Dead Man's Footsteps (8 page)

SEPTEMBER 2007

The metallic blue Holden pick-up headed west, away from Melbourne. MJ, a tall young man of twenty-eight with jet-black hair and a surfer’s frame, wearing a yellow T-shirt and Bermudas, drove with one hand on the wheel, his free arm around Lisa’s shoulders.

The ute sat low and squat on its shocks, on wide mags shod with fatties that clung sure-footedly to the contours of the winding road. This vehicle was his pride and joy, and he listened contentedly to the burble of the V8 5.7-litre engine through the drainpipe exhausts as they drove through big, open country. To their right, plains of scorched vegetation stretched out for miles. To their left, beyond a tired-looking barbed-wire fence, softly contoured brown hills rose in the near distance, parched and arid courtesy of six years’ almost unbroken drought. A few thin ridges of trees were scattered over them randomly, like strips of facial hair missed by a razor.

It was Saturday morning and for two whole days MJ could forget about his intensive studies. In a month’s time he was sitting tough stockbroking exams, which he needed to pass to secure a permanent job with his current employers, Macquarie Bank. Spring had been a long time coming this year, despite the drought, and this weekend promised to be the first truly glorious one after the dreary winter months. He was determined to make the most of it.

They were ambling along. With six points on his licence, he was being careful to drive well within the speed limits. Besides, he wasn’t in any hurry. He was happy – intensely happy – just being here with the girl he loved, enjoying the drive, the scenery, the Saturday morning feeling of the whole weekend stretching out ahead of him.

Something he had once read was going around inside his head:  Happiness is not getting what you want. It is wanting what you have.

He said it out aloud to Lisa, and she said they were beautiful words, and she agreed with them. Totally. She kissed him. ‘You say so many beautiful things, MJ.’ He blushed.

She pressed a button and music from the Whitlams thumped out of the madly expensive sound system he’d had installed. And their camping gear and the slab of VB beer thumped under the battened-down tarp behind the cab. And his heart thumped too. It was good to be here, good to feel so alive, to feel the warm air blowing on his face through the open window, to smell Lisa’s perfume, to feel her tangle of blonde curls batting against his wrist.

‘Where are we?’ she said, not that she cared. She was enjoying this too. Enjoying the break from her weekly routine of visiting doctors’ practices as a haemophilia drugs sales rep for the pharmaceutical giant Wyeth. Enjoying wearing just a loose white top and pink shorts, instead of the business suits she had to wear during the week. But most of all, enjoying precious time together with MJ.

‘Nearly there,’ he said.

They passed a yellow hexagonal road sign depicting a black bicycle and stopped at a T-intersection, beside the skeletal trunk of a Radiata pine that was topped by a thick clump of needles, like a badly fitting toupee. Immediately ahead of them rose a steep, bald hill with isolated clusters of bushes looking as if they’d been stuck to it by Velcro.

Lisa, who was English, had only been in Australia for two years. She had moved to Melbourne from Perth a few months ago and the terrain was all new to her. ‘When were you last here?’ she asked.

‘Not for some years – ten maybe. Used to come here camping with my parents, when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘It was our favourite place. You’re going to love it. Yee-hah!’

With a sudden burst of exuberance, he tramped the accelerator. The ute shot forward, making a sharp left on to the highway with a squeal of its tyres and a roar of thunder from its exhausts.

After a few minutes they passed a sign on a pole that read  BARWON RIVER, then MJ slowed down and started looking to his right as they passed another saying  STONEHAVEN AND POLLOCKS FORD.

After a while he braked sharply and turned right on to a sandy track. ‘I’m pretty sure this is it!’ he said.

They bounced along for five hundred yards or so. Wide open country to their right, bushes to their left and an embankment down to a river they couldn’t see. They passed a steel-girder bridge sitting on old brick buttresses to their left, then thick brush obscured the view. The track suddenly dipped sharply, then rose again on the far side. After a few minutes it widened out for some yards and ended, turning into scrub grass beyond which was dense brush.

MJ brought the ute to a halt and put on the handbrake. A cloud of dust swirled over them. ‘Welcome to paradise,’ he said.

They kissed.

Then, after some moments, they climbed out. Into total warm silence. The engine pinged. There was the scent of dried grasses in the air. A bowerbird made a sound like someone whistling  yoo hoo!, then was silent. Down below them, snaking into the distance, was shimmering water and further away, beneath the fierce late-morning sun, there were bald brown hills sporting just the occasional acacia or eucalyptus tree. The silence was so intense, for a moment they felt they could be the only people on the planet.

‘God,’ Lisa said, ‘this is so beautiful.’

A fly buzzed around her face and she batted it away. Another one came and she batted that away too.

‘Good old flies,’ MJ said. ‘This is the right spot!’

‘Obviously they remember you!’ she said, as a third one landed on her forehead.

He gave her a playful punch, before arcing his hand several times in rapid succession in front of his face, giving an Aussie salute to flap away more flies that were pestering him. Then, with his arm around her, MJ steered Lisa to a gap in the brush.

‘This is where we used to launch our canoe,’ he said.

She peered down a steep, sandy slope overgrown with bracken that was a natural slipway into the river, a good thirty yards below. The water, about twenty yards wide, was as still as a millpond. A few damsel flies sat on the surface, feeding off mosquito larvae or laying eggs, and more hovered just above. Reflections of the brush on the far bank appeared in sharp focus.

‘Wow!’ she said. ‘Wowwwwwww! That is amazing.’

Then she noticed the series of white sticks planted all the way down the slipway. Each of them had precise ruled markings in black.

‘When I was a kid,’ MJ said, ‘the water level was up to here.’ He pointed at the top marker.

Lisa counted eight exposed rulers, all the way down to the water. ‘It’s dropped this much?’

‘Good old global warming,’ he replied.

Then she saw the looped hangman’s rope fixed to the overhanging branch of a tree thick as an elephant’s leg.

‘We used to jump off that!’ MJ said. ‘It was just a short drop.’

Now it was a good five yards.

He peeled off his T-shirt. ‘Coming in?’

‘Let’s put the tent up first!’

‘Shit, Lisa, we’ve got the whole day to put the tent up! I’m hot!’ He continued stripping. ‘And the flies hate the water.’

‘Tell me what the water’s like – I’ll think about it!’

‘You’re weak as piss!’

Lisa laughed. MJ stood naked, then disappeared for some moments into the undergrowth. Moments later, she saw him crawling along the overhanging branch. He reached the rope, which looked dangerously frayed, rolled over and clung to it.

‘Be careful, MJ!’ she shouted, suddenly alarmed.

Holding on with one arm, he beat his chest with the other, making a series of Tarzan whoops. Then he swung out over the river, his bare feet almost touching the surface of the water. He swung back and forward in several arcs, then he let go and dropped with a loud splash.

Lisa watched anxiously. Moments later he surfaced and tossed his head, shaking wet hair away from his face. ‘It’s beautiful! Get in here, wuss!’

He struck out, doing a couple of powerful crawl strokes, then suddenly he raised his head with a pained expression.

‘Fuck!’ he spluttered. ‘Shit! Owww! Bloody stubbed my toe on something!’

Lisa laughed.

MJ duck-dived. Moments later his head broke the surface and there was a look of panic on his face.

‘Shit, Lisa!’ he said. ‘There’s a car down here! There’s a fucking car in the river!’

11 SEPTEMBER 2001

Lorraine stared in numb disbelief. The unlit cigarette between her fingers was quite forgotten. A young, female reporter, talking urgently to the camera, seemed totally unaware that the South Tower, just a few hundred yards behind her, was collapsing.

It was dropping straight down out of the sky, disappearing inside itself, neatly, almost unbearably neatly, as if for one brief instant Lorraine was witnessing the greatest conjuring trick ever performed. The reporter talked on. Behind her, cars and people were disappearing under rubble and swirling dust. Others were running for their lives, running straight down the street towards the camera.

Oh, Jesus, doesn’t she realize?

Still unaware, the reporter continued reading off her autocue or from a feed in her ear.

LOOK BEHIND YOU!  she wanted to scream at the woman.

Then finally the woman did turn. And lost the plot totally. She took a startled, stumbling step sideways, followed by another. People were running past on either side, jostling her, almost knocking her off her feet. The mushrooming cloud was now as tall as the sky itself, and as wide as the city, tumbling like an avalanche towards her. In bewildered shock, she spoke a few more words, but there was no sound with them, as if the cable had been disconnected, then the image became just a grey swirl of shadowy figures and chaos as the camera was engulfed.

Lorraine, still in just her bikini bottoms, heard various shouts. The image on the screen cut to a jerky, hand-held shot of a massive slab of steel and glass and masonry crashing on to a red and white fire truck. It smashed through the ladder, then flattened the whole mid-section, as if this was a plastic toy truck a child had just stamped on.

A woman’s voice was shouting, over and over, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God.’

There were cries. Darkness for a second, then another handheld shot, a young man limping past holding a blood-drenched towel against a woman’s face, helping her along, trying to pull her faster, ahead of the cloud that was gaining on them.

Then they were in a studio news set. Lorraine watched the anchor, a man in his forties in a jacket and tie. The images she had been viewing were all up on monitors behind his head. He looked grim.

‘We’re getting reports that the South Tower of the World Trade Center has collapsed. We are also going to bring you the latest on the situation at the Pentagon in just a few moments.’

Lorraine tried to light the cigarette, but her hand was shaking too much and the lighter fell to the floor. She waited, unable to bear taking her eyes from the screen for even one second in case she missed a glimpse of Ronnie. There was an agitated woman on the television now, shouting unintelligibly. She watched an attractive woman clutching a mike, who was standing against a background of dense black smoke flecked with orange flames, through which she could just make out the low roofline silhouettes of the Pentagon.

She dialled Ronnie’s mobile number and once more got the lines-busy beep.

She tried again. Again. Again. Her heart was thrashing around inside her chest and she was shaking, desperate to hear his voice, to know that he was OK. And all the time inside her head was the knowledge that Ronnie’s meeting was in the South Tower. The South Tower had collapsed.

She wanted more pictures of Manhattan, not the sodding Pentagon, Ronnie was in Manhattan, not the sodding Pentagon. She changed channels to Sky News. Saw another jerky hand-held shot, this time of three dusty firemen in helmets carrying a busted-looking grey-haired man, their yellow armbands jigging as they walked urgently along.

Then she saw a burning car. And a burning ambulance. Figures appearing out of the gloom behind them. Ronnie? She leaned forward, close up to the huge screen. Ronnie? The figures appeared from the smoke like faces on a developing photograph. No Ronnie.

Then she dialled his number again. For one fleeting moment it sounded as if it was going to ring! Then she was thwarted by the lines-busy signal once more.

Sky News cut to Washington. She grabbed the remote and hit another button. It seemed that every station was now showing the same images, the same news feeds. She watched a replay of the first plane striking, then the second. It replayed again. And again.

Her phone rang. She hit the answer button with a sudden burst of joy, almost too choked to get any words out. ‘Hello?’

It was the washing-machine engineer, calling to confirm his appointment for tomorrow.

24               OCTOBER 2006

The target’s name was Ricky. Abby had met him on a few occasions at parties, when he always seemed to make a beeline for her and chat her up. And in truth, she found him attractive and enjoyed the flirtation.

He was a good-looking guy in his forties, slightly mysterious and very self-assured, with the air of an ageing laid-back surfer dude. Like Dave, he knew how to talk to women, asking her more questions than he answered for her. He was also involved in stamps, in quite a big way.

Not all the stamps were his own. Four million pounds’ worth, to be precise. There was some dispute over their ownership. Dave told her that he and Ricky had made a deal to split the proceeds fifty-fifty, but now Ricky was reneging and wanted ninety per cent. When she had asked Dave why he didn’t simply go to the police he had smiled. Police, it seemed, were off limits for both of them.

Anyhow, he had a much better plan.

OCTOBER 2007

Roy Grace was still struggling, even with the help of the direct beam of a halogen light, to see the minute object Frazer Theobald was holding up in his stainless-steel tweezers. All he could make out was something blue and blurred.

He squinted, reluctant to admit to himself that he was getting to the point where he needed glasses. It was only when the pathologist placed a small square of paper behind the tweezers and handed him a magnifying glass that Roy could see it more clearly. It was a fibre of some kind, thinner than a human hair, like a gossamer strand of a spider’s web. It appeared translucent one moment, then pale blue the next, and the ends were jigging from a combination of the faintest tremor in Theobald’s hand and the icy breeze blowing through the storm drain.

‘Whoever killed this woman did his best to leave no evidence,’ the pathologist said. ‘It’s my guess he put her down here expecting that at some point she’d be washed along through the drainage system and then flushed out of the sewage outfall into the sea – thinking a sufficient distance from the shore for sewage would be a safe enough distance for a body.’

Grace stared again at the skeleton, unable to get the possibility that it was Sandy out of his mind.

‘Perhaps her killer hadn’t considered the drain not flooding,’ Theobald went on. ‘He hadn’t reckoned on her getting embedded in the silt, and because the water table was down, there wasn’t enough flow through the drain system to wash her free. Or maybe the drain went out of use.’

Grace nodded, looking again at the twitching thread.

‘It’s a carpet fibre, that’s what I think. I could be wrong, but

I think the lab analysis will show it’s a carpet fibre. Too hard to be from a pullover or a skirt or a cushion cover. It’s a carpet fibre.’

Joan Major nodded in agreement.

‘Where did you find it?’ Grace asked.

The forensic pathologist pointed at the skeleton’s right hand, which was partially buried in the silt. The fingers were exposed. He pointed at the end of the middle finger. ‘See that? It’s an artificial nail – from one of those nail studio places.’

Grace felt a chill run through him. Sandy had bitten her nails. When they were watching television she would chew on them, making busy little clicking sounds like a hamster. It drove him nuts. And sometimes in bed as well. Often when he was trying to go to sleep, she would be gnawing away, as if fretting about something she could not or would not share with him. Then suddenly she’d look at her nails and get angry with herself, say to him that he must tell her when she was biting and help her to stop. And she would go to a nail studio to have expensive, artificial nails put over her bitten ones.

‘A plastic compound, glued on, somehow the nails didn’t get washed away when the skin beneath rotted,’ Frazer Theobald said. ‘The fibre was beneath this one. It could be that her assailant dragged her along a carpet and she dug her nails in. That’s the most likely explanation of how it got there. Bit of luck that it didn’t get washed away.’

‘Luck, yes,’ Grace said distantly. His mind was racing.  Dragged along a carpet.  A blue carpet fibre. Pale blue. Sky blue.

There was a pale blue carpet at home. In the bedroom. The bedroom he and Sandy had shared until the night she disappeared.

Into the blue.