To the Sea Read online

  Tony couldn’t argue.

  ‘One last thing,’ said Bill. ‘She couldn’t have washed up on any of those islands. They’re against the current from here and against the tide for the night she went missing. If she’s drowned and her body’s washed up somewhere it’ll be, with luck, in Norfolk Bay, but more likely way further out in Frederick Henry Bay, where I’ve already indicated we’ll be searching again today.’

  Tony was glad that Bill didn’t say Storm Bay. From Storm Bay, there was nothing but the dark heaving Southern Ocean all the way to Antarctica.

  ‘So, is she on any of the channel islands?’ Bill continued. ‘No, Inspector, she is not, and I have no intention of wasting time searching out there. If she’s on an island, someone took her there in a boat and that’s a whole other investigation for CIB, not us marines.’ He paused. ‘We’re searching for a body in the water and it will almost certainly be this side of the channel in one of the bays. Sorry, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘So I suppose Cremorne is a no-go?’ Tony said. He was pointing at the white sandy arc of Cremorne beach across the water in the far distance.

  ‘Jesus Christ, are you fucking deaf or are you just trying to wind me up?’ said Bill, waving his arms in the air. The two divers sitting at the back of the boat looked over at them.

  ‘Cremorne is at least seven nautical miles, twelve and a half k, from here without all the other obstacles I’ve already explained to you. No, she didn’t swim to Cremorne. And why the fuck would she even try? Seriously, get off my boat and let me and my guys get on with a realistic sea search.’

  This time Tony accepted Bill’s decision.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it. Paul’s gone out with some of your guys. He’s across the case if you need any decisions made out there.’ It was worth asking. ‘If you have some time, could you maybe take Paul into Black Arm Island, White Eye and maybe Isle of Caves so he could have a look? They’re small. It wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘We’re marines, not a bloody water taxi.’

  ‘I know, Bill, but we’re all cops. And like you said, if someone with a boat is involved, it’s possible that we have an island as a crime scene. How else can we get there except by boat? Water taxis aren’t keen on carrying bodies. But if she’s alive, I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Every hour counts.’

  ‘Don’t pull that “every hour counts” bullshit with me,’ said Bill, looking Tony in the eye. ‘I can organise an island search tomorrow if we don’t find her body today, but today we’re doing a full water search. Because, Inspector, every hour does count if she’s in the water, and I’m not wasting any more of them looking on land or anywhere I know she’s not.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Tony, ‘but if we don’t find her today, I do want an island search tomorrow.’

  Bill exhaled slowly. ‘All right. We can do the closest islands later today if you want,’ he conceded.

  ‘I’ll come with you to do the search.’

  ‘You bet your arse you will,’ said Bill. ‘But right now we’re doing a full search in Norfolk and Frederick Henry Bays while we’ve got the tide. I can be back here at six. Tomorrow, we’ll check out Black Arm and White Eye islands, maybe Hog Island too. One boat only. We can carry ten. Cops, not civilians.’ He gave Tony a warning look.

  Tony nodded but said nothing.

  ‘I’ll see you here on the jetty at six o’clock. My guys will need a dive break and food by then anyway. I’ll make sure Paul is back here too. Up to you if you want to bring others.’

  ‘Thanks, Bill.’

  Bill turned over the big engine of the rescue boat and, as it rumbled to life, Tony remained standing on the boat. He looked at Bill.

  ‘I’m afraid to ask,’ said Bill, ‘but is there something else, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant, there is, but I need it to stay just between us.’

  They had to speak up now over the deep grumbling engine and Tony was aware of the two divers at the back of the boat. They were talking to each other though and weren’t interested in what was happening up front between him and Bill.

  ‘Do you know the big sandstone cliff about a half a k around the point?’ asked Tony, pointing up towards Munster Bay.

  ‘Yeah, I know the one.’ Bill sounded interested.

  ‘How high do you think it is?’

  Bill squinted, considering. ‘Pretty bloody high. Thirty metres. Maybe more. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I have it from a reliable source that Zoe Kennett has dived off that cliff and swum out past the headland, as far out as the channel and back into shore in Driving Sound.’

  ‘How fucking reliable is this source?’ asked Bill, looking incredulous.

  ‘Reliable. He saw Zoe do it in September and described it to me in detail.’

  Bill turned the boat’s engine off. The quiet of the warm, still day was immediate. He took his cap off and scratched his head.

  ‘Is the water deep enough there for a dive from that height?’ asked Tony.

  ‘Yeah, it’s deep enough. But that’s not really the issue, is it? That’s a killer dive, and a killer swim back to shore. I’m struggling to believe it, I’ve gotta say.’

  Tony waited for Bill to think it through.

  ‘And she dived? Didn’t fall?’

  ‘Dived.’

  Bill grabbed a marine chart and studied it.

  ‘And she swam out here, all the way to the channel and back into here?’ he asked as his finger trailed the route Tony had described.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, first off, I don’t think your source is as reliable as you think he is, but if we accept his story, this girl is something else. That is a massive dive. A spine-breaking dive. And then she’s trapped. There’s no way into shore. She has to swim way out just to get back in. So if the dive goes bad, she’s dead. Either smashed against the cliff face or drowned. But if she survives the dive, the real work is still in front of her. And the water in September is a good two degrees colder than it is now. She’d have to have been in a heavy-duty wetsuit to protect her when she hit the water and she’d need it for the swim to delay the onset of hypothermia. Even so, a wetsuit can only do so much.’

  ‘She was naked.’

  ‘Holy fuck, Tony. You need to get some better sources.’ Bill leaned both his hands on the chart in front of him and looked at it, clearly trying to reconcile what Tony was telling him with the realities of this coast that he thought he knew.

  ‘Maybe so, but if she could do that, could she swim out to the islands?’ asked Tony. ‘Could she have swum out to an island from the cliff?’

  For the first time, Bill seemed lost for words. Finally, he said, ‘If she could do the dive and the swim you reckon she did, then maybe. But I’m not buying it.’

  When Tony got back up to the house, Eva Kennett was standing in the open doorway leading out from the big lounge room onto the front verandah. She was wearing a loose, white dress which looked like a man’s long shirt with a thin brown leather belt at her waist. She had flat brown leather sandals on her long lean feet. Her white hair was tied back in a loose twist high on her head. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewellery. She was an old woman, well into her sixties, but her body hadn’t yet morphed into either of those horrors awaiting women in old age: loose wobbling fat or bird-boned frailty. Her skin, while creased around her eyes and mouth, was still clear and smooth. Her large cat eyes were blue and direct. She was older than his mum but looked twenty years younger.

  She smiled at Tony as he stepped up onto the verandah. Her smile was just like Zoe’s. The presence of the mother brought the absence of the daughter into sharper relief.

  ‘Hello, Detective. Sadie tells me you would like to meet with me.’

  ‘I would, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I’d be delighted. Let’s sit out here. John’s bringing us out some coffee.’ She had a faint accent. Not anything Tony recognised. Her voice was like the soft rustling of leaves overhead in a tall tree. Barely audible an
d soothing. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t stay. It’ll just be the two of us.’

  It was hot now. The real heat of this Tasmanian summer’s day wouldn’t arrive until mid-afternoon. By three it would be sweltering. Eva Kennett sat down at an old, delicately carved wooden table in a pocket of shade at one end of the front verandah. There was a salty whiff of a breeze off the water and Tony could hear the pine needles scratching softly on the slate roof. This spot had to be one of the best at Rosetta. There were lots of tinnies and little sailboats out today. A couple of teenage boys were hooning around on jet-skis in the next bay over. A speedboat not far out from shore at the mouth of Driving Sound was pulling a biscuit behind it and Tony could hear the faint squeals of two kids as they bounced along in the big rubber tube, their arms waving wildly.

  The two littlest Kennett girls were sitting in the shade of a tall white-trunked peppermint gum on the lawn playing with a pink and white Barbie house and, Tony guessed, every Barbie attachment that had ever been made. He recognised the campervan and horse but there was also a pink and white American convertible and some other pieces of furniture and accessories that looked pure 1960s. He guessed little Kennett girls had been playing with Barbies here at Rosetta for a very long time. These latest two sat in a sea of pink and white plastic in the dappled shade quietly engrossed in their game. They were the two girls in the photos with Zoe.

  Around them, Rosetta was quiet. All the loud holiday fun of the beautiful day was happening out on the calm blue water.

  Tony took off his suit jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, undid the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie. John Kennett came out carrying a coffee pot and cups and saucers on a tray. They were the same little green cups and saucers Sadie and Cecile had been using earlier. The coffee pot matched the cups. There was no milk jug or sugar bowl. It seemed Eva Kennett liked her coffee strong and black, just like Tony. There were slices of plum pudding and some fruit mince pies on a plate.

  John said hello to Tony and then excused himself to his studio to spend the afternoon painting. Tony noticed that he looked many years older than his wife. John clearly did not share her comforting view that Zoe was safe somewhere and would be home soon. He was quietly dying of grief. Tony’s eyes fell on the bright multicoloured hammock still hanging between a pine tree and the end verandah post.

  ‘I see the police divers are out searching for Zoe,’ said Eva Kennett after her husband left.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  Tony gave her a brief run-down, including the planned island search. She was perfectly still as she listened.

  ‘Whose idea was it to look on the islands?’ she asked.

  ‘A joint decision. Do you think Zoe might have swum out there?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Has she ever swum out there before?’

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘Zoe has swum out to Isle of Caves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The other islands?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One of our marines says that it would be impossible.’

  ‘It’s possible. I’ve taken Zoe out there myself when she was just a child.’

  ‘Sailing?’

  ‘No, Detective.’

  Tony didn’t know what to say. He could either believe her or not. There was nowhere else to go. He’d been told in a particularly useless Policing and Older Australians seminar he’d attended last year that when talking to people with dementia, it was best to stay in their reality. They couldn’t exist anywhere else. If you wanted to meet with them, it had to be in that place and that time, and on their terms. They could become angry or distressed if they were forced into an unfamiliar world. Eva Kennett wasn’t demented but she wasn’t operating in the same world as the one Bill had just described to him.

  ‘Is solving a crime the same thing as solving a mystery, Detective?’ she asked Tony as he sat wondering how to start the conversation he needed to have with her.

  So many people asked him this. Or some version of the same question. People assumed he was a naturally curious person, a real problem solver, who could see the almost invisible lines that held things together outside the box. But few criminals were masterminds and few cops joined the force because of an intellectual need to stretch their powers of observation and problem solving. It was all so much simpler.

  Most crimes were opportunistic. Committed without planning or forethought. The heat of the moment. No plan. No intent. No careful cover-up. Anyone could solve a crime if they were given the authority to do it and were confrontational enough to push people when all they wanted to do was lie and hide and convince you of their unlikely innocence.

  Crimes left a mess behind them, especially crimes of violence. Not just blood and DNA but mayhem. Lies. Aberrant behaviour. Events so odd people remembered them. Innocent bystanders became witnesses. It was like watching ripples move out in ever-widening circles on still water, no one had to see the object hit the water to know that it had. And if you were a cop and asked enough people the right questions, you would find one person who saw that it was a stone that hit the water, and who could even describe the stone.

  It was always hard to start an investigation. But tasks would present themselves. Each completed task would uncover something or nothing, but either way, it would lead to the next task. Everyone would keep putting one foot in front of the other, moving inexorably towards the centre of the ripple. And sooner or later, after long days or weeks or months and sleepless nights and mountains of evidence, they would get there.

  ‘No, Mrs Kennett. A mystery isn’t the same thing as a crime.’

  ‘No,’ Eva said, looking at him. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

  Tony sipped his coffee and tried to get back on a track he recognised. He remembered John Kennett saying something about Zoe doing long swims.

  ‘Does Zoe swim in a wetsuit?’ he asked. It was as good a place as any to start.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I’m told that people would succumb to the effects of hypothermia out there in just a few hours, even at this time of the year.’

  ‘Is that right?’ She sounded vague and disinterested.

  ‘Yes. The human body cannot survive in the deep channel water for very long. Not long enough to swim out to the islands.’

  Eva made no response. He was losing her.

  ‘Mrs Kennett,’ he started again. ‘Can you please explain to me how Zoe can swim in such cold waters and for such long distances when the experts tell me it’s physically impossible?’

  ‘Do you like stories, Detective?’ Eva asked, looking at Tony over the lip of the little green coffee cup. ‘Stories that speak to your soul?’

  ‘I have all afternoon for you to help me find Zoe. So if you have a story that can help me do that, I want to hear it.’

  ‘I do have that story,’ Eva Kennett said softly. ‘And it’s time you heard it.’

  Eva’s Story

  ON THIS PLANET, THERE ARE TWO WORLDS. THE WORLD OF THE LAND and the world of the sea. Some say there are worlds within worlds: the deserts and the mountains and forests, the rivers and lakes, but in the end there is only the land and sea. Two separate worlds locked together, spinning around the sun.

  If you are a creature of the land, the sea is an alien place for you. Some ancient animals can move between the two, but they are only truly at home in one. People may swim or dive or ride the sea, but they cannot live down in the deep blue of that other world. They cannot skim across the slippery surface of a calm sea at speeds that only the wind can catch. They cannot know the freedom of floating in a fathomless deep far from the sight or smell of land. These joys are only for creatures of the sea.

  But some beings are of both the land and the sea. Who does not know a tale of creatures moving fluidly between the worlds? Of sea nymphs, mermaids, sprites and gods, who can bend the sea to their will?

  These legends have power: the power to calm sailors in terrifying st
orms, to comfort the lonely wife of a missing fisherman or to soothe the crazed mother of a drowned child. There are other tales of angry gods and malicious sprites who will drag down the careless and undeserving to live eternally in an underwater realm. Sailors and those who live close to the shore must remain vigilant and abide by the laws of the sea and those that live in it. There is a truce that must be honoured, and when it is not, the legends tell of the consequences. I know the power of these legends, but I do not know the truth of any of them. Except one.

  I know this story to be true because it is my story. It is the story of the women in my family. It runs uninterrupted for centuries to its unhappy climax with the destruction of my mother. And I fear it ends forever with Zoe.

  But a story should not start at the end. This one starts twenty generations ago with Ornice standing on a narrow peninsula of rock in a tiny cove in Mayo.

  Mayo is an empty and remote place. If all you know of Ireland is Dublin and the soft green hills of the south, then you know nothing. The Mayo coastline is littered with rocky outcrops and craggy islands; it is a coast as dark and primal as the legends it has birthed. Inland, rock gives way to empty windswept bog and deep black inland waters. All is drenched with icy wind and rain. Rivers rush white and brown, carving flooding waterways through sodden bogland. Cliffs fall to deep loughs and mist covers everything. The sun is a stranger there. It is a lonely place if you do not belong there.

  Mayomen who survive from fishing the rich waters live in permanent struggle yet complete accord with the land and sky and water. The people of Mayo’s sea islands are hardier still, though short-lived. They are a people clad in shawls and pampooties, clinging like periwinkles to wind-battered rocks far out into the Atlantic. Mayo islanders have lived on their outcrops since the first Norse sailors landed in Eire. These islanders do not move back to the mainland. They take the Mayo road. The hard road.