Something Fishy (21 page)

‘Can I help you?' His tone implied that he hoped not.

‘I'd like to speak to the senior officer on duty,' I said.

‘I'm the watchhouse keeper, if that's senior enough for you. Or you can wait for the sergeant. He'll be here at seven.'

‘Is there a CIB attached to this station?'

‘Nearest CIB's Torquay,' he said. Torquay was nearly an hour's drive away. ‘What's it concerning?'

‘A murder,' I said. ‘And the whereabouts of Rodney Syce. The Remand Centre escapee. He's got a bush camp somewhere up there.' I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the hills behind the town. ‘There's a fair chance of collaring him if you're quick enough.'

The cop narrowed his eyes, letting me know that he'd spent a long night listening to bullshit and his tolerance was pretty well exhausted. ‘Is that right, sir?'

‘I can assure you this is not a joke. I'm not crazy. I'm a member of parliament.'

Constable Leeuwyn's expression suggested he did not consider these categories to be mutually exclusive.

‘And I'm not drunk, either,' I went on. ‘If I look like crap, it's because I've spent half the night in the sea in fear for my life. I am not playing funny buggers here, officer. I'm here because I've just witnessed a number of very serious crimes involving a wanted fugitive.'

My high-horse tone did the trick. The copper, alert now, laid a clip-board on the counter between us. ‘Do you have any identification, sir?'

‘Not on me,' I said. ‘But I'm sure you can check. My name is Murray Whelan. I'm the member for Melbourne Upper in the Legislative Council.'

The constable took down my name, address and DOB, then disappeared through a door into a muster room with computers on the desks. I paced the worn linoleum of the vestibule in bare feet, keeping the blood flowing to my still-chilled extremities. The walls were hung with framed certificates of appreciation and commemorative photographs of civic events. In one picture, a representative of the Rotary Club was shown presenting the results of a fund-raising fun-run to an officer of the Country Fire Authority. Jake Martyn was holding one end of the cheque.

After ten minutes, the constable reappeared. Word had evidently come down the line that I was to be treated with kid gloves. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Whelan,' he said. ‘The sergeant will be here shortly to take charge of matters. In the meantime, you'd better tell me all about it.' He raised the flap on the counter, inviting me to step through. ‘Can I get you a cup of something?'

‘Tea with milk and sugar,' I said, my gratitude unfeigned. ‘Please.'

We went through to the muster-room where I dictated my statement between sips of hot tea. Three cups, it took, and twenty minutes. Leeuwyn two-finger typed my account of the night's doings straight into a computer, interrupted only by periodic visits to the cells to quell outbreaks of communal singing. I stuck to the bare bones and he tapped at the keys without comment or question, even when I mentioned Jake Martyn, whose name was almost certainly known to him.

When I got to the part where Syce fed Tony Melina's ear to the dog, the young copper looked up from the keyboard and opened his mouth as if about to warn me that telling outrageous fibs to the wallopers is a chargeable offence. I held his gaze until he turned back to the computer.

He printed out the finished statement and, as I was signing it, the sergeant arrived.

He was a solid man in his iron-grey fifties, with a military moustache and the bearing to match. His cheeks and chin were still raw from the razor and, judging by the bags under his eyes, the shave had come on the heels of a minimum of sleep. The buttons of his powder-blue shirt were taut over a midriff like a sack of concrete.

He introduced himself as Sergeant Terry Pendergast, took the statement from my hand and led me into his office, his demeanour correct and businesslike.

The sergeant's office was a cubby hole off the muster room. There was a large map of the district on the wall and a stand of fishing rods in the corner. He wedged himself behind an almost-bare desk and invited me to sit on the other side of it. He put on a pair of reading glasses and studied my statement. He took his time. Occasionally his gaze shifted from the page to my face, then back again. He stroked his moustache once or twice. There was coming and going in the outer office. I may have tapped my feet and chewed on a knuckle or two.

‘Hmmm,' said the sergeant at last. ‘Quite a story.' He laid down the statement, folded his reading glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He pushed his seat back and crossed his hands on his stomach. The ball, I understood, was in my court.

‘If you've spoken to Melbourne,' I said, ‘you'll be aware that I have a history in regard to Syce. You might even have been told that I've got a tendency to imagine I've seen him.'

Pendergast gave a slight nod, confiming that he'd been backgrounded. ‘And do you?'

‘Syce killed the woman I loved,' I said, ‘and our unborn child. So, yes, I'll admit to a degree of obsession. But this isn't like those other times. I realise it all sounds pretty far fetched, Jake Martyn's involvement and so on. And I don't have anything to substantiate my claims. But I'd have to be certifiably mad to make up something as unlikely as this.'

Pendergast gave me the copper's eyeball, as though considering the possibility. The salt encrusted on my printed hibiscus didn't help. Then, abruptly, he swivelled in his seat and directed his freshly shaven chin at the map on the wall. ‘So where do you reckon this bush camp is, Mr Whelan?'

The map was large-scale, the contours of the hills so dense they showed as crumples in the paper. Filaments of blue ran between the wrinkles, dozens of creeks and rivers. I got up, put my finger on Lorne, ran it up to Mount Sabine Road and traced the route along the ridge of the ranges to an unnamed road that led back down to the coast.

‘Somewhere here,' I said, placing my palm on an area of perhaps a hundred square kilometres. ‘It's hard to be more precise. You'll need to get in a helicopter.'

‘Let's start by trying to find your car,' said Pendergast.

A Constable Heinze was summoned. He didn't look more than twenty, a sinewy lad with a flat-top and a lazy drawl.

‘Any sign of this Syce,' the sergeant instructed, ‘let me know immediately. Do not approach.'

‘Understood,' said Heinze. ‘No worries. This way, sir.'

He rustled me up a pair of thongs, fed me into a police 4x4, dropped a pair of mirror shades over his eyes and hauled me back up into the hills. It was a tad more civilised than the trip down.

The sun was climbing, turning the sea to tinfoil and flooding the town with a harsh light. Work crews were clearing the foreshore of rubbish and stay-over party beasts were emerging from parked cars, blinking and wincing.

I tried to make myself comfortable, damp knickers wedged up my bum crack, eyes puffy with salt and glare. I wished I had a pair of sunglasses and some lounging pyjamas. I wished I were waking up in Barbara Prentice's bed, but the last time I thought about her was a lifetime ago.

‘Busy night for you blokes,' I said, making conversation.

‘Not as bad as usual,' said the young constable. ‘So they tell me. Only twelve arrests.'

‘How about the Falls?' I said. ‘How'd that go?'

‘No problems, if that's what you mean,' he said. ‘Hunters and Collectors stole the show, I heard.'

‘Were they charged?' I said.

‘Very amusing, sir,' said Heinze. ‘Where to from here?'

At first, I had no great difficulty in retracing the route I'd taken the previous evening. Landmarks and side-roads appeared in the right places. The twists and turns of the track resonated in my memory. But as we advanced deeper into the bush, my self-assurance began to wane. The whole aspect of the terrain was transformed by the daylight, even if that daylight was strained through a rainforest canopy. The tracks and trails, no longer revealed by headlights, twisted and forked in ways I didn't anticipate. The sheer vastness of the bush threatened to overwhelm me.

I hunched forward in my seat, staring through the windscreen, scanning the sides of the track, directing Heinze down dead-end tracks that were little more than faint ruts in the hillsides. We backed up and tried again. And again.

‘It's around here somewhere,' I kept repeating. ‘It has to be.'

But the damned thing had vanished, swallowed up by the landscape like some dingo-snaffled Adventist infant.

After an hour of buggerising around, Heinze got a call on the radio, a string of letters and numbers, unintelligible code.

‘A4, copy that, 7–11,' he replied, or words to that effect.

We'd been summoned back to Lorne. Developments had occurred.

‘What developments?'

‘Sarge'll fill you in,' said young Heinze.

Hitting the nearest sealed road, we dropped down to the sea. I scanned the outline of the hills, concluding that this was probably the road I'd ridden in the boat with Tony Melina. Syce had turned south-west at the Great Ocean Road. We turned north-east. The tide was coming back in. Tony's body was out there somewhere, catering to the bottom feeders.

Sergeant Pendergast was waiting outside the cop shop, lips compressed, thumbs hooked in his belt. There'd been developments all right. ‘Your car's been located,' he announced. ‘It's parked near the Cumberland River caravan park, twenty kilometres back along the Great Ocean Road. It's been there for several hours, apparently.'

My shrivelled dick shrivelled further. I stared at the copper, struggling to understand. I was back to square one.

‘Somebody must have moved it…' I said.

The sergeant raised his hands, cutting me short. ‘This obviously raises a number of questions, Mr Whelan. But I'm sure we'll soon get some answers. A member of the Syce Task Force is on his way from Melbourne to take charge.'

Was he bringing a straitjacket, I wondered? A ticket to the funny farm? Or just the Victim Liaison shrink, ready with some on-the-spot counselling for the bitter and twisted Murray Whelan, headbanging fantasist.

I nodded bleakly. ‘The car?'

‘For the moment, we'd prefer to leave it where it is,' said the sergeant. ‘If you don't mind.'

As if I had any choice. I felt hollow inside. I must have looked it. Pendergast took pity on me.

‘This time of year,' he said, ‘Christmas and whatnot, it can be very emotionally difficult for some people.' The sergeant twitched his moustache in the direction of the cop shop. ‘You can wait inside. We'll get you something to eat if you like.'

At the mention of food, I felt a sudden ravenous hunger.

‘Okay,' I said. ‘I'll have an orange juice, two fried eggs, bacon, mushrooms, grilled tomato, wholegrain toast, a selection of jams and a black coffee with sugar. And a cigarette, thanks.'

‘Best we can do is a cup of instant and a slice of cold pizza I'm afraid, Mr Whelan. This isn't the parliamentary dining room.'

Delving into my cling-shrunk shorts, I confirmed that my cash was still there. ‘Maybe I'll just pop down the street,' I said.

The sergeant dispensed an indifferent shrug. ‘Better make it quick,' he said. ‘The officer from Melbourne will be here soon.'

‘I'll try not to keep him waiting.' I hoisted my shorts, turned and hobbled away in my borrowed flip-flops.

It was getting towards nine and the early risers were up and about. The pock of ball on catgut came from the tennis courts on the foreshore. A man with a bowling-ball beergut was hosing the footpath outside the pub. Couples pushed toddlers in strollers. Kerbside parking places were filling fast. The air of normal life seemed discordant, bizarre.

As I trudged back down the hill towards Mountjoy Parade, I contemplated my situation, seething with frustration. The business with the car had trashed my fragile credibility with the coppers. This dick from Melbourne had been dispatched to hose me down. At best, I might be able to persuade him to contact Immigration and have Tony Melina's name put on a passport watch list. An immediate full-scale manhunt for Syce was clearly out of the question.

There were other law-enforcement buttons I could push, of course. Corporate Affairs. The tax department. But that was a long-term approach. In the meantime, Syce would slip through the net again.

I found breakfast being served at tables on the terracotta-tiled terrace outside the Cumberland Resort. Some of the other customers looked a little the worse for wear, although none of them came near my level of unkempt. The waitress asked for cash upfront when she took my order.

As I peeled off the notes, I recalled that I'd left my wallet under the seat of the Magna. Where it had probably been found by whoever moved the car. An image came to me of Rodney Syce in Bali, spending up big on my Visa card. But there was more than plastic in my billfold. As well as a creased ultrasound Polaroid, it also held my driver's licence and the rent receipt for the holiday house.