Clear to the Horizon

by Dave Warner

  The remnants of his dream once again wrapped themselves around Clement like some stubborn mist. He’d been on an airplane, a big jet – though the spatial dimensions didn’t make sense because there was a small swimming pool and a kitchen eerily reminiscent of the one at the first house Marilyn and he lived in. Even so, it had been a jet with seatbelts, tray tables. Marilyn had been beside him. They were going somewhere, a vacation maybe? He seemed to remember she was in a summer frock, white with coloured patterns. Where had they been going? It was elusive but there was that budding excitement that coincides with a holiday. Phoebe wasn’t in the dream. It was just them, like way back when.

  ‘So you were walking back from your mates’ place?’ Clement forced himself back to the subject at hand even though the image of the jet was as real as those hard paper coffee cups.

  ‘Yeah. I won, bluffed them on a pair of queens. And I heard something over in the shops there and I’m looking up at the back of the shops when this bloody shape jumps out the fucking window. Probably the toilet, because it was tiny, narrow …’

  ‘Yeah, it was the toilet.’ It was di Rivi. She was the uniform who had followed up the job after Shepherd called it in.

  ‘And I yell out “stop!” and he keeps running, so I chase.’

  ‘What’d he get?’ Earle took his first mouthful of bun, directing the question at di Rivi.

  ‘Three dive watches.’

  ‘Went for what was light and valuable.’ Shepherd was still smarting.

  Clement was thinking this was the third of these shop break-ins the last month – probably a meth addict – but the dream was still at his shoulder, in particular the horrible moment when he’d looked at the seat next to him to find Marilyn no longer there. There was an instant of dread, of panic that he’d lost her, followed by the sudden command to himself: ‘Don’t worry it’s a dream, it’s not real’, in turn followed by a counter-warning: ‘No it’s very real. You’ve lost her, for good this time.’ And that’s when he’d woken.

  ‘We have any idea who it might be?’ For once he was grateful for the distraction of local crime.

  Earle shook his head, the bun already half-devoured.

  ‘Nothing on the street,’ added Shepherd.

  Clement suppressed a smile at the cop-show parlance. In Broome, ‘on the street’ was pretty well literally on the one street.

  ‘Usain?’ Clement speculated. Usain, real name Simon Mifflin, was a shoplifter whose modus operandi was to pinch stuff in plain sight and then run like the clappers. Earle swallowed the last of the bun.

  ‘Still in hospital.’

  Usain’s career had come unstuck when he sprinted out of the news-agency, unaware that its sliding glass door, open when he’d entered, had since shut. He’d been travelling too fast for it to reopen in time and had cut himself to pieces.

  Clement looked up to see his boss Scott Risely gesturing at him from his doorway.

  ‘When you got a minute.’

  ‘Now’s good.’ Clement addressed the trio. ‘Stay on it. He’s probably swapping the stolen goods for meth. The watches’ll turn up. Then we can find the dealer and our thief.’ The tragedy was that if the thief got away with it for much longer, any chance of saving his life would be down the toilet of meth addiction. He’d be better off being caught.

  Clement stepped into Risely’s sparse office and shut the door. Risely looked up from his computer and gestured Clement should sit.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Apart from our B&E specialist, pretty quiet.’

  ‘I meant how are you going?’ The emphasis on ‘you’. ‘When’s the wedding?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  Clement had never had a deep and meaningful with his boss about how he felt about Marilyn and her impending marriage. It was irritating that Risely discerned it was affecting him. If it turned out Risely had been alerted by Graeme Earle or the others, well, that would be even more galling. Clement hated being the subject of office gossip but he was resigned to it as a fact of life.

  ‘How do you feel about it?’ Risely’s demeanour was surprisingly neutral, not unlike the psych he’d had to visit after the big murder case the summer before last.

  ‘I don’t know: pissed off, happy for her, all at the same time.’ Surprisingly, before this, he’d never got close enough to the question to look for an answer. He’d just accepted his emotions were confused, unruly. There was something that hurt about the finality of it but the worst part – that she was no longer his, that somebody else had her love – well, that ache he’d long grown accustomed to.

  ‘They staying here?’

  ‘Far as I know. Phoebe tells me they are planning a lot of travelling.’ Which was the best part. There was talk of him getting Phoebe for something like three weeks while they honeymooned before she joined them overseas. It wouldn’t be all that long, maybe eighteen months, before she’d be going to Perth for her schooling and maybe lost to him forever. He had expected Risely to ask another question as if this had been leading to something about the way he was doing his job but Risely just nodded sympathetically and looked back at his computer.

  ‘You ever heard of Ingrid Feister?’

  Half joking, Clement said, ‘Any relation to Nelson Feister?’

  ‘His daughter.’

  The reclusive Nelson Feister was the richest man in Western Australia, one of the richest in the world. His company controlled the largest iron ore deposits on the planet. Risely continued.

  ‘Two weeks ago Ingrid left Perth to head north with her boyfriend. Ten days ago they were in Port Hedland. That’s the last communication from them. Normally she posts on Instagram but there’s been nothing. There’ve been no calls from either her phone or her boyfriend’s. The AC called me to ask us to check around. I spoke to Richo in Hedland and he’s looking into it that end.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Ingrid is twenty, the boyfriend twenty-one. No criminal record but the AC says they called him a druggy-musician-loser.’

  ‘Who is “they”?’

  ‘The half-brother and sister. Apparently they don’t want to upset the old man too much, he’s getting on.’

  I remembered now that Feister had divorced wife one and married a much younger woman, a caterer or something like that. Could that be twenty-odd years ago?

  ‘So Ingrid is his daughter by the second wife?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Clement asked why Ingrid’s mother had left it to the siblings to call.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘We’ve got car rego? Photos?’

  Risely hit a key on his computer and the printer began sputtering. He jerked his thumb at it and added, ‘Contact numbers for the brother and sister are included.’

  ‘What was the purpose of the trip?’

  ‘The AC didn’t ask them.’

  Clement’s guess was that if you were the daughter of a billionaire it was hardly looking for work.

  ‘I’ll get onto it. Is HQ trying to get a bead on the phones?’

  Risely stood with him, collected the printout and handed it to him. ‘Trying. But up here …’

  He didn’t need to tell Clement about the difficulty of tracking a phone not in use in this remote part of the world. ‘Why don’t you come to dinner this week?’

  ‘Sure. Wednesday?’

  ‘Wednesday’s good.’

  Neither man referenced the fact the invite was obviously to offer Clement support in his time of ‘need’. Clement was not used to being a welfare recipient. He didn’t like it one bit.

  Clement sat at his desk in his office and studied the photos of Ingrid Feister and boyfriend Max Coldwell. They looked the kind who would search for dolphins while strumming guitars and smoking pot. Coldwell had long straggly hair with a goatee. His eyes were soft. They didn’t scream intelligence. Ingrid had a spark about her but she also had the unadorned look of somebody who has rejected reticulation, swimming pools and pinstripes. The siblings were Kate Hayward
(nee Feister), forty-five, and Simon Feister, forty-one, both of Dalkeith. Clement decided he would call Peter Richardson, his Pilbara equivalent, before he contacted them.

  Richardson answered swiftly. He knew why Dan was calling.

  ‘I’ve just got back from the Kookaburra. They booked into one of the motel units Thursday seventeenth of August and left Friday eighteenth. Got a maid who saw the car leaving. I thought I’d try the local office of Giant Iron, see if by any chance the boss’s daughter had called in and, bingo, she had. The kids’ old Landcruiser was losing water,’ Richardson said, ‘so Ingrid asked if a mechanic could check it out. They put in a new radiator and gave it a service.’

  So Ingrid wasn’t beyond using the family connection.

  ‘That’s where we’re at. Unless they stuffed up the service we’re not talking breakdown. I figure the next step is checking roadhouse cameras.’

  Richardson was deftly handballing into Clement’s court. If the couple had headed north towards Broome – given the way they looked in their photos a near certainty – then they’d almost certainly call in for petrol at Sandfire. This was Clement’s bailiwick. Truth was, he didn’t care.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll check that out, call you soon as I know anything.’

  ‘Appreciate that.’

  The Sandfire Roadhouse was around three hundred k north of Hedland and the same south of Broome. About three hours. The beauty of this part of the world was that, despite its vastness, there was still only one main road, the Great Northern Highway, and one main stop. It shouldn’t take too long to locate them on CCTV if they had gone via Sandfire. Besides, Clement could do with a long drive.

  Graeme Earle looked up from his desk, more curious than anxious as Clement emerged. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Rich kid gone missing. Mal,’ Clement called out and waved the paperwork.

  Sergeant Mal Gross edged over, paint chart in hand. Clement indicated the chart.

  ‘Renovating?’

  ‘I caved in on Laura’s demand: a new look for the house. It’s bought me time on her other ultimatum: a new look for me.’

  ‘He’s weighing whether to cut down on beer or fish and chips,’ joked Earle.

  ‘I’ve been weighing that for five years. I’m starting to think light beer and keep the chips, or full strength and just the fish.’ Gross scanned the paperwork and raised an eyebrow at the name.

  Clement said. ‘We need everybody looking for the vehicle. Graeme, you take the accom, see if they booked in anywhere.’

  ‘You want me to send a car to Sandfire?’ asked Gross.

  ‘No. I’m going.’

  ‘Who are we talking about?’ Shepherd grabbed the papers off Mal Gross, read. ‘Is she …?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Clement knew Shepherd would be trying to factor in the chances of a reward.

  ‘So what’s my role?’

  Shepherd liked to think of them as a footy team, each with a designated role.

  ‘Your role is to find our B&E specialist who gave you the slip last night.’

  ‘He was lucky he had a bike.’

  The weather this time of year was about as clear as it got, temperature around thirty in the day, a bit under twenty at night. The skies were blue, cyclone build up a month or two away. You could even swim in the water off Cable Beach without being stung to death by jellyfish. Yet Clement was aware that to match his mood the skies should have been gloomy and threatening, full of rolling cumulonimbus. He would have stuck on Leonard Cohen but he’d left it in the deck of his CD player at home after giving it a heavy bash last night. What was she thinking? Brian wasn’t up to her speed. He wasn’t a bad guy, he earned better money than Clement, bought Margaret River reds and took painstaking photos with a heavy camera; pretty good shots, Clement had to admit. Clement had scrolled through Phoebe’s Facebook for glimpses of Marilyn – there were a few – and then tried to read her expression, the secret codes he was convinced only he would ever really know. Mostly he read tolerance, as in, okay, I’ll let you photograph me even though I really don’t want to be displayed like some butterfly on a leaf – a favourite subject of Brian’s. So, a guy who takes nice photos of butterflies on leaves, sells plastics or buys plastics or something from China and thinks it’s a big deal to drink the same red wine as his rich business cronies. Is that really the guy she should be marrying?

  Of course not. She shouldn’t be marrying anybody. She had her independence, which was what she claimed she was after when they split. Now she was giving it up.

  Clement blotted her out, splat, like the bug on his windscreen. Only now did he yield to the veracity of his senses, the sky was clear and blue. He fumbled through his CDs. Beach Boys, yes, perfect desert music: blue sky and sand. At the first chords he realised his mistake. She’d been the one who had introduced him to The Beach Boys. All he’d known of them was the snappy ‘Kokomo’, which he’d first heard up here, under the hot bronze gong, while riding his bicycle, or sprinting across burning sand to protect the soles of his bare feet. But then when he was all grown up, or thought he was, he met Marilyn and at night on her single bed while traffic sizzled past underneath her first floor window, he held her, smelled her hair and hushed when she commanded, to ‘God Only Knows’ or ‘Surf’s Up’. He smelled her hair now.

  He managed to fight the impulse to eject the disc. If he had to give up Marilyn, he wasn’t going to throw Brian Wilson into the deal.

  Too much time to think: that was the trouble with living up here, a vastness that seemed prehistoric. You could look clear to the horizon both sides of the car and see nothing but low scrub, and Clement couldn’t help but think that one time way, way back, the whole world would have been like this. Okay, there might have been rainforest or mountains, but no glass and steel environmentally observant skyscrapers, no houses, bridges, no man-made landmark. Which he supposed was why the people who lived here got to know every dip in the red earth, every drooping branch, every slight incline.

  The other Wilson Brothers were dead. Only Brian was left. Don’t talk, put your head on my shoulder … listen … listen … let me hear your heart beat.

  Clement thought of that morning dream again, of the one bedroom apartment where he held Marilyn. What had been Them was now only Him, and a vacant road that stretched who knew where.

  The CCTV footage revealed the Landcruiser arriving at Sandfire just after 11.30 on the same morning it had left Port Hedland. The registration papers showed the car belonged to Ingrid Feister but it was the boyfriend Max Coldwell who was driving. On the tape Ingrid stepped out, alive and unrestricted. The resolution wasn’t crystal clear but it was much better than it had been in days of yore when you found yourself dealing with old VCRs, the heads clogged with grime.

  Clement watched in the manager’s office, a sweat box without the comfort of air-conditioning. A desk fan and standard fan did their best to circulate air but it was difficult. The desk was a jumble: lever-arch files, computer, printer, phone, an empty glass. A broken till, an old freezer and other detritus injured in the service of hosting weary travellers, straddled the floor like a rugby scrum On the desktop computer screen, Clement watched Coldwell pop the fuel tank and pump petrol while Ingrid headed off screen to the loo or the shop.

  The interior camera picked them up a few minutes later. You couldn’t see their faces all that well but you could recognise Ingrid as she paid for a couple of soft drinks from the fridge. Coldwell joined her, hair unkempt in the fashion of star AFL footballers. Ingrid pulled a wad of notes from her jeans, peeled off cash and paid the cashier. Not wise to be flashing a big roll of cash like that, not with hungry eyes about. Clement instinctively checked out other customers. A guy in a cap at the soft-drink fridge didn’t appear to be looking but could have caught the reflection, Clement supposed. Thing was, it might not have been here somebody saw the cash. Could be Broome, or wherever they would wind up. He watched Ingrid and Coldwell peel away. Then, almost out of camera, they stopped and faced e
ach other and there was a desperate hug. What was that about? Just hippie types showing their emotions? They clung for quite a while, then broke apart and left. The body language pinged Clement’s brain but it was too murky in there to say what it might be sensing. Him and Marilyn perhaps, one of those times when she was a trainee teacher up the country and it was agony to part after a wonderful city weekend.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to be together …

  Too late now.

  CHAPTER 11

  There was nothing out of the ordinary about this particular morning. It was a Wednesday and the colour of the sky matched my grey Toshiba laptop, which was six or seven years old and still ran Windows 7 because I tried Tash’s once, which ran on 8, and couldn’t manage it at all. I hate updating anything but especially computer stuff because everything you finally figured out counts for nix with the snap of a keystroke. That’s what was great about swimming. It’s the same Indian Ocean, same sky, same distance from North Cott to Cott and back. All that changes is the price of the coffee afterwards. Seventeen years before, at the beginning of the new millennium, my cappuccino cost me three bucks. It had gone up fifty percent. The group I swim with had probably changed by fifty percent too over the period but you don’t notice. It’s not like everybody disappears at once. But one day somebody brings in an old photo, the kind you used to get in little wallets from the chemist, and that’s like a frypan in the face. You hope you haven’t aged as badly as the rest and then realise that half of those in the snap have moved out of your life without you even noticing.

  Anyway, it wasn’t actually overcast, it was just early morning mid-August, spring was dusting itself off and so was I after three big glasses of red the night before. I’d reached the point in my life where I drank less than your average pensioner after an expired Happy Hour. Tash and Grace were in Spain, however, so for the first time in twenty years I’d been left to my own devices and the cheap red had caught my eye right around the same time I’d been salivating over my takeaway Tibetan. Goodness knows what was in the dish I’d ordered. I doubted yak, it was too cheap, they’d have to import but it tasted fine and the rice was excellent. Naturally I hadn’t bothered to turn on the dishwasher after eating, figuring I may as well wait till breakfast. Such indulgences of the single man had become as foreign to me as available street parking. I think it was probably goat in the dish, something I’d never be able to eat with Tash who considers herself pretty much vegetarian because she only eats chicken, fish, and sausages at the netball. Unfortunately there’d not been much of that lately. Grace, who showed a bit of sporting potential in that area, had recently broken her father’s heart by saying she was concentrating on her Spanish. I sat back on the couch and cracked the red. Skype had been a disaster – like Control’s Cone of Silence in Get Smart. Either the girls couldn’t hear me or I couldn’t hear them, and we’d resorted to phone calls in the end. Barcelona was brilliant apparently. Tash was doing some work thing that involved photographing stylish ideas and eating at exciting restaurants, while Grace studied at some special class. I could have bought a case of the red for the price of the twelve minutes we talked about nothing in particular, so I made rectifying the Skype problem my highest priority. They’d be gone another ten weeks and the way it was heading it would have been cheaper for me to have gone with them and let the adulterers and petty thieves of my great metropolis get away with their misdemeanours.