“I knew you were full of crap,” he told the soldier. “All that rubbish about super spies from New Zealand. As for this global catastrophe of yours, exactly how gullible do you think I am, Captain?”
“I don’t blame you for being upset about the New Zealand thing,” Luckman replied. “It was a cover story. Not a very good one, admittedly. But I wasn’t having a go at you, I was trying to muddy my tracks. Everything else is the God’s honest truth. Look, tell you what, if you don’t believe me try calling Darwin. When’s the last time you spoke to your colleagues up there?”
Pollock couldn’t remember offhand. Couldn’t be more than a few days.
“Do me a favour – ring them now,” Luckman urged. “Please.”
Pollock picked up the phone and hit the speed dial for his mate Allan Terndale in Darwin CIB. He got a disconnected tone. Strange. He hung up and tried again. Same thing.
“Phone’s playing up,” he reported with a degree of annoyance. He tried another number. Again, no answer.
“You could keep that up all day. You could try any number in the phone book. No-one will answer. No-one’s there. Darwin’s been wiped off the map.”
Pollock stared over Luckman’s shoulder. A gentle breeze shook the leaves in the gumtree outside. It was a typical autumn day. If this was true, why didn’t he know about it? And how come nothing had changed in Alice Springs?
“Tried using the internet lately?” Luckman persisted.
Deep in his gut, Pollock felt a distant memory stir. He detected a metallic taste in his mouth and a growing sense of unease. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but that feeling told him something was terribly wrong. A sense of panic gripped him as he was overwhelmed by the impression he had forgotten something critically urgent and important.
He pushed his chair back so violently it smacked into the filing cabinet. For the first time in his career, he fled in alarm from his own office. The bile was rising in his throat as he kicked open the door to the men’s toilets. He threw up in the sink, then in embarrassment and disgust he recoiled from the toxic soup of last night’s beers and this morning’s bacon and eggs and sausage roll. He retched again, then wiped his mouth on a paper towel. He hadn’t ralphed that hard since he was a teenager. He stared at his own sorry visage in the mirror. The teenager had long gone. A fat, pathetic old man had taken his place.
There was much to be said for the power of memory in the solving of crime. The little details so often proved invaluable in building a case strong enough to withstand the rigours of trial by jury. He had always prided himself on sorting the wheat from the chaff, on being able to sift the pearls from the pig shit. But he was beginning to remember things that made no sense. Flashes of chaos ran through his head, a town on the verge of panic, people lost in the trample as the Army evacuated people to… where? He couldn’t recall. Still staring at the reflection of his own pitiful inadequacy he found it hard to decide what was worse – staying in here with no-one but himself for company or going back outside to face Luckman. He exited the toilets and was unsurprised to find the Captain waiting for him.
“Do you remember the emergency warning that sparked it all?” Luckman asked.
“No,” he lied.
“Sure you do. It was a warning about the sun and how it had ejected a critical level of electromagnetic radiation.
“Come on, detective. You helped gather up everyone in town on buses, remember?”
Pollock walked back to his office, resisting the temptation to slam his door in Captain Luckman’s face. How come he knew so much?
“It’s all right, it doesn’t matter,” Luckman relented. “I’m guessing you noticed there is a US Army truck parked in Clarence Paulson’s shed? Made any inquiries on that front?”
“I haven’t seen any damn truck at Paulson’s place.”
“Then you haven’t looked very hard.”
This guy was really pushing all his buttons.
“Look, do me one favour,” said Luckman. “Take me to see Warigal.”
Pollock recoiled in confusion. “Why?”
“He’ll confirm everything I’m telling you.”
“Why should I believe what that little black bastard tells me?” Pollock spat back.
Captain Luckman sighed. “OK, let’s pretend for a moment you aren’t really a racist blowhard and proceed with a presumption of innocence. Besides, deep down you already know he’s not guilty.”
Pollock had punched men to the ground for saying far less. But right now he wasn’t up to a fight. He muttered a procedural “get fucked” by way of a comeback, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“None of this is your fault, if that’s any consolation. What’s the autopsy report say?”
Pollock spotted the report on the top of his in-tray. How long had it been sitting there? He hurriedly scanned the coroner’s findings. “Cause of death blunt trauma to the head. But the body had been moved, like I told you before.”
“He didn’t die on the river bed.”
“Nothing terribly toxic in his blood… but there was a high concentration of auric chloride in his stomach.”
“What’s that?” Luckman pondered.
“Says here it’s the result of ingesting gold. It reacted with the hydrochloric acid in his stomach.”
“He’d been eating gold?”
“Or someone forced him eat it,” Pollock suggested.
“None of which sounds much like an act of drunken violence,” Luckman concluded.
Pollock wasn’t so quick to dismiss the possibility. He’d spent years dealing with the blacks and their squalid town camps. Luckman wasn’t like them. He was from the city. Had he ever mopped up after a fight with a broken beer bottle? Did he know how many children in those camps were neglected or abused by their own family members? It was easy to call someone racist when you weren’t the one living on the front line.
Luckman was still talking. “…why I need to speak with him. I’ve had no contact with Warigal. He’s been in your lock-up virtually the entire time I’ve been in Alice Springs. If he can confirm my story, as I believe he will, surely that will prove to you I’m telling the truth.”
Even though it felt like an admission of defeat, Pollock rang the constable on duty at the cell block. “Get Wozza out and whack him in interview room number one.”
Upon arrival they saw the prisoner’s left eye was swollen and bruised. Warigal didn’t have the injury when Pollock had interviewed him two days ago. One of the uniforms had used him as a punching bag.
“Cops do that to you?” Luckman asked him. Warigal nodded. Luckman sighed. “Go on detective, ask him.”
“Warigal, I want you to tell me whether you’ve noticed anything strange in town lately.”
For some time it appeared as if the prisoner either hadn’t heard the question or was ignoring it. Finally he looked up at them. Something was troubling him deeply.
“Anything at all,” Pollock prompted.
“You mean like everyone in town forgettin’ everything? Or maybe like when some strange spaceship comes down out of the sky and dumps Father Clarence’s dead body at my feet on the riverbed?”