Gunshot Road (5 page)

Meat shed man

I STEPPED OUT INTO
the dazzling glare. It felt like being zapped by a battery of lasers. I followed June's directions and came across a concentric building with fly-wire walls and a wet hessian door.

The little dog was on guard. It bristled when it saw me coming, unleashed a racket of yaps and flapping. The man inside—broad of back, jobby-jowled—was hacking into a strung-up side of beef with a cleaver. His face was a picture of twisted concentration, tongue slipping through tobacco-stained teeth, eyes only for the job at hand. Clearly a man who enjoyed his work. His right arm was thicker than his left, a mass of muscle and twisted vein. Sparks of blood and bone flew through the air.

‘Mr Redman?'

He paused, turned round with a look that explained, perhaps, the harried wife. ‘Depends who's askin.' His mouth barely moved.

‘I'm with the cops.'

The dog seemed to know the word, let fly with a renewed flurry of vituperation.

‘Stiffy!' snapped the boss; the dog changed down to a malevolent snarl, but the tail stayed at attention. Maybe that explained the name; I sure as hell hoped so.

‘Senior sergeant wants a word.'

He put the cleaver down, shook his head. ‘Fuckin ol Doc, eh? Pain in the arse to the very end. Be chargin a bloke for the funeral next.'

‘I'm sure he wouldn't have got himself stabbed if he knew it was going to be such a nuisance.'

He frowned—a rock thrown into a pond of sweat and flesh. Wondered if I was taking the piss, but followed me outside. He walked with a slight limp, a hesitation in his gait.

‘Bloody hot,' I commented.

The grunt may have been a reply. Redman was one of those Aussie males who find it easier to crack a ball-bearing than a smile. But he told his story readily enough and it confirmed what we'd already heard. The day had been hellish hot, the pub awash with booze of every denomination. Doc was meant to pay his rent by doing odd jobs around the place; lately, I gathered from the proprietor's tone, the jobs had been getting odder.

‘Doc had a bit of a turn, a few months ago,' put in June. ‘I tried to get him to go into hospital in Bluebush, but he wouldn't have a bar of it. Reckoned they'd never let him out.'

‘And he wasn't wrong,' added her husband. ‘Out of his tree, the old goat.'

‘Weird kind of goat,' I couldn't help but point out.

‘What?'

‘In a tree.'

He and Cockburn gave me the twin stare. Redman pushed on, warming to his theme. ‘Full of bullshit about, oh Christ, what was it last week? Time running backwards, wasn't that it? Underground rivers! And what was that crap about Einstein?'

Wireless waved his arms in frustration. ‘Reckoned he'd solved Einstein's last dilemma—the attempt to unify relativity and quantum mechanics. Solve it my arse! I told him, but he was beside himself, silly old bastard. And yet other times, black as a dog's guts. Paranoid. Said they were out to get him.'

I was puzzled. ‘Who was out to get him?'

‘You name it: Martians, devils. The CIA. Missionaries!'

The last was no surprise; Doc had always been the most proselytising of atheists; when he was up and running he made Christopher Hitchens look like an altar boy. Maybe in his demented state he thought the god botherers were getting one back at him.

I wondered if he'd been beyond irony when an evangelical preacher delivered his last rites.

‘How did he get on with the missionary himself?' I asked.

‘The which?'

‘Whoever's driving the Evangelical Fellowship van out the front.'

‘Ah—Pastor Bodycombe.' Wireless gave a fleeting smile. ‘That was the only time I thought he was getting back to normal—loved revving up the Rev, did our Doc.'

‘I bet he did.'

‘But still, he was a troubled man. If anything, that was why I tried to get him going about the Paradox, Plato's Cave, that sort of stuff…'

Jenkins scratched his chin. ‘Plato?'

‘Please,' I muttered to myself, ‘don't ask.'

Wireless pushed on. ‘They were the things we'd talked and argued about for years; thought it'd settle him down. But it was no use; even there, he was off the planet.'

Cockburn raised an arm, trying to bring the conversation back to earth. ‘Right, so he went a little whacky. Frustrating, I'm sure. The two of you had an argument. Things got out of hand, and you grabbed the hammer and belted him?'

Wireless stared miserably into the distance. Swallowed. ‘Maybe…'

The Redmans backed up the sequence of events: Doc and Wireless had kicked off in the back bar, carried on all the way over to the shack. When Noel went to rustle the old boy up, he found him lying in a pool of blood. Wireless was passed out on the camp bed.

‘How long you reckon he'd been dead?' asked Cockburn.

‘June heard em still carrying on—what was it, love? Hour or so before I went over there.'

‘I'd say so,' she drawled warily. ‘About the time the tour group arrived. The Japanese.'

‘And nobody else went near the shack?'

‘Veranda was choc-a-bloc,' interjected Jenkins. ‘Must have been a dozen people had a clear view of the place. They've all said the same thing: nobody in or out or anywhere near.'

Cockburn put a hand on the old man's shoulder. ‘Sorry mate, looks like you're for it. Bit of luck, you'll get off with manslaughter.'

Jenkins rose to his feet. ‘We gonna take statements?'

The senior sergeant checked his watch. ‘Okay, but let's not bugger about.' He turned to the publican. ‘What do you recommend from the menu?'

Redman flashed the boys-only smile. ‘We're in beef country.'

‘Emily, nip into the bar. Steaks all round.'

The proprietor waved an expansive arm in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Tell Sandy it's on the house.'

Cockburn shook his head. ‘Can't accept that Noel. Thanks for the offer. Tell em we'll be ready in forty minutes, max. And don't forget Wireless.'

The old man looked up, a pathetic gratitude in his eyes. ‘Thanks sarge.'

‘No worries. Might be the last you'll be having for a while.'

I stepped out once more into the blasting heat. Christ almighty what a day: I felt like a pig on a spit. If a heat-seeking missile were to arrive on the scene it wouldn't have known where to start.

I walked around the side of the pub, past the toilets, the delightful melody of 150-proof piss crashing into a urinal.

I stepped in the front door. Polished wood, whirling fans. Shafts of green-gold light streamed among bottles and mirrors.

The bloke behind the bar—Sandy, I assumed—wasn't quite as polished. Still youngish, but with an air of general disintegration. He had a DIY haircut and the fiery complexion of your everyday outback alcoholic.

He spotted me, and his eyes flicked at the dog-box window by the bar. A lot of these places still kept one for the blacks. His mouth started to move.

‘Don't even think about it,' I warned him.

He suspended his instincts for long enough to look at me properly, changed tack.

‘What would you like?'

‘Some respect. And while you're working on that, five steaks. I'm with the police.'

He went to the kitchen window and said something to a steamy man in a once-white singlet whose appearance brought to mind my father's advice regarding roadhouse cuisine: always check for body parts.

The Rabble

I TOOK A LOOK
around the room. There were maybe twenty people in there. A woman leaned over the pool table, generous buttocks sausaged into stretch pants. One of the old timers in the back bar—red-grey beard, flickering tongue, more sunspots on his skull than hairs—was slurping up the dregs of his lunch. He raised the plate and tipped the last of the gravy into a glass of rum. Drew a flask from a pocket and added a shot of slithery goo, sprinkled in something grey—not gunpowder surely?—and sank the results in one horrible hit.

He shuddered, shook his head into the bar and gasped: ‘Ahhh…Bloody snake juice!' He issued a volley of subterranean noises—snorts and hoiks, rumbles and rough sighs, a general shakedown of the orifices that culminated in the expulsion of a mucus wad. It shot past his lonely front tooth and hit the trough at his feet with a wet slap.

‘Talk about gob-smacked, eh Geordie?'

Geordie Formwood lowered the glass, studied me, ragged eyebrows arcing down, red eyes swirling suspiciously.

‘Emily Tempest,' I clarified.

The eyebrows shot back up. ‘Well I'll be fooked!'

‘Not by me, you ugly old prick.'

He smiled broadly, rustled up more phlegm. ‘Aye, that's the Emily I remember.'

Geordie had lived in Australia for fifty years, but he still hadn't shaken off the Aberdonian burr. He raised his glass and voice to his mates along the bar. ‘Boys, boys, come and say hello to Motor Jack's daughter. Hear she's got a quicker lip than he has.'

It took about a minute flat to get the introductions out of the way: a half a dozen sun-dried miners from the nearby Gunshot Goldfields, an oyster-faced shot-blaster, a shovel-nosed truckie, a bikie with oxyacetylene eyes and a sweaty Texan well-sinker who could have kept himself in business drilling his own armpits.

Collectively—and when the Annual Green Swamp versus the World Cricket Match came round, they were indeed a collective, the dirtiest cricket team outside the sub-continent—they were known as the Rabble. They were the pack of reprobates for whom the Green Swamp Roadhouse was, god help them, their local.

Half of them had worked for my father over the years; the others had been tormented by his spin bowling, especially by the ball known locally as the ‘dustcutter', which he slipped in every couple of overs and which could land anywhere but tended to collect your middle stump.

They gathered round, and somebody shoved a beer into my fist as they attempted to pump me for the inside story on the dustcutter. The argument was clearly a long-standing one: the consensus was that the delivery owed its fearful reputation to a triple differential between the torque of the ball, the angular momentum of his wrist and what the bikie, Jan, described as the ‘black hole effect' attributable to the missing tip of Jack's middle finger.

Doc and Wireless weren't the only philosophers in this neck of the scrub.

I was sharing with them my own theory—that there was no such thing as the dustcutter, and that Jack's success was due to his intuitive knowledge of human nature, which meant that it took him about three deliveries to suss anybody out and work out what they'd do next—when I felt a chill run down my back.

I turned around.

The senior sergeant was standing in the doorway.

The Rabble looked at him awkwardly, then at the floor. They did a lot of throat clearing and chin scratching. Like most dwellers out here on the fringes of civilisation, their relationship with the law could be described as ‘complicated' at best.

Cockburn lowered his shades, took in the rough-cut assembly. Barely bothered to conceal his disdain.

‘Nice to see you getting into the swing of things, Emily.'

‘Gathering intelligence, boss.'

‘Find much?' The skeletal remains of a smile.

‘Takes time.'

‘Which we haven't got. Let's take our statements and get out of here.'

Harley and Jenkins joined us, and we began the interviews. Raced through them, in fact, like a mob of horses heading for the home paddock.

The Japanese were the first to be sent packing. Harley started the interview, but Cockburn had to take over after the senior constable copped a withering tirade from a woman in black who wanted to know why he was interviewing her cleavage.

A few minutes with the tour leader—an eager fellow in yellow shorts, name of Lobert—was enough to convince him that they had nothing to add, and they were on the bus before they could say sayonara. Not that they were likely to be saying that in a hurry, since they turned out to be Taiwanese.

The rest of us were assigned a corner of the pub each. I copped the Rabble, while Harley and Jenkins worked their way through the dozen other travellers who'd found themselves caught up in the investigation.

My old miners didn't have much to offer, and I kept an ear on the other conversations. Harley seemed to be hitting it off with a sabre-toothed anthropologist, a snarling, spinifex-haired German woman keen to pin it on ‘zie Fascists, always zie Fascists…' but with nothing to tell us who the fascists were, other than an intimation that Harley was of their number.

Among the others were a couple of public servants from the Land of the Long White Sock, a Copperhead mining engineer, a pair of Bluebush plumbers, a sprinkling of grey nomads and a strange little mustachioed spiv in chiselled pants who reeked of Brylcreem and gave his occupation as ‘ex-army'.

Bunter tackled the Christian Evangelical Fellow, Pastor Bodycombe if I recalled correctly, a spindly creature in a green Hawaiian shirt with crosses on the collar, much given to wringing his hands and smiling the satisfied smile of the saved. He was weak chinned and clean shaven. Very weak chinned and very clean shaven: the effect was of a fish in spectacles.

Bodycombe seemed to be of the opinion that the deceased was better off in the arms of the Lord.

‘Know him personally, did you then?' I heard Bunter ask.

‘For my sins, yes,' replied the pastor, the tone of his voice telling you that getting the last word on Doc would have been his highlight of the week.

‘Gave you a run for your money, I bet,' I threw into the interview.

Bodycombe peered at me, puzzled.

‘Doc. Argumentative old cuss, wasn't he?'

‘He wasn't the most docile member of my flock.'

‘Hardly a member of your flock at all, I'd have thought—and yet you were keen to get over and give him a send-off.'

The tendons in the trout-like neck clenched.

‘It would have been derelict of me not to.'

‘Reckon Doc would have said so?'

The pastor raised his eyes to the ceiling; beyond the ceiling, up into the realms of the choir invisible. ‘Who can tell what his state of mind was at the end? My duty is to offer grace—whether the individual has the will to accept…'

Bunter closed his notebook; Bodycombe picked up a nifty sports bag and slunk off in the direction of the veranda.

Geordie Formwood, sitting next to me, leaned over and growled, ‘Dickweed. Just wanted to rub his nose in it.'

‘Which dickweed wanted to rub whose nose in what?'

‘Sky bloody pilot. Doc used to bore it up him every time they met.'

‘How often did they meet?'

He shrugged. ‘Whenever.'

‘Yesterday?'

‘Oh, aye. They been having this ongoing, em…debate. About evolution. Doc would show up with a piece of actual evidence—a fossil from the Precambrian, or some such—and the pastor'd shimmy that cat's-arse smile and say it was all part of a Greater Plan.'

‘Well, maybe it was.'

Geordie's reply was a long snort and a longer pull of his malodorous brew.

‘Just as a matter of interest,' I asked, ‘where was Bodycombe when Doc and Wireless were having their little contretemps?'

‘Pretty sure he was out on the veranda, sipping his lemonade.'

‘Not all the time, but,' Jan chipped in. ‘He had a kip in his van for a while; frazzled from all the atheism flying round.'

The pastor departed soon afterwards, and I watched carefully as he checked his van, topped up the water and oil and headed off down the Gunshot Road.

We interviewed everybody there, but it was a waste of time, the whole exercise. Despite the fact that there'd been a half a dozen people on the veranda at any time during the afternoon, nobody had seen anyone other than Wireless go near the shack. Even the Rabble, despite their best efforts, couldn't come up with anything that would put a dent in the case against him. ‘Tripped and fell on his pick' was the best they could do.

As we finished with them the witnesses went their respective ways. We were hoeing into our steaks within the hour, my colleagues with gusto, Wireless less so. His mind was presumably on other things.

By the time we rose to leave, our prisoner was visibly disintegrating. His hands trembled, his mouth was working, his eyes flicker-drifted across the row of bottles behind the bar.

‘Bloke couldn't have one for the road, sarge?'

‘You're in custody, mate. Better learn to get along without it.'

Wireless grimaced.

‘We won't worry about the cuffs, though.'

‘Nice,' I commented, and copped a dose of the Cockburn glower for my troubles.