The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘What did she want when she came here?’

  ‘She said something about he’d left her a message saying he needed to crash in her spare room for a while, but she couldn’t get hold of him.’

  Charlie trembled. ‘And she wanted to tell him he could stay?’

  A decisive headshake. ‘No. The opposite. She was all steamed up, even had a go at me, as if I’d put him up to it.’

  Maybe Lambert had more than one cousin. Charlie took out his phone, tapped the Facebook icon. ‘Is this her?’

  Maberly peered. ‘Looks like her.’

  On an impulse, Charlie swiped the screen again. ‘How about these two?’

  Images of Nadal and Deamer. Maberly looked and said, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘They came here but I don’t know them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A few days ago.’

  Now Charlie had a part-explanation for Maberly’s wariness. ‘What did they want?’

  ‘Same as you. Wanted to know about Shane. But I don’t know them, so I didn’t tell them anything.’ Maberly looked troubled now; reluctant. ‘Look, this is all getting a bit too strange for me. Who are they?’

  ‘Making a podcast, so they say.’

  Maberly clenched in alarm. ‘About Shane and your mother? Why would I know anything about that?’

  Charlie held up a hand. ‘I believe you. I’m not sure what their podcast is about.’

  Maberly subsided. He twisted his mouth. ‘They showed me photos too.’

  Charlie stiffened; waited.

  ‘Four or five men, like I was supposed to know who they were.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘I didn’t. Well…’ He paused. ‘I did recognise two of them. They were the ones who came here to see Shane that time.’

  Charlie felt the creep of something nameless and alive. ‘You recognised them after twenty years?’

  Maberly backpedalled. ‘I think it was them.’

  Charlie didn’t press the matter. ‘Did you tell the podcasters you recognised them?’

  Maberly winced. ‘No. Was that wrong?’

  ‘No. In fact, if they show up again, don’t tell them anything,’ Charlie said.

  Maberly hunched miserably. He didn’t want to get involved.

  Charlie continued: ‘So they gave no indication who these men were or why they were interested?’

  Maberly pouted. ‘It was like I was supposed to give and get nothing in return.’

  ‘That’s how the media operate,’ Charlie nodded.

  Same as the police, really, he thought, as he left the timber yard.

  16

  LATE MORNING NOW, Charlie heading out along Bittern–Dromana Road and down through the cuttings to the flatlands and Port Phillip Bay. The sea was glassy, two container ships etched against it, and with his window down Charlie could smell the salt air, laced with vehicle exhaust and fried food.

  He drove parallel to the shore, then left and uphill again into the system of paved and unpaved side streets where Maeve Frome lived. One car on the lawn this time, a white Hyundai. No one on the deck. Rather than pull into her driveway and have her recognise his car, he drove past her house and parked behind a dumpbin in the next street. Switched off, got out, walked.

  Frome’s house seemed to offer no ground-floor access, except possibly through the garage, which was closed. He climbed the steps to the deck and caught a glimpse of the Bay over the tops of the nearby trees. Melbourne floated there, too. No dreaming spires, just hazy glass tower blocks shirtfronting each other. The sun was high and hot; Charlie could almost feel it leaching the colour from the outdoor furniture. He rattled the glass sliding door with his knuckles.

  A moment later it was swept open. ‘Yeah?’

  Maeve Frome wore shorts and a baggy white T-shirt. Solid legs and her feet were bare. Chipped scarlet nails. Watery eyes and springy grey hair. She was smoking; she took a drag and jetted the smoke at Charlie. ‘Help you?’

  Charlie decided on a mix of directness and evasion. ‘I’m Charlie Deravin and it would mean a lot to me if I could have a word with you about Shane—Shane Lambert, your cousin.’

  She stared at him, still expectant, but then slumped. Touching the tips of her fingers to her lips, she rubbed vigorously as if to seal them. I’ve lost her, Charlie thought, getting ready to leave, but she gathered herself and said, ‘One, I haven’t seen Shane for years. Two, I know who you are.’

  Charlie felt awkward. ‘Oh. Okay. Sorry to bother you.’

  ‘Come in. I can give you a couple of minutes.’

  Really? Feeling a kind of wonder, he followed her across an island of cream shag on a glossy wooden floor. She gestured at a bloated red leather sofa, took the matching armchair and rested her feet on a misshapen pouffe. Picked up a glass; rattled ice at him in a kind of toast.

  Vodka? Gin? Giving her a grimace more than a smile, he said, ‘You said you know who I am?’

  ‘Deravin. Not a name you’d forget.’

  Her voice and tone were harsh, but her face was sifted with traces of sadness and sympathy. She’d remembered the name for twenty years? Charlie realised he didn’t know where to start.

  She sensed that. Her voice was flat: ‘You want to speak about Shane because he rented a room off your mother.’

  ‘You’ve got a good memory.’

  ‘My memory’s fucked. But two reminders in one week?’

  Charlie stared at her. Me, he thought, and the podcast twins. ‘You had visitors.’

  She shot him a suspicious look. ‘Yellow VW. You sent them here?’

  ‘God, no. Did they want to speak to Shane, or about Shane?’

  ‘Both. What he was up to back then, where he was living. I told them I hardly ever saw him.’

  A pause. Maeve Frome was awkward, looking for the words she wanted. ‘I didn’t like them. They were full of themselves, and they tried to get me to say I knew Shane was doing burglaries, like I was some kind of low-life. I told them to fuck off.’

  ‘You did the right thing,’ Charlie said. ‘They’ve had a go at me, too.’

  She nodded. ‘Don’t know what their game is, but it got me thinking about what happened to your mum.’

  Charlie waited a beat. He said carefully, ‘Shane worked in Hastings back then, and went to stay in a motel after… after he left my mother’s place. Did he ever talk about that?’

  Frome drew deeply, sustainingly, on a fresh cigarette. ‘No. All I know is, after your mother, you know, went missing, he rang me to say the police might want a word—which they did—and could he stay a few nights.’

  ‘And did he?’

  Another bite of her cigarette. ‘No. As soon as he said about the cops, I told him I didn’t want his shit in my life, not with a couple of kids still at home.’

  Charlie decided not to tell her what Maberly had said. ‘Are they still living with you?’

  ‘No. And you leave them out of this.’

  ‘Are they in touch with Shane?’

  ‘Leave them out of it.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Charlie held up his hands.

  ‘They don’t know anything. Wouldn’t even remember him, it’s been so long.’

  ‘Okay. So the police contacted you…’

  ‘Yeah, well, they wanted to interview Shane again and couldn’t find him and thought I might know where he was.’

  ‘What about in the years since then? Any cold-case detectives been to see you?’

  ‘Not a peep. Far as I know, Shane dropped off their radar.’

  Charlie felt glum. Frome picked up on that and said, ‘Look, he was a no-hoper. Still is, probably, but hurt someone? No way. Plus, he was in the Rosebud lockup the day it happened—I know, I had to go and pick him up the next morning.’

  ‘All I want to do is talk to him.’

  ‘Yeah, well, good luck finding him,’ Frome said. She waved the smoke from her eyes. ‘You don’t mind? Should of asked you first.’

 
; ‘It’s your house,’ Charlie said, gasping for breath in it.

  ‘Yes, it is my house, and Shane’s never lived here, no matter what them podcast people said.’

  Charlie tensed. What had Nadal and Deamer heard? He said, ‘But you used to hang out with him sometimes?’

  Maeve looked into her glass as if hoping it had been replenished. ‘Not that often. Maybe if I had’ve, things would’ve turned out different for him. He was in foster care when we were growing up. Our whole family was a bit fucked, actually, excuse the French.’

  Treading carefully, Charlie said, ‘When the podcast people said Shane was into burglaries, what do you think they meant by that?’

  ‘I have no bloody idea.’

  ‘Did you ever meet any of the people he hung out with?’

  ‘No. Look, if he was stealing, it wouldn’t have been hardcore, he just had trouble making good decisions. But he might of known people who’d hurt other people.’ She wriggled her shoulders uncomfortably and added: ‘The kind who might’ve hurt your mother. Why? No idea.’

  Charlie nodded. His smile was sad. ‘So you haven’t seen him for twenty years? No letters, phone calls, Christmas cards?’

  ‘No. He just disappeared. Maybe he was into something dodgy at the same time and got spooked when the police came sniffing around. He went walkabout.’

  ‘For twenty years.’

  Maeve drained her glass. ‘He’ll be up north somewhere. Andamooka, Lightning Ridge. Might be an opal millionaire by now.’

  ‘Did he respond to your family reunion invitation?’

  She gave him a look. ‘You’re a fucking sneak, aren’tcha? Is that how you found me? Facebook?’

  Charlie shifted awkwardly. ‘Something like that. Sorry.’

  ‘No.’ She was shaking her head at him. ‘No, he hasn’t responded.’

  One last move. ‘Do you have old photos I could look at? Shane with friends or family?’

  Another look. ‘If it’ll get rid of you…’

  She left the room, returned with a photo album and sat beside him. The sofa complained softly, tipping her thigh against his. ‘These are the only ones I have.’

  Her cousin as a small boy; as a teenager; at work. Charlie peered. ‘That’s the Hastings timber yard. His last job.’

  ‘He had a friend there, don’t know his name.’

  17

  WAS KEVIN MABERLY lying when he’d said Lambert wasn’t his friend? Maybe. What was more likely, Lambert had lied about having a friend.

  Charlie walked around to his car and drove it into the deceptive shade of tall gums at the bottom of Maeve Frome’s street. Ten minutes later her Hyundai backed timorously onto the street and then uphill and left at the intersection. For all Charlie knew, she was headed down to her local Woolworths, but the Hyundai turned right at the end, then a short distance upslope to the freeway on-ramp. That didn’t tell him much: she might stay on it until Eastlink and the city, or take an exit to one of the intervening towns. Lunch in Mornington; the Kathmandu outlet in Frankston…

  He tailed her for several kilometres, keeping well back, separated from her car by an Australia Post van, an SUV and a small truck hauling a ride-on mower. The sun beat down. He flipped the visor; fumbled in his shirt pocket for his sunglasses.

  Frome exited the freeway inland of Mount Martha, down to a roundabout that led to Mornington in one direction, Balinoe in the other. She turned right onto Balinoe Road. Tailing her would be trickier now: one lane, fewer cars, a lower speed limit, so Charlie pulled over to the side, waited an agonising half-minute for another car to pass, then pulled out behind it. A few minutes went by, the road bending and dipping in and out of hollows, so that he thought he’d lost the Hyundai, but then, at the bottom of a hillslope near the Balinoe sportsground, a flare of brake lights: Frome was turning right, onto a street that formed the northern border of the town.

  The intervening car also turned right. Charlie followed confidently until near the end, when it wheeled into a driveway, leaving him exposed. Holding back, he slowed and pulled to the side of the road, watching the Hyundai, now two hundred metres ahead. It turned right onto a narrow, potholed dirt road leading to an area Charlie had always found anomalous in such a prosperous beach town. On one side of the road was a poultry farm with a rusted corrugated-iron roof and a ramshackle piggery which—literally—got up the townspeople’s nose when there was a northerly. On the other side was a defunct boatbuilding yard and a collection of fibro shacks that housed a halfhearted experiment in communal living: a few grubby dreadlocked kids growing wizened vegetables and spinning wool for weekend markets. It was a local-traffic kind of town outcrop; even in mid-summer everything here seemed chilly, damp, untouched by the sun.

  Charlie slowed at the road entrance and watched Frome turn into the boatyard. Then she was swallowed up by tin sheds and rusted hulls on blocks, so he drove on down the road and past the boatyard to where the track wound up into scrubby trees and a paddock of depressed alpacas. Here he stopped and fished out his binoculars. Frome had parked beside an old Kombi and a mould-streaked caravan skirted by dry grass.

  He focused on the numberplates to be certain: South Australian, and there was the Coober Pedy sticker on the rear window. As he watched, a man stepped out of the caravan and gave Frome a quick hug. Charlie recognised him, too: the guy who’d been sweeping the sands of Balinoe Beach with a metal detector.

  Charlie did a five-point turn on the narrow track, drove down to the boatyard and knocked on the caravan door. When the guy peered through the gap at him, he smiled. ‘Shane?’

  They got the recriminations out of the way—Lambert dismayed with Frome; Frome angry with Charlie—and invited him in. They both seemed tired: tired of life, and, maybe in Lambert’s case, tired of hiding.

  ‘Shane, I’ve been trying to find you for twenty years,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just, you know, wanted answers.’

  Lambert was smoking. He took a final draw on his cigarette and mashed the tip in a brimming ashtray. ‘You along with everyone else. So, I pissed off out of here and up to Coober Pedy—where they don’t ask questions. Kept my head down.’

  Maeve Frome was sitting beside her cousin, separated from Charlie by the caravan’s fold-down table. ‘And don’t you go reading anything into that,’ she warned, leaning over the table, jutting her chin at him.

  He raised his hands. ‘I won’t.’ Turned to Lambert again and said, ‘But you didn’t need to leave—or hide. You were cleared.’

  ‘Cleared, yeah.’ Lambert narrowed his eyes. ‘Something bad goes down, it’s just safer for a bloke like me to be somewhere else. The cops had a second go at me—like everyone, they thought I knew things, saw things, knew the wrong kind of people…That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

  Time hadn’t been kind to Lambert. The ungainly bulk of late middle-age; sun-damaged skin and work-damaged hands; sunspots on his bald dome and greasy hair to his shoulders. Watery eyes. And he was hunched protectively over his ashtray as if the life he’d led was one where you guarded your possessions. Prison behaviour. But the guy hadn’t been arrested since the day Rose Deravin disappeared, according to police records.

  Lambert lit another cigarette and now Frome lit up too. The air thickened, already superheated from the midday sun beating down on the thin metal skin of the caravan.

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘Getting too old for that kind of work. This here’s like a caretaker position.’

  Of a defunct boatyard. Frome saw the doubt in Charlie’s face and said, ‘The owner’s a friend of mine. The place doesn’t look like much but there’s equipment and stuff locked in the sheds and Shane keeps an eye on it.’

  ‘Free rent,’ Lambert said.

  Charlie nodded. ‘Plus you do a bit of metal detecting down on the beach? I saw you the other day. Didn’t recognise you, though.’

  ‘I recognised you,’ Lambert said. ‘Thought, fuck, here we go. Beer?’
r />   Charlie blinked. ‘Sure.’

  Lambert edged out and stood stiffly, the toll of hard physical labour. Charlie watched him limp to the fridge and bend into it. The metal detector leaned against a cupboard. There were few other possessions. Everything was neat and clean, but it was a place of faded laminex and swollen MDF. The hopelessness of poverty and ill health, he thought. Of a life put on hold.

  Lambert returned with three cans of Foster’s. They popped them and drank.

  Charlie said, ‘I won’t stay long, don’t want to hassle you, but if I could just ask a few questions…?’

  Lambert shrugged. ‘Knock yourself out.’

  But Maeve intervened. With a glance at her cousin as if assessing his ability to look after himself, she told Charlie, ‘Shane was questioned for hours back then. When I got there to collect him after his night in the lockup, detectives from Frankston showed up. I waited all day, practically.’

  ‘Tell me about the arrest,’ Charlie said.

  Frome answered. ‘He never done nothing to anyone. He went on a bender and got aggro with a cop and they locked him up.’

  Lambert smiled at her, patted her hand. ‘It’s okay, I can tell it.’

  He turned to Charlie. ‘No hard feelings about you and your brother asking me to leave your mother’s house, all right?’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘I wasn’t the best tenant,’ Lambert said. ‘And it was good, you blokes paying for me to stay in the motel. But, you know, I was a bit of a mess back then, drinking and whatnot. Plus, I couldn’t stay on in the woodyard, I was stoned half the time. I nearly cut my own hand off once. So I quit. I couch-surfed for a bit, then went over to Dromana to ask if Maeve would put me up.’

  He shot her an apologetic look. ‘She wasn’t there, but the kids were. Troy, the eldest, shut the door in my face and so I went to the pub and started drinking and the rest, as they say…’

  Charlie let him talk. It was all useful context, but he knew he’d soon outstay his welcome. Maeve Frome was clearly protective of her cousin this time around. She’d lied to the podcast twins, lied to Charlie, and Charlie reckoned he had until she reached the last mouthful of beer before she told him to wrap it up.