Peter Temple - Black Tide

We looked at each other. Without saying anything, we walked over to the feed barn, skirting the pools.

The big door came open under protest.

Walls of hay bales fallen, come apart. A mound where a broad aisle had been.

Cam went over to the pile, took a broken bale, pulled it off the heap, another, another.

I joined him, pulling hay away, getting hay all over my clothes.

Cam stopped.

I stopped.

Cam took his right foot back and kicked the hay.

Something solid.

Another grab of hay.

The tail-lights of a car, a dark-grey car.

In seconds, Cam had uncovered the back door, tried it, locked.

The front doorhandle, more scrabbling, Cam pulled it open.

The body came out sideways, falling into the hay, bringing with it a powerful smell of putrefaction.

For a moment, I thought I was going to be sick, swallowed, stood back.

Cam looked into the vehicle.

‘Another one in there,’ he said. ‘Head shot.’

‘Going bald?’

‘No.’

I kicked away some more hay from the back of the car, stood back, found a pen and wrote the registration on the palm of my left hand.

‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Put the hay back first,’ said Cam.

Heavy rain, sheets of water, began to fall as we turned into Sligo Lane. ‘Nice rain,’ Cam said. ‘Hate to have to change these tyres. Japanese tyres.’

I sat in silence, trying to think calm thoughts, until I felt my heartbeat return to normal. Then I took out the tiny mobile, looked for the On button, found it, paused.

No.

I put the phone away.

‘Think of anythin else,’ Cam said, ‘don’t tell me. Goin home now.’

The trip home was sedate, just under the speed limit all the way. I got Cam to drop me two blocks from Taub’s.

‘Thanks for the company,’ I said. ‘Not the best sort of outing.’

‘Could have been worse,’ said Cam. ‘Last outing like this I went on with you, a bloke hit me with a shotgun. Often. Kicked me too.’

‘There’s that,’ I said.

‘Anyway, I never went on this trip.’

‘Unless you went alone,’ I said.

Charlie was back, hobbling around. I did an hour’s work on the Purbrick construction, then stepped out of sight, switched on the tiny mobile and punched one-two.

It rang three or four times.

‘Yes.’

‘Dave?’

‘Yes.’

‘Recognise the voice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Use names on this thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I found Canetti. Dead. Shot in a water tank on a property belonging to Gary near Warrnambool.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Dave.

‘Two others dead there too, two blokes in a grey Camry.’

‘Jesus. Not Gary?’

‘No.’

‘Look for ID?’

‘I’m averse to sticking my hand into the jackets of people who’ve been dead for a fair while. What about you?’

‘Point taken. Get the registration?’

I read it off my palm.

‘Possibly hired talent,’ he said. ‘From far away. Didn’t think Gary had it in him.’

‘Gary? All of them?’

‘With help maybe. Don’t know who. You shouldn’t have gone without someone watching your tail. Very risky. Keep an eye out?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Dealing with pros here, Jack. You haven’t been putting the mobile on.’

‘Busy.’

‘Had something to tell you. Dean hired a car on April 3. Firm in South Melbourne. Phoned for it. It never came back. Turned up yesterday. April 5, some bloke had it parked for him at the Hyatt. Same day it got nicked from the carpark. Yesterday, the cops find the shell, stripped, in a shed out in Brooklyn.’

Pause.

‘Anyway, the bloke who parked it never came back. I showed the car parkers some faces yesterday. Probably our friend. There’s also the trip mileage. Bit more than the round-trip down to where he parked in the sea.’

Canetti had hired the car. Two days later, Gary had dumped it in Melbourne.

‘This is getting urgent,’ said Dave. ‘The worry is the other side gets nervous about you now, decides to do something.’

‘What about the casualties out there in the sticks?’

‘Don’t expect to see it on the news. Gary. Work on Gary. And put the mobile on.’

I put the phone away. But not quickly enough.

Charlie came around from behind the pillar, wiping his hands on several metres of paper-thin, fragrant plane shavings.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Mr Important Lawyer, got a new walkie-talkie. Smaller even. Should be getting on with a simple piece of work, three days late. No. He hides behind the pillar for a talk on the little phone.’

‘Legal business,’ I said. ‘An important client.’

He looked at me sadly. ‘Hah,’ he said. ‘Horse business, that’s what I think.’ Muttering, he limped off.

I wished it was horse business.

She came to the door in a towelling dressing-gown, knee-length, long, lean legs showing, hair damp again.

We stood in the hallway, both awkward.

‘This is better than ringing,’ Lyall said. ‘I was just thinking about setting off on a stalk.’

‘No need to approach me with stealth,’ I said. ‘I respond well to the full-frontal approach.’

She smiled the crooked smile, took my jacket lapels in her hands. ‘I’m not terribly full in the frontal,’ she said. ‘A source of humiliation to me as a teenager.’

She loosened my tie, pulled it off, hung it over a peg on the hatrack.

I slid my right hand into the front of her gown, felt ribs, moved upwards to the lower curve of a breast. ‘Beautifully adequate in the frontal,’ I said. I was having difficulty speaking.

Lyall looked me in the eyes, unblinking, unbuttoned my shirt, got to the waist. Her right hand kept going south, slowly, deliciously south, stopped, began to explore.

I loosened the belt of her gown. It fell open, flushed chest. I bent to kiss her breasts.

One hand in my hair. ‘Why do you always find me with wet hair?’

I disengaged my lips. ‘Just lucky,’ I said. ‘I like your hair wet.’

‘Feeling damp all over,’ she said. ‘For some reason. Let’s talk upstairs.’

‘I’m not clean,’ I said.

She took my hand. ‘I could stand another shower.’

‘Standing is what it may come to,’ I said.

It was after 9 p.m. before we got around to eating at the table in the warm kitchen: scrambled eggs made with cream and Roquefort cheese and tarragon, dash of Worcestershire sauce.

‘You have many talents,’ I said, drinking some of the riesling I’d fetched from the car. ‘Culinary, amorous, photographic. I’ve never quite understood photography. It chooses you, does it?’

Lyall combed her hair with her fingers. She was wearing a big grey cotton sweatshirt and trackpants, hair pulled back, no makeup.

‘You mean I can scramble eggs and I’m randy? Photography just happened to me. My mother was a painter, quite good, I think. She stopped when she got married, had my brother. Women did that then. Still do, probably. Just stop, turn it in. As if it were nothing, something you’d outgrown. You got down to the real work, the husband, the kids. Anyway, she pushed me to paint. It didn’t take much pushing. I ended up besotted by art, the whole thing, painting and painters, went to art school in Sydney, won a scholarship to go to the Slade in London.’

She forked up some scrambled egg, chewed, drank some wine. ‘Nice wine. I was very intense. Art is all. I blush to think about it now.’

‘Blushing becomes you. The chest blush is particularly attractive.’

She hooked her ankles behind my right calf, squeezed. ‘Anyway, the intensity didn’t help me eat. I was on the breadline when I got a part-time job with a portrait photographer. A man called Rufus Buchanan.’