The Ellie Chronicles (48 page)

The jury shuffled out, looking a bit embarrassed at all the attention, and I talked to the police prosecutor for a while, who was a really nice guy, and then Gavin and I went for a hot drink. Chocolate in his case, flat white in mine. Mr Lucas said to hang around as he didn’t think the jury would take long, although then he added, ‘I’m usually wrong.’

After an hour nothing had happened so he put us in an office where Gavin could play on a computer and I could read my book, which was called
Sing, and Don’t Cry
, and which I liked because it took me far away from Stratton and Wirrawee into the exotic world of Mexico, where guys sit in the back of a ute and serenade their women at midnight, playing guitars and singing achingly and lovingly and warmly and mournfully . . . it made Jeremy look pretty boring.

Then suddenly Mr Lucas put his head in the door and said, ‘They’re coming back’, and Gavin and I joined the little rush of people heading into courtroom number 4.

After that it was pretty much like on TV. The jury came in, and none of them looked at Mr Manning, except one woman who gave him a quick nervous glance, and I knew then that they’d gone for guilty.

They handed a bit of paper to the judge and she read it and said, ‘Is this the verdict of you all?’ and they all nodded, and she then announced that they’d found him guilty of attempted murder and that she agreed with them. She leant forwards and said to him, ‘Mr Manning, you are basically a complete asshole,’ perhaps not quite in those words, but she did let him have a pretty good blast. She said he was a coward and a person of no conscience and no integrity, who was quite prepared to kill children if they got in the way, and who showed absolutely no remorse. She then hit him with ten years on the hard rock pile and they took him away, Gavin and I waiting till he was out of sight before we highfived each other. I hoped they put him in a cell with Sideshow Bob, or with a couple of six foot four, two hundred kilo bikies who found him irresistibly attractive. I hoped they left him there to rot.

For us, it was back to the farm, back to school, and back, I thought, to life as normal.

THERE ARE NO prizes for guessing what I did when I realised Gavin was missing. Went a little crazy, ran around in circles for a few moments with my hands to my head like I was trying to keep my brains from exploding with all the different thoughts rioting in there, then headed for the phone. I called Homer’s place first and when Homer answered I screeched, ‘Someone’s taken Gavin,’ then hung up. I rang Lee and got Pang, so I asked her to find Lee and have him call me straightaway. I didn’t want to upset Pang. I wasn’t very rational, because I then rang Fi’s boarding house at her school and went through that whole annoying thing of having the phone ring for ages and then a girl answers but she’s kind of lazy and she says, ‘I don’t know where she is,’ and when you say, ‘Oh will you please find her, please, please, it’s really important,’ she says, ‘Oh all right, she might be in the TV Room, I’ll go and have a look there.’ And you wait and wait and you can hear people laughing and talking as they pass the phone and you think you’ve been forgotten until the girl comes back and says, ‘Sorry, can’t find her,’ and you say, ‘Well can you please tell her Ellie rang, and it’s totally important and urgent,’ and you hang up wondering if the message will ever get through.

God, I had an anger-management problem at that point.

I realised I’d rung the old gang first, all except Kevin, and he was still in New Zealand as far as I knew. Old friends are the best friends. But I rang Bronte then. There was something about her calmness and strength that I needed right then. And at least she was home.

‘Have you called the police?’ she asked.

Duh, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Shows how far I’d come since the war. In other words, nowhere. I still hadn’t adjusted to this world where, if I killed someone, like I’d done at the Youngs’ when enemy raiders attacked them, the police had a major investigation. I was now living in a world where a man who tried to stab Gavin and I to death actually got arrested and put on trial. Where if hostiles grabbed the kid you were meant to be looking after, you could call the cops and they might do something.

So I took a deep breath and called the cops.

The deep breath was because I had a feeling I’d be in for a lot of complicated explaining, namely about my illegal trips across the border, plus something I wasn’t used to: having a problem taken out of my hands and being told to go and sit in the waiting room and ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.’

Bronte was right, of course I had to ring them, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence in what they might do.

‘Constable Brickwater.’

Funny name. ‘This is about a kidnapping. The little kid I look after, who lives with me, I think he’s been –’

‘Whoa, whoa. What’s your name?’

‘Ellie. Ellie Linton.’

‘OK. And where are you from?’

I told him. I realised later how clever he was. He’d taken control of the conversation, and that calmed me down and put everything into some kind of order. Otherwise it would have been a huge mess, with me yelping and stammering and sounding like a whole mob of cockatoos in the last light of day trying to settle in a gum tree.

‘Now who’s been kidnapped?’

‘This little boy, Gavin, he lives with me, he’s lived with me since the war and he’s deaf and this afternoon when I got home from school he’d gone and the TV’s been smashed and there’s a magazine full of bullets in the hallway.’

The bit about the bullets got his attention. ‘They’re not your bullets? They don’t fit any of your weapons?’

‘No way. He’s been abducted or something. We did a lot of stuff during the war, and seems like we’ve been targeted since then. My parents got killed here earlier in the year . . .’

‘Ah, OK, yes, now I know who you are.’

From then on things went into serious mode. I found myself talking to a detective sergeant and when I got impatient and said, ‘But you should be doing something, they could be a hundred k’s away by now,’ he said, ‘There are three cars on their way out to you,’ and not much more than five minutes later they arrived, pretty much one after another.

In the meantime I made a quick call to Jeremy, and he was home, thank God, and he said he’d be right out here too. That was good. Sometimes I needed a guy with me. And Jeremy was quite a guy. I had big-time feelings for him. I spent most of my spare time at school with him now, and we’d been to two parties and a barbeque. I loved being with him and lit up inside when I saw him at school each day. I scanned the crowd for his face every morning, and felt restless and empty till I found it.

I hung up when I saw the police cars. Coming out of winter there was enough dust for them to raise a bit of a cloud as they came down the driveway. I don’t know if they took any precautions against being ambushed but I didn’t notice any. Homer, Lee and I, coming into a situation like that in cold blood, I think we would have.

There is something stirring and terrible and exciting about having three police cars parked in your front driveway. There were probably more than three when my parents and Mrs Mackenzie were killed, but I was in the kitchen most of that day and don’t remember too many details. Now, seeing them all lined up, with their headlights on and their blue lights slowly turning, the police labels and logos all over them . . . Gavin would have loved it.

I answered their questions but in a kind of blank state. What could they do? If he was dead, find his body. If he was over the border, they might take a year to get him back. It would all have to be done through official government channels. Investigations, denials, negotiations, I knew that script. I’d read about it in newspapers, with other cases of kidnappings. The man we’d gone over the border to find, Nick Greene, was a typical example. My only chance was for us to do what we had done all through the war, and since the war for that matter. Take charge. Act for ourselves. When the tsunami hit south-east Asia I saw a guy on TV who’d lost his brother. He said to the camera, ‘Where’s the government? The government should be over here looking for him.’ I felt sorry for the guy – and for his brother – but I did think that he was asking too much of the government. If Gavin was dead it didn’t matter who found him, and when and where. If he was alive the person who had the best chance of finding him was standing in the kitchen wasting her time helping the cops to fill in forms. This realisation dawned on me gradually as I answered their endless questions, but after a while I felt an impatience for them to be gone.

Some of the cops had been searching the sheds and the paddocks but as darkness dropped over the house they drifted back in, shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders. The cop in charge was a guy called Henry, who seemed pretty important. He was quiet but efficient. I think he was an inspector at least. He talked to a circle of other police for a few minutes then came back and sat me down at the kitchen table. In front of him was a little pile of plastic bags. Evidence. The magazine full of bullets, Gavin’s ug boot, a grubby red cap that they thought might have belonged to the terrorists but I knew was an old one of my father’s that Gavin wore occasionally. Henry gave that back to me and dropped the bag in the kitchen waste bin. Then he came back to the table and sat down again.

He went through the options. He thought Gavin was probably alive. ‘If they’d wanted to kill him they’d have done it here.’ I’d already thought that, but it gave me more hope to hear an adult in uniform say it. It was the only encouraging thing he did say though.

‘These acts are nearly always carried out by groups of renegades who, as you know, have no support from their own government. No official support anyway. They have different agendas. Some are just out-and-out bad, men who come here to rape or plunder. Some are politically motivated and they carry out assassinations and terrorist attacks to try to soften us up. Some have personal motivations. I’m guessing that the people who came here might fit into the last group. The only reason I say that is because the attack on your parents didn’t seem to have any obvious motive, and the abduction of a child is unusual too. I believe you published a book about your guerrilla activities during the war?’

I nodded. ‘Three books.’

‘And you described various attacks you and your friends carried out?’

‘Yeah, only a few. But there was a lot of publicity for a while . . . Some of the other stuff we did got written about in newspapers and magazines. There was some stuff on TV too.’

‘I wonder if someone who read your books or saw you on TV formed the belief that you were responsible for something they felt strongly about. The death of someone they were connected with, for example.’

I nodded again. ‘Probably. I got a tip-off not long ago that we might be a target.’

‘How did you get that tip-off?’

I went red, wondering how much I should say. ‘It’s a bit awkward. It came from over the border. Someone saw a map that had our house marked on it, like they had a special interest in us.’

He frowned. ‘I hope you haven’t been involved in anything you shouldn’t. I hope your guerrilla activities ended when the war did.’

I sat there in silence, wishing I hadn’t started down this path. Guerrillas. All I could think of was an old joke of my father’s. One day when Mum was away we were working in the machinery shed, close to the house, and it was getting quite late. Eventually Dad said he’d go into the house and turn on the griller, to heat it up so we could chuck a couple of steaks on it when we knocked off work. He came back a minute later, looking shaken.

‘That was a close shave,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

‘I nearly turned on the gorilla instead.’

He thought he was so funny. When I groaned he said, ‘It’s no laughing matter. Have you ever been trapped in a kitchen with a turned-on gorilla? It could have been very ugly.’

I wonder if people like Jim Carrey and Glenn Robbins have kids, and whether their kids groan and say, ‘Oh Dad,’ when their fathers make jokes.

But Henry was still frowning and all I could say was, ‘Well, I wasn’t meant to see the map but it did give me the idea that someone might be after us.’

‘If you weren’t meant to see the map, how did you see it?’

‘It’s a bit awkward,’ I said again, going even redder.

‘Do you want to help us or not? Do you want this boy back or don’t you?’

‘I think the Army knows about the map,’ I said. ‘But I can’t really say anything, except that there was one, and I heard about it a couple of weeks ago and it made it seem like we were going to be a target.’

Suddenly he exploded. It was so unexpected. He’d been so nice and mild and calm before that. He leant forward and shouted into my face. ‘You think you’re going to sit there and tell me you’ve got vital evidence but you won’t tell me what it is? Listen, I’ve got no tolerance for people like you who think you can run some kind of amateur war, and then when things go wrong you call in the police and expect us to clean up the mess. And you don’t even tell us what you’re up to!’ He stood up, scraping his chair back. ‘We’re not a taxi service, you know! You don’t just call us in and then send us away when we’ve done what you want. A major crime’s been committed here and it’s my job to deal with it, and if you obstruct me in doing that, then you become part of the crime. Is there anything about that you don’t understand?’

I shook my head. I was too numb to speak.

‘Then where did you see the map? Who had it? Where did it come from?’

His tone had changed again, back to calm and reasonable, so I started to think this was just part of his routine. An act he did when he wanted information. Good cop, bad cop. Maybe he wasn’t too angry at all.

I was trying to weigh up the consequences of betraying Homer and Lee and Liberation but it was so hard to think. All I could do was decide not to betray them right now. I needed time. An hour, a couple of hours. Would that make a huge difference to Gavin’s chances? That was the bit I couldn’t get straight in my head. The possibilities ranged from ‘I’ve just sentenced him to death’ to ‘It won’t make any difference.’

‘I never saw the map. I just heard about it.’

‘Who did you hear about it from? We need to talk to him. Or her. Urgently.’

‘I think it was smuggled over the border. But I don’t know any more than that.’

‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t know any more than that. But the person who told you about it, I want to know what that person knows. I need to know who that person is.’

‘I can’t tell you. Not for now anyway. I need to check up with them.’

That made him mad again. And so it went on for another ten minutes, him getting mad, being calm, getting mad. I was so tired and my head was hurting. I couldn’t make these decisions on my own. I wanted, I don’t know, not a too-hard basket but a too-hard silo.

Then suddenly he stopped.

‘Well,’ he said, shrugging. ‘We’ll do what we can, based on the limited information you’ve given us. When you’re ready to tell me more I suggest you call me, and the sooner the better. I can tell you that if he’s on this side of the border we’ll find him, but if he’s on the other side of the border it becomes a matter for the Department of Internal Security and the Department of Foreign Affairs. We have no jurisdiction there of course. In the meantime, I’ll leave four officers here overnight to protect you, and we’ll resume our search in the morning. I want to put a tap on your phone in case they try to contact you. Based on previous cases, it’s not very likely, but it has happened occasionally.’