The Lost Man(42)

At the clinic, Jenna had spoken to a younger Steve Fitzgerald, fresher-faced back then as he found his feet during his first posting in Balamara. After that, she and her boyfriend had crossed the street and walked into the police station. Over a cup of tea, they had sat down with the sergeant at the time. It hadn’t been Glenn back then, but a cop not unlike him. When they’d left, the sergeant had phoned the Bright household as a courtesy from one local to another. Nathan could still picture the look on Liz’s face when she learned what was being said. Variations of the same two emotions: horror and disbelief.

‘What did Jenna tell the police?’ Xander asked.

‘That she hadn’t wanted to have sex with Cameron, but she’d been too drunk to stop him,’ Nathan said.

There was a stunned silence in the car.

‘She said Uncle Cam raped her?’ Xander sounded bewildered.

‘I think technically that word was never used,’ Nathan said. ‘The cop at the time reckoned she never actually said that exactly.’

Liz had wanted to immediately drive Cameron into town and speak to Steve Fitzgerald and the sergeant – maybe even speak to Jenna herself if they could – and get all this mess straightened out. Carl wouldn’t let her. That boy is not going to be jumping through hoops because some uppity bitch has woken up and changed her fucken mind, right? Cameron had hovered, white-faced. No-one had asked him what he wanted to do.

‘So what Jenna was saying spread around town in about five minutes flat. But –’ Nathan stopped, his eyes on the dusty track. ‘But loads of us had been at that party and they’d been all over each other all night. Everyone saw it. I saw it, your mum saw it, Xander. Everyone who was there said the same thing.’

Even people who hadn’t been there reckoned they’d seen it, by the end of the day. Jenna was a full three years older than Cameron, who was on his bloody school holidays, for Christ’s sake. And she was the one who’d been putting alcohol in the kid’s hand all night, even though he was technically too young to be drinking. Plus there were plenty of girls at that party – sensible outback girls who didn’t take any shit from the local idiot blokes – so if Jenna hadn’t wanted something to happen with Cameron behind the dunes, all she’d had to do was call out and she’d have been right. She’d let him drive her back to town afterwards. If it had been some of the other blokes in town, then yeah, maybe you’d give her the benefit of the doubt. But not Cam Bright. He was only a kid, and a good one too. He was barely even old enough to know what he was doing down there.

Nathan came to the turning in the track and the car juddered as the wheels went over a rougher patch.

‘Watch out,’ Bub said. ‘It was somewhere here that I wrecked those tyres the other day.’

‘Along here?’ Nathan could make out the peak of Lehmann’s Hill in the far distance. He glanced at Bub. ‘I thought you were coming from the north paddock to meet Cam?’

They went over a pothole and Nathan’s eyes were forced back to the road as the whole car lurched.

‘Track was too sandy,’ Bub said. ‘I had to loop around. Danger spot’s further up, I’ll shout out if I see it in time.’

Nathan was trying to work out where Bub would have joined the track when Xander interrupted.

‘So what happened after Jenna spoke to the police?’

Nathan thought for a moment. ‘Nothing, actually.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No. I mean, it was all pretty bloody tense for a day or two. Dad wasn’t happy.’ It was one thing for Carl Bright to bag his own sons, but it was quite another for someone else to talk shit about one of them in public. Especially if that one was Cameron. ‘But it blew over before it really got started.’

‘What, just like that?’ Xander frowned.

‘Yeah. Jenna’s boyfriend calmed down, apparently. Jacqui said they both went to her dad, told him they’d thought better of it and wanted to move on. Handed in their notice. Next day, they packed up and left. And that was the end of it.’

Cameron’s colour had slowly returned to normal over the following week. No formal complaint had been made, leaving his police record unblemished, which was more than a lot of people in town could say for themselves. And fair enough too, had been the general consensus. It wasn’t fair that a good kid like Cam should have his life ruined by some drunk backpacker with a few hungover regrets.

Xander sat back in his seat. ‘And he never heard from Jenna again?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘So why now?’

‘Yeah. Good question.’

Cameron had been over-prepared, as usual, Nathan thought as he stood on top of Lehmann’s Hill. They had managed to arrive with all four tyres intact. As the ground had grown sandier, Nathan and Bub had got out and deflated them to avoid getting bogged. They’d driven up to the peak and got out to examine the repeater mast, squinting in the sun.

Nathan could tell almost immediately that they wouldn’t need the repair instructions Cameron had carefully printed out before he’d left home on the second-last morning of his life, or most of the tools and equipment he had gathered. The mast on the top of Lehmann’s Hill was suffering from nothing more serious than the wear and tear of constant exposure. A good clean-out of clogged sand and grit and a couple of replacement wires and it would be good to go. It wasn’t really a two-man job, let alone three, so Nathan worked while the others watched.