1

Few men out this way need an excuse to drink, or to fight, for that matter. But celebrations were scarce, so when the new king, George V, was crowned, coronation balls and dances appeared like flies around a corpse. I’d fought for Georgie’s old grandma, Vicky, in South Africa. Oh yes, I had a long relationship with our kings and queens, always drinking their health and singing about how long they might reign for and killing their enemies and drinking and singing some more. But tonight, my job, as a mounted trooper, was to keep the peace.

I was sent to police the coronation dance held in Larne, three hours north of my post in Calpa. The Larne trooper, Parry, and I put a stop to the odd fracas, threw some drunks in the lock-up and hung about on horseback looking suitably grim, coat collars up, faces in shadow, horses breathing out plumes of steam. Every man jack in that dance hall who came out for a piss at the edge of the light was guilty, and we’d find ways of proving it if they so much as turned a bleary eye our way.

By midnight, the new king was christened and his people staggered out of the hall, stained with piss and splatter, and trying to recall how they got here and why. Soaked in rum, reeking of carbolic and hot shearer’s armpit – a stench so ingrained you’d have to chip it off with a chisel – some fell in the dirt and some on each other. I’d been in that state myself more than I care to admit and found nary a laugh in it, just tar-black shame, some of which still held fast to the inner walls of my skull.

Finally, the last of them set off and the words ‘God Save the King’, accompanied by screeches of laughter, faded into the silence. Cleaning the hall wasn’t our job so we just locked up and grunted at each other. Parry set off to patrol the road north and I set off for Kitty’s house on the edge of town to try my luck. She tossed me out an hour later. The punt man was still up, albeit in a filthy mood, but he took me across to the west of the river and I set off on the long ride south.

Silent forks of lightning flashed in the west. Rain was coming in, driving the dust before it. It would be a long ride before I reached my bed but I didn’t mind all that much, sleep being a difficult pastime for me. My horse, Dancer, picked his way along the rutted road. I lounged in the saddle, pulled my oilskin closer as the rain hit, fat drops pelting down, then settling into a steady downpour. Soon my boots were full of water, my feet numb. Dancer was fed up, ears back, plodding along with his head down, sticky mud cleaving to his hooves. Water rushed along a ditch at the side of the road, rain hitting the parched ground loud as a train.

Out of habit I took notice of the fenceline, looking for breaks. Through the rain I noticed a whole section down, sagging wires and a fencepost uprooted. It looked fairly recent. No dead roos tangled in the wire. What could have been fresh wheel tracks led across the fenceline, over the sagging wire and up a low rise. No stock around, just saltbush and the odd clump of mulga.

I saw the cart on top of the rise, no horse in the traces. No people. The rain continued its steady pace. I dismounted, took my rifle out of its holster, stomach clenched tight, and walked over to what looked like a pile of wet washing.

A young woman, sprawled on the ground, her skirts torn and her legs twisted. Rain fell on her face, washing the blood away and leaving a mask of jagged bone, tendon and muscle. I felt for a pulse and then lurched away and vomited, glad no one was with me. I’d seen death many times as a soldier, but I’d never seen a woman so brutally bashed. Still shaking, I turned back to her, fairly certain I knew who she was, but the state of her face left some hope I was wrong.

With the cloud cover the night was dark, and in the back of the cart I found a lantern. I took it out and crouched under the cart, trying to get a match to strike, hand shaking. Once it was lit I straightened up, then walked over to another crumpled pile and held the lantern aloft, the raindrops glittering as they smacked into the body of a girl, a blanket tangled around her feet.

I squatted beside her. She was facedown in the mud, her hair loose and flowing in the rivulets like shining seaweed. There was a small hole in her back which had to be a bullet wound. I couldn’t tell if she’d been raped and I didn’t want to go looking. I checked her pulse. People sometimes take a while to die, but she was gone. Her skin was as cold as the mud she lay in.

Lantern shadows danced like spirits of the unshriven dead. Back at the cart I found a young man slumped by the rear wheel, the side of his head caved in, his hands in his lap, water and blood dripping from his face. I recognised him, and fought off the urge to throw up again. It was James Kirkbride, and the girls were his two younger sisters, Nessie and Grace.

God in his wasteland of a heaven – who would kill these three?

Rain hammered my face, trailed down my back, dripped from my hat. I wiped my eyes, blinked as my mind galloped around in useless circles. Three dead. Two females and a male. Three in the morning. I needed a doctor, I needed a tracker, more troopers. I needed a slug of whisky. I heard a noise and swung around, ready to shoot.

Nothing.

Thunder rumbled in the clouds above. There were four Kirkbride siblings – another sister, Flora. I searched, frantically pushing aside scrub, holding the lantern aloft, shouting her name, my words drowned by the rain. If she was here I couldn’t find her, but I couldn’t keep looking. Complete the mission first – that was a rule the soldier lived by, and it was still deeply embedded in my brain, despite frequent flushing with alcohol.

I checked my watch – ten past three – put the lantern back in the cart, went back to Dancer and mounted up. He didn’t have much left in him but I set him at as fast a gallop as could be managed in the wet. I needed to raise the alarm, get telegrams off to Bourke, find the doctor and get back to the scene of the crime as fast as I could.

~

The rain kept up, a relentless drumbeat. I remembered the ripple and snap of the Union Jack over our camp. The Butcher’s Apron, as it was known. The call to violence, the thrill of it. Until it was done unto you. The Boer who attacked me cut my face in two with a bayonet, from hairline to jaw, then went at my chest, my arms, anything he could get at, scything my flesh like wheat.

I was fighting because I was young and foolish. He was fighting for his land. That’s why he went for my face, I reckon. But it wasn’t even his land – it belonged to the Zulu. I was an Australian, fighting to take it back from the Boer and give it to the British, after the Zulu had been knocked out of the game. Make of that what you will.

~

I galloped the twelve miles into Calpa like the devil was on my tail, dragged the postmaster from his bed and watched him falter as I dictated the telegram to my boss in Bourke. I couldn’t officially name the dead, not yet, so I just said ‘bodies’. Next I woke the town doctor, Joe Pryor. I saddled a fresh horse, Felix, threw a blanket over the exhausted Dancer, then set off back up the road to the dead.

I heard a shout and looked over my shoulder. A dark-hooded figure on a black horse riding at me, on its way to the apocalypse. Dr Pryor, huddled under an oilskin.

‘How far?’ he shouted.

‘An hour.’

By the time we got there the rain had stopped, the sky cleared, the cold winter night closed in, crickets clicking in the darkness. My uniform stuck to me, clammy and cold. The three bodies lay there in the mud, exactly as I’d left them, pitiful and full of reproach.

Joe, holding a lantern, walked from corpse to corpse, breath misting, his boots squelching in the mud. ‘You know who they are,’ he said, glancing up at me.

‘James, Nessie and Grace Kirkbride.’

‘Who the hell would do this?’

‘Just declare them dead so I can cover them.’

‘Should have sent for Reverend Hickson too, because by God there’s been some evil done here.’

‘He can wait. Start with Nessie. If you can.’

The black, silty mud dragged at our boots, and we floundered about, destroying evidence, but there was no help for it. The rain had already washed away so much of what would have been useful. The chatter of birds and the glow on the horizon signalled dawn, and we were still waiting for somebody, anybody, to come and assist. I checked my watch – nearly seven – and made a note of it. Joe sat wearily on a log and lit a cigarette.

I had to know if Flora was lying out here, dead or dying. I headed off into the patchy scrub, silently begging a God I had no time for to spare her and take me instead. My shouts raised no answer.

I heard Joe call out and froze. He’s found her. If I stayed by this mulga long enough, the universe would right itself and Flora would come to me, pushing through the saltbush, a smile in her eyes, some broken bird cupped in her hands.

I hurried back, heart in my mouth. ‘Flora?’

‘No. Just … yeah, it’s eerie out here.’

The men who’d done this were long gone, but I was armed and he wasn’t. He held out a lit cigarette and I took it, inhaling a lungful of smoke with relief. As I sat beside him I noticed a circular, dirt-covered sliver in the mud. You don’t see perfect circles in nature that often. Picked it up, wiped it on my breeches. A coin, thruppence.

‘It’s like the Breelong massacre,’ Joe said.

‘It’s usually white raping black, not the other way round,’ I said, sticking the coin in my pocket.

‘True, but it happens. Were they at the dance in Larne?’

‘I didn’t see them.’

‘Why the hell were they on this road? I would have thought they’d go to the ball in Cobar?’

Robert Kirkbride, their father, owned the biggest station in the districts, and was rich and influential, so his four children were like local royalty. Attending a stockmen’s dance was unheard of for such a family. Joe was right: the Coronation Ball in Cobar was where they should have been. Cobar was a fairly wealthy mining town to the east, and you didn’t get there travelling the western road along the Darling.

A couple of wallabies, raindrops on their fur sparkling in the light, watched us from a distance then slowly hopped away. Rabbits ran about. The sun glinted on puddles of water, steam rose off the wet horses, water dripped from the leopardwood. Three people dead on my watch – except I hadn’t been on watch. I’d been fucking the Larne schoolteacher.

‘Can you tell what time they died?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say … maybe seven or eight hours ago.’

‘Around midnight, then?’

‘Or a bit earlier. Impossible to get an accurate time of death, unless you have a witness.’

We sat smoking in silence. I slipped my hand under the oilskin and inside my shirt. The tangle of knotted and raised scar tissue covered my chest from armpit to midline. In idle moments, my fingers always sought this gristly map, plucking and rubbing, tracing each welt from one end to another, as if still unable to grasp what had happened.

Joe got to his feet. ‘Someone’s coming.’