Whistle Down The Wire
Robert Engwerda
A Mitchell Mystery
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Text copyright © 2016 Robert Engwerda
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are imaginative creations or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 9780994595614
Cover design by Pier Vido. Cover photograph Pixabay. Formatting and file conversion by Pier Vido.
Publisher: Robert Engwerda
robertengwerda.net
For Rod and Di Case
Special thanks also to: Pamela Biggins, Pier Vido
Also available at Amazon.com: The Summertime Dead (A Mitchell Mystery, Book 1)
VICTORIA, 1967
Chapter 1
It was the middle of the night calls he dreaded most, the ones that had him lurching from his bed muddle-headed and nauseas. This time Senior Sergeant Lloyd Cole scrambled to his feet doing his best to push away the possibility that their son or daughter might have been hurt in an accident, or worse, be laid out dead in a Melbourne hospital.
However quiet he tried to be, he couldn’t help but disturb his wife, Nancy. He found the telephone in the passageway gloom and grabbed the receiver, his heart pounding. Behind him Nancy was already pulling her quilted dressing gown tightly around her, hovering as she swayed with sleep. Her husband seemed to have his ear pressed against the telephone for aeons before he spoke into it.
‘Alright, I’m on my way,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ she asked groggily.
‘The goods train,’ he said as he fumbled his way into clothes. ‘Another car that thought it could beat it across the Harper’s Corner intersection.’
‘Is it bad?’
‘It looks like it. I’ll have to go out.’
‘It’s been raining, watch you don’t slip off the road, too,’ she cautioned.
Her words surprised him. This last six months they’d been faltering, her drinking flaring from time to time so he never knew what to expect when he walked into the house at the end of the day.
‘I’ll be alright. Thanks,’ he answered.
He finished dressing, swaddling himself against the cold July air. Even with the choke fully out his car took longer than usual to start. He knew Harper’s Corner well. It was a remote intersection he’d been called to on more occasions than he cared to remember, including several times when there had been altercations between vehicles and the night train. The worst accident he’d seen had occurred there. In broad daylight, five teenagers in a battered old Ford had been obliterated by a new passenger train careering through it at full speed.
But at night here, away from town lights and with fine, misty rain darkening the paddocks around him, it wasn’t hard to see how a careless driver might be caught out. Murky, threatening: the perilously muddy roadsides, the rusted barbed-wire fences, the low, smoking dams and shadowy houses set back from the road. A reach down to find something better on the radio, or a packet of cigarettes slipping to the floor might be all the distraction it took.
Cole drove on. A faint glow of vehicle headlights and the train’s powerful light in the distance beckoned him to Harper’s Corner.
He parked his car fifty yards from the junction of road and railway line, noting the light drizzle falling through his headlights before he turned them off. The fire brigade truck sat squarely on the intersection, like an X marking the place of contact. The train had come to a stop further along the track.
Cole took a torch from his coat pocket and shone it either side of the track as he made his way to the wreck. It began to rain heavily and he pulled his coat collar up against it. Torchlight picked out glittering glass and shards of sharp metal strewn over the bluestone rubble. Ahead, men crouched silently around the track and the freight trucks. Several other men stood where the wrecked car had finally come to rest. In charging through the intersection the locomotive had lifted the car and crumpled, dragged and swallowed it before spitting out its remains over the side of the elevated track. Cole imagined the train’s locked brakes squealing to a halt in showers of sparks as the wreck came to a halt almost a hundred yards from the point of impact.
But even before he reached the wreck, he knew that no one inside it could have survived. And as if to intensify the misery, rain began slanting in harder.
Garry Chambers, captain of the local fire brigade, saw him approaching.
‘No hope?’ Cole asked.
In the dim and rain and with water already dripping from his helmet, Chambers looked more miner than fire brigade chief as he scrutinised the wreck, a car mashed into half its original size and even less of its shape.
‘None,’ he answered. ‘They would have been dead in a second. We’re trying to get them out. Or what’s left of them.’
‘Any idea who we’re looking at?’ Cole said, having to speak louder over the noise of the rain as he caught something vaguely human inside the wreck.
‘Someone thought maybe Harry Colston and his wife, from the look of the car, but we can’t be sure.’
‘Harry? Really?’
‘Yes. I’ve sent your Ben Whittaker back for a flatbed truck and some help from the railway station. Somehow we’ll have to haul this mess back to town.’
Cole had run into Harry Colston numerous times at the Shepparton harness racing, Colston often with a wad of money in his hand and none too careful about who he flashed it in front of.
Two of the brigade’s volunteers began attacking a ruptured car door with crowbars, taking turns at launching themselves at the door’s hinges.
Cole shone his torch around the wreck, found a numberplate and hunching over recorded it with the stubby pencil in the pocket notebook he always carried.
‘I’ll do a search on this,’ he told Chambers. ‘It should tell us for certain if it is the Colstons’ car. What about the train driver? Where’s he?’
‘Up there,’ Chambers pointed. ‘He’s pretty shaken up by it all. I told him to stay in the cabin. Incredible, too, that every truck stayed on the track, or at least that’s how it looks. Who knows about damage to the track? We’ll need the railways to check it in the morning.’
‘You know the train driver?’
‘I’ll go and have a word,’ Cole said and he walked through the dismal rain to the front of the train, the locomotive’s headlight still illuminating the track ahead.
Cole swung himself up onto the engine’s step and opened the cabin door. The train driver was every bit as dazed as Chambers had said. His shivering and trembling had nothing to do with the cold. He slumped with head in hands, his close-cropped hair almost blue in the dim.
‘You alright?’ Cole asked.
‘You never get used to it,’ the driver said, raising his head to stare straight ahead through the cabin window. ‘You see it coming. The car, the motorbike, or the horse float that’s never going to clear the track in time. It’s like slow-motion. And all the time you know. You pull the brake hard and brace yourself. Wait for it to happen.’ He turned to Cole. ‘That’s the worst part of it. When you know there’s nothing you can do.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Cole told him. ‘Everyone thinks they can beat the train. Are you up to telling me what happened?’
The driver nodded miserably and Cole jotted down his particulars first.
‘When did you first see the car coming? Did it have its lights on? Take your time.’
The driver stared down at his lap, thought.
‘I’m not sure, not exactly,’ he said. ‘I think I must have been almost on it by the time I noticed.’
‘The car’s headlights?’
He shook his head, answered ambiguously, ‘Maybe.’
‘Think about it. Were its lights on?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure they were. In the dark, it’s the lights you usually notice, not the car.’
‘Did you sound your horn?’
‘I always do. Every level crossing I come to I send a warning, first when I’m a couple of hundred yards away, and then once again when I’m closer. I can’t see why they didn’t hear it.’
‘And then?’
‘I pulled on the brake. I’d seen the car out of the corner of my eye. You know what I mean? Then I would have shut my eyes, bracing for it. You can’t help it.’
‘It wouldn’t be a good feeling,’ Cole agreed. ‘Was there anything you noticed about the car before it hit? Who was inside, anything like that?’
‘Nothing,’ the driver said. ‘When you know you’re going to hit someone you don’t want to be looking for a face. Only I thought the train’s nose would have hit the car. That’s why I braced like I did. Only it didn’t. It must have hit further down the train and got dragged under the trucks.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m not sure. But I guess it meant the car was going slower than I thought, that it took longer to get to me.’
‘If you had to guess, how fast do you reckon they were going?’
The driver shrugged, ‘It still happens so quick, but the feeling I have now is that they weren’t trying to race me. It was more like they never saw me at all, just ran straight into me like they were out on a Sunday drive.’
‘With your horn blaring and that great headlight on?’
‘You’d be surprised. People get lost in their own little world. They might be on the grog, or arguing, have the radio on loud, or fall asleep. There are all sorts of reasons, and some of them you can never figure out.’
‘You don’t think the conditions, the rain, had anything to do with it?’
‘Nothing at all. They weren’t trying to stop.’
Cole saw the strain on his face. The engine driver’s life wouldn’t be all beer and skittles, he thought. Crashes like this one, crashes where they saw the accident coming from a long way off, carnage when someone deliberately drove into the train. All those things would leave their mark.
‘We’ll leave it there for the time being,’ Cole said. ‘I’ll find someone to get you home.’
The devastated driver nodded again before slumping over.
Cole stepped down from the cabin and felt the rain once more. In the short time he’d been talking to the train driver an ambulance had appeared, its crew told to wait for the bodies to be retrieved so they could ferry the dead to the undertaker in town.
Garry Chambers walked up to Cole.
‘Sarge, one of the blokes, he’s pretty sure it’s Harry and Dianne Colston.’
‘They live up on Doherty’s Road, don’t they? That new house? What’s it called, Hilltop?’
‘That’s it. Hilltop.’
‘Alright then,’ Cole decided. ‘I’d better get out there and have a look around.’
Chambers hesitated before saying, ‘The Colstons, Lloyd. They’ve got a kid. A toddler. It’s a bloody mess all round.’
‘A kid? Then you’re not wrong there. I guess I’ll be breaking the bad news to someone close to them, or a babysitter, until I can find out who the next of kin is,’ Cole said. ‘My lucky night isn’t it? But can you get someone to sort the train driver out too please, Garry?’
Chambers said he would as he glanced back at the wreck, rain dripping off his helmet.
Cole’s heart sank for the bearer of bad news he would have to be. He trudged slowly along the track back to his car, not even worrying about trying to stay dry now. He raised his hand in farewell to the brigade members still working on the car, raised it again to another man checking for damage to a truck’s bogie.
But as he left them behind and crossed back past the intersection where the collision had occurred, two things bothered him: what the train driver had said about the car’s slow speed, and what the Colstons were doing out here in the middle of the night, on the opposite side of the town from where they lived.
Chapter 2
Doherty Road was a crumbling strip of bitumen spearing off North Boundary Road at forty-five degrees, the junction of those two roads not far from where Lloyd and Nancy Cole’s friend Coral Bridges and her family lived. Unlike the Bridges’ place, however, the Colston property a mile down Doherty Road offered a decent acreage and was the result of generations of hard work, a property well established by the time the Soldier Settlement Acts carved up and dissipated the land around it.
Cole’s car’s windscreen wipers beat at the rain, barely keeping up with a downpour that left him squinting at the road ahead. He again thought of the wreck by the railway line, the phone calls he hated, and how it was now him having to personally deliver the worst possible news to someone. He rehearsed a few consoling and sympathetic phrases as he drove to his unwelcome appointment.
He tried recalling what he knew of the Colston family. In his mind he saw the name on honour boards in the town hall, and on the plaque embedded in the bush hospital’s foundation stone. And wasn’t there a Colston, or even two, among the names on the war memorial in town? But what of the more recent family history? Cole remembered the passing of Harry Colston’s father, his mother dying even longer ago, but the details were sketchy to him.
He drove into the property through wrought iron gates left open and glistening wet in the car’s headlights, a peacock fashioned from metal improbably displaying itself in the centre of each gate. An imitation Grecian urn sat atop each of the brick pillar gateposts, a limp weed doing its best to escape one of the pots. From the gates he drove past the milking shed and then a hayshed before arriving at the carport jutting from the Colstons’ house. He was grateful for the carport’s shelter as he brought his car to a stop beneath it.
The new cream-brick house, a low-slung, rectangular affair with an almost flat, tin roof, squatted on an artificially raised island of green grass. A light burned in the carport, with another close by above the front door. A dull glow emanated from a window further along the house, all signs that someone was home or intending to return home.
It was only as he stepped from the car that Cole realised how soaked he was, his skin prickling with cold. He listened to the rain drumming on
the house and carport rooves before collecting himself and pressing the buzzer by the front door. His watch said one-fifteen a.m.
As he waited for the door to open he noticed the wooden board above the door, the word Hilltop crafted from small, white pebbles on it.
He buzzed again before pressing his ear to the door. There was the noise of something, perhaps the refrigerator rattling, he decided. When no one answered he walked about the house to find curtains drawn in all rooms bar the lounge room. There was no sign of anyone, but the television was on, emitting clouds of static into an empty room.
Then he heard the unmistakeable sound of a small child crying above the pounding rain. Had the Colstons left the house just briefly then, thinking the child would be fine on his or her own?
He tried the windows but all were locked, as were the front and back doors. He listened and heard the child again. He called out in the event someone was sleeping, hoping to stir them. He thumped heavily on both the front and back doors, tapped as hard as he dared on the windows, all the while getting more and more drenched.
Nothing.
The laundry window immediately beside the back door was the house’s smallest and he put his elbow to it, knocking out enough glass to reach through and turn the back door key.
Instinct warned him to be careful, to not muddy the scene in case something had gone awry here. He removed his boots and draped his wet coat over the washing machine. The Colstons were reputed to have money and it was evident even here in the laundry: in the expensive appliances, the gold-framed mirror on the wall, and in the pairs of women’s leather boots and shoes matched up on the floor. Smart piles of pressed clothing sat on the extended ironing board, none of it everyday work wear. The only thing out of place was a rubbish bin overflowing with empty beer and wine bottles.
‘Hello!’ he called out. ‘Hello!’
There was nothing but the rain, and then the child.
The laundry led to a short passageway and then the main hallway where he followed the cries. He pushed a first door open, a bedroom, and then a second. The cries came louder and he found the child standing in his cot in the third bedroom, a tow-haired, howling, two-year-old who at first resisted his efforts at hauling him from the cot.
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