The wind continued to sweep through the night, but it had a little less fury in it now. I sat in the HiLux and called Danny Clarion, the CFA captain. I’d only met him a couple of times, but I instinctively trusted him. He had an air of no-bullshit about him.
‘Still on the job?’ I asked.
‘We’ll be goin’ all night.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Green Creek. Tree down on a house.’
I heard a scream in the background. Hopefully it was a chainsaw, not a resident.
‘Any chance of meeting me back at Wycliff?’
‘When?’
‘As soon as.’
A long pause, during which I presumed he took a drag of his smoke. ‘Is it urgent? We’re under the pump.’
‘I don’t know what it is.’
Another pause. The wind howled. I could imagine it whipping away the smoke, the nicotine streams and embers.
‘Sam Kelly spoke highly of you,’ he said. Kelly, captain of the nearby Canticle Creek Fire Brigade, was a family friend. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
I checked the time. Just after five.
I drove out to Wycliff Rise. The tractor was gone, but the bog holes were still there, the tape was still in place. I got out and stood there staring, trying to work out what had snagged in my consciousness. I hoped that being on scene would add more detail.
I walked across and examined the tree.
The fallen section of the trunk was still partially attached to the stump. There were torn shreds where the tree had snapped off. Was it all torn? No, at the base of the split was a small chainsaw incision. Fresh. Was it deep enough to bring the tree down? Not on its own. Somebody must have given it a hand, maybe dragged it down with a winch.
Why would the CFA operator make an incision like that? And if the operator hadn’t put it there, who had?
I stood at the stump and looked around, trying to recreate the incident.
What did the ground have to say?
Not much; between the wind, the rain, the emergency workers’ vehicles and boots, the site had been trampled into a quagmire. I walked across to the far side of the road and prowled along the churned verges, occasionally getting down on to my knees. Muddy water flooded my boot prints, then my boots. The scene bore all the scars of the chaos that had erupted here. Skid marks, tyre tracks, runnels and ruts, potholes, bog holes everywhere.
There was a multitude of vehicle tracks. I tried to recall how many there’d been at the job. At least seven or eight. They’d pulled in along the edge of the road, leaving room for the ambulance. The CFA tankers had parked at either end of the site, their beacon lights serving as a roadblock. If there were any civilian vehicles here, they’d been held well back. From what I’d seen of the tow truck, it had kept mostly to the bitumen, doubtless wanting a solid base to work from.
I checked along the opposite edge, slowly and carefully, studying the surface by my Maglite. I’d gone maybe twenty metres when I came across what I’d been looking for: a set of tyre tracks, deeper than the others, at a 45-degree angle to the road.
I made a rough calculation of the distances and angles involved, then crossed over to what was left of the tree.
The fireys had sawn the fallen trunk into short lengths, each a metre or so long. That was the best way to get rid of unwanted wood round here; anything left on the side of the road would be gathered up by somebody keen to avoid the effort of cutting their own.
No one had done so yet, though. There were half a dozen sections lined up along the verge. I went through them, one by one. Nothing. I improvised a crowbar from a length of timber then turned the sections over and examined the undersides, forcing my hands through the chunky mud, scraping it away. I was two-thirds of the way along the tree when I found what I was after: a scarred section where the bark had been torn and a cable had bitten into the wood. I scrutinised it closely. I could just make out a slick of oil and tiny splinters of steel glimmering in the torchlight.
‘So what the hell are we doing here?’
I spun round in alarm. There was a shadowy figure on the rise above me.
It was Inspector Dougherty, hood up, hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. He must have parked back along the road. Absorbed by my task, or distracted by the weather, I’d missed his arrival. Still, he moved quietly for a big man.
‘Scared the crap out of me, boss.’
‘Pays to keep your eyes open, Redpath. Like I said, you’re not in the Territory now.’
He didn’t look happy. He looked even less happy when I showed him the section of tree trunk at my feet and asked what he made of it.
‘Bit of wood,’ he replied.
‘Look at the marks on it.’
He obliged.
‘Bit of scarred wood,’ he expanded.
‘Scarred by a winch cable.’
‘Maybe. Maybe it was a randy possum.’
‘Look more closely, you’ll see traces of oil and flecks of steel. Someone’s dragged it down with a cable.’
Another vehicle appeared, then Danny Clarion joined us. I filled him in on my concerns. After a close inspection of the log, he agreed that the scars could well have been made by a winch cable.
I took them back to the stump and showed them the v-shaped wedge.
‘Would your guys have done that?’ I asked Danny.
He flicked his smoke away, shook his head and said no, he couldn’t see any reason why they would have.
Then I showed them the churned earth where the vehicle with the winch had planted itself.
‘Put it all together and you’ll see,’ I said. ‘Somebody prepped the tree – just a bit, so it wouldn’t be too obvious. Then they put a winch around it and dragged it down onto the tractor.’
‘You’re saying this was deliberate?’ Dougherty asked. ‘Somebody killed the poor bugger with a falling tree?’
‘No.’
His brow furrowed.
‘Then what the hell are you saying?’
‘I’d say he was already dead. Or at least unconscious. Be a bloody inefficient way to kill someone, dragging a tree down on him as he was driving past. Anybody with his wits about him would just stop when he saw the cable round the tree, or jump out of the way. No, they put him in the tractor, positioned it carefully then dropped the tree on top of him.’
I thought some more about the damage done to the body. ‘Maybe they even rammed a branch into his chest to make sure he was dead.’
Dougherty cast his eyes across the scene, calculating, assessing. I sensed that he was coming round.
Danny Clarion lit another rolly and blew out a line of silver smoke. His eyes were burning. Death, I presumed, he could accept. He’d have seen plenty of that; I knew he’d been a strike team leader on Black Saturday. Murder was another matter.
‘I don’t suppose any witnesses have come forward?’ I asked Dougherty.
The inspector shook his head. ‘We spoke to the locals. Nobody saw the tree come down.’
‘When was the body discovered?’
‘Call came in around ten pm.’
I tried to recollect the events of the night.
‘I saw a girl on a white horse,’ I said. ‘About a kilometre down the road to Satellite, riding away from the scene. She might have seen something.’
Dougherty turned to Danny. ‘That sound like anybody you know?’
‘Horses all over the place round here, most of ’em have got teenage girls on their backs. I didn’t see any of ’em out and about last night.’
There was a golden glow in the east. Dawn wasn’t far off.
I asked if we knew anything about the victim and Dougherty checked his notebook. ‘Name’s Raph Cambric,’ he said. ‘His family own the apple orchard at the end of this track.’
I nodded thoughtfully. My brain was automatically shifting into accumulation mode: first gather your facts, then find the golden thread that runs through them.
‘What is there in the way of family?’
Danny Clarion obviously knew the victim. ‘Father’s a widower, but he’s more or less retired now. His sons do most of the work. Raph lived in a cottage down at the packing sheds, but the other brother, Jared, lives with his wife and kids in the main house. Raph did a bit of farrier work as well as helping run the farm.’
I cast my eyes up and down the road, trying to get a better sense of the locality, something I’ve always found essential to the resolution of a crime.
Dougherty asked some pertinent questions of Danny. Did he know of any enemies Raph might have, were there any local or family feuds? His interest was clearly piqued by the fact that support was coming from another local, rather than from the interloper. Danny’s answers were all in the negative. He knew the family, had no idea who’d wish any harm on Raph Cambric.
‘So what are we going to do now?’ I asked Dougherty.
He turned and began trudging through the sludge, back up the slope towards his own vehicle. He returned a couple of minutes later, a roll of crime-scene tape in hand.
‘I’ve called in Homicide,’ he said wearily.
He stopped for a moment and kicked up a clump of mud.
‘What a fucking night,’ he said.
True story, I thought. And it’s not going to get any better.