No Safe Place

by Jenny Spence

  They all look blank.

  “Bloody exes,” says our hostess. “My daughter’s went all the way to Coober Pedy. Last heard of. Maybe you should look there.”

  The other old guy, the silent one, gets up slowly and painfully and brings both glasses over to the bar for a refill. He digs deep into both pockets and counts out a small pile of coins.

  A young woman with a whingeing toddler firmly attached to one leg comes through with my steak sandwich. It’s enormous, with a mountain of shredded lettuce and plenty of tomato sauce. I look at it with dread, but when I take a bite the steak is excellent, juicy and succulent and done to a turn.

  “Aileen,” says the older woman. “Have you ever heard of people from Newcastle Uni doing some work around here?”

  “Don’t be a dill, Mum. They were those people digging those holes out Lonely Plains.”

  “Oh, them. With the nutty professor.”

  “Sounds right,” I say. “The sister said some professor gave him the job.”

  “Them, yeah,” says the older woman. “Young blokes had a drink here a few times. I only seen the prof once. They reckoned he was a teetotaller. All young blokes, though,” she adds, giving me an appraising look as if she’s thinking ‘cougar’. I gaze levelly back at her.

  “Up themselves,” sniffs Aileen.

  “Never seen anyone else with them,” says her mother.

  “Saw Fred Hollis with them once or twice,” contributes the old bloke, who’s been all ears.

  “She’s not after a local, she’s after someone from out of town!” shouts our hostess. God knows why she would imagine he’s deaf.

  “Who’s Fred Hollis?” I ask.

  “Yeah, whatever happened to Fred Hollis?” asks Aileen.

  “Wasn’t it his land they were digging up, out the Lonely Plains road?” says her mother.

  “No, Jean, it was further out, right out the end,” says the old bloke. “But I reckon he was doing a bit of work for them. He was pretty short of a quid there.”

  “There you are, then,” says Jean. “You can always go out and ask Fred Hollis.”

  “Where would I find him?” I ask.

  “He’s out the Lonely Plains Road. Now, you go straight through out of town on the main road. It’s not the next turn-off to the left –”

  “He’s sold up,” interrupts the other old bloke in lugubrious tones.

  “Who says?” His mate is incredulous.

  “He could be right,” says Aileen. “I haven’t seen Fred’s truck around for a couple of months.”

  “That’s bullshit, Frank. I’d have heard about it,” says Aileen’s mother, affronted.

  Frank shrugs and sips his beer. “He’s gorn,” he says flatly.

  “I might as well check him out anyway,” I say. “Maybe he hasn’t settled yet?”

  Jean gives me elaborate directions, glaring at her antagonist, who returns his attention to the bottom of his beer glass. I pay for my lunch and go out into the suddenly chilly afternoon, but then a thought strikes me and I go back.

  “You said that professor was a teetotaller?”

  “That’s what the boys said,” replies Jean. “And when he came in here he had that same soft drink you had.”

  They all look at me accusingly. Even Frank looks up from the bottom of his glass.

  “Hot day in summer,” he says indignantly. “A man’d want a beer.”

  38

  Following Jean’s directions, I find the badly-marked turn-off for Lonely Plains Road a couple of kilometres further on, and swing the wheel to the left. The narrow road is sealed for a few hundred metres, then settles into a corrugated unsealed boneshaker. At least it’s rained in the last day or so, and there’s no dust.

  On either side there’s beautiful farmland, fallow at this time of year, with lovely mature trees at the roadside. Birds reel and dive after insects. I see galahs and other parrots I can’t identify, a flash of iridescent turquoise on one of them. A hawk drifts overhead.

  They told me Fred’s house would be the first one I’d see, and I nearly miss it. The roof is only just visible off to my right, surrounded by dark green foliage, and I’m past his entrance before I notice it.

  I back up and get out of the car, surveying the gate. There’s no mistaking the shiny chain wound around the post, and the big new padlock. The letterbox is bulging, mostly with junk mail, but when I look inside I can see a few bills in there as well.

  I didn’t come all this way just to turn around, so I climb over the gate and walk up the long driveway.

  The house has an abject look, the paint on the front door peeling, weeds growing up between the pavers on the front path. The place must have been in Fred’s family for two or three generations, a once-gracious homestead with wide verandas, tall European trees for shade, an orchard and a veggie garden, now a sea of dandelions.

  The curtains are drawn but they’re sparse, and I can see through to the unfurnished rooms, with bits of rubbish strewn here and there. Fred’s well and truly gone.

  I walk back to the car and drive further. There’s another farm, the house not far from Fred’s across the paddocks. The gate’s shut but not padlocked and there’s no sign of life. A tractor sits in a half-cleared paddock. Beyond that, there’s not much at all. Land that looks as though it should be productive has been neglected. Scrubby, native trees are growing back here and there, and a couple of fences have seen better days. The road itself is starting to fail when I come upon signs of digging, off to the left: little heaps of gravel, some steel stakes left lying, a bit of rusted equipment whose purpose is unclear.

  I squat and examine the scanty evidence. Any holes that were dug here have been filled in again. There’s water seeping out of the base of one of the piles, but there’s plenty of water lying around in puddles from the rain, so I couldn’t say that means anything. I take a few pictures with my phone, but I can’t imagine what use they’ll be.

  I notice the phone’s got no reception out here. That’d be right – Steve and Luke got me a good phone with a cheap carrier. It wouldn’t bother them, because they never leave the city.

  Reluctantly, I climb back in the car, turn around and head back the way I came.

  As I’m passing Fred’s gate I see an old ute approaching from the opposite direction. We both move over to give each other space on the narrow road, and each raise a finger in the universal country greeting. In my rear vision mirror, I see him turn into the driveway after Fred’s and stop to open the gate.

  I brake so hard I nearly go into a skid, then carefully do another U-turn and stop outside where the man drove in.

  He’s grey-haired and scrawny, and could be any age from fifty to seventy. I walk up the drive, setting off a cacophony of barking from his dogs, chained to a shanty town of kennels. He’s pulling bags of fertiliser and cans of petrol off the tray of the ute, and he goes into freeze-frame when he sees me.

  “G’day,” I say, a bit self-consciously.

  “The highway’s that way.” He points. “Where ya headed?”

  “Yeah, I’m not actually lost,” I say. “I was looking for your neighbour, Fred.”

  “Fred? He’s moved. Sold up.”

  “Yes, I saw that. Looks like I missed him,” I say.

  The man goes on unloading his ute and I stand watching.

  “I was hoping Fred could tell me a bit about that work they were doing up the road, digging those holes. Apparently he had something to do with it?”

  “What, you from the university?”

  “No, from the city. I’m working on the report, writing it all up. My name’s Jane.”

  “Oh, yeah. Bob McLeod. Pleased to meetcha.”

  He finishes unloading everything and straightens up.

  “Yeah, I don’t think Fred knew that much about what they were doing. He told me it didn’t make much sense really,” he says and sets off round the side of the house. “Wanna cup of tea?”

  He doesn’t wait for me to answer. In normal cir
cumstances I wouldn’t follow a strange man into his house, but compared to what I’ve been dealing with I can’t conjure up any fear of Bob McLeod. We go up a couple of steps and through a tattered screen door into the kitchen. It’s spartan and shabby, but reasonably well organised – the kitchen of a single man. There are dishes in the sink, but they’re just today’s accumulation: he’ll do one big wash-up tonight. The lino floor is worn and stained, but it’s not dirty. All the crockery is old, cheap and chipped. At least it’s warm. He probably piled wood into the firebox before he went into town.

  He pulls the kettle to the front part of the stove, where it starts chattering immediately, then puts tea leaves in an ugly brown china pot. Meanwhile, he goes on talking.

  “See, Fred really just ran messages for them. When they needed stuff it’d get delivered to Quirindi or somewhere, and he’d drive in and pick it up. Or he’d go off and get food for them, or he’d take people to the airport at Tamworth. He reckoned it was a great lurk. Easy money. He’d pretty much given up on the farming, old Fred.”

  “Then he sold up?”

  “That was the biggest joke of all. The company that’s wanting to put in this mine, they paid him top dollar for his land, and Fred reckons the mine’ll never go in.”

  “Really?” I say. “How come?”

  He pours tea into thick white mugs.

  “I don’t know the ins and outs of it. Something about those holes they dug. It was supposed to show some new way of mining they was gonna use. Only Fred reckons it was a disaster.” He chortles. “Every time he went out there, some new thing was goin’ wrong. Water getting in, sides collapsing – you name it. They wrote it all up, it was all very proper.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s why he couldn’t believe it when they went ahead and bought his property. Settled real quick, too. Big money.”

  “Lucky Fred,” I say, sipping my scalding tea. “Where is he now?”

  “He went to Perth. His daughter’s there. Couple of kiddies.”

  “It’ll be pretty quiet for you here.”

  “Yeah,” he says, looking shifty. “Looks like I might be making tracks meself.”

  “Did they make you an offer too?”

  “It’s not the mining company. Some other crowd. Graphite Holdings, they’re called. Nice looking young sheila – real city type. I don’t honestly know why they want the place, but I’m not complaining.” He grins, showing bad teeth.

  “So you’re sick of life on the land?”

  “Sick’s the word,” he says sombrely. “It’s me prostrate. I’m too far from the hospital here, and the doc says I shouldn’t be living on me own.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “But they’ve got great treatments these days. You’ll be right.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be right.”

  I’ve remembered why Graphite Holdings rings a bell.

  “This young city sheila,” I say. “You met her, did you? Was her name Helena?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Helena. Came up here with her feller, both wearing that RM Williams clobber.” He chuckles.

  “Did you catch the bloke’s name?”

  “Nah, dunno who he was.”

  “Right.”

  I get up and rinse my cup in the sink. “Well, thanks for the tea. I’d better be on my way.”

  “Yeah.” He doesn’t get up. “Sorry you missed Fred.”

  The dogs don’t bark again when I reappear at the top of the drive, just watch me with narrowed eyes. Then I hear a shout behind me.

  He’s holding a thick brown folder. It’s stained, tattered on the edges and tied up with string.

  “Maybe you should take this,” he says.

  “Yeah?” I walk back to meet him.

  “Fred thought it should stay in the area, but now I’m going I don’t know who’d want to look after it. Maybe it should be with that report thing?”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “This is how they wrote it all up out there,” he explains. “See? For each one, they’d write in all the figures and stuff, and someone would sign it, and someone else would witness it. All done proper, like. Fred witnessed a lot of them. They did two copies of this, and they put it all in their computers too.”

  “How come Fred had it?”

  “The prof asked him to hang onto this copy in case someone came back to redo any of the work, so they’d have all the results there. But no-one ever came back.”

  With trembling hands I take the folder from him.

  39

  With the folder tucked in my bag behind the seat I’m suddenly very afraid. In this open, deserted country I feel exposed and vulnerable, and I can think of a dozen scenarios in which Helena and her minions could find out that I’m on the road with the professor’s real report.

  I breathe a little easier when I get back onto the sealed road, but it’s still pretty quiet and I feel conspicuous. My plan was to stay the night in Quirindi, but when I get there and see how small the town is I decide against it. I stop on the outskirts and take stock.

  In my imagination, if I turn back I’ll come face to face with pursuers racing up from Sydney, so I adopt my usual strategy of going sideways. The bird’s-eye view on the GPS shows a minor road that will take me east onto the New England Highway.

  “Well, what do you think?” I ask it. “Is it a decent road?”

  The modulated voice is silent on this subject.

  I figure out how to set the route.

  “What do you reckon now?” I say.

  “Drive three kilometres and turn right,” is the bland reply.

  Before too long I’m admonishing my heartless guide. The road is narrow, in poor condition and utterly deserted. Darkness falls, and I drive on and on. At one point another car comes up behind me and hovers there, insistent high beam headlights in my rear vision mirror. My hands start shaking and I’m too scared to pull over and stop in case he’s come to kill me. I’m fumbling to turn on my phone, panic-stricken when he pulls out to overtake, his horn blaring angrily and I realise he’s just a hoonish country driver who’s annoyed because I was going too slowly for his liking.

  At last I emerge onto the highway, and not long afterwards the welcome lights of Tamworth spread out on the horizon. There’s a string of motels, and I choose one at random. Not surprisingly it has a country music theme. The sluttish girl at the desk accepts my cash without looking up from her Facebook, and I resist the temptation to write June Carter, Tammy Wynette or Mavis Staples in the register. Instead, I give Diana’s name and address.

  There’s a room service menu, so I call up and order the country vegetable soup. Then I get out my computer and find the section of the report that has all the details corresponding to the contents of the brown folder. It doesn’t take long to verify what I knew I was going to find: most of the results have been fiddled. The professor was free and honest with his handwritten assessments, and I suppose the correct information was entered into the computer at the time. But the results in the report I was given are completely fictitious.

  I push my computer aside and turn on the television to catch the seven o’clock news. There’s a knock on the door and I jump up and mute the television.

  “Who is it?” I call, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “Room service.”

  It’s the same girl, and she takes ages fumbling with dishes and stainless steel covers. When I turn back there’s a familiar building on the screen but with crime-scene tape plastered around it and police going in and out. An ambulance is in the background and a man in a suit, surely a senior detective, being interviewed. Water glistens behind the building. I dive for the remote control and get the sound back, but only in time to hear the reporter say: “Police are investigating. David Coleridge, Darling Harbour.”

  There’s a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and I scramble for my phone, which I’ve forgotten to turn back on. It takes ages to fire up. Four messages. I ignore that for the moment and
call Steve.

  “Where’ve you been?” he says.

  “Out of range. Is it Brett?”

  “Must be. They found him this afternoon. Electricians. They’re looking for you.”

  “What! Me?”

  “Get on the net,” he advises.

  I’m shaking, but I have to pull myself together. If I were a drinker maybe a whiskey or brandy would help, but in my case it would finish me off. I go out to the desk and negotiate a couple of hours of Internet access.

  Steve’s right. They’re not naming Brett or saying how he was killed, but there are “suspicious circumstances” and they’re looking for a woman who was known to have been in the building with “the deceased”. One of the news services even has a blurred picture of me – it’s the ID photo they took when I started the job.

  God! Has the girl at the desk seen this? No, probably not, and anyway she was so preoccupied with her Facebook, and then with the dishes, I don’t think she even looked at me.

  I feel sick. Poor, innocent, idiotic Brett. I was angry with him for selling me out, but I was the one who led him into a trap. Why didn’t I drag him out of there when I had the chance? And what kind of monster would just walk in there and shoot him without hesitation, just because he was there?

  Somewhere in the building a door slams, and my heart starts pounding like crazy. I can feel my palms go clammy, and I stand in the middle of the room clenching my fists and trying to breathe. Be rational, Elly. I think back over my journey from that building to here, and my rational mind tells me that I haven’t left a trail to follow, and I don’t think I’ve endangered anyone else. Jean and the old blokes at the pub? Bob McLeod? If anyone asks them questions, they’ll have no reason not to give straight answers, and they’ve got no idea where I am now. I’m safe and anonymous here.

  I fight down the fear, and in its place comes rage. My tormenter is no longer a shadow. I’m not going to pass him in the street and wonder, is it you? I know what he looks like now and I want to catch him, and what I really want is to kill him.

  I’d also like to catch Helena, with her neat little figure and her blow-dried hair, and get my hands around her throat and howl obscenities into her carefully made-up face. I think she has a splinter of ice in her heart, like the servants of the Snow Queen. Maybe I could shake it loose and make her see what she’s done.