The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘You obviously took pains not to be seen or heard. No lights, dark clothing, a cloudy night.’ Chris felt glad he’d checked the weather.

  Francesca acknowledged this with a small, indifferent nod.

  ‘Let’s assume for a minute that you didn’t give yourselves away, or not in time for a welcoming party to be in position on the beach. You must have talked about who it might have been. Bobby’s name must have come up.’

  ‘We accused each other. Hard words were exchanged.’

  Chris couldn’t help admiring Francesca’s turn of phrase, the way she was determined not to let pride in democratic methods get in the way of accuracy.

  He couldn’t see her as a killer; she could, however, be shielding someone else. Francesca would possibly consider this her duty, and it was quite within her scope. But shield a murderer, and a child murderer at that? His judgement of nurses was way off if that’s what this woman was doing. And kill Bobby because he’d got wind of their plans and told the soldiers? It was impossibly far-fetched.

  There remained the fourth member of the group, Alex, who’d been sceptical about Bobby’s motives, though Sef had rejected the word.

  When Chris asked about this, Francesca had her answer ready. Alex had raised some misgivings, which had been discussed. Alex had come round to agreeing that making friends with Bobby and allowing him to share their picnic wouldn’t do any harm.

  ‘Alex didn’t want to invite Bobby to eat with you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But he didn’t, all the same.’

  This time, Francesca let it go. She said, ‘They met out on the water, Peter, Sef and Bobby.’

  ‘Where were you and Alex?’

  They’d been a fair way behind. Chris guessed that Bobby had chosen the most likely couple to approach. It was also possible he’d been given his instructions. Chris recalled Peter and his ex-girlfriend at the Esplanade, who’d probably been mistaken in believing they had not been recognised.

  ‘So Bobby came back with Sef and Peter. Where did he leave his kayak?’

  ‘On the beach.’

  ‘Making it clear that he intended paddling home. Did you ask him where he’d come from?’

  ‘Peter and Sef might have. I didn’t.’

  ‘You weren’t curious?’

  ‘I was thinking of other things.’

  ‘The action? You would have been wanting to discuss it.’

  Francesca hesitated before nodding. If the line of questioning was making her uncomfortable, she showed it only by this small hesitation.

  ‘Inviting Bobby to share your picnic meant you couldn’t talk.’

  ‘He was hungry. He ate as though he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks.’

  ‘That must have made you curious about him. Did you ask him where he lived?’

  ‘I work in a hospital. I see kids with broken bones, cigarette burns, babies who’ve been raped.’

  Chris nodded gravely. ‘But you did ask Bobby about his family.’

  ‘He said he had two brothers and an older sister.’

  ‘What about his parents?’

  ‘I don’t recall that he said anything about them. He didn’t stay with us for long. He shared our food, then said he had to go.’

  ‘He walked down to the beach and got into his kayak?’

  ‘What else would he have done?’

  ‘Did you see which way he went once he was on the water?’

  ‘Towards Queenscliff.’

  Which was also the direction of Swan Island, Chris reminded himself. Bobby would steer clear of the island, which didn’t mean he wasn’t being watched by someone on it.

  ‘Whose idea was it to give Bobby money?’

  ‘Mine. Bobby was pleased. He said he’d buy something for his brothers.’

  ‘Something?’

  Francesca fixed Chris with her level stare and said, ‘I thought that was his business. I’m sorry, but I’m really bushed. I need to get some sleep.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Chris and Anthea took their time over focaccia and coffee, having chosen an outside table in a narrow, busy street.

  They ignored the stares of passers-by. You’d think they’d never seen a copper in uniform before, Chris said crossly to himself, rubbing at a patch of grease with his paper serviette. Yet he knew there was something different about him; he not only felt different, but there was something subtly different in his appearance, and Anthea’s as well. They were both on duty, and not. They were acting on their own behalf, for which they might have to pay a hefty price.

  Did Anthea consider it was worth it? He hadn’t asked her outright. In the unforgiving noon light, she looked exhausted and determined.

  She ignored the marks on the table and concentrated on her meal, but took only tiny mouthfuls before pushing her plate away.

  Chris did not feel hungry either; his coffee tasted gritty and unpleasant.

  He looked up to ask Anthea what she’d made of Francesca.

  ‘I thought she was telling the truth.’

  ‘In every particular?’

  ‘In every particular she knows about, yes.’

  ‘Which is not to say that Bobby didn’t approach one of the others on his own.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Money. Mischief. Both.’

  ‘But not Francesca,’ Anthea said.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Chris agreed.

  ‘Peter, then,’ said Anthea. ‘That might explain the guilt.’

  Anthea was walking on thin ice — a good expression that. It occurred to Chris that his assistant would go her own way, no matter what he did or thought. Strange that it had taken him so long to realise that. He could try and shield her from the consequences. Perhaps she believed that she could do the same for him.

  Chris thought of the life that Olly had been carving out, and the life that Anthea had been making with him. Even if Olly were innocent and cleared of blame, would they ever be able to pick up the pieces? He realised Anthea had her own answer to this question, and that it was no.

  Alex Mellion was the father of the two whose bikes they’d noted, the only member of the group with children.

  Chris wondered if having children of his own might have made Alex less likely to be taken in by Bobby. They hadn’t been in the young man’s company for more than a few minutes when he thought he had his answer.

  Alex’s energetic, tousle-haired daughters were playing a game outside the living-room window. From the way their voices rose, Chris guessed it wouldn’t be long before the game turned into an argument.

  Judging by Alex’s frown and lifted chin, he thought so too. He moved over to the window and spoke sharply to them.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ Chris said when Alex returned to face them.

  He could have insisted that they come back another time, but it struck Chris that Alex wasn’t a man who put off unpleasant tasks. It also struck him that Alex would never have done what Peter Aaronson had, and come knocking on his door.

  They must have worked out what approach to take with the police; if all had gone to plan, they would have been arrested for trespassing, at the very least. Now that approach, whatever it had been, was redundant. If he and Anthea were flying blind, then so were these anti-war protesters. Chris thought it ironic that he might have been the officer to arrest them in the first instance, had they made it to the generators on Swan Island; after that the matter would have been swiftly taken out of his hands.

  Alex stared at Chris, his expression stern. ‘I never saw Bobby after our last practice off Edward Point. I had no idea he planned to double-cross us — which I don’t believe he could have, by the way.’

  ‘Why were you against involving him?’ Chris asked mildly.

  Alex replied without pausing to think. ‘Bobby was clever, acutely observant, and accepted no authority apart from his own.’

  Yes, Chris thought, and you know where it got him. But he was not about to contradict anything Alex
said. He folded his hands on his knees and waited, guessing that whatever Alex was expecting from him, it would not be silence.

  ‘We had a task,’ Alex said finally. ‘I’m utterly against the war and ashamed of my country’s involvement in it. Our action was intended to highlight the training of the SAS, who use the skills they learn on Swan Island to kill Afghanis. We couldn’t allow ourselves to be side-tracked into some kind of half-baked social work.’

  ‘You were in Afghanistan yourself,’ Chris said.

  Alex threw him an angry look which told Chris that his guess was right.

  He thought it odd that none of the others had hinted that Alex was an Afghan vet. Perhaps they assumed that he already knew.

  The children’s quarrel was forgotten. Their voices seemed to come from far away.

  Chris said, ‘Bobby knew. You told him.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  Anthea, who’d been sitting very still, took up the question. ‘It was why Bobby agreed to help you. He admired soldiers. They were heroes to him.’

  Alex shrugged. Chris said, ‘You knew the trainees on the island. Not so long ago, you were one of them.’

  ‘Not this lot.’

  ‘The group who were waiting for you on the beach?’

  ‘I don’t know who they were.’

  ‘Peter described them to you. He watched them at the Esplanade.’

  ‘I tried to talk him out of going.’

  ‘Because you knew they’d pick him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? He was just a young man having a drink with his girl at a pub.’

  ‘I was one of them, as you said. And I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Peter is?’

  ‘Naive.’

  ‘Maybe the soldiers at the pub that day were tipped off.’

  ‘Who by?’

  Bobby was the obvious answer. ‘You tell me,’ Chris said.

  ‘Bobby wasn’t there that day. Peter didn’t see him.’

  ‘He wasn’t in the beer garden, but he could have been somewhere else in the hotel. He could have recognised Peter and let the soldiers know.’

  Alex frowned. It was clear to Chris that he’d wondered about this himself.

  There was another way of looking at it, or perhaps the same way taken a step further. Alex had guessed Bobby was using them, and it had made him angry. How angry? Chris wondered. Alex had disdained to have it out with the other protestors, whom he thought of as amateurs. He’d worked out his own way of getting back at Bobby.

  ‘You sound as though you expected your protest to fail.’

  ‘I didn’t expect —’

  ‘Why did you go ahead with it? Why were you involved at all?’

  ‘Because I hate the war.’

  Alex’s brown eyes opened wide enough to swallow all the water in Swan Bay. His friends had died, his expression said, or come back wrecks and drug addicts. Wasn’t that enough?

  Anthea took up the questioning. ‘Bobby joined you for a picnic. When asked about his family, he mentioned brothers and a sister. He was hungry and the consensus seems to have been that there could be no harm in sharing your food with him.’

  Alex nodded. His anger seemed to have abated. He looked wary, but controlled.

  ‘Whose decision was it to ask him to join you again?’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Bobby met the four of you. It was dark, or nearly dark. You paddled half way to Swan Island. Bobby led the way.’

  ‘He didn’t — look, if you must know, I thought it was a dumb idea. I was over-ruled.’

  ‘Dumb?’

  ‘We didn’t need an escort, particularly not a child.’

  ‘So whose idea was it?’

  ‘Peter’s or Sef’s. They came up with it together.’

  ‘I think it was Bobby’s idea.’

  ‘What difference does it make now?’

  You’re a poor liar, Chris thought, despite being more experienced than those two young men.

  Alex said angrily, ‘We spent a couple of hours paddling around one evening, that’s all.’

  ‘And since you’d concluded that whatever “help” Bobby was offering, he was offering for payment, you believed it ended there.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned it did. I never saw Bobby, or heard from him again.’

  ‘How did you work out where you were going to land?’

  ‘We had maps. Peter’s got them now. We needed a beach of sorts. It wasn’t a difficult decision to make.’

  ‘And the security cameras?’

  ‘We knew we wouldn’t be able to avoid them. All we wanted was to get to one of the generators and switch it off. It was a simple enough aim. It could have worked.’

  Anthea’s voice was pitched low. ‘Did you ever meet or speak to Bobby on your own?’

  Alex looked at Anthea for a long moment before he asked, ‘How would I have done that?’

  ‘I’m not asking how you arranged it. I’m asking if you did.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did any of the others?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware.’

  ‘But you have your suspicions?’

  ‘No,’ Alex said again, looking straight at Chris this time.

  ‘Do you like dogs?’ Chris asked.

  Alex relaxed and almost smiled. ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘But you don’t have one of your own.’

  ‘My wife’s allergic to cat and dog hair.’

  ‘Did Bobby ever mention a man called Olly Parkinson?’

  ‘The sergeant went on at me about that. No.’

  ‘Did Bobby tell you someone was looking after his dog for him?’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Making conversation.’

  ‘Bobby didn’t make conversation. He didn’t behave like a normal boy.’

  ‘Some children grow up fast,’ Chris agreed. ‘You must have seen that in Afghanistan.’

  ‘I did. Will that be all? I answered all the sergeant’s questions. I don’t see why I should answer any more of yours.’

  You would have been a match for Shaw, Chris thought. Probably, after five minutes in his company, you felt like punching him. If you had, Shaw would have arrested you, so it’s to your credit that you didn’t.

  NINETEEN

  ‘I know of people who are allergic to cat fur, not so much to dogs,’ said Anthea, as they walked back to Chris’s car.

  ‘Oh, I think he made that up, don’t you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To confuse us and amuse himself.’

  ‘You think Alex killed Bobby?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How did you know he was in Afghanistan?’ There was only a hint of reproach in Anthea’s voice, but it was audible enough.

  ‘I guessed and he confirmed it.’

  ‘Why didn’t any of the others mention it?’

  ‘Perhaps he asked them not to. No, that doesn’t sound like Alex. Perhaps they’re trying to protect him.’

  Anthea got into the driver’s seat. She concentrated on the traffic for a few moments, before asking, ‘Could he have killed Bobby?’

  ‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? Logistics. Knowing Bobby’s and Olly’s routine, knowing where Max’s lead was kept and being able to get into the cottage. Difficult when you’re living in Melbourne.’

  Anthea agreed that it was.

  She busied herself getting them onto the Westgate Bridge. Once that was accomplished, she said, ‘Alex lost his temper, and he’s regretted it ever since.’

  Chris thought that perhaps it had been wrong for him even to float the possibility. Anthea would clutch at it because it led away from Olly. Had she tried to contact him? Chris felt he couldn’t ask, and he was suddenly uncertain whether, if he did, she would tell him the truth.

  ‘Francesca would understand where Alex is coming from, but not those two boys,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Chris agreed. ‘They’re out of their depth.’

  ‘But Francesca w
ouldn’t shield him if she believed he’d killed a child.’

  Chris nodded. He reflected on what it meant to say that someone was ‘out of his depth’. It seemed an inadequate description of Peter and Sef, but brought him back, inevitably it seemed, to the shallow water of Swan Bay. At low tide, you could almost wade across it.

  ‘Stellar and his group must hate Alex,’ Anthea said. ‘To them he’d be a traitor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why Alex put up with Bobby at all, why he didn’t piss him off.’

  ‘Maybe he was out-voted. You heard what the others said about consensus. But there’s something — I’m not sure of the right word — anarchic about Alex. Or perhaps just contradictory. On the one hand, he’s decided that he wants to make his protest as part of a group, though, as you point out, he has little in common with the others. On the other hand, he’s driven by anger and just wants to lash out.’

  ‘His poor wife. And daughters.’

  ‘They must put up with a lot. How can you bear driving in this traffic?’

  Chris looked at Anthea along his shoulder. The lights of a passing truck illuminated both their faces. Anthea smiled, a pale, sad smile, but a smile nevertheless.

  Chris made himself comfortable in the passenger seat, shut his eyes and wished he’d had a chance to get Alex’s wife on her own. But he didn’t believe she’d talk about her husband behind his back.

  He knew the importance of filling in the background of anyone who was under investigation, at the same time acknowledging that he and Anthea lacked both the authority and means. The failure of his phone to ring all day made him as good as certain that Peter Aaronson’s visit had been noted, which meant their trips to Torquay and Melbourne had been noted too. All very well for Anthea to say she didn’t think they were being followed. What experience did either of them have that could make them a match for professional spies?

  Chris could not conceive of policing in a context where nearly all the people he came into contact with, whom he had to assess, were strangers. He tried not to conclude that what he’d thought of as an asset was now a limitation.

  He opened his eyes as they came to a sudden halt. Another red light. Once more he acknowledged — this time it came to him with a feeling that was physically uncomfortable, like indigestion — that his town was changing, and that what had happened at the railway yard would change it even more. The importance of Swan Island as a training facility was under threat; there’d been too many botched exercises, too many stuff-ups. If the protestors had succeeded, it would have been yet another embarrassment. Some kind of reckoning, so far as the island went, had been coming for a long time.