‘Something I ate,’ he said, and Henson nodded. He clapped Tommy on the shoulder once and cleared his throat. They both studied the ground.
‘Thomas,’ Henson said, and Tommy looked at him. Nobody ever called him Thomas. He stood up straighter and raised his chin. Shoulders back.
‘You really like this girl, eh?’
Tommy nodded.
‘She like you back?’
He shrugged. He didn’t know. She’d kissed him, sure. But maybe just because there was nobody else to kiss. Well, whatever. He didn’t even care about that anymore. He wouldn’t mind if she never even touched him again, if it meant he could know she was okay right now. Of course, he’d prefer that she did touch him. He’d prefer she never stopped. But really, he just wanted for her not to have disappeared at all.
Tommy cleared his throat. ‘So, there we have it. A witness who saw Cameron following Sarah on the morning she disappeared.’
‘So that’s it, then? We know all there is to know?’ Henson spread his hands out in a question.
Tommy frowned. ‘What are you trying to say?’
Behind them, Crane stepped out onto the verandah. He put his hands on his hips, and let out a sonorous fart. He grinned at them, and went back inside.
‘Not that, exactly,’ Henson mumbled. The corners of his mouth twitched.
Despite himself, Tommy smiled a bit. ‘Are you asking me to help you with your case, Sarge?’
Henson guffawed and cuffed him on the back of the head.
‘Because, y’know, I could do you a deal. Mates rates and all that. Consulting private investigators don’t come cheap, Sarge.’ Tommy couldn’t stop himself grinning now.
‘Fuck off then, lad.’ Sergeant Henson pretended to walk away.
‘Wait, Sarge.’ He looked back. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘Just that we still don’t have any idea what happened. We don’t have anything that places Cameron at the creek, and we still don’t know where either of them is now.’
‘So . . .’
‘So we shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions. That’s shoddy police work. Lazy.’
Tommy looked at his feet in the dirt. Cameron Wolfe was an arsehole. That wasn’t jumping to conclusions, that was fact. He rubbed his eyes. When he found Sarah, he was going to sleep for about ten years. If he ever found Sarah.
‘We need to keep open minds. Particularly about other possible suspects. Think about people who might want to hurt Sarah. People who might want her out of the way for some reason,’ Sergeant Henson said. ‘Opportunities. Men who visited her mother. Someone could be trying to send a message to Susannah by taking Sarah.’
They were both quiet for a long time. First Tommy and then the sergeant sat down on the steps to the police station. Eventually Tommy looked up from where he sat with his head resting on his folded arms.
‘Sarge, what about Graham Knight?’ he asked. ‘He was probably Susannah’s most regular, um, customer.’
Henson nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about him a lot, too. There’s things that man’s not telling us. And in circumstances such as these, a liar is of interest to us. Mrs Montepulciano mentioned that she was talking to him outside her house when she saw Sarah going back down the hill that day. So Graham saw her too. He neglected to mention that.’
Sergeant Henson pondered what he was about to suggest to Tommy. He had to keep reminding himself that the boy was only fourteen. He seemed, at various times, to be closer to six, or sixty. It was all very well including him, but Tommy was starting to get under his skin, and the sergeant didn’t even want to think about how many protocols he was breaking by involving the boy in this investigation. It was nothing suss, but it wasn’t exactly professional distance either, the way he felt. What he wanted was to take the boy home, give him a good feed and then put him to bed and stand in the doorway with Gertie, watching the rise and fall of the figure under the quilt breathing, peaceful, warm and safe, with the light from the doorway casting a wedge of soft yellow onto the carpet.
‘What would be good,’ he said, ‘is surveillance. Twenty-four-hour surveillance. But Crane has sent the young Sydney coppers back to the city to try to track down Wolfe, and I wouldn’t trust Roberts with a task like this.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
Tommy sprang to his feet. He didn’t look so tired anymore.
‘Are you off, then?’ Henson asked, keeping his voice casual.
‘Mmm,’ Tommy said. He looked like a racehorse straining at the bit, ready to fly through the gates.
‘Thomas, listen. You find out anything, you tell me, right? Don’t go rogue on me, son. None of this vigilante bullshit. I’m trusting you. Good coppers call for backup, you hear?’
Tommy nodded, but he was moving away.
‘He could be a dangerous man, Tommy,’ the sergeant called out, but he was already talking to the space where Tommy had been. As fast as a speeding bullet, he was. Henson felt a surge of pride. The boy could surely run.
chapter thirty-one
Graham flipped the suitcase onto its back and shook the filmy layer of dust and mothballs out of it. He wiped it down with the tail of his shirt, and set it on the bed. He looked at the rows of clothes hanging in his side of the closet and frowned. He didn’t want any of those garments, all the pleated trousers and polo shirts, the navy sports jacket with a gold insignia on the breast pocket and stiff, camel-coloured boat shoes that cramped his toes and chafed at his heels. Maybe he could just get new things. He slid the door over and looked at Geraldine’s clothes. At the front hung the things she wore most of the time: sensible pants and modest blouses in muted colours. But at the back, there were some dresses in a startling array of colours, like a fruit salad. He pulled one out. It was green, with a pattern of orange daisies around the hem and neckline. Why did she never wear things like this anymore? It was a dancing dress though, Graham supposed, and they certainly never went dancing. He hoped that when he left, Geraldine would find someone to take her dancing. They had been married for almost twenty years.
She hadn’t really made the best of a bad situation, though. They could have come to some arrangement, lived together amicably. Like housemates. But she had held on to her anger, nursed it at her breast instead of a baby, nurtured it; let it grow up big and strong. Now it was all there was to her.
‘Did you ever really love me?’ she would scream at him in those first few years. ‘Was there ever room for anyone else, anyone except for that slut Susannah?’
Graham would look at her, her face red and creased, snot pooling in the divot above her top lip, her straw-blonde hair sticking out madly like spinifex.
‘No, Geraldine. There was never room for anyone but Susannah.’
He did not know how to lie, then. He was learning now, though. He was on a crash course. Frankly, it surprised Graham that Geraldine had taken their sweaty, fumbling evening together as a declaration of anything more than just that, sweaty fumbling. He had been a teenager, for Christ’s sake. It was what he was biologically programmed to seek out. He had never envisioned it leading to marriage, but his sisters told him it was the right thing to do. Only now did Graham wonder – right for whom, exactly?
For a large chunk of their life together, Geraldine had done her darndest to pretend her husband did not actually exist. In fact, she seemed to actually try to physically erase any evidence of his presence in her house. He had learnt to be neat, leave no mess behind him, but still she would spray disinfectant on the seat of a chair he had been sitting in, wipe down the windowsill where he had placed his keys with ammonia and hot water, swab the button on the kettle with Dettol anti-bacterial wash. They had separate beds, separate televisions, separate bathrooms, designated toilets. And yet she insisted they remained married, said that was the least he could do for her. It hadn’t been so bad for Graham, really. He was mostly left alone. And as long as he was in the same town as Susannah Vale, he thought he could be happy.
&nbs
p; But he saw now that he had not been happy. He had simply been surviving, a passive receptacle – a man whose life just happened to him. Geraldine had always said if they ever got a divorce her mother would die from the shame. Graham knew this wasn’t true. Geraldine’s mother would not actually die because her daughter got a divorce. In fact, he thought she’d be quite alright with never seeing her son-in-law again. But how did he respond? Nod meekly and skulk back to his den. Yes, Geraldine, no, Geraldine, three bags full, Geraldine. Three bags full of cleaning products. Had he been born a coward, Graham wondered to himself, or had he become that way? In any case, his own weakness stunned him. But there was still time. Amends could be made. In light of recent events, Graham had had a revelation – it was more like a slow-burning fuse than a light-bulb moment, but a revelation nonetheless: we are the masters of our own destiny. We are at the helm of the plane, not just passengers. We are the pilots! Grant us our mosquito wings! It is true you can sit and wait for things to happen, but it is also true that you can make them happen. And if you don’t like the way things are headed, you can reach out, grab that path by the scruff of its neck and twist it, wrench it around until it is going in the direction that you want it to. And if you don’t, you have only yourself to blame. You can think about that while you live your half a life.
So what if Geraldine wouldn’t give him a divorce? That didn’t mean he couldn’t leave, leave her and this house and this town and even this country. A divorce, in the end, was just a piece of paper. They didn’t build prisons out of paper. Geraldine had always assumed Graham was bitter about not making it into the air force. But Graham had never really thought he would get in. Even before his accident, he had never really been in bracing good health. He was plagued by asthma as a child and hayfever as a teenager. Even now, as an adult, he had the sallow, pallid look of someone who was deficient in some essential vitamin or other. He was always sniffling or clearing his throat, his eyes wept in the springtime and his extremities turned a startling rosy red in the winter. The air force would have been very interesting, Graham had thought; he did love planes, and it was a ticket out of Banville. But if he was honest, Graham was not especially keen on flying. He wasn’t scared, exactly, it was just – he didn’t want to know. Getting behind the controls of a plane would have stripped flight of its magic, rendered the aircraft dull machines, functioning mechanically, an assembly line of cause and effect, able to be traced and understood. Graham preferred to observe planes behind the veneer of his television screen. That would probably have proved an obstacle in his career. He thought maybe they could hire him in some administrative capacity so he could be around the aircraft without having to go inside them, but he couldn’t even type. It had been worth it, though, for the trip to Sydney.
Geraldine thought Graham was too oblivious or stupid to understand how gleeful people were about what they saw as his manifestation of an essential cliché, a truism that made them feel safe in their beds at night. The world was in order. The man who was denied admission to the air force sat alone and watched movies about planes, growing more bitter with each reel of film. Geraldine was wrong on two counts. Graham understood how people saw him, but did not care. And he didn’t grow ever more bitter when he watched films about planes. On the contrary, that was when he was truly happy. He just really liked planes, and the whole idea of flight. Giant spectacular birds with motors in their bellies, cruising around while people like him were stuck on the ground. A whole other level of existence was going on up there, people reading, talking, sleeping and eating, all in a world in the sky. Humans being humans, but thirty thousand feet up in the air. What could be more amazing than that?
Graham replaced Geraldine’s dress and shut the wardrobe door. He took the suitcase down through the kitchen to the basement. He could hear Geraldine watching a soap in her sitting room. He shut the door behind him. In the basement, Graham put the suitcase on his workbench, got a can of lemonade from the refrigerator and sat down in his recliner. He drank deeply. It went down a treat. Not as nicely as an icy cold beer would have done, but he had given up drinking to try to encourage Susannah.
‘It will be a new beginning,’ he had told her.
She had looked at him, tired and sad. ‘Every day is a new beginning, Gray. And yet nothing ever changes.’ She had put her hand across the back of his neck and rubbed it.
He would take his model-building equipment, maybe some cuttings from his vegetable garden – the Jersey Royals would have been Grevillea Festival quality this year. His money, his favourite aviation movie in the limited-release video box set – Twelve O’Clock High, with Gregory Peck. His compass. His knife. And that was all he would need to start a new life. Amazing. One suitcase was all it took.
chapter thirty-two
Two houses down from Graham Knight’s two-storey brick veneer, the Wilkinsons were getting their weatherboard cottage painted. They had chosen a stark, crisp white with dark maroon trim to disguise the rusted guttering. Personally, Tommy would have torn the whole lot down and started again. On his reconnaissance mission, he found evidence of white ants nibbling through the foundations. His dad had once shown him how to tap the wood and listen for the hollow sound that indicated the tunnels the ants had bored through the beams. He didn’t think the Wilkinsons would want his advice, though.
Marjorie Wilkinson had told him, when paired together for a spelling test in grade three, that he ‘usually smelt quite bad’. Her little button nose had wrinkled with distaste and she had shuffled right to the end of the bench seat they shared, tucking her skirt under her bottom and making a show of breathing with a hanky clutched over her mouth. Tommy had tried to fold himself into a tiny square, knees pulled up to his chin, face tucked into his arms, his default position even now. When the lunch bell had rung, he had made for home, the first time he had ever wagged. His father wasn’t there, and nobody came from the school to find him. That was a revelation. He wagged a fair bit after that, but he never missed science. Marjorie was still an unpleasant girl.
Tommy had been sitting in the mango tree for five hours. When it started to get dark, he would scale the scaffolding that the painters had set up at the Wilkinsons’ and sit on their roof. In the blackness of the night, the windows of Graham Knight’s house would be lit up like little yellow television sets, and Tommy would be able to watch Geraldine and Graham as they moved around their home, probably nowhere near each other, if today was any indication. They seemed to have some sort of radar that allowed one to avoid the other while still sharing a space. It had been a quiet day for the Knights. Neither of them had left the house except Graham, at about one o’clock. He had gone to the Vale house again, let himself in with his key, stayed for just shy of an hour and returned home with his blue backpack full and heavy-looking. Why would he take something from the Vale house? Only diligent surveillance would reveal the answer.
It felt good to have a mission. He had not forgotten Cameron Wolfe, but Cameron Wolfe was nowhere to be seen. Graham could be monitored. It was not dissimilar to tracking an animal, and Tommy had done that plenty of times. The only problem was that Graham often disappeared from his view, and Tommy could only speculate that he had some sort of basement or cellar down underneath the first floor. Whatever it was, Graham certainly spent a lot of time down there. When he wasn’t down there, he often sat alone in the dim lounge and watched old black and white movies, often about pilots or flying. Tommy recognised Clark Gable in some of the films. His maternal grandmother, who lived in a retirement village in the Blue Mountains, had kept pictures of Clark Gable on her bedside table along with all the grandchildren. One week and two days after his mother had died, her mother had died also. Tommy thought that was possibly the loveliest and the saddest thing he could think of. Since his mother had died, his father had seemed unable to stay in Banville for very long, and though Tommy missed him terribly when he was gone, he understood even more now. His mother was everywhere in this town, and yet nowhere. Just like Sarah.
Tommy stared hard at the house, and then had to grab a nearby branch with both hands to stop himself from falling when Geraldine suddenly appeared in the doorway. Behind her, Graham materialised, carrying a round Tupperware container. Tommy’s mouth watered. A cake. They stepped out of the house and Graham locked the door behind them then turned the knob to test it and Geraldine took a tissue from her handbag and wiped the doorknob and the fixtures after him. She sure did like things to be clean, Tommy thought. Graham simply watched her. Tommy could hear her saying something, high-pitched and strident. They walked down the path, Geraldine in front, and down to the corner heading away from the park. At the last house on their street, they stopped and went in the gate, Geraldine first. Tommy watched as Graham followed her, trying to shut the gate behind him, but it would not stay closed, swinging back to hit him in the backside each time he turned around. Tommy laughed to himself. Graham turned around and gave the gate a kick, and it swung right back and clanged against the latch so hard that it came loose at the top hinge and hung crooked and useless, the curlicued iron rim scraping on the dirt. Geraldine’s pitch increased. Graham followed her into the house. If it was anyone else, Tommy would feel sorry for them. But he didn’t feel sorry for Graham. Graham was a suspect.
He looked over at the Knight house. He needed to get into that basement. There might be evidence down there. He had no idea what, though. Something of Sarah’s? If Tommy went in now, there was the danger of Graham returning early. What sort of man stayed at his mother-in-law’s house for very long? Graham was odd, but not necessarily a masochist. Still, Tommy could take this time about looking at the house from outside, find all the escape routes and plan his later entry. Casing the joint, it was called in detective comics.
He jumped down from his perch and ran into the yard of the Knight house and around the side. When he reached the backyard, he paused. There was a wonderful garden. It looked like Graham had some interesting plants, and flowers that made Tommy’s eyes light up, but he didn’t have time to look at them all today. With difficulty, he tore himself away from the garden and went around the other side of the house. So far he had seen only two entrances, one door at the front and one at the back, and no reachable windows. But around this other side, there was one very low window, just above the ground. Aha! This must belong to the basement. Tommy got down on his stomach to peer through the glass. It was quite dark inside, but he could make out a long bench under the window with what looked like tools hanging on the wall above it. The bench was clear, except for a garden gnome soaking in a bucket. Tommy shook his head. Whatever tickles your pickle, Graham. It looked like a big space down there, with plenty of places to hide evidence. He got to his feet again and went back to the mango tree, satisfied. The joint was thoroughly cased. And as soon as he could, he would be getting inside it.
The Vale Girl Page 17