by Nick Hawkes
Her companion helped her remove her fins; easing them free and throwing them into the boat. However, she then discovered she didn’t have the strength to climb the ladder, hampered as she was with a wounded arm and her dive gear on. She fell back into the water.
Her rescuer reached around her from behind, undid the straps, and pulled the air tank and vest from her. He looped the assemblage over an arm and then undid her weight belt. Felicity had the disconcerting impression of being stripped by competent hands. She reached for the ladder and found that she was now able to climb it with ease. Once on board, she turned and hauled the dive gear into the boat as the stranger held it out to her. Felicity ignored the stabbing pain in her forearm, unfastened the regulator from the tank and lifted the cylinder into one of the storage slots along the side of the boat. It was an act designed to give the appearance of a normalcy she did not feel.
She turned to find that her companion had climbed aboard and was watching her. He pulled off his hood. Water hung from his dark, curling hair like jewels. He was slim and swarthy. Felicity had the impression of dark eyes, darker than her own, seeing rather more than she would have wished. His features were strong and pleasing. So was his body. His long limbs looked strong, even though his frame looked spare.
“First aid?” he asked. His voice was a soft purr—loud enough to be heard and nothing more.
Felicity pointed to a green box tied down with shock chords under the gunwale.
She reached around to locate the tape attached to the zip so she could undo the back of her wetsuit. Where is the wretched thing?
The stranger turned her around and unzipped the back of her wetsuit. Then he moved around to her front and pulled the wet suit carefully from her arms.
Her forearm was a mess. Blood was flowing freely from the macerated flesh. The man held a pad against it before pouring antiseptic fluid over the wound. He took her other hand and placed it over the pad to apply pressure while he unpeeled some antiseptic gauze from a foil pack and strapped it onto the wound with a roll of bandage. He didn’t say a word.
Felicity felt it was important that he should know her name. “My name’s Felicity. They call me Flick.”
The stranger nodded. “They call me…” He paused, “Benjamin.”
“Where do you live?”
“Port Fairy. I’ve a small woodworking business there.”
“Oh! I live there too.” What an inane thing to say.
Silence.
Felicity hid from her sense of awkwardness by walking to the back of the boat. She retrieved the flat piece of stone from the engine bay.
As she returned, Benjamin asked, “Will you be able to get this boat back by yourself?”
Felicity nodded. “It’s moored to a pontoon. Simple.”
Benjamin reached over, put a hand on hers, and turned the piece of stone over so he could see the carving etched on it. Looking up, he smiled, “Then I’ll leave you with your Atlantis stone.” With that, he donned his dive gear, sketched a wave, and slid into the sea.
Chapter 3
Marjorie Eddington never intended to be a spy—and didn’t consider herself to be one. Her passion was anthropology, not national security. She sighed. Occasionally, life conspired to take her down paths she would never have chosen.
She sat alone at the old wooden table she had requisitioned as a desk. Her secretary and friend, Phoebe, was preparing a night-time drink for them both in the kitchen. Beside her, a standard lamp threw shadows against the wall of the Victorian room. It reeked of history, and she was glad she had booked the beautiful old holiday house.
Only three objects sat on the table. The first was a communiqué from Thames House, London, which gave details of a murder. The second was a letter from her doctor, confirming that her cancer was inoperable. The third was a laptop computer.
Marjorie scrolled down the computer’s screen. Despite being in her mid-seventies, she loved computers and had embraced their technology with enthusiasm. Computers were a godsend for her area of research—genetic anthropology. She twitched her blue silk dressing gown across her lap and retied the chord around her slim frame as she gazed at the screen. She’d seen the data many times. Thousands of genetic codes—row upon row of them—were summarized before her. They detailed the genetic history of indigenous Australians. The legal situation surrounding land rights and deals struck between mining companies and local aboriginal people now required genetic proof of heritage and ties to the land. Just occasionally, the data threw up some surprises.
She was looking at one of those surprises now. In among a long stream of coded letters was a single name: “Benjamin Bidjara.” By itself, the name meant nothing but when coupled with the recent murder in London of a senior archivist, it claimed Marjorie’s attention. Her interest had also been sharpened by a phone call she’d received earlier in the day.
Marjorie put an elbow on the table and massaged her temple. The pain wasn’t too bad tonight. It did, however, remind her that time was at a premium. She reached into a drawer of the desk, took out a pocket Bible, and turned to Lamentations, chapter three:
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…
She tucked the letter from her doctor into the page and closed the book.
Phoebe came in clutching two mugs of hot chocolate. Her stocky, buxom figure was squeezed into a pink flannel dressing gown. Marjorie smiled. To look at Phoebe, few would guess that she had a fearsome intellect and an extraordinary memory. That, and her instinct for caring, made her an ideal companion.
“How long have you been fetching me hot drinks, Phoebe?”
“Thirty-six years and three months.”
“You know, of course, that you should be doing it for a husband, not a dried-up intellectual who is well past her use-by date.”
“We should probably have made plans for that fifty years ago.” Phoebe shrugged. “It never seemed to work out for me…and your fella was thoughtless enough to get himself killed somewhere up north—just a month before your wedding, wasn’t it?” She placed a mug in front of her. “So, how are you feeling tonight?”
“Not too bad.”
“Hmm.” Unbidden, Phoebe reached across and picked up the communiqué from London. “Is this all you have from MI5?”
Marjorie nodded.
“And you can’t get ASIO interested?”
“No. I’ve been trying for a month.”
“But you think it could be important?”
Marjorie shrugged her thin shoulders. “That’s why we’re here.”
“It makes a change for you to be trying to rev up ASIO. You’re normally trying to cool them down.” Phoebe smiled. “It was how we first met, if I remember. I was asked to contact you, tell you enough to alarm you, then ‘afford you all the assistance you needed’ to help us investigate.” She laughed. “It didn’t work. You were never alarmed. But it still took you five years and 250,000 dollars of the department’s money to convince ASIO that there wasn’t a problem.”
“That was…um…”
“The threatened radicalization of the Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. ASIO wanted your singular skills…and your links with the church.”
“Aah, yes. The World Council of Churches were providing funds for the Gwalwa Daraniki movement’s 1973 conference. The government was worried.”
“To be fair, they had some justification. The stuff in their Bunji newspaper could be pretty inflammatory.”
Marjorie shook her head. “It was only ever going to lead to justice for indigenous Australians. Land rights had to happen.” She folded her hands together and closed her eyes. The issues impinging on the well-being of indigenous Australians were horrendously complex, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle truth from greed. One thing she was sure of: it would take more than compensation claims and political correctness to build the dignity and autonomy of Australia’s first inhabitants. They desperately needed meaningfu
l jobs.
Phoebe tapped the communiqué from MI5 with a finger. “This is nasty.”
“Throat cut. He was murdered in the small grove of trees between the National Archive and the railway bridge over the Thames.” Marjorie leaned back. “What do we know about the National Archive at Kew?”
“It’s the latest repository for the UK’s public records. I think England’s earliest records were stored in the Great Treasury off the cloisters at Westminster Abbey. They became the responsibility of the Public Records Office that relocated to the National Archive at Kew in 2003. They’ve got some pretty important documents there, including the Doomsday Book.”
“Hmm.”
“Why does this murder concern you?”
“A fifteenth century treaty was stolen.”
“Yes, so I read. Is it significant for us?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure. It was a secret treaty signed between Henry VII of England and John II of Portugal. John was hedging his bets. He was signing treaties with both Spain and England at the time.” Marjorie furrowed her brow as she tried to recall the details. “There was a flurry of treaties in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mainly concerning who had rights to which lands in a world that was rapidly being discovered. Most were not worth the paper they were written on.”
“What was the subject of this treaty?”
“Jave la Grande.”
“Isn’t that…?”
“Australia? Yes.”
Benjamin waited in the interview room while Detective Richard Anderson went to check that Crime Scene had finished in his workshop. The door was open, allowing him to hear most of the conversation that was taking place.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing crashing through the doorway of the deli?”
(Indistinct)
“Speak up.”
“There was a jackhammer.”
“So?”
“It sounded like gunfire.”
“Is that a problem?”
(Indistinct)
“Speak up, man.”
“It was a bit of a problem in Afghanistan.”
“You were serving there?”
(Indistinct)
“Where?”
“Lots of places. The Tora Bora ridges, Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar.”
“What did you do?”
“Long distance observation sorties, mostly.”
There was a lengthy pause. “You would have been with the SAS, then.”
There was no reply.
The interviewing officer’s voice was kinder now. “Did you lose some mates?”
“A few. A Black Hawk went down in the north of the province.” A pause.
“You’ve got post traumatic stress, haven’t you?”
Silence. Then, barely audible…“Yes. A bit. Getting better. Noises can cause me to react.”
“Well, your reaction caused two hundred dollars’ worth of damage and succeeded in terrifying the occupants of Jamison’s deli.” There was a pause. “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to sleep rough around here. Either go to the Salvos or move on. Where are you headed?”
“West, I suppose—anywhere I can get a bit of work.”
The rest of the conversation was lost as Detective Anderson bustled back into the room. “Crime Scene has finished, Mr. Bidjara. You’re free to go back to your shed. But I’d advise you to keep a low profile. The local council might have a dim view of you living in your workshop.”
“Thank you.”
“And I’d be grateful if you continued to keep O’Lauchlan at bay, at least for the moment. I’ll draft something for him in a bit. He’s waiting for you outside, incidentally.”
Benjamin nodded. “Thanks for the warning.”
As Benjamin left the room, a bearded man dressed in a camouflage jacket stepped out of the room next door and joined him in the corridor. Long blonde hair spilled out from under a black knitted cap. Although the man was the same height as Benjamin, he was bulkier. None of it looked like fat. His blue eyes appraised Benjamin briefly before he stepped aside to let him move ahead.
Marcus O’Lauchlan managed to look both slovenly and indolent as he leaned against the wall of the waiting room. He pushed himself off and came over to Ben, bobbing with excitement. “What can you tell me?”
“I can tell you that you are a good bloke who has done an old mate a good turn. I can tell you that you push too hard and would get on better with a bit more grace. I can tell you that you’re welcome to come to my place and have a feed of fish…if you give me a few days’ notice so that I can catch them. But I can’t tell you anything more…largely because I don’t know anything more.”
“But Ben, surely…”
Benjamin held out his hand. “Thanks for helping me out, mate. If you want to yarn over old times, come over to my workshop next Thursday. It’s pretty basic, but the fish will be great. Six-thirty. Bring a plate and some cutlery.”
The comment succeeded in taking at least some of the wind from Marcus’s sails. He puffed out his cheeks and shook Ben’s hand. “You’re crazy, d’you know that?”
Benjamin shrugged and turned around.
Marcus shouted behind him, “But I’ll come.”
Benjamin walked outside, grateful for the warm sunshine on his back. He’d left his ute parked under a Morton Bay fig. He glanced at the tree. Its wood was too soft for woodturning and its milky latex made it impossible to work with when it was green.
A low, white wall ran along the front of the police station. The stranger he’d seen inside the police station had hefted his rucksack onto it and was in the process of strapping it on. Benjamin paused to consult his instincts, but there was nothing. Nothing good; nothing bad. Unusual.
He called out to the stranger. “Throw your gear into the back of the ute. I can give you a lift as far as Port Fairy.”
Benjamin drove the ute out of town. “I couldn’t help overhearing some of your conversation with the police.”
There was a pause before the stranger answered. “Yeah. Not real good.”
“Happen often?”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever dived through a door into a newspaper stand. It sort of upset the two old blokes buying their daily.”
“Any of the bullets hit ya?”
“Not this time.” The stranger gave a tired smile and scratched his chin.
There was a long pause. The passing trees caused the sunlight to flicker on Benjamin’s face. Light, dark, light, dark. Benjamin surprised himself by saying, “It’s not real easy, is it?” He bit his lip. Too late now.
The stranger raised a questioning eyebrow. “You know a bit about it?”
“PTSD? Yeah—had to see a counselor at school. There was a bit of trouble in my uncle’s house where I lived as a kid.”
“Violence?”
“A bit. But most of it was directed at my sister. Had to listen.”
“Sorry, mate.” There was a pause. “She okay now?”
Benjamin sighed. “She committed suicide when she was thirteen. A rope and a tree in the back garden. She was pregnant.”
There was silence.
“Geez, what a happy pair we are.” The stranger flexed his shoulders. “My psychologist says I need to talk about it to get a true perspective on the dramas in my life.”
“Yeah. But sometimes I don’t like perspective.”
“And sometimes there are just too many dramas.” The stranger breathed in deeply before asking, “Do you blame yourself?”
Benjamin didn’t answer.
“How old were you at the time?”
Benjamin wished he hadn’t started the conversation. He compressed his lips and said, “It started when I was nine. She died when I was eleven.”
“Just a kid, then.”
It was time to change the subject. “Where will you stay tonight?”
“Dunno. I’m not real good at sleeping indoors. All I need is a roof.”
Benjamin nodded and pondered this information. Two min
utes later, he cleared his throat and said, “I live in my workshop. There’s a shed out the back where I rack some of my timber. It’s dry and pretty clean…and there’s an outside toilet. If you don’t have anywhere else, you can use that. There’s a shower inside you can use but its only got cold water.”
“Thanks. Might check it out.” The stranger leaned his head back. “What do I call you?”
“Benjamin.”
“My name’s Archie. Archie Hammond.” He paused before adding, “Would you let me do a few jobs for you in payment?”
“Before you decide to stay, I think I’d better tell you that a bloke fell through the skylight, broke his neck and died two nights ago. No idea who he was. The police have been investigating the scene. They’re only just letting me go back. I may have to tidy things up a bit.”
Archie Hammond said nothing, so Benjamin continued. “I’ve organized some guys to put some safety glass in my skylight this afternoon. They might appreciate a hand—if you still want to stay.”
“My, my, Benjamin. You do live an interesting life.”
When they arrived at the workshop, Archie set to work with a broom, sweeping up the glass and vacuuming the floor. Benjamin made a pretense at normality by fastening a piece of black bean into his wood lathe and turning it into a bud vase.
Archie leaned on the broom and watched him.
Benjamin saw his interest and gave a commentary on what he was doing. “Good woodturning involves cutting the wood to shape rather than scraping it. The technique for cutting is harder to do but it’s quicker. It gives a better finish, and it doesn’t blunt the chisel as quickly.”
A long ribbon of shaving spiraled off the wood as Benjamin carved. Archie picked it up from the floor and inspected it. “You make it look easy. How long does it take to learn?”
“I could teach you the basics in a few hours.”
Archie nodded. “I reckon I’d like that.”