The Fourth Season (24 page)

‘They could have been in each other's boxer shorts all weekend. There's no law against it. And you know, drugs don't come to Australia from New Zealand.'

I told Brook there was always a first time.

‘Are you saying the Fanshaw girl didn't know about the
Lightning
bringing drugs? Assuming for a moment that there
were
drugs, which I think is most unlikely.'

Strange that it was Brook putting it like that that made the connection clear.

I thought for a moment, then I said, ‘Laila may have found out at the end. It may have been the reason she was killed. What I think it's fair to assume is that once she found out about the trip to West Cove she was determined to be included.'

‘What about Sanderson? Why was he killed?'

‘For greed, perhaps. To cut him out of his share of the money? Because he took Laila's side? Cameron could have been keeping a number of options open. But he underestimated Laila's determination, and she
over
estimated her persuasive abilities. Perhaps she'd never been alone with him before. Perhaps she'd never turned her beam on him. It hadn't failed her so far.' I paused a moment, then continued. ‘My guess is that Cameron's a narcissist. Why hang around the internet cafe? Why follow me at Jindabyne? He wants to be noticed. “Look at me”, he's saying. “I've got alibis you'll never break. I can always stay one jump ahead.”'

‘And Don?'

‘Acting under orders, I would say.'

Brook's nod told me he'd already come to this conclusion. ‘Then Cameron must have something over him,' he said.

. . .

That night, Brook rang with some more news. He'd been speaking to a member of the Geelong Yacht Club who knew Cameron well, and who'd watched the three set out on their sailing trip. The weather forecast hadn't been good, but Fletcher had said he'd ‘take his chances with a bit of weather.' They'd cast off around six in the morning to catch the ebb tide through the heads.

‘They had to sail out through the Rip,' Brook said. ‘It's a treacherous bit of water. Port Phillip Bay creates a bottleneck. The ebb tide with a wind behind it can take you half way to Tasmania before you can say whoa there.'

Brook had put in a request for information to the National Surveillance Centre; he summarised the results.

The
Lightning
had been sighted by a
Coastwatch
Dash 8 at 0905 on the morning of 12 February. Radio contact was made on the VHF open channel. The
Lightning
's skipper was asked for his boat's registration details, where he'd embarked from, and the number of people on board. All of these questions were answered, plus his destination, which he gave as Erith Island. They discussed the weather report. The mean wind speed over open water was forty knots and rising. Wave height was four to five metres, but the
Lightning
continued on its course.

‘The Dash 8 kept track of them,' Brook said. ‘They made it to West Cove, but only just. They were advised to turn back, but Cameron ignored the advice. There are three community marine stations that cover Bass Strait. They take position reports and give regular weather updates. The
Lightning
radioed them at—let me just find that—seven minutes to ten on the Saturday morning. They were advised to return to Port Phillip Bay.'

‘Cameron had to make the rendezvous,' I said.

‘If drug smuggling was that easy, those islands would be crawling with couriers masquerading as yachties.'

‘Our lot weren't masquerading. They
are
yachties, or Cameron is at least. And they were amateur couriers, if, as you say, they were couriers at all. Does
Coastwatch
monitor radio conversations?'

‘Under normal circumstances, no.'

‘And under abnormal?'

Brook said, ‘Nothing between the
Sea Wizard
and the
Lightning
.'

‘What Laila thought is important too.'

‘I was coming to that. She rang the yacht club, and asked all sorts of questions. The guy she spoke to didn't pass on Fletcher's sailing details. He didn't know them, for a start. And he told me he wouldn't have, in any case, not to a stranger.'

‘Laila may have talked to someone else. She may even have turned up at the marina.'

Brook said suddenly, ‘I've got to go.'

I sat in my office and thought. Pete and Katya were in bed, and Ivan watching television. Laila had been a diving enthusiast with a particular interest in shipwrecks. She was living in an inland city on a student's income. She pursued her interest where she could, and when she could afford to, including a weekend course at Merimbula, where she met Sanderson and Robben. She was attracted to both these men because they were professional divers and because she had already begun to imagine—and more than imagine—a fantastic diving opportunity. Laila was used to pulling men. She did it effortlessly. She was used to getting what she wanted from them, and what she wanted from these two was a chance to dive in circumstances that presented a big challenge to professionals. I thought again about her dispute with Abenay that morning at Lake Jindabyne, and wondered if Laila had been telling the truth after all, or more of the truth than I'd given her credit for. She
had
wanted to dive the homestead on her own. She wanted to prove that she could do it, and had planned to present Robben with the fact. Instead, she'd argued with Abenay and when she found Robben, he had company—not just Sanderson, but Cameron Fletcher too. She'd gone to work on all three men once she discovered that Fletcher planned to take the two divers to visit some of the islands in the Strait.

Up until the morning the
Lightning
set out from Geelong, Laila might well have believed they'd take her with them. She might also have learnt that the
Sea Wizard
had fetched up at West Cove, and figured that, if the
Lightning
got her that far, she could talk her way onto the dive boat.

Robben couldn't shake her off. Sanderson had a go at placating her, maybe offering her a consolation prize, but she didn't want it. Fletcher's real reason for meeting the
Sea Wizard
was too important to let some upstart girl interfere.

Laila was furious when she discovered that they'd gone without her, but Cameron often sailed out into the Strait and visited the islands. Next time, Laila determined that she would be on board.

What did the two murders have in common? A certain theatricality, for one thing. Ben Sanderson had been a professional diver, at home in the water. So what does his murderer do? Dumps him in a pool. He wasn't killed there, so why do it? What was Cameron demonstrating? Cruelty and malice. He was showing someone that he had a flair for it: Bernhard Robben, to keep him in line; his drug mates, whoever they were; and his brother—don't forget his brother Don.

I wondered if Cameron had kept Ben Sanderson's share of the money, perhaps as a punishment for telling Laila too much. I recalled Jess's description of the couple in the tram. It didn't sound like a man getting rid of a girl who was being a nuisance. There'd been Laila's tears, turned on for extra persuasion. Cameron would have been angry when he heard about that.

Three more days went by. Brook rang in the afternoons, but with nothing more to tell me. Cameron's name did not come up in connection with any drug networks—neither with the heroin trade, nor the ice brought down from factories in Fiji. I began to doubt my theory.

The Fiji connection was the most likely, given the
Sea Wizard
's route, yet unless some real evidence turned up, or one of the three confessed, there did not seem to be any way to prove it. Robben must have felt confident that it didn't matter if he was seen with Sanderson and Cameron Fletcher. He had photographs of them in his shop, and the
Lightning
too. Perhaps he reasoned that it looked more innocent that way. If the
Lightning
's name ever came up in connection with a drug rendezvous, Robben would not deny knowing its owner. Instead, he would describe Cameron as a rich man who liked to scuba dive and who took him sailing in Bass Strait.

The main problem was always going to be getting the drugs into Australian waters, but that wasn't something Robben, or even Cameron, need worry about. Indeed, it would be unlikely they'd be told what methods were used. It wouldn't be the
Sea Wizard
every time. In the first instance, Cameron might have been approached by a yachting buddy, seduced by the amount of money he stood to make on a single run. And Cameron being what he seemed to be, a recreational yachtsman taking his friends out for a few days' sailing, was basic to the plan. The arrangement might have worked, and gone on working, if it hadn't been for Laila and the
Maria Rosa
.

The phone rang and I picked it up, thinking that it must be Brook. It was Don Fletcher, and he'd rung to warn me. Cameron was going to get me or my daughter. He'd sworn to.

Don hung up before I could ask him any questions. I was shaking all over. I went and lay down on the floor beside Katya's bed.

Thirty-one

Katya was taken in the middle of a soccer match. One minute, my daughter was defending into the wind; the next, she was gone. No one heard her cry out. No one saw what happened. The ball moved quickly to the other end, while Kat disappeared.

The weather was bad that day, squally showers and a wind straight off the mountains. Spectators were few. Those die-hard parents, who turned out to watch their children play no matter what the weather, were grouped underneath umbrellas at the club house end. I'd been watching Katya when her coach called me from the doorway. I turned aside to speak to him; when I turned back, she was gone.

Two spectators had been standing close to the side line. From underneath a large black golf umbrella, I'd caught a glimpse of blonde hair tied back with a blue scarf. Tall woman, I'd thought, and wondered whether her daughter, somewhere on the field, was tall as well.

Their unfamiliarity should have alerted me. And Kat? Had I imagined her a giant child, too big to be secreted underneath a bat-wing coat, an umbrella that could have done duty as a tent? Why hadn't Katya screamed? How long does it take to strangle a small girl with a bright blue scarf?

Play was stopped immediately. Brook and his detective constables questioned all the teams. There'd been no red Hyundai in the carpark. Cameron's Landcruiser was at the forensics lab. Peter had been playing on an oval far away from Kat's. When he heard what had happened, he ran, first of all to the carpark, then from team to team. His hands shook and he begged. We knew Kat wouldn't leave of her own accord. It was out of the question. Yet many of the young players didn't know this, were confused, asked questions, made suggestions, that were all beside the point.

I kept on seeing the black coat, the couple underneath the golf umbrella, as though bringing them back into my mind could change who they were and what they'd done. The idea that some kind of politeness, some brake of manners, had stopped me from approaching them, going up to get a closer look, made me feel sick.

But had it been like that? Had I been at all suspicious? I couldn't remember. I heard myself asking questions, framing words, felt my breath going in and out, and saw myself from a great, mocking distance, not knowing whether my daughter was alive or dead.

Inside, I was screaming, yet I moved as through a thick and viscous liquid. I got into my car and drove. Civic had never looked so pitiless and stark. The flagmast and top curves of the Parliament ought to have been softened by the rain, yet stood out baldly, raw and ­unassuaged. Their classic, familiar and yet foreign bends and angles, their way of refusing to nestle in against the hill, made them seem like buildings from another planet, expressive of nothing more substantial than a coloniser's vanity. It would have been funny if I'd felt like laughing. Smoke was rising from the front of the Aboriginal tent embassy. I doubted the people keeping vigil there felt like laughing either.

My hands were shaking too much to hold the steering wheel, so I pulled over to the side of the road. A shout of laughter made me lift my head. The spot where I'd stopped offered a long downward view towards the lake, and in the distance, just within my vision, the stretch of shingle where Laila's body had been dragged ashore. I wound down the window and sat staring at the water, fancying that I could see it feeling its way back now the rain had come, the grinning gums that would, by nightfall, have been covered up.

Willows crouched. I recalled others, by the lake at Jindabyne, their long hair brushing dust and catching in the cracked, baked earth, which parted to reveal the bones of beasts who'd died of thirst.

Willows had a pinkish gloss when bare; their new growth was the palest green.

I roused myself and drank from a bottle that had been rolling around on the back seat. The water tasted of plastic; it was tepid and refreshing. A small girl with sun-filled hair was running down the slope and laughing. She ran swiftly, as children do who have knowingly escaped the adults watching over them. Her sturdy legs were purposeful. She heard the water calling.

A man ran out from between the trees. The chase was clearly not a game to him. He ran straight, while the small girl hopped and zigzagged, suddenly unsure. The man scooped her up, and now he was laughing and tossing the light, negligible weight across his shoulder, and the small girl was yelling with excitement and relief.

. . .

There was an item on the evening news about a white Honda that had skidded into the Yarra River near Alexandrina Drive in Melbourne. A woman walking her dogs had rung and reported it, but there were other witnesses as well. The driver was presumed to have lost control down an embankment.

A woman walking dogs. An accident in water that was no accident at all.

I walked all the rest of that night, through and around my suburb, long after walking became no more than a mechanical placing of one foot in front of the other, long after my eyes stopped taking in the buildings and the streets. The idea of going home without my daughter caused the last meal I had eaten to rise as green bile in my throat. I stared through the fence at Dickson Pool. The black plastic had at last been removed and this seemed stupid somehow, a stupid kind of joke.

The sky was beginning to turn grey when Brook phoned. The white Honda belonged to Clare Fletcher, and it was empty. Brook was in Melbourne. The search for bodies was about to begin. His voice was very clear, as though he was standing in the room; clear and matter-of-fact, his training taking over.

I found Peter in Kat's room, underneath her doona, at the bottom of her bed. I'd been thinking of Peter almost as an adult, a sixteen-year-old with one foot only remaining in childhood, the rest of him leaping out and away.

I said his name softly and the doona stirred. I bent down and took the bundle in my arms, the whole unwieldy inner hardness of it, hearing first a gulp and then a sob.

‘It's not your fault,' I said. ‘None of it is your fault.'

I hugged Peter and he didn't push my arms away. In those moments, he was a child again, with a child's clear sense of justice and shock at what the adult world was allowed to get away with.

Brook rang again to say that the
Lightning
had left Geelong the night before with both brothers on board and that he was going after them. No bodies had been found in the Yarra so far. I tried to draw strength from this, telling myself that Cameron intended using Katya as a hostage, therefore he would keep her alive.

How had Katya been smuggled onto the
Lightning
? In a blanket? In a bag? There were TV crews at the yacht club, a Channel 7 helicopter circling the Rip.

I wondered what Brook had said to Sophie. Sophie had great self-control, and I realised how much Brook respected this quality and relied on it. In those early morning hours, I learnt something about sucking up to fate, imagining the worst in order to stave it off, and how this didn't work. Waiting taught me lessons that I hated learning.

Ivan made tea in two saucepans and we drank it sitting at the kitchen table. Peter phoned Derek, who came to pick him up. Whatever Ivan and I had tried to make—of a family, a business venture—seemed irreparably broken. I felt as though I had used up two husbands, had two failed marriages to show for my time on earth.

Brook phoned from a police launch, and told me to keep my courage up. The Coastwatch plane, the Dash 8 that had reported the
Sea Wizard
's troubles with the storm, had found the
Lightning
, which was heading, not for one of the islands close to shore, but the open sea. There was still no confirmation that Katya was on board. Cameron, in his radio conversations with Coastwatch and the police, energetically denied it. He'd taken his yacht out with his brother. There was no law against it. As for having a child on board, well that was nonsense. Had anybody seen them taking one?

The weather was getting worse, a front coming in from the south-west. Cameron would drown them all—himself, his brother and my daughter—rather than give himself up. He would use Katya as his last card. The police and Coastwatch boats could catch him, but he would see them coming.

Ivan lined up dead matches on the edge of the stove. He hardly spoke, and seemed almost to have lost the power of speech. It felt as though the slightest human whisper might tip the balance the wrong way. I wanted to be left alone, to find what comfort I could in familiar objects. Dead matches mocked me from a corner of the room.

It was two hours before Brook contacted us again, and those two hours were the worst that I had ever spent. Yet it seemed that, beyond dread, there were still questions to be asked. Cameron was refusing to admit that my daughter was on board. They had a trained negotiator talking to him. I sat beside the phone, picturing everything from a shooting to a drowning, plaguing myself with the certainty that the next call would be one that left no hope. The pictures kept coming, as though I was photographing them from a helicopter.

Ivan's eyes were flat, expressionless in the autumn light. Horror entered through the windy gaps in reason. I wanted my vigil to be solitary. If I'd thought of candles, then I might have lit them; but it was too late for candles.

I noticed how thin Ivan had become, how his face underneath his beard was concave, how, in another life it seemed, I'd loved to touch his springy hair and feel its gentle pressure in return.

. . .

It was Don Fletcher who acted in the end, Don who decided that his life was worth more than his brother's freedom and finally said, ‘Enough.' Cameron might have overpowered Don, thrown him overboard, and Katya too; but it didn't happen this way. Instead, Don hit Cameron from behind and radioed the news.

Relief, wonderful relief, came in the form of a quick phone call. ‘It's over, Sandra. It's all right.'

A few hours later, Brook, neat-haired and neatly dressed, faced a press conference with news of Cameron's and Don's arrest.

Derek brought Peter home. I hugged him and we cried with joy. The three of us—Ivan, Peter and myself—flew down to Melbourne to bring Katya home.

Katya had been drugged and unconscious for most of the time. Neither then, nor in the days or weeks to come, did she talk much about her capture.

She recalled a hand over her mouth, then something soft and dark covering her completely. She remembered being lifted off the ground and trying to call out, and then nothing apart from disassociated moments—waking on the boat and being sick and trying to get up—a man pushing her down, locking her in a cabin, being forced to drink something they told her was chocolate milk. ‘It tasted yuck!'

I was pleased when, back in Canberra, Brook invited me to his office to talk.

Katya had returned to school, but would not go near the soccer fields. She'd announced that she wanted her brother, not either of her parents, to meet her at the school gates, and to walk her home.

Boxes on his desk, bare walls, announced what Brook could only echo. ‘Yes, I'm going, Sandra. Finally.'

So it had been his swan-song then, that rush into Bass Strait.

‘Going to
live
,' I said, because the distinction felt important.

Brook nodded, with the quick understanding that made my chest contract.

‘It's a good thing you didn't drown then. It's a good thing Cameron didn't shoot you.'

Brook laughed. ‘Murder on the high seas,' I said.

We laughed because what might have been was not.

‘Rather that than drowning in a puddle,' Brook said.

‘You don't have to remind me. Are you and Sophie going to get married?'

‘I've asked her and I—I think she'll say yes.'

I congratulated him. We could have gone on speaking of survival, but we didn't need to. Brook said he'd be around to see Kat and Peter soon.

He'd proved himself one last time, beaten the traitor in his bloodstream; or, if not beaten, then at least faced death square on, head into the wind. Whatever had happened out there in the strait, in the teeth of the southerly, in pursuit of a vain, cruel man and the brother who was tied to him, had unlocked a last knot in
this
man, even as two brothers fought and one betrayed the other.

Brook had been sleek in front of the news cameras, generously deflecting praise. His swan song might not have been tuneful, but it had been dangerous enough.

. . .

Any summing up must be imperfect, over-general, so that a person might wonder, afterwards, why summing up had seemed important at the time. The tying of loose ends is an artifice that begs the question whether it is in the nature of some ends to remain forever loose. What had happened to put Ben Sanderson off working on the oil rigs was one such loose end, Laila Fanshaw's reason for making an appointment to see Senator Fitzpatrick on the evening of her death another.

‘We may never know,' Brook said.

After thinking some more about it, I concluded that the meeting between Laila and the senator may have had nothing to do with the
Maria Rosa
, or with Cameron Fletcher, but that Cameron, if he'd got to hear about it, would have believed that it did. Perhaps more would come out about that during Cameron's trial.

Don Fletcher and Bernhard Robben spoke volumes in exchange for lighter charges. Cameron had been charged with both murders, but Brook reported him as confident; he'd hired one of the best criminal barristers in the country.

I pictured the scene Brook remained reluctant to describe—boarding the
Lightning
, Don standing over Cameron, opening the hatchway to the cabin, hoping and not daring to hope that Katya would still be alive. The small, cramped space smelt of vomit. Kat was dirty, scratched and bruised, yet breathing. Brook lifted her into his arms.

I felt silly with relief all over again as I thanked him.

‘It was touch and go with the weather,' he said.' I thought at one point that we'd have to turn back.'