Rocking Horse Road Read Free

looked right enough for the
under-seventeen girls' beach racing: a silver girl
finishing a race, head dipping forward, arms flung
backward. The finishing tape is draped across her
chest. Apparently the trophy hadn't been significant
enough to be engraved with Lucy's name. There
was, however, no one else it could have belonged to
— and of course it matches the one in the photograph
perfectly.
    All things considered, it's a very good photo of
Lucy. We like to think that in different circumstances
she would have been happy for it to be printed so
widely.
    That summer, the weather had stayed hot right
from early November. By the time Lucy Asher was
murdered no one was talking about a perfect summer
any more; everyone was moaning about the drought.
What little lawn there was down the Spit had yellowed
and died even before school finished for the year, the
dead blades of grass eventually blowing away on
the easterly to scatter over the water of the estuary.
Only the cabbage trees seemed to thrive. They had
predicted the long hot days, flowering in great white
sprays in late October. Nearly everything else had the
life sucked out of it by the sun.
    Except for the sea lettuce: that was also roaring
ahead. Whether it was the heat raising the water
temperature in the shallow estuary, or the outflow
from the oxidation ponds (we called them the poo
ponds) that emptied into the estuary at the western
end, that year the sea lettuce spread like never before.
Lime green, and crinkled at the edges like slippery
potato chips, it carpeted the acres of mud that was
the estuary at low tide. The sea lettuce threatened to
choke even the deepest channels. It sucked the oxygen
from the water. Dead flounder and herring could be
seen floating on the surface. New warning signs went
up warning people not to eat the shellfish.
    There were bitter letters to the paper about council
mismanagement of the estuary and numerous theories
put forward explaining the sea lettuce's sudden
bloom. But all we knew was that it stank like nothing
else. During the hot days and nights the smell hung
low over the Spit. The fug of the estuary at low tide
permeated that summer. It was the smell of the rotting
sea-lettuce, mud and the dead fish, the flesh of which
armies of crabs fought over in the darkness, clicking
and clattering. The smell crept into our nostrils as we
lay in our beds thinking about Lucy. It got so bad some
nights that we could taste it. It put us off our food and
stopped us from sleeping.
    Some of us took to rubbing Vicks under our nostrils
at night. We slept wrapped in the smell of childhood
sickness and were taken back to a time when our
mothers would tuck us in tight and murmur soothing
spells against our fevers. It was a time that, at fifteen,
we could remember clearly, but that we didn't yet
fully understand was gone forever.
    The amount of material we've collected over the years
has become a problem. By the time we were in our
mid-twenties we already had enough paperwork
for two filing cabinets. There are the newspaper and
magazine articles, but also the police reports, plus the
transcripts of all the interviews (we have the tapes as
well). We've kept the larger items: the photograph
of Lucy; the trophy of the running girl; the two rafts.
There are hundreds of photographs. We've also got a
small library on police procedure and forensics. There
are books on DNA and fingerprinting. There are lots
about famous crimes and how they were solved.
Anything really that we've come across over the years
that might be of some use or relevance.
    Alan Penny was originally in charge of the
archives. But Al got married to a local girl when he
was only twenty-one and they had three little girls in
quick succession (actually, if you do the maths, the
first baby came a little too quickly after the wedding).
Al's wife told him, when she was pregnant with their
third kid, that she didn't want their home cluttered up
with all that 'morbid rubbish' so we all came