Blue Dome (The Blue Dome Series) (4 page)

I passed my bag through
the window to him and tried to mimic the way I’d seen him slide his legs, one,
then the other, neatly through the gap. As I felt my back scrape against the
bottom of the sash, I knew how ridiculous I must have looked. Bede turned away
from me, his body shaking with laughter.

“C’mon,” he said,
stifling a smirk as we headed down
Percy Road
, across
Dowling Street
, and onto
Beasley
Pass.
As I struggled to keep up, I
realised I hadn’t bargained on just how much speed an extra bit of leg length
could add. Although I had to admit, it wasn’t just leg-length that was the
problem – I was seriously out of shape.
Who’d have thought skateboarding all
day could make you so fit
? I thought resentfully. My lungs were now burning
a hole in my chest and I began to regret the time I’d spent finding novel ways
to dodge sports at school.

“Man, you’re slow,” said
Bede, stopping yet again to let me catch up.

“Yeah, well now’s not exactly
a great time to be worrying about my fitness,” I said.

Bede shook his shaggy
head and rolled his eyes at me again.

“Let’s head to the river,
we’ll be able to hide down there.”

I nodded, while grimacing
silently to myself. The
Wiltsdown
River
was still
several kilometres away. I took a deep breath and tried to cajole my legs into
running again. Man, I was going to be sore the next day.

 The afternoon was
steadily blackening into night and the street lamps had begun sputtering into
life. The neatly manicured lawns of the neighbourhoods, so ghostly peaceful in
the twilight, seemed surreal when I thought of the devastation we’d left at
home. By the time we’d reached the banks of the river it was completely dark,
but if I looked south to the
Old
Town
I could still
make out the vague shape of the clock tower on the far bank. The bridges
spanning the river to either side of us were covered in car headlights. A pang
of envy struck me as I imagined the lucky passengers travelling home to their
safe, normal lives.

Bede suddenly elbowed me
in the ribs and I turned to see him pointing towards
Murphy
Bridge
,
immediately in front of us.

“If we cross here we can
walk down to the old jetty,” he said.

I nodded. If it was
privacy we wanted then the old jetty made sense. No one ever went down there
any more. We began walking along the footbridge and were halfway across when
Bede made an announcement that made me stop dead in my tracks.

“We can hopefully find
somewhere to camp down here tonight.”

“Camp?” I said. “You
mean, as in ‘outdoors’?”

“Yeah, that’s usually
what camping means,” he said.

“Bede, it’s winter. We’ll
freeze,” I argued.

“C’mon,” he said,
beckoning with his hand as if completely ignoring what I’d just said. I stood
my ground.

“No. This is completely
ridiculous. I still think we should go to the police and explain.”

This time Bede paid
attention.

“Look, Clare, if the
police get hold of me I don’t know what they’re going to do. Please, trust me
on this, it’s going to be okay.”

My brother’s had some harebrained
ideas in the past, but the way he was looking at me, so serious and frightened,
made me believe that this one was different.

“Okay,” I said
eventually, “but I’m trusting you.”

We carried on walking
while I fished out my mobile to check if Arlene had called. There were no new
messages. I thought about asking Bede to check his phone too, but then I
realised there was probably no point. If Arlene hadn’t called me, then she
definitely wouldn’t have called him. Those two had never got on. I think it was
partly Mum’s death, which had hit us both really hard, but Arlene also didn’t
make much of a secret that she found Bede and me a bit of an inconvenience. She
also had this really annoying way of manipulating Dad into doing whatever she
wanted – buying the new house was just one example. Neither Bede nor I trusted
her, but I think I was probably just better at hiding it than he was.

I began gazing at the
thick black oiliness of the water below, imaging how cold it was, when my
thoughts were shattered by the sound of a police siren approaching from
somewhere behind us. Bede began to walk faster.

“Just keep going,” he
said. “Don’t act weird or anything and it will probably just drive by.”

I frowned at him. Did he
really think I was about to cartwheel my way through the traffic or something?

Bede caught my look.
“Just let me do the talking, okay?” he said.

I sighed quietly to
myself. He was doing that ‘I’m the oldest’ thing again.

“Fine,” I said.

The siren was now
deafeningly loud, making me cringe into the collar of my coat as I waited for
it to tear past. Then, all of a sudden, the wailing stopped and I could hear a
car slowing down. It crawled towards the kerb and pulled up just in front of
us. I glanced at Bede.

“Just act normal,” he
said.

We watched as an officer
stepped out of the car and started walking slowly towards us. I could feel the
muscles in my chest tense up, just like they do before an exam. The officer
nodded to us.

“Evening. Where are you
two heading?”

“Just into the
Old
Town
,” said Bede.

“Something special happening
tonight?”

“Umm, not really,” said
Bede. “Just going to see…umm, a band.” He glanced at me for support and I
nodded on cue.

“Who’s playing?”

“Oh, no one really, it’s
just some High School thing,” said Bede, shifting nervously on his feet.

The officer glanced
sceptically at Bede’s back-pack.

“Clothes,” said Bede
quickly, “for the band.”

The officer gave a small
nod. “Would you mind just staying here for a minute?” he said.

“Sure,” said Bede,
sounding anything but sure. I sneaked a sidelong glance at him, as the officer
ambled back towards his car. Bede had his ‘serious face’ on, the one that
always made me worry that something bad was about to happen. The officer
crouched by the boot of the car and began examining one of the tail lights.

“I don’t suppose either
of you noticed if one of these lights was out when I pulled in?” he said.

“Err, no,” I said,
completely forgetting Bede’s instructions about letting him do the talking. As
soon as the words were out though, it was too late. I figured I couldn’t just
stop talking or else it would be too weird and the officer would definitely
suspect something. There was only one thing for it, I had to keep talking like
it was the most natural thing in the world.

“I mean, we didn’t
notice
if it wasn’t working, not that it actually
wasn’t
. Although it probably
was working. I mean, it’s a police car, isn’t it? Stuff on police cars always
works. It’s not like a normal car is it? If it was, how would you catch anyone?
Not that you probably do want to catch anyone…”

Bede elbowed me hard in
the ribs. By that stage though, I was already horribly aware I was making an
idiot of myself. A dangerous idiot. I was relieved when the officer just looked
at me and laughed.

“I guess you’re right,”
he said. “You two have a good night now, won’t you?”

Bede and I held our
breaths as we watched the officer open the driver’s door and slide inside the
car. As he drove away, Bede sighed heavily.

“What got into you, you
moron?” he said. “Five more seconds and you would have been offering to go
joyriding with him!”

“Sorry. I guess I was
just really nervous,” I said.

Bede shook his head,
wearily.

“Your nerves are getting
on my nerves,” he said.

We continued in silence
to the end of the bridge, before following the pavement down a small, grassy
slope towards a path on the southern embankment. There was hardly anyone
around, apart from a few homeless people who were searching through the rubbish
bins. As we walked further away from the bridge the streetlights became more and
more sporadic. Before long, the only light we had was a thin rim shaved from
the moon.

“It’s like we’ve stepped
off into some sort of forgotten city,” I said.

“I guess it kind of is in
a way,” said Bede. “The cargo ships stopped coming here years ago.”

We carried on for what
seemed like another hour at least. I was so tired that my feet had started to
drag and I could feel my eyelids getting heavier. In the distance I could see a
large structure that looked like a square animal with its head down, drinking
at the water’s edge.

“Is that it?” I said.
Bede squinted.

“Yeah, I think so,” he
said.

As we got closer I began
to pick out the individual pieces of the jetty – its thick central posts,
encased in a chaotic lattice of broken wooden struts and criss-crossed beams,
with the bollards on the top for tying up ships. Everything seemed eerily quiet
and still. By day, I might have said it was tranquil, but at night it was downright
creepy.

We left the path and cut
across the grass to where it met the riverbank. Bede jumped down, making a loud
squelching sound as he landed. I followed, cringing as I felt my boot sink into
the sludge.

“That’s so gross,” I
said.

Extracting my boot, I
began walking through the debris along the bottom of the river bank to the
wooden casing of the jetty. Several of the planks had already rotted away,
making it easy to crawl into the space beneath the pier. It was only once we
were both in there, huddled close in the dark, that Bede finally began to relax
a bit.

“None of this makes any
sense,” I said. “Why would anyone target our house like that? And why would
they break in, smash it up, and not even take anything?”

“I dunno,” said Bede. “To
scare us maybe?”

I spun to face him. “Do
you know something about this?” I said.

Bede glanced away
evasively, as if rehearsing in his head exactly what he wanted to say. He
cleared his throat, drew a breath, then promptly chickened out.

“Just tell me,” I said.

“Okay,” Bede paused. “I can’t really think of any other way of saying
it, except that Dad’s got himself mixed up in some pretty heavy stuff.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Well…money laundering
for a start.”

“Money what?” I said. I’d
never heard of it.

“Laundering. It’s
basically when someone sets up a business which looks legit, but it’s not.
People do it to hide money that they’ve got from doing dodgy stuff behind the
scenes.”

I laughed. Out loud.

“C’mon Bede, you don’t
seriously expect me to believe that do you?” I said.

Bede stared at me,
stony-faced. I waited for him to smile, to tell me he was kidding around,
before giving me the real explanation. Instead, he just looked down at the
sludge and began fidgeting with a dry bit of stick that was poking up out of
the ground.

 “Bede, stop mucking
around, it’s not funny,” I said. “We don’t have time for this, just tell me the
truth.”

“I’m telling you the
truth,” he said. “I wish I wasn’t, but I am.”

I shook my head and
snorted. “You can’t be. It’s mad. I mean, for a start, we’d know about anything
dodgy that Dad was involved in. He’s uber ‘establishment’.”

“What makes you so sure
we’d know about it?” said Bede. “It’s not like he’d just come out and tell us,
is it? Hey kids, guess, what, I’ve just started up a money-laundering business.
Shh, don’t tell anyone.”

Okay, so Bede had a
point. But even so, it still didn’t stack up.

“Dad’s just not like that
though,” I said. “He’s an ordinary guy who gets up every morning, puts on a
shirt and tie, goes to work at an insurance company, and then comes home. That’s
what he does Bede,
that’s
his life. I’ve even seen his pay slip. He left
it on the coffee table one day by mistake.”

 “You need to see this.” Bede
pulled a piece of paper from the inside of his coat and handed it to me.

“What is it?” I said.

“Just open it.”

I unfolded the paper
along its firm crease line to reveal the letterhead of Dad’s insurance company.
It began, “
Dear Mr de Milo…
” I scanned the lines quickly, interrogating
the words for clues, until I came to the final sentence, “
…it is for this
reason that we must, regretfully, advise you that your post has become
redundant to the needs of our organisation
”. I flicked my eyes back to the
top of the page where it had been dated three years earlier, but that couldn’t
be right. Dad was still getting ready and going to work in the mornings just as
he always had. I looked at Bede and shook my head.