Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

He left until last a godfather of a nugget, four times as big as the tombolas he’d nicked as a kid. The weight alone told him it must be almost solid. The main body was in the shape of a bird, with enough of a fan rearing up behind it for him to call it The Peacock.

Kelly could only ever use this name in his head, which, as anyone in town would tell you, was addled by too many years on the turps until he’d settled into semi-sobriety. The Peacock was the king of his pickings, his prize for spending thirty years chasing the remains of alluvial gold that the earlier waves of prospectors had failed to find.

Had he been honest with himself, he would have admitted that the nugget had brought him about as much luck as the bird it represented.

But honesty had never been Kelly’s strength.

He’d even let an innocent mate take the blame when he’d poached the nugget from the front seat of the ute belonging to the prospector who’d unearthed it.

And as greed succumbed to reason he’d realised that he had a gold piece too distinctive to cash in, yet way too valuable to conveniently “lose” down one of the abandoned mine shafts that pocked the landscape.

Kelly kissed the big lump before packing it away with the rest and returning the satchel, with some difficulty, to its hidey hole inside the chimney.

With the brick too replaced, he shaved, using a dish of water and a manual razor. He didn’t believe in wasting electricity to cut hair, even if his humpy had been connected to the mains. Which it wasn’t, because he’d be damned before paying money to a state institution!

He closed the ritual by lifting a tan leather dog collar and lead from a nail behind the door. The dog tack was stiffened with fencing wire so that the lead and collar held firm when he gripped the loop of leather in his right hand, even without a dog in the collar.

“Come on, Ben.” Kelly gave a sharp whistle. “Show yourself, boyo, pub time!”

Anyone who heard him would think him mad, he knew that. Half the town said so already, and the other half thought it but was either too kind or too timid to say so. Not to his face. But he rather liked the idea of a dog called Ben.

Ben Hall. After the bushranger who’d plundered the nearby hills until felled by police gunfire at Billabong Creek.

“Ned Kelly and Ben Hall,” he said aloud, then laughed before whistling up the dog again. “Ah, there you are at last, you mullocky mongrel...”

Kelly stooped and fastened the collar, then, lead in hand, he unlocked the door and set out for his regular Friday night pint of lager in the public bar at the Hargreaves.

Ben Hall was a popular figure in the bar, and Kelly knew he’d receive his fair share of comments on the state of the dog. Except, of course, the collar was empty because there was no dog and never had been. You had to wonder, sometimes, who was madder, the pub patrons or the wild-eyed old man who conned them into seeing a dog that wasn’t there.

A faded mustard Land Rover pulled into the angled parking outside the Hargreaves Hotel. Publican Eleanor Parry stopped restocking the bar fridge to study the vehicle.

The mirror over the public bar caught her — back straight as a ramrod despite a birth certificate that put her age the other side of sixty. She disguised the years with pancake, mascara, and a slick of scarlet lipstick she considered totally appropriate for an ex-cop who’d taken on a run-down pub and pulled it up by its bootstraps.

Yet there was enough country copper still kicking in Parry to justify keeping the snap-locks on her handcuffs lubricated with machine oil.

Her ice-blue eyes widened as the lean, dark figure slammed the door as hard as one does when a vehicle reaches that precarious state between sentimentality and the scrap heap.

The former police sergeant made a quick assessment — she couldn’t stop herself, even after ten years out of the force. Caucasian, male, thirties, tanned — suggesting a job outdoors or enough money to spend a lot of time on the coast. Probably the former, given the clapped-out state of the Land Rover.

“Holy hell,” she murmured as the stranger removed his Akubra and pushed open the heavy pub door with his right forearm. In his left hand was what looked like a small thermos flask, wrapped in a cloth.

The lines in Parry’s life-honed face set as the visitor peeled off a pair of wrap-around lenses. The big woman’s flint eyes narrowed. “You the Forrester kid?” She shook her mane of bottle-burgundy hair in disbelief. “For a minute there, I thought you were your old man.”

Forrester held the look, read the mistrust, returned it. “That’d be hard.”

Parry picked up a chewed biro and scribbled something illegible in an invoice book. “Your dad still... away?”

“Nope.” Forrester surveyed the premises. He’d heard Eleanor had introduced some brassy class to the old pub. There were panning dishes hung on hooks fastened over a low-slung beam, sepia photographs of the gold rush, local produce arranged on a dresser. “Did his time and got out.”

“So...” Parry summoned a wary smile, felt it flicker and let it die. “What’s he up to now?”

“Not a lot.” Forrester pulled the cloth away from the container and put it on the counter. “He’s in there. Only been out six weeks when he died.”

Parry shifted her weight from one black patent killer heel to the other, and back again. She stared at the urn. It hadn’t been easy, watching her bent senior sergeant arresting the father with the mother already dead.

Harder still when he claimed all the credit. She’d spoken up only to see her chance at promotion permanently shelved.

Welfare authorities wearing well-meaning smiles had stepped in to deal with the Forrester kids. The girls had been fostered out back in Sydney. The boy had been just old enough to slip into the shadows of the outside world.

Now Parry felt her glance darting between the urn that contained the senior Forrester’s ashes and the coolly seething face of the son.

“Is that what your dad wanted?” Parry grabbed a tea towel and began drying glasses with undue vigour. “To be laid to rest, here!”

“At the old cemetery.” Forrester picked up the urn and wrapped it again in the cloth. “You got a law against it?”

The convicted thief’s son didn’t wait for an answer, and Parry’s copper training told her not to attempt one. But the change of direction with the next question surprised the woman who’d once claimed she’d heard everything.

“Want to buy some honey? On commission? It’s local.”

“Where’d you get it?”

Forrester didn’t rise. “Mudgee, Sofala, far north as the Burrendong. I’m an apiarist. It’s what I do.”

The retired copper’s relief was such that she heard herself gushing. Hadn’t the father kept bees? To supplement the meagre living he’d made as a prospector who did a bit of rabbiting on the side.

If only he hadn’t been fool enough to get greedy.

And to get caught with evidence linking him with the theft of one of the biggest gold nuggets west of the Great Dividing Range.

Parry shook her head, rejecting the memory. If the boy had made good, then that was some sort of atonement.

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said, opening the till.

It took Forrester the best part of a warm afternoon to track the bees to the orchard surrounding Kelly’s hut.

He’d seeded a small wooden box with honeycomb and brushed the cork from a bottle of anise oil lightly across the lid. Then he lured four workers from a patch of Paterson’s Curse, fluoro mauve in the syrupy heat, into the bee box and felt it throb with their wrath.

“It doesn’t take long for their greed to overcome their outrage...” His father’s homily carried to him on the wind. Across the purple flower heads. From an afternoon in a long-ago September when the earth surrendered the scent of dust and pollen to him. In that moment he’d realised his destiny would be inextricably linked with the annual honey trail.