‘Of course it matters,’ said Gran. ‘It matters more than anything.’
More silence. Fish waited. At last Gran asked casually, ‘Where were you all when that man died?’
‘We were in town that afternoon, looking after the evacuees, and then at the fire when it reached River View,’ said Great-Uncle Joseph flatly. ‘We didn’t even know Jed hadn’t made it into town till Carol missed her.’ His voice softened as he added, ‘She and Scarlett and I drove out there just before Mattie was born.’
‘My,’ said Gran, ‘you do lead interesting lives.’
‘At least we don’t land planes on top of cows,’ said Blue.
‘It was a bullock, and Johnno missed it,’ said Gran.
‘I suppose the police will want to talk to me too,’ said Great-Uncle Joseph.
‘Yes. The detective said he’d be back later,’ said Great-Aunt Mah.
‘Good,’ said Joseph crisply. ‘I’ll put him right.’
A pause. Then Gran said carefully, ‘The blokes in the tanker — would they lie for Sam?’
Fish could hear silence settle on the room again. ‘They’d lie for him,’ said Joseph. His voice had lost its confidence again. Fish knew he spoke for Blue and Mah too when he said, ‘We all would.’
Fish lurked in the bedroom even after the conversation grew general, talking about the various vintage planes Gran and Gramps were doing up now they’d sold their air-freight business to TAA. The scent of roasting lamb and rosemary floated from the kitchen.
She’d hesitated over her paints when she was unpacking. She would have loved to slap some around, but she was a bit too messy when she painted for this clean, pretty room.
If she’d been back home, she’d have gone for a walk. Fish liked walking. She had whole conversations with herself while she walked, or rather with Socrates, the fifth century BC Greek philosopher who was executed for blasphemy, for encouraging young people to ask questions. Or young men, to be specific, because the ancient Greeks hadn’t thought of women as people. Something they had in common, Mum had taught her, with an awful lot of males even these days, even though it was nearly the 1980s.
But Fish’s imaginary Socrates had no problem with females, and he was the most interesting conversationalist Fish knew. Unfortunately, the conversations didn’t work when she was just lying on a bed. Nor did she want to walk outside here. Not till she knew more about the snake and spider situation. And if there were dingoes. Fish made a note to check her sandshoes for funnel-web and redback spiders before she put them on.
No, going for a walk was not an option. Nor was disturbing the Greats’ conversation, because sure as eggs she’d ask the wrong question. Gran was right. They were all in too much pain and uncertainty to have Fish blundering about in their house . . .
She finally settled on sketching, one pencil in hand, another in her mouth ready to use when the first one lost the sharp lines she wanted. Sheep grew on the white page, amorphous sheep except for their faces, which had teeth. Because Fish had learned that no matter how safe something looked, there were always sharp teeth waiting for you . . .
She looked at the page again, then put the pencils down. It wasn’t working. She didn’t understand sheep, or the potential of their teeth. If it wasn’t true, then it wouldn’t work on the page.
A car engine. Fish looked up as the household’s kelpies barked. Interesting. They hadn’t barked when Joseph drove in. Fish opened the bedroom door a little wider.
‘Yes, officer, please come through. I’ve been expecting you.’ Her great-uncle’s voice. ‘You don’t need to speak to the ladies again, do you? Good. This isn’t easy for them.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Gran.
She heard the great-aunts and Gran moving in the kitchen, the clink of the dented blue kettle being put on the gas stove. Hadn’t the Greats ever heard of electric jugs? The voices from the living room were muffled but intelligible.
‘. . . so you see Sam had no opportunity to hurt anyone. Nor would he have,’ said Great-Uncle Joseph firmly.
A lie, thought Fish. She wondered if the police were any good at catching lies. Most people thought they were, but few really could. The Greats were not at all sure that Sam, whom she had never met, would never kill. She approved of their insight. People killed enemies in war all the time, and this Merv had been Sam McAlpine’s enemy. But it hadn’t been a war: would Sam have killed to protect his family?
Not if he was intelligent, thought Fish. Not if he could think of other ways of stopping that man, like calling the police. Sam McAlpine had probably been very intelligent. Her family usually was.
The sound of the great-aunts offering tea and cake muffled the policeman’s questions, but she could still hear no sound of real alarm in Great-Uncle Joseph’s voice. The police must have just been checking that his account matched everyone else’s, just as Blue had hoped.
‘By the way,’ Great-Uncle Joseph’s voice held nothing but curiosity, ‘are you any closer to finding the identity of the other two skeletons? Svenson at the hospital told me he thought they might even be forty years old.’
‘Not yet,’ said the city detective.
‘Nor the others,’ said the deeper, younger voice of Constable Ryan.
‘What others?’ asked Great-Uncle Joseph sharply.
‘I’m afraid we’re not making that information available just yet,’ said Detective Rodrigues smoothly.
‘Old remains, or more recent?’ demanded Joseph.
‘Good afternoon, sir. Thank you for your time.’
Fish heard the door shut, the crunch of feet on gravel. She moved to the window in time to hear:
‘. . . not to be discussed, Constable.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. But Dr McAlpine is a sort of expert on bodies.’
‘He is also related to the main suspect and possibly a suspect himself.’
‘Surely you can’t believe Dr McAlpine could be involved in murder! Sir, you don’t know these people.’
‘And you will do as you’re told, Constable. You are here to take notes and give me necessary local information, not to be a character witness.’
‘But that is necessary information, sir.’
‘That is enough, Constable!’ A door shut. The police car crunched down the driveway.
Fish walked slowly back to the bed and sat down. Many dead bodies, not just three. She imagined them, skeletons below the ground, their peace broken by a bulldozer. Had they died peacefully? No, or there’d have been no need to hide the bodies. And only someone truly gruesome would hide the dead below a church. Someone who killed again and again, here in Gibber’s Creek.
That changed everything. Great-Uncle Joseph might be Sam’s father, but she suspected he knew his son and daughter-in-law extremely well. Sam or Jed might just possibly kill the man who threatened Jed, especially if it had been an accident, but no one could ever think of either of them as a multiple murderer, a twisted killer who left bodies under a church.
Nor could any of the Greats have killed the man. Fish had heard truth in their voices.
Fish lay on the bed and stared at the white plank ceiling, which would look much better with a few supernovas painted on it, and tried to think what to do next.
The police were just asking questions about the murder of Ignatius Mervyn. The real task was to find who might have been killing around here for years. A mass murderer. Because if there was a mass murderer around here, then that was who would have killed this Merv bloke. Why couldn’t the police see that? They were asking the wrong questions.
But Fish was good at asking questions. She could prove it was absolutely impossible for Jed and Sam McAlpine to have killed anyone. The first step was finding out the identities of those other bodies. Once she found out that, it should be possible to find out who might have killed them.
She snuggled into the feather pillow, feeling as if there might be a reason for her existence for the first time since she got here. The last week had been a nightmare o
f loss and guilt. Mum would never forgive her. And Dad . . .
She couldn’t bear to think of what she’d done to Dad.
But now she had a job to do. A job that needed to be done, a job she might even be good at. If she proved that a madman had murdered Ignatius Mervyn, someone who killed just for the sake of killing, someone who had killed before, then part of the blanket of grief across this house might lift. And maybe doing something good would counterbalance the harm she’d done.
She also had the perfect excuse for asking questions. She’d just be a visitor bicycling around Gibber’s Creek, seeing the sights and meeting people. She’d seen a bicycle she could borrow propped up against the shed. No need to tell Gran or the Greats where she planned to go or why.
Snakes couldn’t bite you while you were riding a bicycle, could they? She could even imagine the old people’s looks of relief if she did something normal, like bicycling, just like she’d bicycled with Dad . . .
No! Stop thinking of Dad! Think of finding the true killer, presenting him to the police and Gran and the Greats, showing them that while seeing the truth could hurt people, it was necessary too.
Truth was good, thought Fish.
Chapter 6
CWA in a Loo Doors Flap
The CWA ladies are turning their exacting eyes to the swing of the loo door. What do they want? An inwards, rather than an outwards, swing. Those in the know believe that an inwards swing is safer because it prevents those passing by being hit, and means those on the loo can keep others out with a well-placed foot. The Gazette’s view is that a dunny door, regardless of swing, is a luxury not to be sniffed at.
NANCY
Blood. The air about her was a mist of blood and sunlight, but if Nancy hurried, she could put the fragments of flesh and bone back together, squeeze them, shape them into the bright small boy she loved.
She needed a weapon. If she didn’t have a weapon, they might kill her sons too, her darling boys sleeping down the corridor. They’d killed Gavin, but she would not let them hurt Clancy or Tom. Nancy glanced around the kitchen, saw the knife drawer and opened it. Yes! The carving knife!
She almost sobbed with relief. Somehow she knew this had happened hundreds, thousands of times before, and each time she had been trapped and held down. But this time she could move. This time she . . . she could fight back at last . . .
‘Nancy. Nancy love, wake up.’
She struggled out of the mist. Michael stood next to her in the Overflow kitchen, one hand grasping her arm, the other stroking her face. He’d turned the light on. Nancy looked in horror at the knife in her hand. ‘What?’
‘You’re sleepwalking again, love,’ Michael said gently. He took the knife without comment and put it back in the drawer.
Nancy sat. ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘Shh. It doesn’t matter.’ Michael dropped a kiss on her hair.
He wasn’t going to mention the knife, she realised with relief. What would she have done with it if he hadn’t woken her? Charged outside into the night looking for the guards who had imprisoned her in the World War II internment camp?
Outside the kitchen window, trees hushed and the river song dappled the night, sounds she had heard all her life except during those nightmare years as a prisoner of war in Malaya. Nightmare, she thought. This is real. That was nightmare. Just lately it was getting difficult to tell which was which.
What if Michael hadn’t woken her?
The sweat chilled under her nightdress. ‘I need to go for a walk. You go back to sleep.’
‘May I come with you?’ asked Michael quietly.
He always asked, every time she’d had these nightmares in the whole wonderful thirty-two years of their marriage. And each time she told him the same thing.
‘I’m better off alone.’
Especially now she had begun to walk in her nightmares, which since Sam’s accident came almost every night, harsher and brighter than ever before. The light, she thought. That pitiless Malay light, glaring on the barbed wire, the emaciated faces of her friends, lying on their pallets as still as Sam lay in his hospital bed.
She’d been at the hospital with Moira, discussing the new rehabilitation centre being built there, when the ambulance arrived. She had looked out the window and seen Sam, seen the stretcher bright with blood, seen Jed stumble after it, her jeans and shirt bloody too. She’d sat with Jed, her arms around her, as they wheeled Sam into surgery and Moira had rung Blue and Joseph.
The nightmare that night had been the worst for years, after she had staggered home at nearly midnight (Sam ‘critical but stable’), had glimpsed herself in the mirror, had seen the bloody handprints on her dress. But she didn’t think it had been the blood that had called the memories back. It was the helplessness, sitting in Matron’s office, drinking cup after cup of tea, trying to get Jed and Blue to drink too, to eat a sandwich, while Joseph prowled the corridors, a doctor powerless to enter the operating theatre and try to keep his son alive.
Life shouldn’t change so suddenly, from normality to horror. And knowing that it could was more than she could bear.
She glanced at the window again, at the blessed darkness, the soft night, where she was away from death and blood and the eternal light — in Malaya, once the sun set, the searchlights came on. You dreamed of and longed for darkness in the camp, a luxury almost as great as food or clean water.
‘Go back to bed, my love,’ she said to Michael. ‘I’m fine now.’
She wasn’t fine. She would never be fine. But outside in the soft dark she would be better.
Michael looked at her with bruised eyes. He would protect her from bushfire, wake her from nightmares. But he couldn’t save her from this. His lips tightened, a strong man helpless. He kissed her hair again. She waited till she heard the creak of the bed, then slipped down the corridor to the boys’ rooms. Yes, they were safe, sleeping as soundly as wombats at midday after a day filled with enough activity for fifty nine-year-olds.
And now for outside. She didn’t bother with boots. Nancy had rarely worn shoes as a child here at Overflow, or even in the tiny bush school where Mum had taught the kids. Shoes stopped you feeling the heartbeat of the earth, according to Gran, and besides, you needed to grip the rocks with your toes when you leaped from stone to stone up the creek.
The ground was still warm, even as the breeze misted cool from the river onto her arms and face. Blessed coolness, after the oppressive heat of Malaya: blessed dry air, not humidity. Malaysia now. The Malaya she had known existed only in her memory, a brief few months of colonial boredom and then the frantic escape down the Peninsula, the evacuee ship, the water.
And then the internment camp. Three years of it. Four women alive at the end of it, though she had not truly been alive — her body breathing, just, but her mind dead, crushed by the effort of survival not just for herself but for those she loved.
And failed. The women she had loved, dead. Ben, her beloved brother, dead. Gavin, the four-year-old nephew she had loved as a son and as a symbol of all that was still joyous in the world, for he was the child who chased butterflies, a gleam of transcendence for all those in the camp, the guards too . . .
She trod across the track to the creek, feeling the stones and the dust. Moonlight sank into the bedrock of the creek and then reflected back at her. Moonlight or starlight was bright enough to keep going up the creek, feeling her ankles cold from the water, the soles of her feet warm when she trod again on rock, breathing in the frog calls, the thud of a wallaby. Then finally she was there, the largest pool, the pool Gran had taught her was the most important one of all, deep and round, its blackness still and silent, despite the dappled song of water above it and below . . .
She sat on a rock and watched.
This alone healed her, the pulse of the earth joining hers, her earth, the land of her ancestors, reaching into her. No, that wasn’t fair. Many people had healed her too. Michael, who had never given up hope he’d see the girl he loved a
gain, her parents, Gran . . .
But none of them knew. None of them suspected that Nancy Clancy had never entirely come home from the war. The woman who wore her face still walked in blood at night. When you had lived with death on either side for so long and when you were so young, you didn’t think like others did.
The worst time hadn’t been the years after her return — she had managed to bury the memories then. She wasn’t even sure what brought the attacks on. Helplessness, perhaps? The last year of the 1960s drought had been bad. There had been times it had almost faded, when the dreams came only once a week, or less, when they had hurt but not clawed at her so she woke screaming. Setting up River View, the happy exhaustion after the birth of her sons. Maybe having children, working with children, had helped keep thoughts of death away.
She had seen so many dead. Had watched them die. Death was not just possible. It was easy. As easy as sending fat lambs to the abattoir, because humans were animals too, and as unsuspecting, mostly, that their lives could be taken as easily as a sheep’s.
And this was why she walked at night, alone, without Michael. Because Michael’s wife was the confident, capable Nancy Thompson, not the shivering victim who dreamed of blood. Nor was his wife the woman who imagined how she might have fought back, if she’d had a weapon in that internment camp, who even thought of how she might defend her sons, her family. Once you knew how easily someone you loved could be murdered, you realised that you could also kill, to save them.
She didn’t want to be a person who imagined that, and yet she was.
Gradually the stillness of the water calmed her. Strange, how a pool could fill from such brightly running water and escape in a small waterfall at the other end, and yet sit so still in this deep, dark pool. She was the water, belonging to this land. She was the stars that whirled above.
Then suddenly she heard it. A song that was part dog, part wind, part of the land itself. A dingo’s howl, the first she had heard for years.
She waited for another to answer it, for the hills to sing with the dingoes’ call, as they had her whole life, before the last ten years.
The Last Dingo Summer Page 5
