The Fourth Season (8 page)

Ten

I rang CSIRO as soon as Pete and Katya had left for school the next morning. Ivan was asleep, catching up on all those nights spent walking. He would wake up with a hangover. I had no idea what I would say to him when he did.

I asked the receptionist for Dr Tarrant, and was told he was away on a field trip. Mulling over what this might involve, I pictured Laila leaving that third cafe in Garema Place, no car waiting this time, nobody watching her climb into it either. I wondered why I was suddenly certain no one had been watching. Was it because the man Rowan had seen outside the
Tradies
had learnt all he needed to and had no further need to spy on her?

I imagined Laila waiting for the bus in Civic, thoughtful and ­preoccupied, ignoring the appreciative stares of young men in the street, the occasional envious glances of the women. I considered the possibility of frequenting the Garema Place cafe in the evenings, noting the regulars, trying to start conversations with them. Had Laila been smiling as she waited for her bus? Had she been disappointed, or undaunted, already planning her next venture, at another cafe, in another suburb, where no one had set eyes on her before? Why had she given up trying to break into the computer in Richard King's office, if, in fact, she
had
given up? More importantly, what had she been looking for?

Laboriously, I went through each of the canyons named in Don's reports. I was surprised he hadn't phoned me for an update by now. I checked the longitude and latitude of each canyon, crossing them off when they proved not to be the one in Laila's sketch. When I got to the end, I felt flat and disappointed. I'd been so sure that one would match. I trawled through Geoscience Australia's website until I found a detailed map showing Bass Strait canyons and downloaded it.

The Babel Canyon was one hundred and two kilometres north east of Tasmania and fifty-eight kilometres from Flinders Island, the closest to any landmass of all the canyons I had read about, close also to an ExxonMobil oilrig that had been given the same name, and was right on the border of the proposed marine park.

Then I noticed something else about the contour lines. Inside the section Laila had circled, the sea floor was considerably more shallow than on either side. ‘Sediment flow,' I said aloud. I didn't know what caused it, or how frequently it occurred, much less what might be hidden by the example Laila had singled out; but I felt convinced that something was hidden there, or that Laila had believed it was.

When Don
did
phone—I'd made a pot of coffee and was just about to wake Ivan up—it was to arrange for me to meet his wife.

. . .

Clare Fletcher shook my hand with an expression of recognition mixed with contained excitement—yes, that's
her
—which quickly gave way to anger. It occurred to me that practically everyone I met these days was angry. A further glance of recognition passed between us, while I hoped that my emotions weren't etched so obviously on my face. It occurred to me that, for two weeks now, I'd been avoiding mirrors.

On the drive over, I'd anticipated a bit of fencing to and fro with Clare, both of us disappearing behind shutters of politeness before re-emerging; but Clare's anger burnt its way out from underneath her skin, made politeness redundant.

Both our husbands were suspects in a murder investigation. What fools men were! What fools!

Clare knew that Don was paying me. She knew all about it. Don thought he was clever, Clare said, but he was the most transparent of creatures, and impossibly weak.

It didn't sound as though Don's aim of saving their marriage had much of a chance. Yet here was a professional woman; childless, unencumbered, with a secure income, who could have divorced her ­stumbling, luckless spouse at any time, but hadn't done so.

I wondered if Clare was thinking the same about me, if she'd reached the mistaken conclusion that I was childless and financially independent, and if I should enlighten her. But I wasn't there to talk about myself, or to complain about Ivan, tempting though this was.

Clare was well and expensively dressed, making me ashamed of my appearance, my clothes that looked shabby next to hers, my hair I raked a comb through once a day and then forgot about, my lack of proper sleep.

When I asked Clare how long she and Don had been married, she answered automatically, ‘Fifteen years.' She did not need to think, much less to add up. I had a fleeting mental picture of Bill Abenay, that hint of quiet satisfaction behind eyes that were watchful and alert, the peculiar restfulness I'd felt in a house occupied by a single adult male.

But then Clare surprised me. I asked about Don's shoes, and she replied aggressively, ‘What about them?'

The police had taken everything Don had been wearing the night of Laila's murder, including his underwear. Clare supposed he'd never get them back. If there'd been sand or gravel on his shoes that put him at the lake that night, he wouldn't still be walking round a free man.

Simon was a worm, she said, no friend to her husband at all. Simon's story was ‘full of contradictions.' Clare looked at me meaning­fully, as though she expected me to have unravelled them by now. Don's shaky alibi infuriated Clare, but for reasons I was obliged to revise. Furious with him, she was also ready to pour scorn on anyone who wasn't on his side. Her husband's motive only served to fuel her anger. The girl had ruined his career. But murder? If a fly got caught in the house, Don caught it in a tissue and released it outside.

I asked Clare how she'd found out about Laila. ‘I mean in the first instance.'

Clare had found out when her husband was dismissed. ‘That's
when
.'

‘There were no hints before that?'

‘Hints?' Clare pounced on the word as though it was a bit of iron heading for a magnet. She spent the next five minutes cataloguing Laila's faults, then asked abruptly, ‘What about your husband?'

‘Oh, I picked up hints,' I said. I found myself describing the Lennox Gardens picnic.

Clare laughed, and suddenly the air between us felt lighter. She seemed to be revising her opinion of what we had in common. For a moment, her eyes emptied of all emotion, even the anger she'd been wearing like a second skin.

We talked about neutral topics for a while before Clare checked her watch and said she had to get back to work.

On the way home, I wondered how much Laila had known about Don Fletcher before she approached him. It struck me as likely that she would have researched her target. Only a handful of public ­servants—maybe ten, I thought at a guess—would have had access to the correspondence Laila had leaked to the press. She would never have fooled Clare though, or any woman who had reason to suspect her man might stray given the right kind of temptation.

I decided that Clare had wanted to meet me in order to size me up. What did that say about the balance of power between her and her husband? Perhaps Clare had expected to observe that I'd floundered a long way from my area of competence. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that this had been her motive. For much of the time, I felt like a flounderer—or should that be a flounder?—so why shouldn't others arrive at this conclusion too? It occurred to me that, of all the people I'd spoken to so far who might have been responsible for Laila's death, Clare Fletcher was the most likely. It was her combination of rage and self control. The men—Ivan, Tim, Don—were sunk in self-absorbed misery. Not Clare.

. . .

I rang Simon, who ostentatiously repeated his offer to assist me with my inquiries ‘any time'. I took him back over meeting Don, how Don had arrived late and flustered, with grit on his shoes. As before, Simon latched onto the word, which evidently pleased him. Then I rang Don and told him that Clare seemed more supportive than he'd led me to believe, to which Don replied mildly, ‘Oh, she's coming round. She's coming round,' as though Clare was a large boat that needed a great deal of space for turning. He asked for an update and we fixed a time to meet.

. . .

My first night at the internet cafe was very quiet. Neither Rowan nor the two young men Owen had described showed up. The first thing I did was to set up my computer so that I could monitor the others. There were so few customers that it was easy to keep track. The games they were playing quickly bored me.

We'd agreed that, since Owen and Rita couldn't afford to pay me for more than a few hours, and since most of their clientele were young people who used the cafe in the evenings, I would keep it open from seven until ten four nights a week. Rita hoped to come back herself after two, or at the most three weeks.

Ivan reacted indifferently to the news that I'd taken on another job. It was Peter I was most concerned about, but if Peter was angry that I'd cemented my connection with the internet cafe, then he kept it to himself.

I'd taken some reports with me and read through them steadily, looking up every time somebody walked past the cafe's glass front. The reports contained plenty of references to cost effective bathy­metric mapping, diverse geomorphic features and key bioregions. One section on canyons described them as ‘structurally diverse, physically and ecologically dynamic productive systems'. My eyes went out of focus as I imagined these great underwater crevices, deeper than the Grand Canyon. The Bass, for instance, boasted an entrance fifteen ­kilometres wide and sheer walls a thousand metres high. Krill fed in the canyons, layers upon layers of them. I pictured the routes Aboriginal people might have taken around the edges of these giant holes, before the sea flooded them nine thousand years ago. I pondered the sentence: ‘We know more about Mars than we do about the sea just off our coast.'

The door opened. I looked up, hoping for Rowan.

It was Bronwyn, looking as surprised to see me as I was to see her. She backed out quickly, her spiked hair standing on end like the questions she obviously didn't want to answer. I cursed the fact that I could not go after her.

It was raining when I closed up—a hard, sleety rain with the taste of winter in it. I told myself I ought to feel grateful for the rain, and did. But the sudden drop in temperature and the stinging wetness made me shiver. I put my bag over my head, not that it made much difference, and ran towards the
Tradies
entrance.

Once there, I glanced back over my shoulder. A street light outlined the shape of a man, an oblong of light catching him refracted through the rain for no more than a second before he moved away.

I ran across the street, ignoring a car horn and an angry driver.

The man had disappeared. I walked up and down, staring into parked, empty vehicles, rapidly getting soaked, furious with myself for letting him disappear like that, for not spotting him earlier.

. . .

Next morning, I knocked on Bronwyn's door. She opened it, but left the screen door closed between us.

When I asked who she'd been looking for the night before, she pretended not to know what I meant.

‘You came to the cafe looking for someone.'

‘No I didn't.'

‘What were you doing then?'

Bronwyn laughed angrily. ‘I could just as easily ask
you
the same question.'

‘And I'll answer you, no problem. I'm standing in for Owen and Rita while Owen is in hospital.'

I watched Bronwyn closely, to see how she reacted to the names. She blinked and said, ‘My answer's simple too. There was something wrong with my internet connection. I needed to check my mail.'

‘Why did you leave when you saw me?'

‘I just remembered that I could use the library internet for free.'

‘Did you see anyone outside?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Outside the cafe. When you were coming in, or leaving. A man on the other side of the road.'

‘What kind of man?'

‘He was wearing a jacket. Short hair. Average height and build.'

Bronwyn shook her head. She put her hand on the door, preparing to shut it.

‘What was Laila like at school?' I asked her.

‘How do you know we went to school together?'

It had been a lucky guess. ‘What was she like?' I asked again.

‘Like she is now,' Bronwyn said roughly, then corrected herself quickly. ‘Was. I mean
was
. She was beautiful and special and had boys lining up to drool over her from here to the next town! There, does that satisfy you! Is that what you came here to find out?'

‘I'm sorry my questions have upset you,' I said.

Walking to my car, I reflected on the fact that Bronwyn's story about the library had to be a lie because it closed at eight, but I decided to double-check. The library internet was in great demand, and it was necessary to book ahead, on booking sheets kept at the information desk. Bronwyn's name did not appear on the sheet for yesterday evening and the sheet was full. It was an excuse made up on the spot, like her excuse that she was working on the night Laila had been at the cafe. But why had Bronwyn turned up there last night? Had she come to meet someone, or to use one of the machines?

Then there was the man who'd been watching the cafe entrance and had seen me leave. Had Bronwyn recognised him from my description? I'd seen no recognition in her face, which had been wary and belligerent. As before, I concluded that Bronwyn was a bad liar. I didn't think she'd been lying about that.

I phoned Rita. Owen had come through his operation, and was as well as could be expected. I said I'd like to visit him in hospital. Sounding pleased, Rita said to give it a day or two, and asked how the cafe was going.

‘No problems,' I replied.

. . .

Don Fletcher met me at the same Civic cafe where we'd met before. After thinking hard about it, I'd decided to show Don Laila's diagram and sketch, or photocopies of them. I'd hidden the originals.