And then Sarris vanished.
Where was Rai at this moment? What was he doing? Pouring a drink in some gated canal estate in Queensland, the boat outside, the whole place owned by drug dealers and white-collar criminals and slave-brothel owners and property crooks?
Had Rai been prepared to die the day he drove his vehicle into them? He was mad. Dying had probably never entered his mind.
Cashin remembered sitting with Shane Diab in the battered red Sigma from surveillance, looking at the grainy little monitor showing the two-metre-high gates down the street.
When they began to slide apart, he felt no alarm.
He remembered seeing bullbars, the nose of a big four-wheel-drive.
He didn’t see the station wagon coming down the street, the chidren in the back, strapped into their seats.
The driver of the tank didn’t care about station wagons with children in them.
Watching the monitor, Cashin saw the tank gun out of the gate and swing right.
There was a moment when he knew what was going to happen. It was when he saw the face of Rai Sarris. He knew Rai Sarris, he had spent seven hours in a small room with Rai Sarris.
But by then the Nissan Patrol was metres away.
Forensic estimated the Nissan was doing more than sixty when it hit the red car, rolled it, half-mounted it, rode it through a low garden wall, across a small garden, into the bay window of a house, into a sitting room with a piano, photographs in silver frames on it, a sentimental painting of a gum tree on the wall behind it.
The vehicles demolished that wall too, and, load-bearing structures having been removed, the roof fell on them.
Slowly.
The driver of the station wagon said the four-wheel-drive reversed out of the ruins, out of the suburban front garden, and drove away. It was found six kilometres away, in a shopping centre carpark.
Shane Diab died in the crushed little car. Rai Sarris was never found. Rai was gone.
Cashin got up and made another big whisky, he was feeling the drink. Music, he needed music.
He put on a Callas CD, settled in the chair. The diva’s voice went to the high ceiling and came back, disturbed the dogs. They raised their heads, slumped back to sleep. They knew opera, possibly even liked it.
He closed his eyes, time to think about something else.
How many people like Dave Rebb were there out there, people who chose to be ghosts? One day they were solid people with identities, the next they were invisible, floating over the country, passing through the state’s walls. Tax file numbers, Medicare numbers, drivers’ licences, bank accounts, they had no use for them in their own names. Ghosts worked for cash. They kept their money in their pockets or in other people’s accounts.
Did Dave ever have an earthly identity? He was more like an alien than a ghost, landed from a spaceship on some dirt-brown cattle station where the stars seemed closer than the nearest town.
An imperfect world. Don’t obsess. Move on.
Sensible advice from Villani. Villani was the best friend he’d had. Something not to be forgotten. Best friend in a small field. Of how many? Relations excluded, relations didn’t qualify as friends. Not many.
Cashin had never sought friends, never tried to keep friendships in good repair. What was a friend? Someone who’d help you move house? Go to the pub with you, to the football? Woody did that, they’d drunk together, gone to the races, the cricket. On the day before Rai Sarris, they’d eaten at the Thai place in Elwood. Woody’s new ambition, Sandra, the high-cheekboned computer woman, was looking at Woody and laughing and she ran her bare stockinged foot up Cashin’s shinbone.
Instant erection. That was the last time he’d felt anything like that.
Woody came to the hospital a few times but, afterwards, Cashin didn’t see him, they couldn’t do the same things as before. No, that wasn’t it. Shane Diab lay between them. People thought he was responsible for Shane’s death.
They were right.
Shane was dead because Cashin had taken him along to see if his hunch was right that Sarris would come back to the house of his drug-trader partner. Shane had asked to come. But that didn’t exonerate Cashin. He was a senior officer. He had no right to involve a naïve kid in his obsession with finding Sarris.
Singo never blamed him. Singo came to see him once a week after he was out of danger. On the first visit, he put his head close and said: ‘Listen, you prick, you were right. The bastard came back.’
More drink. Think about the present, he told himself. People wanted Donny and Luke to be Bourgoyne’s killers. If they were, it justified the deaths of Luke and Corey. And Donny’s suicide, it explained that-the act of a guilty person.
Innocent boys branded as the killers of a good man, a decent, generous man. Two injustices. And whoever did it was out there, like Rai Sarris-free, laughing, sneering. Cashin closed his eyes and he saw the boys, unlined faces, one barely breathing, chest crushed, one gasping, spraying a dark mist, dying in the drenched night, the lights gleaming off the puddles of rain, of blood.
He had another drink, another, fell asleep in the chair and woke in alarm, freezing, fire low, rain heavy on the roof. The microwave clock said 3:57. He took two tablets with half a litre of water, put out the lights and went to bed fully clothed.
The dogs joined him, one on each side, happy to have been spared the middle passage of exile to their quarters.
THE LIGHT came back to a freezing world, wind from the west, bursts of rain, hail spits the size of pomegranate pips.
Cashin didn’t care about the weather. He was beyond weather, felt terrible, in need of punishment. He took the dogs to the sea, walked to the mouth in a whipping wind, no sand blowing, the dunes soaked, the beach tightly muscled.
Today, Stone’s Creek was strong, the inlet wide, the sandbars erased. On the other side, a man in an old raincoat, a baseball cap, was fishing with a light rod, casting to the line where the creek flow met the salt, reeling. A small brown dog at his feet saw the poodles and rushed to the creek’s edge, barking, levitating on stiff legs with each hoarse expulsion.
The poodles stood together, silent, front paws in the water, studying the incensed animal. Their tails moved in slow, interested scientific wags.
Cashin waved to the man, who took a hand off his rod. There was little of him to see-a nose, a chin-but Cashin knew him from Port, he was an odd-job man for the elderly, the infirm, the inept, replaced tap washers, fuses, patched gutters, unblocked drains. How is it, he thought, that you can recognise people from a great distance, sense the presence of someone in a crowd, know their absence in the instant of opening a door?
On impulse, he turned left, walked along the creek, threading his way through the dune scrub. The dogs approved, brushed past him, went ahead and found a path worn by human feet over a long time. The land rose, the creek was soon a few metres below the path, glass-clear, shoals of tiny fish flashing light. They walked for about ten minutes, the path diverging from the creek, entering a region of dunes like big ocean swells. At the top of the highest one, the coastal plain was revealed. Cashin could see the creek winding away to the right, a truck on the distant highway, and, beyond it, the dark thread that was the road climbing the hill to The Heights.
Below, the path ran in a gentle curve to a clearing of several hectares, cut from bushland now coming back. It led to a roofless building, to the remains of other structures, one a tapering chimney standing amid ruins, a brick finger sticking out of a black fist.
The dogs reached the scene well ahead of Cashin, stopped, eyed the place, tails down. They looked back at him, got the signal, kicked off, running for a pile of bricks and rubble. Rabbits unfroze, scattered, bewildered the dogs for choice.