. . .
Ivan drank water standing at the sink, a small ritual that had become a way of avoiding conversation. I fetched a glass as well, filled it with tap water, and took it to the kitchen table.
Only Katya could pull her father out of his depression. I didn’t know how long it would be before even Katya’s efforts made no difference. Ivan didn’t seem to care that there’d been another murder. Wherever he’d gone to, whatever place inside himself, the news simply couldn’t reach.
A few days before, I’d watched Kat walk across the living room to where her father was sitting slumped in misery. She’d blinked, standing completely still for a matter of perhaps six seconds, then turned and walked away again.
Kat had looked at me with a face full of adult emotions, but these emotions fleeting, very brief, and her expression had told me that she knew that I was powerless to change her father back into the man she loved. After dinner, every night now, Peter and Katya shut themselves in Peter’s room. Sometimes they listened to music. Sometimes there was laughter, sudden, sharp, a knife through paper walls.
. . .
The evening television news gave the dead man’s name as Ben Sanderson, and reported that he’d taught scuba diving at Dickson pool. Cameras panned across a line of police and SES workers scouring streets at the Causeway, an older suburb at the unfashionable end of the lake. The Causeway was an interesting part of Canberra. A few of the original cottages remained, built for workmen who’d raised the city from sheep paddocks in the 1920s, under the quarrelsome eyes of architects and planners. These cottages hung on in silent contrast, a stone’s throw from the shining white faces of the new apartment blocks. The pocket of old houses was enclosed between river wetlands and a railway yard.
In photographs reproduced on television, Sanderson looked as young as Laila Fanshaw, though his age was reported to be twenty-seven. His had been a pale oval face, with large green-grey eyes, short brown hair and the kind of incipient beard favoured by teenage screen idols.
It wasn’t a night for opening the cafe, but something drew me back there. I decided to go the long way round, via the pool. Drops of water glittered on police tape underneath the street and carpark lights. Stepping outside, I’d welcomed the mist: it was dampness, if not rain. I’d stuck my tongue out, waggled it, then coughed, understanding that I was avoiding a showdown with Ivan, but that sooner or later it would have to come.
While pausing at the fence to get my bearings, I heard voices, pitched low but carrying across the carpark. Shapes became more distinct as I took a few steps forward, the mist seeming to join, then separate them. Two men were standing with their backs to me, one maybe five centimetres shorter than the other. I reflected on the way death draws a crowd. In a normal autumn, once the pool had closed, six months might pass without a single person stopping to look through gate or fences. Rubbish was blown in by the winter gales, remaining trapped there till the cleaners got busy in October, draining the pools of green-brown muck, filling them with clean water once again.
It seemed that the men, absorbed in their conversation, hadn’t heard me, yet I decided that I’d better go no further. One of the shapes looked familiar. I picked up a phrase, suddenly distinct. ‘No. Not that.’ The mist began to thicken, the two outlines again becoming one. The other voice said confidently, ‘Don’t lose your nerve now, little brother.’
. . .
Next morning, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t hurt by his failure to contact me, I decided that my proximity to the pool justified paying Brook a visit.
After going through the usual procedure before I could be admitted as a visitor to the Winchester Building, I found Brook behind his desk, which was covered with papers, some in folders, some in loose piles.
Brook hugged me, and I kissed him on the cheek.
Brook had lost his hair as a consequence of the months of chemotherapy that had forced his leukemia into an extended remission. His hair had grown back for a while, and now he was going bald naturally. Ivan used to tease him, it being an unspoken truth between the three of us that Brook was proud of his increasingly meagre tonsure.
He drew back now and looked me up and down. I felt uneasy, knowing how the last weeks had aged me. Brook hated personal neglect. Part of his response to illness had found expression in a kind of desperate question: how dare you when I look after myself well?
Brook didn’t comment on my appearance, though I was sure he’d taken in each detail. Instead, he asked how Ivan was.
‘Not good,’ I said.
Brook hadn’t asked me to sit down, but I did so anyway. He patted one of the papers on his desk, and I recognised it, upside down, as a copy of Ivan’s statement, recorded the morning after Laila’s death. Brook moved the page, covering it with a folder. It struck me as strange and disorienting that here was the testimony of the man I lived with, and I could not say what it contained.
Brook looked up and met my eyes unflinchingly, though not unkindly. My stomach knotted when he asked me to tell him about Ivan’s relationship with Laila.
I took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t think they were sleeping together.’
Brook nodded in his dry, familiar way. He could see the struggle going on inside me, but I understood that he wasn’t going to refer to it directly, or tread lightly for my sake. I’d turned up in his office, and he would make the most of it.
There had always been this hard persistence in Brook; I didn’t know if it was part of his policeman’s armour, or if he’d always had it. Brook was hard on himself, and expected me to understand the consequences of that.
‘I thought DS Brideson would be given this new murder,’ I said.
‘So did he.’
I tried for a smile. ‘You’ve been locking horns?’
Brook smiled back, then lowered his head and gave a half-hearted bellow.
‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
We laughed, and I felt the knot of tension in my gut dissolving.
‘The Super’s a fair-minded bloke,’ Brook said mildly, ‘and he doesn’t walk around with his eyes closed either. He knows Brideson’s after his job. Brideson’s not a bad detective, but he’s inclined to let ambition cloud his judgment. His main fault is his belief that he’s way smarter than the average copper.’
Brook had never criticised any of his colleagues to me, not in all the years we’d known each other. He must have seen the surprise in my face.
‘I don’t want to be Super. God forbid,’ he said, his voice still mildly conversational. ‘And for the record, just in case you haven’t taken it to heart, Brideson hates private operators.’
‘Operators, that’s a good word,’ I said.
‘If there’s anything he can do to trip you up, he will.’
I told Brook I’d gathered that much, but thanked him for the warning.
Brook patted Ivan’s statement, now conveniently out of sight. ‘Fill me in a bit on all of this, Sandra.’
I took a deep breath, and led Brook back to what I thought of as the beginning. Once or twice he looked at me sharply, but he didn’t interrupt. It felt like old times; in spite of what we were discussing, it felt good.
‘It’s pure chance I found Owen Thomas,’ I said. ‘That cafe is his hobby. He remembers faces, pretty young ones in particular.’
I told Brook that Tim Delaney believed Laila was having an affair with a married man.
‘To turn attention away from himself?’
‘That did cross my mind.’
‘Delaney was in love with her as well?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
Brook pressed his lips together. I wanted to forget all this and ask him about Thailand, ask if he was still in love with Sophie, when they were getting married.
Instead I raised another question. ‘I was wondering if Ben Sanderson and Laila knew each other.’
Brook raised his eyebrows a fraction, then blinked without replying.
I recalled his ability to retre
at into silence and stay there, how I’d never been a match for this, how I always broke it first. I did so now, repeating what I’d learnt from Bronwyn, and what puzzled me about her, how I suspected that it may have been Bronwyn who’d picked Laila up outside the internet cafe.
Brook listened. He had the ability to remember conversations word for word. His teeth appeared whiter than usual in his evenly tanned face. He looked healthy and rejuvenated. I wondered why he’d come back to work at all.
I nodded at the folders and asked, ‘Does one of them have a description of what Laila was wearing?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Bronwyn told me Laila was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt when she came to pick the car up. But the body—in the press reports she’s described as wearing a red waistcoat. That’s what alerted Tim and Ivan.’
Brook waited; he could always tell when I was keeping something back.
Now was the time to tell him about Don Fletcher and the sketch and diagram, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why, except that I knew Brook would be angry to learn that Don was paying me. I wondered how long it would take for him to find out from another source.
‘What about Laila’s phone?’ I asked.
‘In the lake, I imagine,’ Brook said, ‘keeping company with the murder weapon.’
‘The same one that killed Ben Sanderson?’
Brook laughed again.
‘Well, you can’t blame me for trying,’ I said.
The line between talking to Brook as a friend and talking to him as a policeman often shifted, and Brook’s expression, amused and lenient, but also wary, acknowledged the shift now. We were both adept at riding either side of lines that might have been invisible to other people, though that morning I was conscious of fatigue dragging at my concentration, an undertow composed of anxiety and a profound feeling of betrayal.
Brook’s phone rang. He held up his hand to let me know that the call might take a while.
. . .
I drove to the Causeway, spotting the police cars from a distance, and parked on Newcastle Street, behind tape marking off an area roughly fifty metres square, observing there were two crime scenes, two chances for the police to uncover tiny but traceable links to the killer. If Sanderson had been murdered close to where he’d lived, why drive to Dickson and dump the body in the water? I wondered what DS Brideson was doing and thinking at that moment. Brook had sounded pleased that Brideson had been passed over, if that had been the Superintendent’s intention. Again, I felt surprised at Brook’s decision to jump back into work.
The two murders seemed to me to have quite a bit in common, and it would have made sense to put one officer in charge of both. I wondered if Brideson had gone out of his way to make trouble for Brook, and this tactic had backfired. The Brook I knew did not waste time on power games, or attempting to climb up the hierarchy. His battle against leukemia had put paid to that. But people changed. Look at Ivan, I said to myself. I would never have imagined Ivan falling in love with a twenty-one-year old, then going to pieces in the way he had.
Brook was stubborn and resourceful. But his remark that morning suggested a side of him that was new to me, an antipathy towards a colleague and determination to get the better of him.
Before I got anywhere near the cars, a constable in uniform pulled me up. A crime scene in a public, open space like this was bound to be a headache. As was Dickson Pool, for that matter. I retraced my steps to Blueberry Street. Autumn sun shone down on old red brick. There was a fullness to the sun that morning, a sense of promise more commonly associated with the spring. Recently built units were compact enough to fit on the tiny rectangular blocks that had once held workmen’s cottages. They were neat, with miniature clipped lawns, many of them greener than in my suburb. One held a raw, empty bird bath. The community hall had seen better days.
Vans and cameras left no doubt as to which unit Sanderson had rented. An old man was being interviewed on the footpath right outside. I stopped to listen, and heard him referred to as Ben Sanderson’s next door neighbour. But the interview was winding up, and there was little else to hear.
The reporter held her hand out, and the neighbour, leaning heavily on his walking frame, reached across and shook it. Long white hair stuck out around his head, making a bedraggled halo.
I waited at the end of his driveway. Once the TV crew had moved away, I approached and offered him a smile.
‘Well done.’
The old man smiled back, enjoying the praise. His opinions had been sought. He’d been busy supplying information.
‘Were you a friend of Ben’s?’ I asked. ‘I’m a cousin from Port Campbell. I’m afraid that none of it’s sunk in. I thought that maybe, coming here—’
The old man eyed me steadily, balanced on his walking frame, and said, ‘I can’t believe it either.’
‘Can I help at all?’ I indicated the frame, the distance to his front door.
‘I’m perfectly independent, thank you.’
‘Did you know my cousin well?’
‘He was a nice young chap. Always friendly. Took the time to stop for a chat.’
I said I was surprised when I heard that Ben had moved to Canberra.
‘Well, I’ll tell you something, Miss. My name’s Ian, by the way. Young Ben didn’t like our fair city. Too clean and prissy for him. This place, the Causeway, reminded him a bit of a coast town, he said. And it’s right by the water. That was important to him.’
I introduced myself as Sandra. Ian began walking slowly up the path, then turned to look at me along his shoulder. His eyes were bright, face still flushed with the excitement of the interview. ‘Come inside,’ he said, ‘if you’ve got five minutes. I’ll make us a cuppa.’
I followed Ian into his small kitchen, but I could see that he wanted to do everything himself, so confined my help to carrying two mugs and a plate of biscuits to a table pushed right against the window.
With a little prompting, Ian was happy to talk to me about Ben’s job and what had brought him to the national capital. Ben always went out for a run after work and the night before last Ian had watched him leave.
‘I had a bad feeling. I was trying to explain it to that young journalist. I was used to Ben’s routine, you see.’
Ian described how Ben ran the same route every weeknight; down Blueberry Street to Sandalwood, up Spinifex to Cunningham, along the Causeway to Newcastle, then back up Blueberry. He started at seven and was back within three-quarters of an hour.
I recalled that daylight saving had ended on the weekend. Unless Ben had changed his time, he would have been running in the dark.
I mentioned this to Ian and he nodded, looking sad and guilty, his enthusiasm gone. He’d had a bit of tea in front of the telly, he told me, hadn’t seen or heard Ben coming home. He’d had a bad feeling, but he hadn’t acted on it.
‘If I’d known he hadn’t come back, you see, I could have phoned the police.’
I murmured something that I hoped would offer Ian some small comfort. We drank our tea in silence for a few moments, then I steered the conversation back to Ben’s diving. Ian was as proud of this as though Ben had been his grandson.
Ben had dived all over the place. He took groups to the south coast on a regular basis. ‘He worked for them big oil companies as well, down in Bass Strait. What’s it called, the Gippsland basin? Where all the oil rigs are.’
Ian described the dangers of working on the rigs, the storms that could blow up with very little warning, how problems had to be dealt with immediately because any time a rig was off-line, that was millions of dollars down the plughole, literally. ‘Per hour, mind you, not per day.’
But Ben had given up that kind of work. He hadn’t worked for an oil company for the past few years.
I knew I should go before Ian began probing my connection with Ben’s family, but chanced one last question. ‘Did Ben ever mention a rig called the Babel?’
Ian frowned and said he couldn’t recall
that one directly. I thanked him for the tea and we said goodbye.
. . .
I left my car parked where it was, and walked to the nature reserve along the route Ben’s neighbour had described. Joggers and cyclists were making the most of the fine morning, well-dressed, fit young men and women for the most part. Focussed on their heart rates, all of them ignored me. The bush smelt fresh, despite the lack of rain.
I estimated that, if what Ian had told me was true, Ben would have reached the Newcastle street dead end, where the nature reserve started, at about seven-thirty. He would have had to slow down to make the turn back to Blueberry. I looked up and noticed that one of the street lights was broken. A car could have parked between the trees and the killer waited there without being seen.
A well-marked path to the right led to bird hides and wetland ponds, joining other paths that wended their way through stands of eucalypts a good thirty to forty metres above the water. The land between was boggy, covered with tall reeds. I wondered about disposal of the weapon. Would a man who’d just committed murder make his way through the reserve in the dark, in order to throw it in the creek? Would he risk using a torch? I returned to a fork, and took the left path this time. It was much narrower, no more than a winding line of flattened brown grass. A rabbit hopped ahead of me and veered underneath a bush. A sign warned me that fox bait had been laid, and blackberries sprayed with poison.
I stood on a rise overlooking the creek. Reeds and thick bushes made closer access difficult. Difficult, but not impossible, I thought.
. . .
More details about Ben Sanderson were reported on the evening news, along with film showing police divers searching the lake. Ben had taught diving at Civic Pool as well as Dickson. He was qualified to a class three commercial certificate, one of the most highly qualified divers in Canberra. He’d done maintenance work for ExxonMobil in Bass Strait.
I recalled that ExxonMobil had recently put in a new bid for acreage close to the marine park. It took me a few minutes to find the reference. ExxonMobil owned over twenty rigs in the Gippsland Basin, including the Babel.
The Fourth Season Page 10