Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  There was one more article that caught my attention. It was a small piece on a yachting blog that noted Damford’s purchase of a very slick speed cruiser, navy blue, The Eel. I liked the name of the boat. I thought it suited the guy perfectly. There was a picture of Damford shaking hands awkwardly with the previous owner, his face turned away from the camera. I didn’t know anything about boats. Idly, I copied the name of the boat and its type and punched them into the search engine, just messing around now, my search over.

  The old advertisement for the boat was still up on the yacht broker’s website. Jersey Boat Sales had listed the vessel for $79,999. A big red SOLD banner was plastered proudly over the image of the low, sharp boat.

  That was an awful lot of play money for a constable. I went back to the original photograph of Damford and the boat-seller, the half-grip handshake and the back quarter of the man’s face, all I could see as he seemed to reactively cower from the lens as the flash burst.

  It took about six hours to clean the house after the officers had left. They’d done a solid job of destroying my things, but I also went overboard trying to remove the stain of their actions from the house and thus cleanse my own psyche. I even took the untouched plates and cups down from the shelves and gave them a going over in the sink. I had to know that some surfaces, particularly those I ate from and slept in, were newly clean.

  Sean emailed me while I was re-hanging the door to tell me Kelly wasn’t up for any sort of physical custody of Lillian, as expected, but she had sent through a bunch of photographs of my child as a kind of piecemeal gesture to keep me quiet. I knelt down on the floor in the hall and opened the attachment, and there, sitting at my old kitchen table – the one we’d purchased on an abysmal trip to Ikea as a new couple – was my infant daughter. I wasn’t ready for how old she looked. She had enough hair now for a tiny jet-black ponytail. She was grinning, and in her open mouth I saw what I thought might have been the beginnings of a tooth. I zoomed in on the photograph and felt my face break into a wide smile. Her first tooth.

  There was a knock at the door. I was so lost in my grief that I pulled it open before I’d arranged my face. Fabiana got a full-frontal glimpse of my downturned mouth and wet eyes before I realised what I’d done and turned away, swiped at my cheeks.

  ‘Are you … okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s bleach. I’m using bleach.’ I walked away from her as fast as I could. I felt my back teeth grind together as her heels sounded on the hall floorboards.

  ‘That wasn’t an invitation to come in,’ I called, taking refuge at the kitchen window.

  ‘Well you should have shut the door, then.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have had enough doors slammed in your face to know when the intention is there, Fab.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Bad news?’

  ‘No.’ I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. ‘Everything’s fine. Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘Coffee?’ she said.

  ‘I’m out.’

  ‘Tea, then.’

  ‘I’m outta that, too.’

  ‘Look, I didn’t come here to harass you, Ted. I come in peace today.’

  ‘I don’t care what you come in.’ I thrust open the cupboard doors. ‘I’m out of tea and coffee. I had … visitors. They … used … everything.’

  She looked at the shelf where Hench or his miscreant partner had aimed his sweeping arm at all the glass he could find, taking out the olive oil, some tomato sauce and the bachelor’s liquid gold – a bottle of soy sauce. Her eyes fell to the very bottom shelf, where I’d lined up a couple of bottles of cheap wine.

  When I asked myself what the hell I was doing sitting down on my back steps with this woman and some wine, I wondered if it was just that Hench and Damford’s earlier attack had stripped the resistance from me. Those animals in uniform, or the vigilantes who came in the night, or the inevitability of the news that I was floating around in the town’s bloodstream like a malignant cell spreading – one of them, all of them, had broken any resolve I’d mustered since leaving prison. But I had to admit, also, that there was something about Fabiana herself that intrigued me, if only that the rage I felt around her was something new to feel, something different to the quiet terror that had been my only friend since my arrest. There was something familiar about this kind of hurt. I remembered it from my time inside. Felt comfortably enveloped by it, like the fence at the bottom of the property.

  ‘Do you get crocs here?’ She motioned to the cyclone fencing in the distance as though she’d read my mind. The fading sunlight caught the red of the wine in her glass and some of the same colour woven into her dark hair, making her seem almost witch-like, a fire beauty. I looked away.

  ‘I haven’t seen any. But I hear them barking. Growling.’

  She hardly seemed to be listening.

  ‘Why don’t you take me through that day, Ted?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That day. Why don’t we talk about it?’

  The anger turned, rolled.

  ‘Because I don’t have to,’ I said, almost sneered. ‘I don’t have to do anything, Fabiana. I didn’t have to let you in here. In fact, I don’t know why I did. I think I might be going nuts. I’m tired. I’m tired of all of this.’

  ‘Just give up, then,’ she said. ‘Stop hiding. Stop running. Tell me everything.’

  ‘I’d be wasting my time with you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ She shrugged, rubbed her knees uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know if you’re wasting it with me anymore.’

  She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who was frequently lost for words. And yet she was struggling before me, unsure where to look.

  ‘You mean you might actually be coming around to the idea that I’m telling the truth?’ I scoffed. ‘I thought you said you worked for the Herald.’

  ‘I’ve been looking into the case,’ she said. ‘Really looking into it. I listened to that woman, Valerie, when she gave me an earful about you and told me to check out your arrest photographs. How there wasn’t a nick on you, and her theory about defensive wounds. I have to admit that some things about the case don’t make any sense. She told me to go and investigate a man named Trevor Fuller.’

  ‘The silent witness.’ I leaned back against the sun-warmed porch. It was so like Valerie to be right on the money like that. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to find much on him.’

  ‘There isn’t much.’ I sipped my wine. ‘Not under “Fuller” anyway. He has a couple of previous names, but after the trial he changed it again. Homeless people are always changing their names, trying to stay fresh in the police records every time they’re arrested. During the trial he was Trevor Finch. But he was never called to the stand. We didn’t get that far before they ruled no billing. His evidence was never heard.’

  ‘What did Trevor know about you?’ Fabiana asked.

  ‘It’s not what he knew, it’s what he saw,’ I sighed. I was sinking. Being drawn down deep into the bowels of my recollections of that day, into the miles and miles of police reports, into the hours and hours of interrogation video in which I tried to account for every second of that day, before, during, and after that awful moment when I laid eyes on Claire Bingley by the side of the road, not having any idea how very bad ever doing so was going to be for me.

  Tick, tick, tick. The seconds going by.

  12.47 pm. Marilyn Hope and Sally Hope drive past, seeing my car turn and stop suddenly in the bus stop.

  12.48 pm. Gary Fisher drives past, seeing me with the back passenger door open.

  12.48 pm. Michael Lee-Reynolds drives past, seeing me with the back passenger door open, my body half in, half out of the vehicle as I mess around in the back seat.

  12.49 pm. Jessica and Diana Harper drive past, seeing me talking to Claire Bingley.

  12.50 pm. Two more carloads of witnesses see me wave at the girl.

&n
bsp; ‘And then what?’ Fabiana was saying. I was sweating, wiping my palms on my damp forehead, trying to stop it dripping in my eyes. There was no sign of a storm on the mountains, meaning tomorrow’s would be big, the land humidity-choked and gasping.

  ‘Twelve-fifty, I drove off,’ I said. ‘I took the highway to the 7-Eleven, about twelve minutes up the road, and I bought bait.’

  ‘There were no cameras inside that service station,’ Fabiana said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It had only just become a 7-Eleven.’ I rubbed my eyes. I was so tired of telling these stories. ‘Before that, it had just been a privately owned station. The 7-Eleven was planning to refurbish it and add cameras to the interior. They had cameras on the outside of the building.’

  ‘Why didn’t your purchase of bait show up on the sales for the day?’

  It was difficult not to scream that I’d answered these questions a hundred times already. Once I’d bitten back the sound, I eased air through my teeth.

  ‘The guy’s EFTPOS system was down,’ I said. ‘I took a bottle of water and the bait to the counter. I had a five dollar note for the water, but not enough for it and the bait. I asked to pay on EFTPOS, and the guy told me it wasn’t working. He looked at the note in my hand and said not to worry about paying for the bait. Just to take it.’

  ‘That seems unusual to me,’ Fabiana said carefully. ‘7-Eleven is a big chain company. You’d think every item would be accounted for, leaving underling employees like that guy unable to just give stuff away.’

  ‘The bait was a couple of bucks. And he didn’t seem too interested in the job, if I’m honest. Pretty disinterested in life in general. Maybe the takings hadn’t switched over to the big chain yet. Maybe this guy was leftover from when the station was privately owned, and he was used to doing things like that. I don’t know. We never got to cross-examine him.’

  ‘So you buy the water and get the bait. So far, you’re invisible. Your purchases don’t show up, and the guy doesn’t remember you. He’s disinterested.’

  ‘There was a phone call, I think.’ I frowned. ‘In the middle of all this. While I was being served. He was distracted.’

  ‘Distracted and disinterested,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And accustomed to giving away small stuff. The guy doesn’t ring the purchase in, which accounts for why it’s not on the takings for the day.’

  ‘No, he just took the cash.’

  ‘So why didn’t you show up on the exterior CCTV?’

  I smirked ruefully. ‘Because I walked in and walked out through the camera’s blind spots.’

  Fabiana stared at me. I knew how this sounded. I’d known how it sounded from the very start. As far-fetched as they came. But that was the story. I couldn’t change it.

  ‘The CCTV cameras covered the petrol pumps,’ I said, demonstrating with my hands. ‘They pointed straight out from the roof of the building. I parked around the side of the building and walked in underneath them. The road leading up to the petrol station curves away sharply from the driveway. So you don’t see me. At all.’

  ‘That’s incredibly unlucky,’ she said, trying to swallow her scepticism.

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  ‘So you park and go into the store, and Trevor Fuller comes in after you?’ She turned towards me, seemed to scooch a little closer.

  ‘No, he never entered the store,’ I said. ‘He was hanging around outside. I don’t know what he was doing. He might have been going through the bins there for food. They throw out a lot of outdated stuff from the convection ovens. He did appear on the cameras briefly, wandering around.’

  ‘Trevor Fuller is long-term homeless. He had a couple of drug arrests back in the nineties under his various other names, and was treated at a psychiatric clinic in Kings Cross in 2009.’

  ‘Yep. Hence me being completely unable to use him as a witness at trial, even if the whole thing hadn’t have fallen apart before I could have,’ I sighed. ‘I have one witness in the whole world who proves me innocent. And he’s a fucking homeless loon.’

  I sculled the rest of my wine and poured myself more. When I offered her some, she refused.

  ‘What exactly did Trevor Fuller say he saw?’

  ‘He told police he saw me. I came around the corner on him really quick and he thought I was going to jump him, he said. He remembered me when he saw me on the news at a homeless shelter.’

  ‘Did he see your car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he see into your car?’

  I paused, watching her.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What? So he doesn’t see that Claire Bingley’s not in there, tied up on the back seat or something?’

  ‘I never said “tied up”.’

  ‘Stop.’ I found my fist clenched against my forehead. ‘Just stop. I don’t know why we’re talking like this. It always ends up the same way.’

  We sat in a painful silence for a minute or so. She wanted to speak a couple of times, but before the sound could come from her lips she settled back again and turned away from me. I felt the flames licking up my insides.

  ‘I like the Trevor Fuller line of inquiry,’ I said. ‘Okay? I like the feeling that I almost had a witness. That I almost had someone who could save me. You going and saying that even if he was the best, most credible witness in the country, it doesn’t mean anything because he didn’t see into the back of the car – that just ruins my day, all right? And it’s been pretty shitty already so far.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she said. I was surprised by it. I shuffled on the step.

  ‘You left the bus stop at twelve-fifty,’ Fabiana continued after a time, looking at my eyes. ‘Claire was gone, vanished, when her bus drove past two minutes later.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What if the times are wrong?’ Fabiana said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The first witness, Sally Hope, said it was twelve-forty-seven exactly when her mum drove past you,’ Fabiana said. ‘Sally reported that she remembered the exact time because she glanced at the clock in the car and calculated that they had thirteen minutes to get to her dance lesson. But what if she was wrong? But what if the clock in their car was off? And what if the bus’s clock was out, too? Let’s say that, across the twelve witnesses who account for your activity at the bus stop, they’re all a little bit out. We can double the time, if you like, say the time between you leaving and Claire being gone was four minutes, not two.’

  ‘Okay.’ I shrugged. ‘So what?’

  ‘It means that he was there,’ Fabiana said. ‘It means he was no more than four minutes from that very spot when you got into your car and drove away. Minus from that the time it takes to get out of the car, walk up and grab the girl. Put her in his car, get back in. There’s not a lot of time. He was nearby – very nearby – when you were there.’

  ‘Four minutes. He could have driven up, seen her and grabbed her in that time,’ I said. ‘Or –’

  ‘Or he was already there, watching, when you arrived,’ she said. ‘He might have been about to pounce. He might have paused when you turned up so suddenly and unexpectedly. And when you moved on …’

  The sweat had spread across my shoulder blades. I felt a trickle running down my spine.

  ‘What do you remember about that moment? The minutes before?’ she asked. ‘Did you see anything? Hear anything? Do you remember any other cars parked nearby?’

  I looked at the mountains. It was too much, all of it. I needed to finish it now. I stood and took the bottle from the porch, signifying the end of our conversation.

  ‘Only her,’ I said. ‘All I remember is the girl.’

  Fresh sheets usually put me right to sleep. But there was no sleeping after Fabiana left. The shrill seconds before I’d arrived at the bus stop played over and over in my mind as I lay in the dark.

  I’d been thinking about the fight with Kelly. Arguing with her in my mind, the
turning circle of blame always coming back to me, because she’d just had a baby and was slowly going out of her mind. No one in the house had been sleeping. I’d been clumsy on the job with exhaustion, filling in forms wrong, getting perps mixed up. On my days off I slept too much and didn’t contribute around the household. Didn’t hold her enough. Didn’t talk to her enough.

  At midnight I got up and dressed, checked on the sleeping geese and went out the front door. The cane field was alive with creatures fluttering and buzzing in the moonlight, a good helping of tiny winged things inspecting me, drawn in by my body heat, as I stood at the roadside looking. I went to the low brick wall at the front of the house and sat there listening to the sounds of the night, a truck’s horn on a distant highway and the noise of night birds in the rainforest further down the road. The air was still thick with humidity, and a light sweat began at my temples.

  It was an hour before I saw lights on the road. I crept behind the wall and crouched, watched as the lights went out just a hundred metres from where I hid. The vigilantes. The ridiculous hope I’d held that they might arrive flourished in my chest, and I was almost smiling as the car rolled past, gravel and dirt crumbling under its tyres. Datsun Bluebird, grey. There were four or five figures inside. The car rolled past without stopping, trying to see if all the lights were out. They were.

  As the car moved on to turn around before the forest, I crept out from behind the wall and shuffled into the dark by a bush, my skin alive now and ticking with my heartbeat. The car returned, faster this time, rolling as fast as a man might jog. I saw the back passenger window roll down, the one behind the driver, and I rose to my feet as a girl leaned out the window.

  ‘Kiddie fucker!’ she screamed, and lit the fuse of a glowing red firecracker. Her face was lit candy-pink by the flames as she hurled the rocket towards my front porch. I recognised her.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled. I had no real plan, and my lack of preparation showed when the car swerved back onto the road and headed straight for me. ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’