The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  ‘It’s all right.’ Veronica wanted to add, ‘You stand over there. I’ll deal with this.’ That is what she – old Veronica – would have said. But when she heard herself speak again it wasn’t that.

  She said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  Chapter 24

  ______

  This time they kept her much longer. Before asking anything, the police had her examined by a young doctor from Bangladesh, very short and cheerful, with a shy intelligence and a quiet voice. She downplayed her injuries and managed to pull herself together sufficiently to convince him that she wasn’t suffering undue shock or trauma. She didn’t tell him about her head being bashed against the wall. After raising children and working in the clinic, she knew the signs of concussion and felt nothing more than a dull headache. The young doctor said she was bruised, but not seriously injured. She knew she should be checked thoroughly: her stomach and her head. But there was no time for scans or emergency rooms. She would just have to hope that the damage wasn’t serious, that she didn’t have concussion, that she wasn’t going to collapse, at least until after she had made sure Mayson was being cared for.

  After that the detectives interviewed her. Maybe to unsettle her, instead of starting with the events of the day, they asked her about Treen. They mentioned Roland and this time she did call a solicitor. Peter Willensen was a friend of a friend who had dealt with Alan’s parents’ estates. He was not experienced with cases like this one.

  Criminal cases. Is that what this was?

  Peter sat quietly, listening while they made her repeat her story several times.

  From somewhere she dredged up some intelligence. She said she didn’t know where Roland was now, and she had only recently learned that he had been friends with the girl on the mountain. They questioned her over the details, seeking a lie. They asked her where Roland was staying and if she knew the woman from the South Hobart bookshop. They asked her about the blue Honda and whether Roland had any access to morphine-based medication.

  After a second cup of tea, they began asking about Belle. She was able to describe the events in the old hospital exactly as they had happened, except that she omitted hearing Roland, Paul and John. She tried to stay vague about how many voices she had heard and said she hadn’t been sure whose voices they were. As far as she could tell, the police hadn’t found anyone in the old building. It hadn’t been the detectives who’d come initially, just a couple of uniformed police, sent to investigate reports of a disturbance. They had gone through the front door and straight downstairs to the yard, and security guards had come through the back gate from Salamanca. Roland, Paul and John had been upstairs somewhere. Presumably they had slipped out the front door.

  She also omitted Vicky from the story. She said Belle had left Mayson and run upstairs and she, Veronica, had gone out the back looking for help, where she ran into Dane. She said she didn’t know what had happened to Mayson, secretly hoping that Vicky had looked after him properly, got him to Roland, got him to hospital. Surprisingly, she felt confident this had happened. In a break between questions she allowed herself a moment of gratitude for Vicky’s obvious strength and dependability.

  Then she described Belle’s fall. The police questioned her about the high door, the protective barriers that had been dragged away. They spent a long time asking about the way the door had been trapped open, apparently trying to trick her into admitting that she had arranged it that way. This confirmed what she had suspected. That high door had been deliberately held open for Belle to fall through. Belle had been led to it, or pushed.

  There was no time to think that through during the questioning. Once again, Detective Sergeant Collins had fresh creases in his shirtsleeves and once again she found she couldn’t ignore them. Like the last one, this shirt was all cotton, but it had small flecks of blue and it was more finely spun. He had been at the police station all day. There was a reddish shadow on his chin and a tackiness to his hair. So she had been right. He kept a shirt here, ironed and ready, in a cupboard somewhere, for … what? Ladies of a certain age? Surely there couldn’t be many people like Veronica dragged through these sad rooms. It was for the difficult cases then, the dramatic ones. For the deaths.

  She gathered her faculties. There were a lot of things she must tell the police, large terrible truths, and at the same time there was a whole array of details she couldn’t tell them. And yet things could so easily be revealed, by the flicker of an eye or a hesitation, or a tone of voice. One thing she was able to describe vividly was Belle’s appearance, her struggle with Dane, the blood on his face. She could describe Belle’s threats to the child and her uncontrolled movements, and she also told them about the shouting, the footsteps that she couldn’t locate. She didn’t mention the drawing stuck to the door, which was still in her pocket.

  She said she didn’t really know Judith except as the owner of a second-hand bookshop, someone she had seen in the streets. She said she was just a mad old drunk, which was true. A savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound.

  She said she had visited Belle, once in her shop and once at her house, out of a sense of connection and responsibility, having been the one who had found Treen, and out of concern for Treen’s child. Belle had asked her to come to the old hospital at three thirty, to help her settle in and, despite the fact that she disapproved of squatting, Veronica had agreed to do that. She had not known what she would find. She had been hoping to find a way to help Belle look after the little boy.

  Constructing all this had been exhausting.

  She said that at the old hospital she had tried to talk some sense into Dane and Belle, but she had been swept aside. She assumed Belle’s death was a tragic accident, that the high door must have been left open by builders, that the workers would have had no way of knowing there would be intruders. She said she had tried and failed to close it. But she was appalled by the dreadful result. As a mother herself, she felt sickened, and she would do anything required to help them find out what had happened.

  She didn’t mention the bone, or the misaligned neck, or the moment you must and cannot have.

  Some time after midnight, after she had talked and waited and signed a statement, she was interviewed by a welfare person – a counsellor or social worker dressed in dowdy jeans and running shoes – and then they decided to let her go. Peter Willensen said that Lesley had phoned him several hours ago, offering to come and pick Veronica up. He wasn’t sure how Lesley had found out where she was. Presumably Roland had told her, or Paul. According to Vicky, they had both been in the building somewhere. They must know what had happened.

  Peter insisted that she accept Lesley’s offer, despite the hour, and Veronica agreed. She was still determined not to contact family members, and the prospect of a lonely taxi ride home was more than she could take.

  The police kept her car and her clothes, and gave her a polyester tracksuit to dress in. They would find Roland’s drawing, carefully folded in the pocket of her pants. ‘Roland asked me to look after you. At least, he got Vicky to ring me. She said the other girl has been killed now. That’s just terrible.’ Lesley started her car and then paused to peer at Veronica’s face. ‘And you were mixed up in it somehow. You poor thing.’

  ‘So Roland and Vicky are together?’ Vicky had taken Mayson to him. Thank goodness.

  Lesley reversed out of her park and drove up Liverpool Street. ‘Not now. It sounds as if Roland and Paul both know something about this girl’s death. They met Vicky soon afterwards and made some plans. I mean, heaven knows. It’s just so ghastly and dreadful.’

  Lesley went on, telling her things she already knew. ‘Roland had been trying to help the girl Belle get away from the violent man. Yesterday he roped in Paul and Vicky, to all go and help settle her into the old Davey Street building. Roland had given her one of Gordon’s keys.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lesley didn’t stop. It seemed to be helping her to go over this. ‘And then, apparently this Dane man turned up and all
hell broke loose. Vicky helped rescue the little boy from Belle.’

  ‘I was there.’

  ‘Somehow they got Dane to run off, but then the boys tried to subdue Belle, who was in some kind of wild state. She ran away from them, through the building, and at some point she fell through the high door.

  ‘And now they’ve all gone their separate ways. Roland was distraught, apparently. Well, of course he was. No matter how dysfunc-tional those two young women were, they had once been his friends. He’s still hiding from the police and Paul has just gone off somewhere. He’s very upset too. Unfortunately, as we know, he would never come to me for help.’

  They passed the windows of Hadley’s, darkened, one dim light at the door. Veronica let Lesley talk. ‘But before they split up, the consensus was that I should be asked to look after you. So here I am.’ Lesley turned right into Davey Street. They were moving quickly through the empty town. ‘But I can’t believe another one has been killed. It sounds as if Roland and Paul were actually there when it happened. It’s all just impossible.’

  Yes, that was a good word for it. All these horrible, unthinkable events, and Roland and Paul caught up in them. And Lesley. And Veronica. A minute ago she had been talking calmly to the police about poor, pretty, naive, childish Belle – about Belle falling to her death and whether anybody had pushed her.

  It was. It was impossible.

  ‘Where’s Mayson?’

  ‘Mayson?’ Lesley pulled into Veronica’s driveway and stopped the car. ‘The little boy? I have no idea.’

  Veronica half-expected Roland to be in the house, was hoping he’d come slinking out of one of the back rooms. But that was irrational. Roland couldn’t come here. The police would be watching the house even more diligently than before. Most likely he was back at the bookshop, or, if he had any sense, he was in some other out-of-the-way place, the home of a friend of a friend or one of his many radically minded contacts.

  Lesley came with her into the kitchen, saying she wouldn’t stay. But she accepted a glass of water. While Veronica filled it, she said, ‘I don’t resent all the second-hand communication. Roland is quite right to be in hiding. More than ever, now.’

  Veronica got some food out for Ridley and took it to him at the laundry door. When she got back, Lesley was looking at the papers spread over the kitchen table, the copy of Silas Marner, the white stone.

  Veronica opened a tin of cheese biscuits and held it out to her.

  Taking one, Lesley said, ‘The police came and took the car, you know.’

  ‘The Honda?’

  ‘For forensic examination. They really are determined to accuse him of killing that poor girl on the mountain. They took the keys, the main ones and the spares.’

  ‘Hopefully, the truth will come out before they find him.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Surely. It has to be that monster she was married to, doesn’t it? That must be obvious, now that he’s killed the other one. Surely even the police can see that.’

  Veronica found she was eating biscuits, one after another, quickly and without tasting them. She got out a board and a knife and started cutting up an apple.

  Lesley said, ‘Oh, you must be just starving.’

  There was a note on the bench. It was from Miriam.

  GNOCCHI IN THE FRIDGE.

  Yes, Veronica should get some real food. But she didn’t want to offer Lesley a meal. She wanted to be alone. She pushed the note aside, hoping Lesley wouldn’t mention it.

  Lesley took a piece of apple and sat down at the table. She was being kind, wanting to stay long enough to make sure Veronica was all right, and Veronica was too tired to think of a way to get rid of her. So she joined her.

  Lesley said, ‘I got another message from him this morning. Or it’s technically Monday now, isn’t it, so I suppose I should say yesterday?’ She looked at the kitchen clock. It was one in the morning. ‘He didn’t text me directly. He still isn’t contacting either of us openly, because the police might be monitoring our phones. I mean, who knows? But he sent me a message from Spring Beach. He texted it to the bookshop woman.’

  Lesley never said Judith’s name. Just as she had not said Treen’s. They were ‘the bookshop woman’ and ‘that poor girl’.

  ‘The bookshop woman wrote it down and then accosted Gordon in the Battery Point Bakery. Shoved the piece of paper at him and stomped off. Of course, his first impulse was to throw it away. Fortunately, he read enough to see that it was a message from Roland for me, so he brought it home.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Well, you’d think it would be something important, wouldn’t you, after all that effort. But it was still just about the wretched monologue. He was admonishing me to keep up the good work. It said that now, more than ever, we need to tell Treen’s experiences from her own point of view. The monologue has to demonstrate how angry she was and that she lived in a kind of panic. He said the drawings made it clear. Extraordinary.’

  Veronica said, ‘He had a long lonely evening at Spring Beach to think about it all. He had to wait there until the afternoon, when he’d arranged to meet Belle, with Paul and me, at three thirty.’ That had been only ten hours ago.

  Lesley shook her head. ‘Well, the message didn’t help me, I can tell you. I can’t see that his drawings have any meaning at all. Those girls, with their eerie blank faces. These supposedly misunderstood women. I’ve come to hate them all.’

  Absently, Lesley picked up the white stone from the pile of papers on the table. She held it in both hands as she talked. ‘I read Silas Marner. Molly chose to take heroin, or whatever it was. She had a baby, a toddler. She froze to death, but it was only by extraordinary good luck that the baby didn’t freeze with her.’

  Why were they talking about this? Veronica couldn’t remember how the conversation had started. But Lesley was right to be indignant. It was absurd of Roland still to be nagging her about the writing project.

  Lesley said, ‘And I put Treen in that category too. She made choices. She took drugs and neglected her child, hurt him, or allowed him to be hurt. She was monstrous. Evil. I know that’s an idea that’s out of favour. But what other word could there be?’

  Veronica realised she agreed. Treen was a terrible person. Maybe that explained Roland’s obsession. Maybe that’s what he wanted people to see. What had he said? That the drawings would help people to understand about Treen and why she had to die.

  When Lesley had gone, Veronica’s thoughts went immediately to Mayson. Vicky had taken him to Roland, but Roland was hiding somewhere. Did he have Mayson with him? There didn’t seem to be any other possibility. And Veronica couldn’t think of a way to find him. She needed to settle. Her thoughts went to Miriam’s gnocchi. She opened the fridge and looked at the large pyrex dish. Stuck to the top of it there was another message, in Miriam’s handwriting, with her familiar brevity and the customary exclamation marks.

  YOUR GRANDSON. I’VE GOT HIM!!

  Miriam. Veronica heard herself make a sound that was part laugh and part sob. She didn’t know how Miriam had become involved in this, but she had apparently felt the need for some kind of clumsy subterfuge, possibly in case the police had come into the kitchen.

  In the face of this new information there was no question of staying at home. If the police were going to follow her, so be it. Veronica was going to find her grandson.

  She got changed and spread make-up over her doughy face, then allowed herself one minute to lean on her hands and stare, unseeing, at her dressing table. She was bone-achingly tired, bruised in her stomach and shoulders, with a lump on the back of her head. She seemed to have wrenched something in her neck. Her skull felt as if it was full of small rocks that rattled when she moved. And she was dazed. Somewhere at the back of her mind there were dreadful pictures that, if she allowed them, would flood her – Mayson being hit with the leg of the chair, Dane’s face pushing into hers. Belle. These pictures were tightly wound, held under pressure, ready, at any moment to uncoi
l into long trails – Belle in a white dress and a shawl, slipping from euphoria into senseless rage, fighting with Dane, screaming, swinging the chair, then running, playing some kind of game, shrieking with excitement. Give it back. Give it back. Then Belle coming to the open doorway, laughing, tripping. Or being pushed. Or maybe at that point she had been running in terror, blindly. Or maybe she had been dragged.

  Did Belle know what was happening? Did she have time to care? Veronica tried to picture it: the fall, the cold air, the lurch downwards. How much could a mind register? Had there been time for real fear? For regret? A second of wordless longing for life, for … what?

  There was no time for these thoughts. She simply had to keep putting one foot in front of the other until this was fixed. She topped up Ridley’s water. He would have to stay outside until she got back. She went to the kitchen for food. It was only a ten minute drive to Miriam’s in lower Sandy Bay, but who knew what she would find when she got there? She would have to eat on the way. She went back to the kitchen, cut two thick slices of sourdough, buttered them and threw some apples, bananas and chocolate into a bag. Then she went to get Alan’s car out of the garage.

  Driving. Eating. She couldn’t change anything that had already happened, but she had been dealing with appalling events since Treen had died, and she was learning how to do this now. She couldn’t get rid of her memories or her wild suppositions. So she would just have to carry them with her. It was like the wine bottle, Paul’s dismissive solution. Bring it.

  Veronica pulled up, looking through Miriam’s black railing. The house was brick, painted white. The garden had a birch, a willow and a Japanese maple, all delicately bare, and a set of wiry white garden furniture. It was a kind place, a home that was cared for, in which people would be nurtured. Just the place she wanted her grandson to be taken. In front of her car she could see Joss’s Subaru and Britta’s square old ute.

  One bedroom window was softly lit, the curtains closed. It was nearly two o’clock. She got out and started up the path, but before she reached the house the door opened and a young woman tiptoed out. The young woman saw Veronica, made some incomprehensi-ble hand gesture, shut the door quietly, then came closer and whispered, ‘Have you come to see the little kid?’