The Light Between Oceans (33 page)

Bernie Gutcher looked askance. ‘Since when have you been interested in babies?’

‘Since it was about evidence!’ the policeman replied.

It took time for the photographer to set up his equipment, and as he did, Lynch looked around the walls at the portraits illustrating choices of style and frame. His gaze passed evenly over an array of examples that included the local football team, Harry Garstone and
his
mother, and Bill and Violet Graysmark with their daughter and granddaughter.

A few days later, a photograph was duly pinned to the notice-board outside the police station, showing the rattle next to a ruler for scale, and asking for anyone who recognised it to come forward. Beside it was a notice from Septimus Potts, Esquire, announcing that the reward for information leading to the safe return of his granddaughter Grace Ellen Roennfeldt now stood at
three
thousand guineas, and that all approaches would be treated in the strictest confidence.

Down Partageuse way, a thousand guineas could buy you a farm. Three thousand – well, with three thousand guineas there was no telling what you could do.

‘Are you sure?’ Bluey’s mother asked again as she paced the kitchen, her hair still in the rag curlers in which she had slept. ‘Think, boy, for God’s sake!’

‘No. I can’t be sure – not completely sure – it was so long ago. But I’d never seen anything that flash before, and in a baby’s cot!’ His hands shook as he rolled a cigarette, and he fumbled the match as he lit it. ‘Ma, what am I going to do?’ Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead beneath his red curls. ‘I mean, maybe there’s some reason for it. Or maybe I was just dreaming.’ He drew fiercely on his cigarette, and exhaled a thought. ‘P’raps I should wait until the next trip out to Janus and ask him then, man to man.’

‘Man to monkey, more like! You’re more lame-brained than I thought if that’s your idea of what to do. Three thousand guineas!’ She waved three fingers in his face. ‘Three thousand guineas is more than you’d make on that godforsaken boat in a hundred years!’

‘But it’s
Tom
we’re talking about. And Isabel. As if they’d do anything wrong. And even if it
is
the same rattle – it could have just washed up and they found it. You should see some of the stuff that ends up on Janus. He found a musket once! And a rocking horse.’

‘No wonder Kitty Kelly sent you packing. Not an ounce of ambition. Not an ounce of common sense.’

‘Ma!’ Bluey was stung by his mother’s jibe.

‘Put a fresh shirt on. We’re going to the station.’

‘But it’s Tom! It’s a mate, Mum!’

‘It’s
three blessed thousand guineas!
And if you don’t get in first, old Ralph Addicott might be down there spinning them the same story.’ She added, ‘Kitty Kelly’s not going to look down her nose at a man with that much money, is she? Now brush your hair. And put that wretched cigarette out.’

CHAPTER 24

AT FIRST TOM
thought he was imagining the shape of the
Windward Spirit
as it approached, lashed by the tail end of the cyclone which had been whirling down the West Australian coast. He called to Isabel, to see if she saw it too. They had been back on Janus only a week. No boat was due again until the middle of March, when it was scheduled to take them to the mainland before their transfer to Point Moore. Perhaps it had engine trouble on the way from another job? Perhaps Ralph or Bluey had been injured in all the wild weather?

The swell was treacherous, and it had taken all the skill of the crew to dock the vessel without smashing it into the jetty. ‘Any port in a storm, eh, Ralph?’ Tom shouted above the wind as the boat came alongside, but the old man did not respond.

When, instead of Bluey emerging from the back of the boat, Tom recognised the craggy, timeless features of Neville Whittnish, his confusion deepened. Four policemen followed.

‘Crikey, Ralph! What’s all this?’

Again Ralph failed to reply.
A
chill crept through Tom. He looked up the slope and saw Isabel edging back, out of sight of the jetty. One of the policemen staggered down the gangway like a
drunk,
and took a moment to adjust to the stationary dock. The others followed.

‘Thomas Edward Sherbourne?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Sergeant Spragg, Albany police. This is my assistant, Constable Strugnell. Sergeant Knuckey and Constable Garstone you may recognise from Point Partageuse station.’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘Mr Sherbourne, we’re here about Frank Roennfeldt and his daughter Grace.’

It was a king-hit, knocking the breath out of him for a moment. His neck was stiff, his face suddenly waxy-pale. The waiting was over. It was like finally getting the signal for a hop-over after days of waiting in the trenches.

The sergeant fished something from his pocket – a piece of cardboard that flipped about in the blustery wind. He held it steady between both hands.

‘Do you recognise this, sir?’

Tom took in the photograph of the rattle. He glanced up at the cliff as he considered his reply: Isabel was gone. Time balanced on a fulcrum – there would be no going back after this.

He gave a great sigh, as though relieved of a physical weight, and hung his head, eyes closed. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Ralph’s: ‘Tom. Tom, son … What the bloody hell’s been going on out here?’

While the police question Tom alone, Isabel retreats to the little crosses near the cliff. The rosemary bushes move in and out of focus, like her thoughts. She is shaking as she goes over the scene: the shortest of the policemen, the youngest, had been very solemn as he showed her the photograph, and could not have
failed
to see her eyes widen and her breath stop at the sight.

‘Someone sent the rattle to Mrs Roennfeldt, last week.’

‘Last week?’

‘Looks like the same person as sent her a letter getting on for two years ago.’

This last news was too much to make sense of.

‘We’ll want to ask you some questions once we’ve spoken to your husband, but in the meantime, perhaps you should—’ He shrugged awkwardly. ‘Don’t go too far.’

Isabel looks out over the cliff: there is so much air, yet she struggles for breath as she pictures Lucy, having an afternoon sleep while in the room next door, police question her father. They will take her away. Her mind races: she can hide her somewhere on the island. She can – she can set off in the boat with her. She calculates quickly – the rescue boat is always ready to launch at an instant. If she can pretend she’s taking Lucy … where? Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. She can get the girl to the boat and they can be off the island before anyone realises they’ve gone. And if they get into the right current, they’ll head north … She pictures the two of them, making land far up towards Perth, together, safe. Logic intervenes to remind her of the risks of the southerly current and the certain death of the Southern Ocean. Urgently she explores another route. She can swear that the child is her own, that the dinghy washed up with
two
dead bodies, and they kept only the rattle. She clutches at any possibility, no matter how absurd.

The same impulse keeps returning: ‘I must ask Tom what to do.’ Then she feels sick, as she remembers this is all Tom’s doing. It hits her just as when she woke in the night after learning of her brother Hugh’s death and thought, ‘I must tell Hugh the awful news.’

Gradually, some part of her concedes there is no escape, and fear gives way to anger. Why? Why could he not just leave things be? Tom is supposed to protect his family, not rip it apart. Deep beneath awareness, a tar-thick feeling has been disturbed, and now looks for
a
safe harbour. Her thoughts spiral into darkness – he has been planning this for two years. Who is this man who could lie to her, tear her baby away? She remembers the sight of Hannah Roennfeldt touching his arm, and wonders what really happened between them. She retches violently onto the grass.

The ocean thundered against the cliff, showering spittle right up to where Isabel stood, hundreds of feet above the water, on the edge. The spray had soaked into the crosses and her dress was damp with it.

‘Izzy! Isabel!’ Tom’s voice was all but blown off the island by the gale.

A petrel was wheeling in the air, circling, circling, before plummeting hard as lightning into the jagged swell to retrieve a herring. But luck and the storm were on the side of the fish, and it wriggled from the bird’s beak, falling back to the waves.

Tom covered the few hundred yards to his wife. The petrel continued to hover on the storm currents, knowing that the tumult of the water would make easy pickings of any fish not sheltered in the deepest reefs.

‘We haven’t got much time,’ Tom said, pulling Isabel close. ‘Lucy’ll be awake any minute.’ The police had been questioning him for the past hour, and two of them were now heading down towards the old graves on the other side of the island, armed with shovels.

Isabel searched his face as though he were a stranger. ‘The policeman said someone sent Hannah Roennfeldt a rattle …’

He held her gaze, but said nothing.

‘… that someone wrote to her
two years ago
, to say her baby was alive.’ She wrestled with the implications a little longer. ‘Tom!’ was all she could say, her eyes wide with terror. ‘Oh, Tom!’ she said again, stepping backwards.

‘I had to do
something
, Izzy. God knows I’ve tried to explain. I just wanted her to know her child was safe.’

She looked at him, as if trying to make sense of words shouted from far away, though he was standing so close that strands of her hair blew into his face. ‘I trusted you, Tom.’ She bunched her hair in her fists as she stared at him, open-mouthed as she struggled for words. ‘What in God’s name have you done to us? What have you done to Lucy?’

She saw resignation in his shoulders, relief in his eyes. As she dropped her hands, her hair swept across her face again like a mourning veil and she began to sob. ‘Two years! Has everything been a lie for
two years
?’

‘You saw the poor bloody woman! You saw what we’d done.’

‘And she means more to you than our family?’