Whistle Down The Wire

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘It’s still theoretically possible, but so are your suspicions. Will you get photos made of the car?’

  ‘I’ll take them myself later. I might be talking myself into this, but my instincts just keep gnawing away at me, and in a way that isn’t good.’

  ‘Any chance of fingerprints?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so. Too many people would have been hacking away at the car last night. Then there was the towing mob taking it back here. Add to that the rain and how much the car has been pulled apart in the process.’

  It wasn’t just the doors missing, she then noticed. The car’s bumper bars had also been destroyed or cut off, the mangled wheels removed, anything to make it easier to get the car back to town.

  ‘So let’s assume for a minute that the pair were killed.’ Sheridan continued. ‘That leaves us with two more questions, the big ones,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Who and why.’

  ‘It won’t be easy.’

  ‘No. Not unless …’ Cole said, thinking. ‘… unless we work our way back from the crash. Not try to think about it going forwards, but rather take it step by step backwards. Pick our way back through time.’

  ‘Should we go out and have a look at the rail crossing then?’

  ‘We should. It’d be good to have two pairs of eyes looking over it,’ Cole agreed.

  It was no more than a ten-minute drive to Harper’s Corner, but even that was enough time for a train leaving Mitchell to work up a full head of steam. It was a peaceful if subdued scene today, even if the images of men and train and wreck were still alive in Cole’s mind. He looked up. There was no rain today but high, scudding cloud. He felt the breeze cool on his neck and face.

  ‘We start here,’ Cole told Sheridan, as they stood at the precise spot where he had parked his car the previous night. ‘The Colstons came in the same way that we did. The road looks pretty flat. Can you see any skid marks?’

  ‘None. But unless I’m mistaken, there’s a slight dip in the road here, beginning about twenty yards behind where we’ve parked the car.’ She got down on her hands and knees on the bitumen, almost pressed her face against it in trying to take a line of sight along the road. ‘If I had a marble in my pocket I reckon it would roll on down to the train line without too much of a push.’

  Cole peered down the road.

  ‘Someone kills them. Puts them in the car, drives them to this location, arranges the bodies in front and waits in the dark for the train to arrive, but probably not for too long in case someone else might also be driving along this road. Then with the train in sight they – you’d think it’d have to be two people pushing the car – begin putting their shoulders to the car, get just enough momentum up so that it running into the train is inevitable.’ He looked at her. ‘What do you think so far?’

  ‘I could see that happening. The road’s flat enough that the car would’ve travelled in a fairly straight line once it was set on its way.’

  ‘Lets walk down to the line. What about the timing? Getting the car to hit just at the right moment?’

  ‘How many trucks were on the train?’

  He thought. ‘Maybe ten or twelve?’

  ‘That gives whoever a decent margin for error then,’ she said confidently. ‘One question though.’

  ‘Only one?’

  ‘How could you be sure that the car hitting the train wouldn’t just bounce it off? How certain could you be that the train would snag the car and rip it along the track?’

  ‘You couldn’t. But anyone who’s seen the remains of a car versus train collision will tell you that not many cars come out of it recognisable. Sometimes the impact will even throw the train or its carriages off the tracks. If whoever was pushing the car forward, through whatever means, and it did happen to miss the train, they could have simply got back in the car, thrown the driver into the back and sped off somewhere else to dump the bodies. And they would have known that.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ she thought. ‘And the driver claims he didn’t see anything?’

  ‘That’s what he says. If he had seen anything you’d expect he would have homed in on the car. But he wouldn’t have been looking for anyone behind the car, much less two or three figures lurking further away.’

  ‘And of course, the pitch black night and the rain.’

  ‘You’ve got it. Alright then. What do you think? An accident or not?’

  She regarded the straight line of railway track running into the distance, the ragged, wooden fence line that followed it.

  ‘I haven’t seen the dead couple and even if I did it probably wouldn’t help. I’m not a doctor or someone who could do an autopsy. It could well be deliberate. But I’d like to know something about the motive behind it all before I signed my name in blood under it,’ she said.

  ‘And that’s as it should be. We have to find out whether there’s any reason for this, because, of course, there has to be,’ he said, kicking away a scrap of metal from the rail.

  They walked back to the road and carefully picked their way along either side of it. Beside the odd piece of litter and a bottle sunk half way into a muddy pool there was nothing of note. It was only when they continued searching beyond where their car was, up the almost imperceptible rise that Sheridan had earlier noted, that Cole spied something.

  ‘Look at this,’ he called and Sheridan strode across. ‘A car’s been parked here where these tread marks are.’ He pointed. ‘And then another one here. See where the grass has been flattened? Two separate cars.’

  The grain of one car’s tyres was visible in the soft ground. It was even faintly possible to see where it had been brought back onto the road. There were other marks about, scuffing in the grass, but if blood had fallen here it was impossible to see now.

  ‘Fresh,’ she said. ‘These tyre tracks have to be from last night. There was no chance someone from the rescue team parked here?’

  ‘No. I deliberately stayed this far back to keep out of the way, and where you see our car now is exactly where I had it last night. Everyone else was as close to the railway line as they could get.’

  Cole returned to his car and took a camera from it, being careful to take a number of pictures of the tyre marks from different angles and distances.

  ‘My money’s on one of these marks being a match for either the Colstons’ car or another brought here with it. We just have to find out what happened to the wheels missing from the wreck now and hope these marks match the tyres on them.’

  As they got back into the police car Sheridan noticed a horse racing form guide on the back seat.

  ‘Do you follow the horses?’ she asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he answered. ‘Only the horses I follow generally want to follow other horses, too.’

  She laughed, ‘Do you ever win?’

  ‘No one ever wins,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you to go to the towing business when we get back into town, see if you can track down where those tyres went.’

  ‘And after that?’

  He regarded her seriously.

  ‘We want to keep our powder dry on this for as long as we can while we gather what information we can. There’s no clear proof of anything yet and if anyone gets wind of our suspicions the shutters might come right down.’

  While he drove Cole turned his thoughts inward, wondering what could have drawn the Colstons out this way at such an ungodly hour, if they hadn’t been dead already. Because now it had wriggled into his consciousness, he was growing surer by the minute that the crash was no accident.

  Out of nowhere, Sheridan said, ‘What does everyone at the station call you?’

  He blinked, turned to look at her.

  ‘What do they call me?’ He hadn’t ever had cause to think about it. ‘Well, Janice calls me by my name, Lloyd, but she’s a civilian, so to speak. The other police …’ He felt odd having to sa
y it, almost uncomfortable. ‘…They call me senior sergeant, or chief, sometimes boss …’

  He thought but couldn’t add to the list.

  ‘I’ll call you boss then,’ she said decisively. ‘If you don’t mind.’

  ‘No I don’t. I don’t mind that.’ To change the conversation, he asked, ‘So what are your impressions of Mitchell up to now?’

  ‘It’s only my first day, but I think I’m going to like it,’ she smiled. ‘This sure beats making tea and coffee.’

  ‘Then I’m glad to hear that.’

  Chapter 6

  At home, Nancy Cole quizzed her husband over the dinner table.

  ‘You haven’t said anything about the new policeman yet. How’s he going?’

  ‘She,’ Cole corrected her. ‘Senior Constable Chris Sheridan is Chris for Christine.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were expecting a policewoman.’

  ‘Neither did I. But from what I’ve seen so far she’s going to be a real asset. I had her go over the accident scene with me today. She thinks about what’s going on and asks good questions.’

  ‘What will you get her to do?’

  ‘She’ll have to do the same things everyone else does. That’s the only way it can work. But it’ll be handy having a woman at the station for particular cases. I could have done with her there when we were dealing with the Ruby Bunn issue.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘You know me. I can never tell women’s ages. But if I had to guess, I’d say about thirty.’

  ‘Is she pretty?’

  ‘Well, Janice doesn’t think so, but she’s very clued up and has a pleasant way about her. The boys at the station took an instant shine to her.’

  Nancy looked up from her meal.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘As a fellow officer, I did. Heaven knows we could do with a bit more enthusiasm around the place. Young Whittaker is a lot of fun, and keen, but otherwise we’re a pretty dour lot, the permanents and the relievers we get coming through.’

  ‘It’s different, I expect, since Terry left, anyway. More sombre,’ she supposed. ‘I wonder if he even has other visitors, besides yourself.’

  ‘I know Audrey visits him. Who knows what’ll happen on that front when he’s eventually released, though. He’s just about served his first year. They might shift him to a lower security prison like Dhurringile soon. At least I hope they do. Pentridge is no place for a copper. I don’t even want to think about what they might be doing to him there.’

  ‘Is their marriage over, Lloyd?’

  He pondered. ‘I’d say it has to be. I’d say it was over even before Terry killed the priest.’

  ‘It’s just a terrible thing, the worst you could imagine. I know we have our moments, but we do our best, don’t we?’

  ‘We try,’ he said, knowing that in a long marriage it was often easier to paper over the cracks than to confront the hard realities.

  So after dinner they followed their evening habit by taking a cup of tea in the lounge room, where they sat near the fire and talked about the day’s events, about what flashed across the screen of their television set, and what their children Vicky and Alan might be up to. Vicky was becoming a particular worry, mixing as she seemed to be with the war protest set. When she visited home, too, it was all the wanted to talk about: railing against the innocents massacred from on high by American bombers, the injustice of sending, forcing, Australian young men to fight against their will in a foreign land, the rapacious and immoral behaviour of Australian politicians.

  ‘Where does she even get those words from?’ Nancy quizzed him. ‘Is that what she’s learning at Teachers’ College?’

  ‘I think she’s picking up slogans from whoever’s holding the megaphone or slapping up the posters. But she’s a good kid, Nance. She knows what’s right and wrong. And who knows about this war? Maybe the young people have a case. I can’t see communist fighters busting their guts to leave their jungle hideaways just because they can’t wait to get to Mitchell.’

  She laughed. ‘That’s an exaggeration and you know it. But don’t you think the communists are a threat?’

  ‘They said the same thing about the North Koreans in the Korean War, too, and before that the Japs in World War Two. And look at us now, buying up Japanese television sets and transistor radios like there’s no tomorrow. I don’t see any Koreans or Chinese banging on our doors, either. No one likes the idea of communism, sure. But if anyone thinks it’s all about the communists wanting to take over Australia they’ve got rocks in their head.’

  ‘All the same, I’d rather Vicky stay out of those protests. It’s good to see her expressing a point of view, but I don’t want her trampled by a police horse.’

  ‘Nor do I. But I’m sure she’ll learn something from it, whatever side of the fence she’s on.’

  Tonight, as they settled in to watch television, Cole opened Harry Colston’s Teledex on the occasional table beside his armchair, resting his notebook on his lap as he began working his way through the alphabetical entries in the organiser. He’d missed an opportunity when he was at Hilltop the previous evening, without even realising it. What letter had the flip-open mechanism been on when he’d picked up the Teledex the first time? He couldn’t recall. Could that have been a clue to who he had spoken to last? But then, it was likely someone had telephoned him if he was being lured out. Nonetheless, the identity of the killers might still be among the names listed in the guide. No one would venture out for a rendezvous in the middle of the night if they didn’t know who they were going to meet.

  The other niggling thought was whether it was Colston himself who was up to no good. But why then bring the wife with him, unless she was somehow implicated in it, too?

  The Teledex contained the sort of entries he might have expected: names and numbers for the doctor, dentist, fire brigade, family members of both husband and wife, the tennis club. Many of the numbers were Mitchell listings and he knew the greater majority of the names. In other instances there was only a Christian name, such as he’d found the night of the crash when he came across Linda Fantasio’s name. And then there were the more cryptic entries: a single letter or two letters. A, Pl, SP, TR, X. He’d get someone from the station to call those entries and put names to them. Abbreviations usually served two purposes, Cole thought, haste or secrecy. He was more interested in the latter than the former.

  He began transcribing into his notebook any entry he couldn’t immediately discount, eliminating service providers like plumbers and electricians.

  With an eye on the television, one of Nancy’s favourite shows playing – The Man from U.N.C.L.E – Cole jotted down his persons of interest under the broad categories of Family, Friends and Other, the last category being a catch-all for anyone he didn’t recognise as belonging to the first two. He already knew his first task would be to tease out the Colston family tree. If there was someone with an axe to grind, the family itself was usually as good a place to start as any.

  And you had to start somewhere, he told himself, even if there wasn’t a single, good reason for any specific person to be a potential suspect at this point, Linda Fantasio possibly excepted.

  ‘The Shell road maps. Do you know where they are, Nance?’ he asked.

  Her attention was fixed on suave Napoleon Solo, so dapper in a fine suit as he fiddled with his cuffs almost self-consciously, as if he knew everyone was watching him from their lounge rooms.

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe the tall bookcase?’ she thought. ‘Or in one of the drawers of that dresser in the sleep-out?’ She snapped her gaze away from the television. ‘Would you like me to have a look?’

  ‘I can do it,’ he said, getting out of the chair.

  ‘What do you want the maps for?’

  ‘The Colstons might have been heading out to meet someone, or do something, when they were kil
led. I’m just curious as to who or what that was.’

  ‘You’d imagine they could have found a better time of day to do it then.’

  ‘You would. You tell me what happens to Messrs Solo and Kuryakin.’

  He smiled to himself for the nonsense the show was – pure boy’s own, the handsome lead actors leaping from one fanciful situation to the next as the show became sillier by the episode.

  It didn’t take Cole long to locate the Goulburn Valley road map among the stack of guides wedged in the bookcase. He always kept an entire set of Victorian maps at home as reference and backup for the police station’s set. The more detailed local maps were a boon when Mitchell’s officers were called away from town to assist with road accidents, summer grassfires or the periodic flooding of the Goulburn or Murray rivers.

  What he focussed on now, however, was the country north-west of Mitchell, the land around Harper’s Corner, and then the wider country again to the north as it fanned out toward the Murray Valley Highway. It could be difficult land further north, with little of the intensity of dairy farming and fruit growing. Properties were larger with less water for irrigation and crops, the soil poorer and its inhabitants the same.

  Unless the Colstons had dealings with livestock breeders or bought horses out that way, it was hard to see what business might have had them heading in that direction. And then, too, what business would have been so urgent that it couldn’t have been managed during the day? It was just another pointer to the fact that the couple might have been killed on or near their own property, caught unawares or otherwise, perhaps even letting the killer or killers into their home. It could have been someone they knew, perhaps someone in that Teledex.

  He’d have to go back to Hilltop.

  Chapter 7

  Senior Constable Sheridan walked into the station in the morning, tossing her hat on the desk that was fast becoming her home. Also on the desk was a small photograph of her parents, with another of herself as a teenager cuddling a grinning, black dog. Women being so rare in the force, even more so in the country, and Sheridan being of a likeable disposition, everyone at the station was falling over themselves to make her feel welcome, Janice having already taken it upon herself to do the rounds of the two real estate agents in search of rental properties for the new officer.