Chapter Seventy

Dogs barked. Caitlin hugged Zoe. Ricky hugged Jack. Begley hugged his wife. When they separated, Begley’s dressing gown slipped open to reveal the hairiest torso Jack had ever seen. And other things he would like to unsee. Kowalski studied his boots until his boss’s modesty was restored.

They made plans. Ricky was to email a digital copy of The Beacon to ‘everybody, including God’. Zoe and Caitlin were to drive to The Beacon’s printers to make sure they printed the correct edition – theirs not Bain’s. They were also to double the print run and return with the first copies off the press.

Kowalski said, ‘I’ll go to the station to put out a watch for the black van and start the search for Don Hargreaves.’

Begley, Ricky and Jack were to go to the old house and break up the concrete slab in the hope of finding George Ferris’s body.

Jack took another burner phone from Ricky, called Tony and arranged to meet him with a jackhammer at the old garden shed.

Begley refused to let Jack upstairs to use the bathroom, but went himself for a shower. Veronica Begley, still in her fluffy pink gown, looked the brightest of them all; she’d had a good six hours’ sleep, even though her pillow had been a ping-pong table.

Given no choice, Jack stepped outside and pissed on the Begleys’ petunias. It felt fabulous.

As soon as he climbed into the Land Rover, Jack regretted Begley’s insistence they travel together. The car reeked of fish, a smell so ingrained it didn’t diminish even as they drove at speed to Seven Mile Beach with the windows wound down and Begley smoking a cigarette.

‘So,’ said Jack. ‘A promotion eh? Broken Hill?’

Begley’s face flamed red. The thousands of hairs on his neck stood to attention. ‘Don’t fucking start me. The assistant commissioner caught Kowalski returning the George Ferris file you bloody asked for and Kowalski had no choice but to finger me. I start there next week. One more year and I could have retired here. Just one year. Veronica is refusing to come. And she wants to keep Gizmo and Toto with her. And where are you supposed to fish in Broken Hill? The frozen fucking foods section, that’s where.’ He slammed the Land Rover into another gear. ‘I’m hoping you can pull a fucking rabbit out of a hat here, or at least a body out of concrete. If I can solve an old case, maybe they’ll let me stay.’

‘I don’t think we’ll need the rabbit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you know my father asked for Assistant Commissioner Mitchell to oversee the investigation?’

Begley spun his head towards Jack. ‘What?’

‘And did you also know that the assistant commissioner and my father were at school together?’

Begley returned his attention to the road and resumed swerving around the larger potholes. ‘So, if there’s a body in the slab, the assistant commissioner is conspiring to interfere with an investigation?’ Begley’s whole face slowly transformed into a smile. ‘Perhaps we could go fishing together sometime?’

Tony was waiting for them when Begley drove up onto the lawn behind the old house. He had already dismantled the garden shed, its wrinkly tin panels resting up against the wall of the garage and the gardening equipment it once held now scattered across the lawn. Ricky pulled up behind them in the Beamer. Dark storm clouds stretched from horizon to horizon in the south, pushing back the remnants of blue sky as they advanced with menace.

Jack stared at the exposed concrete. So much depended on whether they found poor George Ferris’s body concealed inside. He felt sick with trepidation. That slab marked a fork in Jack’s life that led in two completely different directions – both bad. Down one, his father was a murderer. His own father. The fallout would be massive, including for Jack himself. The other path was equally grim. His life as he knew it would be shut off to him: his father would disown and disinherit him. The endless court proceedings would stop only when his reputation was trashed, and he was bankrupt.

Jack’s thoughts were dragged back to the present by Tony’s voice. ‘I’ll do the first shift. Let’s hope we can beat that rain.’ He pulled on work gloves.

‘Shouldn’t the police do this?’ asked Jack.

‘Me?’ asked Begley. ‘No bloody way.’ He grinned at Jack. ‘I’ll supervise.’

Tony donned a respirator, goggles and ear protection. When he started the jackhammer, the cacophony of noise assaulting their ears was so painful they all backed away. Clouds of dust drifted up from the slab and blanketed Tony in a ghostly grey. A few minutes later, he’d only removed a small corner section of the slab and he silenced the machine and lifted his respirator.

‘We’re going to be here for a while, Jack. The slab is four hundred mill thick. For a garden shed. It’s ridiculous.’

Jack allowed himself a tiny sliver of hope. He’d heard of the mafia disposing of bodies like this, and there could be no other reason for a slab that thick.

Progress was slow. When Tony took a break forty minutes later, only the first quarter of the slab had been reduced to rubble.

Tony showed Jack how to use the tool. When he started it up, it felt as if his teeth were being shaken out of their sockets. As he smashed off chunk after chunk of concrete, he was willing a body to appear and yet at the same time hoping it wouldn’t, hoping his father wasn’t a murderer. As the slab progressively disintegrated, he moved closer to those tiny impressions of his feet made so long ago. He paused when he reached them. Was this symbolic? Was he about to destroy his past? And his future? He took a deep breath, and pulverised his footprints to dust.

By the time half the slab was gone, the barbed-wire laceration on Jack’s thigh burned with pain. Concrete dust caked the wound and the stitches. That can’t be good, he thought. If he didn’t need antibiotics before, he definitely would now.

Jack was grateful to return the jackhammer to Tony who effortlessly resumed his next shift. Ricky had retreated to the Beamer, where he was taking a nap, his feet up on the dash. Begley sat in his Land Rover, working his way through a packet of cigarettes. By the time Tony stopped half an hour later, only a small portion of the slab remained. The rain was starting to fall now, pissing on Jack’s parade. But he now knew there would be no parade. It really was a coincidence the slab happened to be poured when George Ferris disappeared. His father hadn’t killed Patrick O’Shaughnessy to stop him revealing Ferris’s murder. Which only left Don. A man who Jack had known since he was a child. Don must have killed Patrick so he could blackmail Tom Bradshaw.

Jack knew his father, after reading the ‘Special Corruption Edition’ of The Beacon, would tear him to pieces, in person and in court. And he deserved it. He had broken the fundamental principle of journalism: verify, verify and verify again before publishing. And where did this leave Patrick O’Shaughnessy? In disgrace. Pariah, not Walkley – he’d been duped, and got the story wrong.

Time seemed to slow down as Jack broke up the remainder of the slab. The rain pelted his skin and turned the powdered concrete to grey sludge as the jackhammer bucked and twisted and slipped in his hands. At the end, there was no body in the slab. Just a pile of concrete and tangled reo. Jack dropped the jackhammer, threw his gloves and respirator to the ground and stood staring at the mess. He turned his face up into the pounding rain to wash away the dust, and his troubling thoughts, but those thoughts weren’t going anywhere.

He wiped his eyes clean with his sleeve and opened them. A sodden silhouette traipsed slowly towards them from the old house; head bowed against the sheets of rain. The figure stopped a few metres in front of Jack and raised its head. Don. He looked terrible – one of his eyes was partially closed over by dark-red bruising that was already starting to turn black. Blood had congealed on a split lip. Don’s usual confident demeanour had abandoned him, his eyes darting nervously.

‘Have they gone?’

Jack watched him warily. ‘Don, what the hell is going on?’

‘Those two security thugs. They tried to lock me in a room, but I got away.’ He glanced towards the old house. ‘I’ve been hiding in there. Have they gone?’

Jack nodded, still guarded. ‘Was it Tom Bradshaw who sent them?’

Don looked confused. ‘Why?’

‘Was Bradshaw trying to warn you off?’

‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’

‘My father told me that you murdered Patrick O’Shaughnessy so that you could blackmail Tom Bradshaw.’

There was a long silence before Don replied. ‘It was your father who told me to get you drunk with whisky that night. And to tell Tony to switch off the video surveillance. It was your father’s men, including that brute Fidel, staying down here at the old house the night Patrick died. And those two boofy security guards were your father’s work. They beat me up. I wasn’t blackmailing anybody.’

If Don was putting on a performance, it was a good one – which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given he had so much at stake. Jack’s thoughts pursued each other in ever tightening circles. If Don was telling the truth, it must be his father who was lying. But if his father had organised Patrick’s murder, it was surely to cover up dark deeds in the past – in particular the murder of George Ferris. And yet, there was no body in the slab. Jack wondered whether he had been watching too many mafia movies. The body had to be somewhere else. Jack stared at the pile of debris in front of him and realised his mistake.

Ricky had left the comfort of the Beamer and ran through the rain to join them. He looked perplexed. ‘Why have you stopped?’

Jack pointed to the pile of rubble. ‘We didn’t find a body in the slab. I think it might be under it.’

Ricky said, ‘My father always said, “Bury them once and bury them deep.”’

Jack grabbed a shovel from the lawn and started digging, at first slowly and then faster and faster. When he paused to rest and take a few breaths, a feeling of unease crept over him – a sense of being watched. He looked around. A lone figure stood in the distance, watching him from where the path from the new house emerged out of the forest. His unease turned to dread, clawing at his stomach. His father. He must have heard the jackhammer. For many long seconds, they stared at each other across the lawn, until Jack found himself walking, slowly – his ever powerful father seeming to reel him in.

His father met him with a stony face. There was a long silence until Malcolm said in his gravelly voice, ‘I told you there was nothing buried in that slab. And you didn’t believe me.’

Jack couldn’t look his father in the eye.

‘I always hoped you would be the son to take over from me. But you’ve let me down. Family loyalty, Jack, was that too much to ask?’

Jack could feel the shovel, heavy in his hand.

‘The world would have been yours, but you’ve thrown it away. I’m so disappointed in you, Jack. As would your mother be if she was still here.’

Jack bristled at the mention of his mother – his father had hardly been honourable in that regard, leaving her after a string of not-so-covert affairs. And where had been his family loyalty been? He hadn’t even visited her on her death bed. Jack stared at his father, his rage rising, his grip tightening around the handle of the shovel. He coughed to clear his throat, and found his voice. ‘You did say there was no body in the slab, but you didn’t say anything about under the slab.’

His father’s neck and face flamed red with anger, and he turned and strode quickly back along the path towards the new house.

Jack ran to the others and soon, fuelled by his rage and a growing certainty, lumps of concrete were flying in all directions, some smashing through the asbestos wall of the garage. Tony and Ricky joined him and, when they’d cleared the slab debris, they started on the exposed mud. The muscles of Jack’s shoulders and arms were burning with fatigue by the time their excavations were knee-deep. He stabbed the shovel into the soil for what felt like the thousandth time, only for it to strike something hard. The others heard the noise and stopped to watch. Jack involuntarily held his breath as he scraped back the mud. A bone of some sort. More scraping. A wrist joint. Skeletal fingers.

They stood together silently in the rain as they contemplated the grisly find.

Begley joined them from the Land Rover and stared into the hole. ‘Shit.’ He looked at Jack, and nodded in acknowledgement, before taking out his phone.

For Jack, there was no feeling of satisfaction at being right. Instead, he felt wretched and nauseous. His father was a killer.

Ricky placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’

Jack knew his friend understood how he was feeling – it seemed both their fathers had been cut from the same murderous cloth.

The silence was interrupted by a slow thwack, thwack sound that became increasingly insistent. His father’s helicopter. Jack threw down the shovel and ran for the path up to the new house, the sound of the chopper blades urging him on.

He was gasping for breath as he emerged from the forest onto the large expanse of lawn. The chopper was still on the helipad, its blades a blur. And there he was, his father, walking quickly across the lawn.

Jack knew if his father made it onto that helicopter, he would get away with murder. Two murders. Gold Coast Airport was a short, fifteen-minute ride and, once there, his father could wait at his leisure for the next international flight, or for his private plane to arrive and whisk him away to safety. There was no way Begley, or anyone, could organise an arrest warrant in time – the airport was in a different state, beyond the jurisdiction of the New South Wales Police.

Jack put his head down and raced toward the helicopter.

His father opened the door, climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door closed. Then he saw Jack.

Jack still ran towards him, the sound of the rotor deafening. Malcolm Harris made a hurried gesture to the pilot to take off and the screeching cacophony over Jack’s head became even louder.

Just before Jack reached it, the chopper started lifting slowly off the ground. He flung out his arm and grabbed for the cockpit’s door handle, his father glaring at him from the other side of the plexiglass, lips taut, red-faced, furious. Jack reefed at the handle, but the door held fast as the chopper lifted away, Jack falling heavily to the ground in its wake.

He lay where he landed on the grass, his heart hammering in his chest. He closed his eyes and screamed in frustration, but the sound was lost in the roar of the helicopter overhead.

As the smell of the avgas faded, Jack sat where he had landed and watched in dismay as the chopper receded into the distance until it became a black dot, and then disappeared. He dragged himself to his feet, turned and trudged, head down, back along the path through the forest.

By the time Jack arrived back at the old house, two police squad cars had arrived. Constable Swift was cordoning off the area with crime-scene tape as another constable was speaking with Don. Kowalski snapped photos. Begley looked earnest, pacing backwards and forwards as he spoke into his phone.

Ricky and Tony looked at Jack expectantly when he joined them.

Jack shook his head. ‘Gold Coast, I reckon, then the first flight overseas. He’s going to get away with it.’

Ricky shook his head. ‘Nobody is above the law, Jacko.’ He smiled. ‘Except perhaps my father.’ With that, Ricky took out his phone, strolled away from them, and punched in a number.