Matt Eaton - Blank

He pushed his chair back so violently it smacked into the filing cabinet. For the first time in his career, he fled in alarm from his own office. The bile was rising in his throat as he kicked open the door to the men’s toilets. He threw up in the sink, then in embarrassment and disgust he recoiled from the toxic soup of last night’s beers and this morning’s bacon and eggs and sausage roll. He retched again, then wiped his mouth on a paper towel. He hadn’t ralphed that hard since he was a teenager. He stared at his own sorry visage in the mirror. The teenager had long gone. A fat, pathetic old man had taken his place.

There was much to be said for the power of memory in the solving of crime. The little details so often proved invaluable in building a case strong enough to withstand the rigours of trial by jury. He had always prided himself on sorting the wheat from the chaff, on being able to sift the pearls from the pig shit. But he was beginning to remember things that made no sense. Flashes of chaos ran through his head, a town on the verge of panic, people lost in the trample as the Army evacuated people to… where? He couldn’t recall. Still staring at the reflection of his own pitiful inadequacy he found it hard to decide what was worse – staying in here with no-one but himself for company or going back outside to face Luckman. He exited the toilets and was unsurprised to find the Captain waiting for him.

“Do you remember the emergency warning that sparked it all?” Luckman asked.

“No,” he lied.

“Sure you do. It was a warning about the sun and how it had ejected a critical level of electromagnetic radiation.

“Come on, detective. You helped gather up everyone in town on buses, remember?”

Pollock walked back to his office, resisting the temptation to slam his door in Captain Luckman’s face. How come he knew so much?

“It’s all right, it doesn’t matter,” Luckman relented. “I’m guessing you noticed there is a US Army truck parked in Clarence Paulson’s shed? Made any inquiries on that front?”

“I haven’t seen any damn truck at Paulson’s place.”

“Then you haven’t looked very hard.”

This guy was really pushing all his buttons.

“Look, do me one favour,” said Luckman. “Take me to see Warigal.”

Pollock recoiled in confusion. “Why?”

“He’ll confirm everything I’m telling you.”

“Why should I believe what that little black bastard tells me?” Pollock spat back.

Captain Luckman sighed. “OK, let’s pretend for a moment you aren’t really a racist blowhard and proceed with a presumption of innocence. Besides, deep down you already know he’s not guilty.”

Pollock had punched men to the ground for saying far less. But right now he wasn’t up to a fight. He muttered a procedural “get fucked” by way of a comeback, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“None of this is your fault, if that’s any consolation. What’s the autopsy report say?”

Pollock spotted the report on the top of his in-tray. How long had it been sitting there? He hurriedly scanned the coroner’s findings. “Cause of death blunt trauma to the head. But the body had been moved, like I told you before.”

“He didn’t die on the river bed.”

“Nothing terribly toxic in his blood… but there was a high concentration of auric chloride in his stomach.”

“What’s that?” Luckman pondered.

“Says here it’s the result of ingesting gold. It reacted with the hydrochloric acid in his stomach.”

“He’d been eating gold?”

“Or someone forced him eat it,” Pollock suggested.

“None of which sounds much like an act of drunken violence,” Luckman concluded.

Pollock wasn’t so quick to dismiss the possibility. He’d spent years dealing with the blacks and their squalid town camps. Luckman wasn’t like them. He was from the city. Had he ever mopped up after a fight with a broken beer bottle? Did he know how many children in those camps were neglected or abused by their own family members? It was easy to call someone racist when you weren’t the one living on the front line.

Luckman was still talking. “…why I need to speak with him. I’ve had no contact with Warigal. He’s been in your lock-up virtually the entire time I’ve been in Alice Springs. If he can confirm my story, as I believe he will, surely that will prove to you I’m telling the truth.”

Even though it felt like an admission of defeat, Pollock rang the constable on duty at the cell block. “Get Wozza out and whack him in interview room number one.”

Upon arrival they saw the prisoner’s left eye was swollen and bruised. Warigal didn’t have the injury when Pollock had interviewed him two days ago. One of the uniforms had used him as a punching bag.

“Cops do that to you?” Luckman asked him. Warigal nodded. Luckman sighed. “Go on detective, ask him.”

“Warigal, I want you to tell me whether you’ve noticed anything strange in town lately.”

For some time it appeared as if the prisoner either hadn’t heard the question or was ignoring it. Finally he looked up at them. Something was troubling him deeply.

“Anything at all,” Pollock prompted.

“You mean like everyone in town forgettin’ everything? Or maybe like when some strange spaceship comes down out of the sky and dumps Father Clarence’s dead body at my feet on the riverbed?”

“Spaceship?”

Luckman didn’t look surprised. In fact he reacted like he had just been vindicated.

“He remembers because he’s been in your lock-up,” said Luckman. “All the concrete has shielded him from the psychic amnesia program.”

Luckman was starting to sound paranoid and delusional.

“Wozza – remember the day the Army came?” the soldier asked.

Warigal frowned. “The Americans?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“I thought we were being bloody invaded. All those trucks roaring into the camps. I thought shit, here we go, off to Afghanistan. They’re gonna dump all the blackfellas over there with the Muslims.”

Pollock felt uneasy again. Luckman was staring at him and actually started to laugh. “But they were saving you, weren’t they? You have this man right here to thank for that. He went to the blackfella council to make it all happen. You buggers would all be vegetables now if Detective Pollock hadn’t done what he did.”

Pollock dimly recalled confronting the council chairman. If memory served he hadn’t exactly treated the man with a whole lot of respect, but he’d been under time constraints and in the end they got the job done. He rubbed his hand across his bald and sweaty pate. “Look, I hear ya. Something big is going on with the Yanks. I’m not gonna pretend I understand. But I’m sorry – as a policeman I have to say this isn’t exactly ironclad evidence of Warigal’s innocence.”

“True,” Luckman admitted. “But I know where we can find that evidence. We could take a little drive to Pine Gap and check out the base for ourselves.”

“That’s US territory out there.”

“Not it’s not – it’s a joint Australian-US facility.”

“I’m not gonna create an international incident just to keep you happy – it’s more than my job’s worth.”

“Detective, there’s no-one left alive to take your job away. You and your fellow officers are all that stands between this town and complete social breakdown.”

“Time to man up, eh?” Warigal suggested.

Pollock resisted the impulse to smash Wozza’s face into the table.

Luckman’s voice softened. “Curtis, this reluctance you’re feeling is all down to them. You might be many things, but you’re no coward.”

“All right, all right,” Pollock relented. “Just do me a favour and lay off the pop psychology.”