Free Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon Page B

and was still wearing the white
shirt from the Power Store he managed. His name
badge was pinned to the pocket. Like most of us Pete
had put on a bit of weight over the years. His shirt
was tight over his gut where he had tucked it in to his
belt and there were sweat stains under the arms.
    There was another long pause. Calbourne Courts
is over in the western suburbs and we listened in vain
for the familiar scream of a seagull. The only noise was
the hiss and rumble of the heavy trucks passing on the
wet surface of the new motorway that had recently
been built on the other side of the fence.
    Mrs Asher seemed to find nothing unusual in
recounting episodes from her life to the half-dozen
middle-aged men who had squeezed themselves into
her small unit. But after an hour she tired and her
stories began to be broken up by longer and longer
gaps. When she was not speaking her head began to
nod forward before snapping back up. Each time this
happened she would look around the room wide-eyed
as if seeing us for the first time. Sensing that we were
missing our opportunity, Jim Turner asked if she knew
anything she could tell us about the circumstances of
Lucy's death. We all leaned forward.
    Mrs Asher became suddenly guarded. She shuffled
back into her big chair and fixed Jim with a look. Her
eyes went small and sharp until they were almost lost
beneath those puffed bags of flesh. 'She died,' she said
emphatically and shook her head as though a fly had
landed on her hair. 'My little girl died. That was the
end of that.'
    She told a few more half stories from the days when
her daughters were young, before they went to school.
It was a period that seemed lodged in her mind like
a time of golden weather. But on Lucy's murder she
would not be drawn. Finally she fell asleep. We stood
quietly and filed out, shutting the door behind us.
    We wondered if Mrs Asher would remember
we had been there when she woke up. Perhaps the
dented pillows and occasional biscuit crumb on the
couch would be a source of confusion or intrigue to
her. Would she even vaguely remember the group of
inquisitive men who had appeared in her lounge, or
would sleep, like an unusually high tide, wash her
mind clean of memory's footsteps?
    Perhaps Mrs Asher was right. Maybe there does come
a time when that should be the end of that. Perhaps
we should just let it go, stop digging when we have
no map. It is not uncommon for one of us to promise
himself that he's not going to carry on pursuing the
investigation. All of us have had times in our lives
when we've told ourselves we're not going to lose
sleep thinking about it any more, or go through the
files just one more time. We've persuaded ourselves
that when we meet with the rest of the group for a
beer or two, we're going to insist that we don't talk
about anything to do with Lucy Asher. We've all had
patches when we felt like that. Jase Harbidge went
as far as suggesting that we form a support group,
L.A.A. — Lucy Asher Anonymous. He was only half
joking. Sometimes our abstinence lasts a few months.
Mark Murray went a whole year and a half in the
mid-nineties, before an article in the Herald about a
case with some similarities to Lucy's brought him
back into the fold.
    Mostly our breaks are brought about by the feeling
that there is no progress, that our lives are becalmed,
although it is often wives or girlfriends who agitate
enough to force a clean break. 'Creepy' is the adjective
most often used by women. They resent the time we
spend on the case, time they rightly feel is lost to them
and to our families. But it is more than that: women
sense that the Asher case is an area of our lives into
which they can have no entry. It has been said many
times over the years and in many different voices,
and perhaps they are right; perhaps we should, 'get
a life'.
    But that is easier said than done. It would be fair
to say that none of us has ever got over Lucy Asher.
She was our first true love and, in some sense, our
last. Of