Seven mile beach, p.10
Seven Mile Beach, page 10
Eventually he fell asleep—only to be woken by the sound of a car in the parking area, and by the slow arc of headlights, like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, shining through the windows. The car drove past, then came back. Nick looked at his watch. It was just after three in the morning. He rolled out of bed and pulled on his shoes and crawled to the window. The car was a white saloon—a Commodore, he thought. The last time he’d spoken to Danny Grogan was in a white Commodore.
The car stopped outside a block of units on the far side of the parking area but the engine was still running. Through a gap in the vertical blinds Nick thought he could see two people. He slipped the door latch. A figure—it looked like a woman but in the darkness Nick couldn’t be sure—got out of the passenger seat and shut the door. Now he could see her high-heeled shoes. She walked around to the back of the car and took something from the boot, then opened the rear door on the driver’s side and got in. Nick couldn’t see the driver. The Commodore sat there with its engine running, not moving. Nick felt in his pocket for the keys to the panel van. Had the old man turned him in? He remembered the ruined carpet. Had Kevin Chambers really stayed here before?
Nick thought of Laura-May the skydiver from Sauk City, Wisconsin, who’d survived a fall of ten thousand feet without a parachute. The miraculously lucky happened every day. Why not the miraculously unlucky? He remembered the honeymooning plane crash victims who’d been destined for the front page until they turned out not to exist. The splash that replaced them was about a Kempsey woman who’d run over a masked armed robber in the carpark of the local RSL, only to find that the robber was her own son.
As a junior reporter he’d suspected stories like that of being made up but they never were. Nick scoffed at the idea that age nurtured scepticism. Age nurtured belief, even in the unbelievable. Especially in the unbelievable. Who could have predicted a physical resemblance between Nick Carmody and Kevin Chambers—and yet the resemblance was a fact. Coincidence wasn’t an unnatural contrivance but its opposite. It was what kept the world moving.
Finally the Commodore drove away, and Nick realised he’d been spooked by nothing more sinister than a furtive coupling in the back seat.
It was still dark when he crept out to the panel van with two supermarket bags full of dye-soaked newspaper. The dog stared at him wanly as he opened the car door: the sort of disappointed, reproachful morning-after look that reminded Nick of unhappy nights with Carolyn. He sat behind the steering wheel while the dog sloped off towards the waste ground, then clambered in beside him.
He’d told the old man he was on his way to Sydney, so he set off in that direction, then turned round and drove back, dipping his lights as he passed.
The sun was coming up. Before he came to Batemans Bay a road sign pointed to the Kings Highway. Beyond lay Braidwood; beyond that Queanbeyan and Canberra.
Nick pulled a copy of the Daily Star from a rack outside a service station. The splash said, OVERDOSE KILLS TYCOON’S SON. Beneath the headline was a picture of a body being removed from the back of an ambulance. Someone had tipped off the press: a switchboard operator, probably, or somebody at the hospital. An almost identical photograph was on the front page of the Herald. Nothing in the picture identified the corpse as that of Danny Grogan except, perhaps, the two bruised feet protruding from the blanket. Nick remembered the scene in the toilet cubicle at Central Court, which seemed now like a grim rehearsal for the final act of Danny’s life.
The front page story carried Michael Flynn’s byline under a banner that said STAR EXCLUSIVE, although most of what he’d written had been taken from the files. The police, for once, were keeping their suspicions to themselves and for all Flynn’s efforts his story added nothing to what had been on the radio a full twenty-four hours earlier: Danny had been discovered lying in the stairwell of a block of apartments in Bondi. The ambulance team had been unable to revive him. A used heroin syringe had been found with the body. Danny didn’t appear to have been visiting anyone in the block and no witnesses had come forward to say who Danny might have been with on the night he died. Insofar as the evidence supported a theory, it was that Danny had simply walked in off the street and given himself a fatal shot of heroin.
Turning the page, Nick saw a photograph of himself under the headline: POLICE PROBE MISSING REPORTER LINK. It was the picture on Nick’s staff ID card. Was that Perger’s idea of a joke? If so, he’d done Nick a favour. The picture desk could have chosen from a selection of more or less flattering byline photographs, but Perger had picked a wild-eyed scowling mug shot that made Nick look like a fugitive on a ‘Wanted’ poster. The chances of anyone—even Carolyn—recognising him from that photograph were slight. Strangely, there was no byline. It crossed Nick’s mind that maybe Perger had bullied Sally into writing the story:
Daily Star reporter Nick Carmody, who testified on Danny Grogan’s behalf after Grogan’s Audi TT coupe was caught speeding in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, has gone missing.
Carmody failed to show up for work yesterday and appears to have vanished from the house in Abercrombie Street, Chippendale where he has been living for the past few months.
A friend of Grogan’s from their school days at St Dominic’s College, Carmody is known to have been in contact with the tycoon’s son in the weeks before his fatal overdose.
Colleagues at the Star are surprised at Carmody’s disappearance. The police have been informed, but so far nothing has been found to connect Carmody with Grogan’s death.
Carmody is believed to be driving a red Toyota Camry, registration SVA 709. His dog is also missing.
There was, as Nick had anticipated, nothing in the story to justify the headline POLICE PROBE MISSING REPORTER LINK. If the nameless reporter was Sally then Flynn hadn’t told her about the hit-and-run. Nevertheless, Nick was glad to have got rid of his car.
He skimmed the next few pages. Perger had gone overboard, as Nick knew he would, but most of the material was old hat—a tawdry retelling of Danny’s life under the media spotlight. Had it been anyone but Danny, Nick would have been happy enough to play his part in the ritual cannibalising of a famous corpse, but now he was repelled. It was a pantomime of a human life and it made him cringe.
The Herald was more restrained in its coverage—the tabloids had always owned Danny Grogan—but restraint hadn’t stopped the broadsheet from sending a photographer to corner his grieving mother in the hospital carpark.
Before driving off Nick looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. His face had subtly changed, although Nick had done nothing but dye his hair black. By altering a single feature he seemed to have initiated a deeper kind of metamorphosis—as if his face, the face of Nick Carmody, was adjusting to suit his new identity. Or was it something else: that Nick was looking at himself, for the first time, from the outside? He remembered the shock he had always felt when listening to himself on the radio. What he heard then was not his own voice but the strident, toneless voice of a stranger. In the mirror he saw, for a fraction of a second, a face he didn’t recognise.
The flagpole of Parliament House loomed in the distance. Nick drove across the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and parked the Valiant in a carpark near the National Convention Centre. He walked back towards the city centre. The black dye looked less convincing in daylight than it had under the dusty fluorescent light in the motel unit. He’d missed most of the roots and some of the ends. He needed a haircut.
The place he chose was a unisex hair salon sandwiched between a travel agent and a souvenir shop in the Jolimont Centre. Four of its five chairs were empty. A girl with black nails and black lipstick pinned an apron around his shoulders. ‘My name’s Jade,’ she announced with a quizzical smile.
Nick asked for a number two cut. Jade opened a little zippered plastic bag with her name on it and picked out the necessary attachment, which she held up for his inspection—like a sommelier offering him wine to taste.
‘So,’ she said, lifting some strands of hair on her comb. ‘Am I allowed to ask who was responsible for this—or is it a secret?’
‘I was born with it,’ said Nick.
‘I mean the colour,’ she said. ‘Not the hair.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That was my girlfriend.’
‘Really?’ she answered, meeting his gaze in the mirror.
Nick began to regret not choosing Jade’s taciturn colleague, who was snipping silently at a pensioner in a raincoat.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I did it. I thought I’d surprise her.’
‘I bet you would have.’
‘It was a spur of the moment thing. The instructions made it look easy.’
‘The instructions always make it look easy.’
Nick watched her in the mirror. Jade didn’t look like the sort of girl who spent her spare time reading the newspapers. She looked like the sort of girl who spent her spare time painting herself black.
‘Why do you paint yourself black?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you like it?’ asked Jade. She held her fingernails out for him to admire. Nick admired them. His own fingernails were yellowish brown.
‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ said Jade. ‘It’s not good for you.’
‘I’ve quit,’ he said. It was a short sentence but he never thought he’d hear it. Sometimes, admittedly, a person like him had uttered those words, but only in his dreams. Subconsciously, perhaps, Nick had longed to say them. But consciously, they were anathema—a betrayal of all the hours he’d spent (months in total—years, probably, by the time he retired) loitering on the pavement outside the Daily Star, struggling to keep a cigarette alight in the rain, or lurking like a burglar in the stairwell, keeping an ear out for the approach of the security man. Nick Carmody would never have given up smoking. Nick Carmody was going to die—prematurely, but with a perverse kind of satisfaction—with a cigarette between his fingers. But Kevin Chambers hadn’t smoked a cigarette for nearly eighteen hours. Seventeen hours and forty-six minutes, to be exact.
‘Excuse me for saying it,’ said Jade, ‘but you don’t smell like someone who’s quit smoking.’
‘I quit last night,’ he said. ‘At ten past seven.’
Nick could tell that she didn’t believe him; he only half-believed himself. She held up the mirror so he could see the back of his head. ‘Short enough?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just what I was after.’
‘The colour still looks terrible,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to fix it?’
‘I can live with it. But thanks anyway.’
Jade took the nylon apron off his shoulders and shook the loose hair onto the floor. ‘That’s twenty dollars.’
It crossed his mind to give her fifty but a tip like that was the sort of gesture she wouldn’t forget—and forgettability was a quality Kevin Chambers might need.
The dog was hungry. Nick found a supermarket and bought some tinned food and a plastic bowl. He sat and watched her eat. It was years since he’d spent more than three weeks away from his desk at the Daily Star. Somewhere in the personnel computer was a file showing his accumulated annual leave—nearly seven months, at the last count. Carolyn’s idea of a holiday had been a fortnight in a luxury resort in Port Douglas or Fiji or Phuket. Nick thought of all the holidays he hadn’t taken and all the trips he hadn’t made and all the places he hadn’t visited. He’d sacrificed them all to work and ambition. And for what? To find himself subbing stories about escaped alligators stalking the suburbs of Tupelo. He had five thousand dollars in his wallet. Five thousand dollars was a lot of petrol money.
He drove south to Cooma, north-west along the Snowy Mountains Highway, through Adaminaby and Kiandra all the way to the Murray River. It occurred to him that he didn’t know where he was going—that if he made up his mind where he was going he would be able to choose the most direct route. But without a destination he could keep driving indefinitely. Maybe that was what he wanted.
Near the town of Boundary Bend (population 182) he swung off the Murray Valley Highway onto a dry-weather gravel road that took him to the junction with the Murrumbidgee.
He stood on the banks of the Murray, between the gnarled roots of a dead river gum, listening to the insect hum of irrigation pumps. On the far side of the river he could just make out the shape of a lone angler. The flow of the huge river seemed timeless, irreversible. He thought of the dead white explorers—Sturt, Mitchell, the canoeist Francis Cadell—encountering the river for the first time. He, too, was an explorer—an explorer of possibilities, of the possible lives and possible futures of Kevin Chambers.
As he returned to the panel van the raucous cry of a kookaburra burst from the branches above his head. The greyhound sprinted ahead, as though reminded of its evenings on the track, then scampered back, as the sludge-green river lapped at its banks.
Bending down, Nick thumped his fist against the wing. A crescent-shaped shard of green glass was protruding from the offside front tyre. The broken remains of a bottle of Great Western champagne lay scattered on the gravel beneath the car.
Nick opened the tailgate. The spare was nearly bald but at least it had enough air in it to get him to a garage. He dragged it out and let it fall on the ground. The black plastic tool bag was lying in the well, tied with a length of striped nylon rope. There was another bag next to it—a dark-green household garbage bag sealed with silver gaffer tape. Nick untied the tool bag and took out the spanner and assembled the jack and dug away the loose gravel under the jacking point. The bolts were almost rusted on and it took him a long time to loosen them. Finally he got the wheel off and replaced it with the spare. He was about to throw the old wheel in the boot when he stopped. The dark green garbage bag was lying there and Nick was curious to know what was in it.
He picked it up. The bag was heavier than he was expecting. He carried it around to the front of the car and laid it on the bonnet. The contents shifted slightly as he tore off the silver tape. There were several items inside, wrapped in a strip of oiled cloth. Nick knew already what it was. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he gazed at the lovingly oiled pieces of a small-bore rifle. Next to it was a small box of .22 ammunition.
Nick didn’t want to touch the gun. He re-wrapped the pieces and stuffed the bundle back where he’d found it and threw the old wheel on top and shut the tailgate. What did Kevin Chambers want with a gun?
He thought about the boxes of groceries. Then he searched under the front seats. He found a pair of binoculars in a case. They looked expensive. The leather handgrips were smooth and shiny from use. They smelt of sweat—and lubricating oil. Two brown elastic bands were stretched crosswise across the visor. Pulling it down, Nick found an Australian passport in the name Kevin Chambers.
He got out and examined the roof. The sun had broken down the enamel but just above the door he noticed scratches—the sort of scratches you’d get from hooking a searchlight to the edge of the roof. Nick got down on his hands and knees to look at the floor beneath the pedals. Red dirt was ground into the mat.
Chambers was a shooter. That explained the supplies. He drove into the bush to shoot kangaroos or wild pigs. Sometimes he shot at night and used a searchlight. It wasn’t exactly a yuppie pursuit but out in Canley Vale pig-shooting wouldn’t be an unusual hobby.
Hobby or not, Nick didn’t want to keep the gun. For all he knew, it wasn’t licensed. Even if it was licensed, he didn’t like the idea of driving around in a stolen car equipped with a weapon and ammunition. He’d dispose of it—not here, where an angler might fish it up, but somewhere safe, where it wouldn’t be found.
Nick had never heard of the Sunraysia Daily but there was his face the next morning—the wild-eyed mug shot from his staff ID card—scowling out from the top of page three. He was sitting in a gloomy corner of the public bar in the Grand Hotel in Mildura, nursing a bottle of Steinlager. The report consisted of a six paragraphs in bold type under the headline FEARS HELD FOR MISSING REPORTER.
A car belonging to missing Sydney journalist Nick Carmody was found by police yesterday in a carpark at Seven Mile Beach, on the New South Wales south coast, close to Shoalhaven Heads.
The red Toyota Camry was located by an off-duty police officer from nearby Nowra. Despite a thorough search of the beach and dunes, no trace was found of Mr Carmody.
The ignition keys were found in the car, which was loaded with several boxes of groceries bought three days ago from the Grocery Drop in Nowra. The glove box contained two hundred dollars in cash. Recent tyre marks belonging to another vehicle suggest that Carmody might have met someone in the carpark. Broken glass near the scene indicates that the missing journalist could have been involved in a fight.
Friends and colleagues at the Daily Star, where until recently Carmody held the position of crime reporter, now hold grave fears for his safety.
‘We’re devastated,’ said chief subeditor Jerry Whistler. ‘Nicky’s a top bloke and a great journo and we can’t imagine what’s become of him.’
According to the editor-in-chief of the Daily Star, Les Perger, Carmody was well-liked and had no enemies. ‘No one I can think of,’ said Perger, ‘had any reason to do away with Nick Carmody.’
The picture looked, if anything, even worse than it had in the Star—a copy of a copy of a copy. It was like going backwards through some evolutionary chart: each successive image made Nick look coarser, more feral—and more guilty—than the one before.
The panel van was starting to fall apart. The exhaust fell off in a picnic area off the Sturt Highway. The gearbox felt ready to pack it in at any moment—sometimes, for no reason, it slipped into neutral and the engine revved madly for a few seconds before jerking back into gear.
