13

It was a relief to get back to Calpa but as I approached I heard shouts. The sound was coming from inside the police station. I went through and found Baines, hands on hips, belly thrust forward, face all red and sweaty and Lonergan in his sights.

‘Oh, you’re here, not fucken laid up out the back with a bad case of the tremors, eh?’

I glanced at Lonergan, mystified by this attack.

‘This little paddy gobshite trooper of yours got us lost this morning. Couldn’t read his bloody map, didn’t have a bloody compass on him either. Needs a kick up the arse.’

‘I’ll deal with him.’

‘I’m dealin’ with him now,’ he shouted.

‘Trooper Lonergan is under my command. I will deal with it.’

‘Like you dealt with those fucken useless trackers of yours who are off God knows where. You traps are useless, we’ve been mucked about, and if you hadn’t gone on a bender – in the middle of a murder investigation – I wouldn’t be riding about with the little tosser.’

‘Let’s step outside for a moment, Detective.’

The street was empty, as usual. Baines was all lathered up, huffing and puffing and poking his finger at me. ‘Fucken useless, the lot of you.’

‘You leave my men alone, d’you understand? They’re not here for you to wipe your feet on just because you’ve had a shitty day. If Lonergan got you lost – and obviously he didn’t, because you’re back here—’

‘No hope of sorting these murders with you lot around.’

‘You’ve had everything laid on for you, mate, reams of carbon paper, pencil sharpeners, if you can’t solve it don’t turn to us to take the blame.’

He stared after me as I stomped back inside. Lonergan was rooted to the spot, eyes wide, like a rabbit feeling the wind of a bullet just before it hits. In the traps juniors went out with the more senior officers and were bossed about, set on the unpleasant tasks. They were never asked to guide a city bloke through the bush on their own. It was like taking a young city beat cop and asking him to raid an illegal Haymarket cockfight single-handed. If I hadn’t got drunk … but I had, so that was that.

But, drink or no drink, we were being set up. I could see that now – their failures were ours, or mine alone, and Bourke would be hung out to dry because we were out here and they weren’t.

I fetched a map and navigation instruments and laid them on the table in front of Lonergan.

‘Study this map. Mark where we are, then mark where Baines wants to go tomorrow. When you’ve done that, note all the possible landmarks between here and there, and at what longitude and latitude they lie, mileage and elevation, then work out the fastest way of reaching your destination. By the time we’re done, you’ll know it as well as you know the Lord’s Prayer.’

He looked at me warily.

‘You rock choppers do know the Lord’s Prayer, don’t you?’

He nodded, picked up the compass and gazed at the map like it was a gunpowder trail leading to a locked room.

‘Put that down and start with a pencil and ruler. When you’re finished, we’ll go through it.’

I went to my room, closed the door and opened the drawer, needing to touch Flora’s letters. They weren’t there.

I pulled the drawer out, flung it across the room, yanked the cabinet away from the wall, looked under the bed, kicked the rug out of the way, tossed books onto the floor, opening them, then hurling them aside, searched the wardrobe, the chest of drawers.

‘You been in my room?’ I barked, slamming the door open and startling Lonergan.

‘No, sir.’

My notebooks. My official police notebooks. I rushed out the front and found them still on the lower shelf, in perfect date order. I pulled the laundry apart, then went through the kitchen cupboards, taking out all the jars of sauerkraut and preserved quinces, tomatoes and pickled cucumbers, looking for God knows what.

If someone had been in here to steal those letters, they could have left something, a bloodstained rifle butt, a shell casing, a handwritten plan to kill and rape the Kirkbrides. The station was always locked but I never locked the private quarters, so that Mrs Schreiber could come and go.

I collapsed onto a chair, swallowed down the ramrod fury, let it dissolve back into amorphous shame. If Kirkbride had sent someone to steal those letters, then he’d know everything.

‘Cup of tea, sir?’

I blinked a few times, surprised to see Lonergan in my kitchen in a way that made me question my sanity. He bustled around with the kettle and teapot while I made my way to the laundry and the half-full whisky bottle behind the mangle. I’d eased off the bottle for a while there, almost two years in fact, with the exception of keeping Joe company. But then last Christmas everything changed.

‘There’s a new order in,’ Lonergan said, pouring boiling water into the teapot. ‘It’s from Corcoran. Saying I’m to keep doing escort while you man the station.’

I nodded. Of course there was – and soon there’d be a notice of dismissal.

‘All right. Then you keep going on the map, we’ll drill you on it until you can do it in your sleep. Not going to give those dicks any excuse to fit us up for what’s coming. And I’ve heard you throwing up too many times – eat here with me, as my guest. Mrs Schreiber always makes too much anyway.’

‘Thank you, sir, much appreciated.’

~

That night I lay in bed, smoking and fretting, the candle burning down, moths and insects trapped in the liquid wax like kindred spirits. Kirkbride and Denning could come up with anything, manufacture evidence, pay a witness. Plenty of poverty out here, plenty of people would lie for a quid. Denning could substitute his own findings. I didn’t know how city detectives operated, if they could be bought, and I didn’t know how to fight back if they came at me. I’d need a lawyer, and a good one. Have to go to my father cap in hand. I’d just about got myself standing in the dock with the judge putting the black cloth on his head when I must have conked out.

The terror woke me with a start, and then began the effort to drag myself back to my bed, my room, this life. The familiar rush and gurgle of the river nearby oriented me. I fumbled around, lit a candle, squinting in the light and checked my watch – two forty-five – and my thoughts returned to Flora, as they always did. I felt a desperate need to defend myself to her, to assure her I had not killed her siblings, no matter what people were saying.

I knew the longer I lay there fretting, the worse it would become. I got up, pulled on some old trousers, a shirt, boots and a sheepskin jacket, woke Felix, saddled him then rode up to Inveraray.

~

It was nearly three-thirty and Inveraray should be well and truly asleep. Even the cook who baked the bread wouldn’t be up yet. I tethered Felix halfway up the long drive and walked the rest of the way, keeping to the shadows. The night was clear, the moon making its way back down the sky, my breath misting in the cold, the frosty gravel crunching beneath my boots.

Flora’s room was on the side of the house facing north and the fenced-off vegetable gardens. I crept along the homestead wall, waiting for some dog to go berserk, but it was silent. Just the ticking of the contracting iron roof and the yap-yap of a barking owl.

I picked her window and rolled a wood stump closer to it, then tossed a handful of soil at the glass. God help me if I’d got it wrong and it was Mr and Mrs Kirkbride’s. I tried a small stone and another. She must be sedated, as I was getting no response. I was about to give up when her face loomed behind the glass like a wide-eyed wraith.

I stood on the stump, my head reaching the window. We stared at each other. I pointed to the sash, mouthed ‘open’. She had a nightgown on, white with little frills, her hair like a choppy sea, dark and tousled.

She managed to get the window up a few inches, the noise making me wince. She leant down, her hands clutching the sill. We were face to face, her eyes wide. All that I wanted to say to her, all that I said to her in my daily thoughts, disappeared.

‘How are you managing?’ I whispered.

‘I’m not.’

‘Flora, I’m so sorry. It’s my fault and I am going to fix it.’

‘It wasn’t your fault – it’s my fault.’

‘No, no, no, don’t think like that.’

‘I should be with them now, they’ll be looking for me,’ she said.

I grasped her hand, the stump wobbling beneath me. ‘They wouldn’t want that. I don’t want that.’

‘But I do.’

I held onto her. ‘Flora, wait – I promise you, I will find the men who did this, I will hunt them down if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll make it right.’

‘But they’re gone.’

‘I’ll find them,’ I whispered. ‘I promise.’

‘Can you? Can the living find the dead? Take me with you, then. I don’t know how to be here without them. If you know a way …’

We stared at each other, her dark-brown eyes wide and brimming with despair. Then she pulled her hand away, closed the window and faded back into the darkness.

I walked away from the house towards Felix. A single gunshot shattered the night. I was unarmed and there was no cover. I whirled around and saw a figure emerge from the shadows by the men’s quarters. A light went on in the homestead, then another.

‘Stand with your arms up.’

I saw a light flare in Flora’s room and I put my hands up. A stockman I didn’t recognise approached me, rifle pointed at my chest. Behind him I heard the Scots burr of McIntosh cursing and grumbling. A figure ran down the steps of the homestead, and in the bright starlight I recognised Robert Kirkbride.

The stockman lowered his rifle when he saw me, looked to McIntosh for instruction.

‘Gus? What the hell are you doing?’

‘It’s you,’ Kirkbride cried, his dressing-gown half-open. ‘Creeping around in the darkness. What do you want?’

Before I could come up with a workable lie, I heard screams coming from the verandah. Flora struggling, trying to get free, screaming my name, frantic.

‘I’ll deal with this,’ Kirkbride said to his men, and sent them away.

The front door slammed and then there was silence. A spray of stars glittering above, cool and indifferent.

‘What are you doing on my property, Hawkins?’

‘You sent someone to steal my personal property, my private correspondence—’

‘I did nothing of the sort. You’re mad and a drunk and you lie, and by God, I rue the day Flora set eyes on you.’

I’d punch the bastard if I listened to another word. Walked away to find Felix.

‘Don’t turn your back on me,’ he shouted. ‘You let my children die undefended and then you lied about it. Where were you? Lying drunk in a ditch? Or were you the one who killed them?’

Everybody on the station would hear him.

‘I told the truth about where I was,’ I swung around and shouted back. ‘I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth, and don’t think for a minute you can pin your children’s deaths on me. And what’s more, I don’t want your property and I never spoke to Flora about marriage.’

‘But you did – I have it on paper.’

‘So you did steal my letters. Thieving and lying. Keep that up and, by God, I will come for you.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Yes.’

~

I took to my bed with a bottle when I got back. Lonergan could manage without me. I could manage without me. Kirkbride must have found my letters to Flora, which I knew she kept, and realised her letters to me would be full of compromising material, words like ‘love’ and ‘desire’, things he’d know nothing about. The idea of him reading my letters to Flora made me ill. The humiliation of another man reading my most private expressions of sentiment – God in heaven, it was too much.

Left to my own devices, I simply drank until I passed out, my last thoughts before oblivion being to beg the universe to let me not wake to another day. I didn’t recall Joe or anyone coming near me, but they might have.

I had no recall of how long this went on until I stumbled out of my bedroom into an empty kitchen. I checked the calendar. The funeral was tomorrow. I took a seat, put my elbows on the table and dropped my face into my hands. It had been ten days since the murders. It felt like weeks.

~

The day of the funerals was overcast, as if the sun had drawn a veil over itself in sorrow. Clouds, undersides a deep grey, piled up to the west. My thoughts were of Flora, dressing for her siblings’ funeral, fastening the jet mourning jewellery, her face white, her mind unable to comprehend the silence. The absence.

Mrs Schreiber patted my shoulder as she passed. ‘A terrible day, Herr Kapitän.’

‘It is,’ I replied, in a strangled voice. Tears threatened and I couldn’t bear the thought, even in front of this decent, homely woman.

I was dressed in my only suit, as I was attending as friend and neighbour. Lonergan was doing guard duty at the funeral, organising the six lads into something resembling an honour guard. I ate some porridge, then reached for the plate of eggs. Corcoran came through the back door wearing his dress uniform. Lonergan and I got to our feet, and Mrs Schreiber wiped her hands and left, letting the screen door slam behind her.

‘Ride through the night, sir?’

‘Do I look as if I did? No, the Fletchers are putting me up for a few nights. Martin is staying over at Inveraray. Lonergan, you know what your duties are today?’

‘Yes, sir. Senior Constable Hawkins has briefed me, sir.’

‘Good, at ease, finish your breakfast.’ He turned to me. ‘Mr Kirkbride does not want you attending the funeral. You are to stay here until further notice.’

‘What? Why?’

Lonergan looked up, a sliver of fried egg on his fork, dripping yellow yolk on the cracked plate.

‘Lonergan, please leave us. Take your breakfast with you.’

When we were alone Corcoran said, ‘Don’t question my orders, and don’t question them in front of junior officers.’

‘Sir. But why does he not want me to attend? I’ve known the Kirkbrides for—’

‘Because his children are dead, and you were not there to protect them. You were whoring in Larne.’

‘Either I was in bed with Miss Ryan or I wasn’t in bed with her and I lied. Which one is it going to be? You can’t have it both ways … sir.’

‘I think either way is egregious, don’t you? You are confined to the station until the meeting here at two o’clock. And while you are here you can complete the Tom Fletcher paperwork, which you failed to provide. The magistrate is asking for it and we haven’t got it – why? Because you’re drunk and indisposed? I don’t want to hear another word from you, but by God we’ll have words when this Kirkbride business is over.’

He turned and walked out. I was left with a plate of congealed eggs and the flies. Kev brought the mailbag in. I opened it, saw a letter from my father, tore it to pieces, then took it and dropped it down the long drop to shit on.

When I joined the Mounted Troopers I’d been drowning, and had grabbed at that uniform as it floated past. A uniform gives a man a place to hide, gives him routines and duties – or it did me. And if I didn’t get a grip quickly, my uniform would be stripped away before I was ready to let it go.