29

I escorted Baines back to Bourke, a long and painful ride for him, and picked up the official replacement for Dancer, a young and fit bay called Viscount Wolseley, or Vic, as I named him. He was a frisky lad, all the newness of life coursing through him, tossing his head and up for anything. He settled in for the long haul back to Calpa and I was left to my thoughts.

An hour out of town, I saw Joe coming down the Tindaree Station drive.

‘Good timing,’ he said as we fell in side by side.

‘What’s up at Tindaree?’

‘Doug Forsythe – his heart’s a bit dicky,’ Joe said. ‘Have you seen the papers?’

‘The Bourke paper?’

‘No, the Sydney papers. Came in on the last steamer – Mrs Forsythe was showing me. A big headline, “War Hero Captures Kirkbride Killers”.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you, you dozy bugger,’ he laughed. ‘You should see if you can get a copy. Cut it out and save it for your grandchildren.’

I felt ill at the thought of being in the papers. The idea of strangers reading about me made my flesh creep. It wasn’t even me they were reading about, just some illusory war hero made of a puff of smoke and a magic wand.

‘I didn’t do it on my own, for God’s sake,’ I said. ‘I’d be dead if it weren’t for the others.’

‘It’s a better story. Anyway, you tracked them down. You’ll be transferred anywhere you want now, although I expect Corcoran wants to hold on to you.’

I wondered if Kirkbride would see the same newspaper. Now, that I would enjoy. It wasn’t a very charitable thought, but I didn’t let that stop me thinking it. Kirkbride opens the paper with his morning coffee and reads about the glorious me, the man unfit for his daughter, who avenged his dead children.

‘I’ll send a copy to Flora,’ Joe said. ‘I’m sure she’d want to know they’ve been caught, and that you caught them. I think she’ll be impressed.’

‘How would you bloody well know what she’ll think? You barely know her in any capacity except as some pill-pushing—’

‘Oh, just drop it, Gus, I’m sorry I mentioned her.’

‘Where is she? If you know where she is, you have to tell me.’

He gave me an exasperated look. I held my tongue. He would never tell me and that was that.

~

I stabled Vic next to Felix. Lonergan’s horse had gone back to Bourke with him. The kitchen was as I left it, and Lonergan’s room empty. No empty tea mugs anywhere. I could drink freely, fall wherever I liked, scream all night long and keep my incident book pure in look, if not content.

I walked through to the station. The lithograph of long-dead Queen Victoria caught my eye, a shaft of sunlight illuminating her. She gazed to the left, away across the vast dusty or jungled expanse of her empire, a small crown balanced on her regal skull, a blue sash draped across her maternal bosom. In the patina of dust covering the monarch’s picture, some joker had traced the outline of a cock and balls.

I remembered being told the news of her death while out on a dusty, grimy manoeuvre on the veldt, exhaustion deep in my bones and hunger eating me alive. A hush fell over the men, wind whipping around us. We were soldiers of the Queen, our allegiance pledged to her alone. I was young and felt her death as a shocking break with the sacred.

After wiping the picture clean, I ate my supper in silence, staring at the mail that had come in last night. The usual gazettes and another letter from my father. The days stretched ahead to the horizon, empty and drear. I made a coffee, took a few sips, letting the sweet, bitter fluid slap me around, then I reached for my father’s letter, opened it and read.

He was sorry.

I slapped the letter down. Jumped to my feet. Through the back door, letting it slam behind me. I didn’t know which way to turn – down to the pub, down to the river, get on Felix and go for a gallop, or all of the above.

In the Mounted Rifles, when a man died we said he’d thrown a seven. But I’d thrown a six and a half that day on the veldt, and had questioned the nature of luck ever since. In the military convalescent home in Cape Town, I’d been surrounded by other wounded officers in bathchairs – heads trembling, hands shaky, fags burning their fingers – who at the end of each day would be wheeled away and drugged up for the night. I felt better than some and worse than others. But we were all bound together by the risks we’d taken and the way those risks had played out.

Back home, in my old bedroom, the tin soldiers on the bookshelf mocked me, a nurse hovered over me day and night, the house constantly smelled of beef tea brewed for the invalid, people spoke in whispers outside my door, and the fevers came and went, leaving me shaking and delirious or limp.

My father, a doctor who emerged from his mother’s womb in a white coat, would come home and check on me, bark at the nurses and go off and have a stiff whisky or three. I wanted to get better for him, as he had never wanted me to go soldiering. But force of will can only go so far. I cried out in my sleep, night after night, blood-curdling screams. How could anyone live with that and not snap? And he did snap. Accused me of wilful instability – why couldn’t I be a man and just pull myself together?

I remembered that day so well. The shame, the awful, burning wave of shame.

That night I packed a bag and left while the house was asleep. I caught a train north to a place called Yamba, took a shack, lay on the beach and drank. From there I took off and brawled my way around New South Wales. I was angry and would fight all-comers. A weary copper told me, after he let me out of the lock-up one morning, that seeing as I’d been in the Light Horse, I should join the Mounted Troopers. So I did. Once I settled in at Calpa, my father must have tracked me down because the letters came regularly.

I had destroyed every single one unread. Until now.

I had not seen him since that day in 1905 and now he said he was sorry. As a father, and as a doctor, his helplessness in the face of my injuries had terrified him, he said, and it had come out as anger – he’d only realised this since I left. He thought I was going to die, he said, thought I wanted to die. He must have written this in every one of those letters I so blithely burnt. Remorse, shame, despair – how easily they spread, like typhus in an army camp. He had doggedly apologised every few weeks for three years, and a man like my father rarely explained himself or apologised for anything.

The river gurgled and rushed. A grey heron stood perfectly still on the opposite bank, beak like a small spear. The clouds on the horizon, bright, white, tufty tops. They could bring rain or they could float right by. I remembered the night of the boxing, when Hirst held the rifle above my head, how in that moment, certain it was my end, my thoughts had flown east across the plains, over the Great Dividing Range, to where my father sat alone in his drawing room.

We used to sit together in that drawing room, reading by the fire in the evenings. We’d work in the garden together, train dogs together as we rambled around the countryside, visit relatives together, breathing sighs of relief when the visits were over, exchanging a smile that bound us together in mutual understanding.

I rubbed my face and sighed, walked back to the yard, in through the back door, through the laundry and into the kitchen, where his letter lay on the table. Through all these years, a dull ache had lodged itself deep inside me, one I’d done my best to ignore. But now I couldn’t ignore it – not anymore.

~

I hadn’t been to speak to the Jongs about exhuming Albert’s body, which Corcoran wanted done in person. I was avoiding it. And I wanted to track down the man who raped Grace Kirkbride. Reg Tierney reckoned she was eighteen or nineteen weeks along, which meant the culprit had got at her in March or April.

That was around the time they’d have been getting the rams away from the ewes, so not a terribly busy time and good for entertaining horny coxcombs with vicious tendencies and eyes for a fortune. In Kirkbride’s house. Got at her under his host’s roof. It boggled my sensibilities but not my understanding. I had been at boarding school, after all.

Flora had written to me about these young men in her secret letters, very clever sketches too. But Kirkbride had her letters now so there was no way of knowing who had been staying there in those months.

I put the quest to one side and returned to the Jongs. I thought they’d been through enough, but Baines was right – we had to keep banging nails into the Hirst and Shawcross coffin.

~

The Jongs were now living in Wilcannia, which was about a two-day ride. It was late September and unseasonably warm, a bad sign for the coming summer. I put in for a couple of days to conduct police business at Wilcannia and leave was immediately granted. I left Felix with Wally and set off on Vic in the early hours of the morning, following the river road. A blanket of heat lay over the land and the only breath of air was to be found by the river.

In the early afternoon we stopped and I took my bedroll down to the riverbank, found some shade, rolled my canvas out, stripped down to my shorts and lay down and lit a fag. It was a day when every living creature found a scrap of shade and lay still and drowsing, waiting with sublime patience for it all to pass.

We set off again around eleven pm and arrived in Wilcannia midmorning. Like most towns in the west, Wilcannia had broad streets, wide enough to drive a mob of sheep through. It was flat as a tack but had some sturdy stone buildings like the post office, the courthouse, the municipal hall and the hospital.

I called in at the cop shop and introduced myself, and asked the duty officer if he knew where the Blackwoods lived. I told him about the Jongs and what I was there for. He stabled Vic for me and gave him a feed, and I went away with an address and a rough pencil map.

The Blackwoods’ house, on the edge of town, had a bullnose verandah and a collection of sheds clustered out the back, a horse paddock, a tree with a rope swing and a clothesline held up with forked saplings. A black dog chained up beside a half-barrel went berserk as I approached, and a young woman, thin and worn and wearing a stained apron over an equally stained dress, came out to investigate.

‘Can I help you?’ she said, in a tone that indicated she didn’t want to help anyone.

‘Mrs Dulcie Blackwood?’

‘Who wants to know?’ she asked, waving at the flies.

A little boy about four years old burst out of the house and tangled himself in his mother’s dress, a piece of bread in his fist and a gobbet of green snot hanging from his nose. Dulcie put her hand on his head as he hid in her skirts and watched me.

‘My name’s Augustus Hawkins, senior constable, Calpa.’

‘Oh, you’re the man who buried our Albert,’ she said, breaking into a pretty smile. ‘Mum will be pleased to see you. Come in and have a cuppa – she’s out the back. You got time?’

Mrs Jong was sitting out the back of the house under a vine that had been trained to cover some sort of trellis. She had several rifles on a table, all taken apart and the pieces resting on old newspaper.

‘Trooper Hawkins, how nice of you to call,’ she said, getting to her feet.

Dulcie went to put the kettle on with the small boy still attached to her skirts by one hand.

‘A grandchild?’ I asked.

‘Howie’s brother’s boy, Sam. His mum’s poorly so he’s here with us for a bit. What brings you to Wilcannia? Just passing through?’

‘No – that is, I came here to ask you something. It’s about Albert.’

‘Mmm?’ she said, nodding her head and continuing to rub the gun barrel.

‘I am sorry to tell you this, but Albert didn’t take his own life. He was killed by the same men who killed the Kirkbrides. They have confessed to killing him.’

She looked up, surprised, and held my gaze for a long moment.

‘My poor boy. Well, Eddie will be relieved to know. And now we can give him a good Christian burial.’

‘Which will be a great comfort, I’m sure. However, despite the confession, we need hard evidence, which means an autopsy. If you are minded to rebury him, then we could expedite the process – at police expense, of course—’

Dulcie came out with the tea things. ‘What is it, Mum?’

‘It’s Albert. He was murdered, he didn’t kill himself.’

Dulcie placed the tea tray on the table and sat down heavily, a stunned look on her face. ‘Who? Who would kill him?’

‘A couple of doggers from Tindaree,’ I said. ‘They killed him and robbed your place. It’s best you know the truth.’

Dulcie wiped her eyes on her apron. The little boy stood in the doorway, wide-eyed and watching.

‘My brother was never mad growing up – he was the sweetest boy. He went mad when they put him in the asylum. And then he gets murdered? Where’s God? What’s he doing?’

‘Now, love,’ her mother said. ‘Albert’s safe with God and we know the truth. As the constable says, it’s best to know the truth.’

‘Is it? Their truth, not ours. My Rosie told the truth – she told them about the man putting his thing in her, told them it hurt her, and they said she was lying, said she was a slut, said she lured him. So when is it best to know the truth, Mum?’

‘Dulcie, don’t—’

‘Rosie’s running wild now and they said she’ll be taken away from us if she don’t settle down, get put in a home for bad girls. What’s going to happen to that man who did it to her, but? What’s his truth? That she was a minx who asked for it because a man like him would never lie?’

‘I am sorry, Mrs Blackwood,’ I said.

‘Yeah, sorry because you coppers do nothing,’ Dulcie shot. ‘You just shut us up and tell us it didn’t happen.’

‘That’s enough, Dulcie.’

Dulcie got to her feet. The little boy ran over and tugged on her dress. She was crying, her fists clenched. ‘No, I’m not keeping it a secret anymore.’

Her mother looked away, shaking her head. Dulcie started talking and the terrible truth tumbled out into the harsh light of day.