The Broken Shore

by Peter Temple

  On the way back to the office, she dropped in on anyone who wasn’t quick enough to disappear.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Don’t know what the world’s coming to. Read the paper today?’ She pointed at her desk.

  Cashin reached for the Cromarty Herald. The front-page headlines said:

  ANGER MOUNTS

  ON CRIME WAVE

  Community calls for curfew

  ‘Curfew, mind you,’ said Cecily. ‘That’s not the way we want to go. Can’t have Neighbourhood Watch calling the shots. Old buggers with nothing better to do than stickybeak. Neighbourhood bloody Nazis.’

  Cashin read the story. Outrage at public meeting. Call for curfew on teenagers. Epidemic of burglaries and car thefts. Five armed robberies in two months. Sharp rise in assaults. Shop windows broken in the Whalers Mall. Lawless element in community. Time for firm action.

  ‘Aimed at the Abos,’ said Cecily, ‘always is. Every few years they get on to it again. You’d think the white trash were all at choir practice of a Saturday night. I can tell you, forty-four years in the courts in Cromarty, I’ve seen more Abos fitted up than I’ve had hot dinners.’

  ‘Not by the police, surely?’ said Cashin.

  Cecily laughed herself into a coughing fit. Cashin waited.

  ‘I hate to say this,’ Cecily said, taking the newspaper. ‘Don’t mind telling you I’ve voted Liberal all my life. But since this rag changed hands its mission in life is to get the Libs back in Cromarty. And that means bagging blacks every chance they get.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Cashin. ‘I want to ask you about Charles Bourgoyne. I gather you pay his bills.’

  Cecily didn’t want to change the subject.

  ‘Never thought I’d say something like that,’ she said. ‘Hope my dad’s not listening. You know Bob Menzies didn’t have a house to live in when he left Canberra?’

  ‘I didn’t know that, no. I’m a bit short of time.’

  A lie. Cashin knew how hard the ex-Prime Minister had done it because Cecily told him the story once or twice a month.

  ‘Paid for his own phone calls, Bob Menzies. Sitting up there in the Lodge in Canberra, when he rang his old mum, he put a coin in a box. Little money box. When it was full, he gave it to Treasury. Went into general revenue. Catch today’s pollies doing that? Take a coin out more likely. Rorters and shicers to a man. Did I tell you they wanted me to stand for Parliament? Told em, thanks very much, I’m already paid for being involved with crooks.’

  ‘Charles Bourgoyne,’ said Cashin. ‘I’ve come about him. You pay his bills.’

  Cecily blinked. ‘Indeed I do. Known Charles for a very long time. Clients of the firm, Dick and Charles, Bourgoyne & Cromie, we did all their work.’

  ‘Bourgoyne & Cromie’s a bit before my time. Who’s Dick?’

  ‘Charles’s dad. Bit of a playboy, Dick, but he ran the firm like a corner shop, argue the toss over a couple of quid. Not that he needed to. Go anywhere in this country, all the Pacific, bloody New Zealand, B&C engines everywhere. Put the lights on all over the outback. Powered the shearing stands, made a mint after the war, I can tell you. Whole world crying out for generators.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Dick kicked the bucket and Charles sold the business to these Pommy bastards. They never intended to keep the factory going. Just wanted to cut out the competition.’

  Cecily was staring out of the window, smoke curling through her fingers. ‘Tragedy,’ she said. ‘I remember the day they told everyone. Half Cromarty out of work at one fell swoop. Never worked again, most of them.’

  She scratched where an eyebrow had been. ‘Still, can’t blame Charles. They gave him assurances. No one blamed him.’

  ‘About the bills.’

  ‘Bills, yes. Since old Percy Crake had his stroke. Attend to matters on his behalf. Not that Charles couldn’t do it himself. Just likes to pretend he’s got better things to do.’

  Cecily took a final vicious drag on her cigarette and, without looking, inserted the butt into the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece. A hiss, the sound of silk brushing silk. Mrs McKendrick, her ancient secretary, put flowers in the two rooms twice a week, first emptying urns full of foul beer-dark water and Cecily’s swollen cigarette ends.

  ‘Who’d try to kill him?’ said Cashin.

  ‘Some passing hoon, I suppose. Country’s turning into America. Kill people for a few dollars, kill them for nothing. Thrills.’ A bulge moved in her cheeks, suggested something trying to escape. ‘Drugs,’ she said. ‘I blame it on drugs.’

  ‘What about close to home? Someone who knew him?’

  ‘Around here? If Charles Bourgoyne departs, it’ll be the biggest funeral since old Dora Campbell kicked it, now that was a send-off. A lovely man, Charles Bourgoyne, lovely. They don’t make gentlemen like that any more. He was a catch, I can tell you. Still, the girls all had long teeth by the time he married Susan Kingsley. They say old Dick told him to get married or kiss the fortune goodbye. Said he’d give it to the Cromarty old-age home.’

  ‘What happened to Erica’s father?’

  ‘Erica and Jamie’s father. Bobby Kingsley. Car smash. Had another woman with him unfortunately.’

  ‘Charles have enemies?’

  ‘Well, who knows? Bourgoyne Trust’s put hundreds of kids through uni. Plus Charles shells out to anyone comes along. Schools, art gallery, the Salvos, the RSL, you name it. Bailed out the footy club umpteen times.’

  ‘How does attending to Bourgoyne matters work?’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘The mechanics of it.’

  ‘Oh. Well, all the bills come here, credit card, everything. Every month, we send Charles a statement, he ticks them off, sends it back, we pay them out of a trust account. Pay the wages too.’

  ‘So you’ve got a record of all his financial dealings?’

  ‘Just his bills.’

  ‘From how far back?’

  ‘Not long. I suppose it’s seven, eight years. Since Crake’s stroke.’

  ‘Can I see your records?’

  ‘Confidential,’ she said. ‘Between solicitor and client.’

  ‘Client’s been bashed and left for dead,’ said Cashin.

  Cecily blinked a few times. ‘Not going to get me in trouble with the Law Institute this? Don’t want to have to ask bloody Rees for advice.’

  ‘Mrs Addison, it’s what you have to do. If you don’t, we’ll get a court order today.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose that changes things a bit. I’ll tell Mrs McKendrick to make copies. Can’t see what help it’ll be. You should be out looking for bloody druggies. What’s stolen from the house?’

  ‘The people who work at Bourgoyne’s,’ said Cashin, ‘what about their pay now?’

  Cecily raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘He’s not dead, you know. They’ll be paid until someone instructs me to stop. What would you expect?’

  Cashin got up. ‘The worst. That’s what police life teaches you.’

  ‘Cynical, Joe. In my experience, and I say that with…’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Addison. I’ll send someone for the copies. Where’s Jamie Bourgoyne?’

  ‘Drowned in Tasmania. Years ago.’

  ‘Not a lucky family then.’

  ‘No. Money can’t buy it. And it ends if Charles dies. The line’s broken. The Bourgoyne line’s ended.’

  The street was quiet, sunlight on the pale stone of the library. It had been the Mechanics’ Institute when it opened in the year carved above the door: 1864. Three elderly women were going up the steps, in single file, left hands on the metal balustrade. He could see their delicate ankles. Old people were like racehorses—too much depending on too little, the bloodline the critical factor.

  The Cashin bloodline didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘I CAN’T fix stuff like this for you, Bern,’ said Cashin. ‘I can’t fix anything. Sam’s in shit because he’s bad news and now he has to cop it.’

  They were in a s
hed like an aircraft hangar at his cousin Bern Doogue’s place outside Kenmare, a town twenty kilometres from Port Monro with a main street of boarded-up shops, two lingering pubs, a butcher, a milk bar and a video hire.

  Farmland had once surrounded the village of Kenmare like a green sea. Long backyards had run down to paddocks with milk cows oozing dung, to potato fields dense with their pale grenades. Then the farms were subdivided. Hardiplank houses went up on three-acre blocks, big metal sheds out the back. Now the land produced nothing but garbage and children, many with red hair. The blocks were weekend parking lots for the big rigs that rumbled in from every direction on Saturdays—Macks, Kenworths, Mans, Volvos, eighteen-speed transmission, 1800-litre tank, the owners’ names in flowery script on the doors, the unshaven, unslept drivers sitting two metres off the ground, spaced out and listening to songs of lost love and loneliness.

  The truckies had bought their blocks when land was cheap, fuel was cheap, freight rates were good and they were young and paunch-less. Now they couldn’t see their pricks without a mirror, the trucks sucked fifty-dollar notes, the freight companies screwed them till they had to drive six days, some weeks seven, to make the repayments.

  Cashin stood in the shed door and watched Bern splitting wood on his new machine, a red device that stood on splayed legs like a moon lander. He picked up a section of log, dropped it on the table against a thick steel spike, hit the trigger with a boot. A hydraulic ram slammed a splitter blade into the wood, cleaving it in half.

  ‘Well, Jesus,’ said Bern, ‘what’s the use of havin a fuckin copper in the family, I ask you.’

  ‘No use at all,’ Cashin said.

  ‘Anyway, it’s not like it’s Sam’s idea. He’s with these two Melbourne kids, city kids, the one breaks the fuckin car window with a bottle.’

  ‘Bern, Sam’s got Buckley’s. I’ll ring a lawyer, she’s good, she’ll keep him out of jail.’

  ‘What’s that gonna cost? Fuckin arm?’

  ‘It’ll cost what it costs. Otherwise, tell him to ask for the duty solicitor. Where’d you get this wood?’

  Bern put fingers under his filthy green beanie, exposed his black widow’s peak, scratched his scalp. He had the Doogue nose—big, hooked. It was unremarkable in youth, came with age to dominate the male faces.

  ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘is that a cop kind of question?’

  ‘I don’t care a lot about wood crime. It’s good-looking stuff.’

  ‘Fuckin prime beef, mate. Beefwood. Not your rotten Mount Gambier shit.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Seventy.’

  ‘Find your own lawyer.’

  ‘That’s a special fuckin family price. Mate, this stuff, it runs out the fuckin door.’

  ‘Let it run,’ Cashin said. ‘Got to go.’ He walked.

  ‘Hey, hey, Jesus, Joe, don’t be so fuckin difficult.’

  ‘Say hello to Leanne for me,’ Cashin said. ‘Christ knows what she did to deserve you. Must be something in another life.’

  ‘Joe. Mate. Mate.’

  Cashin was at the door. ‘What?’

  ‘Give and take, mate.’

  ‘Haven’t been talking to my mum, have you?’

  ‘Nah. Your mum’s too good for us. How’s sixty, you tee up the lawyer? Split, delivered, that’s fuckin cost, no labour, I’m takin a knock.’

  ‘Four for two hundred,’ Cashin said. ‘Neatly stacked.’

  ‘Shit, takin food out of your own family’s mouths. He’s up next week Wednesday.’

  ‘I’ll ring with an appointment time.’

  Bern smacked on another log, stamped on the trigger. There was a bang, bits of wood went everythere. ‘Fuck,’ he said. He pulled a big wood sliver out of the front of his greasy army surplus jumper.

  ‘This place’s a model of workplace safety,’ Cashin said. ‘Be on my way.’

  He went out into the grey day, into Bern’s two-acre backyard, a graveyard of cars, utes, trucks, machinery, windows, doors, sinks, toilet bowls, basins, second-hand timber, bricks. Bern followed him to his vehicle, parked in a clearing.

  ‘Listen, Joe, there’s somethin else,’ he said. ‘Debbie says the Piggot kid, I forget his name, there’s hundreds of em, she says he’s sellin stuff at school.’

  Cashin got in, wound down the window. ‘Got something against drugs, Bern? Since when?’

  Bern screwed up his eyes, scratched his head through the beanie with black-rimmed nails. ‘That’s totally fuckin different, we’re talking about sellin hard stuff to kids here.’

  ‘Why’d she tell you?’

  ‘Well, not me. Told her mum.’

  ‘Why?’

  Bern cleared his throat and spat, bullethole lips, a sound like a peashooter. ‘Leeane found some stuff. Not Debbie’s, just holdin it for this other girl bought it from a Piggot.’

  Cashin started the vehicle. ‘Bern,’ he said, ‘you don’t want your cousin the cop cracking down on teenage drug-taking in Kenmare. Think about it. Think about the Piggots. There’s an army of them.’

  Bern thought about it. ‘Yeah, well, that’s probably the strength of it. Mark me for the dog straight off, wouldn’t the bastards. Boong dog. Mind you, comes to Doogues against Piggots, they wouldn’t take a round off us.’

  ‘We don’t want it to come to that. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Wait, wait. You can do somethin else for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put the hard word on Debbie. She won’t listen to her mum and I’m a fuckin non-starter.’

  ‘I thought she was just holding the stuff?’

  Bern shrugged, looked away. ‘To be on the safe side,’ he said. ‘Can’t hurt, can it?’

  Cashin knew there was no way out. Next he would be reminded of how Bern had risked death by jumping onto the back of mountainous, cretinous Terry Luntz and hung on like a chimp on a gorilla, choking the school bully with a skinny forearm until he relaxed his deadly squeeze.

  ‘What time’s she get back from school?’ Cashin said.

  ‘About four.’

  ‘I’ll come round one day, point out the dangers.’

  ‘You’re a good bloke, Joe.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I just don’t want to hear about fucking Terry Luntz again. He would’ve let me go.’

  Bern smiled his sly, dangerous Doogue smile. ‘Never. Blue in the face, tongue stickin out the side of your mouth. You had fuckin seconds left.’

  ‘In that case, what took you so long?’

  ‘Prayin for guidance, mate. What excuse you cunts got for takin so long to catch our beloved Mr Charlie Bourgoyne’s killer?’

  ‘The victim’s not being squeezed by a fat boy. There’s no hurry. What’ve you got against Bourgoyne?’

  ‘Nothin. The local saint. Everyone loves Charlie. Rich and idle. You know my dad used to work there, Bourgoyne & Cromie? Charlie sold it out under em. Shot the fuckin horse.’

  Cashin passed three vehicles on the way home, knew them all. At the last crossroads, two ravens pecking at vermilion sludge turned on him the judgmental eyes of old men in a beaten pub.

  IT WAS darkening when Cashin reached home, the wind ruffling the trees on the hill, strumming the corrugated iron roof. He got the fire going, took out a six-pack of Carlsberg, put on L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti, sank into the old chair, cushion in the small of his back. Tired in the trunk, hurting in the pelvis, pains down his legs, he swallowed two aspirins with the first swig of beer.

  Life’s short, son, don’t drink any old piss.

  Singo’s advice, Singo always drank Carlsberg or Heineken.

  Cashin sat and drank, stared at nothing, hearing Domingo, thinking about Vickie, about the boy. Why had she called him Stephen? Stephen would be nine now, Cashin could make the calculation, he knew the day, the night, the moment. And he had never spoken to him, never touched him, never been closer than twenty metres to him. Vickie would not bring him to the hospital when Cashin asked her to. ‘He’s got a father and it isn’t you,’ she said.


  Nothing moved her.

  All he wanted was to see him, talk to him. He didn’t know why. What he knew was that the thought of the boy ached in him like his broken bones.

  At 7 pm, on the second beer, he put on the television.

  In what is feared to be another drug underworld killing, a 50-year-old Melbourne accountant, Andrew Gabor, of Kew, was this morning shot dead in front of his fifteen-year-old daughter outside exclusive St Theresa’s girls’ school in Malvern.

  Footage of a green BMW outside the school, men in black overcoats beside it. Cashin recognised Villani, Birkerts, Finucane.

  Two gunmen fled the scene in a Ford Transit van, later found in Elwood.

  A van being winched onto the police flatbed tow truck to be taken to the forensic science centre.

  Police appealed to anyone who saw two men wearing dark clothing and baseball caps in the van or at or near the scene around 7.30 am to contact CrimeStoppers.

  It is believed that police today questioned Mr Gabor’s nephew, Damian Gabor, a rave party and rock concert entrepreneur. In 2002, Mr Gabor was found not guilty of assaulting Anthony Metcalf, a drug dealer later found dead in a rubbish skip in Carnegie. He had been shot seven times.

  On the monitor behind the news reader Cashin saw The Heights filmed from the television helicopter, vehicles all over the forecourt, the search of the grounds in progress.

  Following another crime of violence, the seventy-six-year-old head of one of the state’s best-known families is tonight fighting for his life in an intensive-care unit after being brutally assaulted at his home outside Cromarty.

  Charles Bourgoyne was this morning found near death in the sitting room of the family mansion. He was flown to King George’s Hospital by helicopter.

  Mr Bourgoyne, noted for his philanthropy, is the son of Richard Bourgoyne, one of the founders of Bourgoyne & Cromie, legendary engine manufacturers. Charles Bourgoyne sold the family firm to British interests in 1976. His twin older brothers both died in World War II, one of them executed by the Japanese.