Dead Heat

by Peter Cotton

  More footage: Nasutian fishing from a different jetty. Alone, in jeans and a check shirt, his legs dangled over the water. In the next clip, Nasutian and a woman sat talking on a park bench. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. She wore a floral dress and a long black jacket. Her hair was hidden under a scarf. She looked to be in her fifties. As with the other footage, the clip had no sound.

  ‘Well?’ said Peterson, mouth slightly open.

  ‘I’d say it’s him,’ I said. ‘The way he moves. The turn of his head. And especially the way he laughs. He talked to me, of course — on the boat. I assume you’ve got audio to go with these pictures. It’d help to hear it.’

  ‘There is audio on some of them,’ said Peterson. ‘But it’s not available.’

  The look I shot him must have been tinged with frustration, because he shrugged his shoulders and regarded me with some sympathy.

  ‘One other thing,’ he said. ‘We’ve brought everything from Bynder’s house to a hangar here on the base. It’s already been examined by our people and it hasn’t thrown up anything. We want you to have a look at it.’

  My phone vibrated. Peterson nodded, indicating I should take the call. Radcliffe was on the line from the nurses’ station. Daisy wanted time alone with Jade, he said, so he needed a lift back to Steeple Bay. Could I organise it? I asked Peterson, who said he’d have a driver take the priest home.

  The ironclad exterior of the hangar shimmered in the full sun of late morning. One of the sailors guarding the entrance scanned my ID and hit a button. The doors slid open, and I stepped into a cooled and cavernous interior.

  The contents of Bynder’s house had been laid out on three rows of trestle tables lined up in the middle of the space. Peterson had said I should start with a file I’d find on a desk near the entrance. I sat at the desk and flipped through the file. It was an inventory of everything from the house. Four of the listed items immediately jumped out at me: two notebooks from Jade’s room and a couple of ‘academic works’ attributed to Bynder.

  I took a rubberised apron and a pair of gloves from a box next to the desk and put them on. I walked over and stood in front of the tables. I wasn’t sure where to start or why I should start at all. It was obvious everything in front of me had been pulled apart several times. Now Peterson had asked me to do the same again — all by myself. It was the sort of job you gave someone to keep them busy. And out of trouble.

  I knew where these thoughts were heading, so I closed my eyes and checked myself. I had a job to do, and if I became angry and resentful, I might miss something I’d otherwise spot. I had to be present to be effective. I gave myself a metaphorical slap around the chops, and resolved to maintain my focus. It was time to get stuck in.

  I went to the line of tables nearest the door and began. Each object had a cardboard tag attached bearing a brief description and an identification number, and everything had been grouped according to the room in Bynder’s house from which it’d been taken. I weighed each object in my hands, tapped the solid ones looking for hollows, calculated the age of each, and assessed them all for wear and tear.

  I was examining the base of an electric kettle when a low hum caught my ear. I put the kettle down and looked up at the ceiling. The hum built to a distant roar. An aircraft — a huge machine — coming from the west. Maybe two of them, maybe more. Trident’s transport to Stirling. It’d be landing soon.

  I decided to put the kitchen gear aside for a while to look at the items that had piqued my interest when I’d seen them listed in the file by the door: Jade’s notebooks and Bynder’s academic efforts. I found two dog-eared notebooks on one of the tables bearing Jade’s stuff. The notebooks turned out to be less thought-filled than I’d hoped for. Nothing but shopping lists, reminders, and recipes.

  The first of Bynder’s academic works was an essay dealing with the impact of British colonialism on the world’s aboriginal peoples. It included press cuttings, photographs, and transcripts of interviews with various historians and social-justice activists. The second work consisted of transcripts of interviews Bynder had conducted with members of the long-defunct Redfern Black Panther Movement.

  I flipped through both efforts, hoping for a note in the margins, a highlighted passage, or even just an underlined word. Something shedding light on Bynder’s motivations, or improbably, something that pointed to his associates. But the text was clean.

  I put the papers back and ran my eyes over the tables of stuff still to be examined. Maybe I’d find something the other searchers had missed. It was possible, but highly improbable. Chances were, this hunt would occupy me for the rest of the day and yield nothing but frustration and a pounding headache. And I could already feel both coming on.

  No wonder. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in hours. I knew I could use the mess hall whenever I wanted, but I needed fresh air and I felt an urgent desire to get off the base for a while. The only place nearby that sold takeaway was the JB store. I decided to drive there, pick something up, and find a shady spot to sit and eat in peace.

  I nodded at the guards as I exited the hangar, walked to the administration building, and got into the car Peterson’s people had assigned to me. It was my first time behind the wheel since the shark attack, and when I lifted my arms to the steering wheel, a sharp pain electrified my ribs. I immediately lowered my hands to my lap and took a few deep breaths. When I tried again, I employed the taxi driver’s grip — both hands wrapped around the inside bottom of the steering wheel. That caused only minor discomfort, so I slowly reversed out of the parking bay and drove towards the checkpoint at the bottom line of security fencing.

  By the time I got to the JB store, all they had left after the lunchtime rush were a couple of desiccated meat pies and a soggy-looking ham-and-salad roll. I bought the roll and a bottle of water, went back to the car, and drove towards Murrays Beach.

  In another sign that Trident’s transfer to the West was imminent, ten fully armed sailors in camouflage gear had replaced the lone lollipop guy at the start of the works on Jervis Bay Road. I stopped a few metres from them, and they had me get out of the car while they searched it inside and out. They scanned my ID, and when they’d cleared me, I got back in the car, and they waved me on.

  Loose road base crackled under my tyres as I drove slowly through the cutting and onto the elevated causeway. The workers had already knocked off for the day — or more likely, they’d been given an early mark in the interests of national security. I drove past lines of idle road-working machines at the eastern end of the site, the road base gave way to solid bitumen, and I put my foot down as I cleared the work zone.

  Just after the turn-off to Steeple Bay, I was stopped by another group of grim-faced sailors in camouflage gear. They repeated the detailed search and the ID check. When I finally rolled into the car park at Murrays Beach, my ribs ached, my head hurt, and my sense of disruption from being searched twice in quick succession had made me even gloomier about the state of the investigation.

  I pulled into Cherry’s favourite parking bay, the spot once earmarked for a nuclear reactor, got out of the car, and walked through the trees to the beach. I sat on a bench in the shade with a clear view of the water and tuned out for a few minutes, focusing on the clouds hanging low over the bay.

  Then my phone rang, snapping me from my reverie. It was a nurse from intensive care at the base. She said Jade’s condition had deteriorated dramatically and that Daisy was desperate for Father Radcliffe to come back and perform the last rites.

  BLOOD OATH NEWS BLOG

  MONDAY 5 DECEMBER, 1.00PM

  Prime Minister Lou Feeney has confirmed that two of Australia’s newly unveiled Trident submarines were placed on a war footing during Sunday night’s attack on the Creswell naval base by Indonesian ultra-nationalists.

  While the attack was repulsed, and the Tridents were subsequently stood down, Australia’s deployme
nt of nuclear weapons, potentially against Indonesian targets, will have an immense and immediate impact on regional stability.

  In light of today’s revelation, a Chinese Government spokesman said Beijing would consider supplying Indonesia with its own nuclear arsenal.

  The spokesman said a nuclear-armed Indonesia would radically reduce the potential for war between Australia and Indonesia, as a nuclear exchange between the two would result in the ultimate ‘dead heat’ — the destruction of both countries.

  22

  I phoned the priest, who didn’t answer, so I left a message asking him to call me urgently. It’d been about forty-five minutes since he’d been driven back to Steeple Bay, so I figured he’d still be out there, especially as he lacked reliable transport and, it seemed, a reliable phone. I eyed the soggy roll on the bench next to me and thought about asking Peterson’s people to send someone out to collect him, but the roll looked so uninviting, and I was already halfway to Steeple Bay, so I decided to go out and get him myself. Anything to delay a return to the hangar.

  I binned the roll, went back to the car, and drove out onto Jervis Bay Road again. Despite the fact that I’d been through their checkpoint minutes before, the sailors near the Steeple Bay turn-off stopped me for a repeat ID and security check. When they finally allowed me back behind the wheel, I told them I appreciated their thoroughness, and at some level, I did.

  Soon after turning on to Steeple Bay Road, I noticed a largish splatter of fresh oil in the middle of the opposite lane. Given the number of military types who were out and about, I assumed it was from one of theirs. A second splatter glistened on the blacktop about fifty metres after the first, there was a third about fifty metres after that, and regular splatters from then on, though the distance between them seemed to be increasing. A vehicle dropping that much oil needed serious attention, and it’d be very embarrassing for the military if it did turn out to be one of theirs, especially if it broke down and held up the Trident transfer.

  Another checkpoint blocked the road just before the main gates to the air base. The three sailors there again went over my vehicle, and a fourth examined my ID. While I waited to be cleared, I took in some of the preparations for the transfer: military vehicles rumbled along the service road just inside the fence line, a huge air freighter taxied across the apron towards four identical freighters parked next to the hangars, a squad of sailors prepared their gear at the back of one of five troop transporters lined up on the apron, while a kitted-up squad jogged along the runway.

  The sailors waved me on, and I was stopped again for the same range of checks at the south-east corner of the air base. Intriguingly, the oil splotches continued to mark the road after the air base was well behind me, indicating that the oil probably hadn’t come from a military vehicle. The distance between the splotches had increased to about one hundred metres.

  I crested the hill overlooking Steeple Bay and drove down through the settlement. There was barely a soul in sight — everyone must’ve retreated indoors to escape the heat of the day. I turned the corner into the priest’s street, and as I pulled up at the curb outside his place, I was forced to do a double-take — Radcliffe’s emergency vehicle was gone. A big puddle of oil shimmered on the concrete where the back axle would’ve been. The dead leaves that had sheltered under the vehicle were scattered across the bare yard.

  I knocked on the front door, but there was no response. I put my ear to the door, but heard nothing. I knocked again and waited a couple of minutes, but still nothing. I returned to my car, drove back to the main street, and parked for a moment while I thought about what to do. Strips of coloured plastic fluttered in the open doorway of the Steeple Bay General Store. Maybe someone there knew where the priest had gone.

  Davey Spencer, the co-owner of the store, looked surprised when I pushed through the plastic strips and said g’day.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said, closing a fishing magazine.

  ‘What’s up is that I’m really thirsty,’ I said, placing ten dollars on the counter, ‘and a bit peckish.’

  I picked up a couple of chocolate bars and went to the fridge, grabbed a bottle of water, and downed half of it.

  ‘How’re things after the search?’ I said, wiping water from my chin with the back of my hand. ‘Any impact?’

  ‘Haven’t had any strangers poking around, if that’s what you mean,’ said Davey.

  ‘Good. I was looking for Father Radcliffe. Any idea where he might be? His car’s gone. The emergency vehicle.’

  ‘He left about half an hour ago. That thing of his almost shat itself going up the hill. Should get himself a little Japanese sedan, the priest. A used one wouldn’t cost him much. Then he wouldn’t have to bot lifts all the time. Or shit everyone off with the noise that thing makes.’

  ‘If you see Radcliffe,’ I said, handing him my card, ‘tell him to call me, will you?’

  ‘What’s up? Is it Jade?’

  ‘Just ask him to call me. Please.’

  I pushed through the plastic strips and stepped back into the heat. I quickly got in the car and started it up to get the aircon blowing. I sat, ate the chocolate, and finished the water. Then I dropped the empty bottle and the chocolate wrappings onto the floor on the passenger’s side and drove back up the hill. The two dollops of oil I spied on the way to the top had the same colour and splatter pattern as all the other ones staining Steeple Bay Road, and though I had no evidence for it, I reckoned all the oil had the same source: the priest’s emergency vehicle.

  Radcliffe had been dropped home by Peterson’s people within the past hour. It’d taken me twenty minutes to drive the length of Steeple Bay Road, including the time spent at the checkpoints. I hadn’t crossed paths with the priest, so that put him somewhere between twenty and sixty minutes ahead of me. Davey Spencer had told me Radcliffe had motored out of Steeple Bay within the last half-hour, and, while I couldn’t credit Davey’s guesstimate, it fitted with what I knew. So, where had the priest gone, and why had he gambled on his dodgy vehicle to get him there?

  He was well aware of Jade’s condition. If he’d had another matter to attend to, maybe he’d already called Daisy to inform her, and she’d asked him to come back to Creswell urgently. If he was on his way to Jade, he might be there by now. Then again, his emergency vehicle was very dodgy, so he was probably taking it very slowly. I phoned Daisy to see if she’d heard from him, but the call went straight through to voicemail. I hung up without leaving a message, as it occurred to me that maybe I’d been a bit impulsive in calling her.

  If Radcliffe had contacted Daisy, and if he was on his way to Creswell, well and good. But if he hadn’t spoken to her, raising doubts about the priest’s availability, even his whereabouts, would only add to her distress. And I was confident I’d catch Radcliffe soon enough, anyway. His emergency vehicle had dropped so much oil, it was due for an emergency all of its own.

  The layered columns of The Steeple cast sinewy shadows over the coastal heath. I couldn’t discount the possibility that Radcliffe had gone to visit the rock formation or the lighthouse ruins below it. I entertained that thought, until I spotted a splotch of oil on the blacktop about twenty metres beyond the lighthouse turn-off.

  I rounded a curve in the road, and the checkpoint at the corner of the air base slid into view. Hundreds of troops now patrolled in squads on either side of the fence. A significant portion of Australia’s armed forces had been flown into Jervis Bay for the Trident transfer. I slowed and stopped in front of the checkpoint. A sailor ordered me out of my vehicle, and three of his colleagues searched it while he checked my pass.

  When the sailor cleared me to proceed, I asked him if a beaten-up EH Holden spewing oil had passed through the checkpoint recently. He nodded. A vehicle matching that description had gone by about forty minutes ago, he said.

  ‘The driver was a priest,’ said the sailor. ‘On his way to do the last rite
s for some poor bugger.’

  The emergency vehicle had deposited a small pool of oil at the checkpoint near the air base gates. The priest had given the sailors there the same story: he was on his way to minister to a dying person. One of the sailors said Radcliffe had seemed a bit edgy while he’d waited for the all clear. The other sailors agreed with that assessment. One of them put it down to Radcliffe being in a hurry to get to his ‘job’.

  The splotches of oil, my breadcrumb trail, were fifty metres apart as I turned onto Jervis Bay Road. There was no lollipop guy at the start of the roadworks, though plenty of armed troops had their eyes on me as I crossed the causeway and drove through the cutting. At the western end of the works, I was stopped by the same group of sailors who’d stopped me previously. They checked my car and ID again and waved me on.

  Twenty vehicles queued in front of a checkpoint at the turn-off for the Creswell naval base. I stopped near the head of the queue, and a couple of sailors stepped towards me and signalled me to get out of the car. I did as they asked and handed my ID to one of them. While she examined it, I asked her colleague if an old EH Holden had recently come through the checkpoint on its way to Creswell. He said no such vehicle had gone through the checkpoint, though he had noticed an old EH drive past it, heading towards Nowra. He said the vehicle had been making such odd noises that he reckoned it’d be lucky to get much further down the road.

  I got in the car and considered my next move. Should I head back to the hangar and search through stuff that’d already been searched, or should I locate the priest and take him back to Jade? It was possible, of course, that Radcliffe was racing to administer the last rites to someone in Nowra. Even so, I resolved to pursue him, for Jade and Daisy’s sake.