The Rules of Backyard Cricket (25 page)

People come and go—detectives, mostly. They keep their voices low, don't smile or laugh. They're combing their way through everything, using little stepladders and lights, photographing, brushing. All of them wear bright blue disposable gloves, as though fearful of contamination by grief.

Louise is still watching me but there's barely any recognition there. I'm conscious that two of the male detectives have moved closer, looking
at random objects but apparently waiting to hear us talk. I watch one of them long enough to make eye contact. He retreats a little.

‘Should you be in hospital?' I venture.

She shrugs, infinitely uncaring.

‘What do they know?'

‘Not much,' she begins slowly, quietly. ‘Rang the doorbell and I just opened the door, like a fool. They had'—she waves a hand over her face distractedly—‘balaclavas. We'd just been for a…a swim.'

Her face begins to crumple. ‘She hasn't got anything warm.'

The tears flow like she's bleeding them. Her face is veined with the pressure. Her breath hisses forwards as she sobs. I can't even begin to think how much pain she's in.

My thoughts are taking on strange shapes, turning on me like they just noticed me in a crowd. And their mood is turning ugly. I was at the strippers. I was at the strippers with a no-good friend who works part-time as a gangster I think, but I don't really know. I was drinking beer in a dark room with a whole lot of failed humans while a handful of girls—empowered or disempowered, I don't know—took their clothes off for our gratification. Outside the sun burned down on the rest of the world while Louise took Hannah swimming, a mother and her daughter engaged in the happy cocoon of their rituals, while I was ogling someone else's daughter.

Someone came here and did this to my family. While I watched the strippers.

After a long time her weeping subsides, and she goes back to staring, the wakes of the tears shining across her cheeks.

‘Wally?'

‘They've found him,' she responds, absently. ‘Hyderabad. There isn't even a fucking Test in Hyderabad. I mean, what was he—?'

‘Could've been anything,' I offer feebly.

‘Yeah, anything with
him
.' There's a nasty edge of sarcasm in her
voice that's new to me. The anger is unmistakable in her eyes. Two rings on the third finger of her left hand. A green stone, sunlight sparking in it. A child has been torn from her mother. Something elemental has been severed.

‘They're putting him on a plane.'

There's movement among the nearby cops: a woman's whispering to the two suited men. After she breaks off from them, one leans forward.

‘Mrs Keefe, we'll be telling the media that you and your husband will not be paying a ransom under any circumstances.'

She suddenly looks hopeful. ‘Has there been a demand?'

‘No. I'm telling you this because we may have to make some preparations. Now we do want you to have money ready, because what we tell the media and what we'll do might be two different things. Could you get access to a large amount of money quickly?'

‘What's a large amount?'

He rolls his eyes, searching for a random figure. ‘A million dollars?'

‘No,' she says firmly.

‘Couldn't you mortgage this place?'

Seems like a good idea to me. Four bedrooms, a pool, views over the city. Wally would be making a fortune.

‘It's already mortgaged. To its limit,' says Louise, enunciating each word coldly.

‘What?' The detective is visibly shocked. ‘Why?'

‘You'll have to ask Wally.'

The detective wanders off to relay this news.

‘Where will you stay?' I ask, again seeking to push back the silence.

She shoots a look at the nearby huddles.

‘They say I have to be guarded until Wally's back.' She snorts disdainfully. ‘Watched.'

‘Who on earth—?' I begin, but she cuts me off.

‘Don't.' Her fingers splay into hard white stars like she's pressing them on an invisible screen between us. ‘I don't know. I can't imagine…' And then, curiously: ‘I just don't understand this life.'

The media interest over subsequent days is unrelenting and predictably divorced from reality. The police are working on a theory, they say. The police have a suspect, they say. The police have no idea, they say. They hold hopes the girl is being held, alive, for ransom. There has been no contact as yet from anyone claiming to have the girl. There have been claims which they're seeking to verify. There have been claims that have proven to be callous hoaxes. Illustrated liftouts in the daily papers suggest everything from a serial killer to a paedophile ring to an international conspiracy. Her school photograph becomes a permanent fixture behind the shoulders of the city's newsreaders. There is an aerial shot of their neighbourhood in one newspaper; I can see the pitch that Hannah and I mowed and rolled together, a pale scar on the vivid green of the landscaped garden.

No stone, however awful, is left unturned in the lather of their speculation.

Perhaps one stone.

In the free-association vacuum of their ideas, they note Louise is thought to have a history of depression. She was once investigated by an international body (she in fact gave evidence to a Dutch inquiry into NGO employment practices). No one goes so far as to say she is a person of interest or that she is ‘helping police with their inquiries', but nor do they take care to exonerate her or pay any heed to her obvious distress. Meanwhile, Wally is accorded gravity, sympathy, respectful distance. The notion of questioning his absence from his family, and simultaneously from the team, never occurs to anybody.
I don't disagree he's blameless, but I'm struck by the lack of critical thinking when it comes to a man like him.

Craig gives a statement to the investigators explaining our afternoon at the Fillies Bar. It all checks out and he's left alone, which for a man with his recreational pursuits must be a considerable relief, but he disappears for a while anyway.

Wally rings me in the middle of the night, eighteen hours after I walked into his house. The detectives have allowed me to sleep in the spare room there, once they've satisfied themselves that I had no role in the incident. Their preference is for everyone to clear out completely, but as Louise has refused to leave they grudgingly agree I should be there with her until Wally arrives.

It twists the blade inside me: she wants to be here when they bring Hannah home.

Wally's call comes from Singapore, where for these last few hours I imagine he remains a figure of no public interest. He's awaiting the last leg of his flight home and wants me to get him from the airport.

Entering the cavernous building, it's immediately clear that there's been a tip-off: a black and silver knot of photographers and equipment completely obscures the entryway from the arrivals hall. A call goes up from among them and a few spin around to get their shots of me arriving. A few more rush forwards with microphones, their voices cancelling each other, a formless blur ricocheting off tiled surfaces.

I look over their heads: the board indicates the flight is yet to land. And so I spend an awkward half hour seated on a café bench, flicking away journalists while we all wait for the main game. Darren Keefe, alone on a bench with his despair. I don't want to give them the pleasure but I don't have a choice.

Eventually the mob rises and clamours as the first passengers come through. I'm so accustomed to footage of Wally in airports,
pushing his trolley loaded with equipment bags, that at first I don't recognise him with only hand luggage. He's well dressed but not in team gear, his head slapped and pulled by the long-haul drag. Exhausted and depressed, without concealment.

His eyes swivel, looking for me. The cameras crunch one after the other, flashes firing from outstretched arms. The yelling is obscene
. Wally! Any news? Have you had a ransom demand? How are you feeling?

That last one stops him in his tracks. He searches the scrum.

‘Who said that?' he asks.

Woman in a suit, dressed and made up for television. The cameras now turn to her. She loudly announces herself and her network. Wally's baleful eyes fix upon her.

‘How the
fuck
do you think I'm feeling?'

His venomous stare holds her as her mouth opens and shuts.

There's stunned silence for several seconds before the roaring begins again: none of these people has ever seen Wally Keefe uncomposed, unrehearsed. In the last frame of the silence I manage to call, and he finds me by voice, veers my way. We move through the pack towards the exit, the shape-shifting mass re-forming itself around us, a shoal of mackerel cut by two sharks. Wally pays no heed to them, nor to me. His head's down, pushing grimly forward.

We run in front of a rolling taxi which lurches to a halt, cutting the pack from behind us. Their numbers thin as we scurry into the carpark building and across the carpark floor. I unlock the car and Wally throws the small bag in the back seat. He slumps into the front, slamming the door behind him.

‘Thanks for coming,' he says quietly.

‘Are they telling you anything?' I ask.

‘Police? No. They don't know, or they're not saying. You?'

‘Same, really. I think they've genuinely got no idea.'

We drone south down the freeway, both of us staring straight
ahead. I can see out of the corner of one eye that he's trembling slightly.

‘You all right?'

He's studying his phone, hands bouncing all over the place.

‘I'm fine, all right. Just…fucking fine.'

I decide not to push him any further. He makes three calls while we're driving. One to Louise (‘Yep. Me. Twenty minutes.'), one to the police to tell them he's headed for Kew and one that I'm guessing is to team management, about retrieving his gear from India. He finishes by ordering someone to ‘get the fucking media off my back'. There's a barely contained fury about him, from his frantic rubbing at his swollen eyes, to the tone of his calls, even the way he's sitting. It's been a long, long time since he and I have engaged in the combat that framed our childhoods—the blue over my state selection was probably the last decent tangle we had. I'm remembering now that Wally's response to emotional pressure is to lash out.

And there are others out there who don't even know, given his carefully controlled image, what Wally is capable of.

Somewhere around Mickleham Road a hatchback pulls alongside us and lingers just long enough in parallel that Wally and I both look across. It's a rental: the guy driving it gives us a guilty glance, then the back window comes down and some idiot points a camera at Wally. Big, professional lens. Wally looks around inside the car and finds the coffee mug I was using on the way out to pick him up. With his other hand he stabs at the armrest until he finds the window switch. Down goes the window and he hurls the mug at the hatchback, striking it directly in the centre of the driver's window. Mug and window shatter completely, revealing the driver's shocked face, the glittering shards of glass on his shoulder, as the hatch drops speed and retreats.

I'm left staring straight over the top of the steering wheel at the freeway ahead. Wally and Louise are being subjected to an intensity of suffering that I can't experience because I'm not a parent. Watching
them is pure helplessness. I want to clutch at him, to find my beloved brother in his sorrow, there beneath his rage.

Outside the house the cops have set up a card table on the front path, stationed by the most junior of them, a kid with no stripes writing on a clipboard. At either end of the garden, motionless figures dressed in black. Helmets, heavy boots. Rifles, for God's sake. Wally's eyes are wandering over the scene, as if determining which side of his personality to engage.

‘Don't come in,' is all he says as he steps out of the car.

I don't want to come in. I don't want any further part of this. The presence of the men in black is feeding a restless animal in my mind. Whoever's got Hannah is not a lone freak, a street-roaming predator. Whoever's got Hannah orchestrated this for a reason, and they're an ongoing threat.