The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  She asked the girl behind the bar what time the manager normally started work, and was told mid-morning. When asked if he’d arrived early that morning, the girl went red and looked down at her hands.

  Anthea headed for the stairs. She didn’t think anyone would stop her from walking up and down corridors and peering through whatever doors were open. But, to her disappointment, all the doors to the first and second floor rooms facing out towards the street were locked. There was no sign of guests or cleaners. It was possible that the hotel was three-quarters empty; in fact, it was more than likely. Anthea turned left down a corridor towards the back.

  The back upstairs section of the building seemed even more deserted, a strip of linoleum in the middle of bare boards the only floor covering. Anthea wondered if the rooms provided staff accommodation, then reasoned that surely all the staff lived locally.

  The corridor turned left again before coming to an end on a landing directly above the beer garden. Anthea stood looking down through a small window with a view of almost the entire outside area. The vantage point was two-way. If she could see down, then anybody looking up could see her as well. Of course, visibility would depend on the time of day, or night. The window was uncurtained and, though there was a light fitting on the landing, the bulb was missing. Anthea was thinking that someone — could it have been Bobby? — might well had used the window to spy on the hotel’s patrons, when a voice behind her said, ‘Can I help you?’

  She turned around, careful not to hurry or look startled. The man approaching her had spoken mildly and politely, yet Anthea had not missed the sharper undercurrent. She noticed that he walked with a carefully controlled limp.

  Anthea introduced herself, taking care to keep her voice relaxed and courteous.

  ‘I was admiring the view.’

  The man did not offer his name. Instead, he inclined his head and raised an eyebrow slightly, just enough to let her know that he did not believe her.

  ‘These rooms along here, are they for staff?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m curious.’

  ‘They’re unoccupied at present.’

  ‘How long have they been empty?’

  ‘We — that is the owners — have plans for renovating this section.’

  ‘Business must be good then. You’re the manager here, Mr —?’

  ‘Griffin.’

  ‘Mr Griffin, the door to this corridor, is it locked at night?’

  Anthea had seen that the door was fitted with a lock, but it looked as though it was usually left open. When she’d pushed it with her hand, the hinges had felt stiff.

  ‘I told you this section is unoccupied at present.’

  ‘No valuables?’

  ‘None whatsoever. I’ll take you downstairs now.’

  They descended the stairs without speaking. Mr Griffin indicated the door with an open right hand and a miniscule bow.

  The Falcon was still parked outside, but the car with the green stripe along its number plate was gone. Anthea walked slowly up the hill, thinking that her guess about Bobby spying might be wrong, or at least incomplete. She could easily see Mr Griffin standing by that window. She was also sure that if Bobby had taken his turn as lookout, when Griffin had been occupied elsewhere, then the hotel manager would have paid him for it. Bobby would have found his own way of insisting on that.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Did Olly ever do Bobby’s washing for him?’ Chris asked his assistant.

  Anthea stared at Chris, alarmed. ‘What have you found?’

  They were sitting on the station’s back verandah. ‘Come over the road for a minute,’ Chris said.

  After they’d walked around to the far side of the black lighthouse, Chris showed Anthea the underpants.

  ‘Are you sure they’re Bobby’s?’

  ‘I could ask Sharon.’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’

  In the clear morning light, Anthea’s face looked as though some small, desperate animal had clawed it, yet there was no blood.

  ‘Don’t involve Sharon any more,’ she said, then in a voice that was just above a whisper, ‘I was wrong about Olly.’

  ‘Because of these?’

  ‘Not only. Those photos. There’s too many of them.’

  Chris agreed with this assessment; at least three-quarters of him agreed, while one quarter remained stubborn and recalcitrant.

  He indicated the underclothes again. ‘They may have been put in the drawer deliberately.’

  ‘For you to find?’

  ‘Ferguson, or Shaw.’

  ‘Why now?’

  Anthea was slower than usual; Chris felt he had to spell things out. ‘To strengthen the case against Olly,’ he said gently. When Anthea did not respond, he continued, ‘If Olly was abusing Bobby, he’d never leave incriminating details for the police to find. He’d never have strangled Bobby using Max’s lead.’

  Anthea took a breath so deep it seemed to come from the foundations of the lighthouse. After staring out to sea for a few moments, she told him about her visit to the Esplanade.

  The door to the front office was open.

  Shaw said, ‘In here, Merritt.’

  Chris waited for Anthea in the back office.

  ‘Practice for a clown convention,’ she said grimly, when she appeared a few minutes later. ‘Shaw wanted to know where we’d been the day before yesterday. I told him catching up. He knew I was lying, but he didn’t care.’

  ‘The clowns?’

  ‘All of us,’ said Anthea.

  Chris offered to make tea. When he stepped onto the verandah carrying a tray, he saw that his assistant had moved a couple of chairs to the middle of the lawn.

  ‘My statement,’ she said. ‘Watch your feet.’

  Chris felt curiously heartened. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said.

  Anthea filled him in on more details of her conversation with the hotel manager.

  After listening in silence for a while, Chris said, ‘I’ve seen him exercising a German Shepherd a few times. He hasn’t been at the Esplanade for long.’

  He didn’t add that one time had been at night, when he was looking for Bobby’s hiding place. So far, Chris hadn’t told anybody else about that, perhaps because he felt ashamed at having made himself an easy target for the sergeant.

  Anthea said, ‘It would be interesting to find out why Griffin chose Queenscliff.’

  ‘Maybe Queenscliff chose him.’

  Anthea pondered this, as she described the window on the landing, the light fitting without a bulb.

  Chris said, ‘If Griffin spent much time looking out that window, there’d be a chair, possibly a table.’

  ‘I saw scratch marks on the floor, where a table could have been. I didn’t have time to examine them. I was only there for a couple of minutes before he found me. What do you think?’

  ‘Why spy on the spies? Perhaps it was Griffin’s idea. Perhaps he’s done useful little jobs before.’

  Anthea looked up at the sound of a phone ringing at the front of the building. Every time it rings, she believes that it’s with an order to arrest her, Chris said to himself.

  ‘If Bobby was exploring the hotel for reasons of his own,’ Anthea said, looking back at Chris with a determined expression, ‘perhaps looking for a hiding place for his money, he might have come across Griffin on the landing.’

  Chris nodded. ‘It’s embarrassing to have your cover blown. Even by a ten-year-old.’

  Anthea wondered aloud if they were making too much of a window overlooking the beer garden and a few scratches on the floor. The thought of Olly in a cell, Olly being spat at, beaten as a paedophile, was like a stone in her mind, sometimes sinking a little, sometimes rising, always there. But what if he was guilty? Why was she wasting her sympathy on him? More fool she.

  She said dully, ‘Why would Griffin be any use to them?’

  ‘I don’t know. It may not have been worked out in advance. Put your man in place, g
ive him the right amount of cover and the means, then see what he comes up with.’

  ‘You mean, before Griffin there was someone else?’

  ‘An ASIS trainee, maybe. After all, they’ve got to practise somewhere off the island.’ Chris recalled the Sheraton Hotel. Of all the botched exercises, that one had received the most publicity and had resulted in threats to shut ASIS down. He glanced at Anthea, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I checked my house. For what its worth.’

  ‘I did too.’

  ‘You could go home. You don’t need to stay here.’

  ‘Why should I sit there waiting for them to come banging on my door?’

  With a part of his mind, Chris was thinking, they’re not monsters, just detectives doing their job. Then he recalled Shaw’s cruel, malicious smile.

  Anthea said, ‘What if they put microphones in Olly’s cottage before Bobby was killed?’

  Chris knew what his assistant meant: they’d have recorded her and Olly making love.

  He said, ‘Bobby’s death took them by surprise.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That tall man at the railway yard. He wouldn’t have been there if he already knew who’d killed Bobby.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I aim to find out.’

  Anthea did not respond. Chris guessed she was thinking of microphones hidden in the bedroom of her flat.

  ‘The Esplanade’s the obvious choice for a bit of surveillance,’ he said. ‘The SAS trainees drink there. Some drink too much. Given where most of them are heading, it’s useful to find out who can hold his liquor without blabbing, or getting into fights.’

  ‘What about the ones who were waiting for the protesters?’

  ‘The army will have held an inquiry. Maybe Ferguson knows the results of it. Maybe not.’

  ‘Do you think Griffin knows?’

  ‘About the aborted protest? If he’s any good at his job, he does.’

  Chris glanced round at the sound of the station’s back door opening.

  Sergeant Haverley approached them cautiously across the lawn. When Anthea said the tea was still hot and invited him to fetch a mug from the kitchen, the sergeant shook his head and told Anthea she was wanted inside.

  TWENTY-THREE

  There was an old, rusted washing machine at the back of the house. Sharon showed it to Chris, calling it cantankerous. She said she was afraid that one day it would just blow up.

  Chris nodded in sympathetic agreement, aware that he was going against Anthea’s express wishes in speaking to Sharon again.

  He pictured the girl, with Bobby’s help, hanging out their clothes, Sharon hurrying home from the bakery to get them in before it rained, while her mother did what? Sat in front of a television screen and smoked?

  He gave back Bobby’s T-shirt, which she hesitated for a moment before taking.

  ‘Have you seen that man and his German Shepherd again?’

  ‘Which man?’

  Chris said gently, ‘You know the one I mean. You saw him with Bobby, didn’t you, and the two dogs?’

  Sharon raised frightened eyes. ‘Bobby said that they were friends.’

  ‘Did he tell you the man’s name?’

  ‘He meant the dogs were friends. Max makes friends easily. Max is a good dog.’

  ‘He is,’ Chris agreed. ‘And I mean to look after him, for Bobby’s sake.’

  Sharon said nothing to this, but she looked slightly less harried and forlorn.

  ‘Do you believe in heaven, Constable Blackie?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘I used to.’

  ‘I think Bobby’s in heaven right now,’ Sharon said, with a small, stubborn lift to her chin.

  In answer to the crucial question, when Chris came to ask it, Sharon hesitated, then shook her head. The underpants might have belonged to Bobby; she could not be sure.

  ‘The other policeman — the sergeant? — he took all Bobby’s clothes. Mum was cross. She said she could have sold them. I found this’ — she smoothed the T-shirt gently — ‘down behind the bed.’

  Chris wanted to put his arms around Sharon, tell her that however bad things were at present, they’d get better.

  He said, ‘You did the washing for Bobby and his brothers.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Only sometimes?’

  ‘Sometimes Bobby did his own.’

  ‘Did he ever mention Olly Parkinson washing clothes for him?’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘I just wondered if Bobby had mentioned it some time.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you think of Olly?’

  ‘I only met him once. We said hello. I thought he was nice. He’s in jail, isn’t he? Did he kill my brother?’

  Chris would have liked to give her a definite answer, because certainty might have been some kind of comfort to her. He said, ‘I don’t know.’

  The two constables were sent off on another round of door-knocking. Ferguson was convinced that someone living in one of the houses round the railway yard, or along the route between the yard and Olly’s cottage, had seen him doubling back after he’d left Bobby in Wharf Street. The inspector blamed Chris and Anthea for their failure to find that ‘someone’.

  Chris didn’t mind another afternoon spent going from house to house, though he wished that the detectives would finish up and leave. He thought about Griffin while he knocked on doors and listened. If even half of what he suspected about the hotel manager was true, then Griffin was a dangerous man.

  Anarchy frightened Chris, much as he imagined it had attracted Bobby — or perhaps not anarchy so much as an open field, a space presenting opportunities. Bobby had been very young, but already too old, Chris feared, to care on which side of the law these opportunities were to be found.

  As he went on asking questions, receiving the negative answers he expected, Chris found himself wishing Anthea had kept away from the hotel.

  He recalled Sergeant Haverley’s expression as he’d approached them across the station’s back yard, and hoped he’d never be put in a position where he strove to please masters he detested. But perhaps Haverley saw his responsibility as simply obeying orders. Perhaps he’d considered the alternative and rejected it.

  Chris knew himself to have been, until very recently, that kind of officer; one who accepted the need to obey his superiors without question. How could a police force function otherwise? What if Anthea disobeyed him and went behind his back? He’d be furious; he’d have every right to be.

  Over a plate of toasted sandwiches, Anthea read about Australia’s intelligence services. A few years ago there’d been three drownings. She recalled the off-hand way that Chris had mentioned them. At the time, this should have alerted her to the fact that he was troubled by the young men’s deaths.

  She found the Defence Department inquiry on the net. It made interesting reading, the more so for all the sentences blocked out, including the security gate number, which was silly, since anyone could go to the checkpoint and read it.

  Three trainees, driving back to the island from an Easter drinking session at the Esplanade, had clocked 109 in a 40 kilometre zone, then run off the causeway into Swan Bay. Their companions, following in a second speeding car, had been unable to save them. There was no mystery about the deaths. The men had drunk too much, driven far too fast, and gone over the side.

  One detail caught Anthea’s attention. The swipe cards for opening the bridge security gates after hours were kept in the cars, which were shared between the trainees. These cars could be used for recreational purposes, not only around Queenscliff, but the whole of the Bellarine Peninsula. How easy would it be, Anthea wondered, to break into one of these cars and steal the swipe card while its occupants were at the pub? Had the drownings led to stricter control of vehicles and their off-base use? The number plates were colour coded; Anthea recalled the one she’d seen with a green stripe parked outside the Esplanade. Who had come over from the islan
d early that morning, and why?

  A book borrowed from the public library, a history of Australia’s foreign and domestic intelligence services, had a section on Swan Island. The history was unauthorised; indeed the Director General of ASIS had tried to stop its publication. A few years ago, there’d been an incident that might have ended in tragedy. An exercise had involved dropping trainees outside the heads and making them swim back. But there’d been a miscalculation in the timing of the tides, and the men had found themselves trying to swim against a fast-flowing ebb. Two, at least, had almost drowned. Anthea wondered what had happened to the officer responsible for the mistake, and whether that exercise was still part of the training program.

  She decided she’d do what she’d watched Chris doing, make a list of everything she’d learnt so far.

  Pencil notes had the advantage of being easily destroyed; they left no electronic trace. Anthea jotted down her thoughts about Bobby and the ‘jobs’ he might have done for the soldiers and the hotel manager.

  Another possibility occurred to her. What if Griffin had been playing a private game, rather than taking his orders from someone on the island? If Bobby had been nosing round the hotel, what better way to keep him quiet than to recruit him?

  Anthea sighed and rested her pencil against the notebook’s flimsy spine. Were the men in charge keeping Griffin in reserve in case Olly wriggled away from them? But Griffin led towards the island, not away from it, and focus on the island was what those calling the tune most wished to avoid.

  Anthea went outside and sat down on the back verandah. The chairs had been warmed by the sun. She stretched and began to feel her muscles let go of their tension.

  She asked herself if there was any room or landing inside the hotel where the checkpoint could be watched through binoculars or a telephoto lense, and decided that there must be at least one. She wondered whether to invent some kind of story to explain her wish to examine the upstairs balconies and rooms, but could not imagine Griffin agreeing to the search.

  If her hunch was right and Griffin had recruited Bobby, then he could well be in bad odour with the security services. But the more Anthea thought about it, the more Bobby’s private recruitment made sense. Griffin could not spend hours standing in front of a window with binoculars, but Bobby could.