by Peter Temple
Barks.
‘Mind the dogs?’ he said. ‘They won’t bother you.’
‘Let slip the dogs.’
Cashin took her mug, let them in. They charged Helen. She wasn’t alarmed. He spoke sternly and they went to the firebox and sank, heads on paws.
‘It’s not an interview, Joe,’ she said. ‘I want to talk about what’s going on, it’s not like I’m wearing a wire. To say what I think, I think the government’s happy to see Bourgoyne pinned on these boys if it helps politically.’
‘No politics about homicide.’
‘No?
‘No one’s talked politics to me.’
‘There should be a taskforce on this. Instead, there’s you and Dove, you go on leave, not suspended, on leave. Dove’s back in Melbourne. And you tell me you haven’t been told this thing’s filed under Forget It?’
Cashin didn’t want to lie to her.
‘I understand the idea is to let things cool down,’ he said. ‘The man’s dead, the boys are dead, we’re not pressed for time. It’s hard to investigate when you’ve got people full of rage. Who’s going to talk to you?’
‘That’s the Daunt you’re talking about?’
‘The Daunt.’
She drank. ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘do you accept that it’s possible that the boys didn’t attack Bourgoyne?’
The firebox didn’t need stoking. He got up and stoked it. Then he put on Björling. The balance had drifted slighty. He fiddled with the controls. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s possible.’
‘Well, if it wasn’t the boys, you don’t have to worry about the Daunt cooling off. You don’t have to clear the boys before you look elsewhere, do you?’
‘Helen, I’m seconded from homicide to Port Monro. They were stretched and they drafted me. Then things happened.’
‘Did Hopgood have any say?’
Cashin sat down. ‘Why would he?’
‘Because he runs Cromarty. I’m told the station commander doesn’t go to the toilet without Hopgood’s nod.’
‘Well, I’m in Port Monro. Maybe you hear things I don’t hear.’
They looked at each other over their mugs. She did a slow blink.
‘Joe, people say he’s a killer.’
‘A killer? Who says that?’
‘Daunt people.’
Cashin thought he would believe anything about Hopgood. He looked away. ‘People say anything about cops, it’s the job.’
‘You’ve got Aboriginal family, haven’t they told you?’
‘The people I’m related to see me as just another white maggot cop,’ he said. ‘But you wouldn’t understand that. Let’s talk about rich white kids who want to run the world.’
Helen closed her eyes. ‘Not called for. I’ll start again. People say Corey Pascoe was executed that night. You were there. What do you say?’
‘I’ll say what I have to say to the coroner.’
‘You tried to call it off.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘You get that from where?’
‘It doesn’t matter for present purposes.’
‘For present purposes? There aren’t any present purposes. Anyway, the coroner will decide what people did and didn’t do.’
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I can’t seem to get this right. Can you relax for a single fucking second?’
He felt the flare, the flush.
‘I think you’re just spoilt,’ he said. ‘You come over with all this passion but you’re just a rich smart brat. If you can’t get what you want, you stamp your little shoe. Well, go to the media. Get the girl to tell them the watch story. You can be on television. It’ll help your campaign. Yours and Bobby’s both.’
Helen got up, put her mug on the wonky table, picked up her coat. ‘Well, thanks for seeing me. And for the fortified coffee.’
‘Any time.’
Cashin got up and walked ahead, through the huge room with its sprung floorboards that uttered faint mouse-like complaints. Outside, a three-quarter moon, high clouds, dispersed and running. He said, ‘I’ll walk with you.’
‘No thanks,’ she said, pushing an arm into her coat. ‘I can find my way.’
‘I’ll walk to my fence,’ said Cashin. ‘I want to be a witness to any alleged slips and falls.’
He took the big torch from the peg and went ahead. She followed in silence, down the path, out the gate, across the grassland, into the rabbit lands. Near her fence, he moved the torch and eyes gleamed— four, no, more.
He stopped.
Hares. Transfixed, immobilised hares. The dogs would love this, he thought.
‘Dogs would like this,’ she said behind him.
He half-turned. She was close behind him, they were centimetres apart.
‘No, can’t take the dogs out with a light. Hares don’t stand a chance.’
She took a small step, put a hand on the back of his head and kissed him on the mouth, pulled back and then kissed him again.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Just an impulse.’
She went around him, switched on her torch. He didn’t move, astonished, half-erect, light on her, watched her stoop through the wires of the sagging side fence that met his new corner post, start to climb the slope, fade into the dark, become a moving, rising light. She didn’t look back.
Cashin stood there for a time, fingers on his lips, thinking about the night at the Kettle, the other long-ago kisses, two kisses. He shivered, just the cold night.
Why did she do it?
WOOD STREET in North Melbourne was a short dead-end, narrow, blank factory walls on one side facing five thin weatherboard houses. At the end of the street stood a brick building modelled on a Greek temple, no windows, four pillars and a triangular gable. It was a hall of some kind, like a Masonic hall, but the gable was blank.
Cashin drove slowly, angle-parked in front of unmarked roller doors. He didn’t get out, thought about driving all the way for no good reason, about how he could agonise about some things for days and weeks and months but do others with no consideration at all.
Vickie had spotted it early, when he’d come home one day driving a second-hand Audi. ‘You work it all out intelligently, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Think it through. Then you just do something, anything. You might as well be a total fuckwit, what’s the difference in outcomes?’
She was right. That was why Shane Diab was dead, that was why the blood ran out of his mouth and his nose and his eyes and he made terrible sounds and died.
Cashin got out, walked around the vehicle. The floor of the narrow portico of the temple was hidden beneath mouldy dog turds, dumped junk mail returning to pulp, syringes, beer stubbies, cans, bourbon bottles, condoms, pieces of clothing, bits of styrofoam, a rigid beach towel, a length of exhaust pipe.
He went up the two steps, walked over the rubbish to the huge metal-studded double doors. They bore the scars of many attacks. A bell button had been gouged out but the cast-iron knocker had survived. He bashed it against its buffer—once, twice, thrice. He waited, did it again. Again. Again. Then he knelt and pushed back the letterbox flap. Dark inside. He felt eyes on him, stood and turned.
A woman was on the front doorstep of the nearest weatherboard, tortoise head peeping from a shell of garments, the top one a huge floral apron.
‘Whaddayadoin?’ she said.
Cashin went down the steps, approached her. ‘Police.’
‘Yeah? Show me.’
He showed her. ‘Who looks after this place?’
‘Hey?’
‘This building.’ He pointed at it. ‘Who looks after it?’
‘Ah. Used to be a bloke. Never come out the front. Never seed him open that door.’ She sniffed, wiped a finger under her nose, studied Cashin in silence, unblinking.
‘So how did you know he was in there?’ he said.
‘Merv’s got a garage there, he seed him.’
‘A garage where?’
She looked at him as if he were slo
w. ‘In the lane. I said that.’
‘Right. How do you get to the lane?’
‘Next to Wolf’s.’
‘Where’s Wolf’s?’
‘Well it’s in Tilbrook Street. Where’d ya think it would it be?’
‘Thanks for your help.’
She watched him three-point turn, drive off. He waved. She didn’t respond. In Tilbrook Street, he found the sunken lane, just wide enough for a vehicle. He parked in the entrance and walked along the bluestone gutter running down the middle, looking on the left for the entrance to the back of the temple.
It had to be the plank door with the rotten bottom beside the rusted steel garage doors. Yale lock, no door handle. He put both hands on the door and pushed tentatively. It didn’t yield. He tested the right-hand gatepost, it gave a little.
Knocking was required. He knocked, called the name, did it again. Then he looked up and down the lane, stepped into the gateway, braced his back against a gatepost, put a foot on the opposite post, pushed against it and leant on the door.
The door squeaked open and he almost fell in.
Forcible entry, no warrant.
An alley four or five metres long, brick walls on either side, a rubbish bin. Cashin walked to the end. A concreted yard, a rectangle behind a high wall broken only by three small windows and a door. At the left were washing lines, empty.
He went to the door in the building, stood on the top step and knocked, three times, harder each time, hurting his knuckles.
He tried the doorknob. Locked. Another Yale lock, a newer one.
The lane door was one thing, that could be explained away. Forcing entry into a building was another matter. He should ring Villani, tell him what he wanted, what he was doing here.
He examined the door. It had shrunk over the hundred-odd years of its life, no longer fitted snugly into its frame. When you fitted a new lock to an old door, you needed to compensate for the years. That hadn’t been done. He bent to look. He glimpsed the lock’s tongue.
Go away, said the voice of sense. Leave. Ring Villani. Get a warrant.
That would take forever. Villani would take his guide from Singo, he would cite Singo. He would want a proper case made for the intrusion.
Cashin thought that he wanted to go home, walk the dogs in the clean wind, lie on the floor for a while, sit by the fire and listen to Callas, roll red wine around his mouth while he read some Conrad.
He took out his wallet and found the thin, narrow piece of plastic. For a moment, he held it between thumbs and forefingers, bending it. It was strong, just enough flex.
Oh, well, what the hell, come this far.
The lozenge went in easily, slid around the tongue, pushed it back just enough. He put pressure on the door.
The tongue slipped its lodging.
The door opened.
Light fell on a wide passage, linoleum on the floor, black and white squares, he could see the lines of the boards beneath the covering. He took a step inside. The air was cold and stale, scrabbling noises from above. Birds. They would be starlings, no roof could keep them out. In a few weeks, they could insulate a ceiling with crap.
‘Anyone home?’ he shouted.
He took a few more steps down the passage, shouted again. No sound, the starlings paused for a few seconds.
Cashin opened the first door on the left. It was a bathroom and toilet, a shower head above the old claw-footed bath. A cabinet above the basin was empty except for a dry cake of soap.
The next door along was open: a kitchen, ancient gas stove, bare pine table, an empty vegetable rack.
Cashin crossed the passage. The room on the other side was a bedroom—a single bed, made with white sheets, a bedside table, a lamp. Two folded blankets stood on a pine chest of drawers. Nothing in the drawers. Cashin opened a narrow wardrobe. It was empty except for wire coathangers.
The next room was the same, a single bed with a striped coir mattress and a table. Across the way, the door opened reluctantly. Clicking the light switch on the right showed an office with a desk and a chair and a grey three-drawer filing cabinet and a wall of wooden shelves holding grey lever-arch files. Cashin touched the bare desk. His fingers came away coated with dust.
He went to the shelves. There were labelled, handwritten cards in brass holders tacked to each shelf: General Correspondence, Correspondence Q’land, Correspondence WA, Correspondence SA, Correspondence Vic. The Vic shelf was bare. Other shelves were labelled Invoices. Nothing on the Invoices Vic shelf. He chose a file from Correspondence WA, flicked through it. Originals and carbon copies and photostats of letters to and from the Companions Camp, Caves Road, Busselton, Western Australia.
Cashin replaced the file, opened a desk drawer.
Used cheque books, in bundles held together with rubber bands, some of which had perished. He took out a book, looked at a few stubs. All the Moral Companions’ bills appeared to have been paid from this place.
He closed the drawer, left the room, opened the door at the end of the passage. Darkness. He groped, found the switch, three fluorescent tubes took their time flickering into life. Another passage, transverse, three doors off it. Cashin opened the first one, found switches, one two, three, flicked them all. On the wall opposite, a few lightbulbs lit up around mirrors.
It was a theatre dressing room. He had been in one before, the woman’s body was in the toilet. It had been there for sixteen hours. She appeared to have fallen and struck her head against the bowl some time after the last performance of a play by an amateur group. There had been a party. What set the bells ringing was a bruise on the back of her head. The play was written by a doctor. Singo wanted him and they flame-grilled him but in the end there was nothing except an admission that he’d screwed another cast member.
Cashin checked the other rooms. Also small dressing rooms. Two bulbs popped in the second one as he flicked the switches. He walked back, opened a door, went down a long flight of stairs, another door.
A big room, dimly lit by dusty windows high on the walls. He took a few steps.
It was a theatre from another time, longer than it was wide, slightly raked, about thirty rows of seats, all uptilted. To his left, a short flight of steps went up to the stage.
One more time. ‘Anyone here?’ he shouted. ‘Police.’
Starlings up above here too and, from the street, the sound of a car revving, the test-revving of mechanics.
A smell over the dust and the faint odour of damp coming up from beneath the floor. Cashin sniffed, could not identify it. He had smelled it somewhere before and he felt a tightening of the skin on his face and neck.
He walked to the back of the room and pushed open one of a pair of doors. Beyond was a small marble-floored foyer and the front doors. He went back, climbed the stairs to the stage, pushed aside heavy purple velvet curtains. He was in the wings, a dark space, the bare-boarded stage glimpsed through gaps in tall pieces of scenery.
Cashin went to an opening.
Sand had been dumped on the stage, clean building sand, in heaps and splashes.
Sand?
He saw the buckets at the back of the space, three red buckets with FIRE stencilled on them. Someone had emptied the fire buckets onto the stage, thrown the sand around.
Hoons? Hoons wouldn’t limit themselves to throwing sand around, they’d trash the whole place, pull down the curtains, shit on the stage, piss off it, jump on the seats till they broke, rip them from their moorings, light fires.
Not hoons, no. This wasn’t hooning.
Something else had happened here.
He walked out onto the stage, could not avoid treading on sand, it crunched beneath his feet, a startlingly loud sound. At centre stage, he looked around. Dust motes hung in their millions in the pale yellow glow from the windows
There would be stage lighting. Where?
In the wings, he looked around, found a panel near the stairs with switches—four old-fashioned round porcelain switches, brass toggles. He tipped th
em all, solid clicks, the stage was illuminated.
He walked back onto the stage. A spotlight above the arch now lit a painted backdrop and perhaps a dozen footlight bulbs were alight. As he watched, two died, a moment, then a third was gone. He looked at the backdrop. It was of a soft rolling landscape, farm buildings here and there, white dots of grazing sheep, a yellow road snaking over the plain and up a hill, a green, softly rounded hill. On its peak stood three crosses, two small ones flanking a cross twice their size.
Cashin went closer. Crucified figures hung from the smaller crosses. But the big cross was empty. It was waiting for someone. He looked at the sand on the floor in front of the backdrop.
Why would anyone throw sand on the stage? To put out a fire? Perhaps someone had started a fire, poured an inflammable fluid on the floorboards, lit it, then panicked, grabbed a fire bucket, smothered the flames.
That was the obvious explanation.
Hoons lit fires.
But they didn’t put them out.
He moved sand with a shoe, scraped at it. The bottom grains were dark, stuck together, they came away in clumps. He scraped some more, revealed the boards.
A black stain. He felt a twinge of nausea, the cold in his neck, the back of his head, his ears.
Something bad had happened here.
Time to ring the squad, wait in the vehicle.
He squatted and put out an index finger, touched the floor, looked at his fingertip.
Blood.
He knew blood.
How old? The sand had trapped the moisture.
He stood up, back aching, flexed his shoulders, he was facing the auditorium, the spotlight on, the footlights in his eyes, he could not see the hall clearly.
He saw it.
ALL THE seats in the hall were turned up.
Except for one seat. Six rows back, in the middle of the sixth row.
One seat was down. In the whole auditorium only one seat was down.
Someone had sat on that seat. Someone had chosen that seat. It was the best seat in the house to see something.
To see what?
Nonsense. The seat had probably fallen down, seats did that, everything did that, falling down was a law of nature. You lined up a dozen things that could fall over, at least one did.