The sun sort of rose on yet another icy, mist-woven morning. I stood for a moment on the front porch. My fingers were red-raw, frozen. A pair of sluggish kangaroos drifted across the lawn, footprints in the frost, tails wet. Winter up here in the high country was relentless. It was as if all the things that mark you as human – movement, breath, the very spark of life – were slowly being subsumed into an all-conquering, blood-numbing cold.
I lit a fire, enjoyed the heft of my new poker, made a pot of coffee.
I rang the vet, got the nurse, Charlie. She said she’d fallen in love with Flinders. ‘Those eyes!’ she exclaimed. She said he was doing well, but they wanted him to stay there for rehabilitation. That suited me. I would have had trouble caring for a disabled dog just now.
I decided to go down to the monster mall at Greendale and pick up some of the essentials I hadn’t had a chance to buy yet: more bedding, blankets, a good winter coat.
I didn’t last long at the mall. They wore me out, those places. After purchasing the thickest coat and warmest bedding in the store, I went in search of food. Couldn’t find much: it was all pretend. Food from the land of the bland. That didn’t seem to worry the lumpy proletariat, who were lumbering through the food court swilling slurpees and shovelling carbs into their cakeholes. I bought a nori roll and fled.
On my way back to the car I noticed a woman in a green jacket unloading a trolley into a grey Subaru. She looked up as I walked by. She was tall and well-rounded, with a lock of blonde hair falling over her sharp blue eyes. It took me a moment to place her. I’d only seen her from a distance, but there was no doubt.
‘Excuse me – Marcie, isn’t it?’
Raph Cambric’s sister-in-law, last seen wrangling a mob of kids into the house on the farm at Wycliff Rise.
She knew me straightaway, said I’d made quite an impression on her husband. He’d been having second thoughts about his brother’s death since my visit, had tried to come up with alternative explanations. Hadn’t come up with anything, mind you, but he was wondering if they’d been too quick to follow the party line. She said she’d always liked Nash Rankin, had chatted with him over the fence from time to time, but he’d held his cards so close to his chest that she never felt she knew him.
There was a cafe on the other side of the car park. I asked if she had time to join me for a coffee. She said she could give me an hour but no more. She had to get back and rescue her husband from the kids.
‘I’ve seen them in action,’ I said. ‘Better not be late. They’ll tear him apart.’
We found a table close to the window, ordered coffee and cake and engaged in a few minutes of exploratory chatter. She’d lived in the Windmark Ranges all her life, worked as a teacher before she married Jared. She told me some of the newcomer things to do – the best waterholes and wineries, the hidden cross-country ski runs. Not that she did many of those things these days. Raising the kids and running the farm took up most of her time and energy, especially now that Raph was gone.
She leaned forward, fixed me with a firm gaze.
‘Which brings us to . . .’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I’m still trying to work out what happened to him. If Nash was responsible, he’ll have to deal with whatever the legal system dishes out to him. But if he wasn’t . . .’
I let the words drift off into the beams of winter light streaming through the glass panels. I suspected Marcie and I were sharing the same thought: if Nash had been wrongly charged, there was a killer out there somewhere.
‘You seem like a sharp observer,’ I continued. ‘I thought you might have some ideas to add to the mix. I’ve heard rumours – from your husband, actually – that Raph might have been seeing someone.’
She scoffed at the comment. ‘More than that, if I’m any judge of human behaviour. He was a man transformed for a while there. He was a lovely guy, Raph, but not what you’d call outgoing. He just moved through life at his own quiet pace – maybe that was something he picked up from growing apples and handling horses. But then, a few months ago, he changed – dramatically.’
‘How so?’
She thought for a moment, then dabbed at a piece of cake with a fork.
‘His face lit up. He began making quick-fire jokes at the dinner table, played more with the kids. Some sort of nesting instinct, I suspected. My first thought was: he’s met someone. But it was more complicated than that. There was something else going on. Hard to say what, but it sure as hell wasn’t all wine and roses. I started seeing darker emotions in his eyes. Anxiety. Doubt. Maybe even fear – not for himself, for someone else. It made me wonder if perhaps that someone was a person he couldn’t be seen with. Otherwise I didn’t understand why he didn’t just bring her home to meet us.’
‘What if she was a he?’
She frowned. ‘That wouldn’t have worried us. Despite what you might think, we’re not hillbillies up there.’
‘And you’ve got no idea who this mysterious lover could be?’ I asked. ‘You and Jared never speculated?’
She shook her head, but then added she’d been thinking it might have been somebody connected to his farrier business.
‘We’re pretty isolated out on the farm,’ she explained. ‘But Raph travelled all over the place, met a lot of people. He used to do the horse work on Fridays – a regular time so we knew when he’d be off the property. And a couple of times I swear he had that spring in his step – or the shadow in his eye – on a Thursday evening.’
She took a sip of coffee and stared out at the busy Sunday car park, the fat four-wheel drives squeezing into spaces designed for Mini Minors, the wandering shopping trollies.
‘A few weeks before Raph died,’ she continued, ‘something changed. The anxiety came to the surface, took over. He was moody, downcast. He spent a lot of time pacing back and forth down in the paddock, phone in hand, where nobody could hear him. He seemed to be doing a lot of ringing, but not getting much in the way of answers.’
She lowered her head and rearranged the froth on her coffee. ‘They’re so damned bottled up, these bush blokes. When me and my girlfriends get together, we tell each other everything. But the men! They keep it to themselves, bury their emotions – especially their fears. If Raph had just opened up, we might have been able to help him.’
I nodded in appreciation of the picture she was painting. ‘Jared told me Raph disappeared for a while.’
‘He was gone for a week. But when he got back he wouldn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t say where he’d been, what he got up to. Just said he was cruisin’. Like that’s something we do out here. We don’t cruise – we work. I assumed the trip was connected to this mysterious relationship, but that was as much as I could guess.’
‘And you’ve no idea where he went?’
She looked away, almost guiltily. ‘Hate to seem like a stickybeak . . .’
‘In my line of work, we love stickybeaks.’
She finished her coffee. ‘When I was putting out the recycling, the week after he returned, I noticed some receipts in the bin. One of them was for food and fuel – in Dubbo.’
Dubbo. Outback New South Wales. What the hell was he doing there? I pressed Marcie for more information, but she had little to add. There were no family or other connections she knew of in Dubbo. She did wonder whether the mystery person might have gone there and Raph had set off in pursuit, but that was pure speculation.
I wondered if she might have anything else she could share with me. Maybe she knew more than she realised.
‘Do you know how I could find out more about his farrier work?’ I asked. ‘I don’t suppose he kept a list of his clients?’
‘It was mostly word-of-mouth, cash-in-hand. But I might have seen him with a little address book sometimes. He had an office of sorts, at his home. You’re welcome to have a look around it if you want.’
‘I’d appreciate that. When would suit you?’
She checked her watch. ‘No time like the present.’
I jumped at the offer. I presumed the Homicide investigators would have already been through the place, but we would have been searching for different things.
We drove out to Wycliff in our separate cars. Marcie dropped into the main house and had a quick word with Jared, then led me down to Raph’s home. It was a neat, single-bedroom cottage near the packing sheds. She told me it had originally been the overseer’s quarters.
The two of us spent a good hour going through the building. It bore all the hallmarks of a single man’s cave: a bathroom redolent of Old Spice and mint toothpaste, a kitchen of pizzas and stew, a row of old footy trophies on the mantle. From the look of those, Raph had been a goal kicker of some local renown. There were several objects which Marcie told me were of sentimental value: an empty rum bottle, a bronze telescope and a tiny sculpture of a boy on a buffalo.
There was a row of framed photographs on the dresser: Jared, Marcie and the kids; an elderly couple; a boy I realised must be the young Raph going over a high jump on a black stallion. I found the last photo heartbreaking; his face was beaming with all the energy and dreams of youth. I couldn’t help but compare that image to the brutal tableau of his death. The sight of Raph crushed in his tractor would live with me forever. There was a more recent photo of him at work on a horse’s hoof, an expression of deep concentration furrowing his brow, a couple of nails clenched between his teeth. He was an attractive man: sharp lines, firm jaw, mellow eyes. Generous eyes. There were no photos of a woman with long, dark hair.
At the rear of the house was a corrugated iron shed which apparently served as a tack-room/office. It was packed with oilskin jackets and hats, saddles and blankets, an array of tools mounted on a wall: hammers and tongs, hoof nippers, rasps and knives. The room had a not unpleasant scent of oiled leather and sweat.
Over in the corner was a metal filing cabinet, upon it a pile of books. The top one was called Hickman’s Farriery. The others were in the same vein: horses and their care, farm skills, car and equipment manuals. We looked through the filing cabinet, and I was pleased to see he was a fellow who had yet to catch up with the digital age. More for me to look at. There were files on insurance, vehicle maintenance records, tax returns, invoices, receipts, all the bits and bobs of a travelling tradesman’s life. He was a member of several professional associations, including the Master Farriers’ Association and the Australian Fruit Growers. I took a closer look at the files, but found little of interest. The receipts were what you’d expect for a working farrier/farmer and there was no sign of anything from Dubbo.
But as I closed the drawer I noticed an imprint in the dust on top of the books, as if there’d been a smaller one there at some stage. I lifted the pile aside and came across a small black book that had slipped down the side of the cabinet.
It was an address book, a little frayed and falling apart at the edges, well thumbed, oil and dirt stained. I suspected it had been knocked from the pile when the police were searching the place. There must have been a hundred names in there, Raph’s contacts and customers from all over the region. Too many to be useful. But as I flicked through it a small piece of paper – a beautifully rough-textured, creamy cardboard – slipped from the back cover. I picked it up and read a handwritten sentence in a delicate black script:
something inside me weeps black tears
There was no signature, but below the final word was a deft little sketch of a flower – possibly a rose, from the shape of its petals and stem, although it was uncoloured and difficult to identify with any certainty. Marcie, standing beside me, read the note then looked at me darkly.
‘That,’ she said, ‘must be about the saddest sentence I ever read.’
It wasn’t just the words on the page. It was the atmosphere around them. Their anonymity and isolation, the fact of their being discovered among a dead man’s effects. The card radiated heartbreak.
‘You don’t recognise the writing?’ I asked.
‘It’s certainly not Raph’s.’
‘Or the artwork?’
‘Same.’
She gazed out the open door, her mind elsewhere.
‘Any ideas?’ I pressed.
She shook her head. ‘I miss my poor, dear brother-in-law. His life – especially the last few weeks of it – must have been a hell of a mess. I wish I’d known.’
We trailed back to the cottage, sat at the kitchen table and worked our way through the address book, seeing if Marcie’s local knowledge could offer any insight into the authorship of the mysterious note. Some of the names were clear: Hanrahan, Ted. Billy Leotardo. Donna and George, Canticle Creek. Others were harder to read. They were more shorthand, reliant upon local knowledge: Fritzy, tree bloke, Wednesday. Paul the plumber. Raffles neighbour – the strawberry roan – Hettie?
I told Marcie how their neighbour, Stefan, had said he’d seen a woman riding pillion with Raph, that she was dark-haired and slim, in her late thirties. That helped. Marcie could discard some names at a glance: too old, too young, too fair, too heavy. By the time we finished, we’d eliminated maybe half the people in the book, but that still left me with around fifty names – who may or may not have had anything to do with the laughing passenger on the pillion.
Still, it was something, another part of the picture.
I asked Marcie if I could take the notebook with me, to which she readily agreed. I put it in my bag. We exchanged numbers, and she promised to give me a call if she came across anything new. She said she’d ask around, contact friends and family, make some discreet enquiries of people she knew and trusted. Do her best to find out who the woman was. She walked me out to the car, wished me good luck and left me with a kiss that surprised me with its affection.