Taking Tom Murray Home

by Tim Slee

  ‘You, come and help me hitch Danny to the milk cart,’ Mr Garrett says to me.

  ‘He’s got to have a wash,’ Mum says.

  ‘He can have a wash when we’ve got the horse harnessed,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘You don’t want him getting clean then getting dirty again.’

  ‘You can pick up that manure too,’ Karsi says. ‘People play footy on this reserve.’

  Mr Garrett says it’s like a proper funeral procession, the cars in front of us with their lights on and Karsi behind with his blue light turning. I don’t know what I expected but I thought a horse and cart would go much faster than a person walking, but when Coach Don’s hat blew off his head, he jumped down to pick it up and was able to catch us up again without hardly even breaking into a trot.

  It’s a boring trip; grey cloudy sky, not even anyone honking their horns at us, just people peering at us like they have no idea what’s going on and it doesn’t look that interesting anyway so they go back to their tablets and phones and books and conversations before they’ve even properly passed us. Oh, there was a tractor who tried to overtake us, but Mr Garrett said that’s just not on. Overtaken by a John Deere? Not my Danny, and he geed Danny Boy up to a trot and the tractor driver gave up and settled in behind us, and Karsi dropped in behind him, so now the tractor looks like it’s part of the protest.

  As we get closer to Port Fairy, after Yambuk, we have what Mum calls a rolling lunch, which means she climbs around in the back making sandwiches for everyone on top of Dad’s coffin and Mr Garrett and Coach Don share the driving so they can eat. Not that you can really call it driving if you ask me, because Danny Boy basically drives himself. Jenny climbs in the back and puts down Danny Boy’s blanket as a mattress and then some rugs and sleeps on that, which I can’t do because of the smell, promise you that. I want to sleep though, and I must have, because middle of the afternoon I wake up and someone has put me on the horse blanket and Jenny is sitting up in my seat and we’ve stopped to give Danny Boy some water.

  ‘Well, that’s ten now,’ I hear Mr Garrett say.

  ‘Twelve!’ says Jenny. ‘There’s another two.’

  ‘Twelve what?’ I ask, rubbing my eyes and climbing over onto the seat.

  ‘Well hello, sleepyhead,’ Mum says. ‘Thought you were going to snooze all the way to Melbourne.’

  ‘Twelve new cars!’ Jenny says, ‘In the convoy! They’re coming in from Warrnambool! Must have read about us in the Observer.’

  ‘More like over from Colac,’ Coach Don says. ‘Dairy country there. But wherever they’re coming from, they’re welcome.’

  I look in front and behind us and it’s true, there are about ten cars in front of us now and another five behind, plus the tractor. Karsi has made them all pull onto the side of the highway so all the other traffic can pass us, and there’s a line of about a kilometre of cars backed up and they aren’t happy. Well, some are OK, they wave and smile, but most just look grumpy and some even yell out rude stuff at us.

  ‘Don’t listen to them,’ Mum says, putting her hands over Jenny’s ears like that will help. ‘They don’t know what this is about.’

  ‘And what is this about, Mrs M?’ Karsi says, finished waving through the piled-up traffic now. ‘You got some cold water there?’

  ‘Sending a message,’ Mum says, handing him a bottle. ‘Making people notice.’

  ‘Oh, they’ve noticed,’ Karsi says. ‘Noticed what a pain in the arse dairy farmers are.’

  ‘You’d have ended up a dairy farmer if you hadn’t failed Year 10, mate,’ Coach Don says to him.

  ‘Hell I would.’

  ‘It was police cadets or the army for you, as I recall.’

  ‘Yeah, but pulling on a cow’s tits for a living, no thanks. I leave that to you smart blokes. Look, I’m going to have to ask Port Fairy for a car now to see you guys the rest of the way. I’m supposed to be getting back.’

  ‘So?’ Mr Garrett asks.

  ‘So it’s starting to cause problems, like I knew it would,’ Karsi says. ‘Your little stunt. You really should have a permit for a protest like this.’

  ‘This isn’t a protest,’ Coach Don says and he smiles. ‘It’s a funeral procession. You don’t need a permit for a funeral procession.’

  Karsi scratches his head. ‘Oh, it’s a funeral procession now?’

  ‘See all them cars with their lights on? See this coffin?’ Mr Garrett says.

  Karsi looks at Mum like he’s not buying it. ‘Sending a message, you said.’

  ‘With a funeral procession,’ she says.

  ‘Four hundred kilometre long funeral procession,’ Karsi points out.

  ‘Four hundred and twenty-seven,’ Jenny says, getting lippy. Of course she knows exactly how far.

  He’s standing there and a little white car does a totally illegal U-turn on the highway and pulls up right in front of Karsi. A man is driving and a lady jumps out with one of those little hand recorder things and then dives back into her car for a camera. Then she suddenly realises there’s a cop standing there.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she says. ‘Geraldine O’Sullivan, Geelong Advertiser,’ she says.

  ‘Like that will get you out of doing an illegal turn over double white lines on the Princes Highway?’ Karsi asks her.

  ‘I’m hoping,’ she says. ‘Hey, are you the cop who helped load the coffin?’

  ‘No,’ Karsi says and starts walking back down the line of cars. ‘You! Move that bloody tractor further in!’

  ‘Which one is the widow?’ the lady asks.

  Mr Garrett looks like he’s about to give her a serve for being so rude, but Mum jumps down from the milk cart. ‘That would be me,’ she says. ‘And his name was Tom Murray. I’m Dawn.’

  The lady blushes. ‘Wow, sorry. Look, you’re world famous in Geelong today thanks to your policeman friend here. Though I doubt he’s very popular back in Portland.’

  ‘World famous today, you say?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Yeah well, you know, today’s news, tomorrow’s chip wrapper,’ the lady says. She looks up and down the highway. ‘Would you mind if I ask you what it’s all about?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mum says, pointing up to the seat of the milk cart. ‘Come up to my office.’

  ‘My god, is that really the coffin?’ the lady asks as she’s climbing up. She holds out her hand. ‘I’m Geraldine, by the way.’

  Mum shakes her hand back. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  I decide this is boring and I say to Jenny, ‘Hey, do you want to see if the tractor guy will let us up into his cab?’

  ‘Race you, fatty,’ she says, and she’s off.

  Mrs Maynard breaks out a slab of cream cake so the stop turns into a picnic on the verge with people sitting down with cake and thermoses of coffee and tea and Mr Garrett wandering up and down grumbling about wasting time. I grab some cake and try to find a spot to sit but the only empty spot that isn’t on the dirt is next to Karsi.

  ‘Ha, you caught me,’ he coughs around a mouthful of cake. ‘I was just . . .’

  ‘It’s good cake,’ I tell him. And I realise this is my chance. ‘If I tell about a crime, does it have to be official or can it be off the record?’

  He smiles. ‘You watch a lot of CSI or something?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell him. ‘But it’s more a suspicion than a proof sort of thing.’

  ‘You want to accuse someone of a crime?’ he asks. ‘You sure of that? That’s a serious thing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘No. But can it be like, just us, talking?’

  He looks down the verge to make sure no one can hear us. Pop is the closest and he’s looking away, smoking. ‘Sure, we’re just talking,’ he says. ‘Man to man. Off the record.’

  ‘About a murder,’ I tell him. There, I said it.

  ‘Murder,’ he says. ‘Your father, I’m guessing.’

  ‘The man from Mid Valley Bank did it,’ I tell him. ‘The manager.’

  ‘Gary?’ he says, not quite smiling. ‘How do you reckon that
?’

  ‘It’s all written down here,’ I tell him, taking my notes out of my pocket. I’ve been writing stuff down ever since Jenny threw me that line, How do you know he’s in there?

  He takes the paper and tilts it toward the sun, turns a couple of pages then looks back at me. ‘Why don’t you just give me the short version?’

  ‘He and Dad had a big argument a week ago,’ I tell him. ‘Dad would have hit him, except Mum held him back.’

  ‘Well now, I know about that. Gary was shook up and told me about it, but that says more about your dad’s temperament than it does about Gary,’ he says. He leans over to look me in the eyes. ‘He was there to tell your dad and your mum that they were out of time, they had to pay their debt or hand your place over to the bank. You know how bank loans work, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard the whole thing,’ I tell him. ‘Me and Jenny were listening.’

  ‘So, you know, he showed a lot of respect going out to your place to do that in person. Not just send them a letter.’

  ‘I know,’ I told him. ‘He did it because of Mum. He had a thing for Mum.’

  ‘A thing?’

  ‘Him and Mum had an affair and Dad got Mum back,’ I tell him. ‘But he still loves her, so he killed Dad.’

  He doesn’t laugh at me like Jenny would have. He just hands back my notes. ‘Now, that’s a theory. I’ll give you that. And when it comes to something like murder, it’s usually always about either love or money. So I’ll give you that too. But if you’re going to be a detective, you have to think things all the way through.’

  ‘I did, he –’

  ‘First, Gary is already married – happily as far as I know. Second, do you think your mum is going to want to get with a man who threw her off her farm?’ he asks. ‘Even if he is just doing his job?’

  I think about it. ‘I guess not. But maybe he just didn’t want Dad to have her, not that he thought he could ever –’

  He taps my notes. ‘And the other thing you have to do, if you’re determined to be a detective, is keep asking yourself what’s most likely, that Gary killed your dad or that he just had a heart attack due to all the excitement of burning his house down, like the doctor said he did?’

  ‘I guess . . .’

  ‘It’s important we keep our stories straight, Jack. But I’ll think about what you said,’ he says, standing up and brushing cake crumbs off his trousers. ‘I don’t believe you’re right, but I’ll think on it, OK?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  ‘Now, we better get this show back on the road. Do I have cream on my chin?’

  Pop asks me to help him put his chair into the back seat of his car. He has this cool old car with hand controls and he scootches in the passenger side and slides over on the bench seat and then he reaches over and pulls his chair up into the back seat while I push at it. He can’t pull it up on his own, but he’s still really strong from pushing himself around everywhere, so we get it in there pretty quick.

  ‘Thanks, matey,’ he says. ‘Hey, Jack?’

  I look up the verge. I don’t want to miss out on riding in the tractor. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I heard what you and Karsi were talking about,’ he says.

  ‘Oh.’

  He puts his arm out the window of his car and waves his hand at people up ahead. ‘There’s plenty of people who’ve got a lot of not much good to say about Gary. But a killer? No way.’

  ‘No, hey. I was just . . .’ Now I really want to get away. Plus the tractor is starting up and Jen is climbing in. But Pop isn’t in any hurry.

  ‘Gary knew your dad since you were kids. Back when you two first got your diagnosis, you were what? Six years old?’

  ‘Five,’ I tell him.

  ‘Yeah. You were in the same class as his kids, used to play together. He noticed it first, how you’d get hot just running around and nearly pass out. But your mum gave you an icepack and the temperature went away, so it wasn’t a virus or anything.’ He reaches into his car, comes out with the cloth he uses to wipe the inside of his windscreen. ‘Here, wipe your jumper, you’ve got crumbs on it.’ There’s hardly any but I wipe anyway, and he keeps going. ‘I don’t know why no one ever thought to wonder why the two of you never cried, but we didn’t. We just thought you were both tough kids, I guess. We didn’t know that was all part of it. Can’t sweat, can’t cry, can’t feel pain. Then Jenny jumped off Goat’s Head Rock that time and came clomping into your kitchen with her foot all sideways and said there was something wrong with her shoe.’

  I wince. Dad says . . . used to say . . . that you remember the drama, when you’re a kid. I remember the doctor saying Jenny had a greenstick fracture of her tibia and her telling him she couldn’t even feel it. How they sent her to Geelong first and then up to Melbourne and then we both had to go and see the doctors at the university, have all kinds of tests. And there was a doctor there from Sweden and he looked at our DNA and said our genes were a match with this little village in the north of Sweden where they have this kind of mutation. And he said Mum has the same DNA but it doesn’t affect everyone the same. Which is how we heard about Dorotea’s.

  ‘Problem was,’ Pop says, ‘the two of you were growing up fearless. Of course you were. Nothing and no one could hurt you. You were both like that kid in the cartoons standing on the roof of his house with a cape, thinking he can fly like Superman and not worried there’s this thing called gravity. That was you two, at least once a week, one near disaster at a time.’

  He’s getting me angry. ‘We’re all right now,’ I tell him. ‘We’re careful. We watch out for each other. You wouldn’t even know about our analgesia if it wasn’t for our stupid gloves and boots. Except Jenny has a bit of a limp.’

  ‘Hey, I know, I know.’ He looks away and up the line of cars to where Mum is talking with Mr Alberti. ‘Anyway I just wanted to say something. You see all these cars, why do you think they’re here?’

  ‘Because of the funeral procession,’ I reply, frowning, like it’s obvious.

  ‘Yeah, but why? These people have farms and shops and jobs. They’ve got plenty of other things they could be doing. So why are they here?’

  Now he’s really getting me annoyed, asking the same question twice. ‘Because of Dad, I guess. They’re his friends and neighbours.’

  ‘Some of them,’ he says. ‘Some hardly knew him at all. But there’s always a straw that breaks a camel’s back and these people were up to their necks in drought and debt and misery. Then they heard about you. Everyone in town knows about you and Jen.’

  ‘Yeah, because we’re freaks.’

  ‘Stop that nonsense, no one who knows you thinks that. And throwing you off your farm, that just wasn’t right.’

  ‘And he was the one who threw us off our farm!’ I tell Pop. ‘The bank man. That’s why I –’

  ‘See that car there,’ Pop leans out the window and points further up the convoy. ‘The silver-grey Holden?’

  I look where he’s pointing, where a lady I don’t know is standing with her door open and just looking up and down the road, waiting like everyone else. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That’s Gary’s wife. He didn’t come himself, didn’t think it would look right, but his wife has come along.’ He pulls his arm in and looks ahead through his windscreen. ‘Just thought you should know, mate. We came together because of your dad, but we’re sticking with it for you kids.’ He taps the steering wheel with his hands. ‘Everyone’s kids.’

  Port Fairy

  The tractor guy whose name is Trev decides being in the funeral convoy is more fun than pushing down an old wall which is what he was going to do, so he lets us ride the rest of the way into Port Fairy with him which is lucky because the reporter lady is sitting next to Mum which would have meant me and Jenny would have had to ride in the back with Dad which Jenny might be cool with but I’m not. It’s more interesting than sitting behind Danny Boy all the way anyway, because the tractor has this awesome engine humming and it’s got aircon in th
e cab and the dashboard has this big GPS on it, you can see exactly where you are right down to two metres so that if you’re spraying crops you don’t double up on a single drop, which is better for the environment, Trev says.

  He says after he realised there was no overtaking us he turned on the radio and we were on the traffic radio, or there was a story about us, and the radio said to be careful there was a big funeral procession on the Princes Highway south of Port Fairy and Trevor said, no shit, Sherlock. Then he put two and two together and realised it was those dairy farmers and the suicide and Jenny says it wasn’t suicide it was murder.

  ‘Murder? Are you serious?’ Trev asks.

  ‘Jack thinks the bank man killed our dad,’ Jenny says. ‘As good as if he put a gun on his head.’

  ‘To his head,’ I tell her.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Oh, right. I get you,’ Trev says.

  ‘No you don’t,’ Jenny says. ‘You think I’m being metaphysical.’

  ‘Metaphorical,’ I tell her.

  ‘Shut up. Coz I’m not.’

  ‘You really think the bank manager in Yardley killed your dad?’ he asks me.

  ‘Yep. He must have tried to stop him because he didn’t want the house to burn down, seeing as it would be his house when he got it back off us.’

  Trev thinks about this. ‘Wait, wouldn’t he have tried to stop him before he set fire to the house?’ he asks me. ‘The radio said your dad was found inside the house, so it must have already been on fire.’

  Jenny is with me on this and looks at him like he’s a halfwit. ‘Well, obviously they had their fight inside the house.’

  ‘After he lit the fire?’ Trev asks.

  I shrug. ‘Sure. But the bank manager interrupted him and they had a fight and he knocked Dad out or something and he ran for it.’

  ‘He’s a big guy, this bank manager?’ Trev asks me.

  Pop can say what he likes. I’ve still got the bank manager as top of my suspects list. ‘Probably he snuck up on him,’ I say.

  Trev looks a little doubtful, I reckon. But around about then is when the Port Fairy cops stop the convoy.