The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  Chris wondered what he looked like to the animal. Foreshortened and ridiculous? Just another human? Perhaps the seal had danced around the drowning man while he gasped for air. Perhaps he’d seen a wallet, and then a few seconds later a mobile phone.

  Chris recalled how his mother had refused to have anything to do with the investigation into his father’s death. When police officers and representatives of the pilots’ board had attempted to question her, she’d answered in monosyllables, or not at all.

  Listening behind his bedroom door, sick with shock, Chris had memorised each of his mother’s refusals; pitiful and whimpering, or strident and accusing, if whoever it was pushed too hard, or went on too long.

  ‘It won’t bring him back,’ was all she ever said by way of explanation; but mostly she didn’t bother explaining to her son. Chris wondered whether it would have been the same if he’d been the one to drown. Would his mother have exerted herself more, or in a different way?

  THIRTY-THREE

  The vehicle registration database revealed that the green Hyundai Chris had noted in the carpark was registered to Edward Yates with an address in Grafton.

  Chris rang from a public phone. Yes, it was their son’s car, the man who answered said in a broken voice. A police sergeant and their son’s commanding officer had been to see them. Their son had been using their address because he’d been on a training camp and was leaving Australia after that.

  ‘You’re from the police? What more do you want? My wife and I —’

  ‘Thank you,’ Chris said, ‘I’m sorry for disturbing you.’

  He found his feet carrying him once again towards the coastguard office. His uniform still itched. He felt as though the spray from the pier had shrunk it, and walked awkwardly, trying to relax his shoulders. The sound of gunfire from the island made him stop and listen. He heard a dog bark quickly, four times in a row.

  Tom was busy typing, a burning cigarette in the ash tray beside him.

  ‘Blackie,’ he said, without glancing up.

  ‘Shouldn’t leave your door open. Never know who might poke his head in.’

  ‘You,’ Tom said.

  Chris resisted the urge to adjust his uniform again. He nodded at Tom’s laptop.

  ‘Joe rang 000 from the pier at twenty-three minutes to eight. Who called you and when?’

  ‘Eight-oh-five,’ Tom said.

  ‘Why the delay?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘I’m asking you,’ Chris said quietly.

  ‘The ‘copter was there.’

  ‘The helicopter located the body, yes.’

  ‘By the time I got my boat and left the harbour, that young fella was already dead.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure there was no identification on him?’

  Tom glared up at Chris. ‘You know what the joke is? Having a bloody volunteer coastguard at all.’

  ‘You did your best.’

  Tom banged both hands on the table next to his keyboard, then sunk his head into them.

  ‘Who called you?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Copter pilot.’

  ‘That noise you heard, the night Bobby was killed, that might have been oars. You would have heard them landing.’

  ‘I didn’t. You know how it is — suddenly there’ll be a silence and you’ll hear something a little bit out of the ordinary, or you think you hear it. I went out for a piss. How was I to know? Don’t you think I’ve been over it a million times?’

  Chris said, ‘Thanks for calling me from out there.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ Tom pantomimed raising a glass. ‘To spies. May they disappear up their own fundaments.’

  Chris knew how easy it was to tune in to Tom’s frequency; of course Tom knew that as well. He wanted to ask if Tom had checked his office for microphones, but wasn’t it too late for that?

  ‘Suicide,’ he said. ‘That’ll be the official view.’

  Tom nodded slowly, as though the movement was too much for him. It occurred to Chris that the coastguard officer might be drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol.

  He asked about the dead man’s clothes. Tom’s description fitted with what the fishermen had said.

  ‘Chaps were on at me about his ID.’

  ‘Chaps?’

  ‘A major and some suits.’

  ‘An unusually tall man in a suit?’

  Tom nodded. Chris waited for him to refer to his request for a name. Had Tom had time? Had he forgotten about it? He wondered why Tom had been left to pick up the body on his own. Tom answered this unspoken last question as though he’d voiced it aloud.

  ‘Someone had to. Better someone they can boss around. Still, since I didn’t have his ID on me, or my boat, they had to go away dissatisfied.’

  ‘You were body searched?’

  ‘Hope it gave them piles.’

  Chris said, ‘There would have been plenty of people watching when you brought the boat in.’

  ‘A bit of drama. Why not?’

  ‘Did you recognise any?’

  ‘Funny thing about that major — ears stick out. Ought to wear a beanie.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t care about his personal appearance.’

  ‘There is that,’ Tom said.

  ‘What about a man with a German Shepherd?’

  Tom shook his head, then frowned up at the No Smoking sign.

  ‘Time for a breather. Where will we walk to?’

  ‘You choose, Tom.’

  ‘Round by the pub, I think.’

  Round by was exactly where they walked, in a circle, giving the hotel a wide berth, while Tom affected pre-occupation with his cigarette.

  They approached the old pier with the covered end, where society ladies had waited in the shade for the steamer to take them back to Melbourne, in the days when the Esplanade was new.

  Tom hung over the railing in a typical fisherman’s pose, waving his fag around, so that sparks flew down towards the water. It was a still, clear evening, normally an evening Chris would have enjoyed a walk, though not near the sea.

  Tom knew his aversion. There was a certain degree of malice, Chris thought, in his choice.

  ‘A bloody big-eared major,’ Tom said.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘The major, or the other one?’

  ‘Both,’ Chris said. ‘Please.’

  The wind rose, growling round the pier. Chris looked down, half expecting to see the young seal.

  On the first day of the investigation into Bobby’s murder, Tom told Chris, Sergeant Shaw had asked him why he thought Bobby had been killed so close to the coastguard office. Tom had felt insulted and he’d let Shaw know it. Things had gone downhill with the detective from that moment on.

  ‘They’ll close my office and your station. Link it up with Bellarine.’

  Chris agreed that this was more than likely. He thought of the Rip swallowing men. ‘We’re not that old,’ he said.

  ‘But I feel old. By Christ, I feel old. You think he killed Bobby, that young fella who drowned?’

  ‘I think he knew what happened.’

  Tom tossed his butt and pushed himself away from the railing.

  ‘Another rumour,’ he said. ‘Want to hear it?’

  This one — Tom did not say how he’d come by it — concerned a commando-style landing on Phillip Island in the middle of the night. The plan had been to take the local police and other authorities, including the coastguard, by surprise.

  ‘It would have spoilt the fun to tell us in advance. They had to practise reacting to poor drongos who believed that they were being raided.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Aborted. My guess is some poor sod wasn’t as closed-mouth as he was supposed to be.’

  ‘That seems to be the current problem.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll get it sorted.’

  If Chris hadn’t known Tom better, he would have sworn the prospect cheered him.

  Chris imagined rumours in the form of witches on broomsticks cir
cling the island. He heard a cackling sound and knew that it was Tom trying not to cry. He thought of their shared understanding the way he often pictured fear, as a vast underground lake over which he moved, careful not to tread too heavily. A step in any direction was dangerous, yet so was standing still.

  ‘Come on Blackie,’ Tom said. ‘Enough fresh air for one night.’

  Exercises were necessary. Who could argue with that proposition?

  As they retraced their footsteps to the coastguard office, Chris noted the fact that, in spite of Tom’s suggestion, they went nowhere near the Esplanade. He recalled another rumour, unconfirmed of course, about a runway and an old plane, used to practise hostage rescues. Why not? If ever he were held hostage in a plane, wouldn’t he want his rescuers to have had a bit of practice? Every now and again, the story about the runway re-surfaced with a bit more embroidery. He knew he had as little chance of verifying or disproving it as any of the townsfolk who passed it on.

  Now Chris pictured the runway, and thought of practising for emergencies as being part of what made a society, what held a country’s purpose. Occasionally, rehearsals blew up into a storm, then the storm died down again, without involving Constable Blackie, or Volunteer Coastguard Officer Maloney, two men who’d been more or less content with their allotted roles.

  Looked at from the perspective of an Inspector Ferguson or a Sergeant Shaw, their lack of relevance was obvious, though Tom might still have his uses if the process of bringing Olly to trial ran into too many difficulties. He knew that Tom was well aware of that.

  Some people possessed a natural reticence, and a dignity within it, that under most circumstances it was as well not to disturb. It had helped Chris to remember this; surprising details, surprising facts had sometimes come his way as a consequence; facts that, had he asked outright, he would never have discovered. The trouble now was lack of access to the main players and the crucial witnesses.

  Tom waited till they said goodnight before giving Chris one of the names he’d asked for.

  Leonard Charleston, tall and distinguished-looking, was Director of Training on Swan Island and he’d been transferred there in 2006.

  Walking slowly home, Chris recalled the days when Tom had been one of a group of volunteers, men with a love of the sea and a desire to do their bit to keep its human traffic safe. Tom had seen them all off, one by one. Remarkable that, when you thought about it.

  Leonard Charleston: the name sounded like it belonged to someone born into Australia’s upper middle class; private school, then university, then straight into the Department of Foreign Affairs. But Chris knew that you didn’t rise up through the ASIS hierarchy by birth and privilege alone; the selection process was extremely tough.

  Charleston would be in charge of training not only ASIS recruits, but army officers and SAS combat troops as well.

  Chris thought of the dance; he thought of Leonard kicking up his heels.

  Regular army recruits were generally only stationed on the island for a few months, for what was referred to as the ‘dirty tricks’ part of their training. ASIS trainees were reputed to be there for longer, since dirty tricks formed a bigger part of their overall mission.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Chris held the squashed, sodden cigarette packet on the palm of his hand. It was drying in the way that paper and soft cardboard does, and disintegrating, it seemed, in front of his eyes. The colour was flaking off, so that the anti-smoking warnings looked particularly bizarre; the black lungs, grotesque nightmare of a mouth coming apart. Another half day in the water, washing against the pylons, catching on the sharp rocks, and it would have released the small ziplock plastic bag with its precious contents.

  Chris and Brian Laidlaw exchanged a long look in which Laidlaw conveyed, by lifting and then lowering his eyebrows, and tugging at the beanie which already sat low on his forehead, that his first impulse had been to throw the cigarette packet in the nearest bin. He was always picking up rubbish; the fishermen teased him about it, and Laidlaw, for his part, complained about day trippers who wouldn’t foul their own nests, but left the beach a mess.

  ‘You saw what was inside,’ Chris said.

  ‘Filth,’ Laidlaw replied. He surprised Chris by turning and spitting to one side of the path.

  Chris thought it shrewd of the old man to wait until dark, then come to the back door of his house.

  They didn’t speak again till they’d walked a block or so along the street. Chris knew Laidlaw’s respect for him was grudging, and derived mainly from the part he’d played in helping a friend of his the year before. He understood that Brian would never have taken the cigarette packet containing the plastic bag to Inspector Ferguson, not because he didn’t understand the hierarchy and Chris’s place in it, or was unaware of the drowning and its implications, but because, with very few exceptions, he mistrusted human beings.

  ‘Let’s see where you found it then.’

  As a precaution, though he wasn’t sure what difference it made, Chris had begun parking round the corner. He drove to Point Lonsdale with Brian silent in the passenger seat, and, again as a precaution, did not stop in the carpark, but further back, in the shadow of some trees. He thought of Ida as Brian led him to a spot past the pier on the western side, where the flood tide naturally carried things. By then, they both had their night eyes.

  Ida would be home with the doors locked. Chris hoped that she and Joe were safe. He thought that, if Edward Yates had fallen and hit his head on one of the rocks surrounding the pier, instead of making it half way across the Rip, the current would have carried his body somewhere close to where they stood.

  ‘Some kid could have got it,’ Brian said.

  It was a cliché to refer to the old sailor as a man of few words. What was less frequently observed was how much meaning those few words could convey.

  When he was a boy, Chris had made bets with his classmates as to how slowly Brian could ride his bike up the main street without falling off.

  ‘Where were you when he drowned?’

  When Brian didn’t answer, Chris said, ‘You were here, weren’t you? He tore along the pier as though the hounds of hell were after him, and you were watching.’

  Brian said, ‘Hounds of hell is right.’

  ‘Did you see where he came from?’

  ‘The coast road.’

  Chris drew a few more details out. Brian had walked to the pier from the Lonsdale front beach. He’d seen a blue Falcon following the small green Hyundai to the carpark underneath the lighthouse. No one had got out of the Falcon, and after a few minutes it had turned around and left. It had been too far away for Brian to see who was driving, or the registration number.

  The white powder looked like cocaine, and Chris thought it probably was. How to confirm this was the first question, what to do about it the next. He’d had very few problems with illegal drugs over the years — teenagers smoking dope in the parks, at the music festival, two different lots with ecstasy tablets which they hadn’t even bothered hiding. The music festival hired its own security, but the busts had been on his soil, and he’d been involved in the prosecutions. The rest of the time — had he been going around in blinkers, with a peg on his nose?

  The soldiers’ time off the island was severely limited. When most of them were only there for a couple of months, it didn’t make sense to be giving them whole weekends off to spend in Melbourne. Amongst any group of a hundred young men, there would be some who brought their habits with them.

  Chris had known the local pharmacist since he’d taken over from his uncle when Chris started high school. Now in his sixties, trim and fit-looking, John Claremont asked no questions when Chris handed over the small plastic packet first thing the next morning.

  John had eloquent eyebrows, almost as eloquent as Brian Laidlaw’s. His dark brown eyes were youthful and alert. His expression said that if Chris had a reason for not sending the powder to the police lab, then that reason was good enough for him.

 
; Chris returned half an hour later to be told, ‘It’s what you thought.’

  He’d waited till the shop was empty, and chosen a corner away from the security cameras. He was grateful for the pharmacist’s discretion and wouldn’t insult the older man’s intelligence by feigning surprise; but still, he couldn’t help a quick shaft of disappointment from crossing his face. Until proven otherwise, there’d been a slight chance that ‘it’ was some innocent, inoffensive substance.

  ‘Good quality,’ John said. ‘Though I can’t be as exact as a lab.’

  Chris said thank you, making sure his packet was securely fastened. He replaced it in his jacket pocket, walked to the counter and bought some paracetamol.

  Presumably, trainees were searched if there was deemed to be a reason. Discreet searches? Yes, they would be discreet. Much of the island was rough and scrubby, though you couldn’t call any of it wilderness. Security cameras would certainly cover the buildings and equipment, but beyond that? Cameras could be avoided if you knew where they were.

  Chris was inclined to dismiss the notion that Edward Yates had bought the drug solely for his own use. From what he knew of the group who’d been waiting for the protesters — precious little, really — they drank at the Esplanade together, which meant they were granted leave together. He did not see how any of them could be heavy users; but he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine how even light, infrequent cocaine use could remain undetected.

  This led Chris to several hypotheses, one of which was that imminent exposure had spooked Edward Yates. He found a temporary hiding place for the cigarette packet, then drove to the station, eyes on his rear vision mirror, thinking about dogs and their masters.

  Chris pushed open the door to the back office, hesitating, glancing back over his shoulder.