Chapter Twenty
Cam didn’t sleep at all on Sunday night.
Not even for an hour. He had to borrow a T-shirt from Lola’s dad, and otherwise just sleep in his jocks.
Elsa said he could sleep in Lola’s room if he liked, on the trundle bed that pulled out, but he’d shaken his head so she put him in the guest room instead.
And the bed felt huge and cold and even though he didn’t get scared of the dark or anything like that, not since he was a little kid, being alone in that room made everything worse.
Cam tried not to cry. He figured that crying didn’t make anything better, and his dad would definitely just tell him to get some sleep, that everything would be fine in the morning.
He tried to say that to himself, inside his own head, using his dad’s voice.
It kind of worked, for a while. But what he couldn’t get out of his head was the way his dad had looked when the police were at the house.
He’d looked scared. Freaked out. Confused, like he had no idea what to do next.
Which was kind of good, because it meant that whatever the cops thought, they’d got it all wrong. But it was also bad.
So Cam didn’t sleep. He stared at the ceiling some of the time and he cried when he couldn’t help himself and he waited for the morning to come.
It started to get light outside. He heard movement in the corridor.
Straight away, Cam got up and got dressed.
His jumper was a bit dirty from the park, but it felt better, way better, just being in his own clothes.
He pulled on his socks, but his runners weren’t there.
Where had he left them? Probably the TV room.
He moved silently along the dark corridor.
There was just a little light creeping in from outside, enough to see by.
He found his runners and put them on. That was better.
He made his way downstairs. He found Lola’s mum alone in the kitchen.
She was wearing workout gear and had her hair up in a ponytail.
She was setting up the coffee machine when he came in, and didn’t see him.
‘Good morning,’ said Cam.
She jumped and swore a little under her breath. ‘Cam, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was probably being too quiet.’
‘You couldn’t sleep?’
Cam shrugged.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Kind of.’ He was really hungry, but what he wanted was to eat Nutella toast, sitting at the benchtop at home.
He knew from experience that Nutella toast wasn’t usually an option at Lola’s house.
Lola’s mum was into healthy stuff. There was always fruit and this weird seedy bread and sometimes eggs.
She looked at him. ‘I’ve got some chocolate croissants in the freezer. Maybe I should stick some in the oven and we can have a treat. What do you think?’
‘Yeah,’ said Cam. ‘I mean, yes please.’
She told him to sit at the table while she got things ready. Cam waited until she’d put the croissants in the oven.
‘Is my dad coming home today?’
She came to him and leaned on the benchtop, and took his right hand between hers. That felt weird and kind of uncomfortable, and he was glad when she let go.
‘I don’t know that for sure,’ she said. ‘What’s going to happen this morning is that I’m going to bring you and Lola to school. And you can just have an ordinary day. While you’re at school I’m going to go and see your dad, wherever he is.’
‘Even if he’s still arrested?’
‘Even if. Nathan has a very good friend who’s an excellent lawyer, and Nate’s going to call him first thing this morning. He’ll go and talk to your dad and to the police and see if he can sort all of this out.’
Cam felt a tiny, tiny bit better. Like everything that had felt weird and not real had become a little more solid.
‘When they arrested him, they said that he’d mu . . . murdered someone.’
She nodded. He’d told her that the night before. ‘But you and I know that that’s not true.’ Her eyes were very blue, very steady and very calm. ‘Your dad would never, ever do that.’
Another tiny part of Cam steadied and settled. He nodded.
‘That’s right. So someone has made a mistake, somewhere, and now we have to fix it.’
‘But sometimes those mistakes get really bad,’ Cam said. ‘Sometimes people go to prison even when they didn’t do anything wrong.’ Everyone knew that.
‘That’s true, and that’s a terrible thing. But that is not going to happen to your dad, because he has friends who won’t allow it. He’s going to have a very, very good lawyer, and that lawyer will help your dad to show the police the truth, and then they’re going to let him go.’
Cam tried really hard to figure out if she was lying or telling the truth. Her eyes were still calm, still steady.
‘I want to see my dad.’
‘I know, Cam. And it might take some time before I can make that happen, but I promise you, you’ll see your dad soon, and everything’s going to be fine.’
* * *
At five o’clock on Tuesday, Elsa and Nathan drove into the city through rush-hour traffic. They parked on Bourke Street, on the second floor of a multistorey car park, and made their way quickly down through the grubby concrete stairwell to the street below. Nathan reached out and took Elsa’s hand.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said.
‘Are we late?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘I think we’re going to be okay. It’s just across the street.’
But he picked up his pace, and Elsa was briefly glad that she’d gone with her boots instead of the heels she’d originally laid out for the day. Nathan led the way into a small office building and through a lobby to an elevator, where he hit the button for the sixth floor.
‘You’ve been here before?’ she asked.
‘Met Badger for lunch here a couple of years back. It was a few months after they moved in. I think he wanted to show the place off.’
The elevator doors opened onto a short corridor that led to a set of glass double doors.
Nathan held a door open for Elsa, and they entered an open plan space with a reception desk, and a waiting area with large windows that offered a view of the city skyline.
There was a young man sitting behind the reception desk.
He was wearing a suit, complete with jacket and tie, and Elsa tried to remember the last time she’d seen someone wear a full suit to work.
‘Can I help you?’
‘We’re here to see Andrew Cheslyn,’ Nathan said. ‘He’s expecting us.’
‘Of course. If you’d like to take a seat, I’ll let Mr Cheslyn know you’re here.’
They weren’t waiting long. Andrew arrived moments later. He grasped Nathan’s hand and kissed Elsa on the cheek.
‘Come in, come in. Do you want coffee? Are you hungry? Not sure why I’m asking. Can’t offer you anything to eat at this time of day. Café around the corner does sandwiches, but they close at three.’
He led them into his office. There was a large desk to the right of the door, and to the left a round table, meant, presumably, for meetings. Desk and table were both covered in small stacks of papers and files.
‘Place is a mess. Sorry about that. Bloody paperwork seems to multiply. You’d think we’d be past all this, right?
We should have gone entirely electronic, but the law seems to operate about fifty years behind everyone else.
’ He lifted a couple of bundles of files off the table and set them on the floor by the wall. ‘Sit. Please.’
‘Thanks for doing this, Badger,’ Nathan said.
‘Not at all, not at all.’
Andrew Cheslyn was a friend of Nathan’s from high school.
They’d played rugby together. The nickname, ‘Badger’, had come about partly because Andrew had developed a streak of grey through the front of his hair the year he’d turned fourteen, but also ‘because he was a vicious little bastard on the rugby pitch,’ Nathan had said.
Elsa hoped, for Jack’s sake, that the vicious little bastard was still in there somewhere, because on the outside, Andrew was now every inch the urbane Melbourne lawyer.
His jacket was hanging on the back of his door and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, but the suit was Tom Ford, the haircut was expensive and his fingernails, Elsa couldn’t help but notice, were manicured.
‘How is Jack?’ she asked.
Andrew grimaced. ‘Not great.’
Elsa reached out and took Nathan’s hand under the table. ‘I tried to see him yesterday’ she said. ‘The police wouldn’t even confirm that they had him. I don’t understand what’s happening here. All I know is what Cam told us about the gun, and that Jack was arrested.’
‘Sure. Sure. Well, let’s start from the beginning.’
The beginning, for Elsa, had been that painful conversation with Cameron on Sunday night, which had led her to realise that Celine had misunderstood nothing.
Panicked, Elsa had called Balwyn Police Station.
An officer there had taken her information and promised to have someone call her.
When she’d called again an hour later, they’d confirmed that Jack was in custody at Melbourne West Police Station, informed her that Child Protective Services would be in touch about Cameron, and refused to say anything more.
‘I met with Jack this morning at the remand centre and I represented him this afternoon at his filing hearing,’ said Andrew. ‘He’s been charged with murdering a man named Robert Walker.’
The name meant nothing to Elsa.
‘Robert Walker was a psychologist. He was also married to Vanessa Walker.’
Andrew looked like he expected them to recognise the name. It took Elsa a second.
‘The TV presenter?’
Andrew nodded, and Elsa tried to digest that information.
‘What’s a filing hearing?’ Nathan asked.
‘It’s just the first in a long series of procedural steps. A hearing where dates are set for the police to hand in their brief of evidence, for the committal hearing, that kind of thing.’
‘Did Jack know Robert Walker?’ Elsa asked.
‘He says not,’ said Andrew.
‘Okay,’ Elsa said. ‘What about bail?’
‘Jack’s not going to get bail,’ Andrew said. The words landed heavily in the room, shocking Elsa into silence.