Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1)

by Iain Ryan

  “Did you guys run the files?” said Romano.

  Denny lifted a manila folder off the cruiser’s bonnet and handed it to her. “These two must have been bad. Even old Bill had paperwork on them. They’ve done it all. Assault, B&E, sexual assault, possession with intent, you name it. Drags killed a bloke back in the seventies. Did time in Boggo Road. Petey is a convicted pedo. He’s not even allowed up in the North. He’s technically not allowed on the whole island.”

  “So what is he doing here?” Romano asked, head down, scanning through the paperwork.

  Chandler smirked. “What were they doing here, Jim?”

  “Fuck you,” said Harris.

  “What’s this about?” Romano asked.

  They all looked at her.

  “Drainland is before our time,” said Denny. “We don't normally go in there. That place is its own thing. They fix their own problems.”

  “Wow,” said Romano, “Sounds like some good quality community policing.”

  Denny shrugged.

  “Maybe you should have a look before you run your mouth,” said Harris.

  They rode down together in one Land Cruiser. The camp lay at the end of Robinson Beach behind a headland of thick scrub and tea tree mangrove. Chandler drove, and he took them down to the tideline and along the beach to the beginnings of the outcrop. They walked in from there.

  The camp sat in a kilometre-long cove between Point Rhoda and another jutting section of rock that Harris couldn't remember the name of. It was where the lighthouse stood, beside the Mission. As they came over the crest of the point, Romano lost her color. Seeing Drainland for the first time was always a moment. She kept it together but there was no mistaking her fear. They all stood there on the headland and surveyed the nightmare.

  The entire site looked like bomb wreckage or a refuse dump. Torn-apart canvas tents flapped in the morning wind. Rusted caravans sat half-submerged in the sand. All manner of make-do shelters (corrugated iron huts, tarpaulin strapped over barrels, hollowed-out furniture) dotted every conceivable part of the beach inbetween. In the centre of Drainland sat the hull of a beached ship, the back half of it rusted open, disappearing into the ocean.

  “Welcome to Club Med,” said Denny.

  Harris had forgotten how busy the place was. People staggered around and swam naked. Parties gathered around open lit fires trailing columns of black smoke into the air. Dogs roamed freely, like flies.

  Denny said, “Jim, you better have a word to the Riders when you get a chance. This looks worse than last time. It looks worse, right?” He turned to Chandler and Chandler shrugged. “O’Shea would have a conniption if he saw this.”

  Harris ignored it. O’Shea was getting his cut.

  “It smells like…” said Romano, failing to find the words. “How the fuck?”

  It was everyone’s question when they first saw it. How could this happen?

  “Come on,” Harris said. “The Priest is meeting us down there.”

  The residents of Drainland were not generally wary of strangers. People came and went from the place. From what Harris had heard, initiation into the camp was entirely about turning up and not causing too much trouble in the first few days. There was no law or governance, no organisation. No one in the camp represented anything except desire and hopelessness. And it showed. As Harris edged up on the first circle of beach dwellers—a party sitting around a boom box wired to a car battery—he noted the smell of decay. Rotting skin. There were a dozen of them. Living zombies, the lot. There was one woman, her head bandaged, a bright red splotch of fresh blood soaking through the gauze. She laughed at them as they passed.

  All the residents shot junk down here, or had, until the meth swept through. Both were cheap in the camp, and it was the whole reason to be here. The Doomriders ran that side of things. They funded Drainland through government benefits, had a team of people who crawled through the mess to keep everyone’s cash rolling in. Then they bought and cooked the gear in bulk, skimming a good profit. The business wasn't quite enough to lift the gang out of Domino and into the big time, but it wouldn’t be long.

  Harris spotted the priest closer in. Harris watched him stand from a campfire across the beach and walk towards them. Harris had met Father Frith before but the man didn’t make a lot of sense to him. He was no merry parish pastor. Instead, Frith was tall and dark-eyed, with a face of weathered skin, almost ghoulish in appearance. His uniform black suit had an unnatural neatness to it. He was a caretaker, of sorts.

  “Jim,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “You know these two. This is the new girl, Bill Dranger’s replacement. Laura Romano,” said Harris.

  Romano shook the priest’s hand without looking directly at him. She remained distracted by the flush of movement in the camp around them.

  “It’s been a while since you’ve been down this way,” said Firth.

  “Not long enough Pastor,” said Denny.

  “How are things faring?” Harris asked.

  Frith looked at his feet. “Much the same.”

  “Everyone’s white,” said Romano, out of nowhere.

  “There’s an Asian part on the other side,” said Chandler. He was twitchy, too, standing with a hand on his sidearm.

  Frith seemed not to hear it. “You said you needed to find someone?”

  “Two blokes. Petey and Drags,” said Harris.

  He handed over the pictures.

  Frith nodded. “These two, hey. I know where to start.”

  Frith led the way, taking them further into the camp. The locals in the centre of Drainland were older and warier. Conversations quietened as they came through. People brought their children and dogs in beside them. Frith stopped at a caravan awning to speak with a party inside; two women and a man, all of them bloated and sickly, sat in camp chairs around a portable television.

  “I’m looking for these two,” Frith said, holding up the printouts.

  Only one of the women moved. She stared past Frith for a few seconds and said, “Twenty dollars.”

  “Okay,” said Romano. “Have another look first.”

  The woman took the printout and looked at it. Her eyes seemed to focus through the page. “Twenty dollars,” she repeated.

  “Where are they?”

  “In the pit,” said the woman.

  Romano turned to Frith. “You know what she’s on about?”

  Frith nodded.

  Romano took the page back from the woman and handed her five dollars.

  “Fuck you,” said the woman.

  “Slick,” said Denny.

  “Lead the way,” said Romano.

  Frith pointed them north. “You might want to keep your wits about you in this next bit,” he said. “The pit is where they dump their garbage, so watch where you’re walking.”

  “Why would they be up there?” said Romano.

  “It’s where they put the troublemakers,” said Harris.

  “Great,” said Romano. “The ghetto of the ghetto.”

  Chandler took out his service revolver and checked it.

  The smell got worse as the tree line of the dunes appeared. They were back from centre now, diverting up the beach away from the wreckage of the ship. They each had to scramble up a wooden ladder onto the higher ground. When they stood level with the beached ship’s upper deck, Harris noticed a group of children playing in the wreck, perilously high. A small boy spotted them and waved. Chandler waved back. Frith looked displeased. He took a small folded piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled a note on it.

  Behind the dunes sat the pit, exactly as described. The sand tapered off into a steep, narrow valley, and the valley was dug out further and filled with every type of garbage. At the bottom, a few skeletal humans picked over the site, looking even more wretched than the rest. With Frith in the lead, they circled around the edge of the dump to a stretch of bushland. Five minutes into the scrub, they entered a clearing, and at the centre sat a hub of tents and shanties. A grou
p of men sat around an open fire.

  Harris walked into the circle and said, “Nobody move. We're looking for two blokes, Petey and Drags. No one’s getting into trouble, so everybody just relax and stay still.”

  He went a bit closer and looked each of them. The men were comatose, barely upright. It was quiet in the clearing and when of one of them leaned forward to vomit, the sound of the liquid hitting the sand rattled Denny. “Let’s get this over with,” he said. “Come on Jim.”

  Frith said, “He’s right. It might be a good idea to do this quick. I know some of these men.”

  Chandler provided cover while the rest of them searched the tents. Most were empty. A small girl sat in one, pressed into the corner. Another contained a bucket of human shit sitting in a weird occult circle of fake plastic candles. The final tent housed a dead body, an old man, a syringe still poking out of his arm. Romano went in and checked the man’s face. She shook her head.

  “Which one?” said Harris, coming back to the camp fire. He was looking at the men.

  Frith seemed to catch his meaning and pointed to a smaller man with deep welts on one side of his face. Harris slipped on a pair of blue surgical gloves and grabbed the man, slapping him awake. “I want Petey and Drags. Where are they?”

  The man groaned and passed out again.

  Frith winced.

  Harris moved around the circle, slapping each one and shoving the printouts in their faces. He was about half through the circle when a man he'd already hit came awake again and said, “They’re fucking dead, man. Dead as a fucking doornail, hey.” The man’s head rolled on his shoulders like a broken limb.

  “What?” screamed Harris.

  “The pit…the pit,” said the man.

  “I’m not going into that fucking pit,” said Denny. “This is crazy.”

  The man laughed in Harris’s face, a trickle of blood trickling from his nose. Denny moved quickly, bringing his gun up and placing it against the man’s forehead. “This isn’t funny, shit-for-brains.”

  “Hey,” said a voice behind them.

  Romano watched an old-timer try and lift himself off his nest of blankets. He didn't make it all the way up, but he was lucid.

  “You know where they are?” she said.

  “Yeah, they're over there,” he said, nodding to a patch of scrub off to the left. “Now, fuck off.”

  “Or what?” screamed Denny.

  “Leave it,” said Chandler.

  Frith stood in place. He rubbed a hand over his Adam’s apple, agitated.

  “What?” said Harris.

  “They're dead,” said Frith.

  “Okay,” said Denny. “Okay…”

  “You sure,” said Harris.

  Romano pushed through. “I want to see them,” she said.

  Frith took them further inland. There, the bush tapered off into another valley not far past the clearing, and at the base they stepped down into a gravel basin. It was dark at the bottom, despite the blazing sun overhead. Further along the basin sat a small grove of thin tall trees. Frith headed towards it. The place felt wrong. A cool breeze came out of the grove, carrying a smell. Harris recognised it. They all did, but no one spoke. There was something in there. There were shapes in the canopy.

  “Jesus,” said Denny, mouth gaping. Harris felt the same push and pull of revulsion. The grove was filled with hanging corpses. There were dozens of them, a series of swaying, rotting bodies strung up to branches as far as the eye could see. And the place was lousy with flies. The flies buzzed like swarming bees, rising up in waves from the ground—with its hideous pools of human dripping—and up to the silhouetted tree branches above.

  “What, what is this?” said Romano.

  “The locals call it Suicide Valley,” said Frith. The old priest looked bad, like he was dying, too. “I don't come down here. No one comes down here.”

  “Can anyone see these cunts?” said Denny. He started walking through the bodies. In shock, Harris presumed. “Let’s find them and get the hell out of here.”

  They walked through in silence. On one side of the grove, the bodies looked less swollen, color still visible in their clothes. They were newer. Within minutes, they found the two men. Petey and Drags were strung up together, back to back, their necks pinched together through a horrifyingly thin noose of plastic packing tape. Unlike the rest of the bodies, Petey and Drags had been badly beaten, stabbed by the look of it, either post or pre-mortem. One of Petey’s eyes sat open, staring down at them.

  “Happy now?” said Chandler.

  Harris looked at the bodies, noting they were dressed in the exact clothes from the hotel surveillance footage.

  Romano came closer and said, “Should we cut them down?”

  Harris took a small camera from his pocket and wound the film. “They don’t deserve it,” he said. He took photos. “Let’s go check their tents. We better take Denny back home before he has a heart attack.” He turned to Frith. “Do you need a moment, Pastor?”

  Frith crossed himself and muttered a fast prayer. When he was done, he spat on the ground at the base of the tree.

  “Not with these two,” he said.

  Back up at the camp circle, they got the old man awake and had him point out the tents belonging to Petey and Drags. Harris told Chandler to go and grab the little girl they’d found earlier, distracting the others for a moment. Romano took Petey’s, talking it out as she rummaged around. Harris stood in the tent belonging to Drags and listened:

  Dirty needles.

  Porn mags.

  Hunting knife. Broken

  Half-eaten tin of beans.

  Then Chandler brought the little girl over. Through the canvas, he could hear Romano outside again, trying to calm her down.

  It’s okay, it’s okay.

  This was it, as safe as it was going to get. He took Carl Yates’s gun from his waistband and wrapped it in a dirty pillow case. When it was done, he brought it out for the others to see.

  “Look at this. Slipped in under the tent through a hole.”

  Romano crouched by the girl. Frith had her now. She thrashed around. Her crying left no impression on Harris, and he realised he was slightly in shock as well. The whole scene felt distant, light years away.

  Romano came over. She lifted the pistol up, carefully turning it to have a better look. She slipped it into an evidence bag. She nodded.

  “Great. Case closed,” said Denny.

  They walked, leaving Drainland and the girl and the rest of it with the priest.

  Part IV

  The Night Barge

  25

  Saturday, September 11 to Sunday, December 5, 2004

  Romano was determined to juice the end of the case for all it was worth. She needed to wring out every detail and nuance of it for the senator. The fuller the report, the more it screamed, Get this diligent cop off Tunnel.

  She set herself deadlines:

  A crisp report to O’Shea by Monday.

  A copy of the same report faxed to the senator on the sly a few hours later.

  Romano poured whiskey into her coffee.

  She started in:

  There were no known motives for the killings. This did not overly concern her. Motive didn’t prove much, but the family would want an explanation. She typed, Suspected unlawful entry and theft, in keeping with the perpetrator’s history of similar activity. Entry via passkey found or stolen in a previous incident. Subsequent assault considered opportunistic. It wasn’t neat or pretty, but it was enough.

  Romano pushed the physical evidence. She described the gun and the surveillance footage, going into further detail about Petey and Drags. With the files open beside her, Romano listed everything that tied them to the scene. Every scrap of history put Drags in that room almost out of habit. He had a history of borderline random violence, often for money. Petey, on the other hand, was a calculating rapist through and through. Down in the guts of his file she found a listing of his blood work: B- with hepatitis, a perfect
match for the scene samples. He’d undoubtedly assaulted the Bachelard kid. In the file, someone had pencilled Frith / Holy Beach Mission beside Petey’s blood work. Old Bill’s handwriting. A loose end. She transferred it to her notebook, then took another small pour of the whiskey and pushed on.

  The gun recovered from the tent looked like a match. It was the exact calibre. Romano didn’t write it in, but her own conclusion was that these two idiots were high as kites. Their plan was pure junk-brain. They’d obviously drugged Sophie Marr by force and planned to do the same to Bachelard, but he put up a fight. What they gave Marr had ended up killing her. Romano had no real theory why they’d shot Bachelard in the head. Something went wrong, someone got angry, someone felt shame. It all worked. Romano refused to dwell on the scene too long. It didn’t need it. She could see it escalating, two bad men spinning out of control. They both had a history of rash and violent decision-making. Their whole lives were marred by it. It was what they knew. And now they were both dead as well.

  Romano typed the rest of the report with clinical efficiency. Petey and Drags laid to rest as lonely suicides, cause unknown. She described their hanging bodies in the scrub, giving the senator and his family what she could. They appear to have died an uncomfortable death at their own hand in bushland in the south of the island. A search of their belongings revealed the before-mentioned evidence as well as evidence of drug use and destitution. They were both, by every measure, of an unsound mind. She hit print, and sorted the reports into two neat piles.

  It was only as she walked away from the station house, out towards the main road under a wide cloudless sky, that Romano felt the pull of something else. This was the right play, the smart politics, but it was also more of the same: two more suicides for the records. She was starting to sound like the man she’d replaced.

  It took a week for word to come back. They were long, quiet days. Chandler and Denny weren’t talking to her. Harris had disappeared again. No word from O’Shea. As summer ramped up, the wet, dank heat filled Romano’s house and she sweated through her bed sheets, swimming through one fever dream of Drainland after another. Junkies loomed and morphed in her nightmares. In one vivid episode, the ship at Drainland’s centre rolled back into the ocean, spilling the children of Taradale, children from another nightmare. The tiny bodies poured out the side into a blood-red ocean.