Gunshot Road (8 page)

Corrugation Road

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER
I found myself following him into a large bush block at the southern end of Corrugation Road.

Wishy's house was one of the Bluebush originals. It was made out of blue-painted iron, a material that could be brutal in the heat, but this one was built with a clever eye to the weather. Shady location, wide verandas, apertures designed to catch the tiniest sliver of wind, numerous ponds and pools.

‘That the child care centre?' I nodded at a giant ghost gum on the border of the property.

A rough-hewn tree-house sat in the upper branches, with a flying fox and a slide that would have given a school safety inspector nightmares. There was an archery target bristling with arrows, a tyre swing on a lower branch.

‘Ya gotta watch em, but. They tend to put each other in the swing and use it as a target.'

Loreena was on her knees in the garden, fork in hand, a profusion of bougainvillea, gardenia and desert rose blooming around her. She was wearing a hat that could have been picked from one of the bushes. She introduced herself, led us inside. She'd been warned I was on the way, had prepared nibblies and drinks.

‘Where's the horde?' Wishy asked warily.

‘Out on the rampage.'

Wishy ushered me onto a sofa in his office, dropped a chilled brown bottle into my lap. We'd not got past first base when he paused, puzzled.

‘Something wrong?' I asked.

‘Quiet round here.'

‘Thought that's what we wanted.'

‘Not this quiet.'

His gaze swept the room, came to rest on the floor beneath his feet. Narrowed. ‘Tiffany.'

No response.

He dropped an octave: ‘Tiffany!'

The voice seemed to me to assume the tone of command I'd heard in the Works yard, but here it had no effect.

He sighed, resigned himself to something. ‘Tiger Lily?'

A voice piped up from behind the couch.

‘Yes, Daddy?'

‘Would you like to come and say hello to the lady?'

A wiry little girl with a mop of golden hair squeezed out from the narrow gap between the couch and the wall.

‘Emily, meet Tiffany…' She shot him a look that would have cut through reinforced concrete. ‘…who's decided that from here on she's going to be known as Tiger Lily.'

The girl beamed. ‘I hit a six through the workshop window.'

‘I'm not surprised.'

‘Can you play cricket?'

‘Sure.'

‘Bowl?'

‘A bit.'

‘Come outside and I'll belt you through the window too.'

‘Maybe not just now. Me and your dad need to talk.'

‘After?'

‘No worries. Looks like I'm here for dinner.'

Her father gave her a slap on the backside, shuffled her off in the direction of the door. ‘Go tell your mother she wants you. And Tiger…' He thrust a long arm under the couch, emerged with the other half of the duo, wriggling and giggling. ‘Take the Time Bomb with you.'

When the twins hesitated in the doorway, he rushed at them and clapped his hands. They stampeded from the room, but as we resumed our conversation I spotted a golden mop peeking over the window ledge and a tiny hand proffering a hopeful ball.

‘Half an hour!' I whispered.

‘And an extra ten minutes every time you pester us,' growled her father.

He rested his elbows on his knees, pinched the bridge of his nose, concentrating. ‘So, Emily, what were you getting at back at the depot? About Albie.'

‘You know how he died?'

‘Some sort of drunken argument. Can't say I was surprised, truth be told. Albie'd been disintegrating at a rate of knots in recent years.'

‘So everybody tells me…'

‘Is there some doubt?'

‘Probably not. But there are a few…anomalies.'

‘Anomalies!' His face grew animated. ‘Albie was an anomaly from go to whoa! A wandering Latvian eccentric who thought time was going backwards and nardoo root was going to save the world from famine.'

‘Way the world's warming he may be right. Nardoo grows well in the dry.'

‘He tried to tell me life evolved out of a snowball, for god's sake.'

‘Well actually…'

He leaned forward, frowned. ‘Yes?'

‘He's not Robinson Crusoe there either.'

‘Oh come on…'

‘There is a geological theory that the Earth was covered in ice 600 million years ago, and the first complex life forms—which eventually became us—evolved out of the meltdown that followed. It's called Snowball Earth.'

He eyed me. ‘Any chance you're as batty as he was?'

‘Possibly.' I shrugged. ‘But I did do a couple of years of earth science at Melbourne Uni. Like to keep my hand in.'

‘Albie also reckoned he'd been hearing from our father. Reckoned he was still down the old Gunshot Mine, tapping messages in morse code, saying he'd be home for tea and could we heat up the stew? Anything about that at uni?'

‘Must have skipped that class.'

He blinked. He'd just realised something. ‘You haven't seen the autopsy report, have you?'

‘Autopsy?'

‘But you're a cop; I'd have thought that'd be the first thing you'd want to look at.'

‘I'm an
ACPO
—only the real cops get told things.'

‘Yeah, I've met your boss. He didn't strike me as the type to spread the love around.' Wishy frowned; picked at the label of his stubbie. ‘Albie had a brain tumour.'

I took a moment to absorb that.

‘Size of a golf ball. Must have been growing for months—years. Sure, he had a few inches of geo-pick in his throat, but he wouldn't have lasted long anyway.'

That explained a lot of things: the haywire behaviour, the delusions, the fights, the frustration.

But not everything.

Wishy read my mind. I detected, for the first time, a glint of steel behind that genial exterior. ‘Still not satisfied, are you?'

‘Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.'

He let his gaze drift up to the ceiling. An overhead fan sliced air, turned it into waves.

‘What is it, then?'

‘Look Wishy, I've only been in this job for a few days, so I'm not exactly an expert, but I knew your brother—liked him. And I've got an idea of how things work round here, which is more than I can say for most of my colleagues.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I just thought they were a little slapdash, way they went about investigating his death. Almost as if they knew what they were going to find and couldn't be fucked looking for anything else.' I paused, caught his eye. ‘We owe Doc more than that.'

‘What do you think they missed?'

Better to keep my cards close; for all I knew, the man I was talking to was the person who'd been up on the ridge. That didn't seem likely, but I'd seen enough violent deaths to know the prime suspect usually came from somewhere in the family circle.

‘Hard to put a finger on it.'

He wasn't impressed. ‘You're not just doing this for old Wireless, are you? I've got as much sympathy for him as the next bloke, but there comes a point when you gotta take responsibility. Can't blame the grog forever. Besides, your sergeant—what was his name? Little Mister Efficient?'

‘Cockburn.'

‘With a “ck”?' He grinned. ‘He told me Wireless was the only one there when it happened.'

‘Maybe, but the weather that day was something chronic. The Green Swamp crowd were lolling around in an alcoholic stupor and staring into the sun. Most of em couldn't have told their arses from their armpits.'

He didn't seem convinced.

‘Anyway,' I continued, ‘I'd just like to know more about Doc. What made him tick…'

‘Tick! Dunno if tick's the word. Detonate, maybe. Worse the last year or so—the tumour, I presume: mind on the rampage, body trying to keep up.'

‘Any enemies you know of? He and Wireless might have had the odd philosophical argument, but they were mates. Was there anybody he really pissed off?'

Wishy swept his hands through the air in a gesture of futility.

‘Was there anybody he
didn't
piss off? He worked for just about every employer in the Territory: most of the major mining companies, the Geo Survey, Copperhead. Sooner or later, they all decided he was a liability. How long since you'd seen him?'

I shrugged. ‘Fifteen years, at least.'

‘And how do you remember him?'

‘A little eccentric.'

‘Exactly. Take that, add twenty years of confusion, booze and brutal weather, bung in a brain tumour and Albie's what you got.'

‘Completely loopy,' I nodded.

‘Bull
shit
!' The disembodied word came shooting through the window. Tiger Lily appeared, her eyes damp and full of glare. ‘He was the smartest man in the world, my Uncle Albie.'

Wishy rose from his chair, went across and knelt by the window, took her little hand in his big one.

‘Course he was, honey. Emily knows that. He was just unwell. Like I told you. He had this…thing, growing in his brain, made him get a little mixed up.'

She backed off, but her lower lip was wobbling.

I came over. ‘I'm sorry, Tiger Lily. It's just my big mouth. I met your uncle when I was about your age, and I thought he was wonderful—full of surprises—showing me things that made my hair stand on end.'

‘Really?'

‘Sure.'

‘What?' She clenched her jaw, suspicious, braced herself for adult condescension.

‘Like—er…' I remembered the trilobite, pulled the chain over my head and held it out to her. ‘Like this.'

A spark of interest. ‘What is it?'

‘Something very special. It used to be a tiny animal, crawling across the ocean floor.'

She gave me the fuckwit look.

‘I meant what
period
is it from? Most of them round here are Cambrian, but there are Silurians as well.'

I took a step back. ‘Oh. I see. Precambrian, I think. Who taught you about fossils?'

Again, the withering glare. ‘Who do you think?'

‘Your Uncle Albie?'

‘Yes, and that wasn't all…I've got a hundred and twenty-seven specimens in my collection, spread over three hundred million years. Did you know that…'

‘Not now Tiger,' interrupted her father. ‘Emily and I need to talk.'

She kept her gaze on the fossil.

‘You know Tiger,' I said, ‘Doc gave this to me, and I bet nothing would have made him happier than to know that I'd passed it on to you.' I pressed it into her hand, folded her fingers over it. ‘Why don't you go out and start the game? When I've finished I'll come and show you how it's done.'

‘Pig's arse you will.'

Her father and I watched her go, the little fossil tucked into her shirt.

‘Well-spoken child, that,' I commented.

‘Hung around too many bloody Works camps.' But he was smiling as he said it.

As she walked out onto the lawn, a cluster of kids accreted to her. Tiger Lily obviously had her father's natural leadership. The crowd was growing. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, she was doing cartwheels in front of an appreciative audience. The Time Bomb began shooting rubber-tipped arrows through her flying limbs. I took a closer look: couldn't see rubber tips.

I turned to Wishy. ‘You seem to have come out of a background similar to your brother's in pretty good nick.'

‘Yeah. Well maybe that's because he went on ahead and bore the brunt. That and the pure luck of meeting a good woman.'

‘Where'd you and Loreena hook up?'

‘On the Roper Bar. I was putting in a road. She was the bush nurse.'

I changed tack. ‘Don't suppose your brother owned anything of value?'

‘Value! Albie? He wouldn't have a pot to piss in. Had that prick from the pub asking me the same question the other day.'

‘Noel Redman?'

‘Reckoned Albie owed him two years back rent. Told the bastard he could shove it. Asks me what he's gonna do with his stuff. What stuff? I asked. Couple of broken chairs? Firewood! Geordie Formwood wanted the jeep for spare parts; said he was welcome to it. I took a run out there the other day, gathered up what I could, carted most of it off to the tip. Gave Redman his bloody money.'

‘You paid Doc's rent?'

‘Was always going to—just thought he could have waited until after the funeral to ask.'

I drained my stubbie, took a handful of chips. Munched them thoughtfully.

‘I noticed Doc had a filing cabinet. What happened to that?'

He studied me. ‘You are a hard case, aren't you?'

‘Don't like leaving things half done.'

He went quiet for a moment. Rose to his feet. ‘Comes to some bastard killing my brother and trying to shift the blame onto an old man, neither do I.'

Weirder by the year

HE LED ME INTO
an adjoining office. There in a corner sat the battered filing cabinet I'd seen in Doc's room at Green Swamp Well.

‘Been wondering what to do with this lot. You look like you'll make more sense out of it than I'm likely to.' He glanced at my glass. ‘Top-up?'

‘Maybe a cup of tea? Strong and black.'

‘On the way. Might check up on the little monsters while I'm at it.'

He left the room, and I opened the middle drawer. Silverfish and sand came scuttling and trickling out, closely followed by the musty odour of moth-eaten paper. The junk that most lives come down to in the end.

And junk this lot certainly was: postcards from a journey that had grown weirder by the year. I spent a fascinating ten minutes ploughing through it: field notes, photographs, sketches and maps, the odd crumbling geological sample, magnetic images he'd brought with him from his time at the Geological Survey.

A little eccentric Doc might have been, but his filing system was accurate and comprehensive, a mass of papers and canvas-covered notebooks, all neatly stored in thick blue folders and ordered according to topic.

I quickly saw what his goal had been: to carry out a comprehensive survey of the Fuego Desert. He'd traversed it from east to west, recorded rock types, geological ages, erosion and landforms. He'd mapped glaciers, ranges, ridges and water fields.

But over the past year, his imagination had gone off at all sorts of tangents. I skimmed through his observations on nardoo root and its potential to solve the world food crisis, sketches and samples of wild grasses that he thought could be domesticated; blueprints for an array of eccentric devices: a whistle-detonated explosive, a hat with solar-powered air-conditioning and a saucepan that stirred itself.

By the end, it appeared, things were totally out of whack and he'd decided that time was going backwards. He scribbled timelines in which the geological ages of the Earth were reversed, drew sketches of mountains sinking back into the earth, continents drifting together, lava flowing uphill. He proposed a solution to the problem of Grand Unified Theory, made sketches for a time machine—powered by tektites.

Madness. Fascinating, although more from a literary than a scientific perspective. King Lear meets Edward Lear, with a dash of Heath Robinson. But there was something missing.

‘Snowballs,' I said to Wishy when he came back in with laden arms. ‘You said he was obsessed with the Snowball Earth Theory, but I can't find anything about it.'

‘You sure?' He lowered the tray, poured me a cup of tea. ‘He wouldn't shut up about it.'

‘Positive. Look at
S
—nothing in there at all. Hang on…' I took a closer look.

‘Yes?'

‘Feel the file.'

He ran a finger along the divider, felt the bend in the metal frame, the bulge of the sides of the folder. Observed, as I had done, the wear and tear, the pattern in the dust. Came to the same conclusion I had.

‘There
was
something there.'

‘Question is, did Albie take it out—or did somebody else?'

‘Wasn't in the shack, I can tell you that—I cleaned the place inside out. All of his papers were in the cabinet.'

‘So where is it?'

He shrugged.

I made to replace the empty file. Caught a glimpse of something—a glossy triangle of paper on the floor of the drawer. Fished it out. It was a photograph, very old, yellowing: a rocky outcrop, somewhere in the desert. A stand of she-oaks, a drift of sand.

‘Recognise this place?'

He studied it. ‘Pile of rocks on a plain,' he said flatly. ‘Seen a few of them in my time. Nothing to distinguish it from all the others, though.' He raised his eyebrows. ‘Unless…'

He went across to his desk. Took out a magnifying glass, peered at the photo. Pulled a 250 survey map from a drawer, examined it, humming and mumbling to it in a way that made it clear he thought of maps as living things.

A lot of elders I've known think the same about another sort of map, the ones they sing.

‘In the background there.' He ran a finger across the horizon. ‘Pretty sure it's the southern end of the Ricketswood Ranges—from the west. Did a bit of scouting around for a quarry out there one time. If I'm right, then I'd say this photo was taken somewhere in the south-western stretches of the Fuego.'

‘That narrows it down—a bit.'

Not a lot, though. Still thousands of square kilometres of spinifex to choose from.

Wishy obviously knew the roads, but who knew the off-roads? Who'd be able to distinguish this outcrop from hundreds of others spread across the desert?

The Kantulyu, of course. The desert people. The mob from Stonehouse Creek, Magpie and Meg. Danny Brambles' grandparents, the couple I'd met out on the road that first day on the job.

I turned the photo over. A scribbled note:
ice rocks/ the cap carbonates/ the question of age.

I read the words a second time: they were the only remaining trace in the entire cabinet of the theory that had supposedly obsessed Doc. Ice rocks were boulders that had fallen from a frozen overlay of ice above; whether or not they supported the Snowball Theory depended on their age, and the strata in which they were found.

‘What did Albie tell you about this snowball business?'

‘What didn't he tell me about it! He was like a burst water main. Impossible to distinguish from all the other bullshit, of course. Last time I saw him…'

‘When was that?'

Did Wishy look a little uncomfortable, or was it my imagination?

‘Day before he died.'

‘What?'

‘I did mention it to your boss. I was coming back from Alice, popped out to the shack. I'd do that every so often, see how he was getting on.'

‘And how was he getting on?'

‘Shithouse. Crankier than ever. Confused. Used to try to persuade him to come in and stay with us, but I'd given up by then: would have had to drag him in by the scruff. Rough bloody set-up he had there, but it was what he was used to. And he had his rocks out back, of course.'

‘Ah yes, the rock pile in the yard—I was going to ask you about that. Do you know what he was up to there?

‘I asked him about it, sure—he was wearing himself out throwing a lot of rocks and mud together. I presumed it was part of his ongoing obsession with the Fuego—trying to solve some geological riddle or other. When he was with the Geo Survey, he was always making models. Do it with computers nowadays, of course, but Albie said you had to feel the geology with your hands. I must admit he was pretty bloody hush-hush about this one, though. He'd get this furtive glimmer in his eyes…'

‘Furtive?'

‘Paranoid, almost.' The second time I'd heard that said about Doc. ‘What he was afraid of, god knows. Then he'd start rabbiting on about nardoo root or Greek philosophy or whatever was-
ooohhff
!' Wishy picked up the tennis ball that had just landed in his crotch, and traced its flight path back through the window.

I stood up; the crowd outside was growing thicker by the minute.

‘Looks like they're trying to tell us something.'

‘I'm surprised it was just a tennis ball—and that the window was open.'

I made my way to the door. ‘Better give em a bit of a knock before dinner.'