Cemetery Lake (31 page)

The light hits the wall behind the desk. It moves over it and then moves on. He takes a step into the room and then takes a step

back out of it. He carries on to the next room. I figure I have about two minutes to get the hell out of here.

I get out from under the desk and move to the door. My feet

are silent on the cold floor. I listen to the officer making his way further along the corridor. Then I look around the door frame.

He’s further down the corridor towards the rectory. He goes

around a corner, and as soon as he’s gone I start back towards the chapel for my clothes. I reach the end of the corridor. A second flashlight, this one moving around the pews, suddenly moves

across the room and hits my body. I look away before it can hit my face.

‘You! Hey, you! Stop!’

But I do the opposite. I turn and run towards the exit.

I’m out of shape. I can feel it in the first few strides. My socks slide on the floor and the chase is almost over before it begins.

I can hear the officer behind me, and a moment later the first one I saw appears at the other end of the corridor, running towards me. I pull the door; it opens into the corridor and blocks the path of at least one of my pursuers. Then I grab the basin of holy water and throw it in the opposite direction. It clatters on the ground without hitting anybody, but a moment later there’s a

sliding sound and then the man behind me yells ‘Shit!’ as he slips and falls. It forces his partner to slow down. I keep running.

I hit the line of trees as the two men burst from the building behind me. I change direction and keep running, not slowing

when my feet crash into tree roots or get punctured by pieces

of bark and acorns and stones. I can hear them following me,

closing the distance. I make a left and a right, and keep making them. I can see the beams of their flashlights falling on me, on trees around me, but then they appear less frequently The rain is pouring down heavily, drowning out all sounds of pursuit. I keep running, altering direction through the trees. Suddenly I’m out of the trees, heading across the cemetery between gravestones and graves. I have no idea where I am, and the best I can hope for is that a cemetery at this time of night in this kind of weather is a hard place in which to follow anybody.

A car comes towards me from the road and I duck down behind

a gravestone. It passes me by. There is yelling and confusion.

I look out and see one of the officers is only a few metres away.

He comes towards me and I duck back down. He passes me and

keeps going. He’s making quick ground. I crawl towards another grave and then another, staying hidden for a few more seconds.

I look back up — the officers are now twenty metres away. I stand up and run deeper into the cemetery. My feet sink slightly into the grass. Another car travels along the road and I have to hide again.

The cold air makes it harder for me to breathe, and I start sucking down oxygen in deep lungfuls that burn and make me dizzy.

I hide behind a tall grave marker and look back in the direction I’ve come from. I can see flashlights moving around the trees

and graves not far from me. I’m unsure now of what direction to run.

I stay low and move further away, putting more grass and

graves and metres between me and the flashlights. More patrol

cars arrive — I can see their headlights, hear doors banging.

I reach another cluster of trees and rest for thirty seconds or so. My feet are aching and probably bleeding but I don’t want

to look. I check back in what I believe, though am not certain, is the direction of the church. I panic for a moment about

whether my wallet or keys are in the jacket I left behind, and I quickly check. My keys are in my pants pocket, and my wallet — I remember now — is still at home. I stick with the direction I was heading. I’m aware of more cars arriving, and rest for a few more seconds behind another grave marker to watch the show.

Their pooling location shows me where the church is. There are no sirens sounding, but there are plenty of flashing blue and red lights from patrol cars through the trees and from others moving through the cemetery grounds. I keep running. And running

I think about the extra weight Schroder told me I’d put on, and I can feel every kilogram of it slowing me down. The contours

of the land change. I head up and then down and then up again, hitting slight slopes that feel steeper than they really are, and they soon make it difficult to see anything behind me. I reach another section of the cemetery but still have no idea where I am. I forge ahead, trespassing over the dead. I keep looking back. No more light. No more patrol cars. Not that I can see. More trees ahead of me, another stretch of graves. I burst through another patch of bushes and garden, then suddenly I’m at a fence line. I want to scale it but I can’t, not yet, not for a few more moments, not until my heart rate slows some and my body is convinced enough to keep going.

The fence backs on to somebody’s house, an old weatherboard

home with a huge gap between the house and the garage. I drop

down into the back yard and I run for the gap. There is no other fence. I reach the road and look left and right. I know where I am.

There is a bus stop a few metres away from me. I walk down to

it and then decide it’s a bad place to be waiting. I cross the road and sit down behind a hedge. I take some slow deep breaths in an effort to bring my heart rate back to normal.

I start back towards the car. Ten minutes later I’m heading along the same road as the cemetery. I can see lights and commotion way up ahead, but the car is a good two blocks short of it. I unlock it and duck into the driver’s seat, traipsing mud and leaves and blood into the floor-well. I sit the envelope of photographs on the passenger seat. It’s been a bit bent out of shape but is mostly dry except for two of the corners. I start the engine, but leave the lights off until I’ve rounded the first corner. I think about the shovel in the boot and I figure tonight wasn’t the best night to go digging anyway. Besides, there’s something unnerving in

the thought of returning Dad’s car to him after it’s been used to drive a corpse around. That hadn’t been on the agenda when

I borrowed it.

By the time I get home I’m bordering on exhaustion, though

I don’t feel tired. It’s sensory overload. without the benefit of alcohol to keep things running smoodily without sleep, I know

I’m going to crash and burn.

I take a quick shower and check my banged-up feet. They’re

grazed, but not as bad as I’d expected. Then I take the pictures from the damp envelope and separate them so they can dry out.

I don’t look at them closely. Not right now. I can’t. But I can’t leave them out either in case Landry or Schroder show up. I wipe them dry with a tea-towel, then put them into a fresh envelope and throw out the old one. In the corner of my bedroom I lift up the carpet, figuring that since it worked so well for Alderman and Julian, it’s got to work well for me too.

I hit my bed and fall asleep without even willing it.

258

Nobody comes to my house during the night. I reckon the police will have narrowed down last night’s visitor to the church to one of three people — me, the killer or a reporter. They’ll have found my jacket and my shoes, but even if they recognise them there’s nothing on them to say they’re mine, only DNA, and that’ll take eight weeks to arrive. Landry and Schroder will undoubtedly be thinking of coming to talk to me; they’ll be wondering if they can bluff me into admitting I went into the church, though they’ll know they can’t. I know the game. And anyway, all I have to

say is the same person who planted the murder weapon in my

garage also planted my clothes to try to complete the frame job, and that’s also what I’ll be saying in two months’ time when they get DNA from hair follicles caught in my jacket. Landry will

have gone through all of this, hitting it from all sorts of different angles, without coming up with one that will help him cement

a case against me. I’m betting that in the end he’ll know his

argument and he’ll know my argument, and he’ll know that mine

is stronger.

Of course all of this is moot if I can’t get back into the cemetery and dig Alderman up before Monday

The overnight rain has stopped and for the moment the

clouds are mainly dispersed. I open up the curtains and dump my sopping clothes into the washing machine. It seems that getting messed up at night is becoming a habit. Then I make coffee,

wondering at what point in the human evolution coffee became

such an important ingredient, and I figure if nothing else in this world, no matter what happens in the future, coffee will sure as hell be around a lot longer than religion. I carry the photographs I’ve pulled back out from under the carpet into my office. I go through them all again, but recognise only Bruce among the

various boys and girls. Then I turn them over. They all have names and dates on the back. Just first names. The dates go back twenty four years. I start flicking through them, the names rushing out at me from the past month, the names connecting the dots.

I put the photos down. I stand up and start to walk around

my office, my breath quickening. Excitement is starting to build, the kind of excitement I haven’t felt in a long time, not since working homicides in my previous life, not since the thrill of feeling things coming together and knowing you’re heading for

the finishing line.

There are five girls in these pictures. Four of them share names with the dead girls who’ve been found. I have no idea where the fifth girl is, but I have a first name. Deborah. There are three boys too: Bruce, Simon and Jeremy. I have no idea where Simon and

Jeremy are either.

I go back to Rachel’s photo and turn it over. I remember

the other photos I’ve seen of her on the wall of her parents’

house. Then suddenly I’m back in Father Julian’s office. Bruce was like a son to me, he’s telling me. Like a son. Were all these people like sons and daughters to Father Julian? I think they

were. I remember looking at the pictures of the missing girls a month ago and thinking how similar they were, how their killer had a type. I was right and wrong. His type wasn’t based on

characteristics the girls shared, or body type or age. It was based on who these people were. He targeted them specifically because they were all related.

The house looks a little tidier than the last time I was here. I figure their lives are no longer on hold. The news they’d been dreading has arrived, and though they’re struggling with it, they’re starting to move forward.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you,’ Patricia

Tyler says, and she really seems to be trying hard to make up her mind.

‘Can I come in? Please, it’s important.’

“I don’t know. The truth is I hardly know what to think any

more.’

I pull out the photograph from Father Julian’s collection. The rest are in the envelope, tucked inside my jacket pocket. I hand it over. I know immediately that she recognises it. Her knuckles turn white as she holds it ever tighter.

‘Where did you get this?’ she asks, though I’m pretty sure she already knows.

‘Please, can I come inside?’

She takes a step back for me to move in, and leads me down

the hallway.

‘Michael isn’t here,’ she says, then pauses. ‘Thankfully’

The photographs on the wall are all the same as the last time

I was here, but I see them a little differently now. Michael Tyler, who is holding her hand when she is maybe five years old, doesn’t appear in any earlier photographs.

We sit down in the lounge. Patricia Tyler offers me a drink and I tell her I’d like some water. She gets up and returns a minute later, carrying two glasses. She sets them down carefully on a pair of coasters and I ask the question I came here to ask.

‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘It all seems like a lifetime ago. Longer, when I think about it really hard. Rachel was four when I met

Michael and six when we got married. It was like starting a new life. I could only hope that Michael would one day look at Rachel as if she was his own.’ She takes a sip of water. ‘He did see her that way too. He loved her, and the past years — well, they’re killing him as much as they’re killing me.’

And Father Julian, he was Rachel’s biological father,’ I say, and it isn’t a question.

‘It’s been over twenty years, and you’re the first person to

ever ask me about him.’ She looks back down at the photograph.

“I remember this moment,’ she says. ‘It was the day Rachel turned two. I was leaving work early. My mother would look after Rachel while I was at work. She made a cake and we had a party, but

Rachel didn’t understand the occasion.’

I remember a similar party for my own daughter. I remember

getting carried away and buying too many gifts. Emily was excited tearing them open, but her concentration would drift from her

new toy to the wrapping paper the toy had come in, and she

would run around the room as if she was on a sugar high while

friends and family watched and laughed and played with her.

She would have five more birthdays. Rachel Tyler had seventeen more.

‘This moment,’ she says, and she twists the photo towards

me for the briefest of seconds. Rachel is sitting in the corner of a room with her head resting on her knees, her arms wrapped

around her legs, and her eyes either half open or half closed, ‘was at the end of the day. I was getting ready to take her back home and she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay with my mother,

because she thought that it meant there would be more presents tomorrow’

She pauses, and I have the feeling her mind is travelling down a path of a possibility not taken. She’s thinking that if she’d left her daughter at her mother’s house on that day nearly twenty