The creek was a chain of tea-coloured puddles, midges swarming. I caught my breath, examined my abrasions, took an abstemious slug of my bottled water and started to work my way downstream.
The watercourse meandered through a tangle of rotting logs and moss-covered rocks, its fern-crowded banks never more than three or four metres apart. The air smelled peaty and primeval. Bellbirds pinged. The air was almost still, the wind a distant moan.
The slopes on either side gradually became less steep. Dry, undergrowth-choked gullies converged with the creek bed. At the mouth of one, I found footprints in a spill of quartz-speckled sand. Mine, I concluded. My lost-at-sea loafers. I spent half my political life going round in circles, but this was beyond a joke.
Nerve-ends tingling, I began to move more cautiously, half-recognising features of the terrain from the previous night. The wind picked up again, sighing and whistling in the treetops. The creek bank became a redoubt of weathered, lichen-colonised granite. Edging around it, I caught a glimpse of the sandbagged dam, hose running up to Syce’s camp.
I turned and crept back the way I had come, assessing the lie of the land. A hundred metres upstream I scrambled up the bank. I began to circle the camp, dreading what I might discover.
Where were the police, I kept asking myself ? Surely they were somewhere nearby, monitoring the comings and goings. Surely they were up to speed on the desperately changed situation by now. My old lack of confidence in the constabulary was back with a vengeance.
The cloud was breaking apart, the light flickering and shifting as it fell through the swaying leaf canopy. I approached the camp from high ground, duck and dart, bent in a half-crouch.
I spotted the Hilux, caught a fishy smell on a gust of wind. The abalone kitchen was a camouflage-dappled cube in the dusty green. The screen-wall tent was gone, struck.
Nothing moving. Nobody talking, weeping, groaning.
No barking. Not yet, anyway. I changed position, keeping well back. Now I could see the whacky-backy patch, a deeper green, half of it uprooted. And Syce. I could see Syce.
He was standing beside a tree, the one Tony Melina had been chained to. He was staring at its trunk, very close, his back to me, his hands moving at the sides of his head as though batting at his ears.
Jesus, I thought. He’s wigged out, gone Lady Macbeth.
My blood ran cold. His nerves were fine when he was torturing and murdering Tony Melina. It must have taken a far worse atrocity to whip him into such a psychotic lather. Far, far worse.
I got down on my belly with the snakes and the lizards and slithered through the leaf-litter.
‘I need to pee,’ pleaded a girl’s voice.
‘Shuddup,’ grunted Syce. ‘You peed already.’
The voice came from inside the shed. It had to be Jodie Prentice. And she wasn’t too terrified to speak. And Syce was not too deranged to respond. These were good signs, I told myself. A minuscule ripple of relief ran through me.
I manoeuvred until I could see the doorway of the shed. It was a black rectangle, the interior obscure. I now also had a profile view of Syce. He wasn’t flipping out. He was snipping his hair with a small pair of scissors, checking his reflection in a shaving mirror hooked on a nail hammered into the tree.
A fine drizzle descended, a momentary sun-shower, bathing the scene in a brief, sugar-sprinkled incandescence. In the sudden flash of light, a cluster of figures took shape in the shed. They were sitting on the earth floor, hugging their knees, blindfolded. One, two, five. Jodie, Red, Matt, two boys I didn’t know. The mongrel dog lay on its sack in the doorway, scratching.
Relief again. A small tsunami this time.
But where were the frigging cops? And did they know yet that Syce was not alone? That abalone shed was just a tin box. If push came to gunplay, the kids could get caught in the crossfire.
I backed up the slope, hunkered down in the shrubbery and did the trigonometry. It was the police plan, last I’d heard, to wait until Jake Martyn arrived at the camp before making their move. Until then, they were probably holding back, wary of spooking Syce. Martyn would come up the creek bed. So, in all likelihood, would the main force of plods.
I needed to connect with them before things started happening, give them the low-down on the set-up.
As I started toward the creek, the dog began to bark. Syce said something brisk, the word inaudible. The woof-woofing ceased immediately. I crouched, frozen, hearing nothing but the creak and rustle of the bush, the buzz of bugs. Syce spoke again, the words lost, the tone instructional.
Instant replay of the previous night. Martyn was arriving. Syce was telling the kids to behave themselves.
Skirting the shed, I navigated for the creek bed. But a vehicle was already emerging from the tunnel of vegetation. I pulled up short and took cover behind a thick stringybark.
The car was a dark green Range Rover. Syce was watching it, too. He was standing in the lee of a towering bluegum, double-barrel shotgun in the crook of his arm. He’d whittled his full beard down to a rough stubble, thicker at the chin. Likewise the front of his scalp. Got a head start on the big make-over. Charles Manson meets Fu Manchu, the rough-cut.
The Range Rover laboured onto the slew of sand below the camp and stopped. Jake Martyn got out. Big shirt, comfortable pants. Syce came down the slope to meet him, shotgun angled to the ground. Martyn toted a sports bag. That’d be the money. Tony’s passport, the airline ticket, the salon accessories. Avon calling.
They walked back up towards the shed, Syce doing the talking. Explaining. Persuasive hand gestures. The shed doorway was out of sight, around the corner. The dog padded out to meet them, metronome tail, sociable as a parish priest in a public bar.
The guard has deserted its post, I thought. Syce must have realised the same thing. He increased his pace, still pitching his line. Jake Martyn was asking curt questions, not liking the answers.
The cops, the cops. Where, sweet Jesus, were the cops?
Then the dog was woofing again. This time, Syce didn’t silence it. He turned towards the shed, the shotgun swinging around with him, rising as it came. Martyn reached out and grabbed the barrel. The gun went off. Boom. Astonishingly loud.
Birds erupted from the trees, an explosion of screeching feathers. Jake Martyn went down, keening like an air-raid siren, blood gushing from his thigh. As if responding to a starter’s pistol, figures bolted from the shed and scattered into the bush. The kids were breaking out. The dog took off in hot pursuit, barking and snapping.
Syce recoiled from the accidental discharge. Even from thirty metres away, I could tell that he was losing it. The best laid plans were turning to shit, coming apart at the seams. He swept the shotgun in a jerky, erratic arc. Then, snatching up Jake Martyn’s tote bag, he bolted for the Range Rover.
Just as he reached the creek bed, a stick figure in hipsters and a halter-top burst out of the undergrowth and skidded down the bank. Jodie Prentice. The dog had its fangs in the hem of her jeans, slathering and thrashing. She kicked out, trying to shake it loose.
Syce swung around, dropped the sports bag and brought up the shotgun.
Then Red appeared, sprinting, an upraised stick in hand.
Jodie was yelling and swearing, dragging the dog behind her. ‘Fuck off, shit-bastard animal.’
Jake Martyn was back upright, one hand clutching his wound, mouth opening and closing.
Screaming girl, rabid dog, rushing boy, desperate maniac, ruined plan, pointed shotgun. I didn’t like the way the dominoes were falling. Not with one barrel to go and Syce’s history in tight corners.
And where were the pinhead pigs?
I stuck my head out from behind cover. ‘Hey, you,’ I shouted. ‘Up here.’
My words were lost in the cacophony. Windwhip, dogsnarl, birdscreech. Jake Martyn’s gunshot yabbering and Jodie Prentice’s industrial-strength cursing.
I stepped into plain sight and thundered down the slope, weaving through the saplings, a bellowing bu
ffalo. ‘Syce,’ I screamed. ‘Over here, arsehole.’
He spun around and I dived behind a tree. The shotgun came up to his shoulder and the barrel swept the hillside.
Red started belting the dog. It turned on him, sabre-toothed. Syce swung the shotgun around at the sound.
He’d run out of rope. I could see it in the way he was tensing, his grip whitening on the stock of the shotgun, finger crooked at the trigger.
Again, I stepped from cover and yelled. The shotgun came around again. The business end was pointed directly at my chest. I was maybe ten metres away.
Red and Jodie were in retreat, Red beating at the dog with all his rower’s strength. Snarl, snap.
A thunderclap rang in my ears and a blow struck my chest, powerful as a runaway bus. I felt myself lifted off my feet, thrown backwards through the air.
Everything went black.
A heavenly chorus filled my ears.
‘Drop it.’
‘Police.’
‘Don’t move, police.’
‘POLICE!’
My shoulder slammed into the ground with a lung-flattening womph. The runaway bus landed on top of me, pressing my face into the earth. The hubbub of voices swelled. Two shots rang out in rapid succession. In their echo came the unremitting battle-cry of the dog. A voice started yelling, ‘Don’t shoot, I’m not armed. Don’t shoot.’
Over and over, a mantra.
I spat gumleaf crud and unscrewed my eyelids. A body was straddling mine, a black-clad blur, pinning me flat. It shifted aside to let me breathe but maintained the pressure between my shoulder blades. I twisted my head and registered the black as a coverall uniform. Special Operations Group. The Sons of God.
Heavy footfalls drummed past my head. Jake Martyn stopped his shouting. A shrill whistle pierced the bush and the hubbub abated a little. The weight on my spine eased. I was being helped to my feet.
The soggie hauling me upright had a boxer’s nose and Tartar cheekbones. He squinted into my face and spoke, his voice beamed from a distant planet.
‘Yoke, eh?’
My hearing was MIA, still ringing with the din of the gunshots and my impact with the forest floor.
‘R. U. O. K.?’ he repeated.
I nodded stupidly. Okay enough, I guessed. Nothing a month in traction and a bionic ear wouldn’t fix. A bloodcurdling snarl pierced the fug. I spun around, searching for the source of the sound.
The dog was still on the job, fangs bared as it snapped at Red’s groin. My boy was engaged in a desperate holding action. His stick was no more than a shredded stump. Tightlipped, he was fighting a losing battle.
As I launched myself towards him a soggie appeared, cocking his leg. He sank a high-laced boot into the slathering beast’s belly. With a startled yip, the dog rose high off the ground and flew ten metres though the air. Straight through the middle of two tall saplings. It hit the embankment, gave a terminal yap and was finally silent.
Red’s head turned to follow the trajectory of the punted pooch. The goal-kicking copper grabbed him by the arm, steadying him, and said something. The kid’s shell-shocked grimace dissolved into a tension-draining laugh. Then the anxiety flooded back and he looked around urgently.
I raised an arm. He spotted me and took the salute, his relief evident. Then he buckled at the knees. The cop supported his weight.
Between us, on the broken slope of creek bank, Jake Martyn was lying face-down in the forest debris. Two soggies with pump-action shotguns loomed over him while a third cuffed his hands behind his back.
Nearby, Rodney Syce was flat on his back, motionless. His neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, about 328 degrees at a guess. His arms were flung out from his torso. A swarm of soggies surrounded him, pump-actions converging at pointblank range. One of the troopers nudged the double-barrel shotgun from Syce’s limp grasp. Another dropped to a crouch and pressed his fingers to the prostrate felon’s neck.
Up the hillside, a line of dark shapes was advancing through the trees. Two police four-wheel-drives roared from the canopy of vegetation over the creek bed and pulled up behind Jake Martyn’s Range Rover. The doors flew open and cops piled out, DS Meakes among them. Jodie Prentice was limping across the gravel towards Red, escorted by a uniformed officer in short sleeves and a bulletproof vest.
‘This way, sir,’ said the squaddie at my side. He put a hand on my shoulder and steered me down the slope.
‘You saved my life,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘We get time and a half on public holidays.’
‘Taxpayers’ money well spent,’ I said. For once.
Jake Martyn was whimpering, not so full of zest now. The soggies rolled him onto his back and one of them clamped a wad of bandage to his wounded thigh.
The cop with his fingertips on Syce’s carotid shook his head and stood up.
For a clearing in a forest wilderness, the place was busier than the federal tally room on election night. Cops were pouring in from all points of the compass. Matt Prentice and his mates straggled out of the mulga, each with an attendant officer. Jodie and Red stood in the creek bed, watching me approach. She was hanging onto his arm, stroking it like it was a pedigree Siamese. When I got to the bottom of the bank, Red detached himself and ran to meet me.
We clung to each other for dear life, hearts pounding together.
‘I was so scared,’ he said.
Me too. I pressed his head to my chest and buried my face in the glutinous spikes of his hair.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You are so fucking grounded,’ I said. ‘You’ll spend the rest of the holidays locked in your bedroom.’
Over the top of his head, I could see Jodie Prentice laying into her big brother with balled fists, kicking him in the shins. He was copping it, making no attempt to defend himself.
Our manly embrace ran its course. Red started to speak. One question now, I knew, would quickly become a torrent of explanation and justification.
‘Later,’ I said, raising my hand. It was trembling. ‘The main thing is, you’re okay and I’m okay. Only the bad guys got hurt. Go stop Jodie killing her brother while I have a word with the police.’
‘I’ll kill him myself,’ muttered Red. ‘Bloody idiot.’
‘Let’s wait until there aren’t so many cops around.’
I looked back up the slope towards Syce’s body. Two cops stood beside it. Damian Meakes in his light brown summer-weight suit, and a nuggety man with a bony forehead and close-cut iron-grey hair. A homicide cop called Kevin Hayes. One of the many jacks I’d met that morning at the Lorne cop shop.
A uniform blocked my path. I called Meakes’ name. He turned and stared at me from behind the rimless ovals of his green-tinted sunglasses. After a long moment, he nodded.
The uniform stepped aside and I trudged up the incline.
The wind had dropped away and the clouds were breaking up, but the air still had a damp feel to it. I rubbed the bare skin of my arms and shivered.
I’d wanted to see Syce lying dead on the ground, no denying it. I’d lived with the want aching in the marrow of my bones for almost two years. From the instant the gutless prick did what he did to Lyndal. I’d felt it burst into a raging fury when he pointed his shotgun at my son. But now the moment had arrived, I felt only an unexpected emptiness.
The two cops moved apart, wordless. I stared down at the corpse.
He was dead, all right. No doubt about it. His shirt was unbuttoned, the bullet wounds clearly visible. Two in the side, one where his neck joined his shoulder. Very little blood, a quick death. Flies were already buzzing at the dark-rimmed punctures. My gaze moved up to his face. There were flies there, too. They crawled across the rough remnants of his beard and swarmed at his lips. His skin was the colour of putty, the lividity already draining away.
For the first time I looked at the man properly. Close up. Broad daylight. When my gaze reached his lifeless green eyes, a shudder started deep in my
body. My stomach clenched and my mouth filled with a bitter taste.
The fruit of knowledge.
I stared until the silence grew unbearable, then turned to Meakes. His face, too, was motionless. He looked back at me, hands clasped in the small of his back, eyes invisible behind the lenses of his sunglasses. He was waiting for me to speak. But speech, at that moment, was not within my power.
It was Hayes who broke the silence, his tone conversational. ‘Your second message didn’t get through until events were already in progress, Mr Whelan. Your presence here came as something of a surprise to the officers on the ground.’
‘It’s been a big day for surprises,’ I said stiffly, looking at Meakes. ‘Sorry for the inconvenience.’
I turned and walked back down the incline. Gutted. Meakes fell into step beside me.
I’d been overly harsh on DS Meakes. Maybe it was the fashion-plate suits. Or the Heinrich Himmler eyewear, or the cold-fish personality. But that was all water under the pier now. When it came to the crunch, the detective sergeant acquitted himself well. Did his legwork. Came out of his box like a greyhound. Crack of dawn, New Year’s Day. I couldn’t fault that.
Meakes waited until we reached the creek before speaking.
‘I’m heading back to Melbourne,’ he said. ‘Homicide will be handling things here from now on.’
‘Better luck next time, eh?’
I extended my hand. Meakes accepted it. We shook, a moment of silent communion.
‘We’ll get him,’ he said. ‘No matter how long it takes.’
‘I know,’ I nodded sombrely. ‘I know.’
The action sequence was over. The wash-up was beginning. Uniformed cops were running crime-scene tape around the area, tying yellow ribbons round the old gum trees. Jake Martyn’s bulk was being manoeuvred onto a stretcher. Intermittent squeaks and gasps indicated that his condition was painful but not critical.
Kevin Hayes took charge of me. He said the parents of the other teenagers had been informed that their children were safe. Everything else would be sorted out back in town.
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