war songs.

  Chris had been on duty down there, though pretty much a bystander. Mounted police had been sent to the last one, and a squad trained in crowd control. The crowd had never numbered more than thirty. Anti-war demonstrations in the cities were of course much bigger, which was not to say those small gatherings at the approach to the island hadn’t been sincere.

  Chris recalled an incident when shots had been fired, it had seemed randomly, out over the marina. Though he’d conducted interviews and sent in a report, he’d received no response from Swan Island, not even an acknowledgement. He remembered yet another rumour, about an exercise involving running over roofs, and a trainee who’d jumped down and landed on a dog, not one belonging to the army, but a family pet, who’d set up a tremendous barking.

  He thought about how the training facilities on the island were shared between Australia’s security services and the army. It made sense to share training facilities, of course, but he’d never given much thought to what it might be like to have those two organisations living together in a relatively isolated spot. Would bedfellows be putting too strong an emphasis on it? Would combat trainees from the regular army look down on the fledgling spooks and vice versa? And what about the officers in charge? There would be rivalries and turf wars; there always were.

  The group of soldiers — five, plus a sixth who joined them after Chris had ordered a light beer and found an inconspicuous spot — were enjoying their night out. They glanced towards him, then away, and laughed. Chris could have told them he didn’t care about being laughed at. He wondered if they’d known Bobby, or were new arrivals who’d had
nothing to do with the boy. Chris didn’t recognise them, but he told himself that that meant nothing. They looked perfectly at home.

  Scalps glistened under short hair; there was something untried, fresh about the soldiers. Chris guessed that experienced combatants, on the island for a further round of training, would not choose to spend their leisure time with novices like these. Their laughter, though it carried, was not particularly loud. While Chris nursed his beer, all the other patrons’ eyes at some time turned towards them. As for the girl behind the bar, even when she had a customer to serve, she kept glancing in the young soldiers’ direction as though she couldn’t help it.

  You’d think the murder of a local kid would have subdued them, taken the shine off, Chris told himself. It was inconceivable that they didn’t know.

  Chris lay in bed with his eyes closed and his father’s death returned, as though he stood on the deck of the pilot boat himself, watching as his father dived into the water; to save, or sacrifice — there’d never been a way of telling. He saw his own life as an attempt to stretch an unstable bridge over water which ought never to be crossed. His gardening, and the walks that he allowed himself, back resolutely to the ocean — these attempts at recreation, and the routines of his days at the station — all of these activities were pitiable. That was the kindest thing that you could say about them. Scenes faded, though they never disappeared; there were some images he would never be able to switch off. A scream rose from the other side of death.

  TEN

  Without paying attention to where her feet were taking her, Anthea found that she was almost at the railway yard. Police tape flapped, reflecting the lambent light off Swan Bay. The forensics van had gone. In her imagination, Anthea picked Bobby up and held him, a tiny bit of life from which life had been stolen. No matter that Bobby was too big to be picked up; no matter that he would have hated it.

  Anthea walked to the tape, still with that feeling of cradling a child who wasn’t breathing, but might at any moment be persuaded to again. She wondered about the effectiveness of her training and experience, if at this, her first real test, she could so quickly fall apart.

  The tide was coming in, quite fast but silently. Strange to think that Bobby had known every centimetre of this shoreline, had known and understood it perhaps better than any other human inhabitant of the town. While Anthea stood there, she went back over what she knew of Bobby’s life. She did not discount the possibility that he’d been killed by someone of his own age, or a woman. Surprise would have been the key factor. Whoever had done it would not have needed to be particularly strong.

  The murder had once again been the lead item on the news, yet the railway yard was deserted. The narrow path above the tide mark, the island, the opposite shore of the mainland where a farmhouse lights were visible — all seemed peaceful. Anthea heard a rustling in the bushes behind her. Possibly a cat, she thought, or a water bird. She thought back to the night before. She’d lain awake for a while thinking about Olly. It had not occurred to her that he might not be next door in the cottage, that he might have gone out again after walking Bobby home. She’d read for an hour or so before turning out her bedlight. She’d woken early and had been dozing, enjoying the warmth underneath her doona, conscious of the mist over the bay and the bird calls, when her phone rang.

  There were no lights on in Olly’s cottage when Anthea finally returned home. Olly’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Anthea thought about the attack on Max, and how it had been interrupted. Max had not been able to cry out for help, but he’d barked. Who paid attention to a barking dog? Her boss, for one. Chris had not only paid attention, but he’d run ‘fast for an unathletic fellow’ as he’d later told Anthea with a self-deprecating smile.

  Anthea understood Chris well enough to have some idea how far guilt might carry him. What she didn’t know was to what extent he was keeping an open mind about Olly. This brought her to the question of what she believed and felt, truly, as compared with how she presented her feelings and beliefs to others.

  Unlocking her door, Anthea admitted to herself that she didn’t know. Earlier in the day, she’d felt certain, but she’d been wrong about men before.

  If Max had been kept outside at night, would he have jumped the fence and run to save his master? Max had been kept inside for his own safety. Anthea pondered the irony in that.

  A memory returned to her of a man and boy paddling over the seagrass, slowly, almost lost in the gold-green light, then appearing once again. She thought of her own attraction for the man first glimpsed like this, first taken up into her consciousness as a vision from the bay.

  Anthea made sure her doors and windows, including those that led onto her small balcony, were locked. She did not feel hungry, but poured soup from a tin into a saucepan and made herself swallow a few mouthfuls.

  How to fathom the friendship between Olly and Bobby, if indeed it had just been friendship? If Bobby were alive, she would have been content to go on watching from the outside. Now that friendship would be examined every which way. It would be twisted and distorted. She recalled the photographs Olly had taken when the four of them had gone on a picnic one Saturday — the sun on Bobby’s hair and Max’s red-brown fur. There would probably have been other occasions when she had not been present. Should Olly getting out his camera have made her wary at the time?

  Perhaps Bobby hadn’t been killed in the railway yard; perhaps he’d been killed somewhere else and moved. No doubt they’d have a better idea of that after the post mortem. But the fact remained that the killer had to be someone who was familiar with the boy’s routine.

  Moonlight came dappled through Anthea’s bedroom window. She paused in the act of closing her curtains. Where was Olly now?

  Anthea told herself she didn’t like the word relationship, then realised that her personal likes and dislikes had never been less relevant. Whatever happened now, she and Olly were done for. She’d turned her back on him at the crime scene — the fact that she’d felt she had no choice was irrelevant as well — and Olly, even if he were found to be innocent, would not forgive her for that. Perhaps, Anthea told herself, she was simply a rotten judge of men.

  On her way to work the next morning, Anthea stopped by the security checkpoint. She wished the guard good morning and asked who was allowed to visit the island. The guard gave her an odd look, but he answered readily enough: defence personnel with appropriate identification, members of the golf club, and a group of naturalists who’d obtained permission to study the endangered orange-bellied parrots.

  ‘Parrots are down to nine this year,’ he said. Then he seemed to soften, or relent, and added, ‘Terrible about that kid.’

  There seemed something courageous in the sun’s reflections off the water, the way they outlined the boats moored in the harbour — both courageous and indifferent. Anthea picked out the coastguard boat, and the pilot. They looked so still at the flood tide, as though painted on the bay. She thought of swimming out to one of them and climbing up on it. She could sail away. That’s how the song went. So many songs about sailing away.

  ELEVEN

  Chris was summoned to the front office.

  The door was slightly open. He knocked anyway, feeling peculiar as he did so; it felt like knocking on the door of his own house.

  Inspector Ferguson put down his phone and said, ‘Blackie. Well?’

  They’d re-commenced their door-to-door at 8 am. Chris said, ‘Nothing so far, Sir.’ He wondered whether the DI had brought a preliminary post mortem report with him. He looked as though he had something on his mind that was not the door-to-door, and not the post mortem either.

  ‘So nobody saw anything, heard anything, knows anything. Typical.’

  This was not Chris’s conclusion, but he didn’t say so.

  Ferguson raised a sarcastic eyebrow. ‘That girl of yours, how close is she to Parkinson?’

  It took Chris a moment to realise that the inspector was talking about Anthea. ‘You’ll have to ask
her, Sir.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘They’re — they were — Constable Merritt won’t allow that to —’

  ‘Given him the flick, has she?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What I mean is Blackie, she had better. And if she’s having doubts, then you’d better convince her.’

  The inspector’s words followed Chris as he walked across the road to stand under the black lighthouse and stare, not across the bay, but up at the huge stones. He told himself that in a minute or two he’d have calmed down enough to go back. He thought of the travail of the men who’d built the lighthouse, what their hopes had been.

  Sergeant Shaw called out as he was walking down the corridor to the back office. He hated the fact that he was sneaking around his own station like an interloper.

  ‘Blackie, that girl Sharon?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Seems she’s a regular at the Esplanade. Under-age drinking’s only the start of it.’

  Shaw’s lips curved in a superior smile. Chris could not imagine what he found to be amused by, unless it was demonstrating his superiority. It was clear the sergeant wanted to be asked about the source of his information. Chris held his tongue, but inside he was raging. He might not have gone over the road, for all the good the few minutes’ breathing space had done him.

  Anthea was shaking, and so pale Chris thought she was about to faint.

  ‘They think I was in it with him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve accused me of helping Olly to — to groom Bobby.’ Anthea could scarcely get the word out.

  Chris put his arm around his assistant and grasped her small, cold hand.

  ‘There were a lot of photographs of Bobby on Olly’s computer, including those taken at the picnic. I mean the picnic that Saturday. I was there. I never thought, you see —’