Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Kish!” he shouted. “Merridy!” and stumbled into the corridor, a channel of shattered glass in which there floated splinters of Huon pine and bits of fluff. He ran into his bedroom and cried out. As for the wardrobe. Both doors wrenched from their hinges and the oak struts gaping open and raw-coloured as if something had exploded with terrific force.

  It was easy to follow Kish’s path. He had destroyed the house to look like something he knew. He had slashed the sheets and then the samplers. He had next gone into the kitchen and flung the red sauce over the walls and the cappuccino-maker on the floor and the cake down the sink. His ankles trailing coloured strands of ancient wools and letters all jumbled up, he had marched down the corridor to her study and hurled the bottles to the floor. With the exception of the Otago, which Tildy would discover next morning in the middle of the school playground, he had trampled to pieces each and every model ship. In his fury, he had then ripped up the photograph of Hector on the beach. He had wrenched open the cassette of Saucy Sally Sees it Through. He had taken a bottle of ink and spilled it over the scrapbooks and mud-maps. He had seized Merridy’s favourite fountain pen and screwed it into the pages of the novel she was rereading until the nib crossed. In the living room he had snatched the cockatoo from the wall and when Rusty barked at him hurled the lithograph into the fireplace. Only then did he run from the house.

  How long Alex sat in the chair by the fire, stroking the puppy that had crawled quivering onto his lap, he had no idea. Kish had gone out of his way to obliterate everything that Alex held most dear, and he waited for his body to make a commensurate response. But–peculiarly–no anger came. Alex’s instinct told him that he ought to be crushed by the devastation. Instead, he was overcome by what he could only name as a great inner relief. He was conscious of his chest rising and falling, of the distant boom of the waves, of a devil or a possum screeching on the lawn. He could taste the vanilla scent of some herb or plant–a wattle, perhaps–in the air. He breathed in, feeling not anger but on the contrary a deep and authentic peace, as if a barrier which had not, until that evening, been visible to him had been removed. Under his caressing hand, Rusty snored.

  Sometime later, Alex returned to the kitchen and began to clean up. Among the glass shards was a piece of paper all scrunched up. He unfolded it, and was reading the words when the sound of a vehicle brought him to the window.

  The car skewed to a halt at a distance from the house. He watched a figure climb out and the small dot growing taller and taller up the drive. Against the white gravel, the cornflower dress looked ashamed.

  Merridy stepped into the cast of the bright neon light and tugged open the door and then the fly-screen.

  “Alex,” she greeted him.

  He could see from her eye that something had changed. “Kish has gone.”

  “Kish?” She went red.

  “He’s disappeared.” And waited for her to explain. He so much wanted to trust her. Maybe there was an explanation.

  “What’s that?” She did not seem so much interested in Kish. She did not seem to have taken in the destruction. Her eyes anchoring on the scrap of paper that he held in his hand.

  “This? Oh, a note I once wrote you.” The only message he had ever written her. In a hand that did not know the storm or Kish. For years now, he had stored it under the Otago, in the same bottle. Kish must have shaken it out.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. What was he talking about? She could not remember.

  “I forgot that I tucked it inside,” he said numbly. All the excitement he had felt on the journey, all the sensations of release, had dissolved into this hollow feeling.

  She scratched the side of her leg. There was something hectic in her eye. “You’re back early, aren’t you? Weren’t you staying tonight in Alexandria?”

  “I was looking for you. I thought you might be in the shed.” He folded the piece of paper and put it away in his hip pocket.

  “No, I was in the hotel with Tildy. Oh, my God! What’s this? What’s happened, Alex?” in an altered voice.

  Now he remembered. “Listen, there’s something important I have to tell you. Or have you heard?” She looked like someone who had heard something pretty awful.

  “My God. What’s gone on?” absorbing the mess on the walls, the floor, where contents from her pan had congealed and stuck.

  “They’ve discovered your brother’s body.”

  He took it from his jacket and, after brushing away several bits of glass, laid it flat, a page from the Advocate.

  “Read this,” he said.

  And Merridy who thought she heard a cockatoo’s cry, read that the high seas during the recent storm had crumbled a cliff west of Wynyard, exposing a cave that contained the bones of a young child.

  She was leaning on the table.

  “Hector,” she said.

  “It looks like it. I’m so sorry, love.”

  They had come together over the newspaper article.

  “How do they know?”

  There was the picture of a cliff and a cave. They were looking at it.

  “They found a shoe. A Blundstone.”

  Often, when they argued, her face had a twisted look. But never this expression.

  Unimaginable: in that cave, there all the time he was.

  “I thought maybe he was alive still,” she choked.

  They were reading the article again.

  “No,” said Alex. He wanted to do or say something comforting. But he carried on reading. It had seemed so important that he tell her in person.

  A considerable sensation has lately been produced in Wynyard by the discovery of a human skeleton under circumstances which leave no doubt that it is the bones of a child who has been missing for thirty-one years from that neighbourhood. A post-mortem will take place on Tuesday.

  For some years it was believed that seven-year-old Hector Bowman was abducted or murdered. An investigation into all circumstances connected with the boy and with his habits of life followed. Dead men tell no tales. It is often remarked that at some time or other every murder that is committed is certain to be brought to light. But it seems that this tragic death did not come about by murder. Rather, it was the result of a young and innocent lad following his nose and getting lost.

  On the facing page a lawnmower had been stolen from a shed in North Motton.

  She looked outside. The light from the kitchen blotted out the stars.

  “I wonder where Kish is,” she murmured absently.

  The silence was broken by the telephone ringing.

  At last, Alex crossed the room and answered. He listened, nodding. “Yeah, she’s right here,” and handed Merridy the receiver. “It’s your Aunt Doss. She says she’s been trying to get hold of you for the past two days.”

  PART V

  Melbourne, April 2005; Moulting Lagoon Farm, April–May 2005

  CHAPTER ONE

  MERRIDY LABOURED UP THE front steps of the grand bluestone house and pressed a bell near a little grate. She stepped back, catching her breath. There were scratch marks on the cinnamon-coloured door.

  “Ashfield” lay ninety miles north-east of Melbourne. A white-haired man with some effort dragged a roller up and down the lawn, and beyond the high wrought-iron gate stretched bleak flat open fields with sheep and Friesians and young horses.

  The door was opened by an oldish, angular woman. Large sunglasses, loose-fitting jeans, a man’s pink shirt. She had on an apron and a little dot of something floury was caught in her nostril.

  “Mrs Anselm?”

  “Mrs Dove?”

  Merridy registered the tentativeness with which each took hold of the other’s hand.

  “But where’s your car?” looking over Merridy’s shoulder.

  “I told the taxi to come back at five. There’s a train at twenty past.”

  “A taxi! That will cost you…”

  There was a whimpering sound. A black labrador with a hairless patch on its throat that framed a visible scar squeez
ed past and investigated Merridy through nervous eyes.

  Merridy left her coat in a hallway adjoining the stairs and followed Mrs Anselm and the dog through the living room. Tall-ceilinged with cane furniture and expensive-looking modern paintings. On an upright piano, their likenesses framed in tendrils of silver, were arranged photographs.

  “That’s him,” said Mrs Anselm in a Teutonic accent. She picked up a silver frame and smiled at it. “That’s Daniel.”

  Mrs Anselm was an Austrian who had come to Melbourne after the Second World War. She had worked in a shop, selling children’s shoes, and as a freelance reader for a small publisher, and finally as a secretary for a psychologist, in whose clinic she had met her architect husband. He had been building a recital hall in St Kilda. He had invited her to visit the work in progress.

  “He asked me to marry him three weeks later. Three weeks.”

  Merridy saw by the texture of her white skin that Mrs Anselm might have been quite beautiful.

  “You must have loved him immediately.”

  “Oh no, not immediately.”

  “When did you know?” angling her head the better to study the murdered man’s serious, intelligent face.

  “I just did–eventually.” Mrs Anselm repositioned the photograph.

  She had arrived in Melbourne not speaking a word of English, only the words taught by her husband’s friends who played such awful tricks on her so that once, when she went to church, she looked at the children in the front row and smiled tenderly at them and said: “Poor little bastards.”

  Mrs Anselm turned from the piano. “I think it’s warm enough to sit outside, don’t you?” unknotting her apron.

  She led Merridy to a screened-in deck and urged her to choose any of the three chairs to sit in–“They were all designed by my husband”–while she fetched the tea-trolley.

  Merridy creaked into a high-backed cane seat and watched the old man rolling the lawn. Shattered after all her activity in Melbourne, she suddenly felt really tired, but the events of the last two days had been intense and they replayed word for word in her mind.

  Merridy had spent her first morning at a nursing home in Brighton East, her mother having been admitted soon after the discovery of Hector’s remains. Mrs Bowman had been watching McLeod’s Daughters with her sister when the policewoman called.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mrs Bowman.”

  “Why, what’s wrong.”

  “Please sit down.” Then: “It’s about your son.”

  She collapsed when the news sunk in. By the time Aunt Doss managed to get through to Merridy it was two days later and the Advocate had printed the story.

  The coroner’s inquest was low-key and lasted twenty minutes. Dental records, combined with DNA samples that the doctor was able to take from Mrs Bowman, confirmed that the skeleton in the cliff-face near Wynyard was very likely Hector’s. The policewoman had combed the Missing Persons files and discovered a record of what Hector had been wearing. His clothing had lost its colour, but was intact. There were two coins in the pocket of his shorts, minted in England in 1963 and 1957. And there was the discovery, in the same cave, of a left Blundstone boot. Contacted by the forensic anthropologist, a spokesman for the shoe company who examined the boot had no doubt that it was manufactured in the period of Hector’s disappearance. From the DNA evidence alone, the chances of the skeleton not being Hector’s were less than 1 in 76 million.

  Merridy had sat beside her mother’s bed in the Sanctuary, holding her hand, not speaking. Mrs Bowman was a husk. Once or twice Merridy began to talk, but her mother squeezed her hand to stop her doing that. Ever since attending the burial ceremony in Ulverstone she had crumpled without warning, like a coat from a hanger, but at the same time a peacefulness filled her to know that Hector’s soul was finally at rest and that she had an angel in heaven to plead her case with the Lord. So for three hours they sat in their private grasp. The square of light on the bed growing rhomboid. A young doctor giggling in the corridor. A nurse wiping a Kleenex over Mrs Bowman’s Bible on which some cranberry juice had spilled.

  Only as Merridy stirred to leave did Mrs Bowman peer into her face: “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

  Merridy pulled back her hand. “Tell you what?”

  Mrs Bowman looked irritated. “I know when you’ve something on your mind.”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  But the telling was a relief.

  Following her fit of candour, Merridy had spent the remainder of the afternoon in Country Road on Lygon Street and then at various boutiques in Chapel Street where she bought herself a yellow dress in a larger size than she was used to wearing, and a pair of expensive suede boots. And a navy-blue, crew-neck jersey for Alex.

  Next day, in a busy restaurant not far from the fish market, she arrived early for the long-postponed meeting with her wholesaler. She recognised immediately the figure who advanced between the crowded tables: a huge, swaying, black-bearded Greek with a narrow green tie that did not quite reach his belt of snakeskin.

  “Dmitri?”

  “Mrs Dove,” holding her hand and lingering the better, as he put it, “to put a face to Oblong Oysters”.

  Dmitri was all politeness over lunch. Merridy let flow over her whatever he was saying. Only towards the end of the meal did he become flirtatious again. “Your ears would go a funny colour if I told you what Les Gatenby said about you.”

  “Really?”

  “They really would. This colour,” and pointed at the remains of his crayfish.

  “Good. Then Les will have warned you how impossible I am,” and smoothed out the contract that Dmitri had been pressing her to sign ever since Christmas.

  “As you will see, I have added some conditions.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “I will make our agreement exclusive only to this state. And, since I’m putting my reputation on the line, I want to see all documents relating to your food standards. And I want to know how you are going to label my oysters.”

  Dmitri nodded. He ordered a coffee and a grappa. In amongst his beard, his lips were shining. “Is that it?”

  “Not quite. You mustn’t mix mine with any other product.”

  Dmitri wiped his mouth with a napkin, first the top lip, then the bottom. “Go on.”

  “I want you to give me all the names of restaurants and food houses that are going to sell Oblong Oysters–so that I can ring at any stage and see if they’re happy with the product and service, and if they’re splitting them correctly.”

  Across the table, Dmitri had folded his arms.

  “One more thing,” she said.

  “Yes?” and lifted his chin.

  “You pay electronically fourteen days after receipt. I don’t have time any more to go putting cheques into banks.”

  She signed, after which Dmitri enfolded her in his grappa-permeated arms and asked her to dinner at his favourite place, but she declined.

  Upon returning to her hotel she had taken a nap, in the course of which she was visited by an idea so powerful to her that she woke up. She only caught the tail of it, but following a call to the Bilgola Mission, Merridy contacted directory enquiries and eventually was put through to “Ashfield”.

  This was her idea: if there was one person in the world to whom she must speak, it was this Mrs Anselm.

  “How do you like your tea?”

  The tea poured, the cake sliced, the two women would converse for a further half-hour before touching on the reason which had brought them together on this windless afternoon on a deck overlooking the Victorian countryside, the paddocks that stretched flatter than an aerodrome towards Broken River.

  Anxious to keep her dialogue and mood above the surface, Merridy talked about mothers and shopping and the popularity of oysters, while the roller pressed the lawn into strips of light and dark green. Until the widow, at last, broached the subject.

  “They haven’t found him?”

  “No. He’s still at large. He may
not have left Tasmania.”

  “He escaped from your house, you said.”

  Merridy nodded. She expected that he had gone by the beach. His tracks erased by the new tide. She saw in circling images, like wasps making figures-of-eight above Rusty’s bowl: Alex driving away to tell Sergeant Finter; Harry Ford appearing at the door to pant his urgent message–“I have a contact at the Herald…your Kish is a murder suspect”; the policeman checking through the printout delivered by the telephone company to see who Kish might have contacted. But there was nothing.

  “Every district is on alert,” Sergeant Finter told them. “You guys don’t need reminding–this place is second to none at swallowing murderers. If he gets in touch—”

  “Oh, he won’t,” Merridy assured him. “Not with me. I can’t speak for Alex.” But the commotion in his eyes betrayed just how shaken Alex was. She could not remember when she had seen her husband so angry.

  “You let this man stay with us, Pete, knowing what he’d done. How could you?” He looked haggard.

  “But, Alex, he’d done nothing. Not officially.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Of course, now it pokes out at everyone like dogs’ balls, but not at the time, it didn’t.”

  “You took his statement, for God’s sake!”

  “Yes, and he had no record–at least to speak of. That’s what he kept saying. ‘I have no record.’ I told him I didn’t come down in the last shower, I came down in the shower before–and he was a lying bastard. But what could I do?”

  “Did Mrs Wellard tell you he was a murder suspect?”

  “Listen, Alex. I understand why you’re pissed off. But he wasn’t convicted of anything. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been on board the Buffalo. They don’t take people with a record. OK, he had had a number of minor convictions–but that’s in Sydney. It’s a tougher place. You’d expect him to be a petty criminal in Sydney, for fuck’s sake. I’ll spell it out again: none of those kids on that ship were involved in cases that had gone to trial.”