Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

by Stevenson, Benjamin

  No. Sam hadn’t killed her. But if it had been Harry who climbed down . . . Well, then the only witness had died two weeks ago. Perhaps a brotherly pact had been backed out of.

  Ryan suspected something like that. But then why would Harry get Jack involved? To see if anyone was onto him, to make sure he’d get away with it?

  About a quarter of the way through their second turn, on the way up but not quite at the top, the cabin jolted and Jack instinctively whipped a hand out, grabbed cold metal. He was still looking down. This was only a short stop while one of the families in a lower carriage exited, but Jack still found himself wondering if, depending on how cold and long the night was, he would have tried to Tarzan his way down.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Harry slowly.

  Jack suddenly felt like the carriage was too small. Too high. Too jerky in the breeze, hanging by a single hook in the middle of the roof and tilted, always, towards Harry, because Jack was far too light. It all suddenly felt too close. Four metres in the air with nowhere to go. ‘Very funny,’ Jack said. ‘You set this up?’

  ‘You’re thinking it’s not that hard to climb down.’ Harry followed Jack’s gaze at the spokes of the wheel. ‘Just a big jungle gym.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jack smiled weakly. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  The stop seemed longer than it should have been. Jack was just beginning to wonder if Harry really had set this up, and wishing he could be on firm ground away from him – Dad had a suspect – when he looked down and saw Black Singlet walking away from the ride. Someone else hopped in the booth. An innocent delay: a shift change. But something about this movement made him pay attention.

  ‘In my defence’ – Harry brought him out of it, laughing it off as the wheel jolted into action again – ‘it was heaps windier.’

  Jack spent the rest of the wheel’s loop watching Black Singlet thread through the crowd. He was easy to keep in sight because he strode deliberately, without the ambling, sightseeing pace of the punters around him. Jack’s thought on watching Black Singlet leave had expanded. When the ride had stopped for the shift change, he’d tried to put himself in the Midnight Twins’ shoes. Sure, two teenage boys, the last ride of the day, and a slack operator keen to blow the top off one, added up to negligence. But Lily had called Sam twice. Sam’s guilt stemmed from the fact that he could have saved her if he had been there. But, as fate would have it, he wasn’t.

  But what if fate had nothing to do with it? If Sam was the only one who could have intervened in Lily’s death, it was pretty damn unlucky that he had been stuck four and a half metres in the air and out of the picture. Unless he’d been left there on purpose.

  Which was why Jack had decided to pay a lot more attention to the ride operator sliding through the crowd. Because it was an interesting coincidence that Black Singlet had chosen to leave the moment after Jack and Harry had boarded. Rides in these fairs were owned, each family unit laying claim to their space in the wagon-train from town to town. The lifestyle stuck. It was a safe assumption that the operator had been around a while.

  Maybe he’d recognised Harry. That was worth keeping an eye on.

  Black Singlet slipped through a gap between sideshows, towards the circle of residential caravans. But the ride had dipped by then, and Jack could no longer see over the tops of the stalls.

  ‘Goes round three times, but we can get off now if you’ve seen enough?’ Harry said.

  Jack shook his head, and their carriage glided through the entry–exit platform and rose again. Jack craned his neck to catch a glimpse of Black Singlet, but he’d lost track. The makeshift campsite and the carpark beyond were dark enough that nothing at a distance was identifiable. He could only see what lights shone across. A glowing cigarette. A blue wash of someone looking at their mobile. A soft yellow light flicking on in one of the caravans. A pair of headlights rotating through the carpark revealed the white sheen of the police car Jack had approached before.

  Jack could see a blurry shadow in the caravan window, which was veiled with a thin curtain. The shadow inside was waving its arms. ‘Harry,’ Jack whispered, pointing.

  Harry turned and followed his gaze. The shadow was now moving its arms a lot. Talking animatedly? On the phone? Then the shadow bent down, disappeared from view under the window frame. Harry, thinking Jack was pointing out an unimpressive firework that had just snaked up from behind the caravans and popped, shrugged.

  ‘You recognise the guy that let us on?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Harry said indifferently. ‘David, Dennis . . . something.’

  ‘Did he work here back when Lily did?’

  ‘Yeah, probably. Hers was just a summer job. He’s a lifer. Oh . . . you think?’

  In the carpark, a wash of oscillating red and blue now splashed the side of the caravans. For some reason, the police car had turned its lights on. No siren. An interior car light spilled onto the bitumen as a door opened, then was gone as it closed. Replaced by a tiny pinprick of light – a torch. The small circular glow started to float its way from the police cruiser towards the residential caravans.

  ‘It just strikes me that he saw you and scurried off. And now’ – Jack nodded at the torchlight bobbing through the parking lot – ‘it seems the police want to talk to him too.’

  In the caravan, the silhouette was back. One of the arms looked longer now. Like it had a second elbow, pointed rigidly at the roof. Then the arm extension bent at a right angle. But backwards. Double-jointed. Something chunky at the end of it, light shining through a small loop.

  Jack turned back to the policeman’s flashlight, firefly in the dark, getting closer. Then he realised what it was in the window.

  The person in the caravan was loading a shotgun.

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘Hey!’ Jack started to yell. ‘Hey!’ He had his phone to his ear immediately, having dialled triple zero. People on the ground nearby looked up, but his voice wasn’t carrying across the park. And then the loop of the wheel dipped them back below the sightline, and he lost all view of the lights and shadows.

  The last thing he glimpsed was the silhouette of the gun, and the flashlight – the lone cop – moving inexorably towards it.

  ‘Calm down, mate,’ someone in the carriage above yelled.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Harry, who’d clearly missed the shadows.

  Jack pointed through the bars and was about to continue when the emergency operator picked up. He told them where he was. Told them there was an officer about to find themselves in serious shit. ‘At the carnival,’ he said again. ‘In Wheeler’s Cove. You need to call them immediately.’

  ‘All right.’ There was typing on the other end of the phone. ‘We can send an officer to you.’

  ‘You’re not listening,’ said Jack. ‘They’re already here.’

  The lady asked him to clarify, but Jack’s attention was diverted. They were at the bottom of the ride now, not yet docked. He had the gate already unlocked and, despite the protests of the new attendant, jumped the last half metre, landing in a sprint and bolting off the platform. Harry was yelling behind him, slowed by having to extricate his larger frame from the carriage, but Jack didn’t turn or wait. He knew where he was going. And he knew what would happen if he didn’t get there fast enough.

  He was yelling the whole way, for police, for help, for anything. But people in groups don’t respond well to panicked alerts. Groups either parted or stepped forward to slow him down, ask him what was wrong. He weaved under consoling arms and good-intentioned blockades. Half the people didn’t even notice him, unless he slopped their beer on the way through. He knew Harry would be somewhere behind him, but had no time to check. He realised it might look like he was being chased. He jostled and pushed. Copped an elbow to the nose. That confused him, and suddenly he felt pressed in and disorientated. It seemed like there were more people with each step. And noise. The murmured hum of a crowd having a good time sounded instead like the footstep
s of Roman soldiers.

  And then space.

  It was like leaving the atmosphere. That moment in films where the rattle of the spaceship ceases and the director pulls back to the wide shot, watching the spaceship go from rocket launch to serene glide. The air was suddenly less pressed and the sound less obfuscating. Jack was at the edge of the crowd, next to a small alley between two sideshows. He dashed into the gap. Only twenty metres or so until the caravans. So close.

  It didn’t matter.

  Over the hum of the fair behind him, Jack heard the crump that could only be a shotgun firing. Someone screamed, confirming it.

  Jack burst out the other side. The light in the caravan was off. The first thing Jack saw was a long finger of light, splayed across the ground. A dropped torch? Or a torch in a fallen hand, the cop lying behind it, gurgling his last breaths?

  A yell from inside the caravan dispelled that theory. ‘Police!’

  The window became a flickering reel. Three bright flashes. A heartbeat after, the sound hit. Not a thunderous bang, but a small series of bursts. Pop pop pop.

  There was a blur of motion as, across the park, people started to realise what was happening. Other caravan lights came on, shadows flitting past in all directions. In the carpark, engines started.

  Jack walked steadily towards the now dark and silent caravan. As he got closer, the light inside flicked on again. The door was speckled with a constellation of glowing spots. A shrapnel blast. The shotgun had fired through it.

  Jack made the gamble that because the shotgun blast had come first, and the pistol shots second, the cop had come out on top. He yelled, ‘Civilian, unarmed!’ and pushed the door open.

  The park was quickly evacuated, which was a beautiful migration to watch, the floating cells bleeding out into the street. It hadn’t been panicked. People clearly knew something was wrong, but very few knew the scale of the gunfight – or that there’d even been a gunfight – just over the fence, so it was only when they saw the ambulance out front that they formed a pack, pushing against a row of men in fluoro yellow vests with glowing red batons, camera phones held in the air. The police had set up a floodlight in the carpark that lit the whole scene. Another half-dozen cars had arrived. People bustled back and forth. Those dressed in hairnets and shoe-coverings were going in and out of the caravan. Camera bulbs flashed. It looked like a film set.

  Jack had, unsurprisingly, had the caravan door slammed in his face. But not before he’d glimpsed inside. The caravan was pretty standard: one large room with a bed under the window, then a small living area with a table, padded bench and kitchenette. Black Singlet was slumped against the bottom of the fridge, not moving, a large red smear behind him on the white door (like the way a fancy restaurant put sauce on dessert plates, Jack thought morbidly). Blood pulsed rhythmically from his neck, and a pool under his legs was steadily growing too. Shot at least twice. There was a shotgun, threatless, on the floor beside him. Cracked at the middle, mid-reload. The cop had been standing in front of the table, pistol still in hand. On hearing the door open, he’d spun around and jabbed the nose of his gun in Jack’s face before realising he wasn’t a threat and lowering it.

  ‘This is a crime scene. Bugger off,’ he said, slamming the door. Opened it again a second later. ‘Carpark. Don’t go anywhere.’

  It had taken until the crowd thinned in the carpark to find Harry. He had been inside the park, still trying to push through the crowds. He said he hadn’t heard the gunshots, but that a commotion had been obvious, with a couple of the carnies running through the park and herd mentality taking over the rest of the crowd. Inside, the police had arrived and were shutting down the rides. Harry told Jack that since his and Sam’s misadventure, all the emergency services had keys to the equipment. He’d tried to ask an officer what happened, but they’d been too busy shepherding people to answer.

  Jack told Harry as much as he could. From what he had pieced together, it seemed Black Singlet had fired the shotgun through the door, missed, and in response the cop had unloaded back at him. Jack tried to remember the sounds. Three or four pops, he thought. An ambulance was there, but it hadn’t moved since it pulled up. That meant that those shot had no need for an ambulance. Jack looked for an officer on their own to ask, but everyone in even a semi-official-looking vest was swamped with similar questions. It was a small force spread thin.

  Jack felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Jack,’ someone said. Familiar smell of smoke. Voice like cellophane being scrunched. The old policeman, who’d asked him to stay.

  ‘I didn’t give you my name before,’ Jack said, surprised the crinkle-cut officer knew it.

  ‘I’m not saying you’re on a list—’

  ‘What happened?’ Jack cut him off, uninterested in what the local cops thought of him.

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘Can’t say.’ He scratched a scab on his weather-hardened neck. Though he knew what Jack had seen. ‘You know David Winter?’

  Winter was the detective who’d handled the murder case Jack had interfered with eighteen months ago. He was more of a PR specialist than a detective and tended to work cases with a high level of media interest because he was calm under pressure and didn’t cave to tabloids. Jack found it curious that not only were the Sydney police involved in something down here, but they’d also sent their high-profile spokesman. The NSW police investigating Sam’s death as a murder would be laughable. So what were they doing here? Winter was also as straight-laced as a Sherrin, and he didn’t like Jack at all. In fact, Winter had seen to it that, even though Jack had eventually solved the crime, he had gone to prison for his vigilantism.

  Jack’s grimace must have conveyed their history, because the cop continued. ‘Right. Well. Message from him. Wants to speak to you tomorrow, so don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Why’s a Sydney detective plucking around Wheeler’s Cove?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘My car’s in the lot. Can I get it out at least?’

  ‘Tough.’

  His threat turned out to be empty. The police realised pretty quickly that keeping over a hundred people’s cars overnight wasn’t as practical as they wanted it to be, especially with families and children wanting to get home, and they didn’t have the manpower to shuttle everyone. Eventually, deciding that the real crime scene was not in the main lot, they relented. People queued up to be individually escorted to their cars. They had to walk around the circumference and enter from the far side – under the floodlight, moth tornado in the beam – and be guided out by an officer so as not to interfere with anything. It was nearly midnight when Jack and Harry finally got back to the car. Jack tried to spy any black bags on trolleys as they were walked through, but screens, like they used for shot horses, had been erected.

  Jack’s phone buzzed as he started the car. A text from his father. Home tonight?

  The hi-vis guy in front of the bonnet had one arm out, sweeping the other across his body like an air traffic controller. Jack put the phone in his lap, rolled through the lot, following directions. His leg vibrated. Jack stopped at the entrance to the highway, picked up the phone. Another message.

  Maybe it’s easier like this. Look, I meant it when I said I wasn’t strong enough to choose. But maybe it’s hard to talk about. I know your life is all scripts and words and big speeches but I’m not so great at it. Sometimes I use the wrong ones. So it’s simple. If you tell me yes or no, that’ll be what we do. Together. I won’t bring it up again.

  There was a pause, the three dots that meant someone was typing on the other end. Then gone. As if there was something more to come but Peter had deleted it, or didn’t have the words for it. The space in between words almost as powerful as the words themselves. The phone vibrated again. Love, Dad.

  Harry, mistaking Jack’s hesitation as not knowing which way to turn, suggested a motel he knew in Arlington. Jack exhaled in silent relief. His momentary fear
of Harry had been overtaken by his fear of having to go home. His family was just like the Connors, a bucket with a hole in it. Liam a pebble at the bottom, Jack and his father pouring out around him.

  I had to choose between the family I’d lost and the family I still had.

  Maurice grieved like Jack, like Harry too: with rebellion and non-acceptance. It must be a murder. It’s not killing. The lies they told themselves to keep the truth at bay. Such masculine bravado: all masks.

  Found a way to let Lily go.

  Yes or no.

  Words kill people all the time. Jack’s father was giving him an out. He could extinguish a life with a text message. The chance to be faceless. Jack couldn’t do it, not tonight. He pulled the car onto the road, tossing his phone on the backseat.

  They rolled into the brick archway alongside the reception of the Catch of the Day motel. The sign had a Tom Sawyer-esque caricature of a small boy in overalls fishing. The tagline was: Mo-Money Mo-Tel.

  ‘This counts as expenses,’ Jack said.

  Harry got out and buzzed the after-hours intercom. The owner, a full-cheeked woman with a smile that made her eyes disappear, came out and they had a short discussion. Jack could hear it, muffled through the window.

  ‘Is that . . . Sam? Sammy Midford? All grown up?’

  ‘Depends. Do you watch TV?’