There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Nine

Thursday July 7

Avery's father looked at me when we all got to the police station as if he already knew. And I felt guilt; of course I felt guilt. But he wasn't there, he didn't know exactly how it all went down. And as it went on over the next few weeks I never really got the chance to explain it to him, like I will for you. I guess I had history of being on his wrong side in more ways than just with Avery.

The senior cop had summed me up when he first arrived at the place we'd rented for the last nine months. And in his defence the place wasn't in great shape. Pizza boxes gaped from different corners and surfaces, like obese alligators waiting to be filled again. There were a few beer bottles in various states of emptiness, angled where they had last been sucked from or hurriedly poured to get rid of the feeling of what loomed for us both as quickly as the world would then allow. And looming always was the great malfeasance that was our undoing.

But the other cop, the pretty brunette with the perfectly cut suit, she looked at me in a way that both of us knew this didn't strictly have to always be about business. In a funny way she reminded me a bit of Avery, to be honest.

They'd seen the bedroom – only this was arranged and neat (in order to finish what we had started and leave as perfectly as we wanted to remember entering it all those months ago. When our first year or two together had been so soft and warm and promising – where the world seemed to want to wait for us to catch up and understand why everyone else was so keen to search for things they thought they wanted and needed. And perhaps the world seeming to possibly offer us this was a greater form of treachery than what Avery or I had ever done) and so caught his predictable gumshoe attention.

Irrespective of this however, he'd been quick to jump to conclusions that suited him, and in turn Avery's Dad grew more certain of what he thought he knew.

I sat in the hard plastic chair and looked at my hands on the white desk, stained with blood and scratches of those who'd gone before me, equally guilty or innocent – it hardly mattered. I saw how my hands looked so clean, so child-like.

'Interview started at 8:15 pm on Friday July 8, 2016.' He stared at me with those eyes of his that seemed to bore right through me. The girl, Harper, sat and watched him as much as me. I could smell her perfume, Elie Saab, and I knew she was trying to avoid my eye contact. She seemed scared – of him, not me.

I wasn't cuffed.

'Let's go back to the start mate. Tell me what happened.' The middle-aged detectve looked like the cat who'd got the considerably tasty canary.

'Did you want a coffee?' I don't think he was giving me more time, more like he wanted me to feel less comfortable, less able to gather the bullshit story he thought I might be coming out with. Harper almost went to stand up to go and get me one but I said 'No', and she settled herself again after the bloke had thrown her a dirty look.

'Well, when you say the start it could go back a fair way.' All of a sudden as I said this, I had an overwhelming urge to go right back to that night near Barwon Heads and tell him everything. That'd shut the bastard up – give him so much more than the smug prick thought he might get, and it would unload a truck load of stuff from my thin shoulders, but I couldn't of course. Now that Avery was gone it was mine alone to carry, and protect.

'I've got as long as you need mate.'

'OK.' I took a deep breath and closed my eyes – if I played this right and told the absolute truth there was no reason to be worried, and no reason that anything that had gone before needed to come into it.