Dark Country (Dungirri)

by Parry, Bronwyn

  ‘Where’s the victim?’

  The paramedic nodded towards the police cars at the other end of the camping ground. ‘In the bush over there. He definitely doesn’t need us.’

  ‘But you’re hanging around anyway?’

  The guy shrugged. ‘It’s pretty gruesome. Someone might faint or suffer from shock.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Jo did.’ He waved a hand towards two people in khaki shirts and trousers, leaning on the bonnet of a National Parks vehicle. ‘Jo Lockwood. She’s a bit shook up, but she doesn’t need us, either. Jo’s tougher than she looks.’

  Jo would be the slim one with the light brown hair held back in a ponytail. Nick couldn’t see the woman’s face, but from her hands-in-pockets, straight-backed stance, Jo Lockwood clearly wasn’t falling apart in hysterics. That would make his job of interviewing her a hell of a lot easier.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll talk to her after I’ve seen what she found.’

  What she’d found, he discovered when he followed the local constable through the scrub to the scene, was enough to give most people nightmares for months.

  The smells of death – piss, shit and blood – turned Nick’s stomach, but he quelled the response automatically. Never show weakness. That had been life’s first lesson growing up on the docks of Newcastle, and kids who didn’t learn it early didn’t get to grow up.

  The constable stayed to one side, staring avidly at the body. ‘Must be a sick bloody psycho, to have done that,’ he said.

  Nick crouched and, without touching a thing, surveyed the body. Facts. Evidence. That’s what he needed to focus on. A rope tied tightly as a ligature above the amputated hand; another above a mangled and bloody foot. A major wound to the other knee, covered in blood, dirt and grit. The gunshot to the head probably the final of many other cuts and injuries.

  The sustained violence and torture of this death – the patterns of blood flow suggested that the injuries were ante-mortem – was among the worst of the innumerable violent crimes he’d seen.

  ‘No,’ he mused, as much to himself as to the constable. ‘Not a psycho. This guy’s big, and he fought. It would have taken more than one man to restrain him.’

  ‘From the looks of the camping-ground damage, there were a few crims here last night,’ the constable said. ‘And he’s got tattoos. Must be some sort of gang thing. You’d know about that, wouldn’t you, Sarge?’

  Another one who’d heard the rumours. The question might have been merely curious, but the sly grin suggested insolence.

  Nick kept his expression carefully neutral and muttered a non-committal ‘Hmm.’ Yes, he knew about gangs. Street gangs, bikie gangs, criminal mobs. The possibility of a gang connection in this youth’s death was on his rapidly growing list but, far more than most cops, he knew there was no such simplistic crime as a ‘gang thing’. He knew the complexities, the constantly shifting dynamics of power and personalities, of opportunity and risk, of adrenaline and testosterone and fear.

  No, tattoos on the man’s arms – which weren’t any gang tattoos he was familiar with – didn’t amount to evidence of an organised gang. If there were even any such thing out here in the north-west of New South Wales.

  He stood, and glanced at the constable’s name tag. Harrison. A Senior Constable. Young, confident to the point of cocksure; the know-it-all type who probably didn’t like taking orders. Too bad, because Nick would be giving plenty of them.

  ‘This area needs to be taped off, Harrison. From the grassed area to past here. I called the SOCOs in when you first reported in, and they’re on their way from Inverell. They’re contacting the forensic pathologist.’

  ‘Don’t expect one to come in person, Sarge. We’re too far from Newcastle.’

  Eight or more hours’ drive, Nick knew. Too far from city resources … but not far enough from his memories. Not that Newcastle had a monopoly on bad memories. He’d collected more than enough of them, all over the map, during his career. The poor dead bastard in front of him was just another drop in the ocean. Just one more crime that might, or might not, be solved.

  ‘Have you got an ID on him? Or found his car?’ he asked Harrison.

  ‘No. None of us know him. He’s not local. SOCOs will search his pockets for ID.’

  Nick nodded, but he doubted they’d find anything useful. And judging by the burns on the remaining hand, identifiable fingerprints would be almost impossible to obtain.

  He also doubted they’d find a car. If the guy had driven his own car, the assailants had probably taken it, could be a few hundred kilometres away by now.

  He couldn’t learn much more from the victim until after the crime-scene officers arrived, so he would have to start with the nearest thing he had to a witness.

  ‘The National Parks officer who found him – do you know her?’ he asked.

  ‘Jo? She’s a newcomer to Goodabri. Setting up things for the new park. She’s the quiet type, doesn’t socialise much. Seems to work hard enough though.’

  Nick had taken a detour through Goodabri on his way to Strathnairn on Sunday, scoping a fraction of the large region covered by the police command. The town was thirty kilometres off the main road and consisted of fifty or so scattered houses, a police cottage, a small primary school, a row of empty shop buildings in the main street and a run-down pub. Not a thriving community, and presumably reliant on the larger Strathnairn, seventy kilometres away.

  A woman who kept to herself in a small community … He mentally filed that piece of information. Jo Lockwood turned as he walked towards her across the grass, assessing him in the same kind of way he instinctively assessed her during those few moments.

  She’s the quiet type … Her emotions tightly leashed behind her pale face and closed expression, she shook his hand with a firm grasp when he introduced himself, and the constable’s description underwent a swift revision in Nick’s mind. Quiet perhaps, but from reserve, not shyness.

  The calloused hand briefly in his, her lean, fit frame and her lightly tanned skin confirmed the ‘seems to work hard’ part of Harrison’s description.

  Despite her control, the haunting determination in her hazel eyes held his attention. Shock, yes – she still fought to keep it from overwhelming her. But she knew she could. He’d seen that same determination in the eyes of too many colleagues over the years – people who’d seen incomprehensible death, and survived it.

  He guessed she’d be in her early thirties, but those eyes were older. No makeup, no artifice, nothing pretty in her face, only a stunning, stark beauty he found it hard to look away from.

  Her colleague stepped forward and extended his hand. ‘I’m Malcolm Stewart, senior ranger for the Strathnairn National Parks division. Do you really need to interview Jo now? She’s had a tough morning.’

  Before Nick could answer, Jo threw her boss a glance that mixed affection with slight exasperation. ‘I don’t need mollycoddling, Mal. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can all get on with our jobs. I presume you’ll want this part of the park closed, at least for today, Detective?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps you could liaise with the uniformed police, Mr Stewart, while I ask Ms Lockwood a few questions?’

  ‘It’s Doctor Lockwood,’ Stewart corrected him. ‘Doctor Joanna Lockwood. She has a PhD.’

  With a gentle hand on Stewart’s arm, Jo said, ‘It’s just a piece of paper, Mal. The title is irrelevant.’

  Irrelevant? Not in Nick’s estimation. He added intelligence and perseverance to his impressions of capability and control.

  For all the cool calmness of her manner, the late morning was already hot, and she’d been standing around waiting for a couple of hours. Nick dragged his gaze away from a trickle of sweat running down her neck and disappearing below her open collar.

  ‘Can we find somewhere in the shade to talk?’ he asked her.

  She nodded. ‘There’s a table down by the river. I don’t think we’d be disturbing any evidence there.’

&nb
sp; She slung a small backpack over her shoulder and led the way, skirting around the edge of the camping ground, along a thick line of trees and rough undergrowth that obscured the river from view. He could hear it – water running over rocks – but only caught glimpses now and then. So he looked, instead, at the open area of the camping ground. He would go over it closely later, but for now he concentrated on getting the general layout, the context in which the crimes had occurred. Even from this distance, the damage was obvious.

  ‘They sure made a mess. I don’t suppose you collect names, addresses or car registrations for visitors?’

  ‘Names and postcodes sometimes – when they fill in a form. But that’s hit and miss.’ She turned on to a path through a break in the trees, into a clearing beside the water’s edge. ‘However, I can tell you that there were at least two vehicles here. And two dogs.’

  Hope sparked in him. ‘You saw them?’

  ‘No. I was only here yesterday morning, and it was after that. The tyre tracks are there, though, and dog tracks and faeces beside where they were parked.’ She rested her backpack on the wooden picnic table and drew out a camera. ‘I have photos. I was compiling evidence for a long list of offences – criminal damage, bringing dogs and chainsaws into a national park, lighting a camp fire during a total fire ban – but I guess …’ She sat down abruptly on the wooden bench, her bitter, somewhat shaky laugh a small crack in her control. ‘Murder pretty much trumps all of those.’

  ‘It would. If the people who did the vandalism committed the murder.’ Avoiding a lump of bird shit on the seat, he sat opposite her, taking the camera she offered and flicking through the images while keeping half his attention on her. It was incongruous, sitting in such a cool, restful spot under the trees, the river winding its way over rocks less than ten metres away, when thirty metres behind him havoc had reigned in the night.

  She stared at the table, circling a knot in the timber with her fingertip. Short, unpainted fingernails, he noticed. And tanned wrists and hands that, although small, were corded with lean muscle.

  After a few moments of silence, she looked up at him and said, ‘If it wasn’t them, then the timing would have had to be close.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘When I arrived this morning, the dog faeces were still moist. Only a few hours old. And the …’ she steadied her voice and continued, ‘the victim – there was no sign of rigor. And few insects.’

  She had all his attention now. He considered her argument, and explored possible holes in it. ‘The dogs might belong to the murderer.’

  ‘The vehicle the dogs were tied up beside is the same one that rammed down the information board. There’s a distinctive tyre track.’

  ‘You’re very observant.’

  ‘I’m a scientist.’

  She said it simply, as though it explained everything. Which, he supposed, it did. Scientists relied on logical processes and evidence – just as he did.

  But he also relied on gut, on the sense of what fitted and what didn’t fit, on his experience of patterns of behaviours that might not seem rational but could all too easily be the caustic results of mixing personalities, power and passions.

  With the niggling certainty that the elements of this crime scene didn’t all fit neatly together, he flicked through the images on the camera one more time. She had taken some broader context shots as well as detailed close-ups, and despite the small screen, in between her photos and the general view of the destruction he’d seen he could construct a fair picture of some of the night’s events.

  He handed the camera back to her. ‘Can I get copies of those images, today?’

  ‘Of course.’ She opened the side of the camera, slid out the memory card and passed it to him. ‘Take the card. I’ve got spares.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He waved a hand at the camping ground behind them. ‘This kind of vandalism – does it happen often?’

  ‘It happens sometimes. A mob of louts, full of beer and testosterone, with no respect for others’ property, having what they’d call “fun”. There’s something about the isolation and the wilderness that can bring out the Neanderthal. But—’

  She stopped and, curious about her thought processes, he prompted her, ‘But?’

  ‘It’s just … Look, I’m no detective or psychologist, but I’ve been going over it these past couple of hours and it seems to me that the murder doesn’t fit the same behavioural pattern. The vandalism is … well, if we were talking about animal behaviour, I’d call it marking a territory. I suppose it’s the hoon version of it – refuting authority and order and claiming the space.’

  ‘But you think the murder is different.’

  ‘Yes. Possibly. It’s intense, over a period of time. Focused on a person, not property. And I know that cruelty can be about power – it usually is – and vandalism also is, but vandalism is general, and cruelty … well, this seems more personal, more emotional. Anger, or hatred or punishment.’

  He stared out over the water, flowing along the path it had carved out over millennia, and considered her thoughts. She’d put her finger on what was unsettling him: the two crimes didn’t naturally evolve from one into the other. If they had been perpetrated by the same people, then something must have happened to shift the mood. Something, or someone.

  His instinct guessed someone. Someone who’d manipulated the restless mob’s energy and adrenaline, turned it, focused it on a target and let it loose.

  He’d seen it happen before, countless times. And he knew exactly how it was done, because he’d been that kind of ruthless, manipulative bastard himself, more than once.

  Bronwyn Parry grew up surrounded by books, with a fascination for places, people and their stories. She has worked in a range of management and educational roles in Australian universities.

  In July 2007 Bronwyn was honoured to win a prestigious Golden Heart Award from the Romance Writers of America for the romantic suspense manuscript which became her first book, As Darkness Falls. Dark Country was her second novel followed by Dead Heat.

  Bronwyn’s active interest in fiction and its readership is reflected in her PhD research into online communities of romance genre readers and writers, and she is passionate about the richness, diversity and value of commercial fiction. Bronwyn lives on about forty hectares of beautiful bushland in the New England tablelands, with her husband and two energetic border collies, and loves to travel in Australia’s wild places.

  Visit bronwynparry.com