The Survivors(53)

Even now, Kieran caught Renn casting his eye over the room. Whatever he and Pendlebury and the other officers had been looking for, they still hadn’t found it, Kieran felt sure. They must be fairly certain it wasn’t in the house, though, or Kieran doubted they’d have let Olivia back in, let alone him and Mia. Renn also hadn’t seemed worried about them smuggling something out in their pockets or the nappy bag Mia was carrying, Kieran realised. So, probably nothing small then.

What was it? He couldn’t help glancing around as well, aware he wouldn’t recognise a missing item even if he tripped over it.

Olivia barely looked around, walking straight to her bedroom. Mia followed her in and sat on the edge of the bed as Olivia opened a drawer and began to pile underwear on the dresser. Kieran hovered in the hall, giving them some space.

Renn peered in to check what Olivia was doing and ducked straight back out again. He went to the back door and unlocked it, stepping out onto the verandah. He stood framed in the doorway with his arms folded, and his gaze resting on the floral tributes near the shoreline. Two camera crews were down there, Kieran could see. The guys from the Surf and Turf the other night, plus a new pair. They were both interviewing a man who was pointing at something out to sea while trying to stop his dog from chewing the flowers.

Kieran turned away and came face to face with the last room in the hallway. The back bedroom. In his parents’ house, this was his room. In Fisherman’s Cottage, it had belonged to Bronte. The door was wide open. No privacy for the dead, Kieran guessed.

Bronte’s room had the specific type of sparseness that suggested its occupant hadn’t planned to stay long, Kieran could tell from the hallway. A double bed with a green and white doona cover took up most of the space, along with an open clothes rail where she had hung up a single row of dresses and tops. A spare Surf and Turf uniform dangled from the end, garish against her own clothes, which were mostly black and grey. A full-length mirror was propped against the wall, with a hair straightener and a makeup bag on the floor beside it. The single window in Bronte’s room looked out onto the beach, across the sand and down to the place where her body was found.

A desk had been pushed underneath the window. Bronte’s art station, Kieran thought. It was the only cluttered space in the whole room, the surface covered by different types of pencils stacked in cups, small pots of paint and a pile of notebooks and papers. On top of a thick sketchbook lay a yellow industrial-looking torch. ‘Sean Gilroy’ was printed along the side in capital letters.

Kieran looked at the torch and the desk and suddenly imagined Bronte in that room at night. Settling in with the blinds pulled down, and then hearing a noise outside. Getting up from the bed or desk chair, reaching for the torch and going to the window. Kieran tried to picture what Bronte would have done next. Would she turn off the main light and peer around the edge of the window frame, letting her night vision adjust to give her an advantage? Or would she hoist the blind up and stand there, brazen and backlit as she aimed that beam of the light out onto whatever was waiting on the dark beach? Kieran hadn’t known her well enough to guess.

He turned away from the bedroom and walked across the hall and to the back door. Renn looked up as he stepped out.

‘Olivia told you Bronte thought she heard noises at night a few times?’ Kieran kept his voice low so as not to wake Audrey.

Renn sighed. ‘Yeah.’

‘Any idea what that was?’

‘No.’ Renn rubbed his eyes and turned his back on the beach. ‘You know what it’s like along here. Could have been anything at all. Dog, another animal, anything. A person. Who knows?’

He seemed very flat. Kieran wasn’t sure if it was down to being here in the house, or the sight of the tributes on the sand, or the encounter outside the station with Trish Birch. Take it seriously this time. Perhaps simply the investigation in general. Kieran suspected having Pendlebury as a shadow would make anyone want to make sure they were doing things to the letter. Kieran looked back at Bronte’s room.

‘Am I okay to take Sean’s torch, do you reckon?’ he said. ‘He needs it for the wreck.’

‘That yellow one?’ Renn said, his eyes still on the shoreline. ‘Yeah. You’re right to grab that.’

‘Thanks.’ Kieran went back inside, blinking in the sudden darkness of the hallway. As he stepped into Bronte’s room, he could hear Mia’s and Olivia’s voices floating from the main bedroom.

‘Bronte lent me that book.’ Olivia sounded subdued. ‘She said it was her favourite of his.’

‘Yeah, it’s one of my favourites too. They made it into a movie.’

‘I think I saw that. It was good.’

‘Yeah. The book’s still better though,’ Mia said, and Kieran could hear the rustle of pages. ‘“For Bronte, thank you for the inspiration. Yours, George Barlin.” Were they friends, then? The most I’ve ever got from him was a signature. “All the best” once, when the signing queue was short.’

‘Friends? No, I don’t think so,’ Olivia said. ‘George must have twenty years on her. I think he just knew her from around the Surf and Turf.’

‘Is his wife here with him?’

‘He’s not married, is he? He doesn’t seem married. He’s always in there alone.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause and a muffled noise, and Kieran realised Mia was checking her phone. ‘No, you’re right, it says here that he and his wife have split. That’s sad. Maybe that explains the sea change. I think they’d been together for a while.’ Mia was quiet for another moment. ‘They met when they were both interning as journalists on a newspaper in Sydney and have a five-year-old daughter. Separated last year. Amicable, blah blah. He’s in this article going on about mutual respect and how he’s never felt so creatively free.’