by Alan Carter
Cato pondered the career and psychological merits of Stock Squad versus a posting to Hopetoun. Touch and go.
‘By the way, is that Hope’toon or ’town?’ he asked.
‘The older locals call it Hopet’n, lose the last vowel. But they’re outnumbered by the blow-ins these days and you can call it whatever you like as long as you’re paying.’
There endeth lesson one from Tess Maguire. She added that the pub also did meals.
‘Chicken and rice on the menu?’ asked Cato, his mind on the lastknown stomach contents of Flipper. They really had to find a better name for the poor bugger, preferably his real one.
‘The pub and cafe are more your steak or fish and chips kind of places. Chicken, yeah, maybe for the girlfriends. Not much call for rice though.’
It seemed that in the relatively short time she’d been in Hopetoun, Tess could pretty well recite both menus off by heart – not a big ask. She’d never seen rice on either menu, ever. So there was no point in talking to the proprietors about any of their recent customers; Flipper’s last meal didn’t come from any of these salubrious Hopetoun eateries. He was most likely eating homecooked, but where was home?
All this talk of food had them more than ready for their midmorning break. They bought coffees from the mobile Snak-Attack, a caravan converted into a food kiosk and parked on a vacant block just up from the general store. A chocolate hedgehog for Jim Buckley was thrown in for free when he seemed to recognise the young guy behind the counter.
‘On the house,’ chirped the host with exaggerated bonhomie as he focused on spooning froth into the cardboard cups. Dark curls, blue eyes, used to being admired by his customers. His name was Justin, apparently.
‘Been here long, Justin?’ asked Buckley, conversationally.
‘About six months; nice spot eh,’ Justin replied with a ready smile.
‘How about before that?’ Buckley pressed.
Justin’s smile was becoming more fixed by the minute.
‘Freo, Margaret River; my girlfriend used to live in Margaret River. She owns this joint.’
The girlfriend rolled up. A stunner. She blessed them all with a prim smile and a flick of her long dark locks.
Buckley beamed appreciatively. ‘Looks like you’re doing very well for yourself, Justin.’ He winked and waved the hedgehog. ‘Catch you around.’
Cato raised a questioning eyebrow at Buckley and got a second wink in reply.
They rolled down to the groyne in the Stock Squad four-wheel drive. Tess warily eyed the bull’s-head logo on the car door. When Cato gunned the engine he thought he heard her go ‘brrmm, brrmm’ under her breath. Now they were looking out over Seal Rock, about three hundred metres offshore. The early morning stillness was long gone. The sun was still out but a stiff breeze had blown up from the southwest. It would only get stronger as the day wore on. On the rock three or four brown shapes huddled together against the wind and the spray from the whitecaps. Cato assumed they were seals. Buckley paced around outside having his smoko and talking on his mobile. The wind gusted in a different direction and Cato overheard a brief snatch of the conversation.
‘Too busy for that, just tell me now for fuck’s sake.’
Cato was in the driving seat, Tess in the back. Both were taking a great interest in the view. Spectacular. You couldn’t fault it. Ocean, mountains, beaches. Ocean. Mountains. Beaches.
Ocean. Mountains. Beaches.
Cato broke the silence. ‘Is it always this windy?’
‘Pretty much.’
He looked in the mirror. Met her eyes. ‘So how have you been? Since ... then.’
‘Since when? Since you left me? Or since I nearly died?’
‘Both.’
‘Good. Thanks for asking.’
‘No worries.’
Well that seemed to go well, Cato thought to himself.
Tess’s mobile buzzed: a resident near the pub complaining about beer bottles in his front yard, broken glass in the street, and the aerial and wing mirrors snapped off his car.
‘And wondering when the police were going to do something about those bloody mongrel miners,’ Tess relayed to Cato. ‘Life goes on.’
She looked relieved to be getting out of the bull-mobile and into a proper police car. Cato suspected that was not all she was relieved about. Jim Buckley wrapped up his call, flicked his cigarette away and climbed back into the Land Cruiser with a troubled look.
‘Everything okay?’ Cato said.
‘Yup. Where to now maestro?’
‘Back to Murder HQ; let’s see what Greg the Wonder Boy has been up to. Do a bit of thinking.’
‘Suits me.’
‘So when are you buggers going to put a stop to it?’
Donald Rundle glared up at Tess from behind bushy eyebrows. He had gone on for about five minutes and, despite her best efforts and her training, Tess still hadn’t managed to get a word in edgeways. At one point she’d found her hand straying towards the taser stun gun clipped to her belt but she checked herself. Rundle shifted his weight on to the other foot, crunching more broken glass as if to prove his point. As far as he was concerned, an Englishman’s home was his castle, blah blah blah. Jeez he was a Pom-and-a-half. Tess held up a hand to try to stem the torrent of whingeing.
‘Okay Don, look, I’ll make another report but you need to also talk to the pub and let them know.’
‘Money-grubbing bastard, as long as he’s making a quid he couldn’t give a toss about the rest of us.’
‘And put in a complaint to Liquor Licensing,’ Tess said. ‘I gave you the name and number last time. Do you want me to write it down again for you?’
Tess had adopted her slightly raised ‘aged-care’ voice and was trying to rustle up some semblance of sincerity. It didn’t help.
‘I’m old, not deaf or senile. There’s a difference.’ Rundle glowered. ‘I came down here for a bit of peace and quiet and I had it until that bloody mine opened and that toerag took over the pub.’
Toerag? Tess was beginning to feel like she was in an old episode of The Bill. She glanced at Don Rundle’s million-dollar view across the road to the Southern Ocean; yes she was still in Hopetoun, not Sun Hill. Don was off again pointing out his snapped wing mirror and aerial. Tess was saved by the trilling of her mobile: Greg wanting to know if she fancied a ride out bush. She put a hand up to halt Rundle’s tirade.
‘Sorry Don, got to go. Urgent police business.’
Stuart Miller’s first call was to directory inquiries: Adelaide Police. He assumed Detective Tim Delaney would already be in WA but hopefully they’d be put in touch. They put him on hold; the hold music was AC/DC, ‘Highway to Hell’. He hadn’t heard that one for a while. A fragment of music trivia dislodged from deep in his cranium: didn’t AC/DC now have a Geordie for their lead singer? Then again, he was from Newcastle, not Sunderland, and there was a world of difference in those twelve miles. He used to sing a ditty called ‘Geordie’s lost his Leggie’ about a young lad losing his marble ‘doon the netty’, the toilet. Exactly. Miller wondered how the singer communicated to the rest of the band with a killer accent like that. Hand signals? Mind wandering on to anything but the task at hand, Miller felt rusty and awkward. This was no longer his world.
He’d left the police within two years of the Arthurs murders. As the case grew colder he felt less and less like staying. He drifted into private security, like many ex-cops, but didn’t have the lack of imagination required to do the job properly. One blustery northern winter’s day he was walking past Australia House near the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle and he once again saw the posters of Sydney Harbour Bridge bathed in sunshine. This time he walked through the door. Jenny’s younger sister Maggie, a nurse, had emigrated the previous year and kept on sending postcards peppered with words like ‘sunny’, ‘warm’, and ‘beach’. The last one, just a fortnight before, had two new bits of information: ‘boyfriend’ and ‘cop’. Jenny had rolled her eyes at that news. Anyway he and Jenny and Graeme, by then eleven,
were on a plane to Perth within six months – landing on a cold, blustery Perth winter’s day. He’d laughed out loud that day and never looked back.
Somebody finally decided to answer the phone in Adelaide. Miller told his story to the uppity little wanker in South Australian homicide who made it clear that he thought Miller was a crank; yes, the ULW promised, he would pass on the details to DSC Delaney as soon as he could. Miller slammed the phone down and glared at it. He looked at the clock on the wall, figuring out what time it would be in Sunderland. Four in the morning – wasn’t that a line from a song? He dialled another number.
A 1981 inquest found he electrocuted and bashed...
The same findings as in the Arthurs case.
Davey Arthurs had disappeared off the face of the earth. All they found out about him was that he was born in 1946, almost exactly nine months after VE Day, the original post-war baby boomer. He had worked in the shipyards as an electrician, had a couple of criminal convictions for drunk and disorderly, a self-drawn tattoo of the letters CK on his left forearm. His mother and younger brother were still alive and living in Sunderland and couldn’t understand why he would do such a terrible thing, and his mother-in-law thought he was a nice enough lad. Considering he’d slaughtered her daughter and grandson. Nobody knew who ‘CK’ was; maybe an early girlfriend?
Electrocution, it took a good deal of cold calculation to do that. Bludgeoning someone to death, even your own child, seemed to have somewhere in it the hint of reason, however remote, however mad. Even losing control is a reason of sorts. But fixing jump leads to your wife and child, positive and negative, negative and positive – was that what evil was? Stuart Miller had given up seeing a point to his work while somebody could do something like that and still at large, walking the streets. Free, to do it again. Nobody was answering at the other end but Miller couldn’t bring himself to put the phone down. He just listened to the hypnotic ring-ring, ring-ring. Then came a click, a fumble, a rustle and a grunt.
‘Lawton speaking, who’s this?’
‘Chris. It’s Stuey Miller here.’
There was a slight delay or echo in the voices as they travelled across the world. They’d kept in touch over the years, Chris Lawton still seeing Miller as a bit of a mentor even after all this time and all those promotions. Now he was Assistant Chief Constable, Northumbria Police, and a shoo-in for the soon-to-be-vacant top job. Lawton dropped the big-boss tone when he heard who it was.
‘Stu. What’s up? It better be good at this time of morning ... Christ, 4.00a.m.!’
‘I think I might have found Davey Arthurs.’
Miller knew that placing Arthurs in WA meant placing him in a geographical area approximately the size of Western Europe before the Iron Curtain came down, but decided not to trouble Lawton with that little detail.
‘Fucken hell. Where? You sure?’
Miller told him all he knew and took down a fax number to send the newspaper article through. Lawton had talked about scanning and emailing but Miller didn’t know what he was on about. He promised to pass on Lawton’s details to South Australian Homicide so they could liaise and compare notes. Speaking of which.
‘Chris, what’s the chance of me getting another look at the Arthurs case history?’
Lawton assumed his Assistant Chief Constable voice. ‘You’re retired and well out of it, Stuart. Let’s keep it that way eh? Protocol and all that; we need to do these things by the book these days.’
Miller knew there was no chance of changing the man’s mind; Lawton was headed for career greatness and wouldn’t jeopardise that for anyone or anything. He summoned up a bright no-hardfeelings voice.
‘No worries Chris, but keep me in the loop okay? It’d mean a lot. Old times’ sake?’ Miller almost pleaded, hating himself and Lawton as he did so.
‘No worries? You’re sounding more and more like an Aussie, mate. Yeah we’ll stay in touch. And Stu, thanks for that.’
Miller put his phone down. So that was it. After thirty-five years he gives them a solid lead on Sunderland’s most notorious unsolved, one that remained at least a smudge on Lawton’s otherwise unblemished CV.
Yeah we’ll stay in touch.
He recalled an image, an impression from the day: Detective Constable Chris Lawton dry-retching in the backyard of 11 Maud Street. The case that had killed a pregnant young woman and her little boy had also killed Miller’s belief in the job and in himself. Damned if he’d be sidelined on this one.
Greg Fisher had left a note for Cato. He and Tess were off to the bays out at Starvo and Mason to talk to the boaties, they had their mobiles and the UHF switched on to take any routine calls. Greg had crosschecked the state mispers reports and a summary of ‘possibles’ was sitting in Cato’s email inbox. Cato logged in. There were about a dozen males on the list fitting the age range. Some had disappeared up to ten years ago. Some were last seen standing in remote locations up north or on the outskirts of desert outposts or stumbling out of outback pubs at closing time. Travellers, station hands, mineworkers, waiting for a lift, waiting for help with broken-down vehicles, waiting for somebody to save them. Some had probably started walking and never came back. He crossed off four of these as doubtful. The times, distances and circumstances didn’t add up. He opened up the photos of three others. They seemed either too big, too small, too old, too young or too pale. Too pale? Although Dr Harry Lewis wouldn’t commit, Cato had already convinced himself that the dead man he saw was not Caucasian. Any more than that was purely guesswork. That left five on Greg’s list. Out of the corner of his eye, Cato could see that Jim Buckley had his feet on the desk and was flicking through the day’s newspaper with its lurid ‘We’re all doomed, doomed I tell ye’ headlines. He didn’t seem to be reading anything; he was miles away.
Cato returned to his list. A missing Perth businessman, thirtyeight; last seen in a gay nightclub in Northbridge about a year ago. It had been a bit of a surprise to his wife who was now grieving a little less than she might otherwise have been. Italian background, Carlo Donizetti, medium height and build; a possibility? He scanned further down. One leaped out at him. Two years ago, a Royal Australian Navy frigate had come into the south-coast port of Albany after picking up a sick harpoonist from a Japanese whaler in the Southern Ocean. Heart attack. Cato remembered it on the news at the time. Otherwise kindly humanitarian conservationists protesting loudly that they should have left the bastard to die. The navy ship had been on joint exercises with the Indonesian, Singaporean, Thai, and Malaysian forces. An Indonesian sailor had been seconded aboard the Australian frigate. Lieutenant Riri Yusala. Twenty-five years old. Medium height. Slim build. He’d jumped ship after two days in Albany. Since declared an illegal immigrant but authorities were also hedging their bets by expressing ‘concern for his welfare’. Albany, a hop and skip from Hopetoun, west along the South Coast Highway. Cato studied the picture. Smooth complexion and boyish face; he looked well-fed and affluent. He had an education. He also had a wife and two young kids. Nothing concrete; it was pure instinct that had Cato’s heart beating faster. Riri Yusala.
‘Why did you jump ship and where did you go?’ wondered Cato. ‘And is that you in the cold box on the morning flight to Perth?’
7
Thursday, October 9th. Late morning.
Tess was in a filthy mood as Greg Fisher bumped the paddy wagon through another of the huge potholes left by the previous week’s heavy rain and turned into the dogleg on Mason Bay Road. She had been silent and irritable the whole journey. It wasn’t Don Rundle the whingeing Pom. It was Cato Kwong the infuriating ex. Swanning in like nothing had happened between them and everything was okay as long as you didn’t face up to it. True, he had raised the subject when they were out on the groyne but it was obviously on his TO DO list between BUY TOOTHPASTE and SOLVE MURDER. Item 6: Make Tess Miraculously Forget that I’m a Bastard Because I Left Her and Still Haven’t Told Her Why. Tick. Sorted. Then move back on to the business at hand with everybody la-la h
appy. She snorted and Greg gave her a funny look.
A construction team was working on a pipeline that stretched north through the low dusty scrub as far as the eye could see. She knew it snaked about twenty kilometres to the mine. In the other direction, south, it would finish its journey at Mason Bay at a fencedoff compound just along from the campsite. According to the sign by the side of the road, this was the pipeline for the new desalination plant which would deliver all of the nickel mine’s substantial fresh water needs. Tess surveyed the landscape. Gently rolling coastal scrub topped by a huge blue sky.
‘Bloody beautiful isn’t it?’ said Fisher, voicing her thoughts. She nodded and he obviously took it as a cue to expand.
‘But most of the mob from these parts left about a hundred years ago. They’re Auntie Daisy’s mob, on my mum’s side. They were driven out by a massacre after one of your “pioneers” was speared. Auntie Daisy said it was to persuade the dirty little bugger to leave the young Nyungar girls alone.’
Tess had been only half-listening but she began to tune in; this was the first time she’d heard an alternative take on the local history since she’d come to town.
‘Yeah, he died so they decided to teach us a lesson. “Civilising the natives” – that’s what they call it.’
Greg knew all about that stuff, he told Tess, having been raised in Pinjarra, another famous massacre site, just south of Perth. His mum had warned him about taking the job down here.
‘She said, “This country is just too sad, Gregory. Auntie Daisy’s mob don’t go there now and if they do they don’t stop. They wind up the car windows, hold their noses, and keep driving to the other side.” ’
Tess looked at her young colleague. His family stories were filled with stuff she would never fathom.
‘So how come you’re here then?’
Greg lifted one hand from the wheel in a ‘that’s life’ gesture. An early country posting was part of serving your time to get where you wanted to be and quicker, he said. Even with his fair skin he still knew he was up against the tinted glass ceiling so he had to learn to play the game.