Through a Camel's Eye (10 page)

Chris decided to buy himself a coffee in one of the small streets near the hospital.

He took out Camilla's drawings and looked at them, one by one. He knew that Ben was holding out on him, as was Ian Lawrey. Either of them could have taken the camel; or another boy whom Ben and Ian were protecting.

Chris's coffee was put in front of him and he drank it quickly. He liked his coffee hot and this one was barely warm. It didn't matter. The small café was quiet, somewhere to think without being interrupted.

He had no doubt that the scream Camilla had heard had been made by Margaret Benton. He would write another report. Surely this time it would not be ignored.

Margaret Benton might have dropped her coat in the sandhills, or left it somewhere else, which meant somebody besides herself had taken it there. It had been a good coat, expensive. Chris was inclined to think that, if a stranger had found it, then he or she would have kept, or sold it.

He'd been back to look and there'd been nothing else where he'd found the coat, no signs of a disturbance. He'd dug around to make sure that nothing had been buried there.

Chris spoke to the school principal, and obtained permission to question Ben during school hours. The principal offered the use of his office. When Chris said he wanted to speak to the boy alone, the principal frowned, but did not object. He left the office door open and Chris knew that he wasn't far away.

‘When you found out that Margaret Benton had been murdered, you got scared. I don't blame you. Especially when she'd been staying at your van park. But I need to find out where she and her husband went after they left, and I think you know something that can help me.'

Ben's face had gone pale again. The dark hairs on his upper lip stood out strangely, as though he was both too young to have grown them, and too old to have left them unshaven.

‘Rasch - ' he began, then bit his bottom lip.

‘Yes?'

‘Rasch said he'd seen this old witchy sort of woman on the cliff path.'

‘When did Raschid see the woman?'

‘I don't know.'

A cough from next door reminded Chris that he could be interrupted any moment.

Chris returned to the dare and how it had been carried out, asking questions until he had the sequence of events reasonably clear.

When Zorba's bet to ride Riza had been interrupted, the four boys had left the paddock; but they'd been keyed up, too excited to separate and go home. They'd gone back to Zorba's, whose older brother, Theo, had been down from his farm. Zorba had taken a packet of Theo's cigarettes and they'd smoked them on the beach.

‘Who took the camel, Ben?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Could it have been Zorba?'

‘I don't know!'

‘It's time to tell the truth.'

‘I'd never lie about that, honestly!'

‘Ben, listen to me. There's more at stake than loyalty to your mates. What if one of the others stole the camel without telling you?'

‘They couldn't! Specially that Zorba! He's so up himself he'd
have
to skite about it.'

The principal knocked on the door and Ben made his escape, head bowed, shoulders hunched protectively.

Chris drove to the station, where he checked for messages. There was one from Simon Renfrew that could keep. Chris looked up Theo Kostandis in the phone book and spent the time before school got out writing his report.

EIGHTEEN

At first, Raschid was inclined to deny everything, but after fifteen minutes of calm, persistent questioning, Chris got him to admit that he
had
seen a woman in a black coat and that she'd been ‘acting weird'.

‘How do you mean, weird?' Chris asked.

‘She was stumbling, kinda. I thought she might be - like, drunk.'

‘Where were you when you saw her?'

‘On the bike path. I never stopped.' Raschid looked wary and suspicious, trying to guess the next question. Chris thought he would have been terribly ashamed to realise how transparent his expression was.

‘When was this?' Chris asked again, to make sure.

‘New Years Eve. I'd been at Zorba's helping with the lights and that.'

‘You went to Zorba's party?'

‘Did
I? It was awesome.'

‘What time of the day did you see the woman on the path?'

‘In the morning.'

‘Did you ever see her again?'

‘I wouldn't know, would I? Maybe she went by in a car, or something. I gotta go now. Mum'll chew me over if I'm late.'

Raschid fidgeted with the handlebars of his bike, jumping the front wheel up and down the curb outside the school.

‘It's you kids who've been wasting my time,' Chris said, ‘not the other way around. Was the woman on her own?'

‘I dunno. I never
saw
anybody with her.'

‘And the coat?'

‘Well like, it was summer, wasn't it?'

When Chris pulled out his photograph of Margaret Benton, Raschid stared at it for a long time, before he nodded and then shook his head.

Chris sighed. ‘Come on, Raschid, you'll have to do better than that.'

‘I don't know,'
the boy almost shouted. ‘All I know is, she was acting weird and she was in a hurry.'

Chris climbed the path where Raschid had seen the ‘weird' lady. The lighthouse was half a kilometre further on, the spot where he'd found the coat almost a kilometre behind him, in a much less frequented part of the dunes.

He lifted his head and mentally measured the distance, then lowered it again to avoid stumbling over a tea-tree root.

He stopped to examine a small clearing to one side of the path, a hollow in the sand that would make a good resting place on a windy afternoon, sheltered and private. There was nothing to see except bushes overhanging a depression, scattered with leaves and twigs.

There were no human footprints, apart from the ones he'd just made. If there'd been a fight, a struggle, what evidence could be expected to remain after nearly nine months? Some, perhaps, but he lacked the means to find it. The whole area needed to be examined, but Chris knew in advance what response he would get to this request.

What a difficult area to remove an unconscious or dead body from, he thought, how awkward to carry her all the way to the road and whatever vehicle was waiting. If it had happened that way, the attacker had taken a great risk. Chris had to admit that it was much more likely Margaret Benton had been killed close to her home.

He told himself he ought to be feeling hungry and wondered why he wasn't. Instead, he felt light-headed from the effort of interviewing adolescent boys. He phoned Anthea, who was trying another house-to-house, then rang Simon Renfrew and left a message.

It was cold on the path, and Chris pulled his jacket tighter, keeping his back to the sea. Other people had perhaps seen Margaret Benton in her unseasonable black coat, but the locals weren't volunteering anything, and tracking holiday-makers down would be impossible unless they were very lucky.

The ocean heaved below him. Chris told himself he didn't need to walk along the cliff; nothing would be proved by it; but he turned up his coat collar and trudged forward anyway.

On New Year's Eve, Raschid would not have been alone on the path. There would have been other cyclists and plenty of walkers as well. Not too many people would have ventured up there in the fog on December 30, but Camilla Renfrew had.

If his witnesses were right, and he believed they were, Margaret Benton had been seen two days running in the same area. Had she been trying to escape from her husband, and if so, why had she chosen to go there, of all places? Why hadn't she called for help? Had she been contemplating throwing herself over the edge?

Chris stopped walking. Rising before him, without warning, came a nightmare vision of the dead woman being pushed over the cliff, falling to break her neck on the rocks beneath. The insistent, restless water, never still, always worrying at the rocks, lifted her body, billowing the black coat like a pirate's sail.

Chris let himself into the station and turned on every light. He didn't question this. He simply knew he had to make the place as bright as possible. He checked the front door twice to make sure he'd locked it behind him.

He made himself a cup of tea, though he didn't want one, and stared at the hot liquid without drinking it. But the simple actions of boiling water and getting down a mug were calming. He told himself he'd had some kind of waking nightmare, that was all.

The night his father drowned had been pitch black, with a southwesterly gale and the ebb tide running at six knots. The conditions were bad, though not uncommon - the southwesterly holding the waves up against the current, the pilot boat plunging almost vertically between them. After so many years, Chris needed only to walk at night and smell the ocean, particularly if there was a strong southwesterly, to picture it as though he'd been there.

In the maritime museum, there were photographs of pilots climbing rope ladders away from the safety of small orange boats, scaling the huge flank of a container ship or liner, in the dark, above a raging sea. There was a time when he'd forced himself to look at these photographic records, though they made him sick - the man caught in silhouette, black against a ship's white bulk, like some horrible elongated spider. Yet those pilots were the lucky ones; they'd made it and gone on making it, time and time again.

No camera had caught the pilot who'd fallen from the ladder on a vicious night, nor the crewman on the tiny vessel waiting underneath, who'd heard the yell, who'd seen the fall and jumped overboard to save his master.

After sitting for a long time staring at his desk, the mug of cooling liquid still untouched, Chris gave his shoulders a hard shake and got down to work. He made a new list of questions, writing steadily and keeping his mind focussed on the task.

He printed off every single piece of information he and Anthea had unearthed about the Bentons, gathered the pages into a neat pile on his desk, then checked his watch. If he hurried, he'd get to the fish and chip shop just before it closed.

The proprietor, another Greek, not nearly so rich as the Kostandises, looked tired and grey-faced.

He gave Chris a sharp look and Chris wondered about his own appearance, how much of what he'd been remembering showed in his face. Of course, Janaros knew his family history. He wondered who'd told Anthea, if anybody had. He fancied he'd know, by the look on her face, her manner. But maybe he was wrong about this. Maybe she couldn't care less.

‘Got a nice piece of whiting left,' Janaros said. ‘For you, same price.'

‘Okay. Thanks.'

Janaros sank his order into hot oil, then inquired with his back turned, ‘Found that camel yet?'

‘No,' Chris said, aware that his answer was abrupt.

He sat down on a plastic chair to wait, wondering what Janaros would be doing after he shut the shop. His kids were grown up. His wife had gone back to Greece, ostensibly to help look after her sister; but it was already four months and people were beginning to wonder.

No sound but his own footsteps had followed him along Hesse Street. During the summer holidays, the fish and chip shop was a production line, three men behind the counter, two girls taking orders at the till, phone ringing non-stop from five in the afternoon. Sometimes, when it was very late - Chris rang his order in, twenty minutes before he came to pick it up - the cooks were hunched over with exhaustion, and Janaros was leaning on the counter as though it could barely support his weight. For all that, the fish was always fresh, and freshly cooked.

Chris wondered why Janaros didn't give it away, retire, follow his wife to Greece, or go someplace else.

He pulled out his photograph of Margaret Benton.

Janaros bundled up his order and wiped his hands on his apron before saying flatly, ‘It's that woman got herself murdered up along the Murray.'

‘Did you ever see her down here?'

Janaros glanced towards the door. ‘I couldn't swear to it, but I reckon she came in here one night. It's, well, it's not a face a man would remember.'

Chris nodded and waited. Finally Janaros said, ‘She looked like she'd been crying.'

‘Do you remember when?'

‘No, mate. Not a hope.'

Chris took his dinner back to the station. This time he didn't feel the need to turn on all the lights. He read through his file of papers while he ate, shoving chips and bits of steaming fish into his mouth, washing the lot down with Carlton Light. He wondered if the fishy smell would still be there in the morning, and if Anthea would notice. He opened the window, waved his arm about for a few seconds, shut it again and settled back to his reading.

Jack Benton had first reported his wife missing on January 3. They had returned from their annual holiday, which was supposed to have included a week at Swan Bay caravan park. It seemed that Benton had not been questioned in any detail about this. According to his statement, they had driven back on Friday the 2nd, arriving late in the evening, and the next day Margaret had taken the car to the supermarket, or at least had said that this was her intention. She was not on the supermarket's CCTV film, nor had anyone been found who'd seen her in the car park, or inside at the time she was supposed to have been there. When she failed to return, Jack had gone looking for her, and found the locked car. Her bag, which he knew she'd taken with her, was not inside. He'd gone home puzzled, but not immediately alarmed. Six hours later, when there was still no sign of her, he'd rung the police.

NINETEEN

It seemed everyone had a theory. Penny and Alex McIntyre were rung up ten times a day, mostly by nutters, Penny complained to Chris, who was busy fielding his share of nuisance calls.

One woman, who didn't even live in Queenscliff, thought he should know that she'd heard a car pulling up outside her place in the middle of the night. Another had seen Brian Laidlaw riding past with a suspicious-looking bundle tied to the back of his bike.

Chris listened politely. Where were the townsfolk who really might have seen something relevant, he asked himself as he put the phone down. Why did he have to put up with fools and busybodies instead?

In a single morning, they received three confessions to the murder, two by phone and one by a note pushed under the station's front door. The calls, and the note, which Chris found on arriving at work, had to be followed up. A smudge of blue paint in one corner led him, by a somewhat roundabout route, to a handyman called Joe Fisher, who lived in a cottage by the wharf that was painted half-a-dozen shades of blue.

Fisher readily admitted to having written the confession and looked surprised that it had taken Chris half a morning to find him.

‘Why didn't you sign it then, Joe?'

The handyman replied that that would have made his job too easy.

‘How did you get the body back to Swan Hill?'

‘In me van,' Fisher said with a satisfied smile.

Chris sighed. The van would have to be examined, and the workshop - but what a waste of time. Everyone knew Fisher was several sandwiches short of a picnic. He was harmless; or he had been.

Chris looked around the workshop, which Fisher had added onto his cottage at a time when building regulations were less strict. It was filled with what mostly looked like junk, but obviously had value to the handyman - hundreds of tins of paint, many of which looked empty, wood of all shapes and sizes, hammers, wrenches, chisels, jars of nails. Chris knew that Fisher got by on his age pension, very seldom employed by anybody, even as a favour. He thought of Brian Laidlaw, and other old men who'd lived in Queenscliff all their lives, and wondered if he'd end up like them - or, more precisely,
which
of them he'd end up being like.

He questioned Fisher, going over details of the note, where Fisher had been the night Riza disappeared. It took a while to establish which night they were talking about, since Fisher was vague about dates and times. That night, he claimed with a sly, delighted grin, he'd been ‘out on a job'. He wouldn't say what kind.

Chris sighed again, audibly this time, and wondered at the familiarity he'd encouraged with the townsfolk, leading to an insolence he had surely not intended, but was probably his fault. He thought of the debacle over Frank Erwin's horse float, a mistake he was determined not to repeat. Yet Joe Fisher owned a van big enough to transport a young camel. And he was always driving round, ‘on the look-out for this and that'. His van was such a common sight nobody would have remarked on it.

‘We'll have to take your van, Joe.'

‘What? You can't do that!'

‘You shouldn't have written that note, then.'

‘I need me van for work!'

‘You'll have to walk, or ride a bike.' Chris thought once more of Brian Laidlaw, while Fisher looked as though he was suggesting that he sprout wings and fly.

Chris thought of the jokes that would go the rounds. He was already close to a laughing stock. But why? What was inherently absurd about his questions? Was the joke so obvious that everyone but him could see it?

Chris could hear the chortles, yet he still found it difficult to understand except in terms of a false judgement and premature conclusion.
Fancy yourself a detective, Blackie? Better leave that job
to real men.
Could a trained detective tell by looking the difference between hairs belonging to a palomino pony and a camel?

‘How did you kill her, Joe?'

He was conscious of being deliberately cruel, and felt ashamed.

‘I never killed nobody! Can't you take a joke?'

Chris left the van where it was. He wrote another report and filed it. He endeavoured to separate, as much as possible, two crimes that threatened to plait together in his mind. He felt the whole town laughing at him, with Joe Fisher's manic cackle followed by an old sheep's cough. He woke with a headache and dragged himself to work. He heard laughter as he left his cottage in the morning; and the life that he had made for himself, woven out of partly unwanted, partly cherished strands, seemed to dissolve with every step he took.

There were those who could embrace absurdity, even turn it to advantage. Joe Fisher was one of them. Chris wondered if Camilla Renfrew was another. But no, Camilla suffered too much. Her performances - the notes, the drawings - were a product of her disability, a combination of necessity and will-power. A crank call would, of course, have been beyond her; but a mischievous letter or a practical joke Chris felt to be beyond her as well. What was it about murder, he wondered, when its black wings touched down in a place, that made innocent people behave irresponsibly?