by Joanna Baker
‘No, well, that’s it. You didn’t know.’
‘There are texts and phone calls to me on Treen’s phone. They will have found it all.’
‘Yes.’ The police couldn’t be far away.
‘So on Thursday I went round to the house and Belle was there, all kind of spitting because Treen had gone off and left her with Mayson and all the bottles of cream to put into boxes or something. She said Treen had gone off in a car and she didn’t know where. Someone was going to give her some money.
‘And the last I’d heard she was at the Slipping Place. So I went up to have a look. I mean, I didn’t really think she’d be there, but … I don’t know what I thought, but I went to look and there she was.’
‘Oh, my lord.’
‘Yeah.’
She buttered some bread and made herself eat it. ‘But it’s too late to change any of it. What we do need is to think about what happens now.’
He stood up and went to the kitchen table, fished a packet of Monte Carlos out of the bag.
‘Can we go down to the beach?’
Chapter 22
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The cliff path had eroded over the years, so that the planks that used to hold steps now stuck up, sharp edges ready to trip her. Roland went down first and with every step he turned slightly back, ready to catch her if she stumbled. At the bottom they took the duckboard through the scrub. There was new orange tape, and signs telling visitors to avoid walking on the soft sand where plovers might be nesting.
The water was grey, not overly rough but cloudy with churned sand, and over the sea clouds had drifted low, blurring the line between water and air, so that further out the waves were just a mysterious movement in two shades of grey. There was no horizon and no sign of Maria Island.
They went to the south corner where bits of rock had fallen from the cliffs. Veronica sat on one.
It must be almost four and the light would soon fade. They needed to face the hard topics now, before Roland found more distractions. ‘All right. It is time for the one important question. Do you know who drove Treen to the mountain?’
He hesitated.
‘Role?’
‘Treen told Belle she was going for a drive with someone and they were going to give her some money. And this person drugged her and left her up there.’ He jabbed a stick into the sand. ‘They wouldn’t have had to force her. I told you. She was in a bad place. She would’ve had a go at anything.’
‘So someone did it on purpose. It was a deliberate act.’
‘Well, not exactly.’
‘What?’
‘In a way it wasn’t an act at all. Someone drove Treen up the mountain and then they just left her there. They didn’t help her back to the car. In a way it was an absence of action.’
‘That doesn’t change anything. It was murder.’
At the word his head jerked up.
‘It was also very calculated. It happened slowly and took planning. It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing Dane would do.’
He started flicking the stick at casuarina nuts, making them roll away.
She said, ‘The police are going to find out what happened – what Treen had taken, who drove her there.’
‘I hope they do.’
‘Belle said she’d say it was you.’
He shook his head and hissed between his teeth. ‘She won’t.’ ‘She said Treen was drugged with prescription morphine and that you had some.’
He shook his head.
‘She said Treen was driven away in the blue Honda.’
‘It’s all crap. It’s just Belle being …’
She left a silence. ‘Well, look. Yes. Obviously, they will catch up with us soon. But let’s remember, that is as it should be. They are on our side. We’ll simply tell them the truth from beginning to end. Belle is lying. You’re innocent. They’ll find out what really happened.’ She wished she was as confident as she sounded. ‘We’ll get lawyers.’ She left a space and then spoke more softly. ‘But you’ll have to tell them what you know.’
‘I don’t know anything.’ He was lying.
‘It’ll be all right, you know.’
He made an angry sound, threw the stick.
‘You do know who it was, don’t you?’
He was close to telling her. The air was surprisingly still, with the kind of dissolving light that shrinks the distances between things. Somewhere high on the cliff, birds were making comfortable noises thickened by mist.
She was about to prompt him when he said, ‘I don’t understand. I can’t understand why it happened. I’ve got Lesley thinking about it for me. You need to understand women. Women like Treen.’ He was slipping into the woolly ideas again.
‘Roland, you need to wind back the theatrics and just tell the police what you know. Name a name. Tell Lesley, if that’s what you want to do.’
‘Yes. I am telling her things. She’ll end up understanding it and she’ll help me explain it. And Judith. She’ll help too.’
‘Judith?’
‘I think she already knows the truth. She understands people.’ ‘She speaks entirely in quotations.’
‘That’s a deliberate position. She said too much has already been said. She’s decided not to add to the pile.’
‘It’s a pretension. After all these years, you can’t still be taken in by that sort of nonsense.’ Veronica thought of Judith, tormenting Lesley in her lounge room. ‘There’s aggression in it, too.’
‘You’ll see. Judith knows who killed Treen. She isn’t going to tell anyone, because no-one listens to her. She learned that a long time ago. But she knows.’
Veronica’s rock was lumpy. She tried leaning forward, but that hurt her stomach, so she leaned backwards, taking the weight on her arms.
‘I don’t think you appreciate the urgency. Mayson’s safety is the first priority, and we’ll sort that out tomorrow. But then you’re going to have to talk to the police.’ It was as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘They’ll be wanting to interview me again. They’ve been at Lesley’s place. Belle is threatening to say Treen was driven away in a blue Honda. You’ll have to answer questions about where you were that night.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So where were you?’
‘God, Mum.’
‘You’re going to have to tell them.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘What?’
‘This isn’t about me.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Shit.’
This position wasn’t working either. Her wrists and arms couldn’t take it. She pushed herself up and stood facing out to sea.
Roland said, ‘You think you’re so caring.’
‘What?’
‘You do all this stuff, like the forest thing, and saving that lily, and the art gallery volunteers and the painting and the garden.’
Oh, Roland, not now.
‘You think it makes you a good person. But it’s all so separate.’
‘Separate from what?’
‘From everything else. You drive around in that Mercedes. You wear all that handmade stuff. You only drink expensive wine and then you talk about it. I wish you could see what pain and problems would be like if you didn’t have those things.’
He had accused her of all this before, but there was more passion in it this time. Best to just let him finish.
‘There are things you’ll never get. You’re not stupid. You’d just rather not look at them properly. You look the wrong way. You miss the important things.’
Someone else had said that.
‘And you think you’re fair. That’s what really gets me. I mean, you have an agenda. It’s unspoken, but it’s very loud.’
They stared out at the grey bay. On the point, a great slab of sandstone had fallen down. It sat like a large plate, tilted into the water.
‘And you, in the meantime, are drawing dying girls and putting them on shop windows.’
He laughed sadly.
&
nbsp; ‘What are they for?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She knew he hated this, the old pattern, mother interrogating son. ‘Lesley said there are clues in the pictures.’
‘There are. You have to look closely.’
‘Or you could tell me.’
The mist had thinned over Mercury Passage. They could make out Maria now, just a blue shadow. It looked like some other kind of land, something whose substance was not stone but concentrated light.
‘Roland. You see what this is doing. At the very least it shows you’re involved. And the picture of Molly, beside that cairn, is an admission that you saw Treen dead. It connects you to her.’
‘I am connected to her.’
He knew who killed Treen and he was refusing to say. Instead he was drawing. He was the same as she was. This was her fault. She should be telling him not to be stupid, but at the same time, she should be listening, trying to understand what it was he wanted to tell her. She was failing him.
She saw it now. When it came to her children, to Treen, to everyone, she was no help at all. She had spent her life the way Roland did, missing the important things, head in the clouds, head on the page, trying to find the secrets of light, painting, dreaming, and creating pictures that couldn’t change the world.
Chapter 23
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Veronica pulled up on the right-hand side of Davey Street and sat looking at the buildings across the road. She had left Roland the previous evening in Spring Beach, promising to meet him and Belle here at three thirty. Back at home, unaccountably, she had slept deeply for several hours. But the morning had been slow and aimless. She had drifted around the house and garden, beginning and abandoning menial chores, thinking only of Mayson, unable to make plans for his future, unable to stop her mind from trying.
At ten she had remembered that Georgie would be looking for her. There was a string of missed calls and messages and it was only a matter of time before Georgie decided to check the house again. And now, with Roland’s dubious plans to settle Mayson into a squat, she needed to avoid Georgie more than ever. So she had gone out, driven around places Georgie would not look for her, ended up in a milk bar in Fern Tree. Then, at two fifty, she had come here, to wait for someone to show up. After the long, restless, unproductive morning, she felt unable to move, swollen with tiredness and anxiety.
The July sun sat low behind the town, leaving the street in shadow. The hiding place Roland had organised for Belle and Mayson was one of the oldest buildings in Davey Street, across the road from the Royal Tennis Court and the genteel Georgian buildings converted into professional rooms. It used to be known as the ‘old St Mary’s Hospital’. It was a beautiful building – or at least it would have been once – with tall windows set in graceful pairs and gateposts of iron lacework topped with little spiral spikes. But many of its windows were broken, some covered with paper, some with torn blinds. Its stonework had pockmarks and stains and the window ledges were crumbling. At the top, sunlight fell on crenellations and silly ornamented gables, showing up their powdery texture and the broken spaces where chunks had fallen to the street. There was something about that, that erosion, that reminded her of the decay of human flesh. The processes seemed the same – injury, infection, spotting, flaking, scars.
It was nonsense, of course. It was her own mind that was infected, with weakness and doubt and a grey, generalised unease. And there was rational anxiety too. Roland’s plan to house Mayson and Belle here, in this crumbling building, even for one night, seemed ill-conceived, too vague on detail. He didn’t even seem sure that Belle would be able to get Mayson here without Dane knowing about it.
But, at this stage, doubts weren’t helpful. What was required was a level head and sensible action. Roland had copied Gordon’s key to a back door. She would walk down Salamanca Place and find the entry at the back of the building and wait for Belle.
A change in the lights sent a group of cars past. When they had gone she got out of the car and crossed the road. But as she went past, she saw that the front doors were open a crack.
These doors were double, painted a faded red and set in a nest of pointed arches. They were covered in graffiti and shreds of paper from torn-off posters. The right-hand door sat an inch back from the other. The edges appeared undamaged. The doors must have been unlocked from inside.
On the closed door, held with sticky tape across the corners, there was Roland’s drawing of the falling girl. Veronica couldn’t understand why he would have taped it there, after everything she had said. Maybe it was some kind of message for her, a statement of defiance. She pulled it down, folded it and put it in a pocket, then pushed the other door open.
And as she did that, inside the building, there was a high wail. It was a long trembling sound, with laughter in it, but crazed. If it contained words, they were impossible to understand.
Belle? Could she already be here?
The wailing stopped. In the silence, a voice came from behind her: ‘A savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound.’
Veronica turned around. Judith was a few metres down the street, standing near an iron railing. She must have come from Murray Street somewhere, or from Franklin Square. She looked tiny in the narrow-waisted coat and the dainty shoes. A wobbling doll, the voice surprisingly deep and rich. ‘A demoniac laugh, uttered at the very keyhole of my chamber door.’
Behind the railing there was a pit around a basement window. There was rubbish down there, a wet rotting smell. The window was covered.
The voice inside started again. This time it was screaming – long distressed sounds, rising and falling in tone and speed, nothing approaching the rhythms of human speech. At moments, the screams were joined by a lower voice and shuffling sounds. There was a crash, a piece of furniture being knocked over.
Veronica’s grandson was in there.
She pushed the open door, banging it back against the wall.
‘Belle?’
The voices instantly stopped. She went through a panelled space to a dingy hall surrounded by doors. On either side, wooden stairs led to an unlit mezzanine walkway with a heavy wooden railing. There were three doors up there, one open. At each end of the walkway there was an archway and a staircase leading further upwards.
The high voice had to be Belle, but it had been distorted. This was more than simple panic or pain, or conflict. It was a mix of emotions, a kind of undefined distress, something insane about it.
She called, ‘Belle, it’s Veronica.’
But before she finished the screaming started again, and the people up there wouldn’t have heard her. She made out a few words this time: ‘… taking him … getting out.’ They echoed around the building, disembodied, the way voices do in nightmares: ‘… it isn’t me …’ Finally there was a long shriek, a thin wire of sound, ending in a coughing sound.
Veronica’s eyes were adjusting to the poor light. Upstairs, she had a vague impression of fleeting movement in one of the shaded arches, but when she focused on it there was nothing there.
‘To cross the silent hall. To ascend the darksome staircase.’
Judith was standing in the doorway, back in the light of the street. ‘You stay out please, Judith.’ Her voice was hard in the empty building. ‘There’s nothing for you here.’
Judith’s face registered sour amusement. ‘Wrong.’ Then she became serious. ‘I’m here for the baby.’
Baby. Not the right word for Mayson, but enough to make Veronica hot, then cold. Mayson was here somewhere, in this dirt and this insanity, among these thumps and echoing voices.
‘Stay outside. This is bad.’
She was revealing her own anxiety, talking like that, as if Judith was stupid, as if she could barely speak English. In response, the blotched face was twisted by a spasm. Whether this was outrage or inward laughter, or just a problem with nerves, Veronica couldn’t tell.
Belle appeared on the high walkway. Without looking down she ran lightly across and started do
wn the stairs. She looked excited – wildly, madly happy. She was wearing a flimsy white dress and over that some kind of shawl, silk by the movement of it, and very fine. The shawl drifted up behind her, making her appear weightless. But the moment she saw Veronica, she became heavy again. She stopped and gripped the handrail. Her weight swung forwards, towards her hands, but she held herself and straightened.
She stared at Veronica, open-mouthed, and then gave a mad laugh. ‘Two grannies!’ A splinter of light fell from somewhere onto her hair. Veronica looked behind her. Judith was just stepping in through the doorway. Surely Belle couldn’t have seen her. She must have heard her.
Somewhere above there was a shout and a door slammed. Belle gave another wordless cry and ran back upstairs and disappeared. Veronica followed.
At the top of the stairs she went through the door that was open. She came into an empty room, patches on the walls where furniture had been removed, high windows with angled light seeping through paper covers. There were two steel office chairs, one tipped over, and signs of pathetic celebration: an old tin cupboard with two champagne bottles and an empty glass, another glass on the floor. Beside it, splashed across the greasy lino, was a spray of liquid, more than a glassful and long, as if someone had thrown wine from the bottle. No sign of a child.
The noises started again, somewhere above her. She went back out and up the next flight of stairs. There were more doors here, mostly wooden and closed. One was made of aluminium and frosted glass with wire netting set into it and it was open. She went through into a corridor. Rectangular fluorescent lights hanging down on wires, a long wall of interior windows blocked by Venetian blinds. On the right, dirty windows looked over a yard and across a narrow space to another building. At the end there was a pile of metal and yellow tape, as if a barrier had been pulled down, and a door standing open, a rectangle of light, painfully bright against the gloom. Veronica went to look through it, realised there was nothing beyond it, edged closer to have a look. The building was on a slope and the yard was four floors below. She stepped quickly back.