‘Did he say why not?’
‘No. Maybe it had something to do with him not really being Byron Swift, but I didn’t know about that until today.’
‘And you accepted that? That you couldn’t go with him?’
‘I didn’t have much choice.’
‘And how was he? Was there any indication of what he was about to do?’
‘None.’
Martin pauses, trying to assimilate this wash of new information. It corroborates what the boy Luke said, that he saw Swift’s car at the bookstore.
‘Fran saw Byron at the church a little later. She says that he asked her to wait for him out at Blackfellas Lagoon. She seems to believe they were going to leave together.’
‘More like he didn’t want her to witness what he was about to do.’
‘Maybe. You don’t think it’s possible that he would have taken her with him?’
Her features, so impassive a moment before, grow agitated as Martin’s insinuation, that Swift favoured Fran. ‘No. Why would he have taken her and not me? I was having his baby.’
There is silence as Mandy composes herself. Martin tries to imagine what was going through the young priest’s mind that fateful morning. He’d been accused of molesting children by Herb Walker. So he’d either decided to leave town or had been instructed to go; he was either fleeing from the allegations of abuse or from the fear an investigation would uncover his impersonation of Byron Swift. Was he planning to move elsewhere, drop the Byron Swift identity and reinvent himself as someone else? That would certainly explain why he didn’t want to take Mandy with him. But what of Fran?
‘Mandy, that story you spun me when I first got here, about Liam’s father being some abusive arsehole, what was that?’
She sighs. ‘I couldn’t tell you the truth. You must realise that. I didn’t know you; I’d just met you. You were just another journo hungry for a story. You would have splashed it all over that horrid rag of yours. Made it all dirty and ugly when it wasn’t like that at all. I was here after the shooting. I remember the journalists exaggerating any little thing, blowing them out of context. I saw what drives you. You think I’d visit all of that on my son?’
‘So why tell me anything at all?’
‘Because I wanted your help. I wanted you to find out who he really was. Why he did it.’
‘To find out who he really was? So you had guessed that Byron wasn’t really his name?’
‘No, not that. But there were his tattoos, indications he’d been in the armed forces. And all the contradictions in his personality and how he led his life. Once he was dead and I had Liam, I wanted to know more about him. I thought I might persuade you to find out for me.’
‘Persuade? How about manipulate?’
She’s growing testy again, unhappy at being challenged. ‘Use whatever word you like.’
‘And that story about getting pregnant from a one-night stand in Melbourne, you made it all up on the spot, just like that?’
‘Of course not. It’s what I’ve told people in the town ever since I got pregnant. I didn’t want them to know Byron was Liam’s dad.’
‘Why not?’
‘What do you think? I went through shit as a kid because my father was a rapist; how would Liam fare if the whole world believed his father was a homicidal maniac?’
The rape. Martin can see the passion in her face, see her love and her conviction. But she’s about to be interviewed by the police; he might not get another chance for some time. He swallows, pushes on.
‘Mandy. The allegation of rape against Harley Snouch. We can’t find any record of it. The researchers have been scouring the archives. It looks like there was no conviction.’
She looks shocked, eyes wide with disbelief, before certainty returns. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s not true.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ He tries to pitch his words as sympathetically as possible. ‘You don’t think it’s possible your mother made it up?’
‘Fuck no. Why would she do that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she had good reason. The first time we met, you spun me a story to protect Liam, about you contemplating suicide, Byron saving you, touching your soul.’
‘But that’s all true in it’s own way—I was lost before I met him. It’s like an allegorical tale.’
MARTIN SITS IN MANDALAY BLONDE’S OFFICE, TRYING TO WRITE, BUT MAKING no progress. The daily story is only half written and his feature on Riversend’s attitude towards its homicidal priest taunts him from the screen. He’s feeling a swelling anger, a deep antipathy towards Byron Swift. A murderer, possibly a paedophile, and certainly a serial exploiter of vulnerable women. Could anyone be more susceptible to seduction than Mandy Blonde, marooned in Riversend caring for her dying mother? Telling poor Fran Landers to wait out at Blackfellas Lagoon when he had no intention of taking her away; telling Mandy, newly pregnant, that she couldn’t leave with him. And that was just in Riversend. How many more women had he preyed upon down in Bellington? How many more had he impregnated and abandoned in other country towns? Was that the sordid secret behind his assumed identity: fleeing a series of paternity claims? And yet, even now, the women, the victims, defend him. Jesus wept. What did Swift tell himself: was he honest enough to admit to his predations, or did he rationalise them as giving comfort and succour to those who needed them?
Again Martin is forced to consider his own behaviour: sleeping with Mandy when he has no more intention of taking her out of this town than Byron Swift ever did. And in an hour or two, he’ll walk down to the police station and drop her in it. Her diary, her relationship, her boy. No wonder he can’t concentrate; the urgency of the daily story, the biggest story in the country, is upon him, yet he can’t progress until he informs the police about the diary. He thinks of Mandy, so beautiful and so vulnerable, condemned to become entangled with the Byron Swifts and Martin Scarsdens of this world. Eventually he’s had enough of staring at the laptop screen and decides to get out and about.
Outside the heat is waiting. It no longer comes as an affront or a surprise, merely an accepted constant, bearing down like the weight of existence, all that he deserves. He walks in the shade of the shop awnings towards the crossroads where the bronze soldier stands impervious. Two grizzled bikies roar slowly past on their guttural machines, acknowledging no one. A car moves along Somerset Street, heading west, past the soldier, past the bank, moving slowly before coming to a stop, the driver executing a reverse angle park across the road from the police station, joining a number of others. Martin can see a huddle of media gathered in the shade of a tree opposite the station. He’d been thinking of walking down there himself, checking it out, but now he considers turning right and going to the services club for something to eat.