Through a Camel's Eye

by Dorothy Johnston

  Chris said he would get statements typed for all three of them to sign. Zorba kept fingering the phone in his pocket, and Chris knew that he was itching to get away and call his brother, perhaps seeing Theo as a last ally against his mother’s wrath. The boy looked unhappy now, annoyed, but still not sorry. Maybe when he was facing a magistrate he might, but somehow Chris doubted it.

  It was well over an hour before Chris was able to turn his attention to Ian. He was glad to see that Anthea had produced sandwiches, and the boy had eaten. He munched cheese and tomato on brown bread while Anthea told him that Riza was safely back in his paddock with Julie fussing over him, and that the horse float that had been used to bring him was waiting at the Erwins.

  ‘I’d like a word with the driver. Let him know that, will you?’

  Chris wiped his mouth and looked at Ian. He knew the boy would cop at least one hiding from his father. He could talk to Phil Lawrey himself, but would have to be careful, in case this made it worse.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘when did Zorba tell you that he had the camel?’

  ‘He never - ’ Ian began, but Chris cut him off.

  ‘I’ve got a full confession from his brother. So no more denials.’

  Ian licked a stray breadcrumb from the corner of his mouth. ‘Zorba reckoned he had the camel, but he wouldn’t tell me where. He reckoned I had to give him a hundred bucks because he’d won the bet.’

  ‘A hundred?’

  ‘He said that snitching the camel was worth more than riding him. At least twice as much he said.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘I said I’d already given him twenty and how did I know he was telling me the truth.’

  And?’

  ‘He said just give him the hundred and he’d bring Riza back and that would be the proof.’

  ‘Did you guess where Riza was?’

  ‘I thought of Theo’s farm. But I didn’t want to ring and ask him in case I was wrong and in case - ’

  When Ian’s voice trailed away, Chris finished his sentence for him. ‘You didn’t want your parents finding out about the bets. Did Zorba threaten to tell them?’

  Ian was silent in response to this. Chris said, ‘Where did you think you’d get a hundred dollars?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ Ian said.

  The rest of the story came out, at first haltingly, then in a rush, how Ian had borrowed a metal detector from his boss and scoured the beach for coins, all the time hoping for the bonanza of a wedding ring. His boss had lent him the metal detector before, and didn’t ask questions. He knew that practically all of Ian’s pay was given to his mother. But by the end of a whole weekend’s searching, he’d barely ten dollars worth of coins.

  ‘When I told - told Zorb I couldn’t raise the money, he said make it fifty and he’d call it quits.’

  ‘Or he’d tell your father?’

  ‘He said I’d get into even more trouble if the camel never came back.’

  Chris looked grim. He thought it likely that Theo would have kept Riza. There was a risk he’d be caught returning him, and he doubted whether Zorba would have confessed to his brother how much Ian knew. Once Riza was on his property, Theo would most probably have reasoned that it was better to sit tight and hold onto what might be a valuable animal once he was fully grown.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Ian rode home. Chris had offered to speak to his father, but the boy said no. After her initial shock, Zorba’s mother would return to being protective of her sons, keen to shift as much of the blame as she could onto the others, to make Riza’s theft part of a game that had got out of hand.

  When Chris arrived at the Erwins, he discovered that, not only had the driver of the horse float been fed and looked after, but there was practically a party going on. The driver proved to have a tricksy, wicked tongue; waves of laughter met Chris at the door. Julie was there, a different Julie, glowing and carefree. She rushed up to Chris and hugged him.

  ‘You haven’t left your baby all alone?’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s gone to sleep.’ This was Julie and Frank both speaking at once.

  ‘I’m going back there soon!’

  Julie ducked her head and made a face, then hugged Frank too. Chris recalled how he’d suspected the farmer, who’d paid him back by causing that ‘accident’ on the Ocean Road.

  ‘Look at him. That’s the second time I’ve asked you, Blackie. Do you want some dinner?’

  Chris accepted with thanks. He was glad that no one asked him about the Kostandis family. He did not want to talk about them, and even less about Ian. He’d have to see Ben and Raschid in the morning, and the three sets of parents.

  Chris would have been happy to put his head down on the table and close his eyes, or better still, go home and collapse into bed; but there was too much nagging at him, too much unresolved. He satisfied himself that the driver would return the trailer the next day - Frank had offered the man a bed for the night - and took his leave.

  He hoped a walk would clear his head. He felt a sudden need to feel the cool night air on his face, but he didn’t want to go anywhere near the sand dunes or the beach. That side of town felt infected somehow, as though not only had Margaret Benton’s body been buried there, however briefly, but that he had seen it, touched it, smelt it. Death had its fingers in him and would not let him rest.

  Chris drove the long way home, and then, finding himself within a stone’s throw of Anthea’s flat, decided on impulse to call in.

  Anthea answered the door as though she’d been expecting someone else, but recovered immediately and smiled.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked, leading the way to the kitchen.

  ‘At the Erwins. I was thinking - I could do with a walk - ’

  Chris let his suggestion hang in the air, aware of how odd it must sound.

  Anthea half turned and looked at him over her shoulder. ‘Such a long day,’ she said. ‘And you’re still not recovered. Congratulations, by the way.’

  ‘To you too.’

  ‘To us. A celebratory glass of wine? Or would you rather coffee?’

  ‘How about a walk first?’

  ‘Okay.’ Anthea made an admonitory face. ‘A short one.’

  She slipped on a jacket and put a small silver torch in the pocket. Chris noted with approval, as he had before, how everything about his assistant was neat, each of her movements fitted to the task at hand. He was aware also that this care, this composure, made it hard to know what she was thinking, but, with a spurt of optimism, decided that this didn’t matter. They had time to learn each other’s ways, make allowances for each other’s shortcomings.

  Chris recalled, with something of a shock, his resolution while walking along the Murray - could it have been as recently as yesterday? He could resign, or take extended leave. He could tell Anthea right now that this was his intention. But he had to nail Jack Benton first.

  Chris smiled to himself in the dark, realising that Anthea had not spoken for some time. He heard a panting sound and understood that it came from him.

  Anthea took his arm. By unspoken consent, they started to go back. Chris wanted to talk, but felt exhausted. If he confessed to Anthea how little he’d done with his life, would she mock him gently, or offer him a sympathetic hearing which was worse than mockery? He was glad of the dark.

  ‘I only hope there’s something in that horse trailer,’ he said. ‘A bit of blood, or - ’

  Torchlight played over the uneven ground, accentuating dips and rises scarcely visible in daylight. Chris was once more overcome by the sensation, more powerful this time, of being close to a dead body. He shuddered and gagged, imagining he was the murderer, returning for his dead wife, his mind busy with how to carry her down the path to the road. He occupied himself with this, noting the wider places where he might stop to rest for a second or two, how to avoid making it obvious that some sort of load had been hauled down the dune; not that he expected anybody to connect that with his wife’s dis
appearance, having already decided that the river bank would be her permanent burial place.

  He came to with a jolt, realising that Anthea was holding him upright.

  The celebratory glass of wine wasn’t mentioned. He said he’d get himself home, that he’d be all right.

  Chris lay in bed, but, as he’d feared, was unable to sleep. A great deal remained to be done, not the least of which was tracing Margaret Benton’s movements from the moment when Peter Drayson had seen her running along Hesse Street. If only he could find a witness who’d seen Margaret and Jack together after that; better still, seen them quarrelling. Of course, what would really sew the case up would be finding traces of Margaret’s blood or clothing fibres in the trailer. But for these results he’d have to wait. And they might not be there.

  He had no reason to suspect that Theo Kostandis would tamper with what evidence there might be, or shield Benton, who was, after all, nothing more to him than a man who’d rented one of his horse floats. But still, Chris had left nothing to chance. He’d stayed at the farm until a police vehicle arrived to tow the trailer to the lab and he’d kept it in his sights till then. Theo had looked on with a worried frown. Benton might have swept the trailer, even hosed it down, but he needed to bury the body quickly and get the trailer out of Swan Hill before dawn.

  What had Benton done during the daylight hours, given that he would have waited until dark before fetching the body? Sunset at that time of year was around 8.45 and it stayed light for at least a good half hour after that. He may have pulled in with the horse float somewhere off the highway and slept for a few hours. Chris tried to imagine, and couldn’t, how sleep might come to a man who’d bashed his wife to death. And how had he cleaned the blood off his clothes and hands, before turning up to hire the trailer? A swim in the sea would have done the job. Chris was willing to bet that, while Margaret lay in a temporary, shallow grave, Jack had plunged into the surf.

  THIRTY

  Anthea woke to cold, wind-driven rain and a freezing southerly. She opened her bedroom curtains, checked the time, then fetched her spare doona from the cupboard, snuggled underneath the extra warmth and tried to go back to sleep.

  By ten o’clock, Chris, looking tired but determined, was leading the way along the path into the dunes. He was wearing a heavy fisherman’s raincoat and sou’wester. He’d lent Anthea a spare one, dismissing the coat she’d brought as a ‘bit of fluff’ and laughing when she’d produced her umbrella.

  When Anthea suggested that maybe they should wait until the wind had died down, he dismissed this idea as well. They reached the spot where Julie had found the cardigan, and Chris began to pace in widening circles.

  Anthea felt superfluous and cross. She watched her boss’s face, what she could see of it under the sou’wester. He looked both ill and oblivious of her. He ought to be at home in bed.

  She reminded herself that Chris had grown up with one foot in Bass Strait. These sudden, vicious throwbacks to winter, that in Melbourne were cushioned by buildings, and by the habits and layers of a city, were normal to him. Perhaps he even enjoyed them.

  They couldn’t search the whole of the sandhills, particularly not in this weather. She thought that maybe Chris was going mad, and wondered, now that Julie was better, if there wasn’t a kind of madness that floated about under the surface of country towns, and every now and again fixed itself on someone. When would it be her turn?

  Chris glanced at Anthea, whose face was set in an expression of endurance. He knew she wouldn’t complain aloud, and that she would follow whatever instructions he gave her. This certainty surprised him. It hadn’t been there when she was new to the district and the job. He could not have said exactly what had made the change, whether her training had been solid enough, sound enough, to emerge intact after those first weeks of turning up her nose at everything - emerged like good, solid scaffolding under a flaky exterior.

  He remembered that Saturday he’d called her out, instructed her to meet Julie Beshervase, how she hadn’t complained, even though she’d obviously been anxious and upset. Now she would trudge along in the rain until he said, ‘Enough’. You could call it training if you wished, or loyalty, or a sense of duty. The quality pleased him, whatever name he gave it.

  Chris heard a noise behind him. He turned and saw Anthea pointing to the right. The rain had caused a small area of subsidence where the path made a sharp turn. Tea-tree branches had been broken, though not recently, and the ground under them had sunk in a rough rectangle. They made their way over to it. Chris didn’t think Benton would have wasted time digging down to any great depth. His mind would already have been working on how to get the body away after dark.

  Chris bent down and studied the hollow on his hands and knees, then took a trowel out of his coat pocket and began lifting samples, some from the centre, some from around the edges. Rain dashed his eyes, but still he searched, as carefully as he could, for some sign that a body had been buried there. Rain got in between his hat and the collar of his coat. He felt it trickle down his back. His trouser legs below the coat were streaked with grimy sand. He glanced at Anthea again, working on the opposite side of the ‘grave’. Her hat hid her face, but her hands looked bloodless, freezing. He’d offered her gloves when they started out, but his were far too big. He felt a spurt of irritation that she’d come so poorly prepared, but almost immediately this was replaced by the acknowledgement that it wasn’t her fault.

  Chris wiped a hand across his eyes and decided that they’d taken enough samples. Reluctantly, he accepted that there was nothing in the sandy soil but twigs and leaves, nothing, at least, that he could see with his naked eye.

  He led the way back, Anthea falling in behind him. All the way down, he thought about death, as though each step was taking him closer to his own, which was true, theoretically, but what he felt had nothing to do with theory. It was a trick of the harsh conditions perhaps, but he couldn’t get the sight of Anthea’s white hands out of his mind. The world had gone topsy-turvy and would never be the right way up again. He felt as if Anthea’s hands belonged to the corpse whose traces they were seeking, and told himself the waking nightmare was his illness catching up with him. He’d pushed himself too hard for a man with glandular fever, and this was the result.

  Benton would be wet after he’d buried Margaret, having just come from washing himself in the ocean. He’d be wearing swimming trunks, his blood-stained clothes and shoes wrapped in a towel. He would fold the lot into a plastic bag to be dumped in a public garbage bin once he was well away from Queenscliff. He would examine his hands and feet and the backs of his legs carefully, before he climbed into the Landcruiser, then, not taking any chances, place another towel, to be discarded in its turn, on the driver’s seat.

  He would be shivering slightly, from excitement, not from cold. By now he would have a plan clear in his mind, and the events of the next few days would turn out pretty much as he had scripted them. No witnesses would come forward to say they’d seen his four-wheel drive pulling a horse float. His arrival home without his wife would not be noted. The police would listen to his story that Margaret had set off to do some shopping and had not returned. He would allow the inference that she’d left him to emerge and be built on. He would act the part of a deserted husband well. The police, not necessarily believing him, would be unable to prove his story false.

  Chris compared himself with officers of his rank who worked in large city stations, where the detectives were housed in the same building as the uniformed men and women. From time to time he would have been roped in to assist with homicides. Procedures would have become familiar. His supervisor had tried to talk him into coming back. Chris had used his mother as an excuse, though he hadn’t seen it that way at the time. His supervisor had argued with him, pointing out that there were other considerations, that he needed to challenge and to stretch himself. But Chris had had enough of such talk.

  He wondered what had happened to that supervisor. He’d heard,
a few years back, that she’d retired. Of all the senior officers he’d come across, she was the one he’d have liked to talk to about his predicament, the one who struck him as most likely to listen and to understand. Had she been thinking of herself as well, when she’d advised him to take risks? Perhaps the jumping and the risk-taking - or the failure to - had been in her past. She was divorced and had no children. Back then, she’d seemed to him quite old, but she’d probably been no older than her middle forties.

  Chris had almost forgotten that Anthea, his flesh and blood assistant, was trudging along behind him. He thought of the Murray at night, the way light was reflected in the river, its two banks side by side. For now he need do nothing more than contemplate the change that this body of water had brought about inside him. He would visit Camilla again. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt that Camilla had more to tell him - not tell, of course - something important to convey.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Anthea offered to drive the samples to the lab herself. Chris, after looking blank for a moment, murmured an agreement, then settled down to type his report.

  With the address noted down, the samples next to her on the passenger seat, Anthea turned onto the highway, wind at her back, windscreen wipers batting at the rain. She decided to think of herself as a courier, nothing more. It was unorthodox, but in view of all that happened over recent weeks, hardly remarkable.

  Her cargo was precious, but if a semi-trailer hit her and it got spread all over the highway, along with her body parts, more samples could be dug up and sent. Instead of upsetting her, Anthea found a kind of backhanded comfort in this ghoulish picture, in the reminder of her own mortality.

  Her neighbour’s car had been in the driveway when she’d called by her flat to change into a clean uniform. Anthea had delayed for a few moments, watching him carrying his kayak as though it weighed no more than a thimble. He’d tied it onto the roof racks without haste. She pictured him paddling in the rain. He was certainly determined, if not a little mad? Par for the course, she thought. Maybe everyone in Queenscliff was a nutter.