by Poppy Gee
When his editor called him late last night with the assignment, she had tried to sound detached but she couldn’t hide the anticipation in her voice. A murder. Near the very beach a pretty teenager had disappeared from last summer. This was a story that sold newspapers.
“Serial killer is the obvious angle, of course. Inept police, inept local MP, too. Who’s next? Focus on their fears. Vox pop the man on the street. Set the agenda,” she said. “And I need a photo of the dead woman.”
“I think I know how to handle it, Elizabeth,” Hall said before thanking her for the story.
He was surprised that she had chosen him to cover it. Why hadn’t she handed it to one of her favorites, kids with double degrees and shorthand so shoddy they had to record their interviews on their mobile phones? They were the ones getting all the good assignments. Last year someone retired and the state political reporter position came up. Hall had applied. Over the twenty-three years Hall had been on the Voice, his assignments had included council, police, courts, state parliament, agriculture, and arts. His CV was quietly impressive, and he had assumed that the job would be his. But Elizabeth hadn’t even given him a formal interview; she had handed the job to Ned Keneally. The guy had worked on the paper for less than two years, for Christ’s sake.
“You’re too good at what you do,” she had said when Hall fronted up to her office. “You’re good with country people. They trust you. You know all the councilors, from Break O’Day to The Nut. All the issues. We can’t lose you.”
Elizabeth had tossed him a heap of front-page stories to compensate: a murder-suicide up at Mathinna; a garage amphetamine factory in Trevallyn; the Victoria Museum theft of seven nineteenth-century stuffed animal specimens, including a Tasmanian tiger, which his reporting had helped recover. This barely assuaged him. Hall had restrained his bitterness, but it remained within him, quietly malignant.
Concentrate, he told himself as he steered his car onto a narrow crumbling road that curled around a eucalyptus-covered cliff face. He grinned as he drove past a sign that announced You Are Now Entering St. Mary’s Pass. Someone had scratched the “P” off. There were more signs within the pass, warning of falling rocks and active wildlife, and enlisting large vehicles to sound their horn before each blind corner. Hall’s Holden was not that big, but he followed the instruction anyway, honking continuously and keeping his foot on the brake until he rolled out the other side of the pass. He didn’t want to speed, but he needed to get to the Bay of Fires by ten a.m. According to his editor, some locals were gathering at that time to perform an emu parade on the beach where the woman was found. The emu parade involved participants lining up shoulder-to-shoulder and slowly walking the length of the beach, searching for clues. It was called an emu parade because participants resembled emus pecking the ground for food. Obviously they hoped to find something that the police might have missed in their line search the previous day. Hall doubted they would find any new evidence, but it would be an easy way for him to make some contacts.
At the entrance to Bay of Fires National Park, the road turned to gravel and his radio lost transmission. A cloud of dust hovered behind Hall as he steered his jarring vehicle along the rutted surface. Fire had ripped through toward the end of last summer, and the blackened eucalypts were woolly with new leaves. If Hall recalled correctly, the local community had enacted emu parades back then, traversing the burned landscape in a human chain, looking for remnants of the missing teen. They found nothing, not even her surfboard, let alone her bones.
Hall breathed in the charcoal-clean scent of burnt bush. There was the faintest trace of salt on the air, an aperitif to the ocean which the flashes of blue shining through the canopy told him was not far away. He emerged through the trees and onto a long straight road running beside an empty white beach. It looked about four or five kilometers long, curving around the sea and ending beneath a rocky headland. Somewhere on this beach the dead woman had washed in.
A serial killer made for copy that was human interest, crime, and politics. He had a lot to do. So far all reports, newspaper and radio, were based on a police report and a couple of phone interviews. Hall began going over the different angles in his head and then stopped himself. The angles would appear on their own after he started interviewing. This was a good story. No, this was a great story.
Moored in the wind high on the headland was the Bay of Fires Guesthouse. Hall parked beside a battered Land Cruiser and walked up the ramp. He liked the place immediately. It was an old Nissen hut, the kind built to withstand tropical storms. The faded green corrugated iron roof was curved like a giant beer barrel. It looked like it had withstood its fair share of bad weather. He walked up and down the veranda, inspecting the building, wondering how it had come to end up on the Tasmanian east coast.
Inside it was larger than he anticipated. Bench seats fit snugly beneath the curved roof, and tall windows overlooking the ocean were decorated with shell and driftwood mobiles. The furniture was dingy, the yellow rug stained, and the green linoleum peeling, but the sky and sea lit up the room. No one answered his greeting. Downstairs, the dormitory-style rooms all appeared to be unoccupied.
He found a tall thin woman in the side yard, pegging towels on a Hills Hoist swirly washing line. She wore skin-tight jeans and a snakeskin belt.
“Morning,” called Hall.
“Oh, hey.” She spoke holding a clothes peg between her teeth. “You the journo?”
As he moved closer, he breathed the sweetness of her last cigarette coming off her clothes and skin.
“I guess I am.”
“Well you either are or you’re not.”
Hall laughed, but he wasn’t sure if she was trying to be funny. Inside the guesthouse a telephone rang. The woman tossed the pegs on top of the washing basket and marched toward the back door.
“Come on, then.” She didn’t check to see if he was following.
“Bay of Fires Guesthouse.” As she answered the phone, she shoved a form and a pen at him. Her rings were loose on her fingers. “Yes, I’m the manager.”
Her voice remained unfriendly; the wrinkles around her lips rose and sank as she spoke. “Suit yourself.” She hung up the phone. “Okay. Grand tour. Get your bag. There’s no valet service here.”
Her name was Jane. She showed him around, describing the facilities in a rehearsed manner. Downstairs there were two bunkrooms, two bathrooms, and Jane’s private quarters. Hall averted his eyes from her denim-clad buttocks as she took the stairs two at a time. “How long are you staying for?”
“A few nights to start with. Not sure. Depends what my editor wants.”
“The room’s yours for as long as you want it.” Except for the distant roar of the ocean, the guesthouse was quiet. Jane paused in the doorway of one of the upstairs bedrooms. “I take it your wife doesn’t mind not knowing when you’ll be back.”
Hall repressed the twitch of a smile. This gruff woman was sussing him out. If this was how she behaved toward potential suitors, he wouldn’t want to see how she treated men she didn’t like.
“No wife, so no problem,” he said, making sure to avoid her gaze. He didn’t want to give her the wrong idea. Hall recalled a frightening Stephen King novel about a nurse who kept a man captive in her house. If he remembered correctly, that man was a writer too.
“Right. This is you,” Jane said.
“Good day for the beach,” Hall said as Jane winched open his bedroom window and shoved a piece of wood in the frame to hold it there.
“Don’t talk to me about it. I should be turning people away.” She swiped her hand across the bed, dusting something off, before she spoke again. “No one’s staying. I had a group of ten here last night; they all left this morning. Women decided they didn’t want to stay. More people are coming on the weekend, at least. Right now I’ve got twelve beds, one guest. You’re it.”
“That’s hard,” he murmured in the voice he reserved for grieving families and business owners going broke.
“Summer’s our make or break down here. Easter to the November long weekend this place is dead. High season now and they’re not coming. It doesn’t help; all your muckraking.”
“I haven’t written a word on Anja Traugott,” Hall said truthfully, meeting her gray eyes.
Strands of salt-and-pepper hair had fallen out of her topknot. She tucked them behind her ears, and the end pieces of hair scooped out to the sides.
“Her parents are coming to get her stuff. You tell me what I’m supposed to say to them.” She crossed her arms.
“You tell them she was a lovely person and that you are sorry for their grief. That’s all you can say.”
“I don’t want this to be happening.”
“Sure.” Hall unzipped his laptop case.
“I suppose you’ll want to interview me, seeing as how I was the last person to see her and that. The coppers say I’m an important witness.” Her laugh was bitter. “I can only tell you what I told them. She took her camera, went out for a walk at about one p.m. Didn’t come back. You want me to tell you what she was wearing?”
“Listen. I’m not interviewing you now. I need to make notes. We’ll sit down later. Do it properly. Where did you say the men’s room was?”
She stepped past him and into the hallway. With her thumb, she jabbed toward the stairs. “Down to the left. Make sure the button pops up when you flush; it’s almost had it. You want a cup of tea when you’re done? Come outside and I’ll talk. But don’t mess around. I have to go to town to meet the bus.”
“Okay,” he relented, and she finally smiled, showing teeth that looked like they had never been cared for by a dentist.
Walking carefully so the floorboards didn’t creak, Hall bypassed the bathroom and entered the first bunkroom. The beds were made, white sheets folded back over gray blankets. Otherwise the room was empty. The next room was set up the same except one bed was unmade. A backpack leaned against it and a book was on the nightstand. Hall picked it up. Bruchstucke des Zwielichtes was the title. He couldn’t read German, but it looked like a work of literary fiction rather than a romance, which he had half expected it to be. Did that mean Anja was an intelligent woman? He looked at the backpack. There wasn’t time to open it now; if he asked nicely, Jane might let him have a look. If not, he would investigate the bag when she went to meet the bus. The room wasn’t locked.
Hall peered out the narrow window. It looked over a succulent garden and a paddock in which a chestnut mare stood beside a barbed wire fence. A cul-de-sac on the point gave access to several new shacks. You couldn’t correctly call them shacks; their sharp lines and walls of glass positioned to frame certain views suggested the clever touch of an architect, unlike the original Fibro dwellings. In the other direction he could see the lagoon, a purple smudge on the edge of the beach.
It must have been winter when he came here with Laura, for it was too cold to swim. A family of black swans had watched as Laura waded in the lagoon. With her floral skirt hitched around her waist, her face drenched in dappled autumn sunlight, she had looked like one of Renoir’s women. One of the birds had thought she was too close and flapped and hissed with its neck stuck out. At the time Hall had been frightened for Laura; now he wished it had bitten her.
In his notebook Hall wrote the date and time. Perched on the bench seat opposite him, her back to the ocean, Jane ineffectively swatted the cigarette smoke floating in the air.
“So.” Jane propped her lighter on top of the Holiday cigarette packet. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Start at the beginning, when she first got here.” He sipped the tea. It was too hot and burned his lip. Jane didn’t notice.
Anja Traugott had arrived on the bus from Launceston five days before Christmas. She had spent her time reading in the garden, sunbathing, taking walks around the beaches. One afternoon she hired snorkeling equipment; another morning she joined a couple of other guests and canoed around the lagoon. Jane had been grouting her window ledges and saw Anja leave the guesthouse on the day she went missing.
“It’s not my fault no one realized she was missing right away. I don’t keep tabs on everyone who stays here. She’d paid for a week,” Jane said.
She pulled weeds out of the herb pots as she spoke. Jane had been away on Christmas Day. Boxing Day she was busy clearing the beach track. It was on the day after when Jane went to clean the room that she realized her guest was absent.
“When I heard someone had washed up on the beach that morning I rang the cops right away. I have nothing to hide, mate,” she said.
“Why haven’t they taken Anja’s bag?”
“I knew you’d snoop in there. Someone special is coming up from Hobart to look at it. No one’s supposed to go in there.”
“I didn’t touch anything.” Hall was not apologetic. “Tell me about the man who found the body.”
“Roger Coker. He’s retarded.” Jane wasn’t being malicious. It was clear to Hall that as far as she was concerned, her version of his mental capabilities was factual. “One time someone gave him a bucket of red paint and he painted everything in his house red. Pots and pans. Kitchen table. His lawn mower.”
“How do you know that? Do you visit him?”
“God no. I wouldn’t step inside that dump. Everyone knows about the paint.”
“Do you think he did it?”
Jane lit another cigarette and took a long suck, blowing the smoke hard out the side of her mouth. She filled a dog’s bowl with water from a tap attached to a corrugated tank. Hall turned to a fresh page in his notebook, numbered it, and waited patiently for her to decide what she was going to say.
“Probably not.”
“So who did?”
Jane shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“No it’s not.” Hall was irritated by the interview. “You’ve lived here a long time and you know everyone.”
“I’m not going to name and blame. I’ve copped enough of that myself to know what it’s like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I mean.”
She stubbed out her cigarette in an old Vegemite jar almost full of butts. She screwed the lid back on before looking him in the eye.
“I was married once. This place was more upmarket then. When Gary was here. No backpackers.”
“Right.”
“Well, if you want to know what happened to him, you won’t need me to tell you.”
“People talk.”
“You got it, Scoop.”
Jane pulled a cigarette out of the box, tapped it upside down on the lid. Her lips pinched. He sensed the conversation was ending. He closed his notebook and waited. It was an old trick and it always worked. To fill the time he tried to name the herbs on the patio. Basil, flat parsley, rosemary, normal parsley; there were more but he did not recognize them. A flock of gulls swooped overhead, casting fleeting shadows on the table. A dog he couldn’t see barked and dragged its chain.
“I’ll just say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roger Coker knows more than what he’ll tell the police. He’s not as stupid as everyone thinks.”
“You think he did it?”
“Don’t twist my words.”
She returned the unlit cigarette to its box and stood up. She checked the time on a cheap digital watch that had a plastic band.
“It must be hard running a business on your own,” he offered.
“Oh, well. I’m still here, at least.”
Headlands loomed over each end of the beach. On Hall’s map they existed as small curves on the edge of a blue vastness. Standing in the dunes, Hall studied his map of the coast, correlating the markings on the map with the landmarks he could see: the Old Road winding around the other side of the Chain of Lagoons, the cleared hilltop of Franklin’s Farm, the point where the old tin railway had once run on a wooden jetty out into the ocean to meet cargo ships bound for Hobart. There was a turning circle toward the end of the beach, and he could see vehicles and p
eople gathering for the emu parade. He checked his watch; it would start in fifteen minutes.
Hall jotted a couple of impressions of the beach in his notebook. It was a rugged, isolated stretch of coast. Beautiful and wild. There had been a program on Stateline some time ago about the large number of persons whose lives ended in the Tasmanian wilderness. In the past two years there had been four bushwalkers, two rock fishermen, a white-water rafter, a child who wandered away from a campsite, and several teenagers including Chloe Crawford. Some were dead, some were still missing. The program raised the question: Was Tasmania an island of murderous criminals, or had these people been swallowed by the rugged, unforgiving landscape? It was a good question.
He was about to return to his car when he saw a woman striding toward him. Water streamed from her dark hair, and she clutched a jacket around her that was the same muted green as the coastal scrub. She didn’t seem bothered by the spiky dune grass under her bare feet.
“Can I help you, mate?” She didn’t smile back.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re aware this is a crime scene?”
“I am.” She was having a go at him. This could be fun. He fiddled with his camera, ignoring her.
“Well, what are you doing here?”
“Looking around.”
“Looking around?”
“Research.”
“What kind of weirdo lurks in the dunes after someone has been murdered there?”
“No one was murdered here.”
“Yesterday…” She faltered.
Her eyes were bright and her breath ragged. She wasn’t having a go; she was scared of him. He imagined how he looked, a middle-aged man wearing chinos and a crumpled business shirt, creeping around in the sand dunes. His curly reddish-brown hair was bouncing out of the neat combed lines he had urged it into when wet that morning, and his lined face could just as easily owe its weathered appearance to a life of crime as to twenty years of bushwalking in extreme Tasmanian weather. He wore an earring, too, a single silver stud, which the blokes at work reckoned helped in making Launceston’s underworld trust him. From his shirt pocket Hall took a card.
