Man at the Window

by Robert Jeffreys

  ‘Only the state can execute a person.’

  ‘No, an individual executes a person, as directed by a judge, as directed by twelve members of a jury.’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘No. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re meeting at seven, this evening.’

  ‘I can’t come,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘It won’t get back to the school, hence, not back to your police department.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘I don’t. I’ve been told that will be the case. I was asked to invite you. It’s not my idea. And I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ She frowned.

  ‘Who’s asking me then?’

  ‘Sheppard, probably.’

  ‘I can’t come.’

  ‘I said you wouldn’t,’ she continued with a wry smile, ‘they got you into line, didn’t they? I knew you’d be no match for them.’

  ‘Who?’ Cardilini asked gruffly, knowing full well she was right.

  ‘The old boys, the establishment.’ Mrs Lockheed turned in disgust and walked to the pavement.

  ‘Does Robinson know what really happened?’ Cardilini called after her. She shrugged her shoulders without turning and continued walking.

  Ashfield

  7.10 p.m. Tuesday, 10th November 1965

  Cardilini parked 200 yards past the church. He recognised Sheppard’s Chevy Impala. He stood looking at the rectory. Without success, he’d repeatedly told himself that he couldn’t attend the meeting because the risk was too great. He tapped on the door. O’Reilly opened it, nodded a greeting, and gestured him in.

  ‘What did I say?’ Sheppard announced. ‘I said you’d come, a real bloodhound. That’s your seat.’ Sheppard pointed to a dining chair in front of the kitchen door.

  Cardilini looked to the chair, then around the room. The Doneys sat on a sofa to the right of his chair. Neither met his gaze. Mrs Lockheed and Mrs Masters sat in single chairs next along. O’Reilly stood by the front door and Sheppard stood in the centre of the room. Mrs Sheppard wasn’t there, Cardilini noted, and smiled at the fact.

  ‘Mrs Lockheed,’ Cardilini said as he went to his chair.

  Sheppard and O’Reilly took the remaining chairs.

  All eyes followed Cardilini as he sat and Sheppard immediately addressed him. ‘Mrs Lockheed said you kept asking about how Edmund died? We don’t care how he died.’

  O’Reilly coughed.

  ‘Apart from O’Reilly, none of us are complaining. Much more important is how do we make sure no one else dies because of that ratbag? Now you mentioned to me that revealing the truth about Edmund, and having the school recognise it, is the best way to support any other boys. Right?’ Cardilini nodded. ‘So that’s what we intend to do. Any questions?’

  Cardilini looked around to the group. ‘Do any of the boys at St Nicholas know you’re doing this?’

  ‘You mean, Carmody? No. Word of mouth only to the people here. We know the spot you’re in,’ Sheppard assured Cardilini.

  Cardilini turned to Father O’Reilly. ‘Surely the father has divided loyalties?’

  ‘Myself and Doney had a chat to him about our boys’ deaths,’ Sheppard said, ‘and he agrees with us now.’ Father O’Reilly nodded. ‘But we still have a few people to convince,’ Sheppard finished.

  ‘Braun?’

  ‘Yeah, Braun, but he’s not the power house.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The school board, an ex-judge, your bosses and a cohort of old boys.’

  Cardilini turned from face to face. ‘Do they control Braun?’ he asked.

  ‘They employ him,’ Sheppard answered.

  ‘Robinson and I’m sure Deputy Commissioner Warren know the punishment of boys standing with a rifle above their heads,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘We all do. Edmund’s additions are what we need to convince them of. Now,’ Sheppard asked, ‘you’re the copper, what do we have to do to get your bosses sitting up and paying attention?’

  ‘The coroner suspects your two boys’ deaths to be suicide also,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘News to me. What about you, Doney?’ Sheppard asked.

  ‘News to me,’ Doney stated.

  ‘You could start with that, but leave my name out of it,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘Okay. We will. What else?’ Sheppard asked.

  ‘Get Braun to tell you the names of the boys who have complained about Edmund and speak to them,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘Thought of that. Braun wouldn’t do that unless the board, the old boys, told him too. What else?’

  ‘Can I get a cup of tea?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Get Robinson, Warren and whoever is in the power house to listen to John Lockheed. He convinced his mother,’ Cardilini said with a look to Mrs Lockheed.

  ‘Not his father,’ Mrs Lockheed said.

  ‘I know Robinson, he’s no fool. He’ll know the truth when he sees it,’ Cardilini stated.

  ‘Anything else?’ Sheppard asked.

  ‘Carmody would know the other boys who complained,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘We’re not going to deal with him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We don’t understand what he’s trying to do,’ Sheppard answered.

  ‘Siding with Braun. If you ask me,’ Doney said.

  ‘He thinks he’s protecting the identity of whoever shot Edmund. Isn’t that so, Mrs Lockheed?’ Cardilini asked.

  She turned aside.

  Sheppard asked. ‘Have you got anything else to persuade Robinson and Warren?’

  ‘Convince the officers who made the initial reports on your boys’ deaths to tell Robinson and Warren what they really believe,’ Cardilini said.

  ‘What do they really believe?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘Why didn’t they write that then?’

  Cardilini felt he knew the answer for himself: the overwhelming realisation of your boy taking his own life was too terrible to think about. If a constable could avoid plunging the parents into that hell by simply writing ‘accidental’ he might just do that. Cardilini wondered if he would. Speculating on suicide and consequently looking for physical evidence to support it wouldn’t serve anyone. And if you discovered the boys staged their deaths to look like accidents, why betray that young man’s last desperate attempt to save his parents from the agony he was suffering?

  ‘No positive proof and they won’t speculate when writing reports,’ Cardilini answered. ‘That’s for the coroner to do.’

  ‘Okay, we can do all that,’ Sheppard concluded.

  ‘That could take forever. We don’t have that much time,’ Mrs Lockheed said. Frightened faces turned to her.

  ‘Cardilini,’ Sheppard prompted when no one spoke.

  ‘Bring Edmund’s killer to justice,’ Cardilini offered.

  ‘Oh you stupid man,’ Mrs Lockheed blurted.

  Sheppard stood. ‘Right, how about that cup of tea? We’ll just smoke outside,’ he said as he nodded sharply to Cardilini and Doney.

  ‘Off you go, boys. Enjoy yourselves,’ Mrs Lockheed called to them as they left.

  ***

  The rectory had flowerbeds bordering the buildings. Six pencil pines standing as upright sentinels emitted a sharp, sappy scent. A solitary gum tree grew in the middle of a drying lawn. Its branches, free of decorum, twisted one way then another, centuries from the rigour of the pencil pines. At night the branches were dark silhouettes against the points of light gathering millions of miles away. Cardilini thought the gum tree’s branches thrown high and awkward as if in horror reflected what the Sheppards, Doneys and Masters were going through. He wondered how they were coping.

  Doney leant against the trunk of the gum and commenced rolling a cigarette. Sheppard took a cigarette from Cardilini’s o
ffered packet.

  ‘I know Senior Constable Saunders had his suspicions,’ Sheppard said. ‘He played footy with Colin.’

  Cardilini inhaled deeply, he wanted to be home with Paul, he wanted to put his arms around him and never let him go. But Paul was working.

  ‘I know what Peter did,’ Doney replied hollowly.

  Sheppard looked to the ground and pushed some leaves aside with his shoe. Cardilini’s eyes wandered to the rectory windows glowing gold, framed by shadow. He could see Father O’Reilly standing surrounded by the three women, Mrs Lockheed laying down the law and Father O’Reilly slowly nodding.

  After a pause Cardilini said, ‘Mrs Lockheed told me she was shut out from the St Nicholas community.’

  ‘That was shameful. We didn’t help, did we, Doney?’

  Doney sighed.

  ‘We just couldn’t go there at the time. We didn’t want to believe her or John. Then when the school said it was all part of a conspiracy to discredit Edmund for demanding high standards, we jumped at it like drowning men. I’m sure you would do the same, Cardilini.’

  Cardilini turned his eyes from the window to the sky and wondered if Paul would be outside watching the movie at the drive-in or helping the girls in the cafe.

  ‘Mrs Lockheed can say what she likes, when she likes, as far as I’m concerned,’ Sheppard said watching her through the window.

  ‘Yep,’ Cardilini added after a pause.

  The men watched the cigarette smoke push at the night then disperse as tiny tendrils.

  ‘We had a hell of a dog problem a few years back,’ Sheppard drawled. The others listened without looking. ‘It was during lambing. Town dogs and a couple of strays would hunt in packs. Not for food. They would run down a mob of ewes and their lambs. Some of the lambs would run with their mothers, others stood bleating, too terrified or too young to know what to do. The dogs would latch on to the weakest ones first, crushing them in their jaws several times until blood filled their mouths, then they would rush to the next. Sometimes two dogs went at a lamb until it was decapitated or torn in two, then onto the next, leaving broken, squealing lambs in their wake. This would continue until no lambs were left or the dogs started on the ewes. The ewes, heavy with mothering, terrified out of their minds, would be latched upon by a mob. The head, the throat, the downy underbellies were torn at by as many as ten dogs until, blood-sated, the dogs would bound to the next.’

  Cardilini wondered where Sheppard was going with this but felt content to stand, take in the night, and listen.

  Sheppard continued, ‘In one attack I lost twenty-two lambs and three ewes. That night, six dogs were spotted trotting along one of the roads. Not dingoes, town dogs: mongrels, a big shaggy black bastard leading them. A bunch of farmers had lost lambs. It was a killing spree and the dogs were expert. When we got to the paddock, lambs and ewes in all stages of dying were scattered bloody across the field under the most glorious night sky. Some ewes, dragging their intestines, staggered bleating through the carnage, others pushed and nosed at limp corpses. One lamb, missing a hind leg, stumbled and fell screaming as if it was still being torn at. I shot two ewes and twelve lambs that night.’ He paused. ‘We’re not sentimental men, are we, Doney?’

  Doney slid down the trunk and squatted, peering at the ground while Sheppard looked into the far distance. ‘We do what has to be done, we accept it like drought or fire. But town dogs? Once the owners knew what had happened they would put the dogs down. Or that’s what we thought. I stood in front of the owner of the shaggy black dog. He said it was some fancy German breed that were used as police dogs. We went around the back and that bastard dog sat as sweet as could be, a real pet. No, he said, it couldn’t have been his dog. It turned out it couldn’t have been any town dog. They were pets.

  ‘We demanded a full council meeting. Senior Constable Saunders, farmers, owners, anyone who wanted a tyre to kick was there. Plenty of screaming, yelling and abuse, a real old free-for-all, even a couple of fights in the car park, one of them had nothing to do with the dogs.

  ‘One skinny mongrel from the pound was offered up to be shot. Only trouble was, it was locked up the night the mob formed. That didn’t seem to trouble anyone though, so the dogcatcher shot the poor mongrel later. Case closed. Stupid farmers don’t know the difference between town dogs and dingoes. Shit, we thought. We are bloody stupid. So we decided to wise up. A dozen of us, all good shots, got together.’

  The jury, twelve angry farmers, thought Cardilini.

  ‘One farm next to mine hadn’t been attacked. Smart old bugger kept his lambs in the house paddock. But that night he agreed to put them in a paddock adjoining the road from town. And to save any sweet dog the trouble of climbing through a fence, the gate facing the road was left open and a hundred yards from that, on top of a hill, he put his flock. It was a full moon, the first since the last attack, the sheep stood out like mushrooms on the darker ground: ready tucker.

  ‘We waited in the scrub along the fence, upwind of the road. We didn’t expect anything but we felt good, we were doing something. The old fella, whose sheep they were, said he would start the shooting and he didn’t want any dogs getting within fifty yards of his sheep. The previous attacks were around midnight. We chatted until ten and then lay still, no smoking. You get a funny feeling, lying there, rifle out in front of you, knowing five yards either side, someone you know well, was doing the same thing. You get to looking at the sky, glorious and heartless. You smell the ground, feel the insects, hear the insects, hear a mopoke, hear it again. Then you hear a chatter, almost like school kids, a single smoky sound followed by others that were high pitched. Dogs. You get murderous, you get hungry to kill, kill the smug complacence that allows dogs to slaughter at will. The night became stiller. I’m sure we all felt it. I hardly breathed, so badly I wanted those dogs in my sights. I was nervous as hell, thinking they might just turn down the road to my place, or turn around or go somewhere else. I prayed. I prayed to someone I don’t believe in to deliver those bastards to me; maybe we all did.

  ‘I couldn’t see it but the bloke closest to the gate said later, probably while I was praying, that the big shaggy dog stopped and looked towards the open gate. The dog stood stock still, he said, sniffing and straining his eyes against the night. The other dogs became impatient. The black one gave a growl, deep and menacing, and the other dogs settled. Then a stupid-looking dog, that seemed to have his head on sideways, started running to the sheep. He was silent, so silent, no bark, nothing. Then they all took off, silent, dark streaks. They were thirty yards from me when the first shot rang out, then it was Guy Fawkes Night, but deafening, you couldn’t aim, not like roos that just stand there, or rabbits in a spotlight, these were ghosts. I just fired like mad aiming a foot above the ground where their torso would be. The night became all sound. We were being battered by the sound of rifles, deafening, echoing, smacking our ears, then another sound, an almost human sound, a desolate howling that pulled at your insides. Did I stop at this? No, none of us did. We became the silent pack, full of bloodlust but we weren’t going to be sated so easily.

  ‘Then a voice broke the spell, the old farmer whose sheep they were, was walking our line yelling at us to stop, he wanted to get to his sheep without being shot. The gunshots ceased. The silence was deafening. Then we heard dogs screaming to the heavens, ten of them, as our lambs must have done. We walked across to the mongrels that were flipping around, letting out a hell of a racket, some biting at their wounds and thrashing about. It was hard work finishing them off, they knew what was happening and wanted no part of it. A few suddenly became house pets and crawled on shattered legs to the closest farmer’s feet. We wandered the paddock whistling and calling, figuring a town dog would respond to that out of habit, one did. The bloke who shot him said that was nearly as hard as having to shoot his own sheep. When everything was silent again we closed the gate, leaving the corpses there. A coupl
e must have got away. One even ended up at the vet days later because the owner said the dog had been crawling scratching his backside on the ground. He had a twenty-two calibre bullet up his backside, must have been at some distance when the dog was running away. I knew the farmer and his .22 Hornet. Next morning we piled the corpses up in a ute, drove into town and laid them out on the lawn in front of the council building.’

  Sheppard lit a cigarette from the one he had been smoking and pushed the old butt into the ground below the leaf litter. ‘There’s a lot of bitterness still around after that day. But we have nowhere near the problem we had.’

  Doney got up and walked to the house.

  A couple of times during Sheppard’s story, two of the women had come to the door and then retreated.

  ‘Is that why Edmund had to die?’ Cardilini asked.

  ‘Edmund,’ Sheppard muttered, ‘Jesus, you go on.’

  ‘Did you set a trap for Edmund, to get him to the window?’

  Sheppard started to the house. ‘I’m getting that cup of tea. Thanks for your advice. I think we’ll speak to the constables.’ As an afterthought he said over his shoulder, ‘You’re welcome to come in if you want.’

  Cardilini felt anger rising in him. ‘You’re no better than a murdering dog.’

  Sheppard stood still, made a decision then turned, and walked back to Cardilini. Cardilini tensed for a fight, but before Cardilini saw it coming Sheppard’s fist hit him squarely on the side of his jaw. Light like a camera going off flashed before his eyes. He felt his knees hit the ground. He couldn’t hear or see anything but the flashing light. When he did open his eyes, Sheppard was squatting beside him, prodding his shoulder saying, ‘Come on man, come on man, I didn’t hit you that hard.’

  Cardilini pushed himself into a sitting position. His head spun, he tried to steady it by placing his hands to his face. It didn’t help. Sheppard was pulling at his shoulder.

  ‘Stand up man. You’ll feel better.’ With Sheppard’s help, Cardilini got to his feet. He tried turning his head slightly to ease the throbbing. ‘You went down like a sack of spuds. I thought you coppers were supposed to be tough,’ Sheppard admonished. ‘Come on inside we’ll say you had a turn and get some ice on your face.’ He was smiling, ‘You can have a crack at me later when you’re feeling better if you like. Can you walk?’