‘Never have yet,’ said Pete Sampson. ‘And not about to start either.’
Fish sat too. Now she could see him front-on she realised one leg of the moleskins was empty and one sleeve of the shirt pinned up. A single crutch lay on the ground by the armchair. Pete Sampson grinned at her look. ‘Seen a spare arm or leg about the place, missy?’
‘You mean prosthetic ones?’
‘Is that what they call them now? A wretched nuisance is what I call them. Itch? You wouldn’t credit it. Worse than ants in your pants and I’ve had those too.’
‘Did you lose them at Gallipoli?’ asked Fish politely.
He cackled. ‘Makes it sound like I put them down somewhere on me day off. No, Vimy Ridge, and they were blown off mostly, anyhow. I knew exactly where they were at first because they were dangling off me, but when I woke up again, I was in England and they were nowhere to be seen.’ He shook his head. ‘Would have liked to think they got a decent burial, but you used to see great piles of arms and legs outside the surgery tent. Reckon they just went for pig food. No, I’m not joking, missy. I saw the old French biddy who sold me and Tommo a leg of pork drive off with a bullock cart of them. Never eaten pork since.’
‘Is that really true?’ For some reason her truth detector wasn’t working today. Or maybe she just couldn’t easily accept the truths she was being given.
‘True as I’m sitting here. Ah, tea.’ A startlingly white set of upper false teeth suddenly poked out of his mouth. He sucked them back in and grinned at Fish. ‘The young ’uns usually laugh like billy-o when I do that.’
‘I think Fish might be a bit old for false-teeth jokes, Pete,’ said Nancy dryly. ‘Hi, Alannah. This is Fish. Fish, meet Alannah.’
‘Can’t blame a bloke for trying.’ Pete Sampson looked up at his granddaughter. ‘What’s for smoko?’
‘Jam roll,’ said Alannah calmly. Fish tried not to examine her for Aboriginality. Blonde hair, but that might be bottle blonde. Skin that might be tanned or naturally dark or both, blue eyes . . . Fish saw Nancy glance at her with amusement, and looked at the jam roll instead.
‘Alannah won first prize for her jam roll at the Show last year,’ said Nancy.
‘Only because no one else entered the jam roll section. People need to support the Show, or we’ll have no Show left. Fish, is it? Milk or sugar?’
‘Just milk, please.’ Dad hated that she had milk in her tea — ‘You cannot taste the flavour of the leaves . . .’
‘Jam roll?’
‘Please.’
‘Cut it a bit thicker,’ ordered Pete Sampson. ‘She’s thin as a match with the wood shaved off.’
Alannah obeyed. ‘And here’s yours,’ she added to her grandfather. ‘I’m off now. Nice to have met you,’ she added to Fish.
‘Alannah works at River View,’ said Nancy. ‘Occupational therapist.’
‘And what’s she going to do when you shut it down?’ demanded Pete.
‘Work at the hospital. She’s already helping get everything set up properly there. Same facilities or better; the same staff. Fish wants to know about missing people.’
‘Ha. I can tell you about them, missy. Half the boys who left here were missing by the time they rowed us back to the big ships at Gallipoli.’
‘Not that kind of missing,’ said Fish. ‘I mean the sort where someone is around here one day, and then they sort of vanish and no one knows where they’ve gone. That kind of missing.’
‘You think that didn’t happen at Gallipoli? Bodies lying so thick on the ground that sometimes you’d have to tread on them three deep, and I’m not joking.’ He wasn’t, realised Fish. ‘Some poor blighter wasn’t there at roll call and you didn’t know if he was dead, wounded or taken prisoner. Mightn’t know for years, even if he was your brother or had grown up next door. Just “missing”. Two friends of mine, signed up the same day, went missing. They haven’t found them yet.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fish, glancing desperately at Nancy. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . to hurt you . . .’
‘No, missy, don’t you worry about it. Can’t hurt an old bloke like me. I’m tanned like a kangaroo hide, inside and out.’ He took a long drink of his tea, then began to eat his cake in small pinches. ‘Pour us another?’ he asked Nancy.
Nancy poured, adding another two sugars. She stirred the tea and handed it to him. ‘She’s interested in stories about any people who just disappeared from Gibber’s Creek. You know, people who are around and then they’re not,’ she said. ‘You don’t get a visit from two good-looking sheilas like us for nothing, mate.’
Pete chuckled. ‘Which story does she want, eh? Have you told her about Mavis McGoodle?’
‘I don’t think that’s suitable —’ began Nancy.
‘What happened to her?’ asked Fish at the same time.
Pete grinned at Nancy. ‘She was the girl who never was. Roy McGoodle used to bring girls down from Sydney every Friday night.’
‘What kind of . . . ?’ began Fish. She flushed. ‘Oh, that kind.’
‘Too right. But he took a fancy to one of them, real young she was and a bit simple. Kept her on. Anyhow, she had a baby, Mavis, but he never registered her, so no one ever knew about her for years.’
‘Even you?’
‘Even me, missy. Not till he’d put her to work too, and even then I reckon it took a year or two for word to get around, because the blokes who went there weren’t too keen on admitting what they’d done. Turns out McGoodle kept her chained up in the shed, mostly.’
‘He chained her up!’
‘Yep. Anyhow, McGoodle had a stroke and Mavis’s mum turned up at the grocer’s while he was in hospital, wanting food but with no idea what things cost. McGoodle had never let her have any money. First time anyone had seen her for years.’ Pete stopped to drink more tea and pinch off another nibble of jam roll.
Fish leaned forwards, heart beating. McGoodle sounded just like the kind of person who might have hidden his victims under the church floor.
‘What happened then?’ she breathed.
‘What? Oh, Miss Matilda came swooping down, and Mavis’s mum cried and said she had to do what McGoodle told her to do. Well, Matilda convinced her that was nonsense finally. She and Nancy here took Mavis under their wings. Mavis and her mum were living quite happily in the house when McGoodle got out of hospital six weeks later. He couldn’t walk or talk properly, so they had to take care of him.’ Another sip of tea. ‘Don’t know that anyone showed them how to do it, because he was dead about a month later.’ His bright eyes looked at Fish. ‘And no one asked too many questions either.’
‘They killed him?’ Fish whispered.
‘I never said that, missy.’
‘When was this? Where are they now?’ McGoodle might have been the murderer or he might have brutalised the women so much that they thought nothing of killing those who’d hurt them . . .
‘Six years ago, wasn’t it, Nancy? Mavis and her mum inherited the house and everything, being his next of kin. He was a real skinflint, so it was quite a bundle. Enough so neither of them has to work. Real happy they are now.’
‘Oh.’ Fish sat back. McGoodle couldn’t have murdered Merv then. But the poor tortured women? ‘Do either of them drive?’
‘Nah. Don’t think Mavis’s caught up on everything she didn’t get to learn as a little tacker. And her mum’s as timid as they come.’
‘I call in every week,’ said Nancy. ‘They like to give people morning tea. China cups and date scones. I think they feel that’s what respectable people do. They spend most of the day cleaning and cooking for their morning tea party. We have a sort of informal roster to make sure someone’s there every day for them.’
‘That’s . . . kind,’ said Fish. Impossible for the women to have got Merv to the church then; nor did they have any reason to.
Nancy shrugged. ‘It’s what you do. We all feel bad we never knew about Mavis. He was a cunning one, old McGoodle.’
Fish looked
at her, pouring Pete more tea, at Pete, nibbling his cake. They at least suspected that the women had let their tormentor die, either on purpose or because they knew no better. Maybe many people had known he was in that house, uncared for. And they thought nothing of it . . .
‘I really meant people who went missing around here who might have been killed,’ she said slowly.
‘Well, there was Nancy here. She went missing for three years.’
What? ‘Excuse me?’ Fish said, looking back and forth between them.
‘I was in a Japanese internment camp during the war,’ said Nancy quietly. ‘Our ship was bombed out of Singapore. No one knew I had survived for months after the war was over. I was too ill to let them know.’
What? No! Those camps had been . . . Her mind refused to visualise how bad they had been, here in this quiet, normal room. How could that have happened to Nancy without . . . marking her somehow? How could she be walking around in an ordinary life? Being kind to people. Making time for teenagers and their quests. Looking after disabled kids.
But of course there would be scars, even if they weren’t visible like Mr Sampson’s. She looked at Nancy properly. What was happening behind those kind eyes?
‘I . . . I didn’t know.’ No wonder these two took McGoodle’s death in their stride. Both had seen far worse, and for years . . .
‘Your Great-Uncle Joseph was in a prisoner-of-war camp too,’ said Nancy flatly. ‘Blue didn’t know if he was dead or alive for years.’
Fish found she was near tears. Her own family. ‘Why didn’t someone tell me?’
‘They probably would have, if you’d ever asked. Believe me, it’s not something that’s easy to talk about, and not just because the memories sear your brain each night. Saying, “Oh, Singapore? That’s where our ship sailed from before it was bombed!” is a real conversation stopper at dinner parties.’
How could Nancy joke about it? Except she wasn’t. ‘How do you cope?’ she asked softly.
Nancy exchanged a look with Pete. ‘By living,’ she said shortly. ‘That’s what we owe the dead. Not to waste our lives.’
Great-Uncle Joseph hadn’t wasted his life either. He was loved by the whole district, as well as his family. But then to have an accident like that happen to his son, to have that son suspected of murder . . .
‘It isn’t fair,’ she whispered.
‘No,’ said Nancy. ‘Life isn’t.’
Great-Uncle Joseph suffering all those things she had read about in the death camps. Okay, life wasn’t fair, but there was one thing she could do for him, and that was prove his son was innocent.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly to Nancy. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you. I’m sorry I didn’t know, didn’t even think to ask. But I want to prove Sam couldn’t have killed Merv, and if someone else had been killing people and burying them under the church for decades, then it can’t have been Sam.’
Pete and Nancy exchanged an even longer look.
‘What about people who were never found?’ Fish asked Pete determinedly.
Pete gave her a half-grin. ‘Oh, I can give you a lot of those, missy. At least three blokes off the top of my head who headed for Darwin rather than pay child support. Easy to get a job up there under another name. And your Aunt Mah’s brother, he went missing for about fifty years after a robbery he was in when he was a young ’un went wrong . . .’
Fish blinked. Great-Aunt Mah’s brother? How many secrets could one family have? Or did all families have secrets? Because if they were secret, you wouldn’t even know . . .
She looked at Pete again, enjoying his cake, and she knew.
He was playing with her. He’d known exactly what she wanted before she’d come here, and so had Nancy. If they knew anything about the sort of vanishing that might lead to a body under the church, they weren’t going to tell her. Nancy, who seemed to have no guilt at all about a man’s death by neglect, even if he’d deserved it, and this old man who even seemed gleeful at his fate.
Fish stood, deeply uncomfortable. They hadn’t just been playing with her. They’d been playing with the truth. ‘I’d better go. Gran expects me back for lunch. Thank you for the stories, Mr Sampson.’
‘Excuse me for not seeing you out. Going to give me a kiss goodbye?’
‘No,’ said Fish, then added, ‘sir.’
He chuckled again. ‘Turn the TV on again before you leave, will you, missy?’
Fish could hear the chatter of some soap opera as they went down the steps. She looked back at the house. It still seemed so . . . normal.
Just like Great-Uncle Joseph seemed normal, and Nancy, Great-Aunt Blue, and her own life too. Surface normality could hide an infinity of secrets. And that was the most frightening thing of all.
Chapter 36
Hair looking flat and lifeless? Try a new body wave perm from Headline Haircuts and your stye will be bouncing again!
CONSTABLE WILLIAM RYAN
Will sat at the old Laminex table in the office behind the butcher’s shop, took out his notebook and gave Tubby an apologetic look. He’d interviewed him once by himself, when Merv was first identified, and again with the detective. Now there they were again, pestering him in the middle of a workday.
‘Cuppa coffee?’ asked Tubby. He’d taken off his apron. William could hear the apprentice outside wrapping a kilo of sausages, the ring of the cash register as he made change.
‘No, thank you,’ said Detective Rodrigues for both of them.
Which annoyed William Ryan too, though he couldn’t say anything to a superior officer, especially one from Sydney. He’d love a cuppa. His mouth was as dry as Ayers Rock in midsummer. Nor was it right being expected to sit like a kid at school while an outsider asked the questions. This was his town and, okay, Detective Rodrigues asked him for his opinion as well as local information in private. But in public he had to sit as silent as a bloody shorthand typist taking down her boss’s words.
‘Just want to go over the events of February last year again,’ began Detective Rodrigues.
‘I know what you want to ask,’ said Tubby flatly, sitting down and resting his beefy butcher’s arms on the table. ‘It’ll be the same answer as last time. We took that truck from Rocky Valley to Dribble on the back road. We were together the whole time, Sam didn’t vanish anywhere, and we didn’t meet that Merv guy and do away with him. We left Sam at Dribble with Dr McAlpine and Jed and Scarlett and gave Carol a lift back to town. The smoke was so thick we couldn’t see much beyond the road ahead. And that was it. Finish. Finito. Anything else you’d like to know?’
Detective Rodrigues stood. ‘No, that’s all. Thank you for your time. We’ll see ourselves out.’
‘Sorry about this,’ said William. He couldn’t care less if the detective heard it. He had to live and work in this town when Rodrigues went back to Sydney, not to mention that they were as good as accusing Tubby of lying.
He followed the detective out the back door. The police car sat in the lane. William let himself into the driver’s seat and sighed. ‘Where now, sir?’
‘Did it occur to you, Constable, that every single man in the fire tanker has said exactly the same thing?’
‘Yes, of course it has. Because that’s what happened.’
Detective Sergeant Rodrigues gazed at him for a moment. ‘Five men say, “We took that truck from Rocky Valley to Dribble on the back road. We were together the whole time, Sam didn’t vanish anywhere, and we didn’t meet that Merv guy and do away with him.” Word for word, and you don’t think it’s odd?’
‘They’ve talked it over, of course. They knew there’d be questions. You can’t keep anything quiet in Gibber’s Creek.’
‘A word-perfect statement sounds more like they rehearsed exactly what they were going to say.’
William looked at him, exasperated. ‘There are only so many ways you can say it. Look, sir, they’re good blokes. All of them.’
‘Exactly. Good blokes will lie for a friend. They might ev
en give him a hand when his wife is being threatened. Mervyn had a bad record.’
‘They didn’t know about his record, sir.’
‘They knew what he’d done to Mrs McAlpine.’
‘Yes, sir. But I’m sure they are telling the truth. And there must have been dozens of people who wanted Ignatius Mervyn dead.’
‘But none who would have known where he was that day. Everyone we’ve spoken to says how thick the smoke was, how fast the fires were spreading. Why would a stranger head towards the fires on a day like that?’
‘Someone followed him out there,’ said Constable Ryan stubbornly, as he had at least a dozen times before. ‘Maybe they even lured him out there. A stranger, maybe even a criminal he’d been involved with. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’
‘And my experience tells me it’s far more likely to have been someone who either lives out that way, or had a reason to be there. That’s a short list.’ Detective Sergeant Rodrigues shook his head. ‘The fire crew should have realised that no one gives exactly the same story unless they’ve practised it.’
Anger flared. How many lives had Tubby and the others saved? How could anyone think they’d kill someone, no matter what he’d done? Everyday heroes, blokes who spent their weekends chopping wood for the Lions Club raffle or painting the nursing home for Rotary. Had this man ever fought a bushfire? These men weren’t vigilantes, never could be. If they saw something wrong, they called the police. He should know — it had been his father they’d called, and then himself. ‘Telling the same story doesn’t mean they’re guilty.’
‘No,’ said Detective Sergeant Rodrigues. ‘But it does mean they have something to hide.’
Chapter 37
Missing: Much loved pet dog, answers to Wuffles. Reward.
JED
The night glowed, as if the trees and earth had drunk the sun. Faintly from the hills above, the dingo howled again, still the single call, mournful, lonely, waiting . . . Jed threw a wooden train into the toy basket so she wouldn’t slip on it and break her leg, and an elephant and a blue bear before Maxi decided they were hers.
The Last Dingo Summer Page 18
