John Brady - Poachers Road

Felix gave him the eye.

“Well? You broke up with your girl?”

“No.”

“Okay. Let me make a guess. But before I do, let me tell you something. I could kick myself for telling you about that phone call, you know. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay,” said Felix. “I’d have found out anyway. And I would have been annoyed you hadn’t told me.”

Gebhart gave a small nod. He took a swig of beer and held it in his mouth before swallowing it.

“Well yes,” he said. “It was a message for you after all. But if I’d known you’d be flying down at top speed from the far side of the country, well I’d have waited.”

“Wah wah,” Felix murmured, and shook his head.

“Don’t start that what-if stuff, you hear?”

“I can’t help it. Maybe he would have told me then, if I’d not been so”

“Stop that, I said. Are you listening to me at all?”

Felix nodded.

“How can you know?” Gebhart said. “And even still, what’s ‘a secret’ for the likes of him? It could be anything. You don’t know.

Nobody knows.”

Felix thought again about asking Gebhart his son’s name. If his Down’s was severe. If Gebhart knew a lot about that sort of thing.

Of course he must, he upbraided himself. He looked up from the bottle he had been cradling in his hands.

“But why would he not tell his own parents? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Tell me about it,” said Gebhart. “Isn’t that what I’m saying to you here? Whatever he wanted to tell you, this ‘secret,’ well they’re wily enough, those Down’s kids. They want what they want. So it was nothing really, believe me.”

“But,” Felix said. “It’s just so… what happened. It’s so.. I can’t say what.”

“Hard, isn’t it?”

“That kid, I mean, the son. An only child. And now this?”

Felix’s gaze drifted over the photos again. Gebhart said nothing.

“You said ‘suspicious,’” said Felix. “Did you mean it?”

“Yes, I meant it. The word I got from the fire brigade guy up there, old hand, Dorner’s his name, yes said something started it.

I think he even said he thought paraffin. That’s just blather for now, until we hear from their experts. And show me a farm where they don’t keep paraffin or gasoline, anyway.”

“How come no one got out, or woke up?”

Something changed in Gebhart’s expression.

“You’re asking the wrong cop there, kid. Me and Korschak got there pretty damned quick, just the same time the feuerwehr were coming in. The place was an inferno. That I know. The arson guys showed up after a couple of hours, along with some forensics. They went through what they could.”

Gebhart shrugged.

“I don’t know. I did perimeter for a while, talked to a few neighbours. Then a car with two uniforms came from Graz to take over the site. They, er, got them out, the remains, before I left. So they’re getting the P.M. done.”

“How did it happen?”

“The fire? I don’t know.”

He held up his bottle to study the label.

“But I think your mind is working overtime here.”

“You think it was deliberate?”

Gebhart put down the bottle.

“I try not to think about it.”

Felix watched him turn the bottle slowly on the surface of the table. Then he looked at the pictures on the wall. A minute passed.

He noticed skis, mountain rescue gear, a helicopter in the background in one of the pictures now.

Again he thought back to what Gebhart had told him.

“Look,” Felix said, and prepared to get up. “I’ll go.”

“Finish your beer. Don’t waste it.”

“Why am I here? I just feel bad about it. Maybe I’m going nuts?”

Gebhart nodded.

“Could be,” he said. “Do you want some advice?”

“Can I try a sample first?”

“Sure. It’s not hard. A) Don’t drive that scheisse of a car you have at supersonic speed anymore.”

“B?”

“There isn’t a B. But if there was, it’d be this: go back to your holiday. Don’t heat up your brain over this stuff. You’re shocked.

That’s a nice, normal human reaction. But your best place is you know. Just for the record, did anyone ask you to drive all the way back here, without your girl too?”

“She’s taking the train down tomorrow,” said Felix. “It’s just not the same; I don’t want to go back now.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well, the trekking thing was only for the weekend. Italy, still. I hope.”

They fell silent again. Felix heard the TV through the walls.

“Paraffin,” he said after a while.

“Gossip. I heard one of them say it, but that’s all.”

Felix took another mouthful of beer.

“Why are you avoiding this, Gebi?”

“Avoiding what? Avoiding making a depp out of myself, jumping to conclusions?”

“You’re not suspicious, not even a bisschen, the tiniest bit?”

“Look,” said Gebhart. “Give them a day or two. What if it’s just an accident? There’s the father, Himmelfarb, and he’s not sleeping because the kid is up all night. There’s a word for that, I think.”

“‘Sleep deprived.’”

“Right. So wait for a preliminary, I think they call it. Nothing’s instant in the job, even for the PlayStation generation.”

“I feel a lecture coming on.”

Gebhart took a long drink and sighed.

“It’s like your mutti always told you: Morgen kommt besser.”

“‘It’ll be better in the morning?’ My mom never said that.”

“Listen to you. You are like our resident bookworm in there.

Whatever I say, she is always ‘But,’ or ‘No,’ or ‘You haven’t a clue.’”

“Did I say those things?”

“You don’t have to. What’s behind the look, or the words is:

‘You’re a dummy. No, you know zip because you’re not online or glued to your mobile. Geezer.’”

“What century were you born in, Gebi?”

“This is how you repay hospitality? Beer?”

Felix was sure he saw a flicker of humour on Gebhart’s face.

“What century? Well I sometimes wonder. Come now, you don’t want to hear my philosophy, if you can call it that.”

“‘Go home, get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll see.’”

“Exactly.”

Felix’s gaze strayed to the photos again, and his mind wandered to questions he’d someday ask Gebhart.

“A fine bunch, huh?”

Felix broke his gaze on the pictures.

“Guys you worked with?”

“Genau. Some times we had, I tell you. By God they could enjoy themselves, these fellows.”

“Not you?”

Gebhart hesitated before replying.

“Things you do,” he said, and shrugged. “At certain times in your life.”

Giuliana had a sleepy voice. Her replies were slow and yawny.

“You’re reading, aren’t you,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know you. Because you get into something and you don’t stop until it’s finished. What is it, are you back to those old bores like Hesse?”

“He’s not an old bore. Everyone should read him again.”

“I’d rather be tearing your clothes off and reading your skin, and watching your face as you come.”

“My my,” she said, and he knew she was smiling. “You’ll have to tie your hands behind your back when you go to sleep tonight.”

He slouched back further in the sofa.

He felt himself putting the conversation on automatic while his thoughts wandered.

“You went out for a walk at least?”

“Yes, the guilt got to me. I met up with a wife of one of your mountain guys. She’s not into the crazy biking and…”

He listened, but he was thinking about what fire would do to an old house like the Himmelfarbs’. It would have been an inferno in minutes. But Gebi was right: what farmer wouldn’t keep paraffin around for getting a blaze going on a heap of weeds or rubbish, or even running a heater to keep the chill off newborns in the shed.