by Ron Elliott
‘Water if you have any.’ Iris sat, watched Charles limp down into the cluttered cabin. She had meant to ask Detective Pavlovic if the dog walker limped.
Iris closed her eyes a moment to listen to the growl of the forklift and the intermittent throb of boats re-entering the marina. She could hear seagulls, someone hammering on metal. Iris squinted at the interior of Chuck’s cabin, making out plastic storage boxes, clothes, and takeaway food wrappers. A laptop sat open on a table next to a pizza box with an empty whisky bottle. Iris realised she was searching for evidence of electronics, plastic piping, maybe big cylinders marked stolen ether.
Charles came back up to the deck with a bottle of water and a manila file. ‘The tap water is drinkable, not very cold.’ He handed her the bottle, sat in the other director’s chair next to a plastic storage box with an ashtray and an open can of beer in a stubby holder on the lid. He fished about in a cavity along the side of the boat, came up with a cap, which he held out to her. ‘The sun’s got a bit of bite to it.’
The cap said Pro Dive. Iris put it on. ‘Aye aye, captain.’
He squinted at her, looking for the niggle. ‘I’m doing the boat up. It’s going slower than I thought.’
‘How have you gone with past cases?’
‘Jesus. You only put me onto it yesterday!’
‘Yesterday?’ Iris thought about the many things that had happened since she last saw Chuck in the pub near the port. When she tuned back in he was watching her with an expectant smile.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I got some hits on the Passiona.’
‘Where?’
‘I ran a check. They’ve got like a keywords software. They’re entering old cases. Taskforce has analysts and go-fors and computer nerds. It’s still slow, but this is what’s already popped up.’ He patted the manila file on his lap.
‘Can I see?’
‘I’m telling you.’
‘I might be able to see – patterns.’
‘Will you let me lay it out?’ Charles was not giving up the file.
‘Sure.’
‘So, firstly we got a pattern. Early December. The school and two years before, the old people’s home in Riverside and four years ago the backpackers was also in December. I plug December into their software search, we come up with another old people’s home in between the backpackers and the Riverside fire. They put it out, which gives us a list of inventory including unexplained faulty alarms and … a Passiona can.’
‘Any fingerprints?’
‘Being run. We ran Decembers going way back, even smaller fires.’
‘When he was learning.’
‘Like you said. Seeing what he likes, practising. There’s a couple of house fires. The computers are grinding away right now.’
‘Are you working in a team on this now, Chuck?’
‘I’ve got my own remit. Take things as I see them. Bounce stuff off you.’
She asked, ‘Have you met with Detective Pavlovic?’
‘Who?’
‘Young detective. Stuart Pavlovic. He was at the school, interviewing the boy from under the stage.’
Chuck shook his head, impatient. He’d grabbed up the manila folder.
‘What?’ asked Iris.
‘I think we got something else. From earlier still.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know if you remember, about fifteen years ago a nasty shithead was setting fires to young couples. The newspapers called him the Lover’s Lane Pyro.’
‘Yes. It was before I got into profiling.’
‘Yeah, I was still a firey. We used to call him Springsteen because of the song. You know. Dah dah … got a bad desire, oh oh oh, I’m on fire.’
Iris vaguely recalled the incidents. Couples on blankets and in parked cars were splashed with petrol then set alight.
Chuck said, ‘Well, we got a hit on cool drink cans, one of them already looks like it’s a Passiona can.’
‘This is back fifteen years ago.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are the cans in an evidence box still?’
‘We’re looking. If they are we’ll do another fingerprint run with current technology. There’s more. Free set of steak knives. The year before Springsteen, I found another spree by maybe the same baddy.’
Chuck watched Iris’s growing excitement, enjoying himself. ‘Several deros were burned, and the summer before that … December again, a homeless man got burned. The computer is smart when it’s told where to look.’
Iris said, ‘Further back, it would have been animals, burned animals, also disappeared pets.’
‘Not sure they’d be on file.’
‘Merely thinking aloud. Chuck, any witness statements surrounding these various events, especially the Lover’s Lane, Springsteen case?’
‘Should be, we’d have to go find it. The computer spits out matches to lists. There’s no detail unless you go back. The physical evidence is warehoused or destroyed.’
‘I’d like to see the evidence. I’d like to read the witness statements.’
‘You’re asking for a big pile of paper.’
‘He might have been careless when he was starting out. He might have been caught watching, given a statement to the police but been let go, so I might find him in the paperwork.’
‘Like the Nightclub Rapist?’
‘Yes,’ said Iris in surprise. A series of rapes had been committed by a man who pretended to befriend girls leaving nightclubs. His physical description and the particular things he’d said to the girls reminded Iris of a firelighter she interviewed years before. The combination of his cognitive behaviour problems, anger issues with women, as well as his ability to turn on a rough charm caused Iris to contact the police to suggest they look at him for the rapes. Iris said, ‘Of course, the arson wasn’t displaced sexual desire – the sexual crimes and the fire crimes were not causally related, rather, they occurred together in the same offender. His anger and poor problem-solving evinced more than one manifestation.’ Iris stopped speaking. She was quoting herself, from the trial.
Chuck smiled, a little besotted, thought Iris with sudden alarm. She asked, ‘Do you like dogs, Chuck?’
‘I don’t mind them, you know, not enough room for a pet on board.’
‘What’s the name of your boat?’
‘Justine.’
‘Justine?’
‘A mythical woman who is fair. Meaning just, rather than pretty.’
‘Very poetic.’
‘The name came with the boat. I’ve made the rest up.’
‘Have you been living here since the end of your marriage?’
Charles scowled at her, squeezing his fist. It was still a red-button topic for him.
‘Marriage is hard, Chuck. Do you have kids?’
‘Yes. They’ve moved. They call. They send Father’s Day cards. We see each other but it’s a fucking poisoned well, isn’t it?’
‘Your wife made them take sides.’
‘I keep forgetting. You’re a counsellor.’
‘I have a group of firefighters and others who meet once a fortnight. I don’t even go very often myself anymore. They run things. A policewoman. An insurance guy who pulled people from a car wreck. They compare experiences.’
‘I took the end of my career pretty hard. I hit the bottle. Instead of helping, my wife pissed off and took the kids and the house and the friends too. It happens, or haven’t you read that study yet.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I thought we were working together.’
‘Okay. I won’t share my problems, you won’t share yours. Back to work.’
Chuck finished his beer. He pulled the can from the stubby holder, crushed it before dropping it into a big white container with other empties.
‘I’m sorry, Chuck.’
He went into the cabin again to a small fridge. ‘How’s your water?’
‘I can’t hold it like I used to.’
‘What?’
<
br /> ‘It’s good, Chuck.’
He came back with a fresh beer.
Iris said, ‘Have you heard about the ether paper trail?’
‘What paper trail?’ He was still grumpy with her.
‘Apparently, the school bomber, Zorro, got the diethyl ether to a workshop, from the workshop to the school via order forms, delivery people and invoices using computers and phones. All sight unseen.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘He plans meticulously, is highly organised and is pretty smart.’
‘He’d have a workshop.’
‘A workshop. Why?’
‘To prepare stuff. Choose his ignition points. Mostly he tricks up stuff in situ. He rigs up the fault with a selected item, say a toaster or washing machine or urn, so it appears to be the most probable ignition point of an accidental short circuit. It is never a pristine laboratory where we work. If you’re searching for causes in a completely burnt-out building, with melted metal, burn patterns under a fallen roof, hacked up doors from the firefighters, all swimming in ashy water, most investigators would go for it. Most fires are accidental.’
‘So, he’s worked at all those places? He has time, according to you, to turn off the water supply, disable the fire alarms, and block escapes.’
‘Well, half the stuff can be done very easily and quickly if you know what you’re doing.’
‘Is there any way the school could have been a copycat crime, made to look like Zorro?’
‘How? I’m the only one who knew about Zorro, except Zorro. Copy what?’
‘Have you told other firefighters about your theories?’
He took a gulp of beer. ‘It’s not a fireman.’
‘Firefighters have been known to start fires, for …’
‘I know. Wanting to be wanted. No way a firey is going to burn people. No way. Not a chance.’
*
As she walked back to the car, she thought through the many firefighters she had known. She could not imagine even the most broken doing something as calculated and vicious as this. On the other hand, this person was capable of hiding. He, and Iris felt it was a he, had been hiding for fifteen years at least. Was he hiding inside the fire service?
Iris imagined a boy, possibly a young teen, having trouble with his own emerging sexuality. So he spied on it. Punished it. He was struggling with his urges and their expression. Contrary to her own pronouncements, the crimes of fifteen years ago did appear to have a sexual dimension, conflicted with attempts at sublimation.
She didn’t think it was Charles Koch. She would be happy if it was not. She liked his wounded self-confidence. Mind you, his life was in the toilet, to use a phrase he might. His physical health would have to be in the orange zone. A candidate for a heart attack or stroke if the liver didn’t get him. He did not see it that way. His personal narrative trumped reality. Chuck lived on a boat on wild seas while he chased down a criminal he’d been after for years. He was not a washed-up fireman living in a parking lot, he was the Lone Ranger.
Iris pulled off the coast road and drove down to the beach, parking near the ferry jetty where they took daytrippers to the bird sanctuary on an island five hundred metres from shore. She got out of the car, following the path through sand dunes down to the sheltered beach. The island was close. Kayakers and snorkellers floated in the water. She could see people on the island disturbing the sea birds, sending them up and cawing. It was a sanctuary only at night perhaps. A yacht sailed south beyond a break beyond the island.
Iris took off her shoes to feel the sand. She wriggled her bright red toes in the cold water, imagining them as darting fish. She remembered her mother, the particular day when they’d driven to the beach. Bathers, buckets, hats, towels and chatter. They were excited, Iris and her four year old sister, Charlotte, and even her mother, Elsie. Iris could not remember what she’d said wrong that day. She rarely could. Everything warm and happy would suddenly snap cold and silent. As they’d pulled into the parking lot at the beach, Iris had sensed the freeze.
Iris’s hand was on the back car door, when her mother turned, ‘Not you. You can’t come.’
‘Why, Mummy?’
‘You’ve been bad.’
Charlotte spun around in the front seat to stare at Iris with fearful expectancy.
‘What have I done?’
‘You don’t love me.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Charlotte loves me. She’s my good girl.’
‘I’m good.’
‘You only want your father.’
‘I love you too. A lot.’
‘No, you only love him.’
‘I love both of you. Charlotte too.’
‘Charlotte and I are going to have a lovely swim together. You stay here, you bad girl.’
Iris began to cry. She saw her sister watching her with wary fascination, her mother with a mean triumph.
She stopped crying soon after they left. She watched the people who came and went in the carpark. There were people with dogs. There were young men with surfboards, leaving. There were young women in bikinis or long billowy shirts. There were families, tumbling litters of boys and girls and mothers carrying babies and fathers laughing. Only Iris couldn’t hear the laughter. She couldn’t hear anything even though the back window of the car was wound down. She sat in the back of the car, sweating in the rising heat, imagining what was being said, putting together who was who in the coming and going carpark high above the ocean.
She lay on the back seat, watching seagulls in the blue sky and she invented stories. It was good, this hot bubble she lived in. She stared at her feet up on the hand rest of the passenger door. She was in a boat, she drifted on the sea. Near an island. Iris read books. Iris loved books, like her father. She went on a book adventure in the back of the car, exploring the island and bringing peace and prosperity to the dark naked people who lived there.
By the time they returned from the beach, hot, red and sticky with sand and drying salt, Iris was changed. She’d found some strength against her mother’s tantrums. She discovered the foundations of defence against the irrational hatred.
*
Iris shopped on the way home. The bright light in the aisles, perky colours of packaging, soundtrack of music and intermittent store speaker codes comforted her. Iris did not have a list. She was free-floating, following the whims of remembered recipes. It was not very efficient, as she was forced to constantly abandon her trolley to go back through the aisles looking for recalled ingredients.
Iris made a cup of ginger tea while she packed away the shopping. She would make sushi after doing an hour of gardening. She’d use half the salmon for sashimi to have with it. She checked in the fridge, found a tube of wasabi.
Iris went to her home office and opened her laptop. She sent the report on James to Frank without making any additions. Irrespective of her findings about the nature of his trauma and her shocking behaviour, her initial report still stood. He was not the school bomber. She started to imagine him as a fifteen year old riding through the night to a fogged car in a misty forest.
Iris changed back into her shorts and t-shirt. She hung out her whites, smelling the summer air of dry grass and chlorine. She put on a load of coloureds, put on her sunhat and headed for the garage. She caught the scent of the jasmine, faintly sweet, almost sickly, by the side fence.
Mathew’s workshop door was open. Iris looked in at his myriad steel tools, the dusty assortment of model airplanes, the helicopter he’d used to delight Rosemarie and himself. There were unused golf clubs, broken tennis racquets, bike parts and an old valve radio he must have inherited from someone. Men were boys, their whole lives, boys still. Her father had possessed a similarly mysterious shed, forbidden and enticing. Iris shut the door, going to her own gardening bench at the back of the garage. Mathew’s black Audi was parked next to Iris’s Honda. Iris felt the sudden desire to take her pruning shears to the side of it, to make a screech of paint peeling from metal.
>
She headed to the backyard where the jacaranda and the fir tree provided broken shade. Iris started on the bougainvillea, where its new sprouts were attempting to break out from the wall. It was already heavy with rusty orange blooms.
Iris found herself thinking about her mother again and almost immediately saw her father, smiling. Smiling with love, with sadness, with apology but mostly with pride. Nicholas glowed at her achievements, in toileting properly, in learning to walk and talk. He showered her with admiration. At some point, even before Iris could comprehend her own independent mind, her mother conceived of her as a rival. She withheld affection, chided with little reason.
When Iris started school, Elsie began her acts of physical sabotage. Iris would find her homework gone, or water spilled on it or it was given to Charlotte to chew and mangle. Iris tried to appeal to her father for help. ‘Dad, my picture for Mrs Antonio! It’s got food spilled on it.’ Elsie calling, ‘Well, you shouldn’t leave it on the bench. I have food to cook.’ ‘It wasn’t,’ said seven year old Iris. ‘Are you sure you didn’t put it there?’ he asked, home from the hospital, in a crumpled shirt, twisted tie.
Iris recognised her father’s growing panic. Nicholas understood the war but was incapable or unwilling to intercede. He would chide Iris on Elsie’s behalf. He might even punish her at Elsie’s urging. Iris was denied outings, toys, school excursions. Her father would then find secret ways to compensate her, a piece of chocolate or a new book hidden under her pillow. Late at night, Iris listened to her mother’s screams about lovelessness and ingratitude, his weak appeasing.
Grown Iris pruning in the garden tried to imagine the picture she’d have drawn as a child, based on her current understandings of child psychology. How big would the house be? Would a path wind up to the door? She would have drawn her father and herself on one side with the tree and the rainbow, her mother on the other. How big would she have drawn her mother? She imagined the drawing of her father with a smiling face, her mother with no mouth.
Elsie did not have a psychiatric disorder. She would not have qualified for any category listed in the DSM-Four psychiatric handbook. Adult Iris developed theories about her mother’s personality, her uncommon beauty, her poor rural upbringing, Elsie’s tough mother, violent father. How ill-equipped she was for life with a doctor. Whatever Iris’s attempt to reconstruct the formation of Elsie’s social and physical DNA, it always amounted to the same conclusion. Her mother was just plain mean. She was a cow, in the parlance of Elsie’s hometown. She was hard, selfish, determined to keep those around her down at her level.