By Garry Disher
Funny how things turn out. Ever since the cradle I’d been burdened by a kind of restlessness. It had me circling the country in a clapped-out Kombi, taking the hippie trail overland to London, looking for the perfect wave in Honolulu, knocking about in South-East Asia, even studying medicine in a late shot at a productive career. It seemed important always to be moving on. Then, in the fifth decade of my existence, I found myself back where I’d started from, in the old house on the Peninsula, in retreat from life and love. What I didn’t know was, there were others there more at risk than I had been.
On my first night home, Allie tuned the radio to the local community FM station in time for me to hear Neil announce: ‘And this track is dedicated to my brother-in-law. Russ, glad to have you with us, old son.’ The song was ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’. I got a rueful laugh out of that. It was true that I’d been everywhere and true that my sister was glad to have me back again but you couldn’t say that Neil was glad about it.
The song finished. Insects buzzed against the lamp in the corner of the room. It was late and I glanced at the man in the armchair next to Allie’s. He was Mike Wedding, the local policeman. ‘Our best friend’, was how Allie had introduced him when he’d dropped by for dinner earlier in the evening. When Neil had left for work after a late dessert—he was DJ on the 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. slot—Wedding stayed on, saying he hoped the good citizens of the Peninsula weren’t out killing, maiming or robbing one another. I liked him. He was a calm, reliable-looking man, someone who’d listened to lies and evasions for all of his life but hadn’t let it harden him.
He yawned. ‘Time I wasn’t here.’
He shook my hand, kissed Allie tenderly goodbye and let himself out. We settled back in our armchairs again, too full and lazy to move. Neil’s voice murmured over the airwaves, background noise.
‘Ever listened right through?’
Allie laughed. ‘I’d be a wreck the next day. I listen till I know Neil’s safely at work and the show’s under way, then I feel I can go to bed.’ She added self-consciously, ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep.’
I was about to say something, but she stopped me. We heard Neil announce: ‘And this one’s for that special someone in my life. She knows who she is. Indulge me, folks, while I flog it yet again.’
Neil was a volunteer at the station. Apart from sponging off my sister, it was the only work he did. He liked to play Emmylou Harris, Paul Kelly, Hank Snow, Rita Coolidge, Dolly Parton, songs of loneliness, love and heartache for those people who were still awake when the rest of the world was asleep. He was a glossy charmer, a man who encouraged his listeners to call in for an on-air chat and who specialised in long, quirky meditations he called ‘Life’s Like That’. You wouldn’t know that he was full of grievances and bitter envy under all that charm. You wouldn’t know that he drank too much, you wouldn’t know the cruelty of his tongue. I watched Allie now, the special someone in his life, as Willie Nelson’s ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ drifted through the room.
A troubled expression passed fleetingly across her face. Eventually she closed her eyes and hummed along. I went to bed.
* * * *
I slept for twelve hours and woke to find that I had the place to myself. Allie lectured at the naval college in the afternoons. Neil liked to haunt the art and craft barns and antique shops dotted about the Peninsula, searching for records to play on his show. I made a sandwich and settled under the fig tree with a book. I could hear the sea beyond the tea trees that fringed the lawn at the edge of the cliff. The book was heavy in my hands. I felt a little jumpy from the chemical residue still in my system. I wondered what I had made of my life and if I were in any position to judge my brother-in-law.
You may have noticed the house and wondered about its sprawling air of privilege and seclusion along a dead-end road above the beach, maybe even picked up a sense of the generations returning, summer after summer, for six weeks of quiet play—sundowners on the verandah, sprinklers flinging jewels of water across the lawn tennis court, classical music leaking through the open French windows, serious hardcovers face-down on the deckchairs under the fig tree—well removed from the smells of petrol, cheap sunblock and salt and vinegar, the roaring panel vans, caravan parks and takeaway joints on the busy side of the Peninsula.
You’d think What a life! but, back when I was seventeen, all I wanted to do was get away from all that rarefied air. I wanted the open road, some risk and chance in my life, far from the civilised, deadening notions of my family.
Allie stayed. She inherited the house when our parents died and married a man I loathed. Both things stopped me from visiting her as often as I should have. But when life went sour on me who else could I turn to? I lost money on a couple of ventures, kept hurting the people I loved, got caught sniffing halothane in the operating theatre, and was finally asked, more or less politely, to clean myself up or be struck off the medical register. I blinked awake one morning, gave a kind of shudder at what I’d become, and asked Allie if I could come home. I called it ‘home’. ‘Of course,’ she said. I didn’t ask what Neil said.
The side gate squeaked. I cranked my head around. The man approaching me across the lawn had the clenched-fist, raw-edged look of someone with a grievance.
‘Get up,’ he said.
I did, but only because I felt safer on my feet. I kept the deckchair between us.
‘You know why I’m here. Stay away from her.’
I seemed to be playing a part in a farce. ‘Who?’
‘Cassie.’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. Look—’
‘You’re Neil Monkhouse, right?’
‘No.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘I looked in this book she’s always writing in. It was there in black and white, Neil this, Neil that. Stay away from her or I’ll fucking kill you.’
‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ I said.
‘She told me last night she wants me to move out. She’s keeping the boy. Arsehole, home-wrecker, leave us alone.’
‘Neil’s not here. Nor is his wife, who happens to be my sister. Clear off. You’re trespassing.’
Underneath all the bluster, the man was distressed. His face suddenly crumpled, embarrassed, ashamed, grieving, and his shoulders slumped. ‘She told me to get out.’
That had happened to me, too, more than once. ‘Not my problem,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to deal with it yourself.’
He stared at me miserably, forming words that wouldn’t come. After a while he walked back across the grass. ‘Can’t. Can’t get through to her.’
* * * *
It was because I disliked my brother-in-law that I didn’t take him aside and warn him about the man. Instead, I waited until I had Allie and Neil together, at the dinner table, before dropping my bombshell.
I didn’t get the reaction I’d been expecting.
‘Oh Neil,’ Allie said, clasping his forearm. She has a lovely face, my sister, but right then it looked strained, the skin tight over her fine cheekbones.
Neil shook his well-tended head in bewilderment. ‘All this stuff happening around me and I haven’t done a thing to deserve it.’
He poured himself another Scotch. He was a good-looking man, with the kind of moody dark scowl that you might find soulful or attractive—until you noticed all the things that were missing from his make-up. Of course, his listeners heard only the honeyed voice, dispensing wisdom, offering a lifeline in the dark and lonely hours when their defences were down.
Allie knew. But people like Allie remain loyal to the grave. She turned to me. ‘One of Neil’s listeners is fixated on him. A woman called Cassandra Lyle. That must have been her husband you saw today.’
My face must have said something like No smoke without fire, for Neil shouted, ‘Six months she’s been hassling me.’
‘Several letters a week,’ Allie explained. ‘Sometimes several letters a day.’
Neil seemed to like being at the heart of a drama. He leaned avidly across the table. ‘It’s even got to the stage where I’ve developed this phobia about emptying the letterbox.’
I trod carefully, with an apologetic glance at Allie. ‘You haven’t encouraged her in any way?’
‘Never laid eyes on her. I encourage her by existing, full stop. I mean, she’s got access to me, right, listening to the show?’
‘How did it start?’
‘She wrote telling me about a second-hand record shop over on the bay. I wrote to thank her, simple as that. How was I to know what she was like? Things escalated after that.’
‘Rapidly,’ Allie said.
I wondered what he’d written. I wondered if he’d read something between the lines of Cassandra Lyle’s letter, a come-on that he in turn implied he might act upon one day. He had the freedom for it, after all, with Allie out every afternoon and his own days free. ‘Well, the husband certainly thinks you’re having an affair.’
‘No way.’
‘Does Mike know you’re being harassed?’
‘I’ve told him.’
‘And?’
‘He says there’s nothing much the police can do.’
‘Have you kept any of the woman’s letters?’
‘Have I?’ Neil laughed, a short, harsh bark. ‘Wait here.’
He went out and came back with a shoebox crammed with letters and postcards. ‘There you are, doc. See what happens in the real world.’
I flushed at his tone. It seemed to please him that I’d come home with my tail between my legs, a man who’d enjoyed privileges he’d never had yet who’d still managed to come unstuck. It made him feel better about himself. I picked up the top letter. Cassandra Lyle’s handwriting was round, unpractised:
I waited two hours for you. It’s a long way for me by bus. There is only one coffee shop near the library, so you couldn’t have gone to the wrong one. I could kill you. I could put Don’s rifle to your head and pull the trigger. And your wife. She can’t give you what I can. You must not treat me this way. I will give you a second chance. Here is a voucher for the Bay City Natural Healing Clinic. Meet me there on Wednesday morning at 10, tell the receptionist you’ve got an appointment with Cassandra. We can have a cubicle to ourselves. Don’t be shy. You won’t have to kiss me or anything. I know I’m not beautiful like the women who throw themselves at you but I think you could learn to love me. We could keep our clothes on or maybe just strip to our underclothes. I don’t know all the pressure points yet but Jade says I have a good technique. Already I know some that help with my headaches. Please, please, please don’t forsake me this time. I know from your voice when it’s me you’re talking to on the air. It is ordained, Neil, don’t fight it. Remember, vengeance is mine. I don’t want to punish you but I could, in the blink of an eye.
I looked up. ‘Are they all like this?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Sounds like erotomania,’ I said, remembering a term from a med-school psych class.
‘We tried marking her letters “return to sender”,’ Allie said, ‘hoping it would put her off, but even that seemed to encourage her, a sign that she’d made contact.’
Neil laughed. ‘It’s a catch 22. We can’t win.’
I shook the letter at my sister and her husband. They seemed to be so immersed in their own obsessive response to this woman’s obsession that they couldn’t see the danger they were in. ‘She’s threatening to kill you both. The police will have to act.’
But Neil had the confidence of his huge self-love and his adoring audience. ‘She’s out of her tree, that’s all. Doesn’t mean anything.’
Allie put in: ‘And look how her handwriting changes. Look how she veers from anger to abject humility in the space of a few lines. Poor woman. A pain in the neck, but essentially harmless.’
‘Has she ever been here?’
‘No.’
‘Any phone calls?’
Allie shook her head. ‘That would make it too real. She’s happy just fantasising.’
‘Yeah, until the day she steps over the line and comes looking for some kind of reckoning.’
Neil curled his lip at me as if to say: You’d know all about stepping over the line. I ignored him and read the remainder of Cassandra Lyle’s letters. In a couple of them she laid out elaborate plans by which Neil could test Allie’s love for him. She promised to make him a millionaire, hinting at showbiz contacts and the songs they’d write together. He would adopt her teenage son and learn to love him. One letter was ten pages long, a coy yet fervent declaration of erotic love.
Mood swings, yearning, sadness, aggression—they were present in all of the letters. But the clincher was Lyle’s conviction that she was the child of God and that Neil had been chosen to marry and mate with her. Time was running out. It had to be done by the year 2000. ‘Think,’ she wrote, ‘of the power we’ll have to lead the righteous and vanquish the damned.’
I glanced at Neil. At once he said, almost proudly: ‘See what I have to put up with?’
If I’d had a mud pie in my possession then I might have shoved it into his face.
There was a knock on the back door and Mike Wedding walked in, dressed in his uniform this time. He gave Allie a shy kiss, acknowledged me with a nod, shook Neil’s hand reservedly. ‘Just thought I’d pop in.’
Neil launched into a jokey banter about the cushy life of the small-town cop. He seemed to think he was returning to an old joke between them—and missed entirely the flicker of outrage on Wedding’s face.
I cut across my brother-in-law: ‘Mike, we had an unwelcome visitor today’
I went on to tell him about Cassandra Lyle’s husband, his threats, his manner. ‘But I don’t think he’s the problem. His wife is. She’s going quietly mad and I doubt if he’s aware of it.’ I got out the letter. ‘Here she’s threatening to kill Allie and Neil.’
Wedding was sharp and attentive as I spoke, shooting worried glances at Allie from time to time, finally settling his gaze on Neil, who sniggered and shook his head and muttered, ‘Mad bitch.’
‘I’ll call around and talk to the woman,’ Mike said finally. ‘Uniform, police car, it might be the shock she needs. And I’ll have a quiet word with the husband, let him know what his wife’s been up to.’
I walked Mike to his car. It was a fast, dramatic-looking pursuit car festooned with lights and the words ‘police’ in black and a thick black number on the roof. We shook hands. ‘Maybe you could confiscate their gun?’
He pursed his lips. ‘Not a bad idea.’
* * * *
The days passed. It was Mike Wedding’s custom to drop by once or twice a week for a meal or a chat. He’d been doing it for years. It occurred to me that he was keeping a watchful eye on things. He knew what Neil was like and he wanted Neil to know that he knew.
The first time he came around he had nothing to report. ‘School holidays,’ he explained. ‘I’ve been flat out.’
The second time, three days later, he said, ‘Well, it’s done.’
We were eager for the details. He painted a sad picture. ‘The husband wasn’t there. Apparently he just packed his bags one morning and left. The son answered the door. He’s about sixteen, super-protective, didn’t want me to come inside.’
‘Poor kid,’ Neil said, ‘living with a mad woman.’
‘I don’t think she is mad, not on a day-to-day level. She shops, cooks, cleans, takes care of him okay. He’s protective because of the husband.’
At this point Mike glanced at a point above Neil’s head. ‘A pretty abusive type, apparently, jealous, a bit of a mean drunk.’
Neil flushed. I interrupted. ‘The woman?’
‘Scared, apologetic, fairly vague. Refused to admit anything. Just sat there stiffly, shaking her head. I warned her, that’s all I could do. Difficult to say if she was firing on all cylinders or not.’
‘Mike,’ Allie said. ‘She’s a woman, not a car.’
‘But still potentially dangerous,’ I said, more sharply than I’d intended. How was I going to get through to her that something had to be done? Then it struck me that none of us had a clear notion of what could or should be done.
As if reading my thoughts, Wedding said, ‘We’ll see what result my visit has. If nothing changes, Neil will have to take out a restraining order through the courts.’
‘You can’t have her committed?’
He laughed without much humour. ‘We’d have to call in all kinds of experts. It could take months to have her assessed, assuming we were able to convince anyone of the need for it in the first place.’ He looked squarely at Neil. ‘So don’t chuck any of those letters away.’
Allie clutched his arm. ‘The gun. She could be a danger to herself or her son.’
Wedding blinked, his business-like face altering at her touch. He said mildly, ‘There is no gun. The boy seemed to think there used to be one, a .22 for shooting rabbits, but it’s not there now.’ He paused. ‘Unless the husband took it with him.’
* * * *
I was picking fruit the next day when a movement caught my eye. A figure walked past the house, then returned, a flickering shape through the box hedge. A woman. Each time she passed the side gate she hesitated, reached out a hand, thought better of it.
I thought I knew who she was. I crossed the grass toward her, calling, ‘Mrs Lyle?’
Her face went sulky, as though I’d admonished her. She stepped back onto the dirt track. I slipped through the gate. Fifty metres down, at the corner, a taxi was waiting. The driver had his back to us, rump on the bonnet of his cab, smoking idly. I said it again: ‘Mrs Lyle?’
‘I, I . . . ,’ she said, greatly agitated.
I wouldn’t have glanced twice at her in the street. Ordinary pleasant face, skirt and blouse, flat shoes, leather bag on a shoulder strap. She was about thirty-five, small, tired-looking, a little fearful, her face etched with pain and exhaustion.
The words burst out of her. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. I get so tired. It won’t happen again. I won’t write you any more letters. A policeman came. It was awful, a police car outside the door. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I just wanted you to know.’
Then, as I watched, an expression of alertness and cunning replaced the shame. ‘You’re not him!’ Her eyes glittered. ‘Who are you?’ Her hand went to her mouth: ‘You’re the wife’s boyfriend!’ She chuckled, a laugh full of bizarre vigour and glee. ‘Wait till he hears about this!’
Another change. Coming close to me now, covert and complicitous, she said, ‘You could run off with her. She doesn’t love him, you know. Not like I do. Go on—it would be the best solution.’
‘I’m his brother-in-law, Mrs Lyle. You’re behaving inappropriately. You’d better go now. The police are already involved—do you want to appear in court as well? The shame of it? A restraining order, a psychiatric evaluation, welfare people taking your son away from you?’
I regretted the cruelty as soon as the words left my mouth. She was mad and she might even have been dangerous, but the cruelty was unnecessary. She gasped, went pale, opened and closed her mouth. I’d scared her. Finally she turned and ran, stumbling along the ridged, pot-holey track to the waiting taxi.
* * * *
Mike Wedding arrived after the evening news, wearing jeans and a T-shirt this time. He ate pasta with us and we discussed Cassandra Lyle.
‘Was she threatening?’
‘Apologetic’
Neil interrupted, saying what he’d been saying for the past few hours: ‘She came to my house!’
He was heavy-looking in the jowls that night, surly with all the Scotch he’d tossed down his gullet. Mike looked at him coldly. ‘I made no promises. It’s up to you now. A court order or at least a lawyer’s letter warning her off.’
Neil scowled. ‘That’s going to cost.’
‘Yep,’ I said.
Allie said wearily, ‘Neil, I’ll pay for it.’
His face cleared. ‘Guess it’s worth a try.’
Mike left after a helping of the quinces I’d stewed from the ancient tree in the backyard. I used to climb that tree. There was even a length of rotting, greenish rope still tied around one of the lower branches. It had comforted me, seeing that rope again. And stewing the fruit had been a comfort, using my hands, giving my head a rest.
At 10.30 Neil loaded a stack of LPs, tapes and singles into a file box and drove to 3PEN-FM. At five to eleven Allie turned the radio on. I listened with her. The transformation in her face, from anxiety to edgy contentment, brought on an old feeling, a kind of sulkiness.
Neil was good at his job, I’ll give him that much. He drew out the shy callers, joked with the jokers, cut smoothly across the garrulous. He didn’t patronise, was engaging and patient. But he did assume that the average Australian was white, male, Anglo-Saxon and living in the bush, and that grated on me after a while.
At twelve o’clock he said, ‘The witching hour. At this time every night we play a listener’s request. Remember, all you have to do is write in. Tonight we have Sandy, from Seaford. Gedday, Sandy.’
Nothing, only a hiss in the atmosphere.
‘You’re on air, Sandy. Go ahead, I won’t bite.’
Shyly, hesitatingly: ‘Is that Neil?’
I froze. Cassandra Lyle.
‘Sure is, love. I see you’ve requested ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, by Willie Nelson. And a beautiful moonlit night it is, too, let me tell you. Moonlight on the sea, moon shadows on the fields, the brushing wings of owls. Who’s the lucky fella?’
Cassandra Lyle sounded confused. You’re playing it for me, Neil.’
‘I know that, love. What I meant was, who are you dedicating it to?’
Pause. Then—softly, admonishingly, as the song opened and began to swell behind her voice—Cassandra Lyle said: ‘Neil, you always play it for me, the special someone in your life. I can always tell when you’re talking directly to me and no-one else. I can tell from the signals you give out that I’m the one. It’s ordained—’
Neil must have been sitting there thunderstruck, or he’d have activated the delay button much earlier. There was an unmistakeable ‘Fuck,’ a too-late cough, as he cut her off.
Then there was an electronic whoop, as if he’d knocked the stylus in his attempts to snatch the record from the turntable. ‘Sorry about that, folks. Technical hitch. Record’s scratched. Moving right along . . . ‘
Allie was staring at me, the strain back in her face. ‘That was her, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Her head collapsed back into a deep corner of the armchair. ‘That was our song.’
* * * *
They had a fight when he got home. There were heavy closed doors between us and plenty of high-ceilinged rooms and corridors to absorb the sounds, but I heard them nevertheless, enraged bellows and eruptive shrieks. Couldn’t you tell from the handwriting? Come home and you expect me to put up with this shit on top of everything else? Ruined. Tired of playing it anyway. Once I thought I heard a slap, some kind of blow to the flesh. A form of self-disgust settled in me. I hadn’t the moral authority, courage or indignation to intervene. Some people have it. Mike Wedding probably had it. I didn’t.
On the surface they were arguing about a love song spoilt for them by a mad stranger, but really they were arguing about the slipperiness of that love to begin with, the void that lay there underneath. And they were paralysed and afraid.
* * * *
The following evening Mike Wedding dropped in for a quick bowl of soup. ‘Sorry guys,’ he said, ‘I guess I must’ve triggered something in her. Neil, you be careful.’ He left soon afterwards, complaining, ‘Pay day, always a bad night for us.’ Neil left at 10.30. He held Allie tight for some time, murmuring endearments.
I sat up with Allie. She seemed to want it. I was deep in a book—I’d begun to read biographies and autobiographies, curious to learn how other people faced their wrong turns and doubts and fears—and wasn’t aware that anything was wrong until Allie said agitatedly: ‘It’s after eleven. Where is he?’
I listened. Someone, probably the 8 to 11 announcer, had left a tape playing in the studio, some interminable, mind-numbing rainbow-and-waterfall music. No-one announced the time, no-one read the news, no-one read the community notices, no-one gave the station call sign.
‘Phone them,’ I suggested. ‘There’s sure to be a technician on duty.’
Allie complied. She tapped in the number, listened, held the handpiece away from her as though it were diseased. ‘Engaged.’
She returned to her chair. She sat stiffly, knees together, hands clasped in her lap.
‘Perhaps his car broke down,’ I said.
She didn’t reply.
At midnight there was a knock on the back door. Mike Wedding came through the house to us, calling Allie’s name in a tone that seemed to carry dread and anxiety in it. He appeared at the door, moved urgently over to embrace her as she stood up. ‘You’d better come. Russ, bring your medical kit. I think Neil’s been shot.’
* * * *
3PEN-FM was two minutes’ drive away. Mike had called an ambulance but there’d been a spate of accidents on the Peninsula and the expected delay was twenty minutes. Neil’s van was parked at the side of the building. Its headlights were still burning. As our lights swept over it, I saw a slumped shape in the driver’s seat, a lolling head.
According to Mike, the station technician had noticed the headlights, heard the motor running, and come out to investigate. Thinking that Neil had had a heart attack, he felt for a pulse in his neck, and got fresh blood on his hands.
‘Far as I can tell,’ Mike said, ‘Neil’s been shot twice in the back of the head. Probably small calibre, like a .22, or he’d be dead by now.’
We got out. I established that Neil had a weak pulse, checked his torso for other wounds, then dressed the head wounds. There were no exit wounds. I held him half cradled in my arms. ‘There’s nothing more I can do,’ I said. The air, I noticed, was chilly. We were losing summer fast.
* * * *
Allie went with the ambulance. Mike wanted me to accompany him to the Lyle woman’s house. ‘She could need sedating. She could be suicidal.’ He paused. ‘If not before I question her, then certainly after.’
‘You think she did it?’
‘Don’t you?’
I shrugged. The husband, the son, I thought. I strapped on my seatbelt. ‘So long as you don’t expect me to go up against a gun.’
Mike wasn’t listening. He sped us through the night, through the darkened towns and past shadowy horse studs, deer farms and orchards. In all the vineyards, fine-mesh anti-bird netting caught the pale moon, an effect of long, lumpy worms side by side on the terraced slopes. The side window had been down in Neil’s van. He must have pulled into the parking bay, reached for the ignition, then felt the cold nudge of the gun barrel behind his ear.
Cassandra Lyle and her son lived in a weatherboard house on an acre of dead grass and car bodies outside a small industrial bayside town. You’d go quietly—even noisily—mad in a place like that and no-one would ever know about it.
Lights were blazing inside. Mike warned me, ‘Stay here,’ and ran in a crouch to the porch and through the door. He had his police revolver out. He looked mean enough to use it. I hoped he wouldn’t. If this were the city he’d have been able to call in back-up.
He was gone for about two minutes. He came out looking shaken. ‘You’d better come and look at this.’
The interior smelt of damp carpets and damp foundations. There were cracks in the plasterboard walls. The ready-built furniture wore a cheap, fierce sheen and the shelves and tabletops were loaded down with glazed miniatures—dogs, cats, milkmaids in bonnets and skirts. Mike took me through to a cramped bedroom and another of the world’s miserable tragedies. Someone had put a gun to the son’s head and shot him as he slept in his narrow bed.
‘Where is she?’
‘Not in the house,’ Wedding said. ‘I’ll check outside.’
There was no pulse. Rigor mortis was setting in. I looked around at the posters—Magic Johnson, swimwear pinups. There was a fat paperback on the floor, book-marked with a letter. The return address was somewhere in New Zealand and the boy’s father had written: ‘My dear son. You can reach me at Auntie Kay’s any time, night or day. I know things haven’t been good. Maybe Mum needs a rest from me. Just remember, you old Dad loves you.’
What mother shoots her son?
‘Their car’s missing,’ Mike said, coming back for me. ‘I’ll call this in, then I’d better run you home.’
Allie was waiting for us. ‘He’s gone,’ she said simply. ‘Died an hour ago. I came home. I couldn’t stay there.’
All the tension seemed to leave Mike in a ragged sound close to a sob. He went to put his arms around my sister but she inclined herself toward me, leaving him to flounder a little. So he touched her shoulder and said softly, ‘I’ll drop by tomorrow.’
* * * *
I heard about the killings and the roadblocks on the morning news. Mike and the other Peninsula coppers must have spent the whole night searching for the Lyle woman, but it did them no good at all. They would have been searching for a fugitive in full flight. They would have had no reason to search along the bracken-choked track that continues past the house where I had spent my childhood.
I was the only one who used that track. It was part of my self-imposed rehabilitation to walk through the long hours of the day, down the private steps that had been cut into the cliff by my grandfather, along the beach to the distant blowhole, and back along the clifftop.
Allie was still asleep, sedated from the night before, when I left the house. I found the car on my way back. It was a rusty yellow Datsun, and Cassandra Lyle had climbed into the rear of the car to shoot herself. She was upright, the .22 rifle between her knees, the muzzle under her jaw. I examined her. She was cold and dead. I supposed that it made sense for Cassandra Lyle to kill herself after what she’d done, and do it close to where the object of her twisted love had lived.
I set out again, toward the house. I felt keenly awake. I hadn’t felt so awake in a long time. My system was clean, my head uncluttered finally. I began to muse on the things that didn’t fit. One, Cassandra Lyle had come by taxi the day I saw her. Was it possible that she didn’t know how to drive a car? I turned around, went back to the yellow Datsun. The driver’s seat was positioned for a tallish person. Cassandra Lyle was short.
Two, the rifle was a long-barrelled .22. The distance from the muzzle to the trigger was greater than the reach of Cassandra Lyle’s meagre arms
Three, the blood in a dead body pools and settles after death. I’d have expected to see signs of lividity in the buttocks and thighs of a woman who’d died in a seated position. In Cassandra Lyle the signs of lividity were all along the back of her body. She’d been killed lying down, transported to the scene some time later, and propped upright with the murder weapon between her knees.
These were the doubts I’d be putting to Mike Wedding and the coroner when they came to examine the body. I rehearsed them as I walked back along the track to the house where I’d long ago lost a sense of purpose and only recently found it again.
I had an answer ready: the husband. New Zealand was only a few hours away by air. The fact that he’d posted a letter from there a couple of days ago didn’t mean that he wasn’t about to fly back to Australia.
I passed under the kitchen window. The ground slopes there, so that the rear half of the house is elevated. Mike Wedding had called in while I’d been out. He was talking to Allie, and at first I didn’t hear the words, only the tone—low, concentrated and heartfelt— so that I thought this was a private moment between old friends and I ought to leave them alone for a while.
Until Allie said distinctly, ‘Don’t, please don’t, it’s not appropriate, you’re mistaken.’
And Wedding replied, ‘He wasn’t right for you.’
I stopped to listen.
‘I loved him. He loved me, in his way.’
‘He used to hit you, Allie. You loved me, I know you did. I read the signals.’
‘Please don’t do this.’
‘You told me so every time I saw you. The way you did your hair, the way you sat in your chair, the way you placed your knife and fork on the plate. I read the signals.’
‘Mike—’
There was fear in Allie’s voice. The fear got to me and I went in, went in against a killer, and I was thinking: we hurt the ones we love and we are legion.