By Peter Corris
‘What you need is a lawyer, Bert,’ I said, ‘not a detective.’
Bert Russell shook his big bald head and grinned. ‘No fear, I read up on this sort of thing a bit. I need an investigation to see how the land lies. Then, and only then, I make an anonymous phone call or I hire a lawyer. Shit, if it all works out well I might need a couple of bloody lawyers.’
His enthusiasm and good humour were infectious.
‘And an accountant.’
‘Too right.’
Bert was the manager and part-owner of a liquor store in Glebe Point Road and over the years I had put a certain amount of business his way. He’d tried to get me to invest in good wine and, failing that, to drink it. No go. I was a weekly specials buyer at best, and not averse to the better brands in a cask. We’d struck up a kind of bantering friendship and when, after getting a good cheque, I occasionally did buy an expensive bottle his recommendation was always sound. Now we were in my place of business, the very pre-loved office I have in Darlinghurst, and he’d told me about what he’d found buried on his land at Dugong Beach on the Central Coast, where he had a weekender— a metal strongbox, wrapped in oilskin, containing 60 kilos of gold bars.
‘That’s well over a million bucks’ worth, Cliff,’ Bert had said. ‘Give or take.’
‘Read up on that too, did you?’
‘I didn’t need to. They give you the price of gold on the radio every day. Haven’t you ever heard it?’
I shook my head. ‘Most days I’d have to say it doesn’t concern me. Come to think of it, it’s never concerned me.’
Bert had gone on to explain how it concerned me now. Along with the gold, the strongbox contained a pistol, a Colt .45 automatic, and a photograph of a woman. He wanted me to establish, one way or the other, whether he’d be in any trouble if he claimed the money.
‘I don’t know how old it is, or the bloody gun or the picture. If it’s some drug thing, real recent like, I don’t want to know about it. If it’s old, say twenty-five years or more, I’m going to claim it. I’ll pay you your normal rates to look into it, and if I strike it lucky you’re on a percentage.’
‘How much of a percentage?’
‘I’d lose a certain amount to the government and I’ve got Tom and my two girls to think of. How about 5 per cent of what I clear?’
I did the calculation in my head. Geometry, algebra and trigonometry were all a mystery to me at school, but I was sharp enough at arithmetic and this was dead easy. If he kept half himself and came out with 500,000 dollars, I was looking at twenty-five grand. I reached into the top drawer, took out a contract form and filled it in. It was the first contingency fee I’d negotiated and made me feel as if I was moving towards the twenty-first century. Twenty-five thousand dollars would help me nicely along the way. Bert signed and I pointed out to him that he was up for a five hundred dollar retainer fee there and then.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m in the wrong game.’ He wrote a cheque and handed it over.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a sample with you, or the gun or the snap?’
‘No chance. I put it all right back where I found it. If I go to look for it and it’s gone, stiff shit. My question’s answered.’
‘So only you and I know about it?’
‘Right. I told my boy Tom I was thinking of diving off the point, salvage and that. Do you dive, Cliff?’
‘Snorkel only. When do I come up to take a look?’
‘What about tomorrow, Saturday?’ He looked out of the window and would have seen a clear blue late-afternoon sky if the pane hadn’t been coated with grime on the outside and dusty inside. ‘Bring your togs anyway. Be right for a swim. Do you play golf?’
I was thinking about what I had on hand, nothing that couldn’t be delayed in favour of a trip to the Central Coast on a fine February day. ‘Golf? No, why?’
‘I’m just across the way from the course. Good layout. Never mind. I’ll give you the address. I’m going up later tonight. Come as early as you like. I’m always up at sparrow fart.’
‘How long have you had the place?’
He blinked. ‘It was my wife Jessie’s place. It’d been in her family for a while. Dunno how long.’
Jessie Russell, a plump warm-hearted woman, had died of cancer three years ago. Bert had never recovered from the loss and I had to go quietly at that point.
‘I see. Have you got any papers on it?’
‘Nah. Wasn’t worth anything in those days. No mortgage or that. Jessie’s old mum left it to her and her brother and he died a good while back. We just paid the bloody rates. I suppose it’s worth a bit now, but I couldn’t sell it, like. You know
I didn’t know but I made the noises that suggested I did. He left and I poked around the office cleaning things up to allow for a couple of days absence. My mind was already working on the job. Local council records to trace previous owners of the property, neighbours, real estate agents, maybe. The items in the strongbox were another matter, but it looked as if I could count on a couple of days in the sun. I left the office and drove to the central branch of the Leichhardt library to do some reading up myself—on guns and gold and women’s fashions.
After the library, I stopped by the liquor store, not because I needed grog, but to take another look at Tom, who I assumed would be minding the shop. Tom was a skinny man in his middle twenties with pale hair, eyes and eyebrow, nothing like his burly father in appearance. He was stacking bottles into a fridge when I entered and the bottles rattled loudly when he saw me, but it’s a tricky job and that can happen. Didn’t mean he was nervous, although I could tell he didn’t like me. He was smooth enough with the transaction when I bought a bottle of Houghton’s White Burgundy.
‘Bob Menzies’ favourite drop,’ I said.
‘Whose?’
Tom would’ve been four or five when Pig-iron Bob died so you can’t blame him. Still, they should teach them better at school about the heroes and villains. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘How’s your dad?’
Not a flicker of the colourless lashes. ‘Okay. Gone up the coast for the weekend.’
‘Oh, yeah. Where’s that again?’
‘Dugong Beach.’
‘Right. You get up there much?’
‘Nah. Dead place. Good golf course, but. I bloody near parred it once.’
‘Good on you. Thanks.’
I went home and made an omelette to blot up the Houghton’s. The Leichhardt library hadn’t had anything on the law relating to treasure trove and there was nothing useful on my shelves. A year ago I could’ve phone up Cy Sackville, my lawyer and friend, and asked him to look it up for me. He’d have abused me and given me a brilliant summary of the matter at the same time. But Cy had been shot dead a year ago. I missed him and felt depressed when I thought about him. These days I try to keep my wine consumption down to less than a bottle a day, but the Houghton’s was a dead soldier by the time I went to bed.
* * * *
I was on the road by eight and reached Dugong Beach about eleven. Most of the vehicles that held me up seemed to be towing boats or carrying surfboards—it was that sort of a morning. At least I had swimming togs, snorkel and flippers in the boot and sunblock in my bag. I was part of the great tribe of Sydneysiders that heads for near and distant beaches when the sun shines, as if drawn by some kind of ritual or ceremony. If I knew Bert Russell, there’d be a barbie and some wine that slid down your throat like a perfect oyster. Ceremony.
After getting off the highway past Newcastle I went north on the old coast road and eventually hit the hamlet of Dugong Beach. I followed the sign to the golf course and wound down an unmade road with sandy edges towards the water. The fairly substantial houses up near the road started to give way to fibro and weatherboard places as the street narrowed, swung left in line with the coast, and petered out at a solitary stand of mangroves. Bert’s house was opposite the mangroves behind a thick screen of casuarinas, but I got a glimpse of a tin roof and a galvanised iron water tank.
I bounced down a rough track, brushing the trees on both sides and then drove up a slope to the house. It was a double-fronted weatherboard with a verandah running along the front and one side. A section of the verandah was protected by shadecloth and that’s where Bert was sitting in a deckchair, reading the paper.
I got my bag and took a look around before approaching the house. Bert’s 4WD Land Cruiser with trailer and dinghy attached was parked under a tree. I could see a shack of some kind, almost hidden in the bush a good hundred metres from Bert’s house and another building away to the right behind more she-oaks—a pole house with a flat roof. Newish.
‘Gidday, Bert. Thought you’d be fishing.’
Bert carefully folded the business section of the Herald. I wondered if he’d been checking the price of gold. ‘Cliff. Been out, hours ago. Got a few flathead. We’ll have ‘em for lunch. Good for the heart, or so they reckon.’
‘Heart?’
‘Yah. They say I’ve got a crook ticker. Feel all right, but.’
I mounted the steps and moved out of the sun behind the shadecloth. The temperature dropped immediately. ‘How much land’ve you got here?’
‘About three acres, give or take a few rods and perches. That dump back there went up in the Depression.’
I jerked my thumb to the right. ‘What about the house on stilts?’
Bert laughed. ‘They reckoned they’d be able to see the water if they went up like that. Might be able to see it from the roof.’
‘No other close neighbours?’
‘Yeah, there’s another place like this further back. Can’t see it from here, but. Jeez, my manners’re ratshit since Jessie died. Have a seat.’
I dropped into a deckchair and heard the sand crunch under it as the legs moved. Great sound.
‘Not too early for a beer, is it, Cliff?’
‘Got a light?’
‘Coopers, only one I’ll drink.’
He went into the house, heavy-footed and slightly bandy in thongs and flapping grey shorts, and returned with two stubbies. We uncapped them and drank, toasting the Australian way of life for those who were lucky enough to get a piece of it.
‘How’d you come to be digging holes?’
‘Planting a few vegetables. Jessie used to do it and I just thought I’d ... Anyway, I hoed up a patch and started to turn it over. Not too sandy just there. Shovel went in and hit the box. I cleared the dirt off and opened it. Then I put everything back and finished making the vegetable patch. Want to take a look?’
‘No time like the present. But I’ll have to take a sample of the gold and get a good look at the gun and the photo. I can’t do it crouching in the dirt.’
Bert rubbed the grey bristles on his chin. ‘The box can stay put though?’
‘For the time being, yes.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘Sure no-one’s around?’
‘Stan, the derro in the shack, sleeps it off till noon. He’s a useless bastard. I don’t have anything to do with him, but Jessie said he had some kind of a right to the place. The yuppies in the stilt house’ll be staring out to sea. Can’t see the spot real well from the other place. Oh, there’s some boatsheds on the beach and a couple of blokes live in them sometimes. Dunno what you could see from there, but they sometimes wander through a corner of the place to get down there. ‘S all right by me as long as they don’t drop their rubbish.’
I was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, sport socks and sneakers, good digging clothes. I followed Bert around the back of the house and waited while he reached under the back porch for a shovel. I took it from him and checked the shaft for splinters. ‘Let me start earning your money.’
He laughed. ‘Tell you the truth, I’m glad of your company. Tom never comes up here when I’m around. Brings, his mates from time to time. Here we go.’
The area behind the house was thick with kikuyu grass that needed slashing. There were a few shrubs and flower beds that had become weed-choked. Jessie, the gardener, was sorely missed. The vegetable patch was in full sunlight near the stump of a wattle. Bert pointed to the left.
‘Jessie grew the vegetables over there, see. But those bloody wattles grew up and the place doesn’t get much sun now.’ He kicked the stump. ‘This bugger rotted out and blew down and I reckoned that was the spot. Lucky, eh?’
‘We’ll see.’
Bert had cleared away a few square metres of matted grass and turned the loamy soil. He had tomatoes and beans on stakes. That is, the packets were thumbtacked to the wood. No sign of the vegetables. The pumpkins were doing well though, the vines snaking over the cleared spot and off into the kikuyu.
‘Right in the bloody middle,’ Bert said.
As a reflex action, God knows why, I spat on my hands before I wielded the shovel. The earth had been recently disturbed and after taking out one big shovelful, the blade hit the box on the next thrust. I worked for ten minutes shovelling it to the sides and scraping it away until the oilcloth came in view. I scraped away the earth and pulled at the wrapping until the lid was clear. It was a medium-sized sea chest that had once had a thin leather veneer over the metal. Moisture had got in under the oilcloth and this had long since rotted away, leaving a pitted, rusty surface beneath. That was encouraging; it looked as if the box had been in the ground a fair while. Two heavy clasps held the lid down. I cleared the dirt from around them and prized them open without much effort, using the screwdriver attachment on my Swiss Army knife.
‘When did you find this thing, Bert?’
He removed the old hat he had put on and scratched his head where hair hadn’t grown for many a long day. ‘I dunno. Couple of weeks ago?’
The lid opened easily and there they were— bars of dull, yellowish metal the size of cigarette cartons. They were irregular in shape and it was no use looking for serial numbers—this wasn’t bullion in the accepted sense. I hefted a bar and couldn’t guess at the weight.
‘You didn’t take them out to weigh them, did you?’
‘No fear. I know weights, but. It’s like I said, round about 60 kilos. Take a look at the other stuff.’
What I took to be the Colt was wrapped in chamois. The photograph was in a plastic sleeve of the kind used to hold bank passbooks back when people used such things. I took both items out of the box and handed them up to Bert. ‘Got a tarp or something? Wouldn’t want all this to get wet.’
Bert looked up at the cloudless sky, laughed, and tramped off towards his storage area under the porch. I opened the sharpest blade on the knife and took a long, thick paring from one of the gold bars. I wrapped it in a tissue and put it in my pocket. Then I closed the chest after moving several of the bars and feeling around to make sure there was nothing else inside. Bert came back and we threw a tarpaulin over the whole patch and weighted it down at the corners with chunks of firewood.
‘You’re a trusting soul,’ I said to Bert as we moved back towards the house.
‘How’s that?’
‘What’s to stop me bashing you and taking off with the lot?’
He grunted. ‘If I was that bad a judge of character I’d bloody deserve it.’
Good point, I thought.
We went into the house through the back door to the cool, dark kitchen. Bert lifted two holland blinds, turned on an overhead light and put the pistol and photo under it on the kitchen table. He opened the fridge and took out two more light beers. I was sweating after the exertion and swigged the drink gratefully. We sat down and I unwrapped the pistol. It was the standard, slide-action model and still had a very slight oil sheen. The magazine and breech were empty.
‘Old?’ Bert said hopefully.
‘Can’t tell.’ I picked the gun up and looked it over. ‘Serial number’s gone, of course. That’s the best way to tell. The thing is, a well-maintained weapon like this can be quite old and a neglected one can be new but look like shit. An expert’d be able to tell, maybe.’
‘What about the picture?’
I slid it out of the sleeve. Again, it had been carefully looked after. There was nothing written on the reverse. The photo showed a youngish woman, dark with big eyes and bold, handsome features. My research into female fashion had done no good at all. The hairstyle was a short crop and there was no way to date her clothes because she wasn’t wearing any. She was quite naked apart from a wide black ribbon with a pearl set in it around her neck.
Her figure was good, neither trained-down thin in the modern manner nor robust as in days gone by. Her expression was amused and there was something about the pose and attitude that was hard to grasp. There was something sexually ambiguous about it—or was there? Who or what was she looking at? I tried to imagine the photographer and couldn’t. I sucked down the rest of the beer.
‘How old?’ Bert said. ‘The photo, not the girl.’
‘Jesus, Bert, how can you tell? She’s not holding up a copy of the Telegraph.’
‘Good-looking sheila.’
‘Right. Someone must know who she is, or was. That’s a start.’
‘Reckon she’s a pro?’
‘Could be.’
Pros, guns and gold. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
I knew what he was thinking but my mind wasn’t running on the same track. I’m as keen on money as the next man and always in need of it, but this matter was intriguing me in an almost disinterested or theoretical way. Who was she and why did she matter so much to someone? And who was that someone? The beer suddenly had a sour taste in my throat as I considered the possibility that the woman could also be buried out in Bert’s backyard. I rejected the idea, but it nagged at me.
‘What d’you reckon, Cliff?’
I rewrapped the pistol and put the photo back in its sleeve. ‘I reckon I’ll have a swim, do some thinking and then start work, probably after those flathead.’
* * * *
In the afternoon, I strolled around the locality, checking on the other residents who had a view of, or were likely to have spent any time close to, Bert’s place. Apart from anyone staying in the boatsheds, they all had their own tracks to the beach and the trees very deliberately gave each block a good deal of privacy. I told the young couple in the pole house that I was looking for a property to buy in the area. They had sussed the place very thoroughly before making their own purchase, and they were happy to pass their information on. This block was swampy, that had a dodgy title, another had been the site of a council rubbish tip in the Fifties. Bert’s block was the best of the lot.
‘We’d have bought it if we could, wouldn’t we, darling?’ Greg said to Fiona.
‘Oh, yes. But Mr Russell didn’t want to sell.’
I told them I was staying with Mr Russell. I didn’t tell them what he thought about their pole house.
The house behind Bert’s was unoccupied and had a ‘For Sale’ sign with a ‘Sold’ sticker across it. The place wore an air of neglect and disappointment and I went along with Greg and Fiona’s suspicion that the sale had fallen through. Bert was right about the increase in value. This house, not as big or as well-placed as Bert’s, had fetched two hundred and twenty thousand, theoretically.
The boatsheds were set into the rock behind the dunes and comprised every kind of building material known to Australian man—galvanised iron, weatherboard, flattened kerosene tins, masonite and malthoid. They had the look of structures built during the Great Depression when people found and made shelters wherever they could. These were classics, with slipways down to the water made from railway sleepers and hooks cemented into the rocks that had evidently supported blocks and tackle.
Two men were sitting on the rocks in the thin shade provided by a spindly banksia. They wore singlets, baggy shorts and grey stubble. One of the men was scrubbing at a pair of once-white, now-grey sandshoes with a piece of soap-impregnated steel wool; the other was smoking and looking at the water.
‘Gidday,’ I said.
‘Gidday, mate,’ the smoker said. ‘Want a beer?’
‘No, thanks.’ I squatted down, took off my Sydney Swans cap and used it to dry the sweat on my face. ‘Mind answering a few questions?’
‘Shit,’ the smoker said. ‘You from the Council?’
‘Private detective. No trouble for you and your mate.’ I took out two twenty-dollar notes and fanned myself with them. ‘You blokes been coming down here long?’
The scrubber looked at the money and put his ratty bit of steel wool down on a rock, anxious to please. ‘Fuckin’ years, mate. In the nice weather. Mind you, it’s good weather here most of the time.’
I pointed back behind the rocks. ‘You come through Bert Russell’s place to get here?’
The smoker butted his rollie, got out his tin and prepared to make what was probably his millionth cigarette. He coughed cavernously as he did it, but his fingers were rock steady. ‘That’s right. Good bloke, Bert. He doesn’t mind. Slings us the odd can.’
‘Did you ever see anything unusual going on up at Bert’s place when he wasn’t there?’
‘Whaddya mean, unusual?’ the scrubber said.
I shrugged. ‘People around. Cars you hadn’t seen before. Anyone scratching about.’
The smoker shook his head. “The young bloke comes up with his mates and gets pissed. That’s about all.’
‘I mean further back than that. Years ago.’
I was banking on the fact that elderly people have sharper memories of the distant past than last week or the week before. The scrubber seemed interested all of a sudden. He took two cans from the esky and tossed one to his mate, who caught it deftly.
‘Hang on, Merv.’ The scrubber stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Clarrie an’ this is Merv, by the way.’
I shook both hands. ‘Cliff.’
“There was this one time,’ Clarrie said. ‘There was a flash car and that woman, you remember Merv.’
Merv grunted, lit his cigarette and blew smoke.
Clarrie opened his can. ‘His memory’s not as good as mine, ‘specially for women. Can’t get it up any more, can you mate.’
‘Get fucked,’ Merv said, popping his can.
Clarrie cackled. ‘Wish I could. Anyway, I’m a bit forgetful about yesterday and the day before, like, but I can remember things real clear back a bit. We were coming down here from the pub, real late. Fuckin’ hot night and we saw this car parked near Bert’s place. Big, flash car. And there was a woman in it. She opened the door and I seen her in the light. A bloody good-looker. Not Bert’s missus. She was a good sort, mind, that Jessie when she was young, but this was a real looker.’
‘Bullshit,’ Merv said and drank at least half of his can.
Clarrie was trying hard not to look at the money but he wanted it badly, and that made it hard to judge his story. ‘When was this?’ I said.
‘Now I can tell you that, sort of. It was the night that Gough Whitlam beat that little bat-eared cunt. What was his name? What year was that?’
‘McMahon,’ I said. ‘1972.’ Good news, Bert, I thought. Near enough to twenty-five years.
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of a car?’
‘Jeez, what was it, Merv?’
‘A Merc. White Merc’
‘I thought you didn’t see it,’ I said.
‘I remember now.’ Merv drained his can and made as if to throw it into the scrub. He remembered I was there and just crushed it in his hard hands.
‘Good on you, mate,’ Clarrie said.
It was impossible to tell now what weight to give to the story. I questioned them about what the occupants of the car were doing but Clarrie admitted that he didn’t know. There was a man around but he thought he might have just been taking a piss in the bushes.
Merv laughed. ‘ You were taking a few pisses in the bush that night. Shit, we were shickered after winnin’ the fuckin’ election.’
Which might have been a confirmation of a kind, but didn’t really increase my confidence in the information. I took the photograph out of the plastic sleeve and showed it to Clarrie, keeping my hand across the woman’s body and showing only her face. ‘Could this be the woman you saw, Clarrie?’
He rubbed his eyes and tried to blink away the effect of decades of sun, salt, sand and booze. Merv reached into the esky for another can but Clarrie seemed to have forgotten his.
‘Yeah,’ he said, drawing the word out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘The woman I saw looked like this one. She had on this tight dress. Great tits. Let’s see her tits.’
I put the picture away, gave them the money and took a can of beer from the esky. I plodded away along the dunes to the track that led up to the shack on Bert’s block. I’d have bet any money that Merv’s can went into the ti-tree as soon as my back was turned.
It was hot, even in the shade, and there was no breeze to speak of. The shack was more solidly built than the boatsheds and had been less exposed to the weather, but it was still a crumbling ruin with cracked and broken window panes, a sagging roof and a list to the right where some hardy vine was trying to pull it down.
There was only one door and it opened as I put my foot on the plastic milk crate that served as a doorstep. The man who stood there had once been an athlete; you could tell from the set of his shoulders and the lines of his body inside a gaping, buttonless pair of pyjamas. But that was a long time and many bottles ago. He was a once-sound but now battered and faded ruin, like his house.
‘Who’re you?’
‘Name’s Cliff Hardy. I’m doing a job of work for Bert Russell.’ I stuck out my right hand to be shaken and held the can of beer close by in the left. If you wanted the one you had to take the other. ‘Merv and Clarrie sent this up for you.’
We shook hands. The bones stuck out through the thin, dry skin. He dropped my hand, grabbed the can and popped the top immediately. He slightly tilted his grey, grizzled head; the faded pale blue eyes slid back as he raised the can to a mouth that was just a space, the lips having sunk into the toothless hole. He sucked the beer down in three long gulps, barely pausing to take in two wheezy breaths. I produced another twenty-dollar note.
‘I need to talk to you, Stan.’
He wiped his mouth and looked at me as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. ‘It’s happened, has it?’
‘What?’
The pale, red-rimmed eyes went shrewd. ‘You first. Better sit down.’
I thought he meant we should go inside but he merely kicked the milk crate away from the door with his bare foot and squatted down in the doorway with his feet dangling. I sat on the milk crate while he took a last, pessimistic suck on the can.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Forever.’
‘How come?’
‘You know Jessie, Russell’s wife?’
‘I knew her, yes.’
‘I’m her stepbrother. Her mother married my father, poor bitch. Jessie said I could stay here after I had my breakdown. I was in the war. Vietnam. Got shell-shocked. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I fought in Malaya,’ I said. ‘Different kind of war, but I’ve got some idea. Bert told me Jessie’s brother had died.’
‘That was her real brother.’
‘Does Bert know you’re his brother-in-law, sort of?’
He laughed, a surprisingly rich sound out of that ruined mouth. ‘No. She didn’t tell him anything about our fucked-up family or much about Gerry, I suspect.’
‘Gerry?’
‘Are you offering me that money?’
‘For information, yes.’
‘We’ll swap, then. You look like an insurance man or a lawyer who’s gone a few rounds. My guess is something’s been found?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. What? Where?’
‘You haven’t given me anything, Stan.’
‘All right. Try this. Young Tom Russell’s not Bert’s son. Did you know that?’
‘No, and it’s not worth twenty dollars.’
‘How about this then? Tom’s been asking me for years about something hidden here someplace. What’s that worth?’
I gave him the money. He folded the note carefully and tucked it into the pocket of his pyjamas. Once he started talking it was hard to stop him. He paused once, remembering that he was being paid, and I gladly forked over another twenty. He told me that Jessie Russell had been married to a man named Gerry Slim, known as Slim Gerry, who was a tall, pale skinny man. He was Tom’s real father. The boy was about six or seven, Stan calculated, when Gerry Slim was shot dead in his white Mercedes. Slim was a drug dealer and conman who’d formed a close association with some high-ranking American army officers who were stealing everything they could lay their hands on in Vietnam. Something went wrong and Slim paid the top price.
‘Would Bert know anything about this?’
‘Not a thing. She met Bert about a year later and grabbed him. Jessie wouldn’t have said a word. Too much to be ashamed of.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Jesus, I’m really emptying out the family skeletons. I wish I had a drink.’
I gave him another twenty. ‘You can buy something that won’t rot your guts.’
He gave the rich laugh again and put the money in the pocket along with the other notes. ‘Rotted away long ago. Christ, I’m glad to let it all out at last. The money’s a bonus.’
He told me that he had a sister named Vi who went to bed with Gerry Slim two days after they met at Slim’s wedding to Jessie. I produced the photograph and showed it to him in the way I had to Clarrie and Merv. He cleared his throat and spat over my shoulder. I was distracted and he snatched the photo from my hand.
‘No need to cover it up. I’ve seen it all before. Handled it, too. Told you we were a fucked-up family, didn’t I? Jessie was the only decent one among us. Just doesn’t make sense that she should go before me.’
I took the photo back. ‘This is Vi?’
‘That’s her. She was a great root, anyone’ll tell you. Except Jessie. Vi had a go at her, but Jessie wouldn’t be in it.’
There wasn’t a lot more to it. As I brushed away the flies, he told me that Jessie had agonised over her half-sister’s affair with Slim, but she was in love with him, bore his child and couldn’t break away. When Slim was killed she distanced herself from Vi and swore Stan to secrecy about it all in return for letting him live in the shack. About five years back, Tom had been up at the house with a couple of his mates getting drunk. For fun they had supplied Stan with all he could drink and he and Tom had had a drunken conversation in which a lot of what Stan was now telling me had come out. Tom had revealed that his father had told him before he was killed that there was something hidden at Dugong Beach, but he hadn’t said what or where.
‘Tom kept at me about it but I mostly said I knew bugger-all, which was true. I might have hinted around a bit sometimes, because he was free with the grog when I did. He searched the place inch by inch over the years, but he never found anything. Got a bit excited a few weeks ago and came up late one night. Bottle of Johnny Walker that time, but I didn’t know anything.’
‘Excited how?’
‘I don’t know. As if something had happened. He’s got bad blood in him, that boy.’
‘What happened to Vi?’
‘Drug overdose not long after Slim Gerry got shot. She had some money. Had a flat in Vaucluse, flash car, the works. She bought some heroin that was way better than the stuff she was used to and ... pfft! Out she went. That’s one thing about the grog, it’s hard to kill yourself with it in one session. ‘Course, a couple of million sessions, that’s a different thing.’
I left him with his sixty dollars and flies and made way through the scrub to the house. My shirt was sticking to my back and I was looking forward to one of Bert’s beers. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having sorted the whole thing out quickly and at very little expense. There’d be a few legal tangles to work through, but I thought I also stood a good chance of the twenty-five thousand. I noticed that my car was in the sun so I skirted around the house and put it under a tree. Bert’s 4WD where it had been but there was another car in the yard—a yellow Monaro with a black racing stripe. I’d seen the car before, parked outside the liquor store in Glebe.
I went into the house through the shaded porch and was about to call out to Bert when something told me not to. I stopped, listened and sniffed the air. Previously, the house had smelled of disinfectant and I hadn’t noticed any flies. Now there was another smell, urine, and flies were buzzing strongly. I rushed through to the kitchen and found Bert on the floor. The back door stood open. His trousers were stained and soiled and the flies were swarming. He lay on his back with his eyes closed and his mouth open. The room was disarranged, with a chair turned over and plates and saucepans and a frying pan that had been neatly stacked on the sink lying on the floor. I knelt down and felt for Bert’s pulse but it was a waste of time. He was well and truly dead and had been for a while. The open mouth was twisted in a grimace; some kind of froth had dried on his chin and there was a bruise on the right side of his face.
I stood up and looked out the back window. Tom Russell was squatting in the vegetable patch. I watched as he lifted a couple of the gold bars out of the strongbox and put them in a backpack. He tested the weight, added another bar and lifted the bag. I waited until he’d straightened up before I went through the door, jumped down the steps and moved quickly across to block his path.
‘You can put that down, right now.’
‘Get fucked. It’s mine.’
‘Your father’s in there dead and you’re out here robbing him, you little shit.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘He’s been like a father to you. Better than you deserve. Put the bag down.’
I was only a few metres away and very angry. He looked scared. Suddenly, he swung the bag up and heaved it at me. It would have done some damage if it’d hit but I sidestepped and it sailed over my shoulder. Tom grabbed a shovel and made a wild swipe at me, missing by centimetres. I lost balance and fell. He came at me bellowing and wielding the shovel like a battleaxe. I rolled out of the way and it dug into the earth. He reached for it but he was watching me at the same time and he fumbled long enough for me to get to my feet. He got hold of the handle but he had to change his grip to do anything useful with it and I hit him with a short right to the ribs. He let go of the shovel and flailed, gasping for air. I hit him again in the pit of the stomach and he collapsed, spewing beer and whatever fast food junk he’d eaten out over the grass.
* * * *
‘You hit him and killed him,’ I said.
Tom was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. His face was chalk white and his pleated drill trousers and smart white cotton shirt had dirt and vomit on them. I was having trouble stopping myself from hitting him again.
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘He fell over and hit his head on the table. The old bugger had a weak heart. He died of a heart attack.’
I’d covered Bert with a sheet, but his shirt had been buttoned to the neck. ‘I bet you did a lot to help him.’
He shrugged.
‘I had a look at that bruise. I reckon you clocked him with the frying pan when he tried to stop you getting the gold.’
He was rapidly regaining his cool. ‘You’d have a fuckin’ hard time proving that.’
He was right but I had to push him a little more.
‘The way you came at me, that was because you knew you’d killed him.’
‘Crap. That was because you were going to stop me from taking what’s mine.’
I had the solution right then and I smiled. He didn’t like the smile much. ‘You think it’s yours, do you?’
‘I know it is. My dad, my real dad told me about it. It was his, now it’s mine. Even if it was his,’ he looked down at Bert, ‘it’s still mine. I’m his heir.’
‘Your father was a conman and a pimp and a thief and probably worse. If you think you’re going to get anything out of this you’d better think again.’
He summoned up enough courage for a sneer and felt in the pocket of his shirt for his cigarettes. He got them out and I knocked them flying across the room. I put my hands around his thin neck and pulled him to his feet. I gripped beside the carotid arteries. ‘A good squeeze and you go out for twenty minutes. That’s long enough for me to take you down to the water and drown you.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
I increased the pressure. ‘You’re a worthless piece of shit. It wouldn’t worry me one bit.’
‘It’ll leave marks, like…’
‘The frying pan? Maybe, if they found you. But that wouldn’t do you much good, would it.’ I squeezed almost enough to cut off the blood supply, enough to give him a taste of it.
‘Don’t. Please, please, Mr Hardy.’
I eased up a fraction. ‘The alternative is you do everything I say. One refusal and I swear I’ll drown you and anchor you to the bottom. And I’ll wait until you’re awake to do it.’
‘Okay. I’ll do what you say. Okay.’
* * * *
I had him load all the gold into the back of Bert’s 4WD, including the ones he’d already put in his Monaro. Then he drove the vehicle down to the boat ramp and got the dinghy into the water. By the time he’d loaded the gold into the dinghy he was almost too tired to row but he was too scared not to. When he was utterly exhausted I got him to lie face down in the boat. He blubbered but he did it. I started the outboard and took the dinghy well offshore. Then I made Tom take off his shirt while keeping his head down. I made a solid blindfold from the shirt and tied it hard around his head.
‘Sit up!’
He groped and shuffled onto the seat. I took an oar and jabbed it gently into his crotch. He winced and I left it there. ‘Now, one by one, you take up those bits of metal and you drop them over the side.’
It took a while and the sun was fierce in the sky. By the time he’d finished his neck and shoulders were bright red from sunburn and his tears had soaked through the blindfold.