The Fourth Season (14 page)

Don had that sketch and diagram, which meant that he knew more than I did, because he knew how to interpret them, while I could only guess. Don was keeping tabs on me and, I was suddenly certain, following instructions as well.

I imagined a malicious little man watching me through a telescopic lens. But Don's height and build were average, as were his brother, Cameron's. Should I have recognised Don outside the internet cafe, even though I'd only caught a glimpse? What about the man flashing my photograph around the
Tradies
, ringing Sam Borich to inquire about me—why would Don do that? Were the questions, the appearances, meant to unsettle and unnerve me? What would be his next move?

Brook was seriously angry, and I was cut off from the kind of help his friendship had offered in the past. Perhaps the fact that Ivan was a murder suspect would have had this result anyway. I tried to think of times when Ivan had been violent. There weren't any. There were no more than the ordinary arguments couples have, and I couldn't make the leap from those to bashing a young woman over the head. Besides which, it hadn't been just any woman, but one he was in love with. There, I'd said the words.
In love with.
They didn't seem to have much meaning just then. Did all wives of murderers all think along those lines? Not
my
husband!
Wives of murderers.
I smiled to myself, and in that seemingly involuntary movement of my lips I found a kind of comfort.

When I thought back over my life, I realised that most of what I'd done had been as a reaction to fear. It was time to turn around. I realised that, even if I could pin Don Fletcher's motives down with reasonable certainty, it wouldn't stop me now. I wouldn't write to Don, attaching a final invoice, or ring him up and tell him that was it.

The spot I'd found to sit until my legs began behaving normally again was an uncomfortable, low brick wall. But I went on sitting there, enjoying the feel of the sun on my back. I thought that I could buy something nice to eat, and that, with any luck, when I got home Ivan would be out somewhere.

What did that hope say about the state we'd reached, and was there anything that I could do to save my marriage?

I thought about love then, not as an entity, a kind of ball that a person could catch, or fumble—I realised that this was the way I'd been thinking about love in relation to Laila Fanshaw and the men who'd danced around her—but as an absence that people tried to fill.

I made myself more comfortable, then dialled Bill Abenay's number.

Seventeen

The sense that there was something restful about Bill Abenay's house returned as he led the way into his living room. Bill had shown no surprise, either at my phone call, or my request to ask him a few more questions.

I put the feeling of restfulness down, in part, to the absence of children. Like many mothers, I approached childless houses with a mixture of envy and condescension. Here was a man who'd reached the age of fifty without the cares that were a part of all my days. Partly, also, it was the house itself—small, but a proper house, free-standing, with a garden right around it, a garden that blossomed in the middle of the drought.

The inside was cared for too. Despite his appearance of a slow-moving marsupial, Abenay struck me as a man who paid attention to details, who did not leave anything to chance.

His eyes were red; he wasn't at all embarrassed to let me see that he'd been crying.

He wasn't surprised, either, when I began my questions with the trip to Lake Jindabyne, and the certainty came to me that Bill Abenay had moved beyond ordinary surprise. Grief needs to be spoken sometimes, needs, however inadequate the listener, to be shared. And I guessed that this private, careful man had nobody to talk to about Laila, nobody to relive memories, even argue with—in this he was more alone than Tim or Ivan, or Don Fletcher.

‘Did you know that there's an intact homestead down there, beautifully preserved?' he said, in a voice that was low-pitched, with an undertone of sadness that you had to listen for. ‘The water's sometimes muddy, but that day we were lucky. Visibility was good.'

‘You'd been diving at the lake before.'

‘I wouldn't have taken Laila if I hadn't been fairly confident of finding what I was looking for.' The name had never sounded so caressing, I thought, or so sad. Not even her father had given it the intonation this man did, who was her father's age.

‘You might as well sit down.'

Abenay asked what I would like to drink. I understood that it was important for him to show me basic hospitality, and that he'd show it to the police as well. It was important to fulfil the courtesies of being a host, to maintain a polite exterior.

‘The homestead—' he began again, after returning from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee—‘there are lots of buildings underwater, but most are falling, or have fallen down. Old truck bodies—you name it, really—even some stone steps that once led to the Catholic church, though the church has gone completely. Perhaps you saw that piece about it in the paper? For some reason, the Kalkite homestead has remained intact. Of course it's covered in silt. Apart from that it might have been flooded last year, not forty years ago.'

Abenay explained that the trip had been Laila's idea. ‘She'd always wanted to see a drowned village. I told her not to get her hopes up. But like I said, visibility was good. She said we should hurry up and do the dive before the water all evaporated.'

He smiled at the recollection. I said I'd heard that Laila's interest in diving had begun when she was a child.

‘Her father took her on a wreck dive off the Victorian coast when she was—I don't know, maybe twelve, thirteen? She called it the experience that changed her life.'

‘Was Laila a skilled diver?'

‘It's funny you should ask that. To tell you the truth, she had a higher opinion of her abilities than I think was warranted. She'd done her training of course, and she'd been on some challenging dives, but not all that many. And then she lived in Canberra.'

‘What about the south coast?'

‘She'd been diving down there a few times.'

‘Who was her instructor?'

‘I don't know names. What Laila told me about herself, she told me because she wanted to. I never pried.'

Abenay's voice stayed the same, mild and uninflected. The possibility that he was a good liar crossed my mind, unlike Brownyn, whose spiky hair and large, freckled hands rose up momentarily in front of my eyes. I wondered if these two grieving people, who'd loved Laila in different, perhaps less selfish ways than Ivan and Tim had, had met one another, and what they thought of one another if they had.

‘What about the homestead at Lake Jindabyne?' I asked. ‘Did you go inside?'

‘You're not meant to.'

‘But you did.'

‘Laila insisted on it. She swam through the rooms.'

Abenay's voice changed, taking on a note of exasperated pride. ‘She picked over bottles and broken crockery, disturbed the mud and silt. Of course, I was right beside her. The structure
looks
stable, but it can't be, not after all this time.'

‘Was Laila looking for something in particular?'

‘What do you mean? It's just a farm house. It certainly looks ghostly and mysterious underwater, but there's really no mystery about it.'

Abenay described the weekend. The cottage he'd rented was ‘right by the lake'. He'd hired a boat from the caravan park. When he got up to take our mugs out to the kitchen, I followed him so as not to break the story. Some of what he told me was astonishing, but he remained quietly unastonished, lost in his reverie, almost in a kind of trance.

. . .

Pam rang that evening as I was heading off for my shift at the cafe. Owen was taking longer to recover than he and Rita had hoped, and I'd told Rita that I'd keep it up for a couple more weeks at least.

Another waitress had seen Laila at the club. I thanked Pam for letting me know. By seven I was sitting behind my counter, facing an almost empty room. Rowan hadn't been back since the time I'd ­followed him as far as Dickson Pool, and I didn't think he would be.

I switched on my computer and googled ‘Mary Rose'. This time I didn't stop with the pride of Henry VIII's fleet, though the first twenty or so entries were about it.

A less famous ship of the same name had vanished in Bass Strait in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1857 a Spanish pirate ship, the
Maria Rosa
, had crossed the Pacific after its crew had stolen gold and statues from cathedrals in Lima. It had been making for Melbourne when a storm blew up. The precise location where the ship had gone down was unknown, but contemporary letters and police records referred to a last sighting off the group of islands known as ‘Kent'.

I looked up as the door opened. It was Rowan.

My face must have shown as much surprise as his. No doubt he thought I'd be long gone, and that gentle, non-interfering Owen would be back.

Rowan had his own ideas. He chose what I thought of as Laila's monitor, and walked towards it confidently.

He kept glancing up at me, with something teasing in his manner. I remembered our last meeting, how he couldn't wait to get away. I expected him to be accessing porn sites, but he wasn't. I guessed that was the reason for the teasing looks. After half an hour Rowan got up, handed me three dollars with another provocative glance, and left.

. . .

DC Erickson paid a visit in my absence that evening, questioning Peter and Katya, and making Katya cry.

My daughter was sitting bolt upright in bed. Her tears had stopped, but her face was pale and scared.

‘Where were you Mummy? I don't
like
that man.'

‘I'm sorry, Kat.' I sat down and put my arms around her. ‘I was at the cafe. I'm working there, remember?'

‘I don't want you to.'

‘It's not for much longer. It's to help a man who's sick.'

Kat let herself relax then, nestling against my shoulder. ‘When will he be better?'

I said that he'd be better soon, hoping that it was the truth.

‘Mummy, that man wanted to know where you'd gone while I was asleep. I couldn't tell him because I didn't know.'

‘I'm sorry, sweetheart. I do sometimes have to go out at night.'

‘Peter didn't know either.'

‘If you don't know the answer to a question, it's perfectly all right to say so.'

Katya nodded solemnly, still with her head against my shoulder. ‘Dad said the man shouldn't upset me. He made him go away.'

‘Good for Dad. Don't worry.'

‘Is he coming back?'

I wanted to say no, but couldn't. For once I was glad, very glad, that Ivan had been home.

‘I think you should go to sleep now. Roll over and I'll rub your back.'

Gradually, Kat's breathing steadied and her eyes closed.

I thanked Ivan and, that night in bed, we held each other close.

. . .

In the bustle of making breakfast and packing lunches the next morning, I almost forgot about Pam. I rang and said I had to go to the police station, and I'd be in touch after that. Pam didn't ask me why. She sounded pushed for time herself.

It wasn't until I was escorted into an interview room in the Winchester Building that I turned my mind again to DC Erickson. On the short walk down the corridor, all I could think about was how Brook was there, in that same building, and how ridiculous it was that I couldn't knock on his door and go in.

When I complained to Erickson about his treatment of Katya, his response was brief and unapologetic. He opened a folder and took out some sheets of paper, then switched on a tape recorder and asked me again where I'd been on the night Ben Sanderson was killed.

I said I'd left my children asleep in bed and driven to Kingston because I'd wanted to talk to Bronwyn Castles. I could have rung Bronwyn but I'd wanted to speak to her in person. And no, I didn't like leaving my children at night, but Peter was sixteen and responsible. Many girls of that age were expected to mind younger siblings. I was defending myself too much, trying too hard, and Erickson knew it. He smiled as though I was doing a good job of tripping myself up. When Bronwyn hadn't been home, I'd driven back. I hadn't gone anywhere near Dickson Pool. Whoever said they'd seen my car there was lying.

‘Where was your husband while you were gallivanting around Kingston, Ms Mahoney?'

I swallowed the urge to say I had not been gallivanting. ‘Ivan was out.'

‘Out where?'

‘My partner's grieving for Laila Fanshaw. He goes out at night to walk.'

. . .

I felt angry and shaken after the interview was over. For the first time since starting working at the cafe, my heart sank at the thought of the evening ahead. I needed to spend it with my children.

It was no use trying to guess who was feeding false information to the police, but I couldn't help myself. I wondered if it was somebody obvious, like Guy Harmer or Allison Edgeware, two elegant crooks whom Ivan and I had helped to put in jail, and who'd been released last year. The other high profile cases that I'd been involved with—Colin Rasmussen, who'd pushed Niall Howley off the Telstra tower, and Margot Lancaster, who'd injected one of her employees with a fatal dose of heroin—were both serving sentences for murder. But plenty of convicted killers had run operations from prison, and the operation here was very simple. Pay someone to say they'd seen my car at Dickson Pool on the night Ben Sanderson's body was taken there and dumped.

. . .

Laila's father, Henry Fanshaw, was easy enough to find in the phone book. At first I thought he was going to refuse to talk to me, but when I mentioned shipwrecks, he admitted, after a short silence, that Laila had been fascinated by them. He spoke about Laila's favourite wreck dive, the
Falls of Halladale
, off Port Campbell. ‘She's nearly a hundred years old. Mostly in about ten metres of water. Quite manageable, even for beginners.'

Henry's voice softened as he spoke, and I could tell the memory was a comfort to him. I asked about the TV program on the
Mary Rose
. Henry remembered whole sections of it, as well as the date and time of the broadcast.

When I asked if Laila had spoken to him about another ship of the same name, he replied sharply, ‘What do you mean?'

‘It's not that unusual a name. I was wondering whether you or Laila had come across any others. A Spanish
Mary Rose
, for instance.'

‘Ms Mahoney, I'm fifty-two years old. Shipwrecks have been my hobby since I was a boy. If the name's a common one, as you point out, it's likely that I would have come across it at some stage. But I can't remember and, forgive me if I sound rude, but I'm not obliged to try.'

. . .

After checking in with Pam, I phoned the officer in charge of the shipwreck section at the Environment Department, who sounded flattered that a member of the public was interested in his area of expertise. When I asked about the
Maria Rosa
, he said it was a coinci­dence because he'd had the same inquiry a couple of months before. A woman had rung wanting to know about wrecks in the area covered by the proposed marine park. No, she hadn't given her name. He'd told her where to find what information existed within the department's records. There were no confirmed shipwrecks. I asked if he'd send me the same information, and thanked him for his time.

I contacted ExxonMobil to see if I could find someone prepared to talk to me about the work Ben Sanderson had done for them, but drew a blank. It was confidential information, and I was not, as I was continually reminded, the police. After many frustrating phone calls, I managed to track down another commercial diver living in Canberra, who told me that he thought there might have been some trouble between Ben and the company. At any rate, Ben had made it clear that he'd given up maintenance work. When I quizzed him about Ben's interest in shipwrecks, he sounded surprised and said he couldn't help me there.

I made a list of what Laila and Ben had had in common, a fanci­ful, imaginative list I would have been the first to admit was short on facts. Scuba diving; scuba diving at the south coast—I wondered if that should be one point or two. Then there was ‘Babel', as in canyon, and oil rig, tantalisingly close to one another, and close to the boundary of the new park, whose announcement had been delayed again. I wanted to add ‘shipwrecks', so I did, followed by a large ­question mark.