The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  I went back out onto the verandah instead. Seeing all that mess inside made my stomach twist up on itself; I felt small and shivery and just wanted to go home to my mum. It felt like something bad had happened and all the adults were gone, leaving kids to fend for themselves. Tommy said his dad would be coming back soon, but I could tell he didn’t know when. How could he bear it? My mum may not have acted like the sort of mother that I wanted, and she was pretty messy too, but at least she was there, in the house with me. What if his dad never came back? He must have felt scared like I did now, but all the time. No wonder he wanted that rifle.

  After a minute or two, Tommy came back with a notebook. Inside, it was filled with charts and diagrams, numbers and writing, in both Tommy’s hand and his father’s.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said. All I could gather was that it was something to do with science, or maths. It looked like a foreign language to me.

  ‘This,’ Tommy said, taking the notebook from me and stroking its cover, ‘is a chart of the tidal patterns in the creek. Dad and I kept records all of last year, of when high and low tides were, weather, water speed and depth. Stuff like that.’

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Because it’s interesting. And because it’s valuable.’

  ‘Valuable how? Can you sell it to someone?’

  ‘No, not like that. Valuable because if I read this, then I can predict things. About the creek.’

  I cottoned on. ‘Ohhhhh. You mean like when the bottle will wash up?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Tommy smiled at me, and I punched him on the arm. He was so clever. I thought of the look on Cameron’s face when that bottle turned up. It would be excellent. I thought of the water at the creek, the dark and unfathomable depths of it. What Tommy was doing would be like seeing into the future. I punched him again.

  ‘Good one.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  Five days later, on the eighth of January, all the kids in Banville crowded onto the banks and bridge near the steel plant to wait for the Coke bottle to wash up. Tommy was feeling confident. It hadn’t rained, he had charted the tides in the intervening days and all was as he predicted. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, the bottle came tripping down the water, the red top bobbing, and came to rest in the tangle of branches and rocks where the water’s path veered. We all cheered. Graham was summoned to supervise the handing over of the rifle, and Tommy seized it and brandished it above his head in triumph. For a day, he was the most popular kid in Banville. Everyone liked to see a bully beaten.

  That was a pivotal moment, I see that now. When things changed in a way that would echo in our lives for a very long time, and whose aftershocks we are still feeling now. It was when Tommy showed me, and everyone else, exactly how smart he was. And how brave. Those other boys acted tough, but they were still being tucked in by their mothers at night. But it was also in that moment that Cameron Wolfe began to hate me. I had challenged him and he had accepted my dare and lost in front of everyone. He would never forget that. If I’d understood that, I don’t know if I still would have made that dare then. I don’t know if I would have been that stupid.

  It was in that moment too that I witnessed the pull of the tide in the creek, and learnt that anything which went in at one place would come out at another. The water looked like it swallowed things, but it didn’t. It just held them for a while, then spat them back out again, into the world for everyone to see. Nothing was lost. No matter how much you might have liked it to be.

  chapter forty

  Sergeant Henson went home to change his clothes. They smelt like death. Mrs M had looked vacant, not peaceful but not concerned either. Just a pair of impassive eyes directed at the patch of air in front of them. She was lying awkwardly on her side on the floor of the laundry, with her legs bent like she was walking. The gold cross on a chain around her neck had swung up to rest on her lips like she was kissing it. A brightly coloured garden gnome lay on the garden path just metres away from her, a lightning-bolt-shaped crack scissored across its belly. Mrs Montepulciano’s dress was bunched up, revealing a ladder in her beige stockings that ended in a splotch of pink nail polish on her thigh, presumably painted to halt the run. Sergeant Henson closed his eyes and saw only the pink nail polish, the fluorescent candy colour of it pulsing and echoing in his brain like a strobe light. Better he see that than the crimson pool of blood under her head, he supposed, the shock of all that red liquid congealing into black on the grout between the floor tiles.

  Nothing had been stolen, and there was no sign of a struggle. The door from the laundry into the back garden was open, and the door into the back alleyway from the house was ajar also. Mr Montepulciano could think of no reason why the door would be open, or why the garden gnome would be lying in the middle of the path.

  Mr M always went to bed earlier than his wife, and he had slept well, waking early to find her side of the bed empty, the covers thrown back. Still groggy, in the fugue state between sleep and wakefulness, he had stumbled around the house looking for her, and there she was, in the laundry. She must have been letting one of the cats out. He thought for a moment that he was still dreaming. This was not real. Because that was his wife on the floor.

  His wife, on the floor.

  Still conscious, but barely. They had been married for forty-three years. Before the ambulance had reached the main street of Banville, she was dead. The forensics team from Welonga were reluctant to make a call. Maria had died from a blow to the head, they said, but how it was sustained they were yet to determine. The coroner would be in touch.

  Gertie cried when Sergeant Henson told her about Maria’s death.

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’ She covered her face with her hands. Outside, the sun was high and strong. Gertie wilted into a chair.

  ‘Now, Gert, we don’t know yet that she was . . .’

  ‘Murdered? Go on, say it. But you think so, don’t you? You think someone murdered that dear old woman. She was the same age as my mother.’

  Sergeant Henson sighed. ‘I have to get back to the station, love.’

  Gertie stood up and went to the window. She rubbed the fabric of the curtain between her fingers and pushed her forehead against the glass. ‘We might as well be back in Sydney.’

  Henson came and stood behind Gertie at the window and put a hand on her shoulder. She slumped back against him. Henson tried to think of something to say. He had nothing.

  ‘I’ve really got to go, Gert.’

  Gertie wiped her eyes and tried to compose herself. ‘I made some more biscuits for Tommy. You said he ate that last lot in one sitting, so I thought . . . They’re on the counter.’

  ‘He’ll like that, love.’ Henson stroked his wife’s hair. She leant into his hand.

  ‘We haven’t seen him for a couple of days. There’s chicken for dinner tonight. Roasted, with butter and sage. Let him know he’s more than welcome to join us for it.’

  ‘I will.’ Sergeant Henson kissed his wife, grabbed the package of biscuits from the kitchen and left through the back door. He made a mental note to remember to ask Tommy to dinner. The boy needed feeding but it also did Gertie a world of good, having someone else to fuss over. She would need the distraction tonight.

  When he got to the station, the sergeant felt like he had accidentally driven into Sydney. The street was lined with cars, and there were people everywhere. He thought of his wife alone in their quiet house and felt like turning around and going home again. They could draw the curtains, lie together on the couch and watch the midday movie. Have toasted sandwiches for lunch. Iced VoVos with a cup of tea in the afternoon. He could hold Gert in his arms as she cried, for Maria, for her mother, for Sarah. People were supposed to be seventy percent water, but the sergeant suspected his wife was seventy percent empathy. She took each death hard, like a punch. She took it for him, so he could go on working. The sergeant closed his eyes, but then the pink nail polish arrived. He opened them again.

  Re
porters with microphones and cameramen with the logos of Sydney television stations on their equipment clustered on the footpath outside the pub, and he spied Roberts, standing in the middle of them with his arms folded across his chest and his chin thrust out. Henson rubbed his eyes. They must have been called first thing, to get here from Sydney by now. Could the morning get any worse? He climbed out of the car and made his way over to Roberts, pontificating to his captive audience. Oh dear God. Who let that fool get near a camera? He must’ve thought all his Christmases had come at once.

  ‘Well, as I was saying, as an officer of the Banville police force I will not rest until the perpetrator of this horrific crime has been apprehended. When tragedy strikes in our community –’

  ‘The police have no further comment at this stage.’ Sergeant Henson moved to stand next to the junior officer. He drove his knuckles into the small of Roberts’ back. Mouthy little twat. Roberts grimaced and stepped sideways and the microphones swivelled towards the sergeant. Cameras flashed.

  ‘Are you Sergeant Henson? Sergeant, why has the public not been informed earlier about the spate of vicious crimes plaguing the town of Banville?’

  ‘What are the latest known whereabouts of the missing girl?’

  ‘Can you confirm that she is the daughter of a prostitute? Is it your opinion that legal prostitution is the scourge of our rural communities, Sergeant?’

  ‘Is there a link between the missing girl and the brutally murdered elderly citizen, Sergeant?’

  ‘What do you believe has caused the demise of this rural idyll, Sergeant? Drugs?’

  The reporters were almost falling over each other in their haste to shove the microphones in his face. Sergeant Henson took a deep breath. He tried to control the rage bubbling in his stomach. Fucking incompetent Roberts, shooting off at the mouth to some drama-mongers trying to rustle up a sensation. That would help matters about as much as a hole in the head. He held up his hand.

  ‘I ask you all to remain patient and let me do my job. As soon as I have anything to report to you, I will. Let me add that it has not been confirmed that the death of a citizen this morning was in fact a murder, and –’

  ‘Are you denying the circumstances were suspicious? The officer earlier told us –’

  ‘I ask you to disregard any comments made thus far. The officer you are referring to had no authority to speak on these matters.’

  ‘Is he being silenced?’ A woman stepped forward. Henson recognised her as Gwendolyne Meyers from Channel Seven. She looked at Roberts with fake concern and he gazed back, star struck. At close range, Henson could see where her foundation had coagulated in the creases above her upper lip and the thick clotted mascara spiked her eyelashes into spears. Threads of hairspray braced her blonde mane into a lacquered, unmoving helmet. To Henson, her appearance brought to mind the process of objects ossifying, calcifying; he thought of fossils preserved under layers of earth. He wondered what she looked like underneath. ‘He’s not being silenced. He just doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ he said.

  The press pack tittered. Sergeant Henson turned away.

  ‘A clearly anguished Sergeant Bob Henson of Banville and Districts Police Service defends his town against the accusations of out-of-control crime, as we today learn of the teenager missing for nearly a week and the elderly woman murdered in her own home, not two blocks from where I stand now. It seems the victims of this Banville crime spiral are not confined to a particular generation. All citizens are therefore at risk.’

  Sergeant Henson paused, and then clenched his fists by his sides and continued into the station. He pondered the logistics of hanging Gwendolyne Meyers from the guttering of the pub roof by that blonde hairdo. Or ramming that microphone into her lipsticked mouth and shoving it so far down her throat that her stomach split open and her guts poured out onto her silver high-heeled sandals. Right in the ‘crime spiral’ they’d be then, wouldn’t they? Roberts was hovering outside the door of the police station. He took off his hat and began apologising as the sergeant came up the stairs.

  ‘Sarge, I shouldn’t have spoken to them. Sorry about that, eh?’

  ‘You’re fired.’

  chapter forty-one

  From the window of the police station kitchen where he had gone to make a coffee, Henson could see the press pack still swarming around outside. He considered herding them away but thought better of it. Let them swarm; they’d get no sound bites from him. The rain had stopped for a while in the early afternoon but was beginning again now, and sounded impossibly loud falling on the tin roof of the railway station. Any rain was a blessing after so long, but there was no joy in it today. Crane had done the paperwork on Mrs M, Henson finding himself unable to record the events of that morning with the clinical detachment required for the file, so there was little for Henson to do at the office. But if he left he would have to face that mob of bloodsuckers outside. He could see the headlines now: POPULAR RURAL HOLIDAY DESTINATION BESIEGED BY VIOLENCE! RURAL POLICE SERGEANT CHARGED WITH ASSAULT OF SYDNEY NEWS ANCHOR. Henson took a pill from the bottle in his pocket, threw it in his mouth, washed it down with the last of his coffee and returned, reluctantly, to his office. When he walked into it, he found the mayor of Banville, Phillip Doyle, sitting in his chair behind his desk. Neither of them spoke for a moment and then Phillip Doyle leant back in the chair. ‘What the fuck is going on around here?’

  He indicated the chair across from him, but Henson did not sit.

  ‘I’d be able to get on with finding out if there weren’t so many people asking me, Phillip.’

  ‘It’s Mayor Doyle, and are you accusing me of leaking this to the press?’

  ‘No. Not you.’ Sergeant Henson glared through the doorway at the officers from Sydney, seated around the table. One of them looked at him, then immediately looked away. Crane was at his desk, eating a plate of bacon and eggs with his tie thrown over his shoulder and a gaily patterned tea towel tucked into his collar. As Henson watched, a fat glistening drop of egg yolk slid from the corner of the forkful Crane was shovelling into his mouth and landed in his coffee mug. Crane picked up the mug and took a slurping sip.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you this is not a good time, Sergeant.’

  When is it a good time for a teenager to go missing and a woman to die? wondered Henson. Searching the garden that morning, Henson had noticed that Maria Montepulciano had covered all her tomato vines in netting except for one. When Henson asked her husband why that plant was bare, he said, ‘She left one for the bugs.’ What month of the year, what day of the week, would be suitable for a woman like that to die? Or a fifteen-year-old girl to vanish into thin air? The Grevillea Festival, thought Henson. Revenue, that was Doyle’s concern. The man had dollar signs for eyeballs. It beggared belief. He wanted to spit in Doyle’s face.

  ‘Then why are you telling me?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get out of your hair, Bob. But I’ll need your report by the end of the day. Something is going on in this town and I want to know what. I want every little piece of your investigation detailed, because I know you’ve been holding out on me. I am the mayor of this town, and if we are in a crime spiral, as I am told, then I need to know about it. And you need to fix it.’ Doyle came and stood close to him and Henson could smell his body odour under his cologne, foul like rotting vegetables. He was close enough for the sergeant to see the burst capillaries on his bulbous red nose and the flecks of grey in his black eyebrows.

  ‘You like your job here, Bob? The wife likes the scenery, does she?’ Doyle said.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ Sergeant Henson looked into Doyle’s watery eyes.

  ‘No. It’s not a threat, Sergeant. If you don’t get a result, you are history – it’s a fact.’

  Doyle left the station through the back door. Henson sat down and placed his palms flat on the desk in front of him. The warmth of the seat repelled him. He breathed slowly, in and out, in and out. The phone rang and Henson picked up the whole thing i
n his hands and threw it at the wall with all his might. In the next room, the extension rang on. Crane picked it up. He listened silently for a minute, patting at the corners of his mouth with the tea towel. Then he muttered a farewell, put down the receiver and stood up. The buttons over his stomach were done up incorrectly and Henson could see the drum of his white belly speckled with brown hair through the puckered fabric.

  ‘That Doyle fellow’s a piece of work,’ Crane said. He wandered over to stand in the doorway.

  Henson grunted. ‘Thanks for the backup.’

  ‘Psshh. Big boy, aren’t you? Just a small-town mayor, that one. You got bigger fish to fry.’ Crane breathed in and re-tucked his shirt in under his belt.

  ‘How’s that?’ Henson rubbed his eyes.

  ‘That was the boys in Welonga,’ Crane said. ‘They got a floater. Where the creek comes out under the bridge near the steel plant. They said you’d know the place.’

  ‘Yeah. What’s that got to do with us?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. No ID on the body, but one of the young ’uns recognised him. Rang us straight away. Poor chap sounded like he was still green around the gills, said he was the first officer on the scene. Some bushwalkers found the body, hugging a fallen-down log in the shallows like it was his mama. Hard to see one, you know – first body and all.’

  Henson shrugged. It was hard to see the dead body of someone you didn’t know, too. He looked up at the clock on the wall. Whatever this sudden outpouring of empathy from Crane was about, he didn’t have time for it. When he looked back down, he found that the other detective hadn’t moved.

  ‘He said it was our fellow,’ Crane said. ‘The body in the water. He said it’s Cameron Wolfe.’

  chapter forty-two

  When Graham had arrived home from Susannah’s, he went straight to his basement. At the top of the steps, he paused. He could hear the radio playing. He never left the radio on. After all these years, an invasion. He had been so careful to keep his basement as his sacred space. He hadn’t wanted it polluted by anyone, poking at his paints, opening his fridge, sitting in his recliner, fiddling with his tools. He had needed just one room in his house that, despite the geographical anchor of Banville, could actually have been anywhere in the world. Oh, well. He shrugged to himself. And instead of continuing down, he went back through the door into the kitchen. Geraldine was cleaning the pantry. Sacks of rice and sugar were piled on the kitchen table and tins of tomatoes and peas, boxes of biscuits and packets of crystallised ginger and glacé cherries, jars of pasta and oats and pickled onions were heaped around her on the floor. When she heard Graham, Geraldine backed out of the pantry, a scarf tied around her hair and an old apron over her housedress. Her eyes were red from crying. She held out a tin of peaches to him. Her hand was shaking.