“The jinjie?”
Her lips clamped at the word as her eyes searched the dark corners of the house. She pointed at the broken corners of the fireplace. “Other times there. Outside too. Digs around house.”
Leonard studied the fireplace, the scarred wall. “I can give you a ride back to Rubibi.”
She thought about that, then shook her head. “No. My house. Boss paper say this be Aboriginal land!” She added loudly as if ears might be listening somewhere, “This my family house — I stay!”
He waited for the woman’s anger to abate, waited in silence while the breath in her flared nostrils became normal. But she said nothing more. Instead, she squatted on the scarred planks in front of the fireplace and rocked gently forward and back, chanting something to herself. Leonard did not know if it was a prayer or a spell — the elders had denied him knowledge of many ceremonies because of his white blood.
“I have to go back,” he said finally. “Sergeant’s expecting me.”
It was as if she did not hear him, and perhaps she didn’t. Her voice rose and fell in a whispery croon and she rocked, eyes half closed and fixed on the sooty back of the fireplace. Leonard said good-bye, but she did not answer. The thin chant followed him down the overgrown path toward his vehicle.
It was no jinjie. Leonard’s hands steered the Tojo through the deep mud, but his mind was on Bibi Daisy. Even if it was a jinjie, it wouldn’t have to run around digging holes in the walls — jinjies could see into places people could not. Or so it had been whispered to Leonard. But there were no jinjies. So it was pretty clear that somebody searched for something. But what? What could be hidden there?
S. S. Dougald was waiting. Leonard, even if he was only half Aborigine, could smell the man’s anger the moment he swung the rain off his hat and rapped on the door of the OIC’s office.
“Damned glad to finally see you, Smith.”
“Likewise, Senior Sergeant,” he said cheerfully. A little cheer went a long way to irritate the man. “You tell Mr. Anders his boy’s safe up at Stony Hill?”
The teenager, following a raging argument with his father, had flung himself out of his house. After twenty-four worried hours, a frowning father and weeping mother had come to the Broome police station to report him missing. A few words from the boy’s mates, and S. S. Dougald had called for the district’s Aboriginal Liaison Constable to visit the outback. More words from local Aboriginals had led Leonard to the isolated Stony Hill station where the boy had found work as a jackaroo.
“Of course I told them — after you called in two days ago. Where the bloody hell have you been since then?”
“The Jowalenga Road washed out at Fraser Crossing. I couldn’t get back to the Great Northern Highway, so I came around by Country Downs Homestead. Stayed there overnight. They send their greetings, by the way.”
“They have a radio there, Smith. You could have used it.”
Leonard smiled more widely. “I didn’t think you’d worry about me, Sergeant.” In fact, he knew the S. S. would be happier if he did disappear into the bush. One part of the man’s irritation was that bureaucrats over two thousand kilometers away in Perth had imposed the Aboriginal Liaison Program on the Kimberley District without any consultation at all. Nor did it help that Broome, like the other six police stations in the Kimberley District whose budgets were already tight, had to donate toward what they considered bureaucratic bull dust. In Dougald’s eyes, they got damn little for it.
The older man stared for a long moment at Leonard, then at the litter on his desktop. In the cold fluorescent light, his face looked even more haggard. He wagged his head in slow disgust. “Bloody right! Got plenty else to fret over than a bludger like you.”
“You’ve been busy, eh?”
“Up half the night with the Karenji brothers — Albert cutting Edgar, it looks like. Somebody, anyway, came damn close to doing him in permanently. So you earn your bleeding keep while you’re here: Write your report on the Anders boy, and then go find out if Albert’s sober enough to tell you what happened. The arresting officer couldn’t get bugger-all out of him last night.”
Leonard, taking a sheet of paper and settling at an empty desk, figured it would be a bad time to ask Sergeant Dougald if he could first have his afternoon smoke-oh.
Constable Jones took Leonard’s sheath knife and let him into the lock-up.
“Bit of a dust-up, I hear.”
The stocky Welshman nodded. From Cell Two came a loud snore. “Sleeping like an angel, now.”
“A bit pongie for an angel.”
“Yeah, well, he does smell—” Jones started to say more but stopped. Leonard figured it would have been a comment about stinking Abos. But it didn’t bother him: he was neither one, nor the other, and both halves showered. “What happened?”
“Albert and Edgar were down off Streeter’s Jetty, howling like cats in heat. When Lathrop got there, he found Albert passed out and Edgar sliced like a wild pig.” Jones drew a hand across his chest and stomach. “He wouldn’t say who did it, but the sod’ll have a good scar to show off.”
“Pissed?”
“What else? Here,” Jones unlocked the cell door, “he’s all yours.”
Leonard thumped the iron cot with his hand. “Oi — wake up. Wake up now — oi!”
One eye, mapped with veins, slitted open.
“You, Albert Karenji, what you do in here?”
“Who says my name?” The man struggled to sit, grunting against the throb in his skull.
“Constable Smith.”
“Eh? Gubbmint man Smith? Swank-about-man, wear-collar Smith? Burnt-potato Smith?” The sourly grinning man repeated Leonard’s name, “Smith-Smith-Constable Smith?”
Both men knew that the repetition of a person’s name was an insult. It singled that person out from the clan, it drew the jealous attention of evil spirits, it was a dig at the whites’ lack of manners. Sometimes Leonard wished he knew even less than he did of the Kriole dialect and its tapestry of insults. But then he wouldn’t be an AL officer. He shook his head sadly. “You think maybe you kill your brother a little bit. But maybe what you done, you killed him proper. You do a shame job on your brother. Maybe now your brother come back for you, eh?”
Behind the tangle of his dark hair, Karenji’s bloodshot eyes blinked. At first the man tensed, alert for something he would not name. Then anger sharpened the glitter of his eyes. “Who you think you be, try to talk Kriole. You talk rubbish Kriole. You stay in flash talk, Jack-o!”
“Constable Jack-o. And don’t humbug me that you’re a barefooted blackfella grew up in the camps.” Karenji held anger at white blood even when mixed with black, Leonard knew, held anger at a half-caste who pretended to view the world as pure-bloods did. The anger reinforced the almost universal hatred of authority in general. Well, ‘let them hate as long as they fear’ — Leonard didn’t remember where he had read the phrase, but for too many, white and black, it held truth. And if Albert Karenji wanted to keep his Kriole from contamination by someone he considered an enemy, no problems. The aim was to get information about the injury and its cause. “Your brother’s in hospital. Looks bad for him. You tell me about it — why you two fought.”
Worry replaced anger. “How bad?”
“Don’t know,” Leonard said truthfully. “It’s a big cut. Maybe infection sets in, maybe he lost too much blood to make it. Try to find out when I leave here.”
The man thought that over, then his thick lips twisted in an ironic smile and he gave a John Wayne drawl. “That’s mighty black of you, Constable Smith.”