John Brady - Poachers Road

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he said. “But let’s finish here on a good note.”

“I don’t see how. You are doing a number on my family.”

“Really? I’m going to suggest to you things that were not handed down father to son because of your grandmother. Oh, the usual stuff came down fine, I imagine. How to plant potatoes, screw in light bulbs, fix a bike, shoot a rabbit, but from what I gather, your grandmother did her best to protect her kids from the past.

Whatever else had happened, this was a new generation. They wouldn’t be dragged into all that crap. Now there was a brave woman. Would to God all her generation had been like her.”

Something about Speckbauer’s face, his relaxed gaze and quiet tone, cooled Felix’s anger a little.

“What we don’t know,” he added in a murmur, “is if she succeeded.”

“That makes zero sense to me,” Felix said.

“I don’t know if you’re ready for it.”

“Just say it.”

“Your father.”

“What about my father? Now you want to spread the bullshit to him?”

A hint of humour flickered around Speckbauer’s eyes only. It faded quickly.

“Franzi, that bastard, he’s always right,” he said. “Always. It’s uncanny. He made you right from the start. ‘Mark my words,’ he said. ‘That guy keeps a lid on things. But he could plant one on your nose too.’”

“Is that in my file?”

“Ach don’t be paranoid. Of course not.”

“Well you make it easy for me to decide what to do here.”

There was a breeze beginning, and the cool morning air stung his nose. Speckbauer looked back toward the house, and then he turned and began a slow walk out beyond the shed and toward the fields.

“Your father had many, many acquaintances,” he said. “Good policemen often do. It’s their job to be able to find things out. How do you find things out? Through people. And your father was that kind of a guy, was he not? Sociable, outgoing.”

Felix nodded.

“Compared to his father anyway,” said Speckbauer. “He turned out the opposite, didn’t he, thanks to your grandmother, if I may say. But you hardly remember her, am I right? What were you, five?”

“Yes.”

“Cancer?”

“So I heard, later.”

“Okay. Now, your father got about a lot. He liked the outdoors, he grew up in the hills, all that. Right? Oh, and he had a knack for cars, perhaps from your grandfather? The old VWs, the Kubelwagens? ‘The thing’ we used to call them growing up. Christ the same air-cooled lump in them that the Beetles had. There were thousands dumped or abandoned after the war, did you know?”

Felix’s thoughts went immediately to the snapshots of his father leaning against an overturned VW up in the woods somewhere.

There he was, in his element, laughing along with his friends, big strapping guys off-duty too, out for a boys’ day in the woods.

“Your father had a good knowledge of the area, I would say.

Exceptionally good. I bet that your grandfather passed on a lot to him. ‘The lore’ I suppose you’d say.”

Speckbauer tapped his forehead.

“The maps in here,” he said. “Better than your satellites, I’d bet again. Can you imagine how valuable that was?”

“You’re working up to some insinuation here.”

“Which is?”

“That my father was in some racket. Or that he looked the other way?”

“I try to look at everything.”

“That’s a ‘yes’ then.”

“It’s an ‘I don’t know.’”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here. Nor would you.”

“You think I’m in on something,” said Felix. “That’s it.”

“Others may think that.”

“‘Others’ who?”

“I’m not going to get into that. Let’s conclude here. Your father was out and about even more than he usually was in those few weeks. Before his passing, I mean.”

“Right,” said Felix. “I think I’m beginning to get it now.”

“Go on, then.”

“How come a Gendarme drives an Audi? How much did he have to drink?”

“We know it was a used car. Your father was not drunk.”

“Well, thank you for that. I suppose I should be grateful or something?”

“Look, we don’t know where he was that afternoon. He was no stranger to a bite to eat and a krugl of beer up in Eagle’s Nest or wherever, but that’s where the trail ended. He was supposed to be on duty at the time, at his post in Judenburg. You knew that?”

“I found out about it later. People are polite. They didn’t want him to look bad.”

“Sure,” said Speckbauer. “People are polite. They didn’t want him to look bad. But he’d been doing this a lot.”

“So he was under suspicion?”

“No. Not then. Later and it was a bunch of unexplained things, open questions. It was not suspicion.”

“But for you?”

“I’m curious, that’s all. That’s why I pulled the file and read it.

Stuff comes across my desk. I’m like a guy with Alzheimer’s. Sometimes it makes sense, like a big jigsaw. ‘Two men, apparently Slavic/Balkan background, dead in the woods up in Hohe Arschloch, Styria.’ ‘A junkie overdosed in an apartment in Graz with a new quality of heroin.’ ‘A clown gets fired from a crappy factory job in Furstenfeld. Now he gets back at his employer who caught him drinking in the klo fifty times. He phones “anonymously,” says illegals come in at night in the factory, cleaning up.’ All that.”

“How does this come up here? What does this have to do with me?”

“It depends on how you view things,” said Speckbauer. He stopped and looked around. “And speaking of viewing things… ”

He pointed toward a mountain, and glanced at Felix.

“Jacobsberg,” Felix said. Speckbauer pivoted at pointed at another.

“Oberlach.”

“And if I went over the top of it?”

“You’re up on Sommersalm, by the river. It’d take a day.”

“Trails?”

“One only. There are awkward parts.”

Speckbauer kept looking about, but had no more questions.

“Did I pass?”

Speckbauer smiled tightly and resumed his walk. At the edge of the field there was a drainage cut. The ground to both sides was waterlogged and dark with the run-off.

“I was talking about coincidences,” he went on. “Now to superstitious people, or paranoids, there are no coincidences. But me, I am not like that. Well not during daylight hours anyway. What I mean is this: we Franzi and me see the daily ‘news’ we call it and note it. So, we think: two dead guys. From down south there in gangland? In the middle of nowhere? A new departure, a new group? Right by, well, within fifty kilometres anyway, of big towns like Weiz and Gleisdorf, all those new factories?”

Felix took mental note of how deftly Speckbauer stepped over the drainage cut.

“So there we are in our lair there in Strassgangerstrasse,”

Speckbauer went on. “And naturally we ask ‘What else has gone on here in the recent past in this neck of the woods?’ There is your father, his passing. And then, there is a copy of your notes as officer on scene, you and Gebhart. Kimmel One, Kimmel Two. This is a coincidence?”

Speckbauer stopped then and swore, and he shook his head. He drew out his mobile from his pocket.

“No wonder I’m feeling odd. I left it switched off. Christ and His mother.”

Felix took a few steps into the field. Speckbauer had stopped and looked down at the wet soil oozing around the edges of his shoes. Felix’s head was not clearing. He tried to imagine what his grandparents could be talking to Franzi about.

“There are lots of black spots up here, right?” he heard Speckbauer mutter. “And the signal you get here is piddly enough, isn’t it?”