by Iain Ryan
“Are these the students?”
The principal took his time. He sat down and rested the photo on his knee, moving his eyes back and forth between the list and the photograph.
“A few of them are here, in this,” he said, tapping the photo. “Where did you get this?”
“You know Sophie Marr was killed, right?”
He shook his head. “I only know her sister ended up down the other end of the island. I hadn’t seen Sophie in years. These kids popped back up again later. I don’t know what happened to them. It was such a wild time. The transition, I guess. The old island falling away and this new monstrosity rising up in its place. I mean, some of these people are still around.” He pointed at kids in the photograph. “Noel here is an estate agent, I see him around a bit. Caroline has kids of her own. And little Jeffery, I imagine you’ve come across him.”
“Who? Which one?”
He pointed at the photo. A little dark haired boy, Mediterranean-looking. “Jeffery Bruno. He runs the Gold Point now. Among other things.”
“I’ve met him,” said Romano. “What do you know about Pastor Frith? This is from the wall of his house.”
“I knew him. My wife and I went to his church for a time. In my estimation, he’s a lunatic, too crazy for the island even. Virtually ran him out of town when the casinos moved in. He tells a different story now, but that so-called Mission he’s running down there is about the only place that would take him.”
“And he has a picture of these kids that disappeared on his wall?”
The principle held the photo up at arm’s length. “This is just the families that were with him at the time. Maybe a bit after. These would have been the people who helped him set up the Mission, I reckon.”
Romano squatted down beside him and stared at the grainy faces. The whole thing was closing together like a trap.
33
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
Harris called Dev and said, “You busy?”
Dev was home. Harris could hear the air-con shuddering in the background. He worked out of a garden shed in his back yard.
“I was reading the paper,” he said.
“I’m in trouble,” said Harris.
“How?”
"This Gold Point thing is back on the table. Romano’s been stirring things up. And the other night I got wind of some info I had on the back-burner. Looks like that Bachelard kid was onto something. I need to take care of it.”
“And you feel like you have to do it?”
“It’s getting there.”
“You want me to come round? You don’t sound so good. We could meditate, talk it through first.”
“No,” said Harris. “It’s gotten past that. The footsteps in the hall, they’re getting unbearable. And fucking Romano…It’s time for the other route.”
“What does O’Shea think?”
“I don’t know. I need Zane to give this one the okay and then…I have to come out of retirement for a bit?”
“Really? You sure?”
“Yeah, I’ve let things slide. I can see it now.”
“You’ve been so calm.”
“I know.”
“And Lachlan?” said Dev.
The nightmares. His brother.
“No sign of Lachlan,” said Harris. “Not yet. This is all me at the moment.”
Dev thought on it. He was never quick to agree in situations like this. “I’ll get Zane to call you,” he said. He had the hotline.
Carl Yates was in his usual spot. He dealt out of an apartment up in the Gold Point but he had a thing for Asian women and often took an afternoon trip to the Silk Dragon massage parlour. This was part of his hook-up with the Chans. The family and Yates kept the peace over traded information and discount rub-and-tugs.
Harris called ahead. Yates had an appointment. Harris couldn’t risk this at the Gold Point.
He drove over. They let him in. He sat on the massage table and listened to the piped ambience.
This is what happens when you take your hands off the wheel. Retirement. Retire from what?
Old Bill knew it.
More ghosts.
More—
Yates was on time. He opened the door, already showered and ready.
“Surprise,” said Harris.
Harris grabbed him by the throat and put a gun to his face. Yates bristled. The fighter in him was about to throw a punch.
"Think about it,” said Harris, kicking the door shut behind them and letting go of Yates’ throat.
“Fuck me. What do you want, Jim? You scared the shit out of me.”
“Good. What do you know about The Bronze Room?”
“Nothing, nothing, uh, I mean—”
Harris whipped him with gun and pushed him back into a potted plant in the room’s corner. Yates’s nose gushed. He squeezed his eyes shut and fell over himself trying to get back up.
“You know what it is, and that’s the wrong answer,” said Harris.
“What the—”
Harris put the gun’s barrel flush against Yates’ head.
Yates squirmed.
“Chris, Chris…I’m going to shoot you. This is real. Take a fucking breath and tell me what I want to know?”
It took him a few seconds but Yates got it figured. He started to weep.
“Chris?” said Harris.
“I don’t know…I don’t know anything.”
Harris’s screamed, “No, listen—”
“Girls,” said Yates. "They win girls, or boys, whatever they want.”
“Where are they coming in from?”
Yates shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Where is Bruno getting them from?”
“Look, you may as well just fucking kill me, you may as well…” Yates didn’t look far off meaning it. His face wet with blood and saliva.
“Why? How are you mixed up in it?”
Yates shook his head.
“Chris!”
Harris smacked him again. Yates kept shaking his head and Harris kept in on him, until Yates was laid out on the floor clawing at the carpet. When he stopped, Harris turned his hands and they were covered in warm wet blood. Yates finally started to spit it out.
“I just gave them the gear they needed. Tranqs, H, roofies. I just…I just gave them the stuff. They dose them down at the orphanage and…they just…”
“Drainland?”
Yates nodded.
“Don’t go anywhere I can’t find you, Chris. This isn’t over. We’re not even close to done.”
The man started to cough up bile.
Harris left him to it.
Zane got the message. Harris picked up the phone. She didn’t mince words.
“Make sure you’re home tonight, Jim.”
That was it.
Harris sat in the living room and cleaned his gun.
He steadied his breathing.
“This is just me,” he said out loud.
34
Wednesday, January 5th
Romano ran the archives to be sure. She found Pastor Frith’s track record and cross-searched it with abuse stories. It took an hour but the dots started to appear. The last person to pull it all together was a journalist named Maslow from the Courier Mail. He was in Brisbane. He’d published a piece on childhood abuse and the church back in ’83. Over the course of a few articles and mentions, Frith’s name sat in amongst a list of dirty priests and bad men.
Maslow was in the book.
Romano called.
He remembered Frith.
“I’ll be damned. I haven’t thought about that in years. Spent half my career trying to forget it, in fact. Wrote it all up when I was a young bloke, full of piss and vinegar. Didn’t know a thing like that could…” He trailed off, waited a beat. “And you say Joe Frith is on Tunnel now? With another parish? I’ll be damned.”
“No parish. They moved him on in the eighties, by the looks—after the attention, I think.”
“That makes sense. They swept a bunch of the old buggers under the rug when we stirred things up. Shut them all out, for a time. Though you might well find he’d done his dash by then anyhow. Those blokes have a tendency to move around every couple of years. They have to.”
“He runs a Mission over here with the island’s drug afflicted. He wouldn’t still be getting money from the church, would he?”
“I wouldn’t think so. I can probably find out. Can I call you back? I might know someone I can ask. If they are sending money over, you might be able to use that. I’ve heard the island’s a bit of a lost cause, but there’s leverage there if the church is still involved.”
Romano gave him her number.
She went out to score. Over time, she’d worked her way through a few of the island’s drug dealers, before discovering her local pizza guy. He was always holding. He ran a tight ship. You ordered pizza: it came with sides. At home, Romano unwrapped her gear and sorted her pills from her powder, ate a slice of Hawaiian and knocked back a line.
It was time to work. She got out of her uniform. She checked her gun. On the way out, she grabbed a short bottle of vodka in case she lost her nerve.
The gate to the Holy Beach Mission was still locked. Romano had never been much good with locks. She’d never learned to pick one. Her old sergeant wasn’t keen on it. Why fuss with something and risk getting shot when two of you can kick the damn thing in? She stood there in the darkness and thought about that man, trying to remember anything else that felt important. A warm wash of memory started to run through her.
She thought of Will Holding.
Romano shook it off. It was madness. A wave of the drugs coming on, that was all.
She decided against driving in, and stashed the cruiser. As she walked down into the scrub towards the Mission, Romano began to twitch. The bush was alive with animal call. It was dark. She heard the gentle breaking of twigs and dried foliage. She kept her gun unholstered, and stayed low to the ground.
She kept walking.
It got worse.
She had been here before. Felt this exact sensation before. As the scrub grew thicker, disorientation kicked in. The drugs and stress and the island pulsed through her. She was alert but suddenly aware of a million possible problems. After a time, Romano couldn’t even be sure she was walking in the right direction. The scene around her started to dissolve. The black thicket of dry forest started to mash with the past. What was in that gear? And hadn’t they’d walked through bushland like this down in Taradale? Wasn’t the gravel underfoot the same? She kept moving.
35
Wednesday, November 11, 1998
A squad of police hiked through bushland to the site. About halfway down the valley, they stopped. The men in front had spotted the first light of the settlement below. Sergeant Connor gathered them round and handed over to Romano. She squatted down and laid the maps out under torchlight for a final once-over. She didn’t know most of these guys. They were local Taradale cops. The regional unit had called them in. They were yahoos mostly, and they didn’t trust her. They took their orders from Connor, watched for his signals, even though it was her show.
"This is the lab,” she said. “We think these structures here are caravans, probably used to package materials up for storage. I’m not expecting a lot of action out of here but still, be careful coming round. Remember they all have windows facing out. The layout of the whole thing speaks to expecting visitors.”
"Take no chances,” said Connor.
It didn’t matter. The whole thing went to shit anyhow.
The first shots rang out as soon as they crept from the valley’s cover. First, each of the caravans on the perimeter blew, huge eruptions lighting the sky like fireworks. They all heard the screams. A forensics crew would come through later and report that each van was detonated by a hand grenade. And each one contained a body, chained to the furniture, fixed to their job packaging up drugs and Christ knew what else before being eviscerated. One woman survived, blinded but alive. She told them that each van had a guard and was packed with explosives. The grenades were just the fuse.
Romano ran into the clearing popping off shots as soon as the vans went up. They lost two police in that first push. Connor took a bullet in the arm, but a few of them managed to circle round—as planned—and flush out the buildings. Romano got inside and ran through the main hall, seeing the whole thing down the sights of her gun.
They were animals. The whole set-up was something out of a horror film. Romano had never seen anything like it. Everyone chained to their workstation. A sweatshop of guns, drugs, pornography. They had it all. There was a wing on one of the halls mocked up like an office, another like a child’s bedroom. And as Romano ran through, she couldn’t even begin to tally up the bodies, piles of bodies. They were insane. The men behind this shot everyone on the way out. The shock and the sound of gunfire was the only thing that kept Romano moving.
Running point, Romano was the first to find the hatch. They had a tunnel down into the ground. Without thinking, without a moment’s hesitation, she dropped down into the basement and ran the tunnel. The others caught some fire from behind and were forced back, leaving her sprinting through that space alone. That was how it always was from that point onward. That was what happened: she ran into it, like a void. There was no undoing Taradale at that point. At the earth tunnel’s end, Romano learned everything about herself, every crooked, corrupted part of herself.
36
Thursday January 6th, 2005
The ground under her soles started to loosen. Then gravel gave way to sand and Romano stopped running. Her vision spun. She’d pushed it too far, had taken too much. She collapsed on the ground and heaved in deep, painful breaths.
Shaking her head, she wiped her face and looked up at the sky, trying to orientate herself. In the distance, up through the canopy, she could see a beam of light arcing across the sky. The lighthouse. She got up and willed herself towards it. A few minutes later, the Mission came into view: a dark set of buildings, on a dark plane, underneath the blazing tower sweeping the sky.
Romano crouched down in the scrub and watched. Nothing moved in the Mission. She circled round the compound in the cover, until she reached the ridge that abutted Drainland. Romano took a moment to look down into the camp. It was dotted with campfires and light, full of corpse-like silhouettes. Smoke poured out of the wrecked ship in the camp’s centre. It was a communal bonfire of some sort. The wind blew up the sound of arguing and laughter, and the smell of waste and charcoal. It had a carnivalesque hellishness to it, and the Mission sat almost on top of it.
She checked her watch: 1:05 AM. She kept moving. The rear door of Frith’s house was locked and the windows were closed as well. An air conditioner rattled above. Romano tried another door before taking it as a sign that searching the house was too bold. She did not really have a plan. Half of her wanted confrontation, to wake the priest and see what he had to say for himself. The other half, a more conscious part, knew that this was dangerous, more dangerous than it felt. The photo. The camp. The history tucked away down here. People would kill for it. And yet Romano wanted a better look. She wanted the unguided tour.
As she skirted the hospice buildings, she noticed dim light shining inside. A man coughed. Footsteps on timber. The children’s dormitories were completely silent. The curtains were swept open on one of the rooms, and Romano spied a half-dozen boys out cold in bunk beds, the bared windows wide open to let the breeze in. She tried those doors. They were locked. The one building that looked more accessible was the chapel. The timber by the lock looked broken and scarred. It was a door that had been busted open a few times, and it had some give. She waited a moment. The wind came up and stirred the trees. She kicked it in.
Pauline’s description of the place married up. The rest of the year we store food in there. The chapel was half cleared of its pews. In their place sat pallets of tinned produce and dry food. Up further, the altar was set for service.
Romano poked around. She found a cart containing what looked like wine, and took a sniff, then wandered back further, round into the small chamber room at the rear of the hall. Frith would have an office back here. She turned on her flashlight and stepped into a short corridor off the main room. At the end, she came to a closed hallway with two doors.
The first was unlocked.
The room was almost empty. In one corner was an unmade bed: a mattress on an old steel frame. Beside it, a sink and toilet. The floor was tiled in the adjoining corner, a sinkhole in the centre. It took Romano a moment to recognise the room as a holding cell. She turned and checked the door, and sure enough, there was a food hatch at the bottom. She found a light switch and walked the room. She sat on the bed, tapped out a small bump of powder and knocked it back.
The second door was locked. She crouched and checked the lock. It was tight but the coke made her impatient. She worked fast and messy. The door came open with four fast kicks.
Inside was an office. A wall of books lined floor-to-ceiling shelves. There was an old desk, a rug underneath. An office chair. A computer. He had charts on the walls. A plan of the Mission. A calendar. A weird painting of Jesus on one wall, Mary on the other. The place was a mess. Newspapers piled up on the floor. Paperwork spilling out of multiple trays. The books looked unordered, half of them shoved into shelves pages-out.
Romano tossed the place. There was a wall safe behind Jesus, but it was locked. She found a paper envelope tucked in the back of Mary’s frame. Romano opened it: a couple of thousand in cash, high denominations. She pocketed it.
Romano yanked the drawers out of the desk and emptied them onto the floor. There was nothing of interest: packets of aspirin, old keys, stationary, a Dictaphone. Someone had taped a yellow Post-it note to the inside of one drawer. The note had a series of words and numbers:
