True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  They found Larissa sitting on the step as they struggled up the steep path with their luggage.

  ‘It’s a bit late for confessions, isn’t it,’ Kit snapped when they were inside.

  ‘Oh shut up, Kit.’ Rose shot him a warning look, reminding him that, in theory, they did not know of the presence in their garden in Weyville.

  He subsided, sullen, hemmed in by the place already.

  There was no food in the flat and the air smelled stale.

  ‘How long have you been waiting for us?’ Rose asked, opening windows and turning on the hot water.

  ‘Three days.’

  Rose looked properly at her niece. The spiky hair was flattened out, streaky blue and darkish at the roots, the eyes huge and hungry.

  ‘I slept at the shelter at nights. Come back here in the mornings.’

  ‘Haven’t you got any money?’

  The question was greeted with a shrug.

  ‘Did they feed you?’

  ‘Yeah. A bit.’

  ‘Get some fish and chips. There’s a place round the corner. And get some biscuits and milk at the shop next door.’ Kit was pulling out money from his wallet.

  ‘You don’t want to know why I’m here, do you? Go and get some fish and chips, go and do the messages. That’s all you know.’

  ‘We know.’ Rose put her head down in her hands. ‘We do know.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say? I’ve been waiting here three days.’

  ‘Give us a chance. We weren’t expecting to see you. We flew back straight away.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who told you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Treading through the minefield. ‘Where’s Sharna?’

  Larissa began to cry then, not real crying, not weeping, just short puffy gasps as if it was so long since she had cried that she had forgotten how to.

  Rose said, ‘You go to the shops, Kit.’ He turned and left without speaking.

  ‘He hates me and my family, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He hates himself, I think.’ It surprised Rose that she had said this, but as soon as she had it sounded true. ‘So tell me about it. How did it happen? How did Basil die?’

  Larissa stared at her. ‘That was ages ago.’

  ‘Two weeks, three weeks.’

  ‘A month. He was dead and you were gone.’

  ‘A month, well then, yes it must be all of that. Tell me about Sharna.’

  Larissa stirred restlessly. Probably she was as tired as Rose. ‘Can I use your bathroom?’

  She took a long time, running taps, and then there was a long silence, almost as if the flat was empty. When she emerged, she sat down on the floor by the window, staring at the sea.

  ‘That’s where Gary and me should go, somewhere by the sea. That’s where the housetruckers go.’

  ‘Larissa, where’s Sharna?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sharna’s in welfare and they won’t tell us where she’s been taken. Mum’s friend Minna wants to look after her, and they says she’s not a fit person.’

  ‘Do you think she is?’

  ‘She’s okay. She likes Sharna.’

  ‘What about you? Could you look after her?’

  ‘Me?’ Larissa was shocked. ‘You must be joking, they’d never let me look after Sharna in a caravan.’

  ‘You could move out of it.’

  ‘And leave Gary, you serious?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m serious about. I haven’t slept properly for forty-eight hours, I couldn’t get sleeping pills for the plane in Athens, I’m nearly out of my head.’

  ‘Nah, you’re just like, talking off the top of your head, aren’t you? Not thinking, but you are thinking underneath. You’re just not being careful the way you usually are. I’ll tell you what you’re thinking — here’s another chance to reform Larissa. Get her away from the gypsies in the wood. Well, I’m not going to leave Gary.’

  ‘Not even for Sharna?’

  Larissa’s face crumpled again. ‘All right then, I’ve asked them. I’ve promised them anything, and they’ve said no. Satisfied?’

  They would say no, too, Rose thought. How could they hand Sharna over to Gary’s accomplice? Or whatever she was. For all Rose knew Gary’s crimes were Larissa’s too. Some of them, if not all of them.

  ‘And I asked Uncle Jim, who was at least kind enough to bury Basil for us, and he said get stuffed, and now he’s gone to Memphis, and then I asked my father if he’d ask them to give her to Minna and he chucked me out.’

  ‘And now you’ve come to ask me?’

  ‘They’d give Sharna to you.’ The tears that had been so hard to shed were falling fast. Rose moved to put her arms around Larissa, as if, at last, something she had lost was about to be returned to her.

  Kit pushed the door open and put a bundle of groceries and a hot parcel of fish and chips on the bench. ‘I called a taxi from the shops.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Down to the House. To my office. I need somewhere I can think.’

  But for a moment his face softened as he looked at Larissa’s head bent over her arms. He shook his head and turned away. The loss between him and Rose was not Violet, or Morris Applebloom, or even politics; it was the loss of this girl. The loss lay between them, a vacuum in Rose which she had never been able to fill. It was so easy to blame someone else, Rose could see, but in the end it came down to oneself. Loss, and guilt, and the belief that she could have done better in redeeming Larissa from what had befallen her, had numbed her, paralysing all her best intentions and coming between her and Kit and the children.

  She let her hand rest on Larissa’s arm.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ said Larissa, pulling away as if she had been stung. ‘Don’t ever fuckin’ touch me.’

  Nick Newbone had also been looking for Rose for the past three days. He hadn’t come to Wellington just to see her but when Kit’s office told him that the Kendalls were due back he stayed on. He made more appointments and hung around. Probably Rose wouldn’t want to see him after a long flight, but what he had to tell her could not wait any longer. For more than a week he had carried the information which he had picked up from Toni Warner’s lawyer. It was contained in a sealed envelope with his name on it. The police had supervised the lawyer handing it over to him in case it should provide evidence for their case against Lyle Warner.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he had said to the detective-sergeant and to Tippet, a young officer new to Weyville. The force had been supplemented from out of town to help with all the inquiries that had been taking place over the past months.

  ‘It’s just some material for me to print out for the Labour Party. Street names.’ He held it out for them to look at, but his heart pounded.

  ‘Do we need a copy?’ the constable was asking.

  The detective-sergeant crinkled his nose. The Warner case was open and shut. ‘Just for the records.’ His attention had already moved on.

  Nick had been careful not to open it until he was out of sight.

  The Oaks bar had become too familiar to him. He had a second beer and wished he had not. It was still his intention to drive to Weyville that night. He allowed what he considered to be a decent time after Rose and Kit’s expected arrival home and dialled their number. When there was no answer, he rang Parliament. Kit was in a meeting already, a secretary told him, but if he was looking for Mrs Kendall, there was a message here from her saying she had left on a plane for Weyville.

  He picked up a hitchhiker on the way, a straggly childish-looking woman with blueish hair, trying to shelter from the intermittent rain beneath a makeshift pack. He could have sworn he had seen her before. It was hard to tell what she looked like behind the freshly applied layers of black mascara and kohl.

  ‘I could have got a ride on a plane,’ she said, ‘but I like hitching.’

  ‘You turned down the plane for a night on the road?’

  ‘See, there’s this woman offered me a ti
cket, but I don’t trust her.’

  Liar. ‘What did she do?’ he asked, amused.

  ‘Tried to get too close. You’ll hit Weyville by ten if you step on the gas.’

  ‘You’re an expert?’

  ‘Nope. I never come down here before. I can figure things out.’

  He didn’t doubt this. But he was suspicious of her cultivated roughness. She seemed smarter than her cover suggested.

  At Hunterville, she said, ‘You look stuffed, man. Like me to drive?’

  ‘What sort of a mug do you take me for?’

  ‘I’m a good driver.’

  ‘Have you got a licence?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. It’s tattooed on my bum. Do you want to see it?’

  He slowed. ‘Don’t start anything, eh. I can drop you here at the shops.’

  ‘Relax. I only said I’d like to drive.’

  On impulse, he pulled over. ‘You’re right, I’m stuffed out of my tree.’ All the same, he held on to the keys while he walked round to the passenger’s side and she slid into his place. What the hell, life took some funny turns.

  As the car gathered momentum he sat taut, ready to save them if it turned out she couldn’t drive. But as they glided into the night he felt that he didn’t have to worry, only a slight hesitation on the corners giving away the driver’s inexperience. Her confidence built and he dozed as the road sped beneath them, shaking himself awake now and then with a question flickering through his head. Why was Rose Kendall coming back to town?

  Towards Weyville, the silent girl intent at the wheel, and as he could see, happy in some contained way like an aquarium fish that has seen the open sea, turned and broke the silence of hours.

  ‘Was it heavy?’ she asked. ‘Was Mrs Warner heavy? We didn’t have pallbearers.’

  Instinctively, he put his hand on his breast pocket where the wad of papers was stored. After awhile, he said, ‘Let’s say it was a heavy scene.’ They cruised down the hill towards the lights of the town. He knew who the girl was.

  Rose thought it was about fifty-two hours since she had slept and her lids felt gummed to her eyeballs. She had not been to bed since she left Delphi, however long ago that was.

  Larissa had stormed out of the flat.

  ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ Rose had cried, seeing her anger. ‘No strings attached.’

  ‘That’s what you always said,’ Larissa shouted as she backed down the path.

  Rose could not remember ever saying any such thing, but the argument was pointless. Larissa still went.

  Sanity suggested that she wait until the morning to go to Weyville, but she faltered at the thought of her return. By morning she might not be able to go at all.

  The plane was delayed by fog and it was after six when it took off. The woman in the seat beside Rose had a young child. Masses of pretty fluffy brown hair surrounded the woman’s face; her trim body was encased in tailored slacks and a baby-blue button-through cardigan. She released a torrent of information which included details of what the child’s name would have been had she not been called Chloe (it would have been Alice), the number of women in the nursing home who had given their child the same name, and how many teeth the girl had. She leapt on the seat to play games with the baby, paraded its toddling footsteps the length of the plane by fingertip control, and sang ‘Old MacDonald Had A Farm’ in a high penetrating voice as the plane came in to land, to protect her from turbulence, she explained. As they trundled along the tarmac towards the terminal building she burst into ‘Jingle Bells’.

  Rose viewed this remarkable performance with wonder. She had hoped to sleep. While they waited inside the plane for the steps to be wheeled into place, the woman, still fussing over the child, turned and said in the loud silence of the waiting passengers, ‘Now I’ve got you. I’ve been trying to work out who you were, all the way up. You’re that horrible politician’s wife.’ Her look of triumph flashed around the plane’s interior. ‘We vote National anyway, but you might stop him having the trees cut down in the reserve. That’s the very least you could do. But I don’t expect you care.’

  Inside the terminal building she was accosted straight away by Hortense Newbone. For a moment Rose did not recognise her. Hortense’s hair was dyed persimmon and cropped short over her ears; she wore a very brief tunic clasped at the waist by a huge leather belt, red stockings and Doc Marten boots. Altogether she was not unlike an older version of Larissa in one of her various guises. Actually, much older. Her white face with its wine-red lips was taut and lined.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said.

  ‘Who were you expecting?’

  ‘I took a chance on Kit being on board. Matt heard he was back in the country. We thought he might have come straight up to see the electorate about the mining issue.’

  ‘He’s being briefed at Parliament right now,’ Rose lied. Though it could be true.

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’ The pencil hovered above the notebook.

  Rose shook her head. ‘Get it from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘You look dreadful.’

  ‘Thanks, I feel it.’ She opened and shut her mouth, trying to say more. ‘It’s awful about Toni,’ she said at last.

  Hortense sniffed. ‘Oh, Toni. She was very man-orientated.’

  ‘Hortense, she’s dead.’

  ‘Obviously. I’m telling you what the jury will say when Lyle goes on trial. The woman’s always wrong.’

  ‘You sound as if you believe it.’

  ‘Me? I’m for women. But I’m just a journo, very impartial, don’t you know. They’ll crucify her.’

  ‘How can they if she’s not there?’

  ‘That’s what makes it so easy.’ Hortense gave a superior smile as if she thought Rose was pathetic.

  ‘Don’t be a media hoon, it doesn’t suit you.’ Hortense was making a horrible kind of sense.

  Hortense picked her ear with the end of her pencil. Her look said it all: You weren’t even there, you didn’t even come.

  ‘What do you think of your sister?’ she asked.

  ‘Look, lay off Hortense. And put that damn pencil away.’

  ‘C’mon, you must have something to say about that.’

  ‘What do you expect me to say?’ Ever since Kit had filled her in with the details about ten million light years ago in Athens she had been putting off thinking about Katrina.

  ‘I’d say she was great, that’s what I would say if I were you.’ Hortense slammed her notebook angrily into the canvas bag she wore over her shoulder. Then Rose saw the billboard of the evening paper behind them. I DID IT FOR MOTHERS, it blazed, and underneath there was a photograph of Katrina.

  ‘She’s a heroine,’ said Hortense. ‘Anarchy rules, okay?’

  ‘Going to the airport,’ said Jeffrey Campbell, picking up his hat.

  ‘Visiting celebrity?’ Teddy O’Meara’s voice bridled.

  ‘Mrs Kendall’s arrived in town,’ said Campbell evenly. ‘I’m escorting her home.’

  ‘You don’t tell me. I thought she’d beggared off for good.’

  ‘It seems you were wrong.’

  Since O’Meara had been taken off the Kendall inquiry he mentioned it more often than when he was on it. As if the honey drew him. Still, Campbell thought, he need not have told him that he was going to meet Rose Kendall. O’Meara had been given no reason for his withdrawal from the case; if he knew he was being watched he showed no signs of it.

  ‘I always said …’ Teddy stopped.

  ‘Yes, what did you always say?’ Campbell paused in the doorway.

  ‘That she was a lettuce or two short of a green salad.’

  He heard Teddy’s laughter follow him out the station door and into the spring night.

  He explained to her that the shed was empty when it was raided the previous day. It was impossible to tell whether it had been left in the same condition as when the Kendalls lived in the house, given that they did not use the shed, but it was remarkably clean for an outhouse
that had been in disuse for so long. The ground around it had been disturbed and shovelled over; the branches of a tree broken back. But nobody except him, and Buff Daniels, had seen it in use and he was at a loss to prove what he had seen.

  ‘Do you want to go and look for yourself?’

  ‘In the morning, perhaps. I don’t know what I’ll be doing. I’ll probably have to find somewhere else to live.’

  ‘Would you be better to stay with a friend for tonight?’

  He was right of course, but who? There was no Toni. She might once have gone to Mungo Lord’s but her sister had tried hard to kill him, so that was out. And Hortense, well, maybe, at a pinch, but her encounter with her this evening hardly promised a restful night.

  ‘Maybe I’ll ring Matt and Nancy Decker. At least if they know I’m here … but I’ve got some things to do … I want to make some toll calls, my daughter, you know, she doesn’t know we’re back in the country. And I want to get a rental car delivered. Maybe it would be best for me just to go to bed.’

  ‘I’ll send a patrol car round a couple of times during the night. And I’ll come past on my way home.’ He picked up the phone and dialled a number. ‘Just testing, thanks. Your phone’s working.’

  ‘Will Teddy O’Meara come round?’

  ‘Probably not. Did you want him to?’

  ‘It makes no difference. I’ve dealt with him in the past when you’ve been around, that’s all.’

  Campbell sidestepped. ‘I don’t think he’s working tonight.’

  ‘I can understand that the case is peculiar.’ She was remembering her outburst in the station months before. ‘I expect you get fed up with me.’

  ‘We’re here to help.’

  ‘I know that, of course.’

  ‘But you hired a private investigator?’

  ‘True, how did you find out about that?’

  He hesitated. ‘Perhaps we could talk about it tomorrow. You’re tired, if you don’t mind me saying so. You’ll need some rest, especially if you’re going to collect the little girl in the morning.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m grateful for that. I was afraid you might not want me to have Sharna.’