‘Attacked him?’
‘Tried to get the phone away from him and punched him.’
‘He’d told her what he was doing? Phoning someone to take her to hospital?’
‘I suppose so. He said she shouted, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ll say you raped me”. Her nose was bleeding again and her blood got all over him. I saw his jumper when I got back.’
‘So he didn’t phone?’
‘No. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to, Mr Faraday. Went into shock, I imagine.’
We’d reached the verandah. The dog came upright by sliding its forelegs forward until they went over the edge and dropped to the first step.
‘This bloke’s in worse shape than I am,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘Needs two new hips. Can I offer you a beer? I have a Cooper’s Sparkling this time every day.’
We sat on the side verandah in the weak sun and drank beer. I had a pewter mug with a glass bottom and an inscription. I held the mug away from me to read it: To Sim, a mad Australian, from his comrades, 610 Squadron, Biggin Hill, 1944.
‘He was in the RAF,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘He was in England doing an agriculture course when the war broke out, so he joined up. He was billeted with my aunt for a while. That’s where I met him.’
I said, ‘Biggin Hill was a fighter station, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at the sky as if expecting to see a Spitfire come out of the sun. ‘He never got over the war. None of them did, really. All that expecting to die. Every day. For so long. And they were so young.’
A silence fell between us, not uneasy, until she said, ‘The girl calmed down after that, said she was sorry. Simon found some of Fiona’s pyjamas and a pair of her riding jeans and an old shirt. She showered and went to bed in the spare room. The bed’s always made. Simon said he brought her a mug of Milo but she was asleep. The next day, she asked if he could take her to a station and lend her the fare to Melbourne. Simon said she looked terrible, swollen nose, black eyes. He took her to Ballan, bought her ticket and gave her fifty dollars. And that was that.’
‘Did he find out her name?’
‘No.’
‘And he never reported it to anyone?’
‘No. He should have. It was too late by the time I got back.’
‘Did he think she was from Kinross Hall?’
‘Well, she wasn’t a local. You get to know the locals.’
‘But there wasn’t any other reason to think that?’
‘No.’
‘Do you ever think about how she might have found herself in Colson’s Road?’
She shrugged, took a sip of beer. ‘Simon thought she might have been pushed out of a car.’
I finished my beer, got up, said my thanks. At the front gate, Mrs Walsh said, ‘Things left undone. Sins of omission. Most of us err more on that side, don’t you think, Mr Faraday?’
Howard Lefroy’s apartment, the blood up the tiled walls, came into my mind.
‘Amen,’ I said.
A naked girl, neck broken, thrown down a mine shaft, some time after 1984. A naked girl, beaten, by a lonely roadside in October 1985.
Ned worked at Kinross Hall in November 1985.
And never set foot there again. Until a few days before his murder.
I took the long way home, down Colson’s Road to Milstead in the closing day. There was a pine forest on the one side, scrubby salt-affected wetlands on the other. Dead redgums marked the line of a creek running northwest. The last of the light went no more than four or five metres into the pines. Beyond that, it was already cold, dark, sterile night. Nothing cheered the heart on this stretch of Colson’s Road.
Neither did anything in the bar at the Milstead pub. An L-shaped room with a lounge area to the right, it had fallen in the formica wars of the seventies. The barman was a thin, sallow man with greased-back curly hair and a big nose broken at least twice. A small letter J was crudely tattooed in the hollow of his throat. As an educated guess, I would have said four or five priors, at least one involving serious assault, and a degree or two from the stone college. He hadn’t studied beer pulling either.
‘Helpin out,’ he said, putting down the dripping glass. ‘Owner’s on the beach in fucking Bali, regular bloke got done this arvo, wouldn’t take the breathie, the bastards lock him up.’
‘Thought you had some rights,’ I said. ‘You local?’
He gave me a long look and made a judgment. ‘Wife,’ he said. ‘Well, ex, pretty much. Bitch. Fuckin family swarm around here. Get the motor goin, I’m off to WA. Bin there? Fuckin paradise.’
He took my five-dollar note and short-changed me without going near the till.
‘Who owns the pine forest down the road here?’ I said.
He was pouring himself a vodka. Three vodkas, in fact. ‘Wooden have a fuckin clue, mate.’ He raised his voice. ‘Ya breathin there, Denise? Who owns the pine forest?’
‘Silvateq Corporation,’ a husky voice said from around the corner. ‘S-i-l-v-a-t-e-q.’
I took my glass and made the trip. A woman somewhere out beyond seventy, face a carefully applied pink mask matching her tracksuit, was sitting at a round table playing patience. She was drinking a dark liquid out of a shot glass.
‘G’day,’ I said. ‘John Faraday. What’s Silvateq Corporation?’
She looked me over and went back to the cards. ‘A company,’ she said.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Is it local?’
‘Collins Street,’ she said. ‘They sent me a letter tellin me not to use their road. Their road. It’s bin a public track since God was in nappies. Wrote back, told ’em to bugger off. Not another word.’
‘They backed off?’
‘No. Put a bloody great barbed-wire fence across the road and dug a trench behind it. Looks like the bloody Somme.’
She took a sip of the black liquid and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Course the shire’s bought off. Only takes about ten quid.’
‘This was when?’
She flipped a card. ‘More than ten years. When did that Hawke get in?’
‘In ’82.’
‘Round about then. Bought it from old Veene. He planted the trees along the road. Twenty rows, I remember. This other bunch planted the rest. Know what they call bloody pine plantations? Green graveyard. Nothin lives in ’em.’
Green graveyard. I thought about that on the trip home. The mine shaft the girl was thrown down was in a pine forest near Rippon. How far was that from Colson’s Road?
On the way home, gloomy, I stopped at Flannery’s place, a small village of dangerously old sheds surrounding a weatherboard house. He lived with a cheerful nurse called Amy who wouldn’t marry him. ‘Marry a flogged-out backyard mechanic whose first wife walked off with a water diviner?’ she once said. ‘I’d need time to think about that. A lifetime.’
‘Just as easy been the fence bloke,’ Flannery had said, ‘but then I’da had a new fence. This bugger’s got a bit of wire, coathanger wire, picks three spots, bloody wire’s vibrating like a pit bull’s chain. Down we go, drillin halfway to the hot place, fifty bucks a metre. Two holes bone dry, third one a little piddle comes out, takes half an hour to fill the dog bowl. Still cry when I think about it.’
Flannery was in one of the sheds working under the hood of a Holden ute by the light of a portable hand lamp. The vehicle was covered in stickers saying things like Toot to Root and Emergency Sex Vehicle and Bulk Sperm Carrier.
‘My cousin’s boy’s,’ he said. ‘Virgin vehicle. Never had a girl in it.’
‘I can see he’s waiting for someone special,’ I said. ‘Listen, you know of Ned ever going around asking for jobs?’
Flannery was wiping his large hands on his jumper, a garment that qualified as a natural oil resource. ‘Ned? Ask for a job? You smokin something?’
‘Second question. He ever talk about a doctor called Ian Barbie?’