Before It Breaks

by Dave Warner

  Worried about blood loss and hypothermia, Graeme Earle had bundled him into his car and driven hell for leather back to the main road calling for help while debating, should he drive to Beagle Bay where there were some rudimentary medical facilities or try and get all the way back to Broome where he might still need another ninety-minute race to Derby? This was some of the most isolated country in the world, one of the worst places to find yourself at the centre of a medical emergency. In the end, the army came to Clement’s aid. The worst of the winds had moved through and though it was still hairy, they’d had a chopper standing by for evacuations. They directed Earle to Beagle Bay where a chopper was waiting on the football oval with oxygen, fluids and drugs. They evacuated Clement direct to Derby. All of this, Shepherd related in his rather high voice with an edge of rapture so that Clement had the sensation of listening to an amateur calling a football game.

  From his surgeon Clement had learned he’d been rushed straight to surgery where for more than two hours they had worked on him, removing the arrowhead, repairing his right lung and then stitching him back up.

  ‘The main concern was blood loss and infection. We’ve got blood into you and hopefully there’ll be no infection. You also have a fractured rib from the arrow; can’t do much about that except tape you up, I’m afraid.’

  Graeme Earle had been forced to stay at Beagle Bay to pursue Bourke. To Shepherd’s annoyance, the three Perth detectives had been sent off to join him.

  ‘All the glory to them, us locals get to look for Osterlund, probably drowned by now if he wasn’t dead already,’ he offered without cheer.

  Risely was overseeing the Bourke operation but it would be another three or four hours before the weather permitted aerial surveillance. Earle was at Beagle Bay and the detectives on their way to join him.

  ‘So what happened? How’d he peg you?’ Shepherd asked it with complete insensitivity but Clement preferred that to somebody pussy-footing around. Clement told him as he remembered it but his mind was already moving forward to the question of Osterlund and he ended the story about himself abruptly. ‘Lisa must check Bourke’s car for soil, anything that might tell us where he went.’

  ‘She’s onto that, been onto it pretty much since they brought it in.’

  ‘Keep looking for CCTV footage of his car. He’s probably been out to wherever he buried him since he snatched him. Check the records, when he wasn’t working, when his roommates say he was out, that’s when he would have been on his way to him.’

  His mind was running now. Shepherd dutifully took notes.

  ‘It can’t be too far away because he’d have to drive out and back. I bet he filled his tank on the abduction day.’

  ‘But his mate bought the car and took it to Derby, that’ll screw up all the kilometres and fuel and everything.’

  ‘Find out how much petrol was in the car when the mate bought it, if he filled up, when, where, calculate the ks. Most likely Bourke headed into the desert, far enough for privacy but not so far he can’t get back. Forty minutes to an hour, plot it out on a map.’

  He sent Shepherd off immediately to work on it.

  That was two hours ago. Not long after Shepherd had gone he’d called Risely who was genuinely pleased to speak to him. No sign of Bourke yet. The search for Osterlund was continuing as best it could in the circumstances. They’d tried calling Bourke on the police radio but he was not responding. Manners and two others were checking CCTV footage for any signs of a white Rav4 since the abduction.

  ‘You might want to go back a few days before. He might have prepared somewhere,’ said Clement grimacing. He was still investigating the positions in which talking was possible without inflicting pain on himself.

  The cyclone was through, said Risely. Rain was still spitting from its tail but choppers and fixed wing would be up soon. He saw the only hope of finding Osterlund alive now was locating Bourke. Astuthi Osterlund had finally fallen apart and was being medicated so she could sleep.

  Clement ran his theory of a desert burial.

  ‘Even so, it’s too vast an area.’

  ‘Maybe not. They’ve had choppers and whatnot out the last few days reporting on the weather, maybe one of them saw a white car stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’

  Risely said he would try but Clement could sense doubt seeping down the line.

  ‘How about Lisa?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s processing the car but the roommate contaminated it driving it around Derby.’

  ‘Has anybody spoken to the grandmother?’

  ‘I think Perth might have.’

  ‘You should get her involved. He said he did all this for her. Maybe he’s listening to police radio. Get her to ask him to give up Osterlund’s location.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll get onto it. Take it easy, Dan, I mean it, you’ve done a great job but you need to rest. I’ve told the internal guys to give you forty-eight hours. Rest, mate.’

  And that’s what he had done since, going on for two hours now, nothing. It was driving him nuts. There had to be something he could do except just wait.

  Think, he commanded himself. His phone rang. It was Marilyn.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, easing himself on his left side.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m pretty good. Sore, sore as hell actually on my right side, and a bit weak but I’m alright.’

  She asked him the details. He recounted what he could remember and what he’d been told had happened after it went blank. While he was talking he was thinking about Bourke planning this thing. Did he just bury Osterlund in a box and then bury that?

  ‘Is Phoebe there?’ He wanted very much to speak to her.

  ‘No, I thought I better wait till she was out just in case…’

  Just in case the news had been real bad.

  ‘What’s he like, Peter Bourke?’ Her question caught him off guard. He didn’t actually recall anybody else asking that. Risely had questioned whether Bourke was injured or psychotic but not what he was like.

  ‘Probably would have been a nice kid but he’s damaged. He could have killed me, he chose not to.’

  He could feel her on the end of the line, her presence, he could almost smell her. They were one and indivisible, they were divided and apart, they were sympatico and discordant, they had a relationship that needed a theological mindset to explain because it was all contradiction, they had no relationship at all except what held by a gossamer thread in a single moment.

  ‘You’re very special, Dan, you always will be. I’ll get Phoebe to call when she’s back.’

  What did that mean, very special? That I love you but can’t stand you? I loved you once but not now?

  ‘Is Brian special too?’

  He couldn’t help himself and felt the immediate emotional disconnect on her part. He was stupid. He had learned nothing.

  ‘I’ll get Phoebe to call you when she’s back. Take care.’

  He sat there, the light weight of the phone in his hand. It reminded him of the heavy gun he could no longer hold, the pistol that Peter Bourke stripped from him. Thoughts of Marilyn evaporated suddenly. There was something about weight, the arithmetic of subtraction, the use of absence to deduce past reality, omission as a dynamic principle.

  He saw it now, a way of tracing Osterlund, well, an aid to tracing him. And something else he should have spied an eon ago. Bourke had to have known the cyclone was closing in, even a deaf mute living in Broome knew that. So why didn’t he fly out the previous evening after he’d quit his job and sold his car? Because he wanted one last triumphant moment with his captor. Clement dialled Shepherd: engaged. He waited, worked it through again in his head. Bourke had already sold his car, so how did he get there? He dialled again. This time Shepherd was free.

  ‘Shep, you need to find out if somebody loaned Bourke a car Tuesday night or early Wednesday.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he went out to wherever he buried Osterlund. And there�
�s been a mini-cyclone so if somebody did loan him the car they probably haven’t driven it since. You can check ks travelled, fuel consumed and Keeble can check soil on the inside of the vehicle and compare it to the car Bourke sold his mate. Also, Bourke might have had to fill up on the way out or back and he won’t have been careful, he thought he was going to Bali, right, so there might be CCTV of him with that car. Are you getting this?’

  Shepherd said he was.

  ‘Okay, now what you do is, you work out the arc of where he might have travelled and you eliminate every direction where he would have been captured by camera, you understand? If we work out all the routes he didn’t take we are left with the few he must have taken and if we catch him coming in or going out with the other vehicle, we know where to concentrate the search.’

  He asked Shepherd again if he got it. Shepherd claimed he had. But he knew what Shepherd and Risely and everybody else was thinking. What does it matter if some murdering drug dealer, pornographer is found dead? We are safe, the good people of the Kimberley are safe; or most of us at any rate, because we know now who the killer was and he wasn’t after us. As Shepherd had said earlier, Osterlund was a side-issue, Peter Bourke was the main game, Peter Bourke was the glory.

  64

  ‘Please Peter, give yourself up. I still love you. But it’s time to stop this, please, for me.’

  The woman’s accent, a weird mix of German, English and Irish, sent by the wonders of technology via satellite into a receiver in far-off Perth was further distorted by the crackle of the two-way radio. She persisted over and over. ‘Please, Peter, speak to me, pick up.’

  At the radio itself there was no response but the chatter so organically different from the slow drumming of rain on spare earth, the default sound for hundreds of ks, was caught by the tall skinny man who had ventured out today to see if anything of his family’s fishing hut remained. He was not confident. The hut was just a few sheets of tin over a wooden frame, no more than a shelter, really. The sound of a small plane buzzing above had persisted for more than an hour now, since he’d started walking from his cousin’s. Just when it’s too wet for mosquitoes you get a big one buzzing over your head, he thought to himself. He assumed it was to do with the storm, maybe taking photos for TV. He hadn’t seen TV for a couple of days and his radio needed batteries but his experience told him it would all sort itself out soon enough. All he was thinking about was any of those big tides washing crocodiles in closer. Little dry gullies become creeks overnight, you had to watch yourself. That’s when he heard the crackling sound and diverted to investigate. Campers, is what he was thinking, and laughed. They picked a bad time for a camping holiday. The sound was stronger now, sounded like an old woman’s voice but all distorted. He stopped and once more there was only drumming rain and that electronic scratch. The police vehicle was ten metres away from him. He was looking at its rear. Seemed to him it might have been on one of the narrow walk tracks here and then, wham! A big branch had fallen right across the cabin, crunched it down like a soft-drink can. He jogged over, his old runners squelching with every stride. He approached cautiously from the driver side. The young man at the wheel, a policeman he guessed, was twisted, looking away into the distance with eyes of a dead fish in the bucket on the way home. The cabin had been pushed down right onto his neck by the big branch on top of it. Not a mark on him, but he was dead for sure. The old woman’s voice crackled through the radio again.

  ‘Peter, please answer me if you can hear me. It’s not too late, love.’

  65

  When the call came, Clement, with great difficulty, was edging his way out of the bed for a pee. It was Graeme Earle.

  ‘One death from the cyclone and it’s our multiple killer. Is that what you call karma?’

  Clement did not feel sad for Peter Bourke, not really, but he did feel a great hollowness and a sense of loss of what could have been. Earle was heading back from Beagle Bay now. He fed Clement what he knew of progress on Osterlund. Peter Bourke had been carrying phones and camera but none of them contained obvious pictures to point them to Osterlund. But he had indeed been captured in the borrowed vehicle filling up to head out to his dungeon. The girl who had loaned him the car had warned him it was near empty and she had only driven him out to the airport since. This had allowed them to calculate the distance he had travelled in a round trip to about thirty-five k. The service station gave them the rough direction. Planes and choppers were out looking.

  ‘It’s got to be bush or a clump of trees. He would have needed cover.’

  ‘Imagine if we found Osterlund alive? That would be ironic.’

  Irony however had run its course on the case. Six hours into the search a chopper spotted the partly collapsed pit and a little over an hour later Osterlund’s body was hauled out. He was still bound, an arrow protruded from his knee. Rhino send word later that drowning was the official cause of death but that the autopsy showed he was likely already unconscious and probably would never have regained consciousness anyway.

  ‘Drowning in a desert, that’s ironic,’ said Rhino.

  On Monday, the day of his hospital discharge, two experienced detectives from Perth were sent to interview Clement, a man and woman, Eastaway and Chapman. He knew them both: good people, efficient. He was reconciled that they had to ask questions about how he’d lost his weapon and car and after the introductory stuff they got down to where they all knew it was heading.

  ‘You decided not to wait for Detective Sergeant Earle but to pursue alone. Why?’

  It was Chapman. She was in her forties now, originally Fraud squad.

  ‘We had hopes of finding Osterlund, every minute counted.’

  ‘And when you found the damaged vehicle?’

  ‘The same. Plus there was Bourke’s welfare to consider. For all I knew he was in trouble in the vehicle. It was raining so hard you couldn’t see inside until you were on top of it.’

  ‘You sensed an ambush, I think you mentioned to your colleagues?’

  This time it was Eastaway. Pushing fifty he had a bulbous nose with huge pores.

  ‘Yes. He used the same technique with Lee the biker and it helped me avoid his first arrow but then I had to decide whether to wait or go after him.’

  ‘And that’s when he shot you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In retrospect would you have done things differently?’ Chapman this time.

  Clement dwelt on the answer. ‘I don’t know that I could have. I couldn’t wait for DS Earle. Bourke had the advantage and he took it.’

  They wrote notes. Eastaway was the one who spoke next. ‘You got the drop on him though, later, is that correct?’

  He explained how that had happened. He relived the moment, he had Bourke cold.

  ‘You could have fired.’

  He wasn’t sure whether Chapman was offering a statement or question.

  ‘I tried to but I just … fainted I guess.’

  ‘Before that though. You could have fired.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes but I was trying to get him to tell me where Osterlund was.’

  And in the end they had both died hadn’t they? In the end, despite all his efforts, he had saved nobody and nothing. But then his eyes fell on the large card signed by every one of those he’d worked with. Graeme Earle who had proved himself a rock-solid deputy, Lisa Keeble thorough, clever, Scott Risely had walked the line between keeping the powers happy without selling him out, Jared Taylor was a humble student and quiet teacher, Mal Gross provided the humour and glue, Manners had come through, and even Shepherd for all his cheap footy cant had the makings of a good detective. He looked from Eastaway to Chapman.

  ‘Sorry, lost it for a minute. I’m ready again.’

  66

  They drifted in slowly darkening air, the sunset as pink as a matador’s cape. Bill Seratono handed him another freezing beer. Clement could now lean forward and take it without the movement causing a stabbing pain. His right half must have mended, he suppo
sed, or the three earlier beers had anaesthetised it. Far in the distance, shoreward, the Derby jetty loomed like the black skeleton of an animal that had died drinking in the ocean.

  ‘And your father? He’s okay?’ Bill punctuated his question with the gentle pfut of his can being opened.

  ‘No lasting effects, touchwood, but he has to be careful, medications, all that. Phoebe and I are visiting them in a few weeks while her mum’s in Europe with her boyfriend.’

  Clement wondered idly if fiancée was the more correct term.

  ‘So are we going to lose you a second time?’ Bill trawled his line easily and reset it.

  Di Rivi’s dog popped into his brain. He wondered if she’d named it yet.

  ‘Not just yet.’

  The Assistant Commissioner himself had called, peeing in his pocket. ‘Outstanding police work’ and ‘copybook restraint’ being two of the phrases bandied about. HQ loved the idea of a wounded hero. They wanted him back on public display in Perth, a stone’s throw from the TV stations.

  ‘In your own time,’ the AC had added, code for the sooner the better. But how could you trade this, or the fishburger at the Cleo, or a dentist who worked on your teeth in his footy shorts for free?

  ‘Is Mitch ever going to talk to me again?’ he asked, enjoying the breeze on his face.

  ‘Who knows? I told him it was his own bloody fault. He should have been upfront.’

  Clement spared a thought for all the innocent, disconnected people crime touched along the way: Karskine, Astuthi Osterlund, young Tyson. Crime, especially murder was a muddy boot traipsing through your living room. Bill spoke again.