The Slipping Place

  Joanna Baker is the award-winning author of four murder mysteries. Her novel, Devastation Road, won the Sisters in Crime Davitt Award for Best Young Adult Novel and was described by The Age as ‘an outstanding first novel’. Joanna was born in Hobart and educated at The Friends’ School, the Australian National University and RMIT. She sets her novels in the two places she loves: Tasmania and the wine and high country of North Eastern Victoria. She also writes and speaks about murder mysteries – why they are so enduring, and why they are not trivial.

  First published in 2018 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

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  Copyright © Joanna Baker 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-57-4 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-58-1 (ebook)

  Cover and internal design: WorkingType

  For Martin

  Prologue

  ______

  ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?’

  The voice was tight, whining, hysterical.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Paul. He lowered the phone and looked again at the screen. Just a number. This person was not in his contacts.

  ‘What’s the worst thing a person could do?’

  ‘Who is this?’ But he thought he knew.

  ‘Paulie. Help me. Please. Help …’

  The connection was broken. A few minutes later there was a text message:

  Fri, 11 Mar 1.16 am

  Paul its Treen. Help me please please. Now urgent really really

  come now 52 Cooper St Mo

  He sighed and went to tell John.

  Two in the morning and moonless. Just sickly street light. Paul and John got out of their car and went to stand at the end of the driveway of 52 Cooper Street. The house was tiny. It was exactly the same as all the other houses in the street except that it was next to some kind of yard. Through a wire fence they could see storage sheds and piles of wood and iron. There was a faint odour, oil or some chemical.

  At the house, lights were on. There was a lot of noise coming from it, crashing electronic music, and over that the sound of shouting.

  ‘Call the police,’ said John.

  John hadn’t been in Hobart very long. He didn’t know there were places like Mornington, and Paul had tried not to tell him about Treen. Paul wouldn’t have told him tonight, and definitely wouldn’t have come, but John had taken the phone and read the text. He had said, ‘What sort of monsters are we?’

  But he didn’t understand. About people like this.

  ‘You stay there,’ said Paul. But John followed him.

  As they started down the driveway, the music stopped suddenly, leaving a ringing silence. There was a blast of sound, quickly cut off again, and then a wild shriek that might have been laughter or rage.

  Now someone started shouting. The voice was high-pitched and frantic. It was punctuated by a deeper one – short, sharp, angry sounds, three or four syllables at a time. Then there were a lot of voices all yelling at once, and some scraping, scuffling sounds, and some thuds.

  ‘Paul. Call the police.’

  Four young guys came out of the house. Paul and John stepped out of the way. Apart from some mumbled swearing, the guys were hardly speaking. They kept looking behind them and shoving at each other. As they went past, one of them grabbed John by the chest and leaned into him. ‘Do you want this? Hey, ’sa fucken Asian … faa … Woodsy!’ He looked around to show his friends, nearly fell, grabbed at John’s shoulder, pressed back into him. ‘Do you want some? Fucken … want …’

  One of his friends pulled him away.

  Inside the house, there was one final anguished scream. It broke into a series of high yelps and then, as if someone had seen Paul and John coming towards the door, it stopped. There was a crash of wood and metal. A lot of heavy things had been knocked down. Then silence.

  A man came out of the door. He was tall with very straight shoulders and a big bush of hair sticking out over his forehead.

  He said, ‘Oh, here they come.’ He shoved at Paul and went up the driveway.

  In the front hall the smell was sharper, chemical, like turps but dirty. The carpet and walls were darkened by rubbed-in grime. On the left there was an open door and a bedroom, with a woman asleep. Youngish by the shape of her, curled up on a slumping bed, her back to the door. Across the corridor, in the lounge room, they could see bottles and cans and greasy wrappers scattered everywhere, a couch lying on its back and, in the corner, a television, a table and some chairs all piled together. Above the pile there was a hole in the wall. Treen was in another corner, sitting on the floor with her head down and her hands over her hair. Near her, on the floor, there was a phone. Paul squatted by her.

  ‘Treen?’

  She moved her hands outwards and looked up, but not at him. She focused on the pile of furniture and the wound in the wall. Her hands stayed curled in the air beside her face.

  It was four years since he had seen her. Katrina, Kat, Kattie, Treenie, Treen. She had kept changing her name, had come to rest on the ugliest. And she was an uglier version of herself, too, although that could have been the greenish light, or whatever she had taken. Her face was puffy, rubbery. She had a swollen eye, a bruise, not yet black. And there was dark eye make-up smeared everywhere, so that he couldn’t tell what was paint and what was injury. Her whole face was like that, Paul thought. The lines were blurring. She was a form fading into background. Roland had drawn her like this once, in smudged charcoal. Maybe he had seen it in her, all those years ago.

  He didn’t want to touch her. ‘Treen.’

  She straightened her fingers and then relaxed them again. ‘What’s the worst person you’ve ever seen?’

  A young woman appeared from somewhere – plump, squeezed into orange polyester, with teased hair piled behind a rag and big Amy Winehouse eyes. She ran over to Treen and started pulling at her.

  ‘Care for him.’ She picked up Treen’s phone and then put it down again. ‘He’s yours. Care for him.’

  Treen whispered, as if hoping the girl might not hear her. ‘Help me, Paulie. Paulie, help me. Get Roland for me. Help me, get Roland.’

  John came in through a door at the back of the room. He was carrying a pale towel with blood on it. He said, ‘Paul.’

  At this door there was a different smell. Damp, something rotting. John already had his phone to one ear. He said to Paul, ‘Get a blanket. Keep him still. Don’t do anything.’

  But Treen was standing behind Paul. She grabbed at his shoulder and said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t.’

  John walked away, talking into the phone.

  Paul tried to go through the door to the back of the house, but Treen got in his way. Her mouth was a crooked gash, bloodless in a bloodless face. Her clothes smelt sour. She was whispering. ‘Paulie Paulie Paulie. Don’t, I don’t …’ Her eyes looked dark, even the whites, as if all the black colour, all the bruising, had leaked through into the eyeballs.

  She came nearer, put a hand on him. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?’

  Chapter 1

  ______

  There was something hard in the middle of the lawn. Veronica was walking there, heading up from painting the camellias and the stone wall at the bottom of the garden. She heard a tiny sound at the low gate and, when she t
urned to look, she trod on the hard thing, stumbled and fell to the ground.

  It wasn’t a bad fall, as these things go. She had time to throw her easel and the field box clear, and she managed to twist sideways so that her head missed the stones edging the fish pond. The twist sent a shooting pain up her left side, but this didn’t matter. Fifty-eight and falling over – shooting pains were to be expected. She lay still, smelling dead leaves and water, and paint from the open box. Through blades of grass she could see a silver tube, its black and white label, the band of clean, warm, carnival yellow. She rolled onto her back.

  Alan would have sneered at this, if he had still been here. The kids would have laughed. If they had still been here. They would have laughed with that mix of embarrassment and exasperation they reserved only for her. But they would have also been reassured by the fact that she hadn’t changed. Yes, she would have heard all that in the sound of the laugh. If they had been here.

  This morning Veronica had been thinking a lot about absence – people who have left, the spaces between things.

  Against the sky, the pine branches were charcoal, edged with smoky green. Usually, when she looked at her trees, they were flicking around in a northerly or a sea breeze. Today they were heavily, quietly still. Between them, the sky had a high veil of cloud, textured, but too far away to get a focus on, so that it seemed to be constantly pulling away, thinning and lightening and lifting up, as if it was making way for something.

  Something coming. She hadn’t heard the forecast but you could feel the approach.

  That idea made her prop herself on her elbows and look at the gate again. The sound had been stealthy, metallic, the scrape of the old latch.

  But there was no-one at the gate. And it wasn’t as if there was anywhere to hide. There was nothing growing down there because of the scraggy old cypresses that threw black shade and acid and killed everything underneath. Besides, the idea was absurd – someone sneaking in and hiding in the bushes. Whatever she thought she had heard, she had imagined it.

  But there was something hard in the middle of the lawn. She looked over there and saw a stone, smooth and white, and large, the size of a softball. Where could that have come from? Twisting around she could see only the empty house and the garden.

  The truth was, that feeling, that she was missing things, had been with Veronica a lot lately. She was constantly plagued by it – a sense that there was something she should be seeing, something at the corner of her vision, that vanished as she turned towards it. Partly it was about her painting. She knew that no matter how closely she looked at her plants, how carefully she imitated what she saw, always, in that immeasurable space between the world and the page, something was lost.

  But it was more than that, and it felt important. She lay back down again. The felted wool of her tunic was not waterproof. She could feel the cold of the lawn pressing upwards, and wetness was only a matter of time. But this needed to be examined. She squinted at the high cloud, tried to focus, lost it, closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, Lesley was standing over her, a smooth head silhouetted against the white. ‘I parked in the street. There’s a great pile of prunings blocking the driveway.’

  Veronica sat up. ‘Sorry.’ In conversations with Lesley that was often her first word.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lesley was wearing what she always wore when working in her gallery – a fine merino dress in sophisticated stone grey and a clever necklace from one of the current ranges. Over it she had a charcoal coat and a cashmere scarf. She was four years older than Veronica, particular about skin care, always perfectly groomed. Now she was looking at the things on the lawn. ‘Are you painting again?’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘Now, don’t you dare stop doing your little drawings. We’d feel so deprived.’ Lesley sold Veronica’s cards at her counter and she could never help being condescending about it.

  Veronica said, ‘I thought you were busy setting up the new space.’ ‘Oh, I am. We are.’

  ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Heavens.’ Lesley gave her wide rueful smile. ‘You’re going to think I’m an idiot.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘It’s Paul, of course.’ She locked her hands in front of her, pressed them against her stomach. ‘Vee. What else would it be?’

  Veronica didn’t like it when Lesley called her ‘Vee’. Something about the level of intimacy. They had known each other for twenty-four years, since the birth of Lesley’s son Paul and Veronica’s son Roland. The boys had been together in playgroups and preschools and they had been intensely close since they were five. The parents had been thrown together. And now that the boys were grown and gone, Lesley and Veronica still saw each other.

  ‘It’s not important. I can see I’m interrupting.’ Lesley started picking imaginary dirt off a sleeve, fastidious flicking movements. ‘I just thought you might have seen him.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Now that I’m here it seems ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s not ridiculous.’ She had to do a lot of this with Lesley.

  ‘It’s just that he’s been peculiar lately, very … distressed.’ It sounded as if she had rehearsed that word. ‘And look, we both know he can get into states, but this is worse. Something has really upset him. It’s been going on for over a month. And, of course, whatever it is, it’s bound to end up being my fault. I don’t have to tell you.’ She gave a pained sigh. There was a Catholic background here, a remnant belief in the virtue of suffering. Her tone was set at a level that would remind Veronica of all the trouble Paul had caused over the years, the sacrifices Lesley had made.

  Veronica was still sitting on the ground, with Lesley looming over her, but it was going to take a bit of a heave to get herself to her feet, and that would only make this conversation take longer. There’d also be an implied invitation for Lesley to come inside. She decided to stay where she was. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Well, of course he isn’t being clear. There’s some enormous secret. Nothing new there. He keeps talking about the past, the walks we had on the mountain and all those funny place names: the Lost World, the Devils Throne, the Sphinx. And the Slipping Place. Remember that?’ She looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Anyway, I’m just trying to head it off, whatever it is, before it starts to affect the gallery.’

  Lesley saw things clearly and simply. Whatever was wrong with Paul was not important except as the cause of bad behaviour that would affect the running of her business. Lesley was like that: controlled, neat, careful, modest in ambition. Everything Veronica should be.

  ‘And today he’s just vanished. I’ve got the display-stand man coming at noon to talk about his posts.’ They were opening a new floor in the gallery in a few weeks’ time. There would be a ceremony, full of the worst of the Sandy Bay crowd, Paul’s pretentious friends, and his supercilious boyfriend, John, all of them hoeing into canapés and pinot gris. ‘Well, there’s no point in me talking to a welder, is there? I just wish Paul would answer his phone.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for months.’

  At school Roland and Paul had spent all their time together. As often as they were allowed, they had stayed at each other’s houses. When they were nine they had created a kind of fantasy in which they were related, calling themselves third cousins once removed. But now they scarcely saw each other. Roland lived on the mainland.

  ‘You think it’ll get easier as they grow up but it doesn’t, does it?’ Lesley’s cheeks had become thinner, so that these days her wide mouth looked as if it was drawn back at the corners, her skin stretched tight over the cheekbones. She started rubbing her hands together, hard, as if the skin was irritated.

  Veronica tried to think of something that would help, or at least make her go away.

  But Lesley was looking at the house now. ‘I see Mr Thing hasn’t bothered to turn up.’ This wasn’t sympathy. More an accusation. She shook her head. ‘These big Davey Street places. People think they�
��re the best houses in Hobart, but they need so much work, don’t they?’

  They both looked at Veronica’s house, large and shabby, grey stone, with peeling window frames and broken mortar. There was scaffolding across the driveway side and the wall behind the old verandah was covered in skeleton stains where ivy had been ripped down. Next to the steps a piece of lattice had been pulled off, leaving a hole. The sight of it made Veronica feel dizzy. It wasn’t just the house. It was something to do with the broken lattice, the black space there. For some reason it made her remember Alan’s face as he had left, the way his eyes slid away, that blank expression he sometimes got that made her imagine she could hear someone screaming.

  ‘That man.’ Lesley was talking about the builder, not Alan. ‘People take advantage of you, Vee. You can never see them for what they really are.’

  Veronica looked back up, her neck protesting at the angle. Lesley was right, of course. Veronica had always spent too much time looking at the natural world, at lines, colours, light. She missed everything important about people, everything that was meant, everything that was felt. Her mother had said that about her, and then, as her children grew, they had said it too.

  Lesley’s clothes threw a greyish tinge up onto her face. ‘I’m making a start on writing that monologue for the gallery opening. I hope you’re still all right for Friday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You helped so much last time. You know how stressed I get, with the terror of the blank page.’ Lesley pulled a horrified face and then smiled. ‘And it is fun, isn’t it? Working together.’

  Veronica winced and quickly smiled to hide it. For her, helping Lesley with writing projects was a way of keeping in touch. The two women had very little in common, and yet at one time they had been important to each other. She felt a duty to find some way of spending time together. ‘Oh, yes. I –’

  ‘Paul thinks this one should be based on The Portrait of a Lady of all things. You know? The book. He wants me to write about one of the women in it. Madame Merle.’ Lesley shrugged, meaning she had never heard of the character. ‘He’s even dug out an old drawing of Roland’s.’