by Peter Cotton
I’d read up on panic attacks and it seemed my physical symptoms were at the mild end of the spectrum. Even so, I hated them, and I hated what accompanied them even more: an intense and mostly irrational fear that something bad was going to happen to Jean. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. Especially not her. She had to be totally focused on her own safety while she was in Jayapura. Worrying about me would only distract her from that.
As for where the attacks had come from, I figured I’d overloaded on stories about the blockade and that’d pushed my anxiety about Jean into the red zone. Then again, maybe the accumulated impact of all my hairy experiences on the job had finally caught up with me. My deep fears for Jean had just opened the floodgates.
In dealing with the attacks, I’d weaned myself off most media, except for Jean’s reports of course. And I’d worked hard to banish any morbid thoughts about her. It was why I’d welcomed McHenry’s suggestion that I lead this investigation. Immersing myself in work would distract me. It’d also let me escape the colleagues who regularly fronted up at my desk to ask about Jean. Too many of them seemed to be commiserating with me, as if her fate were sealed.
‘So, why’re you still doing this?’ said Cherry, drawing my eyes from my phone. ‘Police work, I mean. I would’ve thought you’d be well set up after that Mondrian business. I said to myself back then, “That guy’s gunna capitalise on this big time.” I figured there’d be endorsements. And royalties. Business opportunities and that kind of thing. Especially after the TV series. I thought you might even become a pollie yourself. How wrong was I then, eh? Here you are, still slogging away.’
My breathing had eased, but I gave myself another moment by pretending to study the small group of media people who were mingling near the entrance to the car park. Cherry had already briefed us on them: a few local print reporters; a junior newspaper guy from the Canberra press gallery who’d been holidaying at Vincentia, nearby; and a camera crew from one of the regional stations.
‘Did you buy the book?’ I asked, forcing a smile as I turned back to Cherry.
‘Well, no,’ he said, looking away, mock embarrassed. ‘But the wife did. At least, she got it out of the library. And she really liked it.’
‘There’s your answer then. I’m still doing this because book buyers are an endangered species. Like that bird out there.’
Cherry chuckled while I scanned the car park. The size of it prompted me to remember a question that’d occurred to me when I’d first seen it from the air.
‘So, what’s with this huge car park? Murrays Beach isn’t that popular, is it?’
‘Gets crowded in summer,’ said Cherry, running his eyes over the blacktop. ‘Especially in school holidays. But no one ever struggles to find a park here, that’s for sure. It’s what’s buried underneath it that made it so big. You see, they had this place earmarked for a nuclear reactor back in the sixties — to produce the stuff they needed to make nuclear bombs. You know. Plutonium. Anyway, they got as far as building the road in here, Jervis Bay Road. And they’d finished the site works for the reactor itself. Then the PM whose idea it was, he got the boot, and the one who took over scrapped the whole thing. So, they paved the place and made a car park of it instead. And right here, where we’re standing, is where they were going to put the nuclear reactor. I love parking on top of it when I come out to Murrays.’
I’d read a fair bit of Australian history, but this bomb story was news to me. I was about to tell Cherry as much when Smeaton gave me a ‘hoy’. He had news.
‘The text was sent from a phone belonging to a Jade Rawlins, our likely stiff. Address: 18 Gore Street, Steeple Bay. They haven’t located her phone as yet, but they’ll keep trying. As for this,’ he said, holding up the phone found on the beach, ‘the number on it belongs to a John Sheridan, and from his texts, I’d say this Sheridan lives at, or lived at, the naval base down the road. Creswell.’
‘John Sheridan,’ said Cherry, flipping a page in his notebook. ‘That’s it, over there. His yellow Subaru.’
He extended his arm towards a yellow sedan parked fifty metres away on the shimmering blacktop.
John Sheridan. A navy man. That could really complicate things. Especially if this Sheridan was implicated in Jade Rawlins’s death. Then again, the signs were pointing to him being a victim as well. The discarded phone. The car he’d left behind. If he were dead too, the navy would want a big say in this investigation. They might even want to take it over. And if our mob resisted, we’d get bogged down in the sort of long-winded jurisdictional arguments that only lawyers enjoyed.
I forced my thoughts back to more productive territory: Sheridan’s phone, and why he’d apparently discarded it. The phone was a long way from the piles of clothes — thirty-one metres, according to Cherry. So, if Sheridan had been nabbed, did he discard the phone on purpose? Was he in fear for his life as he chucked it away? Did he hope its position on the sand would somehow provide us with a clue to his fate? Or did his abductors chuck the phone there for reasons of their own?
I took out my phone and called McHenry. He was finishing off a meeting and asked me to wait a minute. I watched a couple of Cherry’s people string tape around Sheridan’s sedan. Then McHenry came back on the line, and I gave him a rundown. He said he’d get someone to contact navy to ask for a photo of Sheridan, and to see if they could account for him. He’d also tell the commissioner. Laverty hated surprises, and with navy involvement, his input would be required sooner rather than later.
I pocketed my phone and tuned in to Cherry. He was briefing four coppers, who were about to drive to Steeple Bay. He told them to bring back a photo of Jade Rawlins. And he said he wanted them to find someone other than her mother to ID the body. No parent should have to see their child in such a state, he said. He suggested that the priest who lived at the community might do the job. As I watched the cops drive off in two SUVs, it occurred to me: why send four of them? For mutual protection in case the ‘local sensitivities’ that Cherry had mentioned got out of hand? Maybe, and I could’ve asked him about it if I’d really wanted to know, but it might have come off as questioning his decision, and as it had no bearing on the case, I let it slide.
Cherry and I joined Smeaton in the SUV. Cherry took out his phone and called Nowra hospital, and booked a room for viewing the body and a consulting room for the interviews that’d follow. When he’d finished the call, he told us he’d already arranged a forensic pathologist for the autopsy at the hospital. That was scheduled for noon, he said. The pathologist had promised a preliminary report by two.
We drove over to where the media people were waiting, and Cherry got out of the vehicle. He raised his hands as he walked towards them and asked for a bit of ‘shush’. When he had absolute silence, he confirmed that an unidentified body had washed up on Murrays Beach. He said it was too early to say anything conclusive about how it got there. He said he’d keep them informed as matters progressed. He thanked them for their interest and he ignored their shouted questions as he ambled back to the vehicle. Like a true pro, he’d given them nothing of real substance, but they’d still have something to show for their trip to Murrays Beach.
The cop on duty at the entrance to the car park moved a barrier aside, and we eased out onto a sealed road hemmed in by spindly trees and dense shrubs. Cherry spent the next five minutes on the phone with the constable back at the station, re-organising the office roster and the patrol schedule for the bay.
We passed a turn-off on our left with a sign pointing to Steeple Bay. We continued straight ahead, and a hundred metres further down the road, the bitumen gave way to a loose surface of road base and gravel. Large yellow signs along the roadside warned that we were approaching a work zone where the speed limit would be forty kilometres an hour.
We rounded a corner, and fifty metres ahead, next to the road, a yellow excavator dumped a load of earth into a waiting tip truck. Half-a-dozen men
in safety helmets and fluoro overalls watched on. As we approached them, a lollipop guy separated himself from the group and stepped towards us. He raised a stop sign attached to a white pole, and Cherry pulled up next to him, wound down his window, and said g’day.
He and the lollipop guy, a young Aboriginal bloke aged about twenty, discussed the weather. They both agreed it was going to be another hot one. Cherry pointed at a roadside billboard that read, ‘Your taxes at work’. Cherry said his taxes had been at work on Jervis Bay Road for so long he’d be ready for retirement before the project was finished. The young bloke chuckled without mirth. I had a feeling he’d heard the joke before, and possibly from Cherry.
An old grey sedan pulled up behind us and four young Aboriginal men stuck their heads out the windows and razzed the lollipop guy. He smiled, said ‘Seeyah, Sarge,’ and went back to chat to his mates. A couple of minutes later, a solitary ambulance motored towards us. Bits of gravel popped from under its tyres as it passed. I assumed it was on its way to pick up our body. The lollipop guy came back to Cherry’s window, turned his sign to display the word ‘Slow’, and waved us on.
The road gradually sloped upwards on mounded earth and rocks till it merged with an elevated causeway, which ran for about three hundred metres over flat ground that’d been churned up by heavy machinery. Patches of some sort of dried-out aquatic plant had survived the construction work. The type of plant and the continuous line of culverts underneath the road were sure signs that the area was extremely flood prone.
Cherry confirmed that thought, volunteering that the area was sometimes under water for weeks on end during the winter rains. He said the people at Steeple Bay had been pushing for the causeway for years, but it wasn’t the community’s periodic isolation that’d got the thing built. It’d been funded to ensure the navy’s uninterrupted access to Creswell’s air base. A section of the security fence around the air base was visible on our left through intermittent gaps in the trees.
Near the end of the causeway, we passed a large construction hut with a couple of security cameras hanging from the eaves at either end of it. According to Cherry, the cameras were a recent addition, installed to discourage, if not catch, the vandals who’d recently taken a destructive interest in some of the machinery left on site overnight. The cameras swivelled as we passed, monitoring our progress.
‘That’s as serious as it usually gets around here,’ said Cherry. ‘Bored young blokes who smoke a few cones and look for something to tag or wreck. The damage here has had a malicious edge to it, though. Like they really meant to fuck the place up. I put it down to jealousy — young pricks wanting to give a bit of grief to a blackfella who’s made good. And Dave Calder’s certainly done that. Made good.’
‘And he is?’
‘A squillionaire who wins lots of these contracts and gives plenty of jobs to the local Aboriginal people. Who also happen to be my people, so more strength to his arm.’
I looked at Cherry. I hadn’t picked it and McHenry hadn’t said. Cherry turned and smiled at me, and I returned his smile and nodded.
‘Came back home, did you?’ I said.
‘Guess so,’ he said. ‘Twenty years in Canberra, and it was fine. Good for the kids at least. But they’re all grown now, so when the senior’s job here came up, I went for it. And it’s working out okay. It’s just cases like this one that do it to you — where you know the family. Then it’s tough.’
The causeway sloped upwards and merged with a cutting that’d been blasted through a small hill at the north-western end of the works. The walls of the cutting had concrete skin, and small drainpipes jutted out over the gutters at the side of the road. We passed through the cutting and rounded a corner, where another lollipop man waved us onto a newly sealed section of blacktop.
My phone vibrated. A text from Loz at Murrays Beach. The body had been loaded. I pocketed the phone, and it immediately vibrated with a call from McHenry.
‘You won’t like this, Glass,’ he said, instantly provoking my anxiety. ‘The boss has agreed to a naval investigator shadowing you on this one.’
‘What?’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘Shadowing me. What does that mean?’
‘It means one of their investigators, a Lieutenant Stella Coombs, is waiting for you at the hospital. You two’ll partner up for the duration, and she’ll have the lead. Should she choose to exercise her authority, you’ll defer. That’s from the minister’s office, so no choices here. I know it could get tricky. You might even decide to bail. But if you went that way, it’d leave us with a big hole, and no one here would thank you for that.’
Being ordered to play second fiddle to the navy would’ve really got up McHenry’s nose, but I couldn’t detect a lick of it in his voice. It showed how well he knew me. If he’d displayed his anger, put shit on the minister’s directive, it would’ve incited my indignation, and I may have taken up his invitation and bailed from the case there and then.
‘And what about this John Sheridan?’ I said, the irritation in my voice prompting Cherry to shoot me a concerned look. ‘Does navy know where he is? And do we have his photo yet?’
‘We’ve asked,’ said McHenry, ‘but we haven’t heard back, yet. Maybe this Coombs can speed things up. And, Glass, be aware. She’ll monitor your every fart and report back on the aroma. So conduct yourself appropriately. Maintain discipline. And don’t fuck up. Alright?’
‘Yes sir.’
Lieutenant Stella Coombs was easy to spot when we walked into the hospital reception area — she was the only person dressed in navy whites. She was small and fit-looking, with a blonde bob bulging from under her dress hat, and a fresh three-centimetre scar under her left eye. She smiled as we approached, and after we’d completed introductions, Cherry went to check on the viewing room, and Smeaton, Coombs, and I took a seat well away from the reception desk.
‘I know this is foreign to you,’ said Coombs, slipping her bag under her seat. ‘Someone looking over your shoulder.’
‘Happens all the time,’ I said, nodding at Smeaton, drawing his smile. ‘Now, I didn’t get any ground rules from my people — so how’s this gonna work?’
‘I’ve seen your updates,’ said Coombs. ‘So I’ve got a good sense of where you’re at. Keep doing what you’re doing. If I’ve got something to add, I’ll speak up.’
‘What about John Sheridan? Canberra says we don’t have anything on him yet. Like his whereabouts or a photo. What’s happening with that?’
‘We’ll cover that later. When we’re done here.’
She smiled. More a show of teeth than an attempt to engage, though it was better than I could’ve mustered. This surprise arrangement felt all wrong. A criminal investigation was like a giant jigsaw. You gathered up the pieces, put them together, and got the full picture. It was early days yet, but if navy chose not to share what it knew, crucial information would be hidden from us. That’d force us to rely on guesswork, which could take us down the wrong path, or bring us undone in some unpredictable way.
Adding to the challenge was this requirement that I deal with Coombs as if she were a respected superior. People had to earn your respect, and I instinctively railed against such an imposition. I tried to keep a neutral set on my face as these thoughts whirled around inside me, but Coombs picked up on my disquiet.
‘Whichever way you cut it,’ she said, leaning in close, ‘this is a shit sandwich for both of us. But if we work together, we’ll find out what happened to this girl, and that’s why we’re here isn’t it? You can take the running, unless I say otherwise. And if I irritate you, tell me. I grew up with three brothers. Whenever I pissed them off, they let me know all about it, so feel free.’
My phone buzzed. A text from Cherry. The ambulance was pulling in at casualty. I told Coombs and Smeaton, and we headed around to view the unloading.
A female paramedic opened the back of the ambulance, and she and her
male colleague studied the interior of the vehicle for a moment. Then they both took hold of the stretcher bearing the body bag, and they pulled. The stretcher uncoupled from its tracks, a frame dropped from its sides and four wheels clicked in unison as they hit the ground. We followed as they wheeled the body through casualty and down a long corridor. At the end of the corridor, they swung the stretcher around and manoeuvred it through the door of the viewing room, next to the morgue.
The paramedics got on either end of the bag and slid it from the stretcher onto a stainless-steel slab. Job done, the female paramedic took me aside and warned me that the body was leaking. It was best not to disturb it too much, she said.
Smeaton stayed with the body while the rest of us plodded back to reception. Twenty minutes later, one of the SUVs that’d gone to Steeple Bay pulled up outside. A cop got out of the front passenger side and opened the rear passenger’s door. A small, middle-aged Aboriginal woman sat on the back seat, staring straight ahead.
The back door on the other side of the vehicle opened, and a tall bloke in a long, brown cassock got out and hurried around to assist the woman. The priest — from his mode of dress, surely a Franciscan — had intense dark eyes, short grey hair, and a full beard of the same colour. He wore simple leather sandals, and had a giant set of wooden rosary beads hanging from a thick cord knotted around his waist. A large ornate crucifix, dark timber with a silver figure, dangled from the end of the beads. The crucifix slapped against his cassock as he moved.
The woman nodded at the priest and swivelled in her seat till her thin legs dangled from the open doorway. The priest took her hands and helped her to the ground. He stepped away from her, but he stayed ready. She pulled her shoulders back to affect a resolute pose. A helmet of grey hair hung to her shoulders, and despite the heat, she wore a buttoned cardigan over her blue cotton frock. The priest moved in again and took her arm, and they moved as one towards the doors where we stood waiting.
