Jenny says, ‘But somehow they knew the Nordlunds well enough to be invited to Carl’s eightieth birthday bash up at Kramfors. And I’m wondering if this was what your father’s meeting with Martin that day he died was all about. Was Martin maybe thinking of setting up a trust or a scholarship or something in their name, and he wanted your dad’s approval?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s possible.’
‘And then when Joseph, many years later, wanted to come clean about what happened to flight VH-MDX, he thought of Danny Belltree, the young man who rescued him at Moree and who was now a famous judge. He intended to meet him on the day of the crash. Moree is a five-hour drive from Gloucester, so I assume Danny planned to drive us there first, meet Joseph, then go back to Armidale for the night.’
‘Makes sense,’ Harry says. ‘Which would mean that we now know what Joseph looks like, or at least looked like twenty-four years ago, and we also know the place where he wanted to meet—the place they first met, Moree railway station.’
‘According to your father’s speech he’d be fifty-six years old now. We should be able to find him.’
Jenny sees the life go from Harry’s face.
‘No,’ he says. ‘We’ve done enough digging. Let Kelly and the cops sweep up the pieces. I’m finished.’
She takes his hand. ‘Of course, if that’s what you want.’
They sit in silence for a long while before Harry speaks. ‘Go on then, say it.’
‘What?’
‘That we still don’t know why Mum and Dad were killed.’
98
But it seems that Joseph Doyle doesn’t exist. Jenny uses all her legal researcher resources—birth, marriage and death records, Medicare, car registrations, police records, social security—to try to find him, but discovers no one who seems to fit.
‘Unless he’s out of state.’
‘Or changed his name,’ Harry says. ‘The Nordlunds were after him. Maybe he went into hiding.’
‘Back to his original family?’ Jenny suggests. ‘On a mission out west of Moree, that’s what your father said.’
They mull it over, decide to make the trip. Jenny asks Nicole to look after Felecia. They’ll take Abigail with them.
The temperature has moved into the high thirties as they leave the New England Highway and head west, out across the broad inland plains of rich black soil. On each side fields of cotton, sorghum and wheat stretch away to the horizon. They have been driving for almost eight hours by the time they reach Moree, up towards the Queensland border. As the sun sets they drive along the main street, Balo Street, neatly landscaped and decorated with Christmas lights, to the Imperial Hotel at the central crossroads. They book in and take a walk through the town, finding their way to the railway station, much as it was when Harry’s father met Joseph, fifty years before, then they return to the hotel for a drink and a meal.
The next morning they find the office of the local paper, the Moree Champion, further along Balo Street, and place an advertisement in the personals.
——
JOSEPH DOYLE
Harry Belltree would like to meet you at the place you first met his father. He will be there at midday each day, until Christmas Day.
——
Then they walk back along the street, stopping at shops and cafés, the community library, the shire council offices and the local Aboriginal land council to make enquiries, handing out printed copies of the ads for shop windows. A couple of Santas are also working the strip, sweating in their scarlet costumes.
At noon Harry is standing in the sun at the station, conspicuous on the empty platform, while Jenny and Abigail sit in their car in the car park watching passers-by. They stay for two hours, then set off with more leaflets for small settlements in the surrounding country—Pallamallawa, Biniguy and Garah.
In the following days they cover all the pubs and social clubs, the schools and churches. No one can help them, and no one comes to the railway station.
Finally it is Christmas Day. Over breakfast in the hotel they exchange presents. They have bought the same thing for each other, new wristwatches. Jenny smiles. ‘A new time,’ she says. ‘A new start.’
No canvassing today, their last day. ‘We’re in the lap of the gods, Harry,’ Jenny says. Towards noon they return to the station, the sun blazing down from high overhead.
Jenny has Abigail on her knee, giving her a drink, when she notices a dark-skinned man walk across the tracks towards Harry. They talk for a while, shake hands, then Harry points to the car and the two of them walk over. Jenny gets out.
‘Jenny, this is Joseph. His name is now Monti Anaywan. He’s agreed to talk to us.’
Jenny shakes Monti’s big hand, scarred by heavy manual work. He looks the right age and his face does resemble Joseph’s in the photograph. His expression gives nothing away.
‘Monti wants us to go to his place, where we can talk.’
Jenny feels a tremor of alarm. ‘Is it far?’
‘About a hundred kilometres, he says, over the border.’
‘I have the baby. You go, Harry. I’ll wait in the hotel.’
But Monti shakes his head. ‘You should come too, Jenny,’ he says, voice low. ‘There’s someone specially wants to meet you.’
‘Who?’
He just smiles enigmatically, points at a dusty white ute farther down the car park. ‘You follow me, okay?’ He walks away.
Jenny looks at Harry, who shrugs. ‘We’ve come this far, Jen.’
They head out of Moree on the Carnarvon Highway, north and then west across the plains towards the Queensland border.
After an hour and a half the sat nav tells them they are approaching the border town of Mungindi. They drive through a small grid of streets, low bungalows on large plots, until they come to the Barwon River marking the state boundary, then cross over the river into another street grid, larger grass paddocks, some of the cottages on stilts. On the outskirts the ute leads them off onto a dirt road, long and straight, through grass, scrub and scattered trees. Another turn, kicking up clouds of dust in the hot, still air, towards a solitary cluster of metal shacks beside a dam. The ute comes to a halt, Harry pulls in alongside. A smell of roasting meat hangs in the air. Monti grins. ‘Barbecue. Come inside.’
He leads them through a screen door into a dark interior hallway, and a room in which an old woman sits in a wicker chair beside the window.
‘I want ya to meet me aunty.’ He steps closer to the chair where the woman is still staring out the window. ‘Aunty Pearl?’ He touches her shoulder and she gives a start.
‘What? Oh, Monti. How are you, darlin’?’
‘Brought some folks to see ya, Aunty. Harry Belltree and his wife and baby.’
‘Oh?’
She peers, and Monti waves Harry forward, whispers, ‘Eyes goin’.’
‘Are you really Harry Belltree?’
‘Yes, Aunty, I am.’
Monti says, ‘I got some business with Harry, then we’ll come back and see ya. Okay?’
The old lady nods and turns back to the view out over the dam.
They go through to the kitchen and sit around the table. Monti pours them glasses of cold water from the fridge. ‘So you found the letter I sent your dad?’
‘Yes, eventually.’ Harry gives him a short account of what’s happened.
Monti shakes his head. ‘So one murder led to another, and another, and on and on.’
Harry says, ‘Martin Nordlund was murdered then?’
‘Yes. I didn’t understand at first, but later I worked it out.’
‘Tell us what happened.’
‘It was a Friday, ninth of August, a cold winter afternoon, when things started happenin’. The day staff had gone home for the weekend, and we—the ones who lived in the cottages at Kramfors—were packin’ up when Mr Konrad came out and got hold of the chief mechanic, Billy Stokes. Billy was a black fella, like me, but smarter. He and Mr Konrad went to the airstrip, and went off in the he
licopter, over towards Cackleberry Mountain. When they came back I asked Billy what they’d been doin’, but he wouldn’t say.
‘Early the next morning, before dawn, Billy came to my room and shook me awake. They’d heard that Mr Martin’s plane had come down somewhere in the bush during the night, and we were to go out and try to find it. He had kit packed in the Land Cruiser and we got in and drove across the property to a fire trail up into the forest below Cackleberry Mountain, as far as we could go. Then we got out, pulled on two big backpacks, and set off on foot, into this real thick bush. I asked Billy how we were supposed to find the plane, and he showed me an instrument he was carrying, said it was a tracker would help us.
‘We struggled through that bush for a couple of hours, right across to the far side of the mountain, until Billy reckoned the signal was getting close. Not long after, we came on a steel box lying there on the forest floor, like it had just dropped out of the sky. It had big black letters on it: NDB. Billy opened it up and pulled a switch, then said the plane should be nearby. We searched for another twenty minutes till we found it, half buried in a gully. It was a hell of a mess, the propeller crushed, the wings ripped off. We took off our packs and Billy told me to wait. He got a Polaroid camera out of his pack and went down into the gully and took pictures. Then he came back for some tools to open the cockpit that was jammed closed. While he was gone I looked at the pictures he took—about a dozen of them—and I put one in me pocket as a souvenir.’
There is a sudden sound from outside the house of young children squealing. ‘Me kids,’ Monti says. ‘I started late. Had a lot of catchin’ up to do.
‘So anyway, Billy came back up from the plane carrying a smart leather briefcase. I asked if they were dead, and he said, “Oh, yeah. Nuthin’ we can do, mate,” but he was lookin’ kinda sick. He got on the radio and spoke to someone he called boss—I guess Mr Konrad. When he was done we went back to the steel box and Billy got to work with his tools, takin’ out parts and putting them in his backpack along with the camera and briefcase. Then he strapped the steel box with the rest of its equipment to the frame of my backpack and said we were goin’ back to the property. I tell you, my load was pretty damn heavy, and I was buggered by the time we reached the Cruiser.
‘Billy drove us straight to the vehicle workshop, where Mr Konrad was waiting. We unloaded our gear and Billy gave him the briefcase and the camera and photos. He looked pretty serious—well, he’d just lost his brother. But he said he was pleased with us, and would give us a big reward for our efforts. He was lookin’ at Billy when he said this, and I had the feelin’ they’d already talked about it. Then he said he would organise a proper rescue party and Billy would lead them to the plane. He wanted me to go back to work with the horses and not talk to anyone about what we’d done.
‘Later, when I was in the horse paddock, I saw the cars comin’ in from town with people wanting to join the search. While they were gathering I saw Billy drive the Cruiser out to the airstrip and work on a bit of equipment out there by the helicopter pad. And that’s when I remembered seeing that box with the letters NDB before—out there by the airstrip. But I didn’t know what they meant.
‘That evening I watched the search party return, tired as, and disappointed. I asked Billy what happened, and he said he hadn’t been able to find the plane. They’d try again the next day. That’s when I told Aunty Pearl all about it.’
A sound of splashing water, more children’s laughter, and Monti stops to look out of the window, calls out, ‘Sam, you go easy on your sister, hear me?’ He goes to the kitchen sink. ‘Reckon I’ll make a pot of tea. You folks?’
He talks while he busies himself. ‘I should tell you about me and Aunty Pearl. Back in ’65, when your dad found me at Moree station, he put me on the train to Sydney, where his folks were waiting for me. Imagine me, a kid from the bush, arriving at Central station, eh? I’d never seen such a huge building. Then Sydney, and later they took me to the beach. I’d never seen water bigger than a farm dam. I was a country boy, and I loved horses, so they said they knew people on a farm with horses would look after me. They bought me new clothes and we set off to Kramfors, and when we got there Mr Carl Nordlund, the big boss, welcomed me and handed me over to Aunty Pearl, who gave me a room in her place and became a mother to me, though I never forgot my real mother and aunties out west.
‘So, back to that Saturday, the day after Mr Martin’s plane crashed. The one person I could tell about what Billy and I had done was Aunty Pearl. I was pleased with myself because of Mr Konrad’s promise of a reward, and I said I’d share it with her, but she wasn’t happy at all. She knew Mr Konrad, see, and she didn’t trust him one bit. When I told her about the steel box on the airstrip she said Mr Martin once told her what it was when he bought it—a radio beacon, so the plane could find its way home at night or in bad weather.
‘Aunty Pearl told me she had a bad feeling about all this, and told me I had to leave Kramfors, right away, that night, and she would come too. We left when everyone had gone to bed, walked to Gloucester and caught a train in the early hours, ended up in Moree where Aunty Pearl had a friend, and we began a new life. It was Aunty who saw something in the paper a few years ago about the judge, Mr Belltree, a black fella like us, and she suggested that I contact him to tell him what had happened to Mr Martin Nordlund. The judge replied to my letter and we arranged to meet, as you know, but he never showed up and I heard that he’d died in an accident, just like Mr Martin.’
Jenny says, ‘Did you ever meet a man called Palfreyman, Monti? Terry Palfreyman?’
‘Yes, I knew him from Kramfors, an engineer working with Mr Martin on some kind of machinery. He got in touch with me again a couple of months ago. Miss Amber had shown him the photograph I got of the plane wreck, and he wanted to know what really happened. He tracked down an old friend of Aunty Pearl who was still in touch with her, and asked her to ask me if I would talk to him, and I agreed. We met in Moree one day and I told him the whole story. He got it all typed up proper and I signed it. I hoped it would bring Mr Martin some justice.’
Monti looks up suddenly and gets to his feet. ‘Aunty, you okay?’
The old woman is in the doorway, shuffling forward with the help of a stick. Monti helps her to a seat at the table.
‘My legs,’ she sighs. ‘My eyes, my ears, all crook.’ She looks at Abigail, asleep in Jenny’s arms. ‘What’s your baby’s name?’
‘She’s Abigail.’
‘Nice name.’ To Harry, ‘Did your dad tell you where he came from?’
Harry shakes his head. ‘He told me he was one of the stolen children, but he didn’t know where he came from or who his birth parents were.’
Pearl frowns, says, ‘I knew your father.’
‘Did you?’
‘Only for a little while, Harry. Too little a while—four short months. He was my son.’
Harry stares at her in astonishment, then at Monti, wondering if she’s rambling, but Monti nods. ‘It’s the truth, mate.’
Harry looks again at Pearl, her weather-beaten face, and catches a look in her eyes—sharp, intelligent—he hasn’t noticed before. ‘Tell me,’ he says.
‘My folks were Worimi people from around Gloucester, maybe Yoongooar, the original owners. My dad worked as a stockman for the first Nordlund settler, Mr Axel, and saw them building Kramfors Homestead and attended the church service when Queen Victoria died. When I was old enough I served as a housemaid to the Nordlunds, so I was there when Mr Carl, Mr Axel’s son, returned from the war against the Japanese. He was a big hero, tall and strong. I was sixteen, a pretty girl so I was told, and Mr Carl took a fancy to me. I fell pregnant, a familiar story in them days. Mr Axel and the rest of the family knew, I think, especially when the baby, your dad, arrived and was so pale skinned.
‘While I was pregnant, Mr Carl became engaged to his first wife, Hannah, a young beauty from Sydney society, and I suppose his dad, Mr Axel, wanted to avoid any complications. His wi
fe, Mrs Greta, had a nephew and his wife living in Sydney—the Belltrees—who couldn’t have children but wanted one, and he decided that they should adopt my baby Danny. I never saw him again, and he never knew I existed.
‘When Mr Carl died in 2001 he had three other sons—Martin and Bernard by his first wife, and Konrad by his second. Before he died he told Martin that he had an elder brother, and told him the story. He said he felt guilty about how Danny and I were treated, and asked Martin to make amends, if he could. Martin took over the family businesses, and in the following year he decided to carry out his father’s wish. That August he told me what he had decided to do. He was going to see his lawyer in Sydney and they would draw up a plan where Danny and I would be recognised as full members of the Nordlund family, and he and Danny, as the senior brothers, would jointly have control of the family businesses. When they had the details arranged, he would speak to his brothers and explain what he had decided.
‘And that was why they killed him, Konrad and Bernard. After his plane disappeared there was no record of what he had planned. When Monti came and told me what he and Billy had discovered in the forest I knew that we were in great danger, and I told him we had to leave. Later I heard that Billy died soon afterwards in another “accident”.’
The old lady turns to the child sleeping in Jenny’s lap. ‘So you are my grandson, Harry, and Abigail is my great-granddaughter. From what I hear, you brought down God’s vengeance on the heads of the Nordlund family. You made good for your father.’
She reaches out and takes Harry’s hand. Jenny sees him take a deep breath and then relax, as if for the first time in years.
‘And now I am very tired,’ the old lady says. ‘We hope you will stay with us tonight, and we can talk more.’
She gets stiffly to her feet, and Monti helps her to the door. When he returns he sticks his hand out to Harry. ‘Well, congratulations, mate. I guess that makes you the head of the Nordlunds now.’
Slaughter Park Page 27