‘You should have been here, Dad,’ accused Red bitterly, his eyes downcast, his little hands twitching ceaselessly. ‘I got 20,000 points.’
Russell Street Police Headquarters was straight out of Gotham City, a brick wall with a thousand blind windows and an RKO radio mast on the roof. Calling all cars.
As a functionary of the incumbent government, albeit an insignificant one, I could not but regard the police as my colleagues. Benign and efficient upholders of the rule of law. Our boys in blue. In other parts of our great nation, the rozzers were thick-necked bribe-takers, rugby-playing racist bully-boys, brothel creepers. But nobody said that about the Victoria Police. Defenders of widows and orphans they were. Protectors of the innocent.
But not necessarily of a ministerial adviser with spiralling suspicions, insufficient grounds for the laying of charges and a child’s safety to think about. Quite a lot to think about, as a matter of fact. We drove past Russell Street and kept going. ‘How about a movie?’ I said. Something we could do together. Somewhere cool and dark where we could hide and I could start drawing some mental maps.
‘ Die Hard?’ said Red. ‘ Young Guns?’
Whatever happened to Pippi Longstocking? Maybe the movies weren’t such a good idea. We kicked around a few other potential game plans. We decided to go exploring again.
We covered a lot of territory that afternoon. We covered school, friends, holidays. We covered Wendy. My former consort had taken up with a prosecutor from the New South Wales Crown Law Department. His name was Richard. You didn’t need to be Clifford Possum Japaljarri to connect the dots there. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked.
Wendy was a go-getter. It was her go-getting that had got rid of me. In our marriage of equals, some were more equal than others. We didn’t fight. We weren’t unfaithful-not that I knew about. Wendy was just moving faster than me, aiming elsewhere. It took me nearly ten years to figure that out, her a little less. If this Richard could make her happy, fine. A happy Wendy would be a sight to behold.
‘He’s okay, I guess,’ said Red, an endorsement so insipid it brought a smile to my lips and nearly broke my heart. This Richard might be around for years. Wendy could shack up with whoever she liked, but if Dicky Boy started calling himself Red’s stepfather there’d be hell to pay.
Equipped for high adventure in sandshoes and sunscreen, we followed the same route as the previous afternoon. Out the freeway, past the roadside flower vendors, the orchards and stud farms, the go-cart tracks and vintage car rallies. At the Sugarloaf Reservoir, we bought sandwiches and sodas and ate them in the sausage-scented smoke of the public barbecues. The crowds were out in force, clannish Croats and cacophonous Cambodians and stubby-clutching Ockers. Swimming was prohibited and once we’d walked across the weir, thrown rocks into tomorrow’s drinking water and watched the spillway fishermen not catching trout, we struck out for more challenging terrain.
The humidity was 110 per cent, the air as thick as Faye’s tapenade, wet as a sauna. The sky oozed over us like a clammy slug, threatening to rain, not delivering. At the Christmas Hills fire station, the sheds sat empty. The brigade was out on a call. A troop of Scouts were filling their water-bottles at the tap. Red disdained them from behind the window of a feebly air conditioned Japanese hatchback.
A kilometre short of Giles Aubrey’s private road, we parked in a turn-around and skittled on foot down the wooded incline towards the dull sheen of water. A cascade of rocks and leaves dribbled down the slope ahead of us. The river was slow-moving and not much cooler or wetter than the surrounding air. We stripped to our togs and rushed in, thrashing and splashing and laughing.
Half an hour later, rock-hopping our way upstream, we disturbed a full-grown brown snake. In a single fluid motion, it slithered across our path, long as a broom-handle, flicking its tongue. Watching it go to ground in the fissure between two boulders, Red backed against me. ‘Wow,’ he whispered, awed and not a little afraid. ‘Tark will be pissed he missed this.’
A tad more respectful of our environment, we pushed on. Red was still keen, if a little less gung-ho. Even when he charged ahead to blaze our trail, he kept me in sight, looking back over his shoulder to make sure I was keeping up. It grew darker. The clouds were engorged eggplants, roiling and stewing, close enough to touch. A dry stick of lightning forked across the sky.
We waded out of a narrow ravine onto the dry sand-bar downhill from Giles Aubrey’s place. Red, spying the rope where he and Tarquin had played reckless Tarzans, ran ahead.
Halfway there, he pulled up sharp, eyes riveted to the ground. ‘Dad,’ he called sharply, poised between backward retreat and stark immobility. ‘Come quick. Snake attack.’
A man lay face-down on the exposed river-bed beside the eroded wall of the bank. One arm was bent behind his torso, the other twisted behind his neck. It was not a natural position and he wasn’t moving.
I took Giles Aubrey by the shoulder and rolled him over. He was as light as balsa and dead as a dodo. His face had been pressed flat against the dry quartz sand of the river-bed and was flecked with grains of mica, diamond dust against the blotched pink parchment of his skin.
How long he had been lying there was impossible to tell. He wasn’t warm but neither was he particularly cold. How he had got there was easier to determine. A small avalanche of leaves and pebbles lay scattered around his sandalled feet. He had come tumbling down the near-vertical incline of the riverbank, a drop of perhaps ten metres. The fall had been a nasty one and from the ungainly contortion of the limbs, I guessed that death had come on impact.
Red had found a stick and mounted guard. ‘Can you see the snake?’
‘He fell.’ I pointed up towards the vegetable patch, showing what had happened.
‘Yuk,’ said Red, disappointed. ‘Gross.’
Gross indeed. Leaving Aubrey’s body where it lay in sand scuffed and churned from the boys’ play the previous day, we climbed the embankment and back-tracked to where his descent would have begun. The old man’s duck-headed walking stick lay on the ground at the top of the bank. His prostrate form lay immediately below. Picking up the cane, I silently pointed out the skidmarks that traced a path down the slope. Red nodded gravely, as though absorbing some important moral lesson. This is what happens if you go too close to the edge.
A crack like a gunshot split the air, the temperature dropped ten degrees and the atmosphere condensed itself into raindrops. One by one they began to fall, so slow you could count them. They were as big as golf balls, so fat and heavy they raised craters in the dust. Then all at once it was pouring. Rain churned the earth, turning it to mud.
We dashed for the shelter of the house. Red beat me. We were both already saturated. When I came through the door, he was at the phone, offering me the handpiece. I assumed it had been ringing when he burst inside, the sound drowned in the downpour. I put it to my ear. ‘Hello,’ I said.
There was no-one on the line, just a ringing tone, terminating abruptly in the faint hiss of an answering machine tape. ‘Thank you for calling,’ announced a patrician voice. ‘Regretfully, I am unable to respond personally at this time. Please leave a message.’ Short, to the point, polite, confident. Phillip Veale.
I hung up slowly, my brow furrowed into a question. ‘Last number re-dial,’ Red explained to the family idiot. ‘They always do it on Murder She Wrote.’
‘What makes you think it’s murder?’
Red shrugged. He didn’t. He was just following correct television procedure. ‘Now dial 911,’ he told me.
‘Triple zero in Australia,’ I informed him, dialling. ‘It was an accident. He was very old and he fell over. And don’t touch anything else, okay?’