Ecstasy Lake

by Alastair Sarre

  Smyth Chapel was a quaint bluestone building from the 1800s. The bell inside its dainty steeple was tolling as mourners began arriving. A couple of television crews parked down the road and started setting up cameras.

  Tasso had hired the stretch limo again. It made its way cautiously along the cemetery road and pulled up outside the chapel. I recognised a few of the men who emerged. I’d been at university with them—mining engineers and geologists, all wearing dark glasses and some wearing hair plugs. Fern was dressed in a long, black number that was too sexy for a funeral. She embraced another woman, also dressed in black, if less sexily, who had emerged from the back seat of a family sedan. I was fairly sure she was Hiskey’s wife, Sonia, although I hadn’t seen her for many years. A black-suited Tasso was in attendance, being solicitous, which he was good at when he tried. The funeral director was handing out programs.

  ‘So that’s the famous Tasso.’ I glanced behind me. Tarrant hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him several years before: his sandy eyebrows were still hard to see against his pale skin, and he was still wearing a bland, hollow-cheeked smile that told me nothing except that he evidently wasn’t getting enough to eat. He strolled forward to stand alongside me.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Tarrant?’

  ‘I’m not here for pleasure, put it that way.’ He had upgraded his suit since I’d seen him last, and this one wasn’t coming apart at the seams. Beneath his unbuttoned jacket was a hideous tie that only a cop would get away with wearing.

  ‘You’re looking sharp. You been promoted?’

  He grunted. ‘In a minor way. I’m a Detective Inspector now, which means I get a bit more money and a shitload more work. Especially paperwork. And I love paperwork so much I decided to come to a funeral instead.’ He was watching the mourners as he spoke but then he looked at me. He had good eyes for a cop; they gave nothing away, but they had just enough humanity in them to make you think he might be honest. ‘Tasso your friend?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hiskey, too?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How did you know him?’

  ‘We went through university together. He studied geology, Tasso and I did mining engineering.’ I gestured towards the mourners, who were starting to move into the chapel under the mournful guidance of a decrepit priest and the smarmy funeral director. ‘Most of those blokes are the same—either engineers or geologists. It’s a small community.’

  ‘Were you close to him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. I hadn’t seen him for years, probably more than five.’

  ‘What about Tasso? Was he close to Hiskey?’

  ‘I don’t really know. Closer than I was, I guess.’

  ‘I hear Tasso has money.’

  ‘You can hear it from here?’

  He gave me a deadpan ‘your jokes are shit’ look. ‘Where did it come from? The money.’

  ‘It’s all above board. Tasso’s smart and prepared to take a risk. He bought a mining lease in Western Australia that no one wanted and proved that it had more copper in it than anyone thought. The price of copper went up and he sold the lease for ten times what he paid. After he’d paid off the loans he was worth two or three hundred mill.’

  Tarrant whistled. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Anything’s possible in a mining boom.’

  ‘What about you, West? Have you got rich, too, since I last saw you?’

  I held out the lapel of my suit. ‘Does it look like I got rich?’ He didn’t respond. ‘Why are you here, anyway?’

  ‘As of today, I’m investigating Hiskey’s murder. The powers-that-be have put together a taskforce, and I’m in charge of it. In fact, I am the taskforce, not including my assistant.’ He took a packet of gum out of his pocket, withdrew a sliver of silver foil, and offered the packet to me. I shook my head. He removed the silver foil and put the gum in his mouth with a slow, measured movement. ‘Tell your mate Tasso I’ll be in to see him tomorrow.’ His jaw started chewing, regular as a heartbeat. ‘You’d better go or you’ll miss the service.’ I looked across the road. The mourners were inside the chapel now and the funeral director was lighting a cigarette.

  I heard a rumbling, and a convoy of bikes, two abreast with headlights on, turned into the access road. The convoy made its way to the chapel at just faster than walking pace.

  ‘Hello,’ said Tarrant. ‘A bikie cortege. Hiskey did have some interesting mates.’

  The two lead riders were Harlin and Coy, both in leathers. On the back of Harlin’s bike was Melody, wearing an open-faced helmet, high heels and a trench coat. Harlin and Coy stopped their bikes outside the chapel and put down their stands. Melody was first to dismount. She removed her helmet and shook her head to restore the messiness to her hair. She shrugged off her coat to reveal a modest black dress and headed into the chapel, elegant on her high heels. Harlin and Coy waited as the others parked their bikes.

  ‘The one on the left is Harlin,’ said Tarrant in my ear. I could smell his chewing gum.

  ‘I know. I met him on Friday night.’

  Tarrant drew back and gave me a ‘why am I not surprised you’re up to your neck in shit again?’ look and a slow chew of his gum. ‘Did you. Before or after the brawl?’

  ‘Before. Harlin wasn’t there for the brawl. It was a good brawl, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it was. Several hospitalisations, including for a fractured skull, a compound fracture to the arm and internal bleeding, a couple of knife wounds, various traumatised teenagers and a couple of hundred grand in property damage. Yeah, it was fine. Were you at White Pointer when it happened?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Did you see who fired the shots?’

  I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a witness in a gang war. Witnesses in gang wars might find themselves without faces.

  ‘I was too busy panicking. I heard you got someone, anyway.’

  He studied me and sighed. ‘I’m so glad you’re back in my life, West. I’m starting to feel the stress already.’ He chewed his gum and looked as stressed as a headstone.

  Harlin was leading his gang into the chapel. He removed his sunglasses as he entered and made the sign of the cross. I nodded to Tarrant. ‘I’d better go. See you later.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  I crossed the road and negotiated my way among the bikes. Melody had left her trench coat draped over the seat of Harlin’s bike, which gave me an idea. Tarrant had turned and was plodding towards the television crews. I found a scrap of paper in my wallet and wrote a number on the back of it with a pen. I put it in one of the pockets of the coat and drifted into the chapel.

  It was a tiny chapel, and it was packed. Women and some of the older folk were seated, and the rest of us stood. The ceremony didn’t take long. The priest read from his Bible, and a few of the mourners joined him in a chant and said ‘amen’ a few times. The priest spoke about Hiskey’s soul and how it would somehow find his body again at a later date. The bikers at the back were quiet during the service and added a fair bit of volume, if not much tune, to the hymns. I stood just inside the entrance to the chapel and counted heads—there were forty-two, not including the priest and the guest of honour, who waited inside a shiny black coffin, feet towards the audience, with all the time in the world. Melody was sitting straight-backed and solemn next to a forty-ish woman I didn’t know wearing a dark-blue jacket with white trim.

  A man who the priest introduced as ‘Michael’s Uncle Walter’ gave the eulogy, standing on a dais to one side of the altar. He was a rotund character with a red face and wispy grey hair that had receded to the back of his head like clouds blown to the far side of a hill. He looked like he could do with a drink and sounded like he’d already had a few. Mick Hiskey was a northern suburbs boy and proud of it, he said. He was bright, but he hadn’t always tried his hardest at school. He had worked hard at Black Hill, though; he must have walked thousands of miles across the South Australian outback, searching for the ultimate f
ind. He must have known this state better than almost anyone. He must have liked his own company. Hiskey had had big dreams, but that was all they had been, said Uncle Walter, with a sad twist of his nose. He stepped down in silence.

  Tasso walked to the dais, armed with a sheet of paper. He put the paper on the dais and studied it for a while, composing himself. He looked up, his face drained.

  ‘Mick was a mate of mine,’ he said. I shifted position for a look at Sonia, the wife, who was sitting in the front row next to Fern. I could only see part of her face, but it was a tearful part. ‘We met on our first day at university,’ said Tasso. ‘The first thing that struck me about him was that he had a loud laugh.’ He looked around. ‘I’m sure you all remember that. Mick had a laugh like a smoker’s cough. When it got out of control it sounded as if he was about to hoick one of his lungs onto the table.’ A few people laughed. ‘But he wasn’t dying of lung cancer, he was just having a good time. He loved to party.’ There were nods, and another murmur of laughter. ‘Another thing I liked about him, and of course I didn’t know this until later, was that he was a fighter. It got him into trouble.’ He paused and looked around the audience. ‘I had been seeing a fair bit of Mick in the last few weeks and months. He had fallen on hard times. Things weren’t going his way. But he was fighting. He was fighting drug addiction, he was fighting his business partner, he was fighting his wife.’ Tasso looked at Sonia, whose mouth opened in shock.

  ‘How dare you,’ said someone in the audience.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I have to be honest,’ said Tasso. He waved his arms, as he always did when he got excited. ‘Mick was fighting back. And then he was murdered.’ Tasso’s arms landed, and he gripped the lectern. ‘As Uncle Walter said, Mick spent most of his adult life in remote parts of this country, scratching the land and searching, searching for that big ore deposit that would make someone a billionaire and help grow this country. He never stopped looking. Walter was right—Mick must have known this state better than anyone; it was his life’s work. He loved the outback. I said he liked to party, but he also liked to go out back. If he had not been murdered—brutally murdered—he would be out there now. He was a talented geologist, one of the best, and a fighter. My bet is that he fought his murderer to the end.’ He looked deliberately around the audience. ‘I promise you now I will honour that fight. I will do my best to bring his murderer to justice.’ Someone started to applaud, and a few others joined in. ‘Now we lay Mick Hiskey to rest,’ said Tasso. ‘I’ll miss his company. I’ll miss his laugh. I’ll miss him. We say goodbye to a man. A flawed man, yes, but he was my friend.’ Tasso sat down.

  That was about the end of proceedings. I was surprised to see Tasso line up to take the sacrament from the priest, who then waved around incense and led us in a final hymn. I didn’t know the words or the tune but was moved by it anyway.

  When it was over I waited outside with the rest of the party, and we formed a guard of honour. It was the start of a long dusk; the gravestones to the west were casting dismal shadows, dark fingers reaching towards us from the dry earth. The sun dipped and the sky faded, and the clouds were painted in farewell pink and purple, reminding us that sometimes the most beautiful things were the most goddamn sad.

  The television crews were keeping their distance although no doubt still getting plenty of footage of Harlin’s gang, which would be gold on the nightly news. Next to me was the forty-ish woman in the dark-blue jacket with white trim I’d seen inside the chapel. She wore sneakers, which were at odds with her black skirt and stockings and the solemnity of the occasion. She had brown hair tied back in a ponytail, olive skin, plucked eyebrows and a stub nose that was a good size for her face. It was a nice face, with only a hint of desperation about it, and plenty of grief. She noticed me studying her.

  ‘Friend of Mick’s?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I knew him a little.’ She tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. Her face was in danger of disintegrating, so I looked away. Melody walked solemnly past, looking neither left at me nor right at Harlin; when she reached the end of the line she took her place in the guard of honour. She glanced at me, but gave no sign of recognition. Harlin was staring at me, his face stony.

  The bikers were in the line, their respectful hands clasped in front of them and their heads bowed. The coffin was brought out, borne by six pallbearers including Tasso and a couple of Hiskey’s other university friends, and followed by Sonia and the priest. A group of about twenty of us, and a couple of film crews, still keeping their distance, made a procession along the access road to the grave site. We watched as the funeral director lowered the coffin into the ground.

  A car drove past on West Terrace, windows open and sound system blaring. A lad stuck his head out the window and yelled at the top of his voice, apparently at all the dead people.

  ‘Suckers!’

  There was laughter from the back seat. Someone pressed his arse to the window. Tasso snorted.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ said Fern.

  ‘I think he’s mooning death.’

  ‘What an idiot.’

  ‘What else can we do?’ said Tasso. ‘Come on, let’s get a drink.’

  Harlin and his gang departed, bikes cackling, and Melody went with them. The woman in the dark blue jacket with white trim had lingered for a while at the back, but now I spotted her heading north on foot along the access road. I decided to follow her, for no particular reason other than intrigue at the apparent depth of her grief. I peeled off from Tasso’s group.

  She wasn’t hard to track. She walked fast, but because her legs were short I could keep pace with her at a stroll. She walked with purpose, her head down and her ponytail bobbing behind her, as if the faster she walked the faster she would leave her grief behind. But grief can be a bit like a ponytail, and hard to lose. One of her arms kept a grip on a bag slung over her shoulder, and the other was swinging in a big arc. She didn’t look behind her. We left the cemetery and walked north along West Terrace. She crossed over and headed north-east into the city along lanes and minor streets. At one point she paused, put her bag on the ground and dug around in it. I leaned into the brick entrance of a basement car park and watched as she changed into a pair of black low-heeled shoes. She put her sneakers into the bag. Then she took out a compact and dabbed her face while looking in the mirror. When she finished she zipped up the bag, took a couple of deep breaths, and walked on. She turned the corner, and by the time I reached it she had disappeared from view.

  8

  There was a pub across the road called End of the World, and I went in. The woman was behind the bar drawing a beer, presumably for the lone customer, who was seated on a stool at the far end of the world as if he had been there for a decade and wasn’t planning on going anywhere. He had grey hair and glasses and wore a bow tie, and he might have been a professor at the university next door. He had the look of a man with a doctorate in the consumption of alcohol, and his nose was cabernet red. The woman glanced up as I walked in; there was a flicker of recognition and then a practised smile. I folded my suit jacket, put it on a stool and sat next to it. She looked at me again and I ordered a pint of Pale Ale. She drew it for me and took my money.

  ‘Did you follow me? From the funeral?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s stalking.’

  ‘I was curious, that’s all.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘You knew Mick more than a little, didn’t you? It was kind of obvious. He was a friend of mine, too.’

  She leaned toward me over the bar, her elbows on it. She spoke in a soft voice so the Professor of Alcohol couldn’t hear her. ‘Of course he meant a lot to me,’ she said. ‘I loved him.’ She clenched her eyes and the tears came. They came on the quiet; she fought for control of her face. ‘And he loved me.’

  The professor was watching her. ‘The pain will fade,’ he said. ‘Like everything.’ He took a good long sip of his beer.

  ‘Your nose isn’t fading,’ I said. />
  She gave a little wet snort of laughter. The professor took it in good humour, too, giving a loud guffaw that died quickly. ‘My nose is eternal,’ he said grandly.

  The woman grabbed a tissue from a box and dabbed her face. ‘Are you a cop?’ she said.

  ‘No. I told you, Mick was a friend. From university.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen him for a long time. Where did you meet him?’

  She nodded to indicate the bar. ‘Here. When he was in town he came in most nights. Some nights are slow. We started talking. We had things in common. I knew he had problems. But sometimes he sat here for hours, drinking and talking and arguing with people. He was funny; he would argue with anyone and stay until the pub closed. In the last few months, sometimes he would come home with me.’ She gave a smile and managed to hold it on her face. ‘Tasso was right, what he said at the service. Mick wasn’t well, but he was a fighter. And, yes, he was an addict. Addicts are the worst people in the world when they can’t get a fix. But he fought it; he tried to be good to me.’

  ‘He had a loud laugh,’ said the professor, from the end of the bar. He held up his finger to the woman to signal that he wanted another drink. She pulled him a beer.

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘He used to come in here, like she said. We argued a bit.’ He tested his beer, and found it to be fine. ‘He was always good for an argument and he almost never knew what he was talking about.’ The woman glared at him, but the professor just stared at his beer.

  The woman returned to me, a dishcloth in her hand. She started wiping the top of the bar with it. ‘He wasn’t around much. It wasn’t like we were living together or anything. But we had some good times.’ She was wiping hard. There were no rings on her fingers. Her face was showing signs of wear; lines radiated from the corners of her eyes, but they were friendly lines. Hiskey had found a nice woman to mother him a little.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Marianne.’