‘O Jesus.’
He was speaking to burring.
All three were statues, except for their eyes. ‘The police are here.’ Jade slid backwards fast from the wheel saddle. ‘Please, Jade, don’t do anything silly. Go with them, and we’ll do everything possible to get you back here, living here, fostered here! I promise. So please, all sit down and I’ll go and talk to them.’
He stepped through the door to the same view of the house that met him every day. For a second he dared hope that Helen had mistaken the cars’ markings. Then over the roof came a hammering. It was quicker to go round. He broke into a shuffling run and found the rag of towel still in his hand, threw it backwards towards the workshop. At the corner of the house he almost collided with a uniformed constable and a blonde woman in jeans and a green jumper. Both jumped back, the constable’s hand raised in an involuntary whoa, keep your distance! Russell halted. The man looked quickly past him, returned his eyes to Russell’s.
‘Morning, sir, are you the occupant of these premises?’
‘Yes, I’m the owner.’
‘And you are, sir?’
The hammering stopped.
‘Russell Bass.’
‘Well, Mr Bass, I’m Senior Constable Carrick and this is —’ he opened a hand towards the woman without looking at her — ‘Ms Kells, an officer of the Department of Family and Community Services. We have a search warrant if needed, and I’m formally warning you that you’re required under the Care Act to answer any questions put to you. Is that understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Ms Kells.’
‘Mr Bass, we’ve received a report of the presence of children on these premises who the Department have been trying to locate since the arrest of their mother. Those children, Mr Bass, have been declared by a court to be legally in the care of the Minister. Do you have knowledge of the children, and where they currently are?’
‘Yes.’ He turned and pointed. ‘They’re in my workshop.’
‘Thank you.’
The constable touched him on the arm. ‘Come with us, please.’
He had closed the door. Now it stood open. He looked past the workshop and into the tea-tree. The woman was in front, keen to get there, the constable behind him.
‘I’m sorry, I think they’ve gone.’
‘I hope you’re wrong, Mr Bass,’ the woman said into the air. ‘For their sake and yours.’
He wasn’t. A glance told both they weren’t hiding, there being nowhere.
‘As you can see, they were here. The bottle on the wheel is Jade’s. The boy was hand-building. That box’s his. Emma was helping me glaze. We were doing the eggcups.’ They had allowed their eyes to be directed, but both now were watching him. ‘I asked Jade to wait in here and not do anything silly. She’s frightened, though, that they’ll be split up.’
‘Is that what she’s told you,’ the woman said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well it’s not what we do, Mr Bass. We attempt to keep them together. But I’m not surprised she’s spun you a tale, I’m very familiar with our friend Jade. You don’t fit the profile of “family associate”, Mr Bass, if I may say so. So do you mind telling me please how they came to be here. I do know her well enough — and Kayla … I take it she’s been a visitor?’
They turned at a knock on the door. A second constable stood there.
‘They were here,’ Carrick said, ‘but they’ve skipped. Get on the blower to Josh, tell him they could be circling to come out at the lookout. Then I want another four bodies here, to go through this bush at the back. And give that chook run a good search.’
The man nodded, left the doorway. A moment later Russell heard him relaying instructions.
‘Yes — to answer your question about Kayla.’
‘What I was going to say, they wouldn’t have been here if Jade didn’t choose to be. So can you enlighten us, please, as to how you come to have them in your house?’
He omitted Helen from his account. And the night drive to Paris Parade. They appeared, he thought, to believe him. The woman asked did he know where she’d been intending to go after here. He was deliberately vague, an aunt somewhere in Sydney. That was all she’d said. Kayla was arranging it.
‘No mention of a name, or even a suburb?’
‘Not to me.’
The two exchanged a look he couldn’t read. The woman took a phone from her shoulder bag and photographed the bottle abandoned on the wheel-head, then the rough box, its last coil half-attached and hanging. She put the phone away and looked around as if noting for the first time what surrounded her.
‘You’re a professional potter?’
‘I am.’
She grunted as if the possibility had never before occurred to her.
Carrick said, ‘We’ll take a look in your house, Mr Bass, and as part of that we’re permitted to remove anything that establishes their presence. While that’s being carried out I’d like you to remain here, please. A constable will be with you in a minute.’
‘Am I under some sort of arrest?’
‘No, Mr Bass, you’re not. There’s no offence under the Act of harbouring as such. But we’ll need to satisfy ourselves as to whether there might be other matters we wish to speak to you about.’
‘Nothing of that sort has happened, Constable. I just fed them and gave them a roof.’
The man nodded. ‘We’ll leave it there for the moment, eh.’
He stood where he was until they left, then squeezed into the gap beside the wheel to the right-hand window and searched the arc of bush he could see. If they were anywhere, that’s where they were, in the dense ribbon running between the block and the cliff edge all the way round to the lookout. They hadn’t had time or sufficient cover to have run in any other direction but into the tea-tree. She would know they’d be watching the lookout and the well. She’d find them a sinkhole or wallaby lie, hide out till dark. He wondered would she come to the house first, to get clothes and their sleeping bags, ask him for food. He dearly hoped so! He would speak to her properly about fostering. Try to persuade her to stay the night and tomorrow all go with him to this woman Kells to begin the process. He backed out of the gap. Where was this constable? He walked to the door to look through its pane and gave the constable, about to reach for the knob, a minor fright.
The man didn’t give his name, behaved as if he’d been entering pottery workshops all his life and had seen enough to last him. He drew the stool from under the bench and sat looking out the doorway. Russell couldn’t sit. He asked the man was it all right if he worked. Permission was a shrug.
He cut her half-thrown bottle from the wheel-head and dropped it in the recycle bucket. He pinched the coil from the boy’s box and dropped it, too, in the bucket, then enclosed the box hopefully in plastic and slid it on its batt onto the lowest rung of the racks, to be visible, but out of his way. He sponged clean the marble slab, and the spoon the boy had been using for smoothing. Then he sat to finish glazing the eggcups.
He’d dipped and wiped two when he heard a heavy motor come across the grass and pull up somewhere near the kiln shed. The constable stood. ‘Stay here, please.’ He went out to speak to the arrivals.
Russell rose and glided to the door and looked through the pane. The constable was talking to four men in sky-blue forage caps and overalls. Even if they failed to find the three, they would certainly find her orchid colonies and the track to the ledge. He hoped if they went onto the lower ledge they had the nous to understand what they were looking at and the decency to leave the urns untouched. The constable turned, and Russell strode back to the eggcups.
By the dusty clock face he and the constable shared the workshop for a silent forty minutes, until a female constable arrived at the door and asked him to come to the house, please, and lock up, he was going to the station.
He was kept waiting in an anteroom with an internal window he couldn’t see through, but suspected he could be seen through. For how long, he didn’t know, there was no clock. Eventually a man in a suit and tie and carrying a thin manila folder came in, introduced himself — ‘Detective Constable Dixon’ — and conducted him to a small room with three chairs set around one end of a long table at whose wall end was, he guessed, some sort of recording and filming device. A second man in a suit came in and sat. Russell was asked to identify himself to the lens, then the men did.
The folder when opened appeared to hold little more than a single sheet. The line of questioning was what Russell had expected and prepared himself for, but was conducted in such a half-hearted manner it was plain neither man believed him to be a paedophile.
At the end of what he judged to be three-quarters of an hour the first man, while the other continued to write, thanked him for his assistance and stood and told him he was free to go, a constable would conduct him to the front desk. There, he was asked to take a seat until a car and driver were available. He’d find his own way, he said, and walked up the street to the rank outside the fish shop.
He stood at the sink and drank two glasses of water, then rang Helen, got the machine. He was concluding his message when there came a rapping on the back door. He opened it with the phone in his hand, and she was there.
‘I saw the taxi. I know they didn’t find them, but any word?’ She lifted a finger towards the phone.
‘Word? Oh — no, nothing. I was actually just leaving you a message.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind repeating it.’ He was blocking the doorway. She motioned past him. ‘May I?’
‘Of course, please — sorry.’
‘That’s okay, you’ve had quite a morning.’ She waited for him to stand the phone back in the charger. When he turned she nodded towards the blackened Atomic still sitting on the cork mat where he’d placed it at breakfast, in another life. ‘Shall I make us a coffee?’
‘I think I need something stronger.’ He opened the dresser and took out the squat black bottle of cognac. ‘You?’
‘Not this early, I’ll settle for caffeine.’
He didn’t own a snifter. He poured a wine glass half full and sat. She carried the percolator to the sink and while unscrewing it said over her shoulder, ‘So what was your message?’
He took too big a mouthful, had to wait for the burning in his gullet to ease.
‘Just that I was back. And if maybe you’d seen anything of them — afterwards.’
She set the halves of the percolator on the sink and lifted a tumbler from the drainer. ‘On second thought, I’ll join you.’ She sat and slid the tumbler to the bottle. ‘Just a mouthful.’
He poured her a good inch, passed the tumbler back. She put the rim to her nose, sipped, blew a quick startled breath. ‘Woh, that’s strong.’
He wasn’t interested, he was waiting.
She saw and lowered the tumbler. ‘I watched the whole thing from Lucy’s bedroom. They were here for about another hour after they took you. Every time one of them came from behind the workshop my heart was in my throat till I saw he was on his own. The cars all left, but one cop stayed at the corner of your house, just watching. Then a car came back and fetched him.’ She was studying his face. ‘So … did you and she have some sort of plan? For something like this.’
He shook his head. ‘No, but you can bet she did. Just I wasn’t a party to it. Jade to the last.’
‘So where do you think they are? Would they have made it to the lookout?’
‘Not along the road. Adele had her own little track. Jade may have found it. I just wouldn’t have thought they had time. I’m assuming they just ran into the bush. But there’s not enough places to stay hidden from a proper search. So I truly don’t know. My hope is they’re back down in the valley, but they’ve got nothing except the clothes they were wearing. Nothing to eat, no sleeping bags. Or else she’s double-bluffed us all and tracked up the back of the houses and by now they’re on their way to Sydney. Wherever they are, I don’t think we’ll see or hear from them again.’
‘That’s a bit gloomy.’
‘No, I’m just being realistic. She doesn’t look behind her.’
Helen rolled the tumbler between her palms. ‘How … unpleasant was it, at the police station?’
‘Oh, they asked the questions you’d expect. Not really what’s uppermost in my mind. I should have spoken to her days ago, not when the hounds were on the doorstep. I doubt she even heard me.’
‘What … so you actually said it to her? About fostering them?’
‘Way too late, and too hurried. But yes, I did.’
‘Katoomba’s not a big place, Russell. There’s a good chance you’ll see Kayla. You can put it to her, or at least ask if she’ll give you a contact.’
He didn’t wish to see Kayla again. He’d had plenty of time to think about why the police and the woman had arrived. He didn’t need to say any of this. He said instead, both believing it and not, ‘She won’t stay here. They’re all she’s got.’
He rang Hugh and Delys and got the machine.
They didn’t ring back. They were probably down at Bullaburra being grandparents. Anyway, he’d lost the urge to talk. He lit the heater and while waiting for the flames to build remembered he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Not that he was hungry. But he needed to eat. There was plenty in the fridge, he’d shopped for four only a day ago. The only thing that appealed, being quick, were the dreaded eggs. But not yet. There was enough light if he left now to squeeze in another, again almost certainly futile, examination of the paths around the lookout. He’d need his down jacket.
He pocketed the torch from the bedside table, carried the jacket. He was just into the hallway when he heard the back door quietly open. He froze. A moment later it quietly closed. He drew a breath to call ‘Hello?’, held it, and listened. His heart, though, was running ahead of his mind, began to thud. He dropped the jacket and padded fast along the hallway in his socks. The door to the kitchen was open, but before he reached it he smelled them!
He had held the boy, never either girl, but all three walked into his arms. He was glad the light was off, so they couldn’t see his eyes. The ash reek was in their hair, their clothes, their skin. He breathed it in! The embrace was clumsy, their different heights. He felt Jade draw away and lowered his arms. He’d begun to guess, but said, ‘Where on earth were you?’
‘In the kiln, the tunnel.’
‘Why we stink!’ Emma chirped. ‘Right up in the chimney end! She made us breathe through our hands so’s we wouldn’t sneeze!’
‘And you’ve been there this whole time? Till just now?’
‘Yeah, waitin for it to be dark. We could see the sky up the chimney.’
‘I nearly sneezed, but,’ the boy said proudly. ‘Twice! But I stopped it!’
By Christ, he thought, you’re tough little bastards. He moved towards the switch for the ceiling spots, pointed towards the sink, ‘Well, you’d all better have a drink of water, then head to the bathroom.’
Jade flung out a hand. ‘Russell — no! No lights! Em, get the torch —’ she flicked her hand at the everything drawer — ‘go up the hall and turn off that one.’ She swung again to face him. ‘First time Kayla and me got put in care they come at night, yeah. You got candles?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you get em. Please.’
He didn’t argue. He walked into the pantry and groped with his fingers at the back of the shelf he thought them on. They would be there, Adele had loved candlelight. He found two boxes, one unopened, the other with five new ones and a stub. He brought both boxes to the table, took down the pair of crystal candleholders she’d brought to marriage from her maiden’s bedroom, and the salt-fired candle boat of Hugh’s with three sockets. He left the stub, stood the five. The boy wanted to l
ight them, and Russell gave him the matches.
Emma came back, made to return the torch to the drawer. ‘You’d better keep it out, eh,’ Russell said. He left the crystal pair on the table, carried the boat to the shelf above the stove. The new wicks guttered then steadied. He could at last see how much ash they wore.
‘And can you lock the door,’ Jade said quietly.
He found the key, did as asked.
‘And can you sit. Em.’
The girl planted herself in front of him. Her eyebrows and lashes, even the down on her cheeks, were frosted with ash. ‘This mornin. Did you mean it? When the cops come. About we can live here.’
‘Foster us,’ Jade said.
Emma whirled. ‘Jade! I’m sayin it!’ She turned again to him, her face too old for eight. ‘So … did you?’
With all my heart, he wanted to say. The old vow would confuse her. No, it was his heart speaking! He reached and took her hands.
‘With all my heart.’
‘Good. I want to learn more chess, and her and me want to go back to school. And he has to start, we told him.’ Her fingers squirmed. He released her, and she patted the backs of his hands and crossed her wrists at her waist.
‘A bit over two years and I’m eighteen,’ Jade said. ‘So it’s just till then. Then they’ll live with me.’
‘I don’t think we have to cross that bridge just yet. We’ve got a few others first, I think.’
She came with him. ‘Yeah, Kells. How pissed was she?’
‘Without knowing her, it’s hard to say. She didn’t seem to be. She was just very cold.’
She nodded, pleased. ‘She was pissed. I’m waitin to see her face in the mornin when we all walk in.’
‘I’d prefer she was on our side in this process. Don’t you think?’
‘You’re takin us off her case load. What would you reckon.’
He began to grin, quickly suppressed it. She was serious.
‘Russell, we stink, we need to have showers.’ She pointed to the boat. ‘Can we take that one?’ He nodded. She ignored the clever curl, lifted it by the hull. She snapped finger and thumb and pointed, and the boy and girl started towards the hallway. She plucked at her jumper. ‘We’ll drop all these in the bath, then I’ll take em to the laundry.’
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