When I woke up, the dawn was doing its best to break and the dog was at the door wanting outsies.
I let him out then stood on the verandah eating an apple and drinking icy water from a metal cup. There were frozen leaves on the path, icicles hanging from the gutters. Time to get a little heat happening. I rummaged through the shed for some dry wood. The few scraps I found were too big for the Coonara. I dumped them on the front lawn, then poked about the bush near the house and found some more that weren’t too wet. A few minutes more and I had a bonfire blazing on the grass. I dug the billy out of the tray of my twin-cab, gathered together the wherewithal – tea, biscuits, jaffle iron, beans, borderline bread and mouldy cheese – and made some breakfast.
‘Not bad,’ I said as I demolished a cheese and bean jaffle. ‘Not bad at all.’
I threw some wood onto the fire, some food at the dog and reflected again upon the events of the night before.
I should have felt pleased with myself. I’d helped catch a killer. Sort of maybe.
But there was something wrong – and it wasn’t just that I’d been caught red-cheeked. It was the look on Nash’s face as he was disappearing into the bush.
That fleeting glance spoke to me of a lot of things: despair, confusion, a desperation to avoid the lock-up.
What it didn’t speak of was guilt. It wasn’t the look of a killer. I’ve come across a few of those in my time, and none of them looked like that.
Was he a loner? Sure. Damaged? Probably. Unstable? Certainly – he’d spent years in a mental health facility. But that turtle . . . Not to mention the soup, the warmth, the eagle, the dog. You can tell a lot about a person from their dog. Most things, actually. It’s no wonder Donald Trump never wanted one.
Flinders, reading my mind, snuggled up to my feet and started gnawing his paws. I gave him a good rub, which he seemed to appreciate. We were still sorting out each other’s tricks and expectations.
My thoughts turned to his absent owner. There was a bit of life left in my phone, so I did some searching. There it was, in an old copy of The Age. The story was just as Wallace had said. Seven years ago a serving police officer, DC Nash Rankin, had been found unfit to stand trial for the murder of one Leon Glazier. A psychiatrist described him as psychotic, with limited prospects of long-term recovery. He’d been committed to a forensic mental health hospital and had apparently spent the years since then in the acute care network.
I would have been a newly minted constable in the Territory at the time. If I’d heard about it, I mustn’t have paid it much attention. I searched some more, but the press coverage was minimal. It was as if everybody involved had wanted to keep a lid on it, maybe because there was a sense that the perpetrator had already suffered enough in his life. There was a fleeting reference to the fact that he’d had a traumatic childhood in an extreme cult.
I put the phone down. The psychiatric diagnosis was maybe the most surprising aspect of the story. As a frontline officer in a small town, I’d had a lot to do with members of the public – and the occasional colleague – in different stages of psychological distress. Nash was clearly a recluse, but I’d seen nothing to suggest a history of psychosis.
A blue Isuzu ute with red P plates came cruising down the road. Looking for someone? The vehicle pulled up in front of my house, then reversed into the drive.
The tray was loaded with fresh-cut firewood.
The driver’s door opened and my young friend Possum Kelly jumped out and strode towards me, the usual bounce in her step, the usual smile breaking out across her face. She was wearing jeans, jacket and polished Blundstone boots, her tangled black hair flowing out from under a green beanie.
‘Hey, Poss,’ I said. ‘When’d you get your Ps?’ She’d turned eighteen a couple of weeks ago.
‘Yesterday.’
‘Amazing,’ I said, embracing her enthusiastically. ‘And the car?’
‘Same. Been saving for years.’
‘My god, you’re all grown up.’
Flinders loped up to her, tail wagging, tongue lolling, keen to join the party. Here we go, I thought. A meeting of two like minds.
‘You got a dog!’ Possum beamed, giving him a dodgy kiss on the lips.
‘Strictly short-term, believe me. No room for pets round here.’
The passenger’s door opened and Possum’s mother, Lucy Takada, appeared. She gestured at the load.
‘House-warming present,’ she said. ‘Literally.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, giving her a hug. ‘Did you cut it yourself?’
‘It’s some of the stuff that blew down in the storm,’ Possum explained. ‘Plus a bit of dry stuff from home.’
‘I presume your brigade was flat out?’
‘Worked our little arses off,’ she replied. ‘Even the big ones,’ she added, doubtless thinking about the rear view of some of her colleagues.
Possum had joined the Canticle Creek Volunteer Fire Brigade the year before and was now a qualified firefighter – not that she’d seen much in the way of fires yet. It had been ice, wind and water damage for the most part, but the CFA was nothing if not multi-tasking.
‘Can I offer you some breakfast?’
A few minutes later we were sitting on logs round the fire, hoeing into jaffles and flicking cheesy crusts at the dog, who snatched them from the air with a startling proficiency, like a chameleon zapping flies. Lucy’s contribution to the repast was a scrumptious apple and walnut cake.
‘How’s my old man getting on?’ I asked her as I ate.
‘Happy when he’s working, restless when he’s not.’
‘Like always.’
My father, Ben Redpath, had been living in a cottage on the family’s property in Canticle Creek for a year now, helping rebuild a house that had been destroyed by a bushfire. And painting, of course. A landscape artist, he’d been assiduously capturing the changing face of the bush as it recovered from the blaze. He’d lived in the Northern Territory for decades, was well known for his paintings of rocks and minerals, but the year before he’d had a stroke. When he came out of hospital he accepted Lucy and Sam’s invitation to move into the cottage. He seemed to be flourishing in his new environment. I suspected his newfound enthusiasm for the lush Victorian Highlands had added years to his life. He loved the Territory, but it was hard work, all that heat, booze and questionable company, for a man of his years.
‘We heard there was some poor fellow killed by a falling tree up at Wycliff,’ Lucy said.
‘And that it wasn’t an accident,’ Possum threw in. She always knew the score. ‘Did you get caught up in that?’
Where do I begin? I wondered. At least the question suggested they hadn’t yet heard about my own inglorious involvement in the debacle.
‘There was an arrest,’ I said. ‘Didn’t last long. The arrestee was last seen heading for the hills with the Keystone Cops on his tail.’
‘The which cops?’ asked Possum.
‘Never mind.’
‘And which hills?’
‘Whatever you call the hills north-east of Wycliff.’
Mother and daughter glanced at each other.
‘Maybe up around the Wiregrass Valley?’ suggested Possum.
‘I imagine so,’ replied her mother.
Their local knowledge was infinitely greater than mine. I went inside and found a topographical map and the photo I’d filched from Nash’s mantelpiece, then asked if they recognised the location.
‘Hard to say for sure,’ said Lucy, taking a close look at the photo. ‘But from the look of those rough tree ferns – Cyathea, aren’t they, Poss?’
Possum agreed. She was in the first year of a degree in Environmental Science and Botany at Melbourne and knew her flora.
Then she spotted the eagle in the background. ‘That’s weird,’ she said, pointing it out to her mum. ‘The way it’s looking at the camera so placidly.’
I explained that the bird had learned to trust the photographer, who’d helped it recover from an injury. Lucy said that added weight to her view that the picture was taken in the Wiregrass Valley. There was a sizeable community of raptors up there – she’d seen goshawks, peregrine falcons and wedge-tailed eagles. She speculated that they sought shelter in the Wiregrass when their natural habitats were impacted by human activity, most commonly logging and farming – or fire. The birds of prey were well equipped to survive the conflagrations that regularly afflicted the area, taking to the skies when many a smaller species was overwhelmed.
I unrolled the map and found the Wiregrass, a remote off-shoot of the Windmark Valley, some twenty kays to the north-east.
‘Looks rough,’ I said, struck by the jagged ridges and spurs, the tightness of the contour lines, the limited signs of human activity.
‘I’ve been hiking up there,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s old mining country, about as rough as you get round here. And dangerous. Lots of abandoned shafts and rockfalls. Is that where you reckon your escapee was headed?’
I shrugged. ‘Could be swanning around the Gold Coast by now. All I know is that he ran into the bush, heading north – but he did have this photo on his mantelpiece and he seemed fond of the bird.’
Possum glanced at me suspiciously, clearly wondering how close a look I’d had at this wanted man. She was always encouraging me to spice up my love-life, but I doubted whether a homicidal maniac was what she had in mind. I changed the topic, reluctant to say much more about my social intercourse with the man in question.
Possum and Lucy stayed for another hour. We unloaded the wood, then I gave them the grand tour of the estate. That took about thirty seconds. It was composed of a simple cabin on an acre of weeds that was fighting a losing battle against the encroaching tide of wattle and dogwood. Monstrous manna gums towered over everything.
Lucy cast a critical eye over the faded fascia boards and window frames, her arms folded.
‘Could do with a good coat of paint,’ she said.
‘Could do with a good wrecking ball,’ Possum added.
When we went inside, Lucy ran a hand across the bed and scowled up at the ceiling.
‘You’ll want to get that drip fixed,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Sam would be happy to do it when he gets a moment.’ Her partner, Sam Kelly, was a builder when he wasn’t being captain of the Canticle Creek Fire Brigade.
‘I’d appreciate that,’ I said. ‘If he comes across my body in a block of ice, tell him to donate it to polar science.’
Eventually they made to leave. Lucy headed for the Isuzu, but Possum lingered for a moment and looked me in the eye.
‘Not your usual effervescent self,’ she said.
‘It’s just your bloody Victorian weather,’ I said, though even as I spoke I was wondering why I bothered. There was no defence against Possum Kelly when something piqued her curiosity. She kept her ear so close to the ground it probably had footrot. And she had cop connections; her friend Karly’s father was the sergeant-in-charge at Windmark. She’d know about my ill-fated tryst within minutes of getting back to Canticle Creek – if she didn’t already. She kissed me goodbye, told me it was good to have me back in town. As they departed, I noticed a light come on at Rocco and Meg’s across the road. There was one at my place too. Power was back on.
When they’d gone I decided to split some wood, something I do when the shit’s in the vicinity of the fan. Some of it I left by the front door, most of it I stacked in the shed.
Half an hour later the shed was full and I was sweating. The dog came over and had a sniff around. I gave him a pat, then stopped, took a deep breath and looked out over my domain. Light, warmth, water, friends, a faithful canine companion: what more could you ask for?