The White Tower

by Dorothy Johnston

  I ran to where I had a clear view of my front garden. Peter would be waiting there, school bag tossed up on the porch. He would be round the back.

  I pulled at the latch and shoved the back gate open, calling out his name. I ran round the side of the house. The backyard was empty.

  ‘Fred?’ I called out. ‘Fred!’

  Could he be sick or hurt? I checked the kennel, then walked around the yard looking in all the places he liked to lie, up by the back fence next to the rose bushes, underneath the fig tree. I pushed aside branches, stamped in the long grass. Fred was gone. Peter was missing and he’d taken his dog with him.

  I choked on my breath. The air was impossibly dry and full of grit. I checked the nail on the wall of the garden shed where Peter kept Fred’s lead. It wasn’t there. Why hadn’t I noticed earlier that Fred was gone?

  After school, Peter generally preferred his dog’s company, or his own. Sam was the leader of the group he ate his lunch with. If Sam had invited him over, Peter might have been so keen to impress that he’d rushed out of school the back way, collected Fred, and left again without waiting to speak to me.

  I rang Sam, congratulating myself that I’d had the foresight to copy his number into my address book. This piece of clear thinking raised my spirits and I expected to find Peter at the other end, with some laughably simple explanation of why he’d taken Fred with him to Sam’s.

  Sam answered the phone himself. No, Peter wasn’t there. Sam thought he’d left the classroom with everybody else. He gave me the number of another boy. When I rang it, a woman answered and said her son was at basketball practice. It didn’t sound as if she knew who Peter was.

  I clicked on the answering machine, then ran next door and knocked, praying that my neighbour, Sylvia, had seen Peter go off with Fred.

  Sylvia was often at home during the day. She came to the door after my second knock, dressed ready to go out. She’d been talking to her sister on the phone at three, she told me, rather a long call because her sister’s husband had just had an operation. She was going over to the hospital now. She was afraid she hadn’t seen Peter come home.

  Most of the houses in our street were empty, their owners still at work. I ran from one to the next. Of the few people who did come to their doors, none had seen Peter or Fred.

  I scanned the small horizons that bounded all the good safe places. I called Peter’s name until the two sweet syllables crumbled to a bit of old dry wood.

  I headed towards Southwell Park. Would Fred have willingly got into a car with a stranger? If the stranger had offered him food, I was afraid the answer was yes.

  I stumbled over a tree root and looked down. The root was immense, growing with the slow confidence that finds its way through stone. Each blade of grass around it was singular and lovely, the brown pine needles that had come to rest between them, the light shining through the branches of the trees, oblique afternoon light that I’d always found restful, walking outside just to stand in it.

  The road and traffic gave way to scrubby eucalypts and casuarinas. This was the way we’d always come, first when Peter was very small, then with Fred to show him fresh rabbit droppings, the best spots to dig. It didn’t seem to matter to Peter that Fred took no notice of these treats, but simply ran from one garbage bin to the next, and when there were no more, when the playing fields ended and the overgrown bit around the creek began, turned round as if to say, there’s no point going on. No one will have dropped a sandwich here.

  I walked close to the trees that lined the creek, but even there it would have been hard for anyone to hide. The only place Peter could be, if he was for some reason hiding from me, was an overgrown copse that bordered the golf course on one side and the creek on the other.

  I saw yellow everywhere. A leaf catching the sun was the corner of his T-shirt. I heard a dog bark and my legs gave way underneath me. A fluffy, impossibly happy golden retriever ran out of the trees on the other side of the creek. I could have shot it and its owner just for being there.

  Under the thick trees, in the undergrowth, the air was cool and damp. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. There was the tree Peter liked to climb, while Fred stood at the bottom barking as though his master was some large, ungainly cat. There was the glen—funny unAustralian word, not appropriate at all, but it was what we called it—where we’d brought a picnic once during the school holidays. Fred had to be tied up so we could spread our food out on a blue and white cloth. The grass looked flattened as I walked across it, ducking my head to avoid low branches. Could Fred and Peter have been here, rested here?

  The ground was soft. I looked around for open bits where footprints might show, but though a little way further on there were plenty of these, both human and dog, they were too big or too small, the wrong shape, not my son’s or his dog’s. My insides turned over as though all was pulpy there, and no outline could hold.

  I called Peter’s name, and Fred’s, thinking there might be a chance that, if Fred wasn’t on the lead, he would come when he heard me. But all that came back in response to my voice were the ducks on the golf course pond, and small birds rustling in the holly bushes that formed a barrier between the golf course and the copse. I had no sense of anybody hiding, watching me. Still I stumbled on, looking up into the trees, though how Peter would have kept Fred quiet while he climbed one, I couldn’t guess. My feet were muddy, my legs wet from the long grass. I stopped again and for a few seconds there was complete, pure silence, and then my legs, which kept threatening to fail me, did, and I crumpled down by the trunk of a casuarina and began to cry.

  . . .

  I rang Ivan, and left urgent messages for Brook and Derek, who was out of Canberra at a conference. I looked through my kitchen window without being able to make a connection between myself and what was out there.

  Ivan walked in holding Katya, his face hard as an early Cubist painting. I wanted to grab my daughter from him, take my remaining child and run.

  I switched on my computer. There was another email from Sorley Fallon.

  Overcoming time and distance was an image of a castle and a cliff beneath it, cruel rocks, a boy who, in spite of his twisted posture, might possibly be sleeping. But instead of long pale hair, a black shirt, the figure lying on the rocks was a true boy, no more than ten years old, dressed in blue shorts and a Lyneham T-shirt.

  I must have cried out, screamed.

  Ivan was beside me with Katya in his arms. A footfall in the corridor had me running to the door. It was Brook, who used my phone to ring his station commander. A couple of Belfast-based officers could be at Fallon’s shop within three hours.

  In spite of following through the hospital inquiries in his own way, stubbornly, methodically, Brook had never let go his suspicion of Fallon, or of what, in his mind, Fallon represented.

  He examined Fred’s kennel. I showed him the hook on the shed wall.

  ‘Is anything else missing?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Would Fred let a stranger into the backyard?’

  ‘If he was offered food,’ I said, thinking that I should have asked Sylvia whether she had heard him barking.

  Brook left then, to put together a media release. He took a recent photograph and a full description of what Peter had been wearing.

  ‘We’ll start broadcasting at seven if he isn’t found by then.’

  . . .

  Ivan fed Katya. His body bent over her highchair looked ridiculously big, her favourite small gold spoon all but invisible in his hand. When she’d had enough, he made sandwiches, offering me one. I shook my head, but decided I would wash the dishes.

  The sink seemed filled with the discarded paraphernalia of illness—syringes, used gauze bandages, empty bottles and pink cotton wool. A slow leaching down through all these layers was no more, at that moment, than the pastel layers of hope, fading as I watched them. I shook my head to clear away the vision, but my eyes continued to betray me.

  We watc
hed Brook interviewed on television. Whoever had taken Peter knew that the one chance he had of making sure he came quietly was to take Fred, and then get word to Peter—during school? A note in his bag? Unless Peter did what he wanted, he would never see his dog again.

  I saw this part with perfect clarity. The note. Peter too frightened to tell his teacher—wanting to run home and see if Fred was there, but then dismissing this as too risky. The horrible afternoon, the final bell. Peter working out which door he had to make for. And me waiting like a dumb fool as the minutes ticked by.

  How could it be Fallon, or someone acting on Fallon’s instructions? Fallon didn’t even know of Peter’s existence, let alone Fred’s. He hadn’t asked me anything about my life in Australia.

  Night bells. Bells tolling the watches of the night, so that one person might say, it’s over now, my shift. Some time, it could have been a few minutes after the news finished, it could have been hours, I let myself out the front door, locking it behind me.

  The pine trees on the oval looked the same. I knew them well, where each branch went, the ones that had been amputated to make a cycle path.

  I came to the path and turned left along it. The cream-brown wounds of the trees’ lost arms shone under lamps that seemed placed at random, though they weren’t. Weak light cut the darkness. The trees were neutral. The path, pine needles and grass had had their afternoon beauty and would have it again.

  Thunder rolled off Black Mountain as I crossed the road back to the house. A sword of lightning cut the sky in half.

  Twenty-two

  Detective-Constable Freda Jansz met me on the grass at the front of the school at eight o’clock next morning. She was fair-haired, narrow-waisted. She shot warning glances at me, her blue eyes so dark they were almost black. I knew she could sense that a scream was there, just underneath the surface. It was as though we could both see it, this scream of mine, which would sweep away the effort I was making.

  A number of people had rung in response to the news bulletins, reporting sightings of boys who resembled Peter, wearing the Lyneham uniform. Each of these calls was being followed up. In a case like this, Jansz reminded me, there were bound to be any number of false leads. Dozens of boys roughly answering Peter’s description had been making their various ways home from school yesterday afternoon.

  ‘With a man and a dog?’

  ‘We’re not certain of that, Mrs Mahoney.’

  I wanted to start quizzing Peter’s classmates, working my way through them one by one. I knew from the way Jansz looked at me that she didn’t want me there, thought I should leave interviewing to the people who were trained to do it. She wanted me to see that she knew I was being indulged.

  By the end of the morning, my head was buzzing with the sound of the same questions over and over, the answers coming back mono­tonous, repetitive. Three children I’d spoken to had seen Peter leaving through a side door. I interrogated these three as though they’d committed crimes themselves. Where had Peter been going? They didn’t know. What door? The one near the library. Who had been with him? No one. What about once he got outside? They didn’t know.

  Two boys and a girl. They’d seen Peter leave the building alone, through a door the students weren’t supposed to use, which led across a patch of grass to the street. The reason no one had seen Peter outside was almost certainly that no child had been between that door and the street. If Peter had turned in either direction, towards the front of the school where I’d waited, or to the back, the ovals, someone would have seen him. The only possible explanation was that he’d got into a car.

  Police constables had already interviewed the shop owners and ­assistants in the shopping centre across the road from the school. They spent the morning tracking down and interviewing parents who regularly parked outside, plus everybody with a connection to Niall Howley.

  . . .

  ‘Hello, hello!’ I shouted down the phone.

  ‘I’m at the Downer shops.’ Brook sounded out of breath. ‘Get over here.’

  I ran a late orange light on Northbourne Avenue, deaf to the long annoyance of a semitrailer’s horn. I changed lanes like a demented rally driver.

  Was Brook on his own? If the news was bad, then surely he wouldn’t be ringing me from a shopping centre. I’d already spoken to him twice that day. He’d spent part of it interviewing Fenshaw, who’d been at a fundraising dinner the night before, and had about a hundred ­witnesses to prove it. Fenshaw had gone straight to the dinner from the hospital. It was just possible that he’d grabbed Peter from school and hidden him somewhere. There was an hour during the afternoon when he said he’d gone home to have a rest. None of his neighbours had seen him arriving at his house, or leaving. It was Colin Rasmussen’s day off and nobody, including Fenshaw, knew where Colin was.

  A brick arch spanned the small concrete square of Downer shops. There were two police cars in the car park. Brook was standing stiffly to attention underneath the arch, next to an empty fountain. As I ran up, he turned and nodded towards a small supermarket. His face was white, and the jacket of his suit hung on him as though on a wire coat-hanger.

  It was only a short distance to the supermarket, across the barren square. As we covered it, Brook explained that he’d decided to take another look at Colin’s flat, even though a constable had visited it last evening and found it empty.

  The flat had once again appeared deserted as Brook approached it, blinds drawn, junk mail in the letterbox. He’d knocked on an adjacent door and found a surly, uncooperative tenant who said no, he hadn’t seen Colin in the last twenty-four hours. A young policeman had already asked him that.

  Brook said to the balding man behind the supermarket cash register, ‘Here’s Mrs Mahoney. Could you just tell her what you told me?’

  The man blinked and pursed his lips. ‘We’re a small place here, as you can see. I know most of my customers, people from the flats like. They drop by on their way home from work to pick up milk and bread. I know that Colin fellow because he used to smoke. We used to joke about it as the price of cigs went up, the warning signs got bigger. I’m a smoker too, still am off duty. Then one day Colin, he comes in and gets his usual wholemeal sliced loaf, litre milk. No cigarettes. “I’ve quit,” he said. “Don’t talk to me about it. My willpower’s about that big.”’

  The balding man held up his thumb and forefinger so close that they were almost touching. ‘Last night Colin came in. He bought his milk and bread, a packet of rice bubbles and a coupla tins of dog food.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a dog?’

  ‘Not allowed in the flats.’

  ‘Did you ask about it?’

  ‘He seemed to be in a hurry. As a matter of fact I had a few customers waiting.’

  ‘Did he have a child with him?’

  ‘Came in by himself. I would of told you if he didn’t.’

  ‘Where did he go after he left here?’

  ‘Didn’t see. Like I said, had some customers to serve.’

  . . .

  Colin’s block of flats was surrounded by a double cordon of police cars. Brook explained as we walked towards them—I wanted to fly over the cars and men in uniform—that Colin’s flat was at the back. He stopped me at the first row of cars, pointed out a van, said Frank was inside and may have already made contact. A man wearing close-fitting black climbed the steps to the van and disappeared inside it.

  While Brook was busy with the duty officer, I called Ivan, who’d been sitting outside with Katya when Brook rang, left another message for Derek, who was on his way, then went over to the van.

  From the outside, it looked like an ordinary white van. Through open doors, I glimpsed a floor to ceiling panel behind the driver’s seat, covered with communication equipment. Narrow benches lined two sides of the interior. A man with short black hair, shiny as a panther’s coat, was sitting with headphones on and his back to me. Was he talking to Colin? Was it Colin on the other end? Could it be Peter? If the duty officer hadn’t
pulled me back, I would have run up the steps.

  I sat in a car with the duty officer and told him all I knew about Colin, packing as much into every sentence as I could.

  A loud hailer on the car’s back seat looked over-large, impossibly remote and smooth. I looked up at the sound of a door slamming. Derek’s voice cracked through a thin bit of plywood that had been nailed inside me, holding me together. I watched him run first towards the van and then, diverted, to the car where I was sitting. He shouted at me through the window, banging on it with his fists. A young red-haired policeman dragged him off. I watched him go with no emotion, unable to connect him to my son.

  Ivan arrived and sat with me. He’d left Katya with Sylvia, but he obviously wished he hadn’t. I leant against him and listened to his heartbeat. His face was grey and craggy. I would have used it as a mask, to blot out the mocking frontage of the flats.

  Darkness fell. People came and went across my line of vision. Bill McCallum walked like a man who’d once enjoyed authority, but had set it down somewhere along the way, and had not gone back for it. His shoulders were hunched and he did without a neck. It occurred to me that the body recalled effortlessly what the mind would just as soon set down and not return for.

  I went for a walk. I watched McCallum and Brook talking. In the brackish light, they were trees of the same shape, same species, trained by the same winds. If Brook belonged anywhere it was with McCallum and these other men, whose shapes made patterns between the rows of cars. Brook’s mind moved between barriers like these. His heart? That could be offered variously. What bound us—Brook, Ivan and myself? Not marriage, not blood or work that was enduring, not, as we were here now, genuflecting to the illusion of control.

  I was allowed to move around behind the cars. Colin had switched on every light in his flat. I knew what he was doing, what he was saying with the lights. You’ve made sure I’ve no way of leaving without being seen, but I don’t care. I’m going to sit here with my lights on and you can watch my shadow on the blinds.