Rocking Horse Road (3 page)

After more talking with Bill Harbidge, during
which all three men looked in our direction several
times, Ginger Moustache fetched a heavy grey blanket
out of their bag and carefully laid it over Lucy's body.
After that the two ambulance men looked awkward.
They shuffled their feet on the sand and looked up
and down the beach as though waiting for a late bus.
Their prospective patient was dead. Dead wasn't their
field. Effectively they were now like us, just two more
rubberneckers.

To us the heavy blanket seemed to emphasise
Lucy's death rather than disguise it. To be covered like
that, down on the beach on such a hot day, seemed
more unnatural than her previous nudity. Rachael
White had been in Lucy's class at school, and was the
girl crying the loudest even though she had not even
been close to being Lucy's friend. At the sight of the
blanket she turned her sobs into a plaintive keening
that competed with the seagulls' cries. And then she
folded up like a deckchair, bending at the knees and
waist, collapsing slowly on to the sand. Seeing one of
their number fall, the rest of the girls also shifted their
cries into a new gear.

It was apparently the tall St John's guy's turn to
do something. He didn't seem to be in any particular
hurry but ambled over the sand towards Rachael. He
kicked experimentally at a lump of rotting kelp with
his long legs as he passed, raising a swarm of small
insects. He waded into the circle of girls standing
around Rachael. Giraffe-like, he spread his feet wide
and leaned over her without kneeling, as though he
didn't want the knees of his trousers to touch the sand.
Some of us also wandered over to where Rachael lay.
We pressed close for a better look. But the ambulance
guy seemed to have no patience for teenagers. 'Stand
back!' he snapped. 'Forfucksake give her some air!'

He produced a small vial from his bag and wafted
it under Rachael's nose. She immediately retched
back into consciousness. She began crying again like
she had never stopped. Two of her friends helped her
up and half carried her to a bleached log where she
sat sobbing. We all agreed later: it was classic Rachael
White. Trust her to shift the focus on to herself at a
time when everyone's thoughts should have been
with Lucy.

Locals were still appearing over the top of the
dunes. Like Chinese whispers, news had travelled
fast but not accurately. Some people believed they
were coming down to the beach because a surfer had
drowned. Others had heard that someone was badly
hurt and needed to be lifted through the dunes to the
waiting ambulance. Mr Robinson, who was seventy-eight
but still swam in the ocean every day, thought he
was coming down to the beach to help with a whale
stranding. He was carrying a thick O of rope over his
shoulder for relaunching the distressed animals. In the
event, Mr Robinson's rope would not be required.

It was about half an hour before a dozen uniformed
police turned up, along with several plain-clothes
detectives. Bill Harbidge looked relieved when the
new policemen took control. They herded us further
back down the beach and cordoned off a large area
around Lucy using long poles pushed into the sand.
Yellow tape was strung up between the poles. A
policeman was also positioned up at the start of the
main track from Rocking Horse Road to stop more
people from coming down on to the beach.

Those of us who were there already were allowed
to stay. We had nothing else to do so we watched the
police work. Canvas screens were put up around the
body. We could see the heads of the two forensics
guys bobbing up and down behind the flimsy walls
like actors in an amateur puppet show. A police
photographer was the only other person allowed
inside the screens. He snapped photograph after
photograph. 'More pictures than a bloody tourist,'
was Grant Webb's comment.

Later the police spent several hours scouring the
roped-off area for evidence. They moved in a long line,
bending to examine the ground every few centimetres.
Even the most mundane object was picked up and
examined and turned over in the search for clues. It
was painstaking work and, frankly, pretty boring to
watch.

Roy and Jim did a food run back to Jim's house.
They skirted the policeman up on the road and
returned with several bottles of Coke, a Boston bun
with pink icing and only one slice taken out of it, and
some chicken sandwiches Jim's mother had made
especially for us. All Jim had told his mum was that
we were hanging out at the beach and that we were
hungry.

Because it was a Sunday and hot, by mid-morning
the beach had began to fill up with families who had
come out from town. People mostly parked their cars
further north, in the car park up near the surf club
where the beach was patrolled and there were flags
showing where it was safe to swim. The mums and
dads who did drift down the beach soon shied away
when they saw the uniforms and the yellow tape.
They turned and walked back up the sand with their
chilly bins and bundles of beach towels. No doubt they
threw an easy excuse to the kids. Nobody wanted to
spoil their day by getting too close or by finding out
what had actually happened. They'd see it on the
Six
O'Clock News
anyway or read about it in the papers
over breakfast the next morning. None of the mums
and dads was keen to answer the awkward questions
the kids would inevitably ask, not on such a gorgeous
morning, not so close to Christmas.

It must have been over thirty degrees by lunchtime.
The uniformed police took off their jackets and rolled
up their sleeves above their elbows. The detectives
loosened their ties. No one had thought to bring
sunblock: the 'Slip Slop Slap' message was still to
come. The policemen's serious faces and the backs of
their necks slowly began to turn the colour of cooked
crays.

It was Pete Marshall who predicted that the police
would not find anything. Pete had drifted across to join
us, but he still wore his serious expression. Lucy, he
said, was not murdered here — she had only washed
up at this spot on the beach. He pointed out to us the
position of the body amid the frill of driftwood at the
high-tide mark. 'Did you see,' he said, 'the way her
arm was buried in the sand?' What the police should
be looking for, Pete claimed, was the spot where Lucy
had been attacked. We listened to him with a new
respect and nodded thoughtfully. Possibly for the first
time in his life Pete Marshall found himself cast as an
expert.

As it turned out, his analysis was spot on. The
police carried away numerous samples in plastic
bags. But their forensic work unearthed nothing more
incriminating than rubbish that had drifted to shore
on the currents from Korean squid boats, and part
of a tartan picnic blanket, rotted by the salt water.
They also found the partial remains of a previously
unidentified species of jellyfish.

We were all interviewed by the police but had
nothing to add to the investigation. We were as new
to the scene as they were. Only Roy Moynahan's
sighting of Lucy late the previous afternoon seemed in
any way relevant. A young policeman with scrubbed
cheeks, and a moustache that was still thin and
patchy, recorded what Roy had to say and then took
his phone number and address. But Roy's information
must have been deemed unimportant in the bigger
picture because no one ever followed up on that first
interview.

The police had to work fast because all the tape in
the world wouldn't stop the ocean from jostling up
the beach. As it was, the waves were only a couple of
metres away from reclaiming the body when the two St
John's guys (useful again at last) carefully transferred
Lucy's body into a black plastic body-bag and then on
to a stretcher, on which Lucy Asher eventually left the
beach.

We watched them carry her away. Even with two
policemen at each end of the stretcher they struggled
to keep her level going up the first dune. We said to
each other that they were going to drop her. Somehow,
though, they didn't. When they got to the start of the
boardwalk, the track was easier to navigate and they
soon disappeared from view.

We found ourselves alone on the beach. Everything
looked the same as it had done all our lives, the beach
was as familiar to us as our homes, but we were aware
that something had altered, like an only half-sensed
swing in the direction of the wind. We gazed uneasily
at the cloudless blue sky. We looked up and down the
beach, hoping to identify what was different. The air
shimmered in the heat.

Suddenly, we didn't know what to say or do. We
wandered aimlessly for a while, scanning the ground
in imitation of the police. We fantasised about finding
some vital clue, freshly washed up, but of course we
found nothing of interest. We kicked at the sand, and
threw lengths of driftwood into the waves where
they were battered in the white foam. But none of our
usual distractions or topics of conversation held any
interest.

Eventually we drifted back to the road and down
to Jim Turner's house. We went there for no reason
other than it was the closest. For a while we hung
about listlessly on the footpath outside, keeping to
the shade of the hedge. On the road the tar-seal was
melting. The passing cars made a sound as though
they were Velcroed to the road. Small stones rained
upwards into their chassis. No one had told Jim's
mother about Lucy Asher yet, although by that time
word had spread to most of the people living on the
Spit. Eventually she came out and fussed us away.

One by one we broke free from the group and
returned to our own homes. Daylight-saving meant
that it would not be dark for hours. Unusually, we
were not hungry, but we knew our mothers would
by then have dinner on the stove as they did every
night. The uneasy feeling had followed us up from the
beach. Now it dogged us, hard on our heels, slipping
in behind us through the almost-closed doors of our
homes. It trailed around after us all that evening. No
matter what we did to distract ourselves we found it
there afterwards, waiting patiently.

Finally we grew frustrated. 'Piss off!' we thought, in
unconscious imitation of our fathers. 'Getoutahere!'

But it was no good. The feeling was here to stay.

The papers immediately started calling the murderer
'The Christmas Killer'. The stories the reporters wrote
in the first few days only confirmed what we already
knew. Lucy had been strangled and her body dumped
into the water at a different spot from where Pete
found her. On Christmas Eve a police spokesman said
in veiled terms, at a press conference shown on the
Six
O'Clock News
, that the motive for the attack was being
treated as sexual. That caused the story to surge back
to the front of the next edition of the papers, on the
twenty sixth. But as Grant Webb bluntly put it, 'She was
naked, wasn't she? Of course it was sexual! He fucked
her, then he killed her.' His words made us uneasy, but
really you didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work
that one out. We all knew it right from the start. Lucy's
murder oozed sex.

There were nine detectives assigned to the case
originally but that number had swelled to twelve by
New Year's Eve. There was pressure on the police to
catch whoever had killed Lucy. Murders were still
unusual back in the early eighties and the killing of an
attractive young woman had quickened the national
pulse. Of course there was the fact that, like Marilyn
Monroe, she was found naked; that didn't hurt public
interest or newspaper sales either. Lucy certainly got
more coverage than she would have if she'd been a
dumpy fifty-five-year-old and fully clothed.

It helped us that Jase Harbidge's dad was a cop.
We got first-hand information we wouldn't otherwise
have been privy to. Mrs Harbidge had run off with the
local butcher six months before so there was just Jase
and his eleven-year-old sister and their dad at home
that summer. Christmas dinner at the Harbidges' was
macaroni cheese, which the three of them ate sitting
in front of the television. Bill Harbidge reclined on his
La-Z-Boy and downed beers with a steady rhythm.
We knew through Jase that he had been drinking a lot
since his wife had left. Jase told us that the drinking
made him talk about his work, and not just the Asher
case. Murders, rapes, gang shootings, the music
teacher who interfered with the boy saxophonists,
cases dating back through twenty years in the force.
The whole works was trotted out by Bill Harbidge.
Jase and his little sister sat and ate their macaroni and
listened to their father talk. Afterwards they pulled the
Christmas crackers Jase had bought to try and make
things more festive. Even from the inward-looking
world of fifteen we realised that the Christmas of
1980 must have been a pretty strange time for Jase
Harbidge.

For the rest of us, our families' holiday rituals
started up like well-oiled machines. People seemed to
want to put what had happened to 'the poor Asher
girl' behind them. On Christmas morning we woke
early and unwrapped presents. Later, grandparents
were collected from their small units or retirement
homes. Then there were more presents, this time of
the socks and underpants variety. Then we ate the
lunches our mothers had been planning for days. The
roast turkey and pork with new spuds by the bucketful
was too heavy for such a hot day. We quickly became
bloated and slow even as we put away another serving
of our mothers' homemade pavlova or trifle. We ate
Christmas pudding or Tip Top scooped straight from
the tub. On Christmas Day we could get away with
stuff like that.

But through all of that, our thoughts drifted
towards the body we had seen on the beach. It was
disjointing to cast our minds back to that scene while
wearing paper party-hats, with mouths full of plum
sauce and stuffing. While we were unwrapping our
new rugby balls or cricket bats we remembered the
way Lucy's head had been pillowed on the sand.
And then our thoughts couldn't help twisting
sideways to the Ashers. We wondered how
they
were spending Christmas Day. We could not even
imagine. None of our parents said anything about
Lucy or the Ashers — not in front of us, anyway. Talk
of Lucy's murder was conspicuous in most of our
homes by its absence.