Line of Sight

by David Whish-Wilson

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your daughter won’t end up like me. It wasn’t my dad’s fault, what happened to me at home. His fucken brother …’

  Swann couldn’t help himself. He knew it was bad timing after what she’d just said, but the question came out anyway. ‘Did she say anything else to Ruby? When she was coming home?’

  Jacky lit another cigarette, ignoring the one going in the ashtray. ‘Even if I’d seen her I wouldn’t have asked that shit, the whys and the wherefores. You don’t ask that stuff to runaways, unless you want to hurt ’em more.’

  They sat there in silence. Jacky nodded off but Swann kept drinking, waiting for the images of Louise to return, as they did every night. Every night the look on her face the last time he’d seen her, him trying to see it there in her eyes, her broken heart. But all he saw was the same kid who’d run away so many times, the anger and frustration that could only be released through escape.

  There was one memory that kept coming back to him; it was one of his strongest memories of her, he didn’t know why. They were living in Kalgoorlie at the time and Louise was nearly eight, a buck-toothed tomboy with brown legs and a permanently sunburned nose. He could have caught her as she was leaving; Marion had called him to let him know. ‘Louise’s running away again.’ Except that by the time he got home from the station, rounding the unmarked Holden into their street, he’d decided to let her go. He parked and watched her set off from their suburban home, pedalling away from its yard of red desert sand that stretched off into the wan-doo and jam-wattle scrub. The truth was that Swann was curious.

  Louise rode in little tumbleweed bursts. After a couple of minutes he started the car again and followed her slowly from a distance. When she reached the dirt track and her wheels began to slide in the gravel, she got off and walked down the baking hillside before ditching the bike under a saltbush. She looked along the track towards the empty blacks’ camp, but thought better of it. They had all heard strange sounds coming from there at night, and the neighbourhood kids thought it was haunted. Instead she marched up past her abandoned bicycle to a vacant lot and sat beneath a casuarina tree, on a carpet of thin brown needles.

  It was getting even hotter as the morning wind off the desert picked up strength. From the distance of a couple of hundred metres, Louise was a tiny figure slumped against the trunk of the casuarina, drawing pictures in the dirt. Swann watched through his service binoculars as she attempted to climb the tree, gave up, then set about throwing stones at a cannibalised station wagon. She built a little wall with bricks and a sheet of galvanised iron across them. She cut her finger on the browned steel and cried and bandaged her hand with the plastic wrap from her already eaten sandwiches. She held the empty cordial bottle above her mouth and waited for the last drops to fall. Then she packed her bag and retraced her steps along the street and down to her bicycle.

  She pushed the bicycle along the track with one hand, waving flies away with the other, then tentatively rounded the corner of their street. It was so hot now that Swann was worried. He knew that the tar on the road would be soft underfoot. The pavement would be hot enough to fry an egg on. The air would be burning his daughter inside and out. She walked with her skirt tucked up into her underpants; her sandals were covered with gritty red dust.

  He drove down the street after her and parked in front of their home. She threw down her bike in the front garden and her eyes were black and angry as he came towards her.

  ‘I’m not running away today, Daddy,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘It’s too hot!’ She hugged him quickly before pushing her way back into the cool dark house.

  Marion had already run her a cold bath and set a glass of water on the tiles beside it. Louise sat in the tub and drank the water in one long draw through cracked lips, her sunburnt nose poking over the top of the glass. Swann refilled it and Louise drank it straight down again. And another. Then she started to cry, just like all the other times, before confessing the reason for her escape – some trouble with kids at her new school. She wailed for her father to make it better, to take notice.

  One of the reasons Swann had subsequently taken the position as superintendent of Albany regional was so he could spend more time with Marion and his daughters. In the city, he worked a city detective’s hours, long days and late nights. In Albany he could live within walking distance of the station, and the kids could go to the local school. But when Louise became a teenager she spent most of her time with friends, or reading, and not from the books on the shelf by the telephone, the Zane Greys and Alistair MacLeans and Nevil Shutes, but books she borrowed from the library. Swann was proud of her, seeing it as an expanding outwards rather than a withdrawing inwards, which was how Marion couldn’t help but see it. Louise was civil and clever and dry, but she was also secretive. Her secrecy worried her mother, but Swann put it down to teenage growing pains.

  Looking back on it now, there were many things about Louise’s behaviour that Swann hadn’t understood. Things he would have liked to have spoken with Ruby about. Perhaps he could talk about them with Jacky, when he got to know her better.

  He heard the kettle boiling and saw that Jacky was gone from the floor. He shook himself awake.

  ‘We’ve got to get you another place, Jacky. Somewhere more discreet.’

  ‘Like a safe house?’

  ‘Like a safe house. Out in the suburbs.’

  ‘Annie DuBois offered me somewhere but I’m paid up here for one more night.’

  Swann thought about that, didn’t like it. ‘You spoke to her after our meet?’

  She brought two coffees and placed them on the table. ‘Yeah, we spoke. Nobody else, though.’

  ‘She’s not going to tell anyone?’

  ‘Nah. Only her boyfriend, maybe. But don’t worry, Sol’s hip.’

  ‘You know how it works. He tells one person …’

  ‘He’s not like that.’

  ‘I don’t even know this bloke. Who is he?’

  Jacky laughed at him. ‘You don’t have to worry about Sol, I told you. He’s a businessman, a real suit, and he’s been seeing Annie for more than a year – a bloody madam, for Chrissakes. Hardly anybody knows. That’s one guy knows how to keep a secret.’

  ‘Maybe, but Sol who?’

  ‘Solomon Sands. Come over from Melbourne. Big hairy fella, like a bear. Dresses expensive to hide it.’

  ‘What kind of businessman?’

  ‘Something to do with tax. Tax agent? Something like that.’

  ‘He ever do any work for Ruby?’

  ‘Jesus. Once a cop, always a cop.’

  ‘I’m still a cop.’

  ‘There was one job. Only a small thing. Some john wrote Ruby a dud cheque, and you know what she was like with principles. The cheque had a company name on it that she didn’t know – she assumed this bloke was in town for a convention and she wanted to find out where he was from. So she asked me to run it by Sol, who knows all about company stuff. I dropped it off at his place. I’ll never forget it, either – joker was dressed in gold Speedos, drinking a martini poolside. Hairiest bastard I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Did he come through?’

  ‘Right away. Ruby got the money next day. Sol said he checked out the company directors, made a few calls. That was that.’

  Jacky had that look in her eyes again, trying to avoid her works on the table, sipping on her coffee.

  He stood. ‘You got a phone I can use before I go?’

  ‘Do you have to leave? You’re welcome to the couch.’

  He shook his head. ‘But if you move today or you need anything, you let me know, okay?’

  She nodded, staring at her works. It didn’t look like she’d be going anywhere soon.

  It was barely an hour until dawn. Partridge sat on the edge of his bed inspecting his hands. He had no idea how long he’d been sitting there staring. He lay down again and closed his eyes, but there were still coronas around the edge of the darkness.

  He tried to cl
ear his mind but his headache and the events of the evening at the lodge wouldn’t let him. He was out of painkillers again, had tried his breathing exercises, but the throbbing flooded into his limbs with every weak exhalation. He couldn’t concentrate anyway because of his anger. It was outrageous that the premier should suggest he quit the commission. Not to mention the smug look on his face for the duration of the evening, chatting amiably through the second and third courses with the supplicants who joined them at the head table.

  Partridge had waited in vain for another opportunity to speak with Premier Barth alone. He’d been forced to field polite questions amid the smoke and laughter, while Barth sat there smiling and listening and sipping his single-malt.

  What had most annoyed the judge, the thing that made it impossible for him to find peace during the long night, was the premier’s bald admission that the royal commission was one great lie. Barth was far too confident that Superintendent Swann would find it impossible to substantiate his claims of police corruption, as was usually the case with allegations against secretive institutions. Where such proof did not exist, of course, the benefit of doubt had to be given to the government, something Barth had doubtless been counting on when he set the terms of reference.

  All evening, Partridge observed the premier sitting among his fellow Masons like a prophet come to take them to the promised land, a land already their own but not yet fully realised. In Western Australia the harsh realities of the frontier had only recently been subsumed beneath suburban lawns and macadamised byways. What had most surprised Partridge was the almost nationalistic fervour with which the men regarded their state. They seemed uninterested in the recent events in Canberra, had made little mention of the sacking of the federal government by the Queen’s representative, something Partridge took as evidence of their fierce antipathy towards the eastern states. It was a sentiment that showed through under the gentility of their private-school accents, which had become broader the longer the evening continued.

  There was plenty of work still to be done, the men’s discussions had made apparent. There was wealth and opportunity in abundance, but it would take the stewardship and guidance of a man like Premier Barth to ensure the dream, not only for them but for their children and their children’s children, to keep it safe from the meddling of the federal government and the wrongheaded Catholic contrarians of the other team.

  At one point Wallace had joined their table and seated himself beside the premier, filling his whiskey glass from a crystal decanter and chatting with ease. Talk turned to the movement among civil libertarians to remove the death penalty from the statute books, as had been done in every other state in the nation. Partridge wasn’t surprised to hear Wallace’s opinions on the matter – the judge already knew the well-publicised opinions of the premier – but he was intrigued to learn soon after, the discussion having turned to Cyclone Tracy, that Wallace’s father owned and ran a working cattle station in the Kimberley, and that Wallace had grown up riding horses and shooting crocodiles. It was a background at odds with the man’s affected dress and manner, but not, Partridge supposed, with his accent, which like the others had broadened with the quantity of drink.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. He was aware that in Western Australia there still existed strong links between the city and the country. There didn’t seem to be any notion of the urban parasitism so familiar to him at home, especially now that he’d moved to the country himself, where his neighbour had charmingly described the relationship of the city of Melbourne to the state of Victoria as a tick burrowing into its own backside.

  His assistant Carol had in-laws who were farmers. The receptionist at his hotel had only recently moved down to Perth from a cattle station. The woman who cleaned his room was married to a miner who was away for months at a time. There was a sense of the state working as a kind of simple machinery, with clear lanes of mobility and interchangeable parts. There was a degree of opportunity and choice that had been lacking in his own upbringing.

  Partridge got up and made himself a cup of tea, the whistling of the kettle bringing him around. He spooned in two sugars and opened the sliding doors to the balcony and the cool night air. In the smudgy darkness the city resembled the crayon drawing of a child. Even the great brown river that sloped past seemed to move on rollers. During the day the river was covered by a flotilla of pleasure craft that wouldn’t look out of place on a suburban pond. And yet there, across the river, was the golf course where the body of Ruby Devine had been found.

  It was nearly a year since Partridge had stepped down from the bench, but his retirement hadn’t turned out as he’d expected. Indeed, he felt as though he’d aged more than in his last decade of work. He didn’t know why this was the case. He couldn’t have hoped for a better companion than Margaret, and his life was comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable. He had kept up his subscriptions to legal journals as a way of staying in touch, and had returned to the classics in order to keep his mind sharp, rereading Gibbon and Shakespeare in their entirety.

  But even the literature and the time spent with his wife and the weekend visits of his children and grandchildren couldn’t keep the creeping numbness at bay. Life did not owe him anything – something that had been drummed into him as a child – and yet he’d expected his retirement would bring at least contentment, at least satisfaction with what he had achieved.

  From his balcony at Lorne, with its view over the ocean, he often stood as he did now, cup of tea in hand, watching the icy squalls roll across the grey waves, the cold on his skin, his eyes watering in the wind, feeling the discomfort as pure sensation.

  He was reminded of something his father had told him when he was a child of six, in his first year of school. His father, then a district court judge and a staunch defender of the death penalty, said that to sentence a man to life behind bars with the possibility of parole was the cruellest kind of punishment. If released, his father claimed, most lifers died within months of walking out the jail gates.

  This was presented to Partridge as a riddle, a paradox to be deciphered, not then and there but after some reflection. He was expected to enter the den where his father worked and smoked his pipe at night, and sit on the stool by the glowing hearth and explain this latest conundrum. Like all the others, it required an imaginative involvement in the fate of another, but this was one that Partridge had never been able to answer as a child.

  For the sake of Margaret’s feelings, he had feigned reluctance when offered the royal commission. The truth was, however, that he needed a challenge, something to focus his attention and energies. It was also his hope that an absence from home would help him regain his bearings, achieve some perspective on the years left to him.

  He looked once more across the river to the golf course, then went back inside to resume his work.

  Half the streetlights were out on the Great Eastern Highway. Mist drifting across from the riverine swamps painted the Holden silver. Swann tipped his beams but didn’t slow down, veering into the oncoming lane as he sped past the neon signs of the cheap motels that lined the way to the airport.

  He ducked his head to look through the steering wheel at the dashboard clock. The plane was due in at five but he could already hear it in the darkness overhead, groaning above ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the song on high rotation on every station.

  Swann had got the news from Reggie when he called from Jacky’s motel room.

  ‘Good stuff. The Cootes are on the red-eye from Singapore. Last leg from London.’ Reggie, buoyed on coffee and cigarettes, had been waiting for his call.

  One of Reggie’s contacts at Qantas had been checking the flight manifests for months now, in the hope that when the Cootes returned to Perth, Swann could get to them first. Timothy Coote had taken a job as a schoolteacher in rural England right after the murder of Ruby Devine, and his wife Jennifer had subsequently written a letter to the CIB regarding the case.

  Suddenly there was a truck coming the othe
r way. Swann cut back into his lane, slowed and took the airport turnoff, then accelerated down the final stretch of blacktop, lined with spindly gums and wax bush and bleached grass. The red and green runway lights were eerie in the mist.

  The Boeing was screaming on the tarmac when he pulled into a loading bay by the arrivals terminal. He’d made it. He surveyed the carpark and concrete apron by the entrance: taxis, a TAA minibus. A few people smoking and waiting in a huddle across the road. No sign of police, no unmarkeds.

  Perhaps he was in luck, and Casey didn’t know about the Cootes. Either that or he was getting lazy.

  Swann ran a hand through his hair and wiped his face. A secretary on the front desk at Central had mentioned Jennifer Coote’s letter to Terry before it could be sent on to the CIB. Mrs Coote had written from England that the family were on their way to the Perth airport at two a.m. when they noticed a ’60s Dodge and a police wagon parked on a fairway of the South Perth golf club. They hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, assuming the Dodge had been stolen, but friends had since written to them about Swann’s allegations and the royal commission, giving the details of Ruby’s death.

  In her letter Jennifer described everything she’d seen, ‘hoping to assist’. She wasn’t to know that two a.m. was a full five hours before the first officially documented police presence on the scene. Here was proof that uniformed had found Ruby Devine by accident and been warned off, and it had to have been by someone in the CIB.

  Inside the terminal Swann stationed himself beside a Coke machine with a view of the arrivals hall. He drank a ginger beer and smoked a cigarette, tapping ash into a potted palm. Passengers began to clear customs and emerge through smoked-glass doors, juggling laden trolleys, weary children and duty-free. The kids snivelled and dragged at their parents’ legs, dazed and confused.

  All Swann knew about Timothy Coote, apart from his being a schoolteacher, was that he’d rucked for Swan Districts in the late ’60s and had worn glasses in his Bassendean High School photographs. Swann wasn’t confident he’d recognise him when he saw him. Every now and then a squeal of joy went up as someone broke from the crowd to embrace a family member, but mostly the new arrivals were silent and exhausted.