I watched him carefully while I summarised what Justin had told me, without naming the boy, then added a few observations of my own.
‘If you’re suggesting Laila went on a boat ride and fell in,’ said Abenay, ‘then please tell me how she managed it. Who took her?’
‘You told me Laila was at the ramp when you turned around.’
‘And back at the cottage within three quarters of an hour.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t see her talking to anyone?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘How do you think Laila got her clothes wet?’
‘Slipped off the path?’
Abenay knew as well as I did that that wasn’t possible. ‘That red waistcoat came from Syria originally,’ I said. ‘Do you know how Laila came to own it? Had she ever been to Syria?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Do you think it’s likely?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Abenay sighed, but I could see he was relieved by the change of subject. ‘Laila went to university straight from school. She lived on a student’s income. If she had money for an overseas trip, why would she pick Syria?’
A reasonable question, but not one I was about to try and guess the answer to.
‘Somebody could have paid for the trip.’
‘True, but I think it much more likely that—’ Abenay stopped and drew in an audible breath—I think it much more likely that the waistcoat was a gift from an admirer.’
‘Why would Laila take it with her to Parliament House?’
‘I have no idea.’
Abenay got up and began to gather plates and mugs.
‘What reason would Laila have for lying to you?’
He stopped what he was doing and thought for a moment. ‘There was no need to lie. Laila knew that whatever secrets she had were safe with me.’
‘Laila told you about the Maria Rosa.’
‘She told me she’d found a ship, yes.’
‘Is that the secret?’
‘No.’
‘What kind of ship?’
‘A Spanish pirate boat.’
Abenay had thought it very unlikely that the wreck would ever be found, but he hadn’t wanted to spoil Laila’s excitement.
‘You knew she was practising then, up at Lake Jindabyne?’
‘I guessed as much.’
‘Did Laila ask for your help in looking for the wreck? Was she trying to organise a trip?’
‘Not directly. I mean, about the help. As to a trip, she never said anything to me.’
‘Was that the secret?’
Shaking his head, Abenay turned to go out to the kitchen. This time I stayed where I was.
When he came back, his hands were shaking, but his eyes were steady.
‘They say that about the dead, don’t they? That their secrets are safe. Not that I ever promised silence. I had no need to promise.’ Abenay’s voice was very bitter. ‘You’re right when you say she went up there to meet someone, a lover. I don’t know who it was, so there’s no point in asking me. I guessed she’d gone to meet him when she left me at the cottage and I guessed—I guessed they’d made up when she came back looking happy.’
‘Have you told the police about all this?’
‘No.’
‘Phone Detective Sergeant Brook,’ I said.
Abenay looked as though he’d think about it.
When I asked if he’d noticed a red sedan following them at any time during the weekend, Abenay shook his head.
He told me what they’d done for the rest of that Sunday, re-living the memory with tears in his eyes.
‘After lunch we packed, tidied up the cottage and returned the key. We stopped for a meal in Cooma. At an Indian restaurant. It was excellent. I’m glad we had that time together. It’s something I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.’
Twenty-four
There was a holiday air, a feeling that we were escaping from Canberra. Ivan sang in Russian, growling on the low notes, his voice breaking on the high. We drove with all the windows down, and the dry autumn air cooled gradually as we climbed. It was hard to believe in snow that morning. Hard to believe that in two months the ski season would open.
Derek had been happy to have both Kat and Peter for a few more days. Soccer had gone marvellously, with both of them scoring goals.
Ivan and I hadn’t planned what we’d do when we got to Jindabyne, though I had asked him if he’d ever sailed a boat. ‘No,’ had been his immediate reply. I kept checking in the rear view mirror, but saw no red sedan.
The caravan park manager appeared grateful that I’d returned, not only to ask questions, but to rent the cottage that I thought of as Bill Abenay’s. It looked smaller than I remembered it, dominated by its chimney. There was nowhere sheltered for us to leave our car, and we made no attempt to hide it.
Once inside, I confirmed my suspicion that there was only one bedroom, and one, albeit large, double bed.
Ivan stood staring at the bed, the colour draining from his face. I’d tried to prepare Ivan by repeating what Bill Abenay had told me, and was now convinced that, whoever her lover had been, it wasn’t her old lecturer, but still Ivan’s emotions got the better of him.
I told myself I just had to wait for the reaction to pass.
An electric stove sat next to an old wood burning one, and next to that was an open fireplace. I unlocked the back door and noted the clothes line, one that could be collapsed against a wall when not in use. I wondered if Laila had hung her ruined waistcoat out to dry, or if she’d rolled it up at the bottom of her overnight bag.
I found Ivan in the process of wheeling out a small folding bed from underneath the double one. He straightened up with a pouf of exertion and a smile of relief. I smiled back, feeling a small return of that lightness that had touched us on the highway.
We made sandwiches and ate them sitting on the front veranda, then set off for the boat ramp.
It took us twenty minutes, Ivan striding out in imitation, perhaps, of what he imagined to be Laila’s athletic approach to a Sunday morning walk. We stopped to admire Curiosity Rocks, heaped at the mouth of the inlet the way a giant child might have emptied a pocketful of stones. I told Ivan what they were called, and that the inlet we were making for, just past the ramp, was named after a widow. Ivan wanted to know which one, but I couldn’t tell him that.
Two four-wheel drives were parked at the ramp. A ute pulled up, its driver playing a Tool track at full volume.
Ivan trotted over. I hesitated, then decided not to follow. If he had some idea in mind, then better leave it to him to carry out. I recalled happier times, when we’d worked as a team, understanding each other’s moves, often anticipating them. I turned and made for the boat hire shed, only to find it locked. A notice on the door included the caravan park’s phone number and a warning that the pursuit of recreational activities on the lake could result in harm or personal injury. I wondered if Laila had seen it and was suddenly certain that she’d been in some kind of fight.
Walking back, I noticed that a young man had got out of the ute and was leaning against it, talking to Ivan, who was scratching his head and nodding. The young man threw back his head and laughed, and Ivan, after a moment’s hesitation, laughed too.
‘That was Nick,’ he told me a few moments later, as we retraced our steps to the cottage. ‘He was born here, but his parents speak Russian at home.’
‘Did you know he was Russian?’
‘Of course not. How could I?’
‘A lucky guess. What did you talk about?’
‘His parents own the sports store. His father’s a keen fisherman.’
‘He must know Bernhard Robben then.’
Ivan nodded, detouring around a clump of thistles. ‘I got the feeling he doesn’t like him much.’
I waited while Ivan took out his water bottle and drank deeply. ‘Let’s get the car and find the sports shop,’ he suggested.
I smiled and gave his arm a squeeze.
/> . . .
The shop had a huge ski and snowboard hire sign at the front. Ivan suggested going in there on his own. I watched him pass a group of men as they left the shop loaded up with fishing tackle, then settled myself comfortably to wait.
Ivan was in there a long time, and I heard the story of the Russian family as we prepared our dinner. We’d bought some fish to cook, and Ivan was looking forward to lighting the wood stove. I hadn’t seen a stack of fuel anywhere, but I knew that wouldn’t stop him.
The Belovs had come to Jindabyne when Belov senior had got work on the Snowy Hydro-electric scheme, and had stayed on, as had Bernhard Robben’s family. Ivan had quizzed Nick and his father about Robben, who had a reputation for being both ambitious and arrogant. Rumours had flown around the town when his new boat had appeared, along with speculation as to where he could have got the money to pay for it. None of the Belovs had seen Laila in or around Jindabyne.
Ivan scoured the area around the cottage for firewood, while I peeled potatoes with an ancient peeler that I scrubbed with steel wool first.
We joked as Ivan struggled with the fire. The stove smoked a bit, but not too much. The evening was as warm as summer, and we opened doors and windows while our potatoes baked, then fried our fish. I’d made a salad, and we raised our water glasses in the direction of our enemies, and wished them indigestion. I thought fleetingly of the night Ivan had come home drunk, then put it out of my mind.
We tidied up, and made sure the fire was out, then dressed in dark clothes. Ivan debated whether or not to black his face with soot, and we fell about laughing, like kids planning a prank. We put pencil torches in our pockets, and Ivan carried his camera slung around his neck, as we made our way on foot to Bernhard Robben’s shop. Clouds covered the quarter moon for a part of the way, and there was very little traffic on the road.
Once there, we waited in the shadows for a few moments, then walked up to the shop window, glad that it was large and gave a good view of the interior.
Ivan took his time photographing the pinboard. On the way back to the cottage, we hugged what shadows we could, since the clouds had gone. The cottage looked tiny, dark and alien as we approached it, like a lump of something from another planet, its chimney rising hugely from the uneven ground.
I put the kettle on for tea and we looked at one another. Suddenly our get-up seemed even funnier than before. I wondered who we thought we’d fool, with our black jumpers and our pencil torches. We laughed and spluttered. Ivan’s beanie smelt of wood smoke.
Undressed, we lay on the big bed, Ivan with his arms behind his head.
‘We’re sitting ducks right now,’ he said comfortably.
‘Sometimes the best defence is to invite attack.’
I hadn’t thought about it till the words were out, but I wondered if this particular gamble had been Laila’s, if she’d worn her ruined waistcoat not as a private signal, but a flag. But perhaps she hadn’t put it on that night by the lake. I pictured her killer dressing her lifeless body and my bones went cold, as though the mountain air had reached them, as though the winter had, without warning, descended all at once.
I turned to Ivan and stroked his springy hair. This is how Katya was made, I thought, with kindliness and modest trust, a laying aside of others’ claims on us.
After a long silence, Ivan said, ‘I’m beginning to accept it. That I didn’t mean anything to her.’
I waited, the cold coming back into my bones. I opened my mouth to ask Ivan to leave Laila out of it, just for one night. But how could I say that, when Laila was the reason we were there?
. . .
I made spaghetti bolognaise as a welcome home dinner for Pete and Katya. Kat sat close to her father who whispered to her in Russian and made her giggle. I hugged my daughter, delighting in her young, strong, female smell. I sat on the end of Peter’s bed while he told me proudly of the things he and his father had done together. I knew Peter’s feelings about coming back were mixed at best, that if I put it to him then, as a straight question, he’d tell me that he would rather have stayed.
I held Kat in the bath as I had when she was a baby, and she let herself relax into my arms. I cherished every clean, straight line of her, discovering, under the slide and swish of water, the delight of slippery skin.
Ivan was busy with the photographs. Once Kat was in her pyjamas and sitting up in bed, he called me in to see.
‘There’s a pennant on this yacht in the corner. It’s got letters on it. RGYC.’
‘Royal something or other,’ I said, wiping my hands and smiling as I listened to Kat singing to herself. ‘Royal something Yacht Club. Geelong, it could be. That’s on Port Phillip Bay.’
Ivan zoomed in and the background to the photograph went fuzzy. ‘There’s a name here. Pity it’s in curly script.’
‘Lightning,’ I said. ‘It looks like Lightning to me.’
. . .
A helpful young man at the Geelong Yacht Club confirmed next morning that the Lightning was owned by a Mr Cameron Fletcher. Cameron owned a dive shop at Merimbula as well as the one in Canberra and I checked the marina at Merimbula. Cameron was well known and often berthed the Lightning there.
I understood that Brook was under duress from the way he hesitated before saying, ‘It might be better if you come over to my place. Say half past twelve?’
I hadn’t been inside Brook’s house since the summer I’d been left on my own to work in Canberra, when Ivan took Katya to Moscow to meet her aunts, and Peter holidayed at Port Arthur with his father.
When we arrived, Ivan and Brook hung onto each other the way men do when their feelings towards one another have undergone a shift. Before turning to what we had to tell him, Brook said simply, ‘Brideson’s causing a spot of bother’, warning us by a hardness in his eyes not to question him about it.
Enlarged, two of Robben’s pinboard photographs showed a recognisable Ben Sanderson and Bernhard Robben side by side, grinning at the camera in their diving gear. Another was of Sanderson and Robben with a third, shorter man between them, a challenge to identify behind his mask and wetsuit hood.
I pointed out the name Lightning to Brook, who said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and flicked through one of the folders he’d brought with him. ‘Laila Fanshaw had files of photos on her computer. Lightning. Yes.’
I glanced at Ivan, who said, ‘I didn’t think Laila owned a digital camera.’
Brook consulted his folder again. ‘Housemates say no. Interesting. Thanks for these.’
When I said that someone might have sent Laila the photos, Brook raised his head but didn’t comment.
I wondered if it would be better if I wasn’t there. Without me, Brook would offer Ivan whatever hard, brief comfort he was able to. I told myself that the fact that Brook was talking to both of us together was a good sign.
Obviously, Brook was taking a risk by inviting us to his house; Brideson must be pressuring him in ways I couldn’t even guess at.
Brook made notes while we waited, then looked up and said, a frown between his eyebrows, ‘Sanderson was well known and respected as a deep sea diver. ExxonMobil speaks highly of him.’
I asked which rigs Sanderson had worked on.
‘Quite a few. I’ve got a map here somewhere. This is the last one. Shinar it’s called.’
‘Odd name for an oil rig.’
‘Shinar is another name for Babylon. I looked it up in Genesis.’
‘A biblical scholar working for an oil company?’
Brook shrugged. ‘Somebody named Babel rig and Babel canyon first.’
Watching Brook point out the position of the Shinar rig brought Laila’s sketch to mind. The Shinar was on the western border of the Gippsland Basin, where it had been built in 1982. The Babel rig and canyon were both to the north-east.
Ben Sanderson might have talked to Laila about the oil rigs, in the tram that day, and Laila, in turn, might have told Ben about the Maria Rosa. Who else to seek help from, if not a well-quali
fied deep-sea diver? It would have been exciting for Laila to discover how close Ben had been to where she believed the Maria Rosa had gone down.
But then why had Laila been crying?
Brook seemed to recollect just then that we were ordinary civilians, not police; and not so ordinary either. We were civilians who’d been, until very recently, in deep shit with the police. He glanced at Ivan, a sharp, assessing glance this time, then shook his head.
When I told him about my last conversation with Bill Abenay, he nodded and made another note.
‘Thanks for bringing these over,’ he said again. ‘I won’t ask how you came by them.’
It was our cue to leave, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to ask Brook what the trouble was. I wanted to find DS Brideson and put bindis in his shoes.
. . .
Ivan went off to do some shopping, while I rang Bronwyn to ask what she knew about the Lightning.
Over the phone, I couldn’t tell whether Bronwyn’s incredulity was faked, and wished that I’d gone to her place. Bronwyn’s face and large, expressive hands, her body language, might have told me more. She said she had no idea how photographs of a yacht called the Lightning had found their way onto Laila’s computer. Laila could have downloaded them from anywhere. True, I said, but what about the Lightning’s owner, Cameron Fletcher? Bronwyn said she’d never heard of him. She’d never heard of Bernhard Robben either.
‘But Laila told you what she was doing at the internet cafe.’
There was a silence, then Bronwyn said, I have to go now.’
‘Laila told you there were things she needed to find out. You helped by driving her to the cafe and picking her up.’
Bronwyn said, ‘You know, there are coral reefs down there in Bass Strait. Massive sponge beds. Canyons and trenches that have never been explored. There may be whole new species living in them. What we know about their ecosystems could be printed on a postage stamp.’
‘What else?’
‘Isn’t that enough? The government’s in danger of selling out to the oil and gas and fishing industries. That’s why Laila was collecting information.’
‘What about shipwrecks?’
‘If you’re going to make stupid comments, then I will hang up.’
The Fourth Season Page 18
