Flare-up: a tense, taut mystery (A Cam Fraser mystery)

by Felicity Young

He realised then that it would be easier to erase the burn scars from his own body than get his mind off Pizzle’s.

  He hauled himself back up the bank with the help of a bending eucalyptus sapling, which released a tangy medicinal scent into the air. He rubbed the tree’s sap on his face so it stung like aftershave, hoping it would this would help clear his foggy mind.

  Still absorbed in the Pizzle and Brock cases, he reached the end of the track, almost crashing into the padlocked gate marking the beginning of a fenced nature reserve. Somewhere from among the tangled undergrowth beyond, a night bird called. Sharp cracks, rustles and thumps indicated a shifting mob of feeding kangaroos.

  And then a huge buck broke through a barrier of parrot bush. Cam sucked in his breath with a gasp: the only thing stopping the creature from crashing into him was the high fence between them. For a few seconds he thought his heart would explode.

  But the short burst of fear jabbed his mind onto another tangent. He found himself imagining what it would feel like to be chased, not by an overgrown Skippy, but by something far more frightening, a leaping, bounding figure with tearing fangs and bloodied jowls.

  He turned his back on the fence and hurried back along the riverbank, his boots heavy with the cloying mud, the scene in his head getting brighter and moving faster with each step.

  ***

  Cam parked his ute at the Pilkington house, said g’day to the Toorrup officer guarding the crime scene and walked to the shearing shed where it had all started. He turned on the shed light and stood near the patch of dried blood, re-enacting in his mind the possible sequence of events. With his back to the light, he stood on the stone step and gazed for a moment towards the shimmering silver of the olive trees.

  To his right against the wall he saw the same curled hose which Rita had stopped him drinking from after the shearing. Unhooking it, he pulled loose a couple of metres, then turned the wheel spigot, releasing a gush of water. It looked as clean as scheme water, despite Rita’s having said it was tainted with rust.

  So, the hose had been used recently, but what was the significance of that? Nothing yet, but combine it with other factors whirling around in Cam’s brain and it could mean everything.

  After turning the hose off, he pivoted through a slow turn. The sugary scent of bottlebrush grass filled the air. He looked for its source, his eyes settling upon a small clump on the edge of the olive grove, marked by a ploughed firebreak.

  ‘You beauty,’ he said aloud.

  The ground was hard as iron. Too hard to bury the sheep, he heard Rita say in his head. But like European poppies, bottlebrush grass only grows in disturbed, soft earth. Like this firebreak.

  Cam bent to examine the thick, curving stems topped with their pompoms of fine hair. It couldn’t have grown to this height in just over a week, but if someone had wanted to bury something, this and the area around it would be the spot.

  Retrieving a shovel from his ute, he carefully probed the bare patch of earth around the curling grass. The shovel had barely penetrated the top few centimetres of dirt when it met with resistance.

  He tossed it aside and continued to scrabble through the dirt with his hands. It wasn’t long before he’d prised two items of clothing from the chopped earth.

  He took them back to the front step of the shed and spread them out under the light. Despite the coating of gravelly soil, he had no trouble in identifying a yellow shirt with red thread and a pair of blue King Gee work pants.

  In the pants pocket he found a Ventolin inhaler, minus cap, and a wallet bearing a social-security card in the name of Jack Ivanovich.

  His pulse quickened. Now he knew exactly what had happened that night in the shearing shed. He turned back towards the shed and imagined the scene.

  Ivanovich and Block attack Pizzle, the bale hook sinks into Pizzle’s flesh, blood splatters onto the wooden floor of the shed. At once, the dog springs to her master’s aid and all four of them tumble outside, down the stone step in a tangle of thrashing limbs and tearing teeth.

  Outside the shed Pizzle manages to wrest the bale hook from Ivanovich, plunging it into his torso again and again while the dog, gripped by a frenzy of blood lust, lunges from one stranger to the other. The terrified Brock extracts himself from the mêlée and flees into the olive grove. Wounded and bleeding, he runs for his life in blind panic, heart thumping, bowels tingling, face dripping with sweat. He stumbles on through the dark, arms outstretched, dodging trees, ducking branches. Am I safe yet? Am I safe yet? The desperate question beats through his head to the rhythm of his galloping heart as warm rivers of blood pour from his injuries.

  He can’t run any further and has to slow down. The only sounds now reaching his ears are his own rasping breath and the crunch of his feet through the olive grove.

  Relief washes over him in soothing waves and he gulps it down. He slows his pace, telling God he’ll make it all up to him.

  Almost safe: his car’s in sight.

  Five more steps, four, three.

  A sudden crash.

  The scene for Shane Brock ends in darkness.

  Pizzle hears the crash as he stands over Ivanovich, who is now dead, his blood pooling onto the ground just outside the shed door. Pizzle uses water from the hose to spray the blood away.

  After cleaning the place up, Pizzle dresses Ivanovich in his own clothes, burying Ivanovich’s clothes in the soft firebreak dirt near the bottlebrush grass. He rams the body in the wool bale, hoists it onto the shed beam with the block and tackle, then throws the knife and the baling hook into the dam. Then he creeps with hesitant steps to the rubbish pit, bends down and listens. Hearing no sign of life, he rearranges the tin sheets over the hole and unwittingly leaves Brock to bleed to death.

  Cam could see it all, clear and logical. But as the significance of his discovery swept over him, there was still a question he couldn’t shake: How could a man with Pizzle’s limited intellectual abilities organise such a well-thought-out cover-up?

  He felt he knew the answer, but he couldn’t be sure. There was only one solution: find Pizzle and ask him.

  Cam sat on the stone step of the shed, mulling over the possibilities as to Pizzle’s whereabouts. Below him, the crime-scene tape around the farm cottage crackled in the breeze, and he saw a gentle glow coming from the car from which the Toorrup cop guarded the scene. From what he’d seen earlier, the man seemed well organised — newspaper, cigarettes, a flask of coffee. He was probably asleep now.

  Cam stared at his boots, still covered in brown mud from the riverbed. He reached for a stick and absently began to scrape the mud from the sides, in much the same way as Leanne had scraped the white clay from her boots the other day at the dam. That first day back on the job, before the talk with his constables, he’d been with Rita in the house. He remembered thinking afterwards that he’d heard or seen something inside the house, outside the house —

  He stopped scraping. His mind flashed back to the wellies crusted with brown mud that he’d seen standing to attention outside the Pilkingtons’ front door. He must have been subconsciously thinking of that when he’d asked Leanne about any other muddy areas on the property. She’d told him the only mud on their property at this time of year was white clay from the dam. So the mud on Rita’s wellies must have come from somewhere else.

  Rita’s voice intruded into his thoughts once more: Darren said you and he used to bolt off to a secret hidey-hole and smoke when you were kids.

  Cam stopped scraping, Pizzle’s whereabouts suddenly as clear as holy water.

  ***

  Cam found it no easier staring at the statue of Brother Ambrose now than it had been when he was a kid. He’d driven to the agriculture college in order to get his bearings, not entirely sure he would be able to remember the location of the hidey-hole. The statue of the monk, minus his cruel, nobbled walking stick, stood on a grassy patch surrounded on three sides by cloisters. Lights shone from the rooms above. Their old dormitories, once containing up to thirty be
ds each, had been converted into private rooms for the agricultural students. The aggressive thump of a rap song filtered its way through one of the open windows, the sound of a girl’s laughter through another.

  Brother Ambrose would have turned in his grave.

  After leaving the police ute in the college car park, Cam skirted his way around the back of the main building and passed the old dining hall, built by child labourers only a few years before his time. He and Pizzle had been fortunate enough to be among the last children involved in the child migration scheme, and by the time they’d arrived from England conditions had improved slightly, with less emphasis placed on physical labour and more on education and sport.

  He and Pizzle had never been close, but they’d shared a common tie of misfortune that bound them together more tightly than was comfortable for either of them. They say you can’t choose your family — well, you can’t choose the inhabitants of your orphanage either.

  Cam’s mind wandered in a direction he usually didn’t allow as he took the short cut past the chapel and headed towards the extensive farmland that stretched out like busy patchwork behind the school. Soon he was looking over the wide, treeless vista of fenced paddocks, seeing again the view of twenty-five years ago. He remembered the acres of market gardens in which he and the other boys had toiled, rain, hail or shine. Vegetables planted in regimented rows, stretching as far as the eye could see. Battalions of broccoli, cabbage, onions and Brussels sprouts in winter. In summer, row upon row of sweet corn with spears extended, tomatoes in camouflage gear, shining pumpkins strewn like the abandoned helmets of the dead.

  He plodded on, past some well-maintained outhouses and animal pens. A ewe called to its lamb in a quavering bass. In the dim light Cam could make out the white, jiggling tail of the lamb as it dived for the udder. More pens — chooks, goats, some grunting pigs — then gently sloping paddocks of churned earth ready for seeding. Another field alongside this lay untouched, still prickled with last year’s hay stubble.

  The long stretch of farmland led his eye toward the winding course of a small creek that eventually ended up in the Glenroyd river, and after that, his destination: the steep, wooded hill rising above it.

  He increased his pace.

  About a kilometre later, he reached the end of the property and climbed through a barbed-wire fence. His utility belt caught on one of the barbs, and as he extracted himself, his feet sank into the mud of the drying creek, like Rita’s must have on one of her visits to Pizzle. Visibility wasn’t as good here at the bottom of the hill as it had been on the flats. Jumbles of boulders, stands of saplings and clumps of prickly parrot bush cast shadows, hiding the crevices, fallen logs and animal holes. To Cam’s right stood the branchless torso of a dead tree, grey as an elephant’s trunk, twisting upwards as if trying to pluck the stars from the sky.

  A sound like a woman’s scream broke through the quiet. Cam’s breath stalled in his throat. He drew his torch from his belt, its beam catching a pair of greenish-yellow eyes. With a swish of bushy tail and a furtive dash, the fox scampered along the fenceline, which stretched like a belt across the hill. It found a hole and slipped under the fence, continuing its flight on the other side up a narrow roo path. Cam followed the fox’s route to the fence, pressed down the barbed wire and climbed over it.

  The rambling roo path, if he remembered correctly, would take him to the hidey-hole, concealed between some large boulders they used to call Ned Kelly’s Rocks.

  A few minutes later he was huffing his way up the steep path, leaning on his knees with each step, his torchlight skittering over prickly ground cover and small rocks. He reached a flatter, more barren patch, discovering the reason for the change of surface texture when his feet slipped on the loose gravel of an anthill.

  He sprang back to brush the fiery bodies from his clothing, dropping the torch. It clattered from his hand and landed a few feet off the track, its beam impotently pointing into a stunted bush.

  Cursing softly, Cam stepped from the track to retrieve it. But no sooner had he bent down than something akin to a brewer’s stallion took him from behind, knocking the wind from his lungs and shoving him chest-first onto the rocky surface. Scrabbling for his gun, he was stopped mid-reach by a hot, moist tongue on his cheek and tingling snuffles in his ear.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pizzle, get your bloody dog off me!’ he yelled.

  There was a sudden intake of breath, then Pizzle’s voice, taught and anxious. ‘C’mere, Bella, get off, there’s a good girl.’

  Cam wasn’t sure who was panting the most — Pizzle, himself or the dog.

  The weight was pulled from his back. Cam turned to find himself blinded by his own torch. He broke into a tirade of curses until Pizzle at last got the message and redirected the torch’s beam.

  ‘Oh, fuck, Oh, Christ. Jeez, I’m not half sorry, Cam, are you all right? I didn’t know it was you.’

  Cam felt himself grabbed by small, strong hands and hauled to his feet. Pizzle began to vigorously brush down Cam’s uniform until Cam had to slap his hands away.

  ‘I didn’t know it was you,’ Pizzle said again, his excitement fading into a plaintive whine.

  Cam snatched the torch back and shone it down the length of Pizzle’s body. Apart from his old towelling hat, his clothes looked new: a white T-shirt with a picture of a rock band on it, stiff pale jeans.

  Cam took a deep breath. His ribs ached but he didn’t think there was any damage other than a few bruises.

  He put out his palms in an effort to calm the small man down. When Pizzle opened his mouth to start upon a predictable torrent of excuses, Cam cut him off. ‘Pizzle, I know what you’ve been up to.’

  Pizzle stayed quiet for a moment. ‘You do?’

  ‘It was you who killed Ivanovich and you’ve been hanging out in the hidey-hole ever since.’

  For a moment Pizzle looked like a cat caught among the house plants. He took a step back, wiped his hand across his mouth and looked down at his boots. ‘You — you come to arrest me, then?’ he stammered.

  ‘I’ve come to talk to you. I reckon we have quite a lot to talk about, don’t you think?

  Pizzle kept his worried gaze focused on the beam of light shining from the torch in Cam’s hand. ‘Yup — er, maybe.’ Eventually he looked back up at Cam, face brightening. ‘The billy’s just boiled, come in and have a cuppa. Rita should be along soon.’

  Cam swallowed, nodded his head. God, how should he approach this? He was going to have to tell Pizzle about Rita’s death, but he also needed valuable information from him. Who could tell how Pizzle would react to the terrible news?

  As the small, childlike figure turned to lead the way, Cam glimpsed a paper tag hanging off the back of his shirt from a fragile piece of plastic.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Leanne and her father had agreed to meet at the pizza café in Toorrup, where they would be unlikely to see anyone they knew. It used to be their very favourite eating place. A long drive from home, it was once the setting for important family celebrations, like when she’d finally passed her school exams, when her dad had got the job promotion and once when Mum, in better days, had won three hundred dollars at the trots.

  Whenever she’d driven by in the past, the happy memories had flooded back. The front window was stacked with colourful boxes, and bottles of special fruit tea. The milkshakes were the best in the state and there were over fifty different pizzas to choose from. The chocolate and banana pizza, which she’d chosen tonight, she hadn’t had since she was about fourteen. After the first bite Leanne realised how much her tastes had changed over the last eight years.

  Dressed in civvies — a baggy T-shirt and knee-length board shorts — she had never felt more helpless. At least in her uniform she could have maintained some kind of pretence at authority, but as her father finished his story, all she could do was stare at him across the pink Formica table, mouth agape. She felt as if she were ten years old again, had just found her mother lying on t
he floor in a pool of vomit for the first time after a drinking binge. Until then she’d never even been aware of her mother’s drinking; it had been a closely guarded secret and always done on the sly.

  But now it seemed that her dad had also been up to things he shouldn’t have been, also on the sly. Her world was falling apart around her and it looked as if there was nothing she could do about it.

  He’d aged six years in the last six months. A short, tubby man once, he’d lost a large amount of weight. The skin of his once-round face was brown and worn, and hanging in empty folds like the vertical lines on the bark of an old jarrah tree. Strands of what was left of his hair lay scattered across his tanned scalp like iron filings.

  He looked over at her, assessing her reaction to the story he had just told. She briefly met his eyes, saw how the pink fibrous webs across the whites were lumpy and inflamed, the result of too many years spent squinting into the sun and wind.

  ‘You have to give yourself up, tell my sergeant what you just told me.’ She hated the quaver she heard in her voice, gulped in a breath and focused on an ornate bottle of red milkshake syrup on the counter near the till. It was so close to the waitress’s elbow it looked like it could be knocked to the ground at any second.

  Matt sucked his in lips so that they almost disappeared, something she did herself when she was angry or upset. He picked up the straw and held it in his shaking fingers, pretending to study it before stabbing it into his milkshake. He was scared, that much was obvious. Not only was he scared, but he was also unwilling to do what she suggested, and what she could see was his only choice.

  Her frustration was a fire that boiled the cauldron of her cumulative emotions and drove away any further thought of tears. The anger, the sadness at being let down by her father, the pain, the helplessness of not being able to prevent the slow deterioration of her mother, and now this — how dare he!

  Something inside her began to blaze. She scraped the legs of her chair back and sprang to her feet. ‘You’re just being a bloody coward!’ She yelled the words, throwing her balled paper napkin at him. The people at the next table stopped talking and stared.