Skull river, p.8
Skull River, page 8
A few minutes later I knocked on the door. A young woman with a grumpy infant attached to her side yanked it open and was about to flay me alive when her mouth fell open and her eyes widened.
‘Gus? Oh my lord, it is. Gus Hawkins,’ she said, her surprise turning to a smile, which quickly turned to anger. ‘You’ve got a bloody hide, turning up here.’ Another child galloped down the hall behind her and poked his head around his mother’s skirts, saw me and ran off again. It was the little bugger from the stone-throwing episode, Frank Simmons.
‘Mary, is it?’
‘You don’t even remember me, do you?’
‘I do, I do, it’s just the context,’ I stammered, trying desperately to recall that week in Colley back in whenever it was. She adjusted the baby on her hip, who stared at me with a frank and fearless gaze, a rusk clutched in a small fist. I did a quick and panicky calculation. It was 1906 when Mary and I must have become acquainted, and it was now 1912. That kid looked to be eleven or twelve. Not mine.
‘Is he your kid?’ I asked about the boy.
‘Frankie? I’m his stepmum, so you could say he’s mine. Got no other mum. His father, and my husband, is Jack Simmons, but he’s away from home right now. So if you’ve come to have a word about Frankie, I don’t care to hear it.’
As she spoke, the memories returned. Mary Brennan, very young widow of the parish, glorious carroty curls, pearly skin in the candlelight and me passed out beside her, reeking of whisky and vomit. My God, what a charmer I was in those days.
‘Pretty as ever, Mary.’
Mary smiled, ‘Full of blarney as ever, Gus. And who would have thought a man like you, set to take on the world with his fists, would sign up for the traps, eh?’
‘Only safe place for me.’
‘Stationed here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’d ask you to pretend you don’t know me, and to never breathe a word of the past to my Jack or any of his mates. He works away as a water diviner and well digger, and gets awful jealous when he comes back.’
‘I won’t say a word, I promise. Can I ask where you were the morning the station went up?’
‘Here – where do you think? I was busy getting Frankie ready for school and this one fed. I didn’t even know poor old Davy had been killed.’
‘Know him well?’
‘No. He’d come around about Frankie now and then, but he knew to stay away. Most of the men around here know Jack don’t like me talking to them. So off you go, and don’t even nod to me in the street.’
She closed the door in my face, and I took out my notebook and jotted down what she’d said. Mary had been just eighteen when I met her, a widow for a year, and yet life coursed through her lovely blue veins. She looked a little thinner now, and the dark circles under her vivid green eyes could be attributed to the infant attached to her, but by God, she could still stir the loins.
Lawlor and Vogel reported resistance from a man in Mrs Lennox’s shop who told them to fuck off.
‘That’s using offensive language against an officer of the law, sir,’ Vogel said, all huffy. ‘He can’t do that – got no respect for authority.’
‘Did you get a name?’
‘No, sir, he just pushed past us,’ Lawlor said. ‘And he went out of his way to shove me aside.’
We went into the store and found Mrs Lennox behind the counter, arranging a wall display of jars of boiled sweets.
‘What now?’ she sighed, turning around.
‘A customer of yours refused to speak to the troopers. Know him?’
‘Mr Edmund Wallace, dairyman on the Topknot Road,’ she said. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, and it wasn’t these two’s fault, he just isn’t a terribly pleasant man.’
I jotted this in my notebook while Lawlor and Vogel stood there, arms dangling. About as useful as a pair of glass hammers.
‘I thought of something I didn’t tell them,’ Mrs Lennox said, nodding at the troopers. ‘My bedroom upstairs overlooks the empty block, and I can see the police station clearly, or I could. On Thursday night, late, I was woken by a man on Cullen Street shouting. I looked out and saw Scanlon manhandling him up the road towards the station. Probably went into the lock-up.’
‘Anything distinctive about him?’
She shook her head. ‘Just another drunk. I hope Scanlon let him out before the fire.’
I thanked her and we got away quickly before we could explore that topic further. Kennedy and Ray Fitzgerald were yarning in the hallway when we returned. Hilde Fitzgerald, her golden head bowed, long skirt rustling, walked past.
‘Get us a cup of tea, love, will you?’ Kennedy said. ‘Couple of biscuits too.’
‘I’ll put this lot on your desk,’ I said, holding up the notebooks the troopers had written in.
‘Ta,’ he said. ‘Done the dredgers yet?’
‘Now they’re a rough mob,’ Fitzgerald added. ‘Brace yourselves on a Saturday night.’
‘We’ll go down there now.’
~
Vogel, Lawlor, Scott and I rode along the western road for several miles, all of us jumpy as cats, rifles out, scanning for the sharpshooter. The two dredges in operation were in the deepest and filthiest part of the river at Ringer’s Rocks. The sound of steam engines rattling and grunting, of metal clanking, rhythmic and regular, could be heard, growing in irritating intensity the closer we came. We rounded a bend and found, on the banks of the river, the remains of the earliest settlement in the gold rush times, which had had a school and cottages. Now it was just a jumble of dilapidated hovels, huts and debris, all muddy tracks, smouldering campfires and scurvy-ridden, listless old men.
Shoals of pale grey river stones lay on the edges of the river, smooth and unnerving. The dark yellow water lapped at them as the noise from the dredges echoed off the rugged cliff on the other side of the river. The racket was so deafening I had an urge to shoot one of the monsters just for a bit of peace. Each dredge looked like a small cottage on a barge. On the inside of each cottage was a great machine with buckets that scraped the riverbed, brought up the soil and gravel and any gold, which was then extracted using mercury, then the remaining gravel and mercury was dumped on the riverbanks. There were great mounds of it everywhere, which had to explain the colour of the water. These things went up and down the river, digging, sifting and dumping. The four of us stared at them as if their hunger for gold included men. Our horses were well and truly unhappy being near these dark satanic mills.
A soot-covered bloke emerged and pissed over the side, into the river. I waved at him, he waved back and went inside, and the din stopped. Then the other dredge, taking its cue, also stopped. The silence was startling.
A motley bunch of men who looked like piratical, grimy figures from an unspeakable hellhole – which in fact they were – emerged from both dredges, clambered into dinghies and rowed over. A marginally better-dressed bloke sauntered over to me and introduced himself as the foreman in charge of both dredges.
‘Sergeant,’ he said, with an unfriendly nod. ‘Replacement for old Buck, eh?’
‘That’s right. My men are going to take statements from your crew.’
‘What for?’ he said, and lit a fag.
‘The murder of a mounted trooper on the Gibbet Hill Road on Friday morning.’
He took a drag on his cigarette and squinted back at the shoreline, where his men were lined up and talking, or not, to mine. ‘Won’t talk to no coon,’ he said, nodding at Trooper Scott, who was standing alone. ‘And we dunno nothing about it.’
‘Had you met Trooper Scanlon?’
He nodded, his unshaven jowls and cheeks smeared with black grease.
‘In town at the hotel?’
Another nod.
‘See anyone around who looked suspicious?’
Shook his head. He was the sort of man who’d dance a jig at the news of the death of a demon. As for cooperating with us, well, that would be too close to admitting there was anyone at all who had authority over him.
Over by a row of shabby tents, an enormously fat woman sat on a log, taking the watery sunlight. She wore a dirty blue satin evening gown with puffy sleeves and a very low bodice out of which ballooned most of her substantial bosom. Her hair was not a colour normally seen in nature and she had a large fan open and flapping around at the flies.
‘Morning, luvvy,’ she said, as I walked over. ‘Got a special on today for the demons. Two for one, or one for two, however you like it. Girls, come on out and meet the gentlemen.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Mrs—’
‘Madame La Foufoune,’ she said, with an extravagant wink. Four girls clambered out of the tents. Two were Chinese, one looked like she was from some island in the Pacific – dark skin, hair like a puffball – and one was white. All of them were wearing torn and dirty petticoats and corsets. Their faces were masks of indifference, but when Mrs Foufoune clapped her hands, they smiled and swished their petticoats back and forth.
‘It’s disgusting,’ I heard Vogel mutter. He’d obviously finished questioning the workers and thought it’d be a good idea to come over and breathe down my neck.
It was not only disgusting, it was also indescribably sad. I had been, in my ignorant, callous youth, a brothel customer, although not at this squalid level. But with the zeal of a reformed man I loathed these travelling outfits, with their steady supply of opium for the girls and money for the madam. But we weren’t here to right this particular wrong today.
‘Pack up and get out, Mrs Foufoune. If you’re still here tomorrow, you’ll be very sorry.’
‘We’re here because the men on the dredges want us here, luvvy, so you’ll have to sort it with them,’ she said with a hard look.
‘Been in the business long?’
‘Longer than you’ve been alive, luvvy.’
‘It’s not luvvy, it’s Sergeant Hawkins of Colley Station. Leave this area today, or you will find yourself in deep trouble.’
She looked me up and down slowly, from boots to cap, and no doubt she saw the same randy, drooling beast inside me as she saw in every man: pitiful, chained to our idiot cocks, which led us hither and yon, providing a never-ending supply of horniness for her to make money from.
‘Come on, girls, time to pack up,’ she said, having calculated the odds.
The dredging foreman, who’d been about to row back to his boat, came back over. ‘You moving Kiki and the girls on, eh?’
‘Kiki?’
‘Madame Kiki La Foufoune,’ he said with a leer. ‘Foufoune’s French for pussy – yer know that, Sergeant. She serves only the best foufoune too. Get a taste of it while yer can, eh?’
‘She’s not serving it on my beat.’
That earned me a sneer and his crew sniggered in support, and what a mucky lot they were. Barely one tooth between the lot of them and that was a blackened ruin begging to be pulled. The girls in the tents had to suffer their stench, their rough hands, their breath as fragrant as their greasy balls.
Old Foufoune whispered to the white girl, then said, ‘Little Rosebud here reckons she knows something about the murder.’
Rosebud looked more like a daisy that had been trampled on by a carthorse, poor kid. I asked her what she knew.
‘It’ll cost you,’ old Foufoune said.
‘The police do not pay witnesses.’
‘Let us stay, then.’
The dredgers watched closely, sensing their evening’s entertainment at risk.
‘Charge them, then close them down, sir,’ the righteous Vogel hissed in my ear.
‘What do you know?’ I asked the girl.
She glanced at her boss, then said, ‘I’d been with a customer in the town and—’
‘When?’
‘Thursday night. We had a bit to drink and when I woke up I dunno what time it was, but I had to get back or I’d be in trouble, so I walked back along the river road in the dark and I saw a man on a horse. On his way south up the Colley Road. It was real dark and I looked because I heard it and got frightened because I was on me own, but he didn’t see me and was just riding up the hill. I ran all the way back.’
‘Notice the colour of the horse, or what the man was wearing, anything like that?’
‘Too dark – it was like a bit of moonlight and then gone.’
I scribbled all this down. Nobody carried a watch besides police and doctors, so there was no telling what time this was.
‘Name of the client?’
‘Now, Sergeant,’ old Foufoune said. ‘We pride ourselves on discretion. No names, you understand, as the gentlemen want to feel safe.’
‘Whereabouts of his house?’
Foufoune shook her head. ‘It was dark when we dropped her there.’
‘Did you know Trooper Scanlon, Mrs Foufoune?’
‘He wasn’t a customer, if that’s what you’re asking. He’d pop in now and then, ask us to leave, that sort of thing.’
‘I’m not asking, I’m ordering you. Move on or I’ll come back and arrest you.’
The wily old bag folded her arms across her chest, a feat of flexibility that pushed her great knockers even higher, and smiled the sort of smile that said the hell you will.
As we walked back to our horses, I pulled Vogel to one side. ‘Do not tell me what to do unless you want instant dismissal. I am your sergeant, and I tell you what to do.’
‘Maybe you don’t think what they’re doing is wrong, sir, but it’s a sin.’
‘Maybe I think you are impertinent, Vogel,’ I snapped, astonished. ‘The state of their souls is not our concern. We apply the law as it stands. How long have you been a mounted trooper?’
‘Seven months, sir.’
‘Then you will know that backchat to a senior officer is not tolerated.’
‘Yes, sir, but—’
‘There is no “but” when you speak to me. Dismissed.’
We rejoined the others. No wonder O’Malley had a problem with him. Vogel stood apart, dancing to his own peculiar tune, and God knows what it sounded like. Sharing a bunkhouse with him was probably an ordeal – no doubt he gave unwanted commentary on the others’ varying standards of cleanliness and lack of prayers before bedtime.
I was never all that fussed about following orders when stationed at Calpa. It was a one-man station, and I expanded to fill the command vacuum, ordering myself around wherever I saw fit. The Bourke Super lived in a state of dyspeptic fury because of me, but it was a hard posting to fill so I stayed. Now I was getting a taste of my own maddening medicine.
10
I rode out the front on the way back, irritated by what we’d just seen and by Vogel’s insubordination. But the sight of the western river, so recently dredged, held no cheer either. The entire river valley and river bottom had been dug up in search of alluvial gold, overturned and dumped on the riverbanks over decades. I knew from school chemistry lessons that when you expose certain minerals to air, you start a chemical reaction that produces sulphuric acid. That had to be what was happening here with the yellow water.
Wave after wave of prospectors had come in and dug over everything in a frantic search, like a locust plague, taking everything and leaving a ravaged landscape and a dying river. The timber was all gone, except for some trees on private land, used to build cradles and hold up dugouts, then burned to make steam for the dredgers, whose bosses probably lived in Melbourne and spent their gold on the granite columns with gold inlay that propped up the nation. There was no local prosperity or even any level of security. The gold was gone, the party over, and the rich men could get on with being rich. Only the blackberries and wild pigs were doing well.
As we passed what appeared to be the last creek before Cemetery Hill, the mournfully named Insolvency Creek, I remembered Scott’s hunch. We had to get up there somehow.
~
Back in town, I’d come off the boil. I pulled Vogel aside again. ‘If you have something to tell me, I will hear it,’ I said. ‘Just pick your moment and respect the rank.’
‘Why didn’t we arrest her? She’s breaking the law, sir.’
‘She is,’ I said, with all the patience I could lay hold of. ‘But our job is to complete our mission, which is the investigation into Scanlon’s murder. We don’t have the time or resources to arrest and process them, so we kick them into someone else’s patch. But I expect they’ll drag their feet, so what I want you to do is go upstairs to one of the court clerks, get this account by Miss Rosebud typed up, and then go back and get her to sign it. Then remind them they have to move on. Take Jackson with you.’
He didn’t want to go back; his face looked like I’d offered him a slice of dog turd. But he had to learn. Most of our usual customers had complicated moral lives; we simply had to get on with applying the law fair and square, the Bucky Barrett way. And Jackson had a bit of menace running through his veins – I reckoned he could turn it on at will – whereas Vogel would just yap out rules and regulations plus a bit of God-bothery and everyone would have a good laugh.
I wrote it all up at my desk, pleased that Kennedy wasn’t around. O’Malley approached my desk. I put my pen down, blotted the paper, looked up.
‘Excuse me, sir, but I reckon … ah, I don’t know,’ he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. I waited. O’Malley seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, despite the egg yolk on his uniform. ‘One of those dredgers,’ he said at last. ‘I reckon we need to have a closer look at him, sir.’
‘Because?’
‘The others were sorta avoiding standing next to him and he was all nervy.’
‘Name?’
O’Malley whipped out his notebook, flipped through the pages. ‘Josiah Mutkins, sir.’
I jotted the name down. ‘Good work, trooper. Dismissed.’
He strutted out of the office, pleased with his pat from the boss. It was the sort of initiative I wanted, not Vogel’s pious impertinence.
I returned to my paperwork but soon I felt eyes on me and my skin prickled. It would be sudden oblivion, no pain. I looked up and around. Len Fitzgerald was standing in the doorway, his usual scowl in place.
