The Man in the Water

by David Burton

It was also obvious that he was still in pain. He didn’t have any visible bandages, but he moved slowly getting in and out of his car, and walking up the steps to show the boys their bedrooms. Shaun felt guilty and wondered if Simms had any idea that he’d been the one who pointed Peter towards him that night.

  He tried to shake the thought away. He’d only been there for half an hour, and he had already started to think of Simms as a likeable guy who couldn’t be involved in Tyson’s death.

  It was also reassuring that Simms wasn’t particularly agile. If Will’s nightmare vision did come true, and Simms became violent with the two boys, they’d be able to dodge any attack easily.

  To further calm any nerves, they were greeted by Simms’s dog: a caramel-coloured Cavalier King Charles Spaniel that barely made it halfway up Shaun’s shin.

  ‘That’s Bernie,’ Simms said.

  Bernie was sniffing patiently at Shaun’s ankle and then looked up at him with eyes that were as big as moons. Shaun stroked his head. Satisfied, Bernie moved on to Will.

  When the tour was done, Simms smiled (which he could only really do from one side of his mouth). They had ended up on the back porch. ‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘You boys allergic to anything?’

  Will grew pale. ‘Why?’

  Simms grinned. ‘Because Sharon’ll pick up dinner on the way home.’

  Tenner frowned at Will. ‘You all right, mate?’

  Will nodded.

  Simms laughed. ‘You both look terrified. There’s nothing to worry about. This must all seem big and strange compared with back home.’

  Shaun’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

  ‘That’ll probably be your mum,’ Tenner said. ‘Will, you should call your mum too. Tell them you’re safe. I’ll get us some drinks.’

  Tenner and Simms went back inside. The two boys looked at each other, wide-eyed. They both quickly texted their mothers that they were safe. They stood at the edge of the large, glittering pool. The water was pristine.

  ‘This place …’ began Will, his voice half-lost in wonder. ‘This place is amazing. Dude, Simms is rich.’

  Shaun squinted against the glare. ‘Yeah. Well, it makes sense. Everyone talks about how much money the managers make.’

  Will shook his head. ‘Still. Mum always told me that Dad made good money on the mines, but we don’t live in a house with friggin’ pillars.’

  The back door opened behind them. Simms was carrying a tray with a jug of sparkling water, glasses and an opened packet of chocolate biscuits. Bernie was close behind.

  Tenner stood in the doorway, a set of car keys in his hand. ‘Boys, I’m just going to pop out and get dinner now, save Sharon from having to battle the traffic on her way home. You’ll be right here, yeah?’

  Shaun could feel Will’s wide, terrified eyes on him. Shaun resisted the urge to look at him, or do anything at all.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, thinly. ‘No worries.’

  ‘Great,’ Tenner said. ‘See you soon.’

  Simms smiled as he put the tray down on the table. The water had thin slices of lime and a few mint leaves in it. Rich person’s water.

  As Simms poured, Shaun noticed something on the inside of his arm.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  It was a tattoo, as long as a bank note. Simms held his arm out so he could see more clearly. It was an old-fashioned key: one end was a clean circle, the other had jagged teeth. The lines were thick, heavy and straight.

  ‘I got it a few years ago,’ he said.

  Will looked at the tattoo, and then at Simms. ‘Does it mean something special?’

  ‘Well, that’s a complex question. Do you want to sit?’

  The chairs made barking sounds as they scraped over the tiles.

  Bernie lay at their feet.

  ‘I, uh—’ Simms cleared his throat. ‘Okay. I hope you don’t mind staying here. Just that Graham mentioned you to Sharon.’ It took a moment for Shaun to realise he was talking about Tenner. ‘And really,’ he continued, ‘I’m happy to help out. Because I know a bit about both of you.’

  Shaun tried to remain as still as possible in case he gave some outward sign of panic.

  This was it. Simms knew they’d been sniffing around Tyson. He’d somehow managed to track them looking through his social media. He knew they’d sent Peter after him.

  ‘I know that you’ve taken an interest in Tyson Grant. And I can’t say I blame you. It’s a tragedy. Really.’ Simms traced his thumb along the edge of the table.

  If he was lying he was good at it. But Shaun was surprised to realise that he believed Simms: he really did consider Tyson’s passing a tragedy.

  Did that make him innocent?

  Simms looked straight at him. ‘I’ve got no idea what happened. But I know that you know something about what it’s like to lose someone you love to depression.’

  ‘You knew my dad?’ Shaun hadn’t considered it before.

  ‘No. But I knew a bit about him. I came on after his time. One of the first things I did was start implementing new procedures around those bloody diggers your dad was driving.’

  Shaun reached for his glass and took a gulp of water. The bubbles tickled his throat.

  ‘Cool,’ he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  Simms exhaled loudly. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought him up, that was rude. I don’t know what you’ve gone through, but,’ he looked down at the key on his arm, ‘you asked about my tatt. I didn’t always live in Brissie. I’ve lived in a few places now, but I actually grew up in a small town, just like you guys. I’ve got a couple of brothers and some cousins and we all grew up together.

  ‘And, as I say, I don’t know what it’s like for you guys but, ah, some stuff went down. One of my brothers got drunk one night and ended up punching a guy and sending him to hospital. One of my cousins had this whole thing with his girlfriend and ended up in jail. My dad hit all of us. He was a loser. And it wasn’t until I was a bit older that I realised how stuffed up my family was. I just thought life was that violent and that screwed up. It really did my head in for a while. I got really down.

  ‘But then, around your age, I started to see a way out. And I studied and went to uni and ended up in engineering. And I earnt money and met my wife and we had our girls and – sorry, I’m going on a bit.’

  Will and Shaun hadn’t moved. Only Bernie marked the time by stretching out between their feet.

  ‘Anyway, when I think about my family and that small town – and there are still issues – it, you know, it gets to me a bit. And this – ah – tattoo is a reminder that I got out, you know? I got out of that town and I made my own life.’ He looked at Will. ‘So I got out. That’s what the key means. It’s a reminder that I got out.’

  ‘That’s heavy,’ said Will, after a bit. ‘But a cool tattoo.’

  Simms nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  Shaun was attempting to file away all the minor details that Simms had just given them. He hadn’t told them anything about Tyson, or anything really important at all, but it felt as though the world had moved. This wasn’t good. Simms could be innocent.

  He asked the first thing that came into his mind. ‘You fixed the machine that my dad was on?’

  ‘Well, we’ve limited the time that we’ll allow any worker to sit in it.’ Simms leant forward. ‘Your father would be in that thing for a nine-hour shift. No wonder his arm ended up buggered.’

  Shaun remembered the first time he’d heard his father complain about his arm. At first it was a small thing. His elbow started to swell, and then he got pins and needles in his fingers all the time. Day after day, his dad would go to work, travel an hour to go from the surface to underground, and then sit in a machine that was big enough to eat him alive. His arm rested on a thin doorframe. It would shudder and vibrate under him. Wh
en the mining company sent him to a doctor, they tried to convince him it had something to do with his neck, or that he’d somehow banged his elbow at home. But even Shaun, who was twelve at the time, knew that was crap. The company stopped sending his dad underground because of his injury, so he didn’t see his friends that he was used to hanging with every day. Eventually he had surgery to get it fixed, but that just made things worse. The doctor stuffed some of the nerves in his hand, so then he was in pain all the time.

  In the gentle silence of Simms’s backyard, Shaun could remember the sound of his father’s quiet sobs from behind the closed bedroom door. They didn’t sound like his father. They were high and alien. He had never heard his dad weep before. His dad stopped going to work. And a week later he was gone.

  ‘We see it all the time with the blokes down there,’ Simms said. ‘Once you take away a man’s ability to work, he suffers. A bloke’s got to have purpose and drive, otherwise they just, I don’t know, give up. Like they can’t look outside themselves anymore.’

  ‘Is that what happened to Tyson?’ said Will.

  Simms didn’t move. If he was surprised by the question, he didn’t show it. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. There’s been a lot of crap at work because the bosses are restructuring the workforce. Some workers might lose their jobs. I didn’t see him, but I’ve heard from a few guys that he was upset. When I heard he’d gone missing, I flew back down to Brisbane because I wanted to meet with the bosses down here.’

  Shaun felt Will shift in his seat beside him.

  Simms continued. ‘We needed to sort out the whole problem. I knew Tyson’s father was protesting in town. It was all becoming so volatile. But we were too late for poor Tyson. I can understand why Mr Grant’s so pissed at us.’

  They heard the front door opening. A female voice sang out from the hall. ‘I’m home!’

  Simms smiled. ‘Come and meet Sharon!’ he said, and collected the things from the table and walked inside.

  Shaun felt sick. He and Will could do little but exchange a quick glance before going back into the house.

  Was Simms lying? It didn’t matter. Right now, as he smiled politely at Simms’s wife and answered her questions about school, his emotions eventually landed on rage. It suddenly occurred to him how cruelly unfair everything was.

  Simms got a brilliant house. People like his dad and Tyson worked hard and got nothing.

  Simms was trying to pretend like he understood. But he hadn’t heard the sounds of his father sobbing. He hadn’t seen Tyson in the lake. He’d been on a plane back to Brisbane and his luxury home.

  Shaun swallowed his fury and made a decision.

  The second Simms was asleep, he would look around the house. Properly.

  That night, Shaun could hear the blood beating in his ears. He had never experienced silence like this before. Back home was quiet, but he could still hear the road outside, with the occasional rumble of a truck. Or at the very least, there was the intense thrum of insect life in the scrub around his house. Here, in the middle of the city, there was nothing. It was as if the silence had the whole weight of the house behind it.

  If he got up, everyone would be sure to hear him.

  Dinner had passed quickly. Sharon Simms was actually really nice: a tall, friendly woman who cooed over her husband’s injuries and reminded him when to take his pain medication. Tenner brought pizza home and hugged his sister. That was weird.

  They all sat at the table and ate, talking about the universities in Brisbane. Then they went into the media room, turned on the TV and handed the remote to the boys. Will chose an action movie that was pretty dumb, but they all laughed at the corny lines.

  Now he lay in the darkness and stared up at the ceiling.

  It was time to get moving. He got out of bed and padded across the carpet to the door. He was ready. He’d gone to bed wearing socks, shorts and a T-shirt. He took a deep breath and turned the handle. There wasn’t a sound, but his heartbeat was ricocheting off the walls and probably waking up the whole house.

  He needed to get downstairs to the office. That was the obvious place to start. If he could somehow hack into Simms’s laptop, he might be able to find something.

  As the credits on the movie were playing, he had planned out the trip in his mind. It had seemed easy then, but in the hush of the night it struck him as almost impossible.

  He stood in the doorway, briefly contemplating the door opposite him. It was Will’s room. There’d barely been any time to talk before they went to bed. Should he knock?

  He’d be more quiet on his own. And besides, if someone flicked on the lights and busted him, he could always say he was looking for a glass of water and had got lost. But if there were two of them, it would be more difficult to explain their snooping.

  Resolving to move silently but quickly, he made for the stairs. At the end of the landing was a door that led to Simms and Sharon’s room. That door was open a crack, but there was only darkness on the other side. Yet another door led to Tenner’s room. He stopped for a second at the top of the stairs, testing for any sound. Nothing. So far, so good.

  He crept down the stairs, praying that they wouldn’t creak under his weight. But of course, one did. Halfway down, out of nowhere, there was a creeeeeeeaaaaaak as he shifted his weight. He froze, his head thudding, his feet tingling.

  But again there was nothing. It had sounded ferociously loud to him, but it obviously hadn’t been enough to wake the others. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. He decided to move quickly down the rest of the steps, even leaping over the final few, and landing silently on the ground level, his socks dampening the noise.

  He’d made it. He swallowed and headed for the office.

  Then he felt something warm and hairy brush against his legs.

  He almost jumped up the stairs again and struggled to swallow his urge to yell out. He looked down. Bernie’s eyes glittered up at him, his face almost a smile.

  Shaun suppressed a laugh and Bernie’s tail wagged as Shaun knelt down to pat him gently on the head. Then he swore to himself. Bernie would now follow him everywhere. He had no choice in the matter. He must have come from Simms’s room.

  He moved towards the office, Bernie’s paws making a gentle clicking sound behind him. It was only a short distance to the office, but he couldn’t risk it. He picked up the dog and carried him to the office door.

  He turned the handle, once again grateful that it opened soundlessly. The room was carpeted – thank God – so he set Bernie down. But as he stepped into the office, he heard that unmistakable clicking headed in the opposite direction, and then the muted thud of a leap up the stairs.

  Even Bernie wasn’t allowed in this room.

  Shaun closed the door behind him and went over to the desk. Simms’s laptop was waiting.

  He opened it, and the light from the screen washed across his face. He needed to enter a password. He’d expected this, but had hoped he might’ve scored incredibly lucky.

  He’d been running through possibilities while they were watching the movie. The computer would only let him enter a wrong password three or four times before it locked him out. Then he might have to sit in the office for an hour or more to wait for another chance. Or worse, Simms would get a notification on his phone that someone was trying to unlock his computer.

  He took a deep breath and stared at the screen. The tiny cursor blinked back at him, begging him to try. He had narrowed the field down to three. But what if none of them worked?

  Over dinner, Simms and Sharon had talked a lot about their daughters, but they seemed to favour one in particular. Her name was Alex. She was graduating from university this year. Presuming that she had gone straight from school to university, Shaun had done the maths and figured out her birth year.

  He typed Alex into the computer, trying to make as little noise as possible
with the keys. Then he entered the birth year. He paused, took a breath, and pressed enter.

  Wrong. But a new line of text had appeared in red at the bottom of the screen.

  Your password must be at least eight characters long, include a capital letter and at least one numeral (1, 2, 3 …)

  Okay, he was on the right track with the combination of characters. His own password was his mum’s name followed by the year of his birth. With any luck, Simms wasn’t that clever. The text and letters were probably connected.

  He began typing in his second choice: Sharon. He wasn’t sure when she was born, but he had looked at some of the pictures in the lounge area on his way to the bathroom earlier. There was one of their wedding, with Henry and Sharon and the date printed in large, bold script at the bottom. Shaun had felt his skin prickle.

  The wedding looked expensive. It was a huge photo, and the smiling couple looked relaxed and joyous in front of a beautiful beach backdrop.

  Should he enter the year of the wedding, or an abbreviated version of the whole date? He bit his lip, typed the date and pressed enter with a final, quiet tap.

  Wrong again.

  There was new text at the bottom of the screen.

  Warning: you have one attempt remaining.

  Only three attempts. He was almost certainly not going to get this right. It would be safer to stop now, close the laptop and go back to bed.

  But he had come so far.

  He typed Bernie and then stopped. How old was Bernie? He didn’t look young. Or old. He just looked like a dog. And Sharon and Simms had hardly spoken about him.

  Typing quickly so he didn’t overthink it, he simply added 1234 and pressed enter.

  And the computer unlocked.

  He almost laughed. The relief was a rush, and it broke his concentration.

  He didn’t notice the door opening.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Shaun jumped to his feet and turned. It was Will. He sank to his knees and brought a hand to his chest.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he whispered, struggling to keep his voice as quiet as possible. ‘Don’t do that! You scared the crap out of me.’