by Chris Hammer
Mandy is about to walk out past the counter, but first she turns, takes Robbie’s arm and stretches up, planting a sisterly kiss on his cheek. ‘Thank you for speaking for me, Robbie. I won’t forget it.’
Robbie nods, the faintest hint of a blush softening the seriousness of his expression.
‘You ready for this?’ asks Martin. Mandy Blonde nods, and they walk out arm in arm, into the blizzard of camera flashes and the storm of yelling reporters. It’s the money shot all right, but it’s no exclusive.
The photographers and camera operators follow them with the persistence of bush flies, down the road past the bank, past the bronze soldier marking his eternal vigilance, past the shuttered pub. The two of them barely exchange a word. Martin is unable to think of anything beyond banalities amid the mad running, pivoting swarm of cameras. Only as they approach the general store does the media melt away, their appetite for images of the leading police suspect and the disgraced former journalist finally sated. Inside the general store, there is no one at the counter.
‘Fran?’ yells Mandy. ‘Fran? Are you here?’
Martin follows Mandy through the aisles towards the back of the store, where the shopkeeper might be minding young Liam.
‘Fran?’
Fran Landers emerges. She’s wearing rubber gloves, a shower cap and an apron. They’ve disturbed her in the middle of some cleaning task. She looks puzzled. ‘Mandy? Thank God you’re out. Everything okay?’
‘I’ve come to pick up Liam. Where is he?’
‘Oh, not here. Jamie took him back to the Oasis. He said you were back.’
‘Oh. Goodo. Thanks. I’ll see him there.’
‘When was that?’ asks Martin.
‘An hour or so ago,’ says Fran. ‘He saw the police cars returning. We heard on the radio that you were getting out.’
‘Good,’ says Mandy. ‘How was he?’
‘Liam? Wonderful. You’ve really got a playful little fellow there.’
‘Thanks again, Fran. I owe you one.’
Mandy and Martin walk towards the bookstore, Mandy keen to be reunited with her son. They take the back way, out of sight, down the laneways, figuring Jamie will have let himself into the house. It’s Martin who talks. ‘You know, Mandy, the magistrate has ordered me not to write any of this down, or not to publish it, but I would really like to know what’s been going on.’
And she gives a smile, unaffected and pure. ‘Of course, Martin. I’ll tell you what I know. But some of it has to remain between you and me.’
They get to the back of the house, but no one’s there.
‘Maybe they’re waiting out the front,’ says Mandy.
They make their way down the small side lane, Mandy unlocking the gate, and walk out into Hay Road. Still no sign. Mandy is looking slightly annoyed. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘Where are they? Maybe he’s taken him to the park.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ says Martin. He’s about to speak again when his words are drowned out. The Channel Nine helicopter swoops low over the town, shadowed by the ABC’s, before they peel away and head towards their feed points in Bellington or Swan Hill. No prizes for guessing what’s making headlines on the evening news.
And that’s when he sees the homemade sign, the A4 paper sticky-taped to the light pole, the photograph rapidly fading: MISSING. MR PUSS. REWARD. It stops him dead.
‘Shit,’ says Martin.
‘What?’
‘Shit.’
And then he’s running, running as fast as he can, running back towards the crossroads, running even as he tries to convince himself it can’t possibly be true. Past the blind and useless Anzac, guarding his fading myth, around to the back lane, around to the back of the pub. He stops there, panting despite having run no more than fifty metres, sweat pouring off him in the heat of the afternoon. Mandy is right behind him, younger and possibly fitter, compelled by Martin’s urgency to follow. But both stop, halted by a harsh truth: at the bottom of the wooden stairs, half hidden by the car with its deflating tyres, a baby’s stroller stands empty and unattended.
Mandy sees it, is about to yell her son’s name, when Martin stops her, gesturing frantically, talking in a hoarse whisper: ‘Run and get Robbie. Tell him to get here fast. Tell him to bring his gun.’
Mandy stands open-mouthed for a moment, trying to catch up, and then she is gone, sprinting back through the gate, into the lane and out of sight.
‘Right, now,’ says Martin quietly, summoning courage. He should wait, he knows he should wait, that Robbie is just minutes away. But the empty stroller sits there challenging him, condemning him, compelling him.
He’s moving before he makes the decision to move. Past the stroller, to the stairs. Step by step, he climbs. His senses are fine-tuned, the hairs on his neck raised like radar masts, his hands brushing the flaking green paint of the railing as if to vacuum clues, feeling the baking heat rise from the powdery paint. A step creaks under his weight—or is it the plea of a small boy?
He moves more quickly, gaining the top landing, sees the hole punched in the glass window. The door is closed, but unlocked. He swings it open, enters, remembering to avoid as much as possible the shards of glass on the floor, moving away from the cleansing sun into the darkness. Before turning into the main corridor, he pauses to let his eyes adjust. He can hear nothing unusual, see nothing out of place, but deep down his guts are churning out their warning that something is profoundly wrong.
Then he hears it: a cry, a stifled cry. It’s not close, not too close. His mind makes the leap, informed by his last visit. He guesses either the guest lounge, with its empty beer cans and bloated ashtrays, or the room of the dead cat. He moves quickly again, into the main corridor, along it, barely pausing to check before turning the right-angle corner to head along the front of the pub. He’s creeping forward when he hears something new. He pauses again. Someone singing. A lullaby? Jesus. He gathers his guts, threatening to turn liquid, summons the vestiges of his courage, and walks, purposefully and without pause, down the corridor.
How long does it take him to walk those twenty-five metres? A few short seconds or half a lifetime? It’s impossible to say. He passes the stairs leading down into the pub, sees the brass runners on the carpet, notes the watery English light in the foxhunting picture, sees the blazing Australian light through the French doors leading to the verandah. He sees other things—the ornate yet dusty chandelier hanging above the stairs; the veneer lifting ever so slightly on the antique dresser; a painting of mountains, blue ranges with the anvil clouds of a summer storm above them. Smells come to him: dust and blood and mothballs and cigarettes. And fear. The smell he endured for three days and three nights and an eternity in the boot of a battered yellow Mercedes abandoned somewhere in the Gaza Strip. The smell has followed him across the oceans, seeking him out inside a shuttered hotel in the Riverina. But the smell doesn’t stop him. Nothing will stop him. He walks through it, wades through it, pushes through it. The singing is telling him where to go, to the room of the dead cat.
He walks in, treading softly, but not trying to hide. Jamie Landers is sitting on a chair by the window, naked from the waist down. He stops singing. He has a knife in his hand. A long knife, its point wet and red. Liam is on the bed, one arm and the opposite leg tied to the corner posts, a gag in his mouth, eyes wide with terror, tears and snot all over his face. He’s naked and there’s blood smeared across his tiny torso from a cut to his chest.
‘So it’s you, reporter man. I wondered who it’d be.’
‘Jamie, you can’t do this. You have to let him go.’
‘It’s all right, reporter man. I’ll make it quick. They don’t last long, you know. Not the little ones. You’ll last longer, old man, I promise you. Much longer.’
Martin edges forward, arms wide, as if somehow he might counter a knife thrust. Robbie must be on his way; has to be on his way.
Jamie stands, with a smile splayed across his face. ‘You want to watch me do it? Watch the lig
hts go out? It’s quite a sight.’
Martin freezes, is frozen, as the blur comes past him on the left. White and blue and so very swift, hitting Jamie Landers in the chest with a force so fast and fearless that the teenager doesn’t have time to turn the blade. It’s Mandy Blonde, slamming him into the wall, knocking the wind from him, pulling the knife from him.
‘Mandy, no.’ It’s Martin’s voice, a distant, disembodied plea, beaming in from some other universe. But it’s no good. She’s not listening. She glances at her son, struggling and distressed, and then she looks directly into the mad eyes, the face no longer smiling, the smell of fear now filling his nostrils and his alone. She raises the knife, its tip touching his neck. She moves it slowly, drawing blood. ‘I’m going to gut you here and now,’ she whispers. But his hands are up in surrender, and she hesitates. Robbie Haus-Jones bursts through the door, gun in hand.
HOURS PASS AND MARTIN IS STILL AT THE POLICE STATION. THE SAME COUNTER, the same pamphlets, the same useless hands. He looks at them, studies them. The hands of a witness, the hands of a note taker, stained by time but unblemished by achievement.
On some few occasions, in Asia and in the Middle East, he had been present during dramatic events, the stenographer of history, but such heights were rare and, even then, not truly his; they would have unfolded in exactly the same fashion had he been absent. The rest of his career, the rest of his life, he’d been curating history’s footnotes, not dictating its narrative. He’d been objective, licensed by his profession to be both present and not present, standing apart, behind the cameras and the headlines, not in front of them, a voyeur with a notepad, the ghost in the room. That is, until he climbed into the boot of a Mercedes in Gaza and unwittingly became the story and not the conveyor of it; part of events and not just recording them. And now it’s happening again: he’s involved; profoundly, if unintentionally. He has saved a man—the town leper—from a bushfire, and saved the life of a teenage boy—a killer—in a car crash. He stands accused of driving a policeman to suicide, been pilloried on national television and posted bail for a woman accused of perverting the course of justice. And now he’s saved the life of a small child. He has become the antithesis of the dispassionate, objective reporter he once was. Somehow, accidentally, he has inserted himself into the very centre of events, into the vortex of a story sucking in the attention of the nation, pulling in talkback and Twitter and satellite trucks, dragging them in like a tornado across the empty plain.
Max had sent him here to reconcile with his past, to recover from the trauma of Gaza, to rediscover his mojo. But the past has come stalking him: the reality of a life lived on the outskirts, always watching, always recording, never participating. He thinks of a girl, a pretty girl, long ago at university. She had loved him, he realises now, wondering why it has taken twenty years for him to recognise the fact. After all, she had told him so, had said the words, but he had never reciprocated, and they had drifted apart. Where is she now? Happy, no doubt. Married with children; loving and loved. Married to Scotty the dentist, perhaps. And where is Martin? In a one-officer police station in the last town on earth, with no family and no friends and no career. He thinks of Mandy. What passed through his mind, just below the surface, when he first met her in the Oasis: gorgeous, available, transient. Pliable, vulnerable, disposable. He is, he realises, some kind of arsehole, an incomplete man. He came to Riversend to escape his past, but it isn’t the past he needs to escape, it’s not the present, it’s something missing inside of himself. He doesn’t need to escape it; he needs to acknowledge it. He looks at his hands: old and young, sullied and innocent.
The interview with the police had started out curt and confrontational, the detectives struggling to assimilate events, scared of being caught out again. ‘What the fuck just happened?’ Montifore demanded, his face betraying confusion and panic, hope and anger. They’d already heard Robbie’s version, how the constable had arrived on the scene to find Mandy preparing to eviscerate Jamie Landers. And so Martin recounted, emotions suppressed, a reliable and seasoned witness, how he and Mandy had gone to collect her son Liam from Frances Landers, how they had then returned to Mandy’s place and the bookstore looking for Liam and Jamie Landers, how he had seen the Mr Puss poster and made the intuitive leap to the hotel.
That was when it turned nasty; the police demanding to know why Martin hadn’t told them about finding the dead cat. Their intention was clear: they wanted it stated, on the record, that they had been denied vital evidence, that no one could accuse them of overlooking any clue or lead or tip, however obscure, that might have forewarned them of the potential atrocity unfolding a hundred metres from their Riversend headquarters. Martin recognised what was happening and for a moment, the shortest of moments, temptation cast its lure his way: he could lie, say he had told Herb Walker, as he had indeed intended to do. The blame would fall on the dead policeman; Martin would be absolved. But the moment passed, temptation withering. Walker’s legacy was already burdened with enough opprobrium and Martin couldn’t bring himself to care about his own: the child was safe, the madman was in custody, Mandy had been spared every mother’s worst fear. And so he cooperated, accepting culpability, stating he’d intended to tell the police about the tortured cat but had been overtaken by events. His mistake, he confided in them, was that he’d become obsessed with the events of a year before, the shooting at St James, the mystery of Byron Swift and, later, the abduction and murder of the young Germans. Had it not been the same with the police? It hadn’t occurred to him that events were still unfolding, that it wasn’t the past they needed to worry about but the present.
After that, once he’d exonerated the police, the interrogation became an interview. The questions were no longer accusatory but simply seeking information. He continued his dispassionate narrative, recounting the chain of events at the hotel from the time he and Mandy had arrived and seen the stroller to the moment Robbie Haus-Jones had rushed in the door and arrested Jamie Landers. Martin found he could recall every moment, every word, with startling clarity: the position of the stroller outside the pub, the painting of the fox hunt, the blood on Jamie Landers’ dagger. He took them through it, second by second, like a film being played frame by frame. The detectives stopped interjecting, listening. Finally, when he had finished, the silence continued uninterrupted until, eventually, Montifore began to take him back and forth through his evidence.
‘From his words and from his gestures, from what you saw, do you have any doubts at all that Jamie Landers was solely responsible for the abduction and captivity of Liam Blonde?’
‘No doubts whatsoever.’
‘And he had already injured the infant?’
‘Yes. There was blood on the boy and blood on the knife.’
‘And he intended killing the boy?’
‘Without doubt. He invited me to watch, in his words, as the lights went out.’
‘And he then intended killing you?’
‘Without doubt. He moved towards me, brandishing the knife, saying I would last longer than the child.’
‘By which you believed he meant…?’
‘That he intended to torture and kill me.’
‘Like he had done to the two murdered backpackers?’
‘Sorry. There was no reference to them, just the suggestion that I would live longer than the child.’
‘Do you believe that, through her actions, Mandalay Blonde may have saved you and her son from injury or death? That the minor wound she inflicted on Jamie Landers was justified?’
‘Yes, I do. Without a single doubt.’
The meeting had grown more collegiate, Martin more or less a member of the team, invited to assist in locking down the chain of events. It grew even more collegiate when Robbie Haus-Jones interrupted: Landers wanted to make a full confession to the murders of the two backpackers. He wanted to tell it all. Martin observed Montifore’s face, the pressure easing out of it, the grin, starting small and contained before spreading
out until it covered his face from ear to ear as Robbie conveyed what Landers had already told him. The teenager had lured the backpackers into a car together with his friend Allen Newkirk. They’d tortured them, raped them and then killed them. And then Newkirk had died, his comrade in crime, thrown from the ute out on the highway to Bellington. Landers said he had felt scared and abandoned, all alone. He’d had enough. He knew he was sick in the head. He wanted to die; he wanted to join his mate. But he had wanted to better the priest, to do something truly abhorrent. And the opportunity had presented itself to him, as if by fate. He claimed he hadn’t sought out Liam Blonde; the child had been delivered to him. He’d killed a cat, shot some cows out in the Scrublands, some kind of pagan tribute to his dead friend and the fun they’d had with the German girls. Taking Liam had seemed preordained and perfect.
With grim objectivity, Martin then recognised a sense of euphoria among the police. The murder case captivating the nation, the one that had seemed so intractable just that morning, the one that had funnelled pressure down onto Montifore’s team—starting from the premier, flowing down through the police commissioner and the head of homicide—that case had been blown right open. They had the killer, the investigation was now all about tying up loose ends and preparing a brief.
‘It still doesn’t explain why Byron Swift went on his rampage,’ Martin interposed.
Montifore looked at him sadly, shaking his head. ‘True. But who gives a shit? That’s not why we’re here.’
‘What about Mandy Blonde? Can I see her?’
‘We’ll be releasing her soon enough. She’s with her son and the doctor. She’ll be free to go once the kid is patched up.’
‘What about the diary and perverting the course of justice?’
‘Forget it. Water under the bridge, mate. Landers and Newkirk killed the backpackers, not Byron Swift. It’s all water under the bridge.’
