John Marsden - Circle of fight

I went red, wondering how much I should say. ‘It’s a bit awkward. It came from over the border. Someone saw a map that had our house marked on it, like they had a special interest in us.’

He frowned. ‘I hope you haven’t been involved in anything you shouldn’t. I hope your guerrilla activities ended when the war did.’

I sat there in silence, wishing I hadn’t started down this path. Guerrillas. All I could think of was an old joke of my father’s. One day when Mum was away we were working in the machinery shed, close to the house, and it was getting quite late. Eventually Dad said he’d go into the house and turn on the griller, to heat it up so we could chuck a couple of steaks on it when we knocked off work. He came back a minute later, looking shaken.

‘That was a close shave,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

‘I nearly turned on the gorilla instead.’

He thought he was so funny. When I groaned he said, ‘It’s no laughing matter. Have you ever been trapped in a kitchen with a turned-on gorilla? It could have been very ugly.’

I wonder if people like Jim Carrey and Glenn Robbins have kids, and whether their kids groan and say, ‘Oh Dad,’ when their fathers make jokes.

But Henry was still frowning and all I could say was, ‘Well, I wasn’t meant to see the map but it did give me the idea that someone might be after us.’

‘If you weren’t meant to see the map, how did you see it?’

‘It’s a bit awkward,’ I said again, going even redder.

‘Do you want to help us or not? Do you want this boy back or don’t you?’

‘I think the Army knows about the map,’ I said. ‘But I can’t really say anything, except that there was one, and I heard about it a couple of weeks ago and it made it seem like we were going to be a target.’

Suddenly he exploded. It was so unexpected. He’d been so nice and mild and calm before that. He leant forward and shouted into my face. ‘You think you’re going to sit there and tell me you’ve got vital evidence but you won’t tell me what it is? Listen, I’ve got no tolerance for people like you who think you can run some kind of amateur war, and then when things go wrong you call in the police and expect us to clean up the mess. And you don’t even tell us what you’re up to!’ He stood up, scraping his chair back. ‘We’re not a taxi service, you know! You don’t just call us in and then send us away when we’ve done what you want. A major crime’s been committed here and it’s my job to deal with it, and if you obstruct me in doing that, then you become part of the crime. Is there anything about that you don’t understand?’

I shook my head. I was too numb to speak.

‘Then where did you see the map? Who had it? Where did it come from?’

His tone had changed again, back to calm and reasonable, so I started to think this was just part of his routine. An act he did when he wanted information. Good cop, bad cop. Maybe he wasn’t too angry at all.

I was trying to weigh up the consequences of betraying Homer and Lee and Liberation but it was so hard to think. All I could do was decide not to betray them right now. I needed time. An hour, a couple of hours. Would that make a huge difference to Gavin’s chances? That was the bit I couldn’t get straight in my head. The possibilities ranged from ‘I’ve just sentenced him to death’ to ‘It won’t make any difference.’

‘I never saw the map. I just heard about it.’

‘Who did you hear about it from? We need to talk to him. Or her. Urgently.’

‘I think it was smuggled over the border. But I don’t know any more than that.’

‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t know any more than that. But the person who told you about it, I want to know what that person knows. I need to know who that person is.’

‘I can’t tell you. Not for now anyway. I need to check up with them.’

That made him mad again. And so it went on for another ten minutes, him getting mad, being calm, getting mad. I was so tired and my head was hurting. I couldn’t make these decisions on my own. I wanted, I don’t know, not a too-hard basket but a too-hard silo.

Then suddenly he stopped.

‘Well,’ he said, shrugging. ‘We’ll do what we can, based on the limited information you’ve given us. When you’re ready to tell me more I suggest you call me, and the sooner the better. I can tell you that if he’s on this side of the border we’ll find him, but if he’s on the other side of the border it becomes a matter for the Department of Internal Security and the Department of Foreign Affairs. We have no jurisdiction there of course. In the meantime, I’ll leave four officers here overnight to protect you, and we’ll resume our search in the morning. I want to put a tap on your phone in case they try to contact you. Based on previous cases, it’s not very likely, but it has happened occasionally.’

He pushed a form across the table at me. ‘That’s a consent form to have your phone line monitored. I suggest you have something to eat and then try to get a good night’s sleep. There’s nothing more you can do. You can leave this to us now.’

Homer arrived, looking frantic. He took me into the study and listened in silence as I told him the story, but he was impatient for me to get to the end. Just as I finished Jeremy arrived and I had to go through it all again. I’d already decided that Liberation was my best hope so I didn’t need much persuading when they said the same thing. Even in the middle of the pain and the fear and the sense that we had to do something right now, I was still curious to know whether one of the two boys in front of me was the Scarlet Pimple, but they weren’t giving anything away.

I told them about Henry, the policeman, and the pressure I was under to tell him about the map. Homer and Jeremy looked at each other. ‘We’d better make a few calls,’ Jeremy said.

‘Not from this phone,’ I said. ‘The cops are listening in.’

They raced back to Homer’s place while I started making tea and coffee for the cops. Two of them were women and although I think I generally get on better with guys I really liked having these two around. They took their mugs outside so they could keep guard and I went out with them and just hung around while I waited for Homer and Jeremy to get back. The two women didn’t talk much but they had a comforting manner, like they knew what they were doing and nothing too bad was going to leap out at me while I was with them.

The only things that did leap out at me were Homer and Jeremy, out of Homer’s old ute. They hurried me into the house. But it turned out they didn’t have much to say.

‘Look,’ said Homer, ‘we’ve talked to a few people. They all say the same thing. Just try to stay calm, and wait at least twenty-four hours. I know this is going to sound cold-blooded, but the way they put it was that if he’s dead, he’s dead. And if they were going to kill him, they would have done that already.’

This was close to what Henry had said, so I nodded and kept my lips firm, and tried not to tremble too much. I noticed Homer was trembling, although he tried to hide it by hugging himself as he talked.

‘There’s no point telling the police any more about the map. They can’t do anything about stuff that’s on the other side of the border, so even if they knew where the map came from they couldn’t go over there and arrest anyone.’

Homer went on. ‘The Liberation guys think that if Gavin’s alive, he’ll be on the other side of the border. They think he almost certainly is alive, and you’ll get a message eventually telling you what they want. I know the cops said differently, but they don’t always get to hear about the messages.’