Moonlight Downs (16 page)

The silence was shattered by an echoing gun shot, a strangled oath and the sight of two cops emerging from the cave at full tilt. They made for the ropes, but one of them missed and fell to the ground, his fall broken by the vines and trees below.

By the time we reached him, he was kneeling on the ground, face down, big arse pointing skywards. It was Griffo, battered, bruised and clutching his head as if it were about to fall off.

‘You right there, mate?’ asked Kelly.

‘Centipedes!’ muttered Griffo, a dazed look on his face as he climbed to his feet.

Jojo looked surprised for the first time since I’d met him. ‘You shot a
centipede
?’

‘I thought it was a snake, it was that big. Spider webs in the back of the cave were crawling with em. Walked into em. Jesus, I hate centipedes. Oh fuck!’—he ripped his helmet off, his face transformed into a quivering mass of shivers and shudders and gaping holes—‘there’s another one!’

A wicked black arthropod, its little legs flickering like strobe lights, came spiralling out of the helmet and landed on the rocks, then scuttled away.

He raised his gun, but Jojo put a hand on his arm. ‘Okay, Tiger, I don’t think it’s gonna do any harm now. Have you been bitten?’

‘Just once, I reckon. On my neck.’

I considered suggesting a tourniquet, but Jojo, frowning at me as if he read my mind, pulled a handful of leaves out of a pouch on his belt, crushed them and rubbed the resulting oily liquid into the bite. ‘Try this,’ he said.

McGillivray came up and stood over us, the now-familiar look of exasperation clouding his face.

‘Do us a favour, Jojo; go and have a look in that cave for me, will you?’

‘You think there’s any point?’

‘No, but if you do happen to come across Blakie, would you mind asking him if he’ll let us arrest him?’

Jojo shimmied up the cliff and entered the cave. Less than a minute later he was on his way back down.

‘Empty, Tom.’

‘Is there a fire escape or something? I just saw him in there.’

‘Nothing that I could see.’

‘So what are we going to do now?’ I asked McGillivray.

‘Dunno about you,’ he said wearily, checking his watch and casting a cold eye upon the surrounding hills, ‘but I’m thinking about that all-day breakfast at the Resurrection Roadhouse.’

While he assembled his troops, Jojo made his way to a low outcrop, stood there looking down at the jutting rocks and tessellated pavements of the valley floor. I came up beside him.

‘Any sign of him?’

‘Only the ones he wants us to see.’

‘Why do I suspect you’re not surprised by this shemozzle?’

He made no response, but put a hand into his shirt pocket and drew from it a small brown feather.

‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Where’d you find it?’

‘Up the bloodwood.’

‘Feather up a tree. Unusual.’

‘It is.’ He passed it to me. ‘Take a closer look.’

‘Owl, I’d say.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Looks like it’s seen better days. Comes from a ragged old owl.’

‘Comes from a ragged old something. Do you see those tiny smudges at the top?’

‘A ragged old owl with questionable hygiene?’

‘It’s ochre. Smell it.

‘Goanna fat,’ he said when I had done so. ‘Touch of spinifex rosin at the base of the quill, too.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘The bloodwood. I wasn’t the only one up it last night.’

I paused, stared at him. ‘Jesus. What was he doing up there?’

‘Same as me, I’d imagine.’

‘Watching me have my morning piddle?’

‘I don’t know what you got up to before I arrived, but he was watching the lot of you, for sure. It’s the best vantage point.’

‘How the hell did he know we were even here?’

‘How many ways do you want? He could have seen your tracks. I did.’

‘We arrived just on nightfall.’

‘Or heard your cars.’

‘We parked a couple of kilometres away.’

‘Still a million possibilities: you could have spooked a bat, silenced a cricket. A hopping mouse could have told him, for all I know. This part of the world, it’s like an orchestra to Blakie and he’s—well, he wouldn’t think of himself as the conductor, but perhaps he’s on first violin. And if there’s a piccolo off pitch or a timpani out of time, he’ll hear it.’

I sat there for a few minutes, staring off into the distance, thinking about what he’d said and wondering about the sense of what I was doing. I remembered Lincoln’s words to me. ‘Take a little while till the country gets to know you.’ Was there an undercurrent of something similar in Jojo’s voice?

As my thoughts drifted, I found my eyes meandering across the rock face opposite, the one we’d just descended. It was fretted and fringed with hieroglyphs and scribbled shadows, a calligraphy of little dips and folds and charcoal figures. One of which suddenly looked like a face: a dark, furrowed visage topped with matted hair and a purple headband.

I blinked, and it disappeared.

A cup of tea at the Godsfather

THE DAY after my return from this ignominious shambles I got a call from the Lands Council in Alice. A lawyer by the name of Charles Harmes. He wanted to talk to me about Earl Marsh and his dodgy lease, and asked if we could meet the next afternoon.

‘No worries. How about the Godsfather?

‘The
God
sfather?’

‘The café at the northern end of the main street. Sign on the front says “The Godfather’s”, but we’re more into Jesus than Brando round here.’

‘Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse. Will you be free all afternoon? I’ll explain when we get there.’

The Godfather’s was Bluebush’s attempt at inner-city café society chic. For years it had been a greasy takeaway, notorious for its camelburgers and dead white chips. The current owner, Helmut Apfelbaum, had slapped on a coat of paint and arranged a few striped umbrellas artfully out the front, but he hadn’t got around to the back yet. The itinerants he employed to peel the spuds would sit out on the back steps, smoking and yarning and chucking the skins into the long grass that had sprung up around the overflowing septic tank.

Despite the flagrant abuse of health regulations, the coffee wasn’t bad—Helmut ground his own—and the conversation was a cut above what you got at the White Dog. The town’s intelligentsia, teachers and nurses, tended to hang out there on a Friday afternoon and soak up the ambience. Much of which, if the wind was blowing the wrong way, came from the aforementioned tank.

Today the café was full of tourists and Charles stood out like a poodle in a pack of camp dogs. Lawyers with a social conscience inevitably have a haggard, hangdog look about them, and Charles was as hangdog as I’d seen. He was in his mid-thirties, wearing crisp jeans and a blue checked shirt. He had a receding hairline, a receding chin and, by the look of the creases in his jeans, a receding personality. The only thing that wasn’t receding was his nose, an immense proboscis of a hue that suggested it had sat through too many outdoor land-claim hearings.

‘I haven’t eaten,’ he said when the introductions were out of the way. ‘What do you recommend?’

I studied the blackboard menu. Marinated buffalo steaks. Crocodile skewers. Wild boar sausages. Helmut was going all gourmet.

‘A cup of tea. Weak black is probably your safest option.’

‘I prefer it white.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

To his credit he didn’t, when, minutes later, he poured his milk from its cute little silver jug and watched in dismay as it came tumbling out in yellow chunks.

‘Helmut!’ I yelled.

The owner came shuffling wearily over, a tea-towel on his shoulder, hair sprouting from every possible orifice. He’d had a long day. A long life, if it came to that, as had the milk.

‘Helmut, look at our bloody milk!’

He peered, sniffed, winced, then shuffled to the kitchen and back without a word of apology, without a word of any description except for a complaint about the waitress. ‘She must haf used last week’s supply by mistake,’ he grumbled as he placed a fresh jug on the table. ‘Dese girls! Do you haf any idea vot it’s like trying to get staff out here?’

‘You could try selecting them by some criteria other that the size of their breasts.’

I’d only been coming here for a few weeks, but that was long enough to observe that Helmut’s employees tended to be Swedish backpackers who aroused memories of his Bavarian youth and lasted about as long as the first failed seduction.

‘Perhaps the first thing I should do,’ said Charles, after a restorative sip of his Earl Grey, ‘is thank you for bringing the matter to our attention. It does appear that Mr Marsh is engaging in behaviour which could only be described as egregious, and possibly illegal.’

‘Like murder?’

Charles blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing.’ I knew I was going to have to go it alone on that one; the Land Council Legal Department’s brief went a long way, but not as far as homicide. ‘You’ve looked at the lease?’

‘I don’t know that I would dignify it with that name, and in point of fact, no, we haven’t. Which is, in itself I might add, sufficient reason for it to be regarded as lacking in any legal standing whatsoever.’

‘
Que?
’

‘Article 7.6 of the title deed states that for any agreement on the land use to be legitimate it needs to be confirmed by both a two-thirds majority of the owners and their legal representatives. To whit, ourselves.’

‘So you’ll go out there and tell him to piss off?’

‘Quite. Or we will.’

I was raising the cup to my lips, but the last comment made me pause, mid-air. ‘I dunno that I like the sound of that “we”.’

‘I held a meeting yesterday with the traditional owners.’

‘You managed to round them up?’

‘We found sufficient numbers to make a quorum here, in the Bluebush Town Camp.’

‘Including Freddy Ah Fong?’

‘Freddy was there, but his contribution to the discussion was… minimal.’

‘You mean he was pissed?’

‘Possibly. He does seem to have been struck by a certain… amnesia…’

‘That’d be guilt.’

‘…over his negotiations with Mr Marsh. Be that as it may, the owners have authorised the Lands Council to demand Mr Marsh remove his stock forthwith or face the consequences. We’ve sent a field officer out to investigate and, as you said, there are upwards of a thousand head of cattle contentedly grazing upon Moonlight pasture.’

‘So where do I come into it?’

‘When I suggested that it would be usual practice for a representative of the community to accompany us when such a demand is presented, what might best be described as a rather profound silence settled over the group…’

‘Ah. The breach into which Kuminjayi would normally step.’

‘At which point someone suggested you.’

‘I’m not a traditional owner. My mob come from up the Gulf country.’

‘They do seem to regard you as a member of the community.’

‘I’m touched.’

‘It was you who drew the matter to our attention. And it was you who, from all reports, was not afraid to…beard the lion, so to speak. All in all, it would seem that you’d be an appropriate representative.’

‘Does Marsh know you’re coming?’

‘Well, not as such, no. If he knew the reason for our trip I doubt whether he’d sit around waiting for us. But I’m pretty sure he’s there. I put in a call to the homestead and spoke to someone I presume was his wife. She said he’d be back today.’

‘Today?’ I checked my watch. Two-thirty. Charles leaned forward, looked a little wary. Here comes the crunch, I thought.

‘I’ve got a plane waiting out at the airstrip,’ he explained. ‘We could be out there and back before sunset…’

I sipped my tea, my mind busily weighing up the pros and cons of Charles’ suggestion. The main con, the prospect of Marsh slaughtering me on the spot, would presumably be reduced by the fact that I was packing a lawyer. A real one, this time.

What were the pros? A chance to sink the elastic-sided slipper into Marsh, see a bit of new country from the air and, most important of all, carry out a bit of extra-curricular sniffing. Maybe shed some light onto the circumstances of Lincoln’s death.

‘So you’ll come?’ Charles asked.

I smiled darkly. ‘Lemme at im.’

The plane was a single-engine Piper Warrior, the pilot a gangly farm boy named Jason who looked like he would have been more at home at the handlebars of a BMX than the controls of an aeroplane. I studied him warily: he had the shades and the cap, the flak jacket and the gum, but did he have the flying skills to get us there in one piece? My doubts diminished when I observed the supple ease with which he handled the take-off and the hour’s flight to Carbine Creek, but they came rushing back with the landing.

We were still some distance from the station runway when our engine spluttered and fell silent. Our boy-pilot yelled, ‘Oh my God!’ and jerked the throttle back and forth. No response. ‘Have to bring her in downwind!’

Christ, I thought, is this how I’m going to end up? As a pile of avgas-scented ashes on Marsh’s doorstep?

I was sitting in the front seat, and watched in heart-thumping horror as the wind gathered momentum and the earth flew up at us. I closed my eyes and a string of images appeared: my father, for one, then Hazel, and finally, ever so fleetingly, my poor dear mother.

I opened my eyes to see the runway rushing into view. ‘Not gonna make it!’ Jason screamed. We thumped down in rough pasture a hundred metres short of the runway, hit a rock, jerked skywards, bucked about by some killer wave, levelled out and made another touchdown.

The plane shuddered to a halt. The three of us sat there, motionless, stunned. Jason’s fingernails had embedded themselves in the yoke. Charles looked like he’d swallowed his brief case.

‘Nice piece of work, Jason,’ I said, my voice quavering. ‘If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll drive next time.’

Jason climbed out, stretched his back and made a dubious inspection of the undercarriage.

‘Wheel’s gonna need replacing,’ he gasped.

‘Thought we were, too, for a moment there. Got a spare one, have you Jason?’

‘No way I’ll be able to fix that out here.’ He kicked the battered strut, massaged his forearms. ‘What a fucking mess.’

‘Quite,’ commented Charles, adjusting his Adam’s apple. ‘And it’s about to get a lot messier.’

He nodded at a shed adjoining the homestead, maybe a kilometre away, from which a familiar red F100 was emerging, slow and ominous.