‘And is the prisoner all right?’ asked Chandler, raising his voice so that he could be heard.
Roper answered but didn’t take his eyes from the screen. ‘Complaining as usual.’
‘Thinks we should have more officers guarding him,’ said Flo, concentrating on the screen.
‘He’s calling himself the VIP,’ said Nick. ‘Says that we have to protect him at all costs.’
‘That’s why we have to move him,’ said Chandler.
Flo raised her eyes from the screen, suspicion written across the dark lines of her forehead. ‘We weren’t informed about that order, Sergeant,’ she said. There was no hiding the distrust in her expression and tone.
‘Your boss ordered it,’ replied Chandler, locking his gaze on both of them, trying to ooze authority.
‘Move him to where?’ asked Roper, standing up from the desk. His sheer size remained impressive but the slight twitch in his stance suggested he hadn’t fully recovered from Gabriel’s assault. If it came down to a fistfight, Chandler would stand a chance, a fifty/fifty chance at least.
‘Is he not safe here, Sarge?’ added Nick, his tone steeped in wariness. If anyone was going to recognize Chandler wasn’t acting normal then it would be his young constable.
‘We believe Heath isn’t a target anymore,’ said Chandler, moving to the wall cabinet to retrieve the cell keys, ‘but we’re not happy that Gabriel knows where he is. He could change his mind. Heath’s name is still on that list.’
Flo nodded slowly. ‘I just need to call the inspector to confirm this.’
Chandler paused looking for an excuse to prevent this. Nothing came to mind.
‘Go ahead,’ said Chandler. There was nothing he could do but gamble on Mitch being out of radio contact up at Stenzl’s farm.
With what he hoped was a crushing confidence he continued with the plan. Grabbing the keys from the cabinet he strode towards the cells. So far the balance of power lay with him. It was still his station. At least until he did what he was planning to do.
Heath paced his cell, his puffy red face somehow even sweatier, coated in a thick, impenetrable layer of grease.
Trying to balance his nerves and anticipate the questions his prisoner might ask, Chandler opened the cell.
‘You got him?’ asked Heath, hopeful.
Chandler shook his head. Heath cursed and looked around, perhaps in a futile search for something soft to kick inside the cell.
‘But it’s fine,’ said Chandler.
‘How’s it fine?’ spat Heath, long past the feeble assurances of the police. ‘You won’t let me out ’til you’ve caught him. Or he catches me.’
Chandler ground his teeth. To get this done he needed Heath calm and pliable. ‘He’s moved on to another target,’ he said, his tone as flat as Flo’s had been.
Heath abruptly stopped pacing, suddenly interested. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re telling me the truth?’
Chandler nodded.
‘Well. Thank. Fuck. For. That!’ he said, beaming, a smile that Chandler didn’t return. If Chandler hadn’t fully committed to what he was planning to do with Heath, the man’s next comment shoved him off the fence.
‘Let some other poor bastard suffer.’
Chandler took a few seconds to let his anger pass.
‘So I can go?’ said Heath.
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’ exploded Heath.
‘We don’t want to take the chance that he’s bluffing us like before. We can hide you somewhere more comfortable. A hotel. All expenses paid.’ This was his bargaining chip – comfort and food after two nights in a barren cell.
The offer seemed to leave Heath uncertain. Chandler’s offer wasn’t absolute freedom but . . . He came to a conclusion. ‘Anywhere’s better than this shithole.’
Ushering Heath from the cell, Chandler led him towards the office. Both Roper and Flo were on the phone. Trying to contact their boss.
‘Did you get through to him?’ asked Chandler, fighting his nerves.
‘No, but—’ said Flo.
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Roper, walking towards them, a slight hitch in his step.
Chandler shook his head. ‘No. No one but me and your boss are to know where he’ll be.’ He shot Heath a nod of reassurance but all Chandler wanted was to get out of here. Every second they stayed increased the chance that Flo would get through to Mitch.
‘Added security,’ said Roper.
‘I don’t think Mitch would want to lose a valued member of his team to babysitting duty.’
‘Hey!’ said Heath.
‘You know what I mean,’ said Chandler.
‘You shouldn’t transport him alone,’ said Roper. ‘We go in twos.’
‘Normally I’d agree,’ said Chandler, ‘but, as I said, this needs to be kept secret. That’s the whole point.’ He looked to Flo. Her headset was on as she tapped at the keyboard, dialling her boss’s number again.
‘This guy’s right,’ said Heath, pointing at Roper. ‘I don’t want to go out there alone.’
Chandler weighed up his options. The situation was getting out of control.
‘Okay,’ he said, pointing at Roper. ‘You come with me to the place.’
Roper glanced at Flo and paced across the room towards Chandler. Chandler set his feet firm and prayed that the big guy’s resolve had been weakened by the earlier attack. Waiting until Roper was just past him Chandler dragged his handcuffs from his belt and slid them over Roper’s wrist. In the split second it took for Mitch’s goon to react, Chandler had shackled the other half to Heath’s wrist. Heath and Roper were now conjoined.
‘What the hell?’ said Heath. His confusion was matched by Roper’s, though this ended abruptly as Chandler pulled out his gun and cold-cocked the policeman on the side of the head, pounding his already damaged skull. Roper went down in a heap, taking the shackled Heath with him.
Chandler turned towards Flo. She stared at him and her colleague spreadeagled on the floor and pressed her hand to her headphones. Had Mitch answered? As Chandler closed the distance she drew her gun. Swinging his hand, he knocked it from her grasp and across the floor. Grabbing her, he pulled her athletic frame into a headlock before dragging her towards the cells like a disruptive prisoner. Within seconds, and despite her vigorous resistance, he had tossed her into Heath’s old cell. The door slammed closed behind her as she slid across the floor, cursing him.
Returning to the main office, Nick had left his desk and was standing over a terrified Heath and the prone Roper.
‘Sarge? What are you doing?’ asked his young constable, staring at him, hands by his sides. His voice was confused, weak. No training had prepared him for this.
‘He’s gone mental, for fuck’s sake!’ answered Heath, trying to move but unable to get far with Roper’s dead weight attached to his wrist. ‘Stop him! Shoot him! He’s caught whatever disease the other fucker had.’
‘Sarge,’ pleaded Nick. ‘Just let this go.’
Chandler stepped forward. ‘Nick, I can’t explain. I have to.’ He balled his fists. He didn’t want to hurt his young colleague. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.
‘You can explain,’ pleaded Nick. ‘Whatever it is.’
‘Yeah, fucking well explain,’ added Heath, still struggling to pull his wrist from the loop of the cuff.
Chandler sat down in the nearest chair and took a deep breath. From the corner of his eye he watched Nick close in.
‘Whatever it is we can fix it,’ said Nick, sounding as scared as Chandler felt. ‘We’ll get the inspector and the others and find this guy. It’s not your fault he escaped. We all did our best.’
By now Nick was standing over him. Chandler waited for it; the supportive hand gently rested on his shoulder.
Springing to his feet Chandler grabbed the hand and twisted it behind the young man’s back, forcing Nick’s face down on to the hard plastic table as he cried out in pain.
<
br /> ‘I’m sorry, Nick.’
Bending him over and using his arm like a rudder, he steered his young colleague towards the cells, depositing him into the middle one. Two cells occupied, one to go.
‘Sarge . . . Chandler . . . don’t do this,’ pleaded Nick.
‘They’re going to fire you if you don’t let us out. Throw you in a prison like this one,’ echoed Flo from the far cell.
Chandler ignored their pleas, returning to the office and Heath who was screeching for help as he crawled towards the front door, dragging the unconscious Roper with him.
As Chandler caught up he stopped crawling and assumed a defensive stance. ‘What is it you want?’ he begged. ‘Are you working with him?’
The accusation caused Chandler’s temper to flare. Frustration at being unable to explain that he hadn’t gone crazy. That there was a plan.
‘No, I’m not working with him.’
‘Then what the fuck is this?’
Chandler unlocked the cuff from Roper’s limp wrist and attached it to the pipes on the wall, securing Heath inside the office.
‘You wanted to leave the cell, didn’t you?’
‘Not like this. I wanted to be released, not taken hostage by a different psycho.’
Grabbing Roper by the arms, Chandler dragged the unconscious officer across the floor before dumping him into the final cell. He left to another chorus of pleas from Nick not to do anything stupid.
Too late.
As Chandler left the cells and approached the frightened man rattling the cuffs in vain, something occurred to him. Gabriel had known of him and Mitch – and from what he had hinted at over the phone, of their search on the Hill all those years ago. But how could he have known those details? Who the hell could have told him? One of his colleagues who was in the force back then? One of the crazy mercenaries they’d pissed off? The family?
The family. The collective noun, impersonal.
Chandler tried to recall their names. They didn’t come back immediately which filled him with shame.
But come back they did, into focus slowly and filtered through everything else charging around his head. There they were: Arthur, the old, portly accountant forcing himself to trek through the outback for weeks. The mother – Sylvia. The proud, well-heeled woman who had eventually crumbled under the pressure. And their youngest son with the long, straggly hair and the name that was as lost in Chandler’s mind as their eldest child had been in the bush. The boy as Chandler had always thought of him. They were all there, images implanted deep in his memory despite having tried to blank them out. The entire episode in there waiting for the memories to crawl once again to the surface.
Chandler might misremember what had happened, but he would never forget it.
46
2002
The morning radio communication from base urged Chandler and Mitch to ramp up their efforts to persuade the family to stop the search. Twenty-five days had gone by with nothing to show for it. The opinion from up top was that Martin had disappeared into thin air and in all likelihood was dead – though under no circumstances were they to put it to the family that way.
Mitch was in full agreement with this decision, his face and arms scorched from the sun, his feet blistered, and ankles bruised from numerous collisions with exposed tree stumps and rocks. He took the opportunity to complain for the umpteenth time that he was out here walking himself into a fucking crisp in search of a person he didn’t know and no longer cared about. If he ever had in the first place.
After that came the morning ritual: a group prayer, which Chandler had now become drawn into for the old man’s sake, then payment, the unkempt mercenaries huddled around Arthur, their withered old paymaster, almost slobbering as the cash emerged from his inside pocket.
Mitch nudged Chandler while easing the boots over his prominent blisters. ‘You gonna let him keep getting fleeced with no hope of finding the guy?’
Mitch was probing for a response. Chandler knew it – but gave in anyway. ‘You don’t get it, Mitch; they have hope. They’ll always have hope.’
His colleague’s reply was sharp. ‘Hope – but no chance.’
‘You wouldn’t give up if it was one of your family.’
‘None of my family are stupid or suicidal enough to get themselves lost out here.’
‘It might have been an accident,’ said Chandler, though he didn’t believe it himself.
Mitch raised an eyebrow. ‘You know this isn’t an accident. No one could wander this far by accident.’ He pointed to either side of the vague path they were cutting through the rough terrain, each searcher forging their own slice of Australia. ‘He could be anywhere. Lying not two metres from us and we’d never know. And even if by some miracle he is still alive, the longer we go without finding anything, the more likely it is that we never find him at all. Maybe he’s already headed home and is waiting for us.’
To this Chandler had a comeback.
‘But if he did surely he would get in touch with someone?’
‘Or maybe he’s enjoying the attention, even deriving some sort of sick pleasure from it. His fifteen minutes of fame. For all we know he can’t stand his family. Maybe this is his revenge, hurting them like they hurt him.’
‘Your theories are growing as crazy as theirs,’ said Chandler, nodding to the Murray River teenager who was tucking his cash into his socks for security.
‘The mercenaries will know to quit though when the well has run dry. Maybe it’s time you tell the family the same.’
Breaking off from the conversation, Mitch barked out the order for everyone to get moving, leaving Chandler to stew over the options. Chandler knew that Arthur would listen to him if he made it clear that his son was gone from this earth. But could he do it? Could he extinguish their last vestiges of hope? And what would they do once the search was called off? How would the family piece their life back together?
In the end Linda Keeler and a lack of money did it. On the twenty-seventh day of Martin’s disappearance, Linda made the headlines, a young housewife who walked out her front door and into the Blue Mountains in nothing more than her wedding dress and a pair of trainers. Her husband had left her for a co-worker, and Linda’s mind decided it was time to depart as well. The hunt for the pretty housewife immediately went into full swing and with her distraught family owning the second largest trucking business in New South Wales, the remaining mercenaries left the search for Martin to venture to greener pastures. No apology, no goodbye, just gone. All apart from the Murray River teenager, who ducked out with almost a sheepish goodbye to Chandler. But Chandler wasn’t that sorry to see him go either. Over the course of the search the teenager had become more swindler than bushman.
So despite temperatures that topped forty every day and their shattered minds and bodies, the group went out again, now reduced to four: Chandler, Mitch, Arthur and his son.
Understanding time was running short, Arthur barrelled through the scenery like a rock tumbling down a ravine. Chandler had at times resorted to physically grabbing the soaked collar of the older man’s shirt, ringed yellow with sweat stains, salt granules icing a neck that was now slim if not entirely healthy.
‘Arthur.’
‘What?’ said the old man, seeking to free himself from the embarrassing restraint like a punished child.
‘Don’t get separated from the rest of us.’
Arthur flung off Chandler’s hands, charging onwards. Chandler watched him for a few seconds, the bright red wrecking ball of his sunburned face crashing through the thin undergrowth before realizing that the boy hadn’t set off after his father but was studying him alongside Chandler. Their eyes met, the boy seemingly in two minds over what to do, worried wrinkles around his eyes that no kid that age should have. Chandler wondered if at that moment they were thinking the same thing: whether his dad had become a danger to himself and everyone around him.
From his other side, Mitch said, ‘Why are you bothering? If he has an
accident it might get him to stop this shit.’
Mitch had already voiced his thoughts on the matter. There was no glory in finding a set of bones. There would be no individual acclamation for such a discovery, merely a statement in the paper proclaiming that after nearly four weeks of searching the police – in generic terms – had discovered the remains. True to form, Mitch was thinking purely of himself.
As the boy ran after his father, Mitch continued, ‘You have to explain to them that it’s pointless. The time, the effort, the money they’re wasting.’
‘They need to come to that conclusion themselves,’ said Chandler. He wasn’t sure he had the capacity to ask them to stop, no matter how much he wanted to get back to Teri.
‘What if they never do?’
Chandler believed they had to. At some point.
‘They’re fucked,’ said Mitch. ‘Their heads are fucked. We need to bring this to a stop. You need to. If anything happens it’ll be on your head. If anything happens to the other kid . . .’
‘Then you tell them,’ said Chandler. If Mitch was so keen to stop then he could deliver the news.
‘I’ve tried,’ said Mitch, ‘but you’re closer to them.’
The tone seemed to insinuate Chandler had done something improper by developing a bond with the family.
‘Why would they listen to us?’ said Chandler. He rephrased it, ‘They aren’t listening to us.’
‘Make them,’ growled Mitch. ‘Every fucking step out here is grinding my nerves.’
Mitch slowed down and let Chandler forge ahead pursuing Arthur.
Chandler called for a break. They needed some time to breathe, to take on some water and any food they could force down.
Arthur kept walking. And walking. Chandler considered going after him. Suddenly the old man turned. He looked exhausted, his limbs barely preventing him from crashing to the ground.
Chandler brought him some water.
‘Are you okay?’
Arthur nodded but didn’t speak, swigging the water. His son took a seat beside him and did the same.
‘I think I saw something down there,’ spluttered Arthur between swigs, staring at his feet, but pointing into the distance.
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