Gladiatrix (5 page)

It was big and sleek, with a shapely head and gentle eyes.

I looked under the desk at Spud, wrapped around my feet. Then I looked back at the dog on the screen. Something stirred.

Not a memory; not that clear. Just a feeling.

Familiarity.

Lithgow is northwest from the Illawarra, on the inland side of the Blue Mountains. It's about a three-and-a-half hour drive there in my battered old Land Rover, and I was hoping the car would make it that far without overheating; it was better than taking Des' ute as that wasn't in much better condition than he was. I didn't have air conditioning, but Des stubbornly refused to stay at home, so in the end I agreed to get us there early.

It was just getting light when we left. As we climbed Bulli Pass, the sun was stoking itself up behind us, getting ready for another fiery day's work. Bulli Pass is a series of zigzags that run up from the coast road, through the forest, and on to the top of the escarpment. It's known for its steep grade and the downhill run has burnt holes in many a set of brakes and drivers' nerves. But the view it gave of the coast, glimpsed in between lofty treetops, was special, a green-fringed township meeting sandy gold meeting shifting blue. I looked for the line of pine trees at Sandon Point, the north break was working. Normally I'd be down there now, doing my morning meditation: surfing.

At the top of the escarpment we joined the main highway north, and headed towards the outskirts of Sydney. Once there we took a left onto the Great Western Highway, the main road that bisects the middle of the dusty, urban sprawl and would take us across the mountains.

The first white settlers called them the Blue Mountains because of the rich eucalyptus haze that colours them, but feared their labyrinths as an impenetrable barrier to westward expansion. They're really plateaus carved by wind and water into a maze of canyons and river valleys, and everything, excepting the distinctive yellow sandstone cliffs that cap the very top, is covered by a thick carpet of indigenous trees and plants.

Our neighbours, the New Zealanders, from a land of juvenile, sharp-toothed peaks, laugh at us calling them mountains at all. Yes, they're flat, and not that high, but their attraction is that, like the rest of Australia, they are primordial. Gnarled relics of the Earth's distant past. You can sense their age with every exhalation of their blue-green breath.

As we climbed the air grew drier but no cooler, and behind us the summer sun raced upwards. Des dozed a little, so to keep myself awake, I checked off the mountain towns as we passed Lawson, Leura, Katoomba, Blackheath. Quaint little towns, dotting the spine of the highway. Finally, we reached Mount Victoria and plunged back down and into the Hartley Valley. Lithgow squatted in the middle of a shallow valley, just a little further on from Hartley.

We were both tired, so we'd abandoned talking for most of the trip. But, as we were about to roll into town, it seemed time to get a few things straight. ‘So you have no idea who's on duty today?'

Des had rung Lithgow police station around one am and talked to the constable on duty; he was young and hadn't recognised Des' name. Constable Perkins had said the detectives would be in at eight this morning.

‘Perkins gave their names but I didn't know them. John Lugan was the last one I knew who worked there.' After Des had retired he'd visited Lithgow less and less. Said it made him feel old. But I think it was more because he missed his wife and their life together there.

‘John Lugan moved to Brisbane about six years ago, didn't he?'

‘Yeah.' Des was tired, and didn't want to go into the negatives of the situation.

‘Didn't John say that even before he left things had really changed a lot? A whole new organisational structure with new procedures and a big turnover in staff.'

Des shook his head in disgust. ‘You don't get people staying in the same place any more.' He was conveniently choosing to home in on my last point. ‘Not like when I was on the force. I was in Lithgow for nearly two decades. I knew this whole place, this whole area, like the back of my hand. Now everyone shifts around.' He was cranky. ‘They lose, doing that. Moving people around. They lose the history of the place.'

He said, cynically, ‘You get a change in the state government, and a few different police ministers, and they all want to prove they can do better than the last guy. Leave their mark, whether it's needed or not.'

‘So did John say what the new procedure would be today? What they'll do if they believe us?'

‘No, not really.' Des shrugged. ‘But the Local Area Command is headquartered in Bathurst now. So we may have to go there as well.'

I didn't care about where we'd have to go, but how
soon we'd find out about the Dupree case. ‘What about the US connection? Will this Lithgow detective ring the San Francisco PD directly?'

He didn't answer, just looked out the window.

I had a bad feeling about this meeting. ‘What if they don't want to do anything, Des?'

I hadn't been convinced at first — why should they be? Des was in this because of a hunch. And I was only in on it now because of a photo of a black dog. How would it all sound to someone else? Someone who had no stake in it, nothing to catch onto?

Des scowled. ‘Kannon, they'll have to do something. This,' he smacked the battered leather briefcase sitting on his lap, ‘is an important new lead.'

This airy optimism wasn't the hard-line Des I knew so well; this past year had to have affected him too. The link to the Dupree case wasn't, as yet, an important new lead and he knew it. It wasn't anything at all, until we had a lot more information. He wasn't thinking clearly. I was tired, but he must be exhausted.

‘Des, you're gonna have to be realistic here,' I said, with concern. ‘Be prepared for resistance. These guys don't know you, and they certainly won't know, or care, about what happened in this area twenty years ago. They're probably overworked, understaffed, and just keeping up with their own case loads.'

He continued to ignore me. Which worried me. I'd never seen him this vulnerable before. I sighted the turn-off with a mixture of both relief and revulsion, saying, ‘There it is.' We turned right, into Lithgow's main street.

Lithgow is an old mining town, established in the mid-1800s to make use of the local coal seam. Later other industries sprang up like copper smelting, small arms production, and even a gaol. I hated the rotten
place. It was full of Depression-era housing and dilapidated factories. It routinely had heatstroke weather in summer, and snow in winter. To me, everything looked past its use-by date. Burnt out. A nasty, tinny husk of suffering, full of failed ventures.

Well, that was how I saw it anyway. I didn't feel that way about the rest of the Blue Mountains. I'd even been back to Kanangra-Boyd Park when I was a teenager, as part of the post traumatic stress therapy. But I'd never been in the cave where I'd been found, and I hated Lithgow more every time I saw it. I couldn't remember being brought here when I was first found, but there was just something about it that revolted me, made me angry.

Des loved Lithgow. The people and the life. Even now his spirits were lifting as he looked around. Like he'd come home. Des could have gone as far as he wanted in the police force. He was a smart man, with all the right qualities, and he'd been an exceptional detective. He had a kind of instinct for it. He'd had chance after chance to join the city squad, but he'd decided he wanted to stay a country copper right here, cradled by the mountain wilderness, in love with the romance of snow on gum trees. He'd spent nearly two decades in Lithgow because of his twin passions; the law and the bush. Until he was forced to take medical retirement, that is, for his heart.

We pulled up in front of the police station, another Depression-era, red-brick monstrosity. ‘Still the same old place,' Des mumbled with affection, as he opened his door.

I didn't reply. Yep, it was still just as ugly.

We walked in the front door, and got a shock. The station was exactly the same on the outside, but inside had been gutted. Instead of an open building you could
look into, with desks and uniformed officers, a small front foyer had been created that completely blocked off the rest of the station.

Des was a little disoriented, but said gamely, ‘Well, there never was enough room the way it'd been laid out before.'

The foyer, which was really a mini waiting room, ended in a walled-off front desk and had a grey plastic bench running along one wall. There was a solid-looking door next to the front desk, with a keypad on the lock. Okay, it was more secure, but, before, the place had some character. Ugly, sure, but character nevertheless. Now it looked like every official waiting room I'd ever been in. Institutional grey, with bolted-down, hardened plastic fittings. I wondered what else had changed.

The constable behind the front desk looked up. He'd been busy filling out a form pinned to a clipboard. ‘Yes?' He was around my age, but still had a crop of pinky-red pimples across his chin.

‘I'm Desmond Carmichael …'

‘Oh, right. You rang last night. I spoke to you, I'm Constable Perkins. You wanted to see one of the detectives?' He looked over at the big clock on the foyer wall.

Des cut in. ‘Yes, yes. We're a bit early. Just let us know when they arrive.'

The constable nodded, then ticked off a box on his clipboard. Looked like the bean counters had been here as well. Our box was ticked.

Des sat on the grey plastic bench, under a black-and-white photo of three Lithgow miners, probably taken in the early years of the last century. They were covered in black dust, but smiling as though it was pure joy to go down a hole in the ground.

He squinted up at the photo. ‘That used to hang in my office.' He looked away, shoulders sagging ever so slightly.

I sat next to him. There wasn't really much else to look at, that was until I focused on the front door. There was a nasty pattern of knife-shaped gouges at breast height in the wall to the left of the architrave. Someone had stuck a spindly rubber plant in front of it, but it didn't do the job.

We both stared at the gouges, and speculated.

‘Was that here last time?' I asked.

‘Not that I remember.'

Maybe that explained the heightened interest in security.

There was a vending machine near the front desk, just like all waiting rooms on the front line of public suffering: hospitals, police stations; anywhere you're likely to wait and worry. Got to have your caffeine so you can stay awake for it. I was standing next to the thing, contemplating the dismal choice of beverages, when Perkins waved us back to the desk.

‘Mr Carmichael? You can come through now.' Perkins opened the side door for us. Behind the partition was an open plan room with a cluster of five desks in the middle, each with its own computer and filing cabinet. There were four doors set into the rear wall, two were offices.

‘Through there, sir.' Perkins opened the office door on the right.

A short, thick-set man, probably somewhere in his early thirties, was still unpacking a navy and white gym bag, dumped open on his desk. There was a squash racket next to the bag, and his hair was damp.

He was neatly dressed in a white shirt, a slate grey tie and navy work pants. He put his lunch box on
a side table, and stored the gym bag in a tall steel locker next to the door. There was a large disposable cup full of aromatic coffee on his desk, steam rising from the top. The cup was marked ‘Lithgow Coffee Factory'.

The man extended his hand to Des, saying, ‘A pleasure to meet you, sir. I'm Detective Sergeant Cooper.' They exchanged a firm handshake.

Des started to introduce himself, but Cooper said, ‘Am I correct in thinking you're Des Carmichael? The same one the Mayor keeps measuring me against?'

Good. So there was a glimmer of institutional memory here. Thank God for Harry Stockwell, the perennial mayor and inveterate mind game player.

‘Perkins didn't seem to know me last night,' said Des with surprise.

‘No.' Cooper gave a wry smile. ‘He's brand new, just like me. But the townspeople here have long memories, and any time something goes wrong they tell me that you wouldn't have done it that way.'

Des covered his pleasure to say, ‘So Harry's still running the show?'

Cooper nodded. ‘And doesn't let any of us forget it.' He gave me a quizzical glance.

Des introduced me. ‘This is Kannon Jarratt.' He didn't say more, possibly in the hope Cooper would react to my name.

Cooper just extended his hand, without a flicker of recognition. We shook. So he knew Des' name but nothing else. If he'd known much about Des at all, he'd know why Des had moved to the coast. He politely indicated the chairs in front of his desk and we all settled in.

‘So, how can I help you?' Cooper sat ready to listen. ‘Perkins didn't say why you were here.'

‘I'm here …' Des stopped. ‘We're both here, to talk to you about an old case. I have some new information and I want you to follow it up.'

‘An old case?' Cooper wasn't overwhelmed with pleasure. ‘Ah. Well, Mr Carmichael …'

‘Call me Des.'

‘Well then, Des. Before we continue, can I ask exactly what Miss Jarratt's place in all this is?'

Des glanced at me. I nodded. He could do the talking here, it was his backyard. ‘It's her case.' He said my name again, ‘Kannon Jarratt.' When Cooper didn't respond, Des said testily, ‘You may be too young to have heard of the Kanangra Baby?'

Cooper shook his head. ‘Sorry, Des. I'm a Northern Rivers man myself. I trained up in Lismore.'

‘And no-one in Lithgow has mentioned Kannon?'

‘As I said, I'm new here. Three months so far.' Cooper shot me a brief glance, ‘Sorry, Miss Jarratt.' He didn't bother with any more sympathy. He studied the briefcase on Des' lap, ‘But I'm guessing you have the case number handy?'

Des pulled out the file, while Cooper typed commands into his computer. When he'd found the right sheet, Des passed it over to Cooper. Cooper scanned the page, and typed in the case identifier. He leant back again, and waited, then frowned.