by Nixon, Carl
There was one photograph that The Press and the Evening Star favoured. It was taken the summer before she died, when Lucy was still in the sixth form. The photo shows Lucy standing outside the surf club holding a small trophy that she has just won for beach racing at the provincial championships. She is wearing the red one-piece togs she competed in and there is a small patch of damp sand clinging to her left shoulder. You can see her from the waist up. She is tanned and smiling and holding the silver trophy out towards the camera with both hands as though offering it up as a gift to the photographer. Her hair is light brown, bleached lighter than it was in winter (we found out later that she squeezed lemon juice into her hair before bed each night in an effort to lighten it). She has brown eyes and a wide, almost American mouth. Though attractive, Lucy was not what people would call a great beauty, at least not until you got to know her.
We still have the trophy, although it was broken later that year, and has never been fixed. About a month after Lucy died it turned up on the street in the Ashers' rubbish. It was sitting on top of the bag and was found by Tug Gardiner who had a paper round that included the Ashers' place. The trophy is actually meant to be awarded for athletics but whoever bought it must have thought it looked right enough for the under-seventeen girls' beach racing: a silver girl finishing a race, head dipping forward, arms flung backward. The finishing tape is draped across her chest. Apparently the trophy hadn't been significant enough to be engraved with Lucy's name. There was, however, no one else it could have belonged to — and of course it matches the one in the photograph perfectly.
All things considered, it's a very good photo of Lucy. We like to think that in different circumstances she would have been happy for it to be printed so widely.
That summer, the weather had stayed hot right from early November. By the time Lucy Asher was murdered no one was talking about a perfect summer any more; everyone was moaning about the drought. What little lawn there was down the Spit had yellowed and died even before school finished for the year, the dead blades of grass eventually blowing away on the easterly to scatter over the water of the estuary. Only the cabbage trees seemed to thrive. They had predicted the long hot days, flowering in great white sprays in late October. Nearly everything else had the life sucked out of it by the sun.
Except for the sea lettuce: that was also roaring ahead. Whether it was the heat raising the water temperature in the shallow estuary, or the outflow from the oxidation ponds (we called them the poo ponds) that emptied into the estuary at the western end, that year the sea lettuce spread like never before. Lime green, and crinkled at the edges like slippery potato chips, it carpeted the acres of mud that was the estuary at low tide. The sea lettuce threatened to choke even the deepest channels. It sucked the oxygen from the water. Dead flounder and herring could be seen floating on the surface. New warning signs went up warning people not to eat the shellfish.
There were bitter letters to the paper about council mismanagement of the estuary and numerous theories put forward explaining the sea lettuce's sudden bloom. But all we knew was that it stank like nothing else. During the hot days and nights the smell hung low over the Spit. The fug of the estuary at low tide permeated that summer. It was the smell of the rotting sea-lettuce, mud and the dead fish, the flesh of which armies of crabs fought over in the darkness, clicking and clattering. The smell crept into our nostrils as we lay in our beds thinking about Lucy. It got so bad some nights that we could taste it. It put us off our food and stopped us from sleeping.
Some of us took to rubbing Vicks under our nostrils at night. We slept wrapped in the smell of childhood sickness and were taken back to a time when our mothers would tuck us in tight and murmur soothing spells against our fevers. It was a time that, at fifteen, we could remember clearly, but that we didn't yet fully understand was gone forever.
The amount of material we've collected over the years has become a problem. By the time we were in our mid-twenties we already had enough paperwork for two filing cabinets. There are the newspaper and magazine articles, but also the police reports, plus the transcripts of all the interviews (we have the tapes as well). We've kept the larger items: the photograph of Lucy; the trophy of the running girl; the two rafts. There are hundreds of photographs. We've also got a small library on police procedure and forensics. There are books on DNA and fingerprinting. There are lots about famous crimes and how they were solved. Anything really that we've come across over the years that might be of some use or relevance.
Alan Penny was originally in charge of the archives. But Al got married to a local girl when he was only twenty-one and they had three little girls in quick succession (actually, if you do the maths, the first baby came a little too quickly after the wedding). Al's wife told him, when she was pregnant with their third kid, that she didn't want their home cluttered up with all that 'morbid rubbish' so we all came around one Sunday and, under his wife's hard eye, moved the records over to Matt Templeton's place. Matt kept the stuff in a spare room at his house for several years. But when Matt got divorced, the first time, Grant Webb took over for a while.
Most of us have lived with the material for at least a year or two. It's an odd thing to have all that information in your house. You find yourself at three in the morning reading through some article you've read many times before, just looking for a new insight. Or one of your kids will get up in the night for a glass of water and will find you sitting in the dark next to the stereo with your headphones on, re-listening to an interview, the ghosts of the past whispering in your ears. Anyway, it's a fact that having the stuff in the house leaves you bleary eyed and twitchy.
In the end we hired a lock-up. It's a high-ceilinged room with tilt-slab-concrete walls and a roller door, over in the industrial area, past the settling ponds. We chose it mainly because it's only about ten minutes' easy driving from New Brighton, where most of us still find ourselves living. The lock-up is one of about thirty in a compound surrounded by barbed-wire fences, with security gates out the front. We each put in a small amount every month for the rental and we all know the code that opens the gates so that we can get in any time of day or night. Most people use that type of unit to store things like caravans and boats and quad-bikes, or boxes of assorted crap — things that no longer fit into their garages. Ours looks more like a rugby club room. Roy Moynahan is a carpenter now, like his dad was, and he built us a bar out of slabs of macrocarpa. Unlike most of the other units ours has electricity so there's a beer fridge that we keep stocked — although there's always good-natured controversy over what brands we keep in there. There's carpet on the floor over the concrete, and an old pool table. There's even a pretty comfortable bed down the back so that we can sleep over if someone's had a few too many drinks to drive, or a fight with the wife or girlfriend.
And, of course, the files are there. The original material is stored in three tall grey filing cabinets. There is also a large glass display-case for the bigger items, and shelves for the reference books. One whole corner of the room is set up as an office with a computer, which has broadband internet access for doing online research. There's a printer and a high-definition scanner. A lot of the information we've collected over the years has been entered into the computer and stored on laser disks that we keep in a safe in case of a fire. The same goes for the newspaper articles.
The picture of Lucy, the one from the paper, has been blown up and framed. It hangs on the wall near the desk. We like to keep a candle burning on a small table beneath it. It's no big deal if the candle goes out. The next guy to arrive simply relights it.
All in all, the lock-up is a real home away from home.
Even before the ambulance arrived, the two St John's guys breathing hard and moving heavy footed through the sand, locals started drifting across to the beach from their houses. The teenagers were the first on the scene. Perhaps we were more on the lookout for something to lift the morning above the norm, quicker to sense the possibilities. Or maybe our grapevine
was just more efficient at carrying the news that there was something out of the ordinary to be seen down on the sand. We called to one another as we came down the tracks through the dunes. But when we caught sight of the body a silence descended over us.
If you believe everyone who claims to have been down on the beach that December morning, there must have been a hundred locals, at least. By our reckoning there were actually nineteen. Roy Moynahan was definitely there, along with Allen Penny and big, lumbering Jim Turner. Grant Webb and Tug Gardiner were there as well. Mark Murray came over the dunes a bit later. He was by himself and his finger-in-the-socket hair seemed to spring up from his head even wilder than normal. Pete Marshall was there too, of course. He stood apart from everyone wearing a mask of sombre authority that none of us had seen on him before, but that he would often put on again during the following months. We stood in a group about ten metres along the beach from the body. We barely spoke. A tight knot of shocked girls hung back higher up, almost in the dunes. The adults who eventually arrived stood in pairs even further back than we were.
The body was being guarded by Bill Harbidge, who had already been back to his house to call both the ambulance and his fellow policemen. He had pulled on his uniform jacket and hat but still had the faded shorts and sandshoes he had been wearing when Pete pounded on his front door. Possibly the shorts were a concession to the mounting heat, but it was more likely he simply couldn't find his trousers in the few minutes he'd allowed himself before rushing back to the crime scene.
The tide that had discarded the body near the foot of the first dune had been full at four in the morning and was well out when we arrived, and the beach seemed very wide. The waves were not as large as they had been in the night but still rolled in with a heavy sibilance. Occasionally one would crash down with particular force and people would look away from the body towards the ocean.
Bill Harbidge announced in a voice loud enough to carry above the sound of the waves that everyone was to keep well back so that we didn't 'infect the crime scene'. He needn't have worried. We would have kept our distance anyway. We were unfamiliar with death and seeing it there on our doorstep in the morning light had unnerved us. Maybe we harboured the primitive belief that whatever had happened to the woman on the beach could be contagious. That, like head lice, death could jump across short distances, from one person to another.
It took us a while to realise who she was. Even over the wavesound, you could hear as the first person spoke her name. 'Lucy Asher.' It wasn't Pete who said it first; he's always been adamant about that. 'It's Lucy Asher.' Who actually said it and exactly how they recognised her, we're not sure. But once those four rolling syllables were loose on the beach they were picked up and passed quickly from person to person. All of the girls started crying.
We tried to recall the last time we had seen Lucy alive. Mark Murray whispered that he had bought a chocolate-dipped double-scoop cone from the Ashers' dairy just the day before. It had been Lucy who rolled it for him. Roy did even better. He claimed to have seen Lucy walking along the road towards the reserve as late as five o'clock the previous day.
It was while we were comparing notes in hushed voices that the two St John's guys turned up, although we had not heard the ambulance. Maybe Bill Harbidge had told them on the phone that there was no hurry and so they hadn't bothered turning the siren on. They came down out of the dunes further up the beach and walked over to the body. They were carrying a stretcher and a large red bag. Bill intercepted them with one hand raised like a traffic cop, which in fact he had been for a few years.
The St John's guy with the ginger moustache seemed to be the leader. He arrived first and spoke to Bill, nodding solemnly. We were too far away to hear what was said. The tall skinny one stood back, holding the stretcher upright in an unwitting parody of the way that surfers held their boards on the beach every day.
When Bill Harbidge eventually stopped talking, Ginger Moustache walked over to the body. Lucy was face down, half on her side. He knelt down and pressed two fingers against her throat. It suddenly occurred to us that maybe she wasn't dead after all. Perhaps by some miracle she was only unconscious. But he shook his head, too quickly it seemed to us for such an important verdict, and moved back to where Bill and his colleague were waiting.
After more talking with Bill Harbidge, during which all three men looked in our direction several times, Ginger Moustache fetched a heavy grey blanket out of their bag and carefully laid it over Lucy's body. After that the two ambulance men looked awkward. They shuffled their feet on the sand and looked up and down the beach as though waiting for a late bus. Their prospective patient was dead. Dead wasn't their field. Effectively they were now like us, just two more rubberneckers.
To us the heavy blanket seemed to emphasise Lucy's death rather than disguise it. To be covered like that, down on the beach on such a hot day, seemed more unnatural than her previous nudity. Rachael White had been in Lucy's class at school, and was the girl crying the loudest even though she had not even been close to being Lucy's friend. At the sight of the blanket she turned her sobs into a plaintive keening that competed with the seagulls' cries. And then she folded up like a deckchair, bending at the knees and waist, collapsing slowly on to the sand. Seeing one of their number fall, the rest of the girls also shifted their cries into a new gear.
It was apparently the tall St John's guy's turn to do something. He didn't seem to be in any particular hurry but ambled over the sand towards Rachael. He kicked experimentally at a lump of rotting kelp with his long legs as he passed, raising a swarm of small insects. He waded into the circle of girls standing around Rachael. Giraffe-like, he spread his feet wide and leaned over her without kneeling, as though he didn't want the knees of his trousers to touch the sand. Some of us also wandered over to where Rachael lay. We pressed close for a better look. But the ambulance guy seemed to have no patience for teenagers. 'Stand back!' he snapped. 'Forfucksake give her some air!'
He produced a small vial from his bag and wafted it under Rachael's nose. She immediately retched back into consciousness. She began crying again like she had never stopped. Two of her friends helped her up and half carried her to a bleached log where she sat sobbing. We all agreed later: it was classic Rachael White. Trust her to shift the focus on to herself at a time when everyone's thoughts should have been with Lucy.
Locals were still appearing over the top of the dunes. Like Chinese whispers, news had travelled fast but not accurately. Some people believed they were coming down to the beach because a surfer had drowned. Others had heard that someone was badly hurt and needed to be lifted through the dunes to the waiting ambulance. Mr Robinson, who was seventy-eight but still swam in the ocean every day, thought he was coming down to the beach to help with a whale stranding. He was carrying a thick O of rope over his shoulder for relaunching the distressed animals. In the event, Mr Robinson's rope would not be required.
It was about half an hour before a dozen uniformed police turned up, along with several plain-clothes detectives. Bill Harbidge looked relieved when the new policemen took control. They herded us further back down the beach and cordoned off a large area around Lucy using long poles pushed into the sand. Yellow tape was strung up between the poles. A policeman was also positioned up at the start of the main track from Rocking Horse Road to stop more people from coming down on to the beach.
Those of us who were there already were allowed to stay. We had nothing else to do so we watched the police work. Canvas screens were put up around the body. We could see the heads of the two forensics guys bobbing up and down behind the flimsy walls like actors in an amateur puppet show. A police photographer was the only other person allowed inside the screens. He snapped photograph after photograph. 'More pictures than a bloody tourist,' was Grant Webb's comment.
Later the police spent several hours scouring the roped-off area for evidence. They moved in a long line, bending to examine the ground every few centimetres. Even the most mundane o
bject was picked up and examined and turned over in the search for clues. It was painstaking work and, frankly, pretty boring to watch.
Roy and Jim did a food run back to Jim's house. They skirted the policeman up on the road and returned with several bottles of Coke, a Boston bun with pink icing and only one slice taken out of it, and some chicken sandwiches Jim's mother had made especially for us. All Jim had told his mum was that we were hanging out at the beach and that we were hungry.
Because it was a Sunday and hot, by mid-morning the beach had began to fill up with families who had come out from town. People mostly parked their cars further north, in the car park up near the surf club where the beach was patrolled and there were flags showing where it was safe to swim. The mums and dads who did drift down the beach soon shied away when they saw the uniforms and the yellow tape. They turned and walked back up the sand with their chilly bins and bundles of beach towels. No doubt they threw an easy excuse to the kids. Nobody wanted to spoil their day by getting too close or by finding out what had actually happened. They'd see it on the Six O'Clock News anyway or read about it in the papers over breakfast the next morning. None of the mums and dads was keen to answer the awkward questions the kids would inevitably ask, not on such a gorgeous morning, not so close to Christmas.
It must have been over thirty degrees by lunchtime. The uniformed police took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves above their elbows. The detectives loosened their ties. No one had thought to bring sunblock: the 'Slip Slop Slap' message was still to come. The policemen's serious faces and the backs of their necks slowly began to turn the colour of cooked crays.