by Stephen Orr
As Moy left the town behind the road turned to gravel. The houses along Creek Street started spreading out. Dead orchards and wrecking yards; chooks, and a few sheep. These were the backblocks: fences overgrown with prickly pear, goats that hadn’t been shorn in years, whole yards full of door-less fridges and lid-less washers, children that ran mostly naked through forests of salvaged fence posts.
Moy had visited a family on Creek Street a couple of months back. There was no father and the mother would tie a rope around the three-year-old boy’s leg and tether him to the front porch when she went out. A neighbour, sick of the crying, had eventually called the police. Inside the house Moy had found an old box with a rug, a bottle for the boy to piss in and a scattering of shit left by the family of rodents that helped him eat the food left for him every second night.
Another two hundred metres along the houses stopped altogether. Then there was just scrub along the road that led to the one-pub town of Cambridge, another thirty minutes on.
There were farms behind the scrub: wheat and barley stretching back to the horizon. Distant homesteads with grain bins and tractor sheds. Every few hundred metres along Creek Street gates led to access roads that cut through the wheat.
In the middle of the scrub that lined Creek Street there was the smoking ruin of a house. Moy looked at what was left of the collapsed structure: the floorboards, mostly; two of the four outer walls, a few internal walls and the roof trusses. The roof iron had fallen into the rooms. In the lounge room, which was now completely open to the bush, there was a blackened couch and a charred table without legs.
Strange, he thought, looking at the bush around the house. How the fire hadn’t ignited the scrub or nearby wheat crop; how the rising embers hadn’t caught in the overhanging trees.
There were two CFS units. A few men in orange overalls were hosing down smoking walls and furniture as others lifted wet bedding and carpets. Other men, and a few women with smoke-black faces, stood about with their arms crossed.
Constable Jason Laing approached Moy. ‘Busy couple of days, eh?’
‘Too much drama for Guilderton,’ he replied.
Laing led him towards the house. ‘We don’t know who she is,’ he said. ‘No purse, bag, nothing. No letters—unless they got burnt.’
They climbed three concrete steps. There was a stripped-down engine on the porch with a box full of parts beside it.
Moy stopped to look. He bit his bottom lip and felt the stubble that had grown since yesterday morning. ‘Kids?’
‘Just her,’ Laing replied.
They went inside, following floorboards that were unburnt, protected by a runner that had been dragged out front. ‘Have you rung the council?’ Moy asked.
‘My brother-in-law.’
‘He still there?’
‘All this verge is council land,’ Laing said, ‘but according to their records no one’s lived in this house for forty years.’
‘She was a squatter.’ One of the CFS volunteers had overheard. ‘Years ago they tried to get the council to demolish it but in the end they never bothered.’ He wiped his nose with his sooty hand.
‘Ever seen anyone around here?’ Moy asked.
‘No. I live on Doon Terrace. No one ever comes out here. Could be running a meth lab, no one’d ever know.’
The volunteer walked out of what was left of the house. Moy noticed a few pieces of Lego on the floor, bent down and picked them up. One piece had melted but he clicked the others together.
‘There’s nothing in the other rooms,’ Laing said.
‘No toys? Kids’ clothes?’
Laing shook his head. ‘There are two other beds in the front room. It looks like someone was sleeping in them.’
He led Moy to the bedroom at the front of the house. There was bedding smouldering on the floor. A wardrobe and chest of drawers were empty.
Moy sniffed the air. ‘Petrol.’
‘Diesel.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve got a good nose. And I worked at a servo for four years.’ Laing led him back to the lounge room and there, partly covered by roofing iron, was the woman’s body, stretched out on a piece of singed carpet. Her legs were twisted together and her charred left arm was bent up under her body. Most of the corpse was burnt and swollen.
Despite his line of work, death wasn’t something Moy had ever quite got his head around. There it was, this thing of flesh, blood and bone. Human as anyone, minus a heartbeat. Out of the game, and because of what? A poorly installed downlight; a kid trying to light a match. He always experienced a moment of black-and-white fascination—like watching news footage of twins joined at the head, or the memento mori on his desk—before the enforced separation. The distance, which came before the technical concerns.
Still, she was dead. He couldn’t help but stare for a few seconds to try and comprehend how a living thing had stopped working.
‘What do you reckon?’ Laing was watching Moy study the body.
‘It was a hot fire.’ He knelt down. ‘Funny, isn’t it, the way she’s fallen?’
‘How’s that?’
‘You’d think she’d be near a window or door if she was trying to get out.’
‘What, you reckon someone’s walloped her?’
‘Don’t reckon anything. Not till someone’s looked her over.’ Moy stood up. ‘Maybe this time they’ll send someone.’
10
MOY LEFT LAING and King with the body and headed home, stopping at the Taj Masala to buy a chicken vindaloo. He opened his musty house and sat on the back verandah in shorts and thongs. Admiring the view of his dead lawn, contemplating his curry. There were big blocks of hard potato which he pushed aside. Then he tried the chicken, enormous lumps joined by skin and sinew, trailing watery sauce that had started life in a packet.
Undercooked.
Now, he supposed, he’d get sick.
Guilderton had nothing resembling a health inspector. Apparently teams were sent from town to spend their days trawling the pubs and takeaways. Ineffectually, since he always got sick.
He binned the debris, locked up and headed to the Guilderton public links. A ten-minute walk, passing front yards full of home-made Coke-can windmills and lacework outdoor settings. Murchland Drive was alive with galahs celebrating the last minutes of sun. He noticed one of the Paschkes out on a header, its lights cutting through the wheat dust and its giant wheels compacting the earth. He could feel the rumble through his feet.
Checking to make sure the club house was locked, he jumped a waist-high fence and took a plastic bag out of his pocket. Started walking through the bush and leaf litter beside the first three holes. Within five minutes he’d found half-a-dozen balls.
He checked the sand-trap on the fourth hole and moved on to the small lagoon beside the fifth green. It was getting dark so he produced a small torch from his pocket and searched the murky water: six, seven, maybe more. He took off his socks and sandals and waded in.
The lagoon was his best bet, always had been. After he and George moved to town he’d come here of a night with his mates and collect half a wheat bag full of balls. On Saturday they’d fill a big tub with water and bleach and wash them. Then they’d leave them out in the sun to dry, package them in bags of a dozen and sell them to the local sports store.
He crawled out of the water and wiped his feet clean on the grass. Dropped his socks and sandals in the bag with the two dozen balls and continued on.
The scrub beside the sixth and seventh holes ran beside Murchland Drive. There were homes on the other side of the road so he had to move quietly. Three, four months before, an old woman out working in her garden in the twilight had noticed him in the bushes. Minutes later there’d been a patrol car cruising down Murchland Drive, moving its spotlight in and out of the bushes and trees. He’d waited as the light got closer, wondering how it would look on the front page of the Argus: ‘Rogue Cop Stalks Locals’. Just as he’d been about to step forward, the woman ha
d flagged the car down and pointed in the opposite direction. Seeing his chance he’d walked out of the scrub, across the ninth, and sprinted over the fairways towards the back fence. When he was well clear he ran through the sprinklers like a ten-year-old, jumping in the air and calling out at the top of his voice, ‘Who’s been naughty tonight?’
There were no dusk gardeners or patrolling cars now, though. Moy climbed a hill towards a grove of pine trees that always hid balls in a bed of pine needles. He used a stick to search through the litter that sat on the edge of the grove and looked out across Guilderton, squatting grey and solid in the moonlight. Ayr Street was deserted and he could see lights flashing from the Commercial Hotel’s bottle-o. Music was still thumping from the converted cellar that passed as their night club. The back door of the bakery was open and he could feel its lavender light and the heat from its ovens.
His phone rang. Gary. ‘The fire investigator’s arrived.’
‘Already?’
‘Ossie’s taking him out there.’
Moy stopped to think. ‘Okay, I’m on my way.’
He stood up, grabbed his bag of golf balls and looked regretfully at the pine-trash, wondering how many balls still lay hidden.
But then he jogged off down the hill, past a water pipe they’d been meaning to fix since he was thirteen.
11
AN HOUR LATER, Moy arrived at the house on the end of Creek Street. A freshly shaved Metropolitan Fire Service investigator greeted him on the front steps. ‘Sid Lehmann,’ he almost barked, and Moy introduced himself as the lone detective of the mid-north wheatbelt.
‘Nice little town, Guilderton,’ Lehmann said. ‘I was here a couple of years back.’
‘A holiday, in Guilderton?’
‘No. This boy and his mum, dead at the front door. She was holding the keys, trying to undo the deadlock.’
Moy decided not to think about it. ‘So, what’s the verdict?’
‘Diesel. Mainly in the two bedrooms and the lounge. And the woman.’
‘The woman?’
‘She’d been doused in it. Whoosh. Which makes you wonder.’
‘Christ, was she dead?’
The fire investigator smoothed his stubby moustache. ‘That’s why we need a coroner. Dead, or unconscious. We hope.’
Lehmann showed him into the lounge room, to the body—grey and featureless in the moonlight.
‘Where did it start?’ Moy asked.
The investigator led him to the front door. He pointed to a partly burnt match on the floor. ‘My guess is he’s knocked her out, spread the diesel and worked his way back here. Then he’s stood outside and flicked it in.’
Moy sighed. ‘Now I’ve got a job on my hands.’
‘You certainly have.’
‘No other explanation?’
‘Well, she could’ve done it all herself, if she had a great sense of drama. But it’d be the strangest suicide I’ve ever seen.’
Moy attempted a smile. ‘Anything else?’
‘Give us a chance, Detective Sergeant. You leave your man here tonight and we’ll be back in the morning.’ Then he fixed Moy’s eyes. ‘Please don’t go traipsing around.’
‘Obviously.’
‘There’s a lot of disturbance already. Perhaps that’s your Country Fire people…’
‘Perhaps.’
‘They weren’t expecting a body?’ Lehmann suggested.
‘No.’
As Moy headed home he took another call from Gary. Ossie had just visited an old widow called Dorothy Olding who’d reported an intruder. Someone in her kitchen, she said. She’d got out of bed and heard someone running out the back door. Looked down the street and seen a small figure heading back towards town.
‘Said it looked like a kid,’ Gary concluded.
‘Right. That’s all? A kid?’
‘Going through her fridge.’
Stealing food, at this time of night? He thought of the boy in the alleyway. ‘Anything taken?’
‘She said whoever it was had a good go at her orange juice. She was very annoyed. Said she’d paid top dollar. And some mint slices.’
‘How did she know? She counts them?’
‘Apparently.’
He pulled over in front of the first house on the way back into town. Someone would have seen something. As he got out he noticed a blind opening and a pair of eyes peering out. He walked up the front path and knocked. A man his own age, wearing a black AC/DC T-shirt and footy shorts appeared with a beer in his hand. He used it to scratch the tip of his nose. ‘I know you.’
Moy took a moment. ‘Commercial Hotel?’
‘Spot on.’
It was his first week in Guilderton. He’d stopped by the Commercial for a beer, get to know the locals, try a bit of preventative policing. In the almost-deserted front bar he’d heard loud voices and applause coming from out the back. He’d gone to see what was happening.
A small group of men had cleared the tables and used cutlery to make a miniature racetrack on the ground. There were four babies in nappies and jumpsuits at an improvised starting line. One man gave a signal and the babies were off, crawling and tumbling along the beer-wet carpet. If one of them strayed across the cutlery a hand or foot would guide him or her back. The babies approached a finish line of folded napkins where four dads waited, calling, pulling faces and singing snippets of Wiggles’ songs.
Eventually a tubby-looking boy crossed the line and the crowd roared as Dad turned to shake hands with his mates. Then the room quietened. Babies crawled under tables, dads exchanged cash.
Moy approached one of the fathers and said, ‘Looks like a lot of fun.’
‘Ladies’ night at the footy club.’ The man nodded towards the abandoned track. ‘This is the crèche.’ He leaned over and picked up his baby; eyed Moy defensively. ‘It’s not for money.’
Moy was surprised he’d been recognised. ‘Well, I’ve never arrested anyone for baby racing.’
Now, standing in the doorway at the far end of Creek Street, he smiled. ‘How’s the racing?’
‘Good.’ The man was unsure. ‘That what you come about?’
‘No. I’s just wondering if you knew anything about this fire at the end of the street?’
The man took a deep breath. ‘Right…a fire?’
12
MOY TOOK THE usual four hours to get to sleep. He avoided the Stilnox on his bedside table; they left him more tired the next day, and not in a way that translated to better sleep the following night. Just more tossing and turning, cursing himself for not being able to get even this simple thing right. Sometimes he’d get up at two or three in the morning and switch on the television. Abflexer and Hey, Dad did nothing much for his insomnia but they passed the time. Sometimes he’d try a walk around the block. Stand at the end of the driveway staring out across the paddocks.
Think of Charlie.
Eventually he’d go back to bed for two or three uncomfortable hours, sweat soaking his pillow, sheets kicked onto the ground as dark dreams squeezed themselves into what was left of the night.
This morning he was out riding with a boy who seemed to have his son’s face and wiry body. They were following a path that ran beside a dry creek. The path was littered with leaves and the boughs of big gum trees hung low and heavy, brushing and scratching their faces. The boy was twenty metres in front of him. Although Moy pedalled hard he couldn’t catch up.
‘Slow down, my legs have had it,’ he called.
‘Hurry up,’ the voice replied, fading.
Despite his anxiety to get to the boy, there was a feeling of euphoria as the cool breeze passed over his face and through his hair. He hurtled down a hill, no brakes. It was everything good and bad all at once; the feeling of wanting, but not getting.
When he woke the window was light. He felt glad for the sleep; happy he’d done it without the aid of his usual half-tablet.
Then he was asleep again. This time he was pulling into the car park of a hospital. The b
oy, still five years old, was lying on the back seat of his car, secured around the chest and legs by a seatbelt.
‘We’re there,’ he was saying, searching for a park but not finding one, wondering why he was bothering anyway. He stopped in the middle of the emergency department car park. A security guard came over and said, ‘Not here, you’ll block the ambulance.’
He just ignored him. He got out and tried to open the back door. It was locked. He tried the driver’s door but that was locked too. Then he saw his keys in the ignition.
‘Fuck.’ He kicked the front tyre and looked at the guard. ‘It’s my son.’
The guard seemed confused. ‘You’ll have to move the car.’
‘Look,’ Moy screamed, indicating. ‘I can’t.’
‘You’ll have to. There’s an ambulance coming, it won’t be able to get through.’
‘Fuck, are you stupid? I’ve locked the keys in.’
The guard’s face hardened. He stood up, twisted Moy’s arm behind his body and pushed him against his car. Reached for his radio and called for help.
Meanwhile, Moy was looking at Charlie through the back window of his car. ‘It’s my son,’ he pleaded, but the guard was unmoved.
‘Christ, he’ll die,’ Moy said.
He woke. Opened his eyes and realised it was still early morning. He could hear cars and a lawnmower and smell porridge. There’d been no security guard, of course, and he hadn’t locked his keys in the car. He’d found a park straight away and never blocked the ambulance.
His phone rang and he reached for it, knocking over the remains of a glass of water.
‘That you, son?’ A tired-sounding voice.
‘Dad.’
‘Look, I’ve got a bit of a problem.’
And then he heard the phone drop, George curse the goddamn-piece-of-shit, attempt to pick it up off the floor and say, ‘Everything’s coming back up the toilet.’
Moy sat up, rubbed his eyes and asked, ‘What’s everything?’
‘Everything. Whatever’s gone down, it’s coming back up. Weeks’ worth of it, by the look of things.’
He stood up, opened his blind and looked out at a pair of red-headed sisters walking to school. One of them noticed him in his boxers. She giggled and told her sister. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour, Dad.’