Silver

by Chris Hammer

  He finds Topaz lying on the beach, flanked by a couple of young men. She’s topless, sunbaking on her back with her eyes closed, her breasts perfect globes, her admirers unable to look away for long. Martin shakes his head; they’re like putty in her hands. He realises that one of the men is the soapie star Garth McGrath, his hair grown long but his stubble-covered chin as sharp as ever.

  ‘Topaz?’ says Martin.

  ‘Who are you?’ asks McGrath as she opens her eyes and smiles.

  ‘That’s Martin Scarsden,’ says Topaz mischievously. ‘The famous reporter.’

  ‘Scarsden? Another grub journo?’ McGrath spits into the sand.

  ‘That’d be me.’

  ‘Fuck, don’t you people ever get enough? This is harassment. Where’s your photographer? Off in the bushes with a long lens?’

  ‘There is no photographer, sunshine. You’re yesterday’s news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry about that.’ He turns to Topaz, who is smirking happily. ‘Can we talk? Somewhere private?’

  She raises an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It won’t take long.’

  Martin is hoping she’ll get up and follow him, but instead she addresses her companions. ‘Fellas, can you give us a moment?’ And they do, they obey, standing and walking off down the beach together, such is the power of a pair of perfectly formed tits. Martin watches them go, McGrath still swivelling about, trying to spot paparazzi among the bushes.

  Martin crouches. ‘Yesterday morning I went and saw a man called Tyson St Clair. He lives in a big house up by the lighthouse.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Just before I got there, when I was walking down from the light house, I saw you leaving.’

  She says nothing.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Topaz, I’m not a cop, I’m not going to tell anyone. But it’s important that I know.’

  ‘Why? So you can write a story? Sorry, pal, I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s not for a story. I’m trying to help my partner Mandy stay out of prison.’

  Topaz frowns. ‘That murder, the one we gave you the alibi for, that was her?’

  ‘It was her house. She’s still a suspect; I’m helping her.’

  Topaz sighs, looks out at the water. ‘I don’t see how I can help. I already spoke to the cops.’

  Martin won’t be deflected, but he tries to ease some of the urgency from his approach. He sits, moderating his voice. ‘She’s a bit like you, you know: young and very good-looking. Sexy. She went to see St Clair. He told her to strip.’

  Topaz bursts out laughing. ‘I bet he did, randy old rooster. What was she expecting?’

  ‘She went to talk business. He mistook her for someone else.’

  ‘Sounds like it. But sorry, Martin, I really can’t help you.’

  ‘Why not? What do you owe them?’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Them.’ He lets the word and its implications settle. ‘The man who bashed Royce and the men behind him. St Clair owns the hostel; he’s Harry the Lad’s boss.’ That has her attention. ‘Tell me the real reason Harry the Lad beat up Royce, or it’s all going in the paper. It was nothing to do with drugs, was it?’

  Topaz stares at him, lip curling with distaste. ‘You do that, do you? Threaten people? Is that how you get your stories?’ She starts to stand.

  But Martin isn’t wearing that. ‘They bashed your boyfriend. He’s in hospital with a serious head injury. Surely you want to settle the score? You have my word no one will ever know who told me.’

  Something in her changes then, the veneer of brightness falls away, the carefree backpacker vanishes. She looks older, more world-weary. She sits down again, saying nothing, holding her breath. She takes a towel, wraps it around herself. She stares at the breaking waves. Martin lets her think. A young couple, surely still teenagers, amble slowly past, arms around each other, oblivious to anything but their own existence, the youth with the blond curls and his beautiful girlfriend who were kayaking when Martin first visited Hummingbird. Martin and Topaz watch them pass.

  ‘Okay,’ she says finally. ‘But will you take me up to see Royce today or tomorrow? I’ll need to talk to him. And then we’ll have to leave. You promise you won’t publish anything?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  She sighs again before speaking. ‘Okay. It’s true that Harry sells drugs out of the backpackers, no big deal, but the hostel also runs a kind of employment service. They have a bus—you probably saw it—and they drive anyone who’s interested out to the market gardens and greenhouses and orchards to pick fruit, whatever. The backpackers earn some money, and if they do it for three months they can get a one-year extension on their visa. It’s good business for the hostel if they can lock people into a three-month stay. Harry also arranges apartments.’ She pauses, swallows, considers what to say next. Martin stays quiet, knowing any prompt could be counterproductive. ‘But there’s a short cut; Harry told me about it the day we arrived. Some of the farmers out there, they’ll sign the paperwork, get you the visa, if you sleep with them a couple of times. It’s a pretty popular option. All the girls know about it. It’s an open secret. No harm done.’

  ‘And Tyson St Clair?’

  ‘Just the once. He only wants each girl once. It’s the shortest of short cuts.’

  ‘And only the prettiest girls.’

  She flicks him a bitter smile. ‘Yeah, something like that. Harry the Lad vets them, chooses them, sends them up there. Tells them what’s expected of them.’

  ‘Quite the honour.’

  She turns to him then, eyes flaring. ‘Don’t be an arsehole. I’m not proud of it.’

  ‘Sorry. Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘Are you going to write a story, tell people what he does?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  She considers this. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But you can’t use my name. Even if he sues you, you can’t reveal my name, not even in court. I’m not testifying.’

  Martin is surprised by her knowledge of defamation and courts. ‘I’ve been a journalist for twenty years. I know how to protect a source. Tell me.’

  ‘He sent me upstairs to this office. There was no small talk. Harry had told me what to do: to strip, so I was naked when the old man arrived. St Clair came up the stairs, told me to twirl around so he could check me out. He was practically salivating, the old perve. Gross. Then he told me to bend over across this desk, next to a model of Port Silver. So I did, looking out the window over the town. It was a hell of a lot better than looking at him. And then he banged me from behind.’ And she lets out a brittle laugh. ‘And get this, he’s talking the whole time, boasting about how he owns the town, as he’s banging away. I built it and I’ll show the bastards and shit like that, and the model of the town is shaking like there’s some sort of earthquake, and it doesn’t even sound like he’s enjoying himself. And as soon as he’s done he tells me to get dressed and get out.’

  ‘Quite the gentleman.’

  ‘Quite the arsehole.’

  ‘But you got your visa?’

  ‘Yeah, I got the paperwork.’

  ‘And Royce? What happened there?’

  ‘Royce was not so thrilled about what I’d done. My fault for telling him. So he decided to scoop some cream off the top. He threatened Harry, said he’d expose their nice little sex-for-visas scam, demanded a commission. Worked a treat, didn’t it?’

  ‘That’s why Harry the Lad bashed him?’

  ‘Yep. Royce said he knew a reporter and if they didn’t pay it was all going in the paper.’

  ‘He knew a journo? He didn’t mention my name, did he?’

  ‘Why do you think Harry whacked you on the beach?’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  They pause then, considering the waves, the way they line up to break on the shore.

  ‘Here comes the great man,’ s
ays Topaz.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Over there.’ And she flicks her head to indicate back behind Martin. He turns and sees the swami walking along the beach with a small group of followers.

  ‘Check it out,’ says Topaz sardonically, ‘the seer and his disciples.’

  ‘Not a convert, then?’

  ‘Fuck that. He should be back wandering around the Punjab with his begging bowl, not fleecing Aussies.’ And she adds, with the contempt of the eternally thin, ‘Look how fucking fat he is.’

  They watch as the holy man leads his followers into the shallows, stopping when they are knee deep. They kneel in the water and he dunks them under, holding their heads as he does so.

  Martin laughs. ‘Looks more like a christening than a Hindu ritual. It’s not exactly the Ganges.’

  But Topaz doesn’t respond and, when he turns, she’s staring at the swami and his followers with contempt.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asks.

  ‘The arsehole. At least St Clair gives you a visa.’

  As they watch, the faux baptism comes to an end and the group walks back past them, before sitting in a circle on the grass above the beach. They begin to chant softly.

  Topaz stands, apparently intrigued. ‘What are they doing?’

  On the grass, the devotees are taking turns to sit before the swami and have their foreheads daubed with a red-brown dye, not a bindi so much as a circle containing dots. Martin recognises it as the symbol on the sign at the turn-off from Ridge Road.

  ‘They’ve been here for a fortnight,’ he says, recalling what Jay Jay had told him. ‘They must be preparing to graduate. A big party tomorrow night. Could be fun.’

  But Topaz is saying nothing, all humour drained from her face. She looks troubled.

  ‘Topaz?’

  ‘I’ve told you what you wanted,’ she says, voice sharp. ‘Don’t you need to go save your girlfriend?’

  He leaves the young American, heading towards the car park. As he walks, the importance of what she has revealed begins to swell within him, growing clearer, writing itself across his mind’s eye like an old-fashioned ticker tape. St Clair and his henchman Harry ‘the Lad’ Drake are running a sex-for-visas scam out of the backpacker hostel. If Jasper Speight discovered this, it could have endangered the property developer’s ambitions. If St Clair were to be convicted of visa fraud, he would no longer be a fit and proper person to run a company. That’s the law. If Jasper exposed him, the international proponents of the Hummingbird Beach resort would have washed their hands of him and turned to Jasper instead. Which gives St Clair and Harry the Lad a clear motive to kill Jasper Speight. Martin needs to tell Montifore. He quickens his pace.

  Perhaps Jasper had sought leverage over St Clair, had threatened to expose him. Perhaps he’d even informed Johnson Pear, the same police officer who went soft on Harry the Lad after the beach brawl with Royce. Perhaps, instead of acting on the allegation, Pear had sent word back to St Clair and Harry the Lad. Perhaps. And so Jasper had turned to Martin, coming to the townhouse to tell his old friend of another small-town scandal. Perhaps.

  Now a new and urgent concern emerges from Martin’s speculation. If he’s right and Jasper was killed to keep the visa fraud secret, then Mandy could be in danger. Martin had left her with Winifred, intent on prosecuting St Clair for his outrage. His chest tightens, a sense of panic growing. He needs to warn Winifred not to threaten St Clair with legal action. Harry the Lad had put Royce into hospital when the young backpacker had threatened exposure; what violence might he visit upon Mandy? Martin changes course, heads for the office; with his mobile out of range, he needs to use the landline. He needs to call Montifore, and he needs to warn Mandy.

  But Jay Jay Hayes isn’t in her office and the door is locked. He has no idea if she’s nearby or surfing off the point or gone into town to get supplies. It doesn’t matter; he doesn’t have time to search her out. He needs to get word to Mandy and Winifred. He runs up the hill to his car.

  He drives on a knife edge: too slowly and he may be too late, too quickly and he risks crashing, being stuck with no way to get his message to Port Silver. His mind is telling him to take care, that a minute or two either way won’t make a difference, but his heart is telling him otherwise. He guns the engine, swerves to avoid a pothole, crashes into the next one, as wide as the car itself, suspension bottoming out, sump hitting gravel. Trees scrape the Toyota’s flanks, ruts catch at its wheels, rocks thunder into the floor. He almost loses it on a corner, lucky to glance off a roadside stump instead of ploughing into it. Around a bend, a stopped van blocks most of the track: a man holding a jack, a woman staring at a flat tyre; Martin hits the horn, doesn’t slow as the couple scrambles to safety, sending a stream of profanities in his wake. As he nears the junction with the cliff road his mind, having lost the debate over speed, inserts a new calculation: he won’t get a signal on Dunes Road until he reaches the caravan park, a good fifteen or twenty minutes away. But he recalls getting a signal up on Ridge Road, one bar. Where was that? Before Sergi’s? Maybe five minutes away, maybe ten. He hits the cattle grid at speed, becoming momentarily airborne, the steel rails left ringing in the still air. At the cliff road he swings left. The rainforest it is.

  It’s difficult enough to negotiate the wild road steering with two hands, but as he approaches the top of the first hill he slows, steers with just his right hand, holding his phone aloft with the other, the ‘no signal’ message taunting him. He’s almost at the top, starting to wonder if the signal will ever come through, if the previous day was just some anomaly of the weather, clouds bouncing signals, when as if by magic one bar appears. He hits the brakes and it disappears again. He’s not yet at the summit; surely it must work better up there, a few hundred metres further. And it does. Miracle of miracles, it does. Two bars. The phone pings in celebration as texts and emails arrive. He ignores them all. He rings Mandy and, to his relief, she answers straight away. She’s at Drakes, she tells him, alone with Winifred. He asks to be put on speaker, realising he’s breathing hard, as if he’s been running, not driving. He calms his thoughts, takes a breath and tells them what he knows. There are no interruptions.

  Only when he is finished does Winifred speak. ‘You will tell this to the police?’

  ‘My next call. But only to Morris Montifore. I don’t trust the locals, not Johnson Pear.’

  ‘Understood. And the name of this witness? The young woman?’

  ‘I gave her my word I wouldn’t identify her.’

  ‘Okay. Montifore won’t like it, but that’s your battle not mine.’

  ‘Have you got his number?’

  ‘I’ll text it. Don’t say you got it from me. He’ll know, but there’s no need to confirm it.’

  ‘Thank you, Winifred. Just make sure St Clair remains unaware we’ve discovered the visa fraud. He might be dangerous.’

  Winifred forwards the contact, but Morris Montifore isn’t answering his phone. Martin leaves a voicemail: ‘Morris, it’s Martin Scarsden. I’ve discovered something important, a motive to kill Jasper Speight. It involves Tyson St Clair and Harrold Drake Junior. Call me.’

  And now? Now nothing. He’s sitting in his car, still breathing hard, adrenaline still pumping. He gets out, checks the car. There are scratches along its sides, but there always have been, and mud and dirt and dust. The cover of his front indicator is smashed, part of the orange plastic missing from when he glanced the tree stump, but nothing more. He gets back in, moves slowly forward, looking for a place to turn. His engine has developed a deeper, more masculine sound; somewhere along the way he’s managed to put a hole in his muffler. He turns the car around and heads back the way he came. He still needs to get back to town, needs to see Montifore, but the urgency has gone from his mission.

  He mulls over what he’s discovered, what a story it might make, the link between the visa scam and Jasper’s murder more evident by the minute. The old journalistic imperative is back, coursing through his veins,
the need to peel away perceptions and get to the bottom of things. St Clair, the predatory bastard, and Harry the Lad, his thuggish accomplice, most likely protected by the corrupt local plod, Johnson Pear, killing Jasper Speight to avoid exposure; exposure by Martin Scarsden, investigative journalist par excellence. It’s a great story. Not quite the body count of Riversend, but not bad. A further burnishing of the Scarsden reputation, a further poke in the eye for the gutless bastards who sacked him from the Herald. Doug Thunkleton will be begging for forgiveness, pleading for an interview. Martin touches his eye, still swollen, still sore. He looks at it in the rear-view mirror. The bruise is a deep purple with the first hints of less savoury colours. It’s healing, if slowly. Maybe he should get some photographs taken: the seeker of truth beaten by the murderer’s accomplice. Maybe it could be the image on the back cover of his next book.

  As he nurses the Corolla down into a shallow gully and then up again, up where his phone got its first bar, just before the track swings left and down the hill, he reaches a small plateau. Beside the road, on the shoulder, there’s room to park a couple of cars. Curious, he pulls the car over and kills the engine. Climbing out, he’s greeted by the coolness of the forest, the wind nothing more than a breeze at ground level, but hushing through the top of the canopy. The space for the cars is no accident; there’s a walking trail heading into the undergrowth. This must still be Jay Jay’s property, part of the bush block, never developed for dairy. Maybe it’s the section Jasper Speight was interested in developing. No longer in a rush, Martin decides to have a quick look.

  He walks briskly along the track, which soon splits into two, the left fork heading down towards Hummingbird Beach. He follows the right fork, and after a hundred metres or so the sound of the surf starts coming through the trees and he can smell the salt in the air. And then he’s free of the trees, the path leading another dozen metres to a level sandstone shelf, a natural platform above the ocean. The point is not as high as he might have imagined, not as high as Hartigan’s or Bede and Alexander’s, but the view is possibly more spectacular, stretching up the coast to the wild beaches and crashing surf of Treachery Bay. Looking landwards, he can see where the beaches start, at the northern shore of the Mackenzie’s Swamp estuary. He can’t see Hummingbird Beach, but it must only be a few hundred metres from where he stands, hidden by a headland. Below, maybe thirty metres down, there is a flat rock shelf a metre or two above the ocean. He can see rock pools, channels where waves flush water in and out, and large sandstone boulders, dislodged from the clifftop by long-ago storms. And as Martin watches, a figure, all in black and carrying a surfboard, rounds the headland from Hummingbird. It’s Jay Jay Hayes, wetsuit to protect her from the sun as much as it is to keep her warm. He thinks of calling out, but lets her walk undisturbed. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t see him. She appears deep in thought or, more likely, she is so used to this landscape that she feels no need to re-examine it.