Cemetery Lake (8 page)

an excuse to raise Henry Martins’ coffin and I never did. That means…’

“I know what that means. You think that if there are other

people out there, you could have prevented it. Maybe this is

true.’

‘It is true,’ I say, a little shocked at how quickly he has come to this conclusion.

‘Two years ago,’ he repeats. ‘Exactly two years ago?’

“Pretty much.’

‘You can’t blame yourself,’ he says, but his eyes seem to betray his real feelings. ‘The accident — that was two years ago, correct?

Was it the same time?’

‘I still should have done more,’ I say. ‘But I lost my focus.’

‘You lost your family,’ he says. ‘And you lost control. This isn’t your fault, Theo.’

‘There are going to be more girls out there in those coffins,

Father. Three of them. I feel it. I can’t make it right, but I also can’t let it go.’

He looks down at the floor as if there is some internal debate warring inside his head. When he looks up he seems to have aged a few years. He thinks this day is hard on him, but if I drove him to Rachel Tyler’s house tomorrow to meet her parents he’d realise his was easy in comparison.

“I suppose you could talk to his father. He may be able to offer you something.’

I recall the article that I read about Sidney Alderman before I left my office for the morgue. The old man’s retirement last year It made the newspaper, but it wasn’t really news, it was just

one of those human interest stories that are interesting to the people who knew Alderman and not to anyone else.

‘Does he live nearby?’

‘Closer than you can imagine,’ he says. “Promise me you’ll be

careful. Promise me you’re looking for Bruce to question him,

not punish him.’

I shrug. ‘Punish him? I don’t follow you.’

Again Father Julian sighs, then slowly shakes his head. ‘Don’t take the law into your own hands, Theo. Vengeance is God’s, not yours, you know that.’

He follows me to the church doors and gives me directions to

where I can find Sidney Alderman. I thank him and he wishes me a good night, and again he tells me to be careful. I tell him I’m always careful.

He shakes my hand before he leaves, and when he takes his

away I see that he is shaking. Then he disappears back through the doors. God’s working day is still not over.

The rain has disappeared. For now. And the night has set in. I sit in the car with the heater going, trying to collect my thoughts, wondering why I’m chasing down Bruce the caretaker when

I ought to be home chasing down some pizza with Jim the

bourbon. I don’t know, maybe it’s just that my life isn’t interesting enough to be at home getting drunk in front of reruns of bad

comedies and reruns of bad news that happens every day. That’s the problem with the news. The victims have different names,

the presenters wear different outfits, but the stories are the same.

Some of us put our hands up and say that’s enough; we try

to make a difference. When I was on the job we would arrest

one killer and another would appear. It was like the sorcerer’s apprentice Mickey Mouse cutting evil broomsticks in half, only to have each half grow whole and carry on doing whatever it was evil broomsticks did.

The inside of the windscreen is fogging up, so I redirect the

heater to take care of it. My reflection, slowly appearing on

the warming glass, looks pale green from the dashboard lights. I take a small detour on the way out, heading back past the crime Scene that was once a tranquil lake in the middle of a tranquil cemetery. The machinery is moving around — I can hear and

see it — and I wonder what unlucky girl is being dug from the ground by a giant metal claw.

The cemetery road veers away from the machinery, from the

lake, from my daughter, and towards more darkness and more

trees and fewer gravestones, before taking me out onto the street.

From there it’s a thirty-second drive to Alderman’s house, and most of that is taken up with hedgeline views of the edge of the cemetery. There are only a few houses nearby. One is old and

looks like it is ready to fall down; another looks brand new, as if it was built yesterday. I figure the houses in this area are, like many, slowly getting replaced. New replacing the old. The new

then slowly becoming the old. Then the new becoming so old it

becomes condemned. Hard to imagine, I guess, that any house

becomes that way when it’s getting built. But I suppose the same thing happens with people too. It’s the cycle of life.

I strain to read the numbers on the letterboxes, but at last

I park outside and walk up the driveway, the murky light from

the streetlights detailing more of the house with every footstep.

Warped weatherboards and chipped concrete tiles, the windows

smeared with grime, or cracked, The windowsills uneven. There is no garden, just grass and weeds and mud. The concrete foundation and steps leading up to the front door are flecked green with

mildew, and it’s the first time I’ve become aware that concrete can actually decay. There are no lights on inside. If a house could look as if it has cancer and is in its dying stages, then it’s this one.

When I knock on the door the house creaks and I have the

sudden fear it might topple over. Somebody inside yells for me to go away. I keep knocking, using the heel of my hand to keep the impact loud and annoying. Another thirty seconds go by. Then a minute.

‘Jesus Christ, man, what the hell do you want?’ The voice

comes from behind my knocking.

It’s turning into one of those long days when I’m not in the

mood for personality clashes, so instead of telling him to open up the goddamn door before I kick it in, I grab a business card, identify myself and tell him I have a few questions.

‘I’ve had questions all day,’ he answers. ‘People only ever come to my door if they want something. I’m sick of people wanting

something. How about what I want, huh? I want people to leave

me the hell alone. Jesus, doesn’t it look like I want to be alone?

You see any invites?’

‘It won’t take long.’

“No’

‘That’s a real shame,’ I say, ‘because it’s cold out here. I’m going to have to keep myself warm somehow, and the best way

to do that is to keep pounding on your door.’

There is a small shudder as the door catches, then frees from

the frame before swinging open.

The man confronting me is the man I saw pictured earlier this

evening in the article about the retired caretaker. I reach out and offer Sidney Alderman my card, but he leaves me hanging.

‘I know who you are,’ he says. ‘You’re the cop who had to bury his daughter.’

He spits the comment at me as though it’s some kind of insult, and I’m unsure how to respond. The fact this man remembers me

makes me shudder. Two years ago he covered Emily’s coffin with dirt. How the hell did he remember? The way he says it makes

me want to hit him.

He grins, his aged face stretching dozens of wrinkles in dozens of directions. He has a few days’ worth of grey stubble; his hair is dishevelled, as are his clothes. He looks like he just spent a week in the desert. If I saw him two years ago I don’t recall it. His eyes are unreadable in this light.

He smells of cheap beer and even cheaper vodka, and there is

another smell there too, something I can’t identify, but it makes me think of old men hanging out in hospitals and homes gathering a collection of old diseases.

“I’m looking for your son,’ I say.

Only you’re not a cop any more, are you, Tate,’ he says.

‘ You don’t have to be a cop in this world to want to look for somebody,’ I point out. ‘That’s why they have phonebooks.’

‘Then let your goddamn fingers do the walking,’ he says, and

starts to close the door.

I stop it with my foot.

‘What happened?’ he asks. ‘You get sick of the donuts?’ He

starts to laugh, then scratches at his belly as if he has just come up with a real humdinger. ‘No, they fired you, right? Why was that again?’

He keeps grinning at me. His teeth look like they haven’t seen fluoride in years.

‘Sure is a nice place you got here,’ I say — and hell, maybe the day isn’t long enough after all, because here comes that personality clash. ‘You in the middle of renovating?’

‘Yeah. It’s a real fucking palace,’ he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humour in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. ‘Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?’

‘Where’s your son?’

SNobody knows. The police have been here all afternoon,

right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same

damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for

them and it ain’t changing for you.’

‘Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here. Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.’

‘You’re a fucking joke,’ he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.

‘You can’t hide him for ever.’

‘You finished?’

I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while

we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in

the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be

thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.

‘You know, I am going to find him,’ I say, ‘only now it’s going to be the hard way’

“I don’t fucking care about making your life easy’

“I’m not talking about hard for me. You should have given him

up, Alderman.’

Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. ‘You’re just a fucking cliche,’ he says. ‘And on top of that, you have no authority here.’ He composes himself immediately, as if the laugh was as fake as the concern he’s displayed over the years filling in and digging out holes. ‘They never found him, did they?’

‘What?’

“You know what I’m talking about.’

I slip my business card back into my pocket. I’m glad he didn’t take it. I don’t want this guy touching my card; I don’t like the idea that my name could be in print anywhere inside this house of the damned — worse, I don’t like the idea of his fingers brushing against mine.

“I’ll find your son,’ I promise.

‘Ya think so?’

“I know so.’

He shrugs, as if it doesn’t bother him either way. Maybe it

doesn’t. Maybe he really doesn’t care, and that’s always been the problem for his son. Already I can see Bruce Alderman being

found not guilty on a plea of insanity. With this man as his father, there isn’t a jury in the world who would be unsympathetic.

It’s been a pleasure,’ I say, and I back away from the door,

keeping my eyes on him. He stares at me as if he is trying to unlock some great mystery. The only mystery here is how somebody so

antisocial can have worked these grounds for so many years. He Closes the door.

“I’m ashamed at myself, angry with him. I came here to

intterview the bastard yet the only thing I achieved was to let him crawl under my skin. And I can’t take it out on either of us.

I reach the footpath, unlock the car and swing the door open.

And that’s when it happens. I sense it immediately. It’s a sprinkling of goose bumps that covers my arms and the back of my neck, and at first I think it’s just a residual feeling that anybody leaving that house would get; but then something touches my back. I know

it’s a gun even though I’ve never felt one pushed there before.

‘S-s-slowly,’ he says, ‘just move s-sl-low-ly’

‘Where?’

‘Driver’s s-seat. Climb in.’

I do as Bruce Alderman says, trying to stay as calm as possible as he climbs into the seat behind me.

Too much training and not enough experience. That’s my

problem. Plus the training never detailed anything like this. It was more a general thing, like a commonsense warning. If a gun is pointed at you in close proximity, stay calm. Try to talk your way out of it. It’s advice I would’ve figured out even if I’d never learned it.

‘D-d-don’t try anything,’ Bruce says, so I don’t. I don’t fight for the gun. I don’t open the door and try to run. Don’t do any of this because it’d be pointless, unless the point was to get shot.

Instead I slowly adjust my body so I can turn my head and

face him. The gun looks huge, but only because of the viewing

angle and I’m not the one holding it. There are two hands on

the handle. Both are shaking. A finger is wrapped around the

trigger.

It strains my eyes to keep the barrel in focus, but I keep them strained. If Bruce Alderman wanted me dead, he’d have done it

already, but I feel as though if I take my eyes off the barrel I’m going to die.

‘What do you want?’

“I d-d-don’t know,’ he says, and his answer is a problem. If he doesn’t know, that means he has no plan, and that makes him far more dangerous, and it means maybe he is planning on shooting

me. Maybe that’s where his plan is taking him.

His hands keep shaking, the gun rising and falling with minute motions.

‘You must want me for something,’ I say. ‘Probably to tell me

something. Right? To tell me you had nothing to do with the

dead girl we found?’

‘Why were you t-talking to my f-f-father?’

‘I was looking for you.’

‘You s-started this,’ Bruce says. ‘If it hadn’t been for you,

everything w-w-would be okay. It would be okay’

No, it wouldn’t be okay. Hasn’t been okay for Rachel Tyler for some time now.