The Broken Shore (8 page)

‘I had to sell it,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t any money.’

Now you would have to be more than just rich to own a place in the teatree scrub on the Bar and no shacks broke the skyline above Open Beach; on the once worthless dunes stood a solid line of houses and units with wooden decks and plateglass windows. Nothing under six hundred grand.

A fishing boat was coming in, heading for the entrance.

Cashin knew the boat. It belonged to a friend of Bern’s who had a dodgy brother, an abalone poacher. Just six boats still fished out of Port Monro, bringing in crayfish and a few boxes of fish, but it was the town’s only industry apart from a casein factory. Its only industry if you didn’t count six restaurants, five cafes, three clothing boutiques, two antique shops, a bookshop, four masseurs, an aromatherapist, three hairdressers, dozens of bed-and-breakfast establishments, the maze and the doll museum.

He finished his coffee and went to work the long way, through Muttonbird Rocks, no one in the streets, most of the holiday houses empty. He drove along two sides of the business block, past the two supermarkets, the three real-estate agents, three doctors, two law firms, the newsagent, the sports shop, the Shannon Hotel on the corner of Liffey and Lucas Streets.

In the late 1990s, a city drug dealer and property developer had bought the boarded-up, gull-crapped Shannon. People still talked about a bar fight there in 1969 that needed two ambulances from Cromarty to take the injured to hospital. The new owner spent more than two million dollars on the Shannon. Tradesmen took on apprentices, bought new utes, gave their wives new kitchens—the German appliances, the granite benchtops.

Two men in beanies were coming out of the Orion, Port’s surviving bloodhouse, still waiting for its developer. In Cashin’s first week in charge, three English backpackers drinking there at lunchtime gave some local hoons cheek. The one took a king hit, went down and stayed down, copped a few boots. The others, skinny kids from Leeds, were headbutters and kickers and they got into a corner and took out several locals before Cashin and his offsider got there.

The bigger man on the pavement was giving Cashin the eye. Ronnie Barrett had various convictions—assault, drink-driving, driving while suspended. Now he was on the dole, picking up some cash-in-hand at an auto wreckers in Cromarty. His ex-wife had an intervention order against him, granted after he extended his wrecking skills to the former marital home.

Cashin parked outside the station, sat for a while, looking at the wind testing the pines. Winter setting in. He thought about summer, the town full of spoilt-rotten city children, their blonde mothers, flabby fathers in boat shoes. The Cruisers and Mercs and Beemers took all the main street parking. The men sat in and outside the cafes, stood in the shops, hands to heads, barking into their mobiles, pulling faces.

But the year had turned, May had come, the ice-water rain, the winds that scoured skin, and just the hardcore left—the unemployed, under-employed, unemployable, the drunk and doped, the old-age pensioners, people on all kinds of welfare, the halt, the lame. Now he
saw the town as you saw a place after fire, all softness gone: the outcrops of rock, the dark gullies, the fireproof rubbish of brown beer bottles and car skeletons.

Ronnie Barrett, he was Port in winter. They should put him in an advertisement, on a poster:
GET TO KNOW THE REAL PORT MONRO
.

Cashin went in, talked to Kendall. It was overlap time, the two of them on duty for a few hours. He wrote the report on his visit to The Heights, sent it to Villani, printed two copies for the file.

Then he rang homicide and spoke to Tracy Wallace, the senior analyst.

‘Back in harness, are you?’ she said. ‘I gather it’s titsoff down there.’

Cashin could see the flag, plank-stiff in the arctic wind. ‘Nonsense. Only people with over-sensitive parts say that. What’s the word on Bourgoyne?’

‘Unchanged. If you’re recovered, please come home. The place is filling up with young dills.’

‘Be patient. They’ll turn into older dills.’

THE SHIFT went by.

Cashin went home, along the country roads. Newly milked dairy cows, relieved for a time of their swaying burdens, turned to look at him, blessed him with dark, glossy eyes.

No sign of Dave Rebb.

He walked the dogs, made something to eat, watched television, all the time the pain getting worse. It took revenge for the hours he was upright. For a long time after he left hospital, he had been unable to cope without resorting to pethidine. Getting off the peth, the lovely peth, that was the hardest thing he had ever done. Now aspirin and alcohol were the drugs of choice and they were a poor substitute.

Cashin got up and poured a big whisky, washed down three aspirins. Callas, Bergonzi and Gobbi always helped. He went to the most expensive thing he owned, two thousand dollars worth of stereo, and put on a CD. Puccini, Tosca. The sound filled the huge room.

He owed opera and reading to Raimond Sarris, the mad, murderous little prick. Opera had just been rubbish arty people pretended to like. Fat men and women singing in foreign languages. Books were okay, but reading a book took too long, too many other things to do. There were few spaces in Cashin’s days before Vickie and, afterwards, he left home early, came back in the dark, ate at his desk, sitting in cars, in the street. His spare time he spent sleeping or someone, a cop, would hoot outside and they’d go to the races, the
football, fishing, stand in some cop’s backyard eating charred meat, drinking beer, talking about work.

Then came Rai Sarris.

After Rai, he had many hours of the day and night in which he had no capacity to do anything except read or watch television. At night, when they were trying to wean him off painkillers, the aches in his back, his pelvis, his thighs, would always give him a moment to drop into sleep. He would fall away from himself for a while, to a deep and dreamless place. The pain would wake him slowly, pain as a sound, far away but insistent, as with a crying baby, part of a dream of hearing something unwelcome. He would move, not fully awake, lie every way, trying to find a position that lessened the pain. Then he would give up and lie on his back—sweaty, now aching from neck to knees—and switch on the light, prop up, try to read. This happened so many times in a night, they blurred.

One day a nurse called Vincentia Lewis brought him a CD player and two small speakers and a box of CDs, twenty or thirty. ‘My father’s,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t need them anymore.’ They sat on the bedside cabinet untouched for a long time until, waiting for the dawn one morning, pain shimmering, Cashin put on the light, picked out a disk, any disk, didn’t look at it, put it on, put on the headphones, put out the light.

It was Jussi Björling.

Cashin did not know that. He endured a few moments, gave it a minute, another. In time, the day leaked in under the cream blind, the morning-shift nurse came and ran it up. ‘Look a bit more peaceful today,’ she said. ‘Better night?’

What did Rai Sarris call himself now? For months, they had tapped everyone Rai knew. He never called anyone.

Cashin got up with difficulty and poured another whisky. A few more and he’d sleep.

THEY WALKED around the western side of the house, through the long grass, dogs ahead, jumping up, hanging stiff-legged in the misty air, hoping to see a rabbit.

‘Where’d you grow up?’ Cashin said.

‘All over,’ said Rebb.

‘Starting where?’

‘Don’t remember. I was a baby.’

‘Right, yes. Go to school?’

‘Why?’

‘Most people know where they went to school.’

‘What’s it matter? I can read, I can write.’

Cashin looked at Rebb, he didn’t look back, eyes front. ‘Like a good yarn, don’t you? Big talker.’

‘Love a yack. How come you walk like you’re scared you’ll break?’

Cashin didn’t say anything.

‘Confide in anyone comes along, don’t you? Why’s the place like this?’

The dogs had vanished into the greenery. Cashin led the way down the narrow path he’d cut with hedge clippers. They came to the ruins. ‘My great-granddad’s brother built it, then he dynamited this part of it. He was planning to blow the whole thing up but the roof fell on him.’

Rebb nodded as if dynamiting a house was an unexceptional act. He looked around. ‘So what do you want to do?’

‘Clear up the garden first. Then I thought I might fix up the house.’

Rebb picked up a piece of rusted metal. ‘Fix this? Be like building that Chartres cathedral. Your kids’ll have to finish the job.’

‘You know about cathedrals?’

‘No.’ Rebb looked through an opening where a window had been.

‘I thought we could do it in bits,’ said Cashin without enthusiasm. He was beginning to see the project through Rebb’s eyes.

‘Easier to build a new place.’

‘I don’t want to do that.’

‘Be the sensible thing.’

‘Well, maybe cathedrals didn’t look like a sensible thing.’

Rebb walked beside the wall, stopped, poked at something with a boot, bent to look. ‘That was religion,’ he said. ‘Poor buggers didn’t know they had a choice.’

Cashin followed him, they fought their way around the building, Rebb scuffing, kicking. He uncovered an area of tesselation, small octagonal tiles, red and white. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Got pictures of the place?’

‘They say there’s a few in a book in the Cromarty library.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ll get copies.’

‘Need a tape measure. One of them long buggers.’ Rebb mimed winding.

‘I’ll get one.’

‘Graph paper too. See if we can work up a drawing.’

They walked back the long way, it was clearing now, pale blue islands in the sky, dogs ranging ahead like minesweepers.

‘People live here before you?’ said Rebb.

‘Not really. A bloke leased it, ran sheep. He used to stay here a bit.’

‘Cleaning up the garden’s going to take a while,’ said Rebb. ‘Before you start the big job.’ He found the makings, rolled a smoke as he walked, turned his back to the wind to light up, walked backwards. ‘How long you planning on taking?’

‘They know how long a cathedral would take?’

‘Catholic?’

‘No,’ said Cashin. ‘You?’

‘No.’

The dogs arrived, came up to Cashin as if to a rendezvous with their leader, seeking orders, suggestions, inspiration.

‘Met this priest done time for girls,’ said Rebb. ‘He reckoned religion’s a mental problem, like schizophrenia.’

‘Met him where?’

Rebb made a sound, possibly a laugh. ‘Travelling, you meet so many priests done time for kids, you forget where.’

They were at the front entrance.

‘Help yourself to tucker,’ said Cashin. ‘I’m getting something in town.’

Rebb turned away, said over his shoulder, ‘Want to leave the dogs? Take them to Millane’s with me, stay in the yard. He likes them. He told me.’

‘They’ll be your mates for life. Den’s has to be better than the copshop.’

Cashin drove to Port Monro down roads smeared with roadkill— birds, foxes, rabbits, cats, rats, a young kangaroo with small arms outstretched—passed through pocked junctions where one or two tilted houses stood against the wind and signs pointed to other desperate crossroads.

In Port, Leon made him a bacon, lettuce and avocado to take away. ‘Risking the wrath of Ms Fatarse here, are we?’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of having a sign painted. By appointment, supplier of victuals to the constabulary of Port Monro.’

‘What’s a vittle?’

‘Victuals. Food. In general.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘V-I-C-T-U-A-L-S.’

‘I find that hard to accept.’

Cashin ate his breakfast at Open Beach, parked next to the lifesaving club, watching two windsurfers skimming the wave tops, bouncing, taking off, strange bird-humans hanging against the pale sky. He opened the coffee. There was no hurry. Kendall was acting station commander while the Bourgoyne matter was on. Carl Wexler didn’t like that at all, but the compensation was that he could bully the stand-in sent from Cromarty, a kid even rawer than he was.

Bourgoyne.

Bourgoyne’s brother was executed by the Japs. How could you be interested in Japanese culture when your brother was executed by the Japs? Did executed mean having his head cut off? Did a Jap soldier cut off his head with a sword, sever the neck and spine with one shining stroke?

Some fucking
In Cold Blood
thing. How did Villani know about Truman Capote? He couldn’t have seen the movie. Villani didn’t go to the movies. Villani didn’t read books either, Cashin thought. He’s like me before Rai Sarris. He doesn’t have the standstill to read books.

Before Rai, he wouldn’t have known what
In Cold Blood
meant either. Vincentia gave him the book. She was doing a literature degree part-time. He read the book in a day and a night. Then she gave him
The Executioner’s Song
by Norman Mailer. That took about the same time. He asked her to buy him another book by Mailer and she came in with
The Naked and the Dead,
second-hand.

‘All about dying?’ he said. ‘I think I can read other kinds of stuff.’

‘Try it,’ she said, ‘it’s about a different kind of senseless killing.’

Shane Diab shouldn’t have been there. Nothing could change that. He was just a keen kid, he was in awe, so rapt at being in homicide he would have done anything, gone anywhere, worked twenty-three-hour days, then got up early.

There was no point in thinking about Shane. It served no purpose, cops got killed in all sorts of ways, he could just as easily have been shot by some arsehole brain-dead on Jack Daniels and speed. That was the job.

Cashin’s mobile rang.

‘Joseph?’ His mother.

‘Yes.’

‘Michael rang. I’m worried.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the way he sounds.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Strange. Not like him.’

‘Rang from where?’

‘Melbourne.’

‘The one-and-a-half bathrooms?’

‘I don’t know, what does it matter?’ Irritated.

‘How does he sound?’

‘He sounds low. He never sounds low.’