The Survivors(49)

She dropped the leaf on the ground and it blew away as they turned and began to walk towards town.

‘Hey, I ran into Olivia earlier as well,’ Kieran said as they hit the main street. The Surf and Turf was open again for business, he could see from the lights through the windows. He scanned the street, trying to spot the CCTV camera that had captured Liam and Bronte together on Saturday night. He found it high on a lamppost.

‘Was Liv okay?’

‘Not really. She mentioned that Bronte reminded her a bit of Gabby.’

‘Oh God, did she really?’

‘Both people pleasers apparently. Maybe a bit soft-hearted.’

Mia frowned a little. ‘I suppose.’

Kieran looked over in surprise. ‘You don’t think so?’

‘No, I do. I guess. About Gabby, at least. It’s just –’ Mia thought for a moment. ‘When someone dies, it’s pretty easy to only remember the good things, don’t you think? Especially if they died young. I mean, Gabby was my friend, but she could also be –’ Mia hesitated this time. ‘– a bit difficult. Like we all can be. Obviously.’

‘In what way?’ Kieran asked.

‘She could be petty.’ Mia sounded uncomfortable now. ‘Often about Olivia, really. She hated feeling left out, which she was, quite a lot. So she’d sometimes try to stop Olivia having fun or doing things without her. It wasn’t mean-spirited. Just jealousy mostly.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well. It wasn’t easy for her having Olivia as a sister. Liv had all these friends, and Gabby was pretty much stuck with me.’ Mia shrugged. ‘Gabby didn’t help herself, though. She could be really immature a lot of the time. We both could, to be fair.’

They walked on and up ahead, Kieran could see the petrol station and the squat red-brick police station come into view.

‘But look, it wasn’t Gabby’s fault.’ Mia sounded guilty now. ‘She developed physically so early and all of a sudden she had all this attention coming her way. She never really worked out how to handle it.’

‘Olivia mentioned that. Sounded like it happened a bit.’

‘A bit? Honestly, men used to stare at Gabby all the time. We’d be in our school uniform, we could literally be playing with toys – like a board game or something – and it wouldn’t make any difference. So if she acted a bit childish and annoying, I think it was her way of trying to deal with it.’

Kieran frowned. ‘Blokes around here used to stare at her? Which ones?’

‘Looking the way she did?’ Mia said. ‘Pretty much all of them.’

She opened her mouth as though to say something else, then stopped. They had reached the police station.

Mia was looking across the street to the station’s glass door. It was propped open and Sergeant Renn was speaking to Sue Pendlebury on the threshold. It wasn’t clear if they were coming or going, but they both stopped talking as they saw Kieran and Mia. Renn turned to Pendlebury and said something too low for them to hear. Then both officers straightened, and Renn raised his hand and beckoned.

Kieran looked at Mia. ‘I’ll go and see what he wants.’

He had started over when Pendlebury lifted her chin.

‘Both of you,’ she called. ‘Thank you.’

She looked at Kieran, then past him to Mia, then turned and disappeared into the station.





Chapter 18


The cardboard boxes stacked inside the glass doors of the police station reminded Kieran of his parents’ house, albeit a more efficient version. Preparations for the station’s closure the following month were well underway, with the cabinets behind reception standing empty and the corkboard stripped of its usual advisories about the non-emergency hotline number and warnings against leaving valuables in cars.

But the mothballing process had screeched to a sudden halt, Kieran could see as he and Mia followed Renn and Pendlebury down the hall. A large yellowing map of the Evelyn Bay township looked to have been taken down and then hastily tacked back up, presumably for the benefit of the Hobart officers. The sun-faded paint on the wall showed exactly where it had previously hung. A couple of officers Kieran didn’t recognise glanced up as they passed, then turned back to their work.

‘The coffee machine has already gone, I’m afraid,’ Renn said as he led them into his office and gestured to two battered chairs. ‘But we can do instant if that’s of interest?’

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Pendlebury with a smile as both Kieran and Mia shook their heads. She ignored the fourth chair in the corner and stayed standing, leaning her hip against the filing cabinet from where she could see all three of them.

‘Right. Hopefully we won’t keep you too long.’ Renn sat down behind the desk that used to be the domain of Sergeant Geoff Mallott. It might quite literally be the same desk, Kieran thought, looking at the scratched surface as he unclipped Audrey and passed her to Mia.

Kieran wondered if Chris Renn was also counting off the days to retirement, semi-forced or otherwise, the way Sergeant Mallott had been that summer before the storm. Under the buzzing fluorescent lights, Renn looked older than he had yesterday morning. Kieran hoped working for his brother’s haulage company would turn out better for him than Mallott’s retirement had. Within six months of hanging up his uniform, Mallott had died on his sofa of a heart attack.