True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  Teddy O’Meara walked in and threw his hat on the desk beside him. ‘I’m glad I’m going off duty. They’re burying the Warner woman today.’

  ‘You’ve been recalled for it.’

  ‘Ah shit.’

  ‘A pity the body couldn’t have been released sooner, there’s a few people out there who’ve had a chance to work up a head of steam.’

  ‘Preserve us from ranting females.’

  ‘They’ve got a point.’ Campbell stopped short of condemning fair comment.

  ‘Yeah? Warner’s lawyer’s going for provocation. I reckon he might get it, too.’

  ‘D’you happen to know whether Mrs Kendall’s coming back for the funeral?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have a clue, Sarge. I haven’t seen the lady in months.’

  ‘I gave you a copy of that last letter about her?’

  ‘Oh, yep, Daniels. The Lambton Quay sleuth. The letter’s on file.’

  ‘I thought you might have heard something. We seem to have drawn blanks all round.’

  ‘You’d be the first to know if I did. Anyway, there’s not much we can do about her while we’re here and she’s in Wellington, is there?’

  ‘If Mrs Kendall’s coming back to town we ought to know about it. She might need protection.’

  ‘Have you mentioned it to CIB?’

  ‘Well. I’m thinking about it.’

  O’Meara lifted an eyebrow. It was so light it almost disappeared into his skin. Then his face widened in a disarming smile. ‘She is a couple of sandwiches short of the full picnic, don’t you reckon?’

  ‘Sooner or later that turkey has to make a slip,’ said Campbell grimly. ‘I’d like to be there when he does.’

  O’Meara shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘You ought to get some rest before the funeral.’

  Campbell got called out after that to investigate an overnight break-in at the Blake Block School. On his way back to the station, along Blake Pass, he stopped at the filling station to look at some spanners. He knew he was dawdling, wouldn’t have tolerated it in other staff, but anything rather than the station was irresistible today. He had no special use for spanners but he thought he might eventually do a little tinkering on some old motors. Retirement again; he would have to make a decision soon.

  He listened to petrol gushing in the background while he chose a twelve-inch crescent, feeling the weight of it in his hand. The attendant took it without comment and dropped it in a container bag.

  In the background a man was sweeping the yard, bending and shuffling along like someone much older than his years. Campbell recognised him as the attendant who had been beaten up and robbed months earlier. His neck had been injured.

  ‘I thought your mate was still on compo?’

  ‘I thought your mates might have caught the bastards who did him.’ The attendant handed him a Biro to sign his credit slip.

  Driving through the Block, Campbell looked for clues, as if he could somehow sleuth the air. It occurred to him that the reason he stayed in Weyville was, in spite of all he said to the contrary, because he loved it. All his life he had heard people slamming small towns as if lesser beings lived here. His father, the Irishman, was a Dublin man; he said that the heart died before the body in places like this. Why did you stay, his son had asked him, to which his father had shaken his head and asked where else a man was to find a bite to eat to feed the hungry mouths. Which was a lie, because there were only the two boys to feed. At the weekends his father had worn string around the tops of his pants and pissed himself after he had been to the pub; during the week he worked on a factory floor. His son had disappointed him, a boy with an absence of music in his heart, he said, too quiet for his own good and a straight and narrow kind of lad at that.

  Now he knew, as he watched the town shaking itself into gear for another day, that he had always wanted to die in a place like this. There were empty streets and filling stations, motels that nobody went to any more and lawns littered with old cars and flightless wooden butterflies on houses and rusting railway tracks, and cold blue lights which lit the vacant shops at night; there were houses where people slept six to a room and beer bottles piled on the verges in this part of town, and up the road there were neat suburban boxes with clipped edges and blinds which lined up with each other right around the sides of the house and milk bottles out on the dot and hair nets and cold cream and letterboxes with gnomes on them waiting for letters that never came from children who had escaped (he thought of his wife’s son then), and there were sumptuous places like Orchard Close and Cedarwood Grove where he was now heading, and all of them he loved. For, as well, there were children playing outside the schools, and Queen Anne lace growing in the gardens, there was a library where all the attendants knew what all the borrowers read and put books aside for people, and art exhibitions where everyone who went to see the pictures understood them, home-baked bread and pot-luck dinners, flower shows and horticultural demonstrations (he and Lola went to the rose pruning at the garden by the lake once a year) and a cemetery where the dead were buried beside their relatives.

  He needed to remind himself of all of this because a scandalous killing had taken place in a town already full of random violence and it was the responsibility of the police to stop it and still it kept on. An image of a ball bouncing up and down assailed him; it hit the ground and a force propelled it upwards and if you were quick you caught it but if it eluded you it bounded off into space and you might well lose it in the undergrowth. There was no one simple way that you could keep the ball under control, but the mystery that surrounded Rose Kendall seemed to be at the heart of the problem, almost the force itself.

  He shook his head, tired. Too simple. Blame politics for everything. That was what people were doing. Only he couldn’t get it out of his head that politics was people; it was like diets and what you put in your mouth. We are what we eat, fat, thin, healthy, unhealthy. That was how it looked to him. People had done politics to themselves.

  Campbell turned the car into Cedarwood Grove, heading towards the Kendalls’. Emerging from the driveway, Teddy O’Meara’s off-duty Laser picked up speed and passed him.

  Teddy drove on, sliced to a halt as he caught sight of Campbell and did a fast U-turn.

  ‘Place looks dead quiet to me,’ he called when he was alongside Campbell. ‘I’ve checked right around, snug as a bug in a rug.’

  He gave a thumbs up, letting his motor idle. Jeffrey Campbell studied the dead windows. Trees were growing in a wild unchecked way across the driveway. Someone had collected papers from the letterbox, but items of junk mail had fallen out and were strewn along the path.

  ‘I heard you up here, Chief.’ O’Meara tapped his skull with his forefinger.

  ‘Yep, good one, Teddy.’

  ‘And I called the Newbone woman, the one who works on the paper …’

  ‘Hortense?’

  ‘The Kendalls aren’t coming. Skedaddled.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Know any details?’

  ‘Not yet.’ The young man spoke with triumph and with the pleasure of someone who has been seen to do well in such an obvious manner.

  ‘Thanks. Well done, O’Meara.’

  Campbell drove down Cedarwood Grove. Glancing back in the rear-vision mirror, he saw O’Meara hesitate, but it was only to put on sunglasses in the early morning light.

  A hearse bore down on him travelling away from the hospital. A small coffin was carried inside it. Its smallness and bareness affected him. He pulled over to the side of the road, thinking how important it was that he sort himself out before he went back to the station. After awhile it occurred to him that O’Meara had not passed him.

  When Larissa saw the line of cars winding through the hills that led to the crematorium she could not believe so many people would be coming to Basil’s funeral. The sun glinted on their roofs and fenders, and their headlights blazed on full beam in the midday light.
r />   She glanced at her mother’s stony face beside her. Katrina had not addressed anyone directly all day.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ Larissa said, to nobody in particular. She rather wished that she had let Gary come now. ‘It won’t be your scene,’ she had told him, ‘and anyway my mother doesn’t like you.’ It was getting easier and easier to be nasty to him these days, partly because he didn’t really notice. He was out of it a lot of the time or else he was away working at the greenhouse. It would have been all right if she could have asked Jason.

  Of course she could see that would have been a mistake.

  But she felt that he would have understood more about life and death. He had been very nice to her since this had happened. ‘It doesn’t matter too much, he was my half brother and I hated his father’s guts,’ she told him. But she had a feeling that it did matter, that the death of a brother could not be so easily dismissed; nor could she discount the enormous role he had played in her alienation from her mother. What lay before them both, now that Basil was dead, was a mystery that Larissa could only guess at. Maybe nothing would happen. After all, death was about nothingness, so why should she expect it to deliver solutions and answers, to her in particular.

  Her uncle, Jim Diamond, was standing on her other side. He looked puzzled too when he saw the cars coming towards them. He flicked a look at his watch. Now Larissa could see that there were family station wagons and a sprinkling of Volvos in the procession. Perhaps, after all, there were only twenty or so, but that was twenty more than they expected to come to their funeral.

  ‘We’re early,’ he said, to Ellis Hannen rather than to her.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. Perhaps we should just go in.’

  ‘The coffin’s not in place yet,’ Jim said. ‘I’ll ask the funeral director.’

  The funeral director, one of the new school with a chubby face that positively renounced lugubriousness, was looking unusually perturbed. He hurried forward to speak to Jim, drawing him to one side and whispering.

  Jim shook his head, and shrugged. ‘It’s the Warner funeral,’ he announced to Katrina when he returned. ‘They weren’t due for another half hour, but the police have had a problem with the families. Some of his turned up and her family wanted to get stuck into them plus there’s a radical group of women who went to the service and Mrs Warner’s old mother from Hawke’s Bay can’t understand what they’re doing there, so they’re coming up earlier here than they were expected.’

  ‘They all ought to migrate to the Blake Block, don’t you think? Such behaviour, we could sort them out.’ Minna was actually wearing a dress, an embroidered caftan which had seen better days, but looked as if it had been starched-up for the occasion. Her blonde hair swung against it like spun glass as she moved. Sharna was sleeping in her arms, her head against Minna’s shoulder.

  ‘They’ll just have to wait,’ said Ellis.

  ‘That’s the point, they want them to go first, so they’re not all hanging round while we have our service.’

  ‘But that’s not on.’ Minna was genuinely shocked now.

  ‘Well we’re still early, you see.’

  ‘It’s all a mix-up, I am so sorry.’ The funeral director was close to wringing his hands. ‘Special circumstances, it’s very awkward. They’ll only take a few minutes, having had their main service at the church. This is just a short committal.’ Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. ‘It would be so sad if … if your service were to suffer any disturbance. For your sakes, I am thinking of.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Katrina, speaking at last. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh thank you, Ms Diamond. So kind.’ The funeral director bobbed his head. ‘Most unusual circumstances. Most understanding. Perhaps if you would care to sit in your cars. Or I could provide a little place for you to retire to at the back of the chapel.’

  ‘We’ll stay here and watch them, thank you,’ said Katrina.

  An uneasy silence fell over the group. A small red-complexioned man in an unremarkable suit with a raincoat thrown over his arm and a briefcase in one hand had joined them, or was at least standing near to them. It was difficult to tell exactly where he had come from. His stance was distant but respectful. For all that, Larissa did not like the way he was looking at her. She was trying to work out where he fitted in when he moved towards the incoming group of mourners.

  Larissa recognised some of the local cops trying to look inconspicuous. They were a laugh really, they stood out like sore thumbs. Though O’Meara looked kind of cool, you had to give it to him, he was a bit of a dude. He did not let on that he had seen her as he walked on into the chapel. Apart from them the cremation was supposed to be private, so the mourners consisted of tearful relatives and another group whom Larissa remembered from the days when they visited her aunt’s house. Presumably classed as ‘close friends’, they appeared strung-out and desperate to the point of incoherence. Matt Decker and Nick Newbone and Harry Ryan (who looked as if he was going to faint) carried the coffin with some other men. Larissa was glad they weren’t having pallbearers; she couldn’t think who they could have got to make up the numbers.

  ‘That’s Mungo Lord,’ said Katrina, making a little darting movement in the direction of one of the pallbearers whom Larissa had not recognised on the far side.

  ‘Leave it.’ Minna put out a restraining arm. ‘Not now.’

  ‘He wouldn’t see me.’ Katrina’s voice traced acid into space.

  Mungo, preoccupied with the sorrow of the moment did not, indeed, see Katrina.

  ‘You’d think Rose Kendall would be there,’ said the reddish man with the raincoat, to Jim.

  ‘You’d think Rose Kendall would be here. She’s my sister.’ Jim’s voice was grim.

  The man swallowed, looked as if he was about to take his own pulse, Larissa thought. She wondered who was going to say first what a phoney this guy was, pretending to be one of them, when really it was like he was spying on them.

  ‘Name’s Daniels, just call me Buff,’ said the man, extending his hand to Jim.

  ‘It’s like Jim’s sister not to be here,’ her Aunty Fay said. Fay was a washed-out person who had started to cry as soon as she saw Toni Warner’s coffin topped with a spray of red hothouse carnations. Larissa tried to read the card as it was lifted out of the hearse. It said something like, ‘In memory of our beloved Toni, from the Weyville Branch of the Labour Party’: then the funeral director came back and took it off the coffin and replaced it with a similar one which was from Toni’s mother and father and children, and put the Labour Party one on the table in the foyer. Another bouquet which was as good as identical to these two remained in the hearse. The card on it read; ‘To my darling Toni, love you for ever, Lyle.’ Only no one moved to bring that inside, and Lyle, being locked in jail, was unable to deliver it himself.’

  ‘Rose always leaves things to other people,’ Fay said.

  ‘That is not exactly true,’ said Katrina, surprising them, and again silence fell over the group.

  Jim was turning to the sandy-haired man to make conversation, which was the appropriate thing in Jim’s eyes to do at a funeral, and Larissa was getting ready to denounce him as a spy when she was distracted by the sight of her own father, Paul, emerging from a V12 Jag. She watched with a kind of wonder as he sprinted across the grass towards them.

  ‘Am I too late?’ he panted.

  ‘We’ll be starting in a few minutes.’

  ‘But …’ He gaped around the group, seeing Katrina now.

  ‘My former husband,’ said Katrina loudly to Minna. Inside the chapel heads turned, mouths pursing and shushing them. ‘My son is dead,’ she said to Paul.

  ‘I heard that, gee I’m sorry, I didn’t know yours was today too. Kind of coincidence, eh.’ He ran his hand over his thinning hair, then gestured towards the service, embarrassed. ‘I thought I ought to come, you know, the firm’s gone computerised. Well. I did business with Mr Warner’s firm.’r />
  ‘Gawper,’ said Minna.

  ‘This bit’s private,’ said Larissa, ‘so you’d better come to ours.’

  As the mourners from Toni’s service filed out, a car started up in the parking lot, driving away at speed.

  ‘Applebloom,’ said Ellis Hannen. ‘I wouldn’t have gone in either if I’d been him.’

  Finally, at exactly the appointed hour, they walked into the chapel to confront the fact of Basil’s dying. Larissa had no way of knowing, of course, but she suspected that the same fire would consume both Basil’s and Toni’s misadventures.

  That night the weather changed and fog lay in dank streamers over the town. Buff Daniels, returning to Wellington, was driven off the road in his car. At first he did not believe it was happening. The following car commenced overtaking and slowed down two or three times alongside him as if the driver was uncertain, then fell back.

  Then on a shoulder of hillside the car drew level again, holding the road until an oncoming car approached, as if on a signal, and Buff drove towards the only place left for him to go, over the bank. Listening to the wheels spinning, the gathering wind whipping the sides of the gully where he had landed, and his own heart racing, he heard too the cars turning and coming back to the spot where he had gone down.

  That might have been an end of it, but a truckdriver called Ellis stopped, attracted by the unquenched beam of his headlights, and pulled him back on to the road. The cars which had pursued him accelerated off into the night. Daniels was grateful for a passion for numbers which printed them like photographs in his brain. The world was swirling around him, but when he woke up he was certain, sooner or later, he would remember.

  10

  Katrina Diamond wore black leather pants bought from an op shop and a denim jacket that Minna had given her for a present when she went to see Mungo Lord. The pants fitted her beautifully; she could not imagine why anyone would give them away for next to nothing unless they had got too fat for them. Every now and then she stroked her bottom as if she was stroking a live animal. As well, she wore Shadze so that he couldn’t read her eyes, not straight away.