Darkwater

by Georgia Blain

  ‘Don’t do it,’ I urged him, as he lunged for the front door.

  He brushed me aside.

  ‘There’s no point in even trying to run now. They’ll catch you.’ I was crying, the tears hot on my face, as I held on to him. ‘Please. If you stay calm, you have a chance. I’ll go down to the station with you.’

  I felt the change in him. The tension loosening in his forearm as he heard them coming up the stairs, their footsteps loud on the concrete.

  ‘Just call out.’ I pointed to the open front door. ‘Tell them you’re here and you want to talk.’

  His voice was cracked as he tried to utter the words.

  I called with him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I told the policeman who’d emerged in the doorway, aware that I was still crying. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

  Lyndon was on the floor, knees drawn to his chest, nodding.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ I told the policeman.

  But he ignored me, and I watched as he hauled Lyndon up, forcing his hands behind his back, before walking him to the stairs, and the police car waiting down below.

  twenty-one

  I do not believe Lyndon Hayes is guilty.

  I woke in the middle of the night and wrote the words by torchlight, a thin beam of white illuminating the lined pages of my journal. It was quiet, and outside my window, nearly all the houses were in darkness, with only the pale shine of the streetlights to break up the low-slung night sky.

  I had slept fitfully, waking every half-hour or so, until eventually I had given up, taking my diary out of its hiding place at the back of my wardrobe. I had read through each of the entries I had written since Amanda’s death, aware of how little I knew. Nothing could really be called fact. Everything had been told to me by someone else, or overheard, or guessed at, and I could only wonder at how anything was ever regarded as truth, crystalline, sharp and uncontested.

  But, despite not using the word, this last entry came close. At that moment, I did not believe in his guilt. And my own beliefs were all that I could know for certain.

  The police brought me home that afternoon. Dee was on the phone in the kitchen when Tom opened the door to find me, standing small next to the officer. He was alarmed.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  He held me close and I kept right on crying.

  Sitting in the sunken lounge, I picked bread crumbs and dog hairs out of the shag pile carpet while the story was told. Dee had come in by then, and I could see she too had been crying, but whatever had upset her had occurred before my return, so I knew it had nothing to do with me.

  ‘She was very brave,’ the policeman eventually said, glancing in my direction.

  I just looked down at the ground.

  ‘Or very foolish,’ Tom replied. ‘What were you thinking going there on your own?’

  I tried to explain. ‘I wanted to warn him.’

  The policeman looked at me sharply, and I knew I had only muddied the situation.

  ‘I wanted to tell him to give himself up.’ I glanced straight at Tom. ‘I don’t think he did it. I thought it would be better for him if he went in, rather than being taken in.’

  ‘Why don’t you think he did it?’ It was the officer who asked me the question. His eyes were iron grey, flat and hard, and I looked away.

  ‘He said he didn’t.’

  ‘Lots of people lie when they’re in trouble.’

  ‘Is there something you know?’ This time it was Dee. ‘Something you’re not telling us?’

  I shook my head. I could feel them all looking at me and I wanted to articulate why I believed in his innocence, but it wasn’t easy. ‘Sometimes I don’t like him all that much, but it doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. To be a murderer–’

  I broke off for an instant, swallowing before I spoke.

  ‘That’s a huge thing,’ I eventually finished.

  Dee held my hand in her own and squeezed it gently.

  When the policeman left, she made me a sweet, milky cup of tea and told me she wanted me to stay in for the rest of the day. I’d had a shock, she explained.

  I lay on the couch and pretended to watch television, but really I was listening to her and Tom talking in the kitchen. She wanted him to go down to the station. ‘He doesn’t have anyone,’ she kept saying. ‘He’s going to need an adult to make sure that he’s okay. He needs a lawyer.’

  I got up.

  In the bright light of the afternoon sun, the kitchen was washed out, white in the glare. I sat at the table and picked Sammy up, holding her, warm and soft, in my lap. I was all right, I told them. I didn’t think he was ever going to actually hurt me. ‘Please,’ I asked Tom. ‘Just check on him.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘You’re as mad as your mother.’ But he found his keys and headed out the door.

  Dee ran her hands through my hair. ‘I’d take that as a compliment, if I were you.’

  The phone rang and she picked it up, and as I listened to her telling a friend about Ray, and the visit to the hospital that morning, I remembered how upset she’d been. When she hung up, I asked her how he was.

  The news wasn’t good.

  ‘What happened?’

  She sat down opposite me and held my hand.

  ‘No one knows, but it looks like one of those bastards bashed him.’

  ‘What bastards?’

  She tried to explain. Since the union had agreed not to work on the Greenwood Bush site, there’d been trouble.

  ‘Atkinson’s company had a lot of money invested in building their luxury flats. They’re not going to give up. First of all they tried to bring in people who didn’t belong to the union. They wanted them to start work on the site. But the second they did that, all the union builders refused to work on any of the other Atkinson developments. They put down their tools and walked off the job. It’s like war.

  ‘Since then, Atkinson has been trying to scare our guys, and to get the union to give up on the ban and order their builders back to work. Some of the top men in the union have been getting threats. They’ve been harassed and intimidated. One had his car written off. Another had his house trashed.

  ‘Now it’s got worse.’ She paused for a moment. ‘It’s complicated. Are you sure you want me to continue?’

  It wasn’t like Dee to treat me like a child. She must have been worried about me. I just nodded.

  ‘Well, the big developers like Atkinson are also in with government. They donate money to the political parties in the hope it will help them get their developments approved. And the political parties want to keep the developers happy because they want their money.

  ‘Recently, our guys have been afraid that their union will be shut down because they’ve been causing trouble. There’s another builders’ union and they think the developers and people in power have been giving money to this other union in exchange for getting the officials that they want elected. Members of this new union have been harassing them and spreading rumours – that they’re corrupt and that they’ve been stealing members’ money and that refusing to work on sites that are bad for the environment is irresponsible and does builders out of work. And the thugs that Len Atkinson and others like him have been hiring to frighten them have been told to get tougher. Ray’s wife is convinced that he was bashed by someone hired by Len.’

  ‘Isn’t there something they can do?’

  Dee looked out the window. ‘Sometimes I wish we’d never begun all this,’ she eventually said. ‘When I saw Ray today, his face was barely recognisable. They’d bashed him senseless.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she bit on her bottom lip as she stared up at the ceiling. ‘You know, when someone gets that hurt, you wonder whether it’s worth it.’

  I’d never seen my mother doubt her convictions and it surprised me.

  ‘Is he going to be in hospital for long?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘They don’t even know if he’ll come out of the coma.’

  It was a couple of hours bef
ore Tom came back. Joe was home by then and we had told him the news about Lyndon. He was surprised at my certainty that he was innocent, and I was disappointed by his willingness to doubt.

  ‘Cherry saw him go down to meet Amanda. She told Kate, she told me and she told the police.’

  ‘Well, he says he didn’t.’

  ‘Of course he’d say that,’ Joe scoffed.

  I was angry now. ‘He was your friend,’ I told him. ‘And even if he did go down there to meet her, even if he did lie about that, it doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer. That’s a giant leap.’

  I could see my words had some impact. He looked at the floor.

  Tom said Lyndon had continued to deny everything in the police station. ‘He did confess that he’d been seeing Amanda, but he said he never went down to meet her that day and he didn’t kill her.’

  Lyndon hadn’t called a lawyer despite Tom urging him. He said he couldn’t afford one. Tom told him about legal aid, he even offered to pay, and in the end he just stayed with him during the interview. The police said Amanda had been found with a black eye and her arm was broken. She had fallen into the river from one of the rock ledges, her foot getting wedged and her arm almost certainly in excruciating pain. She had been unable to extricate herself and she had drowned. She was, as Cassie had guessed, pregnant.

  The police had asked Lyndon whether the child was his.

  Tom said Lyndon had looked horrified and then he’d cried.

  The police believed Amanda had asked Lyndon to meet her down there so that she could tell him about the pregnancy. He had freaked out and the conversation had escalated into an argument. He had hit her and then run off. She had fallen in the water and drowned.

  As Tom relayed the story, he looked worn out. ‘I don’t want either of you repeating any of this to anyone,’ he said.

  I asked him where Lyndon was now and he told me that he had been charged and was being held in custody until a committal hearing. ‘It’s likely he’ll continue to be held as he doesn’t have anyone to put up bail for him, or anywhere to go. I’ve convinced him to get a lawyer and not to say any more until one arrives.’

  He took my hand. ‘He wanted me to tell you he was sorry if he scared you.’

  I was surprised.

  Tom made us promise again that we wouldn’t repeat what he had said, and then he gave me a hug. ‘You were very brave,’ he told me. ‘And you did the right thing in sticking up for him, although not in putting yourself at risk like that. You should have just called the police.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry it looks like he might have done it after all, although I certainly don’t think he intended to kill her.’

  I didn’t know what to say. As we left the room, Joe shook his head.

  ‘You know, I feel sorry for him,’ he said.

  I looked at him.

  ‘I know I presumed he was guilty. I know all that. And it’s far worse for Amanda’s family, but the poor bastard. He obviously didn’t mean it, and now his life’s ruined.’

  We were just outside the kitchen door, and it was still half-open, enough for me to hear Dee and Tom continue talking.

  ‘Do you think he did it?’ Dee asked.

  Tom was silent for a moment. ‘It looks like it,’ he eventually said. ‘But you know, when they told him Amanda was pregnant, he looked so surprised. Genuinely so.’

  As I lay on my bed looking through my journal, it was those words that kept running round my head, feeding my faded belief in Lyndon’s innocence. It wasn’t what it seemed, I kept thinking. It was wrong. I flicked back through the pages, looking at it all, events I had recorded, many to do with Amanda’s death, but also many others, until I eventually wrote the one true fact: I do not believe Lyndon Hayes is guilty, the words in bright blue ink on the white page.

  And it was then, as I realised how sure my conviction was, that I remembered. There was some one who might know if Cherry was lying, some one who could have seen it all – someone whom no one would have thought to ask.

  twenty-two

  I woke late the next day. Despite having resolved to get up as early as I could and put my plans into action, I didn’t even open my eyes until well after ten. Outside it was overcast, the sky leaden with the promise of a last summer storm before the true onset of a long, dry autumn.

  Joe’s bedroom door was open and I could only presume he was out. I wondered whether he’d gone round to Kate’s to tell her the news, despite having promised he wouldn’t breathe a word. I wouldn’t have blamed him. It was so close to their lives, it would have been hard to keep silent.

  Downstairs, it seemed that Tom and Dee had also gone. The radio was still on in the kitchen and whoever had been in there last had left the milk bottle out, the foil top off. I put my nose to the rim cautiously. It was as sour as I had expected it to be.

  I peeled a banana; the sweet smell and slightly soft flesh was on the edge of repulsive. I dropped it half-eaten in the bin and searched for some bread.

  Outside there was a frenzy of chirping and a flurry of wings as the birds descended from one branch to the next, aware of the oncoming storm. The clouds had thickened, clotted together like a bruise and the lift in the breeze told me that it wouldn’t be long before the change hit with full force.

  I took my skateboard, aware that it had become a habit to grab it whenever I left the house, and also secretly thrilled by the speed with which I took the hill that led down to the waterfront stairs.

  I hadn’t been here since the time I had looked after Bradley Parsons. In just a few days, the trees at the edge of the scrub had begun to lose their leaves and the path was littered with them, golden and russet and pale underfoot. At the bottom of the stairs I could see the river. The tide was high and the water was slapping against the rocks along the shoreline, small white peaks out where it was deep, the colour a darkening steely green as it flowed rapidly, chopped by the oncoming wind.

  When I pushed open the gate to the gloom of that garden, I had to lift it carefully over the stones on the pathway, raised by the roots of the trees that pressed close. It was as I remembered: you could see everything from the entrance to Bradley’s house.

  I knocked on the door and there was no immediate answer. The second time I was a little louder, rapping my knuckles sharply against the deep blue paint.

  She didn’t open it immediately. She asked who was there, her voice both cross and nervous.

  When I told her, I heard her slide back the bolt rapidly.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘Neighbourhood kids come down here and knock and then run away. Or they call out for Bradley telling him they want to play, and then when he opens the door...’

  Her voice trailed off.

  Behind her, Bradley was holding out his hands, impatiently jiggling up and down, trying to squeeze past his mother. As she stepped to the side, he made a rush for me, hugging me so tight I felt the air disappear from my lungs.

  ‘No, Bradley,’ she told him. ‘You can’t do that. Gentle.’

  He stepped back.

  ‘He’s talked about you non-stop,’ she explained.