Marble Bar

by Robert Schofield

  ‘He’s small, skinny. Got a very round head.’

  The road curved left around the hotel and playing fields. ‘I recognise this,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Are we heading out of town now? I don’t want to get stuck on the open road with these guys up my arse.’

  ‘Take the next left,’ said Ford. ‘That’ll take us back past the police station. Let’s see if these guys are embarrassed at following us on a complete lap of the town.’

  Once they had passed the police station, Ford gave Kavanagh a series of directions through residential streets.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she said.

  ‘To my house. If you want to lose them, you won’t do it in this little hatchback.’

  ‘I’m not swapping cars just so you’ve got more leg room.’

  ‘Trust me. I need to pick up Grace so we need to lose these guys. I need my car.’

  She turned the corner into his street. His LandCruiser was still in the driveway next to Harding’s ute. He looked for a police car but the street was clear. As Kavanagh swung into the drive, they both turned their heads up the street. The Nissan rounded the corner and as soon as the driver saw them park, he gunned the engine and accelerated past them. Both driver and passenger made a vain attempt not to show their faces but they were too late; Ford had caught a glimpse of them.The passenger was Asian, his features flat and his skin pock-marked, his straight black hair in a bowl cut that accentuated the roundness of his head. The driver was big, his skin dark, his hair cropped short. Ford looked at Kavanagh and she nodded.

  ‘Chinese,’ she said. ‘Don’t know about the driver.’

  ‘Black maybe, all muscle. That’s all I got. We’d better get moving before they come around again.’

  Ford was around the back of the house by the time Kavanagh had the keys out of the ignition. She grabbed her backpack and followed him, checking up and down the street, and found him staring at the new hasp and padlock that had been fixed to the back door. There was black and yellow hazard tape across the frame and a sign indicating it was a police line.

  ‘Well,’ said Kavanagh, ‘what did you expect? They’ve sealed the place until they can get forensics up from Perth.’

  Ford twisted the padlock to test the strength of the hasp and the new screws driven into the door frame. ‘My spare keys are in there,’ he said.

  ‘Anything else you need from the house?’ asked Kavanagh.

  ‘Everything,’ said Ford. ‘At the moment all I’ve got is the clothes I’m standing in. Eley took my phone, my wallet, my keys.’

  Kavanagh dug into the side pocket of her leather jacket, then tossed a bunch of keys to him. She took his phone and wallet out of her inside pocket and held them in her outstretched palm. Ford raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I persuaded Cupcake to release them to me,’ she said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I called him a good boy and gave him a biscuit.’

  Ford back-tracked towards the driveway and flipped the locks on the LandCruiser, then hauled himself into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Kavanagh strolled up behind him, and swung open the passenger door. She threw her backpack in the footwell, took off her red leather jacket, folded it carefully and laid it on the bench seat between them. She then took her place, plucking at the sleeves of her shirt where wet patches had spread from under her arms. Ford leaned across her and opened the glove box. He took out a roll of oiled canvas bound in a leather strap and laid it on the seat on top of her jacket. He undid it and put the pistol on the dashboard in front of Kavanagh. ‘You’d better take this,’ he said.

  She thought for a few moments before picking it up. It was a heavy black automatic with a short barrel and a star embossed on the grip.

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You really are paranoid.’

  She pulled back the slide and peered into the chamber, then released the clip and counted the rounds.

  ‘There’s another clip in the glove box and some sort of webbing shoulder holster that I could never quite work out how to wear,’ said Ford.

  ‘This is a Makarov,’ she said. ‘Do I want to know where you got it?’

  ‘You know where I got it.’

  ‘If I can’t get a gun on a plane, how did you?’

  ‘I had it delivered,’ said Ford, ‘by special motorcycle courier. One of our old friends from Kalgoorlie.’

  ‘Anyone else know you’ve got this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re lucky Eley was too dumb to search your car or impound it,’ she said, ‘or nothing I could’ve done would’ve got you out of that station.’

  She banged the clip back in the pistol, examined the safety, and put it under the seat between her feet. ‘Alright,’ she said, ‘let’s see where those two clowns have got to.’

  Ford reversed out of the driveway. The Nissan was parked a hundred metres away, facing them. Kavanagh smiled. ‘You were telling me you had a way to lose them,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you show me?’

  FIVE

  By the time they reached the end of the street the Nissan had turned around to follow them, keeping a hundred metres back but staying in plain sight.

  ‘They don’t seem to worry about being seen,’ Ford said. ‘You think they had something to do with Harding?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I think whoever killed him wasn’t too fussed about leaving evidence.’

  ‘You mean that cigarette?’

  ‘I didn’t know about that. Constable Cupcake said there was physical evidence all over your house. I thought he meant fingerprints. He said the forensics would have plenty to work with.’

  ‘There was a cigarette butt left burning on the kitchen table.’

  ‘Does Harding smoke?’ she said. ‘I mean, did he used to?’

  ‘No. I do, but it wasn’t my brand. It was a Marlboro. I saw the writing around the filter.’

  ‘I didn’t think anyone smoked those lung-busters anymore.’

  ‘It’s more than that. Australian smokes don’t have branding on them now. New plain-packaging laws. Whoever left that cigarette bought the packet overseas.’

  ‘And left his DNA all over it.’

  ‘Do we need forensic evidence to point us to the culprit? Surely you’ve got enough to stop the guys behind us?’

  ‘You think I should apprehend them using an illegal handgun previously used in an armed robbery? I think I’ll wait for forensics and armed back-up.’

  Ford turned on to Newman Drive and the houses petered out as the road started climbing uphill.

  ‘Where are we headed?’ asked Kavanagh.

  ‘We’re going to lose these guys, then go pick up my daughter.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘With neighbours. A sleepover with one of her little mates.’

  ‘Does she do that every time you’re on the night shift?’

  ‘Just this week. I normally work the day shift and she’s at pre-primary, then afterschool care.’

  ‘Seems a bit hard on her.’

  Ford shook his head. ‘It’s easier here than you’d think. You ever tried to find decent out-of-school care in Perth?’ Kavanagh looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘We’re both better off up here, at least in the short term,’ he said. ‘The company looks after us, there’s a decent school and out-of-school care, and a network of families that shuttle one another’s kids around.’

  ‘Surely you’d be better off in your own home?’

  Ford sighed. ‘Grace and I lived in her mother’s house in Shenton Park for six months, until the end of the enquiry and the police told me I was no longer a person of interest. It didn’t feel like a home to either of us. It was difficult for Grace, her mother leaving both of us. Took her a while to get used to only having me, thinking her mother didn’t love her, and I felt like a trespasser among all Diane’s things. The place felt spooky, if it’s possible to be haunted by the absence of a living person. When this job in Newman came up, it didn’t feel like we were leaving much behind.’

&nbs
p; ‘I didn’t think you needed to work. I thought you had that trust fund.’

  ‘We did, but some lawyers showed up. They’d been appointed by the receivers chasing McCann’s money. They claimed there were some bullshit irregularities with the trust fund that Diane had made him set up for Grace. I don’t know if Diane had done it out of guilt for Grace, or if it was part of the plan to take her away from me. Anyway, they’re contesting it. Until it’s sorted out I have to work, and this is the best offer I had.’

  ‘How many offers did you get?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about that.’

  ‘So this is your life now?’

  ‘Only until the legal dispute is settled, and while Grace is at pre-primary. Another eighteen months maybe. I want to be back in Perth when she’s ready for primary school.’

  ‘And you’re happy with that?’

  ‘Happy with what? A life that’s flat and stale, like an old glass of beer?’

  ‘I thought you chose this?’

  ‘It was my decision. I wouldn’t say it was my choice. Just making the most of what was left to Grace and me when Diane left with McCann. It’s not the life that Grace deserves, up here on the mines.’

  Kavanagh’s eyes softened. ‘You seem to be coping alright.’

  ‘I try. I never thought life as a single parent would be so hard. The company helps, the other families are great, but it’s still tough.’

  ‘Plenty of kids are raised without their mother, who’s dead or crazy or a junkie. I see enough of it on the job.’

  ‘Grace’s mother is none of those things.’

  They were beyond the town now, the road rising steadily to meet the great red curve of Mount Whaleback. The mountain was barely recognisable as natural landscape, stripped of trees, carved into a series of flattened steps, dressed with spoil from the mine, a vast fortress of red dirt shrouded in dust.

  ‘My mother died when I was young,’ said Kavanagh, the slightest tremor in her voice. She cleared her throat, regaining control of her voice. ‘My dad did his best to raise me on his own and be a good cop at the same time. The whole town expected so much of him.’

  Ford sighed. ‘Maybe I’m not as good a man as he is.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ she said, gazing out the window.

  Ford waited for an opportunity to change the subject. He saw the boom gate that barred the entrance to the mine and checked his mirror. The Nissan was keeping its distance, as if unsure where they might be going.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. He reached under his seat and pulled out a baseball cap with the company logo stitched on the front. ‘Put this on and act like you belong here.’ He opened his window as he stopped the car in front of the guardhouse, a low brick building in the centre of the road, with boom gates each side. He leaned out the window and ran a pair of swipe cards over the scanner, smiling at the guard sitting behind the glass in his air-conditioned booth, then looking at the camera mounted on the roof. As the boom gate went up the guard lifted a finger to the peak of his cap in mock salute. Ford accelerated away from the gate then pulled over, watching to see what the Nissan would do.

  ‘They following?’ asked Kavanagh, trying to see in the side mirror.

  ‘They’re not even trying. They’ve pulled in way back down the road. Looks like they’re going to sit there and wait.’

  ‘Is this the only entrance to the mine?’

  ‘Would I have trapped us in here if it was?’

  ‘And so you know a way out of here that those muppets don’t?’

  ‘Natch,’ he said, allowing himself a smirk. He waited for a semitrailer to come through the boom gate behind them and block the line of sight from the Nissan, then he pulled out ahead of it, switching on the flashing orange light on the roof. As the road curved around towards the mountain they crossed the railway, over a long train of ore cars snaking its way beneath the bridge. Ford turned on the two-way radio hanging under the dash, and the car filled with static and chatter from across the mine.

  ‘Are those guards back there armed?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘No, why would they be?’

  ‘So what’s the point?’

  ‘They are more concerned about health and safety than anything else. They don’t want any outsiders wandering around the mine causing accidents. You think those guys are armed?’

  ‘If they were, they’d have made a move by now, rather than just trying to spook us.’

  The road ran parallel to the base of a vast slope of shattered rock, and Kavanagh leaned forward to watch the huge haul trucks crawl along the sky line. Ford stopped the LandCruiser at an outsized set of traffic lights showing red. The other road was twice as wide, coming off the hill in a broad curve, and down it came an empty haul truck, throwing up a plume of orange dust behind it. Without slowing, it raced across the junction in front of them.

  ‘I didn’t think those things could go so fast,’ said Kavanagh as she watched it drive into the service yard and park at the end of a long line of similar trucks in front of a maintenance workshop the size of an aircraft hangar.

  ‘They don’t travel so fast when they’re laden. They only go that fast when it’s the end of the shift.’

  ‘I take it they always have right of way?’

  ‘You don’t want to get in front of one. They show you a safety video of what happens when one of those things runs over a light vehicle like this. Flat. Splat. Like Tom and Jerry.’

  He reached across for the radio handset and put it to his mouth. ‘LV four-two. Pulling on to haul road above workshop. Over.’ He waited a moment for a reply, and when none came he swung the Cruiser right and started up the slope the truck had just come down. As the road climbed the view opened up to show the line of hills marching eastwards from Mount Whaleback, the railway weaving its way along its base and the vast featureless plain spread out to the south. Ford saw where Kavanagh was looking.

  ‘Those hills are the tail end of the Ophthalmia Range,’ he said.

  ‘What a romantic name,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘Those pioneers certainly had an imagination.’

  ‘When Ernest Giles came through this country in 1876 he was temporarily blinded. He’d travelled for weeks from the coast by camel, and had sandy blight, couldn’t even see those hills, had to be led over them by his men. He named them after his condition.’

  ‘Makes a change from naming the landscape after royalty, kissing arse for a knighthood.’

  ‘Giles stayed around here until his sight returned,’ said Ford, ‘then decided there wasn’t much to see and moved on.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  The road reached the top of the hill and veered left as the ground fell away into the vast open pit that stretched five kilometres along the length of the ridge, carving out the inside of the mountain into a series of steep terraces. Excavators and ore trucks were operating at the far end of the pit, hundreds of metres below them.

  ‘Impressive, huh?’ said Ford.

  Kavanagh shrugged. ‘I’ve seen the Kalgoorlie Super Pit. It’s bigger. Once you’ve seen one enormous hole in the ground, it kinda spoils you for the next one.’

  They crested the top of the hill and a man in a hard hat stepped out of a small hut and waved a pair of orange flags at them, holding them out wide to block the road. Ford checked his watch and waved at the man in acknowledgement. Kavanagh glanced at her own watch. ‘Now what?’

  She had opened her mouth to speak again when the ground shook and the Toyota rocked on its suspension. As Kavanagh turned to look into the pit the deep rolling boom of the explosion engulfed them. Jets of dust spat upwards from the edge of the pit and a long wedge of rock slid slowly down the wall and crashed onto the terrace beneath it, breaking like a great wave as the dust boiled into the air.

  Ford smiled. ‘Twice a day, every day.’ He was shouting over the crashing echo of the blast. ‘It will be a while before they give the all-clear.’

  ‘And what do we do until then?’

  ‘We talk.�
��

  Kavanagh waited for the rumbling to subside before she spoke.

  ‘I thought we had exhausted all the niceties,’ she said. ‘We’ve done family, jobs, all that crap. I’m all out of chit-chat.’

  ‘You shouldn’t bother with small talk. You’re not good at it,’ said Ford. ‘Maybe just skip that and tell me why you came up here so fast.’

  Kavanagh tilted her head backwards against the headrest and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and let the air escape in a slow hiss, then turned her head to gaze out the window at the cloud of dust floating across the pit. The air outside was so hot the dust seemed to give off its own light.

  ‘That why you brought me up here?’ she said. ‘Keep me here until we talk it out?’

  ‘I came up here to lose those guys. Maybe you could tell me what you know about them.’

  She didn’t answer. She looked through the windscreen at the man with the flags. Ford, deciding to give her all the silence she might need, listened to the last rumbling of the rock rolling down the wall of the pit, felt the heat radiating off the windows.

  ‘Henk Roth came back into the country last week,’ she said. She let it hang in the air for a moment, let the cold air from the dashboard vents blow it around the cab. Ford was gripping the steering wheel, flexing the fingers of his left hand. She carried on.

  ‘He jumped off a bulk ore carrier in Port Hedland using a false passport that we had on record. There was no passport scanner at the port, and by the time customs logged his entry and the computer flagged him, he was gone.’

  ‘You think these guys work for Roth?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I found out three days ago that Roth was in the country and then today you call me, bleating that there’s a corpse in your living room. I haven’t had any kind of lead on this for months, then two things happen within days of each other. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You’re still chasing the Gwardar gold?’

  ‘My hunch is that it’s still in the country.’

  ‘You thought it had gone on McCann’s boat, or on his plane.’

  ‘So why has Roth come back? If he’s got the gold, he’d be long gone.’