Anthea said goodbye, wondering if she should have offered to drive him. He wasn’t well enough to make the trip alone. But she knew that, if she offered, Chris would refuse point blank. And someone had to remain on duty at the station.
Returning to the empty rooms, Anthea realised something else: she didn’t want to follow Chris into the downward career spiral his impulse was about to lead to. She had come to respect, even to admire her boss, but she had an instinct for self preservation too.
She kept expecting Chris to call; or worse, to be told there’d been an accident. She remembered the way his hands had grasped the wheel, the tension in his arms and shoulders as he’d said goodbye. A contrary impulse surfaced then, making her itch for the chance to question Jack Benton herself, to ask without preamble where he’d gone that first morning of the new year, after Margaret had been seen running towards the church.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Chris woke the next morning with an extraordinary feeling of wellbeing. He had slept deeply, and his hands were no longer shaking. He showered in the motel’s tiny shower cubicle and went in search of breakfast. It was too early for any of the cafés in McCallum Street to be open, but, after walking for ten minutes, he found an all-night service station and ordered sausages and eggs. As he ate, he felt the town coming to life around him, and fancied he could smell the water, though, by his calculation, the river must be over a kilometre away.
On impulse, after he had paid, he walked towards the Murray, thinking of the belief that the sea was supposed to stretch a person’s horizons and induce far-sightedness. He felt an enormous relief to be away from it. All his senses were alert. A dullness that had been at the back of his eyes, he realised, since long before he’d fallen ill, was replaced by a child’s unspoilt curiosity.
Chris almost ran the last few hundred metres, drawn by what it was not sufficient to imagine, and towards an idea that was new to him as well - a boundary of which both sides were visible and touchable, one river bank opposite another.
Across the border was a different state, with a different administration. Margaret Benton’s body had been found on the very last unstable, crumbling edge of Victoria, and for the first time Chris asked himself if this might be significant.
The trees parted and he was there, standing right above the river which flowed swiftly, green and purposeful. He looked across at New South Wales. The bank was damp and covered in leaf mould. He picked up some soil and smelt it. The smell was heavy, thick and saltless. He wondered how long it had been since he’d breathed in air that did not contain at least a hint of salt. He breathed again, taking the river air deep into his lungs.
That morning he’d be shown where Margaret’s body had been found - it was a request that had already been agreed to - but for now he was content to picture a spot very like this one. The grave would have taken only a short time to dig. Lambent light might have been enough. Of course, the body did not have to have been buried at night. But why take the risk in daylight, especially if you knew the area well and were confident of finding your way about?
Chris could not, even then, standing on the river bank, have said why it mattered so much that his and Anthea’s findings should be acknowledged in some way. He knew that only a tiny percentage of cases ended neatly like the ones on TV. Decisions had to be made and blame apportioned; but that didn’t mean the victim’s family thanked you for it. Much more frequently, friends and relatives griped behind your back, sometimes forming astonishing alliances. The griping could go on for years. It helped to know your townspeople, to be able to predict what they were, and were not, likely to get up to; but Chris admitted to himself, taking another deep breath, that over the years people he’d thought he’d known well had been capable of extraordinary surprises.
If Swan Hill had been his patch, he would have known the Benton family. If they’d lived in the district for a long time, he would have been familiar with quarrels and alliances going back several generations. He felt again the humiliation of unanswered phone messages, of the reports he’d sent off seemingly into thin air.
After this morning, he would be richer information-wise, but still, of course, without the authority to act.
Two sides to the river: a far bank that could be seen and touched. The river - river bank rather - had given up the body. Well, it was a combined effort, of rain, strong currents, and that absence of other factors which militated against a body breaking loose. At sea, these factors were many, and he knew them by heart. Not for the first time, Chris reflected on the fact that Margaret Benton had no children to mourn for her. As for her husband, well, he hoped that he would get to meet Jack Benton. He felt that he would be able to tell at a glance whether or not the man had loved his wife; he would be able to see through Benton’s lies.
Pondering all of this, Chris began walking back the way he’d come. At a T intersection, he checked his watch and took the left-hand way, instead of the right, which led to the centre of town. It was barely eight. His appointment at the station wasn’t until ten. Presumably now there would be cafés open, but he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He preferred to walk, rather than sit around and wait.
This time he looked at the buildings he was passing, not in a fever to get to the river, but with a solid sense of the river at his back, the smell of freshwater soil still on his hands. He read billboards with the vague prurience of a tourist.
One caught his eye. He hadn’t forgotten that the stud where Riza had lived for a short time was close by. Indeed, visiting the manager was on his list of things to do. But he hadn’t paid attention to exactly how far out of town the stud was, and in what direction. Eleven kilometres along the road that he was facing, the billboard said. If he got the car now, he could easily drive there for a look and be at the station in good time.
Chris started to run. A proper jogger, in shorts, T-shirt and headphones, passed him, heading towards the river. Chris hadn’t noticed a jogging track along it, but there probably was one, a cycling and jogging track combined. It was what country towns went in for these days.
Within twenty minutes, he was pulling up outside the stud. On impulse he’d booked to stay at the motel for another night. He had no intention of questioning the manager just then, assuming the manager was there and willing to be questioned. There’d be nothing worse than starting an interview and having to break off.
That Wallington was a large stud, and camels no more than a sideline, had been apparent from their website. The land was rich and green and gently sloping, not right on the river, but close to it, with at least one good-sized creek visible from the main road. Instead of driving in through the gates, Chris parked at the side. One sign advertised equestrian show-jumping, lessons for beginners, and everything in between. A smaller one was decorated with a camel and her calf.
The main buildings, stables and farmhouse, were a long way from the road, well screened by trees. Chris could make out red roofs and at one end a smoking chimney. He decided to keep walking along the road, since it was public land and he could do so without drawing attention to himself. He was aware, however, that a solitary man on foot was an oddity, and if anyone drove past him they’d probably take note and remember.
Two young camels came over to the fence to check him out, regarding him from under eyelashes so long and thick they looked as though they must be false. Chris stopped, picked some grass from his side of the fence, and held it out on the palm of his hand. He had no idea whether the principle of grass being greener on the other side applied to camels. On the whole, he thought not. They were probably smart enough to see that it was exactly the same, and not waste energy hankering after what they couldn’t reach.
These two sniffed his hand curiously, bumping each other with their hips and shoulders. Chris transferred half the grass to his left hand, and held his hands apart. The animals went on sniffing, then one nuzzled at his offering, lifting back her top lip gently to reveal a row of large, gleaming teeth.
They were relaxed and co
nfident in the presence of a human stranger. Perhaps they’d been handled regularly from birth. Chris wished he’d taken the time to ask Julie about her training, or to watch a session when he’d had the chance. So often in his life, it seemed, he found out about something good, or potentially good and valuable, only after it had been lost or spoilt. Then people came to him to complain, to demand or plead, all with the expectation that he could put right, retrieve or mend what he had never himself experienced.
He’d never expressed this difficulty to anyone, never even thought it out properly before. Of course, his life would have been very different if he’d been part of what he thought of as a normal family; if his father hadn’t died, if his mother had not become dependent on him. He’d loved his mother. That he’d never doubted. But one love had had to cover, compensate for, other kinds he’d missed.
Though he feared otherwise, Chris hoped that Riza was alive and safe with a more personal hope than he’d acknowledged until then. He swung round at the sound of a heavy vehicle approaching, and then as quickly swung back so that he was facing the fence again. It was a Toyota Landcruiser. Chris’s eyes took in the registration number with a shock of recognition. The Landcruiser pulled in through the gates, at its wheel a dark-haired, thickset man.
The camels were regarding him as seriously as though he might be part of their curriculum in the study of human behaviour. Chris felt ridiculous, with his hands stretched out and bits of grass clinging to them.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he said under his breath.
But he was glad that he’d had something to occupy himself with when the Toyota had passed him, glad that he was out of uniform and could pretend to be a tourist. There was no reason why Jack Benton should recognise him, though he was glad he’d parked on the other side of the gates and Benton had not passed his car on the way in.
Chris dropped the grass on the camels’ side of the fence and wiped his hands on his handkerchief, then drove to the police station.
His briefing was as comprehensive as he could have wished. Sergeant Fowler seemed determined to smother him with facts, and assured him repeatedly that all the points he’d raised about the Queenscliff connection had been properly considered.
It seemed irrelevant now for Chris to ask why no one had phoned him in order to tell him this, and he reminded himself that he did not want to get off on the wrong foot.
Fowler was sandy-haired, built like a rugby player. Unless invited to do so, Chris thought, you’d hesitate to call him Chook. His wide-spaced blue eyes sought Chris’s and held them, with no hint of resentment or embarrassment; but with the awareness that, in this encounter, he held all the cards.
They spoke about the black coat. Jack Benton had no recollection of his wife having left it behind in Queenscliff. The most likely explanation, Fowler said, was that she’d left it at the caravan park, and that ‘one of the boys’ had taken it to the sandhills.
Chris thought this unlikely. He said he’d seen Benton driving into the stud whose owner had sold Riza to Julie Beshervase. He would not necessarily have raised the camel theft just then; but the connection couldn’t be ignored.
Wallington was one of the best known and most prosperous studs in the Riverina, Sergeant Fowler told him, in the manner of a teacher delivering a primary school lesson. Practically everyone in Swan Hill had an association with it of one kind or another, whether it was riding lessons for their kids, or the camel rides they organised at the local show - all proceeds to charity - or even picking up a load of horse manure for the garden.
Chris repeated what Julie had said about seeing Margaret Benton at the gates, glancing at the file on Fowler’s desk as he registered the sergeant’s patience and tried to guess in advance what its limits might be. Presumably his reports were in there somewhere, in that pile of paper. He described what Julie had referred to as Margaret’s desperation as she climbed into the Landcruiser.
‘If the Beshervase girl thought she was in that bad a state, why didn’t she ring up and report it?’
Chris knew it was a reasonable question. He also knew, as Sergeant Fowler didn’t, that Julie was mentally unstable. But he did not believe that she’d been lying about the encounter at the gates. He said that the police only had Jack’s word that Margaret had gone to the supermarket on January 3. There was most of Thursday and all of Friday to account for. The drive home would have taken five hours maximum.
Fowler scratched his chin and frowned, but he didn’t contradict or interrupt, and Chris, taking heart from this, pressed on.
‘Jack and Margaret had been fighting. I think the fight started at the caravan park. He spoilt her holiday by getting into an argument and being told they had to leave.’
Two witnesses had seen her on the cliff path. Her coat had been found in the dunes. Another witness had seen her running down the main street.
Chris wanted to mention the cardigan as well, but he had not yet received the forensic report, and he knew he’d been out of line in sending it to the lab himself. Perhaps Fowler knew about this, and perhaps he didn’t.
Fowler said, ‘That Landcruiser shows plenty of signs that Mrs Benton drove around in it, but what would you expect? Look, Blackie, no one’s blaming you. No one’s saying you’ve done less than you could.’
A drum began to beat behind Chris’s eyeballs. He suppressed a cough.
‘Jack’s got a temper. He admits that. But he swears that they returned to Swan Hill together, that Margaret left to go to the supermarket, and never came back. She ran away. She took her chance and scarpered.’
‘Who killed her then?’
‘I never said it wasn’t Jack, but we haven’t got enough to charge him. We’ve turned his house upside down. As soon as we found the body and it was identified, we were up there.’
Chris forbore from pointing out that Benton had had plenty of time to get rid of any incriminating evidence.
‘What was he doing while his wife was supposedly at the supermarket?’
‘Working in the garden. He’s got a large vegetable garden with an adjoining orchard. There was a lot of work to do after even a few days away.’
Chris bit his tongue to stop himself from arguing. He forced himself to listen to what Fowler was saying, to look at him without unreasonable prejudices rising up to spoil a meeting the sergeant could end at any moment.
‘Who found the body?’
Chris knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear Fowler’s description.
‘It was kids. Kids and a dog.’ The sergeant’s voice expressed both lack of surprise and sorrow that it had been, as it so often was, children who found what they weren’t supposed to. ‘There’d been that week of heavy rain. We were all so glad of it up here.’ He managed to convey that he expected Chris to be ignorant of the drought. ‘The dog found the body. The kids had to stop him making a picnic of it.’
A crease appeared between Fowler’s eyebrows that in a couple of years would be permanent. It had fallen to him to reassure the children and their parents. He made no mention of how hard this had been. He didn’t have to. Chris could imagine the parents’ outrage; the sequence of chance events that had led to children making the discovery, and their children in particular. He could imagine, too, the suspicion with which they’d treated the police once their initial shock was over, as though the police somehow shared the responsibility for murder - keepers of the peace who had not kept it, who had allowed, instead, this horror to emerge.
Chris had felt this public hostility himself, on numerous occasions. From one second to the next, he stopped judging the young colleague sitting opposite him. Instead, he felt Fowler’s need to make an arrest as soon as possible, and his frustration that he lacked hard evidence. An arrest was necessary for the sake of those kids and their parents, for the sake of the town and in some way to make up for having left a body rotting in the river bank until a rush of water led to its exposure. The sergeant hadn’t been responsible, but he’d been made to feel as though he was.
Chris knew that he had no grounds whatever for insisting; but he was disappointed, and he was sure his disappointment showed. They talked around the periphery of the case for another ten minutes, both withdrawing by degrees. Chris was given copies of more statements to take away. Sergeant Fowler looked relieved.
Chris’s visit to the spot where Margaret Benton’s body had been found was both a pleasure and a disappointment. A pleasure in that he smelt again and tasted on his tongue the rich, black soil. Gulping in one breath after another, he turned to Sergeant Fowler and felt his face grow hot, but Fowler didn’t seem to notice. The police tape had been removed; only the churned up earth and foot and tyre prints remained to mark the interest that had once been concentrated on a few square metres of river bank. There was nothing new to be learnt from it, and Chris had known there wouldn’t be.
Margaret Benton’s grave had been a destination, a goal that had, for reasons of his own, been necessary. Standing over it, Chris understood that this had as much to do with his father’s lack of any kind of grave as with finding the woman’s killer.
He felt faint, and rested his forehead on his left hand, which was cold and damp.
When he raised his head, Fowler was looking at him with concern. He swallowed hard and felt his stomach drop, a sensation he’d never experienced with such absolute physicality before.
Stumbling over the words, he thanked the sergeant for his time. They returned to their cars. Chris sat in his and watched Fowler drive away.
It seemed to him a foolish notion then, that humans should consider they had earnt some right to shelter from the elements, when the elements were so clearly and effortlessly superior. When he’d walked along the Murray, the fact that he could see both sides had seemed to give him ballast. The ocean was too large, too filled with danger. Chris felt an immense weariness, and that his own small victories and successes were behind a veil of water, laughing at him.
Through a Camel's Eye Page 15
