Time's Long Ruin (52 page)

Bill leaned forward. ‘Fragrancy.'

Dad smiled but Bert just lifted his eyebrows.

‘Fragrancy,' Bill repeated, slapping Bert on the shoulder. ‘That used to get a big laugh.'

Bert looked back at him. ‘Where?'

‘The Tiv.'

Bill was walking from the stage, and he could hear the clap from each individual hand. Back in the car he looked out of the window at the Mount Lofty Ranges spread out in front of him, and wondered how he'd got from there to here. This was a thought he often had as he drove the highways and dirt roads of South Australia.

Bert, meanwhile, was still holding his notebook and pencil. He licked the one-inch long HB and wrote:
BR, changeable
character. one day a pillar of salt, the next a comedian . . .
At quarter to twelve Dad and Bill sat on a bench beside the granite Anzac in the middle of Nhill's main street. He was no ordinary Digger. He was a corpulent, middle-aged man who didn't quite fit into his uniform. He was slightly effeminate and grinning, stretching his hand out to an angel – a stumpy little angel with an arm knocked off, dressed in a granite robe that blew in a wind smelling of pigs and April Violet from the frock salon – and wings, twice the size of his body, like some giant wedge-tailed eagle rising up over Nhill.

‘Is it just me?' Dad asked, looking at the Digger.

‘What?' Bill replied.

Dad indicated a squat man in shorts, abattoir boots and checked shirt who'd just walked past.

Bill smiled. ‘Maybe it's his dad.'

The main street of Nhill was packed with utes and flattop trucks stacked high with hay. There was an occasional tractor and the local copper cruising up and down the main street, watching Dad and Bert with suspicion. He slowed and wound down his window. ‘You fellas okay?'

‘Fine,' Dad replied. ‘Lovely town.'

Bert sat on a bench along the main street outside a pet shop advertising
Labradoors, Groomed and Vacsinated
. He was watching for anything suspicious, or hopeful. So far there was just an old cocky, standing against the bank with his arms crossed, smiling at kids as they walked past. Not the criminal type, Bert supposed, writing in his notebook:
Nearly
midday. Nothing.

Dad looked at Bill. ‘You're not gonna be disappointed, eh?'

Bill shrugged. ‘No, but stranger things have happened.'

‘What I mean is,' Dad continued, leaning back and breathing the warm, beer-soaked air from the Commercial Hotel, ‘people don't generally steal something, and get away with it, and then give it back.'

Bill looked up into the lino-blue sky and closed his eyes. ‘I know. I'm not stupid, Bob.'

‘And then get us to a small town, where the kids were sure to be noticed.'

‘I know.'

Dad was thinking about the carpet cleaning van with its Victorian plates.

Maybe some fella drove from Melbourne, he thought. Maybe he took them at random, and used them and killed them, dumping them on the way back. At Nhill? No, why would he draw attention to himself?

Usually, as details built up, a case would start to resolve itself, but not this time. Dad was back to his string of coded letters.
Taman Shud
. The End. Although now there were just some old chips and cigarette butts, and a franger that had dried up in the sun, a wreath of dead roses beneath the poofy Digger, a phone box with its door hanging off one hinge, and concrete paths, as thin as sliced cheese, crumbling like old poultry rations.

Dad looked at his watch. ‘Just about time,' he whispered. He looked over at the pet shop and Bert shrugged, as if to say, Well, where's your man?

‘Who would do something like this?' Bill asked, grinding some old almond husks with his heel.

‘It comes with the publicity,' Dad replied. He stood up and looked at his watch. It was midday. He turned in a slow, careful orbit, observing every detail of the landscape – every woman, every child – a sign-writer busy on the front window of C.B. Haese, Feedstore, a dog lifting its leg on a power pole, sniffing it and having another go, a man in overalls changing light globes in front of the Newline Cinema, and a builder removing cracked tiles from a butcher shop floor.

Dad looked at Bill. ‘Not everyone's like you and me, Bill. Some people see a dog and they kick it.'

Bill stood up. ‘Hello,' he shouted, and a few of the shoppers looked at him.

Ten past twelve, quarter past, half past – Bill cupped his hands and turned in a circle as he shouted, ‘Come on, I'm here, like you wanted.'

Dad stood beside him. ‘Come on, Bill.'

Bill sat down. ‘He's not coming, is he?'

‘Probably not. Still, since we've come this far . . .'

Bert didn't say a word, lift an eyebrow or offer an opinion, and they walked up and down the main street, going into the post office, the deli, the co-op and the car yard. Dad showed his charge card and a picture of the kids and explained why they were in Nhill. Middle-aged women, smelling of talc and pipe loaves, shook their heads and said, ‘No, a terrible shame . . . to think they might have been here . . . do you really think so?'

‘Probably not . . . thanks anyway.'

On the way back to Adelaide, Bill was nowhere near as entertaining. He just sat in the back, letting a breeze smelling of dry grass and native pines pass over his face. At one point he said, ‘I'm sorry fellas, I know it was a waste, but it was for Liz.'

Dad waited for Bert to say something, but he didn't. ‘Wasn't a waste, was it, Bert?' he asked.

‘No,' Bert replied.

‘Anyway, 's just what we needed. Get away from town. Nothin' worse than the same four walls.' He stopped to think. ‘When I was about eighteen, me and ten other blokes, cadets, went up to Arno Bay. Ate chops for a week. Got pissed every night. I got burnt red on the first day and had to stay inside. They're the things you do when you're young. Dumb things. But things you remember, eh, Bert?'

‘Suppose so.'

‘You don't remember doin' the dishes and mowin' the lawn.' He looked in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You must have some stories, Bill. From when you were on the road.'

‘Yeah,' Bill replied, watching a distant train blow puffs of black smoke into a sky bleached skull-white. He had lots to remember, but he wasn't interested in brightening anyone's day with anecdotes. No matter how much you remembered, you couldn't go back. No matter how many paper clippings or how much sheet music propped up on the piano, no matter the certificates, or smells, or hair left in combs – no matter what anyone said or did. There was just an empty world filled with old stone walls and rusted barbed-wire fences twisted together like string. There was just a foal, grazing bare paddocks littered with stones.

‘What about when you stayed in country towns?' Dad asked, looking back.

But Bill's eyes were closed.

‘Let him sleep,' Bert said.

Dad looked at Bert. ‘You gonna talk to me now?'

‘Don't start.'

‘Well go on, say it.'

Bert looked ahead, through a windscreen coated with insects and bird shit. ‘I've already said it.' He looked back, to make sure Bill was asleep. ‘Eh, Bill?' he said.

No reply.

He stared ahead. ‘Remember when I rang the manager of the Snowtown pub?'

‘Yeah.'

‘The other day I rang him back. I said, “Thanks for handing on the message.” And he says, “What message?” Hold on, I think, then I say, “About Bill's kids going missing.” “No,” he says. “He'd already gone, I didn't tell him anything.”'

Dad looked at Bert and squinted. ‘So what are you saying?'

‘How did Bill know?'

‘He knew. The manager probably forgot he'd told him. Or he heard it somewhere.'

‘Couldn't have. No one in the state knew then.'

‘Christ, Bert, so what do you reckon, that he – '

‘We're paid to ask questions, Bob.'

Dad pulled over into the shade of a giant callitris pine. He and Bert got out, closed their doors without slamming them and walked slowly towards an irrigation ditch. ‘You think I'm not doing my job properly?' Dad asked, finding some tussocks to sit on.

‘Don't get dramatic.'

‘Because I know Bill, and I know that he'd never . . . I can't believe you'd even think that.'

He looked up at him, frowning, his cheeks compressed and his eyes narrowed. There was silence; just the whistle of a hawk searching for field mice, the chug of a distant tractor and the crackling and cooling of the engine.

‘It's about ruling people out,' Bert replied. ‘How do you know it wasn't Bill driving that car down Main North Road that afternoon?'

‘Come on.'

‘How?'

Dad was having none of it. He stood up. ‘This is bullshit. If you want, you go and make a complaint about me.' He stood up and returned to the car, climbing in and starting the engine. Bert stared out across a paddock, reaching down and pulling a flower from a tall weed. Dad sounded the horn. ‘Hurry up,' he called.

As they drove Bert said, ‘You ask him then.'

‘You ask him.'

Bill could hear everything – the wind in his ears, the clicking of a rock in the tyre tread and Dean Martin singing under the hum of the motor.

‘Think of what he's been through,' Dad said.

As Bert licked the tip of his pencil.

That night Dad and Bill sat at our kitchen table going through the detective's reports (searches at the dump, at the Gepps Cross abattoir and sewers under city streets). Dad produced a slim, paper-clipped file and handed it to Bill. ‘We thought there might haven been something in this one.'

Bill sat forward to read. ‘This the freighter?'

‘Yeah, the
Devon
.'

Detective Farrugia and myself spoke to each member of the
crew. All were on board, unloading, on the 26th. The captain
explained that no passes were issued until the 28th, when all of
the lumber was finished.

Another hunch. One of Dad's detectives had noticed that the
Devon
had been in Adelaide on 26 January and also in Melbourne six months earlier when a young girl had gone missing from Portsea.

‘Same thing in Melbourne,' Dad explained. ‘They were all unloading.'

‘Is the captain telling the truth?'

‘Well, the harbourmaster reckons so, and we'd have to explain how a hundred ton of wood got onto the wharf.'

Bill returned the report. ‘Lot of muckin' around, eh?'

Dad produced another clump of pages, paper-clipped together. ‘This one was a fresh grave at Flagstaff Hill. Turned out to be a horse.' He smiled. ‘Took three cadets a day to dig it up.' He looked at one last report, but dismissed it, and then said, ‘That's it.'

Bill stared at him. He picked up his beer and drank it without tipping his head or dropping his gaze. ‘Nothing else?' he asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing you wanna ask me?'

Dad looked puzzled. ‘Like what?'

‘Like what time I left the Snowtown pub that morning?'

Dad swigged his beer. ‘What's that got to do with anything?'

Silence. The hum of the fridge motor. Dad wiped froth from his lips. ‘You weren't asleep?'

‘I haven't slept for two months.'

‘Listen, let me tell you something about Bert. If I went to the shithouse without washing my hands, he'd write it in his book.'

‘Bloke at the pub got it wrong,' Bill explained. ‘Yes, I'd left, but I rang later. Thought I'd left my watch in my room. I'm useless without a watch. Anyway, I got the girl servin' at the bar and she says, “We got a message for you. You gotta get home straight away.”'

Dad shook his head. ‘That's what I told Bert. Someone's said somethin' to someone, or forgot.'

‘You tell Bert to call that pub back,' Bill continued. ‘Tell him to talk to that girl. Tell him so there's no more bulls-hittin' around.'

‘Just forget it,' Dad said.

‘Go on.'

‘He's a drama queen, Bill. Doesn't like it that I'm in charge.'

‘Still, I'd like him to call. And an apology wouldn't go astray.'

‘Forget it.'

‘Why should I?'

Dad talked slowly. ‘Then he'll get his hackles up. I don't want any more drama. I wanna concentrate on the kids, not Bert.'

Bill took a moment and then said, ‘Just as well you've got some common sense.'

Dad had a long, slow drink. ‘How long I known you, Bill?'

‘Too long.'

‘Exactly.'

Mum came in the front door. She looked in my room and saw me busy with my homework and said, ‘Good boy.' Then she was off, storming down the hallway, fronting up to Dad and saying, ‘Thanks a bloody lot.'