Gunshot Road

by Adrian Hyland

  Bodycombe seemed to be of the opinion that the deceased was better off in the arms of the Lord.

  ‘Know him personally, did you then?’ I heard Bunter ask.

  ‘For my sins, yes,’ replied the pastor, the tone of his voice telling you that getting the last word on Doc would have been his highlight of the week.

  ‘Gave you a run for your money, I bet,’ I threw into the interview.

  Bodycombe peered at me, puzzled.

  ‘Doc. Argumentative old cuss, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He wasn’t the most docile member of my flock.’

  ‘Hardly a member of your flock at all, I’d have thought—and yet you were keen to get over and give him a send-off.’

  The tendons in the trout-like neck clenched.

  ‘It would have been derelict of me not to.’

  ‘Reckon Doc would have said so?’

  The pastor raised his eyes to the ceiling; beyond the ceiling, up into the realms of the choir invisible. ‘Who can tell what his state of mind was at the end? My duty is to offer grace—whether the individual has the will to accept…’

  Bunter closed his notebook; Bodycombe picked up a nifty sports bag and slunk off in the direction of the veranda.

  Geordie Formwood, sitting next to me, leaned over and growled, ‘Dickweed. Just wanted to rub his nose in it.’

  ‘Which dickweed wanted to rub whose nose in what?’

  ‘Sky bloody pilot. Doc used to bore it up him every time they met.’

  ‘How often did they meet?’

  He shrugged. ‘Whenever.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘Oh, aye. They been having this ongoing, em…debate. About evolution. Doc would show up with a piece of actual evidence—a fossil from the Precambrian, or some such—and the pastor’d shimmy that cat’s-arse smile and say it was all part of a Greater Plan.’

  ‘Well, maybe it was.’

  Geordie’s reply was a long snort and a longer pull of his malodorous brew.

  ‘Just as a matter of interest,’ I asked, ‘where was Bodycombe when Doc and Wireless were having their little contretemps?’

  ‘Pretty sure he was out on the veranda, sipping his lemonade.’

  ‘Not all the time, but,’ Jan chipped in. ‘He had a kip in his van for a while; frazzled from all the atheism flying round.’

  The pastor departed soon afterwards, and I watched carefully as he checked his van, topped up the water and oil and headed off down the Gunshot Road.

  We interviewed everybody there, but it was a waste of time, the whole exercise. Despite the fact that there’d been a half a dozen people on the veranda at any time during the afternoon, nobody had seen anyone other than Wireless go near the shack. Even the Rabble, despite their best efforts, couldn’t come up with anything that would put a dent in the case against him. ‘Tripped and fell on his pick’ was the best they could do.

  As we finished with them the witnesses went their respective ways. We were hoeing into our steaks within the hour, my colleagues with gusto, Wireless less so. His mind was presumably on other things.

  By the time we rose to leave, our prisoner was visibly disintegrating. His hands trembled, his mouth was working, his eyes flicker-drifted across the row of bottles behind the bar.

  ‘Bloke couldn’t have one for the road, sarge?’

  ‘You’re in custody, mate. Better learn to get along without it.’

  Wireless grimaced.

  ‘We won’t worry about the cuffs, though.’

  ‘Nice,’ I commented, and copped a dose of the Cockburn glower for my troubles.

  A woman on the edge

  AS WE STEPPED OUT onto the veranda, the senior sergeant glanced across the road.

  ‘Strewth, Jenkins. You planning on giving it away for Christmas?’ The shack was still wrapped in red and white crime-scene tape. ‘Better go and clean it up.’

  We drove the couple of hundred yards to the shack. As we climbed out of the car, Harley glanced up at the surrounding hills and muttered an oath.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘One of the Chinks is still here.’

  I followed his gaze. There was a woman on the lower ledge of the cliff overlooking the shack.

  ‘Bloody idiots must have left her behind.’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t with them,’ I suggested. ‘Transit van’s still in the car park.’

  ‘Not a jumper, is she?’ frowned Jerker.

  Cockburn clicked his tongue. ‘Whatever she is, she shouldn’t be there.’ He made a megaphone of his hands. ‘Oi!’

  The woman ignored him.

  He bellowed again, with similar results.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ He turned to me. ‘Emily, make yourself useful. Shinny up there and tell her to shove off. And not literally—we’ve already had our quota of casualties for the day.’

  I kept my grumbles to myself. I hadn’t spotted ‘gofer’ in the job description, but that was clearly how the senior sergeant saw me.

  I studied the rock face. The crevasse down the middle of the cliff offered the quickest access, but it was also the trickiest. Getting up there looked like hard, hot work, and I didn’t fancy breaking my neck first day on the job.

  The west side was a better prospect: lightly canopied with shrubs, a little shade, a kinder slope.

  I began the climb, and even that gentle effort took its toll, the red dirt on my forearms rapidly inscribed with sweat. I kept an eye on the woman, but as I drew closer I sensed that she wasn’t in any danger. She was perched atop a skull-shaped boulder a metre or two from the summit. She had about her an air of tranquility and balance, as if precipitous terrain was second nature to her.

  She was busily working away at a sketchbook, her face closed in on itself, focused.

  I was just below her when I called out.

  She glanced at me: it was the woman who’d given Harley a spray. She was close cropped with a smooth, tawny complexion, punishing eyes. She might have been attractive were it not for the stern cut of both jib and hair. She was wearing a black cotton dress, woven sandals, a turquoise armband.

  ‘You interrupt the view,’ she said brusquely. Just a little trouble with the r sound. She returned to her sketch.

  ‘Bloody hot up here.’ No response. ‘Your friends leave you behind?’

  She raised her head. ‘Flen…friends?’

  ‘The tour group.’

  ‘The Taiwanese.’ She scowled. ‘I have met them for the first time last night.’

  I needed to know what she was up to, and I was getting a sense that the hard-arsed approach wouldn’t cut it. I sat beside her, leaned back against the rocks. She’d chosen a shady spot, but the granite radiated stored heat.

  ‘Planning on staying here long?’

  ‘I plan nothing but this drawing in my hand.’

  Right. Maybe softly-softly wasn’t going to work either.

  ‘Where you from?’ I asked.

  ‘Sydney.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you were born there.’

  ‘Nor you.’

  ‘You were talking Chinese—is that where you’re from?’

  She leaned forward, spat succinctly over the edge.

  Was that an answer? If it was, then maybe she was from one of the ethnic minorities. In another life, I’d spent a year or so scratching around the north-western fringes of the Empire, out on the Silk Road. I recognised the attitude: Uyghur? Kazakh? Tibetan? If so, her mob occupied a space in her nation’s consciousness I found familiar.

  ‘My boss down there is worried you shouldn’t oughter be here.’

  ‘Your boss?’ She peered down the hill, deigned to notice them for the first time. Disdain sparkled in her eyes. ‘You are policeman?’

  ‘Dunno bout the man. Don’t suppose I can argue with the rest.’

  ‘I intended to ask you about this stone—what do you say?—shape? forming?’ She nodded at the pile of rocks at Doc’s door.

  ‘Formation.’

  ‘Formation. But if you are not
sure which side you are on…’ ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘This man who died—he lived in that little house?’

  ‘He did, yeah.’

  ‘Do you know why was he building a map in his backyard?’‘What?’

  ‘Or…’ She searched for the word. ‘Ah—labyrinth. In the end, each becomes the other.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I snapped. This woman—this foreigner—was trying to tell me my business. I may not know much, but I know rocks. I grew up with a prospector, spent my earliest days rambling with Dad over rough country looking at rocks. Did a year or two of earth sciences at Melbourne Uni. Hollows and blocks, buckled plates, pillars and cones. Rocks: they’re a puzzle I want to read. Have read for as long as I can remember.

  And as a black woman I tread near them with a very gentle step. I see their mythic dimension, their lunar beauty. I know them as stories and songs, as ancestors and sisters, as objects of affection and respect, sometimes fear.

  So I was even more pissed off when I took a closer look at Doc’s rock pile and saw she was right.

  It wasn’t just a madman’s garden down there, a representation of its builder’s addled brain. This tired old man had somehow managed to collect several tons of rock—mostly ironstone and gneiss—and from it created a structure with a definite pattern.

  I leaned forward. The formation was a rough rectangle, crosscut by a series of creek-like incisions. On its western side, what might have been a row of fan-shaped deltas below a range of hills. Like the woman had said, studying them from the air was like peering into a 3-D map, or a geological model.

  But a model of what? Did the construction ring a bell? Possibly: the faintest tinkling. Nothing I could pin down.

  I turned back to the woman. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘He was murdered, this man?’

  ‘Not for me to say.’

  ‘Is it known who killed him?’

  ‘You think I’m going to tell you that?’

  ‘No. It seems not,’ she turned away. Took up a pencil, slashed a few strokes onto the paper. ‘If I want to understand what happens here,’ the pencil sliced air, ‘…I would begin, perhaps, with these l…rocks.’

  A bellow from below. ‘Oi!’ Cockburn and the boys had gathered up the tape. Were getting impatient.

  ‘If you’re quite finished your APEC bloody summit up there…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I muttered. ‘We’re on our way!’

  ‘We?’ the woman put in. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Look honey, personally I don’t care whether…’

  I paused, distracted, my attention caught by a wagtail stuttering about in a ruby saltbush on the ledge above.

  ‘Whether what?’

  The bird disappeared. I frowned, put a foot on a jutting rock, dragged myself up to the summit. Slid into what might have been a natural—or manmade?—hollow among the scrappy saltbushes and rat’s tail on the edge.

  I touched a thorn and picked off the scrap of fresh green material I’d spotted from below. Took note of the woman’s clothing. Black, head to toe.

  I studied the rough ground. Scuff marks, recent. Somebody had been lying there, since the rain. In the past twenty-four hours.

  ‘You been up here?’

  ‘No.’

  I examined the layout of the land between the hill and the shack, threw a few possibilities around my brain. The direct route was fully exposed to the crowded pub veranda, but the western route, the one I’d taken? Somebody could well have climbed up under the cover of the scrub, made a fleeting descent to the cabin. Moving down the crevasse in the late afternoon glare, they could have gone unnoticed, returned the same way. Maybe even hidden behind the shack, blended with the crowd when the body was found.

  I stood up. Again, I sensed it: a shiver of menace, a shudder of anxiety.

  I shielded my eyes, gazed out over the aeolian landscape. The sun’s rays blasted my skin. Splinters and wheels of light shot in from the white plains, spun about my brain. The country felt poised; primed, like a finger on a trigger.

  I blinked, and the feeling disappeared.

  Paranoia, surely? Maybe Doc’s was rubbing off.

  Over at the pub, a couple of flash four-wheel-drives had pulled in. Tourists. Paint-jobs sparkling, high-tech toys hanging off and welded on. Outer suburban plumbers or Pommy computer programmers on the Great Outback Adventure.

  I spotted Noel Redman coming in from the meat shed, his fat arms laden, Stiffy strutting at his heels. Directly below, my colleagues were shuffling, restless. Cockburn was nowhere to be seen. Then the Cruiser’s horn blared.

  I called to the woman. ‘I gotta go. You coming?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. Her frown was friendlier. ‘Be seeing you.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  She spat a quickfire response.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘In this country, where you are so poor with language, they seem to call me Jet.’

  ‘Jet?’ I muttered as I made my way back down the slope.

  ‘That’d be right.’

  A fissure in the ziggurat

  I REACHED THE CLIFF base, came round to the front of the shack. Harley wiped some sweat and checked his watch. ‘Took your time. Where’s your Chink?’

  ‘Still up there.’

  ‘Is she?’ Cockburn joined us, nodded at the rock formation behind the shack. Jet was perched alongside it, sketchbook out, pencil flying.

  ‘She must have taken the shortcut. Which is what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We need to make a more detailed examination of the cliff top. Somebody’s been up there.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘A scrap of material on the bushes.’

  ‘The woman,’ suggested Harley.

  ‘She’s all in black—the material was green. Plus there are scuff marks…’

  ‘Dingo. Wallaby. Hills are full of wildlife. Any footprints?’

  ‘Not that I could see, but it’s rocky up there.’

  ‘Even if there were,’ said Cockburn, ‘this is a roadhouse. Tourists, miners, hippies wanting to commune with Mother Nature—any manner of idiot could go traipsing about.’

  ‘Maybe, but these marks are recent. Why would you struggle up there on a day like this?’

  ‘Your friend there did.’

  ‘She’s some sort of artist—weirdness is in the job description.’

  Cockburn sighed, his patience wearing thin. He folded his arms, drummed a tattoo on his left elbow. ‘Matter of balance—available resources against likely outcomes. I mean, we could call in the dogs and choppers, set up a bloody emu parade every time a couple of blokes thump each other in a bar. But it’s just not feasible. Forensic’s gone back to Alice. We haven’t got the manpower, the time.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: this was a man’s life we were talking about. ‘I’m not asking for the bloody SAS—all I want is for you to get up there and…’

  The beginnings of a fissure—the tiniest crack, really—appeared in the Cockburn ziggurat. ‘What you’re doing is scratching about looking for anything that’s going to muddy the waters and make it less likely we’ll convict your mate.’ He leaned in at me. ‘It’s not going to happen. What we’ve got here is as straightforward a case as I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem. Everything looks straightforward to you.’

  ‘Jesus!’ The anger welled up, briefly, then his retentive instincts reasserted themselves. He dispersed a few flies, squared his legs. ‘I’ve put up with enough of this crap. We’re going back to Bluebush. I’m ordering you to come with us. If you choose to disobey, you can go poking around the hills until you’re bloody well blue in the face. But don’t think you’ll have a job to come back to.’

  I studied them. Cockburn, so self-controlled, controlling. Harley and Jenkins up on their hind legs like meerkats, our little argument the most entertaining thing th
ey’d seen all day.

  Support? Not likely.

  I looked at Wireless, slumped against the column of the car, gazing listlessly into space. Talk of support, he was going to need all he could get.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ I said.

  ‘That’s sixty seconds and counting.’

  I dashed out to where I’d last seen the Chinese woman. She’d disappeared. Then I spotted her black-clad rear. She was half-way up the rock pile, nose down, carrying out a close examination of god knows what.

  ‘Hey, Jet!’

  She turned around.

  ‘Those sketches. Can I have one?’

  She had a way of staring that stopped you in your tracks. ‘Why?’

  ‘Souvenir.’

  She looked into my eyes, must have seen something. She jumped down, moving over the rocks with the casual agility of a rock wallaby. She flipped through the pad, pulled out one of the more detailed depictions of the formation.

  ‘Use it wisely,’ she said. Not quite a smile, but a flash of interest. Her eyes were like ripe mulberries. ‘Might be worth fortune one day.’

  Kite hawks

  I PULLED UP ON the outskirts of Bluebush’s dismal little cemetery, checked my watch. Nearly twelve. The church service had started at eleven, so they should be along any tick. I’d come to make my farewells to Doc and—and what? I wasn’t sure. Lay some of the dust the old man’s death had stirred up in my brain.

  There were things about it that unsettled me.

  There were things about most deaths that unsettled me, but this one I found particularly disturbing. Why, I couldn’t say. My sympathy for the alleged killer? Maybe the tracks on the cliff top, or that bizarre rock formation in Doc’s yard.

  More than anything, it was that feeling of unease. It had been quietly biting, like a threatening fever, since that morning nearly a week ago now when we were heading for the Gunshot Road.

  I hadn’t made it to the church: organised religion and I have had a rocky relationship since I was forced to fight off a hot-blooded Mormon—name of Randy, appropriately enough—when I was fourteen.