After the Flood, page 17
Up until she had met him, she had nothing to show for her life but her tags, and by now they would all be gone, obliterated by other taggers, or the bricks they’d been placed on smashed down so a new generation of losers could be raised on the bones of the old. From time to time, she had grabbed a job stacking shelves, collecting trolleys, tending a lunch-bar counter, although the service industry wasn’t a natural vocation for her. People were stupid. They were sheep. Slowly she had progressed from being apathetic all of the time to angry most of the time. There was nothing much to do but look at your phone and read about all the ways you were being screwed. Sex was like fast food, frequent and gratifying for a very short time, with one meal much like the rest. In fact, it was at McDonald’s one night that she’d got talking to Joel. Poor Joel, so earnest. He had convinced himself he was a social justice warrior but that Joel was really an avatar who the real Joel hoped might appeal to some like-minded woman enough it would lead to sex. Which in her case it had. The real Joel was never honest enough to admit to himself that’s what drove his zeal. It could have easily been music or anime, he just needed a hobby he could develop that might help him find a girl. Without Joel though, she would never have started going to the rallies: anti-greyhounds, live exports, gay rights. She tagged along because by then she was his girlfriend, she liked having a target for her anger and Joel was a conduit to so many new directions for it. She and Joel lived together, alternating between a Waterloo squat and a back shed at his aunt’s.
It was at a gay-rights rally that her world turned.
That’s when she met him. He wasn’t like Joel and the others, despite being only two years older than him. He knew things about history and books and politics and most importantly about her that she didn’t even know herself. He was slim but wiry and wore a beard and those brown eyes bore right into her body and pulled out all the bullshit she’d covered herself with: the rebel, the tagger, the would-be anarchist. He told her she was playing at life, not really living it, and he dominated the landscape as surely as those big fucking steel towers where she grew up that stood astride the flat creek-land by the highway, humming twenty-four seven. She was better than what she was allowing herself to be, he’d said, and three hours later she’d had sex with him on the floor of an Ultimo squat with columns of anti-logging handouts around the perimeter, the four posts of their bed.
‘Everybody says handbills are a thing of the past,’ he’d told her as they lay there, her toes up against the photocopier, ‘but people don’t know shit. Digital is the ultimate disposable. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat are no more than the layers of skin we shed every day without realising. They have their uses. Coordinating, yes, and simple communications, like an advertising jingle. But a pamphlet says “I am in your life and even to get rid of me you must make a conscious decision to screw me up and bin me”.’
When she had told Joel it was over, he had burst into tears and pleaded with her to stay with him but that only made it worse. She knew nothing could ever be the same again. That had been three years ago.
Their camp was silent. The air crawled up her shirt like an abductor’s clammy hands. She had not told him about the clinic. He had expressly forbidden her to raise a finger. There is too much at stake, he’d told her. But dammit, he didn’t control her. And these stupid, sheepish women were placing their kids at the risk of autism and other shocking illnesses because they believed the giant pharmaceutical companies who only cared about profit. He agreed with her, she knew that, they had spoken about it often enough but still he’d wanted her to lay off. In the end she couldn’t. She had to save those kids, or at least make some gesture, and that is exactly what she had done. It would not affect anything anyway but all the same it was better that she did not reveal her efforts. Not yet.
Likely he was meditating by the creek. She pulled out the shopping bags and trudged to the nylon tent. She bent and pushed in. Even this time of night and with the flaps up, it was stifling in here. Fortunately, he had said they would be leaving tonight. She opened the esky and whacked in the fresh ice, milk and water. Her eyes strayed to the box in the corner and she shuddered and had that image again and found herself rushing outside. Where was he?
‘Thomas!’ she yelled up at the blue sky, so loud she expected cockatoos to burst forth from the treetops in fright but there was nothing, not a sound.
Too late she heard the soft tread behind her. Strong hands seized her, freezing a scream in her throat. Her heart crashed wildly against her ribs like the hooves of a horse trying to escape a barn fire. She felt herself being spun. His lips found hers, the coarse hair of his beard caressed her chin and she let loose a single small sigh like a wisp of smoke.
‘Any calls?’ she asked.
‘One. Police. I let it go to voicemail.’
A spear of fear twisted inside her. He had directed her word for word the message to leave. ‘Hi, this is Kim. Grace and I are on the Gibb River Road and there’s hardly any reception so leave a message and we’ll get back to you when we can.’
He had been adamant that the message would ring no alarm bells. First thing the cops would assume is that they were people who had attended his class. They’d only spoken to the Frenchman twice by phone anyway. Probably he was right. He was, mostly. But she knew sooner or later it would ring again.
18
Lauren Bagot bent at the waist and studied Lilly’s drawing of the wanted woman so closely her nose almost touched it. Despite it being Sunday night she had come into the station on a moment’s notice. She shook her head.
‘No.’
‘You’re certain you don’t know her?’
Clement could see her taking in every line.
‘Sorry,’ she said and looked up into his eyes. ‘Has she got something to do with Jean-Claude?’
‘We’ve got someone claiming they saw her a week ago at the beach carpark talking with Jean-Claude. She’s wanted in connection with something else, not exactly major. We believe she is an activist: animal rights, anti-development. That kind of thing. Was Jean-Claude passionate about any particular issue?’
Bagot sighed, seemed to search through her filed personal history of her dead lover.
‘He was very pro-nature but he wasn’t even vegetarian let alone vegan. I guess you would say a greenie. I know he hated the tourist boats at the Barrier Reef and he said that if it got like that here he would quit his job guiding tourists.’
Not much to go on. About seventy percent of people under forty felt that way. Clement nodded to Jo di Rivi. This was a signal for her to lay an eight-by-ten photo of Valentina Gomez in front of Bagot.
Bagot had arrived at the station wearing a tank top, shorts and sandals. Winter had set in over her features, though it looked like she’d stopped crying. Clement had asked di Rivi to partner him rather than Graeme Earle. While he valued Earle’s insight, he was thinking they would be doubling up on similar points of view and that especially with a female being interviewed, di Rivi might be attuned to subsonic signals that would have passed Earle and him right by. It also freed Earle to chase up who the woman in the drawing might be. Earle was excellent at procedure, tenacious and alert. He’d climb that tree and shake the branch. If there was any fruit hiding, chances were Earle would bring it to ground. But it was late at night and Clement knew his senses were blunted and likely the rest of the squad. He’d even called Josh Shepherd back in to help Manners try and track video of the Sahara.
Once more Bagot studied what had been placed in front of her.
‘No.’ Bagot looked up with anxious eyes. ‘Is she involved with the other woman?’
‘Her name is Valentina Gomez.’
He looked to di Rivi to handle it. She jumped right in.
‘There is no easy way to say this, Lauren, but it appears that Jean-Claude has been in a relationship with her for around six weeks.’
Lauren Bagot’s mouth opened as if to machine gun them: they had it wrong, they were stupid, didn’t know what they were talking about …
But then her mouth froze and her bottom lip trembled. Clement felt guilty that they could not spare her this embarrassment, but they had to see.
Her silence was a far better testament to her ignorance of the relationship than anything else.
Very weakly she finally managed to ask, ‘Do you think …’
But then the words ended like footprints heading into the ocean.
‘So I won’t see you for two whole weeks?’ Ingrid pouted playfully. They had been playing a game of table tennis in the rec room. There had been a time in Brazil before Gabrielly when he had become quite good at it but that was only because he’d had nothing else to do with himself. Now he was below average and Ingrid was pretty terrible but that made it more fun.
‘I was thinking about that.’ He had not told her but he had tried to see if he could get the alternate engineer Hollis to come back early. Hollis though was hiking in Tasmania and wasn’t able to oblige. If she had been a normal member of staff it would have been much easier to simply give her a furlough early, he was the HR boss after all. The trouble was her role demanded she was on the island until replaced. ‘You have a week off, right?’
Her contract only gave her a week off, not the two that he got as a matter of course.
‘You’d know,’ she teased.
‘I was thinking …’ the confidence he’d had a moment ago deserted him. He looked around for it, tried to beat it out of the bushes but his tongue was tied.
‘Yes?’ she was on one elbow now leaning in towards him, her eyelashes batting.
Go for it, he urged himself.
‘If you wanted … only if you wanted … you could come up to my place in Broome and spend the week with me. Then we could both come back together.’ Oh shit. He began to blather. ‘Of course only if you’re –’
‘I’d love to do that! That would be so great!’ Her eyes were dazzling.
‘It’s not that special or anything, my place I mean, but it’s near the beach. There’s just one bed but there’s a sofa bed too. I can sleep on that.’
‘Well, I’m sure we can manage on the one if we have to,’ she said with a smile.
He wondered if he was blushing. He changed the subject. ‘I could pick you up if you like.’
The smaller plane that flew locally based employees would drop her at the airstrip at Onslow. He would drive from Broome to collect her.
‘That’s miles out of your way,’ she said. ‘I can find my way.’
‘But it’s expensive to hire a car. I keep mine at Onslow. I don’t mind the drive. I might even stay around the Pilbara for a week. Couple of days, Hedland, Dampier, Onslow …’
Paul was hoping he would find them straight up at the Dampier beach house and that everything would be settled, although his gut was already tight at the pending confrontation. Thomas was such a force, like a cyclone. But the two of them had both experienced loss and Paul hoped that he could explain to Thomas how he had come to see the world in a new light since Ingrid. If him, why not Thomas?
Ingrid was smiling. ‘Well, that would be great if you could. It would be nice to drive up together but I don’t expect it.’
‘No, I’d like to do it, I would.’
Paul sent his Broome address to her phone so she knew exactly where they would be staying. ‘I can organise you a seat on the Onslow flight,’ he said. Normally, like most of the workers, she would fly direct to Perth on the bigger plane. He promised he would be there to meet her when she got off the plane at Onslow.
‘You want another game?’ she tilted her head towards the table-tennis table.
He was going to say ‘sure’, even though he had no real desire.
‘Or we could go for a walk,’ she said. ‘And then watch a movie or something.’
‘Let’s do that,’ he said.
He felt like he was being carried on a beautiful smooth wave but he couldn’t let go yet, not completely. There was a big dark shape lurking beneath the surface. Until he sorted things out with Thomas, it would remain there.
It was close on 11.00 p.m. now and Lauren Bagot had been shuffled back to her apartment with all her humanity sucked from her, nothing but a piece of cardboard with holes punched through it. Keeble had let Graeme Earle know that there were no fingerprints of Lauren Bagot at Gomez’s place or vice versa. Now she was running a quick simulation of a Toyota Sahara running over a prone Jean-Claude Seydoux.
Manners and Josh Shepherd were searching for any video of the Sahara from Thursday on, starting with the service stations. Earle had directed them to start with Willare, the closest servo to where the cycle had been found. So far nothing. Earle himself was crosschecking the identities of those who had phoned or messaged Seydoux recently, against owners of a Toyota Sahara. If the vehicle was licensed interstate, they would not get confirmation until the next day.
‘We should also check driver’s licence photos against the phone calls and messages, see if any match the sketch,’ said Clement and went off to tell Manners and Shepherd to make that their priority at start of play tomorrow.
Di Rivi was still at her desk.
‘Thought I told you to head home.’
‘It’s this Lizard Minerals thing. The paperwork needs to be finished.’
‘I’ll get Beck Lalor onto it tomorrow. You go home and get a decent sleep. You’re going to need it. I want everybody in here at six thirty.’
She looked grateful despite the early start.
‘And you did a good job in there with Lauren. Thanks.’
Manners and Shepherd went too. Keeble was in her office, and that left just him and Earle in the squad room. Clement welcomed the opportunity to compare notes with his trusted ally.
‘She was devastated,’ Clement said of Lauren Bagot. ‘It was bad enough she’d lost her partner but how does she grieve now, knowing he was a cheat?’
Earle asked if he was certain now about Bagot.
Absolutely, he thought. Sitting across from her, watching her go through that, he’d been like a drum snare vibrating to a tuning orchestra. I know what you feel, he’d thought.
‘I’d be flabbergasted if she had anything to do with it.’
‘Gomez?’
That was trickier.
‘She was angry, pissed-off with Jean-Claude. But she admitted driving him to Port Hedland right off, and she wasn’t having a bar of being at the beach on Thursday. And Jacinta Richmond’s statement might actually support her.’
Earle took the contrary position. ‘She could have ridden out to the beach, seen Jean-Claude with our sketchpad girl and decided enough was enough. Just because Richmond didn’t see her on her bicycle, doesn’t mean she wasn’t there.’
That of course was true. But –
‘Of course,’ said Earle, ‘the old guy at May River said he saw a car and a cycle.’ This was exactly the point Clement would have raised. He finished off their common logic.
‘It’s a lot easier to believe that car was sketchpad girl’s Sahara than that Valentina planned some complicated murder that involved her borrowing a car that fits exactly the tracks at the murder scene and the May River camp.’
Keeble entered right on cue.
‘About the car. A Toyota Sahara fits absolutely perfectly as the vehicle that killed Seydoux.’
It had been impossible to sleep. He’d lie down for a few minutes then get up and pace about the unit, round and round. He must have pissed eleven times. Ingrid and Gabrielly’s faces kept morphing into one another. Eventually he had taken himself outside and stood under the stars staring. The plant was like the exoskeleton of some large, shiny cricket, the lights dewdrops.
As a child he would spend hours transfixed staring at insects in the bush. He wanted to be their protector. He was angry when other kids would kick through an ants’ nest or put a praying mantis in a jar with holes punched in the lid.
He should never have become involved. Never.
Yet that was easier to see now. A few short weeks back he had no life. It was understandable. Everything had been ripped from him and what had the consequences been to the entity responsible? A swag of millions that barely affected the bottom line, some forsaken bonus options for executives already on obscenely large salaries.
He had been outraged. The company, he had come to realise, had treated them all only as parts to a machine. Fine, he was happy to embrace the mechanical him and, freed of any moral responsibility, he would act how they had in effect given him liberty to act. He had been ready, willing and, he hoped, able. And then Ingrid had happened. She was not, nor would ever be, Gabrielly. She was her own person with her own qualities that entranced him. Again, he recalled those bush walks of his youth especially after fresh rain when, strung between narrow trunks in a track, a glistening silver spider web would confront you, the spider hanging in front of your eyes like the bullseye in the centre of a target, the thread seeming to vibrate with your breath. Some kids would pick up a stick and swipe right through that. He would never do that. He would get down on his haunches and try to get under or divert around it if he could.
