Whistle Down The Wire

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘Just got the dentist’s bill did we?’ Janice quipped.

  ‘Something like that,’ he muttered, and called Ray.

  He and Janice were usually first into the building in the morning, the others traipsing in around the compulsory starting time of nine o’clock if they hadn’t been working a shift or had business to pursue outside the station.

  At mid-morning Janice distributed the mail and with it came a large, flat envelope for Cole. There was no name on the back when he flipped it over.

  Inside was a sheaf of papers he instantly recognised as being Harry Colston’s betting records. Typed out in columns, the records were a list of the venues, the type of racing, the numbers and names of the bets, the amounts wagered and at what odds and, lastly, the date and time of the bet. A final column indicated only if a bet had been successful, and then the amount of the win. A quick glance told Cole that Harry Colston collected about ten per cent of the time, and nowhere near enough to cover the total extent of his bets.

  The dates began in early 1966, the last a week before Colston died. Collectively, and if accurate, they showed Fry had been right in describing the erratic nature of Colston’s betting. There was seemingly no rhyme or reason for what he would bet on and when, in that he might gamble for two days on greyhounds, only to move to trotters the next, and the flat races after that, as if he was scurrying about trying to find something to win on. The amounts were also random. Two dollars on one bet could lead to a hundred on the next, and then thirty, or five, or sixty on the following wagers. It all smacked of desperation and he imagined it might be worthwhile comparing the bets with Colston’s bank statements, to see if there was any correlation between his larger bets and bank withdrawals.

  He returned the papers to their envelope. Nowhere had Bob Fry identified himself as the author of the correspondence.

  Not long after, the telephone rang. It was Ray Furnell.

  ‘How’d you get on with the flats?’ Cole asked.

  ‘There was a bit more to it than I figured on,’ Ray answered. ‘You know what you thought about kids letting down the tyres?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well it wasn’t. I had to pull both wheels off. You’ve had a knife put through those tyres, Lloyd. Shame too. They were nice Goodyears.’

  ‘A knife? Are you sure?’

  ‘No mistake. Can’t be fixed. I’ve got a couple spare in the garage I’ll bring over to your joint. They’ve got a bit of wear but not too much. Okay if I go ahead?’

  ‘Sure,’ Cole said, thinking. ‘And thanks for doing that Ray. I appreciate it.’

  ‘You know me, Lloyd. Any time you want a favour you just got to put your hand up.’

  When he got off the phone, Cole was dismayed that anyone would do that. As a policeman you weren’t always the most popular man in town, sure, but he’d never had anything like this happen before. It was hard to imagine, too, that a kid would have done it. It was a violent act, from someone harbouring a grudge, or from someone who didn’t like what he was doing.

  He decided to pay Bob Fry another visit, and this time the bookmaker was dressed and up and about. With his tweedy pork-pie hat on, Cole guessed he was preparing to go to the races, and made that observation to Fry.

  ‘You’re on the ball, Lloyd. Credit where it’s due,’ Fry confirmed. ‘Bendigo races as soon as I finish my lunch. Got some homework to do.’

  ‘Thanks for sending me Harry Colston’s betting records, too. It’ll help me join a few dots.’

  Fry said, ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. But if someone’s sent you a letter in the mail, then good luck to them, and to you.’

  ‘One of my sergeants gave me the names of your helpers.’

  ‘Like Santa, hey? Except, unless I’m mistaken, it’s not Christmas yet.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Trevor Boland. How much work is he doing for you, Bob?’

  ‘Well, I help young Trevor out now and then when he’s looking to make a few extra quid. There’s not the money in panel-beating they say there is, you know.’

  ‘If you say so, Bob. What’s Trevor do for you?’

  ‘He’s an odd-job man, Lloyd. People like panel-beaters are usually good with their hands and can do all sorts of things, like clearing up yards, painting and fixing things. I can tell you surely as I stand here, that he does any number of charitable jobs for me.’

  ‘What about Wayne Jennings?’

  ‘Wayne Jennings,’ Fry mused, rubbing his chin. ‘Now there’s a man who can do with a helping hand from time to time. He can get himself into trouble sometimes, can Wayne, but he’s got a good heart and he means well and so I try to help him out when I can. I get him to visit old ladies and do other voluntary work for me. Sometimes he might even give someone a little financial assistance, through me, if circumstances permit.’

  ‘If their bets come good, you mean.’

  ‘You’re a cynic, Lloyd Cole. When a man does his best to improve the world just a little, paint his corner of the sky with just a touch of blue, you can’t come down on him and try to pull a hessian bag over his head. It’s not right.’

  ‘Cut it out, Bob, this isn’t the amateur theatre group. These blokes are your messengers and it’s common knowledge that they are. If I start putting them up before a magistrate with aiding and abetting in the end it’ll be him putting the bag over your head, and I guarantee it’ll be a wet one. Tell me what you know about Jan Van der Sloot.’

  ‘You don’t say his name like that, it’s pronounced Yarn,’ Fry explained pedantically. When Cole just stood there waiting for him to go on, Fry sighed and continued. ‘Alright. For a Dutchman, Jan is a reasonable fellow. He even takes his shoes off before he comes inside your house. Polite, like. He’s new to town so he runs an errand for me here and there. What’s the harm in it?’

  ‘How much did Harry Colston owe you at the time of his death? There’s no way of knowing from the paperwork you sent me, but because he was phoning through his bets you must have been giving him a bit of rope. Would it be correct to say that?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘So what did he owe you when he died?’

  ‘For the generosity I showed him, he owed me about two thousand when he died. It hurts, even for a bloke like me.’

  ‘And given the nature of your transactions with him, there’ll be no way you’ll be able to claim it back from his estate.’

  ‘Sad but true.’

  ‘Bob, you weren’t responsible for the knife that went into a couple of my car’s tyres last night, were you?’

  ‘Good god no, I had no idea!’ Fry objected, his joviality gone in an instant. ‘Live and let live. You’ve done nothing to me so why should I do something like that to you? And whether you popped me before the magistrate or not, I still wouldn’t do anything like that. It’s not my style. My reputation is that I’m straight with everyone. I’m as honest as the day is long.’

  ‘You better be,’ Cole told him. ‘Because I’m not happy about it, Bob. I’m not happy about it at all. I’m going to be talking to Jennings and your friend Jan, too, so you can tell them to expect a visit from me.’

  But as Cole drove back to the station he doubted that Fry would have been behind the attack on his car. Whatever else he was, Fry was honest in his own peculiar fashion. When his investigation into the Colstons’ deaths was unofficial and still circumspect at best, he considered it unlikely anyone in that case’s orbit would be ruffled enough yet to draw attention to themselves. It would be smarter for them to just sit tight and hope that his inquiries would peter out.

  His tyres being slashed must have been someone coming home last night, bored and drunk, someone carrying a knife. They mightn’t even have known it was his property, or else mistook his place for someone else’s.

  Besides ruining two perfectly good tyres, it was probably something quite innocuous, h
e thought, a spur of the moment, stupid act. There was nothing for him to worry about.

  Chapter 18

  Cole kept a double-sided cork pin board on a ledge in his office. Whenever the door was opened it swung back to partly hide the board from view. If ever there was anything of a confidential nature pinned to it, Cole simply turned the board around to reveal the old police circulars and station administrative details on the other side.

  He told Janice he wanted an undisturbed hour and shut the door, locking himself in with his thoughts. It was time to think about what he had, and what he didn’t have so far as the Colston case was concerned.

  Taking out blank sheets he ascribed each sheet to a party having a motive for wanting to kill Harry and Dianne Colston, listing their motive and what questions remained about them.

  First sheet, and top of his list, was Linda Fantasio. What she had to gain was a slice of Hilltop and Harry and Dianne’s child, George. She wasn’t to know the conditions of Harry’s will before her brother died, and given the two hadn’t been on the best of terms it was unlikely he’d told her. Furthermore, she had a clear hatred of Dianne. Did she dislike her brother enough to want to kill him, though?

  The Bramleys came next. As inheritors of half of Hilltop and with Dianne Bramley an insider at the property, there was a fair chance she had known about and communicated the terms of the will to her family. In fact, knowing what he did now about Harry, Dianne and her family, it was likely her hand was heavily involved in the writing of the will. The gifting of the Hereford herd to Ken Bramley pointed to that. The fly in the Bramley ointment, however, was Dianne’s death. Would they have killed one of their own family? And how odd would it have been for Dianne to oversee a will that factored in her own death? There were contradictions and complexities, the personalities of two families, that made it hard to be certain of anything there.

  As much as he thought Bob Fry generally harmless, the fact remained that Colston had owed him a sizeable amount of money when he died, and Fry could even have been understating the amount. He had partners in crime: Boland, who he immediately discounted as a basically decent young fellow who wouldn’t get out of his depth. Then there was Jennings, a drunk. And the Dutchman Van der Sloot he knew nothing about. And who else might there have been? Bob Fry could have been a duck on a pond – calm on the surface but furiously paddling beneath it. Who knew the depth and extent of what he was involved in?

  There was also the Kinross girl, Robyn, who had already displayed the testy side of her character. She, too, had been open about her dislike of Dianne Colston and the Bramleys, and had reason to hate Harry, too. She’d been close to Harry before his father put a stop to it, blaming him for being weak and not defending her, and afterward had gone to Hilltop with her brother to cause mischief. Cole didn’t know what it was, but something about Harry and Robyn seemed wrong, why they had even matched up in the first place. At least he could discount monetary gain as a motive for Robyn Kinross. The family was visibly wealthy, with a long-established property, classy E-Types and the attitude that went with that.

  Who else then? What about Hilltop’s neighbours, he wondered? Colston had close dealings with Xavier Guiney, but was Guiney guilty of anything other than chronic laziness? There had been a dispute with the Bigelows over the bull they had sold him, and who knew what else now that there was only one side of the story to be told. Raf Agostini the horse dealer had also been close enough to Colston to be of interest. The pair must have had many conversations and deals over horseflesh. A falling-out was always easy to imagine in the horse racing business.

  And they were only the suspects Cole knew about. At the speed Harry Colston was racing downhill there must have been many others he’d sideswiped along the way. He had no doubt he’d run into a more people with grievances before the ride was over.

  Pinning each sheet to the board, he stood back and stared at them. He could deal with the names on the board, the here and now, but more difficult to unearth would be the buried history that might lead him to the reason for the Colstons’ deaths. What had Robyn Kinross said to him about voices whistling down the wire? They were rattling through his head now, too. Voices he couldn’t yet quite hear. They were the ghosts of the Colstons’ past, perhaps, and maybe also of the Kinross’s. And if not Harry, had Dianne Colston been the real target? It was universally agreed that Harry was a wastrel and a hopeless farmer, although a likeable enough person. The same couldn’t have been said about his wife. No one appeared to have a kind word to say about her.

  If he was certain of one thing, it was that two people had pushed the Colstons’ car into the train’s path. And the odds were better of a mistake coming from either of two than from one alone.

  At lunchtime, and still waiting for his car, Cole decided he’d take one of the police cars home and try to broker a peace with Nancy, but he found her hung-over and combative.

  ‘How are you getting on with that new girl?’ she asked accusingly.

  ‘Senior Constable Sheridan is settling in well with everyone, and is doing a good job,’ he answered.

  ‘I’ll bet she is.’

  ‘You don’t know her, Nance. You shouldn’t be like that about someone you haven’t even met.’

  ‘But I know you,’ she said, blearily focussed on him.

  Cole got up from the table.

  ‘I don’t think you do, not lately,’ he said.

  Outside it was grey and gloomy, the air feather still. The sun wouldn’t pierce the clouds all day and Cole felt sick knots in his stomach, and knew he shouldn’t head back to the station just yet, that he should give it time to pass. Instead, he drove out to the Kinross property, not bothering to call ahead first.

  A one-man reception party in the form of Bill Kinross was waiting for him at the top of his driveway. Cole was wary, not just because of what he’d heard about the family’s supposed madness, from Xavier Guiney and others, but also because Kinross was a big man with a known temper. He stood with arms folded as Cole got out of his car.

  ‘It’s just a courtesy visit. I wanted to see if you’d had any more trouble with missing stock,’ Cole told him.

  ‘It’s a long way to come to tell me that,’ Kinross said suspiciously.

  ‘Not really. I like to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘And so do I,’ Kinross said, trying to stare him down but failing as Cole held his nerve and his position.

  ‘So, no more trouble to report, Mr Kinross?’

  Kinross saw that Cole wouldn’t be bullied, and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  He said, ‘No, not lately. But I keep my eye closest to home,’ he said, in a thinly veiled reference to his neighbours.

  Both men relaxed then, as they stood talking about the many ways cattle and sheep could be stolen, how a fence might be cut in the middle of the night, stock shepherded onto a truck, and their flesh displayed in a butcher’s shop window the next morning with no inkling of where it came from. Cole was sympathetic to the farmer who in turn saw that Cole knew his business.

  Whoever had been stealing Kinross’s stock, Cole thought, they had been wise to stop, however. There remained in Kinross’s voice a slightly menacing tone, and if Kinross ever caught the thieves in the act he knew there wouldn’t be a pretty resolution to the story.

  ‘All butchered meat looks the same. The trick is to catch them before it gets to that stage,’ Kinross noted as Cole saw Robyn Kinross skipping down the house’s front steps.

  Bill Kinross was a gruff man, but as he watched his daughter approaching Cole knew he had a very soft spot for her, that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to try to make her happy. He thought of Vicky visiting he and Nancy soon, and understood how Kinross felt. Fathers and daughters.

  ‘Hello, senior sergeant. How lovely to see you!’

  Robyn Kinross’s voice rang with jollity. She was rugged up against the weather in a knit
ted dress and scarf.

  The warm look father gave daughter made it clear she hadn’t mentioned their meeting in town, but with Cole she picked up from where she’d left off, being friendly and welcoming to him.

  ‘I just came to see your father about the missing stock,’ Cole explained.

  ‘Then, while you’re here, I should show you around,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been here before, have you?’

  Cole admitted he hadn’t, to which the farmer added that he had work to get back to and would leave them to it if they didn’t mind. Only the briefest glance thrown back over his shoulder told Cole that the Kinross patriarch hadn’t yet relinquished all his suspicions about him.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said to Cole as they began their tour of the farm. ‘He’s really as meek as a lamb when you know him. Come this way, Lloyd. You don’t mind me calling you that, do you? I can be formal if you like,’ she said, tongue-in-cheek.

  ‘No, Lloyd is fine, Robyn.’

  The property was impressive, even to someone with an untrained eye. Over the fences Cole saw the first of Kinross’s well maintained, green paddocks, where there wasn’t a tussock or thistle to be seen. His daughter drew out the boundary lines with her hand, teased out the history of the property and how it came to be settled. The first Kinross’s, two brothers, arrived in the 1860s when there was only a scattering of white people in the district, and neighbours could be ten or twenty miles apart. There were no roads, no railway, no post, no towns. There was, however, a surfeit of land, and the Kinross brothers proved adept at selecting promising, well-watered tracts. They also had fortune with them, their first years being a period of good rainfall and verdant ground. As they cleared scrub and trees, knocked up their first, rude wooden fences and dug wells, they were able to establish a firm foothold on the country before the first drought struck.

  One run became two for the Kinross’s as other pastoralists came and went. Hamlets began appearing as children did too, schools and churches bringing learning and spiritual comfort to this far-flung outpost of the new colony. With time came the first railway, the centre of population gravitating to Mitchell when the railway went through it. The beginnings of irrigation in the 1890s gave stability and water security to farmers and orchardists sorely in need of it over the years. From that period on, she explained, the district really began to flourish.