Authors: Peter Temple
‘Bedrooms.’
Cashin looked into the dining rooms. They appeared undisturbed. At the door to the big sitting room, Erica stopped and turned to him.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said.
The room smelled faintly of lavender and something else. The light from the high window lay on the carpet in front of where the slashed painting had hung. The bloodstain was hidden by a sheet of black plastic, taped down.
Cashin went over and opened the cedar armoire against the left wall: whisky, brandy, gin, vodka, Pimms, Cinzano, sherries, liqueurs of all kinds, wine glasses, cut-glass whisky glasses and tumblers, martini glasses.
A small fridge held soda water, tonic, mineral water. No beer.
‘Do you know what was kept in the desk?’
The small slim-legged table with a leather top stood against a wall.
Erica shrugged.
Cashin opened the left-hand drawer. Writing pads, envelopes, two fountain pens, two ink bottles. Cashin removed the top pad, opened it,
held it up to the light. No impressions. The other drawer held a silver paperknife, a stapler, boxes of staples, a punch, paperclips.
‘Why didn’t they take the sound stuff?’ she said.
Cashin looked at the Swedish equipment. It had been the most expensive on the market once.
‘Too big,’ he said. ‘Was there a television?’
‘In the other sitting room. My step-father didn’t like television much.’
Cashin looked at the shelves of CDs beside the player. Classical music. Orchestral. Opera, dozens of disks. He removed one, put it in the slot, pressed the buttons.
Maria Callas.
The room’s acoustics were perfect. He closed his eyes.
‘Is this necessary?’ said Erica.
‘Sorry,’ said Cashin. He pushed the OFF button. The sound of Callas seemed to linger in the high dark corners.
They left the room, another passage.
‘That’s the study,’ she said.
He went in. A big room, three walls covered with photographs in dark frames, a few paintings, and the fourth floor-to-ceiling books. The desk was a curve of pale wood on square dark pillars tapering to nothing. The chair was modern too, leather and chrome. A more comfortable-looking version stood in front of the window.
The drawer locks of two heavy and tall wooden cabinets, six drawers each, had been forced, possibly with a crowbar. They had been left as found on the morning.
‘Any idea what was in them?’ said Cashin.
‘No idea at all.’
Cashin looked: letters, papers. He walked around the walls, looked at the photographs. They seemed to be arranged chronologically and, to his eye, span at least seventy or eighty years—family groups, portraits, young men in uniform, weddings, parties, picnics, beach scenes, two men in suits standing in front of a group of men in overalls, a building plaque being unveiled by a woman wearing a hat.
‘Which one’s your step-father?’ he said.
Erica took him on a tour, pointed at a smiling small boy, a youth in
school uniform, in cricket whites, in a football team, a thin-faced young man in a dinner jacket, a man in middle age shaking hands with an older man. Charles Bourgoyne had aged slowly and well, not losing a single brushed hair.
‘Then there are the horses,’ she said, pointing. ‘Probably more important than the people in his life.’
A wall of pictures of horses and people with horses. Dozens of finishing-post photographs, some sepia, some tinted, a few in colour. Charles Bourgoyne riding, leading, stroking, kissing horses.
‘Your mother,’ said Cashin. ‘Is she still alive?’
‘No. She died when I was young.’
Cashin looked at the bookshelves: novels, history, biography, rows of books about Japan and China, their art, culture. Above them were books about World War II, the war against Japan, about Australian prisoners of the Japanese.
There were shelves of pottery books, technical titles, three shelves.
They moved on.
‘This is his bedroom,’ said Erica Bourgoyne. ‘I’ve never been into it and I don’t think I’ll change that now.’
Cashin entered a white chamber: bed, table, simple table lamp, small desk, four drawers open. The lower ones had been broken open. Through a doorway was a dressing room. He looked at Bourgoyne’s clothes: jackets, suits, shirts on hangers, socks and underwear in drawers, shoes on a rack. Everything looked expensive, nothing looked new.
There was a red lacquered cupboard. He opened it and a clean smell of cedar filled his nostrils. Silken garments on hangers, a shelf with rolled-up sashes.
He thought of asking Erica to come in.
No.
Beyond the dressing room was a bathroom, walls and floor of slate, a wooden tub, coopered like a barrel, a toilet, a shower that was just two stainless-steel perforated plates, one that water fell from, one to stand on. There were bars of pale yellow soap and throwaway razors, shampoo. He opened a plain wooden cupboard: three stacks of towels, six deep, bars of soap, bags of razors, toilet paper, tissues.
He went back to Erica. They looked at another bedroom, like a room in a comfortable hotel. It had a small sitting room with two armchairs, a fireplace. There was another bathroom, old-fashioned, revealing nothing. At the end of the passage was a laundry with a new-looking washing machine and dryer.
Beyond it was a storeroom, shelves of heavy white bed linen and tablecloths, napkins, white towels, cleaning equipment.
They went back they way they had come. ‘There’s another sitting room here,’ said Erica. ‘It’s the one with the television.’
Four leather armchairs around a fireplace, a television on a shelf to the left, more Swedish sound equipment to the right. Cosy by the standards of this house, thought Cashin.
‘Well,’ said Cashin, ‘that’s it. We needn’t go upstairs, I gather it’s undisturbed.’
There was a moment when she looked at him, something uncertain in her eyes.
‘I’d like to go up,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘Of course.’
They crossed the house to the entrance hall, walked side by side up a flight of broad marble stairs to a landing, up another flight. All the way, he shut down his face against the pain, did not wince. At the top, a gallery ran around the stairwell, six dark cedar doors leading off it, all closed. They stood on a Persian rug in a shaft of light from above.
‘I want to get some things from my mother’s room, if they’re still there,’ said Erica. ‘I’ve never had the nerve before.’
‘How long have you waited?’
‘Almost thirty years.’
‘I’ll be here’ said Cashin. ‘Unless…’
‘No, that’s fine.’
She went to the second door on the left. He saw her hesitate, open the six-panel door, put out a hand to a brass light switch, go in.
Cashin opened the nearest door and switched on the light. It was a bedroom, huge, twin beds with white covers, two wardrobes, a dressing table, a writing table in front of the curtained window. He walked on a pale pinkish carpet, lined like a quilt, and parted the curtains. The view was of a redbrick stable block and of treetops beyond,
near-leafless, limbs moving in the wind, and then of a low hill stained with the russet leaves of autumn.
He went back to the gallery and went to the balustrade and looked down the stairwell at the entrance hall, felt a flash of vertigo, an urge to throw himself over the barrier.
‘Finished,’ said Erica behind him.
‘Find what you wanted?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing there. It was stupid to think there might be.’
They went back to the sunroom and sat with a glass-topped table between them.
‘Notice anything worth mentioning?’ said Cashin.
‘No. I’m sorry, I’m not much use. I’m pretty much a stranger in this house.’
‘How’s that?’
She looked at him sharply. ‘Just the way it is, detective.’
‘Everything locked at night, alarm switched on?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t been here at night for a very long time.’
Time to move on. ‘About your brother, Ms Bourgoyne.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘He drowned, I’m told.’
‘In Tasmania. In 1993.’
‘Went for a swim?’
Erica shifted in her seat, crossed her legs in corduroy pants, twitched a shiny black boot. ‘Presumably. His things were found on a beach. The body wasn’t found.’
‘Right. So you were here on Wednesday morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘Visit your step-father often?’
She rubbed palms. ‘Often? No.’
‘You don’t get on?’
Erica pulled a face, looked much older, lined. ‘We’re not close. It’s our family history. The way I grew up.’
‘And the reason for this visit?’
‘Charles wanted to see me.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘This is intrusive,’ she said. ‘Why do you need to know?’
‘Ms Bourgoyne,’ said Cashin, ‘I don’t know what we need to know. But if you want me to record that you preferred not to answer the question, that’s fine. I will.’
She shrugged, not happy. ‘He wanted to talk about his affairs.’
Cashin waited until it was clear that she wasn’t going to say any more. ‘On another subject. Who’ll inherit?’
Widened eyes. ‘No idea. What are you suggesting?’
‘It’s just a question,’ Cashin said. ‘You didn’t discuss his will?’
A laugh. ‘My step-father isn’t the kind of person who would talk about his will. I doubt whether he’s ever given dying a thought. It’s for lesser beings.’
‘Assuming that he knew the person who attacked him…’
‘Why would you assume that?’
‘One possible line of inquiry. Who might want to harm him?’
‘As far as I know,’ she said, ‘he’s a much respected person around here. But I don’t live here, I haven’t since…since I was a child. I’ve only been a visitor.’
She looked away. Cashin followed her gaze, looked out at the disciplined gravel that ran to the hedge. Nothing lifted the spirits about the grounds of The Heights—hedges, lawns, paving, gravel, they were all shades of green and grey. It came to him that there were no flowers.
‘He had all the garden beds ripped out,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘They were wonderful.’
‘A last thing. Do you know of anything in your step-father’s life or your life that might have led to this?’
‘Such as?’
‘This may become a murder investigation.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing will be left private in the life of anyone around your stepfather.’
She straightened, gave him the unfazed gaze. ‘Are you saying I’ll be a suspect?’
‘Everyone will be of interest.’
‘What about perfect strangers?’ she said. ‘Is there a chance that you
might take an interest in perfect strangers who got into the house and attacked him?’
He wanted to echo her sarcastic tone. ‘Every chance,’ he said. ‘But with no sign of forced entry, we have to consider other possibilities.’
‘Well,’ she said, looked at her watch, a slim silver band, ‘I’d like to get going. Are you a local policeman?’
‘I’m down here for as long as it takes.’
There was truth in this. There was some truth in almost anything people said.
‘May I ask you why you brought the bodyguard?’ said Cashin.
‘It’s a work-related thing. Just a precaution.’ Erica stood up.
Cashin rose. ‘You’ve been threatened?’
Erica held out her right hand. ‘Work-related, detective. In my work, that makes it confidential. Goodbye.’
They shook hands. The ex-SOG man, Jacobs, walked onto the forecourt to see him go. In the mirror, Cashin saw him give a mocking wave, fingers fanned, right hand held just beside his tough-guy smile.
Cashin gunned the cruiser, showered Jacobs with gravel, saw him try to protect his face.
CASHIN DROVE out on the road behind Open Beach, turned at the junction with the highway, went back through Port Monro, got a coffee. He parked above Lucan Rocks, below him a half-dozen surfers, some taking on the big breakers, some giving it a lot of thought.
It was a soothing thing to do: sit in a warm car and watch the wind lifting spume off the waves, see the sudden green translucence of a rising wall of water, a black figure’s skim across the melting glass, the poetic exit into the air, the falling.
He thought about Gavin’s shark-bitten board, paddling out on it, the water warm as a bath. The water he was looking at was icy. He remembered the testicle-retracting swims when he was a boy, when they had the family shack above Open Beach and the Doogue shack was over the next dune, rugged assemblages of corrugated iron, fibro sheet, salvaged weatherboards. In those days, the town had two milkbars, two butcher shops, the fish and chip shop, the hardware, a general dealer, one chemist, one doctor. Rich people, mostly sheep farmers, had holiday houses on the Bar between the sea and the river. Ordinary people from the inland had shacks above Open Beach or in South Port or in the streets behind the caravan park.
Cashin remembered his father stopping the Falcon on the wooden bridge, looking down the river at the yachts moored on both sides.
‘This place’s turning into the bloody Riviera,’ his father said.
‘What’s a Riviera?’ said Joe.
‘Monaco’s on the Riviera,’ said Michael.
Mick Cashin looked at Michael. ‘How’d you know that?
‘Read it,’ said Michael. ‘That’s where they have the grand pricks.’
‘Grand pricks?’ said Mick Cashin. ‘You mean the royal family? Prince Rainier?’
‘Don’t be rude, Mick,’ said Cashin’s mother, tapping his father’s cheek. ‘It’s pronounced pree, Michael. It means prize.’
Every year there had been more city kids on the beach. You knew city kids because of their haircuts and their clothes and because the older ones, boys and girls, wore neck chains and smoked, didn’t much care who saw them.
Cashin thought about the winter Saturday morning they had driven up to their shack and Macca’s Shacca next door was gone, vanished, nothing there except disturbed sand to show where the low bleached building had stood, gently leaning backwards.
He had walked around, marvelling at the shack’s absence. There were marker pegs in the ground, and the next time they came a house was half-built on a cement slab.
That summer was the last in their shack, the last summer before his dad’s death. Years later, he asked his mother what became of the place.