Something Fishy (6 page)

‘You've done a deal with Wilson,' I said. ‘And I'm the fly in the ointment.'

Sutherland shrugged. ‘What if that Bunting bloke had drowned?'

‘No chance of that,' I said. ‘Too buoyant. Completely empty head.'

‘Tell that to the committee of enquiry, just before they transfer me to shore patrol ticketing dog owners for crapping on the beach. Thought you might understand. Being Labor.'

I heaved a defeated sigh. ‘Yeah, all right,' I said. ‘None of this happened. And if it did, I didn't see it. Just get me back on dry land pronto, okay?'

The light was fading when we cruised into the San Remo boat harbour. Up on the Phillip Island bridge, the coaches were bumper-to-bumper, packed with tourists bound for the twilight parade of penguins waddling ashore at the rookeries.

I hit the dock as soon as we tied up, glad to have something solid beneath my feet. Next time I got on a boat, I promised myself, it would be nothing smaller than the
Queen
Mary
.

It was nearly six o'clock. I walked down the jetty, past the fishermen's co-operative and into the front bar of the Westernport Hotel. Three blokes in working clobber were nursing beers at the bar, swapping monotones. A bunch of bozos were playing pool, their banter lost in the plink-plink of the poker machines from the gaming lounge. ‘Wheel of Fortune' was showing on the box above the bar. I parked on a stool and ordered a Jameson's. ‘Straight up,' I told the barman, a girl in a Jim Beam tee-shirt. ‘Water on the side.'

I diluted the whiskey and sipped, letting it settle my stomach. When the television news began, I tipped the last of it down my throat and signalled for another.

The inquest story came after the first ad break. The state coroner, the newsreader reported, had found that Lyndal Luscombe, thirty-five, was murdered by convicted felon Rodney Syce during a break-out from the Melbourne Remand Centre.

Of course it was fucking murder. It was murder the instant that the motorbike slammed into Lyndal. You kill somebody while you're escaping from jail, it's murder. Not manslaughter. Not involuntary homicide. Not reckless driving. Not oops. Murder, plain and simple.

Lyndal's picture filled the screen, a full-length shot cropped from a portrait taken at her cousin's wedding in late '93. She was laughing, crinkling her nose at the camera like a naughty schoolkid.

‘Despite an extensive search here and interstate, Syce remains at large,' continued the newsreader's voice.

The screen filled with a mug-shot. It showed a thick-lipped, round-faced man with a receding brow and dark, surly eyes. He looked like one of those guys who stand at road works, directing traffic with a lollipop sign. The sort of face you see, but don't register.

‘Police are hopeful that the coroner's finding will result in new information that may lead them to Syce.'

Vision cut to a sleek, fortyish man in a fashionable suit and rimless glasses standing on the steps of the Coroner's Court. A caption identified him as Detective Sergeant Damian Meakes. ‘This man Syce is dangerous and absolutely desperate,' he said, leaning forward into the camera, one hand holding down his tie. ‘Anyone who believes they might have seen him on the day of the escape or any time since, or has any other information, should contact the Syce Task Force or Crime Stoppers. Under no circumstances should members of the public approach him directly.'

And that was it. Sixty seconds, tops. My second whiskey was on the bar. I slammed it down neat and stomped out the door, fire raging in my belly.

The sea was purple with the last shreds of the day and the air was acrid with rotting seaweed and diesel fumes. I put the key in the ignition of the Magna and drove across the bridge to Phillip Island. I went past a tourist information booth and a flower farm, down streets with nautical names, following the road through the sand dunes to the rectangle of asphalt beside the Woolamai lifesaving club.

A half-dozen vehicles were parked overlooking the beach. Sedans, tradesmen's utilities and a panel van with roof-racks. Solitary men sat in two of the cars, gazing out at the monotonous pounding of the surf. Sad, lonely fucks like me, pining their lives away.

Should I ball my fist and bang on their windows, I wondered? Tear open my shirt and display the scar where my heart had been torn out? Defy them to outdo my wounds? Squat with them in the tufted dunes and howl like a stricken animal at the rising moon?

I lit a cigarette from my emergency pack in the glovebox and sat on the topmost plank of the wooden steps leading down to the sand, shoulders hunched against the deepening chill.

Aeons ago, I'd surfed here at Woolamai. Driven down with friends from university, spent a weekend catching the break that unfurled beyond the sandbank. But tonight the waves of Woolamai were not surfable, not by me anyway. They reared up, menacing black walls, their crests shredded by the wind, their glassy surface bursting open as they smashed against the shore.

The cigarette made my head spin. I gave it the flick and plodded down the steps to the empty beach, hands buried in my pockets. When I reached the edge of the water, I took off my shoes, stuffed my socks inside, hung them around my neck by the laces and rolled my pants to the knee.

Talk about a fucking wasteland. It wasn't supposed to be like this. We were going to have a daughter. There would be the father, the mother and the children. An affectionate, intelligent, playful, semi-blended family. We would adore each other. The big brother would cherish his little sister. She would worship him. The father would be a competent provider, the beloved butt of his children's teasing. The mother would outshine him and he would glory in her accomplishments. They would all live happily ever after.

Then had come a man on a Kawasaki racer.

The man of my dreams.

Rodney Syce was a light-fingered chancer with a tendency to lose his grip when things got slippery.

The third child of a Darwin construction worker, he was sent to live with elderly relatives in a one-silo town in Western Australia's wheat belt in 1974, after his mother was killed by flying debris during Cyclone Tracy. At fourteen, he was already in trouble with the law. Illegal use of a motor vehicle was the first entry in a ledger that grew to include breaking and entering, possession of stolen goods and trespass. The juvenile court gave him good behaviour bonds and suspended sentences.

I knew this because I'd made it my business to find out.

The cops had told me a certain amount, of course. In the beginning they were falling over themselves to keep me in the picture. Later, when the search became a long-haul operation, they were much less forthcoming. But by then, I'd started making my own enquiries.

Call it a kind of therapy. Or fuel for speculation in the absence of news. Information is currency, they say. I wasn't sure what the facts I was gathering could buy me. Not peace of mind, that's for sure.

I collected newspaper clippings and studied video footage. Read court transcripts. Talked to lawyers, journalists and jailbirds. Pulled what few strings I could still lay my hands on. Assembled a file. Sifted it. Pored over it deep into the night.

Height: 168 cm. Weight: 75 kg. Eyes: dark brown. Distinguishing marks: nil. Criminal history: extensive.

At seventeen, Rodney Syce quit school and headed for Queensland, and a string of short-lived rouseabout and labouring jobs on cattle stations. His first taste of jail came at nineteen, two months for assault and robbery after he rolled a drunk at the Cloncurry races. The magistrate was less exercised by the ninety-seven dollars lifted from the victim's wallet than the metal fence picket used on the back of his head.

Back on the outside, Syce fluctuated between low-wage jobs and petty crime. He worked in canneries, on a prawn trawler, down the Mt Isa mines where he was dismissed for pilfering from the employees' changeroom. Then came a two-year stretch in Boggo Road after he pushed a night watchman down a flight of stairs during a bungled factory break-in. On release, he took up with a gang of Brisbane car thieves. That ended when he bashed the employee of a dodgy panel-beater with a steering-wheel lock. She turned out to be the girlfriend of a local heavy. On the wrong side of both the cops and the crims, he hightailed it to Melbourne.

Within a month, he was back in custody. Disturbed during a daylight burg in South Yarra, he belted the householder, an eighty-two-year-old retired judge, with an antique inkstand. The old beak went down squeezing his heart-attack alarm. The ambulance arrived just as Syce was coming out the front door, making like he lived there. The paramedics, burly boys, sat on him until the cops arrived.

In his ten-year life of crime, Rodney Syce had generated enough paperwork for a psychological profile to emerge. In layman's terms, he was a gutless mongrel, a coward given to unprovoked outbursts of violence, a loner who had trouble maintaining relationships with other people.

Except in prison. There, Syce seemed to find the sort of society he craved. Quick to suss the pecking order, he found ways of attaching himself to a high-status inmate, some means of making himself useful to a top dog.

Someone like Adrian Parish. At fifty-three, Parish was king of the heap in remand. An armed robber and old-school all-rounder, he was a tiler by trade. He had a reputation for covering his tracks well and keeping his head down between jobs. He used violence only when he believed it was necessary. Shooting at coppers to avoid arrest, for example. And, although he'd been charged with dozens of offences, he had a knack for beating the rap. In a thirty-five-year career as a professional criminal, he'd served a mere eight years and seven months of jail time.

But Parish had run out of luck. An armoured-truck heist had turned to shit. Shots were fired. A guard had a coronary embolism and nearly died. Dye-bombs spoiled the cash. When fingerprint fragments were found in the burned-out getaway car, the driver rolled over. Parish was rousted from his marital bed at 5 a.m., charged with everything but indecent exposure, committed to the County Court for jury trial, found guilty and remanded for sentencing. The judge was poised to throw the book. The way things were going, Adrian Parish would be a very old man by the time he got out of prison.

But while he was waiting for sentence, Rodney Syce entered his orbit. And Rodney had qualities that Adrian appreciated. He could ride a motorbike and do what he was told.

The sands of Woolamai beach had turned to grey. The sky and the sea were seamless. The breaking waves advanced, line after line, roaring like distant artillery.

If I had a gun, I told myself, I'd kill Rodney Syce. Do it with my bare hands if necessary. If I ever found him, came face-to-face with him, saw him walking down the street.

But I knew that it was just as well I didn't have a gun. If I had a gun, I might already have taken revenge.

Three times I'd spotted Syce. The first was during the AFL grand final. The Eagles were thrashing the Cats. Late in the last quarter, Peter Matera darted from the pack and took a stab for goal. The ball went wide and sailed into the crowd. Fans rose, reaching to grab it. A camera tracked the action, magnifying the image on the electronic scoreboard. One of those who reached for the incoming pigskin was Rodney Syce.

I knew him as soon as I saw him. He had a beanie pulled down around his ears, a West Coast scarf swathing his neck. Probably figured he could pass unnoticed, one of thousands decked out in blue and yellow.

I came up out of my seat, fumbling for my mobile, dashing down the stairs to the section of terrace where the ball had landed, jabbering at the task-force detective who picked up the phone. Then the full-time siren blew and the crowd was streaming for the exits, ninety-seven thousand people in motion.

Even before the last of the fans had dispersed, two dicks were sitting with me in the stadium's media centre, running the tape over and over, slow-motion and freeze-frame. Yes, they agreed, the guy did look a bit like Syce. It was possibly him. But within a week, it wasn't. The seat was bought with a credit card by a retired librarian from Warrandyte. The lead was scratched.

The second time I saw Syce, he was coming out of a service station on the Hume Highway near Wangaratta. It was Boxing Day and I was driving back after spending Christmas with Lyndal's parents at their orchard near Beechworth. It was their first Christmas without her, Red was in Sydney with Wendy, and I hadn't seen Lyndal's family since the funeral. We ate roast turkey on the screened veranda and sat not saying much in the listless afternoon heat and I slept on a trundle bed on the floor between two near strangers who would have been my brothers-in-law if not for Rodney Syce.

An hour into the trip home, I was filling the tank at a roadhouse pump when a man came out the gas-station door and got into a dust-covered Falcon. Wraparound sunglasses, stringy goatee, but Syce all right, no doubt in my mind. I bolted inside to the cashier. ‘That guy just left, you know him?'

The cashier shook her head, I grabbed the phone and the Falcon was intercepted at roadblock just south of Glenrowan. The driver came out with his hands in the air, babbling that he'd paid already, the cheque must have been held up in the Christmas mail. An unlicensed driver with $900 in outstanding speeding fines. A win of sorts, but not Rodney Syce. Not by a country mile.

After my third sighting, I had a house-call from Detective Sergeant Damian Meakes of the Syce Task Force.