The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘My daughter. I’m babysitting today.’

  ‘Oh. I’d better go. I don’t want to—’

  ‘Stay. There’s no hurry. You were saying about a man living in your mother’s house?’

  In the seconds or minutes left to him before the back door opened and daughter and grandchild appeared, Charlie told Tania Saul he’d finally managed to speak to Shane Lambert. ‘He didn’t really know anything. Said there was a guy Mum might’ve been seeing, but…’ He shrugged.

  ‘So, dead end? Back to the drawing board?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘And you’re wondering if maybe Billy was the intended target.’

  Charlie winced. ‘It crossed my mind.’

  ‘Crossed mine, too, except in reverse. They were after your mother and it was somehow wrong time, wrong place for Billy.’

  A mild commotion in the rear of the house, a woman’s voice speaking babytalk softly, then yelling, ‘Mum!’

  ‘In here.’

  Charlie waited. He stood as Tania did, watching a reunion that was probably repeated several times a week. Big smiles; the baby lifted from its stroller; the handover; the coos and talking over one another. Except this time a strange man was there, and the daughter, uncannily similar in appearance to the young Tania Saul in the photos, looked quizzically at Charlie, a stranger in her mother’s house. Quite a bit younger, so maybe not a would-be boyfriend. Both drinking iced tea, no apparent tension in the air…

  So no immediate cause for concern. She finally smiled warmly at Charlie. ‘Hi, I’m Nan.’

  Charlie shook her hand. ‘Charlie.’

  Tania Saul, watching on, rocking the baby, peering around the wispy head, said, ‘Love, it was Charlie’s mother who was buried with Billy.’

  The daughter looked shocked. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Charlie smiled; nodded. Nothing much he could say.

  Then Nan left to run errands and Charlie found himself eating an early lunch with Tania while the baby slept. Radishes, gherkins and cheese on a dense black rye loaf, in the kitchen this time. Over faint noises coming from the baby monitor on top of the fridge, Tania said, ‘I googled you after you called on Saturday.’

  ‘I’d do the same.’

  ‘Umm…’ She gave him a shrewd look. ‘Do people think your dad was responsible? Sorry if I’m stepping over the line here.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Charlie said. ‘Yeah, people do think that. A twenty-year whisper campaign.’ He paused, embarrassed. He didn’t want to air dirty linen. ‘They were going through a divorce, et cetera, et cetera, but he was never violent to her. He’s not like that. And believe me when I tell you he’d never hurt a child.’

  She waved that off. ‘You’d like to silence the critics.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Tania Saul wet the tip of her forefinger and dabbed at seeds and crumbs. ‘A man on a mission. You could say I’ve been on one these past few days, trying to work out who’d want to hurt Billy.’ She cocked her head at Charlie. ‘Nan happens to be a Thai name; did you know that? And Billy’s real name was Kiet—that didn’t last long. Anyway, they were both given a hard time in various ways. Outright bullying, in Billy’s case. Insults in the street. People would cross the street, in fact. This is—or was—a pretty white-bread town.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I doubt it. Sorry, that was rude. Anyway, I got some of the spill-over racism—like I was soiled or something.’

  ‘Rough.’

  She looked annoyed: inadequate response. ‘Yes, it was rough. But Nan and Billy bore the brunt of it, especially in primary school. The thing is, I can’t see kids killing and burying anyone, can you?’

  Charlie decided not to tiptoe around. ‘Kids have older siblings though. They have parents. Was there anyone more than casually racist back then?’

  Tania barked a laugh. ‘Oh, there was nothing casual about it. And some of them had that look—you know, white supremacy.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘But kill someone? They weren’t bad like that, if you know what I mean. Just not very bright.’

  ‘What about the kids’ teachers over the years. Any of them a bit…’

  Tania shook her head. ‘You know primary school teachers.’

  Charlie didn’t, but she seemed to be saying that your average primary school teacher didn’t go around killing and burying people. Pretty sure I can prove otherwise, he thought.

  But she was moving on. ‘Anyway, how likely is it that a parent or a teacher would drive all the way to the youth camp and hang around on the off-chance Billy would run away?’

  ‘And the teachers on duty would have been too busy,’ Charlie said.

  Tania was constructing a new sandwich. ‘Exactly,’ she said. He realised that he wasn’t bringing her anything new, she’d already thought it all through.

  She looked up. ‘Which leaves,’ she said, ‘someone who was already in the area. A local. A paedophile, say.’

  ‘Yes. A line of inquiry that was followed at the time, but paedophiles weren’t thick on the ground.’

  She snorted. ‘I expect there’s a lot who never get caught. What about the camp staff?’

  ‘Checked and cleared.’

  Tania Saul lifted her sandwich with both hands and tore out a bite as if impatient with Charlie and their conversation. ‘His beach towel.’

  Charlie went very still. A tingle in his scalp. ‘I did wonder about that at the time.’

  ‘Did you? So did I, but no one listened. It didn’t make sense to me in the first place that he’d run away from the camp to go swimming—he didn’t really like swimming. But take some ratty old towel with him instead of his good towel? No.’

  ‘It was important to him?’

  ‘Very. Nan gave it to him that Christmas. The two of them were very close and he adored it. Right from the start I thought he must have run off because he was upset and intended to come back later. But someone grabbed him, for whatever reason, or he walked in on something he shouldn’t have, and was killed. And whoever did it staged the beach scene using that old towel.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A mind at work,’ Tania Saul said. ‘Clever. Cruel.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘I can feel him.’

  31

  CHARLIE RETURNED FROM Point Leo on Tuesday to find a Hyundai police van parked outside his house, two uniforms on his veranda, the male officer in the act of knocking on the glass, the female cupping her eyes to peer through it. Hearing the Skoda pull into the driveway, they turned in unison. ‘Mr Deravin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charlie went about his business as he said it, methodical, his mind racing. He took his surfboard down from the roof rack and rested it on the old garden table, then sluiced the sand from his feet and fetched a tin of wax from the footlocker. Cast looks at the uniforms. They weren’t wearing faces of professional regret—no one had died—and seemed too junior to be asking questions on behalf of homicide, sex crimes or major collision.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he went on, beginning to apply the wax to his board.

  They watched, fascinated, and then the spell broke. They were based at Hastings, they said, and had been tasked with an action.

  ‘Tasked with what action?’

  ‘Your whereabouts on Saturday. Specifically, the afternoon.’

  Charlie felt some sympathy for the men and women he’d interviewed over the years. Sometimes they simply lied, but often they were completely flummoxed by the demand to recall dates, places, movements, their days merging and blending.

  ‘I was here early afternoon. Mid-afternoon I went surfing at Point Leo.’

  The guy perked up. He surfs, thought Charlie.

  ‘Anyone vouch for that?’ his colleague asked.

  ‘Not sure. Hang on…’

  Charlie leaned into the Skoda and backed out with the carpark ticket. ‘Will this do?’

  The examined it expressionlessly. ‘You said you were here early afternoon. Where we
re you in the morning?’

  ‘Here. Reading the paper. Pottering.’

  ‘At lunchtime?’

  Charlie pointed at the old table on the front lawn. ‘Right there. Can I ask what this is about?’

  ‘Can anyone at all vouch for your movements on Saturday?’

  Charlie shrugged. He’d seen Noel Saltash patrolling the beach early Saturday morning, but not to talk to. It was unlikely the Point Leo mob would remember him. ‘Sorry, no.’

  The woman had been taking notes. She came to the end of her scrawl, pocketed her notebook and nodded at her partner. ‘Thank you, Mr Deravin.’

  ‘You going to tell me why you want to know what I was doing on Saturday?’

  ‘Have a good day, sir, what’s left of it.’

  In what was left of his day, Charlie finished waxing his board, defrosted and consumed a pesto sauce from November 2019 and tried to watch junk.

  Unable to concentrate, he finally called Fran Bekker. ‘Is your investigation concentrating on me for any reason?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really? I had two uniforms from Hastings here today, wanting to know about my movements on Saturday.’

  ‘I have no knowledge of that, Charlie. Perhaps it’s related to your other issue.’

  Other issue. Kessler. ‘All right. Any update, now that I’ve got you on the line?’

  After a longish silence, she said, ‘We found your mother’s car.’

  And immediately the old maroon Corolla, 300,000 km on the clock and likely to last another 300,000, was in Charlie’s head. But that car had taken her to her death, or so everyone thought, and been badly damaged in the process. Who would want it after that? After it had been scoured for trace evidence? You’d want to toss it into some big metal-crushing machine, surely? And why hadn’t he wondered about that car, all these years?

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a tractor shed in Leongatha.’

  ‘What was it doing there?’

  ‘Your dad sold it—still registered in his name. He had it repaired and sold it to a dairy farmer, who drove it until it gave up the ghost.’

  ‘You going to retest it for trace evidence?’

  ‘If there is any, it’ll be badly degraded by now. But yes, we will, you know that, Charlie.’

  His other issue, she’d said. He called Sue Mead and asked for a Kessler update.

  ‘Stay out of it, Charlie.’

  ‘Just asking, sarge. Did you form an impression of the jury, for example?’

  ‘What do you mean, impression of the jury?’

  ‘Well, the last one was overloaded with defence favourites. Football fans, older women.’

  ‘Charlie, good to talk to you, sorry again about your mother, but—’

  ‘If you guys need to debrief me, just say so.’

  ‘Not going to happen.’

  ‘Ms Picard is happy to talk off the record, if that would help.’

  ‘Not going to happen, Charlie.’

  ‘Okay, just thought I’d mention it. What’s Allardyce doing?’

  A pause, guarded and prohibitive. ‘Why do you ask?’

  At once, Charlie was on the back foot. ‘Sorry, sarge, none of my business.’

  ‘Did you know his son was run over on Saturday? Jake, the oldest, a hit-and-run.’

  ‘Oh,’ Charlie said. That explained the cops. Allardyce thought he’d done it.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Hurt pretty bad,’ Sue said. ‘He was out jogging.’ The line went dead.

  The news creeped Charlie out. Forces were at work.

  32

  IN THE STILLNESS of those days in early February, Charlie walked. Walked and brooded.

  Sometimes, halfway to Swanage, he’d cut through the dunes to Balinoe Creek and head back along it and then skirt the campground on his way to the beach, eyeing the small dome tents of schoolkids, their chip packets and Red Bull cans accumulating in the grassy verges. Sometimes he saw these kids, chaperoned by a couple of teachers, toiling self-consciously along the beach, saddled with boredom, obligation and massive backpacks. There always seemed to be a Somali kid alone at the rear.

  Walking soothed him, his bafflement and formlessness. He made mental lists as he stamped along, transferring them to paper when he got home. All the names he could recall, his mother’s friends and workmates, and, in the evenings, he phoned them, hoping something might have shifted, now that the world knew her body had been found.

  But nothing had shifted: they were sympathetic, they knew nothing—and a crabbed kind of cynicism grew in him to learn that Bekker and McGuire hadn’t bothered to reinterview most of them.

  He could think of only one other avenue of investigation and one morning, back from his swim, showered, shaved, comb tracks in his hair and coffee and toast at his elbow, he sat at the kitchen table, working his phone and his laptop, tracking down the title history of his mother’s old rental house, 12 Longstaff Street, Swanage.

  Real-estate ownership was a matter of public record, and there it was: BM Holdings. Well, that told him nothing; it was part of EKW Nominees anyway. What was interesting was that the property had not changed hands since 1998. Charlie continued to search, conscious that current and original police investigations would have covered the same ground. They’d not found anything, presumably, so what made him think he could do better? Unless Bekker and McGuire were already following a new lead. Following a lead that traced back to his father?

  The names listed under BM Holdings were Brian and Madeline Wilson—who were also linked, with one Evangeline Wilson, to EKW Nominees. Charlie’s eye might have let the name Wilson slide unnoticed off the page. But Evangeline…

  Memories flooded in. He remembered a shy, gentle woman on the margins of the backyard barbecues, the beach games and birthday parties when he was about thirteen. Married to a CID detective constable, a Keith or a Ken? Based at a police station near Dandenong. He hadn’t registered with Charlie back then—but his wife had, the grief in her beautiful face after he was killed in a pile-up on the Monash Freeway. Charlie, still a boy, halfway a man, full of sweet yearning and drama, wanting to make things better for her.

  The Wilsons had lived in a rental house in Menlo Beach back then. Must have bought the Swanage site with a view to building a permanent home. Evangeline—the words to the old song in Charlie’s head now—had moved away with the kids a few months after the accident. Apparently she’d not done anything with the block on Longstaff Street. Too-hard basket, maybe.

  Charlie googled her. She’d died in 2018. The kids Brian and Madeline inherited, presumably. Brian was an accountant in Geelong, Madeline a cellist with the Tasmanian Symphony.

  He called Wilson Financial Planning and was put through to Brian, who was irritable.

  ‘I’ve already been over this with you people, just last week.’

  ‘Ticking boxes, Mr Wilson. Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘Like I said, Maddy and I thought we’d get a better price for the block if we built on it. I mean, who wants to buy an old slab? If only we’d known.’

  ‘Your mother was never tempted to sell or develop it?’

  ‘She just wanted to get away from the Peninsula. She never got over Dad’s death.’

  A reproving note: Charlie was trespassing. He said, ‘You were quite young when the three of you left?’

  Wilson snorted. ‘Oh, well done the police. You think a three-year-old and a five-year-old and their grieving mother killed and buried two strangers first.’

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ Charlie said, but the line was dead. He curled himself into a self-castigating ball.

  33

  OUT OF SORTS, out of leads, no worthwhile surf anywhere on the coast but needing to do something, Charlie climbed onto his father’s old bike that afternoon and bumped along the potholed clay roads behind the clifftop mansions, then down to the store and up to the road to Swanage. Pumping hard, burning away his mood. The Woodleigh school bus swept past, a kid pressing his bare
bum against the rear window. What I’m reduced to, thought Charlie.

  His ride took him to his mother’s old street—of course. Not much of a police presence now, crime-scene tape and one forensic services van, but he U-turned before he could be spotted and freewheeled away from the street and down to the sea, and there was Mark Valente, cycling uphill towards him, scarcely puffing. His legs flexed and pistoned, and the bike, a trifling bit of metal tubing, tilted violently left and right beneath his bulky frame. When Charlie was a kid, you were careful to avoid Valente and his bike. He was apt to suggest a marathon ride somewhere, forty, fifty, sixty kilometres up hills and around blind bends.

  Halting, setting one foot on the ground, the other on the pedal, Valente said, ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Mark.’

  They were in the middle of the street like two local geezers on a back road. No cars in sight.

  Valente leapt right in. ‘Been to your mother’s?’

  ‘You got me.’

  ‘I see her car’s been found.’

  ‘Yep.’

  Silence. Charlie wanted to say, I’ve got a good reason to be here—what’s your story? He stared at Valente with mixed feelings. In some ways, the old cop had supplied what Rhys hadn’t. Dad was warm and loving, Charlie thought. Funny. But disengaged. No good at advice or guidance, or explaining things. Dad didn’t show me how to surf, how to wax a board, how to fix a bike—Mark did all that. Dad had seemed baffled to have two sons; Mark had seemed to want sons he didn’t have.

  He watched Valente take a swig of water from the bottle attached to the frame of his bike. He was kitted out for cycling: gloves, shoes, helmet, Lycra. And the old Valente was there in him when he scowled at Charlie’s bike. ‘Jesus, Charlie, look at the rust on that thing.’

  ‘It’s Dad’s, been in the shed for years.’

  ‘Get it seen to, mate.’

  ‘Will do.’

  The old pattern: Valente stating how things should be, Charlie acquiescing.

  ‘Sea air,’ Valente said. ‘You need to protect against it.’