The world softly faded in on him again. Rain splashing off the bridge of his nose, Graeme Earle looked down at him, distressed, as if he were already dead; Bourke, his gun, the car gone.
I’ve only got maybe half a dozen words left in me. The thought was surprisingly deliberate, like a thief moving fast but without haste, knowing what he wanted.
‘He buried him alive.’
‘Where?’
He could only shake his head. Graeme Earle was shouting at him but he was muted.
Black.
The ocean was pale blue, a very small gum tree hovering dead centre, and it struck him as odd but for the first few seconds he couldn’t fathom why. No, as his eyes focused he saw it wasn’t the ocean it was a wall and at its centre was a small watercolour in a cheap frame, no glass. It was the smell, that weird co-mingling of sickly pre-warmed meals and antiseptic that told Clement this was hospital.
‘About time, mate.’
Clement turned to his left and through a little fairy-forest of plastic tubes saw Shepherd, beaming, an apple poised half-eaten in his hand. Only then he realised he was wearing an oxygen mask. The clock on the wall indicated it was one ten.
‘It doesn’t work. It’s five thirty in the morning. Welcome, back.’
He tried to smile but wasn’t sure if he managed it, the white fell too quickly.
Later, the mask off, breathing unaided but with difficulty, his right side aching with every breath, Clement sat alone in his hospital bed listening to faint sounds in the corridor, a trolley clanking, a raised voice, a fading laugh. He had the room to himself, privileged he supposed. Elevated on the pillow he stared directly ahead at the gum tree print. Who chose those paintings, one of the staff here? Or was it an actual job? Somebody in Perth buying prints for hospitals all over the state, matching thematically the region to the print: gold prospectors in Kalgoorlie, whales in Albany. What had been on the wall of his father’s hospital room? He tried to remember. It seemed an age ago. That single contemplation prised open a whole cupboard-full of responsibilities that tumbled out: calling his mother back, Phoebe, interviews about how he came to lose his gun and police vehicle. Marilyn had not visited. For that matter she hadn’t even called but Shepherd assured him Risely had notified her. His mother had rung a couple of hours ago. Tess was with her now. He’d managed to reassure them he was okay but had told his mum he was tired and would call her back, which was only half true. The fatigue had left him now, it was pure physical incapacitation confining him to bed but he did not reveal that to her, it would only have taken explanation. How he came to be lying in a hospital bed in Derby with a large dressing on his right side instead of the arrow shaft that had been there last time he’d looked, was relayed to him by Shepherd a couple of hours after that first brief phase of consciousness.
Worried about blood loss and hypothermia, Graeme Earle had bundled him into his car and driven hell for leather back to the main road calling for help while debating, should he drive to Beagle Bay where there were some rudimentary medical facilities or try and get all the way back to Broome where he might still need another ninety-minute race to Derby? This was some of the most isolated country in the world, one of the worst places to find yourself at the centre of a medical emergency. In the end, the army came to Clement’s aid. The worst of the winds had moved through and though it was still hairy, they’d had a chopper standing by for evacuations. They directed Earle to Beagle Bay where a chopper was waiting on the football oval with oxygen, fluids and drugs. They evacuated Clement direct to Derby. All of this, Shepherd related in his rather high voice with an edge of rapture so that Clement had the sensation of listening to an amateur calling a football game.
From his surgeon Clement had learned he’d been rushed straight to surgery where for more than two hours they had worked on him, removing the arrowhead, repairing his right lung and then stitching him back up.
‘The main concern was blood loss and infection. We’ve got blood into you and hopefully there’ll be no infection. You also have a fractured rib from the arrow; can’t do much about that except tape you up, I’m afraid.’
Graeme Earle had been forced to stay at Beagle Bay to pursue Bourke. To Shepherd’s annoyance, the three Perth detectives had been sent off to join him.
‘All the glory to them, us locals get to look for Osterlund, probably drowned by now if he wasn’t dead already,’ he offered without cheer.
Risely was overseeing the Bourke operation but it would be another three or four hours before the weather permitted aerial surveillance. Earle was at Beagle Bay and the detectives on their way to join him.
‘So what happened? How’d he peg you?’ Shepherd asked it with complete insensitivity but Clement preferred that to somebody pussy-footing around. Clement told him as he remembered it but his mind was already moving forward to the question of Osterlund and he ended the story about himself abruptly. ‘Lisa must check Bourke’s car for soil, anything that might tell us where he went.’
‘She’s onto that, been onto it pretty much since they brought it in.’
‘Keep looking for CCTV footage of his car. He’s probably been out to wherever he buried him since he snatched him. Check the records, when he wasn’t working, when his roommates say he was out, that’s when he would have been on his way to him.’
His mind was running now. Shepherd dutifully took notes.
‘It can’t be too far away because he’d have to drive out and back. I bet he filled his tank on the abduction day.’
‘But his mate bought the car and took it to Derby, that’ll screw up all the kilometres and fuel and everything.’
‘Find out how much petrol was in the car when the mate bought it, if he filled up, when, where, calculate the ks. Most likely Bourke headed into the desert, far enough for privacy but not so far he can’t get back. Forty minutes to an hour, plot it out on a map.’
He sent Shepherd off immediately to work on it.
That was two hours ago. Not long after Shepherd had gone he’d called Risely who was genuinely pleased to speak to him. No sign of Bourke yet. The search for Osterlund was continuing as best it could in the circumstances. They’d tried calling Bourke on the police radio but he was not responding. Manners and two others were checking CCTV footage for any signs of a white Rav4 since the abduction.
‘You might want to go back a few days before. He might have prepared somewhere,’ said Clement grimacing. He was still investigating the positions in which talking was possible without inflicting pain on himself.
The cyclone was through, said Risely. Rain was still spitting from its tail but choppers and fixed wing would be up soon. He saw the only hope of finding Osterlund alive now was locating Bourke. Astuthi Osterlund had finally fallen apart and was being medicated so she could sleep.
Clement ran his theory of a desert burial.
‘Even so, it’s too vast an area.’
‘Maybe not. They’ve had choppers and whatnot out the last few days reporting on the weather, maybe one of them saw a white car stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’
Risely said he would try but Clement could sense doubt seeping down the line.
‘How about Lisa?’ he asked.
‘She’s processing the car but the roommate contaminated it driving it around Derby.’
‘Has anybody spoken to the grandmother?’
‘I think Perth might have.’
‘You should get her involved. He said he did all this for her. Maybe he’s listening to police radio. Get her to ask him to give up Osterlund’s location.’
‘That’s a good idea. I’ll get onto it. Take it easy, Dan, I mean it, you’ve done a great job but you need to rest. I’ve told the internal guys to give you forty-eight hours. Rest, mate.’
And that’s what he had done since, going on for two hours now, nothing. It was driving him nuts. There had to be something he could do except just wait.
Think, he commanded himself. His phone rang. It was Marilyn.
‘Hi,’ he said, easing himself on his left side.
‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m pretty good. Sore, sore as hell actually on my right side, and a bit weak but I’m alright.’
She asked him the details. He recounted what he could remember and what he’d been told had happened after it went blank. While he was talking he was thinking about Bourke planning this thing. Did he just bury Osterlund in a box and then bury that?
‘Is Phoebe there?’ He wanted very much to speak to her.
‘No, I thought I better wait till she was out just in case…’
Just in case the news had been real bad.
‘What’s he like, Peter Bourke?’ Her question caught him off guard. He didn’t actually recall anybody else asking that. Risely had questioned whether Bourke was injured or psychotic but not what he was like.
‘Probably would have been a nice kid but he’s damaged. He could have killed me, he chose not to.’
He could feel her on the end of the line, her presence, he could almost smell her. They were one and indivisible, they were divided and apart, they were sympatico and discordant, they had a relationship that needed a theological mindset to explain because it was all contradiction, they had no relationship at all except what held by a gossamer thread in a single moment.
‘You’re very special, Dan, you always will be. I’ll get Phoebe to call when she’s back.’
What did that mean, very special? That I love you but can’t stand you? I loved you once but not now?
‘Is Brian special too?’
He couldn’t help himself and felt the immediate emotional disconnect on her part. He was stupid. He had learned nothing.
‘I’ll get Phoebe to call you when she’s back. Take care.’
He sat there, the light weight of the phone in his hand. It reminded him of the heavy gun he could no longer hold, the pistol that Peter Bourke stripped from him. Thoughts of Marilyn evaporated suddenly. There was something about weight, the arithmetic of subtraction, the use of absence to deduce past reality, omission as a dynamic principle.
He saw it now, a way of tracing Osterlund, well, an aid to tracing him. And something else he should have spied an eon ago. Bourke had to have known the cyclone was closing in, even a deaf mute living in Broome knew that. So why didn’t he fly out the previous evening after he’d quit his job and sold his car? Because he wanted one last triumphant moment with his captor. Clement dialled Shepherd: engaged. He waited, worked it through again in his head. Bourke had already sold his car, so how did he get there? He dialled again. This time Shepherd was free.
‘Shep, you need to find out if somebody loaned Bourke a car Tuesday night or early Wednesday.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he went out to wherever he buried Osterlund. And there’s been a mini-cyclone so if somebody did loan him the car they probably haven’t driven it since. You can check ks travelled, fuel consumed and Keeble can check soil on the inside of the vehicle and compare it to the car Bourke sold his mate. Also, Bourke might have had to fill up on the way out or back and he won’t have been careful, he thought he was going to Bali, right, so there might be CCTV of him with that car. Are you getting this?’
Shepherd said he was.
‘Okay, now what you do is, you work out the arc of where he might have travelled and you eliminate every direction where he would have been captured by camera, you understand? If we work out all the routes he didn’t take we are left with the few he must have taken and if we catch him coming in or going out with the other vehicle, we know where to concentrate the search.’
He asked Shepherd again if he got it. Shepherd claimed he had. But he knew what Shepherd and Risely and everybody else was thinking. What does it matter if some murdering drug dealer, pornographer is found dead? We are safe, the good people of the Kimberley are safe; or most of us at any rate, because we know now who the killer was and he wasn’t after us. As Shepherd had said earlier, Osterlund was a side-issue, Peter Bourke was the main game, Peter Bourke was the glory.