by Chris Hammer
Errol Ryding is there with his volunteers, their tanker gleaming in the firelight, water streaming from two hoses into the building. Townspeople are gawking from a safe distance, pointing and muttering; the media are pressing closer, camera crews and photographers lost in the moment, in thrall to the flames and the imagery, careless of their own safety.
Martin rushes over to Errol, standing stoic beneath the bronze Anzac. The statue is uncaring, back to the conflagration, reflected flames rippling across its back like flexing muscles. ‘Errol, what happened?’
‘Who knows? Just went up.’
‘Can you save it?’
A shake of the head. ‘Doubt it. There’s no wind, so we might salvage something. Main thing is to stop it spreading. Give Luigi a hand, will you? Same as the other day.’
Martin nods, moves to the young man struggling to keep his hose trained on the fire. Martin taps him on the shoulder; Luigi turns, acknowledges his presence. Martin takes up the hose a few metres behind the nozzle man, helping him to wrangle it when he moves. Slowly the two men crawl right, Martin following Luigi’s lead. The local pours water into one window, then moves along to its neighbour. The tanker is at the intersection; Luigi is moving them around the corner, opposite Jennings. The fire is upstairs, concentrated on the corner and the rooms above Somerset Street, but with the verandah alight, the whole top storey is threatened.
Behind them, a man pulls up in a farm tanker: good for grass fires, not something on this scale. He looks at the pub, gives Martin a thumbs-up, then turns his attention to Jennings, spraying the untouched shopfront with his hose, then the roof, protecting it from embers.
There’s the slow scream of metal; Martin turns back to the pub, watches as the verandah starts to peel away from the front of the building, Errol striding before it, signalling for the crowd to get back, for the photographers to make themselves safe in case the verandah comes down. Where’s Robbie? Why isn’t he controlling the crowd? Martin begins to feel faint. The heat is intense, the day has been so very hot, the night too young to bring relief, the fire amplifying the temperature, draining the energy from him.
Fran Landers emerges from the bedlam; she’s walking through the crowd, blinking in the smoke, handing bottles of water to the firefighters and media. For half a second, their eyes meet. She takes the top from a bottle, hands it to him, leaves another by his feet. Moves on. Some water goes down his throat, some goes over his head. Relief. Then, through his other arm, wrapped around the canvas hose, he can feel the pressure dropping. They’re running out of water. He looks to the truck; men are attaching a feeder line to a hydrant. Errol is with them.
‘Two minutes and we’ll be back on. Take a break—these other blokes can take over.’
Martin and Luigi hand over the hose. Luigi walks to the far side of the road and slumps down on the gutter. Fran gives him water. Martin looks at the fire. It’s gaining territory. The crew is holding the line along Hay Road but the back half of the pub is beyond saving. It must have started there, close by the rear of the building, near Avery Foster’s apartment.
Martin walks around past the pumper just as it starts up again, twin hoses blasting water into the hotel, the focus now trying to prevent the verandah collapsing into the street. He looks at the door to the staircase. Images come to him: the fox hunt, the chandelier, the painting of the summer storm. He’s still looking as the door bursts open. Claus Vandenbruk is pushing out through the smoke, clearing the way for two younger, fitter officers, who are half carrying Robbie Haus-Jones, his arms around their necks. The constable is coughing uncontrollably, body racked, his face black with smoke, his clothes singed, his hands a red mess, swollen and ugly. They get him onto the street, out to safety. Sit him down.
Martin is frozen to the spot, watching. Doug Thunkleton’s camera crew, all the camera crews, swarm about, Carrie the photographer pushing her lens within centimetres of the policeman’s face, shutter firing like a machine gun, his rescuers standing, breathing in the air, looking at each other in disbelief. And Martin sees D’Arcy Defoe, thin frame silhouetted against the fire, standing slightly back from the throng, taking it all in, writing notes, dispassionate, removed, professional. Like a shadow of a person, like an echo of Martin Scarsden. There’s something in the stance, something in the concentration, the focus, that takes him back. Martin in battlefields, in refugee camps, in field hospitals: present but not present, viewing events through a reporter’s eyes, witnessing the suffering, but not feeling it. It’s D’Arcy Defoe’s silhouette, but it’s himself he sees.
Something explodes deep within the hotel, and as if in answer, the front section of the verandah tears away and starts to fall: slowly at first, then accelerating, like a sinking ship, breaking apart and crashing into the street, embers flying, the crowd retreating. He sees her then, across the road, in front of the bank—Mandy, holding Liam. He moves towards her, but she sees him coming, shakes her head. Her face is wet with tears, shining orange and red in the fire’s reflected glow.
THE PHONE WAKES HIM, THE DISCORDANT JANGLE OF THE BLACK DOG’S OUTDATED technology. His sleep has been deep, but not long. Yet the phone won’t let him slumber; it won’t let him be. It persists. He lets it ring out once, only for it to start again a moment later. He lifts the receiver, if just to stop it ringing. ‘Martin Scarsden.’
‘Martin, Wellington Smith. How are you? Trust I didn’t wake you.’
‘No. Of course not.’ He glances at his watch. Six forty-five? What sort of newspaperman is Wellington Smith?
‘Martin, I’ve been thinking. This story you’ve got. It’s massive. Fucking huge. I want the magazine piece, the first bite, but I want a book as well. This is going to make your career. You, mate, are going to be a legend.’
‘Right,’ says Martin, unsure what to say. Not that he needs to say anything; for a full ten minutes Smith speaks nonstop, promising Martin a lot of money and a lot of everything else as well: recognition, salvation, awards, status, fame, television rights and groupies. Everything. Smith talks so quickly, so effusively, that he doesn’t appear to draw a breath, like a didgeridoo player on repeat. Finally Smith pauses long enough for Martin to thank him and end the call. He should be enthusiastic, he knows he should; he should be grateful, he just doesn’t feel it.
He tries to go back to sleep but it’s no longer possible. Now he’s awake and aware, he can smell himself; he stinks of smoke and sweat. Reluctantly he abandons his bed for the shower. The water pressure seems even weaker than usual, as if fighting the fire has all but depleted the water supply. Who knows? Maybe it has.
Leaving the motel, he enters a wounded town. Hay Road is a mess. The tanker stands guard across from the burnt-out shell of the Commercial Hotel, splintered pieces of verandah littering the street. A couple of locals, belatedly dressed in high-vis overalls, stand guard by the side of the truck. They offer a mumbled ‘g’day’ as he surveys the damage. Errol and the crew have done their job well; the damage has been restricted to the hotel. The building’s bottom half is still standing, largely intact, although the smoke and water damage will have ruined it. The second storey is another matter. At the corner overlooking the intersection, the roof has collapsed and the verandah gone, part of the outer wall crumbling in. The windows are blackened sockets. There is little left of Avery Foster’s apartment; the windows are blown out, the verandah is a remnant, only a small section of the roof hangs from the end wall. Smoke is still swirling upwards, grey tendrils from a thousand coals, but not enough to justify further dousing. The hotel is beyond saving; it requires demolition.
The general store is closed. Of course it’s closed. After the arrest of Jamie Landers, will it ever reopen? Martin walks back towards the T-junction. There’s no sign of life at the Oasis Bookstore and Cafe, none at the wine saloon, none anywhere else. It’s Thursday, but it’s still too early for Riversend’s surviving stores to open. At least the service station on the highway is trading, offering newspapers and an approximation of coffee: Ne
scafé self-serve, the granules rattling as Martin spoons them into a white foam cup, filling it with boiling water from an urn, milk from a two-litre container. It tastes the same way he feels: ordinary.
He sits on a white plastic chair at a white plastic table, cheap outdoor furniture brought inside for the summer. Inevitably Riversend is on the front page again: Carrie O’Brien’s long-lens photo of Jamie Landers at the crime scene in the Scrublands. BLUE-EYED PSYCHOPATH says the headline. Martin reads D’Arcy’s stories dispassionately, the news report supplying the facts, the colour piece supplying the emotion. D’Arcy does them both well, but it all seems like a very long time ago, not yesterday afternoon. Riversend has experienced new dramas since then; new questions have emerged. Martin looks up from the papers, as if trying to spot an answer lurking in the petrol station.
Instead, through the door barges Doug Thunkleton. ‘Hi, Martin. Fancy seeing you here. How are you?’
‘Oh, you know. Disgraced.’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Oh, right. I get it. Listen, Martin, about that—I want to apologise. You know, what happened in Bellington. It wasn’t my angle; the chief of staff pushed it.’
‘Right.’
‘Angie Hester. Sounds like you know her.’
Angie? An image of a dark-eyed woman comes to Martin, the memory of a brief assignation, but nothing more.
‘Don’t know what you did, but she sure has it in for you. The news director is apoplectic. Reckons it will take forever for our reputation to recover. He’s sacked her.’
Martin feels a barb of guilt: guilt for whatever it was he’d done to the woman, and guilt for not remembering what it was. ‘What about you?’ he asks Thunkleton.
‘I went along with it, so I have to wear some of the grief. But I’ll survive. I just wanted to say sorry.’
There’s contrition in Thunkleton’s manner and Martin finds himself offering solidarity of a sort. ‘I saw the suicide blonde story. You get shit-canned by your editors?’
‘Did I what. Bunch of fucking desk jockeys. Not that I didn’t deserve it. Some of it. But I won’t be getting a pay rise this year, put it that way.’
The two men sit in silence; Martin suspects it’s an unusual experience for Thunkleton. He’s right; the television reporter stands up, nods his apologies again and leaves.
A moment later he’s back. ‘Thought you might want to see these. Late editions.’ He hands Martin the latest Melbourne newspapers, The Age and the Herald Sun. The front page of The Age is given over entirely to another of Carrie O’Brien’s photographs, taken as Vandenbruk’s officers helped Robbie Haus-Jones from the inferno of the Commercial Hotel. The men are in silhouette, rimmed by fire, the flames brought closer by the length of the lens. There is something vaguely Christ-like in the posture of Robbie, his arms draped across the shoulders of his rescuers, his legs buckling beneath him. The headline is emblazoned onto the photo: DEATH TOWN HERO SAVED, with only enough room for the first few paragraphs of D’Arcy’s story.
The hero of Riversend, Constable Robert Haus-Jones, has been saved from a fiery death as yet another remarkable day of high drama unfolded in the embattled Riverina town.
The young police officer, who saved countless lives when he shot dead homicidal priest Byron Swift close to a year ago, again put his life on the line, rushing into the town’s burning hotel to ensure no one was trapped inside.
Haus-Jones was saved by fellow officers after he became disorientated and affected by smoke as the fire tore through the century-old landmark.
The dramatic rescue came just 24 hours after Robert Haus-Jones saved the life of a young child moments before alleged backpacker murderer James Arnold Landers allegedly attempted to butcher the boy.
The fire, believed to have been caused either by an electrical fault or deliberately set by vandals, moved through the structure at astonishing speed, trapping Haus-Jones.
The story continues inside but Martin doesn’t bother turning the page. D’Arcy would have been racing against time to get the story to print, only just making the late edition. But that doesn’t save it from being wrong: there was no one in the Commercial Hotel; there was no one to save. Just a fire, upstairs, engulfing the apartment of Avery Foster. Not caused by an electrical fault, not when the power was disconnected months ago; not caused by vandals, not with Allen Newkirk dead, Jamie Landers in custody and the place wrapped in crime scene tape.
Martin remembers Robbie’s face; he remembers his hands. And he remembers telling the young policeman about the undisturbed flat. What had Robbie imagined up until that point? That Foster’s widow had cleared out all the records? Not an unreasonable assumption if she had known what her former husband was up to. Not an unreasonable assumption if Robbie Haus-Jones had known what her former husband was up to. If he had known…
Fuck. Robbie. What an idiot.
Back at the Black Dog, Jack Goffing is sitting outside his room, smoking a cigarette. They nod to each other, but don’t speak. Martin hands Goffing the papers, eliciting a wry grin.
‘So he’s a hero, is he?’
‘Apparently.’
‘You told him about what we found?’
‘Enough. Yesterday, after I talked with Jamie Landers.’
‘You going to publish the truth?’
‘You think I should? There’s a bloke wants me to write a book. Offering hard cash and easy redemption.’
‘Sounds promising.’
‘Yes. I’m filled with enthusiasm.’
Goffing smiles at the ironic turn of phrase. Martin offers him tea, makes them a cup each in his room and brings them outside.
‘So where is he?’ Martin asks. ‘Robbie?’
‘Down in Melbourne. Burns like that need specialist care.’
‘Will they charge him?’
Goffing shrugs. ‘Montifore’s gone, taken Landers back to Sydney. Homicide have their man; they won’t give a shit about Robbie. And the brass like the idea of having a hero. They don’t have that many.’
‘What about Vandenbruk?’
‘That’s a different story. He probably hasn’t worked it out yet, but he will. If Robbie knew about the drugs, if he was taking backhanders, if he didn’t tell Herb Walker what he knew, then Vandenbruk will crucify him. You can ask Vandenbruk yourself. He’s down at the cop shop but he’ll be back in a moment. He wants you in the loop.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘They’re raiding the Reapers. Started before dawn. Here, there, everywhere. Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra. Half the towns in between. They’re wrapping it up, pulling in the Mr Bigs. Robbie’s heroics will be washed away by lunchtime. The media’s been tipped off; they’re all over it.’
‘So why does he want to talk to us?’
‘Not sure. It’s not his show. He’s senior, but not in charge. I think he wants to know why Walker died.’
‘He’s blaming himself?’
‘I would, if I were him.’
Martin sits next to Goffing, sipping his tea and looking up at the sky. He knows that somewhere in the world there must be clouds; there have to be. Somewhere it is raining; somewhere it is pelting down. There will be floods and landslides and hurricanes and monsoons. Somewhere. More water than you can imagine, more water than you could ever want. Somewhere, but not here. Here there are no clouds and no rain. The drought can’t last forever; he knows it, everyone knows it. It’s just become hard to believe.
Claus Vandenbruk arrives, ushering them into Goffing’s room, bringing his surly manner with him, shutting it in with them when he closes the door. Martin finds it hard to imagine Vandenbruk and Walker were ever best mates: Walker was always laughing, patting his belly with satisfaction; the ACIC investigator is a man without a smile, a hair’s breadth from rage.
‘Okay. The raids are going well. We’ve got just about everyone we want and the evidence already looks compelling, but I need to tie up loose ends here. So, Martin, I need to know everything you know. Dick me ar
ound, and you won’t believe how much shit I can drop you in. Help me, though, and I’ll help you.’
‘How can you help me?’ asks Martin, trying not to sound intimidated.
‘I have the telephone intercepts from the church—on the day of the shooting.’
‘You have recordings?’ Martin doesn’t hesitate. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘The dope operation. The shed out in the bush there. Tell me all you know.’
‘I thought Jason Moore was helping with inquiries?’
Vandenbruk pauses; he appears to be counting to ten. ‘Right. Listen carefully. Jason Moore is a protected witness. He’s going to put a lot of very nasty people behind bars. So you must never, not in this world and not in the next, mention his name. Never. Not to anyone. Not in print, not at the pub, not to the love of your life. He’s a no-go zone, okay?’ He pauses for effect before continuing. ‘But I do need to corroborate what he’s been telling us, so talk.’
‘Okay, here’s how I see it,’ says Martin. ‘Jason was growing a few plants. Most people living out there in the scrub do. Then the drought came, there was less water, less money. So he started stealing water. There’s a big old homestead out there called Springfields—at least there was until the bushfire last week. It has a dam, spring-fed. Doesn’t run dry, even in a drought as bad as this. Jason was stealing water from it for his plants. It’s the same dam where the bodies of the backpackers were found, but that’s coincidental. You following?’
Vandenbruk nods.
‘Good. So back to Jason. A few years ago, the owner of Springfields, a man called Eric Snouch, died and the place became vacant. His son Harley was in prison in Western Australia under a false name, Terrence Michael McGill, so the place was empty and there was an opportunity to steal even more water. With impunity. Open slather.’
Vandenbruk has his hand up, signalling Martin to stop. ‘Is this true?’ he asks Goffing. ‘In prison under a false name?’