The Fourth Season

by Dorothy Johnston

  Rowan stared at me in silence in response to this.

  ‘Which one was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not from inside. But you’re right. Somebody was watching. He was staring at the car like I was.’

  ‘From the footpath?’

  Rowan nodded. He’d caught no more than a glimpse of the figure, but was confident that it had been a man’s. He’d been of average height and build. It was his attitude of careful watchfulness that struck Rowan as he re-created the scene for me, the man’s stillness caught by the outer reaches of a street light. Rowan didn’t know whether or not he’d followed Laila. He hadn’t seen him get into a car.

  I walked with Rowan till we reached Dickson swimming pool. He turned right to circle it after I’d thanked him and said goodnight. I felt bad for pestering him, but only for a moment. He’d brought me a step closer to the man who might, just possibly, have been Laila’s lover, and her murderer as well.

  Walking home, I thought about phoning the police, knowing that I should, but worried about being grilled about Ivan all over again. I put the decision aside to think about in the morning.

  . . .

  When I got home, there was still no sign of Ivan. Kat was sitting up in bed and Peter was reading to her. I kissed my daughter goodnight, then spoke to Peter in the kitchen, keeping my voice low. Would he mind if I went out again, for an hour or so?

  Peter said he wouldn’t. ‘We’ll be fine, Mum.’

  I knew I ought to tell him I’d spoken to Rowan again, to prepare and warn him, but I put this decision off as well, for another day.

  . . .

  Every light in the house that had been Laila’s blazed out through uncurtained windows, or windows whose curtains had been pulled right back. A Radiohead CD was so loud you could hear it from half way up the street.

  The kitchen sink was full of unwashed dishes. The tape was still across the doorway to Laila’s room, and Tim leant against it, staring over my left shoulder as though he suspected that I hadn’t come alone. You’re putting on a show for me, I thought, but you’ve been in there recently. You go in and out when it suits you.

  There was still no sign of Phoebe, and Tim seemed to have adjusted to living in the house alone, to have acquired a jealous and possessive attitude to it.

  Tim made me impatient; that night he made me feel that I couldn’t be bothered with a diplomatic approach. He gave no sign that he knew two pages were missing from the file hidden in the laundry. Perhaps he hadn’t checked it, or perhaps he hadn’t been the one to take the file from Laila’s room. But if not Tim, then who?

  He spoke through dry, cracked lips. ‘You know, Laila and me—we’d been friends since first year. We were as close as—as any friends could be. But she used me, just like she used Ivan and all those other men.’

  ‘What other men?’

  Tim shrugged. ‘That old guy, her lecturer, for one.’

  ‘Brian Fitzpatrick?’

  Tears came to Tim’s eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Did Laila talk about Fitzpatrick?’

  ‘Not much, just that he was a good person, stuff like that.’

  ‘Do you think they were having an affair?’

  ‘Maybe. I think she was having an affair with someone. I mean a married man.’

  Tim sounded angry and I sensed that, though he didn’t like me any more than I liked him, he wanted to talk, to get some of his anger out.

  It was little things, he said, the build-up of little things over a period of time. There’d be a phone call. Laila’s voice would change. Her phone would ring when they were doing something together, and she’d move away to answer it.

  When I asked why the calls had to be from someone she was romantically involved with, Tim didn’t answer straight away. Once, he told me, Laila’s phone had rung in the middle of his birthday dinner, and she’d left the table. He made this sound like the worst of insults. Another time, in Phoebe’s car, she’d said, “I can’t talk now” and then “me too”.’

  He’d seen Laila and Brian Fitzpatrick together at demonstrations and social functions. He’d seen the way she looked at him. Other men’s attentions Laila had ignored, or else she’d strung them along while they were useful to her. Fitzpatrick had been different. But he didn’t want to think it was Fitzpatrick, not a man whose politics and courage he respected.

  ‘It wasn’t Ivan, anyway. Laila wouldn’t stoop that low.’

  The insult didn’t touch me. I was beyond feeling insulted.

  ‘Other men?’ I asked again.

  Tim shrugged again and said he didn’t know of names. When I asked if he’d ever gone with Laila to an internet cafe in Dickson, he looked blank and shook his head.

  I felt that the two of us were balanced on either side of a steep drop. If I could cause trouble for Tim over the hidden folder, he could cause trouble for Ivan, playing up his quarrel with Laila the next time he spoke to the police.

  ‘You went into Laila’s room the night she was killed,’ I said.

  Tim looked as though he was going to deny it, then he nodded briefly, as though telling me no longer mattered. ‘I didn’t find anything.’

  ‘What did you expect to find?’

  ‘I don’t know. Her smell, some feeling of her. I don’t know!’

  I waited. ‘If you must know, I was looking for a note,’ Tim said. ‘Of course I didn’t find one. I picked up the mouthpiece of her—you know, of the tank. I—I kissed it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was her—because she’d—I was frightened! What’s the matter with you, Sandra? Don’t you even care? Ivan and I spent hours waiting at the lake, not knowing whether Laila was alive or dead, whether it was really her, or some other girl. Then we had to wait again for hours at the station. They let us go home finally, but every minute I kept expecting a knock on the door. It was my last chance!’

  When I asked Tim if he’d taken anything from Laila’s room, he shook his head; but I knew for sure this time that he was lying.

  He told me he wanted me to leave, and I didn’t argue. I wasn’t afraid, or even nervous in Tim’s presence, but I knew I’d get no more from him just then. Maybe when he discovered that the sketch and diagram were missing, he’d come after me.

  . . .

  That night, I got out of bed to check on Katya twice, then told myself to stop it, or I’d wake her with my fussing. I didn’t risk going into Peter’s room, but listened at his door.

  I lay awake replaying first my conversation with Tim, then the scene Rowan had described to me. If Rowan had noticed a man watching Laila get into a car, then others might have spotted him, including, for instance, whoever had picked Laila up.

  I wondered if Laila had used her time on Don Fletcher’s computer looking for particular facts or references, and if discrediting the government had been a kind of side benefit. It was a possibility I hadn’t considered before. I wondered if she’d targeted, or attempted to target, all those organisations who’d been involved in the marine park proposals; CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, the National Oceans Office: not to mention the conservation groups, the oil and gas and fishing industries. I imagined the response I’d get if I started ringing them and asking if they’d had problems with a hacker. It occurred to me that Don might have kept drafts of the reports whose final versions he had sent me, versions that might be different from the final ones. Bill Abenay had said he’d help me with the technical stuff—at least he hadn’t said he wouldn’t. But did I want Bill Abenay to know what I’d found?

  Ivan woke me up by turning on the bedroom light, bringing in the cool night air.

  There was a flush along his high Russian cheekbones, a strong smell of alcohol on his breath. Ivan didn’t drink. His father had died an alcoholic. Ivan didn’t drink.

  Ten

  I rang CSIRO as soon as Pete and Katya had left for school the next morning. Ivan was asleep, catching up on all those nights spent walking. He would wake up with a hangover. I had no idea what I would s
ay to him when he did.

  I asked the receptionist for Dr Tarrant, and was told he was away on a field trip. Mulling over what this might involve, I pictured Laila leaving that third cafe in Garema Place, no car waiting this time, nobody watching her climb into it either. I wondered why I was suddenly certain no one had been watching. Was it because the man Rowan had seen outside the Tradies had learnt all he needed to and had no further need to spy on her?

  I imagined Laila waiting for the bus in Civic, thoughtful and ­preoccupied, ignoring the appreciative stares of young men in the street, the occasional envious glances of the women. I considered the possibility of frequenting the Garema Place cafe in the evenings, noting the regulars, trying to start conversations with them. Had Laila been smiling as she waited for her bus? Had she been disappointed, or undaunted, already planning her next venture, at another cafe, in another suburb, where no one had set eyes on her before? Why had she given up trying to break into the computer in Richard King’s office, if, in fact, she had given up? More importantly, what had she been looking for?

  Laboriously, I went through each of the canyons named in Don’s reports. I was surprised he hadn’t phoned me for an update by now. I checked the longitude and latitude of each canyon, crossing them off when they proved not to be the one in Laila’s sketch. When I got to the end, I felt flat and disappointed. I’d been so sure that one would match. I trawled through Geoscience Australia’s website until I found a detailed map showing Bass Strait canyons and downloaded it.

  The Babel Canyon was one hundred and two kilometres north east of Tasmania and fifty-eight kilometres from Flinders Island, the closest to any landmass of all the canyons I had read about, close also to an ExxonMobil oilrig that had been given the same name, and was right on the border of the proposed marine park.

  Then I noticed something else about the contour lines. Inside the section Laila had circled, the sea floor was considerably more shallow than on either side. ‘Sediment flow,’ I said aloud. I didn’t know what caused it, or how frequently it occurred, much less what might be hidden by the example Laila had singled out; but I felt convinced that something was hidden there, or that Laila had believed it was.

  When Don did phone—I’d made a pot of coffee and was just about to wake Ivan up—it was to arrange for me to meet his wife.

  . . .

  Clare Fletcher shook my hand with an expression of recognition mixed with contained excitement—yes, that’s her—which quickly gave way to anger. It occurred to me that practically everyone I met these days was angry. A further glance of recognition passed between us, while I hoped that my emotions weren’t etched so obviously on my face. It occurred to me that, for two weeks now, I’d been avoiding mirrors.

  On the drive over, I’d anticipated a bit of fencing to and fro with Clare, both of us disappearing behind shutters of politeness before re-emerging; but Clare’s anger burnt its way out from underneath her skin, made politeness redundant.

  Both our husbands were suspects in a murder investigation. What fools men were! What fools!

  Clare knew that Don was paying me. She knew all about it. Don thought he was clever, Clare said, but he was the most transparent of creatures, and impossibly weak.

  It didn’t sound as though Don’s aim of saving their marriage had much of a chance. Yet here was a professional woman; childless, unencumbered, with a secure income, who could have divorced her ­stumbling, luckless spouse at any time, but hadn’t done so.

  I wondered if Clare was thinking the same about me, if she’d reached the mistaken conclusion that I was childless and financially independent, and if I should enlighten her. But I wasn’t there to talk about myself, or to complain about Ivan, tempting though this was.

  Clare was well and expensively dressed, making me ashamed of my appearance, my clothes that looked shabby next to hers, my hair I raked a comb through once a day and then forgot about, my lack of proper sleep.

  When I asked Clare how long she and Don had been married, she answered automatically, ‘Fifteen years.’ She did not need to think, much less to add up. I had a fleeting mental picture of Bill Abenay, that hint of quiet satisfaction behind eyes that were watchful and alert, the peculiar restfulness I’d felt in a house occupied by a single adult male.

  But then Clare surprised me. I asked about Don’s shoes, and she replied aggressively, ‘What about them?’

  The police had taken everything Don had been wearing the night of Laila’s murder, including his underwear. Clare supposed he’d never get them back. If there’d been sand or gravel on his shoes that put him at the lake that night, he wouldn’t still be walking round a free man.

  Simon was a worm, she said, no friend to her husband at all. Simon’s story was ‘full of contradictions.’ Clare looked at me meaning­fully, as though she expected me to have unravelled them by now. Don’s shaky alibi infuriated Clare, but for reasons I was obliged to revise. Furious with him, she was also ready to pour scorn on anyone who wasn’t on his side. Her husband’s motive only served to fuel her anger. The girl had ruined his career. But murder? If a fly got caught in the house, Don caught it in a tissue and released it outside.

  I asked Clare how she’d found out about Laila. ‘I mean in the first instance.’

  Clare had found out when her husband was dismissed. ‘That’s when.’

  ‘There were no hints before that?’

  ‘Hints?’ Clare pounced on the word as though it was a bit of iron heading for a magnet. She spent the next five minutes cataloguing Laila’s faults, then asked abruptly, ‘What about your husband?’

  ‘Oh, I picked up hints,’ I said. I found myself describing the Lennox Gardens picnic.

  Clare laughed, and suddenly the air between us felt lighter. She seemed to be revising her opinion of what we had in common. For a moment, her eyes emptied of all emotion, even the anger she’d been wearing like a second skin.

  We talked about neutral topics for a while before Clare checked her watch and said she had to get back to work.

  On the way home, I wondered how much Laila had known about Don Fletcher before she approached him. It struck me as likely that she would have researched her target. Only a handful of public ­servants—maybe ten, I thought at a guess—would have had access to the correspondence Laila had leaked to the press. She would never have fooled Clare though, or any woman who had reason to suspect her man might stray given the right kind of temptation.

  I decided that Clare had wanted to meet me in order to size me up. What did that say about the balance of power between her and her husband? Perhaps Clare had expected to observe that I’d floundered a long way from my area of competence. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that this had been her motive. For much of the time, I felt like a flounderer—or should that be a flounder?—so why shouldn’t others arrive at this conclusion too? It occurred to me that, of all the people I’d spoken to so far who might have been responsible for Laila’s death, Clare Fletcher was the most likely. It was her combination of rage and self control. The men—Ivan, Tim, Don—were sunk in self-absorbed misery. Not Clare.

  . . .

  I rang Simon, who ostentatiously repeated his offer to assist me with my inquiries ‘any time’. I took him back over meeting Don, how Don had arrived late and flustered, with grit on his shoes. As before, Simon latched onto the word, which evidently pleased him. Then I rang Don and told him that Clare seemed more supportive than he’d led me to believe, to which Don replied mildly, ‘Oh, she’s coming round. She’s coming round,’ as though Clare was a large boat that needed a great deal of space for turning. He asked for an update and we fixed a time to meet.

  . . .

  My first night at the internet cafe was very quiet. Neither Rowan nor the two young men Owen had described showed up. The first thing I did was to set up my computer so that I could monitor the others. There were so few customers that it was easy to keep track. The games they were playing quickly bored me.

  We’d agreed that, since Owe
n and Rita couldn’t afford to pay me for more than a few hours, and since most of their clientele were young people who used the cafe in the evenings, I would keep it open from seven until ten four nights a week. Rita hoped to come back herself after two, or at the most three weeks.

  Ivan reacted indifferently to the news that I’d taken on another job. It was Peter I was most concerned about, but if Peter was angry that I’d cemented my connection with the internet cafe, then he kept it to himself.

  I’d taken some reports with me and read through them steadily, looking up every time somebody walked past the cafe’s glass front. The reports contained plenty of references to cost effective bathy­metric mapping, diverse geomorphic features and key bioregions. One section on canyons described them as ‘structurally diverse, physically and ecologically dynamic productive systems’. My eyes went out of focus as I imagined these great underwater crevices, deeper than the Grand Canyon. The Bass, for instance, boasted an entrance fifteen ­kilometres wide and sheer walls a thousand metres high. Krill fed in the canyons, layers upon layers of them. I pictured the routes Aboriginal people might have taken around the edges of these giant holes, before the sea flooded them nine thousand years ago. I pondered the sentence: ‘We know more about Mars than we do about the sea just off our coast.’

  The door opened. I looked up, hoping for Rowan.

  It was Bronwyn, looking as surprised to see me as I was to see her. She backed out quickly, her spiked hair standing on end like the questions she obviously didn’t want to answer. I cursed the fact that I could not go after her.

  It was raining when I closed up—a hard, sleety rain with the taste of winter in it. I told myself I ought to feel grateful for the rain, and did. But the sudden drop in temperature and the stinging wetness made me shiver. I put my bag over my head, not that it made much difference, and ran towards the Tradies entrance.

  Once there, I glanced back over my shoulder. A street light outlined the shape of a man, an oblong of light catching him refracted through the rain for no more than a second before he moved away.