The Broken Shore (4 page)

‘So you’ve got a record of all his financial dealings?’

‘Just his bills.’

‘From how far back?’

‘Not long. I suppose it’s seven, eight years. Since Crake’s stroke.’

‘Can I see your records?’

‘Confidential,’ she said. ‘Between solicitor and client.’

‘Client’s been bashed and left for dead,’ said Cashin.

Cecily blinked a few times. ‘Not going to get me in trouble with the Law Institute this? Don’t want to have to ask bloody Rees for advice.’

‘Mrs Addison, it’s what you have to do. If you don’t, we’ll get a court order today.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose that changes things a bit. I’ll tell Mrs McKendrick to make copies. Can’t see what help it’ll be. You should be out looking for bloody druggies. What’s stolen from the house?’

‘The people who work at Bourgoyne’s,’ said Cashin, ‘what about their pay now?’

Cecily raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘He’s not dead, you know. They’ll be paid until someone instructs me to stop. What would you expect?’

Cashin got up. ‘The worst. That’s what police life teaches you.’

‘Cynical, Joe. In my experience, and I say that with…’

‘Thank you, Mrs Addison. I’ll send someone for the copies. Where’s Jamie Bourgoyne?’

‘Drowned in Tasmania. Years ago.’

‘Not a lucky family then.’

‘No. Money can’t buy it. And it ends if Charles dies. The line’s broken. The Bourgoyne line’s ended.’

The street was quiet, sunlight on the pale stone of the library. It had been the Mechanics’ Institute when it opened in the year carved above the door: 1864. Three elderly women were going up the steps, in single file, left hands on the metal balustrade. He could see their delicate ankles. Old people were like racehorses—too much depending on too little, the bloodline the critical factor.

The Cashin bloodline didn’t bear thinking about.

‘I CAN’T fix stuff like this for you, Bern,’ said Cashin. ‘I can’t fix anything. Sam’s in shit because he’s bad news and now he has to cop it.’

They were in a shed like an aircraft hangar at his cousin Bern Doogue’s place outside Kenmare, a town twenty kilometres from Port Monro with a main street of boarded-up shops, two lingering pubs, a butcher, a milk bar and a video hire.

Farmland had once surrounded the village of Kenmare like a green sea. Long backyards had run down to paddocks with milk cows oozing dung, to potato fields dense with their pale grenades. Then the farms were subdivided. Hardiplank houses went up on three-acre blocks, big metal sheds out the back. Now the land produced nothing but garbage and children, many with red hair. The blocks were weekend parking lots for the big rigs that rumbled in from every direction on Saturdays—Macks, Kenworths, Mans, Volvos, eighteen-speed transmission, 1800-litre tank, the owners’ names in flowery script on the doors, the unshaven, unslept drivers sitting two metres off the ground, spaced out and listening to songs of lost love and loneliness.

The truckies had bought their blocks when land was cheap, fuel was cheap, freight rates were good and they were young and paunch-less. Now they couldn’t see their pricks without a mirror, the trucks sucked fifty-dollar notes, the freight companies screwed them till they had to drive six days, some weeks seven, to make the repayments.

Cashin stood in the shed door and watched Bern splitting wood on his new machine, a red device that stood on splayed legs like a moon lander. He picked up a section of log, dropped it on the table against a thick steel spike, hit the trigger with a boot. A hydraulic ram slammed a splitter blade into the wood, cleaving it in half.

‘Well, Jesus,’ said Bern, ‘what’s the use of havin a fuckin copper in the family, I ask you.’

‘No use at all,’ Cashin said.

‘Anyway, it’s not like it’s Sam’s idea. He’s with these two Melbourne kids, city kids, the one breaks the fuckin car window with a bottle.’

‘Bern, Sam’s got Buckley’s. I’ll ring a lawyer, she’s good, she’ll keep him out of jail.’

‘What’s that gonna cost? Fuckin arm?’

‘It’ll cost what it costs. Otherwise, tell him to ask for the duty solicitor. Where’d you get this wood?’

Bern put fingers under his filthy green beanie, exposed his black widow’s peak, scratched his scalp. He had the Doogue nose—big, hooked. It was unremarkable in youth, came with age to dominate the male faces.

‘Joe,’ he said, ‘is that a cop kind of question?’

‘I don’t care a lot about wood crime. It’s good-looking stuff.’

‘Fuckin prime beef, mate. Beefwood. Not your rotten Mount Gambier shit.’

‘How much?’

‘Seventy.’

‘Find your own lawyer.’

‘That’s a special fuckin family price. Mate, this stuff, it runs out the fuckin door.’

‘Let it run,’ Cashin said. ‘Got to go.’ He walked.

‘Hey, hey, Jesus, Joe, don’t be so fuckin difficult.’

‘Say hello to Leanne for me,’ Cashin said. ‘Christ knows what she did to deserve you. Must be something in another life.’

‘Joe. Mate. Mate.’

Cashin was at the door. ‘What?’

‘Give and take, mate.’

‘Haven’t been talking to my mum, have you?’

‘Nah. Your mum’s too good for us. How’s sixty, you tee up the lawyer? Split, delivered, that’s fuckin cost, no labour, I’m takin a knock.’

‘Four for two hundred,’ Cashin said. ‘Neatly stacked.’

‘Shit, takin food out of your own family’s mouths. He’s up next week Wednesday.’

‘I’ll ring with an appointment time.’

Bern smacked on another log, stamped on the trigger. There was a bang, bits of wood went everythere. ‘Fuck,’ he said. He pulled a big wood sliver out of the front of his greasy army surplus jumper.

‘This place’s a model of workplace safety,’ Cashin said. ‘Be on my way.’

He went out into the grey day, into Bern’s two-acre backyard, a graveyard of cars, utes, trucks, machinery, windows, doors, sinks, toilet bowls, basins, second-hand timber, bricks. Bern followed him to his vehicle, parked in a clearing.

‘Listen, Joe, there’s somethin else,’ he said. ‘Debbie says the Piggot kid, I forget his name, there’s hundreds of em, she says he’s sellin stuff at school.’

Cashin got in, wound down the window. ‘Got something against drugs, Bern? Since when?’

Bern screwed up his eyes, scratched his head through the beanie with black-rimmed nails. ‘That’s totally fuckin different, we’re talking about sellin hard stuff to kids here.’

‘Why’d she tell you?’

‘Well, not me. Told her mum.’

‘Why?’

Bern cleared his throat and spat, bullethole lips, a sound like a peashooter. ‘Leeane found some stuff. Not Debbie’s, just holdin it for this other girl bought it from a Piggot.’

Cashin started the vehicle. ‘Bern,’ he said, ‘you don’t want your cousin the cop cracking down on teenage drug-taking in Kenmare. Think about it. Think about the Piggots. There’s an army of them.’

Bern thought about it. ‘Yeah, well, that’s probably the strength of it. Mark me for the dog straight off, wouldn’t the bastards. Boong dog. Mind you, comes to Doogues against Piggots, they wouldn’t take a round off us.’

‘We don’t want it to come to that. I’ll call you.’

‘Wait, wait. You can do somethin else for me.’

‘What?’

‘Put the hard word on Debbie. She won’t listen to her mum and I’m a fuckin non-starter.’

‘I thought she was just holding the stuff?’

Bern shrugged, looked away. ‘To be on the safe side,’ he said. ‘Can’t hurt, can it?’

Cashin knew there was no way out. Next he would be reminded of how Bern had risked death by jumping onto the back of mountainous, cretinous Terry Luntz and hung on like a chimp on a gorilla, choking the school bully with a skinny forearm until he relaxed his deadly squeeze.

‘What time’s she get back from school?’ Cashin said.

‘About four.’

‘I’ll come round one day, point out the dangers.’

‘You’re a good bloke, Joe.’

‘No, I’m not. I just don’t want to hear about fucking Terry Luntz again. He would’ve let me go.’

Bern smiled his sly, dangerous Doogue smile. ‘Never. Blue in the face, tongue stickin out the side of your mouth. You had fuckin seconds left.’

‘In that case, what took you so long?’

‘Prayin for guidance, mate. What excuse you cunts got for takin so long to catch our beloved Mr Charlie Bourgoyne’s killer?’

‘The victim’s not being squeezed by a fat boy. There’s no hurry. What’ve you got against Bourgoyne?’

‘Nothin. The local saint. Everyone loves Charlie. Rich and idle. You know my dad used to work there, Bourgoyne & Cromie? Charlie sold it out under em. Shot the fuckin horse.’

Cashin passed three vehicles on the way home, knew them all. At the last crossroads, two ravens pecking at vermilion sludge turned on him the judgmental eyes of old men in a beaten pub.

IT WAS darkening when Cashin reached home, the wind ruffling the trees on the hill, strumming the corrugated iron roof. He got the fire going, took out a six-pack of Carlsberg, put on
L’elisir d’amore,
Donizetti, sank into the old chair, cushion in the small of his back. Tired in the trunk, hurting in the pelvis, pains down his legs, he swallowed two aspirins with the first swig of beer.

Life’s short, son, don’t drink any old piss.

Singo’s advice, Singo always drank Carlsberg or Heineken.

Cashin sat and drank, stared at nothing, hearing Domingo, thinking about Vickie, about the boy. Why had she called him Stephen? Stephen would be nine now, Cashin could make the calculation, he knew the day, the night, the moment. And he had never spoken to him, never touched him, never been closer than twenty metres to him. Vickie would not bring him to the hospital when Cashin asked her to. ‘He’s got a father and it isn’t you,’ she said.

Nothing moved her.

All he wanted was to see him, talk to him. He didn’t know why. What he knew was that the thought of the boy ached in him like his broken bones.

At 7 pm, on the second beer, he put on the television.

In what is feared to be another drug underworld killing, a 50-year-old Melbourne accountant, Andrew Gabor, of Kew, was this morning shot
dead in front of his fifteen-year-old daughter outside exclusive St Theresa’s girls’ school in Malvern.

Footage of a green BMW outside the school, men in black overcoats beside it. Cashin recognised Villani, Birkerts, Finucane.

Two gunmen fled the scene in a Ford Transit van, later found in Elwood.

A van being winched onto the police flatbed tow truck to be taken to the forensic science centre.

Police appealed to anyone who saw two men wearing dark clothing and baseball caps in the van or at or near the scene around 7.30 am to contact CrimeStoppers.

It is believed that police today questioned Mr Gabor’s nephew, Damian Gabor, a rave party and rock concert entrepreneur. In 2002, Mr Gabor was found not guilty of assaulting Anthony Metcalf, a drug dealer later found dead in a rubbish skip in Carnegie. He had been shot seven times.

On the monitor behind the news reader Cashin saw The Heights filmed from the television helicopter, vehicles all over the forecourt, the search of the grounds in progress.

Following another crime of violence, the seventy-six-year-old head of one of the state’s best-known families is tonight fighting for his life in an intensive-care unit after being brutally assaulted at his home outside Cromarty.

Charles Bourgoyne was this morning found near death in the sitting room of the family mansion. He was flown to King George’s Hospital by helicopter.

Mr Bourgoyne, noted for his philanthropy, is the son of Richard Bourgoyne, one of the founders of Bourgoyne & Cromie, legendary engine manufacturers. Charles Bourgoyne sold the family firm to British interests in 1976. His twin older brothers both died in World War II, one of them executed by the Japanese.

Homicide investigators believe Mr Bourgoyne, who was alone in the house, may have been the victim of a burglary turned vicious. Items of value are missing from the house.

Hopgood on camera, outside The Heights, wind moving his straight hair.

‘This is a savage attack on a much-loved and defenceless man.

We are committing all our resources to find those responsible for this terrible act and we appeal to anyone with information to come forward.’

King George’s Hospital tonight said that Mr Bourgoyne’s condition was critical.

Cashin reached for the envelope with the business statements from Cecily Addison. This has nothing to do with me, he thought. I’m the station commander in Port Monro, staff of four.

Old habits, curiosity. He started with the most recent statement. Then he heard the name.

Australia’s newest political party, United Australia, today elected lawyer and Aboriginal activist Bobby Walshe to lead it into the federal election.

Cashin looked at the television.

The new party, a coalition of Greens, Democrats and independents that has drawn support from disaffected Labor and Liberal supporters, will field candidates in all electorates.

Bobby Walshe appeared on camera. Handsome, sallow, hawk-nosed, just a hint of curl in his dark hair.

‘It’s a great honour for me to be chosen by so many dedicated and talented people to lead United Australia. This is a watershed day. From now on, Australians have a real political choice. The time when many Australians saw voting for one of the small parties as a waste of a vote are over. We’re not small. We’re not single-issue. We offer a real alternative to the tired, copycat policies of the two political machines that have dominated our political lives for so long.’

Bobby Walshe had been the smartest kid in Cashin’s class at primary school and that hadn’t stopped him being called a boong and a coon and a nigger.

The Bourgoyne payment statements didn’t make any sense. Cashin’s attention wandered, he put them back in the file, opened another drink and thought about what to eat.

THE HILL was lost in morning mist, a damp silence on the land. Cashin took a route towards the Corrigan boundary, visibility no more than thirty metres, the dogs appearing and disappearing, bounding patches of dark in the pale-grey world.