“From what he described it made for a rather shocking sight. To be confronted like that was confusing, the last thing he expected. It’s a difficult age for a boy, all of those new feelings, and seeing the pair of them in flagrante delicto, so to speak, made him angry.”
“Angry?”
“I have often found, Sergeant Kelly, that anger is a convenient stand-in when men—or boys—aren’t ready to name their true feeling.”
As the sergeant was new to town and therefore not aware of the ins and outs of local family relationships, the reverend went on to explain that of course Marcus Summers had felt betrayed by his brother, and hurt. It had been the two of them for as long as he could remember—a duo, a pair, a team. But now his brother had joined the adult world and left Marcus behind. And although the barrier between them had nothing to do with John Turner, in Marcus’s view, his friend was guilty by association.
“It was John’s sister,” Reverend Lawson explained, “and his great big house, the wonderful, wealthy world of the Turners, that had seduced Marcus’s brother away. And so he did the only thing he could think of to exert some form of control: he cut his friend out of his life.”
All of which is to say that when Matthew McKenzie began appearing on the driveway of the Turner house, John was more willing than he might otherwise have been to overlook his new neighbor’s foibles. It certainly didn’t hurt that Matthew seemed to sport another shiny piece of kit each time they met. While Mrs. Eileen McKenzie’s departure created a minor scandal in Adelaide medical circles, it had proved an unexpected boon to her son, in that Mrs. Edith Pigott reported a significant increase in the number of packages arriving at the post office from Sydney markedfragileandhandle with care.
“You’re so lucky,” John had said enviously, inspecting the new Carl Zeiss binoculars, the Gibson guitar, and, most excitingly of all, the Kodak Brownie camera. “I’d give anything for one like that.”
His new friend had laughed. “It’s ’cause of the guilt,” he’d said, and for a split second John had caught himself fantasizing about what his own mother might send him if she were to run off to Sydney, too.
But John didn’t really want his mother to leave. He wanted his whole family to stay together forever. Indeed, it was this very fact that ended up tying him to Matthew McKenzie and sent him to meet his new friend at the fence line that Christmas Eve. The last time his father was home, John had heard his parents arguing. John was good at hearing things he shouldn’t and had started keeping note of them in the little leather-bound book his mother had bought him so he could write down his big ideas and thoughts.
“It seems I can’t do anything to keep you happy,” his father had said. “I’ve given you all of this. What more could you want?”
“You know what I want.”
Their voices had got low then, too low even for the old glass-against-the-door trick to work, until finally John’s father’s exclamation cut through: “They’re my children, too.”
At thirteen, the vagaries of adulthood were still a mystery to John. He had been shocked to hear his parents using hard voices, but when he tried to tell Matilda about it, she refused to listen. John had carried the conversation around with him for days, and then Matthew had come along with the brand-new camera, and he’d forgotten his troubles for a time. Until one afternoon, when the two of them were sharing a round of ham sandwiches in the shade of the hollow tree, John had found himself telling his new friend what he’d heard.
Matthew considered the information. “Has your dad been staying away from home a lot lately?”
John agreed that his father’s business had been taking him abroad more often than usual.
Matthew batted a fly from his nose and finished chewing a mouthful of bread. “Sounds like your dad is planning to split. My mum had a lot of sudden ‘work trips,’ too.”
John had been shocked at the suggestion that his father might ever want to leave them. He didn’t, couldn’t, believe it was possible—but he did start paying closer attention to Thomas Turner’s actions. He also took the opportunity to look through his father’s briefcase when it was left in his study one evening, and that’s where he’d found the letter from “Rose.”
Matthew was the one to inform police officers, shaking his head and adopting a world-weary tone: “The letter was a shock, poor kid. He idolized his dad.”
Thomas Turner, when questioned in London, was to confess that yes, he had met a woman named Rose in the course of his business in England, and she had developed an infatuation for him.
“It was all a bit embarrassing,” he told the Met officer, when asked why he hadn’t volunteered the information sooner. “It didn’t seem remotely important. My wife didn’t know about it. There was nothing to know. I returned to Australia soon after the woman wrote the letter. I certainly hadn’t meant to keep it—I’d forgotten it was there.”
John began thinking solemnly about ways he could convince his father not to leave. And that’s when he remembered the trip the two of them had taken to see the documentary filmThe Back of Beyondwhen it was playing at the cinema on Hindley Street down in Adelaide. Thomas Turner had been thrilled by the experience. “Do you see how the filmmaker manages to make us think and feel new things, all while telling a story? What a skill.”
Mr. Turner had always praised his son for enterprise. “He takes after me” was the proudest comment John could hope to hear. Faced with the new camera, rememberingThe Back of Beyondand his father’s reaction to it, John had known exactly what he had to do. He was going to tell a story that would make his father think and feel and realize just what he’d be giving up if he were ever to leave this place—this was John’s new and most important mission.
He just needed to convince Matthew to let him borrow the camera.
As John scanned Farmer McKenzie’s field waiting to catch sight of Matthew, back at the house Evie Turner was completing a mission of a different nature. Unbeknownst to her mother, Evie had also been up since before the dawn. She’d woken in the dark and crept very quietly around the landing and down the stairs, escaping the house via the heavy front door rather than the kitchen, so as not to alert Charles Dickens and set him off crowing for his morning scraps.
In and of itself, this was not unusual. Evie often sneaked out while the rest of the house was asleep. At ten years of age, she enjoyed a great deal more freedom than her peers, independence that was not by parental consent so much as an acceptance by Mr. and Mrs. Turner that their third-born child was, and had always been, utterly ungovernable.
“She is a true libertarian,” Mrs. Turner had said to others, her tone one of description rather than apology, when called upon toexplain her daughter’s refusal to comply. “Happy to follow the spirit of the law, but with no compunction to be bound by its letter. She reminds me of my father. He was just the same.”
Whether Evie had heard this comparison or not, she had developed an affinity with the faraway, long-ago figure of her maternal grandfather. He had been a naturalist, just as she was, and while her mother did not speak often about her own childhood, Evie had gleaned enough to inform Mr. Simon Ackroyd during science class that her grandfather had been a celebrated scientist—had even published a book calledFungi of the British Isles. This seemingly innocuous fact was to be of some interest to police officers in the weeks following the Turner tragedy.
It so happened that throughout 1959 Evie had been putting together her own study of plant and animal life around Tambilla. She was torn between whether she would be a scientist or an artist when she grew up, but either way had written, as part of an autobiography project at school, that she planned to surround herself with animals and plants and as few human beings as she could manage.
“Yes, she did strike me as a loner,” Mr. Ackroyd told police. “But not in an unhappy way. She seemed content—the sort who preferred her own company.”
One of the few children who did consider Evie Turner a friend was Kitty Landry, a fellow student in Miss Metcalfe’s year four class at Tambilla Primary School, and the type of even-tempered ten-year-old who was already growing into the role she would someday occupy of community peacemaker. Kitty sat very close beside her mother in the police station on the Tuesday after Christmas when she told Sergeant Kelly, “People used to say Evie was weird, but she didn’t care. She said she liked weird things.”
