The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘Another thing I shouldn’t be telling you: it seems the original investigation was less than thorough.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that we are retesting old trace evidence and testing for new trace evidence. Talking to original witnesses again. And there are a couple of witnesses who called and wrote to us back then but were never followed up.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  Bekker said nothing. Charlie said, ‘Can I look at the original files?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘It’s not that Dad had powerful friends, it’s that you lot didn’t do your job. You know what he told me? No one came to talk to him properly for at least five years, not until the cold-case unit reopened the investigation. Hopeless.’

  ‘I share your concern,’ Bekker said, stomping along.

  ‘What trace evidence are you retesting?’

  A quick sideways glance: did he deserve to know? ‘Her car is long gone,’ she said. ‘Sold as scrap for all I know. But we swabbed the keys, steering wheel, dashboard, seats and seatbelts back then. And we still have her handbag and everything in it—lipstick, purse, tissues…Let’s hope we find new DNA.’

  ‘Let’s hope,’ Charlie agreed. ‘She had that car for a while. Dad drove it sometimes.’

  ‘We’re aware of that. We’re also aware that even if new DNA does crop up during retesting, it could have got there innocently. Maybe she was in the habit of giving lifts to colleagues.’

  Drew Quigley? Charlie wondered. Should he tell Bekker? No. It was just a rumour. He said, ‘Could I look at photos, at least?’

  ‘Charlie, I’m not letting you look at anything.’

  ‘Can I ask what you have photos of?’

  She was suspicious. ‘The car. Her house. Her handbag and the other stuff—in situ and before and after testing in the lab.’

  ‘I was told the car had run off the road and into a fence post.’

  ‘Gatepost.’

  ‘Staged to suggest an abduction.’

  ‘Or an accident,’ Bekker said. ‘She hit her head, got disorientated and wandered off into the bush.’

  No bush there, thought Charlie. Farmland.

  Bekker was striding out again. She seemed to toss her next question on the run: ‘Charlie, when’s your dad due back?’

  ‘Mid-February. Why, you going to arrest him?’

  ‘We just want a word.’

  Charlie was stubborn. ‘Can’t you leave him alone? Tunnel vision.’

  ‘Telling me my job. Love it,’ Bekker said. ‘Did your father ever hit your mother?’

  Charlie halted. ‘Beat about the bush why don’t you? No. Never. They never even argued much.’

  Bekker chewed on that. ‘He didn’t attend the inquest. Were you aware of that?’

  ‘Did he need to? Maybe he was grieving. Anyway, I assume you’ve read the coroner’s report. On the balance of probabilities, Mum was killed by a person or persons unknown.’

  Bekker simply forged on. ‘Was your dad grieving, though? People remarked on his apparent lack of grief back then. And within a short while he’d moved in with Whatshername…’

  Her voice trailed away. She grabbed Charlie’s arm. ‘What is that?’

  A humped shape, brownish black, was stretched out on the sand ahead of them. ‘Not a homicide victim, if that’s your thinking—it’s a seal,’ Charlie said, drawing ahead to make certain.

  He looked back at her; nodded his confirmation. ‘Seal.’

  She joined him, a bundle of distress, awe and curiosity. ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘There’s a colony of them on the Nobbies,’ Charlie said, gesturing across the water to Phillip Island.

  She wrapped herself in her arms. ‘What happened? How would it have died?’

  Charlie shrugged. When he’d lived here as a kid, he’d seen at least one dead seal a year. He crouched to examine the remains. ‘I can’t see any injuries. Sick? Old? Disorientated? There was a bit of a storm last night.’

  And as he looked at the bedraggled seal he thought unaccountably of his father—like this seal, all of his old sleekness gone.

  Bekker stepped around the carcass, walked a few paces ahead; returned. ‘Let’s go back. That’s enough for now.’

  She was brisk again, Charlie hurrying alongside her. ‘Like hell that’s enough for now.’

  She glanced at him, not breaking her stride. ‘Elaborate.’

  ‘You said it yourself, the original investigation was botched. Maybe my mother was seeing someone.’

  Bekker increased her pace. ‘Is that you saying you have someone in mind? I need you to back off, Charlie. Stop hassling people.’

  ‘Well, if you did your job…’

  She stopped, a hostile intensity in her. ‘I have done my job. Butt out, Charlie. Don’t let this become another Kessler.’

  ‘Whoa,’ Charlie said, hands up, backing away.

  Bekker went to pursue him, but regret took over. She touched his forearm, a complicated expression clouding her face. ‘Sorry, unwarranted,’ she said. But walked on.

  After a beat Charlie caught her up. ‘Do you at least have a theory of the case?’

  ‘Charlie, don’t…’

  Charlie was clutching at straws. ‘Like I said the other day, maybe my mother wasn’t the intended victim, Billy was. Some paedophile grabbed him, and she intervened, and he had to kill them both. Do you know who was killed first? Just because Billy was found first, that doesn’t mean he was killed first.’

  ‘Or,’ said Bekker, ‘your mother was the intended victim and Billy happened along.’

  ‘Did you even check for perverts back then? Are you checking now?’

  ‘Perverts. Love the terminology.’

  Charlie felt a clutch of frustration. His fists tightened.

  Bekker, flicking him a glance, noticed the tension and again softened her stance. ‘Charlie, we’re doing a thorough job. We’ve been thrashing out likely scenarios and we’ll thrash out new ones as they arise. Trust us, okay?’

  She stopped suddenly. ‘Tell me about your family. Your dad, your mum—your dad with your mum.’

  That boiled down to one question, really, and it was too big for Charlie. But she didn’t seem to be asking for dirt—she was curious, she deserved a reply. Nodding at a neighbour from Spray Street, who passed with a keen glance at Bekker, he said, ‘What can I tell you? Peninsula born and bred, boyfriend and girlfriend since the first year of high school.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Dromana—where Liam and I went.’

  ‘Tell me about Liam.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You already know Liam thinks Dad’s guilty and I don’t.’

  Bekker switched topics again. ‘Was the divorce acrimonious?’

  ‘They weren’t divorced. They were separated.’

  ‘Getting divorced, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which would have meant selling the house.’

  ‘Has the original file got photos of the house? So you’ll have seen the For Sale sign stuck in the lawn.’

  ‘How did your father feel about that?’

  ‘We were all sad.’

  ‘Your parents split up because your father was…’ About to say, sleeping around.

  ‘He met someone else,’ Charlie said. ‘You know all this.’

  ‘I’m interested in your take on the matter.’

  ‘What do you want me to say? People fall in love with others. Marriages run their course.’

  ‘Tell me about Fay.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ Charlie said promptly. ‘She was single when Dad met her—he’d gone to the police credit union for a loan. She didn’t force the breakup; my parents were already kind of remote with each other.’

  Was that a lie? Not quite the truth. He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Your dad moved in with her pretty quickly.’

  ‘He didn’t have anywhere else to live.’

  ‘Yes he did. The house you’re in now.’

&n
bsp; ‘No,’ Charlie said stubbornly. ‘He was driven out by memories and public opinion.’

  Bekker almost snorted. ‘Have you ever considered that your mother was an impediment to his relationship with Fay?’

  Charlie’s police-work mantra was: Believe no one, accept nothing, until you had proof otherwise. He wasn’t surprised by Bekker’s theory. But he was curiously offended.

  ‘You’ll be checking Fay’s movements too, I imagine.’

  ‘She was cleared at the time—and I mean properly cleared, she was in Sydney, a conference.’

  Charlie let the sarcasm in. ‘But perhaps she was establishing an alibi for herself. Perhaps there’s an unexplained nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine-dollar payment to an identity known to police in her January 2000 bank statement.’

  Bekker punched him lightly. ‘One never knows. Like I said, we’re going over everything again. What did you think when they got married?’

  ‘I was pleased for them. It took a while—Mum had to be declared dead first.’

  ‘And she was dead all along,’ Bekker said.

  ‘That wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He saw that she probably was sorry. She looked spent. He said, ‘When are you going to release her body?’

  ‘It can’t be soon, Charlie, you know that. I know you’d like a proper funeral, and there’s no reason why you can’t have one, but it could be weeks. I have no say in it, sorry.’

  ‘No one has any say in anything,’ muttered Charlie, feeling sour. Wondering if he’d been played by Bekker as he trailed after her to the Tidepool Street steps. She was slipping on her shoes as Mrs Ehrlich descended, sunblock smeared over her nose, her sandals clapping the soles of her feet. She said nothing, merely smiled nervily.

  ‘All my neighbours will think I’m guilty of something.’

  ‘You have an unshakeable alibi for the day poor Billy and your mother died,’ Bekker said. ‘You were with me.’

  Charlie followed her up the steps, thinking: Have you talked to Liam? Has he told you he saw Dad’s car?

  He wanted to tell Bekker that she should be looking for a cold, exacting mind. A mind able to anticipate the steps in every narrative, able to steer and misdirect by staging the drowning of one victim and the violent abduction of the other. But if he told her that, he’d be inviting only one response—everyone’s response: ‘A cop mind, for example?’

  27

  CHARLIE WAS LEFT alone by late morning, but reporters, photographers and media vans soon replaced the search team, crowding Tidepool and Bass streets, trapping him indoors. Some of them walked across the parched lawn to tap on the sliding door; saw Charlie in there, stony-faced, and would mouth words, gesture, smiles splitting their faces. And they all had his phone numbers, so he took the landline off the hook and muted his mobile when he wasn’t calling everyone: Liam, Anna, Em, Jess.

  Mid-afternoon he confirmed the identification with Rhys and Fay. Rhys, looking troubled, lost and very far away, said, ‘Why search the place? What the hell did they expect to find?’

  Charlie didn’t know what to say, with Fay there, listening in. That the police expected to find blood where her husband had hacked his first wife to death? ‘Covering bases,’ he said.

  Rhys started coughing, bent over with it. ‘God. Excuse me.’

  Fay inserted her clever face. ‘Did they find anything?’

  ‘Left empty-handed, as far as I know.’

  Then Rhys was there again. ‘You need us to fly back, son?’

  ‘Nothing you can do,’ Charlie said. ‘Enjoy the rest of your holiday.’ He paused. ‘But they might give you a hard time when you get home.’

  The day drew on, eventually softened by afternoon shadows. Whenever his mobile buzzed, he monitored the caller numbers and listened to voicemail. Mark Valente was sorrowful, sharing a couple of memories and saying, as he signed off: ‘And so the sullen and the wicked are left behind.’

  Charlie smiled to himself, then saw Sue Mead’s number come up. He hit reply.

  ‘Hi, sarge.’

  ‘Charlie. I just wanted to say how sorry I am, we all are.’

  All? Half of his old sex-crimes squad hated his guts. ‘Thanks. Means a lot.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do…’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Charlie said. He paused. ‘How’s the Kessler trial going?’

  ‘It’s going,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Charlie. Got to go.’

  Hopeful reporters still lingered in Tidepool Street as the sun disappeared behind the trees, so Charlie left via the laundry door, over the side fence and across Mrs Ehrlich’s backyard. She was there at her sink, backlit by her kitchen light. She saw him and wagged a friendly, yellow-gloved hand at him before he ducked into the laneway behind her house. He felt her eyes on him all the way: godspeed, Charlie.

  The tide was halfway out, the water still as glass, mirroring the fading light, barely lapping the little rock islands where the cormorants liked to spread their wings to a drying wind. He stood for a while, letting himself grow, his chest or his heart, that part of him that was a vessel for feelings. But what feelings? His mother had been lost but now was found. Only it was bones they’d found, not his mother. Beaten to death—but in his mind’s eye a skull had been beaten in, not his mother. She was still missing. Her absent face: he couldn’t bear to visualise an assault on it. She was a smiling woman; she mostly smiled. Patient, loving—transformed into a loud-voiced termagant whenever she had a vacuum cleaner in her hands. Best avoided. ‘Flee the house, boys,’ Rhys would say. And she’d snap, ‘You do it, then.’

  Where had that image come from? Slowly there clarified in Charlie’s head a real woman, her quirks and character, and he was weeping. He headed left blindly, around the bluff towards Balinoe Beach and wondered what he was weeping for. His mother, yes, but also for his lost years. The fruitless search. The useless suspicion, energy and effort.

  He would have to start again. Butt out, Bekker had said. Trust us. Charlie did trust her, but that wasn’t the point. Being expected to sit around and twiddle his thumbs was the point.

  He tramped along the sand, his eyes drying and the sky and the water and the perfumed air flowed into him. He was a solitary figure, but he wasn’t alone there. A cyclist overtook him, hissing by on fat tyres, and a fisherman stood with three rods in the sand, each one bending tautly to the sea. He’d never seen one of these guys catch a fish. They must have some other reason for being there. Escaping home; embracing thoughts.

  Two black swans bobbing. Now, that was something. From the nature reserve near Swanage, probably, a place of abundance and safety—but even a swan needs to get out and about sometimes, test the boundaries…the porous boundaries.

  Where had that phrase come from? Something Dr Fiske had said. Charlie walked on as the sun spread across the horizon and wondered what to do about his therapist. If he quit the force—or was sacked—he needn’t see her again. But he’d liked her. Little things in him that she’d teased out and nudged into view. Things for him to contemplate.

  Okay. Plan of action. Speak to his mother’s friends and acquaintances again; discover who owned the slab house; look into Billy Saul’s life, see what might still be undiscovered there.

  He passed a woman and two children sitting in the sand, fish and chip scraps beside them. The children patted the sand despondently while their mother muttered into a mobile phone. Charlie saw it every time he walked on the beach. Children who wanted to play but didn’t know how.

  Finding a drift of beach garbage further on, he veered towards Tulum Court and its rubbish bin, and Noel Saltash was coming down the shallow dune with an old labrador on a lead. He and Charlie were about to pass each other with the abbreviated nods of abbreviated men when Saltash stopped, looking shy and awkward. Damn, thought Charlie.

  ‘Hi, Noel.’

  ‘Charlie,’ Saltash said. He was one of those older men who seemed cobbled together from many men. Little pot belly, skinny shanks, eyes
wide apart, gristly ears and a neat nose; pianist’s fingers. Out of his ranger’s uniform his forehead was ghostly white, his forearms and legs like old leather. As old as my father, Charlie thought. As old as Mark Valente. But he’d be the ranger for as long as the shire let him stay. He would be lost without the beach; it was his realm.

  ‘Didn’t know you had a dog—’

  ‘Charlie, I just wanted to say how sorry I am. She was a lovely woman.’

  Charlie paused, taken aback. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Saltash almost said more but thought better of it and nodded an abrupt goodbye. Charlie, watching him step down onto the sand, amused himself with an image of Pat the dog-woman coming along at that moment. It was not quite 7 p.m., the hour at which dogs were allowed on the beach in summer, so she’d be within her rights to call the ranger a hypocrite.

  Dumping his rubbish scraps in the bin, he waited a couple of minutes, half-concealed by the kayaks and surfboards left amid tea-trees and dune hollows all year round, never stolen or vandalised. When he was sure Saltash had a head start, he stepped onto the beach and darted a look each way: thank Christ, the old geezer had headed around to the left. Charlie headed right, back to Tidepool Street.

  ‘Lovely woman,’ Noel had said. The words conjured Charlie’s mother again. Trite words, the sort of thing you said, but also, just then, the simple truth.

  28

  HOLIDAY-MAKERS RETURNED to work and schools opened. Mid-afternoon on Friday, 31 January, Charlie steered the Skoda up steep, switchback roads and through little hill towns to finally settle, engine off, in the visitor carpark of the high school where his mother’s possible lover was now the headmaster. He checked his phone, wound down his window, got comfortable as parents collected their kids, buses trundled off, teachers left for the day.

  Drew Quigley appeared at five-thirty. A tall, thin, nervy-looking man. Balding—he had more hair on Facebook—and wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and tie, he was unlocking a Golf station wagon when Charlie intercepted him. ‘Mr Quigley?’