Massie's operation had the feel of an office assembly-line; there'd been a lot of cutting and pasting, a lot of inserting names and dates, but it was all more or less to the same end: squeezing the teats of the Canberra cash-cow. That was regional development, Territory-style. That was your rugged, outback individual: these days the Akubra was off the head and in the outstretched hand.
Tour operators, miners, roadhouses, retailers, they were all there, looking for a cut. Mick Czaplinski, for example, the proprietor of Micky's Menswear, had done his bit for the cause, his call for compensation based on a loss of income due to the disappearance of your well-accoutred white stockman. That was about the general level of argument.
While the department was thus busily raising scrounging to an art form, it was also sounding out and revving up potential investors who thought they might be able to make a quid out of doing business with Moonlight Downs. Here they were being encouraged to avail themselves of the Commonwealth Government's Regional Business Initiatives Scheme. I was astonished to realise that these were often the same people. Mick Czaplinski, for example, was seeking a government grant for what sounded like an on-line version of the old hawker's van he had trundling around the bush twenty years ago.
I added them up. Jesus! Flogging a dead horse they might have been, but there was no shortage of jockeys ready to jump aboard. More than forty local businesses - storekeepers and miners, fencers, contractors, stock agents, neighbouring stations - had registered a commercial interest in the Moonlight Downs Land Claim. I hadn't known there were that many local businesses.
I ran my eyes down the list, searching for anything that could be in any way relevant to Lincoln's death:
Gillcutter and Co. Harkness and Sons. North Siding Pty Ltd.
Winch, West and Chambers. Impala Productions. Annie Downs.
Sundowner Transport Industries. Barber and Partners
On it went. Some I knew by name, others by reputation. Sam Barber was a local roads contractor-cum-thief whom Jack had seen, years before, spluttering his innocence as the cops dug up a load of stolen equipment from his yard. Sundowner Transport Industries: that'd be Freddy Whittle and his old Kenworth. Annie Downs was Mallee o'Toole's threadbare station out on the Stark River. Winch, West and Chambers sounded like a top-drawer law firm, but was, in fact, a trio of old reprobates who'd been struggling for years to get their backblocks horse abattoirs out of the red and had thus far done little more than feed themselves and their dogs.
The rest looked like the usual outback assortment, the hopeful and the hopeless, the parasitic and the paralytic, the mired fly-by- nights and the failed fortune-hunters who wake up one morning somewhere out in the browner parts of this big brown land and realise they've been stuck in a shit-hole like Bluebush for twenty years.
For each registration of interest there'd been a meeting, and for each meeting Massie had efficiently noted everyone involved. The half dozen references to Carbine were accompanied by the words Marsh, E. In May, I noted with interest, Marsh had brought a friend: Wiezbicki, O.
Wiezbicki, O.? Wiezbicki, O…
What sort of a name was that? Wiezbicki, O. Sounded like a new super-breakfast. But once again, it rang bells.
Wiezbicki, O. Where had I heard the name before? Had Marsh come packing a lawyer? Or was it a station employee, one of the dickheads I'd come across at the pub? Maybe somebody I knew from the old days?
I went back to the original document, and only then did I notice what I'd missed the first time: also present at the meeting had been one Flinders, L.
I looked up, my head spinning. What the hell had the four of them been meeting about?
I needed a breather. I rose to my feet, stretched my back, walked into the main bar. Stilsons, the alcoholic labrador after whom the pub was named, was sleeping it off under a pool table. Meg, the alcoholic cook who named it, was sleeping it off at the kitchen bench. She stirred herself, rattled the cutlery, found a chopper and began slamming away at a slab of meat. What day was it? Thursday. That'd be the Vienna schnitzel special. Or the dreaded Hungarian goulash/chocolate pudding double, which sounded better but tasted like both courses had been cooked simultaneously in the same dish.
The Black Dog's kitchen hours tended towards the haphazard - generally they lasted about as long as Meg did - but the food was popular. The diners were lined up along the bar, and a gruesome spectacle they made. I was surprised how many of them I knew.
Unfaithful bastards; I'd thought they were regulars at my own establishment, but they must have been spreading their favours around. Old Bob the Dog, who looked like a bearded egg, was furiously shovelling in the spag bol. Tommy Russell, sitting next to him, had taken off his glasses; presumably you needed windscreen wipers when you were sitting in the vicinity of Bob and a bowl of spaghetti. Andrea Bolt had stuffed herself into something chiffon and was glaring at her battered flake as if it were a personal enemy.
Even my Toyota Towers neighbours were represented: I spotted Camel, hunched up against a window, yapping into his mobile phone and pointedly ignoring me.
I bought a stubby, and as I returned to my seat paused at the side gate to take in the scenic wonders of the Bluebush night. You name it - gravelly waste lots, broken bottles, bullet-riddled forty- fours, acres of acned bitumen bathed in a pale fluorescent wash - Bluebush had it.
I went back down to my table, took a long swig of the beer and a longer swig of the Massie. It was like wading through fresh vomit, something I'd been doing too much of lately.
Any of the documents, with the right sort of massage and manipulation, could possibly give me a hint as to what was going on out at Moonlight, but that massage and manipulation was beyond me. I felt as if I'd found the key, but lost the door.
I plodded on for another half an hour, but nothing emerged, neither clue nor insight nor indication of what, if anything, was going on at Moonlight Downs. Marsh and Lincoln had met at least once, in the company of Massie and this mysterious Wiezbicki, but what they were discussing I had no idea. In the end I threw the package into my backpack and headed home, frustrated, weary, not a little pissed off.
I took the alleyway home. The Alsatian was strangely silent - must have been his day off - but when I reached my back entrance I got a surprise of another kind.
There was a light burning in the living room.
Had I left it on? No way. Maybe it was time I got a dog myself.
I flung the gate open, ran up the path and opened the door. I wasn't the first person to do so tonight: the newly replaced lock had been ripped off. I stood in the doorway, aghast.
The Sandhill Gang had returned: they'd left their calling card sprayed across the kitchen wall in letters three foot high.
And this time they'd completely trashed the place.
The Boys are Back in Town
'Blue-bloody-bush!' I muttered for about the hundredth time that month.
I roamed through the apartment, my fury mounting as I totted up the damage.
Their first port of call had been the fridge, which they'd hit like a herd of cattle attacking a waterhole. What they couldn't eat or steal, they'd sprayed around the room. A jar of mayonnaise was the only thing still standing.
My faithful old cassette player? Tape spaghetti. The dunny? Blocked, of course: the camp kids only had to look at a piece of plumbing equipment for it to suffer immediate and irreparable seizure. My books? In the dunny, a good proportion of them. A couple of old favourites - including Gouging the Witwatersrand, dammit! - seemed to be missing. Christ, I thought, literate vandals! Maybe the raid was part of an adult education outreach program. The money tin? I didn't bother looking. They'd flogged the wind-chime from the veranda, the crystal from the window, the barometer from the wall. They'd even flogged my new blender.
'My blender!' I moaned. 'You little bastards!' Banana smoothies were the only thing that had kept me going of late.
For a moment I thought 'Massie', out to get his papers back. But that would be absurd. Yo
u're getting paranoid, girl, I told myself. No way was this his style. With the amount of unaccountable Commonwealth funds floating around the Territory, he'd employ some black-skivvied assassin with a silenced automatic and a Harvey-Keitel grimace if he wanted revenge.
I collapsed onto the couch. Felt lonely. Wanted Jojo. Spotted the phone beside it and decided to ring the cops.
As luck would have it, an unpleasantly familiar voice announced that I'd reached the Bluebush police station.
'Emily Tempest here, Griffo.'
'Emily. How are you this evening?'
'Shithouse. Have you heard from Jojo Kelly?'
'No, where's he gone?'
'Out bush for work, Ngampaji way. Don't suppose you could get a message through to him, could you?'
'I could try.'
'Tell him his Kupulyu Creek solution to the juvenile delinquency problem is a load of crap.'
'Er, he'll know what that means?'
'It means the Sandhill Gang are back in town.'
'What!'
'I'm looking at the damage as we speak.'
'Have they hit the other flats?'
I took a look out the window: fluorescent lights were blazing, alcohol-fuelled conversations were roaring, Black Sabbath and Lee Kernaghan were serenading each other from opposite ends of the court. 'Doesn't look like it.'
'Phew. That's a relief.'
'Thanks for caring, Griffo.'
'No worries. Are you going to report it?'
'Is there any point?'
'Probably not. I'll pass the message on to Jojo if I can.'
I spent a hectic hour cleaning up the mess, and by the time I was finished the flat was more or less back to normal. My head was taking a little longer. I stripped off, had a shower, made a pot of tea, pulled on a pair of old army britches and stretched out on the back porch.
Count your blessings, I counselled myself. Count your bloody blessings. There were half a dozen gangs in the town camps.
Lucky it wasn't the petrol boys - they would have eaten the walls. I even had a bit of tucker left. Well, some biscuits anyway, a packet I found in the back of the cupboard. Milk arrowroots. Good job, too; I suddenly found myself famished from my exertions.
I was salivating over the first one, jaws agape, when something twigged. Milk arrowroots - that was it. That was the connection, the hook, the key, that was the thought that had been bobbing around like an unsinkable turd in the toilet of my subconscious all night.
There was an old bloke who lived out on the Stark River, east of Moonlight. An old bloke everyone round here referred to as Bickie. He was a winemaker, of all things. As a kid I'd figured the nickname came from the giant milk arrowroots he was forever munching as he marched around his vineyards, but Jack once told me it was an abbreviation of his real name. Something Polish and ending in 'bicki'.
Wiezbicki. Oskar Wiezbicki.
A picture appeared in my head: a wizened little whitefeller, pale-faced, smooth-skinned, with scrawny legs and big boots, thin lips and a massive hat. But gentle. And clever: they'd hung shit on him for trying to grow grapes out there, but he'd confounded them all. His label, Rotenstok, was said to survive more on curiosity than oenological value, but I'd spotted it at roadhouses and pubs all over the region. He'd started out small and ended up… well, still small from what I could gather. But alive, which was more than could be said for a lot of the blokes who'd been hanging it on him.
One person who'd never shared the general scepticism about Bickie was Jack, and for a very good reason.
Bickie was a water diviner.
He was always the first person the stations round here turned to when they were looking for water, before they brought in the hydrologists and drillers. Jack had used him for a couple of the early mines, and they'd become mates, after a fashion. Jack reckoned Bickie could smell water the way a mozzie can smell blood.
Bickie it'd be, for sure, this Wiezbicki, O. So what was he doing at a meeting between Marsh, Massie and Lincoln? I couldn't imagine the four of them sitting around discussing next year's vintage. Come to think of it, had the meeting taken place in Bluebush at all? Maybe Massie had gone to them; there was nothing in the files to indicate the venue. Massie had always enjoyed mixing it with the locals - the better class of locals, anyway - on their home turf. I remembered my first sight of him, sitting next to Brick Sivvier, hoping a little bit of Brick would rub off.
What was Bickie doing getting round in the company of guys like these?
I finished my tea and my biscuit. Felt a bush trip coming on, like the first flush of spring.
About time, too, I decided. Bluebush was getting me down, and my little bit of it stank of White King and black vandalism. I went to bed, huddled against a pillow, felt a wave of sleep stealing over me.
The jagged hum of Bluebush's night machinery gradually softened into the whirr of wings. I found myself floating over a moonlit plain, wind lilting among silver feathers, the watercourses awash with a music soft as rain. In the hills below I could hear dingoes yapping and howling.
I opened my eyes, troubled by something I couldn't put my finger on. Something suggested by the dingoes.
The dog over the back fence. Why hadn't it barked?
Could the Sandhill Gang have somehow silenced it? That seemed unlikely; I thought about the way they treated their own dogs, cuddling and kissing them, smuggling them out bush.
The implications of this question were just beginning to make their way through my head when I detected a faint, scraping noise from the back door. I looked up in alarm. Russell and the boys coming back for more?
The door creaked on its hinges, ever so slightly. A slight rise in the level of the noise from outside. A footfall. A rustle of clothing. What might have been a stifled intake of breath.
Then a long, malevolent silence.
I lay still, strained my eyes, but could make out nothing in the darkness. Until I spotted a blur of movement in the kitchen. I slipped out from between the sheets, slithered onto the floor.
The intruder entered my room on cats' feet and a holy terror swarmed through my heart.
I lay there, listening intensely as the steps drew closer, then paused. Another couple of steps, then a sudden, furious blow hammered the bed. I heard a sharp snarl of exasperation as he felt the pillow where my head should have been, then a narrow beam of light swept the room. He began to make his way around the bed. I held my breath, did my best to still my heart. He reached the end of the bed, moved round to my side. I braced my body against the wall, prepared to launch myself at him.
Suddenly the room swivelled and swirled and a blast of light shot across the wall. Somewhere outside a heavy motor revved and roared, then stopped. I heard a car door slam.
I looked up in time to catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure haring out through the back door, and heard the crash of a fist on the front one. A fist followed by a familiar voice.
'Emily!'
Jojo.
I scrambled to my feet, rushed to the door and flung it open, threw myself into his arms so ferociously I almost bowled him over.
'Shit, that's an enthusiastic…' he said, then caught a glimpse of my face in the half-light. 'What the hell's going on?'
'Somebody broke into my place.'
'I heard.' 'No, not that. Just now. While I was asleep. You scared him off.'
He bolted into the apartment and out the back door, which was wide open. He pulled the torch from his belt, followed its beam to the back fence.
I came and stood out on the porch; felt suddenly chilled, found myself shaking uncontrollably.
'Jojo!'
'Yep?' came his voice from the alleyway.
'Come back.'
His head popped up over the fence. 'I want to have a look around; he may still be in the vicinity.'
'Don't do that. Please. Just stay with me.'
He came back frowning, studied me for a moment, drew me into his arms. 'You're trembling.'
'This is nothing compar
ed to what I was like a minute ago.'
He held me tight, and his whispered reassurances and the rasp of his whiskers on the top of my head slowly soothed me.
'You didn't get a look at him?'
'Just a glimpse as he ran out the door. It was all too dark and fast.'
He let go of me for a moment, pulled out his torch and ran it across the ground nearby.
'Is that yours?' he asked. He was looking at my nulla-nulla lying in the dirt.
'You ought to know - you're the last person I belted with it.'
'Wasn't it by the front door?'
'It was, but the whole place is topsy-turvy after tonight's goings-on.'
'Don't touch it,' he said. 'I'll get the cops to come and check the place over.'
'Do you have to do that?'
He frowned. 'I don't like the way this feels.'
'It gets worse. There's a dog.'
'Where?'
'Over the back fence, normally. Tonight there wasn't.'
He went out into the alley, shone his torch through the chain mesh, then hoisted himself over the gate. I saw him bend over a prostrate shape close to the house, then knock on the back door. An old bloke came limping out, all splutters and snarls, joined Jojo at the dog's side. Jojo's explanation must have been succinct: a few seconds later the owner was revving up his car. Jojo gently lifted the dog inside and laid it across the back seat. When the owner had belted off down the driveway he came back and joined me.
'Still alive?' I asked him.
'Only just. Gone to the vet.'
'What happened to it?'
'Doped.'
'Shit.' I looked up and down the alleyway. 'What's going on, Jojo?'
'That's what I was going to ask you.'
'Why did you come?'
'To see you.'
'At three in the morning?'
'Got a strange message from Griffo. Said you'd had another visit from the Sandhill Gang.' We were walking back up the path by now. I clutched his arm.
'I did.'
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