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Prologue 1

The two children trot their horses along the rough grass verge of the country road. The boy of about nine rides a wiry Welsh Mountain pony, palomino in colour with a thin chocolate dorsal stripe, the brown haired girl of the same age bounces on a dark bay Whaler stockhorse. A black vinyl bag, advertising TAA hangs around the palomino’s neck, slapping up and down as the pony trots, a similar bag with the Carlton Football Club logo is swinging under the bay’s neck. The boy and girl are laughing playfully but there is some manner of tension in their banter. The pair passes a gnarled old redgum and hooves explode into furious action. The bigger bay pony easily accelerates away from the diminutive Welsh Mountain, the girl on the bay is standing in the stirrups, body leant forward over the pony’s neck in the manner of a stockman, long hair wild in the slipstream.

The boy rides with a trained, upright posture, his pony now at full gallop head straining up for more reign, with complete trust the boy gives the pony her head, all control of speed and direction surrendered. The bay reaches the long rows of fallen trees first where this race is won or lost every school morning. The girl gathers up the Whaler, tries to balance the distance to the first jump against the stride length of the horse, the stockhorse takes three shortened strides and leaps over the log, clearing it by half a metre or more. The boy’s pony has her ears flattened backward, eyes staring at the horse in front not even seeming to take in the approaching log jump. There is no hesitation, no shortening of gate as the little pony appears to raise her legs and glide over the tree, girth scraping the bark. The girl and the Whaler are overtaken in mid-air on the second last log; the boy has a few lengths lead as both horses thunder toward the finish at the Easter Hills road. On the flat the bay rapidly begins to catch the Welsh Mountain, the girl grips more tightly, urges her mount forward knowing for certain that this time she can bridge the gap to the tiny Welsh Mountain before the finish line. The boy looks back, his round girlish face concerned, the boy and the pony have grown up together; she can sense the distance to her pursuer simply from the tension of his grip.

As every morning, the boy has won, the girl flashes him a look, pupils wildly dilated, it is challenge, anger, concession and affection all combined in a glance. He knows well she is a better rider, wilder and more fearless than he will ever be and he knows intuitively she will race any, every time he wants until she wins. He hopes that day never comes for in his nine-year-old brain he cannot translate his overwhelming need for her attention as love. Two ponies steaming in the early morning winter chill walk tiredly along the road toward the little school as their riders chat quietly and hold hands.

Prologue 2

The brilliant moonlight bleaches the hilltop paddock of all colour, the grass appears silver aided by the building frost, scattered eucalypts black shadows on the landscape. Up the valley the mournful sound of a bull calling in the half-light is unheard over the snorting and shuffling of the Jersey heifers on the hilltop, they form a semi circle, brown doe eyes all facing outward. Three new calves hide under their mother’s udders confused by the terror of the herd. Down the east slope of the hill a dark still lump is starkly visible against the shining pasture, this is the focus of attention and in the inexplicable manner of cattle when spooked they shuffle closer to the source of the terror. Heads weaving back and forth snorting even louder they draw closer and it is obvious now the lump is a cow, one of their own. Tendrils of steam coil from the hapless beasts’ open abdominal cavity, for death has not yet had time to steal the heat of living. As one, the herd turns, wheeling across the hill in headlong panic.

The return to the valley Chapter 1

‘Its OK mate, we all end up here’ the words propelled at me in nasal staccato, tension and knowing irony equally evident in each syllable. He smiled wanly without humour or warmth, a nervous spasm above the right eye, thin rodent like face, a semi mullet atop it. I watched with unabashed curiosity as with rapid, jerky motions he hoisted a green garbage bag over a thin shoulder, sinews in motion under the skin of a tattooed forearm and was gone, the cracked glass door still swinging from his passing. An apparition of me to come? Please no, Christ I’ve got to get a washing machine! What is it about laundrettes that draw the relationship crash victims, the hobbling wounded, broken souls weighed down with soiled cloth? They scurry out, relieved of their dirt, clothes smelling of rightness but souls uncleansed. It seems a uniquely male phenomenon, for me it’s the one place where things get better or at the very least cleaner. I wonder what draws skinny mullet man with eyes that don’t linger or look, eyes that bespeak desolation, the end stop on a long road of violent domestic warfare. In the end I really don’t want to know, I just pray silently to the patron saint of fucked up divorced males I never see that haunted, vivisected look in my own eyes in the mirror. Dead heart clean clothes, no, it wasn’t going to be me. So I walked out of that rundown Kilsyth laundrette, leaving the humid warmth for the cold easterly of a Melbourne winter and left my regrets in the clothes dryer along with my washing. Guilt, longing, hatred, love and cloying failure all tumbling over alone without their erstwhile host, abandoned and gladly forsaken or at least so I believed. I know this to be my moment of healing, or the start of it, I walked into a new life, oh and into a white goods showroom and bought a new Hoover front loader.

‘Another sir?’ the ‘sir’ dripping with friendly mocking, one blonde eyebrow raised, open, pretty face inclined to one side. I was a moment slow coming out of my reverie and the grin slid from her farm girl features, I quickly mumbled a yes thanks and she was gone. Her looks brought to mind girls of my childhood and adolescence, country girls who would never need to wear make up, faces not beautiful but undeniably attractive with a manner of physical confidence and combative humour. Coming home had brought more unbidden reminiscing than I had been prepared for and I would have to beware the lapses into fugues of fond remembrance, because in truth very little of it had been fond and I couldn’t keep scaring the waitresses, there weren’t enough in this little town. The ‘little town’ however was a lot larger and a whole lot less sleepy than my childhood here. The Café and local boutique produce store on the veranda of which I sat had been the old Herbert farmhouse, one of the towns first and now isolated amongst herds of Range Rovers and 3 series Bimmers rather than hoofed beasts. Where once six inter-woven and oft impoverished families had been the bulk of the town now its population’s most visible number are yuppies with fantasies of living the life of the landed gentry. On a miniature scale of course, since land prices have pushed up so high that only a few hectares are within the reach of the entry-level nouveau riche. The wire door to the veranda bangs, pushed open by a shapely posterior backing out, two coffees unsteadily trailing, the waitress has a shock of spiky plum coloured hair, lip eyebrow and nose all pierced, a hard flat look to her face that should not be seen on one barely into her twenties, stories there. She looks over to me and I realise one of the small white cups she carries is mine and sadly know I really have spooked my farm girl waitress, I can imagine the conversation ‘he was just staring at me, weird, can you take him? Please?’ either that or I’m becoming a paranoid nutter, probably the latter. She is wearing one of those long white linen aprons and it catches in the door as she backs through and is trapped as the spring return on the door snaps it shut. The pierced lips emit a frustrated moan and she glances toward me with an exasperated pleading expression. Never let it be said that I have no sense of chivalry, keeping the smart arse grin off my face I stride over and release her, brown eyes flash a minute thank you smile and she deposits the short black on my table.

I stand behind her and muster a friendly non-threatening, non-weird smile as she turns I blurt ‘wondering if you might help me with something?’

She nods uncertainly,

‘If I wanted to find a farm around here, I know the owners name but not where it is, who might I ask?’

Brown eyes observe me once more, her wide face looking down now, considering, piercings glinting in the late afternoon sun. I continue my idiot grin and obviously having concluded I was in fact just an idiot and not a serial killer or a stalker she looks up and says in a deep surprisingly cultured voice

‘Try John over at the top shop he knows everyone in towns business’.

‘Thanks’ I reply idiot grinning still

She smiles briefly in return and retreats back to safety of the café. Dropping ten dollars on the small round table I walk away through the car park of Toorak tractors and German taxis toward the ‘top shop’ and the omnipresent John.

Well more accurately I limped, only one foot you can only limp, well only one real foot anyway. A prosthetic marvel the right one is, even looks just like a real foot, does everything a real foot can do the physio had assured me with the exception I subsequently discovered of allowing you to walk remotely properly. I don’t really notice it anymore, the same cannot be said for everyone I meet, as a conversation point it’s not exactly an opposite sex magnet but it is a story that invites a certain morbid fascination and its great for drunken party tricks.

‘You mean Duncan Campbell?’ inquired John with an expression of undisguised distaste.

Sixties were not going to be kind to the shop keeper, chins numbered more than two, a short grey goatee disguising the first, head hair long departed, John’s most striking feature was a gut which protruded at an amazingly horizontal angle. He could quite literally have used it as a shelf and had a look of heavy pregnancy as he carefully navigated the belly around an ancient Bain Marie to face me.

Transfixed I couldn’t help staring at that gut, ‘it’s a hernia mate, not fat’ he snapped apropos of my unabashed gaze.

‘Yeah sorry, look that’s him, Duncan Campbell, do you know the farm?’ I asked trying to keep any hint of interrogation out of my voice.

‘He’s a fucken nutter ya know’ John evaded, I looked at him blankly, ‘ya seen him on the news haven cha? Gunna have every fucken fringe fucken nut job runnin around the hills, fucken wanker, so whadda you want with him anyhow?’

His complexion was best politely described as florid; I suspected our John might be less than sober.

Thrusting out my hand ‘David Johansson’, automatically he took my hand and replied ‘John Carter’, recognition registered suddenly on his face ‘that fucken Footscray UFO thing, you’re that writer bloke, fuck me!’

I nodded, bemused at the instant trust minor celebrity inspired in people, ‘can you help me?’ I implored.

He cast me a knowing look ‘head up Easter Hills road, turn right at the Mount Wise turn off, right again along Skyline Road and left down Butterman’s Track, his joint is about five K’s down, right hand side, sign out the front says Skye farm’.

I thanked him, bought an orange juice and headed back to my forlorn and battered Patrol. That ‘fucken Footscray thing’ had been a blessing, it had gone on for a year nearly, flattened cats and I do mean flat but otherwise intact turning up every night in the good residents of Footscray’s front yards and reports of hovering, flaming lights and deafening explosions equally frequent. It had been my first high profile investigation since setting off on this bizarre new life and it had at first brought months of frustrating, pointless inquiries, the break had finally come when I discovered how one flattens a moggie, I’ll spare you the details but a friend of a friend at the State Museum had been most helpful. The lights had been garbage bags filled with acetylene, a petrol soaked burning rag suspended on a wire underneath (plus the body of a hapless moggy) when the acetylene exploded with an impressive boom, voila, no trace of the device remained. And the ‘why’ you might ask, well when you’re a bunch of university brats, exclusively male I might hasten to add, with too much of daddy’s money and too little useful amusement, jumping in the Bimmer and tripping down to gritty Footscray and creating a bit of you’re own urban legend apparently has an attraction all of its own. I found this quartet of mental giants through the one lad doing an undergraduate degree in comparative anatomy at a Melbourne tertiary institution whose name I dare not mention. You see the Museum keeps thousands of animal specimens the public never get to see and they take up rather a lot of space, they are much more convenient to store when flat, in fact the Museum employs a full time animal flattener. Can you imagine the explanations at parties when people ask this guy what he does at work? As luck would have it the arcane skill of flattening poor fluffy is limited to select few and it was a straightforward investigation to find the culprit in this case. The four had thought it entirely harmless fun, however the fury of a woman scorned may be hellish but it pales by comparison to the wrath of a senior copper made to look like a complete fool by a bunch of rich prats. Senior Sergeant Barry Glover had found charges relating to public nuisance and animal cruelty not used I suspect this century and made every single one stick. When I’m dead and gone those four will probably still be doing community service orders. I took two things from the affair, enough material for my first book, a minor cult success and a guarantee of ongoing police co-operation courtesy of a freshly avenged Barry Glover. Believe me I make use of it. Barry is an old school copper, shall we say quite familiar with both sides of the law and not averse to dispensing justice in a decidedly biblical manner, Old Testament in fact. On reflection Senior Sergeant Glover is probably borderline psychotic, but extremely useful. He has furnished me more stories than a lifetime of research could generate, god forbid he should ever fall foul of some ethical standards probe.

The Patrol wheezed reluctantly into life at the turn of the key and rattled out of the car park, I waited for a huge B-double to roar by and turned onto the main road. In fact I knew quite well where I was going, I had only needed the name of the property. Every road and track of Easter Hills had been explored on horseback while avoiding a childhood home life worth avoiding. The huge rusting hulk among the stringybarks at the side of the road drew my attention back to the present and I realised I had arrived on Skyline Rd without registering a single moment since leaving town. The sight of the squat brown tank brought another rush of memories, the remains of a WW11 Matilda battle tank sans turret and a dozer blade fitted to the front. A play wonderland for a bored young boy. Idly rusting since the fifties it had once been used to clear land for the brief influx of returned servicemen cum farmers with soon to be extinguished hopes of coaxing a living from this fickle ground. Turning left the old Nissan bounces down the rutted gravel of Butterman’s Track. Shortly a faded white wooden sign comes into view and I swing into the dirt driveway up to a forlorn weatherboard farmhouse. A wide veranda surrounds the house, a shock of dense wisteria climbing each support post. A rusty decrepit Landcruiser sits adjacent the porch steps and I pull up beside it. The Patrol probably swelled with pride, a rare moment when it was not the scruffiest vehicle in sight. The wire door springs open an unshaven face topped with wild hair visible in the gloom beyond the doorstep; the face carried a harried suspicious expression, a very different visage to that which piqued my interest in a commercial TV news feature. It was Duncan Campbell none the less, being interviewed by a bemused attractive young reporterette he had seemed earnest and slightly eccentric but compellingly genuine. He struck me as anything other than a loon and trust me I’ve had cause to meet more than a few genuine fruit loops of late. The marked change was definitely cause for concern and I wondered what events had transpired since Duncan Campbell had told his bizarre tale to the world, I had a fair idea. I snatched the book from the passenger seat and jumped out of the 4WD walking briskly toward the front door. The farmer regarded me with unchanged expression, not acknowledging my presence other than to follow with his gaze. As I arrived at the steps I notice the double barrel shotgun leaning butt down against the doorframe, I decided this would be close enough.

‘Mr Campbell, David Johansson, please I’m not a reporter OK?’

‘So just what are you? ‘ he demands in a weary edgy voice and his right hand reaches out to clutch the barrels of the shotgun.

I hold my hands out from my sides, palms outward, trying to appear unthreatening, here goes; ‘This is going to seem very unlikely to you right now but I’m here to help’.

‘You can help me by buggering off’ he barks in reply, thought that one was coming, ‘Look I’m a writer and an investigator of sorts, I’ll leave you this’ tossing the book onto the step ‘mobile number is on the inside cover’.

I turn, imagining the sound of hammers being cocked and stride back to the Patrol; please start you old prick I plead silently. The old beast always responds well to abuse and it started as though it had never done otherwise. I’ve got to tell you I don’t do guns or anything remotely to do with violence, I look and I talk, no more, and my hands would be visibly trembling if not for the white knuckle grip I had on the steering wheel as I sped back along Butterman’s Track.

Explanations chapter 2

The dining room at the Grand Hotel has had a transformation since my last visit two decades before; actually I was more hoping the once lethal food had undergone the transformation than the décor. An extension, with floor to ceiling glass all round and rich red polished boards has been added to the rear of the room. The furniture is all stainless steel and glass and the effect is dramatic and spacious but I can still catch of wafts of beer stained carpet from under the bar door. The click of billiard balls and the intermittent riots of guttural laughter confirm at least some of the patrons remain delightfully unrenovated. I am occupying a table for four, pages of notes spread out over its semi opaque glass top; laptop perched precariously near the edge. Given the subject matter it is lucky I suppose that they are only text. Assembled before me is every recorded attack on livestock in Victoria in the last twenty five years, I've played with this information before, been aware of some of the odd anomalies but Duncan Campbell’s strange accounting has focussed my interest as never before. I can feel that familiar narcotic pull of obsession building and there will be no question of mere dabbling around the edges here, I will need, physically cloyingly need an explanation, a finish, a release. Looking up I catch from the periphery of my vision a face turning away, two tables over toward the windows, I have an impression of big brown eyes, tanned skin, thick shoulder length brunette hair and uneasy, disturbed recognition. Facts, information and patterns are whirling in my head however and the moment is quickly gone form thought, interesting pattern livestock attacks. Most are syllabi of pure anarchic savagery, tracheas torn from necks, entrails ripped and partly consumed, punctured arteries spraying ballistic patterns of blood. Dogs. Docile soppy Labradors, faithful obedient German Shepherds, playful Terriers are all killing machines. That veneer of civil behaviour is just that, an overcoat shrugged off so very easily. These accounts would be a salient lesson to those who whole-heartedly trust dear old rover with their children because rover has imperatives you had best hope your children never intersect. But I’m not in the least interested in dog carnage, there are a very small percentage of attacks in which the hapless animals only injuries are puncture wounds around the underside of the neck and lengthways disembowelling slashes down the torso, generally the entrails are partly consumed. Clearly a different type of predator at work, this is the meat of big cat legends, those who fervently believe that Leopards and Panthers are afoot in the farmlands of Victoria. There is a minute subset of these attacks, no puncture marks, one surgically clean cut from sternum to groin and entrails completely missing and no blood, not a drop on the carcass or surrounding area. Definitely not the work of a four legged predator and right in the centre of my obsessive purvey, hows and moreover whys I had to know. After by chance catching Duncan naively telling his account of mutilated cattle and goats on the evening news I had recorded the repeat late bulletin and carefully re-examined the footage. That 3min and 12 seconds of vision was here with me on my laptop, I had reviewed it frame by frame, pulled up the discreet background images of a gutted Jersey cow and enhanced them. No blood, no entrails, a hollow carcass. Similarly I had focussed on Campbell himself, watched his eyes responding to questions, which way did they look? Was he accessing memory or the imaginative parts of his middle aged brain. Memory, only ever memory, no tell tale body language, no irregularities in the speech patterns. This man clearly believed he was telling the truth as he pleaded for government intervention to hunt down the big cat. I’m sure if Campbell had realised the carnival of smirking media ridicule and the barrage of attention from both poles of the lunatic fringe his coming out was sure to create he would have sacrificed his herds there and then.

I found the face regarding me once more, a handsome face, perhaps late thirties, wide brown eyes conveying bemusement. She has a tanned outdoor look, small crows feet at the corners of her eyes adding rather than subtracting to undeniable beauty of her visage. She flicked a lock of brown hair from one eye and smiled briefly, there was something regretful in that smile, unsettling. Her attention moved to the man approaching her table, tall and ascetically thin with a full head of curly red hair he was sliding a wallet inside the pocket of the sports coat he wore. He flashes me a blank glance and motions for the woman to follow, she stands and they walk side by side to the door, she wears faded jeans, a bulky mottled brown hand knitted jumper and Blundstones. I feel the strongest sensation of familiarity to both these strangers as memory attempts to add twenty-three years to all the teenagers I had known here and come up with a match. My recall for faces and associations prior to the accident is minimal and I had some maybes in mind but no thunderclaps of sudden recognition. Dinner came and went, Chateaubriand and a Yarra Valley pinot, all superb, but unappreciated tonight, other things compete for my senses. I pack up the laptop, stuff the papers into its tattered carry bag and head out through the rear of the dining room. I come to the stairwell leading to the guest rooms, glancing to my right through an open doorway leading to the bar I spy John the omnipresent and his gut sharing a beer. The belly flowed over the bar top and appeared to be contemplating absorbing, blob like, the barman. He catches my bemused look and raises a beer glass, winking theatrically. I incline my head in reply and scurry up the stairs toward the guest rooms, raucous laughter from the bar dogging my exit. The hotel has some unrestrainedly opulent guest suites, tastefully restored with beautiful period decor; mine isn’t one. The rush of frigid air as I unlocked the door announces the lack of heating in my humble lodging. The single room has white painted plain brick walls, their one adornment the muted watercolours of an Albert Namajira print. A double bed with cast iron head and foot, a Baltic pine dresser, an imitation oil lantern with a single dim and frosted bulb and nothing else. Spartacus would have felt right at home. I throw my clutter on the dresser and launch myself at the bed; it’s as lumpy as it looked from the door. With a great reluctance in the frigid air I quickly undress, the white sheets as I slide between them have that delicious cold and starched feeling and the weight of the blankets a comforting pressure. Embraced and a little drunk, all thoughts cease.

He loomed over me, huge and utterly terrifying. Spittle collected in one corner of his contorted mouth, a patina of now brilliant red broken blood vessels covered his hollow cheeks. Repeatedly, to emphasise his rage and disgust his great hand would scythe the air between us, brown liver spots just becoming visible on its back. Each time I would flinch involuntarily, hoping perversely the blow would just come, the torture of anticipation unbearable. Strangely instead of the circular, semi-coherent tirades of alcoholic abuse that were the norm, his mouth seemed to open and close in time with a shrill and irritating chirping. His hate filled face began to dissolve to be replaced by the view of white washed wall. Mind lurching at the dislocation, I reached for the trilling mobile on the dresser, my grandfathers violent presence remained, kept alive for decades in nightmares. Before this sensation would retire back into the hidden night places I would, as every time before, have to endure the recalling of his touch upon me, first violent and furious, later a parody of tenderness, searching, needing, cajoling. The phone launched from my sweaty grasp like a bar of soap, swearing softly I retrieved it noting the time on its pulsing display: 3.22 am.

‘Hello!’ I answer croakily.

‘Duncan Campbell’ comes the flat, minutely slurred reply.

Getting to know Duncan Chapter 3

For a moment I had no idea who was speaking, half my waking mind still lost in the darker recesses of childhood.

‘Duncan’, memory reengaged, ‘what I can I do for you?’ alert now, excited.

‘Another ones dead’ he replied tonelessly, ‘just like the others, gutted and left in the south paddock’ his voice took on a hint of beseechment, I know he would never directly ask for help. Life on the land, especially life alone made for rigid habits of self-reliance and hardness of the soul.

‘Thirty years I've bred this herd, the best Jerseys in the valley, the bloodline’s known all over the country and now they’re being slaughtered one by one and I cant even go to town. Lived here all my life, people always thought I was a bit odd I s’pose but no one ever laughed, no one ever called me off my head, no one ever called me a bloody disgrace. So you tell me, before I’m broke, before I put both barrels to my eye, you tell me Mr Johansson exactly what can you can do?’

A silent pause, what to tell him? I looked out the window overlooking the darkened main street as a Semi rumbled down the hill toward the city. That even if I solved this gory fiasco he would never get his life or probably even his livelihood back. That he would irrevocably be hitched to public ridicule? He had all the necessary attributes; an almost childlike cherubic face topped by thin fly-away brown hair prone to adopting feral arrangements, a mild speech impediment which caused him to emphasise the initial consonants of words, not a stutter but rather holding the sound for noticeably too long, a dress sense from the St Vincent De Paul line and probably most importantly a habitual loner. No, the media nor the townspeople were not going to let him go, so what to say? Make sure you use the number one shot Duncan; it’ll be less painful in the long run.

I opted for the truth, ‘I cant promise you anything beyond doing all I can to find out who is creating this and how, I've done it before Duncan but I cant fix anything else that has come of it, you need to understand that’.

‘You mean what not who’ he stated.

‘Perhaps Duncan perhaps,’ I said without conviction.

‘Come in the morning, breakfast is at seven’ with that the line went dead, ‘goodnight Mr Campbell, poor bloody Mr Campbell’ I replied to the empty handset. I lay back knowing sleep would not return this night, my mind kept returning to Campbell’s plight, was I about to fuck him over? Rationally no, his predicament could scarcely be fouled up more but still guilt tugged unbidden at the edges of my tired thoughts.

My hotel room and the Campbell house shared the same décor; one could kindly call it minimalist. However as my grandmother was fond of saying there appeared to be a place for everything and everything in its place, apparently Duncan was a meticulous man but not given to luxury for certain. I sat at a war torn pine table large enough to seat eight in the centre of this enormous kitchen and absented mindedly ran my fingers over its surface, feeling the texture of it’s scars.

‘Hundred and twenty years old that’ says Campbell apropos of my fiddling upon the table.

‘Always been here?’ I inquire.

‘Me or the table’ he grins inanely

‘The table’, I rap its top.

‘My great grandfather made it, same time as he built this house, its Huon pine from Tasmania’.

He turns to the Agar stove; with a tea towel in hand he picks up the percolator that had just gurgled to completion.

‘Full?’ he asks as leans across me to pour black steaming espresso into two mugs whose only resemblance was the number of chips they bore.

‘Stuffed’ I reply succinctly. And indeed I am, the bacon, eggs, mushrooms and sausages had been delicious and plentiful.

‘All that came from these hills’ he informs me proudly, I nod Looking around the kitchen, the vista from the windows is a vision splendid, early morning sun bequeathing golden haloes to the gums scattered around the undulating, bush fringed pastures.

‘Such a beautiful place’, I was taken with the conviction nothing evil could happen in somewhere so perfect, Campbell cast me stony glance, he has the eyes of a bloodhound I notice, dark brown and his eyelids drooping at the corners giving an expression of perpetual melancholy.

‘Not too much fucking beauty to see these weeks’ his mood changing sharply. I wondered about the changes in his personality, had these sudden transitions between the eccentric bachelor and something darker and harder. Had that always been a part of Duncan Campbell or was it merely the result of recent events? Time to have a good look in your closets Mr Campbell I reminded myself silently; see whose bones pop out.

‘Time’s wasting’ I exclaim as I stand, ‘can I see the remains of last night now?’ Duncan stands silently and strides purposefully out the kitchen door, snatching a weathered Akubra from a hook adjacent the door way as he leaves. I follow down the long hallway and out onto the veranda, screen door banging behind me. By the time I make my way to the driveway Campbell is atop a grey Fergusson tractor in the process of starting the archaic beast. He motions rearward to the pick-up for me to get on. Haven’t done this in a long while I chuckled to myself holding onto the cross bar at the front of the wooden pick-up. Campbell engages the hydraulics and lifts the bed with me on top a metre in the air. With a flatulent roar from the open exhaust stack of the old Fergy we jerk forward and bounce, presumably, toward the south paddock. For a moment I was on my Grandparents farm throwing biscuits of hay to the cows from the tractor pick up. My grandfather exhorting me with a string of expletives not to leave the bale twine in the biscuits again at penalty of having various body parts subtracted from my being. An insistent tapping on my hand, Campbell attempting to get my attention, speech useless over the din of the Fergy. He catches my eye and points to a brown prostrate form in the paddock, I motion for him to stop and find myself pinioned against the front bar of the pick-up, a very literal man our Duncan it would seem.

‘Do I look like a fucking crash test dummy Duncan!’ I yell testily at his back knowing he of course can’t hear me.

‘What!’ he asks as he turns back toward me, I make a cutting motion across my neck and the cacophony of the tractor dies away.

‘Can we walk from here please?’ in reply he slides gracefully off the seat and begins to stride toward the carcass. I follow more sedately; scanning the ground for signs of disturbance or bloodstain, the whole area mashed with recent hoof prints. Morbidly curious animals cows, I have an inane moment of black humour as I imagine the herd of Jerseys forming a bovine cannibal cult and dancing in ritual celebration around the corpse.

Even at this early hour a swarm of insects are gathering around the remains of the cow, Campbell stands looking at his former animal, his expression unreadable. I circle slowly, impressed over the top of the hoof prints are boot prints and rather a lot them, three possibly four different shoes all size 10 or more. Squatting at the open body cavity trying to ignore the melee of god-awful odours assaulting my nostrils I look closely at the incision. It runs from the base of the beast’s neck down to its groin, the sternum is split right down the centre and the ribs spread, the tissue at either edge of the ruler straight incision is slightly frayed, minute tendrils hang from the edges like a tiny fringe.

‘Who else beside you has been here since last night?’

He looks at me as though I had spoken in tongues ‘Duncan?’

‘No one, who the hell would be out here?’

‘Yep you’re right’ I reply, ‘wild thought’.

‘Ok, to work’ I said and withdraw the Nikon digital from my coat pocket and spend the next hour photographing everything.

Introduce Walsh and Nicky chapter 4

‘Good morning’ he greeted me neutrally.

‘Hi’ handing him my card, it was embossed simply with my name and phone number.

‘David Johansson, wanted to make you aware of my inquiries in the valley as a courtesy’.

‘Hard’ did not adequately describe his features; there was not a single curve on his face it was composed entirely of angles and planes. Buzz cut grey hair and ice blue eyes completed the formidable impression Sergeant Walsh’s (according to his badge) appearance conveyed.

He looked down upon me from a full two heads taller with undisguised calculation and his neutral tone immediately flipped to guarded, bordering openly hostile

‘And what inquiries would they be precisely sir?’

I considered a whole encyclopaedia of smart replies but elected to keep my manner friendly and polite ‘I’m investigating the events at Skye Farm’.

‘You are aware sir that that matter is part of an current police investigation’ he barked, the ‘sir’ emphasised in a way that conveyed the opposite of respect.

‘And you would be aware Sergeant that criminal activities have been regularly occurring up there for more than six months which your current investigation has not prevented or redressed’ I pitched my rejoinder in the flattest most bass tone I could muster and steadily held his glare.

‘Who are you doing leg work for’ he made a show of holding up my card and reading disdainfully ‘Mr Johansson?’

‘My inquiries are perfectly legal Sergeant, I came here as a courtesy only’ I evaded ‘I have no intention of interfering with your investigation in any way’

‘What department smart arse?’

‘Pardon’ I asked somewhat perplexed

‘Don’t be fucken cute, you’re lot give me the shits with you’re poncing around in your two thousand dollar suits and the whole fucken secrecy wank, courtesy! Fucken courtesy, if you gave a damn about it you’d act like a professional and identify yourself properly, a call from you superintendent too would be in order wouldn’t it? Get this mate and pass it on to the rest of your homicide god squad; this is my backyard, you want to fucken take a piss here you ask me nicely first. Take this back too some cone head running around the hills gutting a few Jersey’s has as much to do with the murders as you do with real police work’

‘I’ll pass that on’ ironic mirth competing with touchpaper curiosity to show in my reply but I suppressed both and kept my tone grave, demonstrating I had been suitably reproached

‘Good day Sergeant Walsh’ I said as I turned to leave.

He called loudly as I exited the door ‘if you want a cause for your ‘events’ have a good look at that little prick Campbell he’s in it up to his arse’.

Murders? Homicide? what have I stepped into?. I walked bemused into the glorious mid afternoon spring sunshine, feeling rather dapper just now wearing a wool charcoal Hugo Boss suit (the only suit I own), white fine cotton Van Heusen shirt and a blue and gold Hardy Ames silk tie. The attire had served its purpose well, I was glad I had taken the trouble to stop off and change on the way back from Campbell’s. It has been my experience that people, any people, will lend you legitimacy when you’re clothed in an expensive suit. My concern only now was that John the pot bellied proprietor of the top shop knew my concerns had nothing to do with any agency other than the department of David Johansson’s psychotic curiosity and possibly the last hopes of Duncan Campbell. Hopefully I had a little time before Walsh and John traded gossip, cross that bridge when I come to it. What I needed right now were not answers but questions, questions to ask Campbell when tomorrow I interviewed him in a full and frank manner. Poking around the scene at Skye farm this morning had similarly been to find the right questions, there was little point in pressing the farmer just yet, he was too brittle, I needed to build a relationship of sorts to hold him together when the hard queries were made. Tonight’s mission would be to get the surveillance gear in place and worry about hammering Duncan after that. Aggravating a small town copper possessed of an already less than sunny disposition may not have been the wisest move but it did furnish more peripheral pieces of information and besides I really, really didn’t like him in a most visceral way and it was clearly mutual.

Lunch, sustenance required, the Farmers Market Café where I had coffee the day before would fit the bill. I stroll up the main street idly glancing at the displays in the strip of old shop fronts; they seemed to be exclusively one of either antiques or new age paraphernalia. I stop at one that appeared to sell only goods of the colour purple and I am having trouble identifying a useful purpose for any of them, I make a mental note, useless and purple, my daughter would love this place. I laugh quietly at the realisation the shop had been O’Gorman’s general store in my boyhood, wonder what old man O’Gorman would have made of the current stock lines. Outwardly the streetscape has changed little, mercifully most of the original buildings dating back to the 1880’s remain intact albeit probably looking more shiny and new than the day they were built. Here and there is an incongruous modern concrete box of a shop with huge glass windows and the mammoth old plain trees lining the either side of the street have gone to make way for a widening of the road but the effect is still one of quaint charm. Glancing across the street I notice the veranda of the café is virtually empty, odd even allowing for it being mid week particularly given the spectacular cloudless day. As I step off the curb a police car squeals to a halt directly across my path, I leap back in surprise not having registered its approach at all. Walsh is uncurling his bulky form from the drivers seat putting on his hat as he does so; this is to be official then? He makes his way around the bonnet making a show of checking his service revolver is in place.

‘Impersonating an officer of the law is a serious offence Johansson!’ he bawls.

‘I don’t recall making any such claims Sergeant you should be more careful with your assumptions’

‘Identification please sir’ he holds out a palm.

With a resigned sigh I find my wallet in my coat pocket and fish out the small plastic drivers licence and place in the waiting palm.

‘Is this your current address sir?’

‘Yep’

Still holding my licence he slides into the passenger seat of the police car and picks up the radio mike. I look up and down the street intensely aware of the eyes of passers-by drinking in the melodramatic relief to the lunch hour routine. Walsh is in front of me again clearly enjoying my discomfort and relishing the public show of control I suspect. He passes me back the slip of plastic.

‘Inquiry Agents Licence?’ palm out again.

‘This is getting old Walsh’ I sigh

‘Are you refusing to co-operate sir?’ he asks with a gleam.

‘Here’ I pass him another laminated piece of plastic.

‘I’ll hold this you can pick it up at the station when you leave, in the mean time you will report in person to the station prior to any visit to Skye farm and register your intentions in writing, am I making myself clear?’

This extra little service in petty harassment was not unexpected ‘absolutely Sergeant perfectly clear….there’s just one more matter’

‘Yeah?’

‘You can eat me’ and brushing past the burly copper and walking across the street ‘aim for the biggest body mass Sergeant wouldn’t want you shooting off my other foot’ over my shoulder.

‘I might aim a few feet higher mate but probably too small a target even for me’ comes his face saving retort ‘report to the station before you go anywhere near Skye Farm that’s an official warning’ he barks at my retreating back.

Ignoring him I make my way toward my lunch destination, a thoroughly charming welcome home! A couple occupy one end of the Caf&#;s verandah oblivious to the little comedy just unfolded before them in palpably moody silence, immaculate hair, casual designer clothes, closed body language and staring into space at points obliquely away from each other. I head for the other end taking a chair facing outward with a view of the foothills. Towards Campbell’s farm in fact and ruminate over the ‘events’ up there. Why? I couldn’t for the life of me dream up a why. Such an elaborate prank would require the investment of considerable resources and time, to carry it out repeatedly under the scrutiny of media and others indicated a fair degree of ingenuity and motivation. The motivation puzzled me and I suspected it would likely hold the key, the local coppers seemed to believe Campbell himself to be the perpetrator. Was the herd insured? If he was killing his own stock and claiming insurance why choose this way and why involve the news media? I could conceive of any number of more effective and less bizarre schemes to cull stock and cover it up as a genuine loss. If Campbell was in some financial strife I could find out with a few phone calls but it didn’t ring true, abrupt mood changes or not it, just wasn’t in him. So if not Campbell then what could be the payoff, someone perhaps trying to drive him off the property? Had he been approached to sell and refused? What could be on the land that parties unknown would go to such extraordinary lengths to acquire control of? Was it some strange personal vendetta? It had certainly succeeded in making life difficult for the middle-aged farmer and in fact had probably pushed him to the brink of emotional collapse. If this was true why choose such a bizarre high-risk scheme? Indignant self-righteousness can do strange things to peoples behaviour; bigotry, hatred, violence even genocide are universally practiced by those who at least to themselves hold the moral high ground. Vendetta then, a possibility, remote but still. Publicity? It had certainly achieved notoriety but to what end? Strangely publicity seems to be an end in itself, I was waiting for a tram in Swanston Street recently having just finished a fruitless morning of research at the State Library when a mob of a hundred or so people congregated, donned one yellow rubber glove on each of their left hands and stood, all pointing into the sky in the same direction with aforementioned yellow hands. This ridiculous event went for about thirty seconds then the crowd dispersed in silence save for the thwack of rubber gloves being pulled from fingers. Why? There is no why, its part of a world wide movement strung together via the Internet to stage apparently spontaneous crowd events. This case was a little more complex than inane gesticulation with the help of dishwashing accessories but nonetheless I suppose the same principal could apply and in truth I had uncovered it more than once before as the sole motivation for a prank. This would be a particularly nasty joke though, the repercussions for at least one man were going to be long term and I could see nothing to engender humour. If this were the case I would enjoy identifying the culprits and turning sergeant Walsh and his compatriots loose on them. Some sort of deranged religious rite? No I was getting ridiculous now, my mind is tired from the whirling possibilities, tonight hopefully would bring focus.

‘Very swanky’ teases a deep female voice beside me; I had not heard her approach. ‘Funeral, wedding or job interview?’

‘Something altogether more nefarious I’m afraid’ I reply.

‘Ooh mystery’ she laughs with her low sexy voice. ‘Just coffee again today or are we eating’

I was flattered that she remembered me or even recognised me from yesterday’s scruffy jeans and T-shirt.

‘Oh eating, definitely eating’ I reply with gusto, ‘recommendations?’

‘You sound like a man with an appetite’ a crooked, cheeky smile, I am not sure whether I am being flirted with or this is just her manner.

Either way I’m enjoying myself, ‘appetites, yes indeed’,

‘Then I suggest the local deer fillet with a red wine béarnaise and a glass of the house Cabernet Merlot; it’s ’99 vintage’.

‘The deer?’

‘No’ smirking ‘the merlot’.

‘Sounds perfect, thank you’.

‘Did you find your farm?’

‘I did in fact, thank you again’, ‘is it normally this quiet’ I ask glancing around the near empty veranda.

‘No, no its not usually’ serious now ‘the last three weeks pretty much the only people through on weekdays are locals, journos, Ag department suits, UFO nutters and big cat nutters. So which one are you?’ she asks laughing once more.

‘None of the above!’ now I was laughing too ‘more you’re generic nutter I’m afraid’. ‘Oh my god’ her hand goes to her mouth, long slender fingers idly caressing her lip ring ‘it was Skye farm you were looking for wasn’t it?’

Standing, ‘Hi, David Johansson alleged writer’ offering my hand awkwardly, she takes it briefly ‘Nicky Taylor’.

There was a moment of odd silence, ‘you know about what’s been going on up at Campbell’s place?’ I ask, interested.

She looks at me curiously ‘everyone knows’

This conversation has abruptly taken a left turn into something less pleasant than the previously relaxed banter but it might just be more illuminating for it.

‘And what does ‘everybody’ make of it?’

She purses her lips momentarily before responding ‘depends on who you talk to, most people think old man Campbell is doing it to himself’.

---------------------------------------------15/6

‘Why would he do that?’ hungrily.

‘For the insurance money or so the talk goes’.

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think if it’s not him I don’t want to know, came here to get away from twisted crap’ her brown eyes cast downward, odd expression on her pretty face.

‘Came here or ran here,’ realising how impolite that question had been the moment after it was spoken. Too much time asking questions of people with things to hide.

‘I’m sorry’ I blurt ‘that was very rude of me’.

‘Its ok, we’re all running somewhere, only difference is which way, I’ll go put your order in’ she says vacantly and turns, walking away between the tables, purple hair almost black in the shade of the veranda.

Lunch came and went, Bambi was delightful, the perfect couple at the other end of the patio left between lunch and coffee, sliding into a black Lexus still in stony silence. Nicky made several trips out to clear and serve but the conversation was only perfunctory, ‘yes the meal was beautiful, thanks’.

‘No, no more coffee thank you’ etc. I signed the credit card slip and departed.

The happening chapter 5

The Patrol claws its way over the slippery pasture of Campbell’s south paddock, Duncan, sitting beside me is more animated than I have seen him so far, any trace of depressed irrationality gone. I had tried to caution him that this would not be the case but he would not be dissuaded from the naïve belief tonight would end his troubles. I cant blame him, I’m excited too, curiosity, anticipation and a good dollop of fear. ‘There, there!’ he points to the rough track into the bush at the periphery of the paddock, I turn the four wheel drive through an open gate and down the track, cautiously negotiating the ruts, stopping when I estimate the truck is out view, shielded by the stand of Messmate. A dark haired young officer in a marked police four wheel drive had followed my truck all the way to Duncan’s driveway making no pretence of stealth and then accelerated past as I turned in.

‘We need to hurry mate’ I inform Duncan, the late afternoon light is fading fast, grinning he helps me carry the boxes of gear from the back of the Nissan to the fence line which separates the bush from the pasture. I made a stop on the trip up here, to change into something more appropriate than suit and tie and to make a call to Bracks and Gordon Pty Ltd. Euphemistically known as a firm of commercial intelligence analysts. In fact if you can afford their services they will gather any information that is matter of public record on any individual or organisation you might require. Duncan Campbell of course was the topic of today’s inquiries and there would be little I wouldn’t know or be able to infer about Mr Campbell’s financial goings on after I received the report tomorrow. Retrieving the last box to my shock I find Duncan’s shotgun has made its way into the back of the truck.

Whirling on him ‘what the fuck is this doing in here!’ he regards me with a look I really don’t want to know the meaning of, there is clearly violence in that expression. ‘This fucking thing stays right here or I leave immediately’ I’m yelling now, genuinely bloody angry, I want to tell him he is a fucking idiot but I ask firmly ‘are we clear?’

He silently nods his assent but his look says otherwise, stupidly this is not a turn of events I was expecting and I stow the 12-gauge in one of the storage boxes in the back and double check the doors of the old Nissan are locked. Bloody hell! Means I cant take my eyes off him all night but there is too much to do and the worry is soon pushed away. We set up a picnic table and two chairs a few metres back from the edge of the tree line, hidden from casual view. The tripod and digital video camera are set up right at the fence just inside the paddock, I shimmy three metres up a nearby tree and lash the five million candlepower floodlight to its trunk. It’s connected to two car batteries at the base of the tree, for emergencies only, if things get crazy in the darkness.

We return to the table as the last light fades, I set up the laptop and plug in the long output cable from the camera and fire up the surveillance program.

‘Could you walk out into the paddock about fifty metres and come straight back please Duncan?’

He regards me quizzically ‘need to test the gear, I’ll explain when you get back’. The camera is equipped with a low light wide-angle lens and will cover most of the paddock, returning clear monochrome images on the darkest of nights. The crashing of undergrowth stops and Duncan’s image appears on the laptop monitor, immediately a green band appears around the edges of the screen. The software has noted that the image has changed and begins recording video footage to the hard drive, periodically it will automatically write this footage to a blank DVD-R. A low BEEP BEEP indicates the system has located the object moving against the background image and now Duncan’s distinctive stooping form is outlined in red BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP; the software has recognised the object is moving away and the BEEPs come further and further apart.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP and then a continuous tone as Duncan returns to the camera. Even in black and white I can clearly see the lines of tension in his face, the points at the back of his jaw line that show how hard his teeth are clamped together. Truth is I’m as tense as he is and tendrils of doubt cloy at my thoughts undoing confidence. I’m not a professional at this, if I was it would not be the case that no other soul knew I was isolated out here in the bush with a possibly unstable whacko, with more whackos possibly about to appear to do their strange work for the evening. I pull my mobile from the pocket of my anorak and made sure there was signal. I've got myself into trouble more than once this way. Madness. Duncan stomps his way noisily back to the table and slumps in the canvas folding chair beside me, I spend the next hour patiently explaining the workings of the system to him, at the end of the time I am left in no doubt he is a true Luddite and professes to understand not a word I have said.

It is dark proper by now and the furtive night sounds of the bush have begun, ‘so what are you expecting to see tonight Duncan?’

He talks to the darkness, his profile illuminated by the glow of the laptop screen ‘I don’t reckon we’ll see it mate, not tonight, not any night, how many times do you reckon I've sat out here freezing my arse off?’

I shrug.

‘One night it took a calf just over the other side of the hill while I sat in the truck not two hundred yards away, one thing I do know if we see what I reckon it is you’re gunna wish that 12 gauge wasn’t sitting in the back of your truck’.

‘You still think it’s a big cat don’t you?’ I ask, he looks up at the stars by way of reply.

‘You’ve seen the wounds Duncan no animal did that, the tissue is split not sliced open and where do you imagine all the blood goes? This is people mate not big cats, dogs or whatever else and tomorrow I need you to answer some questions about why, OK?’

‘Got nothin’ to hide David ask what you want’.

‘Tomorrow Duncan we’ll worry about it then’.

BEEP BEEP. As one our heads snapped to the LCD screen, creatures with boof heads and big eyes resolved on the screen, cows, dopey bloody cows, I have to consciously start breathing again, Campbell shoots me a glance his pupils wildly dilated. The program has a function to ignore known moving objects, using the touch pad I draw a lasso around the image of the grazing Jersey herd, the beeping ceases.

‘The cops ever bother to come out at night and watch?’

Duncan pauses for a moment ‘That prick Walsh told me he had but I never saw him on the place ‘less it was to tell me I was full of shit, that I was doing this myself, myself for fucks sake. He told me I was going to be charged with making a false claim or some bullshit’.

Slowly shaking his head from side to side he makes a noise halfway between a snort and a groan to emphasise his indignation.

‘Who else has been on the place that you know of?’ I ask him.

‘You name it they’ve been here even the bloody Jehovah’s witnesses, a dozen or more news crews, few blokes from newspapers, couple of crazies with hunting rifles and two blokes from the Department of Agriculture’.

BEEP,BEEP heads snap to the screen again, one of the herd has broken into a gallop, udder swaying wildly. The cattle turn as one to watch the departing brethren as it makes its way, for reasons unknown, up the hillside to our front. Abruptly the stupid beast turns one hundred and eighty degrees and gallops back to the curious herd, the alarm from the laptop ceases. Both of us sit glued to the screen, barely breathing, waiting for the cause of the momentary scare to come into view, an hour later nothing did.

I relaxed enough to gently probe Duncan’s story once more.

‘Tell me about the men from the Department of Agriculture’.

‘They came one afternoon, barely said two words, looked at the last carcass, filled lots of doggie bags and little plastic bottles, looked around the place and then pissed off, no promises, nothin’.

Our conversation such as it had been wound down to tired silence, after the very early wake up call this morning weariness was close to overtaking me. Standing brought on a symphony of pains and tingles from my legs; it was close to 2am now. I glanced over at Duncan, his head lolled back as though his neck was broken, soft snoring coming from his open mouth. The inevitable by-product of coffee, very difficult to move through this undergrowth noiselessly but I endeavoured to pick my way through the darkness to a polite distance from the table. Returning I found Duncan still peacefully asleep, slumping in the chair myself I closed my eyes to relieve the grainy fatigue of a long vigil.

I awake groggy and leaden, a deep sense of unease pervades my returning consciousness. There is a noise in the background, not loud but clearly perceptible, like bees on a summer day I sit up rigidly to listen. Not voices, but like voices, a parody of speech. Louder now, much louder, insistent almost painful, it feels like its not a sound at all, like its inside my head, inside me. The chair sprawls backward as I leap to attention, I know this, I've heard this before! Panic rising, I can’t think. Terror and nausea, guttural loathing--- Duncan! His chair is empty; he is nowhere to be seen in the gloom.

BEEP BEEP…………………..BEEP………………..BEEP………BEEP……BEEP.

Oh fuck! Something’s coming! The sound is consuming everything, its so loud. What the fuck is this! Jesus Christ, BEEP…BEEP.

Closer.

In my bowels I know its not Duncan. I slap the switch for the floodlight; the sparse forest becomes stark black and grey. I’m frozen in the space between breaths, panic, horror, fear everything has been suspended, numbed. BEEEEEEEP. Duncan, grey and mottled in the harsh light, he’s naked, 5 metres in front, wedged, face up in the fork of a gum. His body is bent backward at an impossible angle over the branch as though he’s been snapped, arms and legs hanging limply. Dead eyes stare at me upside down, the gentle expression of mild surprise on his bloodless face stark denial of the destruction of his body. White vertebrae glint, he’s been gutted, abdomen grotesquely splayed and empty.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP its here!

Whop! Whop! The floodlight explodes in a momentary cascade of white embers; the darkness is total, absolute. I’m running now, blind, undergrowth whipping, bark, rough unyielding collides with my face propels me flat on my back. I'm beyond pain now, beyond reason, got to run, get up! Run!

The aftermath and meeting Stuart chapter 6

I'm struck by the similarity of this cell to my room at the Grand, same vintage, same whitewashed bricks, this one’s free though. I’d laugh at the irony if everything didn’t hurt. Earlier I worked up the courage to look at my reflection in the little mirror hanging above the stainless steel sink. A vision of hell, huge lump on the left temple just turning purple, my face appeared to have been grated, a continuous matte of abrasion. Seven stitches; four in the lip, three in the chin applied by a dark skinned doctor his manner gentle and feminine, I had felt no compulsion to respond to his words, in fact didn’t register it as language until much later. His inquiries had been kind and concerned. Like some huge and urgent machine slowly returning to function, the most ancient parts had come to life first, the smell of his skin, cloves and earth had been clear over the sharpness of disinfectant. Comprehension, in snatches initially had followed later, speech later still. As for the rest of me, nothing broken just one unending bruise and not much skin left on the stump of the right ankle. The prosthetic is sitting forlornly by the bed still wearing its hiking boot, retrieved by one of Walsh’s minions from nearby the scene of the…the….the incident I suppose if it must be named. No one has questioned me yet, at least not in any detail but I've no doubt that will be soon. This stark little lock up the rear of the police station is now my island of lucidity; this uncluttered rectangle is safety, its variables minimal. Outside, outside is the possibility of events unknown, uncontrollable, terrifying. Yes in here is good, I need to stay, to sit, I haven’t tested the door. The handle turns as I glance toward it, brown doe eyes peer around the frame full of concern, I can’t help but be touched.

‘Prakesh, on the hour every hour! Please come in’, I gesture with a gracious sweep of invitation.

He grins bemused ‘there has been some improvement then?’ his accent is a curious mix of Australian nasal twang and gentle sibilance of the sub continent.

‘How is the pain?’.

‘Quite nice actually, its keeping me here and now’ I reply making a joke out of the truth, his head moves from side to side in what I understand to be a gesture of agreement.

‘Please remove your shirt’, I comply gingerly with accompanying groans, removing the bedraggled remains of what had once been my favourite RM Williams shirt.

The stethoscope is clutched in his hand, he moves toward me as he manoeuvres the instrument to his ears and spends several minutes applying the cold business end to various parts of my torso, pausing to listen each time and asking to me breathe in or out. As he centres the microphone over my heart he raises his right hand shaking his wrist to bring the oversized Rolex into view, the silver metallic links of its band an ostentatious contrast against his delicate brown hand. My pulse is apparently not cause for concern as he straightens without comment.

‘Rest’ he implores, smiling gently and turns toward the door.

‘Oh’ turning back to me ‘I've asked someone else to come to talk to you he’ll be along presently’.

‘I understand’ I reply and he is gone.

The ‘someone else’ is no doubt a psychologist to assess my fitness to be interviewed, would it be Walsh doing the questioning or had the homicide pit bulls arrived yet?

With great care I lay myself back on the undersize cot not bothering to put my shirt back on, the wool of the blanket is rough against my back. Strangely I feel quite relaxed even peaceful, I don’t really understand the events that have transpired, images of breakfast at the farmhouse, green pasture and Duncan’s animated face play across the back of my mind like flash cards. Darkness, sparks falling as though in slow motion, the glowing computer screen, Duncan’s head lolling in sleep, that incessant beeping, dead eyes, the glint of bone amongst the gore, ragged, the noise humming moaning, oh fuck the noise! It had been speaking to me, calling to me, irresistibly horrible, welcome home. Jesus! No! My stomach spasms, vomit explodes in my mouth hot and bitter. Ignoring the pain I lurch to the sink and heave the meagre contents of my innards into the steel bowl. Tea and a part digested ham sandwich chase each other down the plughole. The spasms are mercifully brief, cool water splashed on my face, equilibrium returning. I sit back on the cot and with spastic motions endeavour to put my shirt back without reigniting the flares of pain in my upper body. Gingerly I retrieve and refit my errant right foot, without testing it I know it will be too painful to walk on but Prakesh has thoughtfully left me a well worn aluminium crutch on one of his hourly visits. The passivity of the last few hours has slipped from my shoulders, my habitual abrasive armour is returning home and I resolve to leave this room and find out what precisely is going on. Or raise merry hell which ever comes first. As I fiddle in impatient frustrated silence to adjust the mechanism of the crutch to fit under my armpit the door springs open once more. I have been too involved in stubborn wing nuts to register the approach of footsteps. A mop of red curly hair, the expensive navy suit hangs on the thin frame underneath. His expression roils with emotions I can only guess at, his cheeks are boy like and freckled, incongruent with his fortyish features. Blushed red under the freckles, pale blue eyes, restless, pupils dilated, his mouth begins to form a word, recants and tries again. I pre-empt him.

‘Dr Freud I presume’ offering my hand, he sloughs off the sarcasm the sense of urgency about him is palpable.

I have registered seeing this man two nights before in the dining room at the Grand but I have the impression he knows much more about me.

‘Dr Robertson, Stuart Robertson actually’ taking my hand, soft dry grip.

He holds my gaze as the floor momentarily tilts under my feet. It’s a familiar feeling, happens every time memory reconnects, the car accident (coincidently on the way back to this place) that claimed my foot five years before has also stolen so much of my ability to recollect. Severe head trauma. Sometimes when associations are thrust before me scraps of images and feelings coagulate violently and another piece of my life before becomes mine again. It’s not a pleasant sensation, as though my cranium has been emptied, rewired and then refitted but I’m grateful for it nonetheless. ‘Stuart’ I whisper.

‘Yes David, I wondered if you might remember,’ he says evenly.

‘That was Paula with you at the hotel wasn’t it? You’re married?’

He nods in reply.

‘Look we can reminisce later we need to get you out of here…now’.

‘Come on’ he places a hand on my shoulder and gently pressures toward the open door, an infinity of questions riot at my lips.

Awkwardly I hobble through the doorway his hand still pressing gently but insistently at my back. As we move through a small cluttered office area, windows left and right a shabby wooden desk at each. Stuart brushes past me to open the door which I assume leads to the counter area at the front of the station. The door opens before he puts a hand to it, a black haired constable, early twenties stops in the doorway a quizzical look on his barely post adolescent face.

Davis the badge reads. ‘Dr Robertson…..what’s going on?’ he asks, clearly unsure who holds the authority here.

As soon as I hear the timbre of Stuarts’s voice I realise its not going to be the young man before us holding sway.

‘Constable Davis I’m taking this man to proper medical attention, you will allow me to do so’.

‘But Prak……Dr Roy has been here five times’ he’s almost pleading.

‘Let us through please Peter’ Stuart says softly but the tone indicates this is not a request and negotiations will not be entertained.

‘I have to clear this with Walsh before you go anywhere’ Davis turns away presumably to use the radio but I suspect it’s an exercise in saving face more than anything else.

‘Give my regards to Sergeant Walsh’ Stuart quips over his shoulder as he holds the front door open for my awkward exit.

‘Still playing the Scottish, old money rich prick I see’ I bait while negotiating the front steps.

Beep Beep.

Fuck.

My heart leaps momentarily. The indicators of the silver Mercedes C class parked in front of the station flash twice, Stuart is holding the remote and moving ahead to open the passenger door.

‘In’ he commands, gesturing while holding the door. I balance myself against the roof, slide the crutch into the back seat and manoeuvre myself onto the front seat. The moment my legs are in he slams the door and moves swiftly to the drivers side.

Davis appears at the door of the station..

‘Hey….wait!’ he yells but there is no conviction in his voice.

As Stuart ignores him, starting the Merc and selecting a gear the young constable makes a half-hearted attempt to block the path of the car. The scene is comical as the this middle-aged man, child hood co-conspirator turned rescuer accelerates, steering around the young copper standing in the middle of the car park, palm ridiculously outstretched a pantomime order to stop.

‘Hey they could give you the electric chaise lounge for that you know’, I laugh, a familiar evil grin breaks across his face, the boy revealed.

‘Seriously though, I dare say Walsh is going to be a very unhappy vegemiter, not to mention the cheery fellows from homicide, thought about what you plan to say?

He casts me a deadpan look ‘homicides not involved’.

‘How so?’ this is unexpected.

‘Currently being considered to be death by misadventure, the case is being handed to the coroners office tomorrow’

Now I'm really dumbfounded. ‘Miss a fucking adventure!’.

‘Stuart he was 20 fucking feet up a tree missing his abdomen, misadventure is getting lost in fucking Niddrie, this is not adventure miss or otherwise.

‘I thought you would consider that good news’ he glances away from the road to regard me quizzically.

‘No good news would be waking up in my bed to find last night was a lurid dream brought on by a bad kebab, where are we going?’.

‘Hartford’ comes the truncated reply.

‘Ah chez Robertson, living there now?’

‘Yes’.

The replies are getting shorter it seems, this seat leather is really quite nice, I'm tired, exhausted on a most basic level and I settle into the Teutonic armchair and watch the vineyards spin by.

subplot2

Low indistinct rumblings herald the coming thunderheads; the air remains angrily hot and close. Late afternoon has not taken the heat off the day but the surging black skies soon will. Her face is wrung with grief, rivulets of tears upon the teenage face, hair still matted with humus and leaf. She has turned her back to the two youths, their loud rising tension insufferable in the horror of the moment. The Whaler mare lies on her side, her breathing laboured, one front fetlock is bent forward at an impossible angle. At the periphery of her panicked thoughts the girl knows her beloved horse will never walk again but the suffering at hand is so horrid she can only think about making it stop. Fishing in the pocket of her moleskins she retrieves a battered soft pack of cigarettes. Tremors rack her hands as she fumbles with the pack, thumb and forefinger pincer for the end of a filter. She finally manages to withdraw one and thrust it to her lips, lighting it, match expertly cupped against the strengthening wind. A long acrid drag, the boys are close to screaming at each other now, beginning to posture, to front each other. Rigidity slithers up her body, fists ball at her sides, she whirls ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP just fuck up and decide’ she sobs momentarily then gathers herself ‘one of you just go PLEASE!’ Wide eyed, the boys cease immediately and glare at her, their mutual fury sublimes. The round-faced youth pivots and strides purposefully toward his horse tied to a nearby tree. The other boy, all red hair and freckles looks to the girl for reassurance, she turns away with an expression of disgust.

Paula Chapter 7

Rrrrmmm….rrrrmmm the cattle grid thrums the wide tyres of the Mercedes. ‘Hartford’ in gold Helvetica reads the discreet sign at the wide entrance to the driveway. Monstrous red cattle graze in the front paddocks.

‘Still breeding Angus I see’

‘Hundred and fifty years is hard to change,’ he replies in a tone hinting at imperiousness.

‘Nice sideline, where did you end up doing your degree Stuart?’

‘PHD actually, Melbourne’

‘Of course where else……. I seem to recall a time you used to fuck with peoples heads for free’

‘You’re still a prick’ he retorts, mild irritation in the tone

‘So are you’

The tension evaporates instantly; the laughter is genuine and fond from us both.

He reaches out with his left hand and grips my shoulder firmly.

‘Welcome back’

‘Thanks’ wincing ‘but I’ll settle for a little less dramatic return next time’.

The driveway terminates in a wide circle; tall standard roses in glorious hues fill the centre.

‘Who’s the gardener’ I ask in admiration.

Stuart inclines his head toward the veranda of the huge old farmhouse; half in shadow standing motionless is a woman. An expression of concern mixed with…with something else indiscernible. Fear?

‘Paula’ the incantation whispers past my lips before I know I have asked my mouth to utter it. Awkwardly I clamber from the car steadying myself against the roof. Before I can retrieve my crutch from the back seat her arms are around me, the grip is tight, unabashed. My face is buried in her loose brown hair, lavender faint but unmistakable, I can smell the oatmeal scent of her skin as well. My arms loop around her shoulders; upper arms and back are hard with muscle. She still works the farm? I’m having trouble coping with the inrush of sensation; my head feels detached, hyperventilated. God, so beautiful! Brown eyes search mine. The expression is briefly vulnerable, childlike and then glazes, disconnected, armoured.

‘I'm sorry I have to sit down’ and I do, my head has become a carnival ride. Stuart is at my side, slides my arm over his shoulders and half supports, half manhandles me through the front door and into the high ceiling lounge room.

‘Lay down’, I settle onto the proffered couch in a controlled fall. The edges of awareness are disappearing and minutiae draw my fascination as I watch an explosion of dust fairies my undignified landing has created dance in the orange afternoon sun. Patterns, beautiful patterns, stars before the blackness.

‘David……David, how do you feel?’ she is gently stroking my forehead, concern and a modicum of tension in her expression. I sit myself up sloughing off a knitted blanket and cataloguing the aches and pains as I do so, but my head is clear and my stomach feels as though it has left my chest and headed back home downward for the first time this day.

‘Surprisingly quite good, what time is it?’ noticing the darkness outside the windows.

‘A little after nine, are you hungry?’

I register the aroma filling the room, hearty, savoury smells. My belly grabs with appreciation, ‘starving, I thought you swore never to cook’

‘Actually Stuart made the casserole’ she gives me a lopsided grin.

‘Jamie Oliver of the valley, that’s what they call me’ comes Stuart’s voice from across the room, he’s leaning against the frame of the doorway to the kitchen, ‘come on’ and disappears into the kitchen.

‘Just so long as your not planning on doing a naked bloody chef routine I’ll be in there in a moment’ I quip to his back.

‘Are you Ok to walk?’ Paula’s gaze flits to my foot.

‘Yep fine, you go ahead, be there in a minute’

Gentle smile again and she is gone.

I go through the routine of readjusting the bloody thing, going to have to walk gingerly methinks. The kitchen is every bit as cavernous as I remember; a fireplace you could almost literally hold a party in dominates the room, the red and brown hues of the hearth’s rough bricks rich in the muted light.

‘Please, sit down’ Stuart gestures to a place at the old oak table in the centre of the room, his hand cloaked in an gaudy floral oven proof glove, the other hand holds a stainless steel ladle. Around his waist a linen apron, the lace edges complete the scene of ridiculousness.

‘Most fetching’ I nod toward the offending apron.

He smiles glibly, clearly enjoying the comedy. I realise this is a very different Stuart Robertson to the tense mercurial boy I had known. I sit and look across the table to Paula, already seated but staring pensively at the flickering candle between us not registering the banter. She looks up and I raise an eyebrow questioningly, the unreadable intense look once more. Stuart doles out generous helpings of a chicken casserole smelling of promise, the taste is even better. After my compliments on his culinary prowess if not his dress sense we eat purposefully, a hungry silent triumvirate. Paula excuses herself from the table returning momentarily with an open cleanskin of red wine and pours three glasses, raising hers ‘to reunions’.

Three clinks of crystal, the wine is a full Cabernet Sauvignon, what I believe the connoisseurs call a ‘big wine’

‘Thank you that was truly glorious’ after chasing the last morsel from my bowl.

‘You’re most welcome’ Stuart genuinely pleased.

‘You’ll stay the night’ Paula states no hint of question ‘Stuart picked up your luggage from the Grand while you were asleep’

‘Thank you that’s very kind’

‘Good now that settled we have two bottles of red to finish and twenty years to catch up on’ Stuart boomed.

The message was clear, this was not to be the time for hard questions, the coddled softness of shared reminiscence only. The details of exactly when Stuart and Paula had become lovers were noticeable blurred but they had married after Paula had graduated from her Fine Arts degree, also at Melbourne University. Stuart had gone on to complete his Doctorate and the two had returned to the valley ostensibly to start a family, unsuccessfully it seemed. He consulted at a number of city hospitals, lectured part time at his Alma Mata and in addition had apparently produced three noted texts on aberrant psychosexual behaviour. She had created a studio in the old stables and become one of the most popular suppliers of ceramic creations to the growing proliferation of local galleries. An artist of some notoriety it seemed. I felt more than a touch of underachievement as I recounted my signing up for the Air force at seventeen, a drift into intelligence, a marriage. Two overseas postings, a daughter sixteen going on twenty-five, an affair, a divorce. A car accident, a medical discharge, depression, therapy and a bizarre new career and here we are. And so the conversation went, I was struck by the strong impression that my summary biography had not been news to the Robertsons.

As though reading my thoughts Paula says quietly ‘we came to see you in the hospital David, you were on life support, wires and tubes, you were barely alive’.

‘You came to see me?’ I ask with incredulity ‘but that was ten years ago, how did you know, why haven’t you been in touch since?’ Over the confusion a distant pinprick of light in the back of my brain was getting larger and brighter, I hoped it wasn’t the 5.02 express.

‘You’re doctors advised against contact too early David and well frankly we just…drifted for want of a better expression I suppose. I’m sorry’ Stuart added almost as an after thought.

Bullshit, absolute bullshit!

‘I see’ holding Stuart’s gaze, his eyes steady and unblinking, a hint of that familiar expression of pomposity he could effect.

After that revelation the conversation shifts once again, Stuart moving it quite deliberately to secure ground; his work.

‘Given your apparent fascination with the bizarre you may be interested in a new client I’m seeing, well more a subject really’

‘Who might that be?’ I ask lukewarm, not enjoying the manipulation.

‘Peter Larson’

‘The Larson who…..?’ I stop short after catching a glimpse of Paula’s open discomfort from the corner of my eye.

‘Yes the Larson who busied himself most of the earlier part of this year kidnapping and killing three successive women’ Stuart lectured full of self-importance, heedless of his wife’s obvious horror.

‘How did you become involved?’ I ask curious now despite myself.

‘From time to time I’m engaged by the Department of Public Prosecutions to make psychiatric assessments of suitability to stand trial, he was being held temporarily at the city watchouse’.

‘And your assessment was?’

‘Soulless’

‘That would be the medically correct terminology?’ I laugh ironically.

‘For a man who on three known occasions abducted and mutilated a woman and left her to die of shock and blood loss; yes soulless .No pity, no regret, in fact he was most enthusiastic to tell his tale. Made and is still making elaborate claims about being told, convinced to do it, convinced of the sense of it’

‘You say still is, you have contact with him now?’

‘Every Thursday morning where he is being held and will be until the day he dies, at Beechworth’.

‘Why you?’

‘Professional interest, the subject of a new paper, I spun out my original role in his commitment to the governor at Beechworth and got permission for regular access’.

‘Taken up drinking heavily on a Thursday night have we?’

‘Were it only Thursday’ he glances at Paula then down at his hands steepled on the table top. ‘Do you remember him?’ Stuart asks.

‘How do you mean?’

‘When we were in grade six he was I think in grade one; Mrs Garner’s class’ he says gravely

‘You mean here, our school?’

‘Yes absolutely’

Why was he telling this? The slam of connection; ‘the Police never released exactly where the bodies were discovered, the reason given was I recall ‘ongoing investigations’’ I probe

‘The bodies were all found a few Kilometres from here’ he replies in a whisper.

‘Easter Hills?’

‘Yes’

‘Fuck….sorry’

‘Yes fuck indeed’

‘The women Stuart, cut?’

‘Yes, sternum to groin’

‘Excuse me it’s late I’m going to bed’ Paula stands abruptly and leaves the kitchen with a single wet-eyed glance.

‘Goodnight’ I reply hesitantly to her retreating figure.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I return my attention to Stuart.

He fixed me with, what I assumed to be, his professionally earnest stare ‘because I want you to understand this is not you're investigation, this is not what you do, I want you to go home, you have no place here’

I regarded him for a long time, I understood he was referring not just to the bizarre goings on of this place but much closer to home. ‘You won Stuart, I left’

‘Perhaps, but I wonder sometimes what went with you’ the reply heavy with bitterness.

He stands, ‘Time to retire?’

I nod by way of reply, wanting to speak no more.

‘I’ll take you to your room’.

Horse and rider flash between the short gnarled gums, branches whip both but both are unfazed. The grey mare is part Arab, muscular, agile and possessed of endless stamina. Her forelegs and hindquarters are streaked with foam, fetlocks with blood but the horse gives no indication of slowing. He still rides upright, trained knows no other way. The Welsh Mountain is long dead, claimed by colic, the Arab mare is equally beloved acquired in one of the grandfather’s snarled and hushed deals. The 303 is a jungle carbine, hand luggage from New Guinea near six decades prior. Apart from a few occasional airings the youth could recall it lain under his grandfather’s bed until now. A wide green sling around the young mans chest, the hard walnut of the Lee Enfield rifle’s stock slapping his back with each stride of the mare. Light Horse style. His grandparents would be out on a hay-cart until late night, the only other adult he could find quickly had been the other boy’s father who was now making his way toward the crippled horse with the farm truck. That would be an hour away though, this area was a spider web of rough circuitous trails. He watched the gathering storm through brief relaxes in the forest canopy, the thunderclaps were coming one on top of the next now, distant still but furious. The lad was close now, reigned in the Arab and coaxed her to a halt. Dismounting and tying the reigns to a tree, the mare was as bathed in fear and tension as the youth and would have none of being tethered. One raise of the beautiful long neck, the reigns snapped, the horse bolting wildly in the direction of home. The young man apparently heedless of his fleeing mount unloops the rifle from his back, works the bolt checking a round is chambered. He walks unhurriedly up the slight incline of the rebate around the old mineshaft that has triggered this chaotic melodrama. Stopping when a clear view of the other side is afforded. The red haired boy and the girl have not noticed his approach, they are in profile to him and locked in an embrace. The sexuality is unmistakeable, hands rest on the ramp of each others buttocks and hips are pressed together. The lad raises the rifle to his shoulder, snick as the safety comes off, finger sure over the trigger. The shot’s report is clear over the thunder, the couple disengage in startled horror. The old whaler mare’s body twitches momentarily and the boy chambers another round, it’s not necessary, the first shot has found its mark below and between the eyes. The three stare at each other over the filled in shaft, two with shock and incomprehension one with murderous rage.

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Paula in the Morning chapter 8

‘Where to from here?’ an expansive wave of toast.

I purse my lips and consider ‘home, close the curtains, lock the door…………for about a year’

A warm wry laugh, eyes laughing too.

‘I wish I were entirely flippant’ I admit

‘So seriously?’

‘There’s nothing here that involves me’ flat, retreating.

‘Oh there’s plenty, but I think nothing that isn’t painful’ brown eyes wide, head tilted slightly. She’s studying me I realise, cataloguing my reactions, gauging the changes the years have wrought.

‘More coffee?’

‘Please’

Back at the kitchen table again, Stuart had left for the city long before I finally poked my nose out from under the doona. I was amused to find that Paula’s culinary ambitions still only ran as far as toast. Curious too, her demeanour in Stuarts company, polar opposite to the wild uncontainable teenage girl. There was no polite way I could probe that and in truth my head was already on it’s way out of here, it was not, would not be, my business.

Two more cups of coffee, bone china gold leaf trim.

‘I remember these, I used to love to flick them to hear the sound. Stuart’s mother used to flip out. She spent an hour once lecturing me about fine porcelain and it’s relationship to etiquette, was lost on twelve year old.’

‘This house is an island in time alright, everything stays constant, the only changes are the generations of Robertson men.’

‘Yeah where is Stuart’s dad?’

‘Recall that antique Purdy he used to keep in the cabinet in the sitting room’

‘Yep’

‘He put the barrels in his mouth on the morning of Stuart’s twenty fifth birthday’

‘Oh god!’

‘Breast cancer had already taken his mother by then, Stuart was sole heir. My turn for questions now.’

‘Fire away………..sorry’ I really don’t belong in polite company.

‘Your memory, how is it?’

‘I really don’t know’

‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

‘OK, well everything after my early twenties is I think pretty much intact but before that it’s not like I have blank spots, more like edited highlights and I’m never aware anything’s missing until events reconnect things somehow. Am I making any sense?’

‘I think so’

‘Try imagining a story laid out in pages on a table, on one side of the page is a one line statement about what happened on that page. The other side has the full text of that bit of the story, most of the pages are full text up and you can pretty much make sense of the end of the story by reading what’s face up. Sometimes things happen which turn over a page and you understand in detail what really happened. Sometimes they turn back. Apart from that, day to day I have trouble connecting together facts and relationships, I have to write a lot down which is in truth how ended up doing what I do now. Self prescribed therapy.’ I look to her for reassurance she didn’t consider me mad.

‘Do you remember making love to me once’ almost a whisper.

‘Oh….I…I…’ I’ve fallen off the edge of the earth.

‘I thought you’d lost that vulnerability, but it’s still there’

She’s smiling and not smiling, measuring again.

‘Picked myself up some armour along the way’

‘Is it shining?’

‘Somewhat tarnished I think’

Three loud blasts of a horn.

‘That’ll be your truck’

‘Hmm?’

‘I asked Charlie from the local garage to drop it off here’

‘Ah the power of the lady of the manor’

‘Look into my eye’ she touches the lower lid of one eye with the ring finger of her left hand. An old childhood joke.

‘That’s not very lady like’

‘Get your truck before it falls apart in my driveway’

Conflict with Walsh, getting to know Nicky and leaving the valley chapter 9

‘I’ve really got to trade you in you rattly old prick’ The vibration in the Nissan is bad enough to prevent rational thought which was a really a blessing. A miserable grey morning with just enough drizzle to be annoying and the river flats on the road out of town are bleached of their iridescent green in the grey light. Paula was right, there was only pain behind me in that township, regrets I already had enough of for one full life. The leaving had been awkward, wrenching and a relief, cowardly though it may be to admit. The touch of her fingers trailed over my cheek lingers, crackling. There were a hundred different emotions in that moment of contact and a thousand questions roiling in my head. I had to go home try and make sane the last few days and package them away somewhere unseen.

My laptop.

The easiest feeling is anger, simple to express and you can subvert so many other things to it. Walsh has my laptop and the DVD-R. Quick U-turn, there is little traffic. I’m parked on the street outside the Police Station in less than five minutes; a figure is climbing from a Police Car in the driveway. I’m out of the truck and almost running up the drive before I’ve thought about it.

‘Just the man I want to see’ says Walsh straightening and smiling, the smile of a great white.

‘You may come to want those words back’

‘You fled police custody Johansson, we don’t appreciate that’

‘Did you arrest me?’

Blank stare

‘Did you charge me?’

‘Not yet’ spoken low and menacing

‘Well you can piss up a rope Walsh, I want my laptop back’

We are squarely facing each other now, chests close. He’s heavier, much, I’m angrier, much and I’m headless of the futility of this now.

‘You won’t be seeing it anytime soon, it’s been entered into evidence’

‘Where is it’

‘Doesn’t matter you cant have it’

I remember a fight just like this when I was seven.

‘Evidence for what Walsh?’

‘Coronial inquest’

He leans even closer, speaks into my ear sotto voce ‘don’t fuck with me again you little worm, come back here you wont leave a second time just limp your sorry carcass back to that shitbox and rattle on out of here’.

My anger is gone, he’s played the game now, the threat had been earnest but I lived a childhood of those, just want to take him a little further for sport now.

I turn my head and plant a kiss on his cheek.

‘You’re sweet Walsh but that blue really doesn’t suit you, perhaps a uniform in a nice shade of grey, maybe an arrow motif?’

His body snaps back, cheeks instantly glowering red, mouth working, no sound.

‘Ciao’ time to go, I turn swiftly and walk back to the Nissan. Looking back just before clambering in.

‘I’ll being having coffee at the Farmers Market……….join me?’ quick smirk.

As I drive away he’s still standing there utterly motionless eyes locked on me. I enjoyed that.

What am I doing here? I’m possessed of reasonable intelligence, the government invested a great lump of Joe taxpayers hard earned teaching me methodical contemplation so why is it I so often don’t know why I’ve done something till after it’s done? I think I’m a passenger here, god only knows who’s driving. It’s far too miserable to sit outside, beside that might just be baiting Walsh a little too much. If he were Barry Glover I think I’d be dying from gunshot wounds by now. You know the deal ‘yes your worship we were endeavouring to take the deceased into custody, unfortunately he fled and we were forced to fire a warning shot……………..into his head……………six times. Ah, yes your honour the entry wounds were at the front, you see the deceased was running backward at the time…powder burns? Yes, well, he was a very slow runner…etc. No not here, not in this stupefied town, but Walsh was evil no doubt about it and dangerous. But what the hell do I care, shortly I’ll be gone with no plans to return. Maybe I just like purple-haired twenty something waitresses who do a good show of flirting with me and have secrets. Besides I had been exceptionally rude to her last time, it would be well to make amends.

‘Table for one, just for coffee’

I’m hazarding a guess this is the proprietor, rotund man, a thick shock of white slightly wild hair atop a jovial face. He casts an exaggerated gaze over the innards of the empty café.

‘We can endeavour to squeeze sir in’ said with a hearty laugh and a twinkling eye. He thrust out a hand ‘Peter Jones restaurateur and master cheese maker at your service’.

‘Davi…..’ he holds up a hand palm toward me

‘I know’ he says with a wink ‘your most welcome’

‘Thank you’ couldn’t keep the confusion out of my tone.

‘Grab a table over by the fire’

‘Is Nicky here today?’

‘Yes she’s in the kitchen I’ll send her out’ he turns and is gone, double doors presumably to the kitchen banging behind him.

I make my way to the proffered table by the glowing open fireplace.

Nicky pokes her head out from kitchen, her lovely smile vaporises replaced by a look of shock. Her hand goes to her mouth.

‘Oh my god!’

I am momentarily confused, perhaps she had been expecting someone else? Then I realise I look like I’ve gone five rounds with Mike Tyson.

‘Don’t get on the wrong side of the coppers in this town they’re mean’ gesturing to my face.

‘That’s less of joke than you know, are you OK?’ quickly bridging the distance between us to stand in front of me, wincing at the damage.

‘Looks worse than it feels, hows life?’

‘Fine, quiet, although stories about your adventures have added a some kick to the week’

‘They’re all untrue’

‘I’m sure’

‘Look I really owe you an apology for my question the other day, they don’t normally let me out in civil company, I can’t be trusted’.

‘Oh I’d forgotten it, that’s trivial I had a guy grab me on the arse so hard the other day it left a bruise, can you believe it’

I was tempted to say well it’s a nice arse but that would have revealed me as the unreconstructed cad I am.

‘What did you do?’

‘Walsh charged him with assault and D& D’.

‘Really? An extra legal interest there?’

‘He wishes’

‘Yes I’m sure he does’

‘Coffee?’

‘Please a short black’

‘Mind if I bring two?’

‘Please’

She returns presently bearing a tray with a short black and a latte places it on the table and pulls up a chair.

‘Nothing much is going to be happening here customer wise today’

‘Good luck for me. Look you probably think I’m quite mad already, I have a bit of a memory problem at times but have I met you before this last week?’

She giggles quite girlishly.

‘I’m serious really’

‘No we haven’t’

‘Ok sorry’, I’m a maestro at embarrassing myself.

‘So what actually happened up at Skye farm?’

Long exhale from me ‘I don’t really understand what happened but Campbell is dead, very dead’.

‘From what?’

‘From having his internal organs removed via the gaping slash in his front.’ I felt annoyance at the pressing and I couldn’t keep it out of my tone.

‘Sorry’ brown eyes said she meant so.

‘My turn, did you grow up here’?

‘Sort of, born here, pushed off to boarding school at twelve, had enough by sixteen, left’

‘To do what?’

‘Nothing good’ eyes cast down at the table

I understood the story without needing to be told.

‘When did you come back?’

‘Three years ago now’

‘Happy?’

‘Hmm happy…..no more like numb’

‘Considered packing up and leaving?’

‘Soon, a few things to do but not yet’

I fish a card from my wallet and hand it to her

‘Call me sometime?’ I ask mildly embarrassed.

She scrutinizes the white card and then produces a small mobile and punches in a number. I noticed the worried fingernails as she does so. My phone trills.

‘Now you have mine too’.

‘Ta’

I had intended to leave a generous tip but it hardly seemed appropriate now, in fact Nicky wouldn’t even let me pay for the coffees as I left. She was a very attractive young woman, undoubtedly, but I didn’t want to stay connected to her for the possibility of some romantic entanglement. Notwithstanding I think relationships across disparate ages invariably end in pain, I wanted to be in her sphere a little longer and in truth she brought Paula so vividly to mind.

Home and introduce Barry and the DVD Chapter 10

---------------------------------------------------------------19/6

I have been busying myself for the last weeks, avoiding serious contemplation. Answered a swag of emails, wrote a few, made a series of fruitless inquiries about getting access to my laptop, argued with the editor of my next book and wrote furiously. Rosie from next door had already taken care of the housework in her weekly visits. Single mum, partner went to Darwin for work last year for three weeks and never came back. She has four year old Josh who happily plays Freddi Fish on my computer while mum cleans up, she does a few houses in the street, cash in hand and manages somehow to pay the rent. In fact since Josh learned to open the front gate he’s been a regular visitor, I suspect he likes the computer games more than my company. Reminds me of when Siggy was that age, happy times or at least they are through the lens of time passed. Actually come to think of it Siggy was never that age, I believe my daughter was born twenty and just kept on going. Lives in Adelaide now with my ex and Ryan, husband two, whom the Sigster detests passionately, I don’t encourage that ever, but I have to admit a secret cheer when I hear it in our chats twice a week or so. Petty aren’t I? It’s a strange arrangement but in some ways I’m more her father living apart than I could be if entangled in the everyday hurley burley. Not possessed of the patience. I share things about my life with her not shared with anyone else and I have become something of her confidante trying to stay completely non judgemental. Which is to say I don’t react when she tells me about the ecstasy, the drink or the parties I just jokingly express surprise that they’ve discovered those things in Adelaide, quietly hang up and then kick the crap out of anything not bolted down in my office. Works well. Another use for a prosthetic foot; it doesn’t hurt. Plus we have the school holidays to compress twelve months of father daughter bonding into, which generally means a lot of shopping with me as the packhorse and wallet. I’ve been summonsed to give evidence at a coronial inquest in a month vis-a-vie Duncan Campbell, that’ll be fun. Still I can amuse myself baiting Walsh who almost certainly will be attending.

When I bought this place a few years ago it was advertised as having city views, not that common in Brunswick. That’s not however why I liked it, the whole bottom floor is open plan, perfect for the office cum workshop. Two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a big balcony, its from here that you can climb over the railing, lean out and catch a fleeting glimpse of the city skyline before plummeting to your death. I don’t spend that much time actually living here these days but it’s quirky, home base and I love it. Wouldn’t sell it despite the fact that property prices around here have become patently ridiculous.

Tummy worms are burrowing, time for dinner. Thai food, chilli chicken and basil, both the chillies and the basil from Rosie’s back garden. It’s a brilliant meal; Basmati rice in the microwave and the whole thing is ready in ten minutes whoa to go. I’m swanning around the kitchen that is just a long bench which sections off one corner of the bottom floor. Blue Pyrenees in hand half way through singing along to the chorus of Dave Grainey’s ‘Drugs are wasted on the young’, kind of Karaoke on acid when there is a knock at the front door. An emphatic knock, a law enforcement knock; this’ll be interesting. I open the front door uncertainly and a monstrous bulk fills the frame.

‘Barry! Don’t you turn into dust or something if leave the boundaries of Footscray’

He’s holding a six-pack of VB by the plastic keeper in one hand a small clear case in the other doing a mute impersonation of the bastard child of Shrek and Arnie Schwarzenegger. He flicks the clear plastic case at my chest.

‘Something you might want’

After catching it two handed against myself I see it contains a silver disk. I peer at him quizzically.

‘A copy from your laptop’

‘Jesus! How did you know?’

‘Mate if I don’t know about it didn’t fucken happen’ guttural, booming voice.

‘Come in, are you hungry?’

‘So long as you don’t try and fucken kill me with one of your vindaloos again’

‘No this ones mild’

‘Thank Christ’

We ate dinner on the couch and drank a beer or two, I have a genuine affection for this giant of a man and I think the stories of his antics are carefully stage managed by the Detective Senior Sergeant himself. Certainly works well for keeping the villains inside the box, no crook with any instinct for self-preservation that had heard the tales would ever cross Barry Glover. Not that Barry exactly hangs with Mother Theresa, I know for a fact he’s been a bad boy but not to the extent the legend would have it. There is good at the core of the man that the carefully constructed persona belies.

‘Nice face mate, were gunna have to call you ‘dances with trees’’ crushing an empty can in his great paw.

‘Had a nice dance with one of your mates up in the valley too’

‘So I hear but he’s not my mate, not anyone’s fucken mate, you wanna watch yourself there’

‘You know him’

‘I know of him’

‘And?’

‘He’s been parked up there where he can’t do much harm to anyone while they figure out how to fuck him off’

‘I don’t think it’s been entirely successful’

‘He didn’t fucken touch you up did he?’

‘No but he did tell if I came back again I wouldn’t be leaving’

‘So what did you do’?

‘I gave him a kiss and some fashion advice’

‘Heard that’ he chuckled ‘ thought it was bullshit, don’t piss off psychos with guns ya dickhead’ I’ve come to learn ‘dickhead’ is a term of endearment from Barry.

‘Doesn’t matter I’m not going back’

‘You haven't seen what’s on the disk yet’

‘Have you?’

‘Nup, you’ll be back anyhow, I hear you got connections up there’ he smiled a knowing smile. ‘Time to make like a tree and fuck off out of here’.

‘Be wise David I’d miss ya books’ he says as a farewell at the door

‘Thanks for the present Barry’ as he walks out my front gate, he raises a hand without turning.

Did I want to see what was on the DVD? Did I really need to give a damn? I thought of Campbell and the promise I’d made, yeah I needed to. Just the notion of watching it was making my heart rate go through the roof and dinner start making noises about the possibility of a return journey.

I’ve got the DVD in the drive of the PC after some procrastination, two hundred and sixty six minutes of footage total. Odd! Shouldn’t be anywhere near as much. Duncan’s face in monochrome looking back at the camera, I can see the tension and the fear on his face again; it brings me near to tears. Poor bastard. He does his walk out and back, then the cattle, then two minutes of a dark paddock and finally two hundred and fifty eight minutes of white noise, presumably at which time the battery ran out. The white noise at the end I can theorise about, something made the floodlight blow to pieces it makes sense that the effect was the same on other electrical equipment perhaps the camera got fried and kept relaying screwed up signals to the laptop. Or the laptop itself got fried either way there was some accounting for it but the two minutes of a an empty paddock makes no sense at all. The surveillance software I was using needs the information on individual pixels to show change over time other wise it won’t record. But it did, why? I cut that section of the footage out and viewed it separately, magnified it, enhanced it, slowed it down, sped it up but still I couldn’t discern any change over that whole 122 seconds. What the hell? Perhaps a software glitch although it’s never played up in the three years I’ve used it. The beers with Barry, the rest of the Grenache has gone and I’m mulling over two fingers of Glenfiddich, my second and I am I conclude, three sheets to the wind. It’s probably the only way I could have pushed down the dread of anticipation of further horrors and watched this useless footage. Time for bed. With the infinitely great care of the seriously drunk, the reality of which is probably something resembling a jellyfish with Parkinson’s I negotiate the stairs to my bedroom. Can’t be bothered with doonas just lay down.

Stirring as the first hint of grey light touches the sky outside my bedroom window I’m convinced Rosie’s neurotic bloody Persian has crawled into my mouth during the night. I can’t believe alcohol alone can produce a sensation as horrible as this. And I’m cold, bloody freezing. Cold! Shit! Of course. Instantly I know sitting bolt upright was an error, my head is still back on the pillow somewhere and it’s not happy. Throbbing agony does not adequately describe the feeling. Adrenaline is quickly knocking back the sharp stabs to a brooding ache. Computer now! A sober brain would have not made such an obvious oversight, the surveillance program I had used was originally written for battlefield use. It intention was to assist strung out fatigued soldiers monitor infiltrations and had been used with great success in East Timor, don’t ask how I have a copy. At night it’s most useful and the system identifies anything with a greater thermal signature than the background against which it is moving. Higher temperature not lower! I’m willing the PC to boot up faster, changing the defaults on the software to invert its normal infrared display. Something drummed into me by the secret squirrels I was trained by, a basic rule, digital displays are not reality; they are always a representation created by a computer and governed by how you have requested it to filter the information it has. Beware artefacts. If I was right the computer had definitely recognised a moving object but with a smaller infrared signature than the background it simply didn’t display it, why would it? The idea was to decrease the raw information coming back to the operator and unless the TNI had been chilling their soldiers out in a freezer before sending them on a border patrol there was no way this situation was going to arise on a battlefield. If it did it was an artefact, not pertinent information.

A small point blinked into existence, distant, faint and pulsing. A luminous mist slowly coalescing around the dot, a form, growing, becoming definite. Sweet Jesus! Near the base of the hill, waiting, watching? Then gliding forward, closing rapidly, filling the screen, glowing spectral whiteness. That was it, white noise from here onward. It was real, I can’t avoid that now and now I know what it is and it knows me, Christ I wish I hadn’t done this. With alcohol laden bile rising in my throat I rise from the chair find a corner behind the kitchen bench, sit down, lean my back against the cupboards and pull my knees up to my chest and sob a mantra ‘oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck’.

Waif like figure standing over me, blue eyes bespeak confusion and fear. A smaller replica figure holding it’s hand a war torn Pooh Bear clutched in the other.

A whisper ‘mummy what’s wrong with David is he sick?’

Cleaning day, damn! The sun is bright and harsh streaming in through the kitchen windows, I have no idea what time it is.

‘Sorry Rosie I’m not too well, hi Josh’

‘Do you need a doctor?’ her voice conveys fear as much as concern

‘No…no I’m OK Rosie I just tied one on last night sorry for giving you a fright’

She regards me unconvinced ‘I’ll just get started then if that’s OK’

‘Thanks Rosie, I think I need a shower if you’ll excuse me’

‘Can I play Freddi Fish David?’ pipes up Josh

‘Go for it little guy you know where the ‘puter is’ and Josh whirls, departing for urgent cyber adventures.

Rosie watches Josh’s retreat and faces me ‘You look like shit on toast hold the toast mate’

‘Well Rosie it’s always good when your appearance and feelings match I think’

‘What happened you finally take the plunge and then find out she’s a closet ‘Pies fan?’ she quips.

I laugh despite myself, Rosie reduces all matters to sex and food ‘No just a little fried still from the trip out to the valley’

‘Wanna talk about it?’

‘We’d be here for a month Rosie, no, I need to empty the hot water service on myself’ I reach out and touch her shoulder ‘but thanks, thanks for the concern I’ll give you all the gos’ when I sort it out’

She smiles but clearly unsatisfied, I take my cue to head upstairs for a long, long shower.

I do my best thinking in the shower and as the scalding water cascades over my head I formulate a definite and clear path of action. Nothing, I’m going to do absolutely nothing. I’m going to hit the delete button for the last few weeks and get on with following up my waiting list of stories.

A diversion Chapter 11

The boy strides purposefully across the filled in mine-head to face the girl and the red haired boy, he does not lower the rifle. The light is fading fast; sunset is past and black thunderheads filling the horizon darken the scene further. Intermittent brilliant flashes show the three figures in stark white relief, rain, pregnant summer drops fall here and there. Unwittingly the three have formed a triangle, a couple of metres each side, the only movement is the shaking of the rifle in the boys grip. Nonetheless it is aimed squarely at the red haired boy. The air is hot and sultry but none of the three notice the tendrils of steam as each exhales nor do they register the low undulating buzzing audible underneath the noise of the storm. The boy works the bolt of the carbine with expert precision, the expelled cartridge glints momentarily in a flash of lightning and arcs to the ground in apparent slow motion.

‘David…NO!’ screams the girl and lunges for the rifle, holding the weapon like a pistol, its aim never leaving the other boy, he strikes out with his free hand backhanding the girl across the point of her cheek His face holds no sympathy, expression vacillating between unthinking fury and deliberate perfect hatred. She rolls to the side with a shriek, clutching her face with both hands. The other boy charges thinking the distraction has created an opportunity, as the rifle spins around and the butt arcs toward his temple he realises the error. A spray of blood accompanies the dull thud of wood on bone; he falls limply, pole-axed.

‘FUCKER!’ screams the boy with the gun. As he does so great clouds of steam accompany the inhuman yell. The buzzing has become a great rushing roaring drowning out the thunderclaps, the sound clumps and coalesces with the metier of speech. The red haired boy has regained consciousness and struggles to sit up, a curtain of blood streaming down his face. The other looms over him, the muzzle finds a point above the bridge of his nose and pushes downward insistently until his head returns to the ground. Incomprehension is a mask upon the red haired boys features, his tormentor is expressionless, vacant as his finger slides over the trigger.

‘Goodbye Stuart’

‘PUT THAT BLOODY THING DOWN’ the voice deep and roaring, six foot seven, broad and compelling vision of old man Robertson towering in the half-light. The boy complies uncomprehendingly, tossing the rifle aside into the mineshaft.

‘You’re that bloke they’re all crappin’ on about, you a poofda or sonthen?’

He was standing over me, clearly unsteady on his feet but I estimated he was about six foot six and seemed about the same across the shoulders. A dullards face full of fury and little else, looked like I was going to be tonight’s sideshow no matter how I responded.

So what the hell; ‘It’s going to cost you fifty bucks to find out sweets’

This brought a guffaw of laughter from the expectant onlookers either end of the bar.

The man’s face flared to the same shade as his neck as he stooped and reached for me. Oh shit!

‘You fucken cu…..’ and next moment he was sitting on the carpet looking supremely nonplussed. As he made to stand the rubber end of a walking stick jabbed him in the chest, pushing him back to the floor.

‘Settle down son’

‘Herb!’

‘No you listen to me Jake Palmer, go home, you’ve left a wife and kids there to get pissed and make a bloody idiot out of yourself here, you’ve been a dickhead since the day you were born do something intelligent for once, surprise us all, go home!’

The big man surveyed the ruddy faces full of unabashed amusement staring at him from the bar, there appeared to be a moment of calculation and he rose, turned on his heels and made his way out of the bar by the nearest door.

‘Thanks Herb’

‘No worries mate’

‘Interesting trick with the stick, how’d you do that?’ I ask genuinely amazed not to mention grateful.

‘Hook around the outside ankle and pull, Jake doesn’t have the brains to know he’s falling on his arse even without the piss, he’s not a bad bloke but he’d fight with a friggin’ stop sign when he’s half tanked’.

‘My front teeth salute your courage’ and I raise my beer in a toast

‘Nah, I've still got a bit a pull in this little hole’ his tone indicated he had not meant the slight against Cloughs. I suspect he probably holds great affection for this town, he had after all lived his whole eighty-two years here save for five abroad in khaki. ‘Besides one good thing about being old, you get to say what you want without worrying about wood ducks like Jake’ he chuckled a rattling laugh.

‘He’s a big bugger all the same’ feeling a surge of affection for this self-effacing old man, he represented in word and deed something this country was rapidly losing.

‘Don’t worry about size mate, you take your average Jap, only a little bloke but by Jesus I don’t mind sayin’ he frightened the shit out of me, didn’t give a rat’s about dyin’, God’s truth’.

‘You were saying before we were interrupted?’

‘What was I sayin? Oh yeah the Western Desert, Jerry thought they had us in the bag at El Alamein course Rommel didn’t know about the thousand bloody great howitzers behind our lines. Mate you’ve never seen a sight like it, turned night into day, a thousand guns all firing at once. Desert fucken Storm my arse mate we had plenty a shock an awe sixty years before those bloody Yanks’.

And so it went, a pleasant enough way to while away the few hours before I departed to do what I do. I think I’m starting to become a connoisseur of run down pubs in country towns I seem to spend so much time in them of late I’m developing a Quik-Eze addiction courtesy of the counter meals but in truth I’m feeling at home.

Herb had just sidled up to me at the bar while I was reading the headline story in the Age about the new spate of grisly murders which were said to have occurred in the seemingly deliberately vague area ‘east of Melbourne’ The victims were all female and there were inevitable comparisons to Larson’s reign of horror. Unbidden he started telling the same war stories I heard at my grandfather’s knee, I liked him immediately and his life had been a fascinating one, awarded a VC, mayor of Cloughs for twenty years, been through two wives and made and lost a fortune in his time. I was planning to have dinner in my room and go through the information I've come across relevant to this case. When I got to the police photos of the hapless Mrs Weston’s ankles protruding from her black leather pumps and terminating in a pile of greyish ashes I lost the need for solitude. From what I had garnered from the local coppers they were just happy if the whole thing went away, the investigation had been desultory at best and had been handed over to the coroner’s office. Spontaneous human combustion was the popular explanation going around here. First I don’t believe in the supposed phenomena, at least I don’t think it’s spontaneous albeit there’s certainly combustion, as Mrs Weston would testify were she not two feet and a pile of carbon. Second if this was what it was rumoured to be then it was unlike any I had read of before.

Generally the event is not witnessed, the victims live alone or have a lifestyle that causes them to be alone for long periods, typically it happens at home, usually in a chair and virtually unknown in Australia. The victim is almost entirely reduced to ash, hands or feet often untouched as are nearby furnishings and fittings. According to Mr Weston’s testimony he had walked into the kitchen at dinnertime and claimed his wife had turned from the stove to speak to him and flames had erupted from her mouth, supposedly she then fell to the floor and was consumed in ‘weird green fire’. The heat of which had been enough to drive back Mr Weston’s attempts to extinguish the poor woman, he then ran to the hallway to call the emergency services and returned seconds later to find his wife nearly fully cremated. Basically the apparently traumatised husbands’ testimony was a stinking pile of, well you get my drift. The kitchen table and chairs plus several metres of kitchen cupboards had been ablaze, put out by Mr Weston with a garden hose. There had been sooty carbon left all over the kitchen walls and ceiling, if this had fit the pattern of an SHC event the only residue on the walls would have been oily fat. The table and the cupboards would have been untouched and the area immediately under the ashes scorched, the floor was in fact untouched. And please tell me how many farmers’ wives cook in the kitchen wearing patent black pumps? This was bullshit pure and simple; the ashes were moved there post cremation (not an entirely successful one) and the kitchen fire was a setup. That the arson squad had not been notified to attend to make even the most rudimentary tests for accelerants (eg petrol) was both astounding and utterly unforgivable.

How can I be so sure this all an elaborate lie? Well a few years ago a British University, I’d would have loved to see the grant application for this one, started research into SHC using dressed up pigs, dead pigs you’ll be relieved to know. They found under these conditions poor old Mr Porky succumbed to massive overcooking: a room with doors and windows tightly closed, some sort of combustion heating which could consume the bulk of the available oxygen in the room, eg a briquette heater, a low temperature ignition source such as a cigarette and a long period of uninterrupted time. Eventually the smouldering would almost totally consume the carcass virtually without smoke and with minimal radiant heat. But a living breathing human being would you might think show some signs of alarm at slowly smouldering to death and get up and put themselves out. Turns out the depleted levels of oxygen for this strange happening to occur are sufficiently low to induce unconsciousness. This all I grant seems counter intuitive but definitely not supernatural.

I don’t doubt the power of slow combustion, as a very young boy I remember Jackson Werner from the property over the back of my grandparents’ farm had been nagged by his wife who could kindly be described as a beast of a woman into disposing of a stump. Left behind when Jackson had cut down a tree in the middle of the missus’s garden a few weeks before. He was a man not prone to fits of excessive physical activity; in truth he was a bone-idle drunk and his farm an unproductive wasteland. So rather than dig out the offending remains of the tree he drilled a small hole in the top of the stump and each day poured some diesel down the hole. After a few weeks of this the grand day of ignition came, it was hugely successful. The stump burned down to ground level and the wife-beast was momentarily placated. Typical farm machinery sheds are a wonderland of highly flammable chemicals, the Werner’s was no different and was situated about fifty metres away from the scene of his triumph of lateral thinking over hard slog. Eight weeks later the shed exploded with such ferocity not even the steel frame was left behind. Roots. Old Jackson had not figured on roots in his calculations, they had slowly smouldered until eventually reaching under the shed igniting some flammable residue…boom. Trees one farmers nil. His wife left him soon after, convinced the house would soon suffer the same spectacular fate as the shed (which it never did).

I exchanged phone numbers and promises to catch up with Herb when I bade the bar goodbye and made my way south of town a few kilometres to the Weston property. The patrol squeaked to a halt on the gravel verge of the intersection of the main high way and Graves road. Turning off the powerful headlights and scanning for a suitable vantage point I see the area is all open paddock small windrows of Cypress dotted here and there. The unmade Graves road runs arrow straight due East but climbs a small incline a few hundred metres away, this puts it parallel with the Weston farmhouse which is set back off the highway a similar distance. The main dwellings on the wealthier farms around here are virtually invisible behind screens of old established trees. Apparently the Weston’s heritage had been more humble since the view of the house is unimpeded by vegetation save a few shrubs in the faint moonlight. Good. It would make tonight’s’ adventures all the easier. Leaving the headlights off I put the 4wd in gear and start slowly down the gravel road, one front light is visible at the windows and I watch with quick glances as often as traversing the dark road will allow to make sure no more come on. So far so good. The incline affords a workable view of the farmhouse and if I'm game enough to climb onto the roof racks it will be close to ideal. I stretch across and open the aluminium case on the passenger seat and pull out the military issue night vision goggles. Once more don’t ask. Reach up, make sure the interior light is off, fit headset, pre-adjusted; see there are times I’m quite professional. The night air is warm and moist, redolent with the competing scents of ozone and cow shit. What is it with bovines lately? Can’t seem to get away from the stupid bloody things, I'm stuck in a perpetual Gary Larson cartoon. Click on the goggles and the Weston house appears in ghostly green daylight, there’s a newish Ford Bronco parked beside the house but no movement evident outside. So I sit on the bonnet and settle back to see what happens. Here’s the plan: establish if anyone is home, wait until they settle and have a look around. Not legal? Well its only illegal if anyone knows about it and no one is going to, so we’re ok no? Heres hoping.

Its just gone eleven and I've been here for ninety minutes now, not a sign of movement. I'm guessing our Mr Weston is either asleep or out for the night, I'm hoping for the former; makes for fewer surprises. Ever tried to climb a barbwire fence in wearing night vision goggles? No probably not, believe me its an art form right up there with synchronised swimming. Should be an event at the Athens Olympics. If it weren’t for the fact I’m reasonably convinced a woman has been murdered here this might indeed be fun. The field is full of mattocks and potholes, the goggles don’t provide much depth perception and I have to be deliberate with my steps. It’s going to take some time to cross the open ground to the house. The Cypress windrow closest the front of the little dilapidated weatherboard looms in front of me and I can hear the furtive movements of roosting birds amongst the foliage. Standing in the shadows in front of the row of trees I reach up and flick the knob to increase the magnification of the goggles. Still no signs of life, not even the telltale flickering luminescence of a TV. Dogs? Can’t see signs of any but we’ll soon see, I rifle through the leg pocket of my cargo pants and withdraw a black box slightly smaller than a cigarette packet. It has a single switch and a red LED on the face, toggling the switch the red LED begins to flash rapidly. Nothing, not a bark, no sounds of long chains rattling across the ground. Good, no dogs. This never fails to drive them insane, it’s a pulsating ultrasonic siren scares the hell of possums too. All is dark still save for the one light on in a front window. Ok here we go, I circle around to the back of the house keeping a respectful distance, nothing back here either. Circumnavigating the house completely and placing my hand on the bonnet of the Bronco I note it’s cool to touch. I’m guessing now no one is home; not good. Better make this quick, after wiping the bonnet of the 4wd with my sleeve I return around the back to locate the window nearest the kitchen. In the other leg pocket of my dark navy cargoes I fish out the self-adhesive bird pooh. This one came from a factory in Taiwan rather than the nether regions of a passing cockatoo. It has a micro fine wire, barely visible even in daylight, about 30cm long trailing from it. It sticks firmly to the bottom of the windowpane. In case you wonder where all the secret squirrel stuff comes from type ‘surveillance+equipment’ into a search engine some time. If you aren’t amazed at the range and economy of gizmos out there on the free market then you’ve been reading too many spy novels; get a life! It has a tiny microwave transmitter and a lithium ion battery good for about a week depending on conditions. Hopefully it will cover nearly the whole floor plan, the window glass acting as an amplifier vibrating in sympathy with sound waves emanating inside the house. The little fake avian stool picks up the vibrations and transmits them, ignoring silence and saving its battery. Job one done, time to look around. Going inside the house is far too risky and what I'm looking for is more likely not in there. There is a large galvanised iron shed set further back than the farmhouse and about fifty metres closer to Grave’s road. I trot unevenly over to its massive double sliding doors, haste is more important now than silence I’m almost certain there is no one about to hear me but if I’m caught in the headlights of a car coming down the driveway it’s going to be awkward to explain. One recent brush with the rural folk of Victoria’s finest is enough, there is smaller swinging door set into the right hand sliding door. Mercifully it’s already wide open however it’s awfully black in there even aided by the night sight. Deep breath, in we go. It reeks of diesel and industrial oil, the goggles instantly compensate for the increased gloom, 2 tractors both Fiats and old Bedford tray truck and mountains of junk! It’s everywhere, not going to find anything in here without spending hours. Damn! A odd shape over in the corner catches my attention and I navigate my way careful around the flotsam to it. It’s like a huge drum on it’s side, about two metres long cut in half lengthwise, sitting on a waste high stand and lined with bricks. At the end is something that looks like an old air raid siren, a huge hand crank protrudes from it. Out of curiosity I turn the crank gently, it resists at first and then moves smoothly feeling as though something inside is being rapidly accelerated. A puff of dust sprays up from inside the trough of bricks. I notice the bottom is covered in a coarse powder, Of course a blacksmith’s forge! Suppressing a knowing chill I grab a doggie bag from my hip pocket (now you know why I wear pants with a million pockets on nights like these) and scoop a small sample of the ash. This is a time for great care for I suppose I’m not overly moralistic (I am after all illegally trespassing right now) but I am prone to fits of outrage that eclipse my better judgement. Squeal of brakes. Crunching gravel, oh shit! I sprint to the door heedless of falling and poke my head around the frame. Stupid! Fuck! That hurt, the headlights of the car coming down the drive have momentarily been intensified two million times. Blind, panic rising now, get your head on man! Ok if I wait until the car pulls up outside the front of the house it shouldl block me from view. Wait, wait…slam..slam, two doors close, two occupants Run! I’m out the door and feeling my way along the front wall. I can hear music. Elvis in fact, its the tune to ‘A little more satisfaction’. Oh no my phone! Forgot to turn it off, what was I saying about professionalism? Vision returning once I’m around the back of the shed I pull out the phone, the display says ‘Paula’.

Hitting the answer button ‘Paula this is a really bad time’ I hiss

‘David it’s Stuart’ she pleads in a voice near to tears.

‘I’ll call you back’ with as much concern as possible in a whisper.

‘Bu…’ I cut her off ending the call mid word and turn off the phone.

My breath is coming in short gasps and I will myself to calm, a man can easily get himself shot doing something this stupid. Going to replace that tacky polyphonic ring tone for a nice simple beep, never want to hear that tune again. The dull percussion of door closing carries to me, hopefully it’s the front door of the house closing. Safe I think. There is a row of Cypress a hundred metres away, getting there will keep the shed between the house and me. I make an ungainly run across the dangerous open ground. Pressing myself into the low canopy, the foliage rough against my cheek, I look back the way I’ve come. No green figures in pursuit, one last job. I withdraw an opaque green Ziploc bag about the size of a chip packet; it contains the receiver for the bug, a digital recorder and a mobile phone. This is my own work and every hour the phone will connect to the Internet via GPRS and email my account it’s recorded sound data for that interval. There is a fork in the trunk of the tree about two metres up and I reach and wedge the bag in the fork. Setting off on a looping path back to the Nissan I have to walk a couple of Kilometres back up Grave’s road. Night goggles off, just a man out for a late night stroll.

Rolling back into the main street I swing the 4wd toward a parking spot outside the pub and then think the better of it. I’m not a hundred percent sure someone didn’t spot my truck loitering around the Weston place. Better to avoid any possibility of trouble. The bakery opposite the pub I recall has a small car park out back that will do nicely. I turn back across the deserted street, dark save for two forlorn street lamps and park behind the bakery. Sitting for a while listening to the lumpy music of the old truck’s idle, thinking music. Call Paula? I already know where it will end up. I’ll go back. I don’t want to, I really don’t. Do I care enough to face a return, a return to the dark things, the half-truths and hidden currents I sense flowing around the Robertsons and the inevitable confrontation with the precious Sergeant? Paula, I’ll go back for Paula, on some level I'm beginning to believe I've been going back to her all my adult life. Impossible love, its safe, you always know its finite and moreover how its going to end; badly. I make a compact with myself. No involvement, no destruction; anyone’s or mine. Go, resolve what can be and leave for the last time.

‘Paula?’ the phone had been answered on the second ring.

‘David, thank god’ said with open relief.

‘Sorry about earlier, what’s happened?’ I ask with dread.

‘Nothing yet but I’m petrified about what might’ she was close to sobbing her voice breaking momentarily.

I wait patiently for her to explain.

‘It’s Stuart, he hasn’t been outside for a week’

I can’t suppress the sarcasm ‘Yep those Vitamin D deficiencies are lethal’

There is a moment of confused silence before she processes my annoyance. Then the fury unloads. ‘This is fucking serious David! What the fuck do you think I’m calling for? Fucking idle gossip!’ an exasperated sigh. ‘He’s been drunk for most of the week, he’s delusional, irrational mostly, he keeps asking for me to get you to come here, to talk to him’.

‘What set this off?’ I ask already half guessing the answer.

‘It’s started again’

‘By it I assume you mean the murders’?

‘Yes’ she whispers.

‘But how does that connect to me?’ I question perplexed.

‘Talk to Stuart’

‘Can you put him on?’

‘No David, he’s quite firm he needs to talk to you in person’.

‘I’m two hundred kilometres away Paula’ I reply flatly.

‘I've never seen him so depressed I’m scared! Please for me, come. Look his father and his grandfather both…both…you know how they died. David it runs, some kind of fracture runs in his family. If you don’t come I don’t know what will happen, please!’

The decision to go of course had already been made even before the phone call but some evil corner of bastardry in my soul had wanted it’s measure of anguish before I acceded. ‘Do you still love him Paula?’ I ask softly

She pauses, I suspect, in momentary shock at the tangent ‘I don’t want to see him hurt himself’

I ignore the evasion ‘I’ll be there by 3am, have some coffee on would you?’

‘I will, drive carefully please’

‘Yep’ and end the call.

Great, a three-hour drive half way across the state in the dead of night. I really would have to drive carefully; feeling exhausted now, can’t imagine how bad I'm going to be when I get there. I clamber out of the truck and crunch across the gravel car park out onto the main street. You’d probably recognise the main boulevard of Cloughs, it has been the set for innumerable movie scenes and has a quaint charm only unarrested dereliction can bring. During the gold rush it had been a thriving centre but these days it was off the highway to anywhere of significance, largely neglected by other than locals. This of course would change as the gentrification of the nearby Spa country expanded to snatch up rustic backwaters like this. That would be a sad day.

Return to the Valley and revelation of secrets Chapter 12

I try to ponder this whole macabre saga during the drive but my brain is simply too tired for meaningful thought. Instead I amuse myself by pondering the quandary of Talburn. Every road sign reads ‘Talburn 32 KM’ no matter how many I pass the distance off to the left is always the same. Does the highway slowly circle around the town or is it that Talburn remains thirty-two kilometres away no matter where you are? I’ve never been there and I fantasize that no one ever has. Does anyone ever leave Talburn; is it perpetually separated from the rest off the universe by thirty-two kilometres? Imagine leaving town and driving straight for hours only to arrive bizarrely at the other end of the same place. Sounds like a metaphor for my life actually. I conclude I like Talburn; it’s my kind of place. Reminds me of a Noddy book when I was very young, there was one picture of a steam train leaving Toy Town, you could see the track wend its way around green hills before disappearing into a tunnel in the far distance. My heart ached to get on that choo-choo through the green hills and be gone, somewhere else, somewhere in the distance. ‘Hartford’ the sign flashes into the headlight beams and my sense of foreboding redoubles. As I circle the driveway and pull up adjacent the front door an exterior light blinks on and the door opens. Paula stands in the doorway and even from this distance I can see the drawn, taut appearance of her face. Her arms encircle me as soon as I am close, around my back and fiercely tight.

A muffled ‘Thank you’, her face is buried in my chest and I can feel the sobs begin to tremor though her body.

I draw my arms around her shoulders and hold her ‘it’ll be OK’.

She draws back from me and her look of utter despondence denies my banality.

‘Come in’ she disengages from my embrace and turns, catching two fingers of my right hand in hers and gently tows me into the old homestead. Halfway down the hallway she stops and gestures me through the doorway to the sitting room.

‘Stuarts in here, I’ll get the coffee, hungry?’

‘Starving if its no trouble’

‘ I have orange cake and fresh cream, okay?’

‘Perfect, have you finally started cooking?’

‘No the new bakery in town’ she smiles wanly.

A single green bankers lamp on a nest of tables by the window lights the sitting room. The walls are lined with dark patterned wallpaper and the effect is claustrophobic rather than the intended warm. Two leather armchairs and a Chesterfield lounge are arranged around the unlit fireplace, Stuart is slouched in the left chair, one leg splayed over the wide curved arm. He wears brown slacks and a once white business shirt half unbuttoned, wrinkles like mountain ranges and unidentifiable stains complete his dishevelment. He looks every bit as bad as Paula’s alarm would have suggested. Bloodshot anaesthetized eyes regard me; he raises an ornate crystal glass half full of red wine in my general direction.

‘Salute’ he croaks.

‘Got another glass down there somewhere chum?’

‘On the table’ he gestures vaguely with his glass, red splashes on his pants he appears not to register it ‘you’ll excuse me if I don’t get up I’ll only fall down’ he chortles but there is no humour in it.

I pour myself a red, ’66 Grange Hermitage at least he gets smashed with class, and settle myself into the chair opposite.

‘You look like shit mate, what’s up?’

‘Still using flippancy to cover your insecurity I see, what about the sarcasm, carving ‘em up with the acid wit still?’

‘Thought you were supposed to be drunk’

‘Becoming an increasingly hard state to occupy these days, more’s the pity’.

His attention focuses toward the door ‘Paula my love, come bearing late night sustenance, ever the perfect wife’ the hostility undisguised by a tight-lipped smile.

She carries an oversize tray on which are three coffee mugs and three bone china plates bearing generous slices of cake topped with cream ‘could you grab a table David?’ nodding toward the window.

I retrieve the smallest table from the nest by the window and place it within reach of the chairs and the couch.

Paula sits at one end of the Chesterfield, legs tucked under her, sipping disinterestedly. She’s wearing jeans, Blundstones and the same hand knit jumper I had seen her in at the Grand. That night seems like an age ago. Stuart has ignored the coffee in preference to the wine I note, a sip of my coffee and I decide to be direct.

‘Is someone going to explain to me what’s going on here?’ glancing at each of them.

Stuart speaks first ‘why do you think you tried to kill me?’

‘Whaat?’ I stammer bewildered.

‘Put a rifle to my head, .303 I recall, your grandfathers and I’m absolutely sure you would have gone through with it if my father hadn’t arrived, most timely that’.

‘Stuart…I…I’.

I look to Paula for confirmation ‘David do you remember the night Greta broke her leg in a mineshaft, the night of the big storm. You put her down David that’s why you had the gun’.

‘Nearly put me down too’ Stuart chimes in.

Paula silences him with a withering look and continues on ‘you were furious completely beyond reason, it was the end of hay carting season we were sixteen, do you remember?’

I shake my head slowly, trying to look through the adjacent wall as though to conjure the memory ‘why was I so angry?’

Paula glances sideways at Stuart ‘Testosterone and an impossible triangle David, and…and a madness’.

‘And so?’

‘I always felt I was walking a tight rope with you two, one or the other of were always wounded over something you imagined I felt for only one of you. When you came back with the gun to shoot my horse, well ….’ She hesitated ‘you found Stuart and I in an embrace. You went straight for Stuart and I knew you were going to kill him, when I tried to get between you knocked me to the ground’

‘Jesus!’ I breathed ‘sorry but I can’t imagine being that angry, sixteen years old or ever’

‘You weren’t’ Stuart commented cryptically

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you remember the noise David’ he asked ignoring my question ‘you said it was like voices but without words, without sound as though it was inside your head’.

‘Oh shit’ the familiar reeling, images, memories let loose, careering through my mind like some wild videotape fast-forwarded at outlandish speed.

‘Kind of’, an emotionless statement, ‘I don’t understand’ then with horror I realise that clawing, invading noise had been same the night Duncan died. My composure momentarily slips, I’m shaking, tears blur my vision.

‘Just tell me what’s going on’ I ask of both of them.

‘Bear with me David I’ll try to explain’ Stuart seems completely sober now, alert, vibrating with tense energy. ‘We always went to Easter Hills, every chance we got, remember the aura of the place? Hippies, Bikies, swagmen, religious fanatics, bizarre characters everywhere in those hills. The strangeness is part of the local consciousness, part of the lore of this valley. It always has been so, I've read the histories, the first hand accounts. It’s a fringe place David; here there are things close to the surface.

I can’t contain the impatience for an explanation ‘What are you talking about for fucks sake?’

Stuart continues patiently as though I hadn’t spoken ‘the blackfellas wouldn’t set foot there, they were spread throughout this valley but not in the hills. Plenty of water, good hunting, shelter but not a one, the night my father stopped you from blowing my head off, Robert remember him? The farm manager. He drove my Dad but he wouldn’t get out of the truck. His family are Koori, come from up at Corenderk, my father said he had to force him to drive into the hills, pleaded with him, can you imagine my father pleading? Yet when the white people arrived we just spread out into those hills, not before we’d committed a few years of genocide though, there were no original inhabitants left to warn anyone, not that anyone would have listened. But not everyone remained in those hills, no, only the strange ones, the outcasts, those who could hear the call even if they weren’t aware of it.

‘What call?’ I ask in a tone of reproach.

‘Read the gold rush accounts of the miners in these hills, they massacred each other by the score and it hasn’t stopped. Do you know how many serial killers have been active in this area in the last twenty years, at least the ones we know about?’

I shake my head by way of reply afraid words would convey my growing incredulity.

‘Twelve! Per capita that’s a hundred times the national average, the old mines here, they're graveyards god knows how many undiscovered souls are held in their bowels. This is an old place, David my family have lived alongside it for two hundred years, my father and his father before him and his father before right back to Erasmus Robertson have known this. We have watched and endured and it has taken its toll’.

Taking a measured breath ‘Stuart I appreciate your conviction that seemingly inexplicable evil things happen in these hills, heaven knows I've seen some first hand but and it’s a big but’ my annoyance is surfacing at this nonsense ‘you haven’t offered a single morsel of explanation and I’m wondering why you have dragged me halfway across the state in the middle of the night’

‘Because you are inexorably entangled in all of this’ there is a hint of condescension in his voice and it’s enough to set me off.

‘Enough mysterious bullshit, enough allusion to something you know Stuart. Either get your explanation out succinctly and quickly or I get up and leave and you can go back to drinking yourself into whatever oblivion you’re trying to find!’

I glance to Paula, she’s staring at me, her expression is unfathomable, bottomless.

‘You can go David, but no matter what you do you’ll be back, there is something here that wants you back and it wont be denied’

I stand ‘you’re still a pompous arse’ to Paula ‘I’m sorry but I have to go’

Stuarts gaze snaps directly, abruptly to me, his voice is raised but deep ‘do you remember anything about you’re accident?’

‘Only what I’ve been told, you know that’ I snap

‘Clear night, no skid marks, on a straight and road you knew like the back of your hand, according to the Accident Appreciation Squad you were not speeding at least not excessively’.

‘Point being?’

‘You drove off that road quite deliberately’

‘Why the fuck would I do that?’

‘To avoid the alternative, a part of you knew it was the only way to end the compulsion’

‘Compulsion to what Stuart, you’re full of shit’

‘Can you explain why your service automatic was found in the wreckage? Loaded and cocked, the safety on thank god’

‘I don’t believe you, there was nothing in the Police report about a gun, I've read it.’

‘I had it…..dissappeared’

‘You did, why?’ I looked to Paula searched for the truth in her face, she looks down and nods her head.

‘The more important question is why you had a loaded gun in your car and what you intended to do with it’

‘Why don’t you tell me Stuart, you seem to know’

‘We had just had an argument over the phone, I had tried to tell you some unpalatable truths but you were deaf with rage to acceptance. You were coming to use that gun on me David, once again I might add. At least a part of you was, the part that couldn’t resist the summons’.

‘Calls, summonses, compulsions? This is very entertaining bullshit but really I don’t need to hear it, not ever but especially not now, not dragged here in the night, have a nice life mate’ and I turn to leave.

‘David! Please stay, try and listen’ Paula spoke for the first time imploringly ‘you know Stuart, you know his way. Please just set aside your anger and hear him out this once’

‘Sit’ she said softly ‘if not for you then for me’

I look at her for several motionless seconds, seeing the hint of so much grief in those brown eyes. I comply and sit resignedly.

‘Get to the point Stuart’ I said icily.

‘I’m sorry David, you’re quite correct I am a ‘pompous arse’ but it’s a habit of a lifetime I can’t be anything other. I’m begging you please let me tell you this and you can rage all you wish after’

‘Go’ I prod. An apology from Stuart Robertson, sixth generation squattocracy (this nation’s ironic retelling of nobility) is a rare commodity and I’m persuaded enough to hear his diatribe.

He takes several fast gulps of wine, emptying the glass ‘David the world makes sense only in opposition, up is only comprehensible with down, we know joy because we understand sorrow, zero and infinity, god and the devil. All things universally have their antithesis but life, what about life? What is the opposite of life? It’s certainly not death. Death is the middle ground not the extreme, death is neutral, passive. Life makes order. Life created this…this world’ sweeping with a hand to emphasise his words. ‘What would life’s inverse do? Feed on order to grow strong? Succour from chaos, sustenance from entropy? Something hungry for destruction living along side us David, there are a thousand different names for it in as many cultures, a singularity where life is a multitude’ He pauses.

‘Stua….’ I start.

He raises a hand.

‘Please’ asked in a beseeching tone. I gesture with an upturned palm for him to continue against my better judgement.

‘There are places in the world, nearby is one where the divide between our existence and the other’s, call it whatever you will, is thin and with enough energy it can be traversed. And in those rare places there are always those who watch and wait, sometimes for generations’.

‘You?’

‘I’m insane David, make no mistake about it, this has twisted me beyond revocation but on some level, beneath your rational mind you feel the truth, the pull of what I’m saying. You, me, Paula we are all linked to this, have been since childhood’.

‘I'm not any part of this lunacy Stuart’

‘But you are, you most certainly are. It’s spoken to you, shown itself to you it exerts subtle influence on the minds of men but with you it has been intimate. It wants you’

‘If for a moment I accept what you’re saying, which I don’t, then why is it here and what does it want with me?’

‘Its here to feed! Getting stronger creating chaos, with the undoing, pushing itself farther and for longer into our existence, tasting.’

‘And me old chum, what does it supposedly want with a one footed man?’

‘You lost your foot directly because of it, you were called here, the circumstances that allowed that were sown long before, but you knew, at least somewhere you understood and you resisted, I’m sure you meant to die that night David, to escape. But you survived and your mind’s only defence has been to forget, a guard that is rapidly coming undone. Your head injuries don’t account for your memory loss As for what it seeks from you I have no idea, but nothing pleasant I might add’ he chuckles incongruously.

‘So according to you Larson, those before him and whoever is bloodying himself now are what? Puppets to this, this….evil?’

‘Not an evil David, the evil but yes puppets, not so blatant though, these were lost souls before they began their unspeakable work, outsiders, the fringe and easy prey to it.’

‘So you’re suggesting I’m a puppet to it as well?’

‘No on the contrary, it can influence a part of you in extremis but you’re tough, you’ve resisted for a lifetime. It tried to remove me, to take away the one voice that might warn you, twice, unsuccessfully’. He looks tired beyond worldly exhaustion as though the telling has taken the life from him, I see the despairing middle-aged alcoholic behind those intelligent eyes.

‘What is Paula’s place in this….tale?’

‘It’s no tale David, there is a thing, unimaginably evil, it’s nearby, it’s hungry and it knows you very very well. Ignore it at your peril, at all our peril. I’m tired, my soul is weary David, Paula has as much a part in this as you or I but tomorrow, we’ll talk more in the morning, goodnight’. He rises unsteadily, back hunched he lurches from the room without a backward glance.

I sit motionless save drinking the rest of my coffee, I can feel Paula’s eyes on me.

‘And you Paula Robertson’ turning to look directly at her ‘what of you, what do you make of all this?’

‘It’s the truth, you left this place first chance you got, to be out of the story’ she said with a brittle edge of bitterness.

‘Paula I don’t remember exactly how it felt but I remember a desperation, a panic to escape, to be gone from this valley. Besides I had nothing Paula, less than nothing even if you had wanted it I couldn’t have given you the life Stuart could’

She snorted derisively ‘this is a life? You never asked David! I would have come with you in an instant, it’s the reason, although he would never admit it, a part of him despises you. He has always known he was a second choice!’

‘I’m sorry’ pitifully small words for the icy void of regret expanding inside me.

‘S’Ok’ she smiles irreverently parroting the deep rough voice of Pancho. The Cisco Kid’s sidekick who we worshipped as children, that one reference to a shared joy brushes away the crushing solemnity of this night for a moment. I smile fondly in return.

She carries on ‘after a while with Stuart I began to understand, I understood why you couldn’t, shouldn’t come back and I never once sought you out even though I ached to every minute. I understood this place would eventually bring you back and that horrible fact made life bearable’.

‘Was it you I fought with Stuart about the night of the accident?’

‘Indirectly yes’ she replies cryptically ‘you argued about my daughter’

‘Daughter? I didn’t know you had had kids’

‘A child, and not a happy one, she hates Stuart with a fury and I hate to say but I thinks it’s mutual. She rebelled very young, had the courage, the anger to break free, we lost her for a while but she’s back now. Lives in town but still wont have anything to do with the Robertson name, she goes under my maiden name’.

‘Taylor!’ yes of course! Nicky ‘Nicky Taylor? I know her!’

‘Yes she said she had met you, talks to you by phone quite regularly too I hear’ tears are cascading down Paula’s cheeks why such sorrow etched in her features?

‘She’s a wonderful girl’ I blurt

‘I’m glad you think so, David?’ she is careful to ensure I am looking directly at her before continuing ‘Nicky is yours’ she whispers.

Sometimes there are truths your heart already knows and waits for your mind to catch up, they require no acknowledgment but simply is patently right. This was one and now tears rolled unbidden down my cheeks too, sorrow for the loss of a childhood Wordlessly Paula moves from the couch and without invitation sits on my lap, curling herself tightly, legs drawn up, head against my chest and sobs. We stay this way, embraced in mourning until exhaustion claims us both.

Nicky is missing Chapter 13

The sun had long been up when Paula disengaged herself from me awkwardly. Both the Mercedes and Stuart had been gone by then, no hint had been given as to his purpose or time of return. Paula and I sat alone on a rough-hewn redgum bench in her studio, the floor to ceiling windows admitting a brilliant morning sun. Matt glazed ceramic creations cover the rear wall, platters, bowls, vases and various other forms all in earthy reds and greens their surfaces appear to have the texture of suede. Then there are statuettes, stylised vignettes of poignant moments, a mother breastfeeding an infant, a despairing old man, a laughing child on horseback and a long line of Gargoyle like creatures. Vestigial wings, oversized teeth and claws, ugly brutal snouts.

‘Creatures from the Id?’ I smile inclining my head toward the shelf of monstrous apparitions.

She nods absently chewing a mouthful of croissant dabbing away the butter from her lips with a stained cloth.

‘They're my sewer’ she replies enigmatically.

‘Any idea where Stuart might have gone?’ I ask

‘Its not unknown for him to take off for a few days without explanation’

‘Where does he ‘take off’ to?’

‘He never says and I don’t ask’ she replies brusquely, ‘its Nicky’s day off today would you like to come see her with me’ abruptly changing the subject.

‘How do you know she’ll be in?’

‘Like her mother, only she prefers paint, she paints every chance she gets’

‘I would love to, tell me…does she know…about me, about us?’ I ask uncertainly.

‘She’s heard most of the stories of the three of us and I know she suspects but I've never told her if that’s what you mean. But today’s as good as day as any for revelations, no?’ that searching head inclined glance again.

‘How will she react?’ I ask with genuine trepidation.

Paula chuckles ‘with relief I suspect’

I’m not convinced I see the amusing side of that ‘I assume you’ve heard Stuart’s theories about this valley before, do you believe them?’

‘I know he does with absolute conviction, he’s convinced the generations of Robertson men have been some sort of gatekeepers’

‘And you?’ I press

‘We’ve been on holiday all over the world and I've never seen a place as beautiful as this valley, on the surface at least’ she pauses and walks over to a low sideboard, kneeling on the tile floor fishing in the bowels of the cupboard making short exasperated snorts. ‘Ah!’ She pulls out an obviously well hidden soft packet of cigarettes and an ancient looking Zippo lighter ‘my other release when Stuart doesn’t find them’ there is child like look of self reproach upon her face. She lights one, pockets the rest in her jeans and takes a long draw. Looking at her in profile for a moment she is sixteen, angry and wild. ‘For all it’s beauty this place has a dark heart David, he’s right about that’ she exhales a long smoky blow, blue tendrils make psychedelic patterns in the morning sunlight. ‘You should go, get out of here’ she says flatly turning to regard me. This is ploy I know well, Paula of old, it has been said to observe and measure the reaction.

‘No’ I respond simply, I don’t feel the need to offer any justification or explanation or show any reaction.

Butting out the cigarette roughly on one her own exquisite plates she turns toward the door ‘lets go see Nicky’ accompanied by a brief pressed lip smile.

Paula steers the Range Rover somewhat erratically in small rapid bites down the narrow rutted lane. I’m just starting to appreciate the smooth quiet ride, the dignified smell of Connolly leather and thinking I should get myself one of these (bank robbery might be necessary first though) when we pull up abruptly outside a stone coloured replica miners cottage. It is surrounded by a cottage garden of the type popular here and is a riot of colour and shape; the canopies of two colossal Elm trees in verdant leaf are visible over the roofline.

‘Here we are’ Paula states redundantly and we clamber out of the lofty Rover. She doesn’t wait for me and is unlatching the gate in the obligatory picket fence by the time I get around the four-wheel drive. Something has changed in her manner; there is an urgency that is making me very uneasy as she almost dashes between the shrubberies along the white gravel path to the front door. I watch as Paula’s hand extends to knock and touches the door once; it swings inward at her contact.

‘Oh shit’ I notice the splintered architrave inside the doorway as I catch up, the striker is missing completely. Paula is frozen on the step a look of open-mouthed panic dawning on her face. I push her aside gently but firmly and automatically I start to catalogue the details. The boot print on the outside of the door, about size 13 the logo of a popular brand now embossed on the insubstantial faux wood door. The gold striker lying on the pale beech floorboards about 4 metres down the corridor, a piece of the doorframe still attached.

‘Stay here’ I turn and say to Paula in a low voice, she hasn’t heard me, wouldn’t have heard anything.

‘NICKY!’ she screams and rushes past me down the hallway, I’m too slow to catch hold of her and she turns left and is out of sight.

Fuck it! I charge after her and find myself in a wood panelled kitchen; a table is pressed against one wall several chairs overturned and strewn around and a large steel-handled carving knife on the floor. Mercifully there seems to be no blood on the blade, Paula is standing in the middle of the room, palms to each temple repeating a mantra; ‘no…no….no….no’.

‘FOR FUCKS SAKE STAY HERE THIS TIME’ I yell at her in the hope she will register through the panic. I carefully investigate the few rooms in the cottage; all else appears tidy and unaffected, ditto the backyard and garden shed. In the front room there is large partly finished oil landscape of the valley from a popular look out and a palette is perched next to it on a stool; the paints don’t appear at all congealed? Resting on the palette is a coffee cup, one of Paula’s by appearances I register irrelevantly and dip my finger in the brown liquid it’s cold. As I return to the kitchen Paula has emerged from her fugue and reaches for the telephone mounted on the wall over the bench.

‘DON’T!’ I bark ‘don’t touch anything’ in a softer beseeching tone.

‘I have to call Nicky, her mobile’ her voice is trill, panic still whirling near the surface.

‘Use this’ and I toss her my mobile. She stabs at the numbers making small mewls each time she makes an error, finally she puts it to her ear and listens. Simultaneously a shrill chirp comes from the area of the stove, I didn’t notice it before but there beside the cook top is a small purple phone. It does a little spinning dance as it vibrates in time with the chirps. Paula sobs once and passes the phone back to me a ‘what now’ expression on her face. Indeed what now, call the local coppers and absent myself from the scene? I thought about the boot print, I thought about it’s exact placement adjacent the striker, the front door not the back. Why did I have the perturbed feeling the local police or at least one of them already knew exactly what had transpired here.

‘Paula I really can’t tell you why, I mean I have no good reason but I don’t think we should call the local police on this at least not yet’

‘You think..’

‘I don’t think anything yet’ I cut her off ‘lets just check around and exhaust the alternatives first OK?’

The next two hours were spent driving around to Nicky’s haunts, her work, friends, the pub. Paula enquired each time trying to affect a casual unconcerned manner ‘just need to give Nick some news she’s not answering her phone and she’s not at home, have you seen her recently?’. We were able to establish that she had left work as usual last night and hadn’t made anyone aware of any recent out of the ordinary events. Fruitless basically. Time to call the cavalry.

‘Yeah what’ve ya done this time dickhead’ was Barry’s greeting of my phone call.

‘I need some help mate’

‘Ya fucken worse than my fucken kids, where are you?’ he growls

‘The valley’

A distinctly ‘I told you so’ snort came through the phone ‘what’s up?’

‘A missing girl, someone close’ I choke on the last word

‘How long?’ he asks flatly

‘Today’

‘Oh for fucks sake mate, she probably met some young fucken hard boy with fuck me eyes and she’s out rooting now, how old is she?’

‘Twenty’

‘There ya go’

‘Barry you know what’s gone on up here, she fits the victim profile, it’s serious’

‘I’m gunna be a while keep yer phone on, let ya know when I’m there’

‘How long approx?’ I ask anxiously

‘Dunno, what’s the quickest way back from Merimbula?’

‘Merimbula! What the fuck are you doing in Merimbula?’

‘Bit a sun, few drinks, bit a pervin’, called a holiday mate’

‘Since when did you start taking beach holidays, any holidays?’

‘New woman bud, got the old dog doin’ new tricks, Anna’

‘Look I’m sorry about…………’

‘See ya in few hours’ he cut me off and ended the call.

Finding out about Walsh Chapter 14

We were sitting back in the kitchen at Hartford just Paula and I. She sat worrying her fingernails, disinterestedly nursing two fingers of scotch and smoking in short hard draws. It had just gone 8pm and there was no word from Barry yet.

‘I’m going for a drive Paula, wont be long’ I rise and hand her my phone ‘can you give Barry directions when he calls’ she takes it without looking at me

‘I’m going to call the police station’ she snaps tersely ‘not sitting here doing nothing when, when….’ She trails off but glares at me with angry reproach.

‘You’re decision Paula’ and I left.

‘Fucken hell didn’t think we’d see you back here’ John greeted me from behind the counter as I parted the rubber ribbons over the door of the top shop.

‘Just passing through John, just passing through’

‘You and every little stoned little whacko this side of the GPO’

‘Huh?’

‘Rave party or some shit they call it, fucken drug fest if ya ask me. Every fucken year up in the hills. Little pricks bring a generator the size of a truck, floodlights like the MCG and a shit load of drugs and they get stoned and fuck each other all night’

‘Touch of jealousy Johno?, pining for a misspent youth? I chuckle.

He snorts in reply as I make my way to the fridge and find an orange juice, placing it on the counter as I pull a one hundred dollar bill from my pocket, lay it alongside and catch John’s eye. He regards me quizzically, looks down at the orange juice and the note and then glances back at me with understanding and a not altogether pleasant gleam. ‘I hear you’re a top class yarn spinner John, can you tell me a good one about you’re local law enforcement agents?’

He snatches the bill from the mottled Laminex counter top, lifts his likewise mottled apron and stuffs the note clumsily into a small bum bag underneath. Craning over the counter to look out into the street he hisses ‘come out the back’ and folds the hinged counter upward gesturing me through with obvious impatience.

We stand in a large storeroom, bare concrete floor, stacked high with crates and boxes. The compressor at the back of the drinks fridge whines and rattles with annoying volume.

‘He know yer here?’

‘Not yet’

‘Better he doesn’t find out, he’s fucken set on you mate’

‘Why do you reckon that is?’

‘He fucken runs this town mate, I mean runs’ he said melodramatically as though I should know what he meant. ‘You get in his face or in his business, well, just don’t. That’n yer made a fucken goose of him, he’ll fuck you up if gets the chance don’t worry’

‘Thanks for the advice, have you seen him today?’

‘Went through town this mornin’ no lights or siren but he was fair goin like a bat outta hell’

‘Seen him since?’

‘Nup’

‘Ok I get Walsh is the local boogeyman, what else does he do for fun?’

‘Yer mean aside from scaring the shit out of the punters’ he looks sideways as though Walsh might materialise from behind a stack of boxes ‘likes a bit a fluff, can’t hack bein told no but, been a few ructions over that’.

‘You mean over sexual assaults?’

‘Yeah that’n more’

‘Nicky Taylor you know her?’ he nods his assent ‘what’s between her and Walsh that you know?’

‘As much fucken space as she can get that’s fucken what, she wont give ‘Im the time a day drives him fucken nuts’

‘What are you saying; he’s obsessed?’

‘I’m sayin he wants in her pants in a big fucken way and she’s like the fucken ice queen, can only end in shit’

‘If you see him tonight John old mate’ I give him a hard look.

‘Yeah I know’ he puts a finger to his lips theatrically. ‘Go out the back way’ and he opens a metal door to the rear car park.

‘Thanks John’ I say as I make to go out the door.

‘He’ll fucken kill you, kill anyone ya know that?’

I nod my understanding tersely and leave via the back exit.

I walk quietly back into the kitchen at Hartford not knowing what to expect.

Paula was still seated at the table, she smiles wanly at me ‘your friend rang’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he’d be here in half an hour ‘sit tight luv’ I think was his instruction’ she did a passable impersonation of Barry’s gruff tone.

‘Did you call the local cops?’

‘No….no I trust you David, god knows why you’re completely mad’ she half laughs.

‘What do you know about the cop Walsh?’

‘Not much, he’s been here two years or so, he’s a bit larger than life if you know what I mean, everybody respects him’.

‘Respect or fear?’

‘Some of both I suppose, not a bad thing for a small town policeman; to have the locals a little in awe’ she replies.

‘What about him and Nicky? Ever seen them togethor?’

‘John at the shop told me he was keen on her but Nicky’s never had much time for the men from around here; at least that I know about. Why do you ask?’

‘They say intuition is just an aberration of madness so perhaps you’re right I’m stark raving but I think I’m beginning to understand what’s been going on here’ I admit.

Paula regards me quizzically ‘care to share?’

I start to shake my head but both of us flinch noticeably as my mobile rings, I snatch it up noting the ‘private number’ on the display

‘Hello, David Johansson’ I speak rigidly to the phone.

‘Hi limpy you sad little fuck’ the voice guttural, hateful.

‘Who is this?’ I ask redundantly, I already know who it is and a languid, frigid creature of dread uncurls in my core.

A mirthless chuckle ‘found out you’re a daddy twice over yet limpy?’ he mocks.

‘Just tell me where she is Walsh’

‘I’ll do better than that limpy, you can come meet her, we’ll have a little family reunion’ he hisses.

‘Where?’

‘The old tank on Skyline Rd, turn left down the track there, she’ll be waiting for you at the end of the road’ the connection cut abruptly.

I find myself breathing heavily; I can’t suck in enough air, Jesus Christ. Paula is sobbing, her hands don’t seem to know where to go they dart from her face to hugging herself and back ‘where is she?’ she pleads between sharp intakes of breath.

‘You’re not coming’ I reply flatly.

I didn’t even see it coming her fist lashes, out strikes me on the cheek accompanied by an inhuman screech ‘SHE’S MY FUCKING LITTLE GIRL YOU PRICK’.

She turns, snatches up the Range Rover keys and bolts for the kitchen door, the blow has momentarily nonplussed me and I’m slow intercepting her but I manage to loop my arms around her from behind at the doorway in a great bear hug pinioning her arms to her sides and lifting her from the ground.

She kicks at my shins for a moment and then sobs limply ‘if you come Paula he’ll kill you it’s a simple equation, please! I’ll get her back I promise please!’

I release her and she turns to face me there is fear and terrible sorrow in her look but there is also a resolute fury I remember well ‘I’m coming David’. Pointless to argue I know absolutely she will not see reason.

‘OK, OK Paula you’re coming I get it I’m sorry, look if you’re going to come we need to at least give him the impression I've arrived alone, I need his reactions to be predictable, buy me some time to help Nicky if she is even there. That’s another possibility Paula she may not be, he might have already….’I stop myself before the look of horror on Paula’s beautiful face breaks me.

‘What do you want me to do exactly?’ all trace of panic has gone from her voice; some resolution has been reached.

‘I want you to get out of the truck a few hundred metres up the road and walk the rest of the way quietly, I want you take my phone and make sure Barry knows where to come and then call anyone and bloody everyone you can think of and get them here. But I want you to promise me unless Nicky is in direct danger that you will stay hidden’.

‘PROMISE ME!’ I shout clutching her shoulders, ‘Paula why do you think he called me? He’s tying up loose ends I’m a loose end .I’d rather not risk dying tonight Paula but if I can get to Nicky……...if you’re there he’ll kill you too so no matter what happens between him and me you stay out of it OK’?

She nods unconvincingly ‘OK’ flat, without emotion.

I reach out and stroke her temple, she clutches herself to me fiercely ‘I’ll get her back, I’ll get her back’ I whisper into her hair, not convincing either of us.

‘Do you have a gun here?’

‘No, no guns since Stuarts dad’

‘Just have to make do then, lets go’.

Chapter 15 The confrontation

The powerful driving lights of the Nissan show the cul de sac at the end of the old mining trail in stark relief the moment I round the last shallow bend. Paula had slipped out the passenger door moments before while the truck was moving at walking pace.

‘End of the road’ I breathe to myself and regret it immediately, nothing other than gnarled trunks of small gum trees are visible beyond the windscreen. The night is comfortably mild and a three quarter moon peeks over the sparse forest canopy. I stop the engine turn off the lights and sit back in the seat having no idea whether Walsh intended to meet me here or simply shoot me as I clambered out. Either way I have virtually zero night vision for a few minutes; wait and adjust. Doof……….. doof…………doof..doof..doof thrumming through the floor of the Patrol, the rave party must be close by, I crack the door and step down, the bass throbbing is dramatically louder, I can hear sounds of a frenetic crowd intermingled with the music. Well so far so good I’m still breathing.

There!

Through the trees in the opposite direction to the music a diffuse light, I start to pick my way through the stringybarks as stealthily as I can manage. The moonlight is providing just enough illumination for me to see the rough narrow trail underfoot, the light is much more distinct as I get closer. It looks like a gas Coleman lamp, my heart is thrashing in my chest, was Walsh sending me on a wild goose chase? Was this just some innocent punter camping out in the bush? A loud metallic snick answers my question, I remember that sound well, the slide on an automatic pistol being worked.

‘Gooday limpy you bung-arse little fuck’ comes the growl from behind me and to the right ‘don’t turn around, palms on top of your head please’.

I complied but remained silent.

‘Ready for your little reunion fuck head?’

Again I chose not to reply, what point?

Walsh it seems is eager for me to talk ‘It’s going to be a short one though limpy, you know you’re going to die tonight don’t you?’ he chuckled hatefully.

I have a very short tolerance for posturing even in situations as horrible as this and my stay silent strategy evaporated. ‘What the fuck have you been watching Walsh? Been wanking over film noir? Throw in another bloody cliché there’s plenty of….ooof. I found myself laying face down on the ground, the humiliation hurt far worse than the kick in the backside I had just been given.

‘Get up!’ he screamed, the vibrato of genuine anger obvious in his voice ‘walk down the path and shut the fuck up’

I pick myself up and do as he asks. Good, his self-control was childishly easy to overcome I would try to use that. Suddenly I realised I have walked into a small clearing, usually means a mine head in these hills. The light was indeed a Coleman lamp, in its glow I scanned around the dell, my heart caught. No! A figure hung limply between two trees head slumped forward, plum hair obvious even in the half-light.

‘NICKY!’ I shriek and lunge forward toward her. The sound of a thunderclap tenfold is accompanied by a flash bulb like strobe of orange light. I prop abruptly and turn. Walsh stands in a splay-legged combat stance; the black Sig-Sauer pistol in his double-handed grip appearing as huge as a cannon.

He smiles malevolently ‘That’s not in the script limpy, palms back on your head and walk slowly over to her I’ll tell you when to stop’

I glare at him, I’ll kill you you bastard no matter how I promise myself silently.

‘MOVE’ he yells

I do as he asks and turn back toward Nicky suppressing a sob, she is strung between two trees bound by thick hemp rope, standing spread eagled and naked save for a pair of tattered orange panties. I feel myself losing control, No! No! Have to hang on here. Her head is slumped against her chin but I can see her small breasts rise and fall with each shallow breath; she’s alive! Walking forward I regard the Bowie knife imbedded in the ground between her legs with horror, its blade glinting in the lamp glow. Her small pale body seems covered in bruises and…..and abrasions?

I whirl ‘what the fuck have you done!’ I scream.

That horrible laugh again ‘we’re just getting to know each other, long overdue, we’ll get down to business when I’m done with you’

I look back at the knife and know with nauseating surety it is the instrument of the coupe de grace, same as the others before. I understand now, understand it all and it brings a calm and a resolve. I must control this situation.

‘Turn round and kneel’

I comply looking up at my daughters beautiful unconscious face, she is Paula remade. I hear the safety come off ‘what do you think the epitaph should read? Stuck his fucken nose in and got his arse shot off….hey? Like that?’

‘Talked to lots of scared people Walsh’ I lied ‘lots of women especially, seems you’re a soft cock Walsh, most impotent fucks settle for little blue pills. All this, is this your revenge for being half a man?’ the silence is palpable and I can feel his fury building, shooting me I’m sure will not be enough. The explosive pain in my right kidney confirms it and I am launched forward across the rocky ground, but I've expected it and I fling myself over onto my back in mid air. The impact with mother earth knocks the air from my lungs, Walsh is closing toward me fast every shade of hatred, fury and disgust on his hard-edged features, I reach above my head, grasp the hilt of the Bowie knife and fling my torso forward. I used to do this with Stuart for days on end, obsessed with Daniel Boone we threw knives until we could hit a Coke can at ten metres. Walsh is close now, the big Sig-Sauer in one hand at his side, my arm reaches it’s apogee and I release the knife but I know at once I have miscalculated, lost balance in the lunge forward. With a satisfying thud the entire blade of the hunting knife imbeds itself in Walsh’s left thigh, he pauses and looks down at the handle of the knife intended for his neck in silent disbelief then back at me with pure abhorrence, his pistol arm comes up, I am still sitting on the ground ‘sorry Paula’ I pray silently.

Crack!

Even in the dim light I can see the black spray of blood from Walsh’s shoulder, he spins one hundred and eighty degrees and the Sig comes up once again. Crack! Again and an apple sized hole explodes in the back of his wind breaker, a sharp pain stings my cheek, reflexively my hands goes there and comes away with a small bloodied white fragment of what I assume to be rib stuck to my index finger. He staggers back and the gun lowers momentarily, steadies and then comes up again, I note the oddity of steam pulsing from his back but my overloaded brain can’t understand why it’s wrong.

Then I hear a familiar roar

‘Oh for fucks sake die will ya’ Crack!

And with that the centre of Walsh’s neck explodes in a ballistic spray, soft gurgling noises escape him, his head lolls to one side and his body crumples to the ground. Beyond Walsh’s dead form a great bear of a shape advances, the .38 snub nose revolver tiny in its giant paw. ‘Barry!’

‘Stay down dickhead’ he commands as he stoops to retrieve the big pistol from Walsh’s dead outline and places two fingers against the remains of his neck.

He slides the .38 back into a shoulder holster ‘fucken peashooters’ he growls and regards me quizzically nodding toward Nicky ‘she alive?’

‘I think so’ I reach forward and with some effort withdraw the knife from Walsh’s thigh, it makes a hideous slurp coming out. I toss it to Barry.

Between the percussions from the rave across the hill another sound comes to me, a familiar sound just audible in the background, low repetitive and insistent.

‘You cut’ I pick up Nicky’s slim frame from the waist taking the wait off her taut arms while Barry saws through the thick ropes at her wrists and ankles. She slumps forward limp in my arms with a tiny groan, gently I lay her on the ground and strip off my thin woollen jumper. Her eyes are open but unseeing as I wrestle the jumper over her battered torso; she helps weakly her awareness returning. Her skin is still frigid and despite the positive signs I know from experience this is a dangerous time ‘she’s in shock mate we need to get her medical attention quickly’ silence ‘Barry?’. I glance up at him, he is looking across the clearing, I follow his gaze. Paula! She is emerging from the bush at the edge of the dell. Barry’s head snaps back the other way a puff of vapour from his lips, hand lashes to the shoulder holster. I register first his huge bulk launching backward as though some invisible rope attached to his back had been wrenched mightily, in slow motion he falls, arms splayed, the revolver spinning off into the gloom. Then the three round burst, rifle fire, the flat distinctive bark of 7.62mm rounds. I look toward Paula; there are only trees where she had been. Poor Nicky, I brushed a matted lock of purple hair from her face and stooped to kiss her forehead.

‘Your OK Nicky’ I tell her gently.

With infinite sadness I accept that I know who is approaching.

‘Hello Stuart’ I say without looking up.

‘Bravo David’ his best tone of booming arrogance ‘not that it really matters but when did you know?’

His words flow into the background sound, mix with the irregular undulating hum as though I were hearing his voice backward and forward at the same time. Barry lays flat on his back a few metres away, intermittent plumes of steam from his gaping mouth; he gives no other indication of life. Still kneeling over Nicky I look up as Stuart approaches he’s cradling an ugly black rifle a Belgian FN carbine with a long curving magazine protruding underneath. He’s all in black, slacks and polo necked top. For a moment I have the impression his outline is blurred as though he were made of fluid, threatening to devolve at any moment, my head lurches.

‘Ten years, twenty, always? But if you mean when did I voice it to myself…tonight’ my voice trails off.

‘How can you allow…this’ gesturing to Nicky ‘Stuart?’ I ask.

‘Allow?’ theatrical disbelief on his face ‘allow it…..I insisted’ he boomed

‘What are you?’ almost a whisper, vapour billows from my own mouth now.

‘I am what I am David, thank you for the favour tonight, our good Sergeant was getting a little out of hand of late, you saved me the unpleasantness’ he replied in a flippant tone.

‘You and Walsh? And Larson? The murders?’

‘Just the tip of the proverbial iceberg David, I warned you about weak minds, I even warned you to stay away did I not?’

Buzzing, cloying and prickling in the front of my head I try to rub it away with one hand ‘you played me Stuart, you had no doubts where this would conclude’.

The unvoices are inside again, louder now and tearing at me, I'm aware my field of perception is shrinking, closing to a point. Stuart’s outline wafts and distorts as though he were moving behind frosted glass.

‘True’ he laughs ‘but I played you well you must admit’ a mirthless smile ‘you have work to do tonight David!’ his voice like gravel on steel at the last.

He is darkly luminous now, shifting, reforming. My brain feels as though it’s being methodically carved to pieces the sound is so loud.

‘You’re going to take this beautiful piece of Flemish armament and visit our band of little party people across the hill’

‘No!’

‘Oh yes David’ his intonation reptilian ‘you’ll want to, it’s coming old friend; you can hear it, feel it, can’t you? You will do this!’

My consciousness is slipping the pain is unbearable, great gushes of steam balloon from me with each breath. I look up he is handing me the rifle.

‘Consider it a trade for your daughters life’

‘You'll kill her anyway’ I groan.

‘True again’ he smiles ‘but you can determine how’; raising his eyebrows in question.

‘Put it down and get the fuck away from him!’ Paula’s voice deep and strong with a calm fury. I look past Stuart to Paula standing twenty metres away a double-barrelled shotgun at her shoulder levelled at Stuart. Where the hell? Of course! Duncan’s gun from the locker in the back of my truck I never took it out; couldn’t face it. Her expression is composed, steeled, the young wild girl racing an orphaned scarred boy on horseback decades before. The look is the same and crazily at that moment I realise I have never seen a being so utterly beautiful, never loved anything, anyone with such intensity

‘Paula my love!’ his voice high, conciliatory, he whirls holding the FN with one hand by the pistol grip. Boom! Momentarily before the shotgun speaks the FN rattles on full automatic. Without needing to look I know with certainty what has happened, standing quickly a round sweeping kick to the outside of his knee, he buckles as I grab the hot barrel of the carbine in one hand, the outstretched fingers of my free hand strike the side of his neck with force. His grip relinquishes the rifle and I flip it around stock to my shoulder checking the breech is still closed as I do. At least one round left, that’s all I'm going to need. The muzzle is aimed at Stuart’s head; he is lying on his back grinning maniacally despite what must be considerable pain.

‘This feel familiar David?’ he laughs almost hysterically.

‘Get on your front put your palms behind your head…..NOW!’ he complies still guffawing with a jackals laugh.

‘Twitch and I’ll blow you’re fucking head off before you make it to one knee……you bastard!’ I sob and turn toward Paula. She lays spreadeagled on her back the shotgun a couple of metres away both barrels still smoking. Her once opalescent brown eyes are open wide now the colour of damp Hessian and equally lifeless, I can only mewl, words will not come as I kneel over her. Mercifully the rounds have left her face untouched; her torso bears three crimson atrocities one directly over her heart.

‘Oh Paula! Christ no!’

With a shaking hand I gently close her eyes and kiss her still warm lips, once. Grief switches off, extinguished in an eye blink a great and terrible inrush of anger has overwhelmed it, I can hear sniggering behind me.

‘Did you think she loved you?’ he calls

I stand and whirl an infinity, a riot of voices cacophony in my head, a colourless glow surrounds Stuarts prostrate form, as I look around everything is tinged with it. The dark spaces under the trees radiate, the world has become negative. I feel an incredible impact, not physical but as though my soul has been shunted aside by some irresistible ugly force. But I sense I am powerful, infinitely strong as large as the universe and hatefully angry. I regard Stuart, I want to gouge him, to rip and tear with my teeth to hear him scream and watch the vapour rise from his ravaged body. I want to taste his flesh, my hands to keep company the warm entrails of his being, to pull him apart for the grizzly fascination of it. I become conscious that I am growling, visceral inhuman noise from my lips.

‘You idiot David’ he laughs mockingly

Rushing to him, I want his life, I want to take it kicking and screaming from him, mine! I aim the rifle at his head.

‘Welcome to hell old friend’ he whispers laughter gone

The weapon shudders alive in my hands as I hold the trigger down, a quick flash of green, the fifth last round in the magazine, a tracer, a standard military load. Dirt and forest debris spew into the air around Stuart’s head he is curled into a foetal position, his palms cradle his forehead and cover his eyes. Click. The magazine is empty in less than a second, he uncovers his eyes and looks at me in a still moment of uncomprehending disbelief. I lower the weapon and walk toward Nicky who is sitting up but thankfully appears unaware of her surroundings. There is a roar, a terrible thundering rush,a thousand freight trains are descending on the clearing it overwhelms everything. I cannot tell if I am hearing it, feeling it or perhaps making it. A pressure inside my skull, it will crack along the middle and spray forth a deluge of cherry pulpy foam I am sure. Everything becomes red, brilliant incandescent red, the sky has been set aflame. An echoing boom through the trees, white sparks cascade through the foliage and then utter silence save for the quiet flutter of a forest of leaves falling to ground. I look around the dimly illuminated edges of the clearing every tree is bare, denuded of leaves and the bass thud of the rave party noticeable by it’s total absence. I’m tired, more tired than imagination can conjure, desolate, the dead who stand. Warm sticky rivulets run from my chin, I realise my nose is bleeding furiously I fruitlessly wipe at the stream with my forearm still clasping the FN by it’s grip in my other hand. A powerful, brilliant beam of light stabs out from the trees directly into my eyes and I am completely blinded.

‘DROP THE WEAPON’ bellows a deep masculine voice from the tree line, a trained voice, trained to command, to get compliance.

I let the rifle slip from fingers.

‘STEP TOWARD THE LIGHT’

I step forward

‘FURTHER!’

Another step.

‘GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES’

Down

‘PUT YOUR FINGERS BEHIND YOUR HEAD’

Hands

‘REMAIN STILL IF YOU MOVE WE WILL FIRE’

Still death

A boot impacts between my shoulder blades, strong hands pull my arms roughly down behind my back, a metallic click, cold around my wrists I feel no pain, forever numb. I crane my neck up into the torch beam, blue uniforms spill into the clearing in it’s glow. The Indians won this one chaps, the cavalry are tardy. A whining, whirring rush of air. The whole clearing is now in the stark relief of light brighter than day, a helicopter hovers over the scene. I look to Stuart, he is as I expected gone.

‘You’ll be right luv’; someone is putting a blanket around Nicky’s shoulders

‘Got a DOA here, three entry wounds, female’ another over Paula’s body.

A shroud over the sun goodbye Paula

‘Yeah he’s breathing’ from behind me ‘got a pulse’ the uneven tearing of cloth ‘shit he’s got a vest on’…. ‘yep get him on the chopper’.

You fat cagey prick Barry, you came prepared.

CHAPTER 16 THE PURSUIT

Winter skies grey and warning hang over the sea; a strong offshore wind against the incoming tide has raised the water of Bass Strait to white peaked surf three metres or more high. I sit in an old leather recliner at the floor to ceiling windows, my leg propped on a similarly ancient poof sipping from one of Paula’s hand made cups glazed with impossible reds and greys.

‘Hey, how you doing’ Nicky says softly as she glides up behind me, her fingers ruffle my hair in a gesture of concern and she sits on the arm of the chair beside me coffee in hand.

‘Getting wild out there’ she says apropos of the ocean view through the windows.

‘Storm tonight’ I state.

‘Need some more pain killers?’

‘No…no its ok’ I reply, the last operation to suture the ruptured blood vessels in the temporal lobe of my aging kilo of grey matter was five days ago and I’m just glad to be free of hospitals despite the pain. The neurosurgeon had reacted with humourless consternation when I accused him of having removed my foot instead of drilling holes in my cranium. I had nearly died in Police custody, a nosebleed became a torrent and I lost consciousness, eventually being airlifted to the Austin Hospital. Not that I was aware of any of this, after the first operation I was placed into a medically induced coma while the trauma subsided for two weeks. The haemorrhage was diagnosed as the result of blunt trauma, assumed to have resulting from the trees that interrupted my flight through the forest from Skye Farm and Duncan’s grizzly demise. I know different.

‘Mails here!’ calls Nicky as she crosses the polished boards of the lounge room and tosses a thick wad of envelopes and a rolled newspaper into my lap. I look up at her smiling irreverently; the purple hair is gone, lustrous brown like her mothers but still cut short and jagged. The piercings are still there too but diminishing in number of late I note.

‘Ta’

The two of us have not been far apart for weeks now as though separation might see us lost to each other forever. The days have fallen into an easy routine, Nicky paints, and I mope about being an affectionately tolerated pain the arse. The airy post modern house sits atop a steep drop to the windswept Gippsland coastline, we rented or more correctly Nicky rented it from her trust fund to make bonds a childhood late, bonds that should always have been. I've been on the phone to Barry for the last hour, indestructible larger than life Barry Glover, superintendent now no less. No details had been passed over on the contents of the sound grabs my surveillance gear had recorded at the Weston’s farmhouse in Cloughs or the ash sample. They would be inadmissible (not to mention verboten) evidence anyway but apparently they had been enough to reinvigorate the investigation. Weston and his son had been arraigned to stand trial for murder and conspiracy to murder respectively. Good, Mrs Weston would be laughing her head off from above and I will be eager to hear the “whys”, although doubtless the reasons will be depressingly banal.

Despite the warrant for his arrest and widespread publicity Stuart Robertson has not been intercepted, within or without this country. It seems according to his banking records he had been channelling large amounts of money both offshore and into cash or untraceable assets for some years but his passport had not been registered at any point of exit. His Mercedes had been found at Moorabbin airport but no charter companies were admitting to having flown him out and witnesses of his boarding a plane could not be found. Barry had indicated the homicide D’s believed this was an elaborate ruse to cover the fact that he had never left the state. They of course wouldn’t find him, the moment he was gone from that clearing he was gone from law, gone from ‘normal’ perceptions of reality, he was among the revellers of dead things now. Well resourced, intelligent beyond the comprehension of most and malignantly evil he could remain hidden indefinitely, but that wasn’t Stuart’s way. I’ve been waiting for a token from him.

Bait.

Something which says ‘I have unfinished work, see how well I do it’. It will come and piece-by-piece he will reel me in, draw me to whatever corner of hell he’s occupying. He knows the simple fact I have to kill him, Nicky will never be safe while he breathes, I will never be safe. Sometimes genius shines a little too brightly; the glare can make the obvious unseen. I know how to find you Stuart, I've already begun, I’m coming, coming soon; we’ll settle accounts for Paula. I've had plenty of time to think in these last few weeks, too much time for mourning, too much contemplation of loss, too much suppressed fury, thank the stars for Nicky. Siggy is flying over in a few weeks to see her dad and meet her newfound big half sister the incredulity of which she is still coming to terms with. After that Nicky having succumbed to my persistent harrying will stay with Barry and his remarkable new woman; Anna. She’ll be safe there and more to the point I’ll know where she is. Anna is indeed remarkable not just for the fact that she exists at all as a female in Barry’s hitherto misogynistic existence but she has transformed the man, brought a softness closer to the surface. Softness is a relative term for Barry however; kindness tends to be expressed by dent of not shooting you. They make an unlikely but strangely perfect couple. I’ll be free to breathe for Paula, she comes to me most nights in achingly melancholy dreams to talk, to regret time forever lost. She comes sometimes with three ragged, gory holes the size of fists torn through her chest and sometimes as the wild bush child, sometimes as a teenager in a black thunderstorm swearing, smoking and beseeching. Stuart, are you still Stuart Robertson, were you ever? Are you the harbinger somewhere of even greater butchery? I had been researching intensively prior to the last hospital visit in defiance of medical cautions, looking for a correlation between reports of animal mutilations and deliberate human tragedy small scale and large. I found so many instances I stopped looking. Long reported histories of occasional strange deaths of livestock suddenly become increasingly frequent building to a crescendo in less than a year, always in places where some horror is visited upon the innocent shortly after. Starts with animals, ends with Pol Pot, Snowtown, Waco, Jonestown, Srebrenica, St Petersburg an endless litany of apparent meaningless death.

I cast my mind back to that late night conversation with Stuart and Paula in the sitting room at Hartford, he was explaining to me quite directly who, what he is; laughing inwardly no doubt at the misdirection, the revelation to come. Weak minds, a gatherer of easy souls put to bloody work to feed….to feed what?

‘Not an evil David, the evil’ those had been his words. There are bad places in the world, we know this as children but heedless, blind in modernity we go where we should dare not. Something incorporeal waits there under the veneer, an otherness that claws for purchase in the world of men by first tasting his surrogates. Gaining the power to turn minds and redouble the bloodthirsty cycle sometimes on an unimaginable scale. David Attenborough or his ilk narrates the blood-smeared tableau as a pride of lions consume an antelope and we can’t help but impute evil to the lions. Take away all the sentimentality and the prosaic reality is one entity must devour the other to preserve the balance of nature, for the whole ecosystem to exist. It is neither good nor bad it simply is as it is.

‘I am what I am David’

Is it possible to believe? That living things have a single antithesis, its mark chaos, entropy, and destruction and my childhood friend is it’s willing agent?… And me, a one footed brain damaged fool, why me? It would seem I am more than an incidental hindrance in all of this…this waking dream. And Paula, a useful prop discarded, slaughtered when redundant, I’ll find you Stuart, soon.

Unrolling the city newspaper I catch the word ‘killing’ and ‘again’ in the headline and then my attention is taken by an A3 sized manila envelope addressed to me in a flowing pedantic script written in fountain pen. I turn it over, stiff and heavy; no return address. I rip the top from the packet and withdraw the contents. Dead eyes, lifeless naked body suspended in a tortured X, abdomen grotesquely slashed breasts to pubis, empty. Glossy high definition colour, my stomach lurches, coffee dropping barely registered to the floor. In thick black texta diagonally across the bottom corner of the print in the same flowing hand XOXOXO.

It’s begun