And then, finally, I hear a noise at the door, and it opens slightly. There is bright daylight in a thin line across the floor. I brace myself, but try to look half-asleep and pathetic. I groan as if still in pain. The light is too bright.
Ben’s voice says, ‘You can go.’
I think I’ve heard it wrong, but he says it again to make sure: ‘You can go, leave, go home.’
The door swings wide open, but no one shows themselves. I walk out, shielding my eyes, looking around to see what is going on. I guess the evidence has disappeared, and all I can try for is kidnapping or something. Deprivation of liberty? Isn’t that a thing?
Outside, Ben is watching, standing well back with a rifle casually hanging over one arm. Behind him is a guy who might be ‘Sergei’ from the races, but I am in no condition to tell. Ben tosses me my phone, and I drop it and then pick it up. The screen tells me it is Wednesday, 10.00 am. I have been here for something like forty-eight hours. There is a message from Marko, and two missed calls from him, and one from Ralph.
Ben waves the barrel at my ute, and says, ‘It’s working. The radiator was pushed onto the fan. We fixed it.’
I walk towards my ute. My head is fuzzy, but still a question makes its way through: Isn’t he concerned I’ll run him down? Or is that what he wants?
I get into my ute, and fire it up. He watches me, but doesn’t move or talk or gesture. I drive away through the paddocks, and out through the front ramp. I can’t feel anything, and I can hardly hold the road. It takes a lifetime to get home.
James’s plot is neat, and the grass has hardly grown. I’m relieved. But the windows in my house are all broken. Inside, no one waits for me. Again, the furniture is all overturned, the cupboards pulled out, the carpets ripped up. I right my couch, flop down onto it, and sit like a genuine zombie, with nothing happening in either my head or my heart. Then I wake myself, and try to check if I am alive. Did I die in that cool room, but just don’t know it yet? I go to the sink and turn on the hot water, and wait for it to be scalding hot. Then I stick my arm in the stream to see what happens. What happens is I feel a powerful burning sensation on my skin. I withdraw my arm, and leap around the room cursing before I get back to the tap, where I run cold water over the burn. Nobody said you couldn’t feel pain in heaven, and everybody says you suffer pain in hell, so my test is inconclusive. I could be in hell. It’s kind of a dopey realisation. This place has been hell long before I ended up in Ben’s cool room.
I listen to the messages on my landline. Mick and Marko are wondering where I am. They’ve both got something they need to give to me. The messages on my mobile from Marko and Ralph are the same. I don’t care what they want or what they have.
I sit back down on the couch, and fall asleep. In a while, I get up, not sure where I am or what has happened. The blood still caked on my face reminds me. I take a long shower, have a drink of water, return to the couch, and close my eyes. I have a nightmare about Ted and Special and wake remembering they have not been fed or thought of or cared for. I drive to the kennels where they sit waiting with their pure expectant hearts. I return to my house, but before I lie down again I walk to the meat room to see if the money has been taken. I’m not sure if I care, but I lift the cloth covering the box anyway. The money is still there. As usual, Ben’s men weren’t as thorough as they should have been. I find my way back to the couch and pass out.
20
There is a light knock on the frame of the door that I didn’t bother to close when I came in.
‘Dave?’
It rouses me, but I ignore it. I never need to have another visitor. I will never move from this couch. I am done. But the rapping is persistent, and I hear slow, soft footsteps making their way through the house.
‘Dave.’
It is Elaine. She is cautious, and quietly spoken. It takes me a while to lift my head, and by then she has already walked into the room and is staring at me. ‘God. What happened here?’
‘Ben. Go away.’
She scans the room. It’s not that much worse than it was before. ‘We didn’t know where you were. Marko said you were probably just camping or something.’
She sits down next to me. I do not look at her, and I’m not even sure she is real. ‘I was too frightened to ring, because I knew you’d made a decision about me. But then Marko called, wondering where you were, and I started to worry that you’d done something to yourself. I’ve been ringing and ringing.’
I don’t talk, hoping she’ll realise I want her to go away, but she doesn’t take the hint, so I say, ‘Ben kidnapped me.’
‘He what?’
‘Held me hostage in his cool room.’
‘No he didn’t.’
‘Yes he did. Your friend. He just let me out.’
Elaine jumps up. ‘He can’t do that. We’ve got to tell the police’.
‘What do I tell them?’
‘The truth.’
She takes out a phone, and begins talking to someone. I think she has called the police, but then I hear it is Marko. She ends the conversation by saying, ‘Yeah, tell everyone.’
I close my eyes, and wish they would all just go away.
‘You need to tell the police,’ she says again.
‘I haven’t got any evidence. Just my accusation.’
‘We’ll find some evidence.’
‘I don’t think I can trust you.’
‘You can trust me. I did the wrong thing, but I didn’t know what I was involved in.’
We sit still and silently. I don’t have the strength or the energy to work out if she is telling the truth. Ben will do whatever he wants to, and there is nothing I can do about it. I can hear her breathing, and I don’t want to. No one can go back. Nothing can be taken back.
Then I hear her leave the house through the front door. My body relaxes, and I can feel my face flatten. I am alone.
But she soon returns.
‘This arrived for you in a small box.’
‘Of course it did.’ I can’t look at her or hear the mention of another box. It is more evidence that my existence is just repetition, and new ways to experience pain. I’m sure that at any moment Buzzcut and his friends will be at my door, demanding to know where the crockery is.
‘Look at it, Dave, please.’
I bury my head in my hands, and then sit up and begin to slap myself hard, suddenly grasping the possibility that this is all just a hallucination brought on by alcohol withdrawal. But nothing changes.
Elaine kneels down next to me. ‘Please. I’m sure it was made by Tito. It’s from a bowl or something, but it’s not a broken piece — it’s been cut. I’m sure it means something. See?’
I look at the thing in her hand. It is a pottery shard, bright-white and shiny. Elaine rolls it over in her hands. The flat part has colour on it, and I remember the ‘magic’ piece that Shiflon gave me when he was here. It is the same.
I put my hand out, and she looks encouraged, wrapping my fingers around the shard. It is smooth and weighty in my hand. The colour is on the flat part of the piece. It looks like a section of a photo somehow incorporated in the glaze. God, no. It must be another photo of James. Why would she bring me this?
And then, of course, a car pulls up outside. Mick comes through the front door, carrying something in one hand, and saying, ‘Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you. Had to drive all the fucking way up here.’
He sees the room, and Elaine, and stops, checks her out, sticks out a hand, and says, ‘Mick. Brother-in-law. Ex.’
They shake hands, and he walks over to me, puts a palm on my shoulder, and asks, ‘Are you all right? You look like shit.’ And then, as if to deflect attention from his comment, he says, ‘Redecorated, I see.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘I got this in the mail. The note said it must get to y
ou. I figured it was from one of your gangster mates. I thought it might blow up. I went into the scrub with a bike helmet and leathers on, and opened it. Nothing happened. It’s just a piece of pottery. You people and pottery. Fuck.’
He extracts a piece just like the others, and I take it and put it alongside Elaine’s, and hold them up. He seems impressed. They click neatly together: pieces of a pie. They have been cut like timber lap joints, one overlapping the other. It has been done so precisely that when I join them and hold them out, you can’t tell there was ever a join. Elaine and Mick watch, entranced. I put the pieces down, and stand up, thinking I need to get my piece when another vehicle stops outside my house. I brace myself. When does this end? Does it only stop if I do?
Marko and Ralph blunder through the door. ‘Hey, what’s going on? Bloody hell, this room.’ Marko says, standing just past the doorway, with Ralph at his shoulder. ‘Are you sick?’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look it,’ Ralph says.
‘We’ve got stuff we’re supposed to give to you,’ Marko says.
In the palm of his large hand, Marko has another box. He pushes it at me. Ralph does the same. ‘It came in the mail, but we couldn’t get hold of you. Elaine said just bring it over.’
From each box I take a piece just like the one Mick has brought in. I take them over to the table, my legs like wet noodles beneath me, and, holding on, click them together. Then I go to my office and retrieve the section that Shiflon gave me, and go back to the table. They watch me, unable to decide what to do with me. My shard clicks in, and I now have five parts of a six-piece puzzle. They show a photo taken from an unusual angle, maybe from someone’s pocket. It is of a man alongside a brick kiln. It shows the bare-dirt area in front of the kiln. The photo is clear and crisp. The man is Ben, and he is reaching over something that looks like a body, but without the sixth part I cannot tell.
‘Shit. That’s Ben,’ says Ralph. ‘What’s he doing?’
Marko is quick to explain. ‘I reckon he’s putting a body in a kiln to burn it. We need that sixth piece.’
‘Who would have the sixth piece?’ Mick asks.
The rest of them immediately say, ‘Ian.’
I shake my head. ‘If Tito made this to protect me, he wouldn’t have thought of Ian as someone close to me.’
‘He wouldn’t have thought I was, either.’ Elaine might be about to break into tears.
‘Yes, but if he thought I might get into trouble, then he would have assumed you’d be involved.’
And then she asks the question that I wouldn’t, ‘What if it’s made with human ash?’
I almost knock the made-up bowl onto the floor. If Tito did this as a final attempt at providing protection, then of course it is made from the remains of someone murdered. As I think about this, another car arrives. This time I’m sure it is Ben, come to threaten or kill me. Maybe he knows about the bowl. Maybe that’s what he and his goons have been looking for the whole time.
I tell everyone to hide, and they move to go, but then stop. Marko says, ‘Nope. We’re not hiding.’
But the face that pokes through the front door and says ‘Hello?’ is Tom Little’s, unmarked and innocent. ‘Am I interrupting something?’ he says. I can hear my friends relax.
‘No. Please come in.’ I know immediately why he is here. I remember I told Tito about Tom — how much I liked him.
He sidles through the door, carrying another small, brown box in two hands.
I take the piece out of his box, and slot it into its place. Everyone crowds around to see the photo of Ben pushing a body into his kiln. The man’s face is undistinguishable, and all I know about him is that he is dead. There are actually gasps around me. It is a gruesome picture, even if you don’t know what it represents.
This is the reason Ben let me go. He couldn’t find the seventh box, so he chose to let me go and lead him to it.
Elaine breaks into our private thoughts. ‘Tito took this photo, didn’t he? He was there, helping Ben put the bodies in the kiln. He was part of this. He cooked these poor people.’
Everyone looks at her, thinking that she is right and unable to say anything to comfort her.
‘Can everyone take a photo of this, and send it somewhere safe?’ I ask. Elaine’s pain and remorse are not my current problem. They respond and pull out their phones, and frame the bowl and the photo.
‘Marko, would you ring the police and tell them we’ve got important evidence in a murder case, and we’re bringing it in right now?’
He steps away and puts his phone to his ear.
And then we are in the vehicles in convoy: Ralph and Marko at the front, then Tom, me, Elaine, and Mick in the rear. We take it steady. I have told them not to let anyone pass, no matter who they are or how angry they get. The guys at the front and the back spread out from the middle three, hoping they can handle any problem that comes along before it reaches me. I have divided the pieces of the bowl between Tom and myself. If Ben or one of his men gets to one of us, hopefully the other one can make it.
We take the turn out of Wilson Road, and see no one. If so much hadn’t happened in the past forty-eight hours, I would think we were being melodramatic. Surely one of us can just whizz over to town with the evidence? But nothing is beyond Ben, so we have to do the safest thing. We pass the mailman going the other way, and his face says he’d like to know what we’re up to. He will tell Ben what he has seen.
We continue on the road to town with no other traffic.
And then I see a ute in the distance behind us. It could be anyone, but whoever they are, they are really setting a pace. I see the ute come up behind Mick, hardly slowing. It tries to pass, but Mick takes the middle of the road. The ute slows, and I hear it honk its horn, and it tries again. Mick snakes from side to side, blocking the way. Then the ute veers off into the table drain and out into the long grass. Mick gives chase, but he can’t match the craziness of the ute driver, who is tearing along the uneven terrain on the side of the road. Mick loses speed and falls back. Elaine, now last in the convoy and the only vehicle between Ben and me, has not moved position, and the ute is coming up to overtake her. My blood turns cold, and I realise that I’ve been soft in the head. She is in on this with Ben — of course she is — she must have alerted him that we were on our way to hand over the evidence.
Ben gains on us. Marko and Ralph and Tom pull back, in case they can help. I am slamming my hands against the steering wheel, screaming at Elaine, but she doesn’t hear me or see me. Her face is blank in my rear-view mirror. She is lost to something I don’t understand, and I realise I have to put distance between me and her, and fast. On the two-way on Marko’s channel, I say, ‘Got to make a run for it, Marko. It’s all we can do.’ I hear, ‘Roger,’ and see his vehicle immediately speed up. Tom gets the message, and increases his pace.
But now Ben is almost equal with Elaine, bumping and jumping through the rough ground and over the tall tussocks. I am cursing Elaine and her trickery, and my endless stupidity, and I push my foot to the floor as Ben gets level with Elaine’s taillights.
And then, as Ben begins to move in towards the road, aiming at me, I see Elaine spin her wheels. Her car turns sharply and peels off, spearing over the drain, through the grass and headlong into the front point of Ben’s ute. There’s a tremendous crunching sound and I can see the look of shock and rage on Ben’s face as the impact sends him spinning off across the grass. Elaine chases alongside him until he comes to a stop. She spins and rams her bullbar against his passenger door, forcing his machine across the paddock until it hits hard up against a fence.
I cheer, and shake my fist with triumph, and leave them behind, hoping Mick will soon be there to support her. Before I can radio Marko to help, he has thrown a sliding U-turn, and headed back towards where Elaine is waiting. I wave at Tom to go forward, and we continue to the statio
n in safety.
21
I am at my mailbox. The air is warmer than it has been for months. The European trees are in full bud, impatient for spring to step forward. It is mail day, but I am not going to check the mailbox. Whatever is in it can wait until I return. For now, I am on my way to lunch at Marko’s in his back courtyard with the fire pit going, if needed. There will be good food and drinks, and favourite old stories. It won’t be the same as it used to be, but it will be something like it. Friendship long held, I guess. I am giving Elaine a lift. We’re friends, too, and we might stay just that. There is no rush. We can take it as it comes.
After we dropped off the pieces of the bowl, Constable Murray called the detectives in, and they were apparently very happy with what we had delivered. A DNA test showed the bowl was made with human remains, probably from the man in the picture. They had a whole lot of stuff on Ben, the fake Vasilievs, and significant underworld people who had disappeared without a trace, but they hadn’t been able to make the links between them. We did that for them.
Constable Murray told me the detectives now believe that Ben invented the Vasiliev family some years ago out of a small group of thugs that included one assassin. It was an attempt to divert attention from himself and his money-making operation. They suspect that, at the time, Ben was feeding the bodies of his victims to his pigs, but they think this will be difficult to prove.
So Tom got the story of a lifetime. A city newspaper picked it up, published it nationwide, and then hired him. He was even a celebrity for a few days, and did the rounds of morning television. This week, he moves to the city to start the new job, and I wish he wouldn’t. It’s a selfish wish I keep to myself.
Ben was arrested, and is awaiting trial. He denies everything. He says the idea that he would threaten me, or lock me in his cool room, or force Tito to make pottery from human bones is just a delusion made up by someone who everyone in the district knows is off his head. I think that’s his main defence: the whole thing is a ridiculous fantasy made up by a lunatic who hates him. It won’t go well.
Boxed Page 22