by Chris Hammer
Martin is standing, rocking Liam. ‘It must be wild out here in a storm,’ he says.
‘Like the bridge of a ship,’ says Bede, eyes alive. ‘It moves. Sideways, up and down. Like a living thing. We love it.’
‘Sounds scary.’
‘Not if you know the engineering. It’s designed to sway. It’s all wood up top here, but underneath it’s high-tech composites and aircraft-grade aluminium.’
Bede offers afternoon tea and seems pleased when Martin plumps for espresso over herbal teas. While his host is inside, Martin takes the opportunity to change Liam’s nappy—how many can the boy go through? Bede serves olive bread with homemade dips and pâté. Martin feeds Liam a little dip from his finger. The boy loves it. He’s clearly hungry and Martin belatedly remembers the food Mandy packed, a container of vegetable mash still in the back seat of the car. But the boy can’t get enough of the spread, giving Martin’s finger an unintended nip with his new front teeth. Bede brings out a jug of rainwater and Martin makes up a new bottle of formula.
‘You know Jasper Speight is dead?’ Martin queries.
‘No. Is that right?’ The man looks surprised. ‘What happened?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Murdered? Are you sure?’
‘There’s no doubt. Stabbed to death.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘At the place my partner is renting—was renting—in town.’
Bede turns away, looking out to sea, shaking his head as if in disbelief. ‘Even here. There’s no getting away from it, is there? The violence.’
‘What violence?’ asks Martin, not quite following the artist’s train of thought.
Bede shrugs. ‘Violence. It just seems ubiquitous. It’s why we moved here from Sydney. Alexander won’t even have a television.’
‘I see,’ offers Martin, not sure that he does.
Bede turns back to him. ‘Alexander was bashed in Sydney. Twice.’
There’s not much to say to that, so they sit in silence for a while before Martin restarts the conversation. ‘So what was Jasper proposing?’
‘Oh, he had plans to subdivide the properties up here. Our place, your place, Sergi’s and Jay Jay Hayes’s. Five-hectare plots, all with houses on the cliff. I think he had plans for about twenty in all. But none of us were interested. I know Bert Sergi isn’t and he’s got the most land. I heard Jay Jay Hayes wasn’t interested either.’
‘What was Jasper offering?’
‘Money, of course. Good money, as a matter of fact. And we’d keep our own houses. The idea was that each house would be screened from its neighbours. Not sure how he intended to achieve that, but we really didn’t get that far. None of us were interested.’
‘I understand. You like it how it is. But was there anything about the proposal that was …’ he searches for the right word and is not sure he’s found it ‘… offensive?’
Bede gives a droll smile. ‘I guess that’s a matter of opinion.’ Then he holds his paint-spattered hands wide. ‘To be fair, if you were going to develop the clifftops, you could do a lot worse. He wanted to open the through road, which we didn’t like, but below that would be given over to a dedicated nature reserve running down to the shores of the wetlands. I forget what he called it.’
‘An environmental covenant?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
Martin is considering his next question when his phone trills in his pocket. ‘You have reception?’
‘It’s the elevation,’ says Bede.
Sure enough, one bar. It’s a text message from Winifred. 6 pm. Breakwater Hotel. Martin smiles: the world’s least verbose lawyer. He checks his watch. It’s already gone five; time to get going. He thanks Bede, promising to invite him and Alexander over when Mandy and he have made Hartigan’s habitable.
Easing the Subaru back down the drive, Martin wonders why Jay Jay had said nothing of Jasper’s proposal. She mentioned the clifftop land, but not the real estate agent’s offer. Surely he would have at least suggested it? And Martin will have to ask Mandy about Hartigan’s. Jasper knew she’d inherited the house. If he had approached Bede and Alexander, Bert Sergi and Jay Jay, then surely he had approached her. So why hasn’t she told him? Maybe by the time Mandy arrived in town, Jasper had already been rejected by the others and had abandoned the scheme. Or maybe it was the other way around, and Mandy’s arrival and her inheritance had been the catalyst for Jasper: a way to make money, a way to protect the swamplands, a way to trump Tyson St Clair. So why hasn’t Mandy mentioned it? If the cops suspected she was hiding something, no matter how irrelevant, their suspicions would rise again. Has she told them? Has she confided in Winifred? If so, why not in him?
He’s just passing through Bede and Alexander’s gate, threading the car through an obstacle course of potholes, when he sees the turn to the left, the continuation of the road. Coming down the hill, it’s easier to see. He noses the Subaru into it. It’s more like a fire trail than any sort of road; he’s glad he’s in Mandy’s all-wheel drive, not his temperamental Toyota. Trees reach across the track, scratching at the windscreen and roof, forming a tunnel above the car. He inches forward. He should probably stop, but now he’s started there’s nowhere to turn; he’d have to reverse all the way. He checks his watch. Five-twenty. He should be heading back. But he nudges the car forward, curiosity getting the better of him. The track is red clay, damp and slippery, so different from the dusty drive into the cheese factory just a few kilometres away. Microclimate, thinks Martin.
A hundred metres further into the forest, the track opens up a bit to a kind of a clearing. There’s enough room to turn the car around, maybe a five-point turn. And there, in front of him, barring their way, a gate. He cuts the engine, climbs out into the silence. The air is cool and damp, the rainforest smelling of nature and echoing with birdsong. In the back of the car, Liam emits a small wail, as if concerned he is being left behind. Martin searches the ground. There are tyre marks set into the clay, leading through the gate. They can’t be that old, not with the amount of rain the forest would attract. He checks the gate. It’s galvanised steel, grown old and rusty, threatening to fall from its hinges, but held shut with a new chain and a shiny brass lock. Who has the key? Who drives along a dead-end track? Who locks the gate on a track to nowhere? The trail on the other side of the gate looks passable, two concave paths running off through the trees, no more deteriorated than the track Martin has just traversed. Maybe it’s the local volunteer fire brigade, maintaining the track as a fire trail. Makes sense. Martin considers getting Liam and the baby carrier, climbing the fence and continuing on foot, at least until he reaches the collapsed bridge. But to what end? He’d satisfy his love of new paths, but what would that achieve? He checks his watch again: half past five. He’s already going to be late. Winifred will be punctual; people who bill in six-minute increments usually are. He looks past the gate, but there is nothing else to see—the track and the bush, that’s all. By one side of the track, in the undergrowth, he spies an old tin sign. He bends down, scrapes away dirt and leaf litter. HARTIGAN. The fence line and the gate must mark the border between properties.
There is silence, a momentary pause, and then two events occur almost simultaneously. Liam lets out an ear-piercing wail and Martin’s phone rings. He checks the screen. Mandy. But Liam will brook no delay; he screams again, a real scream. Panicking, hearing the pain in the boy’s voice, fearing he has been bitten by some insidious creature, Martin rushes back to the car, unbuckling the boy from his booster seat, letting the phone ring out. He lifts Liam, tries to soothe him, rocking him. There is a moment’s respite, Liam red-faced and sucking air, seeming puzzled at his own distress, looking to Martin for help, only to be overwhelmed by another soul-wrenching wail. There is no doubt: he is in pain. The phone rings again. Martin, desperate, answers. ‘Mandy!’
‘Hi, Martin …’ She gets no further, hears her boy’s anguished call. ‘Is that Liam?’
‘Yes. He was fi
ne and then …’ His voice is drowned out by another cry. The boy is writhing in his grip and the phone slips, falls to the ground.
‘What the fuck, Martin? What have you done?’ Mandy’s voice sounds distant but no less anguished.
‘What do I do?’ he yells, feeling utterly useless.
But the phone has cut out. Either that or Mandy has hung up.
Liam sucks in a huge lungful of air, as if preparing for the mother of all screams, when suddenly he pauses and a curious, almost beatific look passes across his radish-red face. And that’s when the diarrhoea begins.
chapter fourteen
Martin finds Winifred Barbicombe contemplating the remains of a long drink by the window in the bar of her hotel, the Breakwater, overlooking the port. In Martin’s youth, the place was a hybrid: the front bar home to the fishermen and dockhands, the fish-gutters and the mechanics, the mill workers and the retired whalers, while upstairs, accessed through a separate entrance, were low-key holiday apartments. It had always seemed a bit suspect, a bit English: why would anyone want a view overlooking a fishing port when they could have one overlooking a beach? But those days are gone. Since the introduction of the marine reserves, the fishing fleet has shrunk to an ornamental size. The port has begun to gentrify; there are yachts, motor launches and charter boats dotted among the empty berths and mothballed trawlers. The docks boast a cafe, a retail outlet run by the fishermen’s cooperative and a wine bar. The hotel itself is lagging behind: the carpet in the bar is sticky in parts, threadbare in others; the seats on some of the bar stools have begun to spring leaks, exposing yellow foam innards; there is the smell of stale beer and long-gone revelries. If this is part of Tyson St Clair’s new tourism-driven Port Silver, it’s badly in need of a facelift. There’s a banner above the bar—UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT—so maybe a renovation is on its way.
‘Hello, Winifred.’
As the lawyer looks up, Martin thinks she’s showing her age. ‘Hello, Martin. You okay? That’s quite a bruise.’
‘Nothing that won’t heal.’
‘How’s the boy?’
‘Okay, I think. Mandy has him.’
‘Where?’
‘She rented a room upstairs so she could give him a bath.’
‘Good idea. He needs it; she can afford it.’
Martin stays standing. He’s still feeling a little shell-shocked from the rivers of shit––how could such a small child contain such volume?—and from Mandy’s tongue-lashing. ‘What’s that you’re drinking?’ he asks Winifred.
‘Long Island iced tea.’
‘Care for another one?’
‘No, one’s more than enough. But please get yourself something. Put it on my tab.’
Martin detours via the bathroom, finding a chipped ceramic basin where he scrubs his hands clean for the third or fourth time, still struggling to rid the smell from his nostrils. At the bar, waiting to order, Martin looks back at the solicitor. Winifred is staring at her near-empty glass, pushing ice around the bottom of it with her straw. Something is troubling her.
‘Have you learnt anything more of use?’ she asks as soon as he returns with his beer.
‘Maybe, but nothing I can make much sense of.’ He tells her of his second visit to Hummingbird Beach, of the road running through Mandy’s land, and Jasper Speight’s proposal to subdivide the clifftop properties—and his suspicion that Jasper must have approached Mandy with his development proposal.
Winifred listens intently, giving an occasional nod of comprehension. But when Martin finishes, she grimaces and shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t help. If Jasper Speight canvassed subdividing or upgrading the old road or anything else, all it does is tie them more closely together. I don’t want them closer; I want them as far apart as I can get them.’
‘Did she tell the police, though, about Jasper and the subdivision? Did she tell you?’
Winifred stares him down. ‘It’s called lawyer–client privilege.’
Martin bristles. ‘She didn’t tell them, or us, about her spat with Jasper at the lifesavers.’
‘What are you insinuating?’
Martin swallows, unsure of himself, speaking anyway. ‘That she’s hiding something. Something to do with Jasper.’
‘Are you going to broach that with her?’
Martin can’t hold the solicitor’s gaze, looks down at his beer instead. He’d done it once before: accused Mandy of misleading him. That was back in Riversend. It almost ended their relationship before it started. ‘I don’t see how I can.’
‘I think that might be wise,’ Winifred says drily.
‘Maybe you should ask her about it. Lawyer–client privilege and all.’
‘Maybe,’ says Winifred. ‘But remember Jasper Speight’s dying words; he gasped your name. He was coming to see you, or to see both of you. It has to be something more. Something else.’
‘St Myron the Wonderworker?’
Winifred just shakes her head again, looking disconsolate. ‘I don’t know what it means. I don’t think the police do either. They’ve been through his collection; thousands of postcards. They can’t see anything significant about that one.’
An elderly man approaches, his cheeks twin webs of burst capillaries, selling tickets for a raffle, a meat tray, proceeds to the local nippers. After Liam’s performance, Martin has no appetite for meat trays or anything else and politely declines.
‘You’re a journalist, Martin, so tell me: Jasper Speight’s murder has barely rated a mention in the metropolitan media. Why not? Is that unusual?’
Martin shrugs. ‘Not really. There’s no news hook. A real estate agent is killed in a provincial town. Worth a mention, but not much more.’
‘Just say Mandy were to be arrested … what then?’
‘Arrested for what?’
‘I don’t know. Arrested in connection with the murder.’
‘That could be different.’ He thinks it through. ‘Maybe very different. Maybe even a media storm, like Riversend. After what happened down there, she’s public property. An object of fascination. Christ, if Lindy Chamberlain got arrested for shoplifting it would be news. And another murder, in another town? The circus would be here before we could scratch ourselves.’
Winifred stares out the window. ‘Sometimes I wish she wasn’t so photogenic. That’s part of it, isn’t it?’
‘Sure. But it’s also the backstory, what she went through down there. She’s perfect news fodder: some people will still think she’s guilty of something; others will go to the barricades for her. Social media would light up like a Christmas tree. It doesn’t matter that none of them even know her.’ He looks down at his beer, then up at Winifred. ‘So don’t let her get arrested.’
Winifred returns serve with a sardonic smile. ‘That’s the plan.’ But soon enough her frown is back, her concern. ‘What do you know of Morris Montifore? You helped him out of a hole down in the Riverina.’
‘That doesn’t mean I know him. He plays his cards pretty close to his chest.’
‘I checked him out,’ says Winifred bluntly. ‘With some of my New South Wales colleagues.’
‘And?’
‘He’s one of the best, one of the state’s leading investigators, with a reputation for thoroughness, professionalism and getting results. He’s straight; there’s no suggestion of him being involved in anything untoward. He also has a reputation for being politically astute, of conducting investigations and getting results in a way that doesn’t rile the powers that be.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That investigations remain focused and don’t spill over into politically sensitive areas. That the identities of influential people are kept confidential. That the media are either shut out and kept in the dark, or receive tip-offs and full access. He gets the job done, but in a way that suits the priorities of the political establishment.’
‘What are you driving at?’
‘So why is he investigating a death that hasn’t even made the metropol
itan media? What’s so sensitive that it requires their go-to guy?’
Martin hasn’t thought along these lines, hadn’t known of Montifore’s reputation. It made sense for the authorities to send their best man to Riversend, but why send him here? ‘Mandy?’
‘Must be,’ says Winifred. ‘If Jasper Speight was killed anywhere else in this town and not her place, I wonder if Montifore would be the investigating officer.’
The meat-tray guy is back, saying that the raffle can’t be drawn until the last of the tickets are sold. Martin buys the rest, twenty bucks worth, just to get rid of him.
He finishes his beer as the man assiduously writes the details on each and every ticket, first name and mobile number. When he’s finally gone, Martin revives the conversation. ‘Do you think Montifore is trying to keep Mandy out of the media? That they don’t want the investigation to get any prominence?’
Winifred doesn’t answer the question directly. ‘Today was strange. Montifore had Mandy and me at the police station for a good five hours. He questioned her three times, about half an hour at a time. Left her there cooling her heels between times.’
‘What are you thinking?’
The solicitor grimaces. ‘The interviews were strange. At times I couldn’t fathom Montifore’s line of questioning. He was using an unusual interrogation technique. I’ve encountered it before, but not often. He kept changing the focus of his questioning, jumping around in time and place as if to disorientate her, to catch her out. I’m not even sure whether it’s about Jasper’s murder or something else. Every now and then he’d ask if she knew such and such a person. At first I thought they were all locals: Harrold Drake, Tyson St Clair, the mayor, the baker, the candlestick maker. But I’ve checked them out. There were one or two who aren’t locals.’