by Peter Cotton
She was right, of course. We could look around for another hideout, but it probably wouldn’t be as good as the cavity. And anyway, if the bandits thought we were somewhere in the immediate vicinity, they’d search high and low till they found us. On balance, it’d be best to stay where we were and hope that they passed us by.
I turned and looked at our hiding spot and realised I could build up the thicket of saltbush that grew in the entrance so as to better screen us and our bike. I took out my knife and cut down some of the bigger saltbushes that grew beside the road. When I had six of them stacked up, I shaped the ends of their thin trunks to a sharp point. Then, with Jade’s help, I carried the bushes back to the cavity. We arranged them on each side of the original thicket and pushed their sharpened trunks deep into the loose soil.
We walked back up the highway and examined our work, and Jade returned to the entrance and made some adjustments. When we were satisfied that the ‘planted’ bushes looked as natural as possible, we eased past them and re-entered our hiding spot.
Jade slid down the rock wall till she was sitting in the dirt next to the back wheel of the bike, and I leant into the wall on the other side of the bike and looked down at her. She was deep in thought, and from the bleak expression on her face, none of her musings were giving her much joy. The time had come to pump her. To take her mind off her troubles, and more importantly, to see if she knew anything that might advance the case.
‘Do you know how you ended up here?’ I said.
She wrapped her arms around her legs and dropped her head onto her knees. Half a minute passed. She finally looked up at me. I wondered if she’d used the time to manufacture a story, or if she’d been trying to make sense of what had happened to her.
‘No, I don’t,’ she said, shaking her head as if trying to clear it. ‘I don’t remember much of the last day at all. I met a friend at a café in the bay early yesterday morning. Then I got on the bus for Nowra … but someone must have done something to my drink at the café, or messed with my food somehow, because I went all wonky on the bus, and then I must have passed out. Next thing I know, I’m getting off a plane and these guys are walking me through the terminal building … After that, I don’t remember anything till I’m roaring along in a sidecar next to you. And I know I haven’t told you this, but thanks for getting me out of there. God knows what they were going to do to me.’
Jade had suffered an ordeal, I’d extracted her from danger, and she was thankful. It was time to harness her gratitude by getting her to spill what she knew. I thought about how to begin. It was clear she didn’t know that her uncle Ken had been only metres from her as she lay drugged in the sidecar. I considered hitting her with that news first up, but decided against it. The revelation might really upset her and send her into her shell. Or maybe she wouldn’t believe me — she could even get angry, and that’d kill the trust that was building between us. So I kicked things off more conservatively.
‘Did you know the guys on the plane?’ I said, ‘Or any of the ones you’ve seen up here?’
‘No, none of them,’ she said. ‘But they weren’t my people. My people wouldn’t do that to me.’
That’s when the penny dropped, and it caught me by surprise. If it’d all happened the way Jade said, she wouldn’t know that Kylie Stevens was dead. In fact, she would’ve been in la-la land well before I even landed in Jervis Bay. If I wanted to find out what she knew, first I had to tell her about Kylie. I steeled myself before I delivered the news. Despite the semi-darkness, she sensed my disquiet.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this,’ I said. ‘But your housemate, Kylie Stevens. I’m afraid she was murdered sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning …’
‘Kylie? No! How can …? I … I …’
‘… and we believe your abduction is connected to her murder.’
Jade let out a sharp scream and her hands shot up to her mouth to suppress the noise. Her body shook, and she began to cry. I would’ve got down and given her a hug, but we’d known each other less than an hour, so I didn’t feel like I could comfort her in that way.
‘What happened to her?’ said Jade, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘What happened to Kylie?’
‘We think she was rendered unconscious somehow,’ I said. ‘Then she was wrapped in a fishing net, weighed down with something heavy, and thrown in the bay, close to Murrays Beach.’
‘At Murrays?’
‘Let’s go back to Tuesday night. What caused the argument between you and Kylie in your room?’
‘You know about that?’ she asked, and then she nodded. ‘Of course you would. Well, it was nothing really. She used my phone to text Shero, and she pretended it was from me, that’s all. She wanted to set up a date with him.’
‘She didn’t ask you first?’
‘No. No, she didn’t.’
‘And Shero. That’s John Sheridan?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why do you think she did it? Used your phone? Pretended she was you?’
‘Shero comes into JB store quite a bit and everyone knows he fancies me. He’s so obvious about it. The thing is, I’ve already got a fella, so I guess Kylie thought that if she could get Shero to the beach, by hook or by crook, something might happen between them.’
‘They did meet, as far as we know. We found Sheridan’s phone on Murrays Beach. But he’s still missing.’
‘Oh my God …’
‘So, why didn’t you contact Sheridan after your fight with Kylie? And tell him it wasn’t you who’d organised to meet him — that it was her.’
‘We might have had a fight, but I wouldn’t dob on Kylie like that. That’d make trouble all round. Especially if Mum found out. Mum doesn’t … she, she didn’t like Kylie. Reckoned she was a bad influence on me.’
‘You didn’t want Kylie to get in trouble. So, you two were close?’
‘Not really. We were too different. Like, she was so intense — about social justice, and all that sovereignty stuff. They used to talk about it for hours out the back, her and uncle.’
Jade let out a desperate sigh and looked down at the ground. Maybe I could’ve been gentler with her, but with time running out, I’d figured a blunt approach was the quickest way to the truth.
‘So, why her?’ she said, her tears streaming again. ‘Why?’
‘We don’t know, yet,’ I said. ‘But if we assume there’s a link between her death and your abduction, the question becomes, why did they kill Kylie and spare you? Any ideas?’
‘I don’t know. You’re making it sound like I had something to do with what happened to her.’
‘I’m not saying that. There just seems to be a link, and we think you might know things that could help us pin it down.’
‘I don’t know about any link. Kylie’s dead, I got taken, and you’re telling me Shero’s missing too. It’s just so fucking awful.’
Jade moved her sandalled feet up and down in the dust. She shook her head and looked up at me and grimaced.
‘I’m sorry to have to press this,’ I said, ‘but why do you think you were brought up here?’
‘That’s hard …’
‘Hard because you don’t know, or hard because it’s difficult to talk about?’
‘I was brought up here against my will. That’s what I know. Now you say Kylie’s dead and me being taken has something to do with it. Why do you think that?’
‘What about your uncle? Ken Bynder. Would he have had anything to do with your being up here?’
Jade’s eyes narrowed slightly, and I caught a flash of anger. Then she bowed her head again, and she seemed to be thinking about something that had just occurred to her.
‘Uncle Kenny wanted us to come up here last week,’ she said, staring at her feet as she remembered
. ‘To Alice. Me and Mum. To stay at Auntie May’s for a while. He even said he’d pay for our flights, but Mum wasn’t keen. Him being sick, and Kylie not being much of a carer. I said Mum could go and I’d stay and look after him, but he said no. So, I dug my heels in, said I was going to stay regardless, and he knew I meant it.’
‘Why did you want to stay so badly?’
‘Like I said, I’ve got this fella and we’ve really been hitting it off, so it wasn’t a good time to leave.’
‘Did your uncle say why he wanted you and your mum to come up here? Was there something going on at home that might’ve prompted him to suggest it?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ she said, her eyes still locked on her sandals. ‘We used to come up here lots when I was a kid, to Alice, so it wasn’t an odd suggestion or anything. It was just that this time, Uncle insisted that we come up, and he wouldn’t say why.’
‘What about Kylie? Was she coming up, too?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She knew Uncle was hassling me to come, but we didn’t talk about it beyond that.’
She stood up and looked out at the road.
‘So why do you think Kylie was murdered?’ I said. ‘Did she make a mess of something? Did she have a particular enemy? Did she really piss someone off?’
‘I’ve got no idea what she did, or if she pissed someone off. We shared a roof and we worked together sometimes — that’s all. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. We didn’t share secrets. You get what I’m saying?’
As well as experiencing mild shock and some level of grief for her housemate, Jade was obviously angry, too.
‘Kylie’s phone was found at the bottom of a cliff, under the Cape St George lighthouse. But the thing is, the phone still works, so we’re not sure how it got down there. And her clothes were found in a pile on Murrays Beach, next to Sheridan’s.’
Jade blinked rapidly for a moment as she processed this information.
‘So I guess you’re thinking Shero’s dead, too,’ she said, strangely matter-of-fact. ‘And that’s what all the fuss is about. Not the murder of a black girl or the abduction of another one. No. It’s the disappearance of a big, white, navy bloke.’
‘How do you think Kylie’s phone got down onto the rocks? It’s not damaged, as I said, so it wasn’t thrown from up top. And all the boats in the bay are accounted for, so none of them took it there. How do you think it could’ve got there?’
Jade’s eyes flickered and she bit her bottom lip.
‘This might sound strange,’ she said, ‘but my grandad — the one who worked on the roads up here? He lived and worked around the bay for years, as well. It’s why we’ve got so much family down there. The thing is, Grandad’s best mate was a bloke from Steeple Bay. They worked together and fished together. Did all the things that mates do. Anyway, this mate told Grandad about a hole that started near the lighthouse and went all the way down to the rocks and the water. That could be how the phone got down there.’
‘What? Some sort of passage?’
‘I don’t know. I never saw it. Nor did Grandad, as far as I know. But the mate who told him about it said that people from Steeple Bay used to hide in it — when the cops were after them or the welfare was out and about. It’s why not many kids from the bay got taken, back in the day. When the heat was on, they disappeared into the long hole near the lighthouse.’
QTV INTERNATIONAL
THURSDAY 1 DECEMBER, 6.00AM AEST
Dozens of Indonesian troops are dead, and many more are injured, following two huge explosions that rocked either end of the Jayapura occupation site just minutes ago.
The troops had moved in behind two bulldozers that were dismantling barricades at either end of the site when the explosions occurred.
Papuan protestors continue to fire on the trucks and ambulances that’ve moved in to collect the dead and injured troops, and a group of Papuans are working to set up a heavy machine gun on top of a four-storey building across the square from where I’m standing. If they use that weapon, the Indonesian troops will respond in kind, and the result for everyone here inside the barricades could be devastating.
More than four hundred foreign protestors are sheltering in a big hall just off the main square, among them about one hundred and twenty Australians. All of the protestors there must be wondering how their peaceful action turned deadly, and how they’ll escape injury or death in the confrontation that’s only just begun.
Jean Acheson, QTV International, Jayapura.
7
Was there really some form of access from the Cape St George lighthouse down to the ocean? Some sort of tunnel connecting the two? A ‘long hole’, as Jade had called it? At first blush, it sounded fanciful and barely worth considering. For a start, if such access did exist, plenty of people would’ve heard about it over the years, not just Jade’s grandad. The fact that he’d been told, and he’d told Jade, and she’d told me, was ample evidence of that.
Then again, maybe I was the end man in a chain of disclosures: maybe Jade’s grandad and his mate from Steeple Bay had had such a ‘special’ relationship that the grandad had been one of the few outsiders to be told about this secret sanctuary. And maybe the grandad was hyper-protective as well as impulsive, which was why he’d opted to break all the rules and tell his favourite granddaughter. And maybe Jade, traumatised and disoriented by recent events, had gone against her natural instincts and told me, a copper. The links in this chain were more implausible than the tunnel story itself, but the possibility of a tunnel still constituted a lead, and, as such, I’d have to write it up. If I survived this fix.
I opened my backpack and took out the bag of provisions I’d salvaged from my wrecked bike. I handed it to Jade, and she rifled through it and came out with a tin of sardines. She peeled the lid from the tin, took out a couple of fish, and passed the tin to me. I picked up a fish by its tail, tilted my head back, and lowered it into my mouth. My first food in hours. I ate another fish, and another, and handed the tin back to Jade.
‘So, what are we gunna do?’ she said, her fingers poised over the last fish.
‘Wait for a while,’ I said. ‘And hope that if the bikies come back, they don’t stop here. So, tell me more about your uncle. He’s your mum’s brother, right?’
‘You’re still on about Uncle Kenny!’
‘Your Uncle Kenny wanted you and your mum to come up here and stay with your auntie. When you refused, you were drugged, kidnapped, and brought up against your will. The link between what he wanted, and what eventually happened, naturally interests me.’
‘Are you blaming him for what they did to me? And you said my being taken was connected to Kylie’s death. Are you saying he was in on that, too? With what happened to Kylie? Can you really think that?’
‘I’m not saying anything like it. I’m just wondering where he fits in, that’s all.’
‘If he had organised for me to be taken, those bastards would never have treated me like they did. And if he really wanted me to come up here, and he had a good reason for it, I’d have come. To please Mum as much as for anything else. Uncle Kenny’s sick. Very sick. So why don’t you just leave him alone?’
Tears welled in her eyes again, and her chin quivered as she fought for control.
‘I can’t leave anyone out of it, Jade,’ I said, turning the screws a bit more. ‘Not you. Not your mum. And not your uncle. I’ll try not to hurt you or your family, but investigations like this can be uncomfortable for the people who come into focus. It’s impossible for us to avoid that. And, like it or not, your family’s a big part of our focus right now.’
She looked away as she struggled with a thought that had taken hold. I considered once again whether to tell her about Bynder being metres from her as she lay drugged in the sidecar, and again I decided to hold off. Jade surfaced from her thoughts and we locked eyes.
>
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Ask anything you like, and I’ll answer as best as I can.’
‘Good for you. So, tell me about your uncle’s friends — the people he saw, like anyone who visited him regularly.’
‘He’s got friends who come by, and plenty of other people who visit. Especially with him being sick.’
‘Any special friends? People who stay with him for hours at a time? Even stay overnight?’
‘Some.’
‘Any names?’
‘Phil Manassa’s one. Uncle and Manassa go back a long way.’
‘What’s he do, this Phil Manassa?’
‘Organises the hiring and firing for Dave Calder, the big road contractor, which makes Manassa himself a big wheel around the place. I don’t know much about him other than that, really. Except that he keeps in good shape, and he’s very proud of his hair.’
This Manassa sounded like the warm-up man from the campfire gathering.
‘Must be good for your uncle to have an old friend about the place at a time like this,’ I said, trying to smile. ‘And good for you and your mum.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so, but I find Manassa a bit creepy, myself.’
‘A bit of a sleaze?’
‘No, not that. It’s just that Uncle changes, somehow, when he’s around.’
‘Changes how?’
‘Hard to put your finger on. He gets serious and cranky, somehow. Like he wishes you weren’t there. One time, I was out on the back verandah when Manassa and him went into the back bedroom to talk. They thought they were alone, but I could hear them. And I know they would’ve hated me listening in, but what am I supposed to do? Disappear or something? Walk round on eggshells? I’m not doing that! Not when it’s supposed to be my home, too.’
‘What did they say that they wouldn’t have wanted you to hear?’
‘They were talking low and secretly about something bad happening to the bay. Not to the people or anything, but to the bay itself. They kept calling it ‘the damage’, and they were both wondering if ‘the damage’ would end up underwater when the polar ice caps melted because of global warming. Both of them reckoned it would — end up underwater, that is. But they reckoned they’d both be long dead before that happened.’
