The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  It wasn’t long before the boy appeared on his bike, riding slowly, balancing his school bag.

  Chris stepped out into the street and said his name.

  Simon was inclined to deny everything, even the fact that he’d been at the hotel with the others, as though he’d completely forgotten that ring of chairs and how he’d sat with his head down and feet planted on the ground.

  Chris was prepared for this. He knew what it was to be small for your age and frightened. He listened to the boy’s verbal ducks and feints. When he sensed Simon was running out of steam, he said, ‘You saw Bobby talking to some men one night. Outside the hotel.’

  Simon stared at his feet, looking cowed and miserable.

  Patiently, Chris pieced together the sequence of events. Simon had been unlocking his bike from round the side of the hotel when Bobby had run across the road.

  ‘How many men?’ Chris asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Three maybe, or four.’

  ‘What did Bobby do?’

  ‘It was under the trees. It was dark.’

  ‘Come on, Simon. Think.’

  ‘He ran up to them.’

  ‘Did you hear what they said?’

  ‘It was dark! I only saw him run across the road! Can I go now?’

  Chris repeated his question.

  ‘One of them said something, a big word. I don’t know.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I rode home.’

  ‘Did any of the men see you?’

  ‘I was round the side, but before, in the hotel —’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The soldiers liked us. They gave us awesome tips.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I don’t go there any more.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Chris said. ‘That’s the right decision. Did you tell Stuart about seeing Bobby with the men?’

  ‘No! No, I never!’

  He had, of course. It would have earned Simon points with Stuart, who would already have been jealous of Bobby’s closeness to the soldiers. Perhaps this was what had triggered the attack on Max. Chris reflected that it did not take more than ten seconds to unlock a bike. ‘Why didn’t you go straight home?’ he asked.

  ‘I was supposed to be at my guitar lesson. It went for an hour.’

  ‘How many times did you skip your lesson?’

  ‘Once! I swear! My teacher rang Mum. Mum told Dad and Dad went for me. Honest, I’ve never missed again.’

  Simon raised huge eyes. Extraordinary eyes the child had, like the bay just before a storm.

  ‘Did you ever see Bobby talking to a man with a German Shepherd?’

  ‘Yes!’ Simon said eagerly, pleased by the change of subject. ‘At the harbour!’

  When asked if he’d seen the German Shepherd before, Simon replied promptly, ‘On the beach.’ He didn’t know if it was always with the same man, he couldn’t say for sure.

  ‘If you see that man again, stay away from him.’

  Simon nodded, frowning, biting his bottom lip.

  ‘And stay away from the hotel.’

  ‘Oh, I will, Constable Blackie, Sir!’

  There was a dead seal on the foreshore. At least, Chris thought it was dead; but when he came right up to it, the animal raised its head. An adult male, it was obviously sick or injured, its neck thick-furred, eyes glassy; a far cry from the youngster Chris had seen tumbling in the swell around Point Lonsdale pier. The seal tried to move away from him and couldn’t. Chris thought that its back was probably broken, that it had probably been hit by a boat.

  Left there, it would be mauled by dogs, die in greater pain.

  Chris fetched his gun from the station safe and one of the spades he kept out the back.

  He returned to Swan Bay, took aim and shot the seal in the head.

  When gunfire answered him from the island, Chris looked up and nodded grimly. He felt relieved that the seal had died without resistance, then ashamed of his relief.

  He dug a deep hole, and it took him a long time. There was a natural dip in front of a line of bushes, where rubbish tended to end up; twigs and leaves and muck, and human rubbish too. Chris’s eyes followed the up and down action of the spade. Lambent light rested on the flat planes of the bay. He heard gunfire again and felt comforted by the regular push of his boot into the sandy soil. He finished digging the grave, then waved his spade in the direction of the island.

  He wondered whether to return the gun and decided that he might as well keep it in his car. He re-lived the hour he and Bobby had spent with Max, after Max’s narrow escape — the smell of petrol, how it filled their nostrils and got into their hair, how the soap did not even begin to cut it, as they soaped Max vigorously, four hands to the job.

  Only when Max’s rough coat shone, when Bobby sat with his arms around his dog, drying in the sun, had Chris ventured his temporary solution.

  Bobby had nodded warily, weighing up the advantages of Olly’s cottage against keeping charge of Max himself; whether there was a third, or fourth alternative, and how these might be balanced.

  Chris wondered if he should be protecting Simon. But surely, if the boy had been considered a serious threat, something would have been done about it by now. Responsibilities braided together, plaited together. He pictured the island as a volcano — purring, bubbling, getting ready to erupt. Men in camouflage crawled on their bellies through the marram grass, hid behind the inadequate and twisted Moonah trunks, as little girls in party dresses walked past, pretending not to see them.

  The afternoon was overcast, wind moaning like a cat in the pines and casuarinas. Chris suspected he was being followed, but when he turned around no shadow separated itself from those of the trees and bushes, and he could hear no noise but the wind.

  When he drove around the town at night, doing the rounds, as he half facetiously called it, once the summer was over he hardly ever saw anybody walking, especially not on an overcast and windy night, a night that threatened rain. There were exceptions, like Brian Laidlaw. Walking at night, without distractions, you were confronted by the squamous underside of life.

  A fog began moving inland from the bay. Chris felt the dampness on his jacket, an insinuating dampness round his neck. His head ached. He wasn’t far from the spot where Bobby had been found, but the fog was coming in fast, obscuring the shoreline. The border between sea and land generally served to make him anxious; but his anxiety was least when there was a fog. Revulsion softened then, the way the fog itself softened shapes and outlines, and sat with the same indifference on both earth and water. The lack of discrimination, lack of singling out, had sometimes been a comfort to him. There was no point in looking for signs or clues in a fog. Better to wait until it cleared; and in that time of waiting, ease might creep up slowly, like the vapour did, pointing its fingers at no one object or person, but slowly covering all. A person could remain still, waiting patiently, inside a fog.

  FORTY

  Chris wasn’t worried when Max ran ahead. They’d got used to the routine of their nightly walks, when Chris felt, not relieved of responsibility or guilt, but to a degree camouflaged. That night he still felt grateful for the fog. He listened for a splash of oars.

  Chris let Max sniff around. It was not that he felt particularly close to Bobby when he walked at night, though he often said he was sorry, in thoughts and whispered words. He no longer believed in heaven, or any kind of afterlife. ‘Not any more,’ he’d said to Peter, and that much was true. It followed, Chris told himself, that he did not believe in the other place either, and could derive no satisfaction from picturing Bobby’s killer there. In the darkness, imagining rather than measuring the drop to shore, Chris lifted both arms high, then swung them out in front of him, so fiercely that he almost lost his balance.

  Time went by and Max did not come back.

  Chris heard him barking sharply, and, since Max never barked unless warning was more important than silence, he switched on his torch and made his way as quickly as poss
ible towards the sound.

  A woman was lying face down on the path. Max was standing guard. The dog ran up to Chris, but didn’t bark again. Chris was later to tell himself that he should have recognised her immediately, even with her head in the deep shadows of the bushes. But he hardly registered more than that the body Max had led him to was female; his overwhelming thought was that whoever was lying there was dead. It was only when he lifted her head gently that he saw that it was Anthea.

  Hours later, when his assistant, still unconscious, was being cared for in Geelong hospital, Chris repeated answers to questions that it seemed to him would never end. He told again what had happened, and how. He hoped for dawn, in so far as he hoped for anything, because the arrival of the sun would at least signal continuance of some kind. This is what madness feels like, he said to himself.

  Chris had had his mobile with him and had phoned Inspector Ferguson after he’d called 000. Then he’d waited for the paramedics and the stretcher. He’d felt for a pulse, and knew that Anthea was alive.

  Sergeant Shaw was furious.

  ‘What were you thinking of, you upstart little shit?’

  ‘Where’s Inspector Ferguson?’

  ‘This is all your fault.’

  Was the sergeant angry at being woken up at two in the morning?

  Chris waited for the avalanche to hit, but after swearing at him for a bit longer, Shaw turned on his heel and left Chris in the waiting room. He probably thinks he’ll get in to see Anthea, Chris thought, hoping the doctors would be as firm with the sergeant as they’d been with him.

  He thought of Max back at his place, where he’d taken him before following the ambulance, and hoped the dog was safe. But he was fairly sure he knew who’d attacked Anthea; if he was right, the man cared more for dogs than for human beings.

  Chris thought of Minnie, then forced himself not to; Sergeant Shaw was a safer topic. Shaw was angry because he’d drawn the short straw; was this how he’d seen it all along?

  Had Ferguson gone back to sleep, or was he in a middle-of-the-night conference with Leonard Charleston? And where did big-eared Major Briggs come in?

  And what about Sergeant Haverley, whom Chris had practically forgotten, who’d proved himself almost totally redundant? Haverley didn’t have the stomach for Shaw’s methods of interrogation. Chris suspected that, if he hadn’t already done so, Haverley would soon be submitting his resignation.

  In a peculiar way, Chris thought, while he stared at the waiting room walls and offered atheistic prayers for Anthea, apologising both to her and God, in the way he supposed many atheists did when they found themselves up against it, Shaw was more comfortable with deceit than with honesty. Perhaps this was why the sergeant would have disliked him no matter under what circumstances they had met.

  Chris remembered the evening he’d begun looking for Bobby’s hiding place, how Shaw had appeared out of nowhere with that comment about spot-lighting rabbits. He did not think he would ever forget the sergeant’s eyes shining with cruel amusement in the torchlight. But Shaw’s approach to surveillance had been haphazard, and he was about to pay for that.

  The doctor told Chris to go home and get some sleep.

  He felt like laughing at that, but of course he didn’t.

  The doctor was joined by a second one, who spoke to him more kindly and said Anthea was doing as well as could be expected.

  Shaw didn’t re-appear in the waiting room, and neither of the doctors knew where he had gone.

  FORTY-ONE

  Anthea’s head and right shoulder were both tightly bandaged. She smiled at Chris with genuine relief and pleasure, and Chris found himself smiling back. Morning sun shone through the ward; the blinds had been pulled back.

  ‘How did you find me?’ was her first question.

  ‘Max did.’

  ‘Thank you, Max. And thank you,’ Anthea said.

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘He came up behind me. I never caught a glimpse.’

  Anthea shook her head, then winced. Chris knew she would not mention her injuries, or the pain that they were causing.

  He bent over and put his arms around her.

  Anthea pulled away first, rubbing her face roughly with the back of her left hand. She stared out the window. ‘Tell them to release me. I want to go home.’

  While Anthea was kept in hospital against her will — the doctors said that she required continued observation — Chris called in every day. He was waiting for Griffin to make his next move, but saw nothing of the hotel manager.

  Chris did not think that entering a hospital would ever be, for him, an enjoyable experience. He was too old to harbour any hopes of becoming a father. Old men could father children, but Chris didn’t, even in his dreams, picture himself as one of them.

  The two constables spoke to one another without fear of being overheard. Chris hid his concern over the doctors’ reluctance to agree to a discharge, telling himself that Anthea’s lucidity and energy were good signs.

  Tom Moloney met Chris on the sandy path under the black lighthouse in order to hand him the information he’d asked for.

  Chris said thank you. He didn’t ask why it had taken Tom so long to produce the names and registration details of the boats within sight of the Point Lonsdale pier at the time Yates had jumped, but he did ask if any of them were familiar.

  Tom hesitated before shaking his head.

  That was fair enough, Chris thought. The man looked frail, with a smoker’s pallor and a smoker’s stoop. They were careful to keep to the thick bushes at the side of the path.

  When Tom asked how Anthea was, Chris said, ‘Doing well.’ He didn’t add that the doctors were keeping her in hospital despite her repeated requests to go home.

  He didn’t want to talk about Anthea. He wanted to get moving. He fingered the piece of paper in his pocket and hoped that the way forward might be there.

  Tom gazed up into the ferns and bushes.

  Chris said, ‘It’s just a bird.’

  He was thinking that he had names. What he needed were provable connections, connections that would stand up in court.

  Tom turned his gaze towards the ocean. ‘Pity to let all that training go to waste.’

  Chris agreed that it was. They parted and went their separate ways.

  FORTY-TWO

  Mr Yu, with an address in Brighton and a berth at Brighton marina for his boat, struck Chris as an urbane and courteous man.

  Calmly, with a smile and outstretched hand, he welcomed Chris into his office in St Kilda Street.

  Chris shook Mr Yu’s hand, noting that the receptionist, a girl who looked too young to have left school, was keeping her head down.

  The businessman’s office was functional and plain. Chris had learnt that he imported silk; eye-catching samples were discreetly placed around the room.

  ‘A tragedy,’ Mr Yu said, shaking his head and looking down at wellkept hands. Chris had a mental flash of Ewan throwing his bucket after Edward Yates.

  He did not think there was anything to be gained by an indirect approach.

  ‘Did you see Yates jump, Mr Yu?’

  Yu looked surprised, then shook his head. The young were so impulsive, he said, speaking softly; they believed they were immortal. That was one thing we middle-aged men came to realise, was it not? We came to relinquish our belief in immortality.

  Chris listened without interrupting. He didn’t know whether to be flattered by being included in the same age bracket as a man who looked no older than thirty-five, or by being included in the more general category of ‘thinking men’. He confined himself to nodding his agreement.

  Yu’s English was barely accented. His glances, summing Chris up, were challenging.

  No one on board Yu’s boat had seen the young man jump. The police had already asked him about this.

  Chris went on probing mildly, asking for names and contact details of the friends who’d been out on the bay with him the day that Yates had drown
ed.

  Yu looked displeased, but wrote them down, consulting his phone and copying numbers neatly onto a sheet of paper with an elaborate letter-head.

  When Chris asked what he’d thought when he’d seen the helicopter, Yu looked up.

  ‘I thought it might be an exercise.’

  ‘Exercise?’

  ‘Involving the safety services, perhaps.’

  ‘When did you change your mind?’

  ‘When I saw the television reports that evening.’

  An odd answer, Chris thought. Surely Yu and his companions would have known before then.

  ‘When did you come back?’

  ‘We’d berthed by four o’clock. It was not a pleasant afternoon.’

  ‘Did Edward Yates speak Chinese, Mr Yu?’

  ‘Very few Australians speak Chinese.’

  ‘Did Yates?’

  Yu’s eyes widened reproachfully. ‘How would I know, constable?’

  When Chris asked if he’d ever visited Swan Island, Yu’s expression became dismissive. ‘Of course not. Swan Bay is far too shallow and besides it is prohibited.’

  There were more ways to get there than by ocean going seacraft, but Chris decided not to press the point.

  ‘What do you think of the new harbour facilities at Queenscliff?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘When were you there last?’

  ‘I don’t recall and frankly I don’t see that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘A couple of months ago, would it have been?’

  Yu stared at Chris. His phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I need to take this call.’

  In the businessman, Chris thought, a cultivated politeness went hand in hand with a deep self-confidence. He could afford to give an interview to an ordinary constable because nothing that constable said or did could touch him.

  The phone call interruption might have been planned; on the other hand, his phone probably did ring every other minute, and some of the calls were no doubt important to him.