Whistle Down The Wire

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘Why did you go there?’ she asked again.

  ‘I wanted to ask your mother about her brother,’ Cole said simply.

  ‘So that’s what this is about.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You think this is something to do with the Colstons, the Harry thing?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘It’d be an awfully long time to wait for payback, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m not counting anything in or out.’

  ‘And how is my mother ever going to be able to help you find out who might have killed the Colstons, even if she was capable of it? I told my father about it, by the way. He just laughed.’

  ‘I don’t exactly know how your mother could help me,’ Cole answered. ‘She would have known the Colston family, though, you both being farming families. And women often see things that men don’t, understand the goings-on behind the scenes better than men.’

  ‘Now that is something I will agree with you on,’ she said tartly.

  ‘Regardless, I’ll ask questions wherever I think they’ll lead to some helpful information. What’s insignificant to some, might be a treasure trove to others.’

  She shifted her weight onto her other foot.

  ‘Or trash.’

  ‘I’ve got a job to do,’ he said firmly.

  ‘I know that, but if you wanted to learn something about our family you could have asked me,’ she said.

  ‘No offence to you, but I thought your mother would be in the best position to talk about her brother.’

  ‘So you couldn’t trust me, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, far from it. But the wider I cast my net the more I’ll learn.’

  She stared at him a moment, the same cold fire in her eyes Cole had seen that day she’d parked across Potter’s driveway.

  She pulled her shoulders back, snapped, ‘Then don’t think you’ll catch me in that net.’

  After she stormed out through the building, Janice said, ‘Charming woman. What’s she done?’

  Cole shrugged it off. ‘Nothing. It’s just me trying to get some information about her uncle, the one who died during the war.’

  ‘The thanks you get then.’

  ‘The thanks, indeed. Have you been able to find anything on him?’

  ‘Not yet. Our own records don’t go back that far, so I’ve had to send a message to Melbourne. They’ll look in their own archives and get back to me, hopefully sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Just keep at them, then.’

  ‘You have to with that lot.’ She paused significantly. ‘Lloyd, the Shepp boys will catch the crook who fired that shot at your place.’

  Cole looked at her. ‘The truth, Janice, is that they won’t. It’ll have to be me.’

  ‘You and Nancy aren’t still staying at home are you?’

  ‘I’ll already moved Nance. But I’ll be staying put. If whoever comes again, I’ll be ready for them.’

  ‘If they don’t kill you first.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re trying to kill me. Or at least not yet.’ He grinned darkly. ‘My plan is to nab them before it comes to that.’

  ‘Do you have any idea yet who might have done it?’

  ‘Some idea, but I haven’t got the proof I need.’

  ‘You should keep one of the others with you, then. Sergeant Forrest?’

  ‘I’ll keep everyone else out of it for the moment. I’ll be fine, Janice. You don’t need to worry.’

  I can do enough of that for everyone, he thought as he packed a handgun from the weapons cabinet, slipping it into his coat pocket along with rounds of ammunition.

  He drove down the street and parked outside the solicitor’s office. Grimes again kept him waiting for half an hour, before he appeared in his crumpled black suit and summoned him in.

  ‘What are you looking for this time, then?’ Grimes asked, as if Cole’s appearance in his office was an everyday occurrence.

  ‘Can I ask again, about when the will was written, what date?’ Cole said.

  ‘You may, but it’s irrelevant. It’s only a current will that will stand up in a court of law, sergeant. You should know that.’

  ‘This last will, Albert. What date did it have on it?’

  Grimes got up and walked that slowly across the room to his filing cabinet Cole thought he might have been on his way to the gallows. He removed a file disdainfully and stood at the cabinet leafing through it.

  ‘Here. It’s dated the twenty-first of February 1967. The will then is about six months old, as I told you previously.’

  ‘It’s nice to have it confirmed then. I’d like to take it with me, if I may. I’ll just check it against something else and return it to you tomorrow.’

  Without a word, Grimes dropped the file on the desk in front of Cole, who picked it up as if to feel the weight of its contents. At first glance it appeared to be the same one Fantasio had provided.

  ‘This will,’ he said. ‘Would I be right in thinking it replaced an earlier version?’

  ‘I presume so,’ Grimes answered. ‘But as I do wills for almost everyone in the town I couldn’t tell you anything about it. It’s my duty to protect them and act on them when a person dies. It’s not my business to go prying about in them.’

  ‘The earlier version. Would you have a copy of it here?’

  ‘Most certainly not,’ Grimes replied indignantly. ‘Imagine the potential for trouble if I kept all the wills a man wrote over his lifetime.’

  ‘They’d all be dated.’

  ‘People make mistakes. I won’t risk that,’ Grimes said, as if that was the final stamp of his professionalism.

  ‘What happens to the old wills?’ Cole asked.

  ‘I send them out to be destroyed.’

  ‘And who does that?’

  Grimes fell once more into an annoying reverie, his head slightly down. The pause was long.

  ‘Mrs Castles,’ he finally deigned to say.

  ‘Betty Castles?’

  ‘Yes, senior sergeant. Feeding documents into a fire doesn’t require any specialist expertise.’

  Betty Castles been a local schoolteacher for many years before going into semi-retirement to work casually for Grimes. She must be seventy-five by now, Cole thought as he drove to her house.

  She was surprised to see him arrive unannounced in his uniform.

  ‘Hello Betty. Good to see you again,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Yes, Lloyd. You too.’

  She was holding her age well, still with the erect posture and attitude of an old fashioned school teacher ready to defend herself against any nonsense.

  ‘Do you have a minute?’ Cole asked.

  ‘These days I have a lot of them,’ she answered. ‘Come in.’

  Over tea and biscuits Cole updated her on Nancy and his children in Melbourne, emphasizing the positive.

  ‘What about the shooting at your house?’ she asked.

  ‘We don’t know who did it. We’ll catch them,’ Cole said.

  ‘I hope so. It’s a bad thing, isn’t it? Yours isn’t a job I’d ever want.’

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ Cole said, in a line he was tired of delivering. ‘But on the subject of jobs, I’ve just come from Albert Grimes’ office. He tells me you destroy all his old paperwork?’

  ‘Yes. After retiring, I helped Albert with odd bits and pieces, here and there. I don’t work in the office anymore, just help with small things. It’s a pittance I receive, but when you’re on the pension it all helps.’

  ‘No doubt. Destroying old wills. Is that one of the chores he has you do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  When he heard the slight wobble in her voice and she didn’t elaborate, he asked, ‘And do you?’ For a moment she didn’t answer, and h
e continued, ‘I need to find an old will. It’s really important, Betty.’

  ‘Whose will?’

  ‘Harry Colston’s.’

  Cole saw the struggle going on inside her. She nodded.

  ‘When I worked for Albert, when I was in the office, I was always taught to take the utmost care with people’s records. I did all the filing, you see. Nothing was ever misplaced. Nothing ever went missing. If Albert ever wanted a file three or five years old I’d know where it was in an instant. I never let him down.’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t have, I bet.’

  She glanced up. ‘If I say something to you, can it be taken in the strictest confidence?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘With never a word about it to Albert?’

  ‘It’s a guarantee, Betty.’

  ‘You see, I was dreading that one day Albert would ask me for something and I wouldn’t be able to find it for him. That he had made a mistake in giving it to me and now wanted it back. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, I can. And look at me now, coming to see you so you can help me with a request. Which I’m pretty sure you can.’

  She rose.

  ‘Come with me.’

  Cole followed her down the back steps and out to the garage they entered through a locked door. Betty flicked a light switch and yellow light fell over her late husband’s pale blue Humber. Bert Castles had been a pigeon fancier, and his wife had taken his nesting boxes, cleaned them up and arranged them on a work bench where her husband would have once tinkered. The pigeon boxes were now stuffed full of Albert Grimes’s duplicate letters, all folded inside dated envelopes. On the bench in front of the boxes were neatly stacked piles of larger correspondence, a separate pile for each year moving from left to right. A red-checked tea towel lightly covered each.

  ‘These stacks at the front. The wills would be in these, right?’ Cole said and she nodded. ‘And the years signify the year it’s come to you, Betty?

  She nodded again.

  Cole went straight to the last pile, this year’s files. Despite feeling some trepidation that for whatever reason the will might not be there, he smiled to himself on finding it near the bottom, exactly where it should be.

  ‘I’ll take this one with me,’ he told her.

  ‘You won’t say anything, will you?’

  ‘No, I promise, but you might think about getting rid of all this,’ he said, indicating her stored handiwork. ‘Later on this old will might have to be made public, and it might cause you and others some embarrassment if someone learns you’ve been hanging on to old files.’

  Chapter 27

  It had been eating away at her since she and Cole had seen Linda Fantasio this morning, and now something needed to be done.

  She knew she couldn’t make the call from the station, so Christine Sheridan signed herself out of the building on the pretext of following up on a small theft from the Albion Hotel. In minutes she’d parked her car in the main street and squeezed into the rear one of two telephone boxes set back beside the post office, in doing so attracting several odd glances from passers-by, which only added to her unease.

  What could she say? How could she convince Linda that she had nothing to do with Cole’s presence at her house this morning?

  Her fingers trembled as she dialled the number, and the pause until the receiver was picked up at the other end seemed eternal.

  ‘It’s me, Chris,’ she said quietly.

  Fantasio’s response was decidedly cool, an impatient shrug down the line. ‘Oh?’

  ‘I just wanted to say sorry that Senior Sergeant Cole came with me this morning. I was going to see you on my own and I would’ve phoned first, but he was insisting and I didn’t know what to say. I told him I would go by myself but he was hot-headed after his house was shot at last night. I just wanted to see you and George. Linda?’

  ‘Is that so?’ came the disbelieving reply.

  ‘I did. I honestly didn’t know he was going to come with me, and then I couldn’t think of a way out of it. When you’ve already done so much for me please believe me when I say that wasn’t what I meant to have happened at all.’

  ‘What’s that noise? Where are you calling from?’

  ‘I’m in a phone box beside the post office. I’m so sorry he went on at you, as if you’d ever do a thing like that. I know you wouldn’t.’

  It was as though a strong wind was rushing her along in her desperation to convince her friend.

  Fantasio said, ‘You sound guilty. What have you done to sound guilty about?’

  ‘Nothing! I swear nothing. Linda, you have to believe me.’ Hot tears came to her eyes and she turned her body to further shield herself from the street. ‘Linda …’

  ‘Alright, calm down.’ Fantasio said in a more conciliatory tone. ‘I’ll take your word for it. So there’s no misunderstanding about it, I didn’t appreciate your sergeant accusing me like that, but I accept you had nothing to do with it. There. Will that make you happy?’

  ‘Me? I want to make you happy. It’s you I care about with this. It’s not me.’

  ‘Oh no?’

  ‘No!’ The line fell silent then, Sheridan pinching her eyes, and hanging on hoping Fantasio would understand what had really happened this morning, but when she didn’t speak, Sheridan felt compelled to keep talking. ‘I want you to know how good my place is looking now, too, and that’s all thanks to you, Linda. I couldn’t have done it without you. I wouldn’t have even known where to start.’

  ‘I’m sure you would have.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t. And now I want to return the favour and do something for you.’ When Fantasio didn’t answer, she said, ‘Please let me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just something I can do for you. So we can be friends, proper friends. I don’t want to quarrel with you.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything right on the spot.’

  ‘And you don’t need to. But take your time, and I do want you to tell me, okay?’

  She could feel Fantasio beginning to come around.

  ‘Fine,’ the hairdresser said, ‘I’ll think of something and let you know. But I have to go now. I can hear George.’

  ‘Soon then, alright?’

  ‘Soon,’ Fantasio answered and hung up.

  Sheridan pushed open the telephone box door and caught her breath, relief flooding over her that she’d been thrown a lifeline. She couldn’t mess it up now. She wanted to stay here, and make and keep her own friends, especially Linda.

  But she felt as if she had only clawed half her way back, that the thread hanging between them could still be brushed away on a whim. She needed to show Linda she had some initiative, too, and that she really meant what she said.

  Then it came to her – a way she could reclaim that ground.

  She popped into the post office and asked the postmaster for an address. She jumped into her car and sped to Bower Street, pulling up in front of the dilapidated weatherboard house.

  She knocked on the door, feeling her anger rising as she heard footsteps from inside.

  ‘Ken Bramley?’

  ‘Yeah? What do ya want?’

  Unshaven, with a handmade cigarette in his mouth and a dirty old cardigan over his singlet, Ken Bramley was just what she expected.

  ‘I want to speak with you about a threatening telephone call you made, Mr Bramley. To Mrs Linda Fantasio.’

  ‘Don’t know her.’

  ‘Yes you do. And she knows you. Your daughter was married to her brother so I’d be surprised if you didn’t know her.’

  ‘So bloody what?’

  ‘So I’m telling you that if you call her again I’m going to have to charge you with making threats, including threatening to kill.’

  ‘That’s a bloody joke. And so are you, girlie. If
that bitch wants to send the coppers around tell her to send around some real ones, not a pretend one.’

  ‘Watch your mouth,’ Sheridan told him and pushed him in the chest.

  ‘You bloody hang on a minute,’ he said and pushed her back, but harder so she almost stumbled.

  Recovering herself, and with her blood boiling, she grabbed Bramley’s cardigan top and shook him hard, ‘Don’t you tell me what to do mister. I’m an officer of the law and you’ll do what you’re told. If you touch me again I’ll throw you in the station cells myself.’

  ‘Get yer hands off me, scrag!’ he yelled and the ruckus brought Bramley’s wife and then his two sons to the door, all four of them soon involved in an altercation that spilled out into the front yard, and with it spectators in the form of neighbours who tried to pull them apart.

  As the wrestling match continued someone called the police and they were at the house in a flash, neighbours having untangled Sheridan from one of the Bramley sons, the policewoman with scratches to her face and neck and with blood trickling from a cut to the back of her hand.

  Bramley and his sons were hauled to the police station by Sergeant Forrest while Constable Whittaker drove Sheridan to the doctors’ surgery to have her injuries looked at.

  It was a very unhappy Cole who listened to Forrest describe the events he had just witnessed.

  Chapter 28

  Sheridan sheepishly returned to the police station an hour later. The three stitches the doctor had put in her hand were throbbing. She ached all over.

  Before anyone even had a chance to fuss over her, Cole nabbed her and drew her into his office and shut the door.

  ‘Now, would you like to tell me exactly what happened?’ he said, in no mood for niceties.

  ‘I went to see the Bramleys. Ken Bramley.’

  ‘So I hear. What were you doing there?’

  ‘Ken Bramley had made a threatening telephone call to Linda Fantasio,’ she said, her eyes downcast.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Did she report it here?’

  ‘No, but she told me what had happened.’

  ‘Did she tell you that this morning?’