‘Where?’
He saw water in her eyes.
‘Fishing,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Where?’
‘Yes. Where?’
‘At the Kettle.’
Cashin didn’t say anything. He got into the vehicle and drove, didn’t wave goodbye.
JUST AFTER noon, on his way back from Cromarty, the photographs of Tommy Cashin’s house finally copied, Cashin registered that he was near the turnoff that led to the Bourgoyne place.
He slowed, turned, went up the hill. There was no thought behind it. He could turn left at the top, take the road around the hill, go through Kenmare, say hello to Bern.
He turned right, went around the bends and through the gates of The Heights.
He had no idea why he was doing this except that it seemed the way to close the business, where it began. He parked and walked around the house, clockwise. At least a dozen cops would have walked the south side, in a line, moving in slow-motion, studying the ground, picking up twigs, looking under leaves.
Today, there were few leaves. Everything was trim, the local football legend and his son were obviously still employed, had been on the job recently, plucking weeds, mowing grass, raking gravel. He went by the kitchen entrance, through an arbour, leafless but with branches so intricately twined as to deny the light.
Single-storeyed redbrick outbuildings to the left, a paved courtyard, old pink bricks in a herringbone pattern, sagging in places, depressions holding saucers of water.
Cashin walked between two buildings, looked through an ornate cast-iron gate into a drying yard, washing lines strung between wooden crosses, enough to dry the washing of an army. He went on, to where mown grass ran to a rustic post-and-rail fence, fifty metres away. Beyond that was a big paddock, its boundary a line of tall pines. The road lay beyond them.
He went back, around the south-west corner of the house. This was a clean space, a long empty rectangle bordered with lemon trees in big terracotta pots. Many of them looked unhappy, leaves yellow.
They’d had four lemon trees at the old house, out the back. You needed to piss on lemon trees, around the trunk. His father had often taken him out to do that after tea. They went from tree to tree, Mick Cashin had enough for all four, the last one got a little less. Joe ran out early but he carried on, stood with his father, aiming his small empty hose at the ground.
‘Some places, it’s all they get,’ said his father. ‘Dry countries. Nothin wrong with piss. Filtered by the body. Mind’s the same. Hangs onto the bad stuff.’
Across the courtyard was a long double-storeyed brick building, doors and windows on the ground floor, sash-hung windows above. Cashin crossed and tried the big double door in the middle. It opened onto a corridor running the width of the building.
A door on the right was ajar. He went in a short way.
It was a big room, well lit from windows on two sides, a pottery studio-two big wheels, a smaller one, trestle tables, several steel trolleys lined up, bags stacked against the far wall, shelving holding small bags and tins of all sizes, implements of various kinds laid out. There were no pots to be seen. The place was neat and clean, like a classroom swept and tidied after the students each day.
Cashin went down the corridor to the door on the left. It opened on darkness. He felt for a light switch, found several, clicked them.
Spotlights came on, three rows in the roof. It was a gallery, windowless, the floor of stone, dull-grey, smooth, the bare walls a pale colour.
A narrow black table ran almost the width of the room. On it, at regular intervals, stood-Cashin counted them-nine vessels. They were big, more than half a metre high, the shape of eggs with their tops cut off, tiny lips. Cashin thought it was a beautiful shape, the shape pots might want to be if potters would let them.
He went closer, looked at them from both sides. Now he saw small differences in shape, in bulge and taper. And the colours. The pots were streaked and lined and blotched and speckled in blacks that seemed to absorb light, in reds that looked like fresh blood leaking through tiny fissures, in the sad and lovely blues and browns and greys and greens of the earth seen from space.
Cashin ran a hand down a pot. There were smooth parts and then rough, like moving from a woman’s cheekbone to a late afternoon stubble. And ice cold, as if the hellish passage through fire had conferred a permanent immunity to warmth.
Was this Bourgoyne’s entire output as a potter? All that he kept? There were no pots in the house. Cashin picked one up carefully, turned it upside down: the letters C B and a date, 11/6/88.
He replaced the pot and went to the doorway. He stood looking at the pots. He did not want to kill the lights and leave them in the dark, their colours meaningless, wasted.
He killed the lights.
The rest of the building was an anticlimax. Upstairs, there were empty rooms on one side, living quarters on the other comfortably furnished, perhaps in the 1970s, a sitting room, a bathroom, a kitchen. He opened a door: a small bedroom, a stripped double bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. The view from the window was across the paddocks, nothing for kilometres.
At the door to the corridor, he looked back into the sitting room. There was a bolt on the bedroom door. He went downstairs, out the back door onto a stone-paved terrace, looked at mown lawn, old elms, an oak wood beyond a picket fence. Straight ahead was the horse barn and the paddock where the helicopter landed.
A concrete path led off from a ramp at the left edge of the terrace. Cashin followed it, went through a gate in the fence and into the dense wood. The oaks were huge, no doubt planted by a Bourgoyne ancestor, trees to climb into, branches arranged in ladders. They were still heavy with brown leaves in spite of the thick new layer on the ground.
The land sloped up gently, the path twisted through the trees, its route dictated by the plantings. He was thirty or so metres along it when he caught himself enjoying the walk, a stroll in a wood on an early winter day, and was about to turn back.
A sound. He stopped. It was hollow, mournful, someone blowing into a cowrie shell.
He went on, the sound growing louder. The oaks stopped, a firebreak and then old eucalypts, towering. They thinned and there was a clearing on a gentle slope. The path veered left around a pile of split wood under a tin roof.
There was the smell of a hardwood fire, long dead.
Cashin stopped, uneasy. He went on, rounded the wood stack.
In the clearing stood a tunnel-like structure of cement-coloured bricks. It tapered in both dimensions, the narrower and lower end pointed at an opening in the trees, at the sea a few kilometres away. At the back was a square chimney.
He went closer. The earth at the base of the walls had a crust like bread. Low along the flank were square steel-shuttered openings, the bricks around them blackened. The chimney had a steel plate sticking out of it, a damper, Cashin thought, it could be moved in and out to regulate the flow of hot air. On the other side were more shuttered windows.
The front was open. On his neck, Cashin felt the westerly blowing straight into the mouth of the chamber, making the hollow sound. This was Bourgoyne’s kiln, the furnace from which the pots emerged.
Blackened bricks were neatly stacked around the mouth. He stooped to look: beyond the scorched entrance were three tiers, like a short hierarchy of broad altars. There was a strong smell of things heated, vaguely chemical.
The wind off the sea would blow into the burning kiln like breath into a trumpet. Was it alight at night? The kiln would hum, the fire holes would glow white. It would have to be fed at intervals to maintain the heat.
Suddenly Cashin wanted to leave the clearing with its sad sound and smell of dead fires. He became conscious that the wind was cold, rain in the air. He went back through the trees, down to the buildings, continued his walk around the house, looking, thinking about what it would be like to approach the buildings at night, where the place would be to break in.