Peter Temple - Dead Point

I was turning to leave, leave the room, the apartment, the building, when I saw, on a shelf behind a chrome-plated exercise bicycle, a bag, a leather-look bag, the size of a small toilet bag.

I went over and picked it up, opened it.

It held a camera. A small digital video camera.

The camera that filmed Susan Ayliss?

Now it was time to go.

Leaving Cathexis didn’t require any codes. In a few minutes, I was on the wintry street, curiously elated for someone who only hours before had been running for his life in a public park.

The woman at Vizionbanc in South Melbourne took the camera away and when she came back her tone was apologetic.

‘Only one image on it is retrievable,’ she said. ‘Sometimes everything isn’t completely wiped. A beach. Want to see?’

I followed her into a room lit by the glow from half-a-dozen monitors on one wall. She took me to the end one. It showed a beach, a featureless and windy beach by the look of it, sea to the left, low dunes to the right, scrubby vegetation. There were two sets of marks in the sand, possibly footprints. In the distance, at the right of the frame, on the dunes side, there was something solid, just a dark blob.

‘What’s that?’ I pointed.

‘Vehicle,’ she said. ‘Old Land Rover, Land Cruiser, something like that. The boxy shape.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘That’s a gift.’

‘Trained at huge expense by the Defence Department,’ she said. ‘We pass the savings on to our clients.’

She went to a work station and fiddled at a console. The dark blob now filled the screen. It was a fuzzy image but it was a vehicle, not quite side-on to the camera, definitely a four-wheel drive, grey.

‘Land Cruiser,’ she said. ‘Short wheelbase.’

‘Is that the date the picture was taken? On the bottom.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I use a phone? Can someone ring me back here?’

She nodded, took me to the reception area.

I rang Eric the Cybergoth, told him what I wanted. Then I looked at the street, the passers-by, at the rain falling on the Stud where it stood in the loading zone. No beading was taking place on its blue-grey skin. The parking persecutor, the grey ghost who left the message for me around the corner from The Green Hill, he would take better care of the Stud. Love it more. Cherish it. Wax it. It would bead for him. I had his number. I should sell it to him.

On the other hand, if he waited a short time, he could buy it much cheaper from my deceased estate.

The phone on the desk rang.

‘Jack?’

Eric the Lawless, master of the cybersteppes.

‘Yes.’

‘There’s one.’

‘What is it?’

‘Land Cruiser. ’82. Want the rego?’

‘Yes.’

I walked around the corner to a place I’d noticed called Cafe Bonbon, just two seated customers and a person getting a takeaway. I ordered a short black and a cold croissant from the coffee-maker, a saturnine youth in a chef’s white top.

There was a used copy of the Herald Sun on top of the unwanted newspaper dump. I took it to a seat, sat down carefully, the day so violently begun taking its toll on my back, my neck, on everything that supported my unworthy skull.

My eyes had been on the front-page headline for a while before the small active section of my brain registered the big words on the page.

DRUGS BUNGLE LINK TO KILLING

The opening paragraphs said:

Police sources last night linked the murder of a man at Melbourne Airport to the disappearance of cocaine worth more than $2 million in a bungled Federal Police operation.

The dead man, Alan Bergh, 47, of Toorak, is believed to have been involved in a ‘controlled importation’ of cocaine from South Africa that went badly wrong and allowed smugglers to get away with cocaine worth more than $2 million.

Victorian Police believe that the Federal Police operation was compromised from within. The Federal Police have declined to comment. Sources say the importation was financed by a Melbourne group looking for new drug sources. ‘There are well-known identities involved,’ a source said. ‘They’re trying to break away from their usual suppliers. The Federal Police had a golden chance to nail some dealers to the big end of town and they stuffed it up.’

The story went on to list other strange goings-on in the local drug squad. Bergh’s was the only name given. It was all speculation based on information from unnamed sources, but it had the unmistakable feel of a story planted by the cops and dressed up by a journalist.

I looked at the street for a while, something at the edge of thought, then I got up and asked if I could use the phone next to the coffee machine.

Cam answered at the second ring.

‘That pilot with the cap,’ I said. Harry and Cam used a pilot who wore a baseball cap backwards.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ve got a name. I need to find out if it filed flight plans recently. Local airports.’

A silence lasting just long enough to express wonder.

‘What’s the name?’

I gave it to him.

‘Call you on what?’

‘Hold on.’

I found a $5 note, put it on the counter. ‘Can someone ring me here?’

‘Sure,’ said the coffee-maker pushing the money away. ‘Twenty-five cents goin out, comin in’s free. What’s your name?’

I told him, read the number to Cam and went back to my seat, drank my coffee and ate the croissant without tasting either.

I didn’t hear the phone but the coffee-maker shouted my name.

‘What’s that hissing noise?’ said Cam.

‘Snakes,’ I said. ‘I’m in the jungle.’

‘That’d be right. The name flew from Moorabbin this morning. Filed a flight plan for Sale. One passenger.’

‘Any other flights to Sale?’ Sale was near the sea. Beaches.

‘June 4 there’s one. With passenger.’

The picture of the beach was taken on June 5. There was something very wrong here, something I should have considered earlier. I paid my bill and left. As I rounded the corner, cold rain blew into my face and ran down my neck and under my collar.

At the office, a message on the answering machine. Barry Tregear didn’t identify himself: The query. ID was by the bloke we were talking about. The dangerous one.

I closed my eyes, let my head fall forward.

Mick Olsen had identified Robbie Colburne’s body. Mick Olsen, drug cop, the commissioner’s suppository, receiver of messages from Alan Bergh, now the late Alan Bergh.

This was even wronger than I’d thought.

I rang inquiries, asked for the Shire of Sale. One last stab. But not in complete darkness.

When I turned off the tarmac, the western sky was the unnatural pink of denture plates. In the east, the light above the lakes was dirty grey and going quickly. I crossed a cattle grid and drove up a dirt road that made its way around boulders and stands of yellow box.

At the top of the hill, I stopped. The road forked and the landscape revealed itself. To the left was a bay, its right shore a narrow heavily treed peninsula. To the right, the country was open, grazing country, fenced into paddocks, with a belt of trees along the lake shore. The road to the right twisted down a long way to what looked like a cluster of farm buildings surrounded by trees. The left fork went to the peninsula, entered the trees and was lost from sight.

Dead Point, the map called the peninsula.

I was tired, sore everywhere, filled with a feeling of futility, the feeling that I was moving because I was scared to stop. Sharks couldn’t stop; they moved or they died. I wasn’t a shark. I was an old goldfish in a pond the new owners were filling with rubble, a fish swimming around trying to find water that had oxygen in it. A shaking of the head, a moving of the shoulders, creaks heard in the joining places. Time to move.