‘Feel like an early walk?’ Chris asked Minnie Lancaster, as though it was the most ordinary of suggestions.
Minnie looked alarmed, but she locked her door behind her and pocketed the key.
She walked quickly; Chris guessed that she was counting steps. They turned out of her street towards the ferry terminal.
Minnie said, ‘I don’t know if it means anything, probably not. You remember that story, about the birthday party on the island, the piñata and all that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well remember that soldier I told you about, the one I surprised in the marram grass? I think I know who he is. I saw him the day before yesterday.’
‘Where?’
‘Outside the pub. He was getting into a car, an army car. It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about it for years, but when I was telling you, his face came back to me. He had ears that stuck out. I recognised him. I’m sure it’s the same man. He’s still in the army. He’s stationed over there.’
‘When was this exactly?’
Minnie told Chris the date and time.
Just to be sure, Chris said, ‘What colour stripe did the number plate have?’
‘Green. It was green.’
‘He’d come to see Griffin?’
‘I didn’t see them together. I don’t know.’
How confident they must be, to meet in daylight, in the open, Chris thought.
He asked the crucial question casually, though he’d been thinking about it, re-phrasing it to himself, for days.
‘If it comes to it, Minnie, will you testify? To the drugs and Bobby’s part in selling them?’
Minnie did not reply immediately. ‘Maybe I’m stupid,’ she said at last. ‘Maybe we all are.’ She took a deep breath, then continued sadly, ‘In and out like a little fox, he was. I thought he could look after himself. All right. I’ll do what you want.’
Chris stayed on the opposite side of the street while Minnie unlocked her front door and went inside. Early sunlight made her bronze, springy hair into a halo. He waited till he saw her outline through the living room window before heading up the hill.
Without conscious intent, Chris’s feet took him in a circle past his own street and back to the Esplanade. For the first time since her death, he truly wished his mother back. For so long — years — he’d thought of her passing with relief, or with relief first and foremost, and only afterwards with guilty sorrow.
Now he felt risk like a bad wind at his back. He’d known Minnie would say yes, but still it increased the risk, made her more vulnerable. Hadn’t he sworn to leave Minnie out of it, to try and keep her safe? But he would need a witness if the plan that was forming at the back of his mind were ever to be acted on. There was nobody who worked at the hotel whom he could ask, apart from Minnie.
Chris thought about how, when he was growing up, his parents had never seemed well-matched, his father being socially superior, and superior — so Chris had believed — in intelligence and education too. Neither parent had complained about the other, at least not to their only child.
Chris wanted to go home, turn in at his own gate, open the front door and find his mother there; a woman in good health, before the cancer got her, a quiet woman, given to melancholy.
The car ferry regularly off-loaded crowds of strangers. He recalled the bikie gang Griffin had described. Had the manager’s intention been to point out an alternative and more likely source of drugs? The bikies’ weekend route took them down the Mornington Peninsula, across to Queenscliff, up the highway and back to Melbourne. Griffin had been letting him know that he had his story well prepared. And it made sense. Of course, the bikies would deny selling cocaine to the soldiers, but who would believe them?
Chris came to a standstill underneath the wreck bell. He knew the warning sign by heart. ‘Any person found ringing the bell except in the case of shipwreck or marine disaster will be prosecuted.’ No prize for guessing who would do the prosecuting; but the bell hadn’t been tampered with in years.
He moved to one side, where trees grew at an angle leaning away from the southerlies. He wondered if they’d known from seedlings that leaning would be their way to survive. He thought of a phrase — flabby oak — that he’d read once in a novel; he’d been impressed by the character it described. He wondered, if he managed his ageing right, whether one day he might be remembered like that. The important point, of course, was that you bent but did not break.
Chris remembered nights, before the coastguard took over rescue operations, waking to the sound of the wreck bell. His father had not been a volunteer, though there was never a shortage of men to put their names down, men who lived their daily lives behind a shop counter, or on the water for one commercial reason or another. His father said he got enough of the Rip as it was. Chris wondered if he’d seen his death coming. He wondered, as he had a thousand times before, if there’d been some essential weakness in his father that had led him to jump overboard.
He remembered what it felt like being kicked in the back by Jack Benton. If Julie hadn’t come by with her camel, Benton would have drowned him. He hadn’t cared. That had been his overwhelming feeling at the time. Do your worst, then. I don’t care.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Chris was waiting for Simon Lee, the youngest and least confident member of Stuart Hocking’s gang. He didn’t wait outside the school gates, or even in the same block, which would have been conspicuous. Instead, he chose the far end of Simon’s street, under another stand of pine trees, a favourite with the black cockatoos.
It wasn’t long before the boy appeared on his bike, riding slowly, balancing his school bag.
Chris stepped out into the street and said his name.
Simon was inclined to deny everything, even the fact that he’d been at the hotel with the others, as though he’d completely forgotten that ring of chairs and how he’d sat with his head down and feet planted on the ground.
Chris was prepared for this. He knew what it was to be small for your age and frightened. He listened to the boy’s verbal ducks and feints. When he sensed Simon was running out of steam, he said, ‘You saw Bobby talking to some men one night. Outside the hotel.’
Simon stared at his feet, looking cowed and miserable.
Patiently, Chris pieced together the sequence of events. Simon had been unlocking his bike from round the side of the hotel when Bobby had run across the road.
‘How many men?’ Chris asked.
‘I don’t know. Three maybe, or four.’
‘What did Bobby do?’
‘It was under the trees. It was dark.’
‘Come on, Simon. Think.’
‘He ran up to them.’
‘Did you hear what they said?’
‘It was dark! I only saw him run across the road! Can I go now?’
Chris repeated his question.
‘One of them said something, a big word. I don’t know.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘I rode home.’
‘Did any of the men see you?’
‘I was round the side, but before, in the hotel —’
‘Yes?’
‘The soldiers liked us. They gave us awesome tips.’
‘And now?’
‘I don’t go there any more.’
‘That’s good,’ Chris said. ‘That’s the right decision. Did you tell Stuart about seeing Bobby with the men?’
‘No! No, I never!’
He had, of course. It would have earned Simon points with Stuart, who would already have been jealous of Bobby’s closeness to the soldiers. Perhaps this was what had triggered the attack on Max. Chris reflected that it did not take more than ten seconds to unlock a bike. ‘Why didn’t you go straight home?’ he asked.
‘I was supposed to be at my guitar lesson. It went for an hour.’
‘How many times did you skip your lesson?’
‘Once! I swear! My teacher rang Mum. Mum told Dad and Dad went for me. Honest, I’ve never missed again.’
Simon raised huge eyes. Extraordinary eyes the child had, like the bay just before a storm.
‘Did you ever see Bobby talking to a man with a German Shepherd?’
‘Yes!’ Simon said eagerly, pleased by the change of subject. ‘At the harbour!’
When asked if he’d seen the German Shepherd before, Simon replied promptly, ‘On the beach.’ He didn’t know if it was always with the same man, he couldn’t say for sure.
‘If you see that man again, stay away from him.’
Simon nodded, frowning, biting his bottom lip.
‘And stay away from the hotel.’
‘Oh, I will, Constable Blackie, Sir!’
There was a dead seal on the foreshore. At least, Chris thought it was dead; but when he came right up to it, the animal raised its head. An adult male, it was obviously sick or injured, its neck thick-furred, eyes glassy; a far cry from the youngster Chris had seen tumbling in the swell around Point Lonsdale pier. The seal tried to move away from him and couldn’t. Chris thought that its back was probably broken, that it had probably been hit by a boat.
Left there, it would be mauled by dogs, die in greater pain.
Chris fetched his gun from the station safe and one of the spades he kept out the back.
He returned to Swan Bay, took aim and shot the seal in the head.
When gunfire answered him from the island, Chris looked up and nodded grimly. He felt relieved that the seal had died without resistance, then ashamed of his relief.
He dug a deep hole, and it took him a long time. There was a natural dip in front of a line of bushes, where rubbish tended to end up; twigs and leaves and muck, and human rubbish too. Chris’s eyes followed the up and down action of the spade. Lambent light rested on the flat planes of the bay. He heard gunfire again and felt comforted by the regular push of his boot into the sandy soil. He finished digging the grave, then waved his spade in the direction of the island.
He wondered whether to return the gun and decided that he might as well keep it in his car. He re-lived the hour he and Bobby had spent with Max, after Max’s narrow escape — the smell of petrol, how it filled their nostrils and got into their hair, how the soap did not even begin to cut it, as they soaped Max vigorously, four hands to the job.
Only when Max’s rough coat shone, when Bobby sat with his arms around his dog, drying in the sun, had Chris ventured his temporary solution.
Bobby had nodded warily, weighing up the advantages of Olly’s cottage against keeping charge of Max himself; whether there was a third, or fourth alternative, and how these might be balanced.
Chris wondered if he should be protecting Simon. But surely, if the boy had been considered a serious threat, something would have been done about it by now. Responsibilities braided together, plaited together. He pictured the island as a volcano — purring, bubbling, getting ready to erupt. Men in camouflage crawled on their bellies through the marram grass, hid behind the inadequate and twisted Moonah trunks, as little girls in party dresses walked past, pretending not to see them.
The afternoon was overcast, wind moaning like a cat in the pines and casuarinas. Chris suspected he was being followed, but when he turned around no shadow separated itself from those of the trees and bushes, and he could hear no noise but the wind.
When he drove around the town at night, doing the rounds, as he half facetiously called it, once the summer was over he hardly ever saw anybody walking, especially not on an overcast and windy night, a night that threatened rain. There were exceptions, like Brian Laidlaw. Walking at night, without distractions, you were confronted by the squamous underside of life.
A fog began moving inland from the bay. Chris felt the dampness on his jacket, an insinuating dampness round his neck. His head ached. He wasn’t far from the spot where Bobby had been found, but the fog was coming in fast, obscuring the shoreline. The border between sea and land generally served to make him anxious; but his anxiety was least when there was a fog. Revulsion softened then, the way the fog itself softened shapes and outlines, and sat with the same indifference on both earth and water. The lack of discrimination, lack of singling out, had sometimes been a comfort to him. There was no point in looking for signs or clues in a fog. Better to wait until it cleared; and in that time of waiting, ease might creep up slowly, like the vapour did, pointing its fingers at no one object or person, but slowly covering all. A person could remain still, waiting patiently, inside a fog.