Rocking Horse Road (8 page)

A few, though, seemed to fall for Carolyn. They
made the mistake of trying to see her again once she
had made it clear it was over. If they called her on
the phone or stopped her on the street she acted as
though she didn't know them from Adam. One of the
persistent ones told us, only a couple of years ago, 'I
only went out with her for like a week, but she was an
addiction. Even now, seeing a girl who looks a bit like
her makes me hard as a plank.'

We were so fixated on Lucy during the days that it was
only natural our sleeping selves also began to focus on
her. We didn't talk about it with each other that much
back then (and didn't later for many years). At the
time, we just acknowledged that there were dreams.
Pete Marshall admitted to being freaked out by them
sometimes ('freaked out' would remain one of Pete's
favourite expressions right into his late twenties). It was
only very recently that we discussed the dreams. As it
turned out we had all had at least a few. In our dreams
Lucy was never a ghost, not in any cliched way. She
was no floating apparition, all see-through and blurry
around the edges. In our dreams Lucy was essentially
the same as she had been before she died, when she
was working behind the counter of the dairy.

Ray told us that for several weeks in January of
that first year he had a dream where Lucy walked into
his science class. She stood next to Mr Mayer who was
up the front, pointing with a ruler at a diagram of a
volcano. 'I expected Mayer to ask her what she wanted
but he just kept on talking. Everyone just carried on as
normal. After a while I realised that I was the only
one who could see her. She wasn't scary, but in the
dream she just stared at me like she was kinda sad or
something. Eventually I couldn't take it any more and
woke up.'

We all had dreams that went something like that.
Pete Marshall probably had the dreams most often
that summer, which is understandable considering
he was the one who found her body. He didn't say
anything much at the time but spoke about it to Mark
Murray. In Pete's dream he looked out of his bedroom
window and saw that Lucy was standing over the
road from his house under a flowering cabbage tree.
She was wearing a red dress. She was staring up at
his window, and when she noticed him looking out at
her, she frowned. That was it.

They weren't nightmares, but they always woke us.
They left us thoughtful and uneasy, unable to slip back
into sleep. We lay in our beds, wrapped in the smell of
rotting sea-lettuce. We listened to the wavesound and
to the occasional cry of a wading bird disturbed on the
estuary. We often lay for hours. It was no wonder that
by the end of January we were all sunken eyed and
edgy and feeling like ghosts ourselves.

People are usually willing to talk to us. That has been
true right from the beginning. In fact, the people we
interview often seem relieved to be able to talk. They
want to unload what they know on to our shoulders.
Almost inevitably they offer us up small details,
tidbits that do not appear in any police interview or
newspaper report. The details they remember for
us maybe did not seem relevant at the time, or were
thought to be too mundane to be chiselled in to official
documentation. Maybe they sense our need for
anything that will connect us to Lucy; that will enable
us to see her more clearly through the mist that death
(and now, the intervening years) has called down over
her. In that sense, the information they dig out for us
is like a gift for which we are always grateful.

We find that the unexpected question is the one that
often draws out the truest response. That is why we
approach people in their homes and while they are on
the job. Sometimes they are on their smoko, sandwich
in hand, or pausing to take stock before moving on
to the next task. We have spoken to a housewife as
she hung out wet sheets. We once interviewed the
manager of a courier company on his way to work.
He sat behind the wheel in his driveway, the engine of
his car idling. One interview was even conducted on
the sidelines of a club rugby match (New Brighton 21,
Old Boys 12 — a rare victory for the local club).

Of course, these days we almost never do
interviews. They've all been done already, completed
and filed down at the lock-up. Occasionally we will
approach someone seeking clarification of some small
point, but that can often be done over the phone. For
years, though, we were the boys who appeared with
pen and paper or — as we became older and more
sophisticated — the young men with a chunky black
tape-recorder lugged around on a shoulder strap. We
have hours and hours of interviews on tape (
Exhibits
T1–T38
).

Mrs Asher only ever agreed to one interview, and
that was only a couple of years ago, when she was
seventy-one. We visited her at Calbourne Courts,
a group of single-bedroom, concrete-block units
arranged in a circle around a lawn, like covered
wagons in an old western waiting to be attacked.

Even in old age, Mrs Asher still dressed in black.
Possibly some of the clothes were the same ones
she had worn when we were fifteen (Al Penny later
referred to her as 'our own Miss Havisham'). Silver
bracelets still hung on her wrists. But Mrs Asher's
taut good looks were gone, replaced by a ballooning
puffiness that had transformed her face and made her
almost unrecognisable as Lucy's mother. Perhaps the
bloating was a side-effect of her medication. Perhaps
she had just chosen to let herself go after years of
keeping up appearances.

Even though we were middle-aged men we
felt the same awe in her presence as when we were
fifteen and used to slip into her darkened dairy. We
sat awkwardly in her cramped lounge and ate the soft
Girl Guide biscuits she offered. We tried not to drop
crumbs on the salmon-pink carpet. Mrs Asher sat in
her big chair and spoke in what often seemed to be
non sequiturs. She did not respond directly to any of
the questions we asked her. She would share with us
a story, which would gush from her mouth and then
stop suddenly, as if a tap had been turned off. More
often a rambling recollection was transformed mid-sentence
into another about a completely separate
incident from years before or years later.

It came as no surprise when Mrs Asher was
officially diagnosed as having Alzheimer's. That was
about eight months after we met with her. Al Penny
visited her in the hospital unit where she is still living.
He told the staff that he was her son. Nobody asked
for ID. Who but a relative would visit a woman like
Mrs Asher? She was someone with neither a past nor
a future.

Al found her sitting up in bed in the small, sparse
room where she slept, wearing a shiny red house-coat
with padded panels. For the whole visit Mrs Asher
thought that he was her husband, even though by
then Mr Asher had been dead fifteen years. Al tried to
talk to her about Lucy, hoping that some small storm-tossed
detail would be thrown up by her mind. But
his questions only made her agitated. She kept talking
over him, telling him that there was some loose iron
on the roof that flapped in the wind at night and
kept her awake. Her thin voice rose and fell like the
probably imaginary wind that was bothering her. He
would need to get up there and fix it, she said several
times. Al finally promised that he would get on to it
right away. Then she calmed right down and shortly
after that Al made his excuses and left.

But on the day of our interview at Calbourne
Courts Mrs Asher still had some of her mind left. The
interview was so significant that all of us were there.
Mrs Asher recognised Tug Gardiner straight away and
asked how his father, her old neighbour, was. 'And is
the dairy still there?'

Tug hesitated, unsure what to say, but in the end,
settled for the truth. 'It closed down about eight or
nine years ago. Too much competition from the
supermarkets, I guess. The new people converted the
shop back into bedrooms.'

Mrs Asher considered Tug through puffy eyelids. 'I
always hated that shop anyway,' she said. There was a
pause. 'Carrots are very hard to peel,' she added, and
held up her hands to show us her swollen knuckles
and twisted fingers. Whether her hands were proof or
reason for the carrots' stubbornness we were not sure.
We silently nibbled the edges of our soft biscuits while
we thought about that.

Lucy, she told us a few minutes later, had always
been a wilful child. 'Right from the very beginning
she refused to bottle-feed. She knew exactly what she
wanted and would howl until she got it.'

'We wish we'd known her better as a girl,' said Pete
Marshall. We all nodded. It was true. Pete had come
straight from work and was still wearing the white
shirt from the Power Store he managed. His name
badge was pinned to the pocket. Like most of us Pete
had put on a bit of weight over the years. His shirt
was tight over his gut where he had tucked it in to his
belt and there were sweat stains under the arms.

There was another long pause. Calbourne Courts
is over in the western suburbs and we listened in vain
for the familiar scream of a seagull. The only noise was
the hiss and rumble of the heavy trucks passing on the
wet surface of the new motorway that had recently
been built on the other side of the fence.

Mrs Asher seemed to find nothing unusual in
recounting episodes from her life to the half-dozen
middle-aged men who had squeezed themselves into
her small unit. But after an hour she tired and her
stories began to be broken up by longer and longer
gaps. When she was not speaking her head began to
nod forward before snapping back up. Each time this
happened she would look around the room wide-eyed
as if seeing us for the first time. Sensing that we were
missing our opportunity, Jim Turner asked if she knew
anything she could tell us about the circumstances of
Lucy's death. We all leaned forward.

Mrs Asher became suddenly guarded. She shuffled
back into her big chair and fixed Jim with a look. Her
eyes went small and sharp until they were almost lost
beneath those puffed bags of flesh. 'She died,' she said
emphatically and shook her head as though a fly had
landed on her hair. 'My little girl died. That was the
end of that.'

She told a few more half stories from the days when
her daughters were young, before they went to school.
It was a period that seemed lodged in her mind like
a time of golden weather. But on Lucy's murder she
would not be drawn. Finally she fell asleep. We stood
quietly and filed out, shutting the door behind us.

We wondered if Mrs Asher would remember
we had been there when she woke up. Perhaps the
dented pillows and occasional biscuit crumb on the
couch would be a source of confusion or intrigue to
her. Would she even vaguely remember the group of
inquisitive men who had appeared in her lounge, or
would sleep, like an unusually high tide, wash her
mind clean of memory's footsteps?

Perhaps Mrs Asher was right. Maybe there does come
a time when that should be the end of that. Perhaps
we should just let it go, stop digging when we have
no map. It is not uncommon for one of us to promise
himself that he's not going to carry on pursuing the
investigation. All of us have had times in our lives
when we've told ourselves we're not going to lose
sleep thinking about it any more, or go through the
files just one more time. We've persuaded ourselves
that when we meet with the rest of the group for a
beer or two, we're going to insist that we don't talk
about anything to do with Lucy Asher. We've all had
patches when we felt like that. Jase Harbidge went
as far as suggesting that we form a support group,
L.A.A. — Lucy Asher Anonymous. He was only half
joking. Sometimes our abstinence lasts a few months.
Mark Murray went a whole year and a half in the
mid-nineties, before an article in the
Herald
about a
case with some similarities to Lucy's brought him
back into the fold.

Mostly our breaks are brought about by the feeling
that there is no progress, that our lives are becalmed,
although it is often wives or girlfriends who agitate
enough to force a clean break. 'Creepy' is the adjective
most often used by women. They resent the time we
spend on the case, time they rightly feel is lost to them
and to our families. But it is more than that: women
sense that the Asher case is an area of our lives into
which they can have no entry. It has been said many
times over the years and in many different voices,
and perhaps they are right; perhaps we should, 'get
a life'.

But that is easier said than done. It would be fair
to say that none of us has ever got over Lucy Asher.
She was our first true love and, in some sense, our
last. Of course we do not say that to each other in so
many words, but we are aware that all of our lives
are littered with troubled relationships with women.
Break-ups and divorces seem to be par for the course,
and at a rate that seems like more than statistics. More
often than not, the place where we meet is the home of
a single man whose kids visit at the weekend or whose
new, often younger girlfriend resents our presence.

We can joke about it after a few beers. Our
conversations are full of self-mocking and jokes at
each other's expense. Occasionally our banter is close
to the bone. But beneath the laughter, you can feel the
undertow of tension and sadness.

The unspoken truth is that we are all still searching
for something. Not just for Lucy's murderer, but for a
moment in time when we had the unwavering belief
that we served a higher purpose and a greater good.
When you've had that, it's hard to let go. It's almost
impossible to find any lasting satisfaction in the small
details of a normal man's life.

You could even say that we are haunted by what
happened back then. There are no rattling chains or
shimmering visions. There are just our memories of a
long hot summer, and the ghost of a broad-shouldered
girl who swims in our blood and looks unlikely ever
to leave.