Through a Camel's Eye (4 page)

SIX

One photograph of Margaret Benton showed a dark-haired woman in her middle forties staring into the wind and clutching the collar of a black coat with her left hand. Wedding and engagement rings caught the light, but she wasn't smiling, and the mood of the picture was sombre.

Anthea stood beside Chris in the clear morning light. He felt her involuntary shiver. She'd downloaded photographs of the missing woman from the internet, and they'd pinned them up. They'd photographed the coat Chris had found before delivering it to the courier and were sure that it was the same.

Margaret Benton had been missing for eight months. Until her disappearance, she'd lived with her husband, Jack, on an orchard on the outskirts of Swan Hill, within walking distance of the Murray.

‘Have you found him?' Julie Beshervase demanded.

‘We're working on it,' Chris said mildly.

He took out Camilla's drawing and handed it across. Julie threw it on the floor. ‘I don't believe this!'

Chris picked the drawing up and pointed. ‘These boys, do you recognise them?'

Julie made a noise in her throat that was somewhere between a growl and a sob, but she did condescend to look.

‘I think this one's parents run the caravan park,' she said.

After Chris left, Julie rang her brother, Clive, to tell him about Riza's disappearance. She'd left messages the day before, which he had not returned.

‘You'll find him, Sis, don't worry. He can't have gone far.'

Julie began to explain about the fences and the gate, how Riza wasn't all that big. She could tell her brother was only pretending to listen. She'd cried on his shoulder too often, and this was the result - he made what to him were appropriately sympathetic noises, while his attention was elsewhere. He said the Talbots were having a good time, and that he'd had a postcard from Montpellier. He told her about a soccer match his son had starred in. When Julie felt a scream rising in her throat, she said a quick goodbye.

When Chris spoke to Clive on the phone, he confirmed what Julie had told him, that it was friends of his who owned the house.

‘They must be well off.'

Clive said he'd lent his sister the money to buy Riza and that she would pay him back when she could.

‘What does Julie live on?'

The answer was a disability pension. She'd had some ‘troubles in the past'.

‘So your sister is in considerable debt.'

‘It doesn't bother her. She's never had much money.'

‘Or a proper job?'

‘Look, when Julie found Riza and decided to buy him, she was living in a horrible boarding house in Melbourne, with other, other - '

‘Troubled young people?'

‘I was happy to help out.'

Chris told himself that he could check with Centrelink, but he believed that Clive was telling the truth. He wondered if Julie had ever lifted a finger to help her brother, and surprised himself by the bitterness of this reaction.

Still, he suggested that Julie could do with a visit. There was a short silence before Clive said that he would see about it, but he had a young family, he lived in Albury and worked long hours.

Chris decided to wait until after school before tackling Ben McIntyre and his friends.

He needed time to think. Normally, he'd do a bit of gardening as an aid to thought, get the old blood circulating. Now he felt embarrassed, knowing what his assistant thought of his hobby, though he disliked the word, and would not, himself, have used it. More than once she'd come across him on his hands and knees and stood there like some princess waiting for him to stand up and address her respectfully. Now he was working himself up into a lather, all because he felt self-conscious getting out his gardening gloves and trowel. And there was that untidy area up the back that he'd been meaning to get to for weeks.

Anthea came upon Chris with his wheelbarrow full of weeds, and the sweat of a warmer than expected morning slipping along his hairline into his cotton hat.

She'd taken photographs of Margaret Benton up and down the main street, but nobody recognised her, or admitted to it if they did. He knew he should have taken the photographs himself, but he wanted to involve his assistant, who after all had been the one to find the name.

Experience had taught Chris that people noticed more than they thought they did; but that while news of a certain kind might travel like lightning round the village, other kinds needed more time to reach him. Especially this was the case if one of the locals looked like getting into trouble. Chris - otherwise a local himself, otherwise perfectly trustworthy and acceptable - might find himself suddenly dropped from the grapevine, swinging free of the gossip he relied on to anticipate trouble.

It was possible that something of the kind was happening with regard to Margaret Benton. On the other hand, it was possible that she'd never been near Queenscliff, that her coat had got into the sandhills by some other means. Chris had already rung Swan Hill that morning and been told that they were handling it. There was no further news.

There was that scream too, that Camilla had heard. When he'd tried to ask her about it, she'd become so agitated that he'd let it go.

Anthea was standing with her arms crossed, staring at the wheelbarrow and frowning, waiting for him to take the initiative, tell her what their next move should be.

Chris would have scoffed at the idea that a young snip of a thing could embarrass him, that he'd be knotting inside himself with the desire to keep up an appearance of authority.

He indicated that she should follow him and stomped inside.

Anthea stared at her boss's departing back, conscious that he was heading for some kind of humiliation. The thought made her angry and frustrated. She suspected at least one of the shopkeepers of lying to her, and had been on the point of losing her patience back there, in the main street.

Chris's attitude to women bordered on the fearful. He was reluctant to inflame Julie Beshervase and he pussy-footed round Camilla Renfrew. Anthea wondered where that left her. Pursuing a conversation with a khaki backside?

Chris made a list of everyone in the town and surrounding farms who owned a horse trailer. There were seventeen, and he began interviewing them systematically. He took it for granted that all of them knew about Riza and Frank Erwin's rental arrangement. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that the target of the theft might have been Erwin, not Julie Beshervase. He could spend time pondering who might want to embarrass or get back at Erwin once he'd made a short list.

He didn't want to judge his assistant prematurely, and was aware that he might have done a lot worse. If and when Anthea left - it was surely a matter of when, not if - they'd probably send him a young man.

Chris was grateful that Anthea didn't expect him to entertain her after work. But she'd grown up in a city, and was used to working at a city's pace. On top of that, she made the mistake of assuming that the surface of a person, or a thing for that matter, told you what they were like inside.

Chris listened to what was, and wasn't, being said, crossed some names off his list and put question marks alongside others, wrote notes between them and in the margins of his notebook.

He took a mug of tea out to the back veranda, avoiding the tiny triangle of sea just visible between the trees, while he mulled over what this or that one of his horse-owning acquaintances had been doing on the night Riza disappeared. He didn't rule out any of them. His crosses and question marks had been made in pencil, and he kept his rubber handy.

He went back indoors, phoned Frank Erwin, and told him he was coming over.

Though Chris greeted the farmer politely, Frank made it clear that he was affronted. His daughter's horse had long since been sold, but Chris knew the trailer would sit there until either it fell apart, or Frank pulled it apart and used the bits for something that was even further gone.

‘I pointed out the bloody tyre tracks. And I'm renting my paddock to that hippy, aren't I? She's paying cash in hand.'

‘It's routine, Frank. I have to cross you off my list.'

‘But - '

Come on now. Let's get it over with.'

The horse float looked as though it hadn't left the shed in years. The paint was practically all gone. The aluminium was coming away from its seams. Frank stood just behind Chris while he examined it, making noises of disgust when Chris measured the width of the tyres, two close together on each side. The tension emanating from the farmer might have been caused by guilt, but might equally have been the result of this unexpected intrusion, these suspicions voiced by a policeman whom he'd thought of as a friend.

Dirt embedded in the tyre treads ought to have been old and dry. It wasn't.

Chris noticed a new padlock on the door. ‘I'll need to see inside,' he said.

‘Why, in God's name?'

‘Just get me the key, Frank. Please.'

There was nothing to show that the float had recently been used to transport any animal, let alone a stolen camel. But the hackles were up on Chris's neck as he peered around an empty and dilapidated interior. The corners were thick with dust and old brown horse hairs, a few amongst them of the palest yellow-white.

Chris pulled some latex gloves out of his pocket and a small plastic bag, while Frank snorted behind him. He teased out the hairs and bagged them.

SEVEN

Anthea held up the small bag and studied the hairs inside it, while Chris typed a report. Typing was not his strong suit, but it would have embarrassed him to ask Anthea to do all his typing for him. He told himself that the report could be a short one, simply stating where he'd found the hairs and asking what species of animal they'd come from.

When Anthea asked what Frank Erwin had said, Chris paused with his hands above the keyboard and looked at her along his shoulder.

‘If we found the beast in Frank's living-room, he'd deny knowing how it got there.'

‘But why?'

‘Why would he deny it, or why would he pinch Julie Beshervase's camel?'

‘Both,' said Anthea, raising a neat eyebrow, ‘but the first one first.'

‘Actually, I think the second answer does for both. The Erwins have owned and farmed that land for three generations. Frank may have rented out the paddock, but in every way he regards it as his. If the Beshervase girl did something to annoy him - '

‘Did she?'

‘I don't know.' Chris was heartened when he paused again, and felt that Anthea was listening. ‘And Julie won't admit it either,' he continued, ‘not if it was something she's ashamed of. It'll need looking into once we've got these confirmed.'

He flicked a finger at the plastic bag.

‘Julie Beshervase doesn't seem the type - ' Anthea ventured.

‘To hold back? I agree.'

Chris noted the way his assistant's mouth pulled in when she wasn't speaking, as though there was too much that she needed and was reluctant to say.

‘I'd like you to talk to Julie. Don't mention the hairs or the trailer. Just ask her what she thinks of Frank, how they've been getting on, that kind of thing.'

Anthea felt a twinge of self-importance as she talked to the courier and arranged for the pick-up, imagining, as she put the phone down, that she was the one making the trip to Melbourne, that things between her and Graeme were so good he'd rearrange his morning's schedule to meet her for coffee, plan the weekend they would spend together. Melbourne was so close, only a couple of hours away. She thought that Graeme's rejection would have been easier to bear if she'd been sent to the opposite end of the state.

Anthea began by asking Julie about herself, where she'd grown up, where she'd learnt about camel training. She discovered that Julie was twenty-three and that she'd been born in the Northern Territory.

‘My parents used to train animals for use in films. Once they had, rescued actually, a baby Bactrian. They gave her to me. I was fifteen, and so rebellious I ran away every second weekend.'

Julie's parents had died in a car crash, her younger brother too. ‘They were hit by a road train. I should have been with them, but that was one of the weekends I was busy running away.'

Anthea said that she was sorry. Julie refused to meet her eye.

‘That camel - her name was Greta, after Greta Garbo. She was my mother's favourite actress - I trained her myself. And she
did
work in the movies. She lived up to her namesake.'

‘And your older brother?'

‘He keeps an eye on me. Tell me this!' Julie turned on Anthea, pulling at her spiky hair. ‘Riza was mine and now I've lost him.
Why do I feel so guilty?'

Anthea boiled water and found tea bags, trying to ignore the cockroach droppings on the kitchen bench. She did not know the answer to Julie's question, but the fact that she wanted to find one, that she was thinking about it, surprised her. She'd marked Julie as a drama queen whose rhetorical questions weren't to be taken seriously.

She made the tea black and sweet, not wanting to think about the state of whatever milk might be in the fridge.

The two women sat facing one another, not directly, but at an angle which made all their glances sidelong.

‘Frank's okay,' Julie said. ‘It's not him who's been perving on Riza and me.'

‘Who has?'

‘You mean, apart from the witch? No one.'

When Anthea asked about the boys, Julie shrugged and said, ‘Just kids mucking about after school.'

‘Cynthia Erwin?'

‘She hardly ever comes down to the paddock. She seems nice enough.'

They went on talking about the farmer, Julie rounding out her opinion that he was friendly without being interfering. Most men, she said, would have assumed they knew more about training camels than she did, even if they'd only ever seen them giving rides to kids. Which, by the way, was how she planned to earn a bit of money, once Riza was old enough.

Julie swallowed and dragged at her hair again. Anthea steered her back to Frank, who was proud of his son and daughter, and seemed especially proud of Jim, who lived along the Ocean Road and had just given him and Cynthia their first grandchild.

Anthea thought of the pale hairs, but decided not to mention them. She thought it would be nice to have a father figure, and wondered briefly why, since the death of her own parents, no candidate for this role had ever appeared on her horizon. She asked Julie what it was about Camilla that got under her skin.

‘If it was an old man in a raincoat, he wouldn't be allowed to get away with it - but it's an old woman who's lived here all her life, so people say she's harmless. I bet she's rich as well. She could have taken Riza and hidden him somewhere, or paid someone to do it. Do you know how many properties she owns?'

Anthea did not want to admit that the answer to this was no.

‘Do you have any enemies, Julie? Is there someone who wants to hurt you, or get back at you?'

‘What, down here?'

Anthea reached in her pocket for the photograph of Margaret Benton.

‘Anywhere,' she said.