‘Yes, he’s dead,’ Prophecy said. ‘Died about two years after Nobby and I came here. But he never talked, not about McIlroy.’
The black woman had come back and I turned and faced her. ‘Your brother was at the mine last night. What was he looking for?’
She shook her head, her whole body suddenly very tense as though poised for flight.
‘Was he looking for gold?’
Again that shake of the head. ‘Him no find. Not stop there find ‘im gold.’
‘Are you sure it was gold they were looking for?’
God! I was so near to it then, her eyes rolling and that deep husky voice of hers saying, ‘Wolli not know nuthin’. You talk ‘im Phil. Mebbe Phil tell ‘im. Not Wolli.’
Prophecy cackled. ‘Yuh want me to translate for yuh? Wot she’s saying is Wolli’d beat the hell out of her if she gave you info for free. Yuh go an’ see Wolli. Cross his palm with a few dollars an’ mebbe yuh find out whatever it is yuh’re after.’
But I was looking at the black woman. ‘Who’s Phil?’ I asked her.
She shook her head, the eyes wide and scared-looking.
‘It’s a white man, isn’t it — name of Westrop?’ The eyes told me I was right and I turned to Prophecy. ‘Do you know Phil Westrop?’
She nodded.
‘Where will I find him?’
‘Grafton Downs.’
‘How far’s that?’
”Bout twenty miles.’ And she added, ‘Odds are he’ll be in the bar tonight. The Grafton Downs boys are in for beer most nights. Why?’
‘He and Wolli were down at the mine last night.’ I hesitated, looking at the black woman. But she had turned back to the fridge. I looked across at Prophecy. ‘You know everything that goes on here. Where was Wolli’s father when McIlroy died?’ Was he with him out there in the desert?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’ She was frowning. ‘Yuh’re not interested in Golden Soak, are yuh? It’s McIlroy’s Monster that’s brought yuh here.’ There was a harder note in her voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Ed’s a good bloke. As good as they come, even if he is a bit of a solitary. And that girl of his, Janet, she’s had a poor go of it one way and another. I thought you was having a dekko at that mine of his with a view to finding him a buyer.’ She heaved her bulk out of the canvas chair. ‘For that I was going to try and persuade Little Brighteyes to go along with yuh. But the Monster — ‘ She shook her head. ‘That’s a load of horseshit. If you believe that…. Well, I got other things to do.’ And she stepped down into the dust, calling to Brighteyes her thanks for the beer as she headed back to the Conglomerate.
The black woman had come out of the bedroom, a can of beer in her hand. We were alone together on the verandah. ‘Where’s your brother?’ I asked her.
She stared at me, her eyes wide so that I thought for a moment she hadn’t understood. Then her thick lips moved. ‘Wolli?’
‘Yes. Where is he?’
She didn’t answer, but her eyes moved, evasive, uneasy. I pushed past her into the bedroom. He was sprawled on the big double bed, a thin spider of a man in ragged khaki shorts, his big horny feet with their splayed toes bare. He didn’t move, only his eyes, wide in the heavy black face, staring at me. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you,’ I said.
He didn’t say anything.
‘You speak English?’
‘Liddle bit.’ His voice was thick and slow. There was a can of beer beside him, but he wasn’t drunk. His eyes were alert, the whites showing in the shaded gloom of the room. The brown ridges were very marked, the face heavier and coarser than his sister’s, only the faintest similarity in the features.
‘You were at the Golden Soak mine last night — why?’
He shook his head, but it was an evasion of the directness of my gaze rather than a denial.
‘What reason had you for breaking into the mine?’ I spoke slowly and distinctly, his sister hovering in the background.
‘Go longa Phil.’
‘Why?’
Again the evasive shake of the head, the face impassive, the eyes shifty and his big hands hitching nervously at his shorts. ‘You speak ‘im Phil.’
‘All right, I will. But I’m speaking to you now. You told a prospector from Kalgoorlie your father was with McIlroy when he died.’
He grunted and swung his legs off the bed, coming to his feet in one easy controlled movement. ‘Who you?’ And when I told him I was a mining consultant from England, he repeated, You speak ‘im Phil.’
And that’s all I could get out of him. He admitted his father had been with McIlroy at the end, but where they had been, what they had found or what McIlroy had told him before he died — to all these questions he just shook his head. It wasn’t that he was stupid or that he didn’t understand. He understood all right. At one point he turned to his sister and the two of them went at it so fast they were speaking on the intake of their breathing as well as the exhalation, both of them talking together, a guttural rolling sound. And when finally he turned to me and said, ‘Bad spirits all longa that mine,’ I thought he was referring to the miners who had been trapped there in the cave-in.
He was scared, but whether it was really the ghosts of dead miners he was scared of or something else I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know enough about the aborigine mind, and when he repeated yet again — ‘you speak ‘im Phil,’ I thought it was more likely Westrop he was scared of. I was wrong there, of course. Westrop was tough, but he was a decent enough man at heart — just an ordinary, hard-drinking, hard-driving, mind-your-own-bloody-business Australian.
He came into the bar that night in a singlet and shorts, a pair of flip-flop sandals on his feet, limping slightly, but with a swagger, his lean body very erect and reminding me vaguely of something, some picture perhaps. He was a very striking man, handsome even in a hard-bitten way. Prophecy wasn’t there. It was the English boy behind the bar who tipped me the wink when the truck drove up, half a dozen of the Grafton Downs men piling out of it and moving in on the bar with the determination of men for whom beer is the only solace in the world of torrid heat and dust.
I was having a drink with the Shire Clerk and the man who now drove the grader on the Nullagine section of the Highway. The Clerk, a baldish man in a clean blue shirt who had come originally from Wittenoom, had given me a whole list of contacts, older men who might have known McIlroy back in ‘38. Most of them were on outback stations and quite inaccessible to me without my own transport. ‘Why don’t you go down to Port Hedland then and see the Administrator?’ But Port Hedland was almost 200 miles away.
I waited till Westrop had downed his first beer, watching him and trying to work out in my mind how I was going to handle it. He looked as tough as Andie had suggested, lean and fit, with a dour face and sandy hair bleached pale by the sun. I saw the English boy lean across the bar to speak to him and then he was looking directly at me, his eyes narrowed, his mouth a hard line below the beaked nose. One of his mates flipped a coin and he did the same, laughing without humour when he found himself odd man out. He went to the hatch to order a round, his left leg almost stiff as though the knee joint was locked. The Clerk’s hand was on my arm, some story about a station owner who’d corraled a bunch of pogies belonging to a man called Stansted. It was a long, involved story and I had to bend close to hear what he was saying. There was a good deal of noise in the room, about twenty people there, some of them women, their faces sweating in the harsh glare of the naked light bulbs. ‘What are pogies?’ I asked.
‘Calves that haven’t been branded.’ His voice was high against the hubbub. ‘ Yuh keep’em starved of water for a few days an’ when yuh give ‘em a drink they’re so bloody grateful they stay put. Well this fellow Stansted, he doesn’t bother with his own bunch, just goes in an’ rustles twice as many — ‘ ‘
‘Yuh Alec Falls?’
I looked round to find Westrop standing at my elbow.
‘Kid behind the bar there says yuh want to speak to me.’