Fresh sap oozed from a small hole
in the tree trunk. It had trickled down, red-gold in colour, and congealed.
“Is that a bullet
hole
sir?” he asked.
Inspector Sharpe came and
squinted at it.
“Could be.
Got a knife? Have a go at
digging in there but try not to scrape the bullet if it is one. We’ll keep
going.”
Stephen licked his lips and
seemed to go pale. He looked around. “I ... I don’t want to stay here on
my own,” he said.
Roger looked around. It was quite
gloomy and spooky. But still he felt some scorn for Stephen and it made him
feel happier.
Inspector Sharpe looked
irritated. “Constable, help dig out the bullet,” he ordered.
“The old man must have run down
here with someone chasing him,” Roger suggested.
“Could be.
Let’s keep looking,” Inspector
Sharpe agreed.
Roger went back to searching. A
broken twig here, a piece of crushed weed there, flattened grass, all showed
the direction. They went on down a steeper slope and through several clumps of
lantana for another hundred metres.
Then Roger’s senses noted a
change. He paused and looked more carefully.
“Sir, here.
Another
cartridge case!”
He pointed to his feet. While it was being picked up he
went on to something which had attracted his curious eye.
As he bent to look at a
splintered scar a few centimetres long on the side of a tree his nose, and then
his ears, made him look beyond it. A swarm of flies was buzzing above the
ferns. Roger looked more closely, wondering what the black coating on the grass
and ferns was. Then he froze and for a moment could neither move nor breathe.
Nausea welled up and he gagged.
Panting with fear and swallowing to hold down the rising vomit he turned and
caught Inspector Sharp’s eye and beckoned. “Sir,” was all he could
whisper.
It was dried blood.
Inspector Sharpe nodded grimly.
He called the others in. “We will search the area shoulder to shoulder on hands
and knees but avoid that area.” He pointed at the area of crushed and soiled
grass and ferns.
“Is ... is that blood sir?” Peter
gasped.
“Yes it is.”
“Oh my God!”
Peter gasped. He looked quite
sickly. Graham looked grim. By then Roger had regained control of his stomach.
He looked down,
then
pointed.
“Another
cartridge case sir.
And it’s different.”
So it was. It was slightly longer
and the brass was a different colour.
“Two guns,” the Detective
Sergeant grunted as he picked it up.
“They went down that way,
dragging the body,” Roger said, pointing along a line of crushed ferns and
grass.
“God Roger, you’re a bloodhound
today!” Graham cried.
Roger grinned but it was more of
a sickly grimace as there was so much dried blood that no tracker dog was
needed.
They followed the trail easily
for a hundred metres till they came to the reeds on the edge of the lake. Half
a kilometre away was the peninsula with Camp Barrabadeen on it and, in the distance,
beyond the cape, the buildings at Tinaroo Dam.
“This is probably where they
chucked the body in,” Inspector Sharpe suggested.
“Why didn’t they bury it, or
weight it down with stones to hide it?” Peter asked.
“Don’t know. They may have been in
a hurry or thought it wouldn’t be found quickly,” Inspector Sharpe replied.
Roger looked out over the lake
and shivered as his imagination recreated the horrible scene.
Graham also looked out over the
water. “That sun is getting a bit low,” he said. Roger looked and noted that
the sun was dipping behind a shoulder of the Lamb Range to the North West.
Graham checked his watch. “It’s
five o’clock. It’ll be dark in less than an hour. Can we go and find somewhere
to camp while it’s still light, please Inspector?”
“Yes. Off you go and thank you.
You’ve all been very helpful, especially you,” Inspector Sharpe said,
indicating Roger. Then he went on, “Sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Roger sir, Roger Dunning.”
The three boys went back up the
hill past the murder scene until they came to Stephen and the constable, who
was still gouging at the tree. Stephen asked where they were going.
Graham answered, “The Inspector
said we can go. We’re going to find somewhere to camp.”
“Not around here!” Stephen
replied, his eyes flicking anxiously around.
“Alright.
We’ll walk on. There’s another
camping area a few kilometres on. We should reach it before dark if we step it
out,” Graham replied.
Roger groaned inwardly. Step it
out! Besides he wanted to stay here to help look for more clues. But the others
obviously didn’t. They said goodbye to the constable and walked up the hill to
the lookout.
Once there they were on the mach
in two minutes. Roger barely had time to pull on his webbing and pack and have
a drink before the others, led by Stephen, were moving.
And step it out they did. They
went down the hill to the main road so fast Roger slipped twice and was lucky
not to have a fall. He called out for them to slow down, but in vain.
The sun was gone from the
clearing. All of their side of the mountains was now in shadow but, as yet, the
air wasn’t cold. The boys turned right onto the main forestry road and marched
briskly along.
Roger quickly fell behind. His
aches and pains rapidly returned and he was soon plodding, puffing and sweating
freely. Graham and Stephen vanished around a bend a hundred metres ahead. Peter
looked back,
then
halted till Roger reached him.
The two walked in silence.
Roger’s shoulders ached and he could feel sore leg muscles, a pinched right
little toe, rubbing on his left heel, chafing inside his thighs and soreness
around his hips but he said nothing. Instead he gritted his teeth and concentrated
on putting one foot in front of the other a fast as he could.
He paid no attention to the
scenery. Most of the time there was little to see, just a tunnel in the
rainforest, but a few times they passed across the heads of bays and inlets of
the huge lake. Only two cars passed them.
It slowly got darker and darker.
The sky overhead went from bright blue to indigo. Roger began to fear they
would have to spend the night camped in the rainforest just off the road. They
had done that on previous hikes when they had miscalculated and he had not
enjoyed it. Now he glanced into the jungle, which looked all spooky in the
twilight, and knew he didn’t want that.
“I wonder how much further,” he
grumbled.
“Another kilometre or two I’d
say,” Peter replied.
“Graham and Stephen could have
waited for us,” Roger complained.
Peter made no answer. The two
continued their march. Darkness seemed to close around them so that it became
difficult to see far into the jungle, or to make out details. The road became a
grey ribbon. Roger started to worry about snakes. ‘They come out at night to
hunt,’ he thought unhappily. He told himself it was winter and most snakes went
into hibernation. Then he remembered the red-bellied black and was twice as
scared.
At each bend Roger hoped to see
the other two waiting. He and Peter rounded the next bend. To Roger’s dismay
another gloomy straight a few hundred metres long stretched ahead. It was now
too dark to see his watch or read a map. He wondered where he had packed
his torch.
“Some sort of a clearing ahead,”
Peter said. They plodded up to it.
To Roger’s relief they got a view
out over the lake to the south. As they came out of the tunnel of jungle the
twilight seemed to be drawn back and in the distance there were even the last rosy
tints of the sun on some hilltops. A turnoff led down to the right into a
picnic area.
This was a small peninsula a
couple of hundred metres in extent. Most of it was a lawn of mowed grass dotted
with a few large trees. Several cars and tents were scattered across it. Roger
didn’t say so but he was very glad there were other campers there.
Stephen called to them from a
toilet block built in the edge of the forest. He pointed to where Graham was
erecting his shelter. Roger plodded the fifty paces and, with a loud sigh,
dropped his pack. He eased off his webbing and just stood for a minute,
trembling slightly.
“Roger, where’s your hutchie?”
Graham asked. “There are only these two trees. We can put up two between them.”
Roger just wanted to lie down but
he knelt at his pack and fumbled with the straps. Graham had tied a nylon rope
around one tree at chest height. Then he proceeded to tie the rope around the
other tree and to strain it taut. Next he draped his and Stephen’s ‘shelters
individual’ over them. These were standard army issue - sheets of plastic with
clips so that two could be joined together to make a tent.
Within the time it took Roger to
pull his shelter out of the top of his pack Graham had pulled each corner of
the ‘hutchie’ into position and fastened it to the ground with a wire tent peg.
This formed an A-shaped tent. Peter shook his shelter open and took Roger’s
from him and began to clip them together. Roger just sat down and leaned back
on his pack. He stretched out his legs and groaned.
Graham came to help Peter. “Don’t
just sit there Roger. Put your pullover on or you’ll get a chill,” he said.
Roger closed his eyes and swore
under his breath. He felt exhausted but he did not dare say so for he knew
Graham would pour scorn on him with comments on what a short distance they had
come. Sometimes Graham could be a real pain.
‘Just because he
can walk 30 or 40km in a day!’
But he was right. Roger felt the cooling
sweat was giving him a distinct chill.
With an effort Roger rolled over and
sat up. He groped in his pack and extracted his pullover. By the time he had
struggled into it Graham and Peter had joined their hutchie to the first one.
Stephen came back from the toilet, reminding Roger he badly needed to go.
Twilight was closing in fast and
the toilets were already hidden in the black wall of the jungle. Roger found
his torch and struggled to his feet. He made his way painfully to the building.
It was quite dark inside and he did not linger but after washing his face he
felt better.
On the way back to the campsite
Roger noted there were five other groups of campers but none was within fifty
metres of them. All seemed to have pressure lanterns or fluorescent lamps and
the sound of music and voices made a hole in the darkness. The smell of steak
sizzling on a barbeque gave Roger sharp pangs of hunger.
By the time Roger rejoined the
others Graham and Stephen both had their hexamine stoves alight. The flames
gave a cheerful and homely feeling. Roger picked up his gear and dumped it so
as to face the others, forming a rough circle. He sat down on his bedroll
and began digging in his webbing for his stove and mess tins. He opened
the metal stove, broke a square of hexamine in half and lit it with a match,
then placed it in the stove. The smell of the burning chemical was something he
loved. It made him salivate at the thought of food.
The flame flickered brightly in
the gentle breeze. He poured water into an aluminium mess tin and placed it on
the stove to heat. Then he rummaged in pouches and pack for his Milo, condensed
milk and food.
Stephen spoke up, interrupting
the companionable silence. “What’s that you’re heating Graham?”
“Braised steak and onions,”
Graham replied, scooping the contents of a can into his mess tin.
“Looks like it’s already been
eaten and passed through,” Stephen said.
Roger glanced across as Stephen
shone his torch onto Graham’s food. It looked a disgusting brown mess.
“Reminds me of the German
Concentration Camp joke,” Peter chipped in.
“Which one?”
Graham asked, stirring the mess
and quite unperturbed.
Peter changed his voice to give a
Germanic accent. “Today ve haf der
gut
news and
der bad news.
First der bad news.
There is
nothing to eat but horse manure. Now der
gut
news.
Zere is plenty of it.”
Graham and Stephen both guffawed
loudly. Roger smiled even though he’d heard it before.
“What are you eating Roger?”
Graham asked.
Roger held up a can.
“Beef meatballs and onion gravy for starters.”
“For starters.
You mean you’ve done your usual trick
of bringing twice as much food as the rest of us,” Peter asked.
“No,” Stephen cut in, “it’s the
onions. They’re for starters, essential for all farters.”