Prohibited Zone (31 page)

‘No. Yes, I don't know.'

She stared at me for what seemed a very long time. Her face was sad and beautiful; emotions seemed to pass over it like clouds. She took my hand and led me to a wooden bench under a blackwood she had somehow got to grow in the Glenelg sand. We ducked under fronds and sat down. Lucy took a deep breath and looked straight into my eyes. ‘Listen closely. This is probably going to sound sad and pathetic, but I have to say it. After all this time, I think I need to say it. I, Lucy Vecchi, have loved you, Steve West. My heart has been yours since almost the day we met. My soul has been yours. And you didn't even know.'

‘Oh.' We kept staring at each other. Then she looked away, the first time I had ever won a staring contest with her.

‘You never really loved me back, did you?' she said. ‘I always knew that, intellectually, but until this morning I never accepted it. It's a great way to fuck yourself up, you know, loving someone who doesn't love you back. Unrequited love and all that. This morning I realised I was in a bad place. Forget Janeway. Yes, what he did will always be with me, there will always be this sense of violation. Maybe sometimes it will make me angry, screw me around a bit. Maybe I'll have a nervous breakdown next week, I don't know. But in the end, what's the big deal? I can get over it. I won't let it dominate me, I won't let it eat me, I won't let it take up dead space. The arsehole got a knife where it hurts. The thought of that brings joy to my heart. It's the
only
thing that brings joy to my heart. All I really want in life is to love someone who loves me. I'm sick of this one-way-love thing, it's tiring, it's unrewarding. All I really want is to have someone to hug, someone to laugh with, someone to cry with. Someone who doesn't hit me, someone who loves me back. That's not asking too much, is it?'

‘I wouldn't've thought so.'

‘I really thought it would be you. I know you think you're not the type to settle down, stay with one woman. But I thought you would change, learn how to love, learn how to love
me
. I should have been more realistic. I'm not quite sure how I could have been so deluded. It just shows you how love can cloud your thinking. The fog of love, that's what it was.'

She bent down and picked up a fallen twig. She started snapping off inch-long bits and flicking them away. She looked at me again.

‘Anything to say?'

I was watching the sprinkler's water plume mark the minutes as it arched back and forth across the lawn.

‘I don't want to love,' I said.

I met her eyes and looked away.

‘Why the hell not?'

I shrugged. ‘There's no guarantee it would last.'

‘So?'

‘So, all that pain, for what?'

‘For what? For the sake of being human, for the sake of sharing this dark little world with another soul. For the sake of living.'

‘There's that.'

She stared at me for another very long time, her brown eyes full of pain and anger.

‘But guess what? It's too late,' she said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I think you're in love anyway. Just not with me.'

‘You think I'm in love with Kara?'

‘Yes. I saw the way you looked at her this morning. That's love. That's also betrayal, by the way.'

She finished with the twig and arose abruptly. She picked up a plastic yellow watering can, filled it under a tap and started watering a row of pink geraniums.

‘She might not love you, though.'

‘Lucy, I . . .'

She turned to me, still holding the watering can. She waved a hand at me in a gesture almost of dismissal.

‘You go and sort yourself out, Steve. You're no good to me the way you are.' There was a hardness in her eyes now that I hadn't seen before, hadn't even thought she was capable of. She laughed, harshly. ‘A man who doesn't want to love. Is there anything more useless in the world?' She laughed again, splashing water on her shoes. She walked across the lawn, timing it so that she didn't get wet from the sprinkler.

‘When does Mike get back?' I asked, following her.

‘A couple of days. I plan to move out before he does. I'll go and stay with my parents.'

‘If you need help moving . . .'

‘Steve, are you getting the message?' She paused, her hand on the sprinkler tap, and looked at me. ‘I don't want to see you again.'

‘Oh.'

She straightened. ‘If, by any chance, you realise one day that you're actually madly in love with me, by all means send me a bunch of roses and invite me to dinner. If I haven't found someone else by then I might think about it.' She put her hand back on the sprinkler tap and turned it off with a quick, almost vicious twist of the wrist. ‘Otherwise, get the fuck out of my life.'

I pulled into the Bay Junction shopping centre and dialled Tarrant on my mobile.

‘This is out of control,' he said. ‘I've got a guard from the Woomera Detention Centre with a knife in his groin. I've got a suspected terrorist still on the loose. I want you in here.'

‘I'm busy. Maybe in a few days.'

‘West!' Tarrant could bark louder than poor old Bozo. ‘I've had enough of being dicked about by you. Get in here now or I'll have every cop in the state out looking for you with orders to beat your irritating little head to a pulp before dragging you into the station by the gonads.' He sounded upset.

‘Alright, alright. Keep your hair-shirt on.'

‘You're pissing me off.'

‘Yes, I've got that message.'

‘You're a human headache.'

‘See you in fifteen, then. In the meantime, why don't you treat yourself to an overdose of Panadol?'

He worked out of the city's main police station on Flinders Street. I made it through the metal detector at the door, having left the gun in the car, and asked for him. He was down in less than a minute, still wearing the same tragic brown suit and still chewing gum. I wondered if it was the same gum, too.

‘So glad you could make it.' He seemed to have calmed down since our phone conversation. He signed me in and escorted me via the lift to the third floor. The office was large, containing a dozen or so evenly arranged desks. There were five other cops in the room, each equipped with a large coffee mug, a cathode-ray-tube computer screen, a hard-wired telephone and a metre-high pile of manila files. A couple of the cops looked at me incuriously as I walked in and then sank their eyes back into the paperwork. I couldn't see Pinchbeck.

‘The open plan is deliberate,' said Tarrant as he directed me to his desk, one back from the window. ‘The powers-that-be seem to think corruption breeds behind closed doors. Putting us where they can see us is meant to keep us honest. Actually, though, corruption can breed anywhere.'

It could have bred in Tarrant's suit.

I sat with my back to the window, watching him chew gum as he searched for a file among the heap on his desk.

‘I'd offer you coffee but it tastes like shit in this place,' he said. He finally found what he was looking for, a folder about half an inch thick. He put it on the desk but didn't open it.

‘Peter Janeway. Know him?'

‘Yes. He's a guard at the detention centre. Is he the one who . . .'

‘Got a knife in his crotch? Yes.'

‘Sounds nasty.'

‘Want to see a photo?' He opened the folder and started leafing through it.

‘No thanks.'

He grinned. ‘Actually, I don't have one. And you've seen it already, haven't you?'

I didn't reply. Instead, I leant back on my chair and looked around the room. A calendar hanging on the near wall showed a pig sty with a dozen or so fat piglets eating at a trough, watched over by a big sow. Someone had scrawled ‘The commissioner holds a briefing' on it in black texta. The other cops in the room continued to ignore us.

‘How's he doing, anyway?'

‘Janeway?'

‘Yes.'

‘I believe he's holding his own, so to speak. He has a fair amount of pain, and he's got several operations ahead of him. His dick was damned near completely severed and the blade sliced through his scrotum and into the pelvic cavity. He will probably survive, though, whether he wants to or not.'

‘Has he made a statement?'

‘Just before they put him in an induced coma he indicated that he had nothing to say.' Tarrant leant forward. ‘Stop pussying around, Westie. You've got to bring her in.'

‘Who?'

‘Ah, Jesus.' He raised his voice and thumped the folder with his hand. One of the cops looked up, glared at me, and looked back down at his work. Tarrant lowered his voice again. ‘Stop this stupid ignorance shit, will you? It's not about her, do you understand? It's not even about you, although you might like to think it is. It's about terrorism. Nobody likes it when detainees escape, but they fucking well hate it when suspected terrorists are on the loose. The terrorism rating is at extreme. That means that everybody is crapping themselves – the Police Commissioner, the Premier, the Minister of Immigration and the Prime Minister. Get the picture, West? Soon they'll all be crapping on you.' He picked up a copy of the
Advertiser
and waved it at me. ‘Have you seen the paper today?'

‘No.'

He slapped it down in front of me.

‘Page three.'

I looked at the paper. ‘WE CAN'T FIND HIM!' screamed the page-one headline, just below the same photo of Amir that Hindmarsh had shown me in Port Augusta, so large you could see individual pock marks in his skin. On page three was a picture of Tarrant walking blandly into the police building flanked by Pinchbeck and another cop I didn't know. The caption read: ‘WORRIED: Adelaide detectives admit they have no idea where Woomera escapee and suspected terrorist Amir Ali Khan is hiding.'

‘Amir is no longer a state secret, I see.' I folded the paper and held it out.

‘Keep it,' said Tarrant. ‘My wife has another twenty-five copies.' He started drumming his fingers on the desk. I pondered a wife who could love Tarrant enough to tolerate his suit.

‘We've got some pretty interesting footage of a car travelling at close to one eighty on the Southern Expressway last night,' he said. ‘Just before Janeway got knifed.'

‘Is that right?'

‘Yes. Turns out the car is registered to a mate of yours, who, it turns out, lent the car to you yesterday.' He leant forward and gave his gum a bit more of a chew. ‘Turns out you're getting deeper and deeper into shit. Bring her in, West.'

‘Supposing I
could
bring her in, I would be crazy to do it unless I was pretty certain she wouldn't get accused of any crimes, wouldn't end up in the hands of ASIO, and would still have a fair chance of getting her visa.'

‘I can't think of any crimes she's committed,' said Tarrant. ‘There
is
an unexplained dick stabbing, but all I've got on that is a kitchen knife with no fingerprints and a victim who has taken a vow of silence, not to mention chastity. I don't think that will be a problem.'

‘That helps.'

‘But I'm only a cop. I can't guarantee that ASIO won't snaffle her, or that she'll get her visa. Those things are way out of my orbit.'

‘That's a pity.'

‘On the other hand,' he went on, ‘since I
am
only an ordinary fucking cop I only have a limited amount of patience. If Saira doesn't turn up on my doorstep in the very near future – by which I mean before I knock off from work this evening – I'll throw the book at you, West, former Crows' star or not,
and
at Kara Peake-fucking-Jones.'

24

T
HE
60 M
INUTES
CREW WAS STILL THERE
when I got back to Port Willunga. I stood outside and looked in through a side window. Kat had finished interviewing Saira and was now grilling Ray. Kara was sitting on a stool alongside Saira. I caught her eye and she left the room and joined me outside. I led her across the road to a bench overlooking Port Willunga beach. The sky was still overcast, clogged by a stodgy clump of grey cloud. She perched on the edge of the bench, leaning forward and supporting some of her weight with her arms. I told her about my conversation with Tarrant.