Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

‘He might have known I came up ten years ago. He wouldn’t have known that I settled here permanently. For all he knew, I could be anywhere.’

  But Graham was shaking his head. ‘The general opinion seems to be that it’s related to the . . . involvement . . . all of you had back then.’

  ‘Have you found any proof of that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wouldn’t believe it even if you had. None of us were like that. There was no need to be.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t think so.’

  ‘I know so.’

  He sighed and shook his head, shuffling some papers around on his desk. ‘Like I said, I’m only assisting on this whole thing, George. It’s a homicide investigation. I’ve been providing some manpower and they’ve kept me informed as a courtesy, but how the investigation goes, and what leads they choose to follow, that’s not up to me.’

  ‘I understand that, Graham. But he was my friend once. I need to know.’

  Another sigh. ‘All right. Officially, though, I’m only telling you this in the hope it might suggest someone or something to you, to help with our inquiries. And it’s strictly confidential, you understand.’

  I nodded and waited.

  ‘Well, quite a bit has turned up so far. We found a car, for one thing. Halfway down the range, shoved into a gully. Keys were in the ignition.’

  ‘It was Charlie’s?’

  ‘Actually, it was reported stolen two mornings ago. It belongs to a Uniting Church society down in Brisbane that runs hostels and halfway houses for recovering addicts and alcoholics. We rang them and mentioned Charlie’s name, and they said he’d been staying in one of their hostels recently. He knew the place well and would’ve been able to get the keys if he’d wanted them. It would explain how he got up here at least. Anyway, we know it was him because we took his prints and they match the ones on the car.’

  ‘Charlie wasn’t a car thief.’

  ‘Oh? So he only broke some laws . . .’

  ‘I just mean it’s odd.’

  ‘A lot of this is odd. We got other prints too. There are lots of them around the substation of course, most of them from power workers we assume, and some of them are Charlie’s. But do you remember all those cans and bottles?’

  I remembered. The concrete floor of the substation, cans with beer frothed at their mouths, the empty bottles lying on their sides. ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’re clean as a whistle. No prints at all.’

  I thought about that and came up with nothing but phantoms.

  ‘We’ll want prints from you, by the way,’ Graham said, neutral, ‘just to be sure.’

  I nodded. ‘What about Charlie and the way he died?’

  ‘That’s not so good either. The pathologist did him last night and the Brisbane detectives got the first report this morning. He was alive when he was strung up against the switchboard, and all the burns to his back were made while he was alive. They were quite specifically done, enough to hurt certainly, and leave marks, but not to kill, because the current was so localised.’

  ‘Jesus . . .’

  ‘Yes. So obviously the desire was torture of some sort, not homicide. At least not at first. And whoever was doing it had to know a fair bit about electrical stuff.’ He paused. ‘Any of this suggest anything to you?’

  ‘No.’

  Graham pondered the wall.

  I said, ‘So how did he die?’

  His gaze shifted back to me. ‘The most serious burns, those associated with the fatal electrical charge, have an entry point at his genitals and exit points at his wrists and ankles, where they were attached to the metal framework of the switchboard. This is a different thing altogether. A major charge went through his whole body and completely fried his system.’

  I remembered the blackened flesh around his wrists. But the rest . . . I hadn’t even thought to look.

  ‘So he was just . . . burnt . . . all those times on his back? And then he was given one big shock to finish him off?’

  Graham thought, pushed at more papers. ‘That’s not the theory we have right now.’

  ‘Well?’

  But it wasn’t something Graham wanted to tell me. ‘What I mean is, he wasn’t killed by the wires they were using to burn him with. Certainly whoever was doing this seemed keen not to do anything so drastic with the power supply that it would crash the substation, not before they were finished anyway. I say ‘they’ because the theory is there was more than one person there. All that alcohol, for one thing. A lot for one person to drink.’

  ‘Charlie might have been drinking. He had . . .’ I paused, looking for the words, ‘a problem with alcohol.’

  Graham nodded. ‘We assumed that, from the hostel. And the pathologist said his liver showed signs of chronic abuse. And certainly there was alcohol in his system, a lot of it. That’s part of what makes what they did to him so terrible. But there were two bottles of vodka there, and a dozen cans of beer. Charlie had only vodka in his stomach. And even then, we don’t think he could have drunk both bottles.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what happened.’

  Graham debated with himself for a long moment, and gave in. ‘The power boys say the substation finally blew because moisture was introduced into the switchboard and shorted the whole place. That moisture we at first assumed was alcohol, but it wasn’t. It was urine.’

  I tried to make sense of it, remembering the smell, entwined with the alcohol. ‘Whose?’ I said, baffled.

  ‘Charlie’s, of course.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Graham fixed me with eyes serious and tired. ‘He was hanging there, right, up against the switchboard, and he’s getting tortured. God knows how long, or what state he was in by the end of it. Meanwhile they’re filling him up with vodka. A lot of it. Eventually, you know what has to happen. Think about it. He would have fought it, but in the end, there’s only so long you can last . . .’

  I thought, but the only thing that came was something monstrous.

  Graham was nodding.

  ‘We assume the people doing this to him knew this as well—had him arranged that way against the switchboard for that very reason, possibly, and kept making him drink. The urine goes straight into the switchboard and bang, he’s got thousands of volts running through him, from his penis through his whole body to his extremities. It kills him. The substation shorts out. Whoever was there with him has had their fun now, and they get the hell away. An hour later, the power truck arrives, and you know the rest.’

  He was angry, staring at me.

  ‘They might have kept him there for hours, waiting for it, zapping him from time to time to keep things lively. He would have known what was going to happen, fought it.’

  I shook my head, disbelieving. ‘Charlie was . . . he had a brain injury. He wasn’t fully aware any more. That’s what I’ve been told anyway. I don’t know how much he would have understood.’

  ‘You think that makes it better?’

  I couldn’t answer. All I felt was nausea. Not like that, no one deserved to go like that. And he was old, he was weak and already long beaten. Why? Why inflict something so slow, so agonising? It was only Charlie. Poor, retarded Charlie. But Graham’s eyes were still on me, and there was no sympathy in them, for Charlie or anyone.

  ‘If this was any of your old friends, you’d better tell me,’ he said, ‘because maybe you don’t know them as well as you think you do.’

  EIGHT

  I fled the police station.

  A misty rain swirled along the main street and I walked headlong into it, my face to the sky. Tiny droplets stung my skin, cold and clear, and I breathed in gulps of wet air. In times past I would have gone straight to the nearest bar and blotted the whole thing out. I would not and could not go that way any more. Even the thought of alcohol only took me back to Charlie, a vodka bottle raised to his mouth by an unknown hand, the fire burning down his throat, choking and fighting and the pressure building in his bladder no
matter what he did . . .

  I walked.

  Not far this time, for the main street of Highwood was not very long, and the offices of the Highwood Herald were only halfway down. Around me the town seemed strange and new, a mirage that had been fractured. That something like this could happen here made Highwood seem sinister, a backwoods community of secrets and violence. Was it someone from town, someone I knew? Was it someone watching me now? With the wind and the rain there were few people on the footpaths, but I felt their stares as I passed. I felt suspicious of everyone and they, too, were suspicious of me—they all knew, it was my friend who had died, my history that had crept up into the mountains. I was an outsider again, someone to be observed. Ten years. Ten years and I’d almost been accepted. But that was all gone again now.

  I didn’t want this. Why had Charlie come here? Why had he died here? There were substations all over the country, there were dozens of little towns just like Highwood—why this one? Why my town?

  And then I remembered Charlie, his empty, crumpled face, and felt ashamed.

  It didn’t matter. No matter what Graham or the detectives might think, none of us from the old days was capable of anything like that. Charlie had been in prison since then. Who knew what sort of people he’d met in jail, or what sort of trouble he’d come across? That was where the police should be looking. There were killers in prisons. Psychopaths. People who could do the sort of thing that had been done to him.

  People who had nothing whatever to do with me.

  And Graham had mentioned a clinic, a hostel for addiction treatment. Maybe that was where the answers lay. Addicts could do anything. They could go completely crazy.

  Nothing to do with me either.

  But the weight was still there, pressing on my heart.

  I reached the Highwood Herald offices.

  As always, the counter was manned by our ancient secretary, Mrs Hammond. Her first name was Vivien, but with the exception of her dead husband, there was only one person who was allowed to use it, and that was Gerry, not me. A lifelong resident in Highwood, and at the paper, Mrs Hammond was one of those who, even before recent events, had never fully approved of my presence in town.

  She was not alone. A man was leaning on the counter, talking with her. The conversation stopped as I entered. No difficulty guessing, then, what the topic was. And the man was not someone I was in any mood be seeing right now.

  ‘Hello Stanley,’ I said.

  He looked as thin and bitter as he had the last time I’d seen him, and he smiled at me without any friendliness whatsoever. ‘George.’

  Mrs Hammond only disliked me with the basic suspicion that the old always held towards a stranger, perhaps, but Stanley Smith had much more personal reasons of his own. He loathed me. And though he rarely came down from his property up in the hills, the news that I was in trouble of a sort, especially of this sort, would have been more than he could resist.

  ‘Gerry around?’ I asked Mrs Hammond.

  She nodded, lips thin.

  I edged by them. Stanley shifted an elbow to make room, his smile still in place, the satisfaction in it palpable. ‘Back in the headlines I see, George.’

  I didn’t answer. There was no point engaging with someone like him. His hatred wasn’t even for me alone, it was for the whole system I represented. Or had represented. Instead I went straight on through and found Gerry in his office. He was staring at a computer screen.

  ‘What d’you think?’ he said, without turning.

  I looked over his shoulder. He was working on a headline.

  MYSTERY DEATH IN SUBSTATION—MAN ELECTROCUTED, TOWN BLACKED OUT.

  ‘Admirably reserved,’ I said, sinking into a chair.

  He nodded. ‘I thought about ‘‘The Lights Go Out In Highwood’’ or even just ‘‘Death Shocks Town’’—but I don’t know that anyone would really appreciate it.’

  ‘It’s no joke, Gerry.’

  He looked over. ‘I know that.’

  He sat back from the screen and reached for a cigarette. Gerry was seventy-three years old and his fingers were stained a mixture of yellow from the nicotine and a grimy black from a lifetime of newsprint, even though he rarely smoked any more and the Herald no longer ran its own presses. There was a long dim room at the back of the building where the machines had once been, but only their memory remained, and only on hot days, when the walls sweated and the air held the tang of clattering noise and steaming metal. These days the paper was typeset on computer, and printed by contract out of town, two editions a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. The entire staff was just Gerry and me, Mrs Hammond, and sometimes a student from the high school, on work experience and disillusioned about it as well.

  He lit up. ‘You been talking to Graham?’

  ‘Him, and a couple of detectives.’

  ‘Should I report you as a suspect?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  He gave a snort of disgust, puffed out smoke. ‘Did you get 46 anything useful from Graham? I’ve got bugger-all so far. And all joking aside, this is still the first murder we’ve had in years.’

  It was true enough, though Highwood had certainly known deaths before, even violent ones. The Herald’s archives, dating back over one hundred years, testified to that. In its day the town had been a mean camp of loggers and timber getters, bullock drivers and sly grog sellers, and more than once an axe had found a human target. But now we lived in more civilised times, everyone agreed. And though during my ten years in Highwood I’d covered assaults and robberies, rapes and domestic abuse, in all that time I’d reported but one other murder. And in that case the man had called the police himself, and waited numbly by the body of his wife for them to arrive. Not much of a story. But a story was the last thing on my mind.

  ‘It was confidential,’ I said.

  ‘He was tortured then killed, that much is right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘I don’t. Neither do the police.’

  He peered at his story on the screen. ‘So far I’ve got just two paragraphs on the death, then the rest is all stuff about how people were late for work because their alarm clocks weren’t working, or how the kids were sent to school without a hot breakfast. And for once we were the first paper on the actual scene.’

  Gerry and his little paper were notable, in fact, for just one thing. The Highwood Herald was one of the last fully independent news-sheets in the state. Most other small town concerns had long since been bought out by one or other of the two big national chains, but Gerry despised both of them equally and had long refused to sell. Not that he was a threat to anyone else’s circulation, and even in Highwood, everyone read the Brisbane paper for serious news. Still, I suspected that one of the reasons Gerry had befriended and then finally hired me, wreck that I was at the time, was because I was a fugitive, sacked and disgraced, from one of his syndicated enemies in the city.

  And for that I’d told him more about my past than anyone else in the town, even Emily.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again, ‘but really, there are no theories yet.’

  ‘You think not? I’ve been getting calls all day. The whole town is agog, I can tell you. If I could print theories I’d have ten pages.’

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘Most people seem to favour a gang killing. One report has it he was machine-gunned to death, not electrocuted. Someone else said the substation was regularly used as a drug pick-up, and that this was a deal gone wrong. Apparently there were piles of cocaine everywhere. Someone else said it was Nazi skinheads—one of the power workers has been quoted as saying there were swastikas in blood on the walls. People have a real bugbear about neo-Nazis around here, ever since those high school kids shaved their heads. Another version of that says it was Satanists who have been holding black masses out there, and that instead of swastikas it was upside-down crosses and 666 everywhere, and a goat’s head on the body. Or else he was part of a paedop
hilia ring and did things to kids out there and some parent finally caught him and he was only getting what he deserved.’

  ‘Which one do you favour?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  I was sick of the conversation. ‘There was nothing on the walls. There wasn’t anything.’

  ‘Just lots of empty beer cans?’

  ‘You heard that?’

  ‘People haven’t been completely uncooperative.’

  ‘Well, yes, beer cans. And bottles of vodka.’

  And that was all I could say. Gerry smoked on, thoughtful.

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ he said finally.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What’re your plans?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything I should do, or shouldn’t do. I don’t see if this is linked to me or not. I can’t really see how it could be.’

  ‘Something from your Brisbane days, maybe?’

  ‘None of that stuff back then was anything like this.’

  He shrugged. ‘I had Stanley Smith in here a minute ago. He doesn’t agree. He thinks this is all about the old days.’

  ‘You know what he’s like about that. Stanley is crazy.’

  ‘A little, but he’s still right about some things. Those times always had their ugly side, George. Maybe you never saw it, but don’t kid yourself.’

  I was determined not to think that way. ‘It could still just be a coincidence. Charlie has had a whole other life since then, and it’s not as if he died in my house or anything. The substation is ten miles away.’

  It sounded like a wish, a prayer I hoped might be answered. What I needed most of all was for there to be no connection at all between me and Charlie’s death. Apart from everything else, my position in the town and the suspicions of the police, the idea that I might be somehow responsible yet again, however remotely, for bringing destruction into his life . . .

  Gerry was staring at me, dubious.

  ‘It really might mean nothing,’ I said, as if praying could make it true.

  Gerry let it be. ‘Well, I can hold the fort here for a while, if you’d like.’

  ‘Thanks.’