by Iain Ryan
“They were strung up with about thirty or so others.”
“That weren’t all us. That’s just where some of them junkies check out. The boys probably put ’em there so people could have a bit of a look. Dem people need a gentle reminder every now and then. They ain’t so smart a lot of the time.”
“You know why Petey and Drags were even up this way around the time Sophie was killed?”
“Nope.”
“No? Nothing?”
“Nope, no idea.”
“They weren’t working for you guys? Picking something up, something like that?”
“Hell, no. Dem two couldn’t do shit for us. And I’ll tell you something else: I don’t want no more pigs sniffing around Drainland, you hear? But I’ll tell you this. Don’t make a lick of sense how Sophie passed, not a fucking lick. That kid had been clean for almost a year. And wild as she was, buck wild, she ain’t ever gonna sell no bad drugs off to someone like dem two. She ain’t have nothing to do with no drugs no more and good for her. So it don’t make no sense for those two to be near her.”
“What about the other guy, Thomas Bachelard?”
“Never met him myself. Never even seen him.”
“Okay then. But…the gear Petey and Drags were moving around the camp…let me get this straight. You’re saying it came from the Gold Point?”
“It was the same shit that killed Sophie. And they damned well didn’t have it before dat poor girl was doped up.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it?”
Romano put her half-finished beer on the ground.
The man reached over and put his hand on her forearm. “You listen to me now, girl. Don’t go making trouble for us down dere. Ray gets you this sit-down, but it ain’t no free pass. We got what we got from taking care of trouble for our own selves. And I ain’t no rat but…what happened to Sophie happened because someone else wanted it to, someone smarter than those two idiots, and you think I can help you with something ’bout her, you ring the club, ask for Vic. That’s me. You ain’t shit to me yet, but we take care of our own, and Sophie was close enough to it. So you and I might be able to help each other, if need be.”
“Yeah,” said Romano, standing up. “Sounds like a real family business you’ve got running here, Vic. Thanks for the chat. I got someone picking me up out on the street. Think I might just walk around now. Take it easy.”
“Oh, I will, lil girl. Is all I ever do these days.”
Romano walked. The street was empty out front.
A battered white sedan came past, slowed to watch her.
The next car was her ride.
She got in.
Romano thought it out as they left Domino. It still wasn’t making a lot of sense. Petey and Drags didn’t bust their way into that hotel room. They had a swipe key. And if Sophie was clean, Bachelard wouldn’t have a brick of H lying around. Unless this was Bachelard’s deal, something that went wrong. But why? That didn’t scan. The kid was a fool but he didn’t vibe drug dealer. And even if Petey and Drags could have fronted as buyers—something requiring a miracle of deception for them—who would ever let them inside a confined space? This Vic character was right. There was a third party to it all. Only one way to work it: start at the end and work back.
Romano knocked on the plastic shield. The driver looked over.
“Forget the pub,” she said. “Take me home.”
27
Monday October 4 to Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Harris watched Romano from afar. She didn’t travel so well after Drainland. Her neighbour across the street, Dave Benchley, was none too impressed. “She’s a bloody drunk all right, and the rest. Lights on at all hours. Music all bloody night. I’d call the cops if she wasn’t one.” She was always alone apparently, never any visitors. In those first few weeks after their trip down to the camp, Romano got worse and worse. She stopped going to work. She seemed to give up what little enthusiasm she had. It boded well. That type of inert despair could keep you alive on Tunnel. It helped.
The whole story took a while to filter through to him, but Harris eventually heard it from O’Shea. “She thought that Gold Point thing was her ticket out of here,” O’Shea said. “Didn’t do her homework on that one.”
Bachelard’s father, the senator, was no innocent bystander when it came to Tunnel. He had his tentacles all over the island. He was invested. No one needed to keep him in the loop, especially not a new cop out to impress.
“So we’re stuck with her,” said O’Shea.
“She’s harmless enough,” said Harris.
It was true. If one taste of Drainland put her into a spin, Romano would not prove dangerous, especially now that she understood how permanent things were.
“Back to business,” said O’Shea.
“Back to business,” said Harris.
The girl’s father, Donald Marr, came back into the fold. O’Shea set him up with a job on the mainland, essentially the same job he’d had on Tunnel except now he drove the supply boat in the opposite direction. Harris and Dev still used Marr’s old boat for delivery runs. They met him out to sea. Very little had changed in Don after Sophie’s passing. He had always been a bit of a blank slate. In the dead of night, as he pulled his new boat up alongside the old one, he gave off the appearance of the same man, doing the same work. Dev found his coldness chilling. Harris agreed.
In December, the removalists came and packed up the Marr house, and it was on the market a week later. A New Zealand businesswoman bought the place for a holiday home. The house now sat there vacant, for the most part.
After that, the rest of the year dwindled away. The tourists came. The heat rose. The tenor of the island ramped up. Harris kept his nights open. Each new week sat discrete from the next. He did the meetings. He made his delivery runs in the boat. He stayed semi-retired. He stayed out of O’Shea’s problems: a guy from the mainland came looking for a missing girl; a brawl broke out at the Bond Mirage; the simmering tension between the Doomriders and the Chans continued unabated. As often as possible, Harris met Dev down on the point to meditate. They sat in the grass together and watched the sun glimmer in the sea water.
Concentrate on your breathing, Jim.
Let the breeze pass through you, Jim.
Let your head hang loose on your shoulders and let the energy drain down, all the way to your toes, Jim.
He could never make it work.
It was never quite enough.
The past nagged at him.
He kept checking on Romano, watching the woman slowly divide further and further apart. He wanted this, but he also couldn’t completely abide it. It felt wrong. By December she was managing an hour or two at the station house, but the pace didn’t seem to suit her. Harris knew the signs. She was using again. Carl Yates confirmed it. He had a pizza guy selling to her. Harris didn’t want to help, but some part of him felt sorry for her.
A quick search through her house one night revealed more case files spread across the living room floor, more note paper full of receipts and lists and theory. Harris still had the phone tapped and by working from home as she did, she left a trail of calls. He went home and followed the paperwork. She was all over Pastor Frith and the Mission, which was a curious move. Harris had no idea why. The old priest never seemed to bother anyone. Harris couldn’t think of someone less involved in the Gold Point thing. Maybe Romano was just spinning her wheels? Or, with a grim smile, Harris realised that maybe Romano was starting to settle in good and proper. No one liked a do-gooder on Tunnel. The locals—true locals—nursed all sorts of vendettas and obsessions. Maybe this was Romano’s induction?
Whatever it was, it put her right into the spiral. By mid-December, she was a wreck, looking more full-blown as the days passed. She was completely oblivious, but it was starting to get noticed. The talk was that she’d interviewed a group of Frith’s nurses down in Arthurton and scared the old ladies half to death. The racket she made on the mainland—calling e
very other day, chasing down files and confirmations—eventually it all appeared on O’Shea’s radar, and he wasn’t pleased.
“Ya going to have to do something,” said O’Shea. “Ya said this shit with Drainland would tame her.”
Harris shrugged. “I’m not doing anything yet.”
“Soon,” said O’Shea. “This is not like the rest of it. Ya can’t just ignore it. Ya got yourself involved, so just remember, ya involved now, lad.”
“I’m a better judge of that than you,” said Harris.
28
Thursday, December 9, 2004
A wave of humidity swept in. It felt like nuclear fallout. Romano cranked the Land Cruiser’s air-con and checked her map. This was the place. Pastor Frith’s Mission was on the southern fringe of Drainland, down under the lighthouse. It was more accessible than the camp. They had what looked like a dirt track cut down from the main road and this track was gated, locked fast with a thick chain.
She had a number for the Mission. She called it.
“Holy Beach.”
“Oh, hi. My name’s Constable Laura Romano. I was hoping to come in and have a chat with the Pastor this morning. Is he around?”
“Nah. He’s over in the camp already. Joe likes to make an early start on the day, especially days like today.”
“Who am I on with?”
“Pauline. His wife.”
“Pauline, I’m up on the road. Any chance you could come let me in?”
Pauline hesitated. “Joe…He won’t be back for lunch till midday, at the earliest. Some days he doesn’t come in at all. So—”
“That’s okay. I can wait. It’s nothing pressing.”
“Well, I guess, I could…Let me see.”
It took a good long while. Romano was dying for a cigarette but didn’t dare crack the car window. Eventually, a small woman appeared out of the scrub on a trail bike. Mid-fifties, dressed entirely in white. She wore tennis shorts, split at the side, a tank top and visor. Her hair sprang out the sides of her hat—a bright white curly fro—and it bounced slightly as she walked over.
“How you doing there, Constable? Hot enough for ya?”
“Plenty,” said Romano.
“Okay, then, follow me. Watch the bend halfway in, there’s a pothole the delivery men are always getting stuck in.”
She opened the gate and waved Romano through. They took it slow. The dry bush scrub on either side of the track was thick, rendering the nearby coastline invisible. It was only at the very end of the drive that the lighthouse appeared, and under it sat the Mission. It was planted in a long, cleared swath of land along the shoreline. The ocean expanded on either side of the buildings, a rich blue cast against the red lighthouse and the glaring white of the church walls and surrounding buildings. In another season—one with rainfall—a lawn would have made the place beautiful. Instead, the grass was brown and the whole scene shimmered in the dust. As she drove in closer, Romano noticed children in the windows of the buildings. The little faces watched them approach.
“These yours?” said Romano, stepping out into the haze.
Pauline dismounted. “Yes and no. That’s most of what we do here. Half hospital, half orphanage. We’ve got ourselves about twenty-five kids on site at the moment. But Joe is bringing new ones home every week. It’s been a rough couple of months down here.”
“So I hear.”
“You want the tour?”
“I guess,” said Romano. “Can I have a smoke first?”
The Mission had four main buildings and a row of demountables tucked in behind the chapel. According to Pauline, they didn’t do much trade in the church. “Christmases and Easters. The rest of the year we store food there.” They had a white brick shed they used as a make-shift hospice. Another structure—an old hall—acted as an adult dormitory for those “trying to right themselves before leaving the camp.” The demountables were the children’s dormitories. They did not step inside any of the buildings. Pauline assured her it wasn’t pleasant. Romano took it as a given. The smell of Drainland was in the air, coming up from the beach below.
To finish, Pauline invited her into the church house. They had coffee together on the rear deck, sitting in the shadow of the lighthouse. The ocean was clear and flat. Romano could hear the waves breaking not far away.
“This isn’t half bad,” said Romano. “You could be anywhere.”
“It has its moments. Now what do you need from my Joe?”
“Not much. I’m poking around this thing we put to bed a few months back, a homicide up in the North. I just need to square away a few details. The blokes who did it, they came up from the camp. To be honest, I’m just trying to get the full lay of the land over here.”
“You haven’t been here long?”
“Not really, no. You?”
“Born here,” Pauline said.
They talked about that. Pauline told stories about the island, back before the tunnel. She said that Joe Frith had a parish proper back then, back when the North was more religious. He was from the mainland too, like her. As Pauline told it, the poor fool actually chose to come here. He felt it was his moral duty. As the morning wore on, Pauline went inside to the kitchen and fixed lunch. As she worked at the counter, Romano wandered around the living room, a second coffee in hand.
The interior of the house had a cramped, musty feel to it. The carpets were worn through, and even Romano could see that the furnishings were mismatched, cobbled together from different decades and trends. A salmon-coloured leather lounge sat by a marble coffee table. An elaborate Swedish wall unit housed an ancient television. Against the main wall stood an antique timber cabinet topped with porcelain figures (elephants and ballerinas mainly), and above the cabinet hung a grid of framed photographs.
She looked at each:
Pauline with various dogs.
The pastor with visiting bishops.
The pastor and Pauline at varying ages, surrounded with children and parishioners. Large groups by white churches and steps.
Romano scanned for familiar faces and found them: Sophie and Silvia Marr and their mother standing amongst a crowd. She took the frame from the wall and turned it over. 1995, Parish Flea Market.
Romano took it round to Pauline. The woman tut-tutted. “Look at my hair,” she said.
“Were the Marr family part of your husband’s old parish?”
“Oh, yes. Di and Don were a big help to us back then. Don had his troubles but he was a good man, deep down. Always willing to lend a hand.”
“I don’t see him,” said Romano.
“Let me see.” Pauline took the frame and lifted it close to her face. She laughed. “He probably took this. He took a lot of photos over the years.”
“And this is from up North, before the Mission?”
“That’s right.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, you’ll have to get Joe to tell you that story. And you’ll never hear the end of it once you do.”
Romano put the photo back. Moving quickly, she snapped a photo of it for her records. If Pauline heard the digital camera beep, she made no mention of it. “Now, are you hungry, Laura?” she called. “Because I might eat.”
When Frith did not show for lunch, Pauline was apologetic. Romano couldn’t shake the feeling she was being entertained. Pauline had a way of turning the conversation to other things, of reiterating, preaching almost. She caught it more and more as they ate. Her husband was a great man in her estimation, if a little doddering and distracted. Eventually, with the sun low in the sky, she started to excuse herself. She said she had to go check on the volunteers. She had rounds of the hospice to attend to, and the children needed checking on.
“I’ve taken up enough of your time,” said Romano.
Pauline insisted she hadn’t.
They drove back up the track to the road where Pauline let her out.
“Tell your husband to give me a bell.”
“I’m sure he will. He’ll be sorry
he missed you.”
“Hang on. One last thing.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know the two men from the camp? Petey and Drags? The Riders told me they were giving you and your husband some trouble recently, before they passed.”
The woman looked back up the track toward the homestead. “Can’t say I do.”
“You sure?” said Romano, and she repeated their names.
“It’s not ringing any bells,” said Pauline.
“Okay then.”
As she drove out, Romano watched Pauline in the rearview. The woman stood by the gate with her trail bike and stared at the cruiser until it was out of sight. Throughout, her face was blank.
29
Friday, December 9, 2004 to Tuesday, January 4, 2005
The priest never did call. Romano put him in the files. They had paper on him in the station house, all dating back to the early nineties. Frith had headed up something called the Holy Covenant Island Church until July ’94. Romano drove past the former site for it up on Burgess Point. It was a set of townhouses now. She called around to town planning, the ATO, the Roman Catholic archdiocese. In return, she got parts of the story.
Frith and his parish had opposed the tunnel. They made noise. They picketed construction sites, wrote petitions, raised funds. And then they lost. After the tunnel was built, the money came in and that was that. Religion was bad for tourism. They ran Frith and his wife out of the North, and burnt his church to the ground. The official police paperwork went nowhere past that. Detective Sergeant Bill Dranger seemed to diligently sit back and let it happen. The reports filed were a masterclass in passive-aggression.