Amongst the Dead (28 page)

Now that the murderer was dead, did it matter that Intelligence had chosen to infiltrate the
NAOU
? Who would take offence at this? Surely, the over-riding response of the Nackeroos should have been gratitude and relief that the killer amongst them had been dealt with discreetly and efficiently. Or were they so touchy about their independence that any outside interference would generate resentment, whatever the outcome? I didn’t know enough about military thinking to know how the various Commands viewed Intelligence. Did they despise that organisation, or mistrust it?

With nothing to do but sit and wait, I brooded over the interrogation. It had been most unsatisfactory, and I couldn’t help but suspect that it breached every rule of law, even military law, which was no doubt less precious about the rights of an accused. Still, there must be processes that have to be followed, I thought, and that informal, nasty, and prejudiced little chat couldn’t possibly conform to them.

When I reviewed the way in which I’d answered their questions, I was painfully aware that I’d done myself no favours. I was particularly aggrieved by the final insinuation of some kind of bizarre sexual impropriety, and all because I hadn’t thought to re-house Rufus Farrell’s private parts. My mind kept snagging on this mean query. It unsnagged itself when I began to consider the implications of the extraordinary fact that three Nackeroos in A Company had died prior to the deaths of Battell and Ashe. It wasn’t feasible that anyone in A Company, let alone the officers in charge, could be ignorant of the fact. What was the reasoning behind their flat refusal to acknowledge my statement, and the absence of any curiosity about how I might have come by information that was closely guarded? I couldn’t fathom it.

I have a tendency — and it gives me no pleasure to admit this — to allow imagination to triumph over ratiocination. In the past this has led me into errors of judgement that have had unfortunate consequences, and which I have sincerely regretted. With a tremendous act of self-discipline, I decided to suppress any further consideration of the three unacknowledged deaths. I firmly believed that as soon as Intelligence in Melbourne got wind of the successful identification of the murderer, their intervention would be swift, and of necessity there would be no fanfare. I’d be released and returned to Melbourne, and it would be as if nothing of any note had taken place up there.

For the first time in many weeks I thought of Nigella Fowler. Sitting there in that hot tent, handcuffed, unable to turn my head, accused of murder and sexual deviancy, I felt far removed from my naïve expectation that the solving of this case would bring us together. I closed my eyes and attempted to form a picture of her. To my surprise and disappointment, I couldn’t bring her sharply into focus — a failure I put down to stress rather than any falling off in my feelings for her. I was, however, rather shaken by this small failure, and I saw with sudden clarity that her behaviour towards me all those weeks ago, at the beginning of this enterprise, had lacked the decisiveness of a woman in love.

At the time, I’d thought she was being careful. Now — and perhaps it was the situation in which I found myself — I re-interpreted her behaviour as indifference, perhaps even hostility. Allowing little flares of indignation against Nigella to leap inside me was a distraction. I might have wished that my feelings towards her were more positive at this time — that they would have been a comfort — but my circumstances precluded generosity of spirit towards anyone. I determined not to allow my mind to wander in the direction of Nigella Fowler until the worst of this was over and I could consider my position with the cool detachment of unhurried reason.

I’d been told that I was to be sent to Brocks Creek, and I was pondering where and what that might be when two Nackeroos entered the tent and manhandled me outside. I was once again the object of curious and disdainful stares as I was marched across an open patch of ground and bundled into the back of a car. Brocks Creek must be close by, I thought, if this ancient vehicle was being trusted to take me there.

The car pulled up at the railway station, and I was handed over without ceremony to two provosts who escorted me into a crowded carriage at the front of a train. Needless to say, we attracted a great deal of attention but, to their credit, the military policemen didn’t respond to any of the raucous calls for information about who I was and what I’d done. They didn’t speak to me, either. They sat stonily, one on each side, bored and radiating disapproval. Perhaps they’d been briefed on my alleged crimes; perhaps not. It probably made no difference to them what atrocity I had or hadn’t committed. Like all MPs, there was no room in their steely hearts for sympathy. They exuded the complacent arrogance that marks the difference between the capturer and the captured.

I tried to shut down all my senses. I closed my eyes and recited Shakespeare in my head. The train lurched out of the station and headed north.

The first stop was at Pine Creek, and it was short. Some soldiers got off; some more got on. The next was Brocks Creek — officially called the 13th Australian Detention Barracks — and the only people who disembarked there were me and my provosts. Brocks Creek wasn’t really a place at all — not a place in the sense that you’d put it on your list of places to visit. It was a military prison that had been built in the middle of nowhere — nowhere being somewhere between Pine Creek and Adelaide River. The provosts escorted me through a gate and into a small hut. Three determinedly grim-looking soldiers took me off the provosts’ hands. They returned to the train, which departed soon after.

The process of dismantling my putative rebellious spirit began with a shouted instruction to step forward. My handcuffs were removed, as was the length of chain that was still attached to my foot. In the time-honoured tradition of prison induction, I was ordered to strip. If this was intended to humiliate me, they would have had to work a lot harder. As an actor used to quick changes I wasn’t prey to blushing modesty, and I was indifferent to their gaze.

I was issued with an unappealing set of clothes that smelled of the previous wearer’s body odour, and pushed into an adjoining room. There, a red-faced, purple-cheeked, and wiry man in his fifties stood before a blackboard on which was printed, in an incongruously elegant hand, a list of rules and regulations. I faced him; he looked me up and down and snorted dismissively, as if what he saw was a particularly unimpressive specimen of the Australian soldier. My stiff neck created the impression that I was standing rigidly to attention, so I was spared any gratuitous instructions on that front. He didn’t introduce himself, so all I knew about him was that he was a major. He made no inquiries as to my name. Indeed, thus far no one had addressed me by name. I presumed they had my details, but were pursuing a policy of dehumanisation. I was as nameless to them as a bug, and they wanted me to know it.

The major picked up a thin piece of dowel and began striking the blackboard with it. He shouted each rule at me to the sharp tattoo of the striking dowel. Somewhere around rule number eighteen the rule-makers had run out of ideas and inserted, ‘You will not sing! You will not whistle!’ When the major read this rule, his voice rose in pitch and he delivered it with particular ferocity, as if singing and whistling posed a greater threat to security at the 13th Australian Detention Barracks than the whole of the Empire of Japan. It occurred to me later that the major had probably been apprised of the fact that I was an actor, and that this rule was more likely than any of the others to be breached by me. At the end of each rule it was stressed that the punishment for breaking it was solitary confinement. This didn’t seem too excessive to me, but at that point I didn’t yet know what solitary confinement at Brocks Creek entailed.

By the time the major completed his fire-and-brimstone reading he was breathing heavily. His face was slicked with perspiration, and the whites of his eyes had become red as sweat crawled into them. It was, I admit, a fearful sight. This was no well-modulated, well-calculated performance. This was mania unmediated by sanity. The man was mad, and the terrible effect of his diatribe was to infantilise me. There was nothing I could do to prevent this regression. I’d been in Brocks Creek for no more than half an hour, and they’d already turned me from an independent private investigator into a compliant, frightened child.

After the reading of the rules, the major began a rapid, almost incomprehensible explanation of the workings of Brocks Creek. There were three compounds, numbered one, two, and three. Detainees were first confined in compound one, where there were few privileges and where one was entitled to write and receive one letter per week. All correspondence would, of course, be closely censored. If a prisoner behaved he might work his way into compound two, and thence into the luxury that was compound three. Here, apparently, a prisoner could write as many letters as he wanted, and receive his full complement of mail — parcels excepted. Parcels generally contained comforts, and Brocks Creek was dedicated to the eradication of comfort.

Just as the major’s final words were battering my ears, a sergeant who was as tall as he was broad stormed into the room and bawled at me an observation that set a new benchmark in stating the obvious.

‘You … are … now … in … detention!’

He took a breath after each word so that he could fill his lungs and bellow them individually.

‘Now! On the double!’

He opened a door to the outside and indicated that I was to pass through it. I did so, took two steps down to the ground, and was shaken when he screamed, ‘Run!’ in my ear. The instruction confused me, and I hesitated. Had some danger appeared from which I needed to flee?

‘In here, you run! Prisoners do not walk! Ever! Run!’

In the moment before I began running towards the barracks that housed inmates of compound one, I took in the spectacle of several men jogging in different directions — as well as the very strange sight of a group of men pulling what looked like an over-sized concrete rolling pin. I learned later that this was Brocks Creek’s equivalent of the treadmill. The men were required to drag this monstrously heavy object across a parched square of earth — laughably called a parade ground.

‘On the double!!!’

I ran, and for the rest of that day I ran to and fro. When night fell, I entered the barracks for the first time.

The barracks in which the prisoners slept was a stiflingly hot, iron structure, built around a crude concrete slab. Not very much care had been taken with planing it smooth, and it was pitted and spiky. This mightn’t have mattered if all we were required to do was walk on it. Unfortunately, we were expected to sleep on it as well, with no buffer between us and it apart from a thin, worn blanket. The blanket was made of wool, but an object further from the sheep’s back I couldn’t imagine.

There was only one good thing to be said for the barracks, and that was that they were dry — a state that made them unusually attractive to scorpions and other vermin. It was the smell of them, though, that stays with me still. At one end was a tin can that served as the lavatory for the twenty-five men who were confined there; the stench of the disinfectant splashed into it, combined with the stench of its contents, made for a nasty effluvium.

There was no light, and talking was forbidden, so we whispered like schoolboys, anxiously aware that one of the bloody-minded guards might burst in at any time and impose a petty penalty for ‘creating a disturbance.’ That penalty was decided by whim — it might be as vile as emptying the dunny can from each of the three barracks (carried on the shoulder and taken at a run so that the contents slopped over the carrier) — or as mean-spirited as a few days in solitary confinement. Thankfully, I didn’t experience the former. I was propelled into the latter within twenty-four hours of entering Brocks Creek.

Conversation became less dangerous when rain began to pound the iron roof and walls. Voices had to be raised, but experience had taught the longest-serving inmates that the guards had an aversion to getting wet, so the possibility of being harassed by them was minimised. I can’t say that my companions in compound one were salubrious, interesting, or even the victims of some miscarriage of justice. I was the only one there who could rightfully make that claim. Their crimes, which they weren’t reticent in detailing (it was almost as if they believed that crimes committed within the world of the military weren’t as shameful as they might otherwise have been), ranged from gross insubordination, to being AWL, to theft. I could have trumped them all by telling them what I was accused of, but my instincts insisted that the way to survive this was to be invisible, so I mumbled a bland confession of having been AWL, with a bit of drunk and disorderly thrown in to improve credibility. I felt no camaraderie with the men in compound one. Indeed, I found myself taking the high moral ground, and silently condemning each of them for reprehensively failing to do their duty. By morning, after a sleepless and wretched night, I’d decided that they were a species of traitor.

My spirits were low and they weren’t improved by breakfast, which was a revolting sludge of army biscuit soaked in hot water — an unimaginative meal that was repeated at lunch and dinner, and was invariable, day after day.

Prisoners were kept occupied with so-called work parades, and it was in the execution of the duties imposed on me that I ran foul of a guard. I confess that I approached the task assigned to me in the wrong spirit. I would have had no objection to doing real work, even if it had been tedious. Instead I was told to run to a corner of the compound where a guard stood holding a bucket. When I reached him, I saluted, as required — an action that sucked self-respect out of me more efficiently than any other. I recognised the guard as the kind of brute who frequented rough pubs, and who would have lived in civilian life off the proceeds of petty crime or handouts. He upended the bucket, spilling hundreds of dead scorpions onto the ground. Each of them had been meticulously cut in half.