for him. I spent most of my spare time at school with him now, and we’d been to two parties and a barbeque. I loved being with him and lit up inside when I saw him at school each day. I scanned the crowd for his face every morning, and felt restless and empty till I found it.
I hung up when I saw the police cars. Coming out of winter there was enough dust for them to raise a bit of a cloud as they came down the driveway. I don’t know if they took any precautions against being ambushed but I didn’t notice any. Homer, Lee and I, coming into a situation like that in cold blood, I think we would have.
There is something stirring and terrible and exciting about having three police cars parked in your front driveway. There were probably more than three when my parents and Mrs Mackenzie were killed, but I was in the kitchen most of that day and don’t remember too many details. Now, seeing them all lined up, with their headlights on and their blue lights slowly turning, the police labels and logos all over them… Gavin would have loved it.
I answered their questions but in a kind of blank state. What could they do? If he was dead, find his body. If he was over the border, they might take a year to get him back. It would all have to be done through official government channels. Investigations, denials, negotiations, I knew that script. I’d read about it in newspapers, with other cases of kidnappings. The man we’d gone over the border to find, Nick Greene, was a typical example. My only chance was for us to do what we had done all through the war, and since the war for that matter. Take charge. Act for ourselves. When the tsunami hit south-east Asia I saw a guy on TV who’d lost his brother. He said to the camera, ‘Where’s the government? The government should be over here looking for him.’ I felt sorry for the guy — and for his brother — but I did think that he was asking too much of the government. If Gavin was dead it didn’t matter who found him, and when and where. If he was alive the person who had the best chance of finding him was standing in the kitchen wasting her time helping the cops to fill in forms. This realisation dawned on me gradually as I answered their endless questions, but after a while I felt an impatience for them to be gone.
Some of the cops had been searching the sheds and the paddocks but as darkness dropped over the house they drifted back in, shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders. The cop in charge was a guy called Henry, who seemed pretty important. He was quiet but efficient. I think he was an inspector at least. He talked to a circle of other police for a few minutes then came back and sat me down at the kitchen table. In front of him was a little pile of plastic bags. Evidence. The magazine full of bullets, Gavin’s ug boot, a grubby red cap that they thought might have belonged to the terrorists but I knew was an old one of my father’s that Gavin wore occasionally. Henry gave that back to me and dropped the bag in the kitchen waste bin. Then he came back to the table and sat down again.
He went through the options. He thought Gavin was probably alive. ‘If they’d wanted to kill him they’d have done it here.’ I’d already thought that, but it gave me more hope to hear an adult in uniform say it. It was the only encouraging thing he did say though.
‘These acts are nearly always carried out by groups of renegades who, as you know, have no support from their own government. No official support anyway. They have different agendas. Some are just out-and-out bad, men who come here to rape or plunder. Some are politically motivated and they carry out assassinations and terrorist attacks to try to soften us up. Some have personal motivations. I’m guessing that the people who came here might fit into the last group. The only reason I say that is because the attack on your parents didn’t seem to have any obvious motive, and the abduction of a child is unusual too. I believe you published a book about your guerrilla activities during the war?’
I nodded. ‘Three books.’
‘And you described various attacks you and your friends carried out?’
‘Yeah, only a few. But there was a lot of publicity for a while… Some of the other stuff we did got written about in newspapers and magazines. There was some stuff on TV too.’
‘I wonder if someone who read your books or saw you on TV formed the belief that you were responsible for something they felt strongly about. The death of someone they were connected with, for example.’
I nodded again. ‘Probably. I got a tip-off not long ago that we might be a target.’
‘How did you get that tip-off?’
I went red, wondering how much I should say. ‘It’s a bit awkward. It came from over the border. Someone saw a map that had our house marked on it, like they had a special interest in us.’
He frowned. ‘I hope you haven’t been involved in anything you shouldn’t. I hope your guerrilla activities ended when the war did.’
I sat there in silence, wishing I hadn’t started down this path. Guerrillas. All I could think of was an old joke of my father’s. One day when Mum was away we were working in the machinery shed, close to the house, and it was getting quite late. Eventually Dad said he’d go into the house and turn on the griller, to heat it up so we could chuck a couple of steaks on it when we knocked off work. He came back a minute later, looking shaken.
‘That was a close shave,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘I nearly turned on the gorilla instead.’
He thought he was so funny. When I groaned he said, ‘It’s no laughing matter. Have you ever been trapped in a kitchen with a turned-on gorilla? It could have been very ugly.’
I wonder if people like Jim Carrey and Glenn Robbins have kids, and whether their kids groan and say, ‘Oh Dad,’ when their fathers make jokes.
But Henry was still frowning and all I could say was, ‘Well, I wasn’t meant to see the map but it did give me the idea that someone might be after us.’
‘If you weren’t meant to see the map, how did you see it?’
‘It’s a bit awkward,’ I said again, going even redder.
‘Do you want to help us or not? Do you want this boy back or don’t you?’
‘I think the Army knows about the map,’ I said. ‘But I can’t really say anything, except that there was one, and I heard about it a couple of weeks ago and it made it seem like we were going to be a target.’
Suddenly he exploded. It was so unexpected. He’d been so nice and mild and calm before that. He leant forward and shouted into my face. ‘You think you’re going to sit there and tell me you’ve got vital evidence but you won’t tell me what it is? Listen, I’ve got no tolerance for people like you who think you can run some kind of amateur war, and then when things go wrong you call in the police and expect us to clean up the mess. And you don’t even tell us what you’re up to!’ He stood up, scraping his chair back. ‘We’re not a taxi service, you know! You don’t just call us in and then send us away when we’ve done what you want. A major crime’s been committed here and it’s my job to deal with it, and if you obstruct me in doing that, then you become part of the crime. Is there anything about that you don’t understand?’
I shook my head. I was too numb to speak.
‘Then where did you see the map? Who had it? Where did it come from?’
His tone had changed again, back to calm and reasonable, so I started to think this was just part of his routine. An act he did when he wanted information. Good cop, bad cop. Maybe he wasn’t too angry at all.
I was trying to weigh up the consequences of betraying Homer and Lee and Liberation but it was so hard to think. All I could do was decide not to betray them right now. I needed time. An hour, a couple of hours. Would that make a huge difference to Gavin’s chances? That was the bit I couldn’t get straight in my head. The possibilities ranged from ‘I’ve just sentenced him to death’ to ‘It won’t make any difference.’
‘I never saw the map. I just heard about it.’
‘Who did you hear about it from? We need to talk to him. Or her. Urgently.’
‘I think it was smuggled over the border. But I don’t know any more than that.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t know any more than that. But the person who told you about it, I want to know what that person knows. I need to know who that person is.’
‘I can’t tell you. Not for now anyway. I need to check up with them.’
That made him mad again. And so it went on for another ten minutes, him getting mad, being calm, getting mad. I was so tired and my head was hurting. I couldn’t make these decisions on my own. I wanted, I don’t know, not a too-hard basket but a too-hard silo.
Then suddenly he stopped.
‘Well,’ he said, shrugging. ‘We’ll do what we can, based on the limited information you’ve given us. When you’re ready to tell me more I suggest you call me, and the sooner the better. I can tell you that if he’s on this side of the border we’ll find him, but if he’s on the other side of the border it becomes a matter for the Department of Internal Security and the Department of Foreign Affairs. We have no jurisdiction there of course. In the meantime,
