Wet Graves

by Peter Corris

  Ballantine climbed along a wide metal strut that intersected with a complex of girders and wires that reached up to a dizzying height. I stood rooted to the spot and watched him climb. He slid and slithered but clung on; he used his rope ladder to get over tricky parts and he went up very high, very quickly. I got a look at the ladder; it was made of something light and slick, like nylon. A man came running towards me. “What’re you doing?”

  I pointed skywards. Ballantine had emerged from behind a pillar and was swarming up his ladder.

  “Jesus,” the man said, “should I get an ambulance or what?”

  “You could use the emergency phone. Tell them there’s a man climbing the bridge.”

  “Right.” He dashed off and I propped myself against the railing and stared up at the mass of grey metal. The man crawling and scrambling up it shrank to the size of a toy soldier. He was more than halfway to the top of the arch and still moving when I heard the sirens. They drew nearer and the flashing lights started to lend a chaotic drama to the scene. The traffic slowed and snarled as drivers watched the crowd form. I was joined on the walkway by a policeman and other people who’d appeared from nowhere. A train roared along the tracks and drowned out the honking horns and screaming sirens. Unconsciously, we shuffled back along the walkway towards the middle of the bridge, following the progress of the man above.

  “My God,” a woman said, “he’s going to jump.”

  Ballantine reached a point where a strut ran out horizontally just below the centre of the arch. He stood, balanced himself with both hands outstretched and stepped out into the void. A whoosh of sound escaped the throats of the people watching as he plummeted. A fierce gust of wind twisted and turned him in the air and threw him against the railway overhead that juttted out beyond the arch not far above us. We heard the body hit with a soggy thump, and we gasped again as the impact flicked it back into space and it fell, fluttering and broken, into the dark water.

  22

  David John Ballantine, 66, of 21 Banksia Street, Drummoyne, had told me most of the truth about his life in our walk across the bridge. He’d omitted the fact that he’d been institutionalised several times for mental disorders. He had offered violence to himself and others over the years, but he was mostly in control and ran, as he’d said, a successful business as a boatbuilder and restorer. The police pieced his life together in the days after his battered body was taken from the harbour. They found ample evidence of his methods of killing and disposing of his victims. They found photographs and notes which showed how thoroughly he’d planned and executed the abductions and waylayings.

  “The man got around Sydney using the waterways,” Loomis told me. “He must’ve known the harbour like the back of his hand. And he was immensely strong. He killed those men with his bare hands, quickly and efficiently. He actually threw one of them over a high fence and into some bushes as a temporary hiding place. Handling them was no problem.”

  “Tell me, when they fished him out, did he have an iron bar in his pocket?”

  “No. Funny thing was, he had a bunch of military medals and ribbons, all crammed together in the pocket of his coat.”

  “He’d have done better to have snuffed his father early on,” I said.

  Loomis nodded. “The father must have been a monster, but make no mistake, Ballantine was very strange himself. Paranoid to an immense degree. He really thought the whole world was out to screw him. Beautiful craftsman, though. You should see some of the model boats he made. Beautiful.”

  “Did you find his boat?”

  “Sort of. He’d holed and sunk it in the water near his slipway. They tell me it was a butcher’s boat. Appropriate, eh?”

  “A butcher’s boat,” I said. “What’s that?”

  “Apparently the butchers used to race each other out to the ships in the old days. First aboard got the provisioning order. They had these light, fast boats. Lithgow had restored his down to the last nail. Ideal for dumping bodies. He was saying goodbye when he sank it, poor bastard.”

  “How’s Lloyd Meredith?”

  “Mending. We would have got Ballantine outselves, Hardy. You realise that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “While on the subject of getting people, what about Tobin?”

  “Conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, he’s going inside for a long, long time.”

  “Good,” I said. “Moody?”

  “Resigned. Pissed off about something or other. It’s not a perfect world, Hardy.”

  Louise Madden buried her father in the cemetery at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. I drove up there for the occasion. It was a fine, cold day in the mountains and there were a lot of people present—Brian Madden’s former colleagues, some of his ex-students, a number of Louise’s friends, people from the golf club. I looked around for Dell Burton, the other woman who grieved for Madden, but she wasn’t there. We all stood in the small space available between other graves and watched the quiet, dignified ceremony. Louise held the handful of earth a long time before dropping it in on the box.

  Later, back at her rambling weatherboard house in Leura, she thanked me for giving her the chance to say goodbye to her father properly.

  I sipped my drink and didn’t say anything.

  She was almost smiling. “Cheer up, it means a lot to me, all this. Having people around. Do any of your cases have a really happy ending, Cliff?”

  “Not lately,” I said. “But I keep hoping.”