Seven mile beach, p.15
Seven Mile Beach, page 15
The dealer was in his fifties, Nick recalled—a Russian, or at least someone from one of the former republics of the Soviet Union. To the police—and to most readers of the Daily Star—they were all Russians, just as any criminal of South-East Asian appearance was Vietnamese.
Detectives investigating the case had worked on the premise that he’d been murdered by a rival, or as punishment for an unpaid debt. He’d died from a single shot to the head: a good shot or a lucky shot, nobody could say which. The killer had left the ejected shell case on the ground.
Now, thanks to Nick, the gun had been recovered. And whatever the police knew, Nick knew that Chambers was not the harmless weekend pig-shooter he had wanted to believe. One thing Nick had learnt as crime reporter was that jumping to conclusions was as foolish as shutting your eyes to the obvious. The rifle he’d found in the tyre well of Chambers’ panel van had been linked to the murder of a Sydney drug dealer. That didn’t mean Chambers had any knowledge of what the gun had been used for, still less that he had used the gun to kill the dealer. Nevertheless, it established a connection—and connections, Nick knew, had a habit of spreading. Was there one between the Kevin Chambers who kept a gun hidden in the tyre well of his panel van and the Kevin Chambers who’d burnt to death in his ute? Or was it just one of those coincidences that made the world go round?
Once upon a time he would have been able to answer that himself. He would have known who to call, what questions to ask, and whether or not to believe the answers. Nick Carmody could have rung one of his former contacts at Police Headquarters to find out if there was anything about the rifle dumped in the Avoca River that hadn’t been reported. But he wasn’t Nick Carmody.
He wished he’d chosen somewhere else to dispose of the gun. He’d thought he was being clever but the truth was he’d panicked, and the land always found ways of punishing those who panicked.
‘Flemington. Racecourse Road.’
The passenger looked vaguely familiar, as business travellers for some reason tended to. There was every chance Nick had picked him up before. He’d been drinking, either on the plane or in the business-class lounge before boarding. The smell of beer and whisky and stale cigarette smoke rolled off him.
The taxi gods had a habit of delivering Nick to the rank at Tullamarine Airport just in time to meet the last Qantas flight from Sydney—the only flight, as far as Nick could tell, that actually honoured the promise of unlimited free alcohol.
The man in the passenger seat had been staring at Nick intermittently from the moment he got in. He was staring at him again now.
Nick had learnt not to initiate conversations with passengers who showed no interest in talking. If they didn’t talk it was usually because they had a reason for not talking. Twelve years at the Daily Star, interrogating and ingratiating himself with strangers, had given Nick a reasonable knowledge of human nature. But what he’d learnt behind a reporter’s notebook paled next to what he was discovering behind the steering wheel of a taxi.
He’d envisaged taxi driving as a form of drudgery—a dispiriting combination of bad pay, long hours, physical risk and enforced subservience to surly, ungracious, preoccupied strangers. And he was right. But it was also something else. A taxi, especially in the early hours of the morning, rattling along empty streets through comatose suburbs, was like a confessional without the screen. Ordinary people confessed extraordinary things, secure in their own anonymity.
Nick had expected to be bored but he was anything but. The money wasn’t great but for some reason he didn’t mind that. He’d tried once to buy the future. For now he was content to live in the present, where having enough to pay the bills was all that mattered.
Pretending to adjust his rear-vision mirror, Nick glanced sideways at the figure slumped in the passenger seat. He was a big man. He looked about forty. His right earlobe, the one Nick could see in the orange glow of the freeway lights, was ragged like a cat’s, as if someone had taken a bite out of it. He wore a dark grey pinstripe suit that would have looked more stylish if it hadn’t been a couple of sizes too small.
‘Carmody,’ he said at last. ‘Nick Carmody.’ It was a statement, not a question.
Nick didn’t say anything.
‘Come on Carmody. You’re not fooling me. I’ve read all about you.’
Nick was trapped and he knew it. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d been anticipating this moment, even while he assured himself that it would never happen.
‘Stackpole,’ the man said. ‘Ian Stackpole.’
Ian Stackpole. They had been at St Dominic’s together but Stackpole was four years older. His father, Lawrie, was a race-horse trainer who’d trained a filly that ran third in the Melbourne Cup. Ian was a useful rugby player and played a few games for one of the Sydney clubs while he was still at school. Then his father suffered a stroke and the stables were sold. In his last year Stackpole was made a school prefect. One afternoon he’d busted Nick and Danny Grogan for smoking. He must have flunked his final exams because after leaving St Dominic’s he went straight into the police. Nick remembered running into him at a coronial inquest into the death of an Aboriginal youth, standing sheepishly in the lobby of the Glebe Coroner’s Court, dying for a cigarette but not daring to go outside in case he missed his call. Stackpole hadn’t recognised Nick in his cheap reporter’s suit but Nick had introduced himself. If he hadn’t then maybe Stackpole would not have recognised him now.
‘Ian,’ he said, trying to sound calm. ‘You look different.’
‘Like fuck.’
For a few seconds neither spoke. Then Stackpole broke the silence. ‘What the hell,’ he said in a more conciliatory voice. ‘Maybe I do. I try not to look in the mirror too much these days.’
‘You look all right,’ said Nick.
‘I wish I felt all right. I can’t piss and my balls are turning blue. Other than that I’m a picture of health.’ He stared at Nick. ‘So what’s the story—or am I going to have to invent one? I mean, that’s what you blokes do, isn’t it? Ask a couple of questions and then make up the rest.’ Ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ sticker on the dashboard, he fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. ‘Mate, I’m sorry. I almost forgot. This is your private pain and humiliation we’re talking about. You don’t want a stranger like me sticking my nose into it.’ He found a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth and said through pursed lips, ‘Coroner’s inquiry, wasn’t it? You were working for the Star. Just started, I seem to remember. But pretty full of yourself all the same.’ He gazed around Homolka’s battered taxi. ‘Felt like a change of career, did you?’
‘Something like that.’
‘No, mate. I’m interested. Star reporter goes missing. Quite a story. They found your car somewhere. I’m trying to remember the place…Somewhere down south, wasn’t it?’
Nick realised that holding out now was pointless. He would have to go along with Stackpole and see where it took him. ‘Seven Mile Beach.’
‘Seven Mile Beach. That’s it.’ Stackpole made several feckless attempts to light his cigarette before Nick passed him the dashboard lighter. ‘Thought you might have drowned, didn’t they? I knew that was bullshit. At fucking St Dominic’s they didn’t teach us much but at least they taught us to swim. You remember the outdoor pool? And that sadist McCluskey. “Who’s going to break the ice for us today?” Shove. I heard that bastard had a stroke.’
Nick shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know, Ian. I haven’t really kept in contact since I left.’
‘No,’ said Stackpole. ‘I don’t suppose you have.’ He blew smoke over his shoulder. ‘So here I am, mate. A passenger in your taxi. Are you going to tell me what happened or what?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Nick. ‘I’ll tell you all about it one day.’
‘I bet you will.’ Stackpole sucked on his cigarette. ‘Of course, I could just ring up the papers. I guess they’d know what to do with a yarn like this. What do you reckon?’
Nick didn’t answer.
‘Maybe I’ll just sit on it for a bit,’ said Stackpole. ‘See if I can come up with a better idea. I might even have a go at writing it myself. Special correspondent. Do you think they’d come at that?’
He flicked his ash into the ashtray and stared for a long time out of the side window. When he turned around his expression had changed. Nick knew he had to keep him talking.
‘What about you, Ian?’
‘What about me?’
‘Are you still in the force?’
‘No, mate. I’m not.’
‘Been out of it long?’
‘Not long enough.’
Constable Ian Stackpole’s career had been effectively over from the moment he testified in court about the death of an Aboriginal man in custody. According to the custody sergeant the man had fallen awkwardly while being escorted to his cell. Aboriginal men had a habit of falling while being escorted to their cells. They fell and from time to time they didn’t get up again. All Stackpole had to say was that, like his colleagues, he’d seen the prisoner throw a punch. But Stackpole wouldn’t say it. He didn’t say the punch wasn’t thrown; just that he hadn’t seen it. Not seeing that punch finished his career. The irony was the coroner took no notice of Stackpole’s evidence and decided that ‘reasonable force’ had been used to subdue the prisoner. Another whitewash, and as far as most of the media were concerned, Constable Ian Stackpole was as complicit as all his mates. But to his mates he was a liability, a colleague who couldn’t be counted on to say the right thing when it mattered. In those few minutes on the witness stand, Stackpole had fucked up his life, not by anything he’d said but by something he hadn’t said. If he was bitter about the way things had turned out, Nick thought, he had every right to be.
‘Family?’ asked Nick.
‘Ex-wife,’ said Stackpole. ‘Three ex-kids. I’ve just been in Sydney to see them. I hadn’t laid eyes on them for six months. She gave me an hour.’
‘Too bad.’
‘You got any?’
‘Kids? No.’
‘Then you don’t know what I’m talking about.’
Stackpole squinted at his watch but seemed unable to read the time. ‘What time is it?’
‘Just after eleven.’
They drove in silence for the rest of the journey. A steady drizzle was falling. Once or twice Stackpole appeared to nod off, only to wake up abruptly as his head lurched forwards. By the time they reached Racecourse Road he was in one of his wide-awake phases. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’
He spoke as if both of them needed sobering up.
‘I’m supposed to be working,’ said Nick.
‘Then don’t come in.’
Stackpole clambered unsteadily out of the seat and held onto the door for balance. Nick switched off the engine.
Stackpole slammed the door and began stumbling towards the gate. He lived in one half of a dilapidated pair of semis. His half was the more dilapidated. A downpipe had come away from the gutter and stood out from the wall like some crazy flagpole. Letters were spilling out of the mailbox, as though it hadn’t been cleared for weeks. Nick removed his takings and took his ID card from its holder and locked the taxi. Then he followed Stackpole up the broken cement path to the front door. As he climbed the steps, the older man suddenly tripped, almost hitting his head against a brick pillar. Nick didn’t say anything but as he helped him to his feet a monstrous thought flashed through his mind. If Stackpole had fallen and split his head on the pillar, the problem of what to do about him would have been solved. From the way he’d described his life, who would have missed him? The thought seemed to belong not to him—that is, to the person he recognised as himself—but to a stranger he didn’t know. He felt Stackpole push him away—out of embarrassment, or because he knew what Nick was thinking?
‘Fucking steps,’ said Stackpole.
He held up the brass key and prodded clumsily at the lock until the teeth of the key disappeared and the door opened. Groping along the wall, Stackpole switched on the light. Nick shut the door behind him.
The carpet was orange shagpile. Overflowing ashtrays and unwashed plates lay everywhere. The house smelt of beer. Around the walls were piles of form guides, circled and scribbled on with red ballpoint, each held in place by a brick. Nick sat on the sofa while Stackpole crashed around the kitchen in search of coffee.
When he finally emerged it wasn’t mugs of coffee he was carrying but a bottle of Famous Grouse. He put down the whisky and stood there swaying for a few moments, as though trying to remember why there was someone else in the house. Then he sat down heavily in the scruffier of a pair of armchairs. He pointed vaguely at a bow-fronted sideboard in the corner of the room. ‘You’ll find a glass in there.’
His own glass was on the floor. He picked it up and unscrewed the Famous Grouse and poured himself a triple. Then he shook a cigarette out of a crumpled packet of Silk Cut and bent his head towards it—like a donkey groping for a piece of apple.
Nick said, ‘You still follow the horses.’
Stackpole didn’t answer at once. As he focused his gaze, it seemed to Nick that he’d forgotten who he was talking to.
‘I should do,’ he said at last. ‘That’s how I earn a living.’
‘You’re a trainer.’
Stackpole tapped his ash into a heavy glass ashtray. ‘I’m a bookie.’
Nick thought at first he was joking. Ex-policemen haunted bookies—they didn’t become bookies.
Stackpole picked up his drink. ‘You don’t believe me?’
‘I believe you.’
‘The old man was a trainer. Had a horse that ran third in the Melbourne Cup. Did you know that?’
Nick tried hard to look impressed. He remembered being impressed once, a long time ago. But now it didn’t seem that impressive.
‘I do all right,’ Stackpole replied, to a question that hadn’t been asked. Then he stood up and said, ‘I need a piss.’
Nick gazed at the walls of the living room, which were hung with photographs of Stackpole’s life. There was a picture of him with his father at Randwick racecourse; another of him at his passing out parade at Goulburn Police College; another with three boys (his sons, maybe?) building a sandcastle in front of Bondi pavilion. He reached for a scrapbook lying on a shelf below the coffee table. Pasted inside were newspaper photographs of Lawrie Stackpole’s third-placed filly, of Ian as captain of St Dominic’s Second XI and caked in mud with his teammates from Eastwood Rugby Club. And cuttings: from Australian Horse Racing, Horse Racing News and the Winning Post; from the Australian Police Gazette (a picture of a police cadet fainting on parade under the headline NEW RECRUIT PASSES OUT IN STYLE) and the Daily Star.
As he sat there, flicking through the pages of Stackpole’s scrapbook, Nick thought about his own life, which existed in a kind of vacuum, a present cut loose from the past. He hadn’t kept a single photograph, a single postcard or newspaper cutting to remind him of the person he had once been. He was beginning to wonder whether that person had ever existed. If he could invent one life then why shouldn’t he have invented two? And yet there it was—his byline—on page three of the Daily Star, above a half-page report of the coronial inquiry that spelt the end of Stackpole’s police career. Seeing that byline filled Nick with a sense of uncertainty, of not knowing who or what he was. Of being somebody pretending to be nobody—or nobody pretending to be somebody.
Stackpole shuffled back into the room and sat down. His cigarette had gone out in his absence and it took him three attempts to re-light it. He finished the triple scotch he’d poured himself and reached for the bottle and poured another. They stared at each other in silence. It seemed to Nick that all he had to do was keep Stackpole drinking and sooner or later he would simply fall asleep. With a hangover like that, Nick thought, he wasn’t going to remember much of the previous night.
* * *
It was lying on the doorstep when he got home: a glossy envelope with the words, ‘Congratulations, Kevin Chambers!’ emblazoned in red across the top left-hand corner.
Rather than stuffing everything in the rusty mailbox, as he was paid to do, as he did on every other day, the postie had made a special trip from the gate to leave the envelope on the porch, where it would be safe from the weather.
Nick unlocked the front door and took the letter inside and dropped it on the kitchen table while he boiled the kettle. It was 3.46 a.m. and he’d earned precisely $106.90, after expenses, for driving twelve hours in the rain. In light of these facts the words ‘Congratulations, Kevin Chambers!’ had a sarcastic ring.
He put a tea bag in the mug and poured the water. As he sniffed the milk, he drew back in disgust. Then he opened the envelope. The letter said:
Dear Kevin Chambers,
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Nick thought about how his world had shrunk. The big picture no longer seemed important. It was the small picture that was starting to keep him awake at night. His universe was shrinking, in time and space. Each week it got a little smaller. Once there had been thousands of names, then hundreds, and soon there would only be one: Chambers. He tore up the letter and threw away the pieces.
