The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are his bathers?’

  ‘He’s probably still wearing them; it’s what the boys do. Boardshorts.’

  Charlie followed Bekker’s gaze. On each mattress a bedsheet, a sleeping bag and a pillow. ‘What shoes was he wearing at the beach?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Thongs or sandals, probably.’

  Bekker glanced at the scattered clothing again. ‘The kids carry their togs to the beach by hand?’

  Jaffe thought about it. ‘They had little daypacks.’

  ‘There’s no daypack here.’

  ‘No hat or water bottle either,’ Charlie said.

  Jaffe winced. ‘You’re right.’

  The preliminary search had been panicky, Charlie thought. No cop-thinking. He fingered each of the beach towels. The one marked with Billy’s name felt expensive to Charlie: thick cotton; dolphins in a vivid sea; a gold fringe top and bottom.

  Bekker was looking at him oddly. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Thanks for your help, Melissa. You can go back to your kids. Constable Deravin and I will have another look around the camp.’

  ‘It’s been searched.’

  ‘I understand that, but if we don’t double-check, it’s my head on the block.’

  They stepped out into hot air scented with eucalyptus and the sea, just as a police car shot in, its dust chasing the tang away. The driver powered down his window. ‘Hop in, Fran, we’ve found something.’

  Charlie rode in the rear, looking back at Melissa Jaffe, who seemed stiff with misery in the shifting light beneath a gum tree. Then they were tracing the road along the shoreline, out to the other side of the town. He glanced left, reflexively, as if he might spot his mother or his mother’s house. He had phoned her every day. ‘I’m fine, dear…He hasn’t been back…Not a peep…I’m fine, Charlie.’

  The driver took them down to a cramped parking area above the beach. They got out and took the steps to the sand and crossed to where a handful of men and women stood around a blue daypack, a sun hat and a water bottle on a beach towel. Two more metres and the tide would have claimed it all.

  Bekker knelt in the sand and unzipped the front pocket of the daypack. A wallet—five dollars and a student card in the name of Billy Saul. Then a pair of underpants, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from the main compartment. Items that made sense to Charlie. The beach towel didn’t. Ratty-looking, threadbare, too small.

  Charlie had little to do with Bekker after that. With the search now concentrated along the shoreline and out to sea, he was sent with two other probationers to find eyewitnesses. They talked to a woman sitting bowlegged under a blanket, nursing a baby, then a man fishing dejectedly for flathead and two teenage girls focused on nothing but browning themselves on their beach towels. None had been on the beach for longer than an hour. None had seen Billy. And the girls were astonished to realise how crowded and urgent the beach had become while they’d been flat on their stomachs.

  After that they climbed to the road above the beach to doorknock and take down numberplates. No answer at most of the houses; no useful information anywhere else. No one had seen a boy with a backpack walking along the street. ‘What’s he done?’ they wanted to know. Or: ‘Is he all right?’

  They walked on, knocked, walked on. Charlie could hear a spotter plane and a helicopter now. He imagined small craft out on the water, volunteers eyeing drifts of seaweed, sea wrack, sea rubbish.

  And, all the while, he felt the pull of his mother’s little house on Longstaff Street, uphill of the sea-view houses and the long road that anchored the town along the shoreline. She didn’t have a view of the sea, only of other houses, a few scrubby trees and the water tower. And she would be at work. He checked his watch: god, almost 6 p.m. She’d be home by now.

  They rejoined the search. Evening darkness deepened. At 9 p.m. Bekker wound everything down. ‘We’ll resume at first light.’

  Charlie boarded the bus again and was back in the Frankston police station carpark by 9.45, addled with tiredness, sunburn and dehydration. Not ready for the men in suits who stopped him before he could get behind the wheel of his Subaru.

  ‘Probationary Constable Deravin?’

  Charlie recognised them from the corridors and the canteen—Elliott and DaCosta, CIU detectives. ‘That’s me.’

  Elliott was about fifty, DaCosta thirty, deeply fatigued men who had been in their clothes throughout this hot day, and the day wasn’t finished.

  ‘We need a word with you,’ Elliott said. ‘Inside, if you please.’

  He was lean but sagging under the chin, his shoulders slumped, a man who had reached the loosened-tie-and-undone-top-button stage of life, and Charlie felt a leap of panic. ‘Is it my wife?’

  ‘It would be best if we could talk about it inside,’ DaCosta said gently. He was solid and, in a few years, he’d be bulky—an impression reinforced by his shaved skull, which he rubbed now, as if for reassurance.

  ‘My daughter?’

  ‘They’re both fine, as far as we know,’ DaCosta said, with a glance at Elliott that seemed to say, We’d better double-check.

  Charlie followed them into a hot, airless briefing room with a long table that took up most of the available space. He slumped into a chair at the end, where he’d be able to observe both men with the least effort. ‘What’s going on? Have I done something?’

  Shane Lambert reported me, he thought.

  ‘Where were you today?’ Elliott said.

  He told them.

  ‘All day?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘I was on foot patrol with Senior Constable Gosling this morning, Karingal shops.’

  ‘Where were you at lunchtime?’

  ‘The tearoom. I was sitting with the others when we got the call.’

  ‘You didn’t see your mother?’

  Charlie was confused. ‘Here?’

  ‘In Swanage.’

  ‘This afternoon? No, I was part of the search. I wouldn’t just sneak off, if that’s what you’re implying. What’s going on?’

  ‘You didn’t see her car anywhere?’

  Charlie felt a dread coldness. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘According to the school, she slipped home at lunchtime to fetch a training video.’

  ‘I was here at lunchtime. We didn’t get to Swanage until early afternoon,’ Charlie said. He paused, a hard truth sinking in. ‘She didn’t return to work, is that what you’re saying?’

  Elliott nodded, assessing Charlie. Not unsympathetic, just dogged. Just doing his job.

  I’m police, I deserve better, Charlie wanted to say.

  DaCosta folded his arms. ‘What about your father? See him at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your parents are getting a divorce, I believe?’

  Charlie said, ‘So?’

  ‘As we understand it, the house will have to be sold?’

  Charlie stood and said, ‘I’m not doing this. You’ve found something. You wouldn’t give me a hard time if all she did was not go back to work. Is she dead?’ By now he was at the door. ‘I’m going to go home now and talk to my wife and talk to my father and talk to my brother.’

  His hand was on the knob when DaCosta said, ‘Your mother’s car was found abandoned this afternoon.’

  Charlie tensed. ‘Where? Just her car?’

  ‘Over near Tooradin. Does she know anyone out that way?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘It had been driven into a gatepost and abandoned,’ Elliott said. Still watching Charlie he added, ‘Blood on the keys still in the ignition, driver’s door open and things from her handbag strewn up and down the road. Lipstick, purse with no money in it, tissues…’

  Eyes flat, DaCosta asked a cop question: ‘What can you tell us about that?’

  DECEMBER 2019 – FEBRUARY 2020

  6

  TUESDAY, CHRISTMAS EVE, and dolphins were arcing in the glassy sea.

  They were right there in a straight line between Charlie Deravin, who was st
anding at the base of the beach steps, and the Nobbies, humped at the end of Phillip Island. He watched and nothing else moved in the half-light of the dawning sun. His best time of the day. The pinks and greys and windless clarity, everything etched, and the deep peace he needed in his life just then. All for him, the rest of the world missing out, asleep behind doors hung with Christmas wreaths and veranda beams strung with fairy lights and tinsel.

  He dropped his towel on the sand and kicked off his beach Crocs and waded in and the sea was shockingly cold around his shrivelling thighs. He cleaved the water neatly, resurfaced and pistoned out to the buoy, then parallel to the shore in each direction until he thought of grey-pointer jaws restless and hungry somewhere below him, and spooked himself. But he’d swum his daily kilometre, he reckoned. He was set up for the day. He was set up, and on suspension from the police force, and back living in the ancestral home and his daughter was asleep in Liam’s old room, unlikely to emerge until noon. Pretty damn semi-perfect.

  Charlie waded out of the shallows just as an elderly couple came in on his right flank, striding with the help of their sticks, the tips inscribing dashes in the sand. They cut across his path before he reached his towel, saying hello from under their sunhats. The world lost its sharp stillness and became a busy, irregular place again, soft at the edges. He had been staying here for a month now and saw them every morning. No idea where they lived.

  He towelled dry, slipped his sandy feet into his Crocs and climbed the steps up to the banksias and tea-trees, then through them to his street.

  Emma had tied a hand-painted Say No to AGL sign to the post that supported his letterbox. He straightened it. She’d pasted a Save Westernport sticker inside the back window of his Skoda and another on the sliding front door of number 5 and was disappointed in him, in her fierce way. ‘It’s not enough to pay lip service, Dad.’

  His morning routine was this: a swim at dawn, breakfast under the flowering gum in the front yard—his muesli bowl at a tilt on the warped and weathered tabletop—the 7 a.m. ABC news scratching from the radio at his elbow. Then a ride along the beach to the Balinoe newsagency or even as far as the Swanage general store to buy the Age. Home for morning coffee: sports section, news, cryptic, and then a shower and a shave. That was his life now—except that Emma was visiting. And he’d had some encouraging news: a Facebook post by Shane Lambert’s second cousin in Dromana, announcing that she was arranging a family reunion in the new year.

  Somewhat encouraging news. Possibly she’d been in touch with Lambert. Perhaps he would attend.

  There had been a handful of such leads over the years, and Charlie followed up on every one of them. No one else seemed to be looking for whoever had snatched his mother.

  It wasn’t Lambert. His police record showed he’d been arrested in Rosebud that day and locked up overnight for public drunkenness. But why hadn’t he been seen for twenty years? Did he know something? Had he seen something he shouldn’t? Been warned to stay away? He might be dead. But otherwise…A word with him, that’s all Charlie wanted.

  He pegged his towel to the nylon rope strung between a pair of flowering gums, then kicked off his Crocs, turned his feet under the garden tap and stepped into the house. Into a sense of slumbering daughter. She altered the air. There was a powerful sense of her warmth spreading unseen and filling every room—modernised since the old days, for the Airbnb crowd. Later today, after he’d taken her to catch the city train, the house would miss her.

  He opened the fridge. Grapes, a mango, strange foreign beer: so that’s where she’d gone last night, dumpster-diving at the Aldi in Hastings. Tipping muesli, blueberries, yogurt and soymilk into a bowl, juice into a glass, Charlie breakfasted under the trees, his bushies’ hat on his head, his boardshorts already dry. The birdbath was empty. He filled it, returned to the table and watched the blue wrens at their crazy pool party, spraying water everywhere as the ABC reported on the bushfires.

  Food inside him, Charlie switched off the radio and checked the news feed on his phone. SBS was reporting on a virus, originating in China, that was possibly deadlier than SARS…the Sydney Morning Herald on the increasing bushfire devastation…7News on a two-dollar Kmart hack that had gone viral because it promised to halve your bathroom cleaning costs.

  That was the world, right there.

  Charlie lost himself to dreams as the world awoke around him. Mrs Ehrlich next door deadheading roses. Margie across the street calling back and forth with her husband. Alby the aircon mechanic strapping a ladder to his ute and clattering a toolbox across the tray.

  They had all been here when Charlie’s mother disappeared, and Charlie wondered if they ever thought about that. If they knew anything. If they thought about Rhys Deravin, who had lived here back then, and if they still suspected him of murder.

  Other people did. Most people, it seemed to Charlie. And the suspicion had driven his father out—or so Charlie supposed, for Rhys refused to talk about the past. And because Liam thought their father was responsible, Charlie had rarely been able to discuss his mother’s fate with anyone. A twenty-year no-go area. Anyway, Rhys could not—or would not—sell Tidepool Street, so the house had been a short-stay holiday rental for twenty years until a few weeks ago, when it all went wrong for Charlie and Rhys handed over the keys. ‘All yours, son.’

  Charlie rinsed his breakfast dishes, brushed his teeth and shoved on his bike helmet and sunglasses before walking his bike over the bone-rattling grit and potholes of Tidepool Street. The leaf mould silenced the racket as he wheeled through the banksias and tea-trees. Reaching the steps, he carried the bike down onto the sand. It was only then that he decided he’d fetch the Age from the Swanage general store rather than the Balinoe newsagency. He climbed aboard and powered off, the tyres crisp in the sand.

  The dolphins again. He dismounted and took out his iPhone. Zoomed in and snapped them and messaged the best one to Anna. It was new between them, but he knew her phone wouldn’t be far from her elbow. Sure enough, a minute later she replied: Wish I was there xxx.

  Rather than mount the bike again, he walked it, eventually overtaking a woman leading three very old dogs, one small and yappy, one mid-sized and nervy, one a lumbering old wreck. Pretty sure that she and her dogs had lived in Menlo Beach back when he was a kid, he gave her a sideways glance as he passed, inviting a connection. ‘Good day for it.’

  She stopped. ‘A good day for striding out,’ she said, looking down at the dogs, resting exhaustedly on their hindquarters. ‘As you can see, I’m limited in that regard.’

  Charlie considered introducing himself. They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking across the water to Phillip Island, until, above the soft sea and wind, came the labouring of a small motor. Charlie turned his head towards the bend that concealed the next curve of sand. ‘The ranger?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the woman said; something rueful in her tone.

  A little all-terrain vehicle with fat tyres and a quivering sunshade was steaming towards them, Noel Saltash at the wheel. He wore vaguely official khaki shorts and shirt, a cloth badge on each shoulder. He cut the whining revs to a fumy rattle and braked a couple of metres from them. Leaned his forearms on the steering wheel, a man weighed down, as the woman murmured to Charlie: ‘It pains me to say this, but…’

  ‘Pat? What have I said? No dogs on the beach between nine and seven at this time of the year. It pains me to say this, but the rules are there for a reason.’

  Saltash shot glances at Charlie as he spoke, complicated expressions flitting about his face. He recognises me; knows why I’ve come back here to live, Charlie thought. He’s left it too late to greet me properly. He feels silly in his little beach buggy. He knows the woman named Pat doesn’t respect him; he suspects she’s not the only one.

  Was he going to issue a fine? Saltash glanced again at Charlie and acute self-consciousness seemed to come over him. ‘Look, Pat, I’m prepared to overlook this, this… infraction, but please, do the right thing. This is a famil
y beach. Little kiddies…’

  And they all looked down at the panting, toothless mutts where they sat dreaming of cushions and long-lost bones. ‘I understand,’ Pat said.

  Saltash made a wide turn and trundled back the way he’d come. Pat stared sourly up the slope of the beach to a low ridge of tussocky grasses above the high-tide mark. Here the sand was soft, and a few people were sunbathing on towels or sitting cross-legged in nylon shelters. A teenage girl anointed herself with sunblock, utterly lost to the flow of her fingers. Her boyfriend or brother lay flat on his back beside her.

  ‘I expect,’ Pat said, ‘some good citizen tipped him off.’

  Charlie doubted it. Clearly, Noel had had run-ins with Pat before. She went on, ‘He seemed to recognise you.’

  Charlie didn’t want to go into it, his childhood informed by the family or cabal or conclave of Menlo Beach cops. ‘I grew up here.’

  ‘You know he used to be a policeman?’

  A sergeant, in fact, an arms instructor at the police academy, but her subtext was clear: old habits die hard, and Noel Saltash was still a jumped-up despot. Charlie made an inadequate noise, leaned over to knuckle the skull of each dog, mounted his bike and said goodbye.

  His tyres whispered over the damp sand, avoiding the tips of rocks, seaweed, a dog-poo plastic bag, neatly tied, sitting on the sand like a floppy-eared black rabbit. A few Christmas-holiday early birds were out walking, others swimming, and a tinnie carved a white wake in the flat water. Then he was on the last stretch to Swanage, leaving behind the Balinoe Beach yacht club and the horse-churned sand.

  Reaching the youth camp on the outskirts, he stopped, hoisted his bike onto one shoulder and carried it through to the long main street, then mounted again. The speed limit was fifty here, but no one observed it: he felt the wind of three cars passing and smelt the toxins hanging. Two bold hand-painted signs a few hundred metres apart: Koalas crossing slow down. A kind of community activism that hadn’t existed when Charlie was a kid.

  He bought the Age at the general store, nodded to the coffee-and-croissant crowd on the sundeck, and, because he was here and because he had a lead on Shane Lambert, he rode on through the town and up to his mother’s old street near the water tower. He wondered what he’d feel. Rode in and along it and didn’t feel her anywhere. A gap, an absence, that’s all.