A man had jumped off Point Lonsdale pier and drowned. An ambulance was there when Chris pulled up, an SES helicopter hovering above the Rip.
Chris had to stop himself from tearing along the pier like a man late for a bus.
Anthea turned towards him and he saw in her face how she’d almost panicked, finding herself alone at the station when the call came through, then finding that his mobile was switched off. She was in the middle of securing the pier with police tape. A group of fishermen huddled under the shelter at its seaward end.
‘Sorry,’ Chris said. ‘I’m really sorry. I had a late night and slept in. I’ll tell you about it later. Who is it, do you know?’
Anthea shook her head. ‘There are more paramedics at the front beach. The body’s being moved in that direction by the current and the tide.’
Chris’s phone rang. It was Inspector Ferguson.
‘So, constable, a bit of drama.’
‘Sir.’
‘Of all the idiotic things. I’ll be there in an hour.’
Ferguson instructed Chris to secure the area between the carpark and the pier, as well as the pier itself, keep sightseers away and take preliminary statements from the fishermen.
He looked up from his phone to Anthea, voicing what she was thinking too: an accident, or suicide? It crossed his mind that Ferguson already knew who the dead man was.
His phone rang again. This time it was Tom Maloney on the coastguard boat, a different Tom, sounding confident and almost cheerful. The plan was to retrieve the body before it washed up on the beach. The helicopter would stay in position above it and Tom would pick it up.
One of the fishermen called out. Anthea raised her hand in response.
‘I’ll talk to them in a moment,’ Chris said. ‘Just tell me what —’
‘He ran to the end and jumped.’
‘At high tide? With this swell?’
Anthea shrugged. It was not indifference, Chris saw, but an inability to comprehend, a lack of willingness to attempt an explanation.
Chris looked again at his assistant’s face. There was a faint light, a bilious yellow light — if biliousness could claim to have a colour — washing over her and the sea at her back. A young seal chose that moment to lift its head.
The fisherman who introduced himself as Joe was no stranger to the pier, or the dangers of the Rip. He was the one who’d phoned triple zero.
‘We shouted at him. We tried!’
The others — there were three of them — nodded, apparently relieved to have Joe speaking for them. Joe looked to be in his mid-fifties, with the heavy facial lines that suggested much of his life had been spent outdoors. Chris couldn’t recall seeing him on Queenscliff pier, but these men had their preferences and habits. It wouldn’t surprise him if Joe scarcely ever fished anywhere but the point.
Joe shook his head in disbelief. They agreed that they’d heard running footsteps and looked up to see a man leaping from the end. One claimed to have heard him call out, but his companions were uncertain; no words had been distinguished; it might have been a cry of anger, or desperation; it might have been the wind.
The fishermen remained in a miserable huddle and answered Chris’s questions in as few words as possible. They smelt of bait and blood.
When Chris asked where the life belt was, Joe said, ‘It was always getting vandalised. It never got replaced.’
‘I threw my bucket in,’ a man who introduced himself as Ewan said.
It had all happened so quickly. Chris continued asking questions until he figured he’d got as much as he was going to just then. He was interrupted twice by Tom, first ringing to say he’d retrieved the body, then that there were car keys in one of the trouser pockets, but no wallet or phone. Chris took the fishermen’s names and addresses and thanked them for waiting. He gave them his mobile number, checked his watch and went to have a look around the carpark.
Anthea was doing a good job keeping curious bystanders off the pier.
A police photographer arrived from Geelong and introduced himself. Chris had wondered who would get there first, the press or Inspector Ferguson. Were his sergeants with him? The inspector had said nothing about them.
Chris shook his head to clear it, feeling that he was moving in a nightmare, with that clogged dragging at his limbs that his sea nightmares always gave him. It had been hard enough standing on the end of the pier while the swell heaved at his elbows. The seal, a curious youngster, no doubt recently abandoned by its mother, had come up first on one side, then the other. It was the season when young males were pushed out of the breeding colony. He hoped this one would learn that free fish also meant fish hooks.
Chris thought of Olly and his kayak and was suddenly certain that if Olly had been on the pier when the man had jumped, Olly would have tried to rescue him. It was a useless distraction, but Chris saw the attempted rescue plainly, superimposed on his vision, or rather side by side with the pier and path leading down to it, and the young, earnest face of the photographer. He reflected that Olly would have dived into the swell without stopping to consider the danger to himself.
None of the fishermen had seen anybody chasing the young man, but Chris was well aware that the pursuer, if there had been one, could have kept hidden in the bushes underneath the lighthouse.
The photographer turned to ask over his shoulder, ‘Is it always like this?’
It took Chris a moment to grasp his meaning. ‘Not at low tide,’ he said.
Chris’s thoughts returned to Olly, who would have climbed the waves and fought the current if he thought there was a chance that he might save a life. Strange that it had taken what was, on the face of it, an act of folly to bring home the likeness between Olly and his father.
Either the dead man’s wallet and phone had been on him and had fallen, or been tossed out, or else they were in his car. Of course he might not have brought a phone or wallet with him. There was another possibility, which was that he’d walked, or run to the pier, instead of driving, but Chris thought this unlikely.
There was a small green Hyundai at the far end of the carpark, the inside of which looked abnormally clean, certainly far too clean for a fisherman. Chris tried the doors. The car was empty, so far as Chris could see. The rego plates had no coloured stripe along the side. Chris wrote down the number, then walked around the car, peering in, trying to recall if he’d seen it parked outside the Esplanade.
He remembered the exercise of dropping SAS trainees outside the heads, making them swim back to shore. If you understood the currents, were an exceptionally strong swimmer and kept your nerve, you’d come out of it all right.
Things went wrong, but he didn’t think this troubled the organisers all that much. The exercise was timed for the flood tide; at ebb tide, swimmers could be half way to Tasmania before their bodies were recovered, if they ever were.
The tide turned and began to flow out quickly. Had the man been aware of the tide times; had he known he’d be swept inside the bay, perhaps been counting on this? If it wasn’t suicide, where had he been going? Had he been planning to swim across to the Mornington Peninsula, and having reached the shore there, disappear?
Chris’s phone rang: Tom again. He was taking the body to Queenscliff to be transferred to an ambulance; better than bringing it up onto the Lonsdale front beach in front of a crowd of sightseers.
When Chris asked Tom about a mobile phone, he said he’d checked the pockets three times and they were empty except for the keys.
The Point Lonsdale lighthouse was one of the few in Australia kept permanently manned. Whoever was up there might have seen something, though not a watcher keeping to the bushes directly beneath.
The carpark was filling up. People lined the viewing platform next to the lighthouse, as they did when an unusually large ship was coming through the heads. Chris recalled a few lines from a book he’d read once, about the dead coming back to watch the living, standing with quiet faces, unable to do more than that. There was no disrespect in it. Still, he would have liked to tell them to go home.
In the normal run of things, Chris did not mind Anthea’s silences. Indeed, it was only now, when her silence made him apprehensive, that he wanted her to talk. He missed their old, companionable silences, when they did not need to make urgent decisions which would probably turn out to be wrong. He missed the unhurried way their understanding had developed. He wondered if the loss was felt only on his side.
Chris was full of questions, but felt constrained from voicing them aloud. An image came to him of trying to bucket water with his hands. Then his hands became transparent and the water began rushing through them. No, he must, and would, shut out all thoughts of that kind.
Inspector Ferguson would have made a good traffic cop, Chris thought. A ten car pile-up wouldn’t have bothered him. He would regard the wreckage and the blood with equanimity.
‘Get statements from all the fishermen. Signed.’
Chris thought that there were worse tasks to be given: conferring a privilege was how the inspector made it sound.
A clap of waves, sudden and ear-splitting, filled Chris’s head. He thought of his beloved Murray, of the banks at Swan Hill where he’d first come to know the river. He thought of the deaths of small creatures; unnumbered, unrecorded, occurring every minute of the day, and how all attempts to create a sanctuary were forfeit.
Then he remembered Minnie — Minnie’s red-gold hair and smile, how she’d smiled in the darkness when she’d told him he was a good dancer.