Dead Heat

by Peter Cotton

  ‘Was Jade in any sort of trouble that you know of?’

  ‘No. Nothing I know of.’

  ‘Can you think of anything that might explain her disappearance?’

  ‘I got no idea where she is, but I reckon everyone’s panicking too much. Jade would’ve wanted to put distance between her and Kylie after the fight, so she’ll be on a train or in a bus, heading for the relatives up the coast. Or she’s on her way to Canberra, maybe, and she’ll phone when she hears what’s happened. That’s what I reckon.’

  ‘Your sister Daisy said you’d supply us with numbers for the people she might be visiting,’ said Coombs.

  ‘I’ll text them to this fella,’ said Bynder, nodding at me. ‘I got his number already.’

  ‘You think Jade took off because of the fight with Kylie?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what I hope, and that’s what I reckon.’

  ‘Hope is one thing, Mr Bynder,’ I said, ‘but Jade and Kylie argued, and within a few hours of that argument Kylie was dead, and Jade had fallen off the radar. Now, most people would see a causal link between those two events, and as a cautious investigator, I’ve got to assume that link as well.’

  ‘Do what you like, mate, but I reckon Jade’s fine. I just don’t see something bad happening to both of them at the same time.’

  Maybe Bynder truly believed that Jade was on her way to visit a relative. Or maybe it was wishful thinking. It was too hard to tell because he looked like he only half-believed what he was saying most of the time. Like none of what we were talking about really mattered. I’d dealt with his type before. Guys who projected a certain sort of over-confidence, which came off as slippery and uncaring. I needed to do something to concentrate his mind. To get something solid out of him. Whether he was sick or not.

  ‘You really surprise me, Mr Bynder,’ I said, smiling without warmth. ‘Your house guest, Kylie Stevens, was murdered last night. Your niece, Jade Rawlins, went missing at about the same time. Yet, in the absence of any evidence, your “gut instinct” tells you Jade is safe. I find that too strange to credit. So, I want you to wrack your brains for anything in Jade and Kylie’s relationship that might help us. The people they both hung out with. Anything they did together, or were both involved in. Anything at all. Because if you don’t start cooperating, I’ll start thinking you don’t really care about Jade, or what happens to her — and you wouldn’t want that. We’ve got one crime scene, Mr Bynder. If we don’t find Jade soon, we might have another. Then you’d really have some questions to answer.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about crime scenes,’ said Bynder, suddenly and absolutely furious with me. ‘You fuckin’ white cunt!’

  His eyes sparkled with moisture as he leant across the table, intent on conveying menace. It was a dangerous ploy — directing that sort of energy at an armed interrogator — but Bynder didn’t seem to care.

  ‘This whole country’s a fuckin’ crime scene, you fuck,’ he said. ‘Dig anywhere, you know what you’ll find? The bones of my ancestors, murdered by your lot! So whaddyah doing about that, you copper cunt!’

  ‘Sounds very militant, Mr Bynder,’ said Coombs, softly, as if offering a diagnosis.

  ‘Militant?’ he said. ‘You mean sovereignty.’ ’Course I’m fucking militant, you navy nut case! Heh! Look at me! Whaddyah see? Another black cunt giving you lip? Well, it runs deeper than that, Missus, believe me. Much fuckin’ deeper.’

  We’d transformed Bynder from a disengaged interviewee into an outraged crusader, but at least we had his attention.

  ‘So, were the girls militants like you?’ Coombs asked. ‘Kylie and Jade — did they share your views?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Bynder, deflated by the question. ‘Some. I don’t know. I wish they had been more militant. A bit of fire in their bellies would’ve been a good thing.’

  Bynder’s eyes fluttered. He stretched them wide open and relaxed them again. He looked to be wilting. I considered taking a last shot at him, but held fire. He tried to nail me with a heavy stare, but as soon as his eyes locked onto mine they started to flicker, and he struggled to control them. Was he bunging it on? The only way to tell would be to push him again, but I wasn’t prepared to risk the consequences if he really was sinking. A breeze rustled the strappy-leafed plants at the edge of the verandah. A bird called, and was answered by its mate in a distant tree.

  ‘If there’s nothing else,’ said Bynder, ‘you lot can piss off. I’ve got something more important to do. I’ll see you again, no doubt.’

  He shook his head and grunted as he got up. He fished his cigarettes from the table, extracted one, and stuck it between his lips without lighting it. He walked to his front door, let himself in, and the door slammed behind him.

  Father Radcliffe’s house needed repairs like a sinner needed a confessional. It was the worst house in the worst street in Steeple Bay. Blistered paint flaked from the weatherboards. Dead weeds hung from the rusted gutters. Oil pooled under a battered Holden sedan sitting low on the concrete driveway.

  The priest opened his front door before I’d finished knocking and invited us in. The contrast between the exterior and the interior of the house was as stark as it was surprising. The front room was neat and clean. A large, comfortable-looking couch and two matching lounge chairs faced an ornate fireplace. Afghan rugs overlapped on the floor. A coffee table in front of the couch was laden with cake and plates. The walls were hung with religious images, including Dali’s rendering of the crucifixion of Jesus. Framed photos of Radcliffe with his family and friends fought for space on the mantle above the fireplace.

  The priest gestured at the couch and mouthed the word ‘sit’, which we did. He offered us tea, which we declined. Then I took out my notebook and pen, and broke the ice by asking him to tell us something of the history of Steeple Bay.

  ‘The settlement here dates from the early 1900s,’ said Radcliffe, sliding forward in his chair, bright-eyed, relishing the question. ‘The people who came here had strong ties to this part of the coast and to the ocean. The location was relatively remote back then, and that appealed, too. Especially when the welfare started taking the children away. Steeple Bay’s isolation is why many of the families here remained intact.’

  ‘Forgive me, Father,’ said Coombs, sounding puzzled, ‘but Steeple Bay has a population of about two hundred people, mostly Aboriginal, and not all of them are Catholic, I assume.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said the priest. ‘The stable population here is about two hundred, about half of them are Catholic, and about half of them attend mass regularly.’

  ‘So, what are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Surely this place doesn’t warrant its own priest. And by the looks of the car outside, you’re not mobile, so you’re not servicing any parishes other than this one.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ said the priest, feigning offence. ‘The car still goes! It just needs its vital juices topped up regularly. I call it my emergency vehicle, because I only use it when I have to. As for Steeple Bay, it’s as much as I can manage at the moment. I’ve not been well, you see. The kidneys. A parishioner takes me into hospital twice a week for my dialysis. I couldn’t live here without such kindness.’

  ‘You’re accepted by the locals, then?’ said Coombs.

  ‘The level of acceptance I’ve achieved in ministering to Aboriginal people has always been less than I’d hoped for,’ said Radcliffe, suddenly sombre. ‘It’s one of the handicaps of being a white priest. Nevertheless, I’ve lived with them for most of my life — in the Centre, in the West, and here — so I have a sense of their pain, which I feel in my own way. I know their stories, and I advocate for them, when appropriate. But the history that shaped me was relatively benign, so I lack their anger, which means I can never really know the true depth of their feelings.’

  ‘Speaking of anger,’ I said, ‘we’ve just come from seeing Ken Bynder. I’d be in
terested in your thoughts on him, and the anger he exhibits.’

  ‘If you’ve spoken to Ken, you have a good sense of how historical dispossession and oppression impacts on a people.’

  He eyed us, waiting for the next question. I nodded, to indicate he should go on.

  ‘Aboriginal Australians have a profound sense of recent history,’ he said. ‘By recent, I mean the past two hundred and fifty years. They see evidence of what happened to their people all around them, and they’ve been raised on the stories. How they were moved off the land. The massacre times. The rapes. The children being taken away. These stories reinforce their lived experience to produce a deep and abiding anger. That anger infects the core of their being.’

  ‘Do people around here ever vent their anger at you?’ asked Coombs.

  ‘If an Aboriginal person directs anger at me,’ said the priest, ‘I try to see it for what it is — the abiding legacy of great trauma — and I try to absorb it without taking it personally.’

  He eyed us expectantly, but I had no more questions for him. I looked at Coombs. She was done, too, so I thanked the priest for his time, and pocketed my notebook and pen.

  ‘Before you go, can you help me with this?’ said Radcliffe, turning his attention to the brick-shaped cake on the table in front of us. ‘From one of the parishioners. I’m sure it’s delicious.’

  Before we could decline, he gathered up the long set of rosary beads hanging from the cord around his waist and uncoupled the large crucifix at the end of the beads. I thought he was going to say a prayer, maybe even bless the cake. Instead, he held the crucifix up in front of his eyes, and with a theatrical flourish, he separated it into two pieces.

  ‘My party trick,’ he said, brandishing a scabbard in one hand and a short, double-edged blade in the other.

  The crossbar and the lower part of the crucifix with the Jesus figure attached had been hollowed out to form the scabbard. The head of the crucifix was the handle, and there was a ten-centimetre blade protruding from it. Radcliffe plunged the blade into one end of the cake and cut a slice, and another. He plated the slices and handed one to each of us.

  ‘My great-great-grand-uncle acquired it during the Spanish Civil War,’ he said, contemplating the blade. ‘It saved his life, so he dubbed it “The Blessing”. It’s been in my family for generations, and I’m its custodian for now.’

  I’d only been to Creswell once before. I’d driven down from Canberra with a couple of mates after a navy recruiter had visited our school and seduced us with his uniform and promises of adventures at sea. Despite our initial enthusiasm, none of us had ended up enlisting, though we all had lots of fun on the base that day, checking out the buildings, wading in the chilly water of the bay, and best of all, climbing over the vessels tied up at the wharf.

  When we rounded a corner and Creswell came into view, it was immediately clear that the place was no longer the simple training facility I’d visited as a teenager. Back then, the naval base had consisted of a small group of heritage buildings set on spacious grounds close to the water. The old buildings were still there, but these days they were sandwiched between half-a-dozen big, box-like bunkers and the two giant submarine hangars that filled the shoreline. It was a dramatic change, and it had me wondering what went on at this now massive facility, especially as it was surrounded by three concentric rings of security fencing.

  As we approached the first fence, the door to the gatehouse that guarded it swung open, and three sailors in combat fatigues stepped out, rifles at the ready. They stood in the middle of the road, and Coombs stopped the vehicle and wound her window down. One of the sailors inspected her pass and scanned her iris with a handheld device. The other two checked under the vehicle with some sort of camera attached to a telescopic pole.

  One then asked me to get out of the vehicle. He scanned my iris, inspected my ID, and handed Coombs a clipboard, and she signed me in. I was issued with a pass, which I hung around my neck, and I got back into the vehicle.

  Coombs drove slowly through the dead zone towards the second line of fencing and its gatehouse. We were scanned there as well, and they re-inspected our paperwork. The sentries at the third gatehouse performed the same checks, and when they’d finally cleared us, we drove through the third line of fencing and moved onto the base proper.

  The six bunkers filled most of the space between the third gatehouse and the cluster of old buildings where we were headed. The last bunker in the line had its own security fence, with separate vehicle access through another set of gates. If you wanted to draw attention to a building, that was the way to do it. Give it its own secured area within a larger secured area.

  ‘What happens in there?’ I asked, inclining my head towards the bunker.

  ‘Whatever’s going on at the time,’ said Coombs.

  ‘And what’s that at the moment?’

  ‘Look, Detective,’ she said, in a sudden show of impatience, ‘I clocked on twelve hours ago, and we’re about to go into a meeting that could last hours. Then I’ve got to escort you back to your lodgings. My cohort is in the mess enjoying the ripeness of the evening and I won’t be joining them anytime soon. So I’m in no mood for inappropriate questions. You get me?’

  That ended our conversation in the same way a nutcracker ends a nut. The empathetic Coombs had morphed into a grouchy superior. But maybe she’d just reverted to type — being back on home ground did that to some people.

  She parked next to one of the bigger heritage buildings, we got out of the vehicle, and I followed her up the front steps, through sliding doors, and into a large well-lit foyer. Our identities were checked at the security desk, we emptied our pockets into plastic trays, and took turns to be scanned in a chamber. We cleared security, and Coombs led me down a brightly lit corridor to a small waiting room, where four straight-backed chairs faced an empty coffee table.

  She invited me to sit, but I opted to stand. She shrugged and headed off down a short corridor. She stopped outside a door near the end of the corridor, knocked, and disappeared inside. A minute later, she reappeared and signalled for me to come.

  Commander Ian Peterson’s smile almost reached his eyes as he circumnavigated his antique desk and extended his hand towards me. He wore navy whites, with four gold stripes on each shoulder and five lines of ribbons on the right side of his chest. His face was deeply lined from years of exposure to the elements, so it was difficult to pinpoint his age. If pushed, I would’ve said he was about fifty-five.

  A bloke sat in a plush chair beside Peterson’s desk. He stood, too, and extended his hand. He was small and neat in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and blue tie. He introduced himself as Colonel Steven Allen of the Defence Intelligence Organisation.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Detective,’ said Peterson, gifting me another half-smile as he gestured for Coombs and me to sit down. ‘I thought it best we meet face-to-face. To confirm the command structure and get your thoughts on what you’ve seen so far.’

  ‘Thanks, Captain,’ I said, working hard to neutralise my face and my delivery. ‘As instructed, I’ve confined myself to the Stevens matter, even though one of your people, John Sheridan, is implicated at some level in Kylie Stevens’s death. Both Sheridan and Stevens’s housemate, Jade Rawlins, had contact with Stevens in the hours before she died. Both Sheridan and Rawlins are now missing. Without access to them, or evidence associated with them, I don’t see a speedy resolution to the Stevens case. As you’d appreciate, it’s impossible to get the full picture if you only have access to half the jigsaw.’

  ‘I hear you, Detective,’ said Peterson, stern-eyed, lips pursed. ‘I hear you. But let me underline one thing. Colonel Allen here has been speaking to your superiors. And to your minister, Senator Harris. They’ve agreed that you’ll confine yourself to the Stevens matter, and that John Sheridan is strictly off-limits to you and your colleagues. Of course, if asked, especially by any of yo
ur media contacts, you’ll say you’re working all aspects of the case. Any comments? Questions? Tell me you understand what I’ve said.’

  ‘I understand, sir. I just find it curious that the navy would knowingly frustrate a major crime investigation.’

  ‘I don’t concede that, Detective,’ said Peterson. ‘But let me say, I sympathise with you and your frustration.’

  ‘Well, can you clear something up for me? So I won’t misinterpret the gaps in my knowledge or look for links where there are none. Is the navy sitting on information or evidence that implicates John Sheridan and/or Jade Rawlins in the murder of Kylie Stevens?’

  ‘You may ask,’ said Colonel Allen, displaying a hint of impatience. ‘And we appreciate your desire to know. But this is a matter of national security, and there are issues and actions associated with it that must remain secret. From all but a few. In the national interest.’

  ‘Can I ask if you’ve retrieved Kylie Stevens’s phone yet?’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ said Allen. ‘But there’s nothing on it that’ll advance your case. What I can tell you is, the people we winched down onto the ledge where the phone was found — they’re certain the thing wasn’t thrown down from up top. It was undamaged, and in good working order. We’ve got a party being dropped in there at first light. We’ll see what it comes up with.’

  ‘What about Jade Rawlins?’ I said. ‘I assume her apparent disappearance is linked to John Sheridan in some way. So should I give her case the short treatment? Effectively stay out of it as well?’

  ‘No, Detective,’ said Allen, sighing as he glanced at Peterson. ‘You should do your job within the parameters we’ve set. I was warned you could be difficult, but I was assured you were a good operator. Well my advice to you is, don’t let your dated celebrity status cloud your judgement. Your superiors expect you to cooperate. That means accepting the limitations we’ve imposed, and otherwise discharging your responsibilities as an AFP investigator.’