The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘Better it keeps company with the cigarette packet for the time being.’

  Anthea did not ask how long ‘the time being’ was. She didn’t ask because she knew he had no answer. Might as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb. Chris hated the expression, just as he hated himself for his indecision. Yet every time he made up his mind to go to the inspector and make a full report, he was stopped by the fear that Ferguson would pass the evidence on to someone on the island, most likely Leonard Charleston, who would bury it.

  ‘I’ll see you home,’ he told his assistant. ‘Try and get some sleep.’

  Anthea bit the inside of her cheek. She didn’t ask how Chris meant to spend the remainder of the night.

  Thorny feral bushes grew on either side of the coastguard office. Chris recalled finding Anthea crouching down behind one the night she’d heard a dog.

  He skirted round a foreshore on which the tide had dumped huge piles of seaweed. He was always amazed to discover that a single tide could leave so much.

  Tom Maloney hadn’t volunteered the information that a diary had been kept under his office. Did this mean that Tom didn’t know about it? Chris thought it unlikely. He was equally sure that Bobby hadn’t revealed his new hiding place to Tom.

  He found Tom lighting up.

  ‘Like flies on a rotting sheep, you lot,’ Tom said gruffly.

  ‘That must be the smell.’

  ‘Not bloody likely.’

  Chris felt Tom unbending, lips relaxing for a moment before clamping once again around the killer weed. There’s the slow way and the quick way, he thought, then hated himself for making the comparison.

  Chris believed that Tom had allowed Bobby access to his ‘nest’ under the office whenever he wanted it, then left the boy alone. But was he mistaken? People had hidden sides, dark sides to their characters. Tom struck him just then as a man who, once fixed on a course of action, would not allow ordinary scruples to get in his way.

  ‘Come outside for a moment.’

  Tom grumbled, but did as Chris asked.

  ‘Did you know that Bobby kept a diary?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, Tom,’ Chris said.

  Tom blew smoke away from him with false, exaggerated courtesy.

  ‘I already told you, Blackie, the boy had precious little privacy. And most of what he did have, he got here.’

  ‘So you did know.’

  Tom looked up. The moon had risen. ‘And you’ve got ears,’ he said. ‘Bobby could have been hiding the crown jewels for all I had the right to interfere.’

  ‘But you saw the diary. You read it.’

  ‘No,’ Tom said, so decisively that Chris knew there was no point in pushing him.

  ‘What about Big Ears?’

  ‘Well, we know he’s a major.’ Tom stood to attention. Chris half expected a salute. ‘His name is Major Briggs.’

  Chris wondered how long Tom had been sitting on the information.

  ‘How long has Major Briggs been on the island?’

  ‘Longer than normal. Maybe he likes the wildlife.’

  ‘Briggs was standing next to Charleston when you brought the boat in?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Next to as in together?’

  ‘They weren’t holding hands, but I’d say so, yes.’

  ‘They weren’t the ones who searched you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t get their hands dirty. Not those two.’

  The CCTV cameras at the harbour might have caught Briggs and Charleston together on film, but what would that prove?

  Chris described Stellar and the members of his group. Tom listened attentively, then shook his head. He didn’t recognise any of them as having been present when he’d brought the body in.

  Chris thought it most likely that Stellar and co were being detained on the island. He thanked Tom and they said goodbye.

  He heard the scraping open of the office door — it had never fitted well — then the sudden noise, echoing across the bay, as Tom banged it shut.

  Chris followed the shoreline, facing inland, to a point opposite where Bobby had been found. There was practically no wind, and the bay was flat, dull moonlight reflecting off the seagrass. Chris had once been shown a list of all the creatures to be found in a metre or so of the shallow water. A splash and a kerfuffle, then a louder splash — a stingray or a banjo shark, he thought. He did not know whether to wish them good hunting, or an empty belly.

  It seemed to Chris that ever since his father’s death he’d been frightened of things he didn’t understand. A hole in the universe had opened up to swallow a man whose chief fault had been his attempt to save another, and had, in closing again, drawn that man’s son with it, not all the way, but to a place he was still trying to figure out.

  Then his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. Everybody knew the word; many were knowledgeable about its causes; the mystery remained. It seemed to Chris that his mother’s death had lain in wait for him since his father drowned, and that she’d known this, though she’d never spoken of it.

  It was then that he’d begun to hate everything to do with seawater. A residue of that disgust and hatred followed him along the tideline now. It was always there, but he’d grown used to ignoring it. He gave thanks, involuntarily, that Bobby had been found on land, then felt ashamed. Shame reached right down into his bowels.

  He thought of Olly practising his scales. Composure was achieved by discipline, by act of will. The sound of Olly’s hands on the keyboard had been both mocking and composed.

  The shoreline was constantly changing, pushed back and forth by the tides. It was as though not even the simplest part of his surroundings could be fixed.

  The barrier that he and Anthea had erected had been taken down. Chris realised that he was standing to attention. He made himself breathe slowly in and out.

  He considered the logistics of hauling Bobby’s body out into the bay, and whether doing so had crossed the killer’s mind. It might have delayed discovery, but Chris did not think Bobby’s murderer had wanted to do that. The body had been arranged so as to be found as soon as possible, and the dog lead as well.

  Would he care if he were demoted or sacked? For himself, no. Hadn’t he come back to Queenscliff because his savings had run out before he’d decided what he wanted to do? The familiar rut had beckoned, and his old, familiar, ineffectual resistance to it.

  Chris came back again to the problem of fetching the lead from the back of Olly’s door, a small mystery nested inside a larger one. He returned to his fisherman’s cottage, only slightly bigger than Olly’s, and checked under the house. For the first time, he felt a grudging respect for spies.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Anthea knew that if she went to bed she wouldn’t sleep. She wanted to walk, but was wary of the cliff-top, of someone coming up behind her in the darkness. She was afraid of being attacked, yet that night possessed a childish kind of courage, and wondered if it had something to do with having read Bobby’s diary. She was sure Chris had hidden the diary underneath his house where any fool could find it. Instead of feeling angry, the thought made her smile.

  She recalled the night Bobby had been killed, an ordinary night that had cried out for vigilance. She had not heard Olly and Bobby leaving the cottage. She had not heard Olly returning on his own. She’d gone to sleep to the soft honking of the swans.

  The memory of Olly’s scales followed Anthea as she moved around her flat. She told herself she shouldn’t be able to hear them, yet she did.

  She walked out onto her balcony. Lights outlined the barracks where the soldiers slept. Anthea pictured Stellar’s group getting up in the middle of the night, heading for the beach on the far side of the island, fortifying themselves with lines of coke.

  What would the collective noun be, for a group of young men in training for combat missions in Afghanistan? No doubt they’d find suppliers once they got there, if they got there. Chris had told her his belief that they’d be court-martialled
. Anthea wasn’t sure.

  When she finally got to sleep, she dreamt that she was swimming. Soft, silky water carried her to an unknown destination. Anthea studied it through her goggles. The bay’s pursed mouth appeared in view, a great metal wedge of a container ship filling it so that she could not get past. Every time she looked up, the ship sliced through her vision. She heard a noise and there was Olly, swimming alongside her.

  ‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ he said.

  Anthea tried to swim faster, to outpace the ringing in her ears.

  Olly stood up perfectly straight in the water, as though every cell in his body had been made for just such an activity.

  ‘I was thinking I might let the sea take me,’ he said.

  Anthea tried to swim out of Olly’s reach, but the container ship was in the way.

  Then Bobby was there too, upright in the dappled water. It seemed that the man and boy did not recognise each other, that she was the only link between them.

  Anthea woke up sweating. She got out of bed and poured herself a glass of water. It tasted salty and she tipped most of it down the sink.

  All very well to speak of duty, she said aloud to the empty space beyond her balcony, thinking, with a great vertiginous bitterness, just how many kinds of betrayal there were.

  She pictured turning up at the remand centre and demanding a confession, as Olly had accused her of doing. She imagined Griffin stalking her along the cliff-top like an escapee from a bad cartoon. She was the cartoon character: what had she been thinking of, strutting around Queenscliff, ticking people off because they parked illegally?

  Anthea slept and woke again, and this time she felt better.

  She lingered over her breakfast, making more cups of coffee and another round of toast. Then she began to search her flat — she’d lost count of how many times she’d already done this — starting with her balcony, where anyone who knew her habits, or had been told about them, would also know she entertained visitors and spent a great deal of her free time.

  There was a double power point and a light switch just inside the French doors. That would be a good position. Anthea hesitated before dismantling them. She would not know how to put them back together again.

  Defeated, she sat down at her outside table and rested her forehead on the heel of her left hand. This was her favourite place for eating, reading, thinking, day-dreaming. If she could not be herself here, then where could she?

  Olly would know how to check for a microphone behind a light switch, or inside a table lamp. Perhaps, having found microphones in his cottage, he’d left them in place, in order to infuriate the listeners on the island with his unremitting scales.

  Anthea stretched out her hands, palms downwards. She wondered how she could have been so conceited as to imagine that the scales were aimed at her.

  There came into her mind another image from the bay, this time of Bobby by himself, paddling his small red kayak round and round.

  Anthea stood up and leant over the balcony so that she could survey the street. No cars were parked there, other than two she recognised as belonging to her neighbours further down. A wind sprang up and the bay looked angry. There were a few early morning joggers on the path. Anthea did not envy them; she felt suddenly pleased to be alone.

  She remembered Olly telling her how much life was to be found in the seagrass.

  ‘Bobby had never netted before. All that time on the water, and he’d never owned a net. We got snails and plenty of ghost prawns and gombies, and a tiny yellow mackerel, all in less than a half a metre. I put them in a container for a short while and we watched them. People are impressed by whales and dolphins, but they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this small life in the fish nursery, which we have to protect.’

  Olly had paused and looked up at Anthea, wanting her to understand the lesson. She’d nodded to let him know she had.

  The atmosphere inside the police station was unnaturally calm.

  Though she’d only just arrived, Anthea went outside again and crossed the road, aware of the bulk of the lighthouse and water tower bearing down on her head and shoulders. She felt dizzy and hung onto the seat where she liked to eat her lunch, imagining the massive stones falling from the cliff into the sea. Perhaps if she lay down where she was, curled up with a rug around her? She might sleep the way homeless people did, ignoring, or apparently ignoring, the goings-on around them.

  Anthea wondered how many nights Bobby had spent out of doors, making a nest for himself and Max, closing his eyes inside the warmth his dog made for him, after writing in his diary. That’s where he’d been going when he’d been waylaid and killed. Without Max to guide him, and unwilling to risk using a torch, he’d been intending to walk along the railway tracks.

  THIRTY-NINE

  ‘Feel like an early walk?’ Chris asked Minnie Lancaster, as though it was the most ordinary of suggestions.

  Minnie looked alarmed, but she locked her door behind her and pocketed the key.

  She walked quickly; Chris guessed that she was counting steps. They turned out of her street towards the ferry terminal.

  Minnie said, ‘I don’t know if it means anything, probably not. You remember that story, about the birthday party on the island, the piñata and all that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well remember that soldier I told you about, the one I surprised in the marram grass? I think I know who he is. I saw him the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside the pub. He was getting into a car, an army car. It’s funny, I hadn’t thought about it for years, but when I was telling you, his face came back to me. He had ears that stuck out. I recognised him. I’m sure it’s the same man. He’s still in the army. He’s stationed over there.’

  ‘When was this exactly?’

  Minnie told Chris the date and time.

  Just to be sure, Chris said, ‘What colour stripe did the number plate have?’

  ‘Green. It was green.’

  ‘He’d come to see Griffin?’

  ‘I didn’t see them together. I don’t know.’

  How confident they must be, to meet in daylight, in the open, Chris thought.

  He asked the crucial question casually, though he’d been thinking about it, re-phrasing it to himself, for days.

  ‘If it comes to it, Minnie, will you testify? To the drugs and Bobby’s part in selling them?’

  Minnie did not reply immediately. ‘Maybe I’m stupid,’ she said at last. ‘Maybe we all are.’ She took a deep breath, then continued sadly, ‘In and out like a little fox, he was. I thought he could look after himself. All right. I’ll do what you want.’

  Chris stayed on the opposite side of the street while Minnie unlocked her front door and went inside. Early sunlight made her bronze, springy hair into a halo. He waited till he saw her outline through the living room window before heading up the hill.

  Without conscious intent, Chris’s feet took him in a circle past his own street and back to the Esplanade. For the first time since her death, he truly wished his mother back. For so long — years — he’d thought of her passing with relief, or with relief first and foremost, and only afterwards with guilty sorrow.

  Now he felt risk like a bad wind at his back. He’d known Minnie would say yes, but still it increased the risk, made her more vulnerable. Hadn’t he sworn to leave Minnie out of it, to try and keep her safe? But he would need a witness if the plan that was forming at the back of his mind were ever to be acted on. There was nobody who worked at the hotel whom he could ask, apart from Minnie.

  Chris thought about how, when he was growing up, his parents had never seemed well-matched, his father being socially superior, and superior — so Chris had believed — in intelligence and education too. Neither parent had complained about the other, at least not to their only child.

  Chris wanted to go home, turn in at his own gate, open the front door and find his mother there; a woman in good health, before the cancer
got her, a quiet woman, given to melancholy.

  The car ferry regularly off-loaded crowds of strangers. He recalled the bikie gang Griffin had described. Had the manager’s intention been to point out an alternative and more likely source of drugs? The bikies’ weekend route took them down the Mornington Peninsula, across to Queenscliff, up the highway and back to Melbourne. Griffin had been letting him know that he had his story well prepared. And it made sense. Of course, the bikies would deny selling cocaine to the soldiers, but who would believe them?

  Chris came to a standstill underneath the wreck bell. He knew the warning sign by heart. ‘Any person found ringing the bell except in the case of shipwreck or marine disaster will be prosecuted.’ No prize for guessing who would do the prosecuting; but the bell hadn’t been tampered with in years.

  He moved to one side, where trees grew at an angle leaning away from the southerlies. He wondered if they’d known from seedlings that leaning would be their way to survive. He thought of a phrase — flabby oak — that he’d read once in a novel; he’d been impressed by the character it described. He wondered, if he managed his ageing right, whether one day he might be remembered like that. The important point, of course, was that you bent but did not break.

  Chris remembered nights, before the coastguard took over rescue operations, waking to the sound of the wreck bell. His father had not been a volunteer, though there was never a shortage of men to put their names down, men who lived their daily lives behind a shop counter, or on the water for one commercial reason or another. His father said he got enough of the Rip as it was. Chris wondered if he’d seen his death coming. He wondered, as he had a thousand times before, if there’d been some essential weakness in his father that had led him to jump overboard.

  He remembered what it felt like being kicked in the back by Jack Benton. If Julie hadn’t come by with her camel, Benton would have drowned him. He hadn’t cared. That had been his overwhelming feeling at the time. Do your worst, then. I don’t care.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, Chris was waiting for Simon Lee, the youngest and least confident member of Stuart Hocking’s gang. He didn’t wait outside the school gates, or even in the same block, which would have been conspicuous. Instead, he chose the far end of Simon’s street, under another stand of pine trees, a favourite with the black cockatoos.