The Fourth Season

by Dorothy Johnston

  I googled ‘shipwrecks Mary’ and came up with the four hundred and sixty year old Mary Rose, pride of Henry VIII’s fleet. The story of her sinking in Portsmouth Harbour in 1545, and her eventual discovery made interesting reading. The ship was first found in 1836 when a fishing net got caught, and a diver by the name of John Deane recovered timbers, guns and longbows; but the location was forgotten after Deane stopped work. Then in the mid 1960s a Professor Edgerton found an acoustical anomaly using a device called a side-scan sonar. That anomaly eventually revealed the warship.

  I got out Laila’s diagram and sketch and pored over them again. Anomaly was a good word. To my mind it well described the mismatched layers Laila had sketched, under the top horizontal line which I took to be the seabed.

  . . .

  ‘I already told you,’ Tim said when I finally got him on the phone. ‘I never went diving with Laila. Never had the opportunity. Scuba diving was for rich kids, not inner-city rats like me.’

  I sighed, annoyed with Tim for always bringing the question back to himself, then asked why Laila had chosen to study in Canberra.

  ‘Good university, good courses. And it was only for three years. She grew up on the coast. On a wild bit of the coast, in Victoria. That’s what got her interested in conservation.’

  ‘I guess Laila made use of what diving opportunities she could. Like that weekend at Lake Jindabyne.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who took her up there? Who did she go with?’

  Tim made an exasperated noise in his throat and said, ‘The old prof could dream, couldn’t he?’

  When I questioned Tim about the accident, he told me Laila had come back from Jindabyne with a cold that had turned into bronchitis. That didn’t sound like an accident to me, but I let it go when I realised that Tim couldn’t explain any further.

  ‘Old Abenay should have taken better care of her,’ was his summing up.

  Then Tim said it had occurred to him that Laila wanted to meet someone at Lake Jindabyne—that’s why she let her old besotted ­lecturer take her up there.

  ‘Meet her lover, you mean?’

  ‘Maybe it suited him,’ Tim said. ‘Maybe he rented a unit up there, or they met at a motel. It’s far enough away from Canberra for him not to be recognised. Look, I’m only guessing. But if he suggested it, then she needed someone to take her, or borrow a car. Laila didn’t like driving. She hardly ever drove.’

  But she’d borrowed Bronwyn’s car the night she was killed. Another anomaly. I wondered if Tim was thinking the same thing. I also ­wondered if the ‘he’ referred to Brian Fitzpatrick.

  Laila had been nervous before she left for that trip to the lake and happy as a lark afterwards, Tim said, even though she’d become quite ill.

  ‘I bought painkillers and Strepsils and made her a hot drink.’ Tim’s voice softened as he recalled these details, how, for once, Laila had needed him and welcomed his attentions. ‘She slept on and off all day. The next morning she was worse and I persuaded her to ring the doctor.’

  After I’d let Tim reminisce about his nursing care for a couple more minutes, I asked if Laila had ever mentioned a TV program about the Mary Rose.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A program Laila watched with Phoebe, one night after the two of you had had an argument.’

  ‘What bloody right has Phoebe got to—’

  ‘Phoebe didn’t tell tales or complain. I’m just interested in knowing if Laila talked to you about the program. According to Phoebe, Laila got quite excited about it.’

  ‘That’d be right,’ Tim said savagely.

  ‘What would be?’

  ‘Phoebe would know what pressed her buttons and I wouldn’t.’ There was a noise in the background, and he said, ‘I have to go.’

  . . .

  I made some more notes. Tim had sounded genuinely ignorant of Laila’s interest in the Mary Rose. Why hadn’t Laila been blessed with a housemate who took notice of details, and asked pertinent questions? But perhaps it was pedantic of me to ask myself this. An observant housemate couldn’t help her now. If Tim’s suspicions had firmed up regarding Senator Fitzpatrick as the most likely candidate for Laila’s secret lover, then he might have made up his mind and passed these suspicions on to the police. If Brook wasn’t furious with me, I thought, I could call in and give him an update. It would be like old times.

  I walked over to the pool, recalling DC Erickson’s warning to stay away if I knew what was good for me. Clearly, I did not.

  I stood still, staring through the fence. There didn’t seem to be anyone about. Superimposed on that flat brownish water I saw the comma shape of Laila’s body, the slight, abbreviated curve of it, form of a question mark without the dot, the red waistcoat that in daylight would have shouted, ‘Look at me!’

  A strong woman could have killed Ben Sanderson, with the advantage of surprise. Odd how I had no trouble picturing Laila’s body in that murky water, while Ben Sanderson’s eluded me.

  Suddenly, the question of timing seemed crucial, and one I’d never properly considered up till then. Two corpses in dark water, one found at nine PM, the other not until the morning after it had been dumped in the pool. Did this mean that the second time the strategy had worked, giving the killer time for whatever task needed to be completed before the body was discovered? But why go to the trouble of murder? Why not steal instead, if it was documents the killer was after? Because despatching these two had given their murderer pleasure. Whoever had wielded that weapon, or weapons, had enjoyed it, enjoyed robbing two young people of their pride and beauty, and would enjoy killing again.

  . . .

  Brook rang as I was walking home. I realised I’d been waiting for his call.

  What did I think I was doing? Wasn’t it enough that Ivan was a suspect? Did I have to go and take money from another one?

  I wanted to shout at Brook, belabour him with a different question. Where else was money going to come from? Was it going to fall out of the trees?

  Brook lectured me, while I looked around for somewhere to sit down, my knees suddenly feeling watery and weak.

  He stated the obvious, which was that I was far too close to the case as it was, and that it could well be in Don Fletcher’s interests to immerse me in it further. He called my behaviour irresponsible and stupid.

  I felt dirty after Brook had hung up on me; scared and dirty and bedraggled.

  A black-fingered wind, that had been gathering strength since the night of Laila’s death, drew closer; I felt its fingers on the back of my neck. I knew that, if it was within Brook’s power to take my children from me and put them somewhere safe, he would. He would go to those lengths and say it was his duty. I tried to hate him then, just for a moment, but I couldn’t.

  Asking questions was the fence I built against panic and despair. But how could Don have known this? How could he have known that his proposal would be attractive to me, while a person with a tad more common-sense would have said no right away?

  Don had that sketch and diagram, which meant that he knew more than I did, because he knew how to interpret them, while I could only guess. Don was keeping tabs on me and, I was suddenly certain, following instructions as well.

  I imagined a malicious little man watching me through a telescopic lens. But Don’s height and build were average, as were his brother, Cameron’s. Should I have recognised Don outside the internet cafe, even though I’d only caught a glimpse? What about the man flashing my photograph around the Tradies, ringing Sam Borich to inquire about me—why would Don do that? Were the questions, the appearances, meant to unsettle and unnerve me? What would be his next move?

  Brook was seriously angry, and I was cut off from the kind of help his friendship had offered in the past. Perhaps the fact that Ivan was a murder suspect would have had this result anyway. I tried to think of times when Ivan had been violent. There weren’t any. There were no more than the ordinary arguments couples have, and I couldn’t make the leap from those
to bashing a young woman over the head. Besides which, it hadn’t been just any woman, but one he was in love with. There, I’d said the words. In love with. They didn’t seem to have much meaning just then. Did all wives of murderers all think along those lines? Not my husband! Wives of murderers. I smiled to myself, and in that seemingly involuntary movement of my lips I found a kind of comfort.

  When I thought back over my life, I realised that most of what I’d done had been as a reaction to fear. It was time to turn around. I realised that, even if I could pin Don Fletcher’s motives down with reasonable certainty, it wouldn’t stop me now. I wouldn’t write to Don, attaching a final invoice, or ring him up and tell him that was it.

  The spot I’d found to sit until my legs began behaving normally again was an uncomfortable, low brick wall. But I went on sitting there, enjoying the feel of the sun on my back. I thought that I could buy something nice to eat, and that, with any luck, when I got home Ivan would be out somewhere.

  What did that hope say about the state we’d reached, and was there anything that I could do to save my marriage?

  I thought about love then, not as an entity, a kind of ball that a person could catch, or fumble—I realised that this was the way I’d been thinking about love in relation to Laila Fanshaw and the men who’d danced around her—but as an absence that people tried to fill.

  I made myself more comfortable, then dialled Bill Abenay’s number.

  Seventeen

  The sense that there was something restful about Bill Abenay’s house returned as he led the way into his living room. Bill had shown no surprise, either at my phone call, or my request to ask him a few more questions.

  I put the feeling of restfulness down, in part, to the absence of children. Like many mothers, I approached childless houses with a mixture of envy and condescension. Here was a man who’d reached the age of fifty without the cares that were a part of all my days. Partly, also, it was the house itself—small, but a proper house, free-standing, with a garden right around it, a garden that blossomed in the middle of the drought.

  The inside was cared for too. Despite his appearance of a slow-moving marsupial, Abenay struck me as a man who paid attention to details, who did not leave anything to chance.

  His eyes were red; he wasn’t at all embarrassed to let me see that he’d been crying.

  He wasn’t surprised, either, when I began my questions with the trip to Lake Jindabyne, and the certainty came to me that Bill Abenay had moved beyond ordinary surprise. Grief needs to be spoken sometimes, needs, however inadequate the listener, to be shared. And I guessed that this private, careful man had nobody to talk to about Laila, nobody to relive memories, even argue with—in this he was more alone than Tim or Ivan, or Don Fletcher.

  ‘Did you know that there’s an intact homestead down there, beautifully preserved?’ he said, in a voice that was low-pitched, with an undertone of sadness that you had to listen for. ‘The water’s sometimes muddy, but that day we were lucky. Visibility was good.’

  ‘You’d been diving at the lake before.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have taken Laila if I hadn’t been fairly confident of finding what I was looking for.’ The name had never sounded so caressing, I thought, or so sad. Not even her father had given it the intonation this man did, who was her father’s age.

  ‘You might as well sit down.’

  Abenay asked what I would like to drink. I understood that it was important for him to show me basic hospitality, and that he’d show it to the police as well. It was important to fulfil the courtesies of being a host, to maintain a polite exterior.

  ‘The homestead—’ he began again, after returning from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee—‘there are lots of buildings underwater, but most are falling, or have fallen down. Old truck bodies—you name it, really—even some stone steps that once led to the Catholic church, though the church has gone completely. Perhaps you saw that piece about it in the paper? For some reason, the Kalkite homestead has remained intact. Of course it’s covered in silt. Apart from that it might have been flooded last year, not forty years ago.’

  Abenay explained that the trip had been Laila’s idea. ‘She’d always wanted to see a drowned village. I told her not to get her hopes up. But like I said, visibility was good. She said we should hurry up and do the dive before the water all evaporated.’

  He smiled at the recollection. I said I’d heard that Laila’s interest in diving had begun when she was a child.

  ‘Her father took her on a wreck dive off the Victorian coast when she was—I don’t know, maybe twelve, thirteen? She called it the experience that changed her life.’

  ‘Was Laila a skilled diver?’

  ‘It’s funny you should ask that. To tell you the truth, she had a higher opinion of her abilities than I think was warranted. She’d done her training of course, and she’d been on some challenging dives, but not all that many. And then she lived in Canberra.’

  ‘What about the south coast?’

  ‘She’d been diving down there a few times.’

  ‘Who was her instructor?’

  ‘I don’t know names. What Laila told me about herself, she told me because she wanted to. I never pried.’

  Abenay’s voice stayed the same, mild and uninflected. The possibility that he was a good liar crossed my mind, unlike Brownyn, whose spiky hair and large, freckled hands rose up momentarily in front of my eyes. I wondered if these two grieving people, who’d loved Laila in different, perhaps less selfish ways than Ivan and Tim had, had met one another, and what they thought of one another if they had.

  ‘What about the homestead at Lake Jindabyne?’ I asked. ‘Did you go inside?’

  ‘You’re not meant to.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘Laila insisted on it. She swam through the rooms.’

  Abenay’s voice changed, taking on a note of exasperated pride. ‘She picked over bottles and broken crockery, disturbed the mud and silt. Of course, I was right beside her. The structure looks stable, but it can’t be, not after all this time.’

  ‘Was Laila looking for something in particular?’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s just a farm house. It certainly looks ghostly and mysterious underwater, but there’s really no mystery about it.’

  Abenay described the weekend. The cottage he’d rented was ‘right by the lake’. He’d hired a boat from the caravan park. When he got up to take our mugs out to the kitchen, I followed him so as not to break the story. Some of what he told me was astonishing, but he remained quietly unastonished, lost in his reverie, almost in a kind of trance.

  . . .

  Pam rang that evening as I was heading off for my shift at the cafe. Owen was taking longer to recover than he and Rita had hoped, and I’d told Rita that I’d keep it up for a couple more weeks at least.

  Another waitress had seen Laila at the club. I thanked Pam for letting me know. By seven I was sitting behind my counter, facing an almost empty room. Rowan hadn’t been back since the time I’d ­followed him as far as Dickson Pool, and I didn’t think he would be.

  I switched on my computer and googled ‘Mary Rose’. This time I didn’t stop with the pride of Henry VIII’s fleet, though the first twenty or so entries were about it.

  A less famous ship of the same name had vanished in Bass Strait in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1857 a Spanish pirate ship, the Maria Rosa, had crossed the Pacific after its crew had stolen gold and statues from cathedrals in Lima. It had been making for Melbourne when a storm blew up. The precise location where the ship had gone down was unknown, but contemporary letters and police records referred to a last sighting off the group of islands known as ‘Kent’.

  I looked up as the door opened. It was Rowan.

  My face must have shown as much surprise as his. No doubt he thought I’d be long gone, and that gentle, non-interfering Owen would be back.

  Rowan had his own ideas. He chose what I thought of as Laila’s monitor, and w
alked towards it confidently.

  He kept glancing up at me, with something teasing in his manner. I remembered our last meeting, how he couldn’t wait to get away. I expected him to be accessing porn sites, but he wasn’t. I guessed that was the reason for the teasing looks. After half an hour Rowan got up, handed me three dollars with another provocative glance, and left.

  . . .

  DC Erickson paid a visit in my absence that evening, questioning Peter and Katya, and making Katya cry.

  My daughter was sitting bolt upright in bed. Her tears had stopped, but her face was pale and scared.

  ‘Where were you Mummy? I don’t like that man.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kat.’ I sat down and put my arms around her. ‘I was at the cafe. I’m working there, remember?’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’

  ‘It’s not for much longer. It’s to help a man who’s sick.’

  Kat let herself relax then, nestling against my shoulder. ‘When will he be better?’

  I said that he’d be better soon, hoping that it was the truth.

  ‘Mummy, that man wanted to know where you’d gone while I was asleep. I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I do sometimes have to go out at night.’

  ‘Peter didn’t know either.’

  ‘If you don’t know the answer to a question, it’s perfectly all right to say so.’

  Katya nodded solemnly, still with her head against my shoulder. ‘Dad said the man shouldn’t upset me. He made him go away.’

  ‘Good for Dad. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Is he coming back?’

  I wanted to say no, but couldn’t. For once I was glad, very glad, that Ivan had been home.

  ‘I think you should go to sleep now. Roll over and I’ll rub your back.’

  Gradually, Kat’s breathing steadied and her eyes closed.

  I thanked Ivan and, that night in bed, we held each other close.

  . . .