Back then the area had been mostly factories and stables and fellmongers, knocked up on the sand dunes, and Swann could still smell the salt on the wind, and biscuits baking in the Arnott’s factory nearby. Across the road was the small park that he and the neighbours had planted with tea-tree and peppermint.
He turned off the radio news – a hike in the price of OPEC oil – and listened to the gargling motor. The timing was out. The EK was the first and only car he’d owned and he’d always serviced it himself, although like everything else, that had fallen away of late. He switched off the ignition and heard the whispering of the wattle trees on the verge. Dogs barked, the lights in houses were extinguished. He peered across the passenger side to see if Marion was smoking on the front porch, then slumped back in his seat to wait.
Like most of the houses on the street, his was an ordinary fibro built from a kit. He and his father-in-law had knocked it up in five weeks over summer in ’54. It was too small for their family of five but nobody ever complained. It had a good yard and a long driveway shaded by gum trees. The place was still home to Marion and Sarah and Blonny. The two youngest daughters shared a room; Louise’s sleepout at the rear was waiting for her return.
At the sight of the family cat perched on top of a driveway pillar, Swann pushed open the driver’s door. Charley came to him, sniffing cautiously around his feet before climbing onto his lap, padding and kissing his thighs with his claws, purring with his best captive expression, pushing a wet chin under Swann’s shirt.
Louise had named Charley when he appeared one night, a stray from the local quarry. They found him sitting on the wing mirror of the Holden, a kitten with big yellow eyes and ribs showing through his chest. Now he was a fat old boy with a dribbling mouth and legs that shivered when he walked.
Swann lit a cigarette and rolled the window down further for Charley’s benefit. He looked across at the park, now dark and quiet. By day it was full of children and dogs. The first time Louise ran away she had hidden there, so deeply in the lantana that he and Marion didn’t see her, even though it was the first place they looked. He could still taste the panic he’d felt that day, as afternoon faded to dusk and Louise still hadn’t been found. The whole neighbourhood was out searching for her; his colleagues from the station turned up in patrol cars and on bicycles. Marion’s father set up a base of operations from his kitchen table. At his word, drinkers walked out of the local pubs and were put to the task.
By the time the sun went down, it had felt to Swann like he was losing his mind. Marion’s face was so pale and her eyes so wide that he was frightened to look at her. Swann had been involved with missing children before but this was different. He had carried a drowned boy off the Point Walter sandspit to his waiting parents, but that was what it meant to be a policeman. This was what it meant to be a father. To feel a love so ferocious that he would follow her wherever she’d gone.
Louise had crawled out of her hideout just after sunset and wandered into the yard, rubbing her eyes. He could see that she was angry with him. She stood there with her hands on her hips and her mouth set and her dark eyes swollen with tiredness. She was four years old. Swann swept her up and burst into tears. He shouted at her and held her tight against his chest.
His love for her, his firstborn, had been pure from the moment she was handed to him, swaddled in a hospital towel. From that day, everything he did was for her, for his family. Everything, that is, until he met Helen.
Parked in front of his family home, he saw again the look on Louise’s face when she discovered that he and Helen were lovers. Her eyes flaring and her mouth opening – but too angry to speak. It was only later that Helen had told him about Louise’s feelings for her; she had got to know Louise as her Police and Citizens volleyball coach. She showed him the letters Louise had written, although they too had stopped the day she ran away, the day Swann broke it off with Helen, and none of them had heard anything since.
He gave the letters to Marion before setting out to find Louise. He had no idea what had happened to them. Marion had never mentioned them again and neither had he.
All that mattered was finding Louise.
The front door opened and Marion came out onto the porch, holding two glasses and an ashtray. Swann picked Charley off his lap and carried him up the drive. He put him down on the porch and embraced his wife, all the awkwardness and embarrassment still there. It was dark but the moonlight was strong. Marion usually kept her hair short but hadn’t cut it since Louise had left; now she wore it in a ponytail like Sarah and Blonny. She wore a long-sleeved cotton work shirt with cut-off denim shorts and bare feet. Her normally tanned legs were pale.
She sat down on the old wicker chair, which creaked when she leaned across to pass him his glass of rum. He lit a cigarette and passed it to her, lit another for himself.
‘Kids?’ he asked quietly.
‘Blonny’s been going out a lot with friends, Sarah’s spending most of her time reading in bed. You?’
Swann shrugged. In the grey darkness Marion looked much like she had when he met her twenty-two years ago. He remembered how good she’d looked dressed up to go dancing, and she still had that way about her. He felt a stab of desire that didn’t go anywhere. They were talking again, but whatever intimacy they’d had was gone for now. Louise’s disappearance had made his affair seem even more pointless and stupid than it already was. Her prolonged absence had taken the joy out of everything.
‘Here’s my pay, minus what I need.’
He handed over an envelope and she took it and placed it on the bench beside her rum. Charley rolled onto his back and offered his stomach for scratching. Swann leant down and rubbed his fingers through the ragged fur and the cat began to purr loudly, in competition with the croaking of the motorbike frogs in the neighbour’s pond.
‘He misses you,’ Marion said, as she did whenever he visited.
Out of habit she began to tell him about her day, the way she had every night since he started work as a policeman. Missing from her story was the fact that those of her friends who were also married to policemen had stopped talking to her, because her husband had turned on his own. That was the code; her father had been a detective and she had been brought up with it.
Some of those policemen’s wives got told little by their husbands, either because they couldn’t be trusted not to pass things on or because they couldn’t handle the truth. It had never been like that with Marion – Swann had always been able to talk to her about his job, and her advice was always good. She knew how much he loved being a policeman, and what was likely to happen once the royal commission was over. She had never complained about the difficulty of her life, or her fears for him, and Swann was reminded again that the only good parts of himself had come from her, and from her father.
It was because Detective Sergeant George Monroe was a policeman that Swann and Marion had grown up in the same suburb without meeting. From an early age Swann worked his way around the bars in the West End. During the Second World War, Fremantle was the largest naval base in the Southern Hemisphere, and a good source of pocket money. As a child of seven and eight, Swann had conned drunk Yanks and run errands for merchant sailors. He worked as a go-between for his stepfather, delivering money and liquor and taking messages to ships. Years later he took over a newspaper concession by beating a kid in a fight, put up to it by Brian. He would stand beside his mound of papers until late at night and for a fee direct sailors and visitors to prostitutes who worked nearby. He told them where after-hours drinks and French letters could be bought.
One day, Detective Sergeant Monroe stopped to buy a newspaper. Swann knew who he was because it was necessary for him to know all the jacks, but he had never seen his daughter before. He hadn’t been brought up to be friendly to coppers but he was sixteen and cocky and good-looking, and so was Marion. He could see from the way she looked at him that she liked him, despite his black eye and bodgie style, and he’d asked around and got the name of her s
ecretarial school; had waited for her one day in his best jeans and drape coat and bootlace tie, and asked her out. Before long they were going dancing regularly, the rock‘n‘roll scene in full swing at that time. Marion was even wilder than he was.
At first he avoided her father, assuming he wouldn’t be accepted, with his teenage history of fighting for small stakes, and his stepfather an occasional crim and a bad drunk with a reputation for hating police. But to his surprise, George Monroe saw something in him that nobody else had, even encouraged him to join the force. In contrast with his stepfather, Monroe was a man Swann could admire. He was tough but not mean, fair but not weak – everything Brian wasn’t.
Swann would sit at George Monroe’s kitchen table sharing a beer, despite being under-age, and from that vantage point, being a cop looked pretty good. It would sure draw a line under his old life, rub Brian’s nose in it. He was sick of being angry. Perhaps it was time to put what he had to some good use. He knew he could do the job, handle the knocks and still deal with people straight. He was in love with Marion and wanted to be like her father. Being around them made him want to do better. Becoming a copper wasn’t going to earn him any friends, but at the same time he would never be on the outside.
On the day Swann was made a detective, his father-in-law told him that now would begin his test of character. The purple circle would be watching, and if he wanted to advance quickly he’d have to earn their trust, but if he wanted to come up straight then he needed to keep out of their way. And if he was told to do something he really didn’t want to, he was to come and tell George.
But it had never been necessary. Swann was never asked to do anything beyond act as driver and bagman on a few occasions, and he’d always assumed that this was due to his father-in-law’s influence. He’d never been ordered to go the bash on a civilian witness, or remove evidence from the lock-up safe, or warn a crim of an upcoming raid, or salt the mine and plant evidence, or coerce a guilty plea out of an innocent man. He had taken George’s advice and kept his nose clean, and the purple circle left him pretty much alone. The same couldn’t be said for Donald Casey, and plenty of the others he’d known in the academy. Even when the two of them had been partners, and long before they’d fallen out, Casey had been protected when he slipped up.
Marion knew Casey well from their days in Kalgoorlie, and while Swann brought her up to date on the royal commission he could see the concern surface in her eyes. From a young age she’d known about the ruthlessness of cops like Casey, and that nothing could be done about it.
‘Dad?’
Sarah was standing behind the screen door, looking out. He waved her onto the porch and she came and sat beside him on the bench. She was in her pyjama shorts and smelt of Nivea. He put his arm around her and kissed her ear and she laid her head on his shoulder. He wanted more than anything to be at home with his daughters, but if the bastards were going to come at him, he wanted it to be well away from his family.
On the floor beneath them the cat sat to attention and listened to something scratch in the darkness. Marion sat back in her chair and tucked her feet up under her buttocks, staring down at Charley as she sipped her rum. Sarah put her toe gently into the cat’s soft belly and rubbed the tanned skin on Swann’s forearm. He gazed at the grey moonlit boards and the cat playing mouse with his daughter’s foot, and despite all his numbness felt the love of those who remained.
Back at the phone box on the docks, Swann put in a call to Reggie. Across the carpark a diesel tanker was berthed, rusty flank looming and generator thudding in its cavernous belly. Swann glanced at his watch as Reggie picked up. Just gone midnight.
‘Learn anything around town?’ he asked.
‘Plenty of money being splashed about but it’s all nudge nudge when I walk up. Wasn’t even allowed into the Perth Club, can you believe that? My father and grandfather were secretary and president. Whatever the definition of a gentleman is, apparently I’m no longer it. What about you?’
‘Cooper knows something. Pretty sure he believed me. We’ll know for certain if he gets back to us. Thought I might go over and check on Jacky at her motel.’
‘Good idea. Stay in touch, I won’t be sleeping.’
Swann hung up and wandered over to his car. Ignition on, he put both hands on the wheel and closed his stinging eyes. Tipped his head back and opened them again. Got sick of staring at the roof lining and poured himself a cap of whiskey to get him back on the road.
Jacky’s motel wasn’t a smart choice: Vic Park was too close to town. She’d registered under a false name but it wouldn’t take half an hour to track her down if word got out. Swann parked next to a bricked bin enclosure under a spray of purple bougainvillea. From here he had a clear view of her ground-floor room. After a scout around to make sure there were no footprints in the garden bed outside her window, no lights taken out in the access corridors, no doors ajar or windows open in the rooms opposite hers, he settled back on the Holden’s bench seat. He tilted the rear-vision mirror to cover his vulnerable side and lit a cigarette.
Once again he had to watch and wait. Shallow sleep if he could manage it, sitting upright. It didn’t pay to get too comfortable. He’d trained himself to wake at the slightest noise, to feel the darkness like a child feels it, as a thing alive. When they came at him they’d want to make it look like suicide. No comeback on that one. No great surprise to anyone either, considering that he was supposed to be mad.
But they wouldn’t get him without a fight.
Swann had seen how fear could eat at a man until he was grateful to be captured, thankful not to have to endure himself any longer. It was what Casey would be counting on. Casey and his surrogate sons. The games they played with him, the petty humiliations.
He took another sip of whiskey, pacing himself. The moon cast a silver light over the motel walls. These were the worst hours, between now and dawn. There was whiskey enough to see him through, if he took it slowly, but he knew that wasn’t going to work this time. Without thinking he went out into the pale glow.
Jacky’s voice behind her door was assertive but bitten with fear. He followed her inside, where the small television was tuned to the test pattern – a close-up of Humphrey B. Bear and two blond children smiling.
‘You must be lonely too, Jacky?’
She looked at the TV and grinned. ‘Nah, fell asleep during the late show, a rerun of Division 4. Still can’t believe they axed that show.’
‘Always preferred Homicide myself. But I never got that guy Humphrey. Fella lacks pants, for a start.’
‘You want a cuppa?’
Swann held up the whiskey bottle. ‘No thanks. Join me?’
She pointed with her chin to the coffee table, where her works were all laid out – needle, saucer, cotton balls. ‘You trying to kill me, detective?’
‘Not something my generation knows a lot about, is it?’
‘Fair enough.’
Seating herself cross-legged before the table, she waved him towards the couch. ‘You mind?’ she asked, without looking up or hesitating.
‘None of my business.’
‘Couldn’t handle it out there in the car, eh? Can’t say I blame you. Moonlight always freaks me, for some reason. City girl, I guess.’
She tipped the powder into the saucer, followed it with a splash of water from the syringe. Swann fought to keep his mouth shut as he watched. Jacky was hardly older than Louise but she looked all worn out.
‘Aren’t you supposed to heat that on a spoon, make sure it dissolves?’
Her fixed stare of concentration didn’t alter as she rubbed the mix with the black end of the plunger. Only when she’d finished did she answer. ‘Nah, that shit’s just for the movies.’
She slipped a dampened piece of cotton onto the saucer and moved it around, put the plunger back into the syringe and drew the liquid up through the cotton. Tilted it and flicked it and gave it a little spray.
Swann looked away while she worked the needle in
to a vein on the back of her wrist, turned to see her draw a plume of blood and send it back in.
‘How many times a day you do that?’
She ignored him, chin on her chest, inhaling deeply, trying to keep some oxygen in her blood. Her eyes were closed and her head was bowed; she looked like she was praying.
Then she jerked upright. ‘Depends,’ she answered finally, her voice a slow drawl. ‘It’s medicine to me, nothin’ else. Got any kind of pain, Lady Hammer’s gonna take it away.’
‘Lady Hammer, eh? She any relation to the Grim Reaper?’
‘Nah, Swann. Not like that. What I’ve got right here and now, it’s not pleasure, just no pain.’
With her close-cropped hair like a boy’s, her rounded shoulders and muscled arms, no fat on her at all, Jacky could look harsh, but she was softened now, slumped over like a melting candle. Suddenly her eyes opened, and stayed open, brought to life by something that had cut through. She looked him right in the eye and he saw tears welling. ‘Who am I kidding, though? About no pain …’
He couldn’t hold her gaze, stared instead into his drink. ‘Yeah, it never goes. Nights like this I can’t sleep, can’t think, can’t even get drunk.’
He felt like a fool for doing it but he toasted her with his whiskey bottle. Took another long draw.
‘Must be even harder for you.’ Her eyes were still on him, searching for insincerity, signs of betrayal. Suspicious like a vulnerable kid.
‘Hard for both of us.’
‘I ran away from my father when I was even younger than your daughter. Thirteen I was. Didn’t think anything of it at the time. Looking back, I can’t believe I did that to him. Can’t believe I felt nothing about doing it, either. Now it’s too fucken late.’
Swann saw the misery there, some of the childhood pain she was trying to step on, and it caught in his throat. He tried to think of something to say to her, something a father might say. The expression on her face changed and he realised he’d been staring at her, seeing Louise.
Line of Sight Page 8