by Peter Temple
He thought of asking Erica to come in.
No.
Beyond the dressing room was a bathroom, walls and floor of slate, a wooden tub, coopered like a barrel, a toilet, a shower that was just two stainless-steel perforated plates, one that water fell from, one to stand on. There were bars of pale yellow soap and throwaway razors, shampoo. He opened a plain wooden cupboard: three stacks of towels, six deep, bars of soap, bags of razors, toilet paper, tissues.
He went back to Erica. They looked at another bedroom, like a room in a comfortable hotel. It had a small sitting room with two armchairs, a fireplace. There was another bathroom, old-fashioned, revealing nothing. At the end of the passage was a laundry with a new-looking washing machine and dryer.
Beyond it was a storeroom, shelves of heavy white bed linen and tablecloths, napkins, white towels, cleaning equipment.
They went back they way they had come. ‘There’s another sitting room here,’ said Erica. ‘It’s the one with the television.’
Four leather armchairs around a fireplace, a television on a shelf to the left, more Swedish sound equipment to the right. Cosy by the standards of this house, thought Cashin.
‘Well,’ said Cashin, ‘that’s it. We needn’t go upstairs, I gather it’s undisturbed.’
There was a moment when she looked at him, something uncertain in her eyes.
‘I’d like to go up,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘Of course.’
They crossed the house to the entrance hall, walked side by side up a flight of broad marble stairs to a landing, up another flight. All the way, he shut down his face against the pain, did not wince. At the top, a gallery ran around the stairwell, six dark cedar doors leading off it, all closed. They stood on a Persian rug in a shaft of light from above.
‘I want to get some things from my mother’s room, if they’re still there,’ said Erica. ‘I’ve never had the nerve before.’
‘How long have you waited?’
‘Almost thirty years.’
‘I’ll be here’ said Cashin. ‘Unless…’
‘No, that’s fine.’
She went to the second door on the left. He saw her hesitate, open the six-panel door, put out a hand to a brass light switch, go in.
Cashin opened the nearest door and switched on the light. It was a bedroom, huge, twin beds with white covers, two wardrobes, a dressing table, a writing table in front of the curtained window. He walked on a pale pinkish carpet, lined like a quilt, and parted the curtains. The view was of a redbrick stable block and of treetops beyond, near-leafless, limbs moving in the wind, and then of a low hill stained with the russet leaves of autumn.
He went back to the gallery and went to the balustrade and looked down the stairwell at the entrance hall, felt a flash of vertigo, an urge to throw himself over the barrier.
‘Finished,’ said Erica behind him.
‘Find what you wanted?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing there. It was stupid to think there might be.’
They went back to the sunroom and sat with a glass-topped table between them.
‘Notice anything worth mentioning?’ said Cashin.
‘No. I’m sorry, I’m not much use. I’m pretty much a stranger in this house.’
‘How’s that?’
She looked at him sharply. ‘Just the way it is, detective.’
‘Everything locked at night, alarm switched on?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t been here at night for a very long time.’
Time to move on. ‘About your brother, Ms Bourgoyne.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘He drowned, I’m told.’
‘In Tasmania. In 1993.’
‘Went for a swim?’
Erica shifted in her seat, crossed her legs in corduroy pants, twitched a shiny black boot. ‘Presumably. His things were found on a beach. The body wasn’t found.’
‘Right. So you were here on Wednesday morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘Visit your step-father often?’
She rubbed palms. ‘Often? No.’
‘You don’t get on?’
Erica pulled a face, looked much older, lined. ‘We’re not close. It’s our family history. The way I grew up.’
‘And the reason for this visit?’
‘Charles wanted to see me.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘This is intrusive,’ she said. ‘Why do you need to know?’
‘Ms Bourgoyne,’ said Cashin, ‘I don’t know what we need to know. But if you want me to record that you preferred not to answer the question, that’s fine. I will.’
She shrugged, not happy. ‘He wanted to talk about his affairs.’
Cashin waited until it was clear that she wasn’t going to say any more. ‘On another subject. Who’ll inherit?’
Widened eyes. ‘No idea. What are you suggesting?’
‘It’s just a question,’ Cashin said. ‘You didn’t discuss his will?’
A laugh. ‘My step-father isn’t the kind of person who would talk about his will. I doubt whether he’s ever given dying a thought. It’s for lesser beings.’
‘Assuming that he knew the person who attacked him…’
‘Why would you assume that?’
‘One possible line of inquiry. Who might want to harm him?’
‘As far as I know,’ she said, ‘he’s a much respected person around here. But I don’t live here, I haven’t since…since I was a child. I’ve only been a visitor.’
She looked away. Cashin followed her gaze, looked out at the disciplined gravel that ran to the hedge. Nothing lifted the spirits about the grounds of The Heights—hedges, lawns, paving, gravel, they were all shades of green and grey. It came to him that there were no flowers.
‘He had all the garden beds ripped out,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘They were wonderful.’
‘A last thing. Do you know of anything in your step-father’s life or your life that might have led to this?’
‘Such as?’
‘This may become a murder investigation.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing will be left private in the life of anyone around your stepfather.’
She straightened, gave him the unfazed gaze. ‘Are you saying I’ll be a suspect?’
‘Everyone will be of interest.’
‘What about perfect strangers?’ she said. ‘Is there a chance that you might take an interest in perfect strangers who got into the house and attacked him?’
He wanted to echo her sarcastic tone. ‘Every chance,’ he said. ‘But with no sign of forced entry, we have to consider other possibilities.’
‘Well,’ she said, looked at her watch, a slim silver band, ‘I’d like to get going. Are you a local policeman?’
‘I’m down here for as long as it takes.’
There was truth in this. There was some truth in almost anything people said.
‘May I ask you why you brought the bodyguard?’ said Cashin.
‘It’s a work-related thing. Just a precaution.’ Erica stood up.
Cashin rose. ‘You’ve been threatened?’
Erica held out her right hand. ‘Work-related, detective. In my work, that makes it confidential. Goodbye.’
They shook hands. The ex-SOG man, Jacobs, walked onto the forecourt to see him go. In the mirror, Cashin saw him give a mocking wave, fingers fanned, right hand held just beside his tough-guy smile.
Cashin gunned the cruiser, showered Jacobs with gravel, saw him try to protect his face.
CASHIN DROVE out on the road behind Open Beach, turned at the junction with the highway, went back through Port Monro, got a coffee. He parked above Lucan Rocks, below him a half-dozen surfers, some taking on the big breakers, some giving it a lot of thought.
It was a soothing thing to do: sit in a warm car and watch the wind lifting spume off the waves, see the sudden green translucence of a rising wall of
water, a black figure’s skim across the melting glass, the poetic exit into the air, the falling.
He thought about Gavin’s shark-bitten board, paddling out on it, the water warm as a bath. The water he was looking at was icy. He remembered the testicle-retracting swims when he was a boy, when they had the family shack above Open Beach and the Doogue shack was over the next dune, rugged assemblages of corrugated iron, fibro sheet, salvaged weatherboards. In those days, the town had two milkbars, two butcher shops, the fish and chip shop, the hardware, a general dealer, one chemist, one doctor. Rich people, mostly sheep farmers, had holiday houses on the Bar between the sea and the river. Ordinary people from the inland had shacks above Open Beach or in South Port or in the streets behind the caravan park.
Cashin remembered his father stopping the Falcon on the wooden bridge, looking down the river at the yachts moored on both sides.
‘This place’s turning into the bloody Riviera,’ his father said.
‘What’s a Riviera?’ said Joe.
‘Monaco’s on the Riviera,’ said Michael.
Mick Cashin looked at Michael. ‘How’d you know that?
‘Read it,’ said Michael. ‘That’s where they have the grand pricks.’
‘Grand pricks?’ said Mick Cashin. ‘You mean the royal family? Prince Rainier?’
‘Don’t be rude, Mick,’ said Cashin’s mother, tapping his father’s cheek. ‘It’s pronounced pree, Michael. It means prize.’
Every year there had been more city kids on the beach. You knew city kids because of their haircuts and their clothes and because the older ones, boys and girls, wore neck chains and smoked, didn’t much care who saw them.
Cashin thought about the winter Saturday morning they had driven up to their shack and Macca’s Shacca next door was gone, vanished, nothing there except disturbed sand to show where the low bleached building had stood, gently leaning backwards.
He had walked around, marvelling at the shack’s absence. There were marker pegs in the ground, and the next time they came a house was half-built on a cement slab.
That summer was the last in their shack, the last summer before his dad’s death. Years later, he asked his mother what became of the place.
‘I had to sell it,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t any money.’
Now you would have to be more than just rich to own a place in the teatree scrub on the Bar and no shacks broke the skyline above Open Beach; on the once worthless dunes stood a solid line of houses and units with wooden decks and plateglass windows. Nothing under six hundred grand.
A fishing boat was coming in, heading for the entrance.
Cashin knew the boat. It belonged to a friend of Bern’s who had a dodgy brother, an abalone poacher. Just six boats still fished out of Port Monro, bringing in crayfish and a few boxes of fish, but it was the town’s only industry apart from a casein factory. Its only industry if you didn’t count six restaurants, five cafes, three clothing boutiques, two antique shops, a bookshop, four masseurs, an aromatherapist, three hairdressers, dozens of bed-and-breakfast establishments, the maze and the doll museum.
He finished his coffee and went to work the long way, through Muttonbird Rocks, no one in the streets, most of the holiday houses empty. He drove along two sides of the business block, past the two supermarkets, the three real-estate agents, three doctors, two law firms, the newsagent, the sports shop, the Shannon Hotel on the corner of Liffey and Lucas Streets.
In the late 1990s, a city drug dealer and property developer had bought the boarded-up, gull-crapped Shannon. People still talked about a bar fight there in 1969 that needed two ambulances from Cromarty to take the injured to hospital. The new owner spent more than two million dollars on the Shannon. Tradesmen took on apprentices, bought new utes, gave their wives new kitchens—the German appliances, the granite benchtops.
Two men in beanies were coming out of the Orion, Port’s surviving bloodhouse, still waiting for its developer. In Cashin’s first week in charge, three English backpackers drinking there at lunchtime gave some local hoons cheek. The one took a king hit, went down and stayed down, copped a few boots. The others, skinny kids from Leeds, were headbutters and kickers and they got into a corner and took out several locals before Cashin and his offsider got there.
The bigger man on the pavement was giving Cashin the eye. Ronnie Barrett had various convictions—assault, drink-driving, driving while suspended. Now he was on the dole, picking up some cash-in-hand at an auto wreckers in Cromarty. His ex-wife had an intervention order against him, granted after he extended his wrecking skills to the former marital home.
Cashin parked outside the station, sat for a while, looking at the wind testing the pines. Winter setting in. He thought about summer, the town full of spoilt-rotten city children, their blonde mothers, flabby fathers in boat shoes. The Cruisers and Mercs and Beemers took all the main street parking. The men sat in and outside the cafes, stood in the shops, hands to heads, barking into their mobiles, pulling faces.
But the year had turned, May had come, the ice-water rain, the winds that scoured skin, and just the hardcore left—the unemployed, under-employed, unemployable, the drunk and doped, the old-age pensioners, people on all kinds of welfare, the halt, the lame. Now he saw the town as you saw a place after fire, all softness gone: the outcrops of rock, the dark gullies, the fireproof rubbish of brown beer bottles and car skeletons.
Ronnie Barrett, he was Port in winter. They should put him in an advertisement, on a poster: GET TO KNOW THE REAL PORT MONRO.
Cashin went in, talked to Kendall. It was overlap time, the two of them on duty for a few hours. He wrote the report on his visit to The Heights, sent it to Villani, printed two copies for the file.
Then he rang homicide and spoke to Tracy Wallace, the senior analyst.
‘Back in harness, are you?’ she said. ‘I gather it’s titsoff down there.’
Cashin could see the flag, plank-stiff in the arctic wind. ‘Nonsense. Only people with over-sensitive parts say that. What’s the word on Bourgoyne?’
‘Unchanged. If you’re recovered, please come home. The place is filling up with young dills.’
‘Be patient. They’ll turn into older dills.’
THE SHIFT went by.
Cashin went home, along the country roads. Newly milked dairy cows, relieved for a time of their swaying burdens, turned to look at him, blessed him with dark, glossy eyes.
No sign of Dave Rebb.
He walked the dogs, made something to eat, watched television, all the time the pain getting worse. It took revenge for the hours he was upright. For a long time after he left hospital, he had been unable to cope without resorting to pethidine. Getting off the peth, the lovely peth, that was the hardest thing he had ever done. Now aspirin and alcohol were the drugs of choice and they were a poor substitute.
Cashin got up and poured a big whisky, washed down three aspirins. Callas, Bergonzi and Gobbi always helped. He went to the most expensive thing he owned, two thousand dollars worth of stereo, and put on a CD. Puccini, Tosca. The sound filled the huge room.
He owed opera and reading to Raimond Sarris, the mad, murderous little prick. Opera had just been rubbish arty people pretended to like. Fat men and women singing in foreign languages. Books were okay, but reading a book took too long, too many other things to do. There were few spaces in Cashin’s days before Vickie and, afterwards, he left home early, came back in the dark, ate at his desk, sitting in cars, in the street. His spare time he spent sleeping or someone, a cop, would hoot outside and they’d go to the races, the football, fishing, stand in some cop’s backyard eating charred meat, drinking beer, talking about work.
Then came Rai Sarris.
After Rai, he had many hours of the day and night in which he had no capacity to do anything except read or watch television. At night, when they were trying to wean him off painkillers, the aches in his back, his pelvis, his thighs, would always give him a moment to drop into sleep. He would fall away from hi
mself for a while, to a deep and dreamless place. The pain would wake him slowly, pain as a sound, far away but insistent, as with a crying baby, part of a dream of hearing something unwelcome. He would move, not fully awake, lie every way, trying to find a position that lessened the pain. Then he would give up and lie on his back—sweaty, now aching from neck to knees—and switch on the light, prop up, try to read. This happened so many times in a night, they blurred.
One day a nurse called Vincentia Lewis brought him a CD player and two small speakers and a box of CDs, twenty or thirty. ‘My father’s,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t need them anymore.’ They sat on the bedside cabinet untouched for a long time until, waiting for the dawn one morning, pain shimmering, Cashin put on the light, picked out a disk, any disk, didn’t look at it, put it on, put on the headphones, put out the light.
It was Jussi Björling.
Cashin did not know that. He endured a few moments, gave it a minute, another. In time, the day leaked in under the cream blind, the morning-shift nurse came and ran it up. ‘Look a bit more peaceful today,’ she said. ‘Better night?’
What did Rai Sarris call himself now? For months, they had tapped everyone Rai knew. He never called anyone.
Cashin got up with difficulty and poured another whisky. A few more and he’d sleep.
THEY WALKED around the western side of the house, through the long grass, dogs ahead, jumping up, hanging stiff-legged in the misty air, hoping to see a rabbit.
‘Where’d you grow up?’ Cashin said.
‘All over,’ said Rebb.
‘Starting where?’
‘Don’t remember. I was a baby.’
‘Right, yes. Go to school?’
‘Why?’
‘Most people know where they went to school.’
‘What’s it matter? I can read, I can write.’
Cashin looked at Rebb, he didn’t look back, eyes front. ‘Like a good yarn, don’t you? Big talker.’
‘Love a yack. How come you walk like you’re scared you’ll break?’
Cashin didn’t say anything.
‘Confide in anyone comes along, don’t you? Why’s the place like this?’