Gunshot Road (6 page)

A woman on the edge

AS WE STEPPED OUT
onto the veranda, the senior sergeant glanced across the road.

‘Strewth, Jenkins. You planning on giving it away for Christmas?' The shack was still wrapped in red and white crime-scene tape. ‘Better go and clean it up.'

We drove the couple of hundred yards to the shack. As we climbed out of the car, Harley glanced up at the surrounding hills and muttered an oath.

‘What is it?'

‘One of the Chinks is still here.'

I followed his gaze. There was a woman on the lower ledge of the cliff overlooking the shack.

‘Bloody idiots must have left her behind.'

‘Maybe she wasn't with them,' I suggested. ‘Transit van's still in the car park.'

‘Not a jumper, is she?' frowned Jerker.

Cockburn clicked his tongue. ‘Whatever she is, she shouldn't be there.' He made a megaphone of his hands. ‘Oi!'

The woman ignored him.

He bellowed again, with similar results.

‘Bloody hell.' He turned to me. ‘Emily, make yourself useful. Shinny up there and tell her to shove off. And not literally—we've already had our quota of casualties for the day.'

I kept my grumbles to myself. I hadn't spotted ‘gofer' in the job description, but that was clearly how the senior sergeant saw me.

I studied the rock face. The crevasse down the middle of the cliff offered the quickest access, but it was also the trickiest. Getting up there looked like hard, hot work, and I didn't fancy breaking my neck first day on the job.

The west side was a better prospect: lightly canopied with shrubs, a little shade, a kinder slope.

I began the climb, and even that gentle effort took its toll, the red dirt on my forearms rapidly inscribed with sweat. I kept an eye on the woman, but as I drew closer I sensed that she wasn't in any danger. She was perched atop a skull-shaped boulder a metre or two from the summit. She had about her an air of tranquility and balance, as if precipitous terrain was second nature to her.

She was busily working away at a sketchbook, her face closed in on itself, focused.

I was just below her when I called out.

She glanced at me: it was the woman who'd given Harley a spray. She was close cropped with a smooth, tawny complexion, punishing eyes. She might have been attractive were it not for the stern cut of both jib and hair. She was wearing a black cotton dress, woven sandals, a turquoise armband.

‘You interrupt the view,' she said brusquely. Just a little trouble with the
r
sound. She returned to her sketch.

‘Bloody hot up here.' No response. ‘Your friends leave you behind?'

She raised her head. ‘Flen…friends?'

‘The tour group.'

‘The Taiwanese.' She scowled. ‘I have met them for the first time last night.'

I needed to know what she was up to, and I was getting a sense that the hard-arsed approach wouldn't cut it. I sat beside her, leaned back against the rocks. She'd chosen a shady spot, but the granite radiated stored heat.

‘Planning on staying here long?'

‘I plan nothing but this drawing in my hand.'

Right. Maybe softly-softly wasn't going to work either.

‘Where you from?' I asked.

‘Sydney.'

‘You don't sound like you were born there.'

‘Nor you.'

‘You were talking Chinese—is that where you're from?'

She leaned forward, spat succinctly over the edge.

Was that an answer? If it was, then maybe she was from one of the ethnic minorities. In another life, I'd spent a year or so scratching around the north-western fringes of the Empire, out on the Silk Road. I recognised the attitude: Uyghur? Kazakh? Tibetan? If so, her mob occupied a space in her nation's consciousness I found familiar.

‘My boss down there is worried you shouldn't oughter be here.'

‘Your boss?' She peered down the hill, deigned to notice them for the first time. Disdain sparkled in her eyes. ‘You are policeman?'

‘Dunno bout the man. Don't suppose I can argue with the rest.'

‘I intended to ask you about this stone—what do you say?—shape? forming?' She nodded at the pile of rocks at Doc's door.

‘Formation.'

‘Formation. But if you are not sure which side you are on…' ‘What are you talking about?'

‘This man who died—he lived in that little house?'

‘He did, yeah.'

‘Do you know why was he building a map in his backyard?'‘What?'

‘Or…' She searched for the word. ‘Ah—labyrinth. In the end, each becomes the other.'

‘What the hell are you talking about?' I snapped. This woman—this foreigner—was trying to tell me my business. I may not know much, but I know rocks. I grew up with a prospector, spent my earliest days rambling with Dad over rough country looking at rocks. Did a year or two of earth sciences at Melbourne Uni. Hollows and blocks, buckled plates, pillars and cones. Rocks: they're a puzzle I want to read. Have read for as long as I can remember.

And as a black woman I tread near them with a very gentle step. I see their mythic dimension, their lunar beauty. I know them as stories and songs, as ancestors and sisters, as objects of affection and respect, sometimes fear.

So I was even more pissed off when I took a closer look at Doc's rock pile and saw she was right.

It wasn't just a madman's garden down there, a representation of its builder's addled brain. This tired old man had somehow managed to collect several tons of rock—mostly ironstone and gneiss—and from it created a structure with a definite pattern.

I leaned forward. The formation was a rough rectangle, crosscut by a series of creek-like incisions. On its western side, what might have been a row of fan-shaped deltas below a range of hills. Like the woman had said, studying them from the air was like peering into a 3-D map, or a geological model.

But a model of what? Did the construction ring a bell? Possibly: the faintest tinkling. Nothing I could pin down.

I turned back to the woman. ‘Who the hell are you?'

‘He was murdered, this man?'

‘Not for me to say.'

‘Is it known who killed him?'

‘You think I'm going to tell you that?'

‘No. It seems not,' she turned away. Took up a pencil, slashed a few strokes onto the paper. ‘If I want to understand what happens here,' the pencil sliced air, ‘…I would begin, perhaps, with these l…rocks.'

A bellow from below. ‘
Oi!
' Cockburn and the boys had gathered up the tape. Were getting impatient.

‘If you're quite finished your APEC bloody summit up there…'

‘Yeah, yeah,' I muttered. ‘We're on our way!'

‘We?' the woman put in. ‘I think not.'

‘Look honey, personally I don't care whether…'

I paused, distracted, my attention caught by a wagtail stuttering about in a ruby saltbush on the ledge above.

‘Whether what?'

The bird disappeared. I frowned, put a foot on a jutting rock, dragged myself up to the summit. Slid into what might have been a natural—or manmade?—hollow among the scrappy saltbushes and rat's tail on the edge.

I touched a thorn and picked off the scrap of fresh green material I'd spotted from below. Took note of the woman's clothing. Black, head to toe.

I studied the rough ground. Scuff marks, recent. Somebody had been lying there, since the rain. In the past twenty-four hours.

‘You been up here?'

‘No.'

I examined the layout of the land between the hill and the shack, threw a few possibilities around my brain. The direct route was fully exposed to the crowded pub veranda, but the western route, the one I'd taken? Somebody could well have climbed up under the cover of the scrub, made a fleeting descent to the cabin. Moving down the crevasse in the late afternoon glare, they could have gone unnoticed, returned the same way. Maybe even hidden behind the shack, blended with the crowd when the body was found.

I stood up. Again, I sensed it: a shiver of menace, a shudder of anxiety.

I shielded my eyes, gazed out over the aeolian landscape. The sun's rays blasted my skin. Splinters and wheels of light shot in from the white plains, spun about my brain. The country felt poised; primed, like a finger on a trigger.

I blinked, and the feeling disappeared.

Paranoia, surely? Maybe Doc's was rubbing off.

Over at the pub, a couple of flash four-wheel-drives had pulled in. Tourists. Paint-jobs sparkling, high-tech toys hanging off and welded on. Outer suburban plumbers or Pommy computer programmers on the Great Outback Adventure.

I spotted Noel Redman coming in from the meat shed, his fat arms laden, Stiffy strutting at his heels. Directly below, my colleagues were shuffling, restless. Cockburn was nowhere to be seen. Then the Cruiser's horn blared.

I called to the woman. ‘I gotta go. You coming?'

‘No.' She smiled. Her frown was friendlier. ‘Be seeing you.'

‘What's your name?'

She spat a quickfire response.

‘Pardon?'

‘In this country, where you are so poor with language, they seem to call me Jet.'

‘Jet?' I muttered as I made my way back down the slope.

‘That'd be right.'

A fissure in the ziggurat

I REACHED THE CLIFF
base, came round to the front of the shack. Harley wiped some sweat and checked his watch. ‘Took your time. Where's your Chink?'

‘Still up there.'

‘Is she?' Cockburn joined us, nodded at the rock formation behind the shack. Jet was perched alongside it, sketchbook out, pencil flying.

‘She must have taken the shortcut. Which is what I wanted to talk to you about.'

‘Eh?'

‘We need to make a more detailed examination of the cliff top. Somebody's been up there.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘A scrap of material on the bushes.'

‘The woman,' suggested Harley.

‘She's all in black—the material was green. Plus there are scuff marks…'

‘Dingo. Wallaby. Hills are full of wildlife. Any footprints?'

‘Not that I could see, but it's rocky up there.'

‘Even if there were,' said Cockburn, ‘this is a roadhouse. Tourists, miners, hippies wanting to commune with Mother Nature—any manner of idiot could go traipsing about.'

‘Maybe, but these marks are recent. Why would you struggle up there on a day like this?'

‘Your friend there did.'

‘She's some sort of artist—weirdness is in the job description.'

Cockburn sighed, his patience wearing thin. He folded his arms, drummed a tattoo on his left elbow. ‘Matter of balance—available resources against likely outcomes. I mean, we could call in the dogs and choppers, set up a bloody emu parade every time a couple of blokes thump each other in a bar. But it's just not feasible. Forensic's gone back to Alice. We haven't got the manpower, the time.'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing: this was a man's life we were talking about. ‘I'm not asking for the bloody SAS—all I want is for you to get up there and…'

The beginnings of a fissure—the tiniest crack, really—appeared in the Cockburn ziggurat. ‘What you're doing is scratching about looking for anything that's going to muddy the waters and make it less likely we'll convict your mate.' He leaned in at me. ‘It's not going to happen. What we've got here is as straightforward a case as I've ever seen.'

‘Maybe that's the problem. Everything looks straightforward to you.'

‘
Je
sus!' The anger welled up, briefly, then his retentive instincts reasserted themselves. He dispersed a few flies, squared his legs. ‘I've put up with enough of this crap. We're going back to Bluebush. I'm ordering you to come with us. If you choose to disobey, you can go poking around the hills until you're bloody well blue in the face. But don't think you'll have a job to come back to.'

I studied them. Cockburn, so self-controlled, controlling. Harley and Jenkins up on their hind legs like meerkats, our little argument the most entertaining thing they'd seen all day.

Support? Not likely.

I looked at Wireless, slumped against the column of the car, gazing listlessly into space. Talk of support, he was going to need all he could get.

‘Give me a minute,' I said.

‘That's sixty seconds and counting.'

I dashed out to where I'd last seen the Chinese woman. She'd disappeared. Then I spotted her black-clad rear. She was half-way up the rock pile, nose down, carrying out a close examination of god knows what.

‘Hey, Jet!'

She turned around.

‘Those sketches. Can I have one?'

She had a way of staring that stopped you in your tracks. ‘Why?'

‘Souvenir.'

She looked into my eyes, must have seen something. She jumped down, moving over the rocks with the casual agility of a rock wallaby. She flipped through the pad, pulled out one of the more detailed depictions of the formation.

‘Use it wisely,' she said. Not quite a smile, but a flash of interest. Her eyes were like ripe mulberries. ‘Might be worth fortune one day.'

Kite hawks

I PULLED UP ON
the outskirts of Bluebush's dismal little cemetery, checked my watch. Nearly twelve. The church service had started at eleven, so they should be along any tick. I'd come to make my farewells to Doc and—and what? I wasn't sure. Lay some of the dust the old man's death had stirred up in my brain.

There were things about it that unsettled me.

There were things about most deaths that unsettled me, but this one I found particularly disturbing. Why, I couldn't say. My sympathy for the alleged killer? Maybe the tracks on the cliff top, or that bizarre rock formation in Doc's yard.

More than anything, it was that feeling of unease. It had been quietly biting, like a threatening fever, since that morning nearly a week ago now when we were heading for the Gunshot Road.

I hadn't made it to the church: organised religion and I have had a rocky relationship since I was forced to fight off a hot-blooded Mormon—name of Randy, appropriately enough—when I was fourteen.

A lot of our mob have gone Christian these days. All those years of missionaries, misery and boredom, I suppose. With a sceptical father and a mob of fiercely traditional elders around me in my formative years, I was never a likely candidate.

But I reckoned I could put up with a bit of whitefeller God out here. The bush and the big blue sky were a bracing antidote.

I felt at my throat for the fossil Doc had dug out of the rocks on Moonlight Downs. Ran a thumb across the trilobite's ruffled spine. He'd told me it was six hundred million years old, put a rocket under my interest in things geological. The least I could do was go to the poor bastard's funeral.

A few minutes later the oddest cortege you were ever likely to see came grinding down the road. There was a boot-black hearse in the lead, but it was all downhill from there, a conga of zombie vehicles risen from the dead to claim another for their ranks: there were clapped out Inters and Blitzes, red F-Trucks with missing screens and one-eyed dogs, clanking battlewagons and utes that had been so patched up and cannibalised there was nothing left of the original.

The hearse slipped in through the gate, everybody else fought for the scraps of shade provided by the ghost gums. I waited until the last possible moment—I'd already grabbed the shadiest spot, and I wasn't exposing myself to that withering sun until I had to.

The Rabble—the ageing miners from the Gunshot Road—emerged from their vehicles slowly, reluctantly, as if they were being dragged out into the light by the hand of a monstrous God. They dribbed and drabbed their way to where the hearse had pulled up, hats in hands, shirts adrift, rum flasks buried in their back pockets.

Tiger Lyons pulled in close to me; his old Holden had a savage list to starboard, and so did he. He struggled out of the cab, all hobbles, wobbles and crusty bends, started out over the gravel like a dilapidated crab. He'd only taken a few steps when he stopped and looked up into the trees around the open grave. Flinched.

‘Jesus fuck!' he spluttered. I couldn't exactly say the colour drained from his face, but the workaday alcoholic scarlet may have faded to a rough rosé.

As I turned to follow his gaze, there was an almighty thump on the roof of my vehicle.

‘Good god! You really are a cop.' My father's head appeared at the window, the rest of him not far behind. He looked me up and down—mainly down: he was a solid six three to my wiry five four. ‘Thought they were having me on.'

‘I think they're having me on as well, Jack. All I've done so far is arrest Cookie Crankshaft.'

‘What for?'

‘Beating up Tom McGillivray.'

He blinked. ‘Say again?'

‘You heard.'

He checked out the uniform again. Scowled. ‘Not putting yourself into any danger?'

‘Yes—I may die of boredom. So far I've been hanging round the station reading files. The boss says I'm learning the ropes, but the main strand is how they take their tea.'

‘Who is this boss?'

‘Senior Sergeant Bruce Cockburn.'

He cracked his knuckles, narrowed his eyes. ‘What's he like?'

‘Keen. Likes to give motivational talks to the troops, then follow up with post-it notes. When I came in this morning there was one on my desk saying
Tidy desk, tidy mind
.'

He nodded. ‘You always did have a dirty desk.'

He straightened up, stepped back from the car, cast an eye across the miserable scene before us. Father Dal Santo, the Filipino priest, was eyeing his watch.

‘Nice of you to come and pay your last respects to Doc,' said Jack.

‘I liked him. He was the one who got me interested in geology.'

‘Thought I did that.'

‘No Dad, you just taught me how to smash rocks. Doc had a little more finesse.'

‘Finesse?'

‘Knowledge.'

‘Right.'

‘Possibly even a degree.'

‘Okay, I get the idea.'

We watched Tiger inching his awkward way back to the car.

‘Tiger not a one for funerals?'

‘Guess not,' said Jack, raising a puzzled eyebrow as the old miner reached into the cabin. The eyebrows went haywire when he emerged with a shotgun and began waving it in the general direction of the graveside.

‘Christ!' came a cry. ‘Tiger's goin on a rampage!'

Everybody hit the turf, a row of bony arses sticking up from behind the pathetic rose bushes and broken headstones. Only Father Dal Santo—steely of hair and character, said to be a feisty bugger at the best of times—stood his ground; maybe such things were part of the ritual at Filipino funerals.

Jack vanished, then reappeared, Jeeves-like, beside Tiger.

‘Mate, mate…' He gently relieved him of the weapon. ‘What are you doing?'

The old bloke looked bewildered.

‘This is a funeral Tiger, not a wedding. No need for the shottie.'

‘Fuckin vampires. Take a few of the bastards with me.'

I followed his outstretched finger. A squadron of hooded kite hawks brooding hypnotically in the lower branches of a ghost gum near the grave.

Jack nodded, passed the gun across to me. ‘Better give this to Emily for safe keeping, eh? Wouldn't wanner give anybody the wrong idea.'

‘Blood-suckin black fuckin…'

‘They're just hawks, mate. Kite hawks. See em every day of the week. They don't suck your blood. Might nibble your nuts if you were road-kill, but we haven't come to that yet. Come on, Tiger—Doc's waitin to say goodbye.'

He took the old man's elbow, led him grumbling and stumbling out over the gravel.

As I locked the weapon away, I spotted a thin, boyish figure on the other side of the road.

Danny Brambles. I hadn't seen him since the crash out on the highway. He had his thumbs in his pockets and his eyes raised to where the kite hawks perched. He didn't look any keener on the birds than Tiger was.

I walked over to him. ‘Danny.'

‘Em'ly.'

‘Where you headin?'

‘Into town.' He shook his head, stared at me. ‘Hey Em'ly, need to ask a favour.'

‘Yes?' I noticed, for the first time, the slight sway, the blurred expression in his eyes. I spotted Willy and Dixon Crankshaft lurking in the distance. Guessed what was coming next.

‘Couldn't fix us up for a coupla bucks, could you?'

‘What's a couple?'

‘Mebbe fifty?'

‘Fifty! Cents, if you're lucky. Thought you were staying out at Stonehouse Creek.'

‘Had to come in.'

‘What for?'

He studied the ground, didn't answer the question, didn't have to: we both knew drink and drugs were the magnet that drew a lot of young people in from the bush.

He figured a change of topic was about due. ‘Who they buryin?'

‘You ever meet ol Doc?'

‘That kartiya from Green Swamp? Seen him. He used to come out to Stonehouse. Lookin at the rocks.' He frowned. ‘What appen?'

‘You wouldn't wanner know.'

‘Somebody finish im? Who?'

‘Another miner, looks like.'

He nodded darkly. ‘This country, dangerous for kartiya…'

‘Dangerous for everybody—especially this time of the year.'

Danny's gaze sharpened, seemed to take in for the first time the uniform I was wearing. They still hadn't found a pair of pants that fit, but they had given me a badge. Emily Tempest: ACPO.

‘I seen you at the car crash. You're a kurlupartu?' A cop.

‘Nah, not really. I'm an undercover blackfeller.'

‘But you got the outfit?'

‘Just the top half, Danny.' I ran a hand down my skirt, grinned. ‘Like to catch a glimpse of me skinny black legs from time to time, remind myself who I am.'

But he was uneasy, I could tell. When he was in town Danny ran with a pretty wild crowd and nothing in uniform had ever done him any favours.

I spotted my father among the mourners. He beckoned with his chin: festivities were about to get underway. ‘I gotta show me face in there. Feller was a friend of Jack's.'

Danny nodded a farewell, set off to join his disreputable mates with an eagerness I didn't like the look of.

‘Hey Danny!'

He paused.

‘When you goin back out bush?'

‘Soon.'

‘You look after yourself in town—wouldn't wanner lock you up.'

He smiled, a flash of the cheeky-boy grin he'd had before the grog got him. ‘Have to catch me first.'