Rocking Horse Road (2 page)

In the days after Lucy's body was found, the
papers were full of the story. Reporters roamed up
and down the beach like stray dogs. They stopped us
on the road to ask if we had known Lucy and what
type of girl she was. Occasionally we would see our
own words in the paper attributed to 'a close friend'
or 'long-time school-mate of the murdered girl'.
Words uttered in passing looked awkward in black
and white. They seldom matched what we thought
we had said. Certainly the words never came close to
describing the Lucy we had seen every day at school
and in the dairy.

There was one photograph that
The Press
and
the
Evening Star
favoured. It was taken the summer
before she died, when Lucy was still in the sixth form.
The photo shows Lucy standing outside the surf
club holding a small trophy that she has just won for
beach racing at the provincial championships. She is
wearing the red one-piece togs she competed in and
there is a small patch of damp sand clinging to her
left shoulder. You can see her from the waist up. She
is tanned and smiling and holding the silver trophy
out towards the camera with both hands as though
offering it up as a gift to the photographer. Her hair
is light brown, bleached lighter than it was in winter
(we found out later that she squeezed lemon juice into
her hair before bed each night in an effort to lighten
it). She has brown eyes and a wide, almost American
mouth. Though attractive, Lucy was not what people
would call a great beauty, at least not until you got to
know her.

We still have the trophy, although it was broken
later that year, and has never been fixed. About a
month after Lucy died it turned up on the street in the
Ashers' rubbish. It was sitting on top of the bag and
was found by Tug Gardiner who had a paper round
that included the Ashers' place. The trophy is actually
meant to be awarded for athletics but whoever bought
it must have thought it looked right enough for the
under-seventeen girls' beach racing: a silver girl
finishing a race, head dipping forward, arms flung
backward. The finishing tape is draped across her
chest. Apparently the trophy hadn't been significant
enough to be engraved with Lucy's name. There
was, however, no one else it could have belonged to
— and of course it matches the one in the photograph
perfectly.

All things considered, it's a very good photo of
Lucy. We like to think that in different circumstances
she would have been happy for it to be printed so
widely.

That summer, the weather had stayed hot right
from early November. By the time Lucy Asher was
murdered no one was talking about a perfect summer
any more; everyone was moaning about the drought.
What little lawn there was down the Spit had yellowed
and died even before school finished for the year, the
dead blades of grass eventually blowing away on
the easterly to scatter over the water of the estuary.
Only the cabbage trees seemed to thrive. They had
predicted the long hot days, flowering in great white
sprays in late October. Nearly everything else had the
life sucked out of it by the sun.

Except for the sea lettuce: that was also roaring
ahead. Whether it was the heat raising the water
temperature in the shallow estuary, or the outflow
from the oxidation ponds (we called them the poo
ponds) that emptied into the estuary at the western
end, that year the sea lettuce spread like never before.
Lime green, and crinkled at the edges like slippery
potato chips, it carpeted the acres of mud that was
the estuary at low tide. The sea lettuce threatened to
choke even the deepest channels. It sucked the oxygen
from the water. Dead flounder and herring could be
seen floating on the surface. New warning signs went
up warning people not to eat the shellfish.

There were bitter letters to the paper about council
mismanagement of the estuary and numerous theories
put forward explaining the sea lettuce's sudden
bloom. But all we knew was that it stank like nothing
else. During the hot days and nights the smell hung
low over the Spit. The fug of the estuary at low tide
permeated that summer. It was the smell of the rotting
sea-lettuce, mud and the dead fish, the flesh of which
armies of crabs fought over in the darkness, clicking
and clattering. The smell crept into our nostrils as we
lay in our beds thinking about Lucy. It got so bad some
nights that we could taste it. It put us off our food and
stopped us from sleeping.

Some of us took to rubbing Vicks under our nostrils
at night. We slept wrapped in the smell of childhood
sickness and were taken back to a time when our
mothers would tuck us in tight and murmur soothing
spells against our fevers. It was a time that, at fifteen,
we could remember clearly, but that we didn't yet
fully understand was gone forever.

The amount of material we've collected over the years
has become a problem. By the time we were in our
mid-twenties we already had enough paperwork
for two filing cabinets. There are the newspaper and
magazine articles, but also the police reports, plus the
transcripts of all the interviews (we have the tapes as
well). We've kept the larger items: the photograph
of Lucy; the trophy of the running girl; the two rafts.
There are hundreds of photographs. We've also got a
small library on police procedure and forensics. There
are books on DNA and fingerprinting. There are lots
about famous crimes and how they were solved.
Anything really that we've come across over the years
that might be of some use or relevance.

Alan Penny was originally in charge of the
archives. But Al got married to a local girl when he
was only twenty-one and they had three little girls in
quick succession (actually, if you do the maths, the
first baby came a little too quickly after the wedding).
Al's wife told him, when she was pregnant with their
third kid, that she didn't want their home cluttered up
with all that 'morbid rubbish' so we all came around
one Sunday and, under his wife's hard eye, moved the
records over to Matt Templeton's place. Matt kept the
stuff in a spare room at his house for several years. But
when Matt got divorced, the first time, Grant Webb
took over for a while.

Most of us have lived with the material for at
least a year or two. It's an odd thing to have all that
information in your house. You find yourself at three
in the morning reading through some article you've
read many times before, just looking for a new insight.
Or one of your kids will get up in the night for a glass
of water and will find you sitting in the dark next to
the stereo with your headphones on, re-listening to an
interview, the ghosts of the past whispering in your
ears. Anyway, it's a fact that having the stuff in the
house leaves you bleary eyed and twitchy.

In the end we hired a lock-up. It's a high-ceilinged
room with tilt-slab-concrete walls and a roller door,
over in the industrial area, past the settling ponds. We
chose it mainly because it's only about ten minutes'
easy driving from New Brighton, where most of us
still find ourselves living. The lock-up is one of about
thirty in a compound surrounded by barbed-wire
fences, with security gates out the front. We each put
in a small amount every month for the rental and we
all know the code that opens the gates so that we can
get in any time of day or night. Most people use that
type of unit to store things like caravans and boats and
quad-bikes, or boxes of assorted crap — things that no
longer fit into their garages. Ours looks more like a
rugby club room. Roy Moynahan is a carpenter now,
like his dad was, and he built us a bar out of slabs of
macrocarpa. Unlike most of the other units ours has
electricity so there's a beer fridge that we keep stocked
— although there's always good-natured controversy
over what brands we keep in there. There's carpet
on the floor over the concrete, and an old pool table.
There's even a pretty comfortable bed down the back
so that we can sleep over if someone's had a few
too many drinks to drive, or a fight with the wife or
girlfriend.

And, of course, the files are there. The original
material is stored in three tall grey filing cabinets.
There is also a large glass display-case for the bigger
items, and shelves for the reference books. One
whole corner of the room is set up as an office with
a computer, which has broadband internet access for
doing online research. There's a printer and a high-definition
scanner. A lot of the information we've
collected over the years has been entered into the
computer and stored on laser disks that we keep in a
safe in case of a fire. The same goes for the newspaper
articles.

The picture of Lucy, the one from the paper, has
been blown up and framed. It hangs on the wall near
the desk. We like to keep a candle burning on a small
table beneath it. It's no big deal if the candle goes out.
The next guy to arrive simply relights it.

All in all, the lock-up is a real home away from
home.

Even before the ambulance arrived, the two St John's
guys breathing hard and moving heavy footed through
the sand, locals started drifting across to the beach from
their houses. The teenagers were the first on the scene.
Perhaps we were more on the lookout for something to
lift the morning above the norm, quicker to sense the
possibilities. Or maybe our grapevine was just more
efficient at carrying the news that there was something
out of the ordinary to be seen down on the sand. We
called to one another as we came down the tracks
through the dunes. But when we caught sight of the
body a silence descended over us.

If you believe everyone who claims to have been
down on the beach that December morning, there must
have been a hundred locals, at least. By our reckoning
there were actually nineteen. Roy Moynahan was
definitely there, along with Allen Penny and big,
lumbering Jim Turner. Grant Webb and Tug Gardiner
were there as well. Mark Murray came over the dunes
a bit later. He was by himself and his finger-in-the-socket
hair seemed to spring up from his head even
wilder than normal. Pete Marshall was there too, of
course. He stood apart from everyone wearing a mask
of sombre authority that none of us had seen on him
before, but that he would often put on again during
the following months. We stood in a group about
ten metres along the beach from the body. We barely
spoke. A tight knot of shocked girls hung back higher
up, almost in the dunes. The adults who eventually
arrived stood in pairs even further back than we
were.

The body was being guarded by Bill Harbidge,
who had already been back to his house to call both the
ambulance and his fellow policemen. He had pulled
on his uniform jacket and hat but still had the faded
shorts and sandshoes he had been wearing when Pete
pounded on his front door. Possibly the shorts were
a concession to the mounting heat, but it was more
likely he simply couldn't find his trousers in the few
minutes he'd allowed himself before rushing back to
the crime scene.

The tide that had discarded the body near the foot
of the first dune had been full at four in the morning
and was well out when we arrived, and the beach
seemed very wide. The waves were not as large as
they had been in the night but still rolled in with a
heavy sibilance. Occasionally one would crash down
with particular force and people would look away
from the body towards the ocean.

Bill Harbidge announced in a voice loud enough
to carry above the sound of the waves that everyone
was to keep well back so that we didn't 'infect the
crime scene'. He needn't have worried. We would
have kept our distance anyway. We were unfamiliar
with death and seeing it there on our doorstep in the
morning light had unnerved us. Maybe we harboured
the primitive belief that whatever had happened to
the woman on the beach could be contagious. That,
like head lice, death could jump across short distances,
from one person to another.

It took us a while to realise who she was. Even over
the wavesound, you could hear as the first person
spoke her name. 'Lucy Asher.' It wasn't Pete who said
it first; he's always been adamant about that. 'It's Lucy
Asher.' Who actually said it and exactly how they
recognised her, we're not sure. But once those four
rolling syllables were loose on the beach they were
picked up and passed quickly from person to person.
All of the girls started crying.

We tried to recall the last time we had seen Lucy
alive. Mark Murray whispered that he had bought a
chocolate-dipped double-scoop cone from the Ashers'
dairy just the day before. It had been Lucy who rolled
it for him. Roy did even better. He claimed to have
seen Lucy walking along the road towards the reserve
as late as five o'clock the previous day.

It was while we were comparing notes in hushed
voices that the two St John's guys turned up,
although we had not heard the ambulance. Maybe
Bill Harbidge had told them on the phone that there
was no hurry and so they hadn't bothered turning the
siren on. They came down out of the dunes further
up the beach and walked over to the body. They
were carrying a stretcher and a large red bag. Bill
intercepted them with one hand raised like a traffic
cop, which in fact he had been for a few years.

The St John's guy with the ginger moustache
seemed to be the leader. He arrived first and spoke
to Bill, nodding solemnly. We were too far away to
hear what was said. The tall skinny one stood back,
holding the stretcher upright in an unwitting parody
of the way that surfers held their boards on the beach
every day.

When Bill Harbidge eventually stopped talking,
Ginger Moustache walked over to the body. Lucy
was face down, half on her side. He knelt down and
pressed two fingers against her throat. It suddenly
occurred to us that maybe she wasn't dead after all.
Perhaps by some miracle she was only unconscious.
But he shook his head, too quickly it seemed to us for
such an important verdict, and moved back to where
Bill and his colleague were waiting.