The Survivors

by Jane Harper

  Liam looked at him for a long time. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘It doesn’t.’

  He turned and walked away, leaving Kieran staring after him.

  Kieran was still standing where Liam had left him when his phone beeped in his pocket with a text. He pulled it out. Mia.

  Where are you?

  He texted her back and a moment later her reply came through.

  I’m coming to meet you. I need to get out for a while.

  Everything okay? he wrote, but there was no reply this time.

  He ran a hand over Audrey’s soft head. ‘Let’s go and find Mummy, hey?’

  Kieran started walking towards town in the direction from which he knew Mia would come. The cliff trail had given way to the tarmac and residential plots of what was now the historic part of town, but back in the 1800s had been its centre. The sandstone houses were set well apart and had sprawling gardens to compensate for the lack of sea views.

  Kieran slowed in front of one in particular. He had passed it on the way up, but now stopped to look properly. The Wetherby place. Ash’s gran’s former house, and now home to Evelyn Bay’s current writer-in-residence, G.R. Barlin.

  It was one of the larger houses, set back from the road. A small excavating digger was parked idle in the driveway, the company’s logo obscured by mud. But its handiwork was clear. Last time Kieran had seen the house it had been surrounded by a lush sea of native trees, plants and flowers. Now it was marked by trenches of exposed soil.

  Kieran leaned on the fence and felt a stir of annoyance on Ash’s behalf. George Barlin might tell himself this was a renovation, but the place looked like a bombsite. It appeared the garden was being systematically destroyed in sections. The north side had already been ripped up, and judging by the various markers attached to mature plants and bushes, they were soon to follow. No wonder Ash was pissed off.

  There was sudden movement inside the house and Kieran saw the writer pace past the kitchen window. He looked to be wearing a different chunky cardigan today, and was holding his phone to his ear. In his other hand, he had a sheaf of papers and was gesturing as he spoke.

  While Kieran watched, George turned towards the window and stopped when he saw Kieran standing by his fence. Their eyes met over the ruined yard. They both stared, and Kieran raised his hand. George responded with a kind of reluctant salute then, with an invisible twist of the wrist, the shutters snapped closed and he disappeared from sight.

  Kieran moved away from the fence and reached for his phone. Seeing the writer had reminded him, and he pulled up a search page and typed, Evelyn Bay Online Community Hub.

  Christ. It was worse than he’d expected. A clunky forum staggered to life across the screen, the measures and spacing blowing out on the mobile. Along the top, hard-to-read blue-on-grey lettering declared: Welcome to EBOCH! Drop in for a virtual cuppa and a chat! Pixelated steam rose from an illustration of a coffee cup.

  People certainly had been dropping in, George Barlin was right about that. Over the entire previous month, the forum had attracted about a dozen comments, mainly, from what Kieran could see, about the perennial problem of tourists dumping rubbish in residential wheelie bins. In the thirty-six hours since Bronte’s death, there had been more than three hundred entries.

  Kieran scrolled through. The vast majority of those weighing in appeared to be brand new members of the site. A few had uploaded a tiny thumbnail profile photo, but most hadn’t bothered, lurking instead behind the default anonymous grey silhouette. Most had adopted a pseudonym but Kieran recognised some of the names. Juliet Raymond, for example, who used to babysit Kieran some days after school, was one of many expressing dismay that ‘you can’t even walk the streets anymore’. Theresa Hartley, the former music teacher at the high school and Mia’s old piano tutor, wrote that her granddaughter went to the same uni in Canberra as Bronte Laidler.

  Meaghan says the students are all devastated, Theresa wrote. SurfGirl93 had liked the post, along with thirty-nine others. Thank you, Theresa had commented, in reply to her own comment.

  There were dozens of messages about Bronte. How she had covered the cost of someone’s coffee in the Surf and Turf when they’d forgotten their wallet. How she had sketched a lovely picture of a daughter’s new puppy on the back of a napkin and given it to her as they left. The compliments seemed sincere, Kieran thought, but superficial. No-one in Evelyn Bay had really known her much beyond the orange uniform and professional smile.

  There were surprisingly few references to Liam. A good handful of posts mentioned ‘someone’ the police were talking to, but there seemed to be a general reluctance to throw the first stone. Kieran skimmed the entries as he scrolled. There was something more than loyalty to Liam going on, though, he decided. Reading through the comments in bulk, he could sense an almost collective need for it not to be the local boy. There were dozens of mentions of tourists, mainlanders, shadowy strangers. Apparently anything was better than it being one of their own.

  Not everyone was so coy, though.

  Liam Gilroy, wrote one anonymous grey avatar. Is anyone seriously surprised?

  Why? several people had asked in reply.

  Kieran scrolled through the whole chain, but the original commenter had remained silent.

  ‘There you both are.’

  Kieran looked up. Mia gave a little wave as she walked towards them. She seemed a lot better than she had that morning, Kieran thought. As she leaned over the carrier to stroke Audrey’s head, he was relieved to see the bruise on her wrist had not come up as badly as he’d feared.

  ‘Everything okay at home?’

  ‘I think so. Your dad seems oblivious. Calmer, though.’

  ‘That’s good, I suppose.’

  Mia reached in and wiped a trail of drool from Audrey’s mouth. ‘How was your morning?’

  ‘We saw Liam.’

  ‘Really?’ Mia looked up now. ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Kieran filled her in on Liam’s account of Saturday night. ‘He reckons that was his car we saw racing by on Beach Road.’

  ‘Was it?’ Mia frowned.

  ‘He says so. Can you remember? It would have been a white Holden.’

  She thought, then shook her head. ‘I really don’t know.’

  As they turned in the direction of town, Mia’s eyes fell as Kieran’s had on what used to be the garden of Wetherby House.

  ‘Look at this place,’ she said. ‘What a shame. Is it still owned by Ash’s family?’

  ‘No. But you’ll never guess who lives here now.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘G.R. Barlin.’

  ‘No. Seriously?’ Mia turned back to the home, a newfound appreciation for invasive landscaping dawning on her face. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I met him. He was at the Surf and Turf yesterday morning too. The bloke with the laptop.’

  ‘Oh my God, of course,’ Mia breathed. ‘I thought he looked familiar. It was so out of context, though, I couldn’t work it out.’ She frowned. ‘He doesn’t look much like his photo anymore. I’m surprised anyone recognises him.’

  Kieran smiled. ‘They don’t, apparently. You’ll probably get another chance, though. Mum and I ran into him last night at the Surf and Turf. And he just caught me and Audrey spying on him.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake.’ Mia gave Kieran a gentle slap on the arm, but she was smiling, properly now. ‘Now he’s never going to want to be best friends with us.’

  Kieran had to laugh. ‘I’m not sure that was on the cards anyway.’

  ‘Why not? We’re fun.’

  ‘We’re really not. Not these days at least.’

  Mia smiled and peered at the house with its closed shutters. ‘I should have worked out it was him yesterday. He used to come here for summers.’

  ‘Yeah, he mentioned that,’ Kieran said. ‘How did y
ou know?’

  ‘I took one of his writing workshops years ago. Remember? I told you.’

  Kieran did remember now, but hadn’t put two and two together. ‘That was here? I thought that was after you moved to Sydney.’

  ‘No, it was here. Back when he was a nobody journalist.’ Her smile dimmed a little. ‘Gabby did the workshop too. It was that one not long before the storm.’

  ‘Right. Of course.’ Kieran leaned on the fence next to her.

  Mia’s eyes were trained on the house, but the kitchen shutters remained stubbornly closed. ‘So what’s he like now?’ she said, unable to hide her curiosity.

  ‘Dunno,’ Kieran said. ‘Seems okay. Takes himself a bit seriously maybe. Ash clearly isn’t a fan.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Mia picked a single leaf off one of the few remaining trees. It was earmarked for extraction according to the tape wrapped around its trunk. ‘This is actually pretty brutal. If Gabby were here she’d be so sad to see it like this.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. She loved walking past this place. Even more when Ash got going with it. You could see that the garden was full of little nooks and crannies and hiding places. We called it the fairy garden. Pretended it was magic.’ Mia shook her head. ‘And that’s obviously one of the many reasons we were so popular at school.’

  She dropped the leaf on the ground and it blew away as they turned and began to walk towards town.

  ‘Hey, I ran into Olivia earlier as well,’ Kieran said as they hit the main street. The Surf and Turf was open again for business, he could see from the lights through the windows. He scanned the street, trying to spot the CCTV camera that had captured Liam and Bronte together on Saturday night. He found it high on a lamppost.

  ‘Was Liv okay?’

  ‘Not really. She mentioned that Bronte reminded her a bit of Gabby.’

  ‘Oh God, did she really?’

  ‘Both people pleasers apparently. Maybe a bit soft-hearted.’

  Mia frowned a little. ‘I suppose.’

  Kieran looked over in surprise. ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘No, I do. I guess. About Gabby, at least. It’s just –’ Mia thought for a moment. ‘When someone dies, it’s pretty easy to only remember the good things, don’t you think? Especially if they died young. I mean, Gabby was my friend, but she could also be –’ Mia hesitated this time. ‘– a bit difficult. Like we all can be. Obviously.’

  ‘In what way?’ Kieran asked.

  ‘She could be petty.’ Mia sounded uncomfortable now. ‘Often about Olivia, really. She hated feeling left out, which she was, quite a lot. So she’d sometimes try to stop Olivia having fun or doing things without her. It wasn’t mean-spirited. Just jealousy mostly.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well. It wasn’t easy for her having Olivia as a sister. Liv had all these friends, and Gabby was pretty much stuck with me.’ Mia shrugged. ‘Gabby didn’t help herself, though. She could be really immature a lot of the time. We both could, to be fair.’

  They walked on and up ahead, Kieran could see the petrol station and the squat red-brick police station come into view.

  ‘But look, it wasn’t Gabby’s fault.’ Mia sounded guilty now. ‘She developed physically so early and all of a sudden she had all this attention coming her way. She never really worked out how to handle it.’

  ‘Olivia mentioned that. Sounded like it happened a bit.’

  ‘A bit? Honestly, men used to stare at Gabby all the time. We’d be in our school uniform, we could literally be playing with toys – like a board game or something – and it wouldn’t make any difference. So if she acted a bit childish and annoying, I think it was her way of trying to deal with it.’

  Kieran frowned. ‘Blokes around here used to stare at her? Which ones?’

  ‘Looking the way she did?’ Mia said. ‘Pretty much all of them.’

  She opened her mouth as though to say something else, then stopped. They had reached the police station.

  Mia was looking across the street to the station’s glass door. It was propped open and Sergeant Renn was speaking to Sue Pendlebury on the threshold. It wasn’t clear if they were coming or going, but they both stopped talking as they saw Kieran and Mia. Renn turned to Pendlebury and said something too low for them to hear. Then both officers straightened, and Renn raised his hand and beckoned.

  Kieran looked at Mia. ‘I’ll go and see what he wants.’

  He had started over when Pendlebury lifted her chin.

  ‘Both of you,’ she called. ‘Thank you.’

  She looked at Kieran, then past him to Mia, then turned and disappeared into the station.

  Chapter 18

  The cardboard boxes stacked inside the glass doors of the police station reminded Kieran of his parents’ house, albeit a more efficient version. Preparations for the station’s closure the following month were well underway, with the cabinets behind reception standing empty and the corkboard stripped of its usual advisories about the non-emergency hotline number and warnings against leaving valuables in cars.

  But the mothballing process had screeched to a sudden halt, Kieran could see as he and Mia followed Renn and Pendlebury down the hall. A large yellowing map of the Evelyn Bay township looked to have been taken down and then hastily tacked back up, presumably for the benefit of the Hobart officers. The sun-faded paint on the wall showed exactly where it had previously hung. A couple of officers Kieran didn’t recognise glanced up as they passed, then turned back to their work.

  ‘The coffee machine has already gone, I’m afraid,’ Renn said as he led them into his office and gestured to two battered chairs. ‘But we can do instant if that’s of interest?’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ said Pendlebury with a smile as both Kieran and Mia shook their heads. She ignored the fourth chair in the corner and stayed standing, leaning her hip against the filing cabinet from where she could see all three of them.

  ‘Right. Hopefully we won’t keep you too long.’ Renn sat down behind the desk that used to be the domain of Sergeant Geoff Mallott. It might quite literally be the same desk, Kieran thought, looking at the scratched surface as he unclipped Audrey and passed her to Mia.

  Kieran wondered if Chris Renn was also counting off the days to retirement, semi-forced or otherwise, the way Sergeant Mallott had been that summer before the storm. Under the buzzing fluorescent lights, Renn looked older than he had yesterday morning. Kieran hoped working for his brother’s haulage company would turn out better for him than Mallott’s retirement had. Within six months of hanging up his uniform, Mallott had died on his sofa of a heart attack.

  Renn’s chair creaked as he moved a clear plastic box filled with phones, sunglasses and watches off his desk to make room.

  ‘The things people leave behind, eh?’ he said, seeing Kieran looking at it. He opened a notebook and clicked his mouse to fire up the computer. Kieran could hear it battling as it whirred to life.

  ‘All right. Saturday night.’ Renn turned to look at them. ‘Just want to double-check a few things. You two walked home from the Surf and Turf along Beach Road.’

  Kieran and Mia nodded.

  ‘What time did you pass Fisherman’s Cottage?’

  ‘I’m not sure exactly. Would have been just after 11.30 pm?’ Kieran looked to Mia for confirmation. She was jiggling Audrey on her knee and gave a small nod.

  ‘Did you see a car parked outside?’

  They looked at each other again. Kieran tried to picture the beach house and the road, dim in the moonlight. In his mind, the street was empty, but he wasn’t certain if he was remembering last Saturday night, or one of the hundreds of other evenings he’d walked home along that same route.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone parked,’ Mia answered. Kieran, still a little undecided, nodded. He heard Pendlebury’s ballpoint pen click a
nd the faint scratch of words on paper.

  ‘Lights in the cottage,’ Renn said. ‘Were they on or off, did you notice?’

  On, Kieran thought, then immediately second-guessed the memory. He wasn’t sure he’d glanced twice at the house.

  ‘There were a couple of lights on, I think.’ Mia was frowning. ‘Enough that it looked like someone was still up.’

  More scratching of pen on paper. Renn waited patiently until Pendlebury gave him some signal so subtle that Kieran missed it.

  ‘And you’d obviously decided to walk home along the road, not the beach,’ Renn said. ‘Bit shorter along the sand, isn’t it? Any reason not to go that way?’

  ‘It was dark. I didn’t feel comfortable.’ Mia jiggled Audrey. ‘The road’s better lit.’

  Pendlebury did not bother writing that down, seeming to find that particular answer self-evident. Renn tapped it into his computer anyway.

  ‘All right.’ Renn turned back. ‘The car you saw driving fast along Beach Road. That was definitely coming from the direction of Fisherman’s Cottage and heading towards town?’

  They were both able to nod with certainty at that, at least.

  ‘Right. Liam Gilroy says it was his. He says –’ Renn tapped at his keyboard, then read from the screen. ‘He reckons he left Fisherman’s Cottage, was driving back towards town around 11.30 pm – speeding, he admits that – and he saw you, Kieran, and put his foot down harder to give you a bit of a scare.’ The officer looked up. ‘I know we’ve been through this, but can either of you remember any more about that vehicle?’

  Kieran hesitated. He could feel Mia’s eyes on him. He tried to focus on Saturday night, and the road, but the images were being nudged out of the way. You kind of ruined my life.

  ‘Look,’ Kieran said. ‘It could have been Liam’s car.’

  He felt Mia shift in surprise next to him and Renn looked at them both.

  ‘Yesterday, you reckoned you didn’t know,’ he said.

  ‘No. But –’ Kieran shrugged. ‘I mean, I’m pretty sure it was a four-wheel drive. And I’m pretty sure it was light-coloured. We were walking along Beach Road at around eleven-thirty, like Liam said. We saw a car driving fast, like he said. So if you’re asking me if it could have been Liam Gilroy’s white Holden, then yes. If he says it was his, I can’t say for sure that it wasn’t.’