Authors: Peter Temple
Today, there were few leaves. Everything was trim, the local football legend and his son were obviously still employed, had been on the job recently, plucking weeds, mowing grass, raking gravel. He went by the kitchen entrance, through an arbour, leafless but with branches so intricately twined as to deny the light.
Single-storeyed redbrick outbuildings to the left, a paved courtyard, old pink bricks in a herringbone pattern, sagging in places, depressions holding saucers of water.
Cashin walked between two buildings, looked through an ornate cast-iron gate into a drying yard, washing lines strung between wooden
crosses, enough to dry the washing of an army. He went on, to where mown grass ran to a rustic post-and-rail fence, fifty metres away. Beyond that was a big paddock, its boundary a line of tall pines. The road lay beyond them.
He went back, around the south-west corner of the house. This was a clean space, a long empty rectangle bordered with lemon trees in big terracotta pots. Many of them looked unhappy, leaves yellow.
They’d had four lemon trees at the old house, out the back. You needed to piss on lemon trees, around the trunk. His father had often taken him out to do that after tea. They went from tree to tree, Mick Cashin had enough for all four, the last one got a little less. Joe ran out early but he carried on, stood with his father, aiming his small empty hose at the ground.
‘Some places, it’s all they get,’ said his father. ‘Dry countries. Nothin wrong with piss. Filtered by the body. Mind’s the same. Hangs onto the bad stuff.’
Across the courtyard was a long double-storeyed brick building, doors and windows on the ground floor, sash-hung windows above. Cashin crossed and tried the big double door in the middle. It opened onto a corridor running the width of the building.
A door on the right was ajar. He went in a short way.
It was a big room, well lit from windows on two sides, a pottery studio—two big wheels, a smaller one, trestle tables, several steel trolleys lined up, bags stacked against the far wall, shelving holding small bags and tins of all sizes, implements of various kinds laid out. There were no pots to be seen. The place was neat and clean, like a classroom swept and tidied after the students each day.
Cashin went down the corridor to the door on the left. It opened on darkness. He felt for a light switch, found several, clicked them.
Spotlights came on, three rows in the roof. It was a gallery, windowless, the floor of stone, dull-grey, smooth, the bare walls a pale colour.
A narrow black table ran almost the width of the room. On it, at regular intervals, stood—Cashin counted them—nine vessels. They were big, more than half a metre high, the shape of eggs with their tops cut off, tiny lips. Cashin thought it was a beautiful shape, the shape pots might want to be if potters would let them.
He went closer, looked at them from both sides. Now he saw small differences in shape, in bulge and taper. And the colours. The pots were streaked and lined and blotched and speckled in blacks that seemed to absorb light, in reds that looked like fresh blood leaking through tiny fissures, in the sad and lovely blues and browns and greys and greens of the earth seen from space.
Cashin ran a hand down a pot. There were smooth parts and then rough, like moving from a woman’s cheekbone to a late afternoon stubble. And ice cold, as if the hellish passage through fire had conferred a permanent immunity to warmth.
Was this Bourgoyne’s entire output as a potter? All that he kept? There were no pots in the house. Cashin picked one up carefully, turned it upside down: the letters C B and a date, 11/6/88.
He replaced the pot and went to the doorway. He stood looking at the pots. He did not want to kill the lights and leave them in the dark, their colours meaningless, wasted.
He killed the lights.
The rest of the building was an anticlimax. Upstairs, there were empty rooms on one side, living quarters on the other comfortably furnished, perhaps in the 1970s, a sitting room, a bathroom, a kitchen. He opened a door: a small bedroom, a stripped double bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. The view from the window was across the paddocks, nothing for kilometres.
At the door to the corridor, he looked back into the sitting room. There was a bolt on the bedroom door. He went downstairs, out the back door onto a stone-paved terrace, looked at mown lawn, old elms, an oak wood beyond a picket fence. Straight ahead was the horse barn and the paddock where the helicopter landed.
A concrete path led off from a ramp at the left edge of the terrace. Cashin followed it, went through a gate in the fence and into the dense wood. The oaks were huge, no doubt planted by a Bourgoyne ancestor, trees to climb into, branches arranged in ladders. They were still heavy with brown leaves in spite of the thick new layer on the ground.
The land sloped up gently, the path twisted through the trees, its route dictated by the plantings. He was thirty or so metres along it
when he caught himself enjoying the walk, a stroll in a wood on an early winter day, and was about to turn back.
A sound. He stopped. It was hollow, mournful, someone blowing into a cowrie shell.
He went on, the sound growing louder. The oaks stopped, a firebreak and then old eucalypts, towering. They thinned and there was a clearing on a gentle slope. The path veered left around a pile of split wood under a tin roof.
There was the smell of a hardwood fire, long dead.
Cashin stopped, uneasy. He went on, rounded the wood stack.
In the clearing stood a tunnel-like structure of cement-coloured bricks. It tapered in both dimensions, the narrower and lower end pointed at an opening in the trees, at the sea a few kilometres away. At the back was a square chimney.
He went closer. The earth at the base of the walls had a crust like bread. Low along the flank were square steel-shuttered openings, the bricks around them blackened. The chimney had a steel plate sticking out of it, a damper, Cashin thought, it could be moved in and out to regulate the flow of hot air. On the other side were more shuttered windows.
The front was open. On his neck, Cashin felt the westerly blowing straight into the mouth of the chamber, making the hollow sound. This was Bourgoyne’s kiln, the furnace from which the pots emerged.
Blackened bricks were neatly stacked around the mouth. He stooped to look: beyond the scorched entrance were three tiers, like a short hierarchy of broad altars. There was a strong smell of things heated, vaguely chemical.
The wind off the sea would blow into the burning kiln like breath into a trumpet. Was it alight at night? The kiln would hum, the fire holes would glow white. It would have to be fed at intervals to maintain the heat.
Suddenly Cashin wanted to leave the clearing with its sad sound and smell of dead fires. He became conscious that the wind was cold, rain in the air. He went back through the trees, down to the buildings, continued his walk around the house, looking, thinking about what it
would be like to approach the buildings at night, where the place would be to break in.
A few metres down the the north-western side of the house was a door, half glass, four panes. He looked in: a small room, tiled floor, benches on either side, coats and hats on pegs.
He turned. The severely tended garden ran for at least two hundred metres to a picket fence, then there were paddocks fenced with hedges, stands of trees, glints of water.
Perhaps a whim, half-pissed kids driving by, one of them given an idea by the big gates and the headlights catching the brass plate. It would have sent a message, as if in neon lights:
RICH PEOPLE LIVE HERE
.
Driving by? Going where? Heading back to the Daunt after fishing and drinking on the beach, you might take this route. It would be less risky than the main road.
Did the boys park a vehicle somewhere along the road, climb a fence, walk to the house? A kilometre in the dark, crossing paddocks, opening gates? No, they hadn’t done that.
They would have parked near the gates and walked up the driveway, a dark passage, no lights in the grounds, the massive poplars, still in leaf, blocking the moonlight.
The boys, standing in the dark at the end of the drive, looking at the house. Were there lights on? Bourgoyne’s bedroom was at the back of the house. He wasn’t in bed. Where was he? In the study? Did they walk around, see the study and bedroom lights? If so, they would have broken in as far away as possible.
Thieves didn’t break into occupied houses where there were lights on. The householder might have a gun.
What did they use to beat Bourgoyne? Did they bring it with them, take it away? There would be a post-mortem on him now, the pathologists would have an opinion, but it might be no more useful than ruling out faceted instruments or round ones bigger than a golf club shaft.
There was a noise. A door from the sunroom opened and Erica Bourgoyne came out. She was in soft-looking clothes, shades of grey, younger looking today, she could have passed for thirty.
‘What’s this about?’ she said.
‘Just having another look,’ said Cashin. ‘I’m sorry about your stepfather.’
‘Thank you,’ said Erica. ‘What’s the point of looking around now?’
‘The matter isn’t closed.’
A man came out behind her, prematurely grey curly hair. He was just taller than short, tanned, dark suit, pale shirt and blue tie. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.
‘This is Detective Cashin,’ said Erica.
He came around Erica, held out a hand. ‘Adrian Fyfe.’
When Cashin felt the hard grip, the real man’s grip, he gave Fyfe the dead fish, took his hand away. This was Adrian Fyfe the solicitor-developer who wanted to build a resort at the Stone’s Creek mouth. Cashin remembered Cecily Addison’s outrage that morning in the newsagency.
What this rag doesn’t say is buying Stone’s Creek mouth’s no use unless you can get to it. And the only way’s through the nature reserve or through the camp.
‘He would have been convicted, wouldn’t he?’ said Erica. ‘Donny Coulter.’
‘That’s not certain,’ said Cashin.
‘What about the watch?’
‘We have someone who says two of the suspects tried to sell it to him. We don’t know how they got it.’
‘Don’t know?’ said Adrian Fyfe. ‘Pretty bloody obvious, isn’t it?’
‘There’s no obvious in these things,’ said Cashin.
‘Anyway, it’s over,’ said Fyfe. ‘The whole thing. Some justice done.’
‘So pointless,’ said Erica, listless now. ‘To kill an old man for a watch and a few dollars, whatever it is they took. What kind of people do that?’
Cashin didn’t try to answer. ‘We’d like access to the buildings if you don’t mind.’
A moment’s pause. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I won’t be coming again. The place will be sold at some point. There’s a big bunch of keys in the kitchen. Dozens of keys. Give them to Mrs. Addison when you’re finished.’
She followed him around the house. They shook hands.
The same security man was leaning against the Saab, smoking. ‘That gravel stunt,’ he said to Cashin. ‘One day I’ll rip your head off, stick it up your arse.’
‘You threatening a police officer?’ said Cashin. ‘Above the law, are you?’
The man turned his head away in contempt, spat on the gravel. Cashin looked back. Erica hadn’t moved. He returned, climbed the steps.
‘By the way,’ he said. ‘Who inherits?’
Erica looked at him, blinked twice. ‘I do. What’s left after the bequests.’
REBB WAS laying bricks, rebuilding the fallen north-east corner of the house. Cashin watched him for a while—the slicing pick-up of the mortar, the icing of the brick, the casual placement, the tapping with the trowel handle, the removal of the excess.
‘Supervising?’ said Rebb, eyes on the job. ‘Boss.’
Cashin wanted to say it but he couldn’t. ‘What do I do?’ he said.
‘Mix. Three cement, nine sand, careful with the water.’
Cashin was full of care. Then he ruined the mixture by flooding it.
‘Same again,’ said Rebb. ‘Half spades now.’ He came over and put in the water, a slop at a time, took the spade, cut and shuffled the mortar. ‘That’s the pudding,’ he said.
The dogs arrived from a mission in the valley, greeted Cashin with noses and tongues, then left, summoned to some emergency—a rabbit rescue perhaps, the poor creature trapped in a thicket.
Cashin carried bricks, watched Rebb, got the mixture more or less right the next time. The trick was extreme caution. The work moved to the opposite corner, a string was strung, tight enough to ping.
‘Ever laid a brick?’ said Rebb.
‘No.’
‘Have a go. I need a leak.’ He left.
Cashin laid three bricks. It took a long time and they looked terrible. Rebb came back and, saying nothing, undid the work, cleaned the bricks. ‘Watch,’ he said.
Cashin watched. Rebb relaid the bricks in a minute. ‘Got to keep the perps the same width,’ he said. ‘Otherwise it looks bad.’
‘Want to eat?’ said Cashin. ‘Then I’ll work on my perps. Whatever the fuck a perp is.’
It was after 3 pm. He had bought pies from the less bad bakery in Cromarty. Beef and onion. They ate them sitting in the lee of the brick pile, in the diluting sunlight.
‘Not bad,’ said Rebb. ‘There’s some meat.’ He chewed. ‘The problem here is the doors and windows,’ he said. ‘We don’t know where they are.’
‘We do. I’ve got the pictures. I forgot.’
When Cashin got back with the photographs, Rebb had made a cigarette. He looked at the pictures. ‘Jesus, there’s bits missing here all right. This is a serious proposition.’
‘Yes,’ said Cashin. ‘It’s not a proposition at all. I should have said.’
He had known the moment he looked at the old photographs. In one, Thomas Cashin and six men, builders, stood in front of the house. Thomas could have been Michael in an old-fashioned suit.
They sat in silence. In the valley, one dog gave the high-pitched hunting bark, then the other. An ibis rose, another, they flapped away like prehistoric creatures. Rebb got up, walked beyond the brick pile and held up the picture. He looked at his newly repaired piece of building, looked at the picture. He came back and sat.