Tunnel Vision

by Andrew Christie

  A police van was parked across the Larkin Street intersection, blocking any traffic coming off the main road. A young cop leaned down to John’s window as he pulled up to the van. “Sorry, sir. The street’s closed. Residents only.”

  “What happened?”

  “Police operation. I can’t tell you anything more. The investigators are still working.”

  “I have to see the people at number twelve. Can I walk over there?”

  “Not till they’re finished. You’ll have to come back later.”

  “Any idea how long that’ll be?”

  The cop shook his head and waved for him to drive on.

  John swung back out onto the main road and parked a bit further down, in front of a motel. He walked back to Larkin Street and joined a group of people standing outside a line of blue-and-white tape stretched across the footpath between a picket fence and a parking sign. They seemed to be a mixture of locals and outsiders, vacationers drawn from the campground across the road by a whiff of tragedy. Most of the police personnel and vehicles were further up the street, past the McPhedran house. John had no idea what was going on, but he really needed to see if there was anyone home at number twelve.

  “Anyone know what happened?” he asked the onlookers standing around on the footpath.

  “Someone got killed,” a man at the front said, not taking his eyes off the street. A couple of women whispered to each other and gave John sideways looks.

  “Do any of you know Dave McPhedran?” John tried again. “Lives at number twelve. I need to talk to him.”

  At the mention of the name, several of them looked up, obviously recognising it, but none of them said anything.

  “I’m a friend of his granddaughter, Rashmi. From Sydney.”

  “Rashmi?” a white-haired woman said.

  “Yes, Rashmi. Do you know her? And her grandfather? Dave?”

  “Yes, I do. Who are you?”

  “John Lawrence. I don’t know Dave McPhedran myself, but I know his daughter, Sally, and his granddaughter, Rashmi. She’s supposed to be staying up here, but I can’t get in contact with her. Or with her grandfather.”

  The woman turned out to be Dave McPhedran’s neighbour. “Linda,” she said, offering John her hand. “Dave’s not home. I checked earlier, after all this started.”

  “I don’t suppose you know when he’ll be back?”

  “No idea. I haven’t seen him since before Christmas. Young Rashmi was here, though, for a couple of days. With a boy.” She gave John a significant nod.

  “They were here?” This was the first bit of good news he’d heard on this trip. “When was that?”

  “I saw them on Christmas Day. Looked like they’d been to the beach. I left her alone, though. After all that fuss in the news, she probably wanted some quiet. A bit of time with her boyfriend.”

  “Have you seen them since?”

  “No. No one’s been about. I don’t know where Dave is. Poor old Kurt usually looks after the place if he’s away.”

  “Kurt? He’s the one they’re saying got killed, right?”

  “You heard about that?” The woman looked up at John and cocked her head to the side.

  “Some people at a café said a man named Kurt had been killed.” John had no idea what was going on. Dave McPhedran and the kids had disappeared, and now this neighbour had turned up dead. “Sorry…what was your name?”

  “Linda.”

  “Linda, sorry. Yeah, do you know Sally at all?”

  The woman smiled. “Of course. I’ve known her since she was a little kid. Bit of a terror she was, back then.”

  John nodded. “Sounds like Rashmi takes after her mother then. Sally said something about her father having a farm. Do you know anything about that?”

  “How is Sally? I haven’t seen her for years.”

  “She’s good. Worried about Rashmi, though. She asked me to try to find her. Do you know this farm of Dave’s? Up in the hills somewhere, Sally thought.”

  “Yeah, Toolongolook. I suppose Dave might be up there.”

  “Too long…?”

  “Toolongolook. It’s the name of the property. Aboriginal, I suppose.”

  “Do you know where it is? The farm?”

  “I don’t think it’s a proper farm, just a few acres. He doesn’t actually grow anything.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Not sure, not exactly. Somewhere out the back of Burringbar, I think he said.”

  “Burringbar?”

  “Off the Murwillumbah road…”

  The woman was looking at something behind him. John turned to see an unmarked white van pull out of a driveway and head towards them. A murmur went through the crowd as the cop who’d spoken to John earlier backed his vehicle off the road to let the van through. John tapped Linda lightly on the arm to get her attention. “If Dave turns up, could you ask him to ring this number? It’s quite urgent.” He scribbled his phone number on the back of the café receipt from breakfast and handed it to her. The woman nodded, her eyes flitting back up the road to the house, where a large contingent of police was gathered.

  It took John until after midday to find Dave McPhedran’s farm.

  Burringbar turned out to be a small village stretched out along an abandoned railway line. A few shops and houses were scattered along one side of the road, facing a park on the other side. A handful of grey-nomads and younger travellers had parked their caravans and motor homes beside the old railway and were using the park’s facilities. It was a free campsite that probably brought a bit of business into the few village shops.

  John parked in the shade of a poinciana tree and crossed the road to the little supermarket. He got a bottle of water out of the fridge and told the young boy on duty he was looking for a farm. “Toolongolook, something like that. Off the Murwillumbah road.”

  “Murwillumbah?” the boy said, taking John’s money. “I guess that’d be the Tweed Valley Way. Goes up over those hills out there.” He waved out the front window of the shop, towards the range that rose steeply on the other side of the old rail line. “Goes all the way through to Murwillumbah. Which way’d you come?”

  “From Brunswick Heads.”

  “Yeah, well, you wanna go back up on that main road, then turn left over the old railway bridge. It’ll take you up over the hills.”

  “Thanks. Do you know this place? Toolongolook?”

  The boy shook his head. “Nah, sorry. Never heard of it.”

  The Tweed Valley Way wound up through hills covered with dense forest. Everything seemed to be green and damp, the trees forming a shady canopy over the road as it climbed.

  Once John crested the range, though, the landscape changed. The land wasn’t as steep, and there were fewer trees. The countryside opened up into rolling green pastures, outlined by rows of trees along the fence lines. Banana plantations were frequent on the lower slopes. John turned left off the main road, unsure what he was looking for or how to find it. He stopped at the first house where it looked like someone was home and asked if they’d heard of a place called Toolongolook. The woman who had come out on the veranda at the sound of the ute balanced a child on her hip and shook her head. “Nah. Sorry. Not around here, mate.”

  He tried at six more houses before he ran out of road at a locked gate decorated with an anti-coal-seam-gas sign. No one had heard of Toolongolook. He pulled over under a shady tree and finished off the bottle of water. What now? All he could do was keep trying. He tossed the empty bottle onto the floor on the passenger’s side and put the ute back in gear.

  Back at the main road, he turned left then took the next side road. It took him across a little valley and under an old, abandoned railway bridge before it climbed up into the hills again. Another intersection, another left turn. This time the road ended in a weird hippie cul-de-sac, surrounded by houses that seemed to be trying to disappear into the ground. A group of kids on bicycles playing in the road came over to see what he wanted. Half them were naked, and all
had rough-looking haircuts. None of them were shy about talking to him, but they hadn’t heard of Toolongolook either. One kid ran off towards his house and came back dragging a bare-chested man with a long red beard and hands that did hard work. Other adults started to emerge too, wondering what was going on. “Toolongolook?” beard guy said, “Never heard of it, mate.” Nobody disagreed with the man; they all just watched John.

  He thanked them and drove back the way he had come. The next side road was on the left again. John kept asking about Toolongolook whenever he found someone to ask. After checking two more side roads, he came across an old bloke on a quad bike. He and his dog were moving cattle from one paddock to another across the road. John pulled over and watched while the man got off the bike to open a gate and let the cows into a new paddock. The dog looked like a cross between a Kelpie and a cattle dog. He didn’t have to do much; the cows knew where they were going and seemed to be happy enough to go there, ambling through the gate, shiny black and sleek in the sun. Well fed. When the man closed the gate, John got out of the ute and called to him. The man looked up, said something to the dog, and walked over to the fence with a stiff-legged roll. His skin was a deep red-brown, nearly the colour of the soil, and his hat was mostly sweat stain.

  “Toolongolook?” he said. “Yeah, young Blackett runs about thirty head on that place. Some bloke from the coast owns it. Not bad country.” He pointed along the road. “About five miles. You go over a couple of creeks, up a bit of a rise, on the right. Name’s on the gate. There’s no house there, mind, just a bit of shed.”

  John thanked the man and left him leaning against the gatepost, rolling a cigarette and watching his cattle.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was starting to think he must have gone too far, but then there it was: toolongolook painted in black on a lacquered timber signboard, hanging from the top rail of a gate. The cattle in the paddocks paused and watched as he drove up the dusty track, past a small dam, over a low hill, and finally into a yard with two corrugated iron sheds. The doors of both sheds were open, but there were no vehicles in the yard.

  John shut off the engine and got out, stretching his back and neck. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone here?”

  The bigger shed was a machinery shed. It held a small tractor with a rear-mounted slasher. In the other shed, he found Billy’s pack and camera. He also found upturned furniture and bloodstains on the concrete floor. Still tacky.

  A chest freezer against the wall had been left open, the meat inside defrosting and starting to attract flies. John didn’t know what had happened here, but the blood wasn’t a good sign. He went back to the ute and put on a pair of leather rigger’s gloves he kept under the seat. Working his way in from the perimeter, he started to search, making a circuit of the yard. There were only two ways in, the track from the road he’d just driven up and another on the far side that looked to head further up the valley. There were plenty of tyre tracks in the dust. Four or five different vehicles—one small, a quad bike or small tractor. The most recent seemed to be car tracks that headed further up the valley, as well as some off-road tyre marks that came out of the machinery shed, heading back to the road.

  The door to the smaller shed had bullet holes in it. Punched through the corrugated iron from inside. From the mess inside, it looked like there’d been a fight. Shell casings were scattered on the floor. 9mm Parabellum. It didn’t look like anyone had been hit. None of the bloodstains on the concrete floor were big enough. Not for a bullet wound. So there was that at least, but something bad had happened here. Someone had bled. A plastic bag of meat lay on the floor, in a puddle of water. Whatever had happened must have gone down last night, after John had been mugged and after Dave McPhedran’s neighbour had been killed.

  Billy’s bag and another bag that looked like it might be Rashmi’s lay near a mattress at one end of the shed. There had been more than just the two of them here, judging by the plates and cutlery scattered about, knocked onto the floor when the table was upended. There was nothing in the kids’ bags that could tell him what had happened. Nothing on Billy’s camera but some pictures of cows and birds.

  Outside John sat on a bench in the shade to catch the breeze and think. Something had happened here. Maybe the kids were all right, but where were they? They’d gone without their bags, so they’d obviously left in a hurry. No crutches had been left behind, though, so presumably they’d had time to take them when they’d left.

  Where would they have gone? John wondered. Where’s the grandfather? And who fired the shots?

  He probably should call Sally, but what would he tell her? Billy and Rash might be all right. But they might not. They could have been taken. Or killed. He couldn’t tell her about the blood or the spent rounds, not before he knew what it all meant.

  The cattle in the field next to the yard watched him and chewed grass as he got back in the ute. They would have seen what happened, John thought.

  He drove across the yard and out the gate at the far end. The track soon became a pair of parallel wheel ruts running up over a low hill. He had to wait for cows to move off the track a couple of times as he followed it across the paddock and down towards the bottom of a line of low hills. The track led across a cattle grid and down to an old railway line. A Falcon was there, crashed down the embankment, and nearby a quad bike lay on its back. The car was empty, the key still in the ignition. John saw footprints in the mud at the bottom of the drainage channel beside the tracks. At least two sets. An aluminium crutch, bent and useless, was trapped under the upturned bike.

  He looked up and down the railway. To the left the line ran north, towards Murwillumbah. To the right it ran south, towards the base of the range, disappearing into an oval-shaped tunnel. Back through to Burringbar, he guessed, probably the same line he’d seen earlier in the day.

  That’s where Billy and Rashmi would have gone, he thought. If they were trying to get away from someone, if they were trying to hide. He grabbed a flashlight from the ute and followed the tracks into the mouth of the tunnel. Judging by the weed growth between the tracks, the line must have been abandoned for a long time.

  Inside, the tunnel was dark and cool, a welcome change from the glare and humidity outside. The air smelled of old soot.

  John swept the beam back and forth across the tunnel as he followed the tracks. He found the body a couple of hundred metres in. A woman, shot by the side of the track, a large part of her head missing. From the blood spray, it looked like someone had shot her from behind. Someone closer to the tunnel entrance.

  There was a recess in the wall just beside the body. The dirt at the bottom had been scuffed up, and John saw what looked like a handprint. Clear and small, maybe a girl’s. He could easily imagine Billy and Rashmi hiding here, crouching in the dark, trapped because Rashmi couldn’t go any further.

  The woman was an older lady, in her sixties maybe. Had she been with Billy and Rashmi? He hoped that whoever had shot her hadn’t found the kids. A wound like that could only come from a high-power weapon.

  John kept going, following the tunnel for nearly a kilometre until it opened out on the other side of the hills. The track ran out of the tunnel and over an embankment, skirting a narrow valley full of deep-green rainforest before it disappeared again into another tunnel. Nothing he saw indicated that Billy and Rashmi had come that far. No footprints, nothing dropped, nothing that looked like it had been disturbed recently. On his way back, he searched the floor of the tunnel and all the safety niches again. He didn’t find anything that he had missed the first time, even with the different angle of the flashlight beam.

  Back at the sheds, John picked up the kids’ bags and Billy’s camera. If they were all right, it would be better that they weren’t linked to a murder. That was a big if, but he was going to assume they were alive until he knew otherwise. Whatever had happened, they were certainly in deep trouble. He should call the cops. At least tell them about the woman in the tunnel. He couldn’t decide whether to tel
l them about the kids too. He didn’t have time to get caught up with police questions for hours. He had to keep looking for the kids. The farmer who had directed him to Toolongolook would remember him, might even remember the registration number of the ute. The police in Brunswick Heads and Byron Bay were already suspicious of him. There was nothing he could do about that. Any of it. He had to find Billy first. Once he and Rashmi were safe, John would talk to the cops.

  When he was back on the road again, he called Sally. “I found the farm.”

  “Is she there?”

  “I’ve just left. No one was there.” No one alive, he thought. “They’d been there, though. I found their bags but no sign of them.”

  “Maybe they just went off somewhere with Dad. To the beach, or Byron Bay maybe. You should wait for them to come back.”

  “Do you think it’s time to bring in the police? It’s been days now.”

  “But you’ve found them,” Sally said. “They can’t be far away.”

  “Maybe. I’m heading back to Brunswick Heads now. I’ll check back at the farm later.” John wouldn’t go back, but he didn’t know where else to look either. Nothing good had happened up at that farm, and the police would be all over it as soon as someone reported the body.

  The kids had to be with Rash’s grandfather. They had to be, but where? And why hadn’t he contacted Sally? John would have to tell the cops soon about the dead woman. If he didn’t, he’d be a suspect. He would be anyway—no way around that. They’d probably charge him with interfering with a crime scene too.

  The sun had dropped towards the horizon, and deep shadows were growing in the creases of the hills by the time John got back to the motorway. His phone rang as he drove south towards Brunswick Heads.

  It was Tony.

  “That you, John?”

  “Yeah, mate.”

  “Good. It’s Billy. He just rang.”

  Something inside John twisted, came loose. “Is he okay? Where is he?”

  “He’s in Queensland. The Gold Coast. Where are you?”