55

by James Delargy

  On the way, Luka advanced another theory he had been developing: that someone could still be in the shack, a partner or another victim. If the killer had locked up one then he could have another tied up for later, like hanging meat to cure; a store for the winter. Though only another of Luka’s fanciful speculations it sped Chandler on, aiming for the smoke drifting above the trees. The land was eerily silent: no cicadas or crickets singing as if they had all gone quiet in anticipation of a gruesome discovery. It was unnerving, like the hush of a crowd before the jury delivered their verdict. So much so that Chandler welcomed the hiss of the radio interrupting the silence, right up until Mitch’s voice erupted from the white noise. Their escape had been noticed, their destination and the possible importance of it raising alarms.

  ‘Chandler, this is Mitchell.’

  Gone were the formalities, a sliver of panic in Mitch’s voice.

  ‘Don’t you do anything to that site. We’re on our way.’

  21

  Chandler came upon little more than a smouldering pile of ash, the stunted remains of the walls poking up from the ground, charred black like matchsticks burned to the tip. He spied a small cast-metal water tank, about fifty metres from the ruined shack, perched on a self-built nest, weeds winding up and around the arms, using their support to reach for the sky. Despite the very deliberate order not to disturb anything, he couldn’t just let it carry on burning and destroy any evidence that might be left.

  ‘Luka, over here,’ he said, running towards the tank. ‘Can you climb it?’

  His brash young constable wasn’t one to resist a challenge. Casting off his backpack, he climbed swiftly up to the nest, the structure surprisingly solid despite its age and disrepair. With Luka in place, Chandler handed him one of the rusted buckets that sat at the foot of the tower and in return was passed down a full one, water slopping over the sides and soaking his clothes.

  Chucking the contents of the bucket into the smouldering mix, ash and smoke exploded out and around him like dry ice at a concert. Coughing up some rancid ash, he returned to the tank for a refill.

  Back and forth he went with bucket after bucket, dampening sections of the buildings in turn, trying to avoid being scorched by the heat and random flicker of flames that popped out of nowhere.

  Blinded by the searing heat and intense light he struggled to the tank.

  ‘Is there much left?’ he asked, spitting out ash that had dried out his tongue.

  ‘Half. Plenty,’ shouted Luka as Chandler returned to the embers, turning his head to the side and casting the water on to another smouldering patch, the ash whipping up and away, revealing what looked to be charred metal remains flashing in the waning sunlight. The discovery drove Chandler on, his eyes stinging, and after about half an hour he had the fire under control. The pair of impromptu firefighters exchanged congratulatory pats on the back, Chandler’s blackened paws smearing his colleague’s sweaty shirt in dark handprints. What lay in front of them didn’t look like much, but they had saved whatever was left.

  Chandler stepped to the edge. Peering into the warm sludge he could see twisted metal. It would need to cool a little more before he could handle it.

  ‘Arson?’ asked Luka.

  ‘Hard to know for sure but looks like it.’

  The fire had been savage, destroying whatever dwelling this had been, but though the surrounding trees had been scorched by the flames the fire had remained localized, the parched wooden slats acting as kindling. Chandler knew that they were lucky that it hadn’t started a major bushfire.

  Grabbing an already charred branch he began to circle the ruins, combing through the debris, discovering chunks of metal that had resisted the heat of the flames: right-angled joints of a table or workbench, a saw that had welded with the heat to a hatchet to create an unwieldy instrument. Fishing into the mess with his stick, he looped it through a set of manacles, the chain-links solidified, and dragged them out on to the ground to cool.

  Stepping around the cabin, carbonized wood and paper floated on the thermal draught, suspended in the air, too heavy to float away but too light to fall back to earth. Chandler reached out for a few pieces but they crumbled into dust.

  He swept the stick through the debris again, whipping up a whirlwind of soot. Something yellowed and singed at the edges made a break for freedom. Paper. He grabbed it at the second attempt, delicately, trying not to damage it further. Another careful sweep of a corner, where the wall had not quite burned to the ground, brought a second piece, fuller than the first. Pretty soon he had recovered a number of documents – including something very important, Heath’s missing driving licence, the plastic surviving the inferno better than the paper. The name had burned away, but Heath’s face stared back at him in black and white, unsmiling, almost sullen. Like a mug shot.

  Mitch and his team arrived suddenly, appearing from the woods like Marines on a covert mission, armed with evidence bags and latex gloves. It had taken them barely forty-five minutes.

  Rather than grateful, Mitch was angry. Chandler expected nothing less.

  ‘What did you do?’ he said, accusing Chandler.

  ‘Put the fire out. We had to make sure there wasn’t another victim in there.’

  ‘And is there?’ spat Mitch.

  ‘No, but there’s some paper—’

  Mitch grabbed Chandler’s shoulder and pulled him aside, the contact unexpected and unwelcome, crossing an unspoken line for a brief second before letting go.

  ‘You should have informed me of the call, Sergeant. Like it or not, I am your superior officer and in charge of this investigation. Any fuck-ups will fall back on me and I’m not prepared to let that happen. It’s not how I work.’

  ‘I dealt with it how I saw fit,’ said Chandler, standing his ground.

  ‘You deal with it how I see fit, Sergeant. Understand? And if that means coming to me to get the go-ahead to have a piss, then that’s what you do. Everything runs through me. You made your decision to stay here, Chandler. That was up to you. Don’t let jealousy cloud your decisions.’

  ‘No, Mitch, you think I’m jealous. I chose to have a family, you chose to have a career.’

  This received only a grin from his opponent. ‘Maybe I have both,’ said Mitch.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Mitch didn’t reply. Was he intimating that he had a family? His cousins had said nothing about marriage or a family when he’d last seen them. He certainly wasn’t sporting a ring on his finger but of course that proved nothing. Chandler wondered why he cared. Mitch was – had been – ten years and hundreds of kilometres removed from his life. It was only this unfortunate series of events that had brought them into contact again.

  ‘Let’s get back to work,’ said Mitch, markedly pointing at Chandler and then to the trees. ‘Go put a cordon around—’

  A loud pop interrupted them, causing Mitch to stumble backwards and reach for his holster. Something black soared into the air and landed beside Mitch’s crew who were busy logging the evidence Chandler had dragged from the wreckage. The charred object smoked at their feet, an exploded aerosol can which had successfully escaped the cabin.

  ‘You might want to question it,’ said Chandler, making for the trees.

  He wound the yellow and blue tape around the clutch of nearby eucalyptus trees and watched Mitch’s team fish more scraps from the blanket of ash, Luka welcomed into the fold as one of them. As the minions combed through the debris, the master prowled the outskirts, an iPhone pressed to his lips recording his thoughts and observations, while Roper, a muscular guy whose mouth hooked downwards in a permanent scowl, recorded every movement with a video camera.

  After all immediately visible evidence was marked with cones or tags, Mitch organized his team to start at one side and carefully sift through the ash, spreading slowly but thoroughly over the ground. A few more shreds of paper were discovered, including a fragment of a map, the lack of contour lines suggesting an area of flat ground rather than
the hill they were on. With the preliminary search completed Mitch extended the remit from evidence only to indications of how the fire started; for containers of flammable liquid, or unusual distribution of fuel, like piles of newspapers or furniture pushed together. They hunted for incendiary devices – aerosol can aside – lighters, matches or even some form of timing device. They fished more metal from the ashy mulch, including the rest of the chain-links, one roughly shorn through, the clean cut indicating that it had been hacked through rather than cracking in the heat.

  Next they moved on to the job that would prolong their stay deep into the night – finding traces of people who had been there, voluntarily or otherwise: hairs, fibres, fingerprints, blood, bodily fluids. The fire would have destroyed much of it but Chandler knew that Mitch wouldn’t give up easily. He ordered Chandler to return to the cars and retrieve more evidence kits. It was a menial task, for someone of a lesser rank, but Mitch took great pains in picking Chandler out.

  As Chandler left to trek back to the cars, Mitch was geeing up his troops, the calm, assured inspector that had sauntered into Wilbrook station beginning to melt under the pressure, his side parting plastered to his scalp, the wet look undiminished even in the heat. It was as if he was oozing sweat solely from the top of his head, his face still unnaturally dry, as if the pores had been plugged up with bitterness.

  22

  2002

  Mitch swept his lank hair back into place, each strand like a sailor clinging to the deck of their sinking ship. ‘Come on! Come on! No time for rest,’ he announced. ‘Another kilometre and we’ll stop for the day.’

  The volunteers were crowded around a huge red sandstone rock that looked out of place amongst the trees, a beacon in the desert, vegetation using the abundant shade to grow at its feet. The volunteers were also taking advantage of the protection from a sun that was lowering in the sky, gaining pace every minute as if being reeled in by the horizon.

  ‘Five minutes,’ pleaded one.

  ‘You can rest all evening,’ said Mitch. ‘Martin might still be out here.’

  It was Mitch’s fallback motivational tool: the lure of Martin. But Chandler knew that there was only one reason his colleague now wanted to find Martin. The one that Mitch had confessed to in the last few days and which had caused the drastic change in his attitude: Mitch wanted to be known as the officer who found the teenager – alive or dead – and to get his name in the paper.

  From that side he didn’t have much competition. Only Chandler, in fact. The search for Martin had been scaled back, resources diverted to the gruesome murder of a trucker in Port Hedland a couple of days ago. Chandler’s and Mitch’s roles had subtly – and unofficially – changed too. Given that the chance of finding Martin was minuscule, their main job was now to keep the volunteers and family from meeting a similar fate.

  But with this command came the authority. The option to call off the search. That morning – day thirteen in total and the second day of this leg – Chandler had broached the topic with Mitch who had immediately stated that they had to keep going.

  The phony enthusiasm was grating. Mitch was hunting glory in others’ despair and Chandler had told him as much. Chandler believed he was at least being honest with his intentions; the quicker they found Martin – or his remains – the quicker he could get back to Teri. There had been another argument with his folks the night before last, and another long night of her tears and cursing that he had to go away for another three days on this bloody search. Teri was sorry that the guy was dead but she wanted Chandler with her.

  To rouse the troops Arthur launched into one of his well-intentioned but overemotional prayers, the old jack-in-the-box cranked up one more time, the springs now worn. He cajoled the remaining volunteers to keep pushing and only succeeded in getting their hackles up.

  As they set off Chandler took Arthur aside and reminded him that he and Mitch were the professionals.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know,’ said Arthur, wiping what Chandler couldn’t tell was sweat or tears from his eyes. ‘I know you’re the professionals but your calm logic also needs some heart.’

  ‘We have heart,’ said Chandler. ‘No one would be out here if they didn’t.’

  The old man nodded for his youngest son to go on ahead. Only after a second, firmer insistence did he go, the roles switched, the boy acting as his father’s guardian rather than the other way around.

  Free now, Arthur walked alongside Chandler in silence for a few seconds before he sniffed a choked laugh. ‘We’re all a lot like Martin, you know.’

  ‘How so?’ said Chandler, peering into the scrub beside him, expecting nothing and finding exactly that.

  ‘Out here . . . slowly getting lost. We’re all no more than one, maybe two hours from walking into the wilderness and disappearing.’

  Chandler’s concern for Arthur’s mental well-being grew. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘If you’re not feeling okay . . . ?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me apart from the blisters and the sunburn. It’s just the weariness talking, the finding nothing, stepping on the dead every step we take: dead plants, dead animals, dead earth.’

  He turned to face Chandler. ‘I know you don’t want me offering prayers and blabbering on, but they have nothing to do with motivating the others. They’re about motivating me.’

  Chandler watched Arthur pace off to join his son. Then he took up station at the rear with Mitch.

  ‘It’s time to call this off, Mitch.’

  His partner was incredulous. ‘What? It’s only been two weeks.’

  ‘Yeah and the dad’s about to collapse, the boy’s practically a zombie, more volunteers are quitting every day. I’m more a grief counsellor than policeman.’

  ‘We’ll go on as long as the family want to try.’

  ‘That’s not realistic and you know it.’

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’ asked Mitch and leaned in closer. ‘If we find him, then his death will result in something positive, it will mean something.’

  Chandler shook his head. ‘To you. It already means something to that family.’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Mitch, ‘but if we give up now it was all a bit pointless, wasn’t it? Walking into the unknown. And don’t give me that newspaper shit about a soon-to-be adult going on Walkabout. A Walkabout has meaning to it, not just a depressed kid seeking annihilation.’

  ‘You say that, but you didn’t know him, maybe this was his Walkabout, his transformation into an adult.’

  ‘Is that what Teri’s going to do to you? Turn you into an adult?’

  ‘Let it go, Mitch.’

  Mitch shook his head. ‘Giving up on life.’

  ‘No, the opposite.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that, Chandler. Not ’til you’ve gone through it.’

  23

  The light was fast disappearing, but Mitch had come prepared, his team erecting a series of searchlights around the site. Chandler watched from the sidelines as more scraps of metal and paper were sifted from the ash, fingers black with soot, searching for the tiniest shard of evidence that could definitively point to what had happened here.

  Mitch stalked past, focused on nothing but the scene, recording details on his iPhone.

  ‘Are you going to run shifts?’ asked Chandler.

  ‘Run what?’ scowled Mitch, frustrated at being interrupted.

  ‘Run us in shifts, to keep going through the night.’

  Mitch paused. ‘No. My team can take it. You can head home.’

  ‘You really that pig-headed?’

  ‘Go home, Sergeant. Get some rest. You’ve had a long day.’

  With that Mitch walked away. Chandler had been given the brush-off. He considered staying on anyway to help retrieve what they could from the ruin but an evening with his kids and a warm bed was better than a cold night up here trawling through the debris. Let these arseholes do it. Even if
they managed to find something to charge one of the suspects, all Mitch was going to be able to charge them with was kidnapping, maybe attempted murder at a stretch. Nothing more. Not until they located the graves. And that was work for a new day and fresh daylight.

  As he passed the yellow glare of the lamps, Chandler watched Flo fish something from the wreckage. A piece of metal, charred but still in one piece, unmistakably the figure of Christ, free from the wooden cross that once held him, arms spread out, a reminder to Chandler that both suspects had mentioned a cross in their statements and that waiting at home, was a young girl nervous about her First Confession. Suddenly, he couldn’t wait to get back home to see her.

  First though he dropped by the now eerily empty station. Only Tanya and Nick were on duty, Tanya completing paperwork and Nick drumming a solo on the front desk. Both reported the all-quiet from the cells, their prisoners coming to terms with the fact that there was no point complaining now, they were stuck there for the night.

  The brief check-in completed, Chandler drove home and was disappointed to find that the kids were already in bed. It was a disappointment shared by his mum – at him for not coming home earlier.

  She met him at the door, her blonde hair striated with grey, falling long and straight back over her shoulders, perfectly set despite the late hour. She was a Wilbrook girl through and through, her humour as dry as the land she’d grown up on.

  ‘I’ll go in and see them,’ said Chandler.

  She stood in the way, arms out like the metal Jesus rescued from the fire. ‘No, don’t wake them,’ she said, her voice squeaked but assertive.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘They were angry with you. For not coming home.’

  This only made Chandler want to see them more. ‘I was held up. There was nothing I could do about it.’

  ‘Caroline, stop it.’ His dad’s voice floated in from the living room, the voice of calm. ‘The boy not being here isn’t the reason they were angry.’