Whistle Down The Wire

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘Go ahead,’ the farmer said.

  ‘I know you bought a block of land from Harry last year.’

  ‘It was all legal,’ Bigelow replied defensively.

  ‘Yes, I know. But I’d like to know a bit about the circumstances surrounding the sale. If Harry mentioned his particular reasons for selling that block.’

  Bigelow looked Cole in the eye. ‘If it was me, I wouldn’t have sold it,’ he offered. ‘Not that block at least.’

  ‘It was one of his better ones, I heard. Were you happy with the price you got it for?’

  ‘I would have paid more, if it came to it, let me say that, and when God isn’t making any more land we were more than happy to take it off his hands.’

  ‘Is that how Harry saw it, do you think? That he was happy to get rid of it?’

  Bigelow’s wife came over, shaking out a shirt.

  She said, ‘These times are changing, sergeant. A lot of people think it’s not a good thing to be on the land any more. Like they’re embarrassed about it. Harry and Dianne were going that way. They didn’t see cows or hay or land, they saw new houses and cars and holidays away. Hard work wasn’t for them. They wanted the easy way. Who likes getting up at five to milk the cows? No one does, but you do it, don’t you? It’s your living and your life.’

  Her husband added, ‘Our kids have good jobs and we’re proud of them, two of them are working in the bank at Shepparton, our daughter’s a nurse in Melbourne. But who’s going to take over here when we can’t do it any longer?’

  It wasn’t a question that demanded an answer.

  ‘Did you ever have any trouble with the Colstons?’ Cole asked.

  ‘The Colstons? Not really. The old bloke was a lovely man even if the same couldn’t be said for his son.’

  ‘Him and his wife,’ Mrs Bigelow added. ‘Show ponies.’

  ‘Show ponies, that’s right,’ Bigelow agreed. ‘John Colston cast a big shadow. There was no doubting that. But the boy could have had a bit more ticker about him rather than giving up, because that’s what selling your land is – giving up.’

  ‘I hear there was some trouble about a bull he bought from you? This was going back a few years,’ Cole said.

  ‘There wasn’t much in it,’ Bigelow said. ‘Just the usual argy-bargy when people are buying and selling.’

  ‘Though Colston claimed your bull wasn’t up to the job. Was that true?’

  Cole knew how quickly these things could get out of hand. A sale where the buyer didn’t get what he thought he’d paid for. A man determined to get what he did pay for.

  The farmer shrugged. ‘He was perfectly happy with our girls, the bull that is.’

  ‘Excuses, sergeant,’ Mrs Bigelow said. ‘He was probably trying to join that bull with those new Hereford steers he was starting to buy and wondering why nothing came of it.’

  Her husband laughed, ‘It wouldn’t have been out of the question. Harry was a bit thick. So long as old John was alive he did everything while Harry just looked on. He idolised his dad, to be fair to him, but for all the time he was part of a farming family it’s amazing how little he knew. Who knows what he was thinking? Probably he did think a steer and a heifer are one and the same thing.’

  ‘What about the financial management of the place? Who was responsible for that?’

  ‘That would’ve been the old man, too. You’d hate to think what might happen to Hilltop now. I guess it’ll be sold.’

  ‘It could be an opportunity for you?’ Cole suggested, but Bigelow’s wife was swift to pounce.

  ‘No, not for us. We’ve enough on our plate now as it is. There’s no more buying for us,’ she said, shooting a quick glance at her husband that told Cole Bigelow might have been considering it.

  Cole said, ‘The new house they built over there. Harry wanted to put his stamp on the place, I suppose?’

  Bigelow shook his head. ‘The plans were drawn as soon as the old fellow started getting sick. Harry couldn’t wait to spend whatever the old boy had earned. John was always happy living in the old place down the road. He only agreed to the new house because he was sick and Dianne bullied him into it. I remember him saying to me once, “Marty, all you want is four walls, a roof over your head and a square meal on the table at the end of the day. That’s all you want.”’

  ‘But you think Harry and Dianne might have wanted more than that? Do you reckon they were well off?’

  Bigelow puffed out his cheeks. ‘In farming you know you’ll have good years and bad years. But lately we’ve had more bad than good, with the drought and all. Thank God we’ve seen the last of that, for the time being, at least. But it takes a toll and runs a property down. John Colston would’ve held the purse strings pretty tight, especially after Cynthia died. She had a reputation for being a waster, did old Mrs Colston, and when she went I reckon part of John would have been relieved to see her go. I think he saw Harry’s wife as being tarred with the same brush, too, the way she thought money grew on trees.’ The man’s gaze took him away, as if he was turning it on the Colston property. ‘It’s probably a good thing he’s not around now. No one wants to watch all their hard work going down the drain. But to answer your question, it’s like my wife said. Harry and Dianne were show ponies. They were only interested in throwing money around, not working for it. And that will only last you so long. They probably thought they had more to spend than they did.’ He stared hard at Cole, as though it had only just occurred to him. ‘Is there some trouble about the property?’

  Cole answered, ‘There’s always trouble when people die, and more so when they die the way those two did.’

  ‘Yes, unexpected. It leaves a mess I suppose?’

  ‘You suppose right,’ Cole told the pair. ‘An awful mess, actually.’

  Chapter 14

  It was just an everyday, minor incident that brought Lloyd Cole into contact with Robyn Kinross. Cole was meandering along the footpath during his lunch break when Cec Potter confronted him outside the grocery store.

  ‘Look at it!’ he exclaimed, pointing at the parked car obstructing any traffic from entering or exiting the narrow lane beside his store. ‘There’s a sign there – No Parking – can’t people read?’

  Cole saw Potter’s delivery truck nose to nose with the vehicle in question, a gleaming white Jaguar E-Type Roadster. Potter’s driver was transfixed by it behind the wheel of his truck.

  ‘Any idea who owns it?’ Cole asked.

  ‘Yes!’ he replied vehemently. ‘Who else could afford a car like that? It’s her. She thinks she can jolly well park it wherever she likes.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘The Kinross woman!’

  ‘Do you know where she is now?’

  ‘Next door, at the florist’s,’ Potter said.

  ‘Leave it to me then, Cec, go inside and I’ll get her to move her car,’ Cole said.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Cec. Go inside,’ Cole ordered, and the grocer, eyes blazing, reluctantly returned to his store.

  Cole looked at where Kinross had parked her car. Stupid, he thought, as he raised his eyebrows at the delivery van driver who, for his part, seemed in no hurry to move.

  As Cole entered the florist’s Robyn Kinross stood at the counter happily nattering to the owner and seemingly oblivious to the fractious behaviour she had incited in Potter. It was only the florist turning her eyes to the door that made her customer turn, too.

  ‘Lloyd, long time no see,’ the florist said cheerfully. ‘Are you after some flowers for Nancy?’

  ‘At another time I might be,’ he said. ‘But right now I need this lady here to move her car.’ He addressed her directly. ‘You’ve blocked Potter’s laneway, Miss Kinross. No one can get in or out while your car’s there.’

  ‘It’s only a couple of minutes,’ the woman protested. ‘Don’t people h
ave any patience?’

  ‘Maybe not. But I’d like you to move your car, please. There’s a truck waiting to get out,’ he insisted.

  ‘Well, alright then,’ she said sarcastically. ‘If it’s so absolutely urgent.’

  Cole pointed at the door and the woman left the shop in a huff.

  ‘There’s a vacant spot just a little further along the street. Park there. I want to have a word,’ he said.

  Robyn Kinross shook the door behind her so forcefully Cole feared for its glass.

  Two minutes later he was at her driver’s door asking her to get out of the car and onto the footpath.

  ‘Senior Sergeant Lloyd Cole. I won’t keep you long,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to book me?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘No. But I don’t want to see you parked across that laneway again, either,’ he said.

  ‘So what do you want?’ she demanded.

  There was a wild look in her eye and the expression Xavier Guiney had used – Mad as hatters – sprang to mind. But Guiney’s comments about her being good-looking were also undeniably true. In her early thirties, she was willowy, blonde-headed and full breasted under a black and white checked dress with long sleeves and short hemline. A pair of slip-on, pointy-toed white shoes provided a touch of daintiness. What was there beneath her outward appearance, besides her initial testiness, he was still to find out.

  And winter was no obstacle to fashion, Cole noted of her bare legs, as he wondered what had drawn her to Harry Colston, who wasn’t possessed of one of the world’s greatest minds, even if he did have something of a simple, raffish charm about him.

  Despite her shortness with him, Kinross quickly struck him as the being the type of woman who was no fool, and a woman who would be intolerant of those who were. And she, or her family, was evidently loaded, as Guiney had helpfully pointed out. The white Roadster was proof of that.

  ‘I’m hoping you can help me with something,’ Cole began carefully. ‘A lot of people were upset when they heard Harry Colston died…’ She returned his gaze fiercely, but he detected a flicker of interest there, too. ‘… His affairs were left in quite a state.’ He fumbled for the right words that wouldn’t provoke an explosion from her. ‘… There’s a bit of drama about some money he might have owed, and some claims to this and that.’

  ‘And what’s this? And what’s that? And why would you be interested, anyway? You’re a policeman, not a lawyer. It’s not your problem, is it?’

  ‘Except if there’s illegality involved, in which case it might be,’ he explained.

  ‘Why are you talking to me about this?’

  Cole weighed it up.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t have any good reason to be speaking with you. I just thought that, as someone who knew Harry better than most, you might be able to shed some light on what he was like. Who he mixed with and so on.’

  ‘I don’t understand any of this. Get to the point. You don’t think he died as a result of the accident, do you? You think he was killed, murdered,’ she shocked him by saying. ‘The minute I heard about the crash I knew it was a fake. Who drives out that way late at night racing the train unless they’re a carload of drunk boys? Harry might not have been a whole lot of things, but he was always a careful driver.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m a big girl, sergeant. Of course I was upset, but I’m not going to throw myself over a cliff because of it. That family was awful to me, disgraceful. Harry’s father thought they were some la-di-dah family when my family could’ve bought Hilltop with our pocket money. John Colston was against me and Harry marrying for whatever reason, and look who he got out of it instead. Dianne Bramley! I never understood it, but serve him right if you ask me.’ A tremor entered her voice. ‘Harry was as weak as water. He wouldn’t stand up to his father. And then he wouldn’t stand up to the Bramley family. He certainly didn’t stick up for me, the coward. Anyone could see that nothing good was going to come from that Bramley lot.’

  ‘You and your brother went out to Hilltop, made some trouble.’

  ‘If you call that trouble then your station would be run off its feet twenty-four hours a day dealing with it. We made a protest, that was all.’

  ‘And was that all?’

  ‘That was all. You’ll find lots of other people with good reason to be angry with them, too. The Colstons would say one thing to your face and then do another behind your back. Make promises and then renege on them. They were slippery as water and they wasted two years of my life. There were underhanded things going on there, too.’

  ‘What things?’

  A rumbling of cars passed by on the street.

  ‘Old grudges, grievances,’ she said over the rumble. ‘Family things they didn’t want dug up. There were whispers about something during the war that they didn’t want made public. People saying things behind their hands and stories passed on secretly, all these voices whistling down the wire.’

  ‘They were trying to hide something, is that what you’re saying?’

  The first trace of unease came into her voice.

  ‘They weren’t trying to hide it, sergeant. They did hide it.’

  ‘This thing, do you know what it was, or do you know but won’t say?’

  ‘I don’t know what it was, only that it ran deep. In the time I knew Harry, I always had this feeling that there was this thing just out of view, something they could see but I couldn’t. And whatever it was, they didn’t like it.’

  ‘I wonder how something that happened so long ago could have had anything to do with the accident?’ Cole asked speculatively.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you that. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. But the Colstons were a proud family, or at least they were until John Colston died. The answer’s somewhere there, would be my guess, in John Colston’s time.’

  Cole nodded to a passer-by before continuing, ‘That’s not going to make it easy if it is.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t. But that’s why you’re doing the job you are. Everyone talks about what you did for the town last year in solving those murders. So if anyone can get to the bottom of what happened to Harry, I’d be pinning my hopes on you.’

  She was like a sleek yacht making a long, leisurely turn, tacking back toward him now by a different course.

  He said, ‘If anything did happen.’

  ‘Come on. You know it did.’

  ‘Anyway, we’ll see. But I appreciate you giving me your time, Miss Kinross, and you’ve given me a lead to follow. I was also going to ask about your family …’

  He caught himself on the edge of saying something that could have been misconstrued, and she saw it.

  ‘You can say what’s on your mind, sergeant.’

  ‘It’s alright. Another time.’

  ‘I know what people say about us,’ she said. ‘We might be a bit different. We might not do what other people expect us to do. We might not care to socialise with them either. My mother is ill, and has been since the war, but there are good reasons for it, and we aren’t mad. Because I know that’s what people say about us.’

  For the first time, then, she smiled, a wary smile that added yet another piece to the jigsaw of her character.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say you are,’ Cole smiled back. ‘I appreciate you talking to me, too. Sometimes it’s hard to get to the bottom of things, to find out the truth. That’s all I’m after, the truth, not to pry into peoples’ lives.’

  ‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘Come out to the property any time you like. If you want to take a look around I’ll show you.’

  ‘If I think of anything else you could help me with, I’ll take you up on that. I hear it’s an impressive house,’ Cole said as she extended her hand in invitation.

  They shook hands and she walked back to her car, turne
d and waved briefly before driving away smartly, the car a smooth white bullet shooting down the street.

  There could have been something in what she had said about a long-buried motive, Cole thought, but the answer to what had caused the Colstons’ deaths might have been much simpler, too. Something as straightforward as the money Harry owed the bookmaker, as Cole was sure he had. Or a dispute with a neighbour, or a family member, that had begun as a spat and developed into a worsening feud. And Kinross’s story about a mysterious family secret could have been a smokescreen, with her now the second woman he’d spoken to who held a low opinion of Dianne Colston and the Bramleys. What was to say it wasn’t Dianne Colston who had been the target, and not poor old Hopeless Harry?

  It wasn’t so much still waters running deep, as the soft, slow undertow of the Colstons’ family history that was now beginning to tug him along.

  Chapter 15

  It grew into a hectic day for Cole. After he’d eaten a sandwich at home with Nancy and arrived back at the station he found his in-tray full to the brim with administrative work, and others waiting to chase him for his time.

  The first was Sergeant Forrest, who Cole had asked to provide some homework on Bob Fry. They sat down at the kitchenette table.

  ‘What have we got?’ Cole asked.

  Forrest was a lackadaisical fellow, six feet tall and overweight. His approach to work was to do what we was asked of him, but not put himself out in the course of it. Expressing an opinion on any topic under the sun, which required less exertion, came easier to him.

  ‘It’s not him doing the legwork, I can tell you that without getting out of my chair,’ Forrest said. ‘He uses two or three runners. The panel beater kid from Brown’s Body Works, Boland, he’s one.’

  ‘Trevor Boland?’

  ‘Yep. Then there’s Wayne Jennings, probably because he’s always in the Union propped up at the bar and everyone knows where to find him. The other one, they say, is Jan Van der Sloot, a Dutchie odd-jobber. I don’t know much about him. Are we going to nab Fry?’