The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  No one spoke for a moment. When she surfaced and swam to the edge of the pool and jauntily hoisted herself up she was grinning. She dived again, a perfect swallow dive this time. After that, whenever I saw the Jantzen swimwear trademark of the diving woman in the bathing cap I thought of her.

  What astonished us was her apparent good health until that day, her sporting ability and agility – and, of course, her relatively young age. She’d turned forty-seven three weeks before.

  How instantly those attributes and impressions fell away. Fitness. Youth. The Jantzen diving girl. As soon as she lapsed into unconsciousness the resilience left my mother’s flesh. Her body was already transformed into something else. Her shoulder muscle didn’t give when I squeezed it. Her cheek was cool to my kiss. Her eyes weren’t quite shut. The open bits, grey and cloudy where they were supposed to be green, didn’t look like normal eye tissue.

  At the hospital I felt self-conscious talking to her. It was like acting. It was like saying loving farewell things to a picture or a statue of her. By now she wasn’t noticeably breathing. You would have had to hold a mirror to her lips to tell. She was lying on her side, her knees jack-knifed under her, and her hip beneath the hospital blanket felt like wood.

  Cerebral haemorrhage, Dr Synott said. ‘We can’t do anything.’ Her brain was swimming in blood, boiling in blood, and he stood there. Dr Fortune had also been called. He stood there, too.

  I willed them to do something brisk and efficient, to undertake revolutionary brain surgery, to connect her to some lifesaving machine, but I didn’t say anything to them. I felt as helpless as they looked. The two doctors, my father and I stood around her bed in the Bethesda Hospital on a sunny autumn afternoon with Freshwater Bay gleaming below the window. Yachts bobbed and rattled at their moorings at the Claremont Yacht Club. Their stays tinkled merrily against their masts. It was a fabulous view.

  After a while the doctors faded from the room. In my mother’s unconscious presence my father and I suddenly embraced for a moment. Tears exploded as he cried out, ‘What will I tell Jan?’ Then we drew apart again and stood around and waited for her to die. It was hard to tell when. The moment after seemed exactly the same as the moment before.

  For a while I was too numbed to be aware that life was in chaos. The orderly world seemed turned on its head. Nothing about her death or its aftermath was appropriate. Not my father putting off for a week telling Jan that her mother had died – by sending her to stay with friends. Certainly not the men-only funeral, that mid-morning gathering of my father’s business associates around my mother’s sandy grave.

  My brother and sister weren’t there, or any of my mother’s friends. I wondered whether this was a Presbyterian habit, or maybe a Baptist rule. Or just my father’s belief that funerals were men’s business, and businessmen’s business at that.

  There was no church service. As the Reverend Dowding led the brief Presbyterian service at the graveside I looked across the grave at the half-circle of men in business suits, forty or fifty of them, all standing superstitiously well back from the hole. Their smug, recently shaved faces stared back. To them Karrakatta Cemetery was just another ten a.m. business appointment. Some of the faces showed a mild curiosity and a willingness to be entertained by the possibility of untoward emotional reaction from the only family members present: my father, my mother’s brother Ian and me.

  My father kept his composure. I wept as the first clod of dirt hit the coffin and saw, astonishingly, that a couple of the men seemed cynically amused at my emotion. The stab of hatred I felt for these businessmen then was so sharp it instantly dried my tears. I wondered whether she would have found it ironic that even her funeral had ended up as a Dunlop function. They were burying Mrs Dunlop.

  Over the next few days I was desperate for sentimental stories of her, for tales of their early love. I couldn’t ask my father. Ian told me how dashingly my father had wooed her. How he’d buttered up Nan, their Catholic mother. How he’d bribed Ian, then aged thirteen, two shillings a time to go to the pictures and let them canoodle on the couch in peace. We laughed as if the tales were much funnier than they were.

  I wanted to hear of the Jantzen girl and the bomber pilot. There was the old family anecdote I’d always found funny and romantic: that my father, while in pilot training at Point Cook, had broken low-flying regulations and buzzed my mother at Camperdown in his Avro Anson. He’d flashed her a message, but no one ever said what it was.

  Ian said I’d got it wrong. The message was for him. He was a teenager in the Air Training Corps by then and my father had told him to watch out and he would fly low and signal something to him.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  Ian said, ‘He signalled “TIT” and then he signalled “BUM”.’

  Back at Circe Circle there was a sudden influx of concerned, bossy, nosy women with stews and steamed puddings and casseroles. Concern for the widower and his family was stretched pretty thin when it came to me, Ruth and the baby. The women stopped talking a little too readily, or loudly changed the subject, when we walked into the room. You could see them absorbing material for later gossip. When they spoke it was to patronise us or question Ruth’s mothering techniques.

  All this made it hard to be publicly joyous about the baby without feeling guilty. The two events had clashed too dramatically. My mother’s death had well and truly trumped his birth.

  Nevertheless, for Jan’s and Bill’s sakes, my father asked us to stay in Circe Circle for the time being. We gave up our exile in the green cement flat in Waterman’s Bay. Every day I went off to report the police courts, and at night we stayed up and watched television until my father came home. He would call for the hairbrush and brush Jan’s hair for an hour or so, until she was falling asleep, and then she and Bill were allowed to go to bed. He sat up and drank Dewar’s.

  I stayed up with him in front of the dead television while he drank whisky and occasionally muttered something. Even though we had no conversation it seemed the right and companionable thing to do. It was understandable that his moods were up and down. I’d sit through the various stages – the silence, the abrupt declarations, the teary reminiscences, until he began getting caustic with me. When his eyes turned cold and savage I begged off just in time and went to bed in my old bedroom under the painted-out bodies of Brigitte and Marilyn and listened to the mother-and-baby noises in the next room.

  Another girl was murdered in the next street shortly afterwards. It was another Saturday night and Shirley McLeod was baby-sitting for Carl and Wendy Dowd in Wavell Road. She was eighteen, an exceptionally bright and pretty girl and, like her friend John Sturkey, a science student on a scholarship at the university. By now these links, or coincidences, if that’s what they were, seemed hardly worth noting.

  A thunderstorm was raging. She was studying on the couch in the Dowds’ living room, her books on her lap. The killer parked his car near the top end of Circe Circle. He strolled up and down the street in the storm, then walked quietly into the house through an unlocked connecting door from the garage, and shot her in the forehead.

  In the storm no one heard the gunshot. When the Dowds returned home at two a.m. they thought Shirley was asleep. Their baby, Mitchell, was sleeping in his bedroom. It was a cold night and the heater was on. A record was still spinning on the record player. A cup and saucer were beside Shirley. She still held her pen poised in mid-word.

  My father and I learned some of this from the papers and some from the detectives who arrived on our doorstep next day to interview and fingerprint us.

  The police had found one fingerprint they believed was the killer’s. They wanted to eliminate all prints that weren’t the Dowds’. They also wanted to know our movements that night. As it happened, my father had socialised in the Dowds’ house in the past. Carl Dowd was a business associate of his, another branch manager sent from Melbourne, the State manager of the Berlei-Hestia lingerie company. (It was famous for its Hestia brassiere range
. A generation of Australians believed Hestia was an acronym for Holds Every Sized Tit In Australia.)

  ‘It could be my print,’ my father helpfully told the detectives. They were suddenly grimly attentive. ‘Do you know John McCurry?’ he asked hurriedly. ‘A good friend of mine.’ But the fingerprint wasn’t my father’s. Or mine, of course. Why then did I feel so strangely guilty as another cop in a grey dustcoat pressed my fingers carefully one by one onto the ink pad? Why did I half-expect the dustcoated cop to take off his glasses and say quietly to the detective in charge, ‘Bill, could you have a look at this?’

  But every neighbouring male was a suspect. The police were clutching at straws. They ended up fingerprinting my father and me twice, the second time with every other male over fourteen from our side of the river. At this stage they were only fingerprinting males from our side. For some reason they thought we were killing our own.

  It was on our way home from the Claremont police station after our second fingerprinting that my father broke into the old Crosby song, ‘Where the Blue of the Night’. I hadn’t heard him sing anything in a long time. Not since the tranquil days of Carousel with the Sunday roast. It was so inappropriate I wondered whether he was all right in the head. But we weren’t ourselves. It was a Friday night. He’d had a few drinks after work.

  We were driving along Victoria Avenue, past the Claremont baths. I recalled skinny, deaf-and-dumb Darryl Beamish skylarking in the baths, grabbing at girls’ saggy swimming costumes as they climbed up from the river. He was a big-eared, glittery-eyed, toothy boy who cackled gibberish. The pylons and wooden ladders at the baths were encrusted with mussels and barnacles so the shrieking girls couldn’t rush it, couldn’t get away too fast without cutting their hands and feet. And now Beamish was on death row for murdering Jillian Brewer.

  He was still protesting his innocence. So was the other nineteen-year-old, John Button, convicted on circumstantial evidence of the manslaughter of his girlfriend Rosemary Anderson, of running her down with his car. The Press and the community were in no mood to hear his protests either. The local feeling was that he was lucky the jury had gone soft on the wilful murder charge. Lucky to get just ten years’ hard labour. It was terrifying that all these different murders were happening in the area but at least two of the killers were off the street.

  A couple of blocks past the baths my father stopped singing. He must have realised what he was singing, and how ominous the words sounded, because he stopped abruptly, set his face in a frown and we drove the rest of the way home in our usual silence.

  4

  SATURDAY NIGHT BOY (III)

  He read the social columns without envy or malice. On the contrary, they made him smile the way they advertised who the rich people were, who of them were getting married or attending charity events and wouldn’t be at home. They were a very useful service. His favourite section of the West Australian, however, was the Saturday architecture page written by Frank Platell. Platell’s articles were another good guide to people with money. Better still, they provided a helpful plan and address of the particular house. It was handy to know the layout before you went in.

  When he left the house this Saturday night he took in his pocket that day’s architecture page, a recent social column item about a wedding on this night, his kid gloves, a handkerchief to cover his mouth and his pencil torch. That was all. None of them could be described as house-breaking implements. He didn’t need those; he opened unlocked doors. So he travelled light. A bit later he did have something else in his pocket. A pair of women’s panties from a house in Peppermint Grove, plus money from there and other houses in Claremont and Nedlands. Well, he had to fill in the time somehow until the street lights went off at one a.m.

  PART FOUR

  1

  PHENOBARBITONE

  When Bill Hawker grabbed him in the dark as he reached for the rifle Hawker wondered what sort of weirdo he’d caught. This creature was burbling strange nasal sounds and when he went to handcuff him the hands felt slick and smooth, almost slimy. Eric was wearing the kid gloves, of course, and in the policeman’s anxious mood the skin of the gloves felt creepy, other-worldly. But Hawker held on. He handcuffed him to the fence. He had him.

  It wasn’t until they turned a light on him that he saw the slimy skin was fine kid gloves. And the harelip explained the incoherent speech.

  It wasn’t detective work as much as sheer luck. Luck and a little help from the Press. An old couple, William and Leila Keehner, had been out for their daily afternoon stroll by the river in Rookwood Street, Mount Pleasant, when Mrs Keehner decided to pick a sprig of Geraldton wax from a thick bush growing on the sandy bank of the road. As she leant on the bank to reach up for the flowers, the sand shifted slightly and something heavy slid out from under the bush. It was a rifle butt.

  After the Cottesloe-Nedlands business he’d thrown the rifle into the river, but this one he’d hidden to use again if he felt the inclination.

  It was the rifle used to kill Shirley McLeod. After they’d tested it, the police put the rifle back in the Geraldton wax bush, and waited. They set up camp in a camouflaged pup tent and watched the bush day and night for two weeks. No one came to get it.

  They decided to let the papers in on the discovery. It was a risk but the police had the papers well trained. Ralph Wheatley and Jack Coulter, the Daily News crime reporter, not only agreed to keep mum about the rifle discovery but to run a story saying the police would be turning their inquiries to the Mount Pleasant area at the end of the week. This gave the gunman time to worry about the safety of his hiding place.

  He came on a Saturday night, of course.

  When he was committed for trial on the charge of murdering John Sturkey, Eric had nodded politely to the magistrate. I thought he also murmured, ‘Thank you,’ but with his indistinct speech, and the scraping of chairs and the shuffling of the police guards in the dock as they moved towards him, I wasn’t sure enough to write it.

  Anyway, despite his Hollywood-gangster appearance he certainly looked resolved about the decision. He was on authority’s side. Anything I can do to help? Just ask me the questions. Short of holding a smoking gun, he looked as much a serial killer as anyone could. Yet he didn’t appear to feel any guilt at all.

  Not like me. As I finally drove back across the Narrows Bridge and headed towards my evening appointment, the guilt kept rolling in, steady as surf on a sand bank. Along with those other recent feelings: grief, confusion, embarrassment. And now a special sort of childish shame and anxiety as well. The feeling of being called to the principal’s office.

  I was anxious about Dr Synott summoning me this evening. I’d intended to go home first, to see Ruth and fortify myself for the ordeal. But having wasted time driving dazedly around South Perth I was running late. I hadn’t seen him since the funeral and, before that, standing helplessly by my mother’s bed at the hospital. He was the family doctor, the family friend. The man who’d made a mistake with my meningitis. The man who could come around to Circe Circle for drinks on Sunday evening, then professionally examine my mother’s body in his office on Monday afternoon. In retrospect this seemed very peculiar to me.

  Some family doctors had offices of cheery disarray, with hunting prints or Rottnest Island scenes hanging beside their medical degrees. For decoration Dr Synott had the gloomy Stag at Bay. Otherwise his office was as bare as an operating theatre, with sharp silver instruments laid out, and coils of vaguely obscene rubber tubing and concave metal appliances like little stacked bed pans. It smelled of methylated spirits. On the wall Landseer’s hounds were about to force the stag over the cliff.

  The doctor told me to sit down. He was frowning. ‘I thought it was time to discuss your mother’s death,’ he said.

  I waited, more a dismal child again than a father. My head swam in methylated spirits. ‘You’ve probably been wondering,’ he said solemnly, ‘whether you killed her.’

  I’d discovered that morning it was possible to fain
t or black out and yet appear to be conscious. This sensation was like the one in court, only sharper and more precise. I realised after a while that Dr Synott was still speaking. I rose from a great depth to the surface. The meths fumes brought me round. ‘I want you to know this wasn’t necessarily the case,’ he said.

  I remained sitting on the cracked leather chair in front of his desk, regressed to a nervous eleven-year-old, while he sat there fingering some silver probe or other and gazing at me with steady disapproval. Over the years I’d sat on that chair many times while he peered into my ears, eyes and throat, listened to my chest, tapped my knees, gave me injections.

  ‘What I mean is, we can’t tell for sure.’ On the one hand, he said, these cerebral haemorrhages were usually congenital. If he were thinking along the lines of a congenital condition, he’d be looking at her family history. ‘But I think I’m right in saying her parents, brothers, aunts, cousins and so on are all still alive?’

  I nodded. My heart was thumping.

  On the other hand, he went on, he’d been treating her for depression, anxiety attacks and insomnia brought on by my ‘actions’.

  Make up your mind, I thought. Her friends already blamed me. I suspected my father did, too. Did I do it or not? Am I a murderer?

  ‘I think we’re looking at a sixty/forty situation,’ he said.

  Which way? I wondered. For the life of me I couldn’t ask. I realised this was all he was going to say. This was the best and the worst he could do – call me in and act as if he were doing me an undeserved favour by saying the answer to whether I killed my mother was on the affirmative side of maybe. The jury was going to stay out on me forever.

  By now my face must have told him what was going through my mind because he ended our meeting by taking my blood pressure and prescribing phenobarbitone for me as well.