After the Flood, page 8
‘And you don’t recall him mentioning the name of the person who sold him the bike?’
She shook her head.
‘Are there any bank statements?’ he asked, not hopeful.
‘No. He did that on his phone too.’
‘Do you know what bank?’
‘Commonwealth. I don’t know the branch.’
‘You too?’
‘No. ANZ.’
‘Has he ever transferred money to you for anything?’
She thought about it, indicated the entertainment unit. ‘Yes. When I paid for that.’
Good. They could trace back from that. Earle took her bank account details and asked if she would mind forwarding statements to them. The quicker they could look at all these things, the better. Bagot didn’t ask why they needed the information. Either she was sharp enough to have figured that out already or was still in shock.
‘Did Jean-Claude have any enemies?’ asked Clement casually. ‘People who might wish to do him harm?’
Bagot shook her head and grabbed more tissues from the Homebrand box.
‘Was he part of a … motorcycle group? Anything like that?’
‘No. He didn’t mix with bikies. He just liked to ride.’
‘Do you ride too?’ asked Clement.
‘I didn’t even like riding pillion.’
‘He looked very fit,’ said Earle.
‘He worked out all the time. He was in the French equivalent of the SAS.’
Clement wondered if that was a tale. Mind you, if Jean-Claude was a diver, maybe he had been.
‘Does he have any friends here?’
‘Not really, not close ones. Just me. Some of his clients like Rex he might spend time with. He didn’t drink much at all, so he never went to bars. He liked to swim and hike, that kind of stuff. He’d go out for a ride for the day and get back for his sunset class, that was usually his biggest.’
‘And you can’t think of anybody with whom he might have recently had some run-in?’
She shook her head, moaned and started crying once more.
‘Drugs?’ asked Earle.
‘A bit of pot.’ Because she was crying, the words came out strangled and she had to swallow, take a breath and try again. ‘A bit of grass.’
‘That’s okay, we’re not drug police, we just need to know if he could have come across the wrong people that way.’
She wilted a little. ‘He might have had eccies now and again but nothing … you know he wasn’t involved in drugs. He was fit and loved nature.’
‘How long have you been in Broome?’ asked Earle.
‘About three months. He wanted to keep travelling so I quit my job at Rio and then we came up here and he loved it and we decided we’d stay. After a couple of temporary stints, I applied for the job at Fitzroy Crossing.’
Clement had to ask, ‘Could you tell us where you were yesterday and last night?’
‘I left the mine at about four and got here close to eight. I just waited in all night getting more and more worried when Jean-Claude wasn’t answering my texts. I couldn’t sleep. I drifted off, I don’t know, about three in the morning. Woke again before six. I knew something had happened. I thought maybe he’d had an accident. I called the hospital but they had no record of him. So then I called the police.’
Perhaps she was clever enough to pretend she didn’t know about the body at Meda. Perhaps she was genuine and completely engulfed now by the darkness of sudden death. That’s how she looked.
‘What are the sleeping arrangements at the camp?’
‘We have our own units in the dongas.’
‘Can anybody confirm you were at the camp all of Thursday night?’ Before she could react, he said, ‘I’m sorry but we have to ask this.’
‘There are two other girls on the site and we were up chatting till about eleven thirty. Then I went to bed. I would never hurt Jean-Claude. I don’t know how anybody could. And he could fight, I mean self-defence, all that, from the army.’
It would have been possible for her to have driven to Meda. If she was lying about riding the bike, perhaps she could have ridden it up a ramp into the ute. But if she didn’t ride, how would she get it into the ute? Maybe there was another bloke on the scene, an accomplice. Her phone records would help in that regard.
‘We won’t take up more of your time,’ said Clement and made as if to stand. ‘Did Jean-Claude ever show you anything like this?’ Clement handed over his phone with a close up of one of the spikes.
‘They use those in mining.’ Her voice betrayed confusion.
‘Found near Jean-Claude’s body,’ said Clement watching her closely. Her face was blank as a cricket sightboard.
‘I’ve never seen him with those.’
‘Do you have these at your camp?’
‘Maybe. I haven’t seen any. But I’m just the cook there.’
Then Clement stood and thanked her for her patience. ‘Could I have the car keys please?’
With trembling fingers, she removed the house keys from the keyring and handed him the car key.
‘Can I see him?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry, Lauren, but the body had to be flown to Perth for an autopsy. I’ll get somebody to call you about arrangements you may wish to make. In cases like this it can take some time before a body is released.’
Earle bagged a toothbrush and pillowslip for DNA comparisons. They left the woman whose whole life had been shattered and walked down the outside staircase in silence. The sun blazed on.
Keeble was already suited up with her team. The trailer that would be taking the car hadn’t yet arrived.
‘Was out of town but it’s on its way,’ she explained. ‘I’d have to do this anyway.’ She pointed at her team taking samples of scrub by the driveway. ‘This won’t be the same as Meda, so best to eliminate it.’
Clement knew Keeble would leave any detailed internal examination of the car till the garage.
‘We couldn’t see any blood in the cabin or tray,’ said Clement. They’d only looked through the window of the car at the interior before they had called on Bagot.
‘Me either. And there’s no smell of disinfectant in the tray.’
Clement used the electronic key to pop the door.
‘Would you?’ he asked Keeble, indicating he wanted her gloved hand to open the door. He wasn’t going to poke around in there, he just wanted that first whiff.
Earle knew exactly what Clement was up to and he stood close behind. Clement nodded and Keeble pulled open the door. Clement stuck his snout in and sniffed. The smell of warming plastic in a newish car, a faint odour of sweaty feet or boots and a half-thimble smell of pizza. No remains though. Lauren Bagot was clean enough to remove any from the car. Clement guessed she grabbed a slice or two for the drive back from Fitzroy Crossing. If she’d murdered her boyfriend, she was brutally cold. But then you’d have to be to nail your lover to the road. She worked in a mining camp, Clement reminded himself, she potentially had access to spikes and could have reached the murder scene at the time of death.
He pulled out his head and indicated Earle take a whiff too. The tow truck was just arriving.
‘No bleach. If he was killed beforehand and then pegged out, there’s not a chance in hell his body was transported in there,’ said Clement. ‘Tyres?’
‘I’ll do comparisons when we get it in the garage.’
Earle said, ‘Well, if she did run over him, she might have used one of the other vehicles from the mine site. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to have come home in the one she used.’
A good point, thought Clement. She could have killed her boyfriend and driven back to camp while the rest slept. Taken a car from the pool, returned it and brought this one home. Keeble looked at him knowingly.
‘You want me to check all those too, don’t you?’
Clement smiled. ‘I’ll phone ahead, ask them to cease using all the possible vehicles.’
He was about to ask Earle to remind him of the name of the company but his partner was already there.
‘Hardcastle Minerals.’
Clement put on his most sympathetic voice for Keeble. ‘You better head there first, eliminate what you can, then come back and do this one.’
‘There goes my weekend,’ she said.
As Earle and Clement reached their car Earle said, ‘Bikes and cash.’
‘Yeah,’ said Clement, anything more being unnecessary. Clement turned and looked back at the rectangular block. He had one word to describe how he felt: flat.
8 TEN DAYS EARLIER
Wednesday 3 November 2021
As he did most days, Paul walked his chosen path to the shore. Passing the fat termite mound of orange clay, he found himself wondering what there was for termites to eat here on this sparse rocky island. There were so few trees. Somehow, they found enough physical nourishment. If humans had the same limited demands, he’d be fine here. There was always plenty to eat. Some days he would look at the crayfish boats out there in the distance, just outside the permitted zone. How interconnected we all are, he thought. Me, standing on this rocky finger surrounded by ocean, scanning for boats who hunt creatures in deep, lonely waters that will be plucked out of their world, snap-frozen and sent to kitchens in the neon-lit alleys of a loud, hurtling Asian city, there to meet their doom at the end of a fork. Interconnected, yes, but only as an image, a theory his bored mind had momentarily conjured. The truth was, once that special connection to the one and only person who ever mattered in your life was severed you were nothing but a satellite dish, transmitting and receiving data that meant bugger all to you really. There was no emotional kick, just dots and dashes. So, he was under no illusion. There was nothing profound about him standing here dreaming of the interconnectedness of all things, it was cheap whimsy.
His life should have been different. He could have been nursing their child. Greed, slackness, the worst traits of our human nature had robbed him of all that he cherished. His life was as inconsequential as a sapling crushed under a tank. That’s what these corporations were – mechanical, relentless soulless things, each as bad as the other. What did they put back into the world? They stripped dirt, rock, earth, gas, oil, they mixed it up in some alchemy and replaced it with what? Traffic, exhaust fumes, stress, wide-screen TVs for teens to play virtual games where they killed each other, leaf-blowers, constant noise and glaring light, scooters delivering unhealthy meals that people had grown too lazy to prepare themselves. And the fumes melted the ice and made the world hotter, and places like this dryer, till only termites could survive.
But we put up with it because it gives us a job. Every time a government announced it would be bulldozing more trees or digging out more earth, what was the spin? It will create two hundred jobs. Don’t worry that these little rodents or lizards or birds will be wiped out, that the workers will need most of their money to live in a concrete and glass box so hot and uncomfortable they require air-conditioning, which means more gas and coal and oil, and more melting ice, and respiratory infections, and more bored, dumb people leaving their boxes more often to visit parts of the world that still held some semblance of nature and humanity, thereby accelerating the process to inevitably degrade those too.
The young Karl Marx might have thought our alienation had peaked in his day, but a hundred and fifty years on the process was far more advanced. Perhaps the physical labour was reduced but the leeching of our humanity was almost complete. Now giant trucks laden with ore didn’t even have a driver at the wheel but instead a youngster at the end of a computer stick in faraway Perth munching on their latest Uber Eats. Man truly was alienated from his essence. You couldn’t blame religion now. Nobody went to church and yet the situation still declined. The corporations had all the power of the old religious institutions and were even less accountable. They threw out phrases like ‘diversity’ and ‘conservation’ as if these were some guiding ethos but they were nothing but catchphrases, the contemporary equivalent of ‘Peace, man.’
He dropped down off the low ledge of spare grass to the thin strip of sandy beach and stood, hands in the pockets of his shorts studying the fairy terns. There were so many birds here still, thank God. Different species picked one part of the island for their own kind, like little countries. Others were daytrippers, nesting on one of the other hundreds of small islands out there and flying in to the big smoke for something that only an ornithologist might know. Paul didn’t mind. He just liked to immerse himself in the sound of the ocean and birds. Here it was still almost untouched. For now. To be fair, the company here worked hard to preserve the native habitats. Anyone coming onto the island was rigorously checked they weren’t bringing on some environmental pest. But that was the exception. You’d not find that rigour in Africa or South America.
Nothing good will last, he thought, not while people are infected by apathy. Better than anybody, he understood this truth.
Something made him look down to his right. The beach was only short, no more than about sixty metres before it ended in a low, rocky bulb. A blurry shape was moving his way. He needed glasses for that kind of distance but never bothered with the pair he’d bought in Melbourne. He’d noticed it had been hard to decipher the names on street signs when he was walking around the suburbs by himself. The optometrist had dispassionately tested him and told him at the end of it he would need glasses.
‘What are you, mid-forties?’ the optometrist had said.
Yes, he had confirmed.
‘That’s when most people start to notice it.’
He wondered what Gabrielly would have said had he walked into their house wearing a pair of glasses. She might have laughed, gently mocked him, called him ‘Mr Professor’ or something similar, and then she would have hugged him and told him she thought he looked great.
Whoever it was heading towards him waved. The blur settled into the recognisable shape of a cotton frock and just a few seconds later he realised it was the English woman, Ingrid.
‘I thought that was you,’ she said as she drew closer.
They had bumped into one another a few times since meeting in the canteen. He was surprised that he actually had enjoyed the brief encounters, and even now that she was intruding on his special little nook, he was not at all annoyed.
‘A dress,’ he heard himself say.
‘Yes,’ she seemed a little embarrassed and he worried he might have been impolite in commenting on her outfit. ‘I couldn’t face jeans in this heat and my legs aren’t up to shorts.’
She was wearing one of the company caps with a long bill. He didn’t think she was fishing for a compliment about her legs. They seemed okay to him. People often worry about their physical features when others don’t give a damn. Gabrielly thought she had knock-knees and she probably did, he realised once she pointed that out, but it never bothered him. In fact, the opposite, he thought it was cute. He wondered what about his own appearance did he place too much store in? He always thought his general shape was unattractive, like a solid block, his thighs too big, his legs shapeless as a Lego piece.
Ingrid said, ‘You talked about the birds, so I thought I should check them out.’
Had he? He didn’t remember doing so. He didn’t think he’d mentioned his pleasure in these birds to anyone.
‘What ones are these?’ she pointed.
‘These are fairy terns. They’ve only started to arrive again this last week or so.’
‘They are very pretty.’
‘Yes. Sometimes I think of them as one big family.’
And the family that he might have had, brushed past him in spirit form like a gust of wind.
‘Have you seen the osprey?’ he asked.
‘The eagles?’
More like hawks, but he went with it. ‘Yes. They’re quite something when they dive for fish.’
‘I have seen one occasionally out there.’
She gestured loosely to the sky over the ocean.
‘They fancy the north side more.’
‘You do know your birds, then.’
He shrugged. He was a long way from being an expert. ‘You spend enough time on the island, you get to notice things.’
‘Not most of that lot back there,’ she laughed jerking a thumb at the residential blocks.
He found himself smiling. Her laugh had a nice ring about it, it was natural and light but still a real laugh.
‘You’ll have to show me,’ she said, still smiling. And then perhaps feeling she might be being too forward said, ‘If you have time.’
‘Sure.’ He didn’t want her feeling self-conscious about it. He liked her company. She dug into her pocket and brought out something wrapped in an absorbent paper towel.
‘Do you do biscuits? I made these myself.’
He didn’t tend to eat biscuits. It had been a long time since he’d had homemade baking. Gabrielly and her mother didn’t bake much, and he’d never himself baked anything.
His fingers hovered over the small stash. There were only three.
‘Please, have one. Or two if you like. I have plenty back in my room.’
He gave in and took one. It was pale and sweet but not too sweet.
‘Good,’ he tried to say, and felt embarrassed that he was spitting crumbs.
‘I like baking,’ she said. ‘It relaxes me. Shall we walk?’
What could he say to that? They began walking up the strip of sand. It was a very long time since he had walked with anybody for pleasure and now with the breeze in his face and the sweet taste of biscuit in his mouth, there was almost a spring in his step.
9 SATURDAY
‘He wanted six and a half, kept saying it was worth it. I said it probably is if you sell it privately but I have to get my margin when I resell, so six tops. He took it.’
Wendell Croft made a bobbing motion with his jaw as if giving himself a tick. The used-car salesman didn’t look anything like the image city people would have in their head for somebody in his occupation. Instead of a wide-lapelled suit with a garish tie, he wore shorts, sandals and open-neck polo. With a haystack of blond hair on his tanned face, he put Clement in mind of one of those Aussie cricketers from the eighties. Early forties, thought Clement, where I was not all that long ago when I felt I could still make a good fist of social sport. Not that Clement had actually bothered with social sport, just that he thought that at that age it had still been within his grasp.
