by Dave Warner
Yes, I missed the girls, a lot, but the bachelor life had compensations: stacking the dishwasher half as often, not having to watch gym bodies on TV in some lame reality show, leaving clothes in the dryer till I needed them, playing vinyl albums on the old stereo – not even Grace got Toots and the Maytals. I retained some self-discipline though, hauling my arse out of bed and down to the ocean to join the pack of like-minded swimmers. There were about ten of us today. Somebody, usually Camo, who had a few years on me but was a better swimmer, would wade in and start off and the rest of us would casually follow. Our only competition was against our personal times and I knew in my condition I would be challenging my worst rather than my best, so I lobbed along and let my mind drift to everything from digging up the roots that kept blocking our sewage pipe, to football, to renewing my car insurance. The water and my even breathing relaxed me. Before I knew it North Cott loomed on the return leg and I managed a token sprint over the last fifty metres, then began to wade in to shore.
I was contemplating how much extra my car insurance would be with Grace driving, when a scream of ‘Shark!’ gatecrashed its way in. I don’t know who yelled it but now I was looking at bodies charging towards the shore, dimly aware that there was something thrashing, churning water just to the right of the evacuees. Like one of the many horses I had backed, I stood flat-footed, my obstinate brain not wanting to admit the reality. Turk Stanbridge also hadn’t moved and was still in thigh-high water near the spume. My brain was trying to sort packages on a too-fast conveyor belt but my body was inert. Then Camo, who had been drying himself off, dropped his towel and charged back into the water. My muscles came alive. I ran back out behind Camo, fearing Turk had been attacked until he began screaming, ‘It’s Craig, it’s Craig!’
By now I could see dark ink in the water and a bare torso, Turk’s body blocking a full view. The shark must have already run. Camo joined Turk who I now saw was supporting Craig Drummond’s head and shoulders. Camo screamed to shore to call an ambulance but Barbara was already onto it. By the time I reached Camo and Turk, they had already started in, walking backwards carrying Craig Drummond whose face was waxen with shock. I helped lift him out of the water, and saw that his right leg was severed below the knee. Somebody else, one of the women, joined in, and Murray Hurst splashed into the ocean with a towel and tried to tie it as a tourniquet but there was so much blood it was sodden in the blink of an eye.
Carrying him, we ran halfway up the beach towards the steps. Swimmers swarmed with towels and their own windcheaters to wrap around Craig. Somebody ripped their towel into strips for a better tourniquet. It was too early for the lifeguards but people were calling on phones and yelling to the restaurant up above the steps. I was looking at Craig Drummond’s face, the skin grey now, the light in his eyes faded. I had stood there when a man put a gun to his head and killed himself: the digital experience, life–no-life with the flick of a switch. But I had never seen this, the cliché of life draining away from somebody before my eyes. And for the first time I understood the trauma of those soldiers who came back from the battlefield, and of survivors of train wrecks and bus crashes who sat with fatally injured passengers as they slowly left for another realm. Camo started CPR. He worked furiously. His face was red, he was sweating. He exhorted Craig to hang in. But Craig was gone.
A fortnight later I stared out over the same patch of sand that had been soaked rust red with Craig Drummond’s blood. I was sitting at the café above sipping tea. I hadn’t ventured anywhere near the area for a week, not till after the funeral, but the last week I’d managed to sit myself here and stare out at the shiny ocean, running the same dumb thoughts over and over again like a coach uselessly trying to improve a team that actually belonged in a lower division. If I had not made that last stupid sprint attempt, would I have been the one taken? Could I have reacted quicker, got back out to Turk a little faster, or thought to tear strips for a tourniquet there and then so the rescue might have been successful. If Camo hadn’t raced past me back into the water, would I have dared? Did I only act out of a blind shame and, if I did, was that more stupid than staying safe on the beach? Until something like this happens you don’t have to ever assess your action or inaction. But it was real. One part of me said I owed it to Tash and Grace to be here for them for as long as I could; another said that’s a coward’s excuse – that the only true question is what would I expect one of my cronies to do for me if I’d have been the one attacked. When I could face that question, which wasn’t too often, I honestly couldn’t answer it. I liked to think that I’d be magnanimous and say, it’s just bad luck, it’s just fate, you can’t risk your life to protect me. But then I would imagine the terror of knowing for an instant that a savage wild creature had, from all the humans on the planet, targeted me, and in that instant, as I began to shut down and go into shock, would not my silent plea be ‘Somebody, help’?
Truthfully, I was grateful that Tash and Grace were away. It wasn’t something I could share, not because I might have felt tainted as scared, but because it was a sacred moment I had shared. Scared, sacred … the realignment of one letter changed everything, just like that day, that hour, that minute. The only people I could open up with were the others who had been with me, and even then it was a case of feeling my way along a reef in bare feet. Camo wore his heart on his sleeve. He was a big, bluff open guy. He cried at the funeral but then he was released, over it. Turk was a mess, he’d not made it down here at all. Helen, who it turned out was the woman who had helped me carry Craig up onto the beach, was the most like me, confused, upset, guilty.
The funeral was a large affair held at the Christ Church chapel. Craig had been an old boy of the school and many of his former schoolmates, now pushing sixty, turned up. Among the mourners mingling on the green lawn outside the chapel beside Stirling Highway was the O’Grady family – well, Gerry and Michelle. Apart from an odd news grab on TV, I hadn’t seen them since the death of Ian Bontillo, prime suspect in the Autostrada abductions. The significance was not lost on me. We were standing within a kilometre of where their daughter had disappeared. Bontillo’s flat, where he had been found dead, could have been reached with a wind-assisted torpedo punt. I made my way over. Gerry grasped my hand firmly. Michelle smiled and clasped my hand in hers. The years had glanced off her like a zephyr. Sometimes you say somebody doesn’t look a day older. In her case it was true. Later it occurred to me that her grief back then had accelerated her ageing and since then things had balanced out. Gerry was more typical. He still looked fit but he was broader in all zones except his hair, which was thinning noticeably. We exchanged the usual stuff you do in this kind of situation. I asked after Nellie, Caitlin’s younger sister, then for a terrible moment dreaded something tragic might have happened to her too. Thankfully Nellie was fine, now working in New York. While I knew that officially Caitlin’s case remained open, unofficially the police considered it closed with Bontillo’s death. The fact there’d been no similar series of abductions or murders since, not just in Perth but the whole country, reinforced this notion. Even I, sceptic that I am, had to admit I had probably been wrong but that doesn’t mean Bontillo’s guilt sat comfortably with me. There had to be a chance the real guy was simply smart enough and strong enough to quit while he was ahead, or he was dead or in jail for something else. But I wasn’t going to raise any of this with the O’Gradys. If they’d finally discovered a measure of acceptance about their daughter’s fate, then who was I to stir it up? And so we talked briefly of Craig Drummond, their friend who had personally paid my fees when I’d been on the case. I’d swum with the guy many mornings for a couple of decades but I didn’t really know him. I had never met his wife or family, nor he mine, but we’d floated in the same salty water and dried off under the same clinical sun. Gerry knew him from school and told me Craig had been a really good squash player. We avoided talk of Caitlin. I wished the O’Gradys all the best and went off to express my condolences to the Drummond family. I left
, with an emptiness in my stomach that reminded me of that emotion on a long flight home after an extended absence when you have abandoned your past but not yet attained a future.
The weird sense of dislocation had persisted. I was steaming through my fifties in a mundane job, in a world that was more foreign to me by the day. They no longer played the football I’d grown up with; now it was all corporate boxes and prepaid memberships and footballers on every channel who fancied themselves as personalities as they fed us the same dull chaff as every other professional sportsperson. If a player gave somebody a whack on the field he was treated like a child molester – and those predators too seemed be to growing in number by the hour, to such an extent that if a little kid fell off their bike and you helped them up, you had a dozen fingers poised to dial 000. Nobody went to church anymore. The closest that people got to organised worship was when they gushed over the release of new Apple products. There were no dark cool pubs either, everywhere was open and noisy, the sound of cutlery reverberating through atriums like a twenty-one-gun salute. My mechanic’s workshop was quieter than most restaurants. And in the middle of this world sat Snowy Lane who couldn’t do a thing to save his friend from bleeding to death on a beach and whose last contribution to making this state a better place had been thirty-five years ago. I sipped tea, staring out an implacable ocean, brooding.
‘G’day Snowy.’
Smile lines creased his face. It was weathered but women might still dub it rugged. There was the odd bit of pigmentation too and his hair was thinner but only a little, and still sandy. Barry Dunn was a good fifteen years older than me but seemed only one or two years my senior. Even with the collapse of his empire he’d obviously still had enough collateral to invest in a fountain of youth. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite. He was wearing a polo shirt and shorts with sandals.
‘How you doing?’ I asked to be polite.
‘Ah, I long for the time PSA meant Public Schools Association and not a gloved finger up my date, but it’s alright. You?’
‘Getting by.’
A coffee arrived for him, macchiato by the looks. The young dark-haired waitress smiled at him and vice versa. I doubted he had to place an order. In Perth’s Jurassic age, Barry Dunn had been the T. rex, and that still carried clout. He sipped his coffee.
‘Married? Kids?’
I gave him bare facts on a wafer: wife, eighteen-year-old daughter.
‘I never married again.’ He gazed wistfully over to Rottnest as if thinking about where his mistress had met her demise. If he harboured a grudge because I’d been sleeping with her too, he never showed it. ‘I’ve recommended you to a friend.’
Hard on the heels of my surprise came suspicion. He read it.
‘You’re still in the PI game?’ Asking it like he wasn’t sure.
‘Of course. But I have a few things in train.’
This amounted to an exaggeration. I had one case, a simple adultery.
‘Drop it or hand it off. I’ve quoted two thousand dollars a day plus expenses on your behalf, which is what he pays his legal counsel. If you think I’ve underquoted you can take it up with my friend.’
I didn’t think he’d underquoted. I’d never earned that kind of money.
‘I draw the line at shooting someone.’
The eyes crinkled and his chuckle seemed forced. ‘I’m serious, Snowy. His daughter is missing.’
‘The police …’
‘Waste of fucking space. I told him he needed you. You in?’
What was I going to say? ‘On the face of it, sure.’
‘It’s Nelson Feister’s daughter, Ingrid.’
This rocked me. Feister was rich as Croesus. I looked around to see if anybody was listening in. There was an elderly couple – from the long socks on the husband, I guessed English visitors. A trio of young mothers with bored children strapped in strollers, and a Brazilian beach bum fiddling with his phone, made up the balance of the clientele. No obvious threat but I lowered my voice. ‘I haven’t heard anything about that.’
‘Course not. You got a phone?’ He gestured for it.
As it happened, I did. I handed it over. He popped on some glasses that had been hanging on his shirt, grunted in disapproval at my low-tech appliance and dialled. It must have been answered quickly.
‘Nelson, Barry. I’m with the guy now. He’s in. When do you want to see him?’ He looked over his glasses at me. ‘Twenty minutes?’ I wasn’t sure which of us he was asking but I nodded. ‘Text your address to this phone. Yep, no worries, China.’ He ended the call and slid my phone back to me. ‘Done.’ He sat back, proud he could still make a deal talk.
‘How long she been missing?’
‘Not sure. Two or three weeks. Ingrid’s the wild child from the second marriage, so they weren’t worried. But there’s a loser boyfriend. Anyway he can fill you in. Good to see you again, Snowy.’ Delicately he placed his empty cup on its saucer and stood up. My phone pinged with a text.
‘Thanks, Barry.’ I reckoned it was the first time I’d called him by his first name.
Dunn had taken a step but paused and some part of me wondered if he was about to take me to task for the familiarity. ‘Watch out for the daughter.’
‘Ingrid?’
‘The older one from the first model.’ He could have been speaking literally or figuratively, I wasn’t sure what line of employment the two Mrs Feisters were in prior to marriage. The family had always been exceedingly private and I wasn’t one to follow the movers and shakers of Perth society. ‘She likes older men.’ He winked and exited with a wave to the waitress, who smiled generously.
I studied my phone. The address was premium: Jutland Parade, Dalkeith. I was in shorts and t-shirt, underdressed. I had to hope it lent me some kind of cache.
If somebody were to ask me what I wanted to come back as in the next life I’d answer: a lawn on Jutland Parade. The houses varied. A few Californian bungalows remained but there were also the kind you see on American TV shows, belonging to Beverly Hills personalities, or plantation owners, with long driveways usually ending in white stone columns. The lawns though were always pristine, superior to your average public golf green. The parade was on the crest of a hill so the backs of the houses sloped down to the Swan River. Over the years, lots had been sold and houses developed on the hill slope but a few properties had maintained land all the way down to the river, ending there with boatsheds and private jetties. My guess was the Feisters’ property might be one of these. The front of the house was fenced and gated. Trees ran down both sides, pencil pines, in close formation. I presumed they hid fences to the neighbouring properties. I pulled up the short entrance way and pressed the intercom.
A woman’s voice answered. ‘Yes?’
‘My name is Richard Lane. Mr Feister is expecting me.’
There was a click and the gates began to swing inward. Clearly whoever was on the other end of the intercom already knew about me. The driveway was a good sixty metres and ended in a circle. A separate garage to the right was open and the rear ends of twin Mercedes gleamed like the teeth of a cartoon villain. I left my car as close as I could to the front door and climbed out in my shorts with the guilt of a dog owner whose pooch had just left a steaming turd on the footpath. The house itself was more modest than I had expected. Tudor in style, it ran only a third wider than your average stockbroker’s, but gables hinted at height and depth to the rear. Waiting for me at the door was a woman, thirty-five to forty, with the kind of sexy haircut, expensive suit and shoes that suggested a bottle of Pol Roger in a fridge stocked with yogurt and greens and little else. No ring on her hand. I wondered if this was the elder daughter.
‘Dee Verleuwin. I’m Mr Feister’s private secretary.’
She extended her hand and I shook it. There was a time that slender arm and delicate hand would have had me thinking all kind of things but I was married and my flirting days as ancient and foreign to me as cuneiform. I followed Ms Verleuwin into a cool entranc
e hall and tracked her pert backside along parquet into a wide-open area with marble tiles and three sets of staircases. We avoided all of these and continued along a narrow wood-panelled corridor that made you think you were on a ship. We passed three closed rooms, two on the right, one on the left. The corridor ended in a massive sunken open living room with a bar and kitchen area and copious views of the Swan below. It seemed the Feister block didn’t extend all the way down for I could see rooftops angling down the hill to the river. To my surprise we did not enter the room but turned sharp right, the narrow and panelled corridor continuing to a large jarrah door which had been left ajar. Ms Verleuwin preceded me to push the door open further, then stood back and announced me to those assembled in what I guess was the den but was exactly how I imagined one of those posh gentlemen’s club’s reading rooms would look: dark wood, green leather sofas and armchairs, a large desk, a hint of brass and some discrete technology.
