The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  The scream in the night, how many forms it came in.

  Minnie of the red hair. Minnie of the Irish red. It was funny the pictures that came back to a person — the glow of those springy strands against the light, a halo, and the glow red-gold. Minnie had no idea how attractive she still was.

  ‘I mind my own business,’ she’d told him in the dream; but her business had become his; his hers.

  Chris pondered again the fact Minnie had never re-married. There was something about her — durable — was that the word he was looking for? He recalled an evening when Minnie had visited his mother during her last months at home. She’d spoken to him briefly, standing on the porch. It must have been summer, or late spring, for it to have still been light after he got home — not only light, but a light full of red and gold.

  Minnie had said something that was meant to comfort; he could not remember what. There’d been several women who’d sat with his mother while he was at work, and a couple of men, including his next door neighbour. Chris thought that he’d never thanked Minnie properly; he ought to do that.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Anthea couldn’t keep the disgust from her voice. She would have preferred Shaw to be telling her that she was sacked.

  ‘I could report you for harassment,’ she said, knowing as she spoke that the sergeant would take her words as an admission of defeat.

  ‘Go right ahead.’ He smiled.

  ‘One day you’ll tie that dick of yours in knots.’

  Shaw’s laughter echoed down the station’s narrow corridor.

  After her first shock and recoil, Anthea realised that he’d chosen a time when Chris would be away for some hours. She walked out of the station, closing the door quietly behind her.

  His taunts followed her across the street.

  ‘Fucking a paedophile! What do you expect?’

  Anthea felt dirty and ashamed. What had Shaw done but squeeze her breast and buttocks? It seemed much worse than that. His expression had said that this was the beginning and she’d better get used to it. Would another woman have ignored him? Would another woman have shouted and kneed him in the balls? Of course, that was what the sergeant wanted, for her to act in a way that would put her in the wrong.

  Normally, Anthea prided herself on her ability to think clearly, to take one step at a time. But Olly’s arrest had changed that; a part of her mind and energy was locked up in the cell with him.

  She recalled the nightmares she’d had for years after her parents died. In many of the nightmares, their death was her fault. She’d learnt self-reliance at an early age; she believed she’d had to, and she still believed that. It wasn’t everyone whose parents were killed in a car accident when they were three. She had almost no memory of them; sometimes, when she was feeling down, she told herself that she had none at all. But then, persistently and quietly, there would come to her, the feeling of her small hands held in two large ones, the feeling of her feet placed one in front of the other, down a path under tall trees in dappled sunlight. The picture wasn’t fake. It was a memory, and hers.

  Anthea had loved her grandparents, and was in no doubt that they had loved her. But by the time she was ten — Bobby’s age — she’d begun consciously watching them grow frailer, dependent on each other and increasingly on her. She had known then that she must learn to think and act for herself. But the mistakes you make creep up on you, and you don’t see them for mistakes until it’s too late. This had been an early lesson too.

  Anthea thought of Graeme, on whom, as she now saw it, she had wasted years. Her failure to recognise that Graeme didn’t love her made her doubt her ability to judge men and their feelings. She should not have gone along with the proposal that Olly look after Max without thinking it through. She should have allowed herself more time to get over Graeme, settle in to Queenscliff, get used to the idea of living by herself.

  Now she was faced with a plunging sense of failure, made worse by Shaw’s insults and crude but confident sexual advance.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ Chris said.

  Anthea had not decided what, if anything, to tell him, held back partly by the knowledge that Shaw would expect her to complain, partly by her own confusion.

  But now she had to say something. As she stumbled through an explanation, Chris’s face grew red and angry.

  ‘Put in a written complaint.’

  ‘If I do, he’ll arrest me as Olly’s accomplice. I’m fair game.’

  They were sitting on the bench under the black lighthouse. Anthea said she preferred that to being inside.

  ‘It’s his word against mine.’

  ‘I’ll back you up.’

  Shaw was like a rubber ball; dented, he sprang back with increased velocity. Was this the sign of a truly narcissistic personality? Chris told himself that was a question for later, not for now.

  When he’d left the station earlier that day, on an errand he now recognised had been dreamt up for him by the sergeant, he’d noticed a car with a green stripe on the side of the number plate parked over the road.

  Instead of driving away immediately, he’d waited. Ferguson and the tall man Chris recognised from the railway yard had got into the car.

  When he questioned Anthea about the tall man, she shook her head. She’d been in the back office with the door shut, and had stayed there till Shaw called out to her.

  Chris had seen photographs of the Director General of ASIS, the only member of the organisation who could, by law, be publicly identified. He couldn’t be sure, but he had an idea who the tall man might be.

  They went back to her flat for lunch. While Anthea made a herb omelette, Chris sat at her laptop searching through photographs.

  He’d believed the tall man must be stationed on the island. But was this necessarily the case? The morning Bobby’s body was found, he could have come by helicopter. Apart from his height, ‘their’ man, as Chris was beginning to think of him, had no features that stood out.

  They washed up their few dishes. Anthea said she was too tired to talk.

  TWENTY-NINE

  ‘Hello darkness, my old friend,’ Chris sang softly to himself and Max, thinking of the different ways the song could be interpreted, its many evocative lines.

  He was tone deaf and never inflicted his singing on anybody else. He was even embarrassed singing in the shower. Max didn’t seem to mind though.

  When you stepped outside at night, on the outskirts of Queenscliff, away from houses and streetlights, when you crossed the borders of the town on foot, that’s when you felt it, the deep darkness of the countryside.

  The small sounds of nocturnal animals heading off to forage, the pilot boat leaving its moorings in the harbour, the last ferry of the night magnified across the water — silence was an illusion. It always had been. A rustle in the bushes to his right was a bird up late, or a native rat. If you listened carefully, you could hear the soft honking of the swans. Lights over the water came from the far side of the island. To claim that it was truly dark was an illusion too.

  Max lifted his nose and sniffed, then turned around so that he was directly facing Swan Bay. For a moment, Chris was tempted to let him off the lead. But Max, normally obedient, might rush to whoever or whatever he had smelt. He would do this if he thought the person — for Chris was beginning to feel certain that the smell was human — could offer him a link to Bobby.

  There was no path that led directly to the water from where they were standing. The one they were on followed a ridge through the Moonah and met up with the railway line further on.

  Bush-bashing was out. Even in daylight it would be difficult, impossible to accomplish at night without making a racket.

  If he and Max stayed on the path and circled round, they might come closer to the man, or men, that way.

  Chris risked shining his pencil torch down at his feet. He knew the path by daylight reasonably well, but there were Moonah roots whose sole purpose in being there, it seemed to him just then, was to trip a
person up.

  Chris had another idea. If the men had come to that isolated spot by water, then they would return by water as well. He could follow the path until it met the railway line, then cut across a relatively open stretch of ground — saltbush and rotting seagrass — that at low tide created a narrow spit.

  The tide had turned and was starting to come in, but still he should have plenty of time. Of course whoever it was might leave at any moment. By the time he reached his vantage point, it might be too late to catch even a shadow or an outline. Chris thought there must be at least two of them. Why paddle to that particular, out-of-the-way spot on your own?

  He made his way step by step, aware of every tiny crunch underneath his feet, Max padding silently beside him. Oh, to have four feet, Chris wished, and to know exactly where to place them.

  The timing suits them, whoever they are, he thought. Swan Bay’s incoming tide was very different from the ocean’s, creeping centimetre by centimetre into the bay with scarcely a murmur.

  By the time he reached the spit, now covered with the faintest of translucent washes — he dared not use his torch again, but watched his feet in the starlight between parted clouds — he was afraid that he’d been making too much noise and his quarry had evaporated. Water magnified sounds and sent back strange echoes, as every child learnt.

  But Max walked forward with his nose up and tail stiff. Whoever he had smelt was still there. Across the water, not very far now, Chris heard a murmur of voices. A good thing the night breeze was blowing away from him.

  Chris crouched low to the ground. There was very little cover. If whoever it was shone a torch in his direction, he’d be seen.

  He had no reason to believe that one of the low-pitched voices belonged to the hotel manager, but Griffin’s balanced limp had been in his mind’s eye for the last few hundred metres. He could not risk going any further, even on his hands and knees. He felt grateful for Max’s warmth beside him, and was aware that he’d been gradually losing his sense of time. He’d switched his phone off because he’d been afraid that it might ring.

  He raised his head sharply at the sound of oars.

  Two men, black shapes against the water and starlight, passed by the spit. One was rowing a dinghy, a bulky, thickset man, who looked to be dressed in some kind of padded jacket. The other sat upright in the stern, holding himself with a military bearing.

  Darkness and the discomfort of a clandestine meeting notwithstanding, the man held himself as erect as he would in a Cabinet Minister’s office, in a roomful of Generals planning Australia’s next military operation.

  Well, hello, Chris greeted the men silently. I’ve seen both of you before.

  ‘Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,’ Chris said.

  Should he be surprised that Tom was awake at three in the morning? It was his night for recalling lines of songs and stray snatches of nursery rhymes.

  Tom was smoking under the No Smoking sign. He looked as though he hadn’t moved for days.

  ‘Blackie,’ he said crossly.

  Though Chris had made his way back from the spit as quickly as he could — using his torch, not caring about making a noise — it had taken what seemed like years to reach the coastguard office. Wet sand, twigs and leaves stuck to his clothes.

  ‘You look terrible,’ Tom said.

  Chris got Max a drink. Then Tom called the dog over to him and Max sat down at his feet.

  ‘Hello, fella,’ Tom said. ‘What’s this silly fool been doing to you?’

  Chris sat down without being invited, and began describing the man who’d been in the boat with Griffin.

  ‘I need a name. I think I know his position.’

  ‘Christ’s sake, Blackie.’

  ‘Tom,’ Chris said quietly, ‘We’ve reached the end of a fraying rope.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re close to the checkpoint. You watch who comes and goes.’

  ‘So?’ Tom repeated, derisively this time.

  ‘You inhabit the same watery realm.’

  This pleased Tom and he grinned around his cigarette.

  ‘Go home,’ he told Chris. ‘Go home and get some shut-eye. Leave Max here with me. I’ll bring him up in the morning.’

  ‘It is morning.’

  ‘Shut up and go home to bed.’

  THIRTY

  A man had jumped off Point Lonsdale pier and drowned. An ambulance was there when Chris pulled up, an SES helicopter hovering above the Rip.

  Chris had to stop himself from tearing along the pier like a man late for a bus.

  Anthea turned towards him and he saw in her face how she’d almost panicked, finding herself alone at the station when the call came through, then finding that his mobile was switched off. She was in the middle of securing the pier with police tape. A group of fishermen huddled under the shelter at its seaward end.

  ‘Sorry,’ Chris said. ‘I’m really sorry. I had a late night and slept in. I’ll tell you about it later. Who is it, do you know?’

  Anthea shook her head. ‘There are more paramedics at the front beach. The body’s being moved in that direction by the current and the tide.’

  Chris’s phone rang. It was Inspector Ferguson.

  ‘So, constable, a bit of drama.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Of all the idiotic things. I’ll be there in an hour.’

  Ferguson instructed Chris to secure the area between the carpark and the pier, as well as the pier itself, keep sightseers away and take preliminary statements from the fishermen.

  He looked up from his phone to Anthea, voicing what she was thinking too: an accident, or suicide? It crossed his mind that Ferguson already knew who the dead man was.

  His phone rang again. This time it was Tom Maloney on the coastguard boat, a different Tom, sounding confident and almost cheerful. The plan was to retrieve the body before it washed up on the beach. The helicopter would stay in position above it and Tom would pick it up.

  One of the fishermen called out. Anthea raised her hand in response.

  ‘I’ll talk to them in a moment,’ Chris said. ‘Just tell me what —’

  ‘He ran to the end and jumped.’

  ‘At high tide? With this swell?’

  Anthea shrugged. It was not indifference, Chris saw, but an inability to comprehend, a lack of willingness to attempt an explanation.

  Chris looked again at his assistant’s face. There was a faint light, a bilious yellow light — if biliousness could claim to have a colour — washing over her and the sea at her back. A young seal chose that moment to lift its head.

  The fisherman who introduced himself as Joe was no stranger to the pier, or the dangers of the Rip. He was the one who’d phoned triple zero.

  ‘We shouted at him. We tried!’

  The others — there were three of them — nodded, apparently relieved to have Joe speaking for them. Joe looked to be in his mid-fifties, with the heavy facial lines that suggested much of his life had been spent outdoors. Chris couldn’t recall seeing him on Queenscliff pier, but these men had their preferences and habits. It wouldn’t surprise him if Joe scarcely ever fished anywhere but the point.

  Joe shook his head in disbelief. They agreed that they’d heard running footsteps and looked up to see a man leaping from the end. One claimed to have heard him call out, but his companions were uncertain; no words had been distinguished; it might have been a cry of anger, or desperation; it might have been the wind.

  The fishermen remained in a miserable huddle and answered Chris’s questions in as few words as possible. They smelt of bait and blood.

  When Chris asked where the life belt was, Joe said, ‘It was always getting vandalised. It never got replaced.’

  ‘I threw my bucket in,’ a man who introduced himself as Ewan said.

  It had all happened so quickly. Chris continued asking questions until he figured he’d got as much as he was going to just then. He was interrupted twice by Tom, first ringing to say he’d retrieved the body,
then that there were car keys in one of the trouser pockets, but no wallet or phone. Chris took the fishermen’s names and addresses and thanked them for waiting. He gave them his mobile number, checked his watch and went to have a look around the carpark.

  Anthea was doing a good job keeping curious bystanders off the pier.

  A police photographer arrived from Geelong and introduced himself. Chris had wondered who would get there first, the press or Inspector Ferguson. Were his sergeants with him? The inspector had said nothing about them.

  Chris shook his head to clear it, feeling that he was moving in a nightmare, with that clogged dragging at his limbs that his sea nightmares always gave him. It had been hard enough standing on the end of the pier while the swell heaved at his elbows. The seal, a curious youngster, no doubt recently abandoned by its mother, had come up first on one side, then the other. It was the season when young males were pushed out of the breeding colony. He hoped this one would learn that free fish also meant fish hooks.

  Chris thought of Olly and his kayak and was suddenly certain that if Olly had been on the pier when the man had jumped, Olly would have tried to rescue him. It was a useless distraction, but Chris saw the attempted rescue plainly, superimposed on his vision, or rather side by side with the pier and path leading down to it, and the young, earnest face of the photographer. He reflected that Olly would have dived into the swell without stopping to consider the danger to himself.

  None of the fishermen had seen anybody chasing the young man, but Chris was well aware that the pursuer, if there had been one, could have kept hidden in the bushes underneath the lighthouse.

  The photographer turned to ask over his shoulder, ‘Is it always like this?’

  It took Chris a moment to grasp his meaning. ‘Not at low tide,’ he said.

  Chris’s thoughts returned to Olly, who would have climbed the waves and fought the current if he thought there was a chance that he might save a life. Strange that it had taken what was, on the face of it, an act of folly to bring home the likeness between Olly and his father.