Cashin walked to the edge of the settlement, stood in the spattering rain. The flat area to the left had been a sports field. Three football posts remained, sunk in long grass, paint gone, wood bleached white. He became aware of the sounds the wind was making as it passed through the ruins-a tapping noise, a creaking like a nail being pulled from shrunken hardwood, a variety of low moans.
He went to the roofless timber structure, four rooms, a passage between them, looked in a window socket, saw a vandalised, pillaged space where fires had been made and people had defecated on bare earth once covered by floorboards. Fifty metres beyond it stood the chimney. He crossed to it, went around to the highway side. Once the brickwork had housed two stoves in big recesses, between them an oven. The cast-iron door lay rusting on the brick hearth, broken from its hinges.
The dogs were running around frantically, demented by rabbit scents everywhere. But the rabbits were gone, safe beneath the broken bricks and rusted sheets of corrugated iron. Behind the kitchen, in the grass on the other side of an expanse of cracked concrete, Cashin found the brick footings of a long building, two rooms wide. The top bricks were blackened and, inside the footings, he stumbled over a charred floor joist.
That’s history, been nothing there since the fire. Companions are history too.
Cecily Addison’s words.
Cashin whistled, a chirpy sound in the forlorn place. The dogs appeared, joined at the mouths by something, tugging at it. He made them sit and release the object.
It was a leather belt, stiff and cracked-a boy’s belt, a size to span a waist no bigger than a football. Cashin picked it up. On the rusted buckle, he could make out a fleur-de-lis and parts of words: B Prepa.
Be Prepared. It was a boy scout buckle.
He raised his arm to cast it away and then he could not. He walked across the overgrown playing field and bent the small hard belt around a goalpost, buckled it, let it slide into the grass.
On the highest dune, Cashin looked back. The wind was moving the goalposts, waving the grass. From the highway came the sound of a truck’s airhorn, lonely somehow, nocturnal. He called the dogs and walked.
They drove home on empty roads, past houses sunk in their hollows, greenwood smoke being snatched from chimneys. The age of cheap dry wood from a million ringbarked trees was over.
He thought about Bourgoyne. Short of a startling piece of luck, it would never be known who bashed him, killed him. But it would always be stuck on the boys, their families, stuck on the whole Daunt, and even on people like Bern and his kids. Bourgoyne’s killing was ammunition for all the casual haters everywhere.
Takin out those two Daunt coons. Pity it wasn’t a whole fuckin busload.
Most of Derry Callahan’s customers would have said Fuckin A to that.
Don’t obsess, he thought. Listen to Villani, leave the business alone.
Rebb was waiting, out of the wind, he had heard the vehicle. He walked across, flat cigarette in mouth. Cashin got out, released the dogs. Rebb held his hands low, palms up, the dogs went to them and didn’t jump, waggled their whole bodies.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you going to town today?’
‘I am,’ said Cashin, deciding in the instant. ‘You eaten?’
‘No, just come from the cows.’
‘We can eat somewhere. Give me ten, I need to shower.’
THEY ORDERED bacon and eggs at the truckstop on the edge of Cromarty. An anorexic girl with a moustache and a pink-caked pimple between her eyebrows brought the food. The eggs lay on tissue-paper bread, the yokes small and pasta-coloured. Narrow pink steaks of meat could be seen in the grey pig fat.
Rebb ate some egg. ‘Not from chooks living out the back,’ he said. ‘You in a position to pay wages?’
Cashin closed his eyes. He hadn’t paid Rebb anything for the work done at the house, the fence. It had not entered his mind. ‘Jesus, sorry,’ he said. ‘I just forgot.’
Rebb carried on eating, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. He reached inside his coat and produced a folded sheet of paper torn from a notebook. ‘I reckon it’s twenty-six hours. Ten an hour okay?’
‘Don’t you get the minimum rate?’
‘No rent, eating your food.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s say fifteen.’
‘If you like.’
‘I’ll need your tax file number.’
Rebb smiled. ‘Do me a favour. Use Bern’s number. Know that by heart, wouldn’t you, your cousin, all the transacting you do? Paying the tax on it all.’
Hopelessly compromised, thought Cashin. Just as guilty as any woman with two kids caught shoplifting.
He parked two blocks from the bank. He could have parked behind the police station but something said that wasn’t a good idea. He took money out of the machine and paid Rebb.
‘I’ll be half an hour,’ he said. ‘Enough for you?’
‘Plenty.’
He walked down wet streets to the station. Hopgood was in, writing in a file, a neat stack to his left awaiting his attention.
‘Paperless office,’ said Cashin from the door.
Hopgood looked up, expressionless eyes. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’d like to know who ordered the spotlight on Donny’s house.’
‘That’s the Coulter bitch’s story, lies, they all fucking lie. It’s a way of life. Just a routine patrol.’
‘I thought the Daunt was Indian territory? What happened to the Blackhawk Down stuff?’
Bright spots on Hopgood’s cheekbones. ‘Yeah, well, time to show the fucking flag in the pigsty. Anyway, where do you get off? I don’t answer to you. Worry about your own fucking pisspot station.’
Cashin felt the heat in his own face, the urge to hit Hopgood in the middle of his face, to break nose and lips, to see the look he’d seen in Derry Callahan’s eyes.
‘I’d like to see the Bourgoyne stuff,’ he said.
‘Why? It’s over.’
‘I don’t think it’s over.’
Hopgood tapped a nostril with a finger. He had fat fingers. ‘The watch? How does that feel?’
‘I’d like to have a look anyway.’
‘I’m busy here. Take it up with the station commander when he gets back from leave.’
Their eyes were locked. ‘I’ll do that,’ Cashin said. ‘There’s something we haven’t discussed.’
‘Yeah?’
‘That dud Falcon. You knew it couldn’t keep up, didn’t you?’
‘Didn’t know you couldn’t drive, mate. Didn’t know you were a gutless fucking wonder.’
‘And the calls. You heard them.’
‘Is that right? There’s nothing on tape. You two boongs making up stories now? Like Donny’s fucking mother? You related? All fucking related, aren’t you? How’s that happen, you reckon? All in the one bed fucking in the dark when they’ve cut the power cause you spent all the money on grog?’
Cashin’s vision was blurred. He wanted to kill.
‘Let me tell you something else, you fucking smartarse,’ said Hopgood. ‘You think you can shack up with a swaggie out there and nobody knows? You can let your arsefucker punch out innocent citizens and you look the other way? Is that a thrill for you? You like that kind of thing? Come in your panties, do you?’
Cashin turned and walked. A uniform cop was in the door. The man moved away quickly.
CASHIN WENT down to the esplanade and stood at the wall, the salt wind in his face. There were whitecaps across the bay, a fishing boat was coming in, cresting the grey swells, sinking into the troughs. He did his deep breathing, trying to take control of his nervous system, feeling his heartbeat slow.
After ten minutes, he went back, the only people on foot a group of kids coming down the hill in a rolling maul. He turned right halfway up, went the way he’d walked with Helen Castleman from the court, climbed the steps to her office. The receptionist was a teenager, too much makeup, looking at her nails.