The Parable of the Mustard Seed Page 18

  “Do you want to tell me about him?” he asked quietly. “What he was like?”

  Caleb shook his head, and for a moment John thought it was a refusal, and then Caleb leaned back so he could look at John. “I don’t even know what he was like. We weren’t supposed to talk or anything, or play like normal kids. I grew up with him, and I hardly knew him. All I knew is that when I looked at him, I got these weird feelings. It didn’t feel like a sin.”

  “It wasn’t,” John said. “It isn’t.”

  “Not out here,” Caleb whispered. “But in there, everything was. I knew it was wrong, but it felt like bubbles under my skin when he caught me looking and he smiled. It felt good. It felt like something totally new, something that had been created just for me, that nobody had ever felt before.”

  John reached out and carded his fingers through Caleb’s hair.

  “I loved him, and I didn’t even know him,” Caleb said. He laughed softly, and there was a sharp, bitter edge to the sound. “It wasn’t real, was it? It couldn’t be.”

  “I think it was,” John said. “I think you can fall in love with someone like that. I think what you felt was real.”

  And maybe it wouldn’t have lasted even if Simon had lived, but John didn’t need to tell Caleb that. Caleb and Simon had been kids. Their love must have been a crash of hormones, of fear, and of rebellion. It had burned bright, but only very, very briefly before it was snuffed out in the most violent way.

  “How do I know?” Caleb whispered.

  John pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “Did it feel real?”

  Caleb gave a jerky nod.

  “Then it was real,” John said. “Mate, of everything that happened in that place, the one thing you don’t need to question was you and Simon, okay?”

  The one pure thing that Caleb had got, and they’d torn it apart in front of him while he screamed.

  Caleb straightened again. “Do you need to interview me again? About what happened in the tank?”

  “Maybe at some point,” John said. “But not yet. We’ve still got your statements from back then.”

  “They didn’t help back then though.”

  “They didn’t help because we didn’t have a body back then,” John said.

  They still didn’t, not really. They had a body, but they had to prove it was Simon. They had to connect it to the Children of Galilee. John hoped to hell that their working theory—that Simon had been related to one of the other cult members—proved to be correct. Because otherwise they had two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle they knew belonged together, but no way to join them. No way would that hold up against a good defence barrister and a reasonable doubt argument anyway.

  But if police work had taught John anything, it was that you just kept plugging away at a problem, day in and day out, until you finally got somewhere. It might take months, or even longer, but John was nothing if not tenacious.

  “Okay,” Caleb said, and nodded. “So this time it’ll be different?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Caleb glanced at him, his lips quirking. “You never make promises you can’t keep, do you?”

  “Not about my job.” John took his hand. “But I promise that whatever happens, I’ll be beside you as long as you want me there.”

  “Thank you.” Caleb squeezed his hand with shaking fingers. “How about an easier promise though?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when I get out of here, you’ll come and visit me at home and we’ll go and get sushi, even if you hate it.”

  “I don’t hate it,” John said, fighting a smile. “I just don’t like it as much as other takeaway options, like pizza, or fish and chips. And that happens to be a very valid position to take, excuse you.”

  Caleb’s smile was like sunshine breaking through the clouds. “You’ll buy me sushi, won’t you, please?”

  John rolled his eyes. “Of course I will.”

  There wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t do for Caleb. Caleb could ask for the world and John would do everything in his power to give it to him, but of course Caleb never would ask, because there was still a part of him, and maybe there always would be, that thought he was unworthy of even the scant moments of happiness and pleasure he received. John silently prayed for a lifetime together, just so that he might get a chance to prove him wrong.

  “Sushi,” Caleb whispered. “And orange Fanta.”

  “Disgusting,” John said, but leaned in and kissed him anyway.

  When he drew back again, Caleb was laughing softly, and John thought that he was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.

  On Sunday morning John juggled a Bacon & Egg McMuffin and a slightly burnt coffee in the passenger seat while Liz drove to Toowoomba along the Warrego Highway. Sunday traffic was light.

  “Back when I was a kid, the trip between Toowoomba and Brisbane seemed like the longest drive in the world,” Liz said. “Though that was because I was a kid from Chinchilla just itching to get to the big smoke of Brisbane. Course, even Toowoomba was the big smoke compared to Chinchilla.”

  “I’m pretty sure everything is the big smoke compared to Chinchilla.”

  “Hey! There are smaller places.” Liz shrugged, and tapped her fingers along the top of the steering wheel in time to the beat of the song on the radio. “Not many, but still.”

  She lifted her foot off the accelerator to give a nervous P-plater plenty of room to switch lanes ahead of them.

  “How’s the family?” John asked.

  “Harry’s cutting another tooth, so I’ve been up to my arse in drool and Baby Panadol for the last few days,” Liz said. “Then last night he’s so miserable that the second he finishes eating he throws it back up again, and also manages to shit himself at the same time. So there I am, holding this screaming kid, vomit all over my nightie and even in my hair, shit dripping down his legs and onto me, and Craig says, ‘Hey, love, do you reckon it’s time we tried for another one?’”

  John couldn’t stop a burst of shocked laughter. “He didn’t!”

  Liz threw him a wry look. “Right? That man needs to know how to pick his moments.” She smiled. “Still, we might be trying for another one soon.”

  “That’s great,” John said. “Good on you.”

  He ignored the faint pang in his gut.

  John wasn’t sure kids were in his future. He loved kids, and he expected David and Tee to produce an entire football team at some point. John liked the idea of being Uncle John to a bunch of little kids. He wondered if Caleb wanted kids, and then he wondered exactly what kind of fate he was tempting by assuming they’d be together long enough for that discussion to even take place. There was no doubt in John’s mind that he would always love Caleb and that Caleb would always be his one, but it was also never that simple. Not for anyone, and certainly not for Caleb. Caleb’s storm was always building, and all either of them could do was take it day by day.

  “Did you see Caleb last night?” Liz asked, and John jolted slightly at her prescience before he figured that, no, he was just that predictable.

  “Yeah. He’s doing okay.”

  “Good.” Liz drew her eyebrows together, a slight furrow appearing in her brow. “I went back over his statements after you left. About what happened that night in the tank. It’s…” She shook her head. “I don’t know how you and Brian held it together in those interviews.”

  “We drank a lot,” John said, and he wasn’t sure it was even a joke. Brian had cracked a bottle of Scotch open right there in the office the day they’d send the brief away to Prosecutions, and not in a celebratory way.

  “And today I get to meet the mastermind,” Liz murmured.

  John thought about that as they drove.

  He’d never thought of Ethan Gray as a mastermind. A deluded fucking nutjob, sure, but not a mastermind. He’d struck John as the sort of guy who had just enough charisma to be dangerous. In another life he would have made a killing selling used cars or timeshares. That natural magnetism
, combined with what John thought was a genuine belief he was the next coming of Christ, had ultimately been a deadly combination.

  For a man who’d once told his followers that he was God’s only son, Ethan Gray had come down in the world. He was now living in a rundown duplex in Harristown, near the caravan park. The right half of the duplex had a padlock on the front door and boarded up windows. It didn’t just look empty, it looked abandoned. Ethan Gray lived in the left half; the windows were open, and a grimy curtain fluttered in the breeze, beckoning Liz and John in from the front gate.

  John banged on the door. “Ethan Gray? Senior Constable Faimu and Acting Senior Sergeant Grant, Logan CPIU. Open the door, please.”

  The man who opened the door appeared a lot older than eight years accounted for, and a part of John was perversely pleased at that. He’d done his time hard. Good. He was thinner around the face than John remembered, with sunken cheeks and hard lines around his mouth. He wore his hair short these days, and it was thin on top and greying at the temples. He had bowed shoulders, and a stoop.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his gaze flicking from John to Liz and then back again.

  “Just a few questions, Mr. Gray,” Liz said breezily. “Can we come in?”

  Ethan shuffled back to allow them inside, where the front room smelled like cats’ piss and stale cigarette smoke. John wandered over to the sagging bookshelf: a couple of magazines, some dog-eared novels, and a hardcover copy of the Bible. John curled his lip at the sight of it.

  “What do you want?” Ethan asked again, digging around on his cluttered coffee table and producing a packet of cigarettes.

  “We’re just checking in,” Liz said. “You’re one of our more high-profile parolees, Mr. Gray. It’s in all our best interests to keep communication open between us.”

  A derisive snort. “Bullshit.”

  Liz shrugged. “I want to talk to you about Simon. I want to know what happened to him.”

  “He ran away.”

  John huffed out a breath as he thought of the bones of the boy that had been levered from the hard-packed dirt in that scrubby ground not too far away from the old Children of Galilee compound.

  “What happened that night?” Liz asked.

  Ethan fumbled with his lighter, the wheel rasping a few times before the flame appeared. He sucked on his cigarette, and a curl of smoke drifted toward the ceiling. “Leon came to me to tell me that he’d seen the boys acting in ways that weren’t in accordance with God’s Holy Word, and he and Ben took them away to be corrected.”

  “Did you give that instruction?” Liz asked.

  Ethan narrowed his eyes are her. “God did.”

  “Hmm.” Liz glanced at John. “Well, to all intents and purposes, that was you, wasn’t it?”

  Ethan answered with a shrug of his stooped shoulders. John wondered if he’d been this evasive with the parole board and, if he had, how they’d let him out of prison to begin with. But maybe he’d spun then a different story about how all his delusions were behind him now. Maybe they had been, right up until he’d been stuck in this sad little flat with nobody to worship him, and now he wanted it all back.

  “Did you know what sort of correction would be administered?” Liz pressed.

  “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Ethan murmured.

  “I’m not a fan of corporal punishment myself,” Liz commented, “but even I can tell the difference between a few smacks on the backside and almost beating a child to death.”

  Ethan’s gaze flicked away from her.

  “In Caleb’s case, I mean,” Liz said. “Because Simon was beaten to death, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Ethan said, a hard tone creeping into his voice that must have only been a shadow of how commanding he’d once sounded. “Simon ran away.”

  Liz looked to John and raised her eyebrows.

  “Everyone says that,” John said. “Funny how he ran so far that nobody ever saw him again.”

  “Funny,” Liz echoed.

  Ethan flicked the ash from his cigarette into a cracked coffee mug. “I didn’t touch a hair on his head.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Liz said. “You gave the order.”

  Ethan lifted his chin and sneered. “You can’t prove it.”

  And there it was, John thought. There was the old arrogance that would trip him up eventually. Eight years couldn’t completely erase the God complex.

  “Not yet,” Liz agreed, unperturbed. “But we will.”

  She gave him a pause to hang himself; he didn’t take it.

  Liz smiled slightly. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Gray. I’d just like to remind you that your parole conditions prohibit any communication with any former members of your group, and that if you breach those conditions your parole can be revoked and you can be sent back to prison.”

  Ethan Gray’s expression morphed into narrow suspicion. “You came all the way from Brisbane to ask me about Simon?”

  Liz’s smile grew. “Thanks for your time,” she said again.

  They left.

  “What a fucking cunt,” Liz said thirty minutes later as she dug into the bag of cinnamon donuts from Donut King.

  John was driving now, navigating their way out of the Toowoomba CBD, such as it was, and back toward the highway.

  “I mean, call me old-fashioned,” Liz said, “but I prefer my gods to be a little more impressive. You have to wonder what the fuck any of them ever saw in that.”

  “He didn’t look quite so pathetic eight years ago,” John said. “He had this… this energy, I guess. This presence. You could see the way they all looked at him like he really was God, you know? It was this weird kind of mix of worship and terror, and you couldn’t pick them apart.”

  “Like kids with abusive parents.”

  “Exactly like that,” John agreed with a nod.

  “Well,” Liz said, “we’ve stirred him up now. We just need the forensics back, and hopefully that’ll give us enough to arrest Harrison and Quartermain. Then we’ll get Gray too, and any other fucker we can prove knew what happened and covered it up.”

  “You don’t think we’re playing our hand too soon?” John asked.

  “It’s not the way I would have chosen to do it,” Liz said at last. “But the boss has a different opinion, and he has more stripes than me. Anyway, none of them are allowed contact. If we find out they’re comparing notes before we make our move, then we’ll just add a breach of parole onto their charges.”

  John nodded tightly.

  “Well get them, John,” Liz assured him. “We’ll get them.”

  They headed east back toward Brisbane.

  Chapter Sixteen

  John hung back and watched as Darren Fletcher paced back and forth, sucking furiously on a cigarette as though he was a drowning man pulling oxygen from it. “I don’t know this kid, John! I don’t know him!”

  The more time John spent with Darren, the more he saw the resemblance. It wasn’t just in their dark hair and eyes, or the similar cast of their features. It was in their pain too. Their pain and their rage and the open wounds in their chests where their hearts had been ripped out.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with him?” Darren demanded, as though John had the answers and was withholding them for the hell of it. “How am I supposed to make it better?”

  “I don’t know,” John said evenly, not even blinking as the stinging smoke hit his eyes. “But I’ll help you any way that I can.”

  On Sunday evening, after another fruitless day of interviewing the couple of former members of the Children of Galilee who’d agreed to come to the station, John walked nervously up the front stairs of Caleb and Darren’s house, a bag of sushi rolls swinging from one hand and a 1.25 litre bottle of Fanta in the crook of his arm. Excited barking greeted him at the door before he even had a chance to knock.

  “Hey, Cricket,” he said through the open plantation shutters, and Cricket stuck her nose against the g
ap. Her tongue lolled out.

  Footsteps sounded, and a moment later the lock in the door turned, and the door was pulled open.

  Darren’s expression shifted though more than a few conflicting emotions before it settled on vaguely uncomfortable. Given the other possibilities, John was going to count that as a win.

  “John.” He stepped back and let John inside. “Caleb’s out the back.”

  “I got enough for everyone,” John said, holding up his plastic bag. “I’d like it if you joined us.”

  That was possibly a lie, but he knew that the sooner he and Darren worked though their discomfort, the sooner they’d settle back into being friends again. And John wanted that almost as much as he wanted Caleb. Both the Fletcher men were important to him. It would break his heart to lose Darren’s friendship over this, but Caleb always came first. And he hoped Darren would eventually realise that was one thing they had in common.

  Darren gave him a look he couldn’t quite read, but then nodded and led the way through the house to the wide back deck. John grabbed some glasses from the kitchen on his way outside.

  Caleb was sitting at the table on the deck, his legs drawn up, staring out into the darkness.

  “Caleb,” Darren said, and then, slightly louder: “Caleb.”

  Caleb seemed to jolt awake. He turned in his chair, his blank expression morphing into a delighted smile as he saw John. “John!”

  He pushed himself up out of his chair and then stepped toward John. He hesitated, his smile vanishing, and then his arms fell to his sides. His hands twitched as he glanced at Darren.

  “We need to talk about this,” Darren said. “I’m not happy about it, but this isn’t about me.”

  Caleb nodded warily.

  John stepped forward with his bag of sushi. He set it on the table, and brushed against Caleb’s shoulder while he did it. He gripped Caleb’s forearm and squeezed, and Caleb’s shoulders sagged as the tension flooded out of him.

  “Brought you sushi,” John said.