Whistle Down The Wire

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘No hurry for anything,’ he told her.

  At the station, the air was electric with the arrests of the last twenty-four hours, the other police reluctant to leave the station for fear of missing any new development. In amongst it, Whittaker asked Cole, ‘Seeings Van der Sloot told us about Harry Colston, are we going to let him off about the girl?’ When he saw Cole’s uncomprehending look, he added, ‘You know, you said to him we’ll see what we can do, if he owned up to being involved with Jennings?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Cole answered. ‘It turns out there isn’t much we can do for him so far as that goes. And we don’t need to be handing out any special consideration to the likes of him.’

  Janice said, ‘We’re expecting Homicide here within the next two hours, Lloyd, before lunch time.’

  ‘Good,’ he answered. ‘I’m going out for a breath of fresh air.’

  Chapter 40

  The more he had gone looking the more he’d found, but there were also much he was never going to know the answer to. Whether John Colston had told his son that Robyn Kinross was his half-sister. Had that revelation ended the relationship between Harry Colston and Kinross, and set in train Dianne Bramley’s ill-fated reception into the Colston family? And was that also the reason why Kinross never truly understood what had followed between her and Harry? Was she entitled to know the truth, even after all this time, or was it a truth best left undisturbed?

  With Dianne Bramley now dead there was no way of knowing, either, whether she’d played a hand in her father in law’s death, or what degree of undermining of Harry had gone on in the Bramley family. The second will suggested a fair bit had.

  He thought, too, of Elsa Kinross in her prison. Her brother’s shooting was likely more than an accident, but it was so long ago that only a straight-out confession from Bill Kinross or Bob Fry would bring about a belated arrest in that matter. And he doubted either of those men would feel like putting their hand up. Only Elsa Kinross held the key to that death now, but with frail health and memory, even if she could articulate how she knew that Fry had killed her brother, how could it lead to anything further? His best bet was doubtless trying to play Fry off against Kinross, each against the other, and see where that led.

  But it was too far away, and too long ago, he thought. The dead Cameron Dunbar. The dead John Colston. The dead long departed and those more recently gone. All those voices calling down to him through the years. All those voices whistling down the wire.

  Cole drove away from Main Street to the house he’d grown up in, parking his car in front of it. There was some talk of the house coming up for sale. The family living here currently had put their own stamp on it, mostly for the worse. The looping wire fence had been replaced by a pittosporum hedge of irregular height and health. The concrete path to the front door was now white gravel infiltrated by a variety of weeds. The old canvas awnings over the front windows had been removed leaving the house looking somehow exposed. The tin sheeted roof was rusting.

  His own memories of growing up here were hazy and incomplete, as if they belonged to someone else’s life and not his. Only sometimes did he have a sense of his childhood there: when he opened the shoe box full of old black and white photographs and saw himself in awkward pose or with nervous smile. His sister. His brother. Combinations of them on birthdays or Christmas. Photographs of them with either their mother or father, depending on who was holding the camera. Occasionally all of them together when someone else was. And yet something hadn’t been quite right he now saw. Over the years his parents had slowly pulled apart from each other, slowly undermining all their foundations. At the first opportunity his brother and sister had separately gone interstate and stayed there. He barely knew them now. It made this house’s hold on him far more potent for what he wanted it to be, than for what it had actually been.

  But see it for what it is now, he told himself. Truthfully, the house was a wreck. The windows needed painting, patching, mending, the garden needed a complete overhaul. If he and Nance were going to move anywhere, it shouldn’t be here.

  He turned the key in the ignition and drove on. He left his car in the street by the recreation reserve and walked into the football grounds, sitting down on the timber slat seating that formed a ring outside the oval’s boundary fence.

  He was early and absent-mindedly watched birds alighting and ascending from the grandstand roof across the other side of the oval. He only heard her when she had almost reached him.

  ‘It’s a funny place to want to talk,’ Robyn Kinross said.

  ‘It’s quieter here, away from the hurly-burly,’ Cole said.

  ‘Hurly-burly? In Mitchell?’ she laughed as she sat beside him.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like in the station at the moment.’

  ‘Ah, that,’ she said.

  She was rugged up against the cold in a ribbed, woollen jumper and plain red scarf, her blonde hair wild beneath a blue French beret.

  ‘I spoke with your father the other day,’ he said.

  ‘So I gather. He seems out of sorts. Don’t ask me why. But is it my father you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Oh, well then. I thought you might have wanted to talk about something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, when she did.

  He watched a magpie glide onto the grandstand roof sending a gust of smaller birds aloft.

  ‘No, not that,’ he said.

  ‘Is your wife still living away from you?’

  ‘How did you hear about that?’

  ‘Everyone knows,’ she said. ‘This town. I’m surprised The Advertiser didn’t make it a front page story.’

  He chuckled softly. ‘I didn’t think it would be that newsworthy. And besides, the reason for her shifting away for a bit has gone. I know who took that shot. And Nancy’s home now.’

  ‘Then I suppose that’s good.’

  ‘It is good,’ he said. ‘But I wanted to talk to you about your mother.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Where she’s living is bad.’

  ‘You have to move her from that place, Robyn. When the time comes, let her die in her own home, at the very least.’

  ‘You think I’m heartless, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I don’t think that at all. What I do know is your father’s a hard head, and it’d be difficult for any of you to resist what he wanted. But maybe think about why your mother’s in Bendigo.’

  She looked at him, perplexed. ‘She’s mentally ill.’

  ‘She might be forgetful. She might sometimes think she’s somewhere other than where she is, but in that place who couldn’t forgive her that? She’s obviously in a fog of drugs most of the time and the staff there like to keep her that way so she’s less of a problem to them.’

  ‘Are you trying to shame me?’

  ‘No, I’m just telling you. And I think your mother still has things to say to you, that I think you should hear. That you’d want to hear.’

  ‘To do with what?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say. Catch your mother early in the day. Ask her yourself.’

  He heard the hard edge his words had.

  ‘So that’s it, is it? That’s the only reason you wanted to see me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes grew moist.

  ‘God, I hate this place,’ she looked away. ‘This God-forsaken hellhole of a place.’

  He couldn’t say anything in return, and then she suddenly swung her legs over the seating and strode away, having already put a good distance between them by the time he turned to glance after her.

  He stayed seated there another half hour, watching the birds, before he trudged back to his car and returned to the station.

  The Melbourne detectives had beaten him there, two suited
officers already making themselves at home and being plied with tea and cake by Janice.

  Cole led them into his office and briefed them on all that had occurred. He lay Jennings’ and Van der Sloot’s statements before them.

  ‘By the look of this, it’s just a mopping up exercise,’ the senior detective said. ‘You want to watch out, Lloyd. We might just recruit you into our team.’

  Cole tried to make light of it, but it came out flat. ‘There wasn’t much to it.’

  ‘You’re being modest, senior sergeant. Ninety-nine out of a hundred coppers would’ve just let it go without a second thought, and the other one wouldn’t have had the nous to run it to ground. So full credit to you.’

  Cole simply nodded and asked if there was anything else they needed. There wasn’t. All they wanted to do was speak with the accused themselves and Cole left them to it.

  Sheridan came into the station not long after.

  ‘How did you go with Mrs Fantasio?’ Cole asked.

  Sheridan put her hat down on his desk.

  ‘She’s pretty upset, as you’d expect. But she’ll be alright. If nothing else, there’s a lot to keep her busy, and enough to keep her mind off what happened to her brother.’

  ‘It was a terrible shock no doubt. When Harry was alive she probably didn’t have a good thing to say about him. But when they’re gone it throws a whole new complexion on it, doesn’t it? And now there’s nothing to be done it’ll be her regrets she lives out. It’s a shame.’

  ‘You could understand her being frustrated with her brother, though.’

  ‘I could. Watching someone fritter away the family’s legacy like that couldn’t have been easy. But in her brother’s dying, he might have saved what was left of the Colstons. And in itself, that was a pretty brave thing to do. If Hilltop comes into Linda’s hands, you’d think it would still stand a pretty good chance.’

  ‘If anyone could do it, it’d be her. She’s got a real fire in her belly.’

  ‘You like her, don’t you?’

  ‘I do. I just hope it’s not too much.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be afraid of that. Just remember what I said earlier.’

  ‘I will, boss, and thank you.’ She contemplated him, wondering whether she should say it, before deciding she should. ‘I can see why Constable Whittaker and all the others here worship you. You mightn’t see it yourself, and they’d never dare say it to you directly, but they do, you know.’

  ‘They haven’t had enough bosses to compare me to,’ Cole answered. ‘Go on now, back to your desk. There’s truckloads to do.’

  She waited a moment, grinned and left.

  It was all well and good being the object of admiration, Cole thought, when all he had done was the job they’d paid him to do. And when he still had work to do on putting his own house in order.

  ‘I think I’ve had enough excitement for one morning,’ he told Janice. ‘I’m going home for an early lunch.’

  ‘All done and dusted, then?’

  ‘All done and dusted,’ he replied.

  But he was thinking of Saturday and being in the car with Nancy, of driving to Melbourne and getting far away from all this, of walking unfamiliar streets and sitting quietly in a restaurant, listening to her and them laying their heads on motel pillows, and finally, of closing his eyes and sleeping and sleeping as though morning would never come.