Wet Graves

by Peter Corris

  “Sorry,” I said, “I’ve asked Ray for some help. He seems to have taken it very seriously.”

  “It’s an right, Cliff,” Paul said. “Ray’s like that. He takes things seriously. I remember once when he …”

  “Don’t start, Paul,” his wife said. “And don’t keep things from me. What are you asking Ray to do, Cliff?”

  I told her as we cleared up the dishes and took them to the kitchen, where she stacked them in the washer. “Aren’t there regulations about that?” she said. “I mean, can anyone just go diving around the bridge? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “Ray’ll bow,” Paul Guthrie said from the doorway. “Or he’ll know someone who will know. Don’t worry.”

  Pat turned on the machine. “It sounds dangerous. At night. No preparation. Why does it have to be like that?”

  Paul Guthrie was spooning coffee into a glass beaker. He poured in the boiling water and set the plunger in place. “Is it dangerous, Cliff?”

  “Ray doesn’t seem to think so. But I’ll call it off if it gets tricky. Don’t worry, I’m too old for cowboy stuff.”

  “So we’ve noticed,” Paul said. He touched his own forehead, which wasn’t scratched and scraped like mine.

  I grinned. “I was assisting the police. Pat, it has to be at night to avoid publicity. The woman I’m working for has a right to that. Anything to do with mysterious deaths brings headlines. Team that up with the bridge and you’ve got a tabloid reporter’s dream.”

  Guthrie pressed the plunger down. He set the pot, cups, sugar and milk on a tray. “Let’s go through to the sitting room. I saw them building the bridge, you know. Went to the opening ceremony and everything.”

  We got settled with the coffee. Paul took some artificial sweeteners from a shelf and dropped in two tablets. “I’m seventy this year,” he said. “Milk, Cliff?”

  Pat laughed as she took a half spoon of sugar. “He’ll take it black, Paul. He’s a tough guy.” For a moment I thought that Pat Guthrie might be turning against me, protecting her young from the sort of disruption I represented. But she included me in the amusement. “And don’t you come the smart-arse old-timer. Tell us about the bridge.”

  “They say a million people went across it on the first day,” I said. “I never really believed that.”

  “I do,” Paul said. “I can’t tell you much about the ceremony. I was there, but way back in the crowd. I know I’ve never seen so many people in one place before. I didn’t see de Groot. There was just a series of yells and shouts and screams. I think I fell asleep that afternoon, somewhere along the line.”

  “I’m more interested in the industrial aspects,” I said.

  Guthrie’s thumb and third finger probed the grooves in his cheeks. “My father was captain of one of the tugboats that helped to build the bridge.”

  “What did the tugboats do?” Pat asked.

  “A lot of the superstructure was built on shore and taken out to where it was needed on barges. Then it was hoisted up into place. The tugs pulled the barges.”

  “I’ve seen some photographs of that operation,” I said. “Must’ve been pretty tricky in bad weather.”

  Guthrie nodded. “It was. The whole bloody thing was tricky. It’s a wonder more people weren’t killed.”

  Pat was about to sip her coffee but she stopped the movement. “I didn’t know people were killed.”

  “Quite a few,” Guthrie said. “In the quarry at Moruya, in the workshop, on the bridge. I saw all of it. I was only a nipper but my Dad was interested and he took me around. He could go anywhere he liked, of course.”

  Paul had forgotten his half-drunk coffee. He was settled back in his chair with his memories. Knowing the sharpness of his mind and the clarity of his perceptions, it was reasonable to hope that the memories would be distinct. “What were the working conditions like?” I said.

  “By today’s standards, terrible, and pretty bad even by the standards of the 1920s and 1930s. You have to remember that it was bloody hard to get work then. Men’d do amazing things for a couple of quid a week when they had mouths to feed.”

  “I’ve never thought about it,” Pat said. “The bridge has always been sort of … there.”

  “Well, it wasn’t. It was the most amazing thing to see those two bloody great arches grow out on either side and finally join up. It seemed, I don’t know, like something almost impossible for men to achieve. It made a very deep impression on me, even though I was so young. My Dad was a bit of a Bolshie, and he used to talk about the cost of the thing in human terms.”

  “Deaths and injuries,” I said.

  “Yes. There was nothing in the papers about the injuries, except the occasional bit of bullshit from the managers.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Guthrie made a derisive, snorting sound. “Oh, about how the workers were like soldiers going into battle, and casualties were inevitable. That sort of thing. My dad used to read stuff like that out from the papers. It made him angry. I saw things that make me angry to think about them, even now.”

  “What, Paul?” Pat had put her cup down and was staring at her husband.

  Guthrie rubbed his hand across his face. He looked around his comfortable, well-appointed sitting room as if he could hardly believe in the reality of his surroundings. “One thing in particular. I can see it now, and I still don’t like to think about it. Dad had taken me to the fabrication workshop. It was where Luna Park is now. They built big sections and took them out on the barges. They used a hot-rivet method.”

  Pat shook her head. ‘You’ve lost me.”

  Guthrie’s eyes seemed to retreat into his skull. “They heated the rivets up, almost to liquid point, then they spooned them across to the rivetter who had heavy gloves and tongs. He lifted the bit of red-hot metal out and banged it into place. It was incredibly dangerous.”

  “This is in the workshop,” Pat said, “not …”

  “They did the same up on the structure. Tossed this red-hot metal around as if it was putty.”

  “It sounds sort of … Dickensian,” Pat said.

  Guthrie struggled up out of his recollection. “How do you mean, love?”

  “Well, like workhouses, sweated labour, children down the mines … that sort of thing.”

  Guthrie shook his head. “No. It was nothing like that. Not as I recall it. The reverse, if anything. The men were happy, cheerful, laughing. Anyway, this time I remember, a rivet jumped out of the dish, or slipped from the tongs. I don’t know. It happened so quick. The rivet hit him somewhere around here.” Guthrie touched his thigh. “And it burned through his overalls and went down inside them. He was screaming and screaming … Dad grabbed me and pulled me away.”

  Ray Guthrie’s head appeared around the door. “We’re on,” he said.

  15

  Three hours later I was sitting in a boat under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Not exactly under, a bit to the side and near the north shore, but close enough. Aboard were Ray Guthrie and another man whom he’d introduced as Milo. Like Ray and me, Milo was wearing a parka and a woollen knit cap and trying to expose as little of himself to the cold air as possible. It had been very cold on the run from Northbridge to this point. Here, somewhat sheltered from the wind, it wasn’t so bad. But the people in the restaurants—the Imperial Palace, picked out in lights, and Doyles at the Quay, spelled out in blue neon—were showing a lot more sense than us.

  I was mindful of Pat Guthrie when I asked Ray how dangerous the operation was likely to be.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Oh well, sharks, getting tangled up in something under the water, electric cables …”

  Ray laughed. “Hear that, Milo? Electric cables. Listen, Cliff, we’ve got only two problems.”

  I could hear Milo chuckling as he did something with ropes. “They are?”

  “One, the water police come along and ask us what we’re doing. That’s your department.”

  “Two?”

  �
�Some amateur could come along and hit us. That’s Milo’s department.”

  “Ready, Ray?” Milo said.

  “Yeah.” Ray went into the little cabin of the boat and came back a few minutes later in wetsuit and flippers. Milo helped him to strap on a tank while they adjusted his goggles and talked about pressure and currents.

  I stared around me, feeling extraneous. I could hear a pontoon mooring creaking over on the Quay side and there was a red light blinking on the near shore. I couldn’t identify the light. The city loomed up on both sides, towers of partly lit steel and glass. The surface of the water was dark but fairly calm. At least I wasn’t asking him to go down in the middle of a howling gale. I still didn’t feel good about it, though. What would I say to Paul and Pat if …?

  “Cliff,” Milo said, “we got no problem about the light.” He gestured to a tube Ray had tucked in his belt and a camera enclosed in a rubber case and fastened to his arm with a heavy elastic strap. “That’s an Ikelite modular job—the best. Hard to say what the visibility’ll be like. Could be a couple of metres, could be more. Depends on the particles in the water. If it’s bad the light won’t help much. Be like headlights coming at you through a dirty windscreen. But we could be lucky. Pictures might be a bit of a problem.”

  “Do the best you can, Ray,” I said. ‘You might not see anything anyway.” I’d explained to Ray that I wanted him to explore the area immediately under the bridge for as much of the four-hundred-metre stretch as possible, but concentrating on the middle. I told him what he was looking for; it didn’t seem to worry him. I didn’t ask him how he’d know where he was once he was under the water. Apparently it wasn’t a problem. Ray dipped his mask in a bucket of water and flapped it around. Then he pulled it over his face and took two froggy steps to the side of the boat. I thought he’d do a back flip, like Lloyd Bridges used to do in Sea Hunt, but he just climbed over and slipped down into the dark, lapping water.

  A bit of threshing on the surface and he was gone. Milo started the engine and the boat puttered across to the Milson’s Point shore. “Can’t stick around out there like a shag on a rock.”

  “Won’t he need a marker or something? How’s he to know where he is?”

  “He’ll come up to five metres or so and look up at the bridge lights. Vertical visibility under water’s better than horizontal. He’ll be right. Fifteen metres, twenty at the most. Piece of piss. Don’t look so worried, Cliff. Ray’s a top scuba man. Top.”

  “What about you, Milo?”

  “I’m pretty bloody good, too.”

  “You’d better be,” I said, “because there’s no way I’m going down there if he gets the cramp.”

  Milo laughed.’ “If he gets cramp he comes up. It’s only fifteen bloody metres. He’s not going to get the bends.”

  I granted. “People drown in the bath.”

  “Jesus, you’re a happy one. Australians’re supposed to be cheerful bastards.”

  “No,” I said, “that’s Greeks.”

  He laughed again. I was the funniest act on the harbour that night. It was too late for the ferries, and there was nothing else moving on the water. I could hear the intermittent ramble of traffic on the bridge above and an occasional crash from the container wharf at Mort Bay. Milo lit a cigarette and hummed as he made adjustments to the line hanging into the water. He checked his watch and started the engine.

  I was too nervous to have any idea of the time. “How long’s he been down?”

  Milo held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “About this much of his tank. Don’t worry about him. We just gotta watch for trouble up here.”

  The red light fascinated me. I located it in Kirribilli, where the prime minister and the governor-general sometimes live. I wondered if they were there tonight, perhaps together, toasting the revolution. Probably not, on all scores.

  “Need any help there?”

  The voice, amplified through cupped hands, came from a man sitting in a dinghy a few feet away from our boat. He’d shipped one of his oars and was using the other to keep the dinghy more or less stationary. On closer inspection, the boat was something more than a dinghy. It was wider and flatter-looking and had provision for a sail and a couple of large lockers built into the structure. Milo shone a torch on him, and he lifted a dark-gloved hand to block out the beam. He was wearing a tracksuit and sneakers and a long peaked cap that kept his face shadowed. He wasn’t young.

  “We’re fine,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Just rowing about. Habit of mine. Don’t see too many people around here at night. Would you think me too rude if I asked what you’re doing? Free to refuse to answer, of course.”

  His voice was that of a man habituated to politeness, but it didn’t cut any ice with Milo. I hadn’t thought nerves were part of his makeup but he showed I was wrong. “We’re minding our own business, mate,” he growled. “Why don’t you do the same?”

  The rower slipped his oar into the rowlock and pulled away expertly without responding.

  “Bit rude, Milo,” I said “What’s the matter?”

  “Bloody nutter. I dunno. This place gives me the creeps.”

  It was getting to me, too; I realised for the first time that the bridge was blocking the light from a low-lying half-moon, leaving us in a deep, inky shadow. “Where do you reckon Ray is now?” I said.

  Milo shrugged. “What would you have told that old joker?”

  “I was just starting to think. Probably would have told him I was a private detective hired to find something that’d been dropped overboard from a Balmain ferry.”

  “Fuck me,” Milo said. “What a bullshit artist.”

  We were saved from falling out even further by a noise in the water. Ray surfaced about twenty metres away and swam towards us. Milo started the engine. I helped Ray climb aboard, and we were moving away as soon as he was properly over the side. He gave Milo a nod, slipped the light from his belt and unhooked the camera. I was unfamiliar with the apparatus, and clumsy, but I helped him to shuck off the tank. When he pulled off the mask his face was unnaturally white and his lips were drawn back in a tight, jaw-locked grin.

  ‘You okay?” I said.

  He gulped and nodded. “There’s some brandy down in the cabin. I could do with a belt.”

  I went down and got the bottle of Toller’s brandy. I uncapped it and Ray took a big swig. I did the same and held it out towards Milo. He shook his head.

  “Not while he’s driving,” Ray said.

  We were skipping across the water, passing Kirribilli where the red light was still blinking. Ray had another drink.

  “Well?” I said.

  Ray towelled himself off and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. “Three of them. Could be more. But three was enough for me. Short chains to plugs of some kind. They’re all wrapped in canvas. I touched one. Squishy. Pretty close together. More or less in the dead set middle under the bridge. Jesus, Cliff, you should’ve seen them. In the light. Sort of … half-floating, half-hanging there.”

  I started to say something about being sorry to put him through it, but he didn’t listen. He looked out at the water and the land and drew in several deep breaths, as if trying to cleanse his insides. Then he shivered and went below to get changed. Milo had another cigarette going and I was tempted to ask him for one. I resisted. I hadn’t earned the right to the weakness. It wasn’t me who’d seen the canvas shrouds. That led me to think of the camera. I picked it up and then heard Milo clicking his fingers. I handed the camera to him.

  “You get what you wanted?” he said.

  “Worse than I expected, apparently.”

  “Must be, to shake Ray up. He’s a tough bastard.”

  “I know. That’s why I …”

  He held the wheel with one hand and examined the camera. When he was satisfied he set it down at his feet. “He got a few shots for you. Could be they’ll come out okay.”

  “I want to thank you for your help,” I said. “I felt pre
tty edgy out there.”

  “That’s all right. Sorry I got shitty. I felt as if the fuckin’ bridge was going to fall down on us.”

  We were well out in the channel, in choppy water, making for Bradleys Head. I passed the brandy bottle to Milo. “Have a drink,” I said. “I’m sure you know your way back from here.”

  16

  The brandy bottle travelled back and forth a few times on the passage to Middle Harbour. Ray changed his clothes and had one of Milo’s cigarettes. He was pretty shaken and I was sorry I’d put him through it.

  “What was Paul talking about just before I came in?” he asked.

  “He was telling your mother and me how things were when they built the bridge.”

  “How were they?”

  “Bloody hard, and dangerous.”

  Ray rubbed a towel over his head but oil and grease from the harbour water remained. He looked at the towel. “Harbour’s filthy. Weird, isn’t it? The water was probably very clean back then, but they treated workers like shit. Now the workers get a fair go and the environment’s a great big toilet.”

  I agreed that it was weird

  “What happened to those blokes? I suppose they were blokes?”

  The question hadn’t occurred to me: were the daughters of the bridge builders also under threat? I was too tired and stressed to give Ray a full answer. I just told him that the bodies were those of missing people and that there was some connection with the bridge. “I can count on you to keep quiet about this, Ray, can’t I?”

  “Absolutely. Milo too. And don’t insult me by offering me money.”

  “What about Milo?”

  “He won’t be insulted.”

  I gave Milo fifty bucks and thanked him for his help. “Sure,” Milo said. “What’s next? Do we climb Centrepoint?”

  “Don’t laugh, Cliff,” Ray said. “He could do it.”

  We stowed the gear and Ray shut and locked the hatches and doors on the boat. Milo said goodnight, jumped up onto the dock and walked off. I heard a car engine start and tyres gripping gravel. Ray said he’d have a shower in his parents’ house and go home. “Paul’ll wake up no matter how quiet I am,” he said. “Want to see him?”