Behind Mt. Baldy (3 page)

The freezing water took his
breath away as he began to breast stroke towards the dark object bobbing in the
waves. But it was not the cold which seized the back of his skull in an icy
grip. It was stark terror.

For a moment he faltered. He
stopped to tread water, his eyes riveted to the bobbing, waterlogged object. It
was half awash and now he could see hair moving in the water.

Peter called, “You OK Roger?”

Roger didn’t turn. He waved a
hand and, gritting his teeth, swam towards the corpse. As he got closer he saw
it was indeed a man, a grey haired man dressed in a dark brown coat. A hand,
the fingers puffy and unnaturally white, seemed to reach towards him.

Roger suppressed a scream,
then
gasped as a wave washed into his open mouth. He
spluttered then swam forward. ‘Strewth it’s cold!’ he told himself, his mind
still trying to fend off the awful reality. Then he puzzled: ‘How do I move him
... it ... what do you call a corpse?’

Roger saw that the body had a
grey scarf wound around its neck. He grasped this and went to tow it...him
..
ashore
. The body moved. Then it
suddenly rolled. An arm came over. A clammy hand seemed to grab at Roger’s leg.
He cried out in fright.

But the man was dead. There was
no doubt of that. As the body had rolled over Roger had seen that the left side
of the skull was a mangled mass of bone and ... and brains?

The scarf was no good. Worse
still Roger knew he was getting tired. In his mind he saw the chill black water
and ooze deep beneath his feet. ‘I don’t want to drown,’ he thought, mastering
with difficulty the urge to give up and swim ashore. He turned on his side and
grabbed the coat collar and began to swim as strongly as he could. His legs
kept touching the body. The scarf wrapped around his right ankle.  He had
to stop and untangle it.

It seemed a long way back to the
shore. Roger could see the others standing there but they didn’t seem to get
any closer. With a feeling of mounting desperation Roger resumed swimming. Just
as he felt he would have to give up there was splashing in the water and Graham
joined him.

“OK Roger. I’ve got him. Not far
now.”

They floundered into the
shallows. Thankfully Roger felt sand under his feet.  He stood up and,
helped by Graham, dragged the body up onto the beach.

Stephen turned away and vomited.

CHAPTER 2

IS THIS TROUBLE?

Stephen continued to retch almost
unnoticed by the other three. They stood staring down in horror.

At last Graham spoke. “He’s dead
alright. And you don’t need to be a doctor to see he didn’t drown,” he said.

“You’re right there,” agreed
Peter, bending to look more closely, his face a mask of grisly fascination.

“Is that a bullet hole in his
forehead?” Graham asked.

Peter bent closer.
“Could be.
Don’t know. If it is, it came out here, on the
left side.”  He pointed at the mangled mess Roger had already observed.

Roger eyed the evidence of violent
death and felt nauseous. “How long has he been dead do you think?” he asked.

They eyed the man’s skin, all
swollen and wrinkled from the water. The sight was so horrible Roger couldn’t
take his eyes off it. The eyes of the dead man were still open - dilated but
dulled.

“Can’t tell,” Peter decided.
“There’s no blood.”

“Don’t bodies sink?” Roger
queried. “At least till they start to decompose and the expanding gasses give
them buoyancy.”

“Aah Roger!” wailed Stephen, who
turned away to gag again.

The boys debated this for a
while. Then Peter asked, “What will we do?”

“Get dressed first,” said Roger,
who had suddenly realised he was shivering with cold. A glance at his naked
body made him feel intensely self-conscious, and also very aware of his mortal
frailty.

The boys were distracted from
their problem for a few minutes while small hand towels were dug out of packs.
Roger and Graham dried themselves and quickly dressed. Both found their teeth
chattering involuntarily until they had begun to warm up.

“We’d better tell the police,”
Stephen suggested.

“Yes, at once,” Graham agreed.
“And we will certainly have to wait till they’ve interviewed us.”

“There goes our hike,” Peter said
morosely.

“Looks like it,” said Graham.

“Is this trouble?” Roger asked.

Graham looked puzzled. “Trouble?”
he replied. “I don’t see how it could involve us, other than being an
unpleasant experience and an inconvenience.”

“No. I meant should we phone
Captain Conkey?” Roger replied.

Graham thought for a moment,
then
reluctantly nodded. “Yes. He needs to know. It will
annoy him if he finds out from someone else. We will tell the police at the
same time. Who feels like a run back to the kiosk on the other side of the
dam?”

Stephen put his hand up at once.
“I’ll go,” he volunteered.

“I’ll go with you Steve,” Peter
added.

Graham nodded. “Yes. Both go.
Look, don’t tell anyone, just the police and Captain Conkey. We don’t want a
crowd of tourists here.”

Peter nodded. “Right you are.
Come on Steve.” he said. He set off up the track. Stephen needed no second
bidding. He fairly sprinted up to the road and did not once look back.

Graham looked at his watch. Ten
past twelve. “I reckon we’ll have a good half hour to wait, minimum.”

“Where’s the nearest police
station?” Roger asked.

“Not sure. Atherton I suppose.”

“Should we search his pockets for
identification do you think?” Roger asked.  He walked to the other side of
the body to peer at the man’s shoes.

“No.
Definitely
not.
Just leave him for the police,” Graham replied.

“Should we cover him up?” Roger
asked.

“What with?
You can if you like. I think
I’ll just move away a bit,” Graham answered. Then Roger saw him shiver. Graham
trembled
so much Roger worried he had taken a chill from the
water.

Graham dug in his pack for his
pullover and walked back up the track to sit on some rocks in the sun. “Come up
here Roger. We can watch the road and it’s out of the wind,” he called.

Reluctantly Roger joined him. He
couldn’t stop looking at the body. “Do you think he was murdered or did he shoot
himself?” he asked.

Graham gave him a jaundiced look.
“I wish you’d change the subject. How do I know? I’m not a bloody forensic
scientist.”

“I wonder who killed him and
why?” Roger speculated. 

Graham kept looking along the
road towards the dam. “The others should be back soon.  Ah!  Here
they come now.  No. No it’s not.  It’s more than two.”

Roger stood up to look. A line of
people walking in single file had appeared around the bend. “They’re Scouts,”
he said.

Graham looked horrified.
“Crumbs!
We don’t want them to see this.”

Roger bit his lip and nodded.
“I’ll go and warn them,” he said. Without waiting for an answer he strode off
along the road to meet the advancing column, now some forty or fifty in number
with several Scout leaders.

The four friends were also Senior
Scouts and as Roger walked to meet the Scouts he vaguely remembered hearing
that there was a Scout gathering this week at Camp Barrabadeen but as it wasn’t
for
Seniors
he hadn’t taken much notice. Then his face
broke into a smile as he recognized the tall, thin man with the moustache and
glasses leading the line. It was ‘Silver Wolf’, the leader of their troop.

The two greeted each other with a
Scout salute, Roger a bit self-consciously in his army uniform. He fell into
step beside the Scout leader and quickly
appraised
him
of the problem.

‘Silver Wolf’s’ eyebrows rose.
“The body is on the beach and visible from the road. Hmm! Oh blast!
Another car.”
He stopped and shrilled a whistle. The line of
Scouts all stopped and stepped to the side. The car roared past. “Well, road
safety comes first. We will just have to hurry them past. I’ll just have a word
to ‘Brown Owl’.”  He called to a solid man in his fifties who walked up to
them.

The man’s cheerful smile died at
the news. “Oh well. We will just go on,” Brown Owl decided.

“I’ll stay with these lads till
the police come if you don’t mind,” Silver Wolf said.

Brown Owl nodded. He blew his
whistle and waved the Scouts on. When they reached the little path Roger and
Silver Wolf stopped. Graham joined them. The body was clearly visible, but only
if you looked. Roger turned his back on it to talk to the boys to distract
them. Some he knew, so he could make smart comments.

The plan half worked. Some of the
young boys saw the body and pointed and the rumour ‘accident’ went along the
line but most
were
too hot and footsore from their
hike to care.

As the last boy went past, Silver
Wolf turned and led the way down to the body.  Roger felt very relieved
that they now had an adult there with them.

The Scout Master pursed his lips
as he bent to examine the head wound. After a careful look he stood up. “He’s
certainly been dead a while and shot for sure. But I’m sure I’ve seen him
before. He looks like the old man who drove up to Platypus Lookout yesterday
morning. We were just leaving on a nature walk when he arrived. He was driving
an old blue car, a Datsun I think it was.”

Roger looked up. “Here are the
Police.”

A police car had pulled up on the
side of the road. Out of the back climbed Peter and Stephen and from the front
two uniformed policemen. The group waited while they walked down.

Both Roger and Graham were
surprised to recognize the senior of the policemen. It was Senior Constable
Grey, although now he wore the rank of sergeant.

Sergeant Grey grinned at them.
“G’day young Kirk.
G’day Tubby.
 
I just knew, the moment I heard that if four kids on a hike had fished a body
out of the lake, which four it would be. How are you?”

He shook their hands and they
mumbled hellos. Roger was nettled by that ‘Tubby’ and kept back a bit.

Graham gestured to the three
chevrons on the policeman’s rank slide. “Have you been promoted
Sir.
I mean Sergeant,” he asked.

Roger looked at Sergeant Grey and
shuddered. He had vivid memories of their earlier meetings during some
adventures on the Kuranda Railway two years before.

Sergeant Grey nodded.
“Yeah.
The powers that be finally realized what potential
they were missing,” he replied. He turned to Silver Wolf and introduced himself
and the constable with him. “This is Constable Widmark.  Now let’s have a
look at this stiff.”

They moved over to the body. The
policemen examined it for a few minutes and Sergeant Grey questioned the boys
on how they had discovered it. When told Roger had swum out and towed it ashore
he gave the Roger an appraising look. That nettled Roger even more with its
implication that Sergeant Grey probably thought him fat and soft.

The constable searched the body
then stood up.
“Nothing Sarge.
Not a thing in any of
his pockets.”

“Looks like it
was murder then.
Any labels or name tags on the clothes?  Look inside the shoes too,”
Sergeant said. Then he turned back to the boys. Roger and Stephen both kept
staring as the constable peeled the coat from the corpse.

Sergeant Grey said, “Now, tell us
what you were doing here. I’ll have to get full statements from each of you and
I will have to do that with your parents or a solicitor or some other such
adult there.”  He looked up at the Scout Master. “Could you do that Sir?”

Silver Wolf assented. Sergeant
Grey thanked him and went on, “I can take notes now but they need to be typed
up and checked and so on.”

Roger pulled a long face. He
didn’t like the policeman and this would surely spoil their hike.

Sergeant Grey glanced at him and
saw his expression. “Why so glum?  What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Because we are on our five day
expedition for our Duke of Edinburgh badge and this will ruin it,” Roger
replied.

The boys then explained why they
were there.  Sergeant Grey nodded. “Yes, I see what you mean. Look, don’t
get distressed. We’ll try to get it done as quickly as we can. This case is out
of my hands anyway. As a Homicide or Suspected Homicide it’s CIB stuff.
There’ll be some Detectives on their way here by now.”

“Where from
Sergeant?”
Peter asked.

“Mareeba for sure.
 
Maybe
Cairns.”

The boys did the calculation in
their heads. “That’ll be hours!” Roger said.