Through a Camel's Eye by Dorothy Johnston Page B

on the young policewoman’s questions. Another drawing. That might be better than words.
    Camilla drew the lighthouse with fog swirling around it. She drew herself in the bottom corner of the page, remembering a summer morning and a woman’s cry. She pencilled in a figure in a black coat, with a blank, white face.
    Anthea sat with her hands folded in her lap, knowing that she must be patient, schooling herself to it.
    Camilla handed the sketch to Anthea, who studied it, then began asking questions, gently and carefully. It had been between Christmas and New Year, Camilla wrote, one of those summer fogs that descended without warning. She hadn’t followed the woman, or seen where she’d gone. She’d stayed by the lighthouse for a while, and then turned for home. She was sorry. She knew she should have gone to the police.
    Having done her best to apologise, Camilla leant back and closed her eyes.
    Anthea reached out and gave her hand a squeeze. She said she had to go, but she’d be back to visit later.
    Anthea stopped by the nurse’s station on her way out to mention the chest of drawers and ask that water be left within the patient’s reach. The nurse on duty eyed her grumpily and blamed the cleaners.
    On her way back to Queenscliff, Anthea hummed a song from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and smiled to herself, reflecting on how little it took to give a person the illusion of travelling towards a brighter future. She’d left Chris a voicemail message, wondering how he was spending his Sunday. Working in the garden would be her guess.
    Anthea’s phone rang when she was nearly home and she pulled off the road to answer it. Chris was pleased that she’d been to see Camilla, and agreed that it had probably been Margaret Benton on the cliff path. When Anthea offered to bring the drawing over straight away, he said there was no need for that. Tomorrow would be fine.
    Anthea had a bad moment, opening the door. Her clean flat, which should have made her feel a certain pride - at least she wasn’t living in a slum like Julie Beshervase - was loud in its emptiness. The silence hurt her ears.
    Exhausted but unable to sleep, Camilla replayed sequences in her mind.
    Her night-time walk to Riza’s paddock returned as though every move she had made was magnified.
    A rustle in the undergrowth could have been a bandicoot, but was more likely to have been made by a bird. Frogs called from the dam. A yellow glow behind the hill came from the farmhouse. The surf, always louder in the dark, had filled Camilla with a wild gladness, as though Riza had been found and was safe and well.
    The walk had made her warm. Though frightened of showing herself at the paddock in the daytime, she understood that night brought its own form of courage - fugitive, stealthy and reliable. As the days had passed since Riza’s disappearance, she’d gone about her simple routines, shopping and preparing food, all the time feeling as though she was on a cliff edge that at any moment might give way.
    Her thoughts returned to the woman with the white face, who, in her haste, a stranger to the area, could have walked clean off the path. Perhaps she had; but then, of course, her body would have been found on the rocks below.
    Camilla had seen the news, and knew Margaret Benton’s body had been found. She might not be able to talk, but she still had a working brain. Who had been after her? Who had made her scream?
    On the path to Riza’s paddock, Camilla had sniffed the air, as though she might smell whoever had taken him away. She’d tripped and fallen over a heaving root, mouth open on a wordless cry.

SEVENTEEN
    It was Monday morning, the start of a new week, and the footpath outside Queenscliff police station rang to the heavy tread of a tall, self-confident man - not yet middle-aged, but no longer young. Anthea realised that he was deliberately walking in the middle of the path, had no intention of