narrow blind lane off Little Bourke Street.
‘What’s the next stop?’ he asked.
We were all leaning on parts of the ute, trying to control our breathing.
‘Shoreham,’ said Linda and caught her breath. ‘On the Mornington Peninsula. I know a place there. It’ll be empty.’
Cam straightened up. ‘Country air,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’ He started loosening the tray cover. When he had the back open, he looked at me and said, ‘They’re looking for two blokes, mate. Hop in.’
‘In the back?’
‘There’s a mattress. And pillows. Lots of air gets in. You can have a kip.’
I climbed in and lay down. Cam lashed the cover down. It was pitch-black under the cover, dark and claustrophobic and smelling of engine oil. I had to fight the urge to try and break out.
We were reversing over cobblestones. The springs transmitted every bump. I found a pillow, dragged it under my head, closed my eyes and tried to think about sharpening the blade of a number 7 plane. I was trying to learn how to grind a hollow angle and then hone the blade on that angle with a circular motion the way the Japanese did. I was thinking about how to improve my honing action when I fell asleep.
I woke with a start, no idea where I was, tried to sit up, bounced off the taut nylon tray cover, fell back in fright.
Cam’s voice said, ‘Nice place. They’d have something to drink here, would they?’
I knew where I was. How had I managed to fall asleep? I lay still and listened to my heartbeat while Cam loosened the cover.
‘Breathing?’ he said. ‘Relaxed?’
Inside ten minutes we were drinking whisky in front of a fire in the stone hearth of what seemed to be an enormous mudbrick and timber house. I went outside and stood on the terrace. There was a vineyard running away from the house.
I went back inside. Cam was on his haunches, fiddling with the fire.
‘Were they cops?’ I asked. I felt wide-awake. I’d slept for more than two hours.
‘Moved like cops,’ said Cam. ‘Very efficient. I gather you decked one.’
‘Tony Baker he calls himself,’ I said. ‘Came to the pub to scare me off. Made out he was a fed of some kind.’
‘If he’s a dead fed,’ Cam said, ‘we have other problems.’ He stood up and yawned. ‘That’s enough Monday now. I’ll find a bed.’
I looked at Linda. She was asleep, head fallen onto the arm of the sofa, hair fallen over her face. In the end, perfect exhaustion drives out fear.
‘I’ll just sit here,’ I said. ‘Reflect on how I got everybody into this shit.’
‘That’s the past,’ Cam said. ‘Think about the future. How to get everybody out of this shit.’
After a while, I got up and found a blanket to put over Linda. She didn’t wake up when I swung her legs onto the sofa and arranged a pillow under her head.
I kissed her on the cheek, got some whisky, put some more wood on the fire. The future. But we weren’t finished with the past yet. What had Paul Vane seen on the night Anne Jeppeson died? What was the evidence he knew about? And what was the evidence Father Gorman had told Ronnie to bring to Melbourne and where was it?
Time passed. I fed the fire, listened to the night sounds. It was after three before I felt tired enough to find a bed. Sleep eventually came.
Sunlight on my face woke me. It was after 9 a.m. My knee was stiff and sore and the skin around my hip was tender. I felt dirty. Looking for a shower, I went into the kitchen. Cam was sitting at the table, eating toast and jam, clean, hair slicked back.
He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. I went that way. Linda was sitting at a big desk, looking at her laptop screen. She looked clean too.
‘Does that thing work anywhere?’ I said.
She looked up and smiled. ‘I’ve written the whole fucking thing. All of it. The whole Yarrabank saga. And I’m plugged in to the world again. Through my trusty modem.’
I said, ‘Modem’s not a word you can love.’
She tapped the computer screen. ‘There’s a P. K.Vane in Breamlea,’ she said. ‘Must have moved from Beaumaris. We can take the car ferry.’
There wasn’t a single thing to lose.
‘I’ll have a shower,’ I said. ‘See if you can find the departure times.’
The woman was tall and thin and her labrador was old and fat. She was wearing a big yellow sou’wester that ended at her knees. Her legs were bare and she was barefoot.
There was no-one else on the beach. Just Linda and I and the woman and the dog and the gulls. We saw her a long way off, walking on the hard wet sand, hands in pockets, head down, getting her feet wet when the tiny waves ran in. The dog walked up on the dry sand, stiff-legged, stopping every few yards for a hopeful inspection of something delivered by the tide.
When she was about a hundred metres away, I got up and went towards her. The labrador came out to meet me, friendly but watchful. I stopped and offered him my hand. He came over, nosed it, allowed me to rub his head.
When she was close enough to hear me, I said, ‘Mrs Vane?’
She nodded. She had strong bones in her face, big streaks of grey in her hair, skin seen too much sun.
‘Are you the widow of Paul Karl Vane of the Victoria Police?’
She nodded again, still walking.
‘Mrs Vane, I’d like to talk to you about your husband and the deaths of Anne Jeppeson and Danny McKillop.’
She kept looking at me and didn’t say anything until she was close, three or four metres away. The dog went to her.
She leant down and rubbed its head, eyes still on me. Her eyes were startlingly blue.
‘I was hoping someone would come,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve had one happy day since they killed that girl.’
She put out a hand and I took it. We walked up the beach.
34
The shack was up in the hills behind Apollo Bay. We got lost once, retraced our route, found where we’d gone wrong. Cam was driving, the three of us crammed onto the bench seat, Linda in the middle.
On the way from Breamlea, keeping to the back roads, Cam said, ‘How come she doesn’t know what it is?’
‘Paul Vane never told her,’ I said. ‘He woke her up on the night Anne was killed and told her he’d seen it happen. He was electric, sat drinking all night. The next day, when the television had the news of Danny’s arrest, he told her Danny hadn’t done it, that it was murder, that he knew who’d done it but couldn’t tell anyone.’
‘So she kept quiet too,’ said Cam.
I moved my cramped arm from behind Linda’s head. ‘She says it haunted her. When she read about Danny’s sentence, she was sick. Paul became morose, drank more, used to say he’d done the wrong thing but it was too late. Eventually he took early retirement. Then he got sick, bowel cancer. He kept telling her he was going to give her the evidence, that he was going to get a lot of money to provide for her after he was gone, that she should tell Danny that he was innocent and give him the evidence.’
‘Money?’ asked Cam. ‘Did he get it?’
I shook my head. ‘No. She thinks he tried to blackmail someone over Danny’s death and that’s why he was murdered. He told her where the evidence was the morning of the day he was shot.’
‘And then she rang Danny?’
‘Later. After Paul’s murder, the house was broken into and searched from top to bottom. Then Paul’s boat caught fire at its moorings at Sandringham and blew up. She says she was too scared to fetch the evidence. And then she was watching television and saw the news that Danny’d been shot. After that, there didn’t seem to be any
