Bay of Fires (6 page)

“It’s not my fault no one realized she was missing right away. I don’t keep tabs on everyone who stays here. She’d paid for a week,” Jane said.

She pulled weeds out of the herb pots as she spoke. Jane had been away on Christmas Day. Boxing Day she was busy clearing the beach track. It was on the day after when Jane went to clean the room that she realized her guest was absent.

“When I heard someone had washed up on the beach that morning I rang the cops right away. I have nothing to hide, mate,” she said.

“Why haven’t they taken Anja’s bag?”

“I knew you’d snoop in there. Someone special is coming up from Hobart to look at it. No one’s supposed to go in there.”

“I didn’t touch anything.” Hall was not apologetic. “Tell me about the man who found the body.”

“Roger Coker. He’s retarded.” Jane wasn’t being malicious. It was clear to Hall that as far as she was concerned, her version of his mental capabilities was factual. “One time someone gave him a bucket of red paint and he painted everything in his house red. Pots and pans. Kitchen table. His lawn mower.”

“How do you know that? Do you visit him?”

“God no. I wouldn’t step inside that dump. Everyone knows about the paint.”

“Do you think he did it?”

Jane lit another cigarette and took a long suck, blowing the smoke hard out the side of her mouth. She filled a dog’s bowl with water from a tap attached to a corrugated tank. Hall turned to a fresh page in his notebook, numbered it, and waited patiently for her to decide what she was going to say.

“Probably not.”

“So who did?”

Jane shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“No it’s not.” Hall was irritated by the interview. “You’ve lived here a long time and you know everyone.”

“I’m not going to name and blame. I’ve copped enough of that myself to know what it’s like.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I mean.”

She stubbed out her cigarette in an old Vegemite jar almost full of butts. She screwed the lid back on before looking him in the eye.

“I was married once. This place was more upmarket then. When Gary was here. No backpackers.”

“Right.”

“Well, if you want to know what happened to him, you won’t need me to tell you.”

“People talk.”

“You got it, Scoop.”

Jane pulled a cigarette out of the box, tapped it upside down on the lid. Her lips pinched. He sensed the conversation was ending. He closed his notebook and waited. It was an old trick and it always worked. To fill the time he tried to name the herbs on the patio. Basil, flat parsley, rosemary, normal parsley; there were more but he did not recognize them. A flock of gulls swooped overhead, casting fleeting shadows on the table. A dog he couldn’t see barked and dragged its chain.

“I’ll just say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roger Coker knows more than what he’ll tell the police. He’s not as stupid as everyone thinks.”

“You think he did it?”

“Don’t twist my words.”

She returned the unlit cigarette to its box and stood up. She checked the time on a cheap digital watch that had a plastic band.

“It must be hard running a business on your own,” he offered.

“Oh, well. I’m still here, at least.”

Headlands loomed over each end of the beach. On Hall’s map they existed as small curves on the edge of a blue vastness. Standing in the dunes, Hall studied his map of the coast, correlating the markings on the map with the landmarks he could see: the Old Road winding around the other side of the Chain of Lagoons, the cleared hilltop of Franklin’s Farm, the point where the old tin railway had once run on a wooden jetty out into the ocean to meet cargo ships bound for Hobart. There was a turning circle toward the end of the beach, and he could see vehicles and people gathering for the emu parade. He checked his watch; it would start in fifteen minutes.

Hall jotted a couple of impressions of the beach in his notebook. It was a rugged, isolated stretch of coast. Beautiful and wild. There had been a program on
Stateline
some time ago about the large number of persons whose lives ended in the Tasmanian wilderness. In the past two years there had been four bushwalkers, two rock fishermen, a white-water rafter, a child who wandered away from a campsite, and several teenagers including Chloe Crawford. Some were dead, some were still missing. The program raised the question: Was Tasmania an island of murderous criminals, or had these people been swallowed by the rugged, unforgiving landscape? It was a good question.

He was about to return to his car when he saw a woman striding toward him. Water streamed from her dark hair, and she clutched a jacket around her that was the same muted green as the coastal scrub. She didn’t seem bothered by the spiky dune grass under her bare feet.

“Can I help you, mate?” She didn’t smile back.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re aware this is a crime scene?”

“I am.” She was having a go at him. This could be fun. He fiddled with his camera, ignoring her.

“Well, what are you doing here?”

“Looking around.”

“Looking around?”

“Research.”

“What kind of weirdo lurks in the dunes after someone has been murdered there?”

“No one was murdered here.”

“Yesterday…” She faltered.

Her eyes were bright and her breath ragged. She wasn’t having a go; she was scared of him. He imagined how he looked, a middle-aged man wearing chinos and a crumpled business shirt, creeping around in the sand dunes. His curly reddish-brown hair was bouncing out of the neat combed lines he had urged it into when wet that morning, and his lined face could just as easily owe its weathered appearance to a life of crime as to twenty years of bushwalking in extreme Tasmanian weather. He wore an earring, too, a single silver stud, which the blokes at work reckoned helped in making Launceston’s underworld trust him. From his shirt pocket Hall took a card.

“I’m a reporter,” he said. She didn’t take the card. They watched each other over the blowing yellow grasses. “In any case, what kind of weirdo approaches a strange man in the dunes where a murdered body was found?”

“Who do you work for? You don’t look like a reporter. Is that your car?”

They both looked up at the Holden, its big round headlights watching them from the top of the dune.

“My other car is a Ferrari.”

“Let me see that.”

“It’s worn out.” She fingered the curling edges of his business card. “You sure you didn’t pick this up somewhere?”

He didn’t answer.

“The
Tassie Voice.
” Her laugh was prettier than she was. “I guess if you were making it up you’d have a card from
The Australian
or something.”

“Of course. Who would pretend they worked at the
Voice,
right?” Hall turned to leave.

“You looking for clues? Speak to Jane Taylor at the guesthouse. That’s where the dead woman was staying.”

“I know.”

“You planning to interview the person who found the body? I’ll answer all your questions if you give me a lift up the hill.”

In the passenger seat she sat sideways, watching him drive. Aware of her bare toned legs, he concentrated on keeping his eyes on the road. She said her name was Sarah, and she drilled him with questions without any self-consciousness. Who had he interviewed? What did the police think? Was there a suspect? Hall wasn’t used to driving on the gravel and couldn’t think to answer her properly.

“Who do you reckon did it?” he asked.

“I’ve got as much an idea of that as I have of what happened to Chloe Crawford. None.”

“Usually in small communities like this, people don’t ask who the murderer is; they simply say who they think the murderer is.”

“I honestly do not know. It was brutal. I don’t believe anyone around here is capable of that.”

Hall slowed as he drove past a crowd milling in a clearing beside the beach. They were mainly civilians, but he noticed a couple of men wearing orange and white vests, the uniform of State Emergency Service’s volunteers. The police, assisted by a dozen SES volunteers, had conducted their official line search yesterday and found nothing. Today there was no designated crime scene; the tape had been removed. There was no point trying to preserve an exposed area indefinitely.

“Tell me, are they locals who are conducting their own line search?” Hall asked.

“You got it. Everyone’s really upset. They all want to try and help.”

“You’re not joining them?”

“I’ve had a look.”

“Find anything?”

She shook her head. “Neither will they. There’ve been two high tides since Anja Traugott washed in. Nothing stays still on the beach.”

The road was curving when Hall felt the wheels slide. He wasn’t driving fast, maybe forty kilometers an hour, but the gravel corrugations offered no grip. They skated past blurry brush and paperbarks. The Holden slid sideways on the ruts and Hall gripped the wheel, trying unsuccessfully to aim the car toward the middle of the road. He shouted helplessly. His car was veering off the road. It wouldn’t stop. It was going to crash.

“Take your foot off the brake, mate,” Sarah said.

He lifted his foot and the car lunged forward. The wheels responded to his steering. They bounced down the middle of the road. Hall felt sick in his guts. He swore, then apologized for doing so.

“It’s slippery.” Hall’s knuckles were white from clenching the wheel.

“The faster you go, the safer you are, you see? More grip.”

“Right.”

At the top of the hill, where the view of the ocean was unencumbered in either direction, she pointed at a small blue shack. Red geraniums grew through the fence, and the concrete tank was painted in a bright mural of sea creatures. She climbed out of his car and waited for him to drive away.

Sarah waved, her face glowing with a wide grin, as he urged the standard H gear stick into first. Damn that stupid corner. She was nice. Pretty in a natural kind of way. Not all done up and fake like the women he drank with at Launceston’s various happy hours. He honked a couple of times as he drove off and immediately regretted it. If his embarrassing driving hadn’t blown it, the horn honking would for sure.

Driving back to check out the emu parade, he considered her advice about driving faster. But the road was sandy in parts, and he let the Holden roll along at twenty kilometers an hour, his hands clenching the wheel and his head craned forward like someone’s grandmother.

Sarah’s words resounded in Hall’s head. Nothing stays still on the beach. She was right. The emu parade had walked the length of the beach twice and found nothing. The people gathered here interested Hall. It was likely one of them was the murderer. It was likely to be a man, too, given the violent nature of the dead woman’s injuries. Hall watched everyone but approached no one. He wondered if the murderer would seek him out. In case of this, he wore his media lanyard and made a show of jotting things down in his notebook, so it would be clear to everyone that he was a reporter.

Three men spoke to Hall of their own accord. John Avery owned a shack and had written a book on the history of the area, which he offered to lend to Hall. Don Gunn, who wore an SES volunteer uniform, had assisted with the police line search yesterday. He ran the shop near the boat ramp. Don took his boat out every morning at six to check the cray pots, and Hall was welcome to come if he wanted to view the coast from the sea. The third person was a young American man called Sam, who pointed out an almost invisible speck on the horizon which he said was one of the racing yachts doing the Sydney-to-Hobart. None of them seemed like murderers.

While Hall was in conversation with Sam, a woman called out to the young man from across the undulating dune. From a distance she looked young enough to be his girlfriend, and the wheedling way in which she called him confirmed Hall’s assumption. She didn’t come over. Instead, Sam stopped speaking halfway through his sentence and excused himself. Hall watched them walk toward the surf, the woman giving the young man her sandals to hold, while she picked up what looked like pieces of driftwood.

Later that afternoon Hall called the police, right before he filed. Lucky he did. A canvas beach bag had been found near a rock pool located at the southern end of the beach. It contained Anja Traugott’s wallet, a booklet issued by the Tasmanian Wilderness Society outlining how to treat poisonous snake and spider bites, a hairbrush, sunscreen, and a digital camera. The wallet contained money, so she had not been robbed. There wasn’t time to do anything more than type it up and file it.

Work was on Hall’s mind as he shaved with cold water in the yellow-tiled bathroom at the guesthouse. He dried his face on a stubbly towel. Twice it slipped off the towel rail when he tried to hang it up, and he tossed it into the sink in frustration. He was worried about the story he had just filed. His three hundred–word update on the discovery of Anja Traugott’s beach bag was padded out with a vox pop of local residents describing how the murder and missing person investigation were impacting their lives. As he put on a clean shirt, he considered whether it was sensational enough to satiate the editor. The thing was, if you had to ask yourself that question, you knew the answer.

He closed the bedroom door behind him. A broom whisked the wooden boards on the deck outside. It was the only sound in the late afternoon stillness.

“I’m going to the Abalone Bake,” he called.

He didn’t notice the leather handbag on the table until after he spoke.

“I might as well show my face.” Jane leaned the broom against the wall. She wore an ironed black blouse tucked into her tight jeans and a slick of coral lipstick on her lips.

“I don’t usually bother with these things,” she told him as they walked down the hill, her fluttering fingers tracing her bag’s worn leather. “Not my cup of tea.”

They paused at the edge of the park. On the beach beyond, children were playing cricket. Hall breathed in the tepid sea air. It was laced with the salty garlic aroma of barbecuing seafood. Laughter and conversation drifted up. He quickly counted around thirty people, lounging in deck chairs, cross-legged on picnic rugs, or standing sloshing ice in plastic cups. Their curiosity was shameless. He could imagine what they were thinking as they stared at the woman in her cowboy boots and lipstick and the freshly showered journalist beside her. Hall tried to look friendly.