Clear to the Horizon
Page 44
1.59.
He turned around his car. Three point – textbook – and sped out the way he came.
CHAPTER 40
After the O’Gradys, I went into some kind of fugue state. I couldn’t be bothered to watch the footy. Everything seemed trivial and indulgent. Instead I sat and played my stereo, old LPs, bands I’d worshipped. It was like floating on my back in an ocean of music, my youth drifting above me: friends long forgotten, old cars distinguished by overheating radiators or cracked windshields, smoky pubs, street posters. Somewhere during The Angels’ ‘Marseilles’, it hit me. I called James Feruggi in Darwin and fluked him right away. There were no polite catch-ups.
‘Did you guys ever do manoeuvres or bivouacs at Jarrahdale?’
‘Let me think. Yes, yes we did.’
Jarrahdale, where Jessica’s body had been dumped. The police had thoroughly searched that area after the body had been found, and intermittently since.
‘Where else did you do exercises?’
‘There were a lot.’
I thought of where Whitmore had been going to bury me: on a hill with a view. Not dissimilar to where Jessica had been found.
‘Hills, slopes, anywhere like that?’
He said he’d need time to think.
‘Do that. Write them down, better still, mark them on a map if you can.’
It took around four hours for him to come back to me. He’d nominated six sites.
The next day, first thing, I put a call into Nikki Sutton. She accepted right away.
‘Thanks for taking my call,’ I said.
‘Your call will always be accepted here,’ she replied.
I asked if they’d found anything new that might give a location for where Emily and Caitlin might be found.
‘Not yet, but there’s a lot to check. He has a half-brother in country Victoria, we’re only just getting to him now.’
‘I have an idea, could be dumb.’
‘I like dumb ideas if they come from you.’
Like Whitmore, I enjoyed the flattery. I told her there were some places I thought might be worth checking out.
It was raining. I don’t know where that came from. You don’t expect rain mid-October. The first two places they’d tried had produced a duck egg. James Feruggi had been good enough to come down for a couple of days and drive around to the sites of the training exercises, pointing out where they had camped. This place near Gidgegannup had a sloping hill, wooded with a clearing or two. I thought about where Whitmore was going to bury me on that hillside, near the base of the highest ring of trees in the clearing.
‘Try there,’ I suggested.
They had some X-ray machine where they could fly overhead and look for buried objects. I was told the bikie gangs buried guns or money or drugs in containers and they could find them from the plane, but they didn’t need a plane here. I was hanging with the tech team personally appointed by Sutton. They drove their machine over in a van. I don’t know how it worked, kind of like a glass-bottomed boat I think, that’s how it seemed from where I was watching a few hundred metres away, sipping thermos coffee, as rain pattered on my hoodie. They drove up and back, up and back. Then, brakelights. They stopped and jumped out and somebody, I think it was one of the female techs, Bernie, was waving and shouting and the secondary team, who were huddled with me, ditched their coffees and started running. The rain stopped all of a sudden and I looked up at the sky; a few drops were spilling from leaves onto my face, but the clouds just vanished and sun beamed out like the smile of a beautiful, innocent girl.
Four hours later as they carefully extracted remains believed to be those of Caitlin, her parents were huddled close to the gravesite, tightly holding one another’s hand just the way they must have that very first night when Caitlin had not returned home, their love and courage through the darkness undiminished.
EPILOGUE
Emily Virtue, the first of the young women to vanish, was the last to be yielded up. Fortunately for her family she was buried at the very next site on the list.
Closure, finally. Luke Whitmore had not won after all.
Tash came back with Grace, and my life too once more became complete. I found myself standing on the water’s edge at North Cottesloe just as I had almost eighteen years ago to the day, recalling that spring, the drone of planes overhead, the ships on the horizon. I wondered about invisible connections: if Timor had never happened would Whitmore’s sociopathy have ever been forged, would Caitlin O’Grady now be standing looking at this horizon with her own young children? I contemplated what Whitmore had said to me as he prepared to kill me: we were on the frailest of ice every day of our lives. Sidney Turner, Ian Bontillo were dead because of a crack in the ice started all those years ago by Whitmore. Robert Plaistowe’s life was in tatters. Kelly Davies had fallen through the ice and perished in an ancient desert. Maybe Whitmore was right, we had such little power in the scheme of things, but here’s where I disagreed with him: the little we did have was critical and what gave us humanity. I thought about the goodness of Craig Drummond who so few would ever know, and about the evil of Whitmore, which would be embossed on the psyche of Western Australia for generations.
And what of Snowy Lane, the celebrated psycho-hunter? What did he think of himself? My summary: he’d done what he could with what he had. He’d made mistakes, he’d been dogged in equal proportions to stupid. Ultimately a life was no more enduring than the impression we leave on a leather sofa but, maybe in my time, I had made a difference. I hoped so. Gruesome had been a long time ago and whatever gift I had then had languished. Drummond had brought me into the maze and, helpless, I had watched him bleed to death. I’d started my second tilt at this case looking for a daughter who was feared dead but was never missing, and found a daughter who was.
I eased myself into the water. It was still a little cold. My arms and feet began moving, and before long I was just a small splash in the distance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank my editor Georgia Richter for her assiduous work on the manuscript, and all those at Fremantle Press who transition the book from an idea into a living reality. Professor Ian Dadour I thank for his insight into many things forensic but especially the effect of desert location on human remains. A big thank you also to Murray Kimber for the benefit of his description of the Bay View Terrace area in the late ’90s and Peter Burke who knows the Kimberley far better than me and gave me his insights.
While the novel uses the infamous Claremont Serial Killings as a prototype for the ‘Autostrada’ killings of the story, this is only to provide a vehicle to explore the psychological impact of such crimes on a community, victims’ families and investigators. There is no sense in which this is a true crime work. This novel is a work of fiction, all characters are fictitious and any resemblance to real people living or dead is coincidental. The geography of most places in the novel, including Bay View Terrace and the streets of Broome, may be recognised in general structure but micro details, such as shops and street names, and the actual layout of lanes, streets and carparks have been altered to assist a work of fiction.
First published 2017 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
25 Quarry Street, Fremantle WA 6160
(PO Box 158, North Fremantle WA 6159)
www.fremantlepress.com.au
Copyright © Dave Warner, 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Front cover photograph: Orien Harvey, ‘A storm rolls in over Cottesloe Beach’ Back cover: Todd Quakenbush (swimmer) and Jeremy Bishop (ocean), www.unsplash.com
Printed by Everbest Printing Company, China
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publicat
ion entry
Warner, Dave, 1953 −, author
Clear to the horizon
Detective and mystery stories
Australian fiction.
Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.
Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body