The Fourth Season (23 page)

The
Sea Wizard
had been filming around the south island of New Zealand before heading for Australia. From Westport on the south island, the captain had notified Australian customs of their next project, which included two weeks in Bass Strait, and three weeks travelling up the east coast. Faxes sent included a list of crew and equipment. Application was made for a cruising permit, which would be granted once the
Sea Wizard
had been inspected.

‘I also got their customs report from Auckland. Clean.'

‘Where was the
Sea Wizard
before New Zealand?'

‘Fiji.'

The boat had entered Australian waters on schedule, on 11 February. A Coastwatch Dash 8 had picked it up at 0700 hours, flying the required International Pratique Q-flag. Radio contact was made and it was agreed that the craft would proceed directly to the customs boarding station. Winds of thirty to thirty-five knots had been forecast. But by 0930 hours, the mean wind speed had reached fifty knots, and an additional low had formed and intensified, moving rapidly over Bass Strait. In the gale, the
Sea Wizard
missed Tasmania altogether and fetched up on Erith Island.

For the rest of that day and night, the captain had remained in regular radio contact with customs officials. Both captain and crew were instructed not to disembark. The storm was so severe that it was mid afternoon the following day before an inspection boat arrived.

‘They attached a copy of the inspector's report,' Brook said. ‘The
Sea Wizard
spent another four days at West Cove. The storm had done some damage to the hull and it had to be repaired.'

I recalled the Bulli's crew throwing its cargo overboard, and wondered why the film's narrator hadn't mentioned the
Sea Wizard
's own troubles on route to the islands.

By 13 February, Cameron's yacht, the
Lightning
, had arrived at West Cove. One of Brook's DCs had been compiling information on other seacraft anchored there.

‘Seems to have been a regular Pitt Street,' Brook said.

Each would be investigated, but only two of the yachts had recently entered Australian waters, and had been inspected at Portland and Geelong respectively.

‘Where's the
Sea Wizard
now?' I asked.

‘Headed back to Fiji.'

‘What about looking for the
Maria Rosa
?'

‘No mention of that in any of the reports I've seen. I think that one's a fizzer, Sandra.'

Not as far as Laila was concerned, I thought. ‘Merimbula's on the east coast, and there are those two scuttled tugs in Eden harbour. I wonder if the
Sea Wizard
stopped there.'

Brook frowned. ‘The customs report just says “travelling up the east coast”. There's a customs station at Eden. I'll follow up with them.'

Thirty

Over the next few days, Brook dutifully rang or called in. There were no more sightings of men hanging round the school, or red sedans, and I was beginning to think the immediate danger had passed.

Brook had finally got Bernhard Robben to admit that he'd had a ‘fling' with Laila.

‘But only after I threatened to question his wife.'

Robben and Laila had met a few times at a motel in Cooma. Laila had been keen to continue, but Robben claimed he'd had enough. He denied taking Laila out in his boat. Brook didn't think the young waterskier had been seeing things or lying, but until another witness was found, he couldn't do much more with that part of the story. The other two men with Robben that Sunday had been Ben Sanderson and Cameron Fletcher. ‘Your three musketeers', Brook called them, trying to get me to smile.

Brook had ticked Robben off for not admitting straight away that Sanderson had been a friend, but Robben denied that they'd been friends. In diving circles ‘everyone knows everyone'. Sanderson had wanted to dive the homestead. Cameron Fletcher had come along ‘out of curiosity', though of course he was an amateur compared to Sanderson.

Robben had met Laila the weekend she'd gone diving off Merimbula.

‘Said he was down that way and decided to call in. His children are seven, five and three. He gave me the impression that family life could be constricting.'

Brook mimicked the accents of a good family man who'd given in to temptation and then thought better of it. Again, he tried to make me smile. And smile I did, in spite of my anxiety. Robben claimed that Laila was the one who'd wanted sex, and that he had no idea why she'd ‘turned up out of the blue at the boat ramp.' As far as he was concerned, the ‘fling' ended by mutual consent.

‘I didn't want to jeopardise my marriage,' Brook said in an aggrieved voice. ‘Laila was a lovely girl. We had some fun together. Where's the crime in that?'

‘Fling is right,' I said, reminding Brook that, when Laila had returned to the cottage and Bill Abenay, she'd been soaked.

‘What about Robben's new boat?' I asked.

‘Claims he's paying it off. It won't hurt him to stew for a few days. He might make a false move, but I'm not holding my breath.'

Brook had questioned Robben about Cameron Fletcher, but Robben claimed to know no more than that Fletcher was Ben Sanderson's employer, and ‘a rich man with a simply gorgeous yacht.' Yes, Robben had been lucky enough to be invited to go sailing, and yes, they'd gone out into the Strait as far as the Kent Group. As to why Laila had photos of the
Lightning
on her computer, he had no idea. He'd never talked to her about Cameron's yacht, and she'd never asked him.

When asked if they'd talked about shipwrecks, in particular the
Maria Rosa
, Robben could not have been more surprised.

‘He laughed at the idea and called it kids' stuff', Brook said, with a warning glance at me.

I saw again—the image was never far from my mind—that red waistcoat, wet and dirty, with its marks of oil. In my mind, it slid and slipped and shrank, becoming child-sized. It blazed into a beacon so that I might know for certain that my child was marked.

I tried not to let Brook see how close I was to cracking up. I didn't know which would be worse, Brook's sympathy, or his saying, ‘I told you so.'

Robben had alibis for both murders. The night Sanderson was killed, he'd been at his father-in-law's sixtieth birthday party, the night of Laila's death at home with his wife and kids.

‘How would I have got to Canberra and back without my wife finding out? I bet it was one of her Greenie friends. You know the type. Peace and love on the outside, and on the inside as driven by their baser instincts as the rest of us. So what if I had sex with the girl? She wanted it.'

‘Lovely,' I commented. ‘You picked Robben as a liar from the start?'

‘More or less.' Brook sighed. ‘But his alibis will hold, and he had no need to kill the girl. He did what he wanted, had sex with her then told her to get lost.'

When Brook had asked about Sanderson meeting Laila at the
Tradies
, Robben claimed not to know anything about it.

‘But Sanderson knew about the affair?'

‘I'd say, if not beforehand, he worked it out that day at Jindabyne.'

When Brook put it to Robben that he hadn't formally broken off the affair, and that Laila had turned up at the boat ramp for a showdown, Robben had looked blankly innocent, and said he didn't know what Brook was talking about. Brook had lost patience then, and told Robben that his wife finding out he'd been having an affair with a murder victim was the least of his worries.

‘Maybe Laila discovered something on Robben's boat that day,' I said. ‘Perhaps she heard the three men talking, perhaps there were charts or notes. She found out that they planned to go sailing in Bass Strait, and possibly to make West Cove their base. She may have told them about the
Maria Rosa
. She may simply have asked Cameron to take her with them, without saying why. Cameron refused, but Laila wasn't the kind of girl to take no for an answer. She may not have heard of the
Lightning
before that afternoon, but after it she made it her business to find out as much as she could.'

I recalled Bill Abenay's words. ‘That was why Laila was in such a good mood when she got back to the cottage,' I went on, trying not to let Brook's sceptical expression interrupt my train of thought. ‘She jumped out of Robben's boat once she got the information she wanted, or as much as she thought she was going to get. Or else one of them, Cameron possibly, threatened her, and she jumped overboard.'

Laila's story of falling in the water had never been believable, rather a fiction concocted on the spot for a besotted middle-aged admirer. When I'd been in Bill Abenay's company, watching and listening to him, the mantle had partly fallen away, and I'd seen a man who was not so ego-bound as to be taken in, but who had willed himself into this position as a kind of loyalty. On the other hand, I couldn't discount the possibility that Bill had lied to me from the beginning. I thought of the game Laila had played with him as different from the ones she habitually played with men. Rather than being fooled into believing he was sought after, or desired in any way, Abenay had taken his pleasure from observing the folly of others, and had seen more—this had been part of the pleasure—than he had let on.

In Laila's courting of her men were hidden clues as to which one of them had killed her. But there were too many men, and the one I was sure was guilty had an alibi. I told myself that each day that passed without further threat to Katya was a bonus.

. . .

It was almost dark when I opened my front door a fraction in answer to a knock. The screen door was locked and the chain securely in place. Through thick mesh, I saw in shadow, and as though the mesh was growing on it, Don Fletcher's haggard face.

‘What do you want?' I asked him, hoping that neither Kat nor Peter would appear.

I'd phoned Don to tell him I could not continue working for him, and sent a final invoice, which hadn't yet been paid. Don had been aggrieved and had argued with me on the phone, but had finally accepted that my mind was made up.

Don opened and shut his mouth on the other side of the screen door. He seemed on the point of explaining something, then he shook his head.

‘Tell your brother to stay away from my family,' I said.

. . .

When I rang Brook to tell him, Brook said sharply, ‘You're out of the equation now.'

I wished I could believe it. I knew that Brook was ashamed of his inability to offer my children better protection.

Next day, when he called in, Brook was gentle and stern with me by turns, his eyes opaque, his few centimetres of hair standing on end when he rubbed it absent-mindedly.

I counted in his face the years since Katya had been born, and those before, when he'd tried, in his quiet, persistent way, to convince me that the line of work I'd chosen was incompatible with motherhood. It had been more than an intellectual conviction, a weighing up of risks: it had been heartfelt. Everything that Brook believed to be good and worthwhile in life was repulsed by foolhardy risk. Perhaps this revulsion had begun when his leukemia was diagnosed; perhaps earlier, before either of us had known of its existence.

I sensed a deeper weariness in Brook as well, caused by the leukemia itself, and the way he'd driven himself when he could have given up his job, opening himself to whatever small pleasures his time on earth had left to offer, learning to treat each one as a gift. I knew that this was what Sophie wanted him to do. Yet partly out of fear of stopping, partly out of a stubbornness he would not acknowledge, Brook had gone on, and the pressures of others, Brideson included, only strengthened his will not to give in until he absolutely had to.

The thought of Sophie was a constant, gentle undercurrent, a reminder that Brook had an emotional life that excluded both me and my children. Sophie was not the sort of woman to nag; she was too intelligent for that; but I had no doubt that she wanted Brook to resign, that she hadn't wanted him to take on this case.

I wondered whether Brook had asked Sophie to marry him, or whether he was working his way up to it, and worried that she would refuse. I knew there'd been times when Brook wished Katya was his daughter, and believed that Ivan had done nothing to deserve her.

Brook began talking about Laila. He said that Laila probably felt confident meeting a man in a relatively isolated spot, that she probably felt confident of her ability to handle men in any situation. I agreed.

‘Laila may have screamed. She didn't try and fight her killer off. Bronwyn Castle's car was left unlocked, with the keys in the ignition.'

‘What about tyre marks in the carpark?' I asked.

‘Too many to be useful.'

Brook had his own ways of interviewing men like Cameron, based on the realisation that they loved to talk about themselves. His strategy had been to give Cameron so much rope he'd hang himself. It hadn't worked. Cameron had remained perfectly relaxed throughout the interviews, and had not put a foot wrong.

‘He had to get Sanderson through the fence at Dickson Pool,' I said. ‘What about his clothes.'

‘He burnt them, or got rid of them some other way. No leads there.'

The way Brook spoke made it clear he didn't think any leads would be forthcoming.

Cameron had handed over his diving gear to the police without fuss or apparent anxiety, and confirmed, in answer to Brook's question, that he only owned one weight belt. He'd appeared willing, if not keen, to talk about that Sunday at Lake Jindabyne, and to portray Bernhard Robben in a less than flattering light. ‘Happy to get the boot in,' was Brook's phrase.

Cameron had understood that something was going on between Robben and ‘that unfortunate girl', but he'd seen no reason to contact the police about it. Brook got him to admit that Laila had gone with them on the boat. She'd insisted, and Robben had taken her to avoid a scene. They'd argued and she'd jumped out. No, he didn't know what the argument was about. He hadn't asked. He hadn't wanted to know. ‘A lover's tiff,' he'd offered with what Brook described as undisguised contempt.

Cameron had never been married, and had no steady girlfriend. He claimed never to have set eyes on Laila before that day, or to have seen or spoken to her since. When Brook raised the subject of the
Maria Rosa
, he reacted with surprise. He may have heard of such a boat—a Spanish pirate boat laden with treasure from South America? He might have heard about it some time on his travels. Interesting, but he was afraid he knew no details. Neither Sanderson nor Robben had mentioned the shipwreck in his hearing, and it had certainly never been suggested that they go looking for it in the
Lightning
. Cameron had found the idea amusing and had laughed aloud. When asked about the dive school at Merimbula, he said he visited from time to time, and described himself as a ‘moderately competent amateur.' As to his shops, he preferred to hire good, intelligent staff and leave the day-to-day running up to them. It was an unfortunate oversight that that photo of Laila had been left up on the website ‘but not a major crime'. As to how he'd got started in the business, he'd seen an opening and gone for it. ‘A lot of Canberrans want to learn to dive and will pay well for the opportunity.'

As to his brother, they'd always been close. Of course, Don had told him about Laila and how she'd ruined his career. Her death was a tragedy, and Ben Sanderson's as well. There was a lunatic out there and the sooner he was behind bars the better.

‘He preens,' Brook said. ‘Even when he's talking about murder, he has that gloss on him—look how great I am.'

But Cameron's alibis for both murders remained solid.

He'd promised to take Sanderson and Robben out in the
Lightning
in return for the homestead dive, and he never went back on a promise. They'd spent a few days in Bass Strait and had called in at West Cove. The weather had been ‘a bit rough to start with, but fine after that.'

‘You should go some time, Detective Sergeant. The old Bulli's sitting upright at the bottom. Just twenty metres down. And the water's crystal clear.'

I smiled, listening to Brook's voice going up and down as he mimicked Cameron's. I'd told Brook, in times past, in better times, that he'd missed his calling and should have been an actor.

He frowned, in response to my smile, possibly reminding himself that he was talking too much. I wanted to tell him anything he said was safe with me, but knew how ludicrous it would sound.

As far as the
Sea Wizard
was concerned, once they'd been cleared by customs, there was no restriction on fraternising with the natives.