‘Hello, love.’ His mother sounded like she was holding it together but just.
‘How is he? Can he move? Can he talk?’
‘I don’t know. They’ve been running tests. He’s in a coma. They said he was fortunate I was there and called the ambulance straight away.’
When Earle had told him the news Clement had first off entered some weird state where objects seemed stagey, props without substance. He half expected the computer to be light as cardboard but it wasn’t and he momentarily forgot why he had sat down at it, then remembered he was after the number for Albany Hospital. His fingers felt like somebody else’s as he typed on the prop computer, picked up the prop phone and dialled. His mother and father were just shy of eighty and neither used the mobile phone he had bought them. It had taken him two receptionists to locate his mother at the ICU. At least by that time he was returning to something normal. She ran through what had happened. A typical Saturday morning, they both liked to rise early and walk. His father had emerged from the bathroom dressed and ready to go. She’d turned to get her scarf and when she looked back he was on the floor. She called the ambulance straight away. The paramedics came quickly and said his heart was beating strongly which was a relief, for her first fear had been a massive heart attack.
‘I’ve been here since and they’ve run lots of tests on him. The main doctor said it was a stroke. He is in a coma. He could come out of it soon or never.’
He felt for her, alone, trying to hold it together. ‘I’ll come down today.’ He was wondering if he’d be able to get seats on the various planes required to get from here to there.
‘You don’t need to.’
Of course he did. His sister Tess lived in New Zealand with her family.
‘Does Tess know?’
‘Yes, I rang her. I told her to wait until things became clearer but she said she’ll make some arrangements.’
‘Do you need anything?’
‘Jess Granger is being an angel. You don’t need to come, really.’
‘I’ll be there. Take care.’
He went online and searched for a flight to Perth. A flight was leaving in an hour. A connecting flight to Albany was leaving within forty minutes of his arrival in Perth. He booked seats at full-tote odds, mindful that that put an end to any hope of flying somewhere for a holiday with Phoebe. Western Australia was a big state and he’d be covering most of its length but he estimated he could make the hospital by eight thirty p.m.
As for the case, he didn’t think there was anything he could do at this point that Graeme Earle couldn’t. He called Scott Risely and found him on the golf course. Risely gave him his blessing to go, his one concern being the warrant for Karskine’s house and car. He expected to have it within the hour.
‘Graeme can handle that. Basically we’re looking for an axe, clothes, shoes, blood in the car.’
Risely wished him luck.
Clement filled in Earle. ‘The boss will have the warrant ready soon. You can handle that with the techs. I’ll call you between flights. If I can organise Rhino, I’ll stop off in Perth on the way back to catch up about the case but whatever happens I will be back tomorrow evening ready to go Monday.’
Earle wished him all the best. Clement shrugged hopelessly.
‘There’s nothing I can do really. Keep trying to find that bikie, get some eyes on Marchant, he knows something. If you find a blood-stained axe at Karskine’s, leave a message.’
Forty minutes later, the shimmering heat from the tarmac barely registering, Clement trundled behind an eclectic bunch, Asian tourists, a few families, kids bent over electronic handsets, elderly couples, young mining bods. The wealthier tourists wore new akubra hats, the mining rats workboots and singlets. This is fun for you, he thought watching tourists cram bags into overhead lockers. This journey is about all the good things you will discover. He considered how often he’d flown and how many times there must have been somebody on the plane feeling like he was now, apprehensive, alone.
The flight was full and he found himself beside a couple of young miners. They put us single men together where we can only offend each other, he speculated, but wasn’t sure if airline staff really were that thorough in their planning.
It was twenty minutes into the flight, after the miners had ordered some can mix of spirits and coke and the various children were immersed in their computer games, before his thoughts bore down and focused on his father. Who ever knew their father? Sure he knew his habits, hobbies. He’d been a pretty fair tennis player in his day and had continued playing competitively well into his sixties. Wimbledon on tele was the highlight of his year. He preferred beer to wine, liked hot English mustard on his steak, cooked medium. So far as Clement was aware his father had always loved his mother. There had been squabbles but no huge domestic where somebody had moved out or run off with the neighbour for a fortnight. But what did he know of his dreams as a young man? Did he play jokes on his friends, was he a wag? Was he a studious, serious kid?
Clement hadn’t really seen any of that in him but you changed when you were a father, you lost individuality and you morphed into the status. Clement had, anyway. Once Phoebe came along his life reduced to only two modes, work and family, and this he saw as a continuation of his father’s modus operandi. As a kid Clement had not been exposed to many of his parents’ friends, who were all left in Perth when they’d come up here to run the caravan park. Very occasionally some old pal would drive up and spend a few days at the park. There’d be laughter, beers, but no stories he could recall. His father was one of five kids and had grown up in the wheatbelt. He should check with Mal Gross, see if they were from around the same neck of the woods. Clement did not remember his grandfather who ran a store and died of a heart attack in his fifties when Clement was two. Clement imagined his father, Alan, driving back to the hometown for the funeral in the old Kingswood, reliving his childhood. Alan Clement had finished high school, not all that common in those days, especially in those parts, and had found a job in the public service somewhere for a few years before joining the Roads department. His parents had met, married, Tess born first, then Dan and then that life had ended for whatever reason, presumably opportunity, and they’d headed north when Dan was six. As a boy in that wheatbelt town, what had been his father’s dream? To play in the Davis Cup, sail the high seas, feel the spray, the wind, chasing down the America’s Cup, to own his own pub, to fly high over the flat brown earth as Clement was now? Surely it can’t have been to run a caravan park in the Never Never. On occasion as a kid, Clement would flip through black and white photos in the family photo album. A handful were of his father’s childhood. They were small with serrated edges and Clement could still remember his thrall as he sat on the floor, or the grass under a shady tree, confronted by these strange physical things that represented a mysterious and foreign world. He pictured them now, farm life, his father with his brothers and a sister all standing against a water tank or propped against a farm ute. Clement’s uncles he couldn’t even name he’d seen them so infrequently but his aunt Meg he knew, being the only girl. She was the only one besides his father still alive. There were only a few photos, maybe a dozen in all. In the 1940s and 50s, cameras and printing a luxury; they didn’t own a fridge until his father was fifteen. The frugality had continued after his parents married and very few snaps chronicled the years before Tess and he came along. Most of those that did exist, a youthful Clement had committed to memory, flipping through the creaking album up here on hot oppressive days with no television and a surfeit of boredom. The courting years of his mum and dad featured group shots of people he had never met, holiday snaps, a wedding or christening. There was little of everyday life. In attempting to capture what they thought was extraordinary, all people had done was replicate the same uninspiring scenes of smiling faces looking at a camera. There was no photo of his parents sitting on their chairs gazing into a strand of distant trees, a solitary bottle of beer between them.
One group of photos always caught his attention though. It was well before his sister was born, his mother and father at a tennis club New Year’s Eve fancy-dress party. His mum was Little Red Riding Hood, his dad a musketeer. The table was littered with large bottles of Swan Lager, the only beer available then. The snap that particularly intrigued him showed his father lunging with a foil—it looked like real one with a button on the end—at a jolly friar. In his father’s eye was a gleam and his youthful body was taut with a theatrical hand caught in a mid-air twirl. The friar was doing a good job affecting wide-eyed surprise at his own ‘death’. This was a side of his father Clement could not recall in the flesh. In that split-second there was a man dashing, theatrical, full of life. Was it simply the booze talking? Or was it a moment where his father’s spirit broke to the surface and ran?
This same man could be on his deathbed and Clement still had no idea of who he was underneath the shellac of fatherhood. There had been times he’d attempted to get closer, inquiring about his dad’s schooldays, his mates, their holidays, the first car he owned, but his father would make a one sentence comment and turn his attention to something practical like unblocking the septic tank or fixing a window. Clement understood the barrier. Parents want to live every aspect of their children’s lives but don’t want their children to know them. He didn’t want Phoebe to know how he felt about himself. Hell, he wasn’t even sure how he did feel about himself. You could say there was a sense of failure and a little guilt, like the draft prospect who never delivered big-time, but that wasn’t quite right. There were moments he was proud of his work, proud even of the fact that at some point Marilyn had been in love with him, proud to be Phoebe’s father, yet that did not mean he wanted Phoebe in on this. Ultimately he assumed the real him would be a disappointment and yet he did not attempt to cultivate a ‘fake’ him, he simply chose to restrict aspects of his old self, to present what he wanted. He was sure that in this he was following a family tradition.
The plane touched down in Perth. Even though the sun clung to the sky only by its fingernails it was still hot, the Doctor thin and wan today as its patients. He had to scoot over to a separate terminal for the flight to Albany. En route he called Earle and listened to his report.
‘I’m at Karskine’s now. Nothing yet but we’ve only been here forty-five minutes or so.’
‘How was he?’
‘Not too bad. Told us we were wasting our time and was not impressed we were impounding the vehicle. Apparently Mathias Klendtwort called the station and left a contact number, sounds like he speaks good English. You want me to follow up?’
‘You’re busy, I’ll do that.’
Earle gave him the phone number and Clement wrote it on his hand.
‘Shep have any luck with those vehicles in the CCTV?’
‘No. Three of them belonged to people working in the shops. Nobody saw the biker.’
The Albany plane was boarding by the time Clement reached the terminal. It was a smaller craft but most of the twenty-odd seats were claimed. The passenger list this time was more homogeneous, ninety percent locals heading home. He edged down the narrow aisle and squeezed in next to a man with ruddy cheeks and nose, and a full crop of snow-white hair, probably in his sixties. The remnants of skin cancers burned off the man’s face suggested outdoor occupation. Odds on he was a farmer. They nodded politely to each other and that was it.
On this leg, Clement dwelt only on whether his father would survive. He had long steeled himself for the death of his parents so he was not shocked to find himself in this situation but he did not want his father to die, not now, not ever. Practical considerations began to pepper him. If his father did survive would he be mobile? Would he have to go to a home? Could his mother cope? No highlights announced themselves, just varying degrees of unpleasant realities that other people were dealing with every day and once more he felt vaguely guilty. Had he earned more money maybe he would have been able to afford nurses and private facilities. He had settled for an acceptable existence, not a good one.
The female flight attendants barely had time to scoop up the tea and coffee cups before informing them they would soon be landing. Clement had taken a sip of his tea, felt his tooth twinge and decided not to tempt fate further. He pressed his face to the porthole and through gloom saw thick forests below. The contrast between where he had come from and here could only have been more powerful with snow on the ground. They landed and deplaned, as the Americans like to say. It was dark and much cooler than Perth, but mild not cold. Whereas the north air was full of desert dust, down here it was clean and invigorating, something to do with negative ions from the Great Southern Ocean, Clement had heard, though he could not remember where. Albany had been a whaling port into the 1970s but a century earlier had been more internationally famous than Perth, for besides the whaling it acted as a gateway to the Kalgoorlie goldfields.
The taxi driver was overweight, with a form guide folded on the dash, simple pleasures. Clement thought of cautioning him on the dangers of stroke but held his tongue. Before entering the hospital he called Earle again. They had finished up at Karskine’s. No axe, surprise, surprise. Mal Gross had been overseeing the biker lead, getting the uniforms to do the legwork. Nothing had turned up yet and they were sending patrols by regularly to keep an eye on Marchant.
Hospitals might offer a small degree of variance on the outside but Clement found once inside they were of a type, almost interchangeable, the same cool air with the faint smell of heated meals, the same church hush. His father had been shifted to a private room. Clement found him on his back, seemingly asleep among a tangle of monitoring devices. His mother sat in the chair beside the bed gazing into space. It took her an instant to come back. She stood up and hugged her son. Clement dragged over the remaining chair in the room.
‘They say he’s serious but stable. His body is functioning normally but they don’t know what damage there might have been.’
‘You want something to eat?’
‘I’m alright. They brought me a roll, they’re angels. What about you? You must be starving?’
Actually he was. He asked again about what had happened and listened to the same details in more or less the same order. Since they’d last spoken there had been more doctor visits but his mother knew nothing substantial although they had said he was stabilised. Clement excused himself, found a dispenser machine up the corridor fumbled in his pockets for coins as he read instructions without taking them in and selected Mexican-flavoured corn chips. His fingers felt stiff and awkward as he fed coins. He managed to work it all somehow, came back and resumed his seat.
‘Tess called. She’s booked to fly in Wednesday.’
‘That’s good.’
He said it even though he was neutral on whether Tess would be much help. Had it been his father having to cope she could have done the basic — cook a meal, clean, wash—but his mum was capable of fending for herself in that regard. Decoding the medical half-truths was where she needed assistance and he doubted his sister would be much use. Tess had never been able to pick up an inference, she had to be hit over the head with directness and her manner could seem brusque for the same reason. Still, he supposed it would be company for his mum, and if his dad was not showing signs of recovery by Wednesday she might need a lot of support.
‘Fine. Really good. He’s been on blood pressure tablets for a few years now but he’s usually good.’
‘Not stressed about anything?’
The slightest hesitation. ‘No.’
Clement realised the stress was probably to do with him. He was a forty-two year old man whose life had at best stalled, at worst fallen apart.
‘You’re on a murder case?’
‘Yes. I’ll have to head back tomorrow.’
His mother understood. She still had vivacity in her eyes but the price for those days in the deck chair was written over her skin. Like a sheet washed and left to dry too many times it was thin and fragile. She wore cream slacks and a light-knit long-sleeved top.
He’d already reached the end of the corn chips and licked his fingers as he asked, ‘How have you been?’
‘Good. Your father and I have both been really very good. The garden looks beautiful.’
She glanced over at her husband. A smile played on her lips. ‘Like he’s sleeping. How’s Phoebe?’
‘She’s off sailing with a friend of hers.’
‘He would have loved that.’
‘He likes sailing?’
‘Oh yes. Well, he likes the idea of it.’
‘And yet he went to Broome. Did he fancy himself as a lugger captain or pearl diver?’
It was never too late to try and learn more about him.
‘No. He did what he had to for the family. He couldn’t see much of a future at Roads. Those days you had to wait for somebody above you to retire or die. And somebody did retire but then one of the other blokes got the job and he thought, “that’s that”. He could see himself waiting another twenty years for his next chance so he said we’re going north, that’s where the future is.’
‘I bumped into Bill Seratono. He’s still up there. You remember him?’
Her small eyes narrowed as she tried to fish his name out of a deep memory.
‘Small, dark hair?’
‘Tall, dark hair.’
The conversation petered out. Neither of them wanted to go to unpleasant places but he had not travelled this far for nothing, things had to be said.
‘Have you thought what you might do if he doesn’t come back he tried to find a good way to say it, ‘… how he was?’
‘There’s a good chance he’s going to be fine.’
‘But if he’s not. We have to … I’ll help. I’ll get time off.’
‘I can manage. We have a good circle of friends here.’
‘You’re not as young as you were, Mum. Neither are your friends, right? Tess won’t be able to stay for long. I’ll be there to help.’
She reached across and held his hand and they sat there like that for some time. Eventually they began to talk about small things, her friends and their various health ailments, Broome and what had changed and what had not. And Phoebe. Her disappointment her only grandchild was more an idea now than a reality manifested itself in every mannerism she adopted to disguise it. Clement realised he would have to tell Phoebe about her grandfather; Marilyn too. One advantage in Phoebe being away on the boat was he could postpone that. His mother was too polite to enquire about Marilyn and probably had no need because they remained in touch. He wondered if she knew about Brian, reasoned she most likely did but was not keen to go there with his mother.
‘I’ll bring Phoebe down in the holidays,’ he said, knowing it would be a promise difficult to keep.
‘We’d love that.’
We, his mother was not affecting the royal plural, she was including his father, refusing to concede an inch on his prospects. By now Clement had adjusted to the air-conditioning and found it almost too cool. A nurse entered and checked the monitors. She was mid-twenties and considerate. She said if they were hungry they were welcome to make some toast in the nurses’ kitchen. There was coffee and tea also.
Around eleven o’clock, after two or three nurses’ visits, he suggested his mother go home, have something to eat and a decent sleep.
‘I’m here. I’ll call you if anything important happens.’
It took a little while but eventually he convinced her that she would be a lot better off continuing her vigil in the morning as he would have to return to Broome. She was worried about him not eating but he said he would check out the nurses’ kitchen. He organised the cab and waited with her until, with the vulnerability of the elderly in a foreign land, she stepped into the taxi. It may well have been the very one that had delivered him. Before returning to the room he wandered along the hushed corridor to the toilet and peed, thinking of his father showing him how to piss standing up. He guessed he must have been four. On the way back he passed the small kitchen and after a momentary debate, diverted to it. Initially he was going to just make himself an instant coffee, as if to eat would have been disrespectful of his father’s condition but hunger won out and he wound up consuming two slices of toast and vegemite. It was then he saw the number written on his arm and on the spur of the moment called Mathias Klendtwort in Hamburg. The phone rang for some time and he was about to hang up when a man answered.
‘Ja?’
‘Mr Klendtwort? This is Detective Daniel Clement in Western Australia.’
‘Oh yes, you got my message. The Hamburg police gave me the number to call.’ His English was better than good. ‘Poor Dieter. He’s dead eh?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. You were a friend of his?’
‘We worked together, quite a long time ago. How did he die?’
‘He was murdered. At a remote fishing area.’
Klendtwort uttered a curse in German. Clement thought he heard a soft sigh. He imagined the German gathering himself. ‘Sorry. He seemed so happy there. Finally. Shit. You have the person?’
‘No, we don’t, no clear suspect and we really don’t know very much about Dieter. Did you speak to him often?’
‘We wrote, usually longhand. I tried emails but they have no personality. I’m sixty-three, I like the old ways. And if you’re going to ask me if he told me of anybody he was worried about, the answer is no. He seemed to enjoy his life there. He loved the heat, being in the open. He had become a hermit I think.’
‘He had no lover?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘He wasn’t gay?’
‘Dieter? No. He was married before. When that fell apart he was really cut up.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Twenty, thirty years.’
‘Is there any possibility, however remote, some criminal from his past might have held a grudge and killed him?’
‘It’s a long way to go for that.’
He thought he heard a match striking.
‘I need a cigarette. My ex used to nag at me but now I’m on my own I can smoke indoors. Pardon, I don’t mean … it’s a bit of a shock.’
‘That’s okay, take your time.’
All the time Clement was acutely aware of his own father battling for survival in a room down the corridor. The German came back on.
‘We had some hard customers, mind, but none who were that angry. And it’s so long ago.’
‘You did Narcotics with him?’
‘We started around the same time with another guy, Heinrich, working out of the station at the Reeperbahn, mainly what you call Vice then. But heroin became a huge problem real quick in the late seventies and they formed us into a narcotics unit around seventy-seven, I think.’
‘We know that Dieter was growing cannabis plants here but so far it seems just for himself and a few mates.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me. We smoked a little reefer back then. Who didn’t? No hard drugs though. Anybody dealt hard drugs, we fucked them over. Dieter was a good cop. He drank too much and he gambled too much but it goes with the territory, right?’
‘Did anybody hold a grudge against him?’
‘From those days? No, it’s too long ago. I mean we made enemies but no, I can’t see somebody travelling halfway around the world to kill an old cop.’
‘Did he have any problems with his gambling?’
‘He gambled a lot but only small stakes.’
‘Do you know where his ex is?’
‘No, I lost track of her years ago. She remarried.’
‘I found a download of German news. There was an article about a man, Klaus Edershen, who was killed, shot through the neck by an arrow. Do you know why he would have that?’
‘Edershen?’
Clement could feel the German trawling.
‘The name does not seem familiar but, shit, it’s so much harder nowadays, the brain just leaks. Killed by an arrow?’
‘In a park in Dortmund, I think the case is still unsolved.’
‘When was this?’
‘September two thousand and twelve.’
‘I was away with my younger daughter in Spain from August to October then. I must have missed it.’
‘How about a seventies drug czar who got away?’
‘The Emperor.’ There was bitterness in Klendtwort’s inflection. ‘We worked that together. We lost a colleague. None of us forget that.’
That would explain why Schaffer had downloaded that. Clement carefully gave Klendtwort his details. ‘I might need to speak to you again.’
‘Feel free. I hope you get your guy.’
Before he ended the call Clement had the urge for one more question. ‘Do you miss it?’
‘It screwed my life up but then maybe it would have screwed up anyway. I’ve got a girlfriend, my kids and I are fine. You bet your arse I miss it. Enjoy it while you can.’
Clement had long finished the toast and his coffee grown cold. He dwelled on what he had learned of Dieter Schaffer and once again had the uncomfortable feeling that Schaffer might be an early prototype of where he himself was headed. Maybe Klendtwort was a closer fit but even that didn’t inspire him with confidence.
Back in the room he sat in the armchair in the dim light and studied his father’s features. Truth be told he didn’t see that much physical similarity but he knew there were mannerisms they shared, a way of phrasing sentences, something he did with his neck.
More memories came back now they were alone, his father teaching him how to shave, and drive. ‘You have to learn in a manual,’ his father had insisted, ‘you may not have the money for an automatic and I won’t be buying you one.’ True to his word he hadn’t. But he had lasted through the kangaroo hops and the clutch grinding. He tried to impart tennis to his son but with little success. Clement never really had the balance. He was better at cricket where he could club the ball artlessly or charge in and bowl fast.
Out of the blue another memory, before Clement’s wedding reception, his father worried about the speech he would have to perform. Clement had caught a peak of him at the reception centre practising in the mirror. He had never let on, a small detail in such a momentous day. He remembered it now, that vulnerability sons rarely associate with fathers. He felt a pang of empathy that he’d ignored at the time when it had been no more than a curiosity. His dad had done a fine job, spoken of him as a determined young man who would strive to do his best for Marilyn.
He’d let him down, hadn’t he?
He recalled his father and mother dancing. His dad was an excellent dancer and enjoyed owning the floor, spinning his mother expertly. Light on his feet, was the old expression. Clement gazed over again and could see the slight rise and fall of his father’s chest. He tried to contemplate what it would mean if his father died. He supposed it made him responsible for his mother. This was more proof to Clement of his retroactive life, lose a wife and daughter, gain a mother.
At some point he must have dozed off. He woke feeling chilly. The hospital was deathly silent and he was gripped with a fear that his father had passed while he slept. Edging over to the bed, he looked down and froze in horror. Dieter Schaffer lay there chopped and bashed, blood congealed over his wounds. Terrifyingly his face turned towards Clement, his dark eyes fixing on him as he tried to speak. His hand reached out to pull him closer for the whisper of dead breath.
Clement recoiled and then blinked awake, woken by the actual jolt of his body. It was three fifty a.m. His father was as before, still breathing regularly. Clement’s heart rate slowly returned to normal though he was aware of the irony that his reality was a bigger nightmare than the nightmare. His father may never regain consciousness. He might join Dieter Schaffer in the land beyond where they could both talk about his failings. The dream made its point. He owed Schaffer. Somebody had murdered the man in the most brutal fashion. Watching over his father, Clement assembled in his head everything he knew about the case thus far, everything he knew about Dieter Schaffer.
It was like holding sand.