by Nixon, Carl
But that is easier said than done. It would be fair to say that none of us has ever got over Lucy Asher. She was our first true love and, in some sense, our last. Of course we do not say that to each other in so many words, but we are aware that all of our lives are littered with troubled relationships with women. Break-ups and divorces seem to be par for the course, and at a rate that seems like more than statistics. More often than not, the place where we meet is the home of a single man whose kids visit at the weekend or whose new, often younger girlfriend resents our presence.
We can joke about it after a few beers. Our conversations are full of self-mocking and jokes at each other's expense. Occasionally our banter is close to the bone. But beneath the laughter, you can feel the undertow of tension and sadness.
The unspoken truth is that we are all still searching for something. Not just for Lucy's murderer, but for a moment in time when we had the unwavering belief that we served a higher purpose and a greater good. When you've had that, it's hard to let go. It's almost impossible to find any lasting satisfaction in the small details of a normal man's life.
You could even say that we are haunted by what happened back then. There are no rattling chains or shimmering visions. There are just our memories of a long hot summer, and the ghost of a broad-shouldered girl who swims in our blood and looks unlikely ever to leave.
Here's what happened to Pete Marshall last July. During his routine medical to get life insurance, they discovered the cancer that had started in his testicles and then hitched a ride in his blood up to his lungs. From there it had journeyed on to his brain. 'Riddled' was the word Pete used when he told us.
A few of us had gathered at Tug Gardiner's place to watch the Crusaders play in the final of last season's Super 14. We watched the rugby in the lounge over a bowl of Cheezels and bottles of beer. It was the same house we used to meet in when we were teenagers. Tug had been left the place when his father died. He could not bring himself to sleep in the room where his parents had conceived him, and where his dad had died of a massive stroke in 2003, so Tug still slept in the boxy room above the lounge where he slept as a kid.
Pete did the decent thing and waited to tell us until after the game. That was the joke that Jase Harbidge made in the seconds after Pete's words had drifted into the air like the black smoke from a bad neighbour's bonfire. We all laughed, including Pete, probably because we didn't know what else to do. But of course we were stunned mullets. We fumbled around for something to say that came close to matching our feelings. Pete let us off the hook by making light of the whole thing. He joked that it had him by the balls, but that he was going to beat it.
Of course you are, we agreed, grinning like hyenas faced with a lion. It's probably not as bad as the doctors think. They're always getting these things wrong. I heard of a bloke who . . . and so on and so on until, when all the beers were gone and it was time to leave, we almost had ourselves convinced that Pete's condition was just a passing thing, like glandular fever or a bone broken in three places.
It was another of those gateway moments, like Lucy's funeral. At the time they are almost never recognised for what they are. People always assume that there will be another chance; that tomorrow will carry on pretty much the same as today. But, as the beer ad says, 'Yeah, right.' The bad jokes, and Pete's positive attitude, were our way of denying that Change had swept up behind us like a rogue wave and was now battering down upon us.
In the following days, and then weeks, we went on with our lives as normal. When thoughts of Pete tapped us roughly on the shoulder we shrugged them off. Of course, when we saw him we asked how he was feeling. 'Fine, better than ever.' And then, relieved to get that part over, we went back to business as usual. The first stage of grief is always denial.
THREE
It was common knowledge that on the night Lucy was murdered she had gone to the South Brighton Surf Club's Christmas party. The police questioned everyone at the party starting on the first day of the investigation. Their police interview notes are comprehensive and make interesting reading (Exhibits T45–63). Even so, we have our own interviews with everyone we've been able to establish was there that night. (Exhibits T-A1–18).
Brian Andrews, who in December 1980 was club president and holder of the national record for men's beach flags, remembered seeing Lucy dancing barefoot. He was twenty-four at the time, which seemed very old to us. The upstairs part of the surf club was just a wide open space with exposed rafters and a small kitchen with a Zip.
'I'd hung a disco ball up there, you know,' said Brian, twirling his finger slowly in the air. 'She was dancing with no shoes on. I remember thinking that she was going to be a real heartbreaker.'
Of course we'd demanded to know who Lucy was dancing with.
'With some of the other senior girls, by herself, with everyone. I don't know. It was a party, nearly everyone was dancing.' Brian shook his head sadly. 'Such a waste, eh.'
Pete Marshall's older brother Tony was also at the party, despite having only the most tenuous connection to the surf club. He had been a member when he was fourteen but had been kicked out for smoking dope on a carnival day, in the storage area under the club house. Tony admitted to us, but not the police, that he had smuggled several bottles of vodka into the Christmas party. Most of it had gone directly into the punch. He told us that as he slipped an empty bottle back into his bag, Lucy had suddenly been standing next to him, her face glistening and flushed from dancing. 'I thought she was gunna turn me in but she just laughed and helped herself to one of those big plastic cups of the stuff. "Cheers" that's all she said to me. Just "Cheers" which I thought was pretty cool. After that I didn't see her. There were a lot of people there.' Tony swept the long, dark hair from his face and looked us squarely in the eyes. 'Pity about what happened. Lucy was cool.'
Other people remembered Lucy from that night as well. Apparently she made an impression. Rachael White, who the next day was to faint so dramatically down on the beach, was sure Lucy was still at the party after midnight. 'She was dancing with lots of boys and not in a nice way, if you know what I mean.' (We didn't really, and frankly didn't trust Rachael's judgement.) 'I think she'd been drinking' was all the elaboration she would give.
When asked for specifics of who Lucy was dancing with, Rachael couldn't name a soul. But Tony Marshall immediately coughed up the name Anton Lester.
We spoke to Anton in the changing rooms after a cricket match. He had been in the same year as Lucy at school and that summer played for the second XI at the North Beach club. It was near the end of the season when we spoke to him. His team had just lost by fifty runs.
'Sure. I told the police. I danced with her for a while. She was a real tease — I thought I was in like Flynn. But then when we were out in the tower she got all frigid.' He undid the last strap from his shin-pad and threw it in the corner of the shower room before fishing his box out from the front of his trousers.
Out in the tower — that was something new. No one else had mentioned seeing Lucy leave the party. We bristled hearing him talk about her like that but wanted to know what had happened. Anton Lester misconstrued our interest. He grinned broadly and tapped the side of his nose with a finger stained red from bowling the new ball. (His mannerism seemed an obvious imitation of someone older, confirming our suspicion that he was a prat. 'For a while it was all good, then she said she didn't feel like it or some shit and she wanted to go back inside. I was pissed off but it didn't matter, a couple of hours later I nailed that White chick in the surf boat.'
And where had Lucy headed after that? Lester thought she'd gone back inside the surf club whose music and light must still have been spilling out on to the beach. But no one else we spoke to could remember seeing Lucy later in the evening. Not that this meant a lot. By then Tony's vodka had worked its magic. A swirling spell had been tossed over those people who were left at the party and to say that their memories were unreliable would be an understatement. The police concluded that Lucy
left the party sometime between eleven and twelve and that she was alone. We have never found any evidence to the contrary.
The last reliable sighting of her was by Karen Wishart and Phil Foster. (Transcript of Exhibit T63.)
KAREN: Phil had driven his car to the party; he was just dropping me home.
PHIL: I was probably a bit pissed to drive but, you know, it wasn't like there were any bends.
[Note: This was a running joke on the Spit.] KAREN: It must have been about two o'clock.
PHIL: Around about.
KAREN: Like we told the police, we were parked outside my parents' place.
PHIL: Just saying goodnight.
KAREN: Yeah. We saw Lucy in the street-light, just up the road.
PHIL: She must've come out of the dunes.
KAREN: She'd taken her shoes off.
PHIL: She was carrying them.
KAREN: She looked to me like she'd been crying.
PHIL: How could you tell that? It was dark.
KAREN: To me that's how it looked.
PHIL: Okay, fine.
KAREN: Then she turned and walked away. I thought she looked sad.
PHIL: Are we finished?
It was Al Penny who pointed out the obvious. 'Karen Wishart lives at number sixty-three, right, so if Lucy walked from the surf club and came out of the dunes near Karen's house then she had already gone past the dairy. And Karen said she turned and walked away. South. If she was heading straight home Lucy would've walked right past them.'
So where was Lucy going? The police reports we have contain separate interviews with Karen and Phil but the assumption seems to be that they saw Lucy as she was walking home. Without discounting other possibilities, the police have always worked on the theory that Lucy met her attacker somewhere between the surf club and her house, and then was somehow taken down to the channel. We now doubt that's the case.
Over the years we've often stood on the footpath at the spot where Lucy was last seen. We go there alone and in pairs, sometimes during the day but most often in the late evening after the street-lights have come on. Karen Wishart's family home was knocked down a while back and replaced by a row of three small townhouses. Apart from that the scene is pretty much the same as it would have been the night Lucy stood there barefoot. The track from the dunes still runs down between two sections. It's only a couple of metres wide and back in 1980 wasn't signposted. It's still hard to spot at either end, particularly with the way the sand is shifted around by the tides and the wind. Even today the track is seldom used by anyone except the locals, and surfers who know where to look. Lucy would have known it was there, of course, but it would have been tricky to find in the dark, especially at the beach end. That makes us think that she looked for it and was headed somewhere specific.
On warm evenings we sometimes stand there on that part of Rocking Horse Road and try to put ourselves in Lucy's shoes (sure, even though they were hanging from her hand). If we squint our eyes we can ignore the new townhouses and the late-model cars. It could easily be 1980 again, a summer night, five days before Christmas. What was Lucy thinking as she stood on this spot? Despite all our speculation, was she simply going for a walk to clear her head of Tony's spiked punch and then overshot her house? Unlikely: she had grown up on the Spit and knew the beach too well. Or was Lucy hoping that the additional exercise, about half a kilometre, would blow away the feel of Anton Lester's groping hands? But then why did she walk south on the footpath and not north past Karen and Phil?
We walk the routes she might have taken, starting at the surf club and then cutting in along the track. So she would have seen Karen and Phil's parked car about here. Did she know they were inside? Probably. She was only about five metres away and 'saying goodnight' can often get quite exuberant. It's possible she saw them before they saw her. And Karen thought Lucy had been crying. If that's right, why was Lucy crying that night? As we stand on Rocking Horse Road, unanswered questions flutter like summer insects around the street-light overhead.
So she turned and walked away along the footpath.
The street-lights are widely spaced. To Karen and Phil, or anyone watching her from a distance that night, Lucy would have vanished into the darkness and then reappeared in the spots of light. We don't know if she went all the way down to the reserve; we're unsure if she made it that far. It's possible she went into one of the houses. Was she stalked and then set upon by an opportunistic stranger as Al Penny has always argued? Or was Lucy going to meet the person would later kill her? That's the other possibility we toy with.
At the end of our nocturnal rambles we are inevitably no closer to answering our own questions. We go home and slip into beds lying alone or sometimes next to a long-suffering wife or girlfriend. The next day she may check our clothes for the scent of another woman and at the end of the month scan our credit-card statements for incriminating purchases. That is part of the price we pay. We've learned not to take it personally.
By the end of January 1981 we had recorded three further sightings of Mr Asher at night in, or near, the dunes.
One day Mark Murray heard his mother on the phone in their kitchen. She was talking to Mrs Webb, Grant's mother. Mark's mum worked nights at the Wattie's factory where she performed the final inspection of the seals on the cans of vegetables. Mrs Murray had finished her shift at four in the morning and was driving home. Presumably she was tired. She would have been surprised, even shocked, to see Mr Asher caught in her headlights.
'There was no mistaking it was him,' she told Mrs Webb on the phone. 'Just crossing the road in the middle of the night like that. It gave me a real scare, I can tell you. Makes you wonder if he's still got all his marbles.'
She looked at Mark to see if he was listening. Mark was pretending to be reading the paper his father had left spread open at the sports pages on the kitchen table. Even so, his mother dropped her voice down to a whisper and Mark had to strain to hear.
'It's the strangest thing,' she continued, 'but I could've sworn he was carrying a baby.' And then she laughed loudly as if to dismiss the idea. 'I must've been staring at too many cans of beetroot.'
Despite his night-time wandering we knew that Mr Asher was still leaving the dairy every morning, six days a week. Tug reported that around nine, his battered ute reversed into the road and drove away, the toolbox rattling on the open deck. We had no idea where the job was that he was working on. The ute carried him beyond our borders, the channel and Thompson Park up at North Beach. They pretty much defined our territory.
As far as we knew, no one was missing a baby. 'What do you think it was that Mark's mum saw?' Pete Marshall wanted to know when we next met. 'What looks like a baby but isn't a baby?'
We all stood around in Tug's bedroom and shook our heads. It was a riddle that we didn't know how to unravel.
Tug had reported that there were lights on in the Ashers' garage most nights until two or three in the morning. Of course he had sneaked over there one night but the single window was boarded over, each board carefully overlapping the next so there were no gaps through which he could see inside. He could hear, though. He stood in the warm night and listened. Tug told us that it sounded like Mr Asher was doing some type of woodwork. There was sawing and hammering, broken by long gaps that the wavesound rushed to fill. If Mr Asher was building something, Tug had been left with no idea what it might be.
It wasn't just Lucy's father who was acting strangely. By the beginning of February Jase's father was officially on sick leave from the police. Jase didn't like to talk about it but we were all aware that Bill Harbidge now seldom moved from his spot in front of the television. He cracked open the first beer of the day with breakfast and almost never left the house. With his mother run off it was left to Jase to cook the meals. He specialised in eggs (fried, poached, boiled or scrambled) and beans (tinned).
Jase's little sister, Charlotte, was eleven and kept asking him when their mother was coming back. She had learned not to ask her father. The
results were too unpredictable. Sometimes the question would make him shout and swear. Sometimes — Jase told us, years later — he would start to cry, silent tears that wet his cheeks and made his big, loose-skinned face look as though it was melting down into his thick neck.
So it was Jase who washed Charlotte's school uniform and changed the sheets on her bed. He packed her lunches when school finally started back and showed her how to repair the punctured tyre on her three-speed. It was also Jase's job to buy his father's beer from the bottle store next to the supermarket. The manager was an old school friend of his father and would turn a blind eye. We would sometimes see Jase biking home with the crate balanced on the handlebars of his bike. By the end of March his father was simply tossing him the car keys, conveniently forgetting the fact that Jase hadn't yet sat his driver's licence.
One of the few things that Bill Harbidge did manage to do that summer, apart from changing the channel on the television, was contact an old mate of his who had left the police and gone to work in security. A couple of weeks later a brown envelope turned up in the letter box. It was Jase who found it and, curious, opened it. The photographs inside showed Jase's mother and the butcher doing everyday things. A couple were taken in the supermarket. Jase's mother is pushing a trolley in one shot while the butcher reaches up to take down a tin of something or other from a high shelf. In another she is sorting through a bin of apples. In another picture his mother appears to be weeding the garden in front of a small blue-and-white house, with a big tree by the gate. In yet another, the butcher and Jase's mother are sitting on a picnic rug on the grass, eating fish'n'chips. At first Jase could not tell why his mother looked so different. She almost seemed to him to be a different woman. It took him a while to realise that it was because in almost every photograph she was smiling.