Rocking Horse Road (12 page)

AMY: So what did you guys want?

AL: We thought you might have some
information.

AMY: I didn't know her.

AL: [Unintelligible] younger.

AMY: She wasn't a friend of mine or anything.

PETE: She was raped.

AMY: So?

PETE: We thought you might know something.

According to Pete she just stood up and walked away.
He said later that he knew they had offended her but
he wasn't sure how. On the tape you can hear her
shouting something at her boys in the background.
The words '. . . you'll brain-damage him' rise clearly
out of the static. Pete and Al left the park as the twins
began rolling pinecones down the slide with a sound
like an approaching stampede.

When they got to the road, Al reached into his pack
and turned off the tape recorder. He told us he looked
back and saw Amy standing by the swings staring in
their direction. 'She looked tired and sad. I kinda felt
sorry for her.'

However, we were not going to be put off that
easily. We reasoned that Amy wasn't going to simply
hand over details of her clients. As with lawyers there
was probably some agreement about confidentiality,
'or like doctors have with the Hypocrite's Oath,' was
how Mark Murray put it (the 'Hypocrite's Oath' is still
something we like to bring up every now and then
when Mark gets a bit cocky).

We took to watching Amy's house. It was just a
small Summerhill stone place, which she rented. There
was a vacant section right next door so we loosened
boards and enlarged knotholes in the fence and took
shifts sitting in the long dry grass after school. Her
clients were not as regular as we had expected. In the
first three days there was only one guy who might
have been visiting for sex. He arrived at 9.30 in the
evening, close to the time when we were about to
give up for the day. He parked his car up the road
and entered Amy's place on foot, walking so quietly
that we almost missed him. He knocked gently and
slipped inside. The blinds were already pulled and we
couldn't see a thing.

He left an hour later and although we got a better
look at his face none of us recognised him. He looked
surprisingly normal. Just in case it came in useful,
we recorded the details of his car: make, model and
number plate. But we never saw him again. After he
had left, Amy came out in her dressing gown. Her hair
was wet as though she'd been in the shower. She put
her rubbish bag down on the footpath and without
looking around went back inside.

We were beginning to learn that investigative work
is mostly boring. It's all about accumulating small
details over long periods of time. The facts gather
like dust on a windowsill until there are enough to
see. Every day after school for two weeks we sat in
the flattened grass, doing shifts of two hours each.
Sometimes we were alone; sometimes one or more
of the others came down because they had nothing
better to do. We read comic books or played backgammon.
Pete had been sent a backgammon board
for Christmas by his brother Tony, who was in the
navy by then. Tony had picked it up in Sydney when
his ship had visited there on some Australia–New
Zealand joint training manoeuvres.

Eventually we came to see a pattern in Amy's
days. She saw clients from Monday to Friday. Amy
started work at around eight o'clock in the evening.
Presumably Jake and Zach went to bed early, exhausted
by a hard day terrorising the neighbourhood. They
probably never met the men who visited their mother.
There were one or maybe two guys most evenings.
Sometimes there would be none and Amy's bedroom
light would be switched off early.

By the end of the second week we were bored and
ready to give up. The only conclusive thing we had
was a list of car licence plates. The guys who visited
her were mostly middle-aged and completely normal-looking.
There were no obvious murderers, no screams
in the night. As Mark Murray asked, 'What the hell
does a sex pervert look like anyway?' We began to
feel foolish for even thinking that we would discover
anything by watching Amy.

It was a Friday and, we had all agreed, the last
evening before we'd give up watching her for good.
Tug Gardiner and Jase Harbidge were watching the
house. Tug thought at first that Bill Harbidge must
have been there on police business. But Jase's dad was
not in uniform and there was no sign of a police car.
In fact, he seemed to have arrived on foot, emerging
out of the dunes.

'His hair was combed,' Tug said, 'and you could
smell the Old Spice from where we were.'

Jase went quiet, Tug added, and left on his bike
soon after his father had gone inside. There was no
real betrayal involved. It didn't look like Jase's mum
was coming back. Nonetheless we knew that it was
a humiliation for Jase. Actually, it disturbed us all. If
Jase's father, a policeman, could feel that inner tension
that moved him to knock quietly on Amy Trousedale's
door, then couldn't those same feelings be stirring in
our own fathers? Who was to say that our dads didn't,
from time to time, pop out on some errand and then
find themselves parking the family car down the road
and walking back to Amy's house?

That was the last time we ever watched Amy.
Without discussing it, we knew that it was better not
to know for sure. We even started avoiding passing
by her house in the evenings in case we should see
something we didn't want to. We never spoke of
seeing Bill Harbidge there, and not just because it
would embarrass Jase. There was more than our
friend's feelings at stake. We had started to see that
there were shadowy places all around us that were
better left undisturbed.

March brought the first real rains of the year. For four
days, Wednesday to Saturday of the first week of that
month, the rain fell almost continuously. It varied
between sheets of windblown mist and heavy drops
that pockmarked the sand. By the end of that week the
dunes had changed from summer's tired yellow. They
now wore a shade of green we could barely remember
from last spring. The tussocks stood tall and the ice
plant was no longer soft and limp but pointed plump
fingers at the sky. Moisture clung to everything so that
as we moved around the dunes our school socks got
soaked.

March also brought the sea fogs rolling in off the
Pacific. Sometimes the fog covered the whole coast,
sometimes just New Brighton and occasionally only
the Spit. It could linger for a few hours in the morning,
or for a whole day. Once or twice that year it draped
itself over the coast for several days on end so that we
lived our lives in a twilight world.

The goal posts had only been up for few days when
someone attacked the local rugby club under cover of
the fog. By then even we were aware that there were
some people who felt strongly that the Springboks
should not be touring at all. We had no time for this
point of view. As Pete Marshall's father said, 'Sport
is sport and politics is politics.' But apparently some
people didn't agree. On the first Monday in March
we went down to the rugby grounds to see the
damage for ourselves. Someone had written the word
APARTHEID in bright red paint across the front of the
clubrooms. The down stroke of the T cut right through
the middle of the door. Even worse though was what
they had done to the grounds. They must have used a
pretty strong weedkiller. The grass from one twenty-two-metre
mark right up to the halfway line was dead
in patches. Standing close it was hard to see what the
oversized letters spelt but when we stood up on the
top of the natural embankment we could read two
words. STOP TOUR.

Nearly everyone down the Spit was outraged. It
felt like a random act of terrorism. What type of people
came in the night and defiled such an important part
of the community? But more and more we were
seeing signs of anti-tour behaviour. Occasionally on
the bus we would see someone wearing a red, white
and black Halt All Racist Tours badge. We looked at
the wearers curiously but there was no discernable
type that we could see. There were badges on both
men and women, on people who were well off, and
on university lefty types. They were even being worn
by some retired people who we believed should have
known better. We wondered which one of them had
been responsible for vandalising the rugby field but
found it hard to visualise people so normal-looking
out on the grass in the night spraying weedkiller. We
believed that we would know a fanatic when we saw
one.

Shortly after that posters started going up in New
Brighton. At first they were only put up at the shopping
centre and then they crept south on the lampposts.

STOP THE TOUR!
RALLY AND MARCH
THOMPSON PARK SOUTH BRIGHTON
8 June 6.30pm

Because of the attack on the rugby grounds we felt
that these posters belonged to an unseen enemy. We
pulled them down and stuffed them into rubbish bins
whenever we could. We even ripped them up into
small pieces so that they could not be taken out of the
bins and recycled. Within a few days fresh signs would
go up and we tore those down too. But it seemed that
whoever was putting up the posters had an endless
supply.

It was Al's idea to talk to Sarah Fogarty about Lucy's
murder. 'If anyone's going to know something, it's
her.' It was an obvious idea and we wondered why
we hadn't thought of it earlier. All the boys at South
Brighton High School were habitually wary of Sarah.
She had an aura of disdain for all things masculine
and had been known to hit boys who annoyed her,
hard enough to deaden arms. We all agreed that she
had been an unlikely best friend for Lucy Asher.

Matt was our emissary to Sarah solely because of
his six sisters: he was well versed in the high rituals
of young women. Matt found Sarah Fogarty at the
school tennis courts. Unusually for a girl in those days
she was alone. She was busy hitting a ball against the
concrete practice wall. When Sarah first came to our
school in the fourth form, after her family had moved
up from Geraldine, she had been a champion tennis
player. She had regularly beaten girls three years older.
Gradually, however — and for reasons known only to
herself — Sarah had given the competitive side of the
sport away and now played only for fun.

When Matt approached her, Sarah was hitting
the ball forehand with all the ferocity of her previous
match-winning form. He told us later that the ball
slammed into the wall at almost the same spot every
time. He waited.

'Well?' she said, when it was at last clear that Matt
was not going away. She spoke without looking over
at him.

'I wanted to talk to you about Lucy.'

'No fucking shit.' Another reason boys were wary
of her was Sarah's disconcerting ability to out-swear
even the toughest boys. 'Can't you see I'm busy
here?'

'We were wondering if you knew who killed
her?'

As investigative work goes it was pretty crude
stuff, but at least the question made Sarah stop hitting
the tennis ball. It bounced back off the wall and rolled
across the ground past Matt's feet, coming to rest at
the foot of the umpire's chair in a puddle left over
from the recent rain. Sarah looked at Matt for the first
time. He told us that she had the sunken bruised eyes
of Ali losing to Holmes. According to Matt Templeton,
Sarah looked as though she had hadn't slept for a
year.

'If I knew who fucking killed her I'd tell the
police.'

Matt didn't comment. His place at the bottom of an
entirely feminine pecking order had taught him when
to stay silent. Sarah walked over to retrieve her ball.
She had to pass close to where Matt was standing and
he tensed up, waiting for her to plant her knuckles in
his arm. But Sarah simply picked up the wet ball and
went back to hitting it against the wall.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Interspersed with the
twanging of the strings.

Matt waited for a long time but Sarah didn't say
anything else. It was clear to him that she could go on
hitting the ball all day.

He was outside the tall wire fence and walking
away when Sarah called out to him. 'Hey, shit-head!'
He turned back and saw that she was standing by
the fence, her racket hanging loose in one hand. Even
from a distance he could see Sarah's cavernous eyes
and they made him shiver.

'She was seeing some guy but she wouldn't tell
me who.' And then she turned away, leaving Matt
feeling as shaken as he would have if Sarah had hit
him after all.

The news that Lucy Asher had been seeing someone,
and all that implied, caused a wave of consternation
to wash through Jim Turner's garage. It tarnished
those memories of Lucy we had assembled and now
jealously guarded. Other images came, unbidden
and unwelcome. Grant Webb openly asked about the
possibility of Lucy having 'done it' but was hissed
down. He retreated into sullen silence. The idea was
an insult to the Lucy we had breathed life into during
the hot pungent summer.

At fifteen, we saw sex everywhere. It hovered
near Amy Trousedale, of course, but also near every
halfway attractive girl passing on the street. We
watched all the girls and women in togs down on
the beach, and gazed at every scantily-clad model
on a billboard, magazine cover or TV ad. Every off-colour
joke we heard our fathers make in passing,
every flick and pout, every giggle and bare-legged
step seemed designed to turn us on. The whole world
was like one big subliminal message. But Lucy Asher
was different. Lucy was exempt from our hormonal
obsessions. We could not believe that Lucy was part
of the guilty world of our fantasies. Lucy's name did
not belong in the same sentence with that of Amy or
any of those other women. They were like different
species. They swam in the same ocean, but at different
depths. By consensus, we decided that if Lucy had a
boyfriend then it must have been someone who took
her to the movies a couple of times, maybe held her
hand — certainly nothing more.

We were inclined to want to push this new
information to the back of our minds but Pete
Marshall said, 'It's our first real clue. We've got to
follow it up. We owe it to Lucy.' It was after school on
the day Matt had spoken to Sarah Fogarty. We were
back in the garage, not having met there as a group
for several weeks. By then Mark Murray had found
an old picture-frame in a storage box and brought
it along to the garage. Al Penny, who had become
the unofficial custodian of all the news reports and
interview notes, had transferred the photo of Lucy
printed in
The Press
into the frame. We covered the
work bench at the back of the garage with a tasselled
table cloth that hung down to the concrete floor. The
frame was painted gold and still had its glass and
Lucy smiled out at us. The silver trophy sat next to
the photo. Above the bench, pinned to the unlined
walls of the garage, were the carefully trimmed
articles from the newspapers.

Pete Marshall's words made us feel guilty and our
eyes dropped. 'We owe it to Lucy,' he said again. He
was right. So, together, we compiled a list of possible
suspects. Boys Lucy could have been seeing who,
we assumed, could have gone on to be her killer.
Unlike the police, we were not constrained by lack of
evidence or even the need for objectivity. The slimmest
connection to Lucy, the whisper of a rumour, a hunch
or old prejudice, saw boys named. They were secretly
photographed and their faces hung in the Turners'
garage on what became known as 'the boyfriend
wall'.

All the photographs were taken by Al Penny with
the second-hand camera he got for his birthday that
year, a Pentax ME Super. Al got very good at taking
pictures to do with the case. The camera didn't have
a great zoom on the lens but he had an instinct for the
impending moment when all the variables would slip
into place. He had a shy boy's knowledge of how to
get in close without being seen.

By the end of March we had nine photographs
pinned to the wall. All the boys were from New
Brighton, all were roughly Lucy's age and, with the
exception of one, all had recently attended our school.
Luckily, all of them still lived at home so we were able
to spy on them. They were photographed through bus
windows or as they got out of cars. Al caught them on
street corners or through the windows of their homes
as they ate dinner with their families. Several were
photographed on the beach, surfing or swimming;
one as he dozed in the sleep-out behind his parents'
house.

Looking back, it is clear that we displayed little
imagination in our choice of suspects. Without
exception they were good-looking young men. More
often than not they were respected rugby or cricket
players. Our reasoning was that if Lucy had been
going out with anyone, why wouldn't it have been
with one of these guys? Only Matt Templeton argued
that our choices were flawed. Girls — all girls — he
argued, went for the outsider, the maverick, the Han
Solo type. To back up his claim he brought along a
poster belonging to one of his older sisters, Mary-
Rose. The poster showed James Dean walking along a
footpath in the rain. He was looking cool and tough,
yet a bit dishevelled like he'd been awake all night.
He also looked slightly lonely. 'That's the type of thing
girls really go for,' Matt said. We were interested.
Because of his sisters he was by far the most qualified
among us. Here was information, if not straight from
the horse's mouth, then certainly from the donkey
who lived in the next-door paddock.

On the strength of Matt's recommendation we
included Steve Weldon on our list. Steve had been in
Lucy's year at school but had left at the beginning of the
sixth form in a torrent of controversy and speculation.
The school never came out and said why Steve was
'asked to leave' and there were a lot of myths that grew
up around the episode. Whether he really had used his
locker key to scratch a jagged FUCK into the side of the
headmaster's orange Datsun is uncertain. It may have
been Steve who released the twenty doomed frogs
from the biology room into the space above the hung
ceilings. (Their gentle croaks could be heard coming
from above our heads for weeks, in classrooms as far
away as the English department.) Whether it was for
one of these acts of minor rebellion, or for something
else entirely, all anybody knew for sure was that in the
July of his University Entrance year, Steve Weldon's
arse was grass.

One fairly typical photograph we have of Steve
shows him wearing tight black jeans and a black AC/DC
T-shirt with a skull on the front. As far as fashion
statements went, we all agreed it was pretty cool. In
the photo he is standing outside his mother's house,
where he lived at the time of the murder, waiting for
the mailman to arrive (
Photo Exhibit P36 SW
). He's
been photographed slightly in profile. His mouth is
partly open as though he is tasting the salt air. If you
look carefully you can see his chipped front tooth.
Steve had never attended another school after leaving
ours and, as far as we knew, never got a job. How he
spent his time was a subject of frequent speculation.

No one could collaborate a definite sighting of
Steve Weldon and Lucy together but we agreed that
didn't exclude them from having been in a secret
relationship. Roy Moynahan went so far as to argue
that no one ever having seen Lucy and Steve together
was in itself suspicious, and possibly proof that they
were
seeing each other. But that was a bit philosophical
for most of us. That Steve was the coolest boy down
the Spit was enough to get him on our list.