Rocking Horse Road (9 page)

Here's what happened to Pete Marshall last July.
During his routine medical to get life insurance, they
discovered the cancer that had started in his testicles
and then hitched a ride in his blood up to his lungs.
From there it had journeyed on to his brain. 'Riddled'
was the word Pete used when he told us.

A few of us had gathered at Tug Gardiner's place
to watch the Crusaders play in the final of last season's
Super 14. We watched the rugby in the lounge over a
bowl of Cheezels and bottles of beer. It was the same
house we used to meet in when we were teenagers.
Tug had been left the place when his father died. He
could not bring himself to sleep in the room where his
parents had conceived him, and where his dad had
died of a massive stroke in 2003, so Tug still slept in
the boxy room above the lounge where he slept as a
kid.

Pete did the decent thing and waited to tell us until
after the game. That was the joke that Jase Harbidge
made in the seconds after Pete's words had drifted into
the air like the black smoke from a bad neighbour's
bonfire. We all laughed, including Pete, probably
because we didn't know what else to do. But of course
we were stunned mullets. We fumbled around for
something to say that came close to matching our
feelings. Pete let us off the hook by making light of the
whole thing. He joked that it had him by the balls, but
that he was going to beat it.

Of course you are, we agreed, grinning like
hyenas faced with a lion. It's probably not as bad as
the doctors think. They're always getting these things
wrong. I heard of a bloke who . . . and so on and so on
until, when all the beers were gone and it was time to
leave, we almost had ourselves convinced that Pete's
condition was just a passing thing, like glandular
fever or a bone broken in three places.

It was another of those gateway moments, like
Lucy's funeral. At the time they are almost never
recognised for what they are. People always assume
that there will be another chance; that tomorrow will
carry on pretty much the same as today. But, as the
beer ad says, 'Yeah, right.' The bad jokes, and Pete's
positive attitude, were our way of denying that
Change had swept up behind us like a rogue wave
and was now battering down upon us.

In the following days, and then weeks, we went
on with our lives as normal. When thoughts of Pete
tapped us roughly on the shoulder we shrugged them
off. Of course, when we saw him we asked how he was
feeling. 'Fine, better than ever.' And then, relieved to
get that part over, we went back to business as usual.
The first stage of grief is always denial.

It was common knowledge that on the night Lucy
was murdered she had gone to the South Brighton
Surf Club's Christmas party. The police questioned
everyone at the party starting on the first day of
the investigation. Their police interview notes are
comprehensive and make interesting reading (
Exhibits
T45–63
). Even so, we have our own interviews with
everyone we've been able to establish was there that
night. (
Exhibits T-A1–18
).

Brian Andrews, who in December 1980 was club
president and holder of the national record for men's
beach flags, remembered seeing Lucy dancing barefoot.
He was twenty-four at the time, which seemed very
old to us. The upstairs part of the surf club was just
a wide open space with exposed rafters and a small
kitchen with a Zip.

'I'd hung a disco ball up there, you know,' said
Brian, twirling his finger slowly in the air. 'She was
dancing with no shoes on. I remember thinking that
she was going to be a real heartbreaker.'

Of course we'd demanded to know who Lucy was
dancing with.

'With some of the other senior girls, by herself,
with everyone. I don't know. It was a party, nearly
everyone was dancing.' Brian shook his head sadly.
'Such a waste, eh.'

Pete Marshall's older brother Tony was also at
the party, despite having only the most tenuous
connection to the surf club. He had been a member
when he was fourteen but had been kicked out for
smoking dope on a carnival day, in the storage area
under the club house. Tony admitted to us, but not
the police, that he had smuggled several bottles of
vodka into the Christmas party. Most of it had gone
directly into the punch. He told us that as he slipped
an empty bottle back into his bag, Lucy had suddenly
been standing next to him, her face glistening and
flushed from dancing. 'I thought she was gunna turn
me in but she just laughed and helped herself to one
of those big plastic cups of the stuff. "Cheers" that's
all she said to me. Just "Cheers" which I thought was
pretty cool. After that I didn't see her. There were a lot
of people there.' Tony swept the long, dark hair from
his face and looked us squarely in the eyes. 'Pity about
what happened. Lucy was cool.'

Other people remembered Lucy from that night
as well. Apparently she made an impression. Rachael
White, who the next day was to faint so dramatically
down on the beach, was sure Lucy was still at the
party after midnight. 'She was dancing with lots of
boys and not in a nice way, if you know what I mean.'
(We didn't really, and frankly didn't trust Rachael's
judgement.) 'I think she'd been drinking' was all the
elaboration she would give.

When asked for specifics of who Lucy was dancing
with, Rachael couldn't name a soul. But Tony Marshall
immediately coughed up the name Anton Lester.

We spoke to Anton in the changing rooms after a
cricket match. He had been in the same year as Lucy
at school and that summer played for the second XI
at the North Beach club. It was near the end of the
season when we spoke to him. His team had just lost
by fifty runs.

'Sure. I told the police. I danced with her for a
while. She was a real tease — I thought I was in like
Flynn. But then when we were out in the tower she got
all frigid.' He undid the last strap from his shin-pad
and threw it in the corner of the shower room before
fishing his box out from the front of his trousers.

Out in the tower — that was something new. No
one else had mentioned seeing Lucy leave the party.
We bristled hearing him talk about her like that but
wanted to know what had happened. Anton Lester
misconstrued our interest. He grinned broadly and
tapped the side of his nose with a finger stained red
from bowling the new ball. (His mannerism seemed
an obvious imitation of someone older, confirming
our suspicion that he was a prat. 'For a while it was all
good, then she said she didn't feel like it or some shit
and she wanted to go back inside. I was pissed off but
it didn't matter, a couple of hours later I nailed that
White chick in the surf boat.'

And where had Lucy headed after that? Lester
thought she'd gone back inside the surf club whose
music and light must still have been spilling out on to
the beach. But no one else we spoke to could remember
seeing Lucy later in the evening. Not that this meant
a lot. By then Tony's vodka had worked its magic. A
swirling spell had been tossed over those people who
were left at the party and to say that their memories
were unreliable would be an understatement. The
police concluded that Lucy left the party sometime
between eleven and twelve and that she was alone.
We have never found any evidence to the contrary.

The last reliable sighting of her was by Karen
Wishart and Phil Foster. (
Transcript of Exhibit T63
.)

KAREN: Phil had driven his car to the party; he
was just dropping me home.

PHIL: I was probably a bit pissed to drive but,
you know, it wasn't like there were any bends.

[Note: This was a running joke on the Spit.]
KAREN: It must have been about two o'clock.

PHIL: Around about.

KAREN: Like we told the police, we were parked
outside my parents' place.

PHIL: Just saying goodnight.

KAREN: Yeah. We saw Lucy in the street-light,
just up the road.

PHIL: She must've come out of the dunes.

KAREN: She'd taken her shoes off.

PHIL: She was carrying them.

KAREN: She looked to me like she'd been
crying.

PHIL: How could you tell that? It was dark.

KAREN: To me that's how it looked.

PHIL: Okay, fine.

KAREN: Then she turned and walked away. I
thought she looked sad.

PHIL: Are we finished?

It was Al Penny who pointed out the obvious. 'Karen
Wishart lives at number sixty-three, right, so if Lucy
walked from the surf club and came out of the dunes
near Karen's house then she had already gone past
the dairy. And Karen said she turned and walked
away. South. If she was heading straight home Lucy
would've walked right past them.'

So where was Lucy going? The police reports we
have contain separate interviews with Karen and Phil
but the assumption seems to be that they saw Lucy
as she was walking home. Without discounting other
possibilities, the police have always worked on the
theory that Lucy met her attacker somewhere between
the surf club and her house, and then was somehow
taken down to the channel. We now doubt that's the
case.

Over the years we've often stood on the footpath
at the spot where Lucy was last seen. We go there
alone and in pairs, sometimes during the day but most
often in the late evening after the street-lights have
come on. Karen Wishart's family home was knocked
down a while back and replaced by a row of three
small townhouses. Apart from that the scene is pretty
much the same as it would have been the night Lucy
stood there barefoot. The track from the dunes still
runs down between two sections. It's only a couple of
metres wide and back in 1980 wasn't signposted. It's
still hard to spot at either end, particularly with the
way the sand is shifted around by the tides and the
wind. Even today the track is seldom used by anyone
except the locals, and surfers who know where to look.
Lucy would have known it was there, of course, but it
would have been tricky to find in the dark, especially
at the beach end. That makes us think that she looked
for it and was headed somewhere specific.

On warm evenings we sometimes stand there
on that part of Rocking Horse Road and try to put
ourselves in Lucy's shoes (sure, even though they were
hanging from her hand). If we squint our eyes we can
ignore the new townhouses and the late-model cars. It
could easily be 1980 again, a summer night, five days
before Christmas. What was Lucy thinking as she
stood on this spot? Despite all our speculation, was
she simply going for a walk to clear her head of Tony's
spiked punch and then overshot her house? Unlikely:
she had grown up on the Spit and knew the beach too
well. Or was Lucy hoping that the additional exercise,
about half a kilometre, would blow away the feel of
Anton Lester's groping hands? But then why did she
walk south on the footpath and not north past Karen
and Phil?

We walk the routes she might have taken, starting
at the surf club and then cutting in along the track.
So she would have seen Karen and Phil's parked car
about here. Did she know they were inside? Probably.
She was only about five metres away and 'saying
goodnight' can often get quite exuberant. It's possible
she saw them before they saw her. And Karen thought
Lucy had been crying. If that's right, why was Lucy
crying that night? As we stand on Rocking Horse
Road, unanswered questions flutter like summer
insects around the street-light overhead.

So she turned and walked away along the footpath.

The street-lights are widely spaced. To Karen and
Phil, or anyone watching her from a distance that
night, Lucy would have vanished into the darkness
and then reappeared in the spots of light. We don't
know if she went all the way down to the reserve;
we're unsure if she made it that far. It's possible she
went into one of the houses. Was she stalked and then
set upon by an opportunistic stranger as Al Penny has
always argued? Or was Lucy going to meet the person
would later kill her? That's the other possibility we
toy with.

At the end of our nocturnal rambles we are
inevitably no closer to answering our own questions.
We go home and slip into beds lying alone or sometimes
next to a long-suffering wife or girlfriend. The next
day she may check our clothes for the scent of another
woman and at the end of the month scan our credit-card
statements for incriminating purchases. That is
part of the price we pay. We've learned not to take it
personally.

By the end of January 1981 we had recorded three
further sightings of Mr Asher at night in, or near, the
dunes.

One day Mark Murray heard his mother on
the phone in their kitchen. She was talking to Mrs
Webb, Grant's mother. Mark's mum worked nights
at the Wattie's factory where she performed the final
inspection of the seals on the cans of vegetables. Mrs
Murray had finished her shift at four in the morning
and was driving home. Presumably she was tired. She
would have been surprised, even shocked, to see Mr
Asher caught in her headlights.

'There was no mistaking it was him,' she told Mrs
Webb on the phone. 'Just crossing the road in the
middle of the night like that. It gave me a real scare, I
can tell you. Makes you wonder if he's still got all his
marbles.'

She looked at Mark to see if he was listening. Mark
was pretending to be reading the paper his father had
left spread open at the sports pages on the kitchen
table. Even so, his mother dropped her voice down to
a whisper and Mark had to strain to hear.

'It's the strangest thing,' she continued, 'but I
could've sworn he was carrying a baby.' And then she
laughed loudly as if to dismiss the idea. 'I must've
been staring at too many cans of beetroot.'

Despite his night-time wandering we knew that
Mr Asher was still leaving the dairy every morning,
six days a week. Tug reported that around nine, his
battered ute reversed into the road and drove away,
the toolbox rattling on the open deck. We had no idea
where the job was that he was working on. The ute
carried him beyond our borders, the channel and
Thompson Park up at North Beach. They pretty much
defined our territory.

As far as we knew, no one was missing a baby.
'What do you think it was that Mark's mum saw?'
Pete Marshall wanted to know when we next met.
'What looks like a baby but isn't a baby?'

We all stood around in Tug's bedroom and shook
our heads. It was a riddle that we didn't know how to
unravel.

Tug had reported that there were lights on in the
Ashers' garage most nights until two or three in the
morning. Of course he had sneaked over there one
night but the single window was boarded over, each
board carefully overlapping the next so there were
no gaps through which he could see inside. He could
hear, though. He stood in the warm night and listened.
Tug told us that it sounded like Mr Asher was doing
some type of woodwork. There was sawing and
hammering, broken by long gaps that the wavesound
rushed to fill. If Mr Asher was building something,
Tug had been left with no idea what it might be.

It wasn't just Lucy's father who was acting
strangely. By the beginning of February Jase's father
was officially on sick leave from the police. Jase didn't
like to talk about it but we were all aware that Bill
Harbidge now seldom moved from his spot in front
of the television. He cracked open the first beer of the
day with breakfast and almost never left the house.
With his mother run off it was left to Jase to cook the
meals. He specialised in eggs (fried, poached, boiled
or scrambled) and beans (tinned).

Jase's little sister, Charlotte, was eleven and kept
asking him when their mother was coming back. She
had learned not to ask her father. The results were too
unpredictable. Sometimes the question would make
him shout and swear. Sometimes — Jase told us, years
later — he would start to cry, silent tears that wet his
cheeks and made his big, loose-skinned face look as
though it was melting down into his thick neck.

So it was Jase who washed Charlotte's school
uniform and changed the sheets on her bed. He packed
her lunches when school finally started back and
showed her how to repair the punctured tyre on her
three-speed. It was also Jase's job to buy his father's
beer from the bottle store next to the supermarket.
The manager was an old school friend of his father
and would turn a blind eye. We would sometimes
see Jase biking home with the crate balanced on the
handlebars of his bike. By the end of March his father
was simply tossing him the car keys, conveniently
forgetting the fact that Jase hadn't yet sat his driver's
licence.