Clear to the Horizon

by Dave Warner

  After clicking on the air conditioner and sending through a text to Dee Vee that I had arrived in Hedland, I lay back on the single bed and stared at the ceiling. I was glad to have a decent job to help me soak up the time without my girls. I missed them both; there was only so much positive spin-off from bachelorhood. I read the local rag that was supplied. Front page was about Giant’s big new iron ore mine and accompanying infrastructure worth many billions. Construction was due to start in a month. The Chinese were putting up the money. A different world, but maybe germane to my case. If some loser realised who Ingrid was, maybe they did kidnap her. Things might have gone wrong, they never got a chance to issue a demand. But I was getting ahead of myself and my muscles were still protesting. I stretched out and cocooned myself in the low hum of the air-conditioner.

  I don’t know when I dropped off. It must have been quick because the next thing I knew my eyes were flicking open and the digital clock told me it was the auspicious time of 7.11. I got up, threw some water in my face, brushed my hair and straightened my clothes. I turned off the air con on my way out. Outside it was already dark and, surprisingly for a place that seemed nearly all gravel and red earth, sweetly scented, particularly with jasmine.

  The beer garden offered that soothing tranquillity only truly appreciated in these climates where by day even your clothes feel sunburned. The night sky was a balm. Around twenty people were dotted at tables, sipping drinks and laughing. I located Dougal on my second attempt, reconciling an electronic till. He was your classic waiter-barista: twenties, small-boned, dark features with a goatee. I introduced myself and got to the point of why I was there.

  ‘Yeah, sure, the sExcitation night.’ At least he remembered the name of the troupe. I let him tell me how he’d already spoken to the police.

  ‘You partied with the girls, and this girl and guy afterwards.’

  ‘In the rooms upstairs.’ He jerked a thumb.

  ‘Who else was there?’

  ‘The roadie, the girls’ manager, Bevan from the bottle shop, couple of guys and chicks, a Chinese dude and this older guy who I’ve seen around before.’

  That, I was guessing, would be Angus Duncan.

  ‘Good vibe? No fights?’

  ‘No, everybody was chilled. Girls had a great show, we made good bucks. I threw in a couple of bottles of champers and a case of beer.’

  ‘See anybody talking to the girl or guy in the photo?’

  He shrugged. ‘It was a party, man. I don’t remember any problems, that’s what I told the detective.’ A short blonde carrying weight on her hips lobbed up and bought a fresh bottle of wine. He placed it in the ice bucket for her, came back to me, seemingly trawling his brain afresh.

  ‘Actually, I think the girl was mainly speaking to one of the strippers, sorry, entertainers, and the Chinese guy.’

  ‘No arguments?’

  ‘No, just, you know, chatting, doing the translation thing.’ He indicated plenty of hand gestures.

  ‘You see if she was carrying any cash?’

  He made an O with his lips. ‘No idea.’

  At least it didn’t sound like Ingrid had been drunk and flashing a roll about.

  ‘How did the guy seem?’

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Any drugs?’

  He was like a kid playing in a field who just spotted a bee. I reassured him. ‘I’m not a cop. Just want to know what was going down.’

  ‘Somebody had a joint going. Could’ve been the dude.’ He indicated the photo. ‘Couple of the girls had a few lines of speed. Not in the party room, though. I saw them when I went to the loo up there. They offered me, but it’s more than my job’s worth. Honestly man, I’ve had school formals where there was more shit going down.’

  As father of an eighteen-year-old, I wished he hadn’t told me that. I thanked him for his time and left him to deal with a man in a very bright shirt with the look of a 1970s full-back, almost bald but no-nonsense tough, who was after a chardonnay. The world had changed a lot in thirty years.

  Bottleshop Bevan wasn’t working tonight but I bought a couple of stubbies anyway and retreated to my room to cogitate. Okay, there’d been a few drugs at this party. No surprise. Nobody had mentioned Ingrid flashing rolls of cash. Max Coldwell seemed a quiet hippie type. My phone rang. Just for an instant I went to default, expecting to see Tash’s name but it was Dee Vee again. I told her what I’d learned, or rather hadn’t. She didn’t comment. I guess to her I could have been a gardener relaying information about aphids in the Feister rose garden. Her job was purely to organise.

  ‘I had you down to see Angus Duncan at nine am but something’s come up and he has to fly out to one of our tenements at seven-thirty. He said he could see you at the airport at six-thirty tomorrow in the morning. Is there a problem?’

  I threw a glance at my two small, lonely beers.

  ‘No problem. I wasn’t planning a big night. Still no activity on her Facebook or Instagram?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Obviously she would have told me if Ingrid’s phone or bank account had been accessed.

  ‘Sweet dreams, Richard,’ she said as she rang off, tantalising me with a forbidden image of her in a sheer night-garment. Slipping off my shoes I lay on my bed in the low air con and cast my mind back to a time when women found me attractive enough to sleep with, but not successful enough to stay with. Not that there were too many. Barry Dunn’s ex-squeeze, the sexy Wendy Smith was always fun, even though she was hiding secrets darker than a block of Jamaican Gold. But Wendy always played understudy. In my deepest emotional trench, that one way down where fish have eyes on stalks, where your soul hides even from yourself, there was only one body, one image, one ghost: Celeste Magnello. A lifetime on, and I could still smell the soap that oozed from her skin when we made love. Her betrayals were unblunted by thirty-five years of icy currents; they could tear into me like a stingray barb if I let them. I no longer lusted after her. I did not want her in my life. I loved my wife wholly, without reserve. Tash had carried me off to a place of sweetness, light and satisfaction. I thanked God for providing her, and then, aware that God was hardly likely to help this little shit, I tipped my hat to Lady Luck for her assistance – a bet each way if you like. And yet, alone, when the blackness of night was as tangible as fear and at its most seductive, it was Celeste whose image floated from the soft silt of the day’s decay and her lips that whispered my name.

  CHAPTER 14

  Whatever sucked him from sleep was with such fierce magnetic pull that he found himself sitting upright. Disoriented, Clement realised he was shirtless but couldn’t think where. Then consciousness flooded: the naked woman beside him, the man’s voice outside the window yelling ‘Thief!’ Louise stirred.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said, and jumped from bed. Even after sex he would put back on jocks or shorts just so as to never be fumbling in the dark in an emergency. Perhaps it was a neurosis that would have proved fertile ground for a psych but tonight it was fortuitous forward planning. He yanked open the door of the motel room. A fat guy, naked, was standing on the first floor balcony yelling down into shadows. ‘Bastard!’ He turned to Clement. ‘Fucker took my wallet.’

  Clement spied fractured light beneath them, a running figure. Without thinking he vaulted the railing. After momentary elevation he found himself on the arc’s downward slope with only his grip on the iron rail to argue gravity. At the nadir his shoulder socket demanded he let go – now! – but he resisted, confirmed the vehicle directly beneath him was his own car and, a scintilla of a second after calculating likely damage to a government vehicle and its consequences, let go. Allowing his legs to collapse upon landing, the way they’d taught him at some long-forgotten parachute drill, he rolled so his hip seemed to take the brunt of the impact, the momentum instantly propelling him through the air like a kid reaching the foot of a water slide. His bare feet landed on smooth concrete but he stumbled and almost fell as he attempted to start running before he had his balance
. Up ahead his quarry swung wide, dodging a parked Volvo. Clement was sprinting smoothly now. The catapult effect of the car had narrowed the gap and when he turned the corner of the rear of the motel he expected to be almost able to reach out and seize the thief. To his dismay, he saw that he had made no ground at all and in the course of the next few seconds felt himself slipping back further. Unlike Josh Shepherd, Clement had no pre-season training to help him sustain his effort. His stomach churned and burned and his lungs shut down. The thief, a school satchel slung over his back, a cap on his head, became fainter and vanished. Clement shuddered to a halt and gulped for oxygen.

  The interior of Clement’s car replicated the atmosphere of a hung jury room, a breath between stasis and action, a pause, a neutral point between on and off, yes and no. Clement held Louise’s gaze, knowing the past could not be regained now, that by sleeping together they had created an array of possible futures most of which would be complicated, fraught. He guessed the same things were going through her mind.

  Of course she was the one who acted. ‘Thanks for the entertainment,’ she said, and leaned over and kissed him. Then she let herself out of the car and moved elegantly up her small path, doing something with her hair. Inside him an emotion he could barely recognise stirred: pride that he’d had sex with an incredibly desirable woman. Not the boasting, swelling, egomania of the stud but an affirmation that such a thing was possible for him. To be brutally honest with himself, he felt relief in equal measure to pride. Despite the false start in the Anglers, he had summoned the courage to call her and ask her to dinner. By the time he was waiting out front of her place, a little after 7.00 pm, he was affirming to himself there was nothing on the line here, intercourse would be social only. He silently reiterated that when she sat beside him in the car and he smelled her perfume and saw in her eyes the positive vibes she was sending him, this stirring up a faint reminder of what it felt like to be an object of desire. As they finished off something in black bean sauce while she told him yet another colourful tale of representing the accused of the Kimberley, he was still assuring himself there would be no physical culmination. And then it was clear that the meal was over, the wine was drained and it was time to go home or do what he’d been avoiding pretty much since Marilyn had walked out of his life.

  ‘I’d ask you back to my place but it’s hopelessly poky.’ Even before he finished the sentence he wanted to take it back. It sounded like an excuse.

  ‘I’d ask you back to mine but Mum’s up from Perth, staying in my bed. How about a motel? I’ve always wanted to have a tryst in a motel.’

  It was the word tryst that won him over completely. ‘Sex’ might have been just a bit sharp for where he was at, ‘tryst’ was playful yet still sexy. And so she’d called her mum and told her not to worry, she was staying with her friend, and he’d driven them around the corner to the Pearl, a respectable two-storey motel with green lighting highlighting a palm by the entrance and a sign that said Foxtel was available. More signs in the small foyer offered highchairs and a fax machine on request but even they couldn’t dampen the pleasant tension he’d begun to feel in his loins. Their room was on the first floor. It was clean, neat, with a bar fridge and a thick wallet that offered motel services and sightseeing suggestions. Clement only noticed those items because that’s where he placed his keys. When he turned, Louise had already stepped out of the pretty red dress that suited her dark hair and suntanned skin. Her stomach was flat and muscled like she worked out and he should have felt intimidated that what he had to offer was less but it was too late. Lust and desire were working up a furious Grappelli–Django soundtrack in his head. Next he knew they were locked on the bed and after that there was no recorded history, like the waves had washed away whatever his senses had at the time scrawled in sand.

  Dawn was lifting itself on creaking knees as he drove through still-slumbering streets back to his flat perched above the chandler, a trace of her perfume lingering. He’d not showered at the motel. By the time he’d got back after his fruitless pursuit, a couple of the night-shift uniforms, Lalor and Hodgkiss, had arrived. They had the good sense not to draw attention to an inspector in his underwear. He told them to take the name of the man next door who sounded the alarm and check whether anybody else had been robbed, then to pass everything onto DC Shepherd.

  Yes, he could have taken charge of the whole thing then and there but he did not wish to. It was 2.20 am.

  ‘You sure know how to show a girl a good time,’ Louise had cracked. She was back in her red dress sitting on the bed. He locked the door and slid on the chain but had not bothered to put on his clothes. He unzipped her dress and she lay in his arms.

  ‘Think you could get back to sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe.’ Banging and voices outside intruded. ‘Probably not.’ She did a good line in dry humour. On their first date she’d told him her father was a musician who used to play piano bars. That’s where she got it from, she’d said, the humour. He told her about the cat-burglar who’d been giving them the run-around.

  ‘He was too fast. I don’t have the stamina these days.’

  She looked up at him, smiled. Her hand rested between his legs. ‘Sure about that?’

  There hadn’t even been a public terminal at Port Hedland last time I’d been there. Mind you there wasn’t the internet either. And sure, these were no longer the heady days when iron ore was a hundred and thirty bucks a tonne and a day’s work in the Pilbara paid a month’s mortgage in Gosford or Townsville but, even in the boom’s slim tail, there was enough flick to generate plenty of fly-in fly-outs. The smaller aircraft were hived off to their own adjacent field where I could see a couple of planes and a chopper sitting as I drove in. The sun was still only flexing, the air crisp as a cracker from a freshly opened packet. I parked by a chain-link fence and strode towards a prefab hut that housed toilets and a small waiting room. It was deserted. I caught sight of a figure on the field about a hundred metres away, checking the undercarriage of a Cessna, and guessed this might be Duncan. When I was about twenty metres off, he swung out of shadow and took a couple of steps in my direction, hands on hips. It was already a few degrees hotter here than the perimeter.

  ‘Snowy Lane?’

  I was a little surprised he used that moniker. With the Feisters I tried to maintain the veneer of professionalism. Duncan was probably forty or a tick over.

  ‘That’s me,’ I admitted. ‘Angus?’

  He stuck out a hand. ‘My old man was a big East Freo supporter. Sorry for the change of plan but we have some samples they need picked up.’

  ‘You fly yourself?’

  ‘These days. Iron ore price goes south, everything gets cut back. Officially though, my title is Head of Exploration and Future Development, Pilbara.’

  Duncan was not a tall man. Maybe five nine, solid build, fit; sandy, curly hair. He wore shorts. His calves suggested cycling or swimming. He had an open face and the confidence of a man in territory where he knew he belonged.

  ‘Ingrid still hasn’t surfaced?’ he asked.

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘The Broome police called me last night.’ He ran me through his conversation with the detective whose name he had forgotten. From his questions, the guy seemed more thorough than his Hedland counterpart.

  ‘So you met up with Ingrid and Max Coldwell …’

  ‘At the office. Well, at the workshop next door to be exact. I’d just flown in from the exploration camp with our Chinese client. I saw these two … alternate types hanging around. Dave, one of the mechanics, let me know who she was before I made any kind of scene. I went over and introduced myself and asked where they were staying and so on. I thought it was polite to ask them to join us for dinner and they accepted. Ingrid seemed really keen to ask Shaun about China, even though he speaks little English.’

  ‘Shaun is your client?’

  ‘His Chinese name starts with an X but he knows it’s easier for us to anglicise it, so I call hi
m Shaun. Shaun Li. He’s the middle son of the Li family. They own of one of China’s biggest steel companies.’

  I remembered the article I’d read. I thought the name Li had cropped up there.

  ‘They’re involved in this new billion-dollar mine.’

  ‘More like twelve billion but yes. They’re the keystone investor. Shaun was out to look at some other prospects with me.’

  ‘Ingrid is interested in business?’

  Duncan stifled a chortle. ‘Didn’t seem to be. She wanted to know about Buddhism and tai chi and feng shui. I mean she was totally barking up the wrong tree. Shaun is all about his Ferrari and the family business. But, as it turned out, they got on fine.’

  ‘Was Ingrid flashing cash? Did she have an argument with anybody?’

  Not that he recalled. They’d had an enjoyable meal. The company had picked up the tab. Then they saw everybody heading out to the beer garden and went out to watch the show. ‘The girls were good-lookers. Shaun was a bit smitten so I sent them a couple of bottles of champers and asked what they were doing afterwards. They invited us all to a party upstairs. A bit of fun.’

  Duncan had seen no incidents. No fights, no drugs.

  ‘I heard Coldwell had a joint going?’

  ‘He might have. I didn’t notice. I was sticking close to Shaun but there was no trouble. About one, Shaun indicated he’d had enough, so we split. Ingrid and Max said they’d come too. We walked them to their motel unit.’