The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘And I hope it pans out,’ Wagoner said. ‘I really do.’

  The silence was awkward, and clearly still pressing on Wagoner. ‘I have a lady friend now,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m happy.’

  Charlie reached for one of the crackers. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘You want anything on that? I’ve got some cheese slices in the fridge.’

  He’s giving himself time to compose the rest, Charlie thought. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Karen. Well, Karen made my life hell.’

  Charlie tongue-chased a cracker fleck from his teeth. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You know what? For a very long time I thought it was your dad she was sleeping with. No offence.’

  Charlie hated to hear that. The old times were uncomfortable enough already. He shifted uncomfortably on the kitchen chair.

  ‘Not sure who it was,’ Wagoner said. ‘Not your dad, but one of them.’

  He means the Menlo Beach cop mafia, Charlie thought, and saw a shy, unworldly man elbowed aside by the dash of faster people, careless people. ‘Is that why you split up?’

  ‘Yes. And the divorce practically ruined me. We had a nice house, you remember.’

  Not a nice house but a big one, a sprawling brick veneer on Hendersons Road. ‘I remember.’

  ‘She took the kids with her but that didn’t last long. They barely speak to her now. Not a nice woman, Charlie.’

  Wagoner picked up a cracker. It snapped, the pieces rolling like a coin trick around his big fingers, and he frowned at it. ‘Fool of a thing.’

  ‘Karen told me she moved away because Mum’s disappearance upset her.’

  ‘It upset everyone,’ Wagoner said, licking the salt from his fingers.

  ‘It frightened her, she said.’

  ‘There’s frightened and there’s frightened,’ Wagoner said, then simply watched Charlie.

  Charlie heard, above the wind, a vehicle crunch in on the gravel, stop, switch off. The slam of a door. ‘Care to elaborate?’

  But a change had come over Wagoner. Ease, relief, simple joy. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be my lady friend.’

  Charlie shook hands with a small, brisk, smiling woman and drove home, thinking about Karen Wagoner’s fear. He’d supposed she meant a general, unnameable fear, but Alan Wagoner had seemed to indicate something more specific. She’d been afraid of the Menlo Beach crowd? Which ones? Why?

  All he wanted to do when he got home was walk along the beach, a salve for the events of the day and a means to clarity of thought. It helped to pace the sand, see the same people doing the same things. It even helped to see Noel Saltash issue a fine to a dog walker; to spot the metal-detector guy again, the old hippy casting where the holiday-makers might have lost coins, phones, Rolex watches. Charlie watched him stop, stoop, sift, check a bottle top, toss it away. Keep it, you prick. Put it in your pocket. There’s a bin at the top of the steps.

  Charlie walked on. One certain decision: he really didn’t want to visit Karen Wagoner again, to learn more about her fear. Police work, of course, mostly entailed going over old ground but all he wanted to do was move forward, over new ground. In this case, Drew Quigley, the teacher who might have been his mother’s lover.

  He went looking when he got home and found Quigley after about five seconds of googling. A headmaster now, at a secondary college in the Dandenongs, Quigley’s Facebook likes ranged from the Carlton Football Club to a microbrewery in Mornington and a Queensland beach resort. Married with two children. 326 friends. And he read Raymond Carver, watched The Wire and listened to Chris Smither.

  Not all bad, then.

  But Quigley would have to wait. School holidays—the Quigleys were in New Zealand, according to Facebook.

  What couldn’t wait was a call to his old sergeant: Luke Kessler’s new trial was about to start.

  Susan Mead was abrupt. ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Just wishing you luck next week, sarge.’

  ‘It’s not luck we need,’ she said.

  That put Charlie on the back foot. ‘It’s good you can put a second victim on the stand.’

  ‘Remains to be seen. Remains to be seen how well she stands up to questioning, Charlie. She’s a bit shaky.’

  As if it was all Charlie’s fault there was a second trial, a second victim prepared to testify. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  So just as damn well Anna was coming down tomorrow.

  14

  THE NEXT DAY. His sitting room, soon after lunch.

  They were still in that mad first stage of instant ignition and hadn’t seen each other for close to three weeks, so it was not until they were slackly tangled on the carpet that Anna said, ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Right here.’ He pressed his lips to her damp shoulder.

  ‘You don’t think Kessler would come after me, do you?’

  He jerked in her arms, his drowsiness vanishing. ‘Where did that come from?’

  She shrugged and her skin moved over his. ‘Just a feeling.’

  ‘He’s in jail.’

  Luke Kessler had punched a court official and screamed at the judge when the judge dismissed the jury and announced a new trial. His bail was revoked.

  ‘His family isn’t,’ Anna said. ‘His friends aren’t.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be mad enough to try anything,’ Charlie said, even as he wondered if that were true. Judging by the TV news, the Kesslers and their friends had seemed aggressive and entitled all through the first trial. They made pronouncements on the steps of the courthouse; gestured at the cameras; shoved reporters aside.

  He propped himself on one elbow, a signal for Anna to roll onto her back and look up at him. He was sun-browned, she pale, and at that moment the contrast fascinated them, Anna lifting her head to look along the variable planes and swells of her body as his fingers cupped, traced and pressed. She flopped back with a soft moan.

  Presently her voice came from far away. ‘When I got back from Sydney,’ she said, ‘there was graffiti sprayed on my front door: Watch your back bitch.’

  Charlie froze again. Lay with her, pressing hard against her. ‘Jesus, Anna. Did you report it?’

  ‘Not yet. All I wanted to do was come down here.’

  Charlie kissed her. ‘Someone getting back at you? Blaming you because there’s going to be another trial?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The fact that the prosecution had a second victim who was prepared to testify against Kessler would worry his lawyers and supporters, even if Sue Mead considered her too wobbly to make a good witness. Doubtless this woman would be traduced, too—slut-shamed, like Gina Lascelles. Charlie knew it was an old defence tactic to attack a rape victim’s moral character while praising the accused’s and ignoring the circumstances of the crime—as if a young woman’s being sodomised with her head trapped in a car window could be called a case of he-said, she-said.

  But maybe this time around the jury wouldn’t be top-heavy with middle-aged housewives. They were a godsend to defence counsel, apparently—unlike nurses, who might have cared for rape victims, or teachers, who might be bolshie and feminist. A barrister had once explained it to Charlie: ‘Your older housewife’s been around, she’s seen a lot, not easily swayed, not afraid to doubt people. And if you’re lucky she’s brought up daughters who wouldn’t in a million years have got themselves into that kind of situation.’ Daughters, in other words, who were sober and conservatively dressed at all times. Who would not have been raped, and if they were, would not have known their assailant. Who would have fought back: shown some spirit rather than freeze, as so many women did. Who would have gone straight to the police instead of waiting a day, a week, a year. Who, more than anything, would have been emotional in the ways that onlookers would consider appropriate.

  Charlie hadn’t attended the first trial, but he’d followed the squad’s water-cooler chatter. The prosecutor had been inexperienced and not very effective. The defence team was hard-hitting and persuasive. They’d trotted out a priest, local businessm
en, a doctor, an ex-girlfriend and other good-character witnesses for Kessler. They’d painted his victim as a loose, untrustworthy, possibly money-grubbing slut.

  ‘I seemed to be the only one taking notes during the trial,’ Anna had told him, the day he met her. ‘Then when we started deliberating, people were nodding off or cracking jokes. And whenever I said anything they’d roll their eyes—egged on by the forewoman, who kept cutting me off and telling everyone what she thought really happened and how we should vote. It was like it was all decided. It was as if I was the only one aware of the gravity of what we’d been asked to do—if that doesn’t sound too pretentious.’

  Charlie didn’t get to meet many people with principles in his line of work. He felt chastened.

  Meanwhile, she said, it had been hot and cramped in the jury room. ‘No windows; awful coffee. My chair was really uncomfortable, and the toilet door banged against it every time someone went. And I kept seeing Gina’s family in my head, the way they stared at us as if begging us not to believe the things being said about her, and the way Kessler’s lot was so intimidating.’

  There must have been a spy on the jury, too: someone feeding information to Kessler’s friends and family. Anna got a call one night, a male voice: ‘If you don’t vote to acquit, you die.’

  Charlie had encountered his fair share of bad juror behaviour over the years—a woman who’d done Sudoku puzzles during witness testimony, for example—and he knew that it was not uncommon for jurors to bully, grandstand, get bored, google names, second guess the evidence and make judgments based on the looks of the victim or the accused. He hadn’t struck jury intimidation or tampering before, though.

  Unfortunately, Anna had turned detective rather than report any of this to the judge or the prosecution. She hadn’t been the first juror to do that; she wouldn’t be the last. And in Anna, it wasn’t surprising. He’d seen her stubborn side right from the start. Driven. Confident that she knew best. Coming on top of the jury-room bullying and slut-shaming, the phone call warning her off had been like a red rag to a bull. She’d visited the crime scene, taken photographs, run internet searches and questioned witnesses in her efforts to find new evidence and other victims.

  Charlie rose onto his elbow again. Ran his gaze over her, circled her stomach with the palm of his hand. A couple of private eyes, that’s what we are, he thought: she was on the Kessler case and I’m on my mother’s. That wasn’t the only congruence. Their birthdays fell in the same month; their mobile numbers both began with 0406; identical thoughts and observations kept popping into their heads simultaneously.

  Charlie flopped an arm across her middle; nuzzled her neck.

  That lasted about a minute. Anna huffed and grunted and pushed him away. ‘Jesus, Charlie, when did you last have this carpet cleaned?’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ She uncoiled neatly, her skin pink where she’d rested against him and inscribed where she’d rested against the weave of the offending carpet. She strode into the kitchen unselfconsciously until she spotted the naked glass all around her—‘Oops’—and drew the curtains. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Charlie said, climbing to his feet and dragging on his shorts.

  The kettle mumbling on its base, Anna came back with her sleepy-eyed face on and wrapped him up, angling for a kiss. Charlie obliged, and she skipped away. ‘Quick shower first.’

  He trailed after her. ‘There’s just about room for two,’ he said.

  Tea was insufficient. They scratched together bread, olives, cheese and hummus and sat at the garden table, shaded by the umbrella. Anna turned Charlie’s wrist to peer at his watch. ‘Three o’clock. Is this a late lunch or afternoon tea?’

  ‘It’s a post-coital snack,’ Charlie said, and saw a flicker in her. She could be bawdy with the best of them, but right now she didn’t think ‘coital’ applied to what they’d just been up to. Too clinical.

  She caught his eye and smiled. She knew that he knew what she was thinking, and reached her hand to his across the weather-gnarled table, her fingers warm. Charlie Deravin felt a wave of gratitude. And she was staying for three days.

  ‘Anna,’ he said, ‘you need to report the graffiti.’

  She curled her lip. ‘I’m not convinced anything will be achieved by that.’

  Charlie tightened his grip. ‘It’s important to have it on record.’

  She withdrew her hand. ‘In case things escalate and they attack me, not my door?’

  Charlie shrugged helplessly. ‘I’ve seen all kinds of shit, you know.’

  The tension left her. She patted his wrist and helped herself to an olive. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  It occurred to Charlie that he was a target, too. ‘No strange cars followed you down here?’

  ‘Charlie. Come on.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Last question: have you been told who might have tried to warn you off?’

  She shook her head. ‘The police hate me. I’d be the last person they’d tell, don’t you think?’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said, thinking that normally there’d be a full-on investigation if a juror was threatened. Perhaps it was still ongoing. Or perhaps not much effort was being expended.

  15

  THE DAYS PASSED, Anna returned to the city, and Charlie resumed his hunt. Until Drew Quigley returned from New Zealand, there was little he could do to follow his mother’s story. That left the search for Lambert.

  He started with the timber yard in Hastings, ten minutes’ drive from Menlo Beach and on a side street in the industrial area past the Kings Creek hotel. The place had not altered in all the years he’d been away. A low-slung admin building at one end of a large shed, surrounded on three sides by stacked planks of varying width and thickness, seasoning away in the sun and the air.

  Charlie parked around the back next to a display of ready-made picket fencing. As he crossed the yard, an eddying wind drew the smell of sawdust past his nostrils. Saws screamed unseen within the shed; a truck trundled out, another in. A forklift shot its tines under a stack of merbau decking boards.

  He discovered that Kevin Maberly was now the manager, and found him behind a desk covered in invoices, order forms and timber samples. ‘Sorry to turn up again like a bad penny,’ Charlie said.

  Maberly grimaced but was too polite to complain. Shaking Charlie’s hand, he said, ‘Always keen to help.’

  ‘How long have you been the manager?’

  ‘Five years. That’s what happens if you stick around long enough. Please, pull up a pew.’

  He waited for Charlie to sit, then collapsed into the chair behind his desk. ‘Not sure how I can help you, though. Is it the anniversary? Are they reopening the case?’

  He struck Charlie as a mild man, trying hard. ‘Just loose ends. But I’d dearly love to talk to Shane Lambert. Has he been in touch at all?’

  ‘Shane? No.’

  Maberly was wary now. As if to hide it he rocked back in his chair and laced his hands behind his head, revealing sweat marks under his arms. He was plump, constructed of overlapping rings like the Michelin man.

  ‘Just thought I’d check,’ Charlie said. ‘You seemed to be the only one he was friends with, and I was hoping he might have returned to the area.’

  ‘Friends is stretching it, as I said before. I lived in Swanage back then and somehow found myself giving him rides to and from work.’

  Found myself: Maberly had used those exact words before. What was the implication? That Lambert was manipulative? ‘Hope you don’t mind, but if we could rehash things, maybe you’ll remember something I can run with?’

  ‘I am busy…’

  ‘Just a few quick questions. Shane quit around the time you helped him move out of my mother’s house?’

  Maberly was curt. ‘A few days later, from memory.’

  ‘How did he quit?’

  ‘Called in sick but didn’t show up again.’

  ‘When, exactly, did the police come here?’

>   ‘I can’t remember the exact date, but it was soon after your mother disappeared.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘That I didn’t really know him and certainly didn’t know where he was.’

  ‘They haven’t contacted you again? Cold-case detectives over the years?’

  ‘No.’

  Slack, thought Charlie. ‘You say you weren’t friends with him. But you must have formed an opinion?’

  Careful, Charlie told himself. You sound accusing. Maberly thought so, too. He said stiffly, ‘We’ve been over all this. Shane was the type of person to take you over. Manoeuvre you.’

  ‘A powerful personality.’

  ‘Not really. Quiet. Hard to read. But in a way that you’d be careful what you said and did around him.’ Maberly paused. ‘I can see why he made your mother feel uncomfortable. No one liked him really.’

  ‘Did he have any other friends in the yard?’

  ‘No. And like I said, I wasn’t really friends with him, it’s just that people thought we were.’

  ‘What about friends outside the yard?’

  ‘We’ve been over this. I have no idea.’

  Feeling frustrated, Charlie said, ‘So you never saw him with anyone at all?’

  Maberly frowned. He sat forward, damply serious. ‘Actually, now you mention it—a couple of blokes were here once. I thought they might have been police, they had that look about them. But if they were, they didn’t hassle him. Had a quick word and shook hands and clapped him on the back and then they left.’

  New information. Charlie thought about it. Got nowhere.

  ‘What about where he went to live after the motel? He only stayed one night.’

  Maberly shrugged. ‘Couch-surfing, maybe? Not on my couch, though. Ask his cousin.’

  ‘His cousin?’

  ‘She came tearing in here a day or so after he quit, wanting to talk to him. Management passed her on to me.’

  ‘See?’ Charlie said. ‘You didn’t mention this before.’

  Maberly shifted uncomfortably. ‘I saw her in the street the other day, that’s all. Not to talk to, but it reminded me.’