Skull river, p.19
Skull River, page 19
The send-off was held at the pub all the troopers drank at, close to the head station. Much alcohol was drunk and many songs were sung. I knew plenty of soldier songs but there were not many songs about the traps – none, in fact. But when, during ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the words ‘up came the troopers, one, two, three’ came around, they were bellowed so loudly the windows shook. Then there was the perennial filthy favourite ‘The Good Ship Venus’, and from there it descended into rugby songs of an extremely earthy nature. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
The troopers and I rode back to Colley early the next morning, a sorry lot with our throbbing heads and bleary faces. But Scanlon had been sent off in style, and that was what mattered. Halfway back to town, with another four hours to go, we stopped at a small pub. When we got back in the saddle it began to rain.
We had heavy oilskin capes but it rained as we climbed the hills, it rained as we crossed the plateau and it rained as we rode down to the river valley. By then we may as well have been wearing cotton sheets as capes, because we were all wet and cold to the bone. We had to get the horses into the ostler’s stable, which he was none too happy about, walk them around, rub them down, feed them and lay out all their kit to dry while cold, wet and hungover.
The troopers trickled off to their bunkhouse while I set off for my tent, which was sagging under the weight of a dozen pinecones the cockies had gnawed off the tree. Where they sat against the canvas a drip had formed, right onto my pillow. Welcome home, trooper.
Mrs Owen had kept Alfie for me tied up on her back verandah. Silly bugger was overjoyed to see me and be let off the chain, and he raced around up and down the paddock in the rain, bouncing off me with his muddy paws and streaking along like a brown bee. When he’d finished, I let him into the tent and rubbed him dry, then he threw himself at the tent flaps, barking furiously.
I opened them and looked outside. Vogel, O’Malley and Jackson were marching up the block in the drizzle, carrying a lantern. Alfie raced out to greet them.
‘You better come down, sir,’ Jackson said, his voice full of suppressed rage.
‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s his other hand,’ O’Malley said. ‘It was left in our room.’
‘While we were giving him a send-off, some fucking mongrel got in there—’
‘It stinks something bad.’
‘His hand, his fucking hand!’
Talking over each other, upset, angry, exhausted. A sense of dread filled me, icy and low in my guts. I was still wearing my sodden uniform, as were they. Two green fox eyes shone from the darkness, watching us.
‘Where’s the uniform who relieved us?’
‘On the desk, sir, the fat toad.’
‘And the pub is kicking off. Full of those mangy dredgers, sir.’
‘Could be they did it, sir.’
I peeled off my wet tunic, found my dry greatcoat and put it on over my sodden shirt, then I got my fags and matches. ‘Right, let’s go.’
The four of us marched down, and an angrier, colder, more hungover and exhausted bunch you couldn’t hope to find. Alfie took the lead, trotting ahead of us like a regimental mascot, tail in the air, as I tried to quell my fury and fear.
The lights of the hotel were ablaze. It was only around seven and the pub was full. The laughter had a threatening edge to it, the shouts and bangs indicating some pent-up steam. It was a wet night, and wet nights brought in the dredging crews, when they weren’t being serviced by the sad girls old Foufoune had under her yoke.
Whiffs of the decaying hand gusted up the hallway as somebody went out the back door. The uniform who had relieved us while we were at the funeral was a fat old bastard, not long from retirement. Should he have been faced with an emergency, he would have done fuck-all.
The skeletal hand, with shreds of browning flesh clinging to it, sat in a corner. I stared at it, recalling the absence of Scanlon’s hands when his body was draped over Toss. We’d buried the man yesterday, sang him out of this world, if not with songs of his bravery, then at least with lusty, strong voices. Then this. By God, it was an insult – to Scanlon, to us, to me, to the uniform.
‘Vogel, go into the bar and ask Watt for a clean linen napkin.’
He ran off and I went back into the police office, where the dullard constable sat, working up a fart and needing all his fucking brainpower to do so.
‘Sir. How’d the funeral go, eh?’
‘Come with me,’ I said.
He followed me into the hall without shutting the office door or locking it. I demanded the keys and did it myself.
‘Relieved of duty. Look there – see that? Smell that? How did it get there on your watch?’
The man scratched his scrofulous head, blinking, looking at the assembled troopers with their haggard faces. ‘Wasn’t there this mornin’ when I got up, sir. Musta got in there today.’
‘Crawled in on its own, did it?’ I snapped. ‘The room should have been locked if no one was in there.’
Vogel returned with a white napkin. I entered the room, wrapped the hand and sent the troopers to get carbolic and hot water from the laundry. The din from the front bar echoed through the building, laughter long and loud. Laughing at us.
‘You’re on report for failing to follow procedure, Constable. This outrage happened on your watch and Bathurst will know it.’
He didn’t care. His comfy pension was only months away.
‘Go out to the woodshed and make sure it’s clear and ready to take any arrests. Now.’
He waddled off to find a lantern, muttering and complaining. The troopers set to scrubbing the smell out of their bunkroom. Ray Fitzgerald appeared at the end of the hallway, agitated, in his clipped, efficient manner.
‘Terrible smell out here,’ he said, distracted. ‘A dead rat in the cellar maybe. I’ll get Mr Watt onto it, but right now there’s a bit of a disturbance in the bar.’
As he spoke there was a rise in the clamour, more bangs and thumps. Just what I felt like doing, wrangling drunks. I sent Jackson and O’Malley in and raced up the stairs, two at a time and thumped down the hall to Kennedy’s room. I banged on the door until he finally answered, a bit worse for wear, breath of a distillery, bags under his eyes.
‘What?’ he snapped.
‘Another hand. In the troopers’ bunkroom.’ I held up the linen-wrapped bones.
‘What did you bring it up here for?’ he said, recoiling.
‘It’s Scanlon’s hand. We buried him yesterday, remember? And we’ve collared Wallace for his murder. To me this looks like Wallace has got out of the mortuary, put the hand there and is having a fine old fucking laugh at our expense as he trots back to his marble slab. Or it wasn’t Wallace.’
Kennedy rubbed his face with both hands, dropped them in exasperation. ‘I’ll talk to you in the morning. Listen to the flaming racket in this pub. It could have been one of the dredgers found the hand and put it there to fuck with us. You have been needling that old banger Foufoune.’
The din from the bar beneath us took a turn to the serious.
‘Better go and sort that out, sunshine,’ he said, then closed the door in my face.
I raced down the stairs, Scanlon’s hand in mine, unlocked our office, put the hand for the moment just inside the door, locked the door, then ran out and around and into the bar. Two men with broken pool cues were facing off. O’Malley and Jackson were keeping the other blokes away, all of them heckling and calling for one or the other to beat the shit of their opponent.
Watt and Fitzgerald stood behind the bar. They must have seen a lot of this sort of thing, and I was surprised that a muscular man like Fitzgerald, so keen on fitness and an ex-Steinaecker man to boot, wasn’t willing or able to stop them.
‘Let it run its course,’ Watt said, polishing a glass. ‘Simmons needs a good beating, just to remind him he’s home.’
I assumed Simmons was the younger one: black hair, stocky build, fire in his eyes and trouble, just like his kid. The other looked like a dredger.
My blood raced, every sense alert, scanning the scrum for the dangers: guns, knives, the men who’d step in if we pulled Simmons and the dredger apart, the men who lived for fighting as I had once done, so angry at a broken world that I’d smash my fist against it until it was broken and bloody too. But I was tired and wanted to go to bed, so I took the rifle from behind the bar and strode over and inserted myself between the two aggressors.
Simmons took the moment to nip around me and bash his opponent with the broken pool cue, and then all hell broke loose.
22
Assaulting a police officer is a serious offence with a very stiff penalty, but when a pack of dopy dredgers get on the turps, it’s odds-on that cold, hard fact gets thrown against the wall along with chairs and other blokes. A brawl ensued, locals against outsiders, punches flying and landing all over the place. Vogel, who turned up to help when he heard the racket, Jackson and O’Malley were in there, subduing, handcuffing, taking the blows, maybe landing one or two punches themselves, just to stun the offender before getting the cuffs on. Amid this uproar, Fitzgerald stood behind the bar and watched. Didn’t bring out a rifle, didn’t get in there and lend a hand.
When the worst of it was over, I stepped outside, wiped the blood from my face and found Madame Foufoune standing by her cart. She was wearing a large man’s overcoat and had a shawl knotted under several of her chins, and her breath was pluming in the lamplight.
‘You still here?’
‘The men paid my bail, luvvy,’ she said with a grin. ‘I’ve come to pick them up.’
‘They can kiss goodbye to their money if we find you’ve been peddling your girls to them while on bail.’
‘Is that your dog?’ she said, bending over and holding out a hand to Alfie. He, being a friendly chap, wagged his tail and sniffed her.
‘Get away, Alfie. I’ll have to wash your nose.’
Foufoune found that very funny. ‘I like dogs. Always happy, aren’t they?’
‘Seen this one before? With a man on a grey horse?’
‘Can’t say I have, luvvy,’ she said, crouching down to smooch with Alfie. ‘I like dogs better than people.’
Jackson came outside and whispered in my ear.
‘You’ll go back without your scaly mates, Mrs Foufoune. They’re locked up, every one of them. You can stand them bail, if you care to.’
She hauled her great bulk up with a groan. ‘Ooh, he’s a darlin’, that dog. If the men are off to Bathurst, then the girls can have a good wash in the river.’
‘The river’s full of mercury – you know that, don’t you?’
‘It’s what keeps my girls clean,’ she said with a wheezy laugh. ‘Don’t need injections when you can wash in it.’
‘That’s not how salvarsan works.’
‘Don’t wet your pants, luvvy, we’re all clean as new pennies,’ she said. She climbed, grunting, up to the cart, then looked me up and down. ‘A strapping young man, you are, fine as there ever was. I reckon I could make a lot of money from you.’ She winked, gave the reins a shake and trundled back to her cesspit.
She’d dug in up at Ringer’s Rocks, a walking fortress of flesh and wile, but a bit of sweet talk with me and my dog would not deter the law. I would win this battle.
~
The rain had cleared by morning. I’d snatched only a couple of hours’ sleep and was running on low spirits, waking to the awful memory of Scanlon’s hand in the bunkroom, and feeling the bruises from the settling of the pub last night. I’d tapped a nail into one of the pine tree trunks and hung a shaving mirror there so I could see what I was doing when I trimmed my beard. I took my ointment and stood, gazing into the mirror, rubbing it into the scar tissue, feeling myself reassemble for the day.
If Wallace was dead, who had left the hand for us? Maybe, as Kennedy suggested, the dredgers had found it and thought it would be a lark to leave it in the bunkroom. Which meant Wallace had left it wherever he’d carried out the mutilation. A location we had not found. Or it wasn’t Wallace at all, and the killer had kept the hands, along with Scanlon’s rifle, sidearm, warrant card and notebook. None of which had been found either.
I’d taken the hand with me up to the police block in the early hours of the morning, dug a deep hole and placed it in, backfilled and covered the diggings with heavy river stones from the fireplace. It could stay there until Bathurst decided what to do with it. Scanlon had been cremated, his remains interred in a cupboard out the back of the head station, no doubt, while somebody tried to find a regulation on Officer body parts – disposal of.
At breakfast, Mrs Owen remarked on my seemingly peaceful nights. ‘You don’t scream anymore,’ she said. ‘Getting better, you are. It’s probably the goats.’
‘The goats?’ I said, knife and fork paused above a plate of sausages and eggs.
‘Soothing, they are. Animals, that is. I like to sit with the goats of a summer evening, always makes me happy.’
‘It’s the dog,’ I said, returning to my food. ‘He senses my distress and wakes me before …’
‘They can tell,’ she said, nodding sagely. ‘My dad had fits, but one of our dogs used to get all whimpery, and ten minutes later Dad started to see spots. Mum knew it was going to happen, so she got the stick for him to bite down on and she’d clear us kids from the room, and sure enough, it happened.’
‘I don’t mind telling you what an enormous relief it is,’ I said. ‘Having him wake me before I make a racket.’
‘Not all dogs can do it, mind. But your Alfie, he’s got the power.’
Alfie heard his name and poked his nose over the threshold of the back door, taking a rare liberty with Mrs Owen. She commented on my black eye and offered a cold cloth, but it was past that. We agreed that I would give her a detailed account of Davy’s funeral after supper, and I headed off to work.
~
I ran into Jack Simmons’ evil spawn on the way, young Frankie, standing in the mud, idly banging a stick against a fence in the lane behind the ostler.
‘Master Simmons,’ I said, coming towards him.
‘Sergeant Hawkins,’ he replied, still banging his stick. ‘Still got the dog?’ he asked.
‘Yes, and I think I know who owned my dog. Belonged to a man called Charlie, but I can’t find him. He visited your mum, then he disappeared.’
‘She’s not my mum. She’s a slut and I wish she was dead.’
I was taken aback for a moment, then said, ‘She’s looked after you half your life. You show some respect.’
He gazed up at me, bold as brass, and said, ‘No. I won’t.’
We stared at each other. I didn’t know what to do with unruly kids, or even with good kids.
‘You called Scanlon on Charlie that night, didn’t you?’
He looked down, started banging the stick again. ‘Had no business in my dad’s house and he was drunk. He wouldn’t leave he was so drunk, so I ran and got Scanlon. He was smacking my mum around when we got back, and Scanlon took him off and I don’t know what happened to him.’
‘You saw me on his horse. I saw the look in your eyes – like you’d seen a ghost.’
‘You were coming for us, and we weren’t doing anything wrong.’
‘Just wrecking someone’s else home. You put the bungers around the cat’s neck too, didn’t you?’
‘Put ’em around your neck if I want,’ he said.
‘Watch yourself, son, you’re talking to the law,’ I snapped back, despite the thud of alarm.
He looked up, like a dog sniffing the breeze. ‘Gotta go.’
He ran off with me staring after him. Bungers around my neck, bloody hell. He was a hard case at twelve. A few more years and he’d be dangerous.
He slipped through a gap in the fence, and I realised it was the back of Mary’s property. I could hear her daughter screaming like a banshee. She was doing it all on her own, waiting for Dawn to die while her feckless husband sat in our locked laundry picking scabs off his knees.
~
Kennedy was re-pinning the map to the wall, squinting through the smoke from the fag in his mouth. O’Malley was on the counter doing the daily paperwork, his split eyebrow swollen and scabby. All the others sported evidence of last night’s smack-up too. I dropped into my chair and looked over at my senior officer in all his glory, waiting for his direction, his assessment of the awful discovery of Scanlon’s hand and its implications for the investigation. Hilde walked past and Kennedy yelled out an order for a cup of tea, then he lit another fag from the one in his hand.
‘You know she doesn’t work for us,’ I said.
‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I’ll get her to bring you a cuppa next time, all right?’
‘I’ll get my own tea, thank you.’
‘You know what your problem is?’
I couldn’t wait for him to tell me, like so many before him. Bloody-minded, neurasthenic, up myself, too hard on myself, a malingerer, a nutcase, stuck up, letting the side down, reckless, cowardly, boring, a pedant, ambitious, lazy, lacking ambition, violent, a drunk, a womaniser, a cur – that one was from a woman – and so on. I was a man with many facets: some glowed, some were dull.
‘You’re an arsehole.’
‘C’mon, you can do better than that,’ I laughed.
‘Don’t tempt me, mate,’ he said, returning to his desk and stabbing the ashtray with his fag. ‘Got to let Bathurst know about the … thing.’
‘The thing in the troopers’ bunkroom. Placed there while they were attending the owner’s funeral. The only reason they slept in there last night was because they were exhausted, but I have a serious morale problem now.’
‘Send ’em back. We’re done here.’
‘It wasn’t Wallace. It’s someone else in this town.’
‘Probably one of those dredgers put it there. Found it out bush. Wanted to make a point.’
‘I’ll make a bloody point for them, all right.’
Vogel had wired Bathurst for two police vans last night to take the worst of last night’s offenders there, because we had no facilities to keep them until a magistrate showed up. They’d all spent the rest of the night crammed in the woodshed – it was like the Black Hole of Calcutta, except they could sit, had blankets and a bucket to piss in. Now, having sobered up, they were waiting to be processed by the troopers.
