The Man in the Water

by David Burton

  ‘For real?’

  Will grinned. ‘Yeah. One or two of those may have been started by me. I was pissed that you lied to me.’

  Shaun couldn’t help but smile back. ‘The alien one, right?’

  ‘Yep. But you kissing Megan – that’s totally true, right?’

  Shaun didn’t reply.

  ‘YES! I KNEW IT.’

  They sprinted to the skate park so they could arrive before the crowd of younger kids gathered there for their usual post-school hang out.

  Like everything else in town, the skate park had been built during the boom. Within a year the town had gained two new playgrounds and this park, the lone concession to the town’s teenagers. Back then it was gleaming. Now the concrete hills rose and fell under a sea of graffiti. The grass that had bordered the park had turned to dirt. And somehow an empty bathtub had turned up, and the council had never got round to removing it.

  Shaun was relieved that they were alone. He had panicked at lunch when he realised that Peter Grant might have organised another day of protests as their camping spot was nearby. But the protesters had either given up or dwindled without Peter’s leadership. Perhaps he’d been warned by the police to stay home and keep quiet.

  As far as Shaun could tell there wasn’t that much to see. Everything was normal. The bathtub was empty, the porcelain was hot from the baking sun.

  ‘It’s dry,’ said Will, running his finger along the bottom. ‘There’s been no water here for a while. You sure Millie said he drowned here?’

  Shaun knelt in the dirt and looked underneath it. Maybe some moisture could still be seen around the bottom.

  There was nothing.

  Will shook his head. ‘So, they’re saying he drowned in the tub. But in order to do that there’d have to be water. And we haven’t had any rain for at least a week.’

  Shaun spotted a tap by the gazebo. ‘Hey, look.’

  ‘But there’s no hose. And besides, why would he fill up a bathtub and then drown himself in it? Or why would anyone else?’

  ‘Let’s run through a couple of scenarios,’ said Will. ‘Just for the sake of it – let’s try and imagine that Tyson actually did die here. And let’s say it was suicide. Where would he have come from?’

  They scanned the horizon. Will sparked at a sudden thought. ‘There’s the Nugget. Less than a hundred metres away.’

  The Black Nugget was the pub most miners went to at the end of their shifts. It was imaginatively named after the coal the town was built to mine. If you were tired, sore or drunk you couldn’t miss it – there was a dirty big black rock right outside its front door.

  ‘So,’ Shaun picked up the story, ‘Tyson gets drunk, stumbles into the park, trips over into the tub, and drowns somehow in a bathtub with no water.’

  Will circled the bathtub. ‘So let’s say that, for whatever reason, Millie’s got mixed up. He didn’t drown. He was found in the dry tub. But definitely without a head wound. So he died from what – the cold?’

  ‘No way. It’s been too hot.’

  ‘Maybe he took something. More than alcohol. Maybe it was an overdose.’

  It was possible. You could buy whatever drugs you wanted in town. And some of the workers tended to blow off steam after a shift. But Tyson had a girlfriend to go home to. And a kid coming.

  ‘Maybe,’ Shaun said, ‘but it’s still weird. The fact that he’s missing for a whole week before he magically rocks up again ruins everything. Someone must have seen him if he was just out wandering round.’

  ‘He could have gone bush for a week.’

  ‘Tyson? Out here? For a couple of days maybe.’

  The drought had turned everything to dust, no-one could survive for long.

  ‘Doesn’t make sense. But that’s good news, I guess. It means that it’s hard to argue with your story.’

  ‘You mean the truth?’

  ‘Calm down. You know what I mean. Let’s go with your version of the—’

  Shaun opened his mouth to protest but Will raised his hands.

  ‘All right, all right! Let’s go with the truth. Tyson actually died last week. And someone freaked out and stole the body, and then decided to return it and dump it here.’

  ‘So a ute with the body pulls up in the middle of the night along here.’ Shaun examined the kerb. ‘Or maybe they even drive up onto the kerb and go straight to the bath? Less distance to have to haul the body.’

  ‘Yep, okay. And what? They fill the bathtub and put him in there to make it look like he’s drowned?’

  Shaun glanced around at the pieces of the puzzle: the kerb, the tap, the bathtub.

  ‘That’s going to take a lot of time. If it was Simms, we know he’s got to have done it before Peter bashes him. Wait.’ Will stopped. ‘Where was Simms when Peter found him?’

  That was a good question. Shaun thought back to the night he’d had dinner with the Grants. Peter had said nothing; he just headed for the door. And then the police called. Elaine and Megan didn’t know any of the details at that stage. And he hadn’t asked Millie about it yesterday. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Simms could’ve been anywhere.’

  ‘We should follow that up.’

  Shaun thought of Megan for the hundredth time that day. He’d checked his phone constantly, but she wasn’t online. He’d thought about texting but didn’t know what to say. There was a good chance Peter would come after him with a cricket bat if he knew he was trying to talk to her. ‘None of the Grants’ll talk to us about it,’ he said.

  ‘Millie?’

  Alone in her house. Had she moved Tyson’s boots from the centre of the living room, or were they still there as a kind of shrine? ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘Because if we know Peter found Simms somewhere around here, then that would mean we could link him to the body.’

  Shaun looked up at the line of streetlights. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘At seven the Nugget would be in full swing. Cars on the road. Lights. He comes up here with a ute, a body and a hose? Surely someone would’ve seen him.’

  A few kids were starting to appear in the park now. The sharp sounds of their boards hitting the pavement ricocheted around them. Younger kids, kids not trying to solve a murder, laughing and swearing at one another.

  Shaun and Will watched for a while, both lost in thought.

  ‘Millie mentioned something else,’ said Shaun. ‘I keep thinking – it’s probably nothing, but—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you remember that can you found at the lake? The Guinness? I asked and Tyson didn’t drink Guinness – ever – according to Millie. But when I was round at the Grants the other night, Peter was sculling one.’

  Will’s mouth dropped open. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Do you think?’

  ‘No, it’s probably rubbish. You look in any bin round here and there’ll be all sorts of cans and bottles. And why would Peter kill Tyson anyway, or do anything to cover the murder up? He’s been furious about it since day one.’

  Will nodded, playing with the idea in his mind. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘it’s interesting.’

  They were silent for a moment before Will gasped.

  ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ he said. ‘The body would have to be like, preserved. In a freezer or something. Otherwise, a whole week out in the open – it wouldn’t be pretty.’ Will was excited and disgusted at the thought. ‘He’d be a full-on zombie. It’d be obvious to anyone that he’d died ages ago.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Shaun said. ‘Millie mentioned that.’ He felt sick at the thought.

  ‘So, where did they put him for a week?’

  Shaun looked hard at the tub, listening to skateboards hit the concrete with a hard slap.

  Will spoke in a half-whisper, mostly to himself. ‘What if Peter was involved?’

  As soon as Shaun walked through the front door, hi
s phone buzzed.

  ‘Crap,’ he said, looking at the screen. He’d forgotten to text his mum to say he’d arrived home safely. Because he hadn’t until just now. He sighed and answered. ‘Hi, Mum. Sorry I forgot. I went straight home after school.’

  ‘Just let me know, okay?’ she said. ‘Now stay there, and try to get some rest.’

  ‘Okay, Mum. Sorry.’ He hung up.

  They’d left the skate park after a while. The case, for the moment, was at a dead end. Shaun fell onto his bed and closed his eyes.

  He thought about all the detective shows he’d seen. Maybe they should print out pictures of everyone connected to Tyson and see who were possible suspects. They were all getting tangled in his mind. Whenever he tried to imagine someone removing Tyson’s body from the lake, or dumping it in the bath, their face was missing. They had broad shoulders and big arms, grunting with the weight of the body, but otherwise silent.

  He checked his phone for the millionth time. There was nothing from Megan, but there was an email from Tenner with the details of the flight and the topic for the debate. They’d discussed it at lunch, and Tenner wanted a draft by the following day. At the time, Shaun had barely absorbed anything, just nodded politely while he thought about Tyson and the skate park.

  Climate change is a real and present threat to the Australian economy.

  Ugh! He couldn’t have cared less about climate change right now. And the more he thought about the topic the worse it got. He’d have to research the science and the economics.

  He flicked through the other details. They were on the ‘affirmative’ team, meaning they had to argue that climate change was indeed stuffing things up. They would fly out on the Sunday, kill a day in Brisbane, and then go to the debate in the evening at some posh private school.

  He googled the school and immediately felt worse. It was perched on top of a hill overlooking the city and looked like a fairytale castle. They probably had a team of speech writers for their debates. They were almost certainly going to win.

  Shaun didn’t care about the debate. The trip to Brisbane was an opportunity to see Megan away from her family, and maybe to apologise to her. But it was also a distraction from finding Tyson’s killer.

  He considered asking Millie if she knew where Peter had found Simms. If he was near the bathtub, that might prove a connection. But there was no guarantee Millie would know. And besides, she was likely to be with Peter and the family organising Tyson’s funeral.

  His mind snagged on an image: Megan, standing beside a coffin, gazing in at her dead brother.

  Shaun knew the bizarre journey of a dead body in a small town.

  There were no funeral services here. The town was too small. Instead, the body was stored in a special freezer at the hospital. Then a funeral company would send a car from the coast to pick it up and take it back for ‘preparations’. Even now Shaun was uncomfortable with the word. His dad had been cremated and sent back to them for a service at the church.

  When he went back into his memory of the days around his dad’s funeral, everything disappeared in a murky fog. He couldn’t remember how the days moved, or how he navigated the seemingly endless time in the quiet house, watching his mother fall apart.

  Megan was in that same fog right now. She’d be there for a while. Maybe she’d forget she’d kissed him. And maybe that was for the best.

  When he heard his mum come home from work, he switched off his light and dived into bed. He wasn’t in the mood to talk. A few minutes after the car pulled in, he heard his bedroom door open for a few seconds and then shut again. His mum was satisfied that he was asleep. But Shaun didn’t rest, and spent most of the night looking through the posts that people had put up on Tyson and Megan’s pages.

  He flicked back to Simms’s profile page. It hadn’t been updated all week. He scanned through his list of friends. And then he froze.

  He knew one of the people on the list.

  Tenner. Tenner and Simms were Facebook pals.

  He texted Will immediately.

  WHAAAAT??? Will texted back. And then another message, seconds later. What does that MEAN?!

  Shaun didn’t have a clue. Why would Tenner and Simms be connected? Simms didn’t even live in town, and he didn’t have anything to do with the school.

  No idea. But it could be a lead.

  TENNER’S THE KILLER!!!

  Shaun couldn’t believe it. Sure, Tenner sometimes lost his temper in class, but he didn’t seem like a killer and he was teaching a class when Shaun found the body.

  Still, it was odd.

  Shaun saw Tenner for their final class the next day. As the lesson drew to a close, Tenner asked to see their debating speeches while the rest of the class was working.

  Will was almost jumping out of his skin with excitement. He couldn’t sit still while Tenner read over Shaun’s speech. Shaun had pulled it together that morning, stumbling through research and eventually writing without thinking. He knew the speech was crap, so he wasn’t surprised to see Tenner scratching all over it with his beloved red pen. At least he had a speech. Will hadn’t prepared anything.

  As Shaun watched Tenner, he tried to imagine him killing Tyson and lugging the body through the skate park at night. Or sneaking into the hospital to store the body in the freezer. None of it made sense.

  Tenner underlined one of Shaun’s paragraphs with steady precision.

  ‘I was thinking,’ Will whispered, ‘about Tyson. And, you know, all the ways to kill someone. And if it’s true that the body doesn’t have any head wounds, we still don’t know about the rest of him. Like, maybe there’s poison in his system. Or maybe they put chemicals in the bath or something that was fatal. Russians do that stuff.’

  Shaun put his head down on the desk. He was exhausted. ‘I don’t think Tyson was tied up with Russian spies.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Will, his whole body almost vibrating, ‘maybe he was poisoned. Or choked. I’m just saying, there’s a million ways to kill someone. I started googling it until I realised that’s, you know, probably not an awesome idea.’

  ‘But Millie said the police thought it was suicide.’

  ‘She also said that made no sense. And the police said he magically turned up after a week,’ Will said, growing louder. Tenner was busy writing a short novel in the margin of Shaun’s speech. ‘And something’s up with Simms,’ Will continued, ‘I know it. He worked with Tyson. He would’ve had access to his locker, his food, everything. He could be the killer.’

  ‘I don’t know what you two are talking about,’ said Tenner from across the room, ‘but you should probably stop.’

  Shaun wondered how much Tenner had heard.

  ‘Shaun, this is okay,’ he said, handing the speech back. ‘Not brilliant, but okay. I’ve got Megan’s speech here too. She emailed it through this morning. So you can read that to make sure you’re all on the same page.’

  Tenner handed him the document. Shaun handled it as if it were a sacred text. It was his only contact with Megan in four days.

  ‘And what are we going to do about you?’ Tenner said, turning to Will.

  ‘Wing it?’

  Tenner didn’t smile. ‘No. You’re going to write something and we’re going to go over it on Monday in Brisbane. You can spend the whole day preparing.’

  ‘A whole day of prep?’ Will rolled his eyes. ‘Isn’t that a bit much?’

  ‘Well, I figured we could go to the art gallery too,’ Tenner said. ‘May as well see some of the sights. Make it a cultural trip.’

  ‘Boring,’ Will mumbled, and Tenner pretended not to hear.

  ‘Also,’ Tenner said, ‘some good news. Megan’s staying with her family, but I’ve managed to secure us a place for the night. It works out nicely. One of the guys from Scotts mines is my brother-in-law: Henry Simms.’

  Shaun felt the ground
fall away under his feet. ‘What?’ he gasped.

  ‘Henry Simms. We’ll be staying with him while we’re in Brisbane.’

  When the bell rang, Shaun gripped Will’s arm and pulled him to the door.

  ‘Holy shiiii—’ Will said under his breath, but Shaun gripped tighter.

  ‘Shut up. Wait till we’re outside.’

  They grabbed their bags and ran for the gate.

  Will cried out once their feet hit the road. ‘Oh my God.’

  Shaun kept walking. He felt that if his feet stopped moving his mind might explode. ‘Do you think he did it deliberately?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you think he talked to Tenner and he knew it was us in the debating team, so he volunteered because he wants to intimidate us or something?’

  Will stopped dead in the street and threw his arms in the air. ‘Holy crap! I didn’t even think of that.’

  ‘Stop!’ Shaun hissed. ‘People are noticing.’

  But Will wasn’t listening. ‘Intimidate us? Well, it’s working, isn’t it? I am officially intimidated. I am intimidated OUT OF MY MIND.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure if he was involved. In fact, we’re pretty sure he didn’t drop Tyson off at the tub.’

  Will dropped his voice to a thin whisper. ‘He’s a criminal mastermind, Shaun. It’s obvious. He’s got the motive. Him and the Grants never got on. Then he ditches his shift to fly out—’

  ‘He could’ve had a family thing. Tenner might know.’

  ‘But then he flies back, just in time to have a cosy chat with the police on the day you told the Grants, and then the body magically reappears?’

  Simms’s movements were weird, no doubt about it.

  Will continued, his voice getting louder again. ‘So, now we’re going to stay there for a couple of nights and drink whatever poison he slipped Tyson and we’re going to turn up dead too! Because we’re too close to the truth. We’re going to die!’

  ‘Would. You. Shut. Up,’ Shaun said. ‘It’s an opportunity, okay? It’s a chance for us to talk to Simms without any interference. Maybe he wants to confess. Or maybe he knows something. Or maybe he didn’t even know that we were the kids who were investigating the thing and he’s just a nice guy.’