Through a Camel's Eye (3 page)

FOUR

Anthea discovered that, almost without exception, the inhabitants of Queenscliff had been indoors watching television the night before. The half dozen who'd ventured to the pub had been glued to the TV too. It seemed to Anthea that she was making inquiries on the flimsiest of evidence. She thought it most likely that Camilla Renfrew had taken the camel, and that it was a waste of her time and Chris's to be looking for it.

It didn't make Anthea feel any better that the people she questioned looked at her as though
she
was crazy. They kept peering over her shoulder, as though expecting Chris to turn up any second and rescue them from the embarrassment his offsider was causing.

The chemist laughed when she told him. ‘Sounds like somebody's idea of a joke.'

Anthea wanted to agree, to justify herself. ‘Just find out about the horse float,' Chris had said. Well, no one had seen a horse float, especially not one that had been used to make a camel disappear.

Anthea stood on the footpath while her sandwiches were being made, not wanting to talk to anybody else. She didn't want the smirking girl behind the counter asking if she'd found her camel yet.

The sandwiches were good and Anthea was hungry. She took them to the bench in the park she was beginning to think of as hers, and stared out across the channel. A container ship was slogging its way towards Melbourne, while the small orange pilot boat sat on the horizon waiting for another one. The sea was flat, the trees on the headland barely touched by wind.

Why couldn't Graeme phone? Now would be a perfect time.

Anthea considered going home for the afternoon, saying she was sick. But that would look pathetic. She guessed that Chris had little tolerance for falsehood or deception, white lies that other superiors might be prepared to overlook. Yet it was thoughts of home that drew her, as she rested her eyes on the grey-blue horizon, the bay calmer than it had been since she'd arrived in this poor excuse for a seaside resort.

Home, for the present, was a one-bedroom flat overlooking Swan Bay. She hadn't unpacked her books or CDs, and half her kitchen utensils sat in boxes alongside them - that was how temporary she'd been hoping this period in the wilderness to be.

Anthea admitted, scrunching up her sandwich wrapping, that her morale would improve if she unpacked. Her tiny living room, with a kitchen alcove at one end, wouldn't feel so cramped. Her bedroom was just big enough to hold a double bed, and she was sick of climbing over boxes.

Up till now, it had seemed to Anthea that the only good thing about her flat was the view over the bay. When her landlord told her how lucky she'd been - a tenant who'd already paid the bond having pulled out at the last minute - she'd tried to look and sound appreciative, instead of showing the disbelief she'd felt. People actually
wanted
to live here? They
competed
with each other to claim such an address? But today it was unpacking those boxes that attracted, rather than the prospect of going back to work, returning to Chris Blackie and his one-man show.

Chris filled in some background over mugs of tea which they drank sitting on cane chairs on the station's back veranda.

‘I've known Camilla all my life,' he told Anthea, expecting to see a downturn of ill-concealed mockery around her mouth, yet disappointed when he did so. ‘She brought her son up by herself after her husband died. Always kept him clean and well-dressed. And her house is a palace of cleanliness compared to the mess that Beshervase girl's living in.'

Anthea warmed her hands around her mug and made an effort. ‘I wonder what the owners will say.'

‘She'll clean it up. Or I should say she'll intend to. She'll leave it too long and then get in a panic.'

Anthea thought of Graeme and the lists he left for his cleaning lady who came every Tuesday. She felt a moment's sharp envy for this woman who could visit Graeme's flat, who could come and go.

‘That trouble with Camilla's voice - ' Chris was saying - ‘I couldn't tell you when it started. It's not as though I've been keeping tabs on her.'

‘What about the son?'

‘It'd be worth having a word to him. He's married, or at least he was. I've never met his wife.'

Chris noted the change in Anthea's expression. It occurred to him that she might be having an affair with a married man.

He breathed out heavily when she left the veranda, then went inside to his computer, where he busied himself looking up Wallington Park stud. He pictured the Murray River with its flood plain and rich, absorbent soil.

Camilla drank water standing at her kitchen sink, but it did nothing to ease the burning in her throat. Riza had been stolen. Perhaps he was dead.

She saw the white face and heard the scream again, then rushed to the lavatory.

Camilla gagged and clutched cold porcelain to stop herself from falling forward, re-living those minutes underneath the lighthouse.

She steadied herself, and returned to her living-room.

Camilla sat in a chair and waited for Chris Blackie to come back, thinking of old Brian Laidlaw scavenging along the tide line, and how it was too late to speak the simple words of greeting. She smelt the fear of nocturnal creatures who had no defence against feral cats and foxes. So quick and unmarked the change from life to death, the small animal swallowed in a morsel, or, mortally wounded, scurrying away to die.

She remembered picking grass and holding it out on the flat of her hand, Riza drawing back his thick lips, the feeling ticklish and delightful.

His trainer never used the gate, lifting her leg, instead, to slip between the fence wires. In the next paddock, a tree gave good shade, half way up a rise, beside a dam. Perhaps the lock on the gate had been faulty and no one had noticed. Riza might have opened it himself.

Camilla recalled the playground in the small country school where she'd been a teacher's aid the year Chris had started. He'd been a skinny boy, though tall for his age, a quiet boy who watched and listened, rather than filling up the space around him with his own noise, a boy whose scuffed black shoes, outgrown felty jumpers and unironed shirts heralded a neglect that marked him out for teasing.

Camilla's mother would never have sent her off to school without a freshly ironed ribbon in her hair. Her own opinion had been that ribbons made her look a fool. She'd watched the new kid from her position as playground supervisor, that first hot summer of his formal education. Several times she'd had to break up fights. Once, a sixth-grader had to be enlisted to take Chris home with a nose that refused to stop bleeding. By mid-autumn the fights had stopped and Chris was left alone.

What was the good of a weak and silent witness?

It began to rain. Camilla opened the curtains and looked out over her front garden. Rainwater filled the gutters and splashed down the tea-tree. She stood at her front door. After the closed-up air of inside, the trees smelt wonderfully fresh.

Memories tripped her up like tea-tree roots. She wondered if that woman had stumbled off the path. She'd been wearing a dark overcoat, unusual for summer, even in the fog. Camilla knew it was a trick of memory that shapes appeared just when you were about to put your foot down, and felt right then the immense gap between a person's raised shoe and the waiting earth.

It was her experience that a bad day generally got worse. Had she wished, she could have measured the progress of her affliction in mornings that began with boredom, or with indigestion.

The doorbell rang. Chris Blackie stood on the porch, his uniform covered in tiny drops of moisture.

Camilla invited him in. He sat on the very edge of a chair.

‘Did you take the camel, Mrs Renfrew?'

Camilla shook her head, but a doubt crept back, the sensation of tree roots rising up to meet her.

‘What time did you leave the paddock?'

‘About six,' Camilla wrote in her notebook.

‘And the camel was there then?'

Of course he was. She nodded.

Chris went on asking questions, keeping his voice and his expression level, and Camilla tried to answer them in writing.

Chris read patiently, then cleared his throat and said, ‘Mrs Renfrew, I'd like you to do me a drawing. What if I leave you to it, and come back in half an hour?'

Chris thought he would spend the time walking through the sandhills - not that he believed Riza had taken himself up there, or that whoever had stolen him had let him go. If that had been the case, someone would have found him by now.

Still, he looked for hoof prints, glad there was nobody to laugh at him for doing so. He shaded his eyes and squinted at a dark object, half covered in sand, then began to walk towards it. He should have been wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes, but he never thought of things like that.

It was a woman's coat, black, or at least it had been. Chris started to shake the sand out, then gave up. He stood with his back to the wind, and asked himself if it was possible that whoever had stolen Riza had been wearing such a garment, at the same time telling himself not to be a fool. The coat had been exposed, out in the weather, for months. Anthea wrinkled her nose when Chris walked into the station with the coat. She listened to his account of finding it, wondering what role she'd be expected to play in tracking down the owner. If it had been left up to her, she would have thrown the filthy garment in the bin.

But she took another look as Chris was folding the coat into a plastic bag. It would once have been expensive.

Anthea surprised herself by holding out her hand for Chris to stop, while she looked for a label. It was faded but legible, and carried the name of a fashionable designer. She became aware that Chris was letting her take her time, and that he seemed quite comfortable waiting in silence.

She turned the label over, then took the coat to the window, the better to read the name on the other side.

‘Margaret Benton. Isn't that the woman who went missing up along the Murray?'

Chris stared at his assistant, then gave a brief nod. He checked the label for himself, then rang Swan Hill police station.

They made tea together and took it out to the back veranda. The air between them felt lighter than it had since Anthea had come to Queenscliff.

An hour later the phone rang. It was Swan Hill ringing back, asking for the coat.

Chris hung up. His temples were throbbing and his face was flushed. For some reason, he didn't want Anthea to see this, but he knew she had.

Anthea went over to the window and stared out at the lavender and rose bushes.

‘What about that camel?' she asked, swinging round to face her boss. ‘Maybe he tromped all over it. Are you going to say in your report that we're investigating the theft of a dromedary?'

Chris caught the glitter in her eye. He laughed in spite of himself and said, ‘Jesus love us.'

Anthea laughed too. ‘Will I ring for the courier?'

‘I will,' Chris said, reaching for the phone again.

When they'd told him they were sending him a woman, Chris had felt both pleased and nervous. It would make a change. His last junior constable, while they'd gotten along all right on the surface, underneath they'd never warmed to each other. The times they'd had a beer together after work Chris could number on the fingers of one hand.

He wouldn't have minded running the station solo. He knew practically everybody in the town, and they knew him. For two months of the summer, there was more than enough work for one man, most of it late at night when the drunks got belligerent. But the rest of the year, no. And Anthea had come looking for drama. He'd seen it in her eyes the minute she walked in. Both the anticipation and the almost instantaneous disappointment had been there. Trouble with the boyfriend. He'd guessed that too. Boring or not, Queenscliff was
his
backwater, and he wanted it to stay quiet. He wanted to go on managing the town his way.

Yet he was conscious of a sharp tug of excitement. What if the coat turned out to be important? He thought how Anthea had lifted it to the light. It hadn't occurred to him to turn the label over. He was aware of his assistant's grace and neatness, the clean lines of her silhouette, holding the mucky coat in her arms. Excitement caught him, a swell beneath the wave's head, unnoticed till it hit you hard.

He'd forgotten all about Camilla Renfrew; he'd told her he'd be back in half an hour.

FIVE

Dusk found Anthea by the boat harbour, vaguely embarrassed to be seen wandering about on her own. As the senior officer, it would have been a courtesy for Chris to have invited her over for a meal. There was propriety, of course; but she was sure that Chris did not think of her as a woman. As for herself, God help her when she became that desperate. He hadn't mentioned his address, but most likely assumed that she already knew it.

Anthea guessed that her superior's reserve had developed over many years, part of his armour - though it could easily have gone the other way. He could as easily have become loud, crude and aggressive, and have got away with it - a small fish in an even smaller pond. She saw Chris, at that moment, as a man who kept his own counsel, a man with private tastes and inclinations hidden behind an exterior developed to suit the job. She also sensed that there was some kind of war going on inside him, and knew it had to do with more than a black coat with the name of a missing woman underneath the label.

The house, when she found it, surprised her by its smallness. It was built right on the street, with no front yard at all. There were no lights on, at the front at least.

Anthea's embarrassment left her as she continued on to the harbour, breathing in the strong smells of fish and seaweed. No one was about and she walked up and down the jetty several times, reading the names on fishing boats and watching the ebb tide, swift, green and muscular, flowing with such strength it seemed to her that it would not stop until it reached Tasmania.

Anthea had never spent time around the Melbourne docks and regretted this now in a mild, nostalgic way, lacking precise memories in which to anchor her nostalgia. One study assignment had involved securing an area of dockland, another working with customs to track down a shipment of heroin in a container. She recalled how keen she'd been to get good marks in her first year, before she met Graeme, and how these assignments now seemed impractical and overly ambitious.

The harbour was attractive in its way. Anthea could imagine Graeme there, with herself as guide, showing him the sights. Graeme would take an interest in the rigging of the yachts. Perhaps she should learn the names of different pieces of equipment. Could these be the kinds of facts he would expect her to pick up? Graeme would ask confident questions of the fishermen, about the ‘take' and what was ‘running'. The conversation would put him in a good mood. They would buy the freshest whiting, which she would cook to perfection.

Anthea paused in her wandering, having come to a halt also in this imagined scene. Would she point out Chris's house? She'd noticed that the outside had recently been painted, and was sure that Chris would have done the job himself. She foresaw the precise way in which Graeme would turn up his nose, a delicate widening of the nostrils, and, in profile, a lifting of his chin away from what held no aesthetic interest. Through the open door of a tiny pale blue house, she glimpsed a gleaming dark wood passage. At the front was a carefully constructed arch for climbing roses, starting from a pocket-sized square of soil.

On the whole, she did not think she would walk Graeme past Chris Blackie's house. Enough that he would be sure to laugh at the lavender and roses, the sign with the big ER and royal crown next to the station door. Enough that it was already an occasion for behind-hand smiles that she'd chosen a career in the police force. ‘My girlfriend's a copper.' How often had she forced a smile in return?

Anthea rounded a corner and came upon another section of the harbour, with huge, hangar-like buildings right on the edge of the water. Two orange boats were moored side by side, bucking against the tide. They were long-prowed, small for the task she'd seen them performing, carrying pilots in and out through the Rip, pilots whose job it was to guide container ships and ocean liners through the narrow channel.

Anthea walked on, Graeme and his jokes forgotten. Serious work was done here, by these modest orange arrows and their crews, work without which trading in and out of Melbourne could not function. She felt glad that the headquarters was situated in Queenscliff. She wondered when, and under what circumstances, the pilot service called on the police. She thought of Chris labouring away in the station garden, head down and back to the ocean, a deliberate turning away. She recalled his expression when she'd mentioned her walks along the cliff top, how his reaction, a swift closing down and turning inward, had seemed a barely conscious act of self-protection. She wondered if there'd been something offensive in what she'd said, and remembered how her one question about swimming had been met with a moment's silence, then the quiet reply that nowhere was completely safe. At the time, she'd passed this off as further evidence that he was a fussy old maid.

Gradually, as Camilla waited, her drawing took shape and filled out. There was the paddock with the fence around it, the Moonah, seaward side, where a fat lip of dune gave shelter from the southerlies. Camilla did not attempt to draw herself, only to pencil in an arrow at the place where she'd often stood and watched.

She drew the young camel as well as she could, sending out a silent apology for the clumsy figure; then tackled other, human ones. Her fingers worked the pencil, strove to make the lines true. She stuck her tongue out, as a child might, that useless tongue whose ordinary work was forfeit.

Camilla decided to include all the people she'd seen at the paddock since Riza had made his home there: Julie, then Frank Erwin and his wife Cynthia; Frank's son Jim, who'd stayed for a week with his wife and their baby; Brian Laidlaw riding past on his bike.

Cars passed, but mostly at a distance, on the main road. Few ventured along the dirt road, for the simple reason that it led nowhere except to a walking track through the sandhills. From time to time cars did come down it, though the sign said clearly, No Through Road. They turned at the end, where there was just enough room to do so. Of course, the driver and passengers couldn't always be seen clearly; sometimes not at all.

Then there were kids - kids used the dirt road and the dunes in ways that adults never did. They kicked up dust with their bikes. They made cubby holes and hideaways. Four boys in high school uniform had propped their bikes against the fence one afternoon and stared at Riza as though they'd never seen a camel. They'd been back next day, whooping and laughing, kidding one another.

Camilla completed her drawing and leant back in her chair, thinking of the dunes whose movement was governed by the wind and their own weight. As a child, she'd believed they crept forward in the night, on feet the size of football fields. She enjoyed the steep incline, wind that met her headlong, catch of moon and starlight at the tops of waves. She enjoyed walking at night. She wondered if she went that way now, in the darkness, she would hear the scream again.

Camilla missed Riza terribly, the beauty that was in his every step. No drawing of hers could come close to expressing that. The fact that an old woman of no account, whom children taunted and adults dismissed as mad, had been able to feast each day on beauty - now that had been something. She pictured the baby fluff and softness, those legs of a sweet, comical length. She almost tore up her drawing in frustration. Where was Chris Blackie? What was keeping him?

She decided to get out of the house, to calm herself by walking.

It seemed important to choose the right hat.

Camilla fetched one from the hall cupboard. She supposed it was the kind once worn for tennis, though she'd never enjoyed the game. Proficiency at sports had eluded her, like so much else. But youthful losses were vague now, and that was a blessing. The memory of missed opportunities had become so slippery that she no longer felt the need to grapple with it, to ask again whether such-and-such a skill had ever been within her grasp. Still, she stared at the old white hat with its rust-coloured brim and put it on with a sense of reliving some kind of athletic occasion.

The phone rang. It was Simon.

‘Is that you, Mum?'

Camilla wondered who else it could be, and why her son insisted on phoning when he knew she hated it.

‘How are you, Mum? Is everything okay?'

Camilla nodded at the phone. She put a hand up to adjust her hat and realised with shame that she was crying.

Simon said she shouldn't live alone. It was not the first time he had said this. He told her he was sending her some brochures in a querulous, insistent voice.

Camilla put the phone down, asking herself when things had begun to go wrong between herself and her son, if she could mark the point where a hostile young man had emerged from the chrysalis of childhood. She knew that Simon blamed her for his father's death, still blamed her, with the unforgiving grief of a ten-year-old boy. And wasn't this the point, that blame and grief had remained locked in him, unchanged? Any attempt to talk about it while he was growing up had been met with hostility.

Alan Renfrew had died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. His heart had been weak, but nobody had known that until it was too late. The day before the heart attack, they'd argued. Alan had been a cold, punitive and jealous husband, and had punished her for failing to produce more sons. After eleven years of marriage, she had hated him. Simon had loved his father. Father and son had loved one another.

Camilla shrank from the idea of selling the house she'd been born in; but perhaps she should. Perhaps she should give in.

She jammed her hat firmly on her head and closed the door behind her. Already she felt guilty for hanging up on Simon. Nervous of giving offence, she had always shied away from the question of why Simon's wife had left him after they'd been married for only two years. Now any matter between mother and son was best broached in writing. The failure of Simon's marriage was a subject that remained firmly closed.