The Last Time We Spoke (8 page)

Carla turned off the highway and slowed for a changing traffic light. The car behind honked, willing her through the amber. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. A woman towering above them in her SUV was shaking her head and gesticulating irately. Carla looked ahead.

Kevin was in the passenger seat, sucking on an unpeeled mandarin, the juice trickling down his chin onto his clean white shirt. At least he was out of his pyjamas.

Excitement coursed through her body. Excitement? She felt ashamed. There was nothing to be excited about. Nothing Steve Herbert had to say would reverse the course their lives had taken. Yet, it was too hard to live in a constant state of pure truth. Sometimes she had to let herself surface to a world of superficialities, where the state of the weather and what was for dinner mattered, where catching the thugs who had ruined her life
was
something to get excited about.

The light turned green and she depressed the accelerator.

What lay ahead? They were moving towards a destination. Surely anything would be better than the past forty-five days in hell’s anteroom, stuck in time like a horror movie paused on a violent scene.

She found a parking space right outside the new police headquarters. Not yet softened by planting, the monolith rose starkly against its suburban surrounds. Stippled concrete and tinted glass towered over the other buildings, intimidating them into submission.

Kevin climbed out of the passenger side, left his door open and started across the parking lot into the path of a reversing car. The driver screeched to a halt.

Carla grabbed Kevin’s hand and yanked him backwards. ‘Careful, Kevin!’

Visibly shaken, he lifted her hand to his mouth and started to kiss it. ‘Sorry, Carly. Sorry. Sorry.’

Carla pulled him in to her and hugged his melting frame. He was all angles and bone. ‘It’s OK, my love. It’s—’

Kevin shoved her back at arm’s length and stared at her intently. ‘Why are you crying, Carly? Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’

‘I’m okay, darling,’ she said, fishing out a tissue from her bra. ‘Mummy’s fine … Oh God, I mean … I mean,
I’m
fine. Here, hold onto me.’

Obediently, he clasped her arm, and they crossed the car park together.

The vast reception area was familiar by now – sparse, save for an empty water dispenser in the corner and a row of grey airport-lounge chairs lining the back wall. A strong dose of disinfectant had successfully erased the Saturday night just gone.

Carla sat Kevin under a poster warning of the dangers of letting children swim unattended, then approached the counter. A generic blonde policewoman greeted her.

‘I’m here to see Detective Inspector Steve Herbert.’

‘And you are?’

‘Carla Reid. He’s expecting us.’

Carla watched as the young woman’s face softened, just as everybody’s did when they learnt who she was.

‘DI Herbert will be right with you. Please take a seat.’

As Carla sat down, Kevin released a deep sigh. He did this up to a hundred times a day. It was as if he would suddenly remember to exhale. The doctors were unsure of the reason for this, but thought it would probably settle down with time. Carla took them at their word. Kevin had to get better.

The glass doors at the entrance slid open and a stocky woman in a floral sundress and strappy leather sandals hurried in, her face flushed, her manner agitated. Her bottom wobbled as she walked.

‘I am must to report a thief,’ she said in a Dutch, or perhaps German, accent. ‘Somebody did smash the window of my campervan and they steal my bag. Passport too.’ Her voice wavered.

The policewoman opened a drawer and pulled out a yellow form. ‘You’ll need to fill out one of these.’ Her pleasant yet matter-of-fact manner reminded Carla how commonplace trauma and disaster were at the station, and how promptly they were stripped of all hyperbole and fuss.

A door to the left opened and Steve Herbert appeared, his shoulders filling the narrow doorway. He stepped into the room.

Carla shook Kevin awake; he’d already dozed off.

‘Kevin. Carla. Sorry to keep you waiting,’ Herbert said, shaking Carla’s hand. His firm, warm grip hinted at everything she yearned for; she didn’t want to let go.

‘Can I get either of you a drink? Tea perhaps? Or a coffee?’ he asked as he swiped his security card and led them through a warren of offices to an elevator.

‘A milkshake,’ Kevin mumbled. ‘A lime milkshake.’

Carla shrugged apologetically.

‘Sorry, Kevin, no can do,’ Herbert smiled. ‘Just cheap instant
coffee and no-name-brand tea bags, I’m afraid. You’ll have to have a word with your local MP.’

‘I bloody well will,’ Kevin said, shaking his head too many times.

They got out on the fifth floor. Carla knew Steve’s office.

‘Come in. Sit down.’ He closed the door, locking in the view over Albany, the grey carpet, the truth.

The inspector looked exhausted. He’d worked non-stop since that night, heading a fifty-strong team from CIB, and keeping Carla informed every step of the way. His daily call had become her raison d’être. Even when there was nothing to report, he still rang or dropped in to see how she and Kevin were doing. To untangle him from her life now would be to let it completely disintegrate.

Was this it, she wondered? The end. The motion of the enquiry had soothed her. The questions, the talking, the rehashing, had all worked to keep Jack somehow alive, sweeping her along with the promise of something better. Perhaps she didn’t want closure after all. The investigation had ordered her minutes and structured her days. It had kept the terrifying emptiness at bay.

Herbert seated himself on the edge of his desk. ‘Carla. Kevin.’ His tone was measured and deliberate. She nodded, willing him on.

‘We arrested two youths on Saturday night in connection with a gang incident on the Shore.’

Carla’s mouth went dry. She put her hand out, searching for Kevin’s.
Arrested two youths … Arrested two youths … Arrested two
—

A ringing telephone punctured the moment.

‘Sorry!’ Herbert leant back to pick up the receiver. ‘Steve Herbert, Homicide.’

Carla waited, teetering on a high wire.

‘When’s the hearing? Yup. I’ll get one of the boys onto it right away. No problem. Thanks for letting me know, Derek. Cheers.’

Herbert scribbled something down on a piece of paper before getting up and putting his head out the door. ‘Jen, hold all further calls, please.’

Carla’s shoulders were aching and she could feel the dull creep of a headache tightening across the back of her head.

Herbert took up his perch on the desk again. ‘As I was saying, we picked up some youths involved in a gang incident over the weekend, and we have reason to believe that one of them was involved in the incident on your farm last month.’

Last month. March. Fine, crisp days hinting at an approaching change in season. Kevin’s birthday. Their wedding anniversary. The first feijoas. Persimmons hanging like orange orbs in the orchard …

Now the grey skies of approaching winter were more comforting in their distance from
that
block of days on the calendar. March would always be stained with horror.

‘Fingerprints place one of the youths at the farm on the night of the twentieth. We’re still awaiting DNA confirmation from body fluid samples.’

Carla blushed and slumped back into the chair, her brain struggling under this fresh load. So the perpetual motion was finite after all. The madness was about to settle. She was scared.

‘I mean what’s so blimmin’ hard about making a lime milkshake?’ Kevin blurted out, kick-starting time again.

Carla burst out laughing – embarrassingly raw, uncontrollable guffaws that quickly turned to tears.

Carla sat under the canopy of a large magnolia. An icy wind gusted across the empty park, stealing a newspaper she’d found folded on
the bench. She jumped up to retrieve it, but the wind toyed with her, swooping the pages of print just out of reach. Eventually, the bare branches of a tree snagged the rehashed news of her life.

In the past she used to read the newspaper every morning. Without this ritual, her day had felt incomplete. Kevin, by contrast, had never been very curious about the world beyond the farm gate,
The Willows
seeming to sate his needs and shelter his shyness.

But she had grown up in the city and relished the pulse and politics of it. As a child, she’d travelled extensively with her parents, both of whom believed that a true education lay beyond the classroom walls. By the age of eleven, Carla had protested outside a bullfight in Spain. By fifteen, she’d hiked through Tibet. And by sixteen, had witnessed first-hand the atrocities of apartheid. Her father, a political science lecturer, had been a learned and deeply principled man who’d fought tirelessly for the underdog, rallied support for unions, and was always challenging bureaucratic limits. She had been raised, not on
Peter Pan
or
Alice in Wonderland
, but on tales of the 1951 Waterfront Strike and the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa, when Māori players had been made ‘honorary whites’. And so it came as no surprise when her father had expressed disappointment in her decision to marry Kevin, ‘the stolid, cardigan-wearing farmer’. He had clearly harboured greater ambitions for her. To him, a life working the land was so entirely bland and insular.

Now the machinations of the real world no longer interested her either. She hadn’t read a paper in weeks. She was in print and tired of her own story, no longer able to distinguish which bits really belonged to her and which were simply the fiction of an overzealous reporter.

Ten o’clock. Another day yawned in front of her. She’d been up since five and already attended an appointment at the Rape Crisis Centre, preferring an early session so that she could leave it behind
and not allow it to monopolise her day. But it was too early to return to the motel. The district nurse and occupational therapist would have both been and gone, and Kevin would be settled in his chair in front of the television. Nothing would have changed. He needed her. She’d always needed him. Yet now it was time alone she was chasing. Kevin had come to epitomise the cruel riddle she was living, his almost normal appearance tricking the eye and supporting the pretence that nothing had changed, when everything had. Everything. His greying hair, different-coloured eyes, and weathered skin were parts of a familiar shell. But her soulmate, lover, and best friend had all died on that awful night, along with their only child. At least when she was away from Kevin she could pretend. To be around him was to be constantly reminded of her loss.

‘Josh. Josh, careful! You’re going too fast.’

A small boy on a shiny red bike flashed past. In slow motion, Carla saw the speed-wobble, the pitch, the somersault, then the bent metal and grazed limbs. A howl brought her to her senses and she leapt up, reaching the injured lad just ahead of his mother.

‘Oh dear, you poor poppet. Here, let me help you.’ She lifted the bike off the child. ‘There we go,’ she said, putting a hand on the child’s leg. It was warm and covered in fine downy hair.

‘There’s blood. There’s blood!
MUM
!’ the youngster squalled.

‘I know, but it’ll be—’ Carla began. Then the mother was upon them, and the boy’s twisted face softened.

‘Oh, Joshy. Oh dear.’ She hoisted him up.

‘Here, let me help,’ Carla offered, righting the skewed bike. ‘Are you parked nearby?’

‘No. Uh, we live just around the corner.’ The woman was distracted and Carla felt like an intrusion. ‘We’ll walk home, thank you. I’ll send my daughter to collect it shortly.’

‘I can, really …’

But the woman had already turned and was heading down the pathway, the boy sobbing quietly into her shoulder. Carla held her hands up to her nose and inhaled. The warm smell of child.

The incident took her back to the first time Jack had come off his bike just after his eighth birthday. Kevin had bought him a brand-new ten-speed model. Ten-speed! Jack had been beside himself with excitement, and the envy of all his mates. That is, until the afternoon Russell came tearing into the kitchen. Carla was making gnocchi and up to her elbows in flour and mashed potato.

‘Come quick, Mrs R! It’s Jack. He’s had an awful accident.’ She remembered as if it were yesterday, running and running and not knowing what she would find.

At first count, a gaping lip, a split knee and a raw-red tummy.

‘Ma, I’ve broken my teeth,’ Jack had cried, two skew pegs poking out of his gums where his brand-new adult teeth had gleamed that morning.

‘Just be grateful it’s only his teeth,’ Dr Johnson had said as he’d stitched Jack’s torn lip. ‘Teeth you can replace. It’s not as easy to mend an eye or a brain.’

They’d all been shaken up for some weeks after. It was Jack’s first serious accident and left the small family feeling vulnerable and cautious, as if they’d skimmed too close to the edge. Jack had been a belated and much-wanted gift, his arrival incredible after so much heartache and waiting. Always in the back of Carla’s mind was the fear that he could so easily be taken from them.

‘There are no guarantees in life,’ was Kevin’s well-worn line. ‘We can’t wrap the kid in cotton wool. He’s going to have many more tumbles in life, Carla, I’m sure of that.’