Authors: Peter Temple
‘Jesus, not enough coons here,’ said Hopgood. ‘We have to import another black bastard.’
‘Is there somewhere I can sit?’ said Cashin.
Hopgood smiled at him, showed his top teeth, a small gap in the middle. ‘Tired, are we? Should’ve taken the pension, a fucked bloke like you. Gone up where it’s warm.’
Cashin willed his facial muscles to be still, looked in the direction of the window, saw nothing, counted the numbers. There would be a day, there would be an hour, a minute. There would be an instant.
IT WAS the usual mess: desks pushed together, files everywhere, a draining board full of dirty mugs. Someone had left a golf bag in a corner, seven clubs, not all of one family.
Cashin was eating a pie, meat sludge, when Hopgood showed Dove in.
‘The supervisor’s arrived,’ he said and left.
Dove was in his early thirties, tall, thin, light-brown head buzz-cut in homicide style, round rimless glasses. He put his briefcase on a desk. They shook hands.
‘I’m here because they want a boong present when you arrest Bobby Walshe’s nephew,’ Dove said. He had a hoarse voice, like someone who’d taken a punch in the voicebox.
‘You can’t be plainer than that,’ said Cashin.
Dove looked at Cashin for a while, looked around the room. ‘Heard about you,’ he said. ‘Where do I sit?’
‘Anywhere. You eaten?’
‘On the way, yeah.’ Dove took off his black overcoat, underneath it a black leather jacket. ‘Got stuff to catch up on,’ he said, opening his briefcase.
Cashin didn’t mind that. He wrapped the remains of the pie, put them into the bin, went back to Joseph Conrad.
Nostromo.
He was trying to read all Conrad’s books, he didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because Vincentia told him that Conrad was a Pole who had to learn
to write in English. He thought that was the kind of book he needed— writer, reader, they were both in foreign territory.
Cashin’s mobile rang.
‘Michael called again.’ His mother.
‘Bit hectic here, Syb. I’ll do it first chance I get. Yes.’
‘I’m worried, Joe. You know I’m not a worrier.’
Cashin wanted to say that he knew that very well.
‘You could do it now, Joe. Won’t take a minute. Just give him a ring.’
‘Soonest. I’ll ring him soonest. Promise.’
‘Good boy. Thank you, Joseph.’
Ring Michael. Michael came to see him in hospital, once. He stood at the window, spoke from there, did not sit down, answered three phone calls and made one. ‘Well,’ he’d said when he was leaving, ‘chose a dangerous occupation, didn’t you.’ He had a thin smile, a boss smile. It said: I can’t get close. One day I may have to sack you.
Hopgood stuck his head in. ‘Cobham. The BP servo. Three in the ute.’
The boys were 140 kilometres away.
Cashin went out for a walk, bought cigarettes, another surrender. A cold night, rain in the west wind, the last of the leaves flirting with bits of paper in the streetlights. He lit up, went down the street of bluestone buildings, past the sombre courthouse, the place where young men finally found the stern father they’d been looking for. Around the corner, uphill, past dark shops to the old Commonwealth Bank on the next corner, now a florist and a gift shop and a travel agency.
Here on the heights of Cromarty the rich of the nineteenth century and after—traders in wool and grain, merchants of all kinds, the owners of the flour mill, the breweries, the foundries, the jute bag factory, the ice works, the mineral water bottling plant, the land barons of the inland and the doctors and lawyers—built houses of stone and brick.
Coming to town was a big thing when Cashin was a boy. The four of them in the Kingswood on a Saturday morning, his father with a few shaving cuts on his face, black hair combed and shining, his mother in her smart clothes, only worn for town. Cashin thought
about her touching the back of his dad’s head, the tongue-pink varnish on her nails.
He turned the corner at the Regent pub, a noise like a shore-break behind the yellow windows. When the shopping was done, Mick Cashin met his brother Len at the Regent for a drink before they went home. He dropped Sybil and the two boys on the waterfront and went to the pub. They bought chips at the little shop and walked out on the long pier, looking at the boats and the people fishing. Then they went up through the town, up the street he was now walking down. Cashin remembered that Michael always kept his distance from them, hanging back, looking in shop windows. It wasn’t hard to find the car, always near the pub. They got in and waited for Mick Cashin. Michael had his school case, he did homework, it would have been maths. His mother read from a book of riddles. Joe loved those riddles, got to know them off by heart. Michael didn’t take part.
Mick Cashin crossing the road with Uncle Len, laughing, hand on Len’s shoulder. Len was dead too, an asthma attack.
Cashin felt the wind on his face, the salt smell in his head. He was a boy again, the child lived in him. He turned the corner and went back to the stale air of the station, two elderly people at the counter, the duty cop looking pained, scratching his head. Someone in the cells was making a sad singing-moaning sound.
Hopgood and four plainclothes were in the office. One of them, a thin, balding man, was eating a hamburger and dipping chips into a container of tomato sauce, adding them to the mix. Dove was at the urn, running boiling water into a styrofoam cup.
‘Welcome, stranger,’ said Hopgood. ‘The bloke at Hoskisson’s just logged the ute. We’ve got fifty minutes or so.’
Hopgood made no introductions, went to the whiteboard stained with the ghosts of hundreds of briefings and drew a road map.
‘I’m assuming these pricks are going to Donny’s house or Luke’s,’ he said. ‘Makes no difference, a block apart. They’re coming down Stockyard Road. We have a vehicle out there, it’s had a breakdown, it’ll tell me when they pass. When they get to Andersen Road, that’s here, the second set of lights, they can turn right or they can carry on to here, go down to Cardigan Street and turn right.’
Hopgood’s pen extended the road out of Cromarty. ‘That’s too hard. So we have to take them here where it’s still one lane.’ He pointed at an intersection. ‘Lambing Street and Stockyard Road.’
He put an X further down the road. ‘Golding’s smash-repair place. Preston and KD, you’ll wait here, facing town. You’re group three. I’ll let you know when to get going so you’ll be in front of the ute. When you get to the Lambing lights, they’ll be red. They’ll stay red till we’re done. With me so far?’
Everyone nodded. The hamburger-eater burped.
‘Now when the ute pulls up behind you,’ he said, ‘you blokes sit tight. Wait, okay? Lloyd and Steggie and me, that’s group one, we’ll pull up behind them in the Cruiser and we’ll be out quick smart.’
Hopgood ran a finger under his nose. ‘And Lloyd and Steggie,’ he said, ‘I hereby say to you and everyone else I have received a message from on high and nothing, that’s absolutely nothing, can happen to these…these dickheads.’
He looked from face to face, didn’t look at Cashin or Dove.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Anything stupid happens, we run away and hide. We will starve the pricks out. This is not some kind of SOG operation. Detective Senior Sergeant Cashin, you want to say something?’
Cashin waited a few seconds. ‘I’ve given Inspector Villani and the crime commissioner an assurance that seven trained officers can pick up three kids for questioning without any problems.’
Hopgood nodded. ‘Detectives Cashin and Dove, you will be group two in the second vehicle behind the ute. Your services are unlikely to be needed. Any questions? No? Let’s get going. I’ll be talking to all of you. Code is Sandwich. Sandwich. Okay?’
‘If they’ve got a scanner?’ said Preston. He had a big nose and a small, sparse moustache, the look of a rodent.
‘Have a heart,’ said Hopgood. ‘These are Daunt dickheads.’
A uniformed cop came in. ‘The third one in the ute,’ he said, ‘it might be another cousin. Corey Pascoe. He’s been in Sydney for a while.’
They put on their jackets and went out to the carpark behind the station, a small paved yard carved out of the stone hill.
‘Take the Falcon,’ said Hopgood to Cashin. ‘It’s in better nick than it looks.’
They drove out in a convoy, Hopgood’s Landcruiser in front, then Cashin and Dove, behind them the cops called Preston and KD in a white Commodore. It was raining heavily now, the streets running with the lights of cars and the neon signs of shops, blurs and pools of red and white, blue, green and yellow. They crossed the highway and drove out through the suburbs, past the racecourse and the showgrounds, turned at the old meatworks. They were on Stockyard Road. The boys were out there, coming towards them.
‘This bloke know what he’s doing?’ said Dove. His chin was down in his overcoat collar.
‘We hope,’ said Cashin. The car smelled of cigarette smoke, sweat and chips cooked in old oil.
‘Sandwich,’ said Hopgood on the radio. ‘Group three, station’s coming up, should hear from me again inside twenty-five minutes.’
‘Group three, roger to that,’ said a voice, possibly KD.
Golding’s Smash Repair came into sight on the right, a big tin building, a scarlet neon sign. In the rearview, Cashin saw the white Commodore turn off.
The rain was heavier now. He upped the wipers’ speed.
‘Sandwich group one,’ said Hopgood. ‘Turning left.’
‘Group two, roger to that,’ Cashin said. He followed the Cruiser into a dirt side road, muddy. It stopped, he stopped. It did a U-turn, so did he. It stopped. He pulled up behind it, killed the lights.
A knock on his window. He ran it down.
‘Keep the motor running, follow us when we go,’ said Hopgood. ‘No more radio talk from now.’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t like this fucking rain,’ said Hopgood and went into the dark.
Window up. They sat in silence. Cashin’s pelvis ached. He settled into his breathing routine but he had to shift every minute or two, try to transfer the weight of his torso onto less active nerves.
‘Okay if I smoke?’ said Dove.
‘Join you.’
He punched the lighter, took a cigarette from Dove, dropped his window a centimetre or two. Dove lit their smokes with the glowing
coil. They smoked in silence for a while, but nicotine loosens the tongue.
‘Do a lot of this?’ said Cashin.
Dove turned his head. Cashin could only see the whites of his eyes. ‘Of what?’
‘Be the Aboriginal representative.’
‘This is a favour for Villani. He says he’s been leaned on about the Bobby Walshe connection. I quit the feds because I didn’t want to be a showpiece boong cop.’
‘I was in primary school with Bobby Walshe,’ said Cashin and regretted it.
‘I thought he grew up on the Daunt Setttlement.’
‘No school there then. The kids came to Kenmare.’
‘So you know him?’
‘He wouldn’t remember me. He might remember my cousin. Bern. They teamed up on kids called them names.’
Why did I start this, thought Cashin? To ingratiate myself with this man?
A long silence, no sound from the engine. Cashin touched the pedal and the motor growled.
‘What kind of names?’ said Dove.
‘Boong. Coon. That kind of thing.’
More silence. Dove’s cigarette glowed. ‘Why’d they call your cousin that?’
‘His mum’s Aboriginal. My Aunty Stella. She’s from the Daunt.’
‘What, so you’re a boong-in-law.’
‘Yeah. Sort of.’
In the hospital, he had begun to think about how he’d never stood with his Doogue cousins, with Bobby Walshe and the other kids from the Daunt when the whites called them boongs, coons, niggers. He’d walked away. No one was calling him names, it wasn’t his business. He remembered telling his dad about the fights. Mick Cashin was working on the tractor, the old Massey Ferguson, big fingers winding out sparkplugs. ‘You don’t have to do anything till they’re losing,’ he said. ‘Then you better get in, kick some heads. Do the right thing. Your mum’s family.’
By the time his Aunty Stella took him in, no one called any Doogue kid anything. They didn’t need help from anyone. They were big and you didn’t get one: they came as a team.
Cashin watched the main road. A vehicle crossed. No move by the Cruiser. Not the one. He put on the wipers. The rain was getting harder. Now was the time to call this thing off, you couldn’t do stuff like this in a cloudburst.
Another vehicle flicked by.
Glare of taillights on. Hopgood moving.
‘Here we go,’ said Cashin.
IT WAS raining heavily, the Falcon’s wipers weren’t up to it.
Hopgood didn’t hesitate at the junction, swung right.
Cashin followed, couldn’t see much.
They were at fifty, eighty, ninety, a hundred, the Falcon went flat, it couldn’t do more than that, something wrong.
He felt a front wheel wobble, thought he’d lose control, slowed.
Hopgood’s taillights were gone into the sodden night.
This wasn’t smart, this wasn’t the way to do it.
‘Get Hopgood,’ said Cashin. ‘This is bullshit.’
Dove took the handset. ‘Sandwich two for Sandwich one, receiving me. Over.’
No reply.
Golding’s Smash Repairs on the left, neon sign a red smear in the wet night. Car one, group three, Preston and KD, they would have pulled out, they would be ahead of the ute now, closing on the traffic lights.
‘Abandon,’ said Cashin. ‘Tell him.’
‘Sandwich one, abandon, abandon, received? Please roger that.’
Four vehicles, speeding in the rain on a pitch-black night.
The lights would be red. Preston would stop.
The ute would stop behind him. Three kids in a twincab. Tired from a long trip. Yawning. Thinking of home and bed. Were they Bourgoyne’s attackers? At least one of them would know who took the watch off the old man’s wrist.
‘I say again, abandon, abandon,’ Dove said. ‘Roger that, roger that.’
‘Say again, Sandwich two, can’t hear you.’
Coming up to the last bend, driving rain, the Lambing Street intersection coming up. Cashin couldn’t see anything except the yellow glow of street lights beyond.
‘Sandwich one, abandon, abandon, received? Please roger that.’