The white half-cabin launch rocked gently in the ocean’s swell, very close to the river’s mouth. There was a fitful north-easterly breeze. A breeze was always coming in off the ocean—only its direction changed.
Sam Corrigan and his son, Bevan, were fishing the run-in tide. They’d caught three flathead and hoped to catch a couple more before they pulled up anchor and headed back to shore. Some of Moondilla’s lights still glowed in the half-dawn, and away to the west the line of the Range was just coming into view.
‘Ready for a cuppa and a sandwich?’ Sam asked his son.
‘More than ready, Dad. I could eat a horse and chase the rider.’
Sam grinned. Bevan was eighteen, a champion swimmer, and his pride and joy. They had fished together just about from when Bevan could walk. He was ready to go off to university now, but he still never knocked back a fishing trip with his dad.
Father and son placed the rods in their holders and settled down to tea and roast-beef sandwiches. They were anchored on what passed as Moondilla’s bar, which was a minor thing compared with the bars of some rivers, making it a good place to rest. The water was so shallow that in a good light you could see the sandy bottom.
Sam reckoned that Moondilla was a particularly great fishing spot. There seemed no end to the types of fish you could catch around here. If you wanted real variety, you could go out to the Islands, a group of rocky islets a few miles off shore. On the other hand, if you didn’t fancy the big swell, you could fish fairly close in to shore, as Bevan and Sam were doing, or in the river itself. You’d always catch something for dinner.
When they’d had their fill and warmed their bellies, Bevan and Sam threw out with renewed expectation of more flathead. The run-in tide was now taking their lines away, so both men added a bit more lead to keep them from moving too far.
The tide brought all manner of sea creatures into the river, and they hadn’t been fishing again long when Bevan declared that he’d hooked something big. Sam looked at the bent rod and, with the wisdom of thirty years’ fishing experience, shook his head. ‘Naw, I think you’re hooked on the bottom.’
Bevan, who was using an expensive lure, admitted that his father was right. ‘But I’ll go down and see if I can rescue it,’ he said.
Sam wasn’t too happy about this proposal, given that there were sharks in these waters—but his son was a wonderful swimmer. Bevan handed the rod over to his father, took off his T-shirt and slipped into the water. Sam watched his body, still a bit worried, until it grew formless over the sandbank.
He didn’t have to wait long for his son to reappear.
‘Dad!’ Bevan burst out as he pulled himself onto the launch. ‘You won’t believe what’s down there.’ He had to catch his breath.
‘What is it?’
Bevan looked like he might be sick. ‘There’s a woman, a naked woman, and the lure’s hooked into her hair.’
Now Sam felt queasy. ‘I reckon you don’t have to say any more,’ he said. ‘Jesus, this is a nice kettle of fish. I never heard of anyone going missing.’
‘Well, there’s a woman down there and she’s not a mermaid, Dad.’
•
A few hours later, the divers got her up. She’d been secured with blocks of concrete so that she would never leave the bottom.
She appeared to be a young woman, although her face was badly disfigured. There was no jewellery, tattoos or distinguishing scars, which made her very difficult to identify. The other thing that puzzled the police was why she’d been dumped into relatively shallow water, but they reasoned that the river’s mouth was a secluded spot.
Moondilla’s medical examiner, Julie Rankin, conducted the autopsy. She pointed to thin, very faint marks across the woman’s back, buttocks and thighs. ‘If I had to make a guess, I’d say that she’s been whipped with a fine leather strap. I found a tiny fraction of leather in her hair at the base of her neck.’
‘You think she was into kinky sex?’ Inspector Daniels asked, his eyebrow raised. He was the top cop in the district.
‘Either she was or the fellow who beat her was,’ Dr Rankin said, calm and composed. ‘But it was heroin that killed her.’
It seemed that no amount of police work could reveal the woman’s name.
And it was from around this time that Moondilla changed in character from a place of very little crime to the centre of drug activities on the South Coast. It began with the sea, and it was the sea and the river that made Moondilla.