Through a Camel's Eye

by Dorothy Johnston

Experience had taught Chris that people noticed more than they thought they did; but that while news of a certain kind might travel like lightning round the village, other kinds needed more time to reach him. Especially this was the case if one of the locals looked like getting into trouble. Chris - otherwise a local himself, otherwise perfectly trustworthy and acceptable - might find himself suddenly dropped from the grapevine, swinging free of the gossip he relied on to anticipate trouble.

  It was possible that something of the kind was happening with regard to Margaret Benton. On the other hand, it was possible that she’d never been near Queenscliff, that her coat had got into the sandhills by some other means. Chris had already rung Swan Hill that morning and been told that they were handling it. There was no further news.

  There was that scream too, that Camilla had heard. When he’d tried to ask her about it, she’d become so agitated that he’d let it go.

  Anthea was standing with her arms crossed, staring at the wheelbarrow and frowning, waiting for him to take the initiative, tell her what their next move should be.

  Chris would have scoffed at the idea that a young snip of a thing could embarrass him, that he’d be knotting inside himself with the desire to keep up an appearance of authority.

  He indicated that she should follow him and stomped inside.

  Anthea stared at her boss’s departing back, conscious that he was heading for some kind of humiliation. The thought made her angry and frustrated. She suspected at least one of the shopkeepers of lying to her, and had been on the point of losing her patience back there, in the main street.

  Chris’s attitude to women bordered on the fearful. He was reluctant to inflame Julie Beshervase and he pussy-footed round Camilla Renfrew. Anthea wondered where that left her. Pursuing a conversation with a khaki backside?

  Chris made a list of everyone in the town and surrounding farms who owned a horse trailer. There were seventeen, and he began interviewing them systematically. He took it for granted that all of them knew about Riza and Frank Erwin’s rental arrangement. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that the target of the theft might have been Erwin, not Julie Beshervase. He could spend time pondering who might want to embarrass or get back at Erwin once he’d made a short list.

  He didn’t want to judge his assistant prematurely, and was aware that he might have done a lot worse. If and when Anthea left - it was surely a matter of when, not if - they’d probably send him a young man.

  Chris was grateful that Anthea didn’t expect him to entertain her after work. But she’d grown up in a city, and was used to working at a city’s pace. On top of that, she made the mistake of assuming that the surface of a person, or a thing for that matter, told you what they were like inside.

  Chris listened to what was, and wasn’t, being said, crossed some names off his list and put question marks alongside others, wrote notes between them and in the margins of his notebook.

  He took a mug of tea out to the back veranda, avoiding the tiny triangle of sea just visible between the trees, while he mulled over what this or that one of his horse-owning acquaintances had been doing on the night Riza disappeared. He didn’t rule out any of them. His crosses and question marks had been made in pencil, and he kept his rubber handy.

  He went back indoors, phoned Frank Erwin, and told him he was coming over.

  Though Chris greeted the farmer politely, Frank made it clear that he was affronted. His daughter’s horse had long since been sold, but Chris knew the trailer would sit there until either it fell apart, or Frank pulled it apart and used the bits for something that was even further gone.

  ‘I pointed out the bloody tyre tracks. And I’m renting my paddock to that hippy, aren’t I? She’s paying cash in hand.’

  ‘It’s routine, Frank. I have to cross you off my list.’

  ‘But - ’

  Come on now. Let’s get it over with.’

  The horse float looked as though it hadn’t left the shed in years. The paint was practically all gone. The aluminium was coming away from its seams. Frank stood just behind Chris while he examined it, making noises of disgust when Chris measured the width of the tyres, two close together on each side. The tension emanating from the farmer might have been caused by guilt, but might equally have been the result of this unexpected intrusion, these suspicions voiced by a policeman whom he’d thought of as a friend.

  Dirt embedded in the tyre treads ought to have been old and dry. It wasn’t.

  Chris noticed a new padlock on the door. ‘I’ll need to see inside,’ he said.

  ‘Why, in God’s name?’

  ‘Just get me the key, Frank. Please.’

  There was nothing to show that the float had recently been used to transport any animal, let alone a stolen camel. But the hackles were up on Chris’s neck as he peered around an empty and dilapidated interior. The corners were thick with dust and old brown horse hairs, a few amongst them of the palest yellow-white.

  Chris pulled some latex gloves out of his pocket and a small plastic bag, while Frank snorted behind him. He teased out the hairs and bagged them.

  SEVEN

  Anthea held up the small bag and studied the hairs inside it, while Chris typed a report. Typing was not his strong suit, but it would have embarrassed him to ask Anthea to do all his typing for him. He told himself that the report could be a short one, simply stating where he’d found the hairs and asking what species of animal they’d come from.

  When Anthea asked what Frank Erwin had said, Chris paused with his hands above the keyboard and looked at her along his shoulder.

  ‘If we found the beast in Frank’s living-room, he’d deny knowing how it got there.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why would he deny it, or why would he pinch Julie Beshervase’s camel?’

  ‘Both,’ said Anthea, raising a neat eyebrow, ‘but the first one first.’

  ‘Actually, I think the second answer does for both. The Erwins have owned and farmed that land for three generations. Frank may have rented out the paddock, but in every way he regards it as his. If the Beshervase girl did something to annoy him - ’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Chris was heartened when he paused again, and felt that Anthea was listening. ‘And Julie won’t admit it either,’ he continued, ‘not if it was something she’s ashamed of. It’ll need looking into once we’ve got these confirmed.’

  He flicked a finger at the plastic bag.

  ‘Julie Beshervase doesn’t seem the type - ’ Anthea ventured.

  ‘To hold back? I agree.’

  Chris noted the way his assistant’s mouth pulled in when she wasn’t speaking, as though there was too much that she needed and was reluctant to say.

  ‘I’d like you to talk to Julie. Don’t mention the hairs or the trailer. Just ask her what she thinks of Frank, how they’ve been getting on, that kind of thing.’

  Anthea felt a twinge of self-importance as she talked to the courier and arranged for the pick-up, imagining, as she put the phone down, that she was the one making the trip to Melbourne, that things between her and Graeme were so good he’d rearrange his morning’s schedule to meet her for coffee, plan the weekend they would spend together. Melbourne was so close, only a couple of hours away. She thought that Graeme’s rejection would have been easier to bear if she’d been sent to the opposite end of the state.

  Anthea began by asking Julie about herself, where she’d grown up, where she’d learnt about camel training. She discovered that Julie was twenty-three and that she’d been born in the Northern Territory.

  ‘My parents used to train animals for use in films. Once they had, rescued actually, a baby Bactrian. They gave her to me. I was fifteen, and so rebellious I ran away every second weekend.’

  Julie’s parents had died in a car crash, her younger brother too. ‘They were hit by a road train. I should have been with them, but that was one of the weekends I was busy running away.’

  Anthea said
that she was sorry. Julie refused to meet her eye.

  ‘That camel - her name was Greta, after Greta Garbo. She was my mother’s favourite actress - I trained her myself. And she did work in the movies. She lived up to her namesake.’

  ‘And your older brother?’

  ‘He keeps an eye on me. Tell me this!’ Julie turned on Anthea, pulling at her spiky hair. ‘Riza was mine and now I’ve lost him. Why do I feel so guilty?’

  Anthea boiled water and found tea bags, trying to ignore the cockroach droppings on the kitchen bench. She did not know the answer to Julie’s question, but the fact that she wanted to find one, that she was thinking about it, surprised her. She’d marked Julie as a drama queen whose rhetorical questions weren’t to be taken seriously.

  She made the tea black and sweet, not wanting to think about the state of whatever milk might be in the fridge.

  The two women sat facing one another, not directly, but at an angle which made all their glances sidelong.

  ‘Frank’s okay,’ Julie said. ‘It’s not him who’s been perving on Riza and me.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘You mean, apart from the witch? No one.’

  When Anthea asked about the boys, Julie shrugged and said, ‘Just kids mucking about after school.’

  ‘Cynthia Erwin?’

  ‘She hardly ever comes down to the paddock. She seems nice enough.’

  They went on talking about the farmer, Julie rounding out her opinion that he was friendly without being interfering. Most men, she said, would have assumed they knew more about training camels than she did, even if they’d only ever seen them giving rides to kids. Which, by the way, was how she planned to earn a bit of money, once Riza was old enough.

  Julie swallowed and dragged at her hair again. Anthea steered her back to Frank, who was proud of his son and daughter, and seemed especially proud of Jim, who lived along the Ocean Road and had just given him and Cynthia their first grandchild.

  Anthea thought of the pale hairs, but decided not to mention them. She thought it would be nice to have a father figure, and wondered briefly why, since the death of her own parents, no candidate for this role had ever appeared on her horizon. She asked Julie what it was about Camilla that got under her skin.

  ‘If it was an old man in a raincoat, he wouldn’t be allowed to get away with it - but it’s an old woman who’s lived here all her life, so people say she’s harmless. I bet she’s rich as well. She could have taken Riza and hidden him somewhere, or paid someone to do it. Do you know how many properties she owns?’

  Anthea did not want to admit that the answer to this was no.

  ‘Do you have any enemies, Julie? Is there someone who wants to hurt you, or get back at you?’

  ‘What, down here?’

  Anthea reached in her pocket for the photograph of Margaret Benton.

  ‘Anywhere,’ she said.

  EIGHT

  Chris was waiting outside the high school when the bell went. Ben McIntyre did not seem surprised to find a policeman waiting for him, but Chris reflected that fourteen-year-old boys were better at hiding surprise than other reactions - fear, for instance, or excitement - which you could smell on them.

  ‘A few quick questions, Ben. My car’s over here.’

  ‘I had nothin’ to do with that stupid camel!’

  ‘When were you last at the paddock?’

  Ben looked as though he was about to make a run for it. ‘It was nothin’!’

  Chris took the sullen and monosyllabic teenager through each step, how someone - he couldn’t recall who - suggested that they ride over and see if the camel lady was there. When she hadn’t been, they’d tried to get Riza to come to the fence. Ian Lawrey had picked some grass and Zorba had some butterscotch in his pocket and he’d tried to give him that.

  ‘What happened then?’

  Ben sighed and looked down at his hands. ‘Zorba wanted to ride him. Ian bet him fifty bucks he couldn’t stay on for five minutes, but - ’

  ‘One of you rode the camel?’

  ‘Zorba was gunna. I mean he was game. But then that old bat showed up.’

  ‘Mrs Renfrew? What did you do then?’

  ‘We left.’

  ‘All together?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  And never went back to give Zorba a chance to win his bet?’

  ‘The camel got nicked, didn’t it?’

  ‘And you swear you had nothing to do with that?’

  ‘I swear to God,’ Ben said, and clasped his hands.

  Chris let the boy’s last word hang in the air for a few seconds before remarking, ‘Fifty dollars is a lot of money.’

  ‘Not for Zorb. His parents are rolling in it.’

  ‘What about Ian? Where would he have got the cash if he’d lost the bet?’

  Ben shrugged.

  ‘Who was the fourth boy?’

  ‘Rasch,’ Ben said reluctantly.

  ‘Raschid Abouzeid?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The others gave him grass and butterscotch, and Zorba was prepared to ride him. What did you do?’

  ‘I’ve gotta go now. Really.’

  ‘All right, Ben. I’ll have to talk to your friends, but I won’t say I’ve spoken to you. I’ll say I worked it out from the descriptions Mrs Renfrew gave me.’

  ‘She can’t talk!’

  ‘You’re right about that, but she draws a mean picture.’

  Chris gave the boy half an hour’s breathing space, during which time he made notes while the conversation was fresh in his mind.

  He paused in the doorway of the caravan park office, nodding hello to Penny McIntyre, seeing that she was expecting him, and that she would take her son’s side if and when sides needed to be taken. Chris respected Penny for this. He would have thought less of her if it had been otherwise.

  ‘Come in, Chris,’ she said. ‘Ben’s told me about your little chat.’

  If there was a sting in the end of this, Chris chose to ignore it. He pulled a chair out from the wall and sat down.

  Penny offered tea, returning with a tray covered with a small white cloth, and delivering what were clearly rehearsed lines. ‘I imagine it’s thirsty work, bailing up young lads on their way home from school.’

  ‘I didn’t bail him up, Penny.’

  ‘Ben wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘I’m not saying he did.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘It was most likely a bit of harmless mischief, up there at the paddock. But the timing - a group of boys messing around with the camel, then he disappears.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence.’

  ‘What did Ben tell you about it?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean nothing till today. He said they went to watch that girl trainer, but she wasn’t there.’

  ‘Did he tell you Ian Lawrey bet Zorba Kostandis fifty dollars that he couldn’t stay on for five minutes?’

  Penny chose not to answer straight away. After a few moments, she said carefully, ‘Nobody rode the camel. If you had kids yourself, you’d understand.’

  ‘If Zorba had won the bet, where do you think Ian would have got the money to pay him?’

  Penny frowned. She knew the Lawreys as well as he did, how the mother’s health was poor, how strict the father was, how their struggle to bring up four kids on a labourer’s wage had been made immeasurably more difficult by Phil Lawrey’s accident.

  It was Chris’s opinion that Ian would have stolen the money, and he knew that Penny thought so too.

  He thanked her for the tea and said goodbye. He did not want to front up to Ian Lawrey’s parents, much less Zorba’s and Raschid’s. The Greek family he knew: they’d lived in the town for longer than his own, arriving as fishermen in the mid 1800s, with branches quickly becoming established in local businesses. Zorba’s grandfather had started a hardware chain. Many of the Kostandises had married Greeks and every New Year they had a big party in the park above the bay.

  Raschid’s family were rece
ntly arrived. Chris had been surprised when Ben had named him as one of the four. He hoped the other boys wouldn’t take their punishment of Ben too far. But it wasn’t to be helped. He had to talk to them.

  The Kostandises lived in one of the town’s most expensive streets, in a two-storey bluestone house overlooking the sea. It had been one of his mother’s favourites. She’d often told him how she used to take him for walks in his pusher along that street, to look at the houses and gardens. These stories had embarrassed him, but during the year before she died, he’d often taken her back there; it was still her favourite walk. When she’d grown too weak for walking, he’d driven her in his car, and sat with his eyes half closed while she kept up a kind of monologue; listing plants, noting renovations.

  No one answered his knock on the door and there were no cars in the driveway.

  Ian Lawrey was out the front of his house, playing cricket with his younger brothers. He stopped as soon as he saw Chris pull up, and began to walk away, his red-gold hair sticking out at odd angles.

  Three small boys watched while Chris caught up with Ian, who half turned and glanced back nervously. Chris understood that he was worried because his father was inside. Phil Lawrey had been off work since he fell off some scaffolding on a building site. A man with three broken ribs and a broken ankle must be getting pretty bored by now; and the man had a temper.

  ‘We’ll stay out here,’ Chris said. ‘Keep going with your game.’

  Ian took the cricket ball from his smallest brother, who’d been holding it with both hands, as though entrusted with a treasure.

  Once Ian had bowled, and a kaleidoscope of small legs had followed the ball, Chris asked, ‘So whose idea was it to go to the camel paddock?’

  ‘We never - ’

  ‘Now Ian, that won’t do.’

  Ian frowned, but had command of himself. ‘It was mine,’ he said.

  ‘I must say I think the bet was a dumb idea.’

  Ian pursed his lips together, getting ready for another denial.

  ‘Where were you going to get the money if Zorba won?’

  ‘From my savings.’

  They caught each other’s eyes, then Ian looked away.