by Jane Harper
He became aware of a shrieking that, for once, had nothing to do with Audrey. Around the cliffs, the seabirds were protesting his presence, swooping and circling overhead. The terns were nesting, he could see now as they hovered around their babies, anxious and agitated. The birds had rarely nested here before, back in the days when Kieran had traipsed up and down all summer. They’d become less used to visitors since the safety barrier had gone up.
Kieran moved away from them, crossing the beach to the South Cave, where he and Olivia had once lingered while the day slipped away and the tide slid in. He stepped inside now, not far, just a few paces. He could see the outline of the ledge from where he stood.
He was struck, as always, by how close it was to the entrance. He walked over. It was definitely the right ledge, though; he could make out where Ash had carved his name nearby.
Kieran reached up and ran his finger over the letters. He had almost forgotten how they had all used to do that. Pull out their keys and slice their names permanently into the sea-softened rock face whenever they reckoned they’d discovered something new of interest in the caves. Only Sean had tried to talk them out of it, with predictable results. Even he had buckled in the end, and under pressure from Kieran had given in and scratched his name at the start of a route they’d mapped together in the North Cave. Sean had felt bad about it for the rest of the summer, which Kieran had thought was overkill at the time. But looking at the letters now, still legible more than a decade after they’d been made into the rock face, Kieran couldn’t believe he had ever been such a dickhead. He couldn’t remember how he’d convinced himself this was a good idea, or even an acceptable one.
He leaned his back against the ledge and turned to the glow seeping in from the entrance. The sea and the sky were both a brilliant blue and he could see Sean’s catamaran anchored above the site of the Mary Minerva.
Kieran watched it for a while, the dive flag flapping. He hadn’t been able to face going out there himself at all in those early years, not even to join his parents for an on-board memorial ceremony to mark the first anniversary of Finn’s and Toby’s deaths. But Sean had never stopped sailing out. Two years after the storm, Kieran had cracked and asked him how he coped with being on the same body of water where his brother had died.
Sean had thought about it for so long, Kieran had started to feel bad for asking.
‘It’s like a bubble,’ Sean said, just as Kieran thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘I sort of draw a circle around it. Keep it all in there and try to carry on like I would have if it had never happened.’ Sean gave a small shrug. ‘It feels a bit easier that way.’
It was the last time they had ever talked about it, but when Sean next asked if Kieran wanted to go out on the boat, Kieran said he would. It had been about as bad as he’d feared, and he had barely said a word the whole time. But at least he’d done it, and after that it had been easier to do it again.
Kieran pushed himself away from the rock now and took a last look at the ledge. In his mind, it was always further back in the cave, buried deep. In reality, the entrance was far closer than he remembered. There was no reason he shouldn’t have noticed the storm drawing in so fast. No excuse there.
He walked with his daughter back out to the beach, shielding Audrey’s eyes as she squinted in the sun. Kieran dug in his bag for her cotton hat, the one Bronte had given them what felt like a long time ago now, but came up empty-handed. He must have left it at home, and Kieran suddenly thought of Mia, still back at his parents’ place with Verity, and Brian.
Don’t leave me alone with him again.
Kieran checked his phone. No messages and no missed calls. Still, he looked down at Audrey.
‘What do you think, little one? Time to go back? See Mum?’
Audrey’s baby face appeared untroubled either way, so Kieran set off across the sand. He slowed as he passed the entrance to the North Cave.
He’d never liked it as much as the southern one, there were too many twists and turns for his taste. But Finn and Toby had thought it was the better of the pair, and had spent hours mapping out routes. They’d made their mark all over the North Cave, quite literally, and even from the sand Kieran could see a couple of places where the two men had scratched their own names. As he moved forward for a closer look, Audrey decided she’d had enough. Kieran started to sing a little song she sometimes liked but that only made things worse. His daughter scrunched up her face until it was hard and red and began to scream, the sound bouncing off the cave walls and ricocheting down into the warren of hidden tunnels.
‘Okay, all right, we’re going.’ Kieran turned, and then suddenly stopped.
For a second, in the thin slice of silence as his daughter drew breath to scream, Kieran thought he heard a strange whisper of movement.
No. He looked into the dark. Not something moving. Something going still. The frozen watchfulness of an animal. Kieran tried to listen, his palm firm on Audrey’s back. He stared into the black hole. He could hear nothing but her cries and see nothing but blackness, but he had the overwhelming sense of something waiting quietly in the dark.
‘Hello?’
Kieran’s call echoed back to him with a hollow flatness. Sound behaved in an unusual way in the caves, he knew, sometimes drawn deep through the tunnels and sometimes muffled by dead ends and water pools. Now, though, Kieran could see and hear nothing but the two of them. No movement. No answer. Just the gaping black hole.
Still, he felt a prickle of cold that had little to do with the cool ocean air. Above the cliffs, the birds were shrieking again. Kieran turned, strode across the beach and, arm tight around his child, climbed up the cliff path much faster than he had climbed down it.
When Kieran emerged a little breathless at the top of the path, he saw straight away that he and Audrey weren’t alone. He sucked in some air, buying himself a minute. The other person stared back, not happy to see him either.
‘Hi, mate,’ Kieran said, cautiously.
Liam was sitting on the safety rail, his legs dangling over the edge, his broad shoulders hunched and his face turned towards the sea.
‘Were you just down there?’ Liam’s eyes were a little red and watery, but it could simply have been the wind and the glare.
‘Yeah.’
‘No-one’s supposed to go down there.’
‘I know.’
‘The birds are nesting. You’ll scare them. What?’ he snapped, noticing Kieran’s surprise. He turned back, sullen. ‘My dad used to show me the seabirds.’
‘Oh. Well –’ Kieran stepped clear of the unofficial path and back onto the formal lookout. ‘Sorry.’
‘One rule for you, hey?’
‘My baby was …’
Liam looked over.
‘… unsettled,’ Kieran finished, cringing inwardly at his own excuse.
Liam rightly rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the sea. He was sitting close enough to the edge of the rail to make Kieran feel uneasy. The cliff was a notorious suicide spot, if three in twenty-odd years was enough to earn such a reputation.
Kieran looked at Liam now, balanced on the edge, and cleared his throat.
‘You walking back to town?’ he said. ‘I’m going that way.’
Liam gave a weird hollow laugh. ‘I’m not about to jump, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I’m not,’ Kieran lied.
‘It’s not even high tide.’ Liam turned now and this time looked Kieran hard in the eye. ‘That’s the real danger zone, isn’t it?’
Kieran didn’t reply. He made himself remember the boy aged seven, placing a footy scarf on his dad’s coffin. How different would Liam be now if none of that had ever happened, and he’d grown up in the family he should have had? His grandparents – Sean and Toby’s mum and dad – had always been caring in their own quiet, reserved way. They had stuck it
out in Evelyn Bay for two years after Toby’s death, battling with the daily reminders of their grief before they’d given in and moved far away to Queensland, settling in a town where the sea water was so warm and flat it was unrecognisable. Kieran knew Sean had thought about joining them for a while but by then he had re-established the diving business and was on the cusp of it turning a profit. Sean’s parents had left with promises to come back every year to visit their son and grandson, but had only managed one difficult tear-stained visit, after which it was mutually decided it was better for all if they didn’t make the trip to Evelyn Bay again. Kieran was still thinking about that when Liam opened his mouth.
‘You got with that chick in the end, hey? That Chinese one who used to live here?’
Caught off guard by the change of topic, Kieran blinked. ‘Mia? She’s half-Singaporean, actually.’
‘Nice,’ Liam said in such a way that made Kieran want to unclip his baby sling, place Audrey carefully down on the grass, stand up and punch the guy full in the face. Instead, he stood completely still and took a breath.
‘I’m walking back,’ he tried again, for a final time. Seven years old. Footy scarf. Coffin. ‘Come with me.’
Liam considered, then to Kieran’s surprise, he nodded. ‘Yeah, okay.’
He swung his legs back over the railing and jumped down. They were the same height now, Kieran realised as they began to walk. Liam maybe even had the edge. He shouldn’t be surprised. Toby had been tall. And Liam wasn’t a kid anymore.
They walked without speaking and it was only as they passed the fork leading to the cemetery gates that Kieran felt Liam’s eyes slide over.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what happened on Saturday night?’ he said.
‘Do you want me to?’ The iron gates were open, the grounds beyond them still empty.
‘Everyone else seems to. I had to go in to the police station.’
‘I heard.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Liam kicked a rock and it bounced ahead of them down the trail. ‘That’s what you get for trying to be nice. I didn’t have to drive her home, you know. I could’ve left her to walk. But I didn’t, did I? Not like some of the others would have.’
‘Which others?’
‘Whoever. I don’t know. The dickheads over summer. That Spanish bloke that was hanging around.’
‘Bronte’s boyfriend, you mean?’
‘He wasn’t her boyfriend.’ Liam was dismissive. ‘She didn’t even like him that much.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘She said he would piss off as soon as the weather started to turn, and she was right. Same as those other bloody tourist blokes trying to impress her.’
Liam had been keeping tabs on her, Kieran could tell. He would have put money on Liam knowing exactly who Bronte had been spending time with during any given week that summer.
The cemetery was well behind them now. There was no-one on the track ahead or behind. The only sounds were the crunch of their feet and the waves breaking below. Kieran watched Liam as they walked. His head was tilted down, his expression dark.
‘Go on, then,’ Kieran said. ‘What happened?’
Liam looked up at that. A strange tight smile crept across his face. ‘I knew you wanted to ask.’
Chapter 17
Liam squinted as a gust of sea air blew dust and dead leaves across the track. Having been invited to tell his side of the story, he now seemed oddly hesitant.
‘I’d driven Bronte home before, you know.’ He rubbed the corner of his eye with a finger. ‘Loads of times.’
‘Like a weekly thing?’
‘No. I mean, I usually offered. It’s, what, two minutes out of my way? But it was so close and she mostly liked to walk.’ Liam shrugged. ‘The Saturday shift was a late one, though, so sometimes, yeah. I’d offer and she’d say okay.’
One shift and not every week. Kieran wondered exactly how many times counted as ‘loads’ to Liam.
‘She said okay this Saturday?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. We’d been talking. About you, actually.’ Liam glanced over. ‘I didn’t even know you were back and then suddenly you turn up like that.’
‘Right.’ Kieran fought the instinct to apologise. He didn’t have to give notice to come back to his own hometown.
‘Anyway, I was telling Bronte about what had happened back then. She was nice about it.’ Liam seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘I dunno. So we got in my car, put some music on, drove to her place –’
Kieran couldn’t help noticing the cosy language. Liam made it sound like a date.
‘– I parked outside. She had a book she was going to lend me – something by that G.R. Barlin dickhead who’s always hanging around. But she said I should read it, so I went in with her to get it.’
‘She invited you inside?’
‘Yeah. She did.’ Liam sounded defensive. Either Bronte really had invited him, or he really believed she had.
‘Right.’
‘She found the book and we talked for a couple of minutes. But then I had to get up early next morning to go to the gym, so I left.’
No way. Kieran almost laughed. There was no way in this world Liam had been inside the home of the girl he liked after 11 pm on a Saturday night and voluntarily pulled the pin so he could be fresh for his gym session. Kieran didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he knew without a shadow of a doubt it hadn’t happened like that. And what was more, he was pretty sure Sergeant Chris Renn would know it too.
‘So what did you guys talk about at her place?’ he said instead.
‘Bronte’s art mainly. She’d been working on this coastal project all summer. She said she’d got some new ideas she wanted to sketch out.’
There it was, thought Kieran. The polite excuse. I’ve got so much work to do. Probably accompanied by a yawn and a faux-regretful smile while she rested one hand on the open door.
‘Then what?’ he said.
‘I told you,’ Liam said. ‘I headed off. I had to get up for the gym.’
‘How long were you at her place for?’
‘Hardly anything. Ten minutes or something. Then I left.’ Liam stopped walking now and looked at Kieran. The trail had turned to asphalt under their feet. They were nearly back in town. ‘But you know that. You saw me.’
‘When?’ Kieran frowned.
‘On Saturday night. You were walking along Beach Road. I drove right by you.’
Kieran remembered the blinding headlights coming around the bend. The rush of air from a car passing too close and too fast in the night.
‘That was you, was it?’
‘Yeah, didn’t you see? I saw you.’
‘And Mia?’
A tiny beat. ‘Yeah. Both of you.’
Liam was staring at Kieran as he tried to cast his mind back. Could the car have been Liam’s white Holden? He remembered putting his arm out towards Mia. He could hear the roar of the engine, see the tail-lights disappearing into the dark. He wasn’t sure.
‘You remember that, right?’ Liam was frowning now. ‘I know you do. You told my Uncle Sean you saw a car.’ He ran his hand through his hair, frustrated. ‘It was mine. Leaving her place.’
‘Sean told you I’d seen a car?’
Liam hesitated. ‘Only after I’d already said that I’d seen you on the road.’
Kieran couldn’t decide if he believed him or not. He pictured Sean’s face at the marina the day before. He wasn’t sure how far Sean would go to help his nephew. Pretty far, probably.
Liam was still watching him. ‘If the cops talk to you –’
‘They already have, they’ve been to my parents’ house.’
‘Oh yeah. That’s right.’ A look flashed across Liam’s face too fast for Kieran to read. ‘Your dad was out walking that night too, wasn’t he?’
Ki
eran didn’t answer. There was a loaded moment, then Liam took a breath.
‘Look,’ Liam said. ‘I already told the cops that it was me driving, so –’
‘Well, I’m not sure I can help you, mate, because I already told Chris Renn that I couldn’t remember much about the car,’ Kieran said. ‘Which is the truth.’
‘You can tell him you’ve remembered now. Or get your girlfriend to tell him.’
‘I’m not asking Mia to do anything.’
‘Then you’ll have to do it,’ Liam said. ‘Please.’
There was a change in his voice now. The bravado had worn thin, and a layer of fear shone through, raw and exposed.
‘Listen, mate,’ Liam tried again, when Kieran didn’t reply. ‘I didn’t do anything to Bronte. Seriously. I dropped her off and I left. That’s it. That neighbour heard her talking on the beach later, didn’t she? So that proves it. I didn’t do what they’re all saying. I –’ Liam was watching him intently. ‘I wouldn’t, all right? I liked her.’
They looked at each other, then Kieran shook his head. ‘I’ve got to go.’
He could feel Liam’s eyes still on him as he moved to leave.
‘Wait,’ Liam said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Do you still miss your brother?’
Kieran stopped. The question had a ring of sincerity and before he could help himself, he had turned back. ‘Yeah. I do.’
‘I really miss my dad.’ Liam was quiet now. ‘Sean does too. You should know that.’
‘I do know that.’
‘My mum and Julian say what happened was an accident. They reckon my dad still would have gone to help, even knowing what happened. And I know Finn died too, so no-one’s supposed to give you a hard time.’ Liam’s face twisted with something both hard and soft. ‘But you kind of ruined my life, you know?’
‘Yeah.’ They stood facing each other with what felt to Kieran like a rare sense of connection. ‘It kind of ruined my life too. If it helps.’
It was one of the most honest conversations he had had in years.
