The Fourth Season

by Dorothy Johnston

  The phone rang and I picked it up, thinking that it must be Brook. It was Don Fletcher, and he’d rung to warn me. Cameron was going to get me or my daughter. He’d sworn to.

  Don hung up before I could ask him any questions. I was shaking all over. I went and lay down on the floor beside Katya’s bed.

  Thirty-one

  Katya was taken in the middle of a soccer match. One minute, my daughter was defending into the wind; the next, she was gone. No one heard her cry out. No one saw what happened. The ball moved quickly to the other end, while Kat disappeared.

  The weather was bad that day, squally showers and a wind straight off the mountains. Spectators were few. Those die-hard parents, who turned out to watch their children play no matter what the weather, were grouped underneath umbrellas at the club house end. I’d been watching Katya when her coach called me from the doorway. I turned aside to speak to him; when I turned back, she was gone.

  Two spectators had been standing close to the side line. From underneath a large black golf umbrella, I’d caught a glimpse of blonde hair tied back with a blue scarf. Tall woman, I’d thought, and wondered whether her daughter, somewhere on the field, was tall as well.

  Their unfamiliarity should have alerted me. And Kat? Had I imagined her a giant child, too big to be secreted underneath a bat-wing coat, an umbrella that could have done duty as a tent? Why hadn’t Katya screamed? How long does it take to strangle a small girl with a bright blue scarf?

  Play was stopped immediately. Brook and his detective constables questioned all the teams. There’d been no red Hyundai in the carpark. Cameron’s Landcruiser was at the forensics lab. Peter had been playing on an oval far away from Kat’s. When he heard what had happened, he ran, first of all to the carpark, then from team to team. His hands shook and he begged. We knew Kat wouldn’t leave of her own accord. It was out of the question. Yet many of the young players didn’t know this, were confused, asked questions, made suggestions, that were all beside the point.

  I kept on seeing the black coat, the couple underneath the golf umbrella, as though bringing them back into my mind could change who they were and what they’d done. The idea that some kind of politeness, some brake of manners, had stopped me from approaching them, going up to get a closer look, made me feel sick.

  But had it been like that? Had I been at all suspicious? I couldn’t remember. I heard myself asking questions, framing words, felt my breath going in and out, and saw myself from a great, mocking distance, not knowing whether my daughter was alive or dead.

  Inside, I was screaming, yet I moved as through a thick and viscous liquid. I got into my car and drove. Civic had never looked so pitiless and stark. The flagmast and top curves of the Parliament ought to have been softened by the rain, yet stood out baldly, raw and ­unassuaged. Their classic, familiar and yet foreign bends and angles, their way of refusing to nestle in against the hill, made them seem like buildings from another planet, expressive of nothing more substantial than a coloniser’s vanity. It would have been funny if I’d felt like laughing. Smoke was rising from the front of the Aboriginal tent embassy. I doubted the people keeping vigil there felt like laughing either.

  My hands were shaking too much to hold the steering wheel, so I pulled over to the side of the road. A shout of laughter made me lift my head. The spot where I’d stopped offered a long downward view towards the lake, and in the distance, just within my vision, the stretch of shingle where Laila’s body had been dragged ashore. I wound down the window and sat staring at the water, fancying that I could see it feeling its way back now the rain had come, the grinning gums that would, by nightfall, have been covered up.

  Willows crouched. I recalled others, by the lake at Jindabyne, their long hair brushing dust and catching in the cracked, baked earth, which parted to reveal the bones of beasts who’d died of thirst.

  Willows had a pinkish gloss when bare; their new growth was the palest green.

  I roused myself and drank from a bottle that had been rolling around on the back seat. The water tasted of plastic; it was tepid and refreshing. A small girl with sun-filled hair was running down the slope and laughing. She ran swiftly, as children do who have knowingly escaped the adults watching over them. Her sturdy legs were purposeful. She heard the water calling.

  A man ran out from between the trees. The chase was clearly not a game to him. He ran straight, while the small girl hopped and zigzagged, suddenly unsure. The man scooped her up, and now he was laughing and tossing the light, negligible weight across his shoulder, and the small girl was yelling with excitement and relief.

  . . .

  There was an item on the evening news about a white Honda that had skidded into the Yarra River near Alexandrina Drive in Melbourne. A woman walking her dogs had rung and reported it, but there were other witnesses as well. The driver was presumed to have lost control down an embankment.

  A woman walking dogs. An accident in water that was no accident at all.

  I walked all the rest of that night, through and around my suburb, long after walking became no more than a mechanical placing of one foot in front of the other, long after my eyes stopped taking in the buildings and the streets. The idea of going home without my daughter caused the last meal I had eaten to rise as green bile in my throat. I stared through the fence at Dickson Pool. The black plastic had at last been removed and this seemed stupid somehow, a stupid kind of joke.

  The sky was beginning to turn grey when Brook phoned. The white Honda belonged to Clare Fletcher, and it was empty. Brook was in Melbourne. The search for bodies was about to begin. His voice was very clear, as though he was standing in the room; clear and matter-of-fact, his training taking over.

  I found Peter in Kat’s room, underneath her doona, at the bottom of her bed. I’d been thinking of Peter almost as an adult, a sixteen-year-old with one foot only remaining in childhood, the rest of him leaping out and away.

  I said his name softly and the doona stirred. I bent down and took the bundle in my arms, the whole unwieldy inner hardness of it, hearing first a gulp and then a sob.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘None of it is your fault.’

  I hugged Peter and he didn’t push my arms away. In those moments, he was a child again, with a child’s clear sense of justice and shock at what the adult world was allowed to get away with.

  Brook rang again to say that the Lightning had left Geelong the night before with both brothers on board and that he was going after them. No bodies had been found in the Yarra so far. I tried to draw strength from this, telling myself that Cameron intended using Katya as a hostage, therefore he would keep her alive.

  How had Katya been smuggled onto the Lightning? In a blanket? In a bag? There were TV crews at the yacht club, a Channel 7 helicopter circling the Rip.

  I wondered what Brook had said to Sophie. Sophie had great self-control, and I realised how much Brook respected this quality and relied on it. In those early morning hours, I learnt something about sucking up to fate, imagining the worst in order to stave it off, and how this didn’t work. Waiting taught me lessons that I hated learning.

  Ivan made tea in two saucepans and we drank it sitting at the kitchen table. Peter phoned Derek, who came to pick him up. Whatever Ivan and I had tried to make—of a family, a business venture—seemed irreparably broken. I felt as though I had used up two husbands, had two failed marriages to show for my time on earth.

  Brook phoned from a police launch, and told me to keep my courage up. The Coastwatch plane, the Dash 8 that had reported the Sea Wizard’s troubles with the storm, had found the Lightning, which was heading, not for one of the islands close to shore, but the open sea. There was still no confirmation that Katya was on board. Cameron, in his radio conversations with Coastwatch and the police, energetically denied it. He’d taken his yacht out with his brother. There was no law against it. As for having a child on board, well that was nonsense. Had anybody seen them taking one?

  The weather w
as getting worse, a front coming in from the south-west. Cameron would drown them all—himself, his brother and my daughter—rather than give himself up. He would use Katya as his last card. The police and Coastwatch boats could catch him, but he would see them coming.

  Ivan lined up dead matches on the edge of the stove. He hardly spoke, and seemed almost to have lost the power of speech. It felt as though the slightest human whisper might tip the balance the wrong way. I wanted to be left alone, to find what comfort I could in familiar objects. Dead matches mocked me from a corner of the room.

  It was two hours before Brook contacted us again, and those two hours were the worst that I had ever spent. Yet it seemed that, beyond dread, there were still questions to be asked. Cameron was refusing to admit that my daughter was on board. They had a trained negotiator talking to him. I sat beside the phone, picturing everything from a shooting to a drowning, plaguing myself with the certainty that the next call would be one that left no hope. The pictures kept coming, as though I was photographing them from a helicopter.

  Ivan’s eyes were flat, expressionless in the autumn light. Horror entered through the windy gaps in reason. I wanted my vigil to be solitary. If I’d thought of candles, then I might have lit them; but it was too late for candles.

  I noticed how thin Ivan had become, how his face underneath his beard was concave, how, in another life it seemed, I’d loved to touch his springy hair and feel its gentle pressure in return.

  . . .

  It was Don Fletcher who acted in the end, Don who decided that his life was worth more than his brother’s freedom and finally said, ‘Enough.’ Cameron might have overpowered Don, thrown him overboard, and Katya too; but it didn’t happen this way. Instead, Don hit Cameron from behind and radioed the news.

  Relief, wonderful relief, came in the form of a quick phone call. ‘It’s over, Sandra. It’s all right.’

  A few hours later, Brook, neat-haired and neatly dressed, faced a press conference with news of Cameron’s and Don’s arrest.

  Derek brought Peter home. I hugged him and we cried with joy. The three of us—Ivan, Peter and myself—flew down to Melbourne to bring Katya home.

  Katya had been drugged and unconscious for most of the time. Neither then, nor in the days or weeks to come, did she talk much about her capture.

  She recalled a hand over her mouth, then something soft and dark covering her completely. She remembered being lifted off the ground and trying to call out, and then nothing apart from disassociated moments—waking on the boat and being sick and trying to get up—a man pushing her down, locking her in a cabin, being forced to drink something they told her was chocolate milk. ‘It tasted yuck!’

  I was pleased when, back in Canberra, Brook invited me to his office to talk.

  Katya had returned to school, but would not go near the soccer fields. She’d announced that she wanted her brother, not either of her parents, to meet her at the school gates, and to walk her home.

  Boxes on his desk, bare walls, announced what Brook could only echo. ‘Yes, I’m going, Sandra. Finally.’

  So it had been his swan-song then, that rush into Bass Strait.

  ‘Going to live,’ I said, because the distinction felt important.

  Brook nodded, with the quick understanding that made my chest contract.

  ‘It’s a good thing you didn’t drown then. It’s a good thing Cameron didn’t shoot you.’

  Brook laughed. ‘Murder on the high seas,’ I said.

  We laughed because what might have been was not.

  ‘Rather that than drowning in a puddle,’ Brook said.

  ‘You don’t have to remind me. Are you and Sophie going to get married?’

  ‘I’ve asked her and I—I think she’ll say yes.’

  I congratulated him. We could have gone on speaking of survival, but we didn’t need to. Brook said he’d be around to see Kat and Peter soon.

  He’d proved himself one last time, beaten the traitor in his bloodstream; or, if not beaten, then at least faced death square on, head into the wind. Whatever had happened out there in the strait, in the teeth of the southerly, in pursuit of a vain, cruel man and the brother who was tied to him, had unlocked a last knot in this man, even as two brothers fought and one betrayed the other.

  Brook had been sleek in front of the news cameras, generously deflecting praise. His swan song might not have been tuneful, but it had been dangerous enough.

  . . .

  Any summing up must be imperfect, over-general, so that a person might wonder, afterwards, why summing up had seemed important at the time. The tying of loose ends is an artifice that begs the question whether it is in the nature of some ends to remain forever loose. What had happened to put Ben Sanderson off working on the oil rigs was one such loose end, Laila Fanshaw’s reason for making an appointment to see Senator Fitzpatrick on the evening of her death another.

  ‘We may never know,’ Brook said.

  After thinking some more about it, I concluded that the meeting between Laila and the senator may have had nothing to do with the Maria Rosa, or with Cameron Fletcher, but that Cameron, if he’d got to hear about it, would have believed that it did. Perhaps more would come out about that during Cameron’s trial.

  Don Fletcher and Bernhard Robben spoke volumes in exchange for lighter charges. Cameron had been charged with both murders, but Brook reported him as confident; he’d hired one of the best criminal barristers in the country.

  I pictured the scene Brook remained reluctant to describe—boarding the Lightning, Don standing over Cameron, opening the hatchway to the cabin, hoping and not daring to hope that Katya would still be alive. The small, cramped space smelt of vomit. Kat was dirty, scratched and bruised, yet breathing. Brook lifted her into his arms.

  I felt silly with relief all over again as I thanked him.

  ‘It was touch and go with the weather,’ he said.’ I thought at one point that we’d have to turn back.’

  Mindful of the fact that it was the last time we’d ever sit together, talking in his office, Brook filled in some of the gaps in the early part of the investigation, how DS Brideson’s badgering had increased, how he’d felt helpless in the face of it.

  ‘He’ll never forgive me for cutting him out at the end, but it doesn’t matter. None of that matters now.’

  Brook looked up and made a wry face.

  ‘Robben’s falling over his feet to give us information. Claims that Cameron held onto Sanderson’s share of the money as a way of bringing him to heel. According to Robben, Cameron got Laila to agree to meet him at the lake by saying that he’d consider taking her along next time. When they met, he offered her money. She refused, and I can imagine she didn’t refuse quietly. When she turned to go, he took out the weight belt and cracked her skull open. As for Sanderson, he couldn’t stomach the murder. Made all kinds of threats. It seems as though Cameron learnt about his jogging route from watching him. He picked his time and got rid of a second trouble-maker.’

  The weight belt came from?’

  ‘Cameron’s shop. Roger Stanton’s talking too now. Can’t be helpful enough. The drug run could have been abandoned, or postponed. Yachties are always passing through those islands. For all Cameron knew there were other yachts at West Cove for the same reason as the Lightning. He’d never have been told. But Cameron couldn’t bear to fail in his first attempt.’

  ‘Laila’s greatest weakness,’ I said reflectively, ‘was expecting Cameron to understand her passion for finding the Maria Rosa. She expected him to believe her promise that if he gave her a chance to do that, she’d turn a blind eye on whatever else happened to be going on.’

  ‘I’m not sure that your reasoning’s correct,’ Brook said. ‘I doubt if Laila would have made any kind of assurance, if she guessed about the drugs. Robben’s adamant she didn’t. It’s a moot point in any case, since Cameron decided he wouldn’t take the risk.’

  Don Fletcher was also bending over backwards in order to be co-
operative, and claiming that he’d saved Katya’s life and risked his own in order to overpower his brother.

  ‘Quite the hero,’ Brook said dryly. ‘But it hardly makes up for his silence up until that point.’

  I thought of the two shadows I’d glimpsed through the mist outside Dickson Pool, and of Cameron’s outline underneath a streetlight opposite the internet cafe, which now had a ‘for lease’ sign in the window.

  I did not like walking past it, being reminded of the end of Owen’s dream.

  Of course it had been Cameron’s idea for Don to hire me.

  ‘They wanted to keep track of you, Sandra.’

  ‘But the track pointed towards Cameron.’

  ‘It was you who called him a narcissist. Don’s brief was to find out what you knew. And by the way, the customs station at Eden doesn’t tape over their CCTV film. One of my constables finally found the Sea Wizard. And who should disembark and head off down the pier looking as pleased as punch? Cameron Fletcher. They’ve faxed through the form the Sea Wizard skipper filled in. Basic information, since they’d already been through customs. No reference to Cameron of course, or where they picked him up. But let them, or Cameron, try and deny the connection now.’

  ‘What if I hadn’t said a word to Don about Laila’s diagram or the Maria Rosa?’

  ‘Cameron read you for an honest person, who feels the need to justify her fee. And they thought to keep you busy. Cameron figured that, with Ivan as a suspect, you’d be asking questions anyway.’

  ‘And wanted me under suspicion too. Hence that report of my car driving around the pool. No one drives around the pool. You should have known that was nonsense.’