Headland, page 7
As he was about to exit the building, he heard someone clearing their throat behind him. He turned and saw that Debbie had followed him to the door. She was holding a rolled-up cylinder of large laminated sheets. She glanced fearfully over her shoulder then thrust the rolled-up papers at him. He reached for them automatically and then, without a word, she hurried back into the silent depths of the building.
He stood for a moment, confused, then made the dash out to his car in the pouring rain.
11
The office was empty and whisper-quiet when he returned. Ellie and Larissa were out. He had passed them on his way to the station, their high-vis vests to the fore, marked cars with the full flashing lightshow happening: the evacuation protocol—whatever that entailed. There was probably an email about it somewhere.
Watson was feeling good, buzzing nicely. He had dropped into the barracks and had two Oxys and then grabbed a McFlat White with three sugars and some salted caramel macarons for lunch.
He made himself comfortable in his cubicle and slid the elastic band off the cylinder Debbie had given him at the council chambers. There was more to it than he’d first thought. The bundle, unrolled, comprised a single A4 sheet, about half-adozen poster-sized laminated sheets and about the same number again of unlaminated poster-sized sheets. He had to push aside the clutter of empty coffee cups and junk that had accumulated on his desk to spread them out fully, then weigh down the ends to stop them rolling up again.
The first sheet was a large map. Gloster and the coast were on the bottom left and the Gloster River snaked its way diagonally up and across to the top right of the page. It was black and white, no topographical information, just roads and rivers. There were tables full of numbers, measurements and volumes and arrows pointing to different sections of the river.
The second sheet was similar to the first but it was an aerial photograph of the same area with the same tables and measurements overlaid.
The next six sheets were all detailed schematic diagrams. They set out construction plans for channels to be dug to specific depths for specific distances and to drain into new dams that were to be constructed. There were pipes to be laid, underpasses constructed under existing roads, land cleared, tunnels dug and gradients flattened. It was, he realised, a massive scheme designed to channel and dissipate floodwaters before they could inundate and destroy low-lying farmland.
The final sheet was a clear plastic overlay with a complex pattern of shaded boxes, dates, numbers and hieroglyphic symbols that Watson could make neither heads nor tails of. On a whim, he laid the clear plastic sheet over the black-and-white map of the town and the river. This brought it all together. The shadowed boxes and the dates related to the entire scope of the Gloster Region Flood Mitigation Plan. It showed the size, placement and extent of each of the individual projects to be completed as part of the plan and the date of completion of each part of the project.
The single A4 sheet was a photocopy from a year-old issue of the local newspaper, The Gloster Gazette, celebrating the completion of the project. There was a grainy black-and-white photo accompanying the article and there, smiling widely, shaking hands with his boss, Sam Nefarian, was the man responsible for the outstanding achievement—Anthony Sweeney: Manager, Infrastructure Delivery. Father of Laura, Tayla Howard’s best friend.
‘Something stinks,’ the old man—Sweeney’s father-in-law—had said.
There’s something there, Watson thought. What am I missing?
He was losing his buzz.
Raised voices made their way up from downstairs. He did his best to ignore them.
Think!
There was a crash, and a scream, and then his phone started ringing.
Fuck it.
He didn’t race downstairs; he got up slowly and waited, just in case.
There was another crash, shouted obscenities.
Damn.
He walked out into the hall and stood at the top of the stairs.
No, it definitely seemed to be picking up steam again.
He walked down one step at a time until he was five or six steps from the bottom, then he bounded down onto the ground floor like a man on a mission to find Philby on the floor in the corridor. His shirt had come untucked and his flabby white gut was spilling out over his belt. He had a small skinny woman in a bear hug, his big salami arms wrapped around her while she struggled and kicked and screamed and tried to bite him.
Watson couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
‘For fuck’s sake, don’t just stand there—give me a hand,’ Philby commanded, all red-faced and breathless.
Watson unhooked the handcuffs from his belt and approached the writhing couple. But as he caught sight of the woman’s face he hesitated. It was Jenny Howard.
He pocketed the handcuffs and knelt down in front of her.
‘Jenny, come on,’ he pleaded. ‘It’s going to be okay.’
‘Fuck you,’ she spat, then subsided, her energy more or less expended. ‘Fuck you,’ she whimpered. She was limp now.
Philby extricated himself and rolled back into a sitting position.
Jenny Howard lay on the floor, sobbing. ‘You said you were going to find her,’ she gasped, wrapping her arms around herself, her eyes closed, tears running freely.
Watson glanced at Philby, raised his eyebrows. What the fuck?
‘We just had to inform Mrs Howard,’ Philby wheezed, as he heaved himself first to his knees and then to his feet, ‘that the, ah, the search for Tayla is, ah, being put on hold, just for the moment.’ He avoided Watson’s eyes.
Briony, the daytime civilian receptionist, was standing at the end of the hallway, her hand to her mouth. Philby angrily waved her away back to reception.
Watson rubbed Jenny’s arm, doing his best to console her.
‘Jenny, it’s going to be okay. Like I said, teenagers go missing all the time. Tayla will show up. She’s probably just caught up at someone’s place now—you know, caught in the flood.’
‘It’s not like that and you know it. I heard her on the phone. I told you! Someone’s taken her.’
Watson had no answer. He looked up at his boss.
Philby just held out his hands, like, What can I do?
Weak as piss.
‘Jenny, don’t worry, I’m going to keep looking for Tayla, okay?’ He stared at Philby as he said it. ‘We’re going to do our best to find her.’
The sergeant wouldn’t meet his gaze.
Jenny dragged herself up off the floor and Watson put his arms around her shoulders and helped her back to the reception area.
‘I’m going to do my best,’ he assured her again as he opened the door for her.
She put her arm out and patted him on the chest, her head down, then she stepped out into the rain.
Philby was dabbing at a vivid red scratch on his cheek with a tissue when Watson went back and stood in the doorway of his office. Philby glanced at him and shook his head; he seemed close to tears. He pulled on his old gravy-stained windcheater and Watson noticed there were a few new stains down the front of it. They could have been blood.
Watson stood aside as Philby passed him and headed out the front door of the station without another word.
12
The rain had reduced to a light drizzle by mid-afternoon, but the damage was done. According to the weather reports, enough rain had been dumped on the ranges west of town to keep the river rising, despite the conditions easing in Gloster.
Meanwhile, Watson had found Jim Banks, one of the local landowners with whom Nefarian had had a ‘misunderstanding’, in the state’s criminal database. He was mid-fifties, and had a record for assault back in the 1990s over a boundary dispute with a neighbour. He had received a twelve-month good behaviour bond for the assault and had no other record on file.
Banks had an address listed as a property about ten kilometres west of town. Watson checked the SES database and found that the road directly west of the property was now closed due to flooding, but he could potentially access it by heading north up the highway from Gloster and then taking a secondary road—still open, according to the SES—out to the west.
Heading over the bridge out of town, he fought the urge to just keep driving all the way back to Sydney, forget he had ever set eyes on the merry municipality of Gloster. He was still feeling tempted when he pulled over to the narrow, gravelled kerb at the highway intersection.
Larissa stood on the road, in the drizzle, in front of a marked police vehicle with its red and blue lights reflecting off her yellow high-vis vest. She was holding a bright orange traffic control torch and waving away sightseers and anyone else who wasn’t a resident or didn’t have urgent business in town.
He was still feeling a bit sheepish after his no-show the previous afternoon, but he need not have worried. Larissa smiled up at him from under her sodden hood as he approached across the road.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘Hey,’ he responded. ‘Okay?’
‘Oh yeah, great,’ she said. ‘You just here to hang out with me or are you heading somewhere?’
‘Yeah, I just decided to pack it in,’ he said. ‘Heading back to Sydney.’
She looked at him, her expression serious, and then must have seen something in his eyes. ‘Dickhead,’ she said, lightly donging him on the head with her torch. ‘Where are you going?’
‘A bloke called Jim Banks. A property called Berimma Station on the Yulong Road. Heard of it?’
‘Nope,’ she said, ‘but be careful if you’re heading out Yulong Road—it’s pretty bad even when it’s dry.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.
‘You do that. Hey, you should come around again—that was fun the other night.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ he said, feeling … something.
They stood there for a moment, smiling awkwardly at each other, then he gave her a little salute and headed back to his car.
The Yulong Road was sealed for the first fifty metres off the highway before it turned into a narrow muddy track. Watson was about sixty metres off the highway when he started to think that maybe heading out to the Banks place wasn’t such a great idea. The road had some serious dips and climbs in it. In the bottom of most of the dips there was brown running water, the depth of which was impossible to determine.
The morning’s fine drizzle gave way to heavier rain the further he headed west and the windscreen wipers, like the tyres of the car, were having trouble dealing with the volume of water being thrown about. When the car lost traction on a steep uphill stretch and started sliding towards a waterlogged ditch on the side of the road, Watson made the decision to turn around. There was no point getting himself stuck out here in the middle of nowhere in the pissing rain.
As he crested the rise, looking for a place to turn around, the Banks property came into view. Even to a born-and-bred city boy, the drama of the landscape was striking. The land stretched away in front of him, deep green and shining wet, as far as the distant foothills of the misty, cloud-covered ranges just visible to the west. On his left, the river had broken its banks to become a raging torrent, swirling whirlpools of debris, covering long flat stretches of land into a rippling inland sea of dark, dirty floodwater. To his right, the land climbed slowly away from the river, the water giving way to small green paddocks and then dense bushland. The paddocks were crowded with seemingly thousands of drenched and immobile sheep and cattle moved up from the lower-lying fields.
The Banks home was only a kilometre further on, up a short gravel driveway. It stood stark and white against a carefully tended patch of dark green lawn. As Watson crunched his way up the driveway, a small four-wheel-drive vehicle detached itself from a huge mob of sheep in a paddock not far from the homestead and headed in his direction.
Watson half lowered his window as the quad bike pulled up beside him.
‘Can I help you?’ the figure on the bike shouted over the thrumming of his own engine, the wind and the rain.
‘Jim Banks?’ Watson asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Detective Craig Watson. We need to have a word.’
Banks stared hard at the badge and then glanced down towards the mass of brown water inundating the majority of his property.
‘Follow me,’ he said.
Banks pulled into a large corrugated-iron shed standing behind the homestead. There was room enough for four or five cars, but the shed was mostly empty, just a collection of tools, something that Watson assumed was a plough, and large drums of oil and diesel. He parked just inside the shed door and approached Banks, who had dismounted from the quad bike and was removing a thick yellow rain jacket and gloves.
The wind was gusting hard outside and the rain was hammering against the sides of the shed. It was freezing cold. Watson fought the urge to shiver and fold his arms.
Banks dug his hands deep into his pockets and glared at Watson as he approached. ‘This about the other day, is it?’ he demanded. He had a large round head, bald, with thick features. His lips were cracked and bloodless and Watson had the impression they didn’t smile much.
‘We are following up a complaint received from Gloster Council, Mr Banks,’ Watson said evenly. He was in an oddly positive frame of mind.
‘Fuck me. Who are they to be making a fucking complaint? Have you seen the state of my fucking stock?’ Banks said, taking a step towards Watson, getting right up in his face.
Watson ignored the advance. His original intention had been to keep things informal, just fishing for information. But fuck it. His good mood was evaporating rapidly.
He took his notebook from his pocket. Reading from his notes, he said, ‘We received a complaint that you attended the council offices, intimidated council staff, acted aggressively and may have committed an assault, Mr Banks.’ He looked up into Banks’s narrowed eyes. He could smell sour tea and cigarettes on the man’s breath. ‘So, we can either do this here, now, or you can accompany me back to the station. It’s up to you, but I’d suggest you might want to back off.’
Banks took his time, then wrinkled his nose and shook his head. His hand rustled inside his pocket and he produced a battered packet of cigarettes and a lighter. He took a step back, turned away from the wind howling through the shed door, and lit a cigarette.
‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, exhaling a thick pall of smoke while gazing outside, over Watson’s shoulder.
‘Well, let’s start with why you were there in the first place, shall we?’
‘Because those cun –’ He stopped, took a healthy drag of his cigarette, then started again. ‘Did you see the state of the property when you drove in, when you came over the rise?’
‘Yes, I did,’ Watson said.
‘Then you can see that I’m fucked, that everything from here down to the river is underwater.’
‘Yes, I saw that.’
‘Well how much do you know about the flood mitigation plan?’
‘A fair bit actually,’ Watson said.
Banks raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Well, why don’t you come inside, and I’ll show you something.’
Watson nodded and returned his notebook to his pocket. Then they both made a dash for the back door of the homestead.
There was a good fire burning in a combustion heater, and Banks quickly opened the door and tossed another split log inside before flipping the kettle on in his small bare kitchen. The home was clean and neat, but it was clearly the lodgings of a recently single man. Furniture was sparse and utilitarian. There were obvious indentations and unworn squares of carpet where now-missing furniture had once stood. There were piles of books, mostly military history, and an obvious lack of any attempt at decoration.
Banks made his guest a coffee and himself a mug of black tea, while Watson stood as close to the heater as he could bear. Banks placed the cups on an empty kitchen table and left the room. He came back with a bundle of paperwork which he placed neatly in front of him as he sat down.
He looked up at Watson before he started. Watson could tell he would have been a good-looking man once. Rugged, tanned, with a strong square chin and vivid green eyes. But he looked more tired than angry now, maybe even slightly embarrassed when he met Watson’s eyes.
‘This is all correspondence from the council,’ Banks said, indicating the stack of paperwork sitting on the table in front of him. There would have been at least five hundred pages.
‘Okay,’ Watson said. He could see Banks wanted to talk.
‘This all started six years ago’—Banks ran his thumb up the side of the pile of paperwork—‘after the last big floods we had out here. Half the farms went under. Not just underwater; I mean financially. Gone. You see, the river narrows around here, it picks up all the water coming out of the hills and flows downstream until it gets about five mile upriver from here and then bang. If there’s too much, it just spills over and, well, you can see for yourself what happens.’
‘Yeah, I can,’ Watson said.
‘So, six years ago we all got together, all the property owners out here on the river and the council, and said, you know, how do we stop this sort of thing happening in the future? And they did this big study and spent all this money and came up with this plan—the flood mitigation plan.’ He looked up at Watson, to check that he was following.
Watson nodded, sipped his coffee.
Banks lit another cigarette.
‘Then they bring in all these experts, hydrologists and whatnot, and say they can fix the problem with the flooding but it’s going to cost us, you know? Cost us big time, because the council can’t afford all this new work. I mean, look at the state of the bloody roads, right? Anyway, we came up with a plan, the council upped the rates, and all the properties with a river boundary had to pay an extra levy.’
‘And it all went ahead?’
‘Too right it did. Five years they’ve been working on it. Fleecing us dry, overrun after overrun, cost blowouts. They kept on coming back with their hand out and it’s bloody hard enough trying to make a living out here as it is.’ He stabbed his cigarette out into the ashtray and glared around his semi-abandoned home.
