Silver

by Chris Hammer

  ‘I’m on probation. They weren’t entirely happy with my reporting down in Riversend.’ He shrugs, looks off to one side. ‘I reckon if I don’t come up with something before my contract ends, I might be for the high jump as well.’

  Martin feels no sympathy. ‘So what’s the crime?’

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  Martin shrugs. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, mate. It’s a cracker.’ Doug has his enthusiasm back, just like that.

  ‘You going to keep me guessing?’

  Doug looks at him, perhaps calculating if Martin remains an active competitor. He must conclude that he’s not. ‘C’mon. Let’s get out of this sun, find some shade.’

  There are trees nearby, across the car park, yet Doug leads him along the side of the building. As the land slopes towards the lagoon, supporting pillars of concrete and brick reach down from the building above. In among them there are tanks, vast vats of rusting iron, the underbelly of the beautiful structure. There are sluices and boilers and pressure valves, all silent now, left to decay. Nothing moves; it is dark and silent. There are pipes leading into the water.

  The building ends and he looks out across the lagoon. It’s quite a sight this morning, sun shimmering on the water, the surface as blue as the sky. Two pelicans float at ease; only birdsong punctuates the silence. The shoreline is rimmed by mangroves everywhere except here, where the land plunges steeply into the water. A few saplings are establishing themselves, not yet tall enough to block the view. There’s a concrete path with weed-filled cracks leading to a short jetty. It could be an eco-tourist getaway, some unspoiled idyll: the clear water, the mangroves and tea-trees, casuarinas and palms. It’s easy to see why St Clair wants to get his hands on it: the perfect location for his clubhouse. Martin regards the cheese factory, tall and impressive from his low viewpoint, its windows overlooking the lagoon, more like a Belle Époque hotel than an industrial relic.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ says Thunkleton. ‘Don’t come at sunset, though—the mossies are bloody murder.’

  ‘Why are you showing me this, Doug?’

  Doug turns towards the lake, his voice suddenly mellifluous and half an octave lower, full of portent. ‘It looks like paradise now, but not so long ago, this was the location of one of the country’s most baffling crimes—a crime that remains unsolved to this day.’ Doug pauses for effect, unaware of Martin’s astonishment, before continuing his recitation. ‘Now, for the first time, Channel Ten can reveal vital new clues that may at last bring closure … and justice.’

  ‘Doug, could you speak normally?’

  But Doug is on a roll. ‘It was here, on a balmy Friday evening in November just over five years ago, that respected local businessman Amory Ashton wished his employees a good weekend, locked the doors of his award-winning factory, and came here, to this jetty, to throw in a line and savour a well-earned beer. It was the last time anyone would see him, alive or dead.’ Doug turns to Martin, his voice returning to its normal conversational tone. ‘We’ve shot a shitload of interviews. His workers saw him heading down here with his fishing gear. Then nothing. We’re shooting the shit out of this place in case they demolish it.’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t just do a runner?’

  Doug turns back to the lagoon, his voice toggling into broadcast mode once again. ‘The following Monday, Amory Ashton’s staff arrived at work to find the buildings locked and no sign of their employer. But Ashton was always the first to arrive, always the last to leave, and his staff immediately suspected something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.’ Doug turns to Martin, voice returning to normal. ‘The interviews are spot on. All of them say what a fucking martinet he was. Wouldn’t trust anyone else to run the show.’

  ‘So what makes you think there was a crime?’

  Doug swivels: eyes again on the lagoon, voice again dripping gravitas. ‘The alert was raised and that same day, seven kilometres north of here, Amory Ashton’s late-model Mercedes was found—burnt out—on a deserted beach along Treachery Bay.’ Martin marvels at how much significance the television man can load into those words. Burnt out and deserted and Treachery. ‘There was no trace of Ashton. Not then, not since. But here on this jetty, here in this piece of paradise, the question lingers: what happened to Amory Ashton?’ Doug switches back from broadcaster to human being. ‘I’m thinking of calling it Paradise Lost. What do you think?’

  Martin eyes the pipes leading from the vats into the water. A couple of cane toads are fornicating at the water’s edge. ‘Doug, it was a factory.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ The newsman frowns. ‘But what do you reckon? Cracker yarn, right?’

  ‘Absolutely. So what are the vital new facts you’ve uncovered?’

  Doug looks at him contemptuously. ‘Mate. You’ll have to watch the show.’

  Martin laughs. ‘Fair enough.’

  The two men walk back the way they’ve come. The camera crew has emerged from the interior and is waiting for them. It’s a different team from the one Doug had down in the Riverina. They must share the love around. ‘You want to get this shot or not?’ the cameraman asks Doug. ‘It stinks like high heaven in there.’

  ‘Sure. Right with you,’ says Doug, before turning to Martin. ‘Mate, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anyone for a while. Any of the colleagues.’

  ‘Of course,’ Martin agrees. ‘But one question: what’s with the muscle? He was about to rip my head off before you intervened.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that. He’s not ours. Why would we need security for a job like this? Belongs to the owner.’

  ‘Who’s the owner?’

  ‘Local bigwig. Tightarse something-or-other.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tyson St Clair.’

  ‘He’s the owner, is he?’

  ‘Apparently. Lucky break. A big fan of mine, so he says. He was a mate of Ashton’s. Wants to know what happened. Now all I’ve got to do is stand it up.’

  Martin looks again at the old building. Metal detectors. What were they looking for, Ashton’s fishing gear? ‘You say it might be demolished?’

  ‘Maybe. Not doing much good as it is.’

  Martin shakes the television reporter’s hand and wishes him luck. He knows he should hate him for what he did in the Riverina, should despise his tabloid sensibilities, but he can’t but help feel sorry for him. Stuck in a decaying cheese factory, trying to resuscitate his faltering career, trying to raise the dead. So full of bravado, so completely clueless.

  chapter ten

  Martin drives out from the cheese factory, across the estuary, and stops, pulling off the side of the road just beyond the bridge. There is no human sound, just the wind in the trees, bird call and the distant rumbling of surf. He walks back onto the concrete span; the bridge and its road a long hard scar upon the softness of the world. He looks down to where the water is flowing, easing into the swamp as the tide comes in. The channel is shallow, sandy-bottomed, the water clear. A skate hovers effortlessly, riding the current as an eagle might a thermal. Small fish, guppies, swim in formation. This is no river, nothing like the Argyle, just a coastal inlet, flowing in and out as the swamp breathes with the tides, similar to hundreds of others scattered along the coastline at the end of every second or third beach. The flow is deep enough for a kayak or a canoe, enough for a tinnie with an outboard when the tide is high, but unnavigable for a boat with a keel. A marina would be ambitious: the channel would require constant dredging, the bridge would need to be rebuilt to allow passage for sailing boats and their masts. It would cost a lot.

  Inland, the inlet sweeps away out of sight behind mangroves; the land looks low and swampy apart from the sharp rise of trees obscuring the cheese factory. The marina would need to be raised on piles, above the sand and mud. More money. The factory site would be ideal for a clubhouse, but the golf course itself would require a considerable effort to build and maintain. He recalls a story he once did, reporting on land grabs and Ponzi sche
mes in Indonesia: mega hotels and golf resorts for the rich, peasants evicted without compensation. He’d learnt that golf course design is first and foremost about water and drainage. But how is it possible to drain land lying at sea level? Any links built around the swamp would need massive earthworks: bulldozers and dredges, retaining walls and canals, even before considering rising sea levels. The amount of money required would be staggering. As he stands on the bridge, the landscape makes real in his mind what the maps in Denise Speight’s office suggested: there is no way the marina and golf course could ever be viable without a wealthy clientele, captive and close at hand. Denise and Vern are right: developments west of the road cannot go ahead without the resort on Hummingbird Beach to feed them customers.

  And yet Doug had intimated that the demolition of the cheese factory may be imminent. Had something changed, something that made the development possible?

  He walks to the other side of the bridge and looks to the east, towards the sea. The land starts rising almost immediately on the south side of the inlet, climbing to a small headland a couple of hundred metres away. Hummingbird Beach itself must lie beyond the outcrop, its north-facing crescent curling towards another headland and beyond that, out past the point, the ocean. From his viewpoint, he can see the mouth of the estuary, roughly opposite the first headland, where the northern shore ends in a spit of sand, a glimpse of the surf breaking beyond it.

  Back behind the Toyota’s wheel, Martin finds the turn-off just a few hundred metres south of the bridge. The dirt road heads through a wall of tea-trees, climbs a few metres and then levels off. A little way further he comes to a fork in the road. The left-hand track is flanked by two signs. One proclaims in deep blue lettering: HUMMINGBIRD BEACH—CABINS—CAMPSITES—SURFING LESSONS—YOGA. On the other, smaller sign, DIVINE MEDITATION FOUNDATION is written in orange-brown lettering, accompanied by a circular symbol in the same rusty hue. Between the two roads there’s an old-fashioned signpost, once white but its paint now motley and peeling, with patches of grey wood and green-grey lichen. HUMMINGBIRD BEACH says a finger of wood pointing to the left-hand track. To the right, the top finger points to RIDGE ROAD and below it others point towards SERGI, CROMWELL and HARTIGAN. Cromwell looks recent, the rest are badly faded. Hartigan. That’s interesting. The road must run up through the bush and back towards town, giving access to the properties sitting up along the clifftops. He was unaware there was a second access road to Mandy’s house; he makes a mental note to investigate it further. But for now Hummingbird Beach is the priority; he takes the left-hand fork. He reaches a cattle grid and his tyres vibrate as he drives over it, a relic of the old dairy farm.

  The road instantly deteriorates into a poorly maintained track, cratered with potholes and puddles, winding here and there, zigzagging through low-lying trees. It climbs a ridge, the trees becoming more substantial, before dropping down the other side, erosion eating at its surface. As he nurses the car down the slope, the forest opens up and Martin catches his first glimpse of the beach through the bush, gold and turquoise flaring from its waves. Can you see the sea? The voice comes from nowhere, memory bubbling to the surface. See the sea and get home free. He clamps down on the memory. It doesn’t belong here; he’s never been to Hummingbird Beach.

  There’s a car park, fallen branches dragged into place to give it a crude boundary. He leaves the Toyota among a disparate assortment of vehicles: a well-kept campervan with a screen door, a kombi from the hippie dreamtime, a can-do four-wheel drive, a rental van adorned with cartoonish breasts and crude slogans, a new BMW convertible, its black cloth roof covered in bird shit, a small hire car with a cracked windscreen and a missing hubcap.

  The bush smells clean, like it’s just rained. Underfoot, the carpet of leaves is moist and slippery. A kookaburra laughs somewhere in the ridge behind him. He walks down the hill towards the allure of the beach, past a large cinder-block building, maybe the old dairy. Today it smells of soap and water, probably the shower block and laundry. There are a couple of newish cabins scattered among the trees and, towards the centre of the site, the old farmhouse, weatherboard modesty boasting a newish deck overlooking the beach, with a separate cluster of cabins on the far side of it. Below the house, between it and the ledge above the beach, a large swathe of green grass spreads the breadth of the site, scattered with tents: camouflage green, navy blue, search- and-rescue orange. A small mob of bush kangaroos graze off towards the trees: nature’s lawn mowers; hard dark pellets of roo shit dot the grass: nature’s fertilisers.

  Closer to the beach, where the land has fully flattened out, there is a covered shelter with tables and barbecues, open on all sides but protected by a pitched corrugated-iron roof. A group of twenty-somethings, three men and a woman, dressed in sarongs and beach wear, are sitting at a table, playing cards and drinking beer. One of the young men, sporting impressive dreadlocks and a less-convincing beard, offers a friendly wave. Martin waves back, keeps moving. He wants to check the lay of the land before engaging in conversation.

  The grass ends where the ground falls away a couple of metres to the beach itself. The waves seize his attention once again, curling crystal, tumbling parabolas, refracting the sunlight in flickering greens and translucent golds. The waves are mild and unhurried—metronomic—the beach protected from the main ocean swell by a headland and rock shelf at its seaward end. There is the rolling echo of gentle thunder as a wave breaks upon the sands and then silence until the sound repeats itself. The breaking waves accentuate the silence; the silence accentuates the sound of breaking waves: an aural yin and yang. Beyond the waves, the water flattens, but further north, beyond the sand spit that marks the estuary’s northern bank, the waves are fierce and free, pounding the shore. The untamed beaches of Treachery Bay, up where Amory Ashton’s car was found. They run for many kilometres, unfettered by headlands, wide and wild, raked by unpredictable currents and shifting rips, frequented by intrepid fishermen, bushwalkers heading north to the national park and the occasional nudist.

  The sight of that pristine nature, its proximity, makes this beach, this place, cosseted in its bushland amphitheatre, sheltered from the open ocean, all the more magical. Hummingbird’s north-facing beach would catch the winter sun, the ridge behind it would protect it from southerly squalls. At this latitude you could swim all year round. Little wonder the backpackers want to stay here; little wonder the developers want to take it from them.

  There is a young couple out in a kayak, splashing awkwardly beyond the tumbling waves, joyous at their own ineptitude, a youth with blond curls and his dark-haired girlfriend. A middle-aged pair lie naked on the beach reading books.

  Now, in the intermittent silence between breaking waves, Martin can hear chanting. He turns back towards the bush, searching out the origins of the sound, and spies a group of about a dozen people sitting in a circle above the eastern end of the beach, legs crossed and eyes closed, chanting gently. Martin walks towards them. A large man, bare-chested, brown-skinned and belly proud, is leading the mantra, an elaborate henna-coloured bindi adorning his forehead. So this is the notorious Swami Hawananda, instigator of orgies. From this distance he looks harmless enough. Yet as Martin nears the group, the man turns his head and his eyes flicker open, looking directly at Martin as if he has sensed his approach. Martin stops, disconcerted. The chant continues. The guru sits totally motionless, gaze fixed on Martin. His face is without expression, yet somehow serene. He regards Martin for a moment longer, then closes his eyes again and turns his head, resumes chanting. Martin feels himself dismissed, judged to be insignificant. There was nothing threatening or reproachful in the guru’s gaze, yet Martin now feels like he’s trespassing. The holy man has seen straight through him, recognised his inadequacies and catalogued his flaws. Martin turns back, pausing to gather himself before edging down off the ledge and onto the beach. He walks across to the naked couple, grateful they’re lying face down.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘I’m looking for Jay J
ay Hayes. Any idea where I might find her?’

  ‘Probably out surfing,’ says the woman. ‘Off the point. Either that or you could try the office. Or the kitchen.’

  ‘Not with the guru?’ asks Martin.

  ‘The swami?’ asks the man. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Oh, look,’ says the woman, ‘there she is.’

  Martin looks to where she’s pointing: on the flat shelf of rocks below the eastern headland he can see a woman coming their way carrying a surfboard, her black wetsuit silhouetted against the shimmering sea.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Martin and walks towards the surfer.

  She waves as she sees him approaching, but as he gets closer, she stops, standing still, staring at him as he reaches her.

  ‘Hello,’ he says.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asks, voice uncertain.

  ‘My name’s Martin Scarsden.’

  ‘Scarsden?’ she says, doubt in her voice. ‘The journalist?’ The sun is bouncing from the curling waves behind her; it’s hard to read her expression against the glare.

  He remembers what Vern told him the previous night, about the media descending on the beach, filling the airwaves with sensation and the tabloids with prurience. ‘I’m not here as a reporter,’ he states quickly. ‘I don’t care about your ceremonies. Or whatever they are. Or your celebrity guests. Or your swami.’

  This doesn’t appear to placate her. ‘What then? Why are you here?’

  ‘I just want to ask you some questions.’

  Martin can’t be sure, but she looks disconcerted, shifting weight from one leg and then back again. ‘What about?’

  ‘About plans to develop this place.’

  She shakes her head, as if confused. ‘Plans? What plans?’

  Now Martin feels confused. Surely she knows about the development proposal. How could she not? ‘I was told that you’d been approached by a big corporation wanting to buy you out and develop a high-end resort.’