by Nixon, Carl
There was a bit of banter and some talk about going for a swim, but no one had their togs. Of course, that led to a few jokes about naked arses and the effects of cold water. Someone brought up the subject of the salty bottles of beer we had once drunk on New Year's. Other memories came out and were passed around.
When the time seemed right, Tug put his empty can down on the sand and took out Pete's ashes from the duffle bag he was carrying. He carefully prised open the lid. We watched in silence. Most of us expected Tug to say a few words and then take out a small handful and toss it gingerly. We thought that maybe he would offer the box around so that we could each take turns at scooping out a bit of the ashes. But Tug simply upended the whole box in one quick movement. The finer ash blew up and swirled back towards the dunes, but most of it scattered on to the beach near our feet, where it quickly became indistinguishable from the sand.
No one had bothered to dress up. We were middle-aged men in shorts and T-shirts. There was a builder and a journalist. A librarian stood next to a guy between jobs who had sold cars for years. A manager of a supermarket stood on the sand shoulder to shoulder with a guy who has a gib-stopping business. There was a cop down from Wellington. We were just normal guys, none of whom would stand out in a crowd. We were locals, down at the beach. Apart from our solemn faces and the empty box Tug held, you wouldn't look twice if you saw us there. We were just a group of men clutching tightly to the past.
Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish between those memories of Lucy that are our own, ones we have actually lived, and those that we have merely gathered together for safe keeping. They shift and move in life's currents.
Lucy on the swings, suspended between the sky and the sandy earth. Just hanging in the air.
Lucy, older now, seen in passing, through the condensation on a car window.
Lucy, waiting with two friends, at the graffitied bus-stop up by the kids' playground.
Lucy in the school grounds at lunchtime, doing nothing much.
There she is in a photograph hung on the wall of a room knee-deep in flowers. She is sitting next to her sister on a park bench. Her father has a protective hand on her shoulder.
We remember Lucy's smiling face flaming into the sky.
Lucy, wearing the red togs she competed in, still with wet sand clinging to her shoulder. She is smiling and holding the trophy out to the photographer like a gift.
Lucy with her hand up in class.
The back of her head glimpsed for a moment amid the wet-day throng in the corridor at school.
Lucy Asher's dry blood smeared on the edge of the silver drinking fountain. The water cascading into the basin catches the sun.
Lucy Asher riding her bike to school on a rainy day. The sky is a concrete ceiling. The hem of her dress is soaked dark, the water coming up off the road in a hissing arc.
Lucy with Carolyn, sunbathing on the wide top step at the school pool. Her hair is wet, fanned out around her head in a dark halo.
Lucy Asher dropping a white paper bag full of Jaffas, which spill and roll across the linoleum floor of the dairy, escaping into the corners and under the shelving like scared mice.
Lucy Asher looking solemn and alone at the front of the class. The teacher's voice drones on about volcanoes.
We remember her picnicking with her mother and sister down on the beach when she was about eight or nine. Her togs were too big for her then and baggy with sea water.
Laughing Lucy behind the counter as she talks on the phone while giving change. Her music is up loud.
Lucy dancing with us in the firelight on New Year's Eve. The light from the flames flushes her cheeks. Her feet are bare on the cool sand.
Lucy ghosting up the right wing, stick in hand, ball at her feet. Now seen. Now lost in the shifting walls of autumn mist.
Lucy Asher's murder was twenty-seven years ago and in another century. It has never been solved. The police still have DNA evidence taken from under one of Lucy' nails, but in the early eighties a DNA database was undreamed of. Even now, when DNA matching has solved Teresa Cormack's murder and the Maureen McKinnel case, plus several other almost forgotten crimes, the sample from Lucy Asher has never been linked to anyone. The police's hard copy of her file sits somewhere gathering dust. Although the case is technically still open and under investigation there's no one in uniform to whom the name Lucy Asher means a thing. Apart, that is, from Grant Webb. He is now a detective and lives up in Wellington. He keeps us informed if there is a case that shows any similarities to Lucy's, or if a likely suspect turns up.
After all these years Al Penny still favours the lone-wolf theory, and in his defence, all of our other suspicions have turned out to be dead ends. Maybe Lucy was killed by a stranger who crept in from beyond the borders of the Spit, and just as quickly disappeared off our map. Or, just maybe, the killer has lived among us all these years. Him or him or even him.
Mark Murray did come up with something promising early this year. When scanning the online editions of overseas papers, he found a small article from September 2003. It was about a young woman who had been raped and strangled on a beach in Cyprus, near the port of Limassol. Her attacker has never been caught. She was a nineteen-year-old English tourist from Leeds. The body had been dumped in the sea. The photograph of her which scrolled down on Mark's screen showed an English rose — an almost-chubby redhead. But there were enough similarities to our case to spark Mark's interest and make him print everything out and add it to the files (Exhibit 135).
Limassol is a major sea-port where sailors come and go on every tide. On a whim, Mark got shipping manifests for Limassol for the week that the girl was murdered. They weren't available online and he had to send away to the Cyprus Ports Authority for hard copies and pay an administration fee. When the papers finally turned up in the mail months later, there were pages and pages of tightly packed names of ships, and details of dates and weights, all in columns. Hundreds of ships had come and gone around the time the girl was murdered. Among them, though, was the container ship Gerd Maersk, owned by the Maersk shipping company, and registered in Copenhagen. It had berthed in Limassol three days before the girl was murdered and left the morning after. There was nothing strange or suspicious about that in itself and the fact would have gone unnoticed by most people. But Mark Murray is a smart cookie: he remembered that in late 2003, the first mate of the Gerd Maersk was Pete Marshall's big brother, Tony.
It's probably the most random of coincidences that brought a man from down the Spit, now working on the other side of the world, close to the scene of another young woman's waveside strangling. As we've discovered over the years, theories are made to be disproved. But as far as theories go, it's an interesting one.
We've grown good at biding our time. We've got our bar and our pool table and our files. We can wait until Tony Marshall berths again in Lyttelton, and then we'll do another interview.
So who killed Lucy Asher?
Despite the thread of hope that Tony Marshall offers, we have to conclude that we may never know for certain. All we do know is that it's impossible for any of us to remember a time before we found Lucy. For better or worse our search for her killer, our search for her, defines us. The case, and everything connected to it, has become as familiar and real to us as our own hand, leg or eye. In fact, it is more real, because it is closer to our core. Certainly, it will be harder to remove should it turn out in the final reckoning to be, like poor old Pete's balls, cancerous.
Since Pete's funeral, Jim and Al have stopped meeting with the rest of us. Tug Gardiner has sold his parents' house and has moved out to the western suburbs. He now lives in a new brick and plaster place in a subdivision of almost identical houses. We helped him shift the little furniture he chose to keep into a rented truck, and since then we haven't seen much of him either. He claims that he doesn't miss the Spit.
Whether any of us can truly put our shared history behind us for good is questionable. We suspect that Jim and Al and Tu
g will be back, given time. Perhaps they don't really have any choice in the matter. Perhaps we are like the dolls that Lucy's father launched out into the Pacific: always sailing at the whim of the tides and the prevailing winds, course and purpose only an illusion.
Our files of evidence are bulging and our shelves sag, but in the early morning hours when we can't sleep, or during one of those endless Sunday afternoons when it's overcast and raining outside and there's nothing on the box, doubts inevitably bubble to the surface of our minds. As we drive yet again from our homes to the lock-up, we can't help but wonder if we're just wasting our time. On the bad days we are filled with doubt. Then it seems entirely possible to us that our own lives are adrift — that we have spent the best years searching, and yet have gone nowhere that we planned, and know nothing for certain. As the lights of the lock-up flicker back on, and we move to relight the candle beneath the photograph of a smiling Lucy Asher, we sometimes find it hard to hold on to our faith.