Clement blinked open his eyes. His head throbbed. The part of the world that was not dark was blurred. Almost at the same instant he realised he was lying in dirt, he heard the faint but distinct sound of a motorcycle peeling away. He sat on his haunches a long minute, the smell of earth assuring him he was alive. Unsteadily he climbed to his feet and touched the side of his head cautiously. His fingers felt the stickiness of blood. A rivulet was trickling down his temple onto his cheek. His torch, still on, had tumbled a metre away. Beside it was a long handled shovel. He guessed that may have been what hit him. He picked up the torch and staggered back inside, his head throbbing.
In the kitchen beside a brush, shaving cream and a packet of disposable razors, he found a mirror the size of an A4 sheet of paper. It was tricky angling the torch to check his scalp but as far as he could tell the wounds were superficial. He contemplated what he should do next. This wasn’t the city with shifts coming on and off. All his people were already knackered or likely in bed, but his head ached and it was a long drive back in the dark. He made his way to the back veranda, pulled a warm beer from the bar fridge, cracked it and gulped. The throb began to ease. He drained the can looking up at the stars; the only sound the fluid in the can and his own breath, and all at once he understood how seductive this life must have been for Dieter Schaffer. When everything was stripped back, what did we really need, but a knife and fork in a tool box, water, a bed, a beer?
He finished the can, walked back inside and over to the bed. He sat down on it and pulled off his shoes dimly aware that his socks had been far too long on his feet. The mattress was soft. Strange that a man who lived so frugally had preferred such a soft mattress. Or maybe he just found one discarded on the street and took it, somebody else’s preference automatically becoming his. By now the pulsing throb had become a more chronic, less intense ache. Fatigue had hit him quickly like the shovel. No chance he was driving anywhere now. Clement lay back on the bed and pulled the mosquito net around him. That took him back many, many moons, to open verandas and the sound of the Gloucester Park trots on a radio. His thoughts drifted to Phoebe sleeping in the same bedroom her mother had as a child, on the cliff far above a green ocean.
Then he slept.
Daylight and the smell of morning woke him. He was surprised how lucid he was. He remembered everything. Well, he thought he remembered everything, he supposed he might not realise if he didn’t. He touched his matted hair. The blood had congealed. He sat upright and his confidence evaporated. His head began to throb again, he felt nauseous. He slowed his breathing and gradually began to feel a bit better. He pulled out his phone and with it the card from Dieter Schaffer’s phone. Shit, he should have been onto that already, valuable time had been lost. He popped it back in his pocket, slid off the bed, saw he’d bloodied up the pillow but that was all, and walked towards the kitchen end of the house, thirsty. Halfway across, he stopped and flopped on the sofa. He stared at his phone, saw it was five fifty a.m. This time the man with the hammer was in his own head. He dialled Graeme Earle.
Seventy minutes later Earle pulled into the area in front of Dieter Schaffer’s shack and parked beside Clement’s four-wheel drive. Clement watched him from the swinging cane chair on the veranda. He’d been enjoying the sun’s early rays and was feeling much better. Earle spotted him and hustled over. He was clutching a brown paper bag.
Clement said, ‘I could get used to this.’
Once he was on the veranda, Earle gave the boss’s head the once-over.
‘I’ve had worse falling off a bar stool.’
‘Bloody high bar stool.’
Earle handed over the paper bag. Clement dug inside, pleased to find fresh current buns. He raised an eyebrow to show he was impressed. ‘How many for me?’
‘How many do you think? One, you greedy bastard.’
Earle was the only one at work who was game enough to talk that way to him. Clement chewed into his bun. His appetite hadn’t been affected. Earle grabbed one for himself.
‘What’d he hit you with?’
‘Long handled shovel I think.’
The men chewed in silence.
‘You need to see a doctor?’
‘Think I’m okay.’
‘That nurse at the hospital will make you feel better.’
Clement suppressed a smile. ‘You call Lisa?’
‘On her way. She’s rapt with you. She’d had about ten minutes sleep she said by the time she got in from Jasper’s. You didn’t get a look?’
‘I heard a motorcycle. In the distance. I’d probably been out a few moments. How was the fishing?’
‘Three nice barra. Then I got home and heard about this shit. One or more?’
‘Just one I think.’
‘You think this is related to Jasper’s?’
Clement savoured the fresh bun. ‘We need to run Schaffer’s phone, see what might turn up.’
The sound of a vehicle arriving swung them back to the driveway. It was Lisa Keeble. Earle took a very big bite. ‘She must have had her foot to the floor the whole way.’
She pulled up hard and dust swirled. Earle watched her climb out.
‘You two should get together.’
Clement’s face was kind of numb which aided his deadpan. ‘First the nurse, now Lisa?’
‘The nurse is just a bit of divorce therapy.’ Earle’s eyes tracked Lisa as she approached. ‘You’d be good for one another. She needs to dump that no-hoper muso bloke.’
Clement didn’t mind Lisa’s boyfriend. Everybody called him Osama because of the dark beard he wore. He was a bit alternative but he had a tuneful voice. Neither man spoke as Lisa joined them. She was detachment itself as she studied him up close.
‘You should get to hospital.’
‘I’ll be fine. I want you to dust for prints inside, especially a set of drawers. There’s a long-handled shovel, DNA it, print it. The can of beer on the back veranda was me. Same for the blood on the pillow, don’t get excited, it’s mine. ’ He looked at Earle. ‘Mate, go through the place, see if there’s anything I missed. Bag all the documents in the drawers, bring them back to the station, I’m going home to change. Stay in touch.’
He turned back to Keeble. ‘Sorry to dump you in it again.’
‘It’s my job. You didn’t see your attacker?’
‘Just a blur.’
‘He heard a motorcycle leaving.’
Earle offered her the last of the buns. Lisa shook her head, Clement shook his. Earle took another large bite. Clement asked if Lisa had found anything interesting at the creek since they’d spoken.
‘Yeah, a shirt underneath the overturned dinghy. And guess what? At a rough estimate, the marks on it matched the bruising on Dieter’s body.’
‘He was wearing that when he was beaten?’
‘He was wearing that when somebody took an axe to his head. A lot of blood had washed into the creek but you could see the stains.’
Clement pondered. ‘How could he change shirts if his head was caved in?’
‘Maybe he didn’t.’
Earle spoke through masticated bun. ‘Somebody else put a different shirt on him?’
‘I think so.’
‘And then dumped him?’ He looked over at Clement. ‘Did they feel guilty? Somebody who knows him?’
Clement, thinking along the same lines, gave a thoughtful nod. ‘What else?’
‘Lots of litter, might be useful but who knows. Right out at the edge of the search area I found a space that looked like it had a car recently, empty beer cans.’
‘How recent?’
‘There was still a tiny bit of beer in the can. I’m guessing forty-eight hours. No useful tyre tracks.’
Clement asked if she had printed the cans. Naturally she had. She also thought they might be good for DNA.
‘That’s not the area I found?’
‘No. There was nothing there except the depression in the ground that indicated some sort of vehicle.’
Two cars, he thought, but no way of telling when exactly they were there. Clement asked her opinion on what might have happened, now she’d had time to sleep on it.
‘Sleep?’ she joked. Then more seriously, ‘I think he was killed with an axe or machete while he was standing near the tent. He was there for some time, bleeding into the ground. He was beaten while he was dying. When he was dead somebody changed his shirt and dragged him to the water in a tarp or something, pulled it up into the boat, drove to the middle and dumped him.’
‘You don’t think he might have changed himself like you said before?’
‘With the beating he took I doubt he could have got it off, and it would have been almost impossible to get that t-shirt on by himself. And there’s very little sign of blood on that t-shirt so the axe blow must have come first.’
‘So the killer or somebody else re-dressed Schaffer?’ Clement was trying to bend the scenario to make sense.
‘It fits.’
Clement was now thinking through the rest of the action, how the body came to be in the creek. ‘The tourists didn’t mention hearing an outboard.’
Earle said. ‘They could have been asleep.’
‘Or there was no outboard in the first place,’ suggested Keeble.
Earle didn’t buy that. ‘An experienced fisherman wouldn’t come to croc territory without one.’
Clement said, ‘Well it’s not here. So I think either it’s in the creek or somebody took it.’ He asked Keeble, ‘One or more perps?’
‘No idea. One person could have got him into the dinghy.’
Clement’s brain was fuzz. ‘Was Shep a problem?’
‘I told you, I can handle Shep. And Briony, one of the techs from Perth, is blonde and kind of cute so that got me off the hook.’
‘Where is The Walking Complaint?’ asked Earle.
Clement wished he’d taken him up on the last bun.
‘Out at the creek. I called him right after I called you. The Fisheries blokes are there too, searching the creek.’
‘Rather them than me.’ Lisa Keeble gave a little shudder at the thought.
‘Oh well, you better get on with it.’ Clement headed to his car. ‘Call if you find anything important.’
It was the sight of the chopping block and axe that stopped Clement in his tracks and had him cursing his own stupidity. It was located at the right-hand end of the veranda, with a small wood stack beneath the veranda for cover, a blue plastic tarp draped over the top as insurance against rain. Clement had missed it last night and the angle had been wrong to spy it from the veranda this morning. He advanced and checked it over. Nothing to indicate this was the murder weapon but he wasn’t thinking about this particular axe. The day before yesterday Mal Gross had been taking notes with that couple who claimed an axe had been stolen from their property. Of course it could be a coincidence but even so, Clement knew he should have thought of it way back at the creek. What the hell was happening to him?