‘No time like the present. But I’ll have to take a sample of the gold and get a good look at the gun and the photo. I can’t do it crouching in the dirt.’
Bert rubbed the grey bristles on his chin. ‘The box can stay put though?’
‘For the time being, yes.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘Sure no-one’s around?’
‘Stan, the derro in the shack, sleeps it off till noon. He’s a useless bastard. I don’t have anything to do with him, but Jessie said he had some kind of a right to the place. The yuppies in the stilt house’ll be staring out to sea. Can’t see the spot real well from the other place. Oh, there’s some boatsheds on the beach and a couple of blokes live in them sometimes. Dunno what you could see from there, but they sometimes wander through a corner of the place to get down there. ‘S all right by me as long as they don’t drop their rubbish.’
I was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, sport socks and sneakers, good digging clothes. I followed Bert around the back of the house and waited while he reached under the back porch for a shovel. I took it from him and checked the shaft for splinters. ‘Let me start earning your money.’
He laughed. ‘Tell you the truth, I’m glad of your company. Tom never comes up here when I’m around. Brings, his mates from time to time. Here we go.’
The area behind the house was thick with kikuyu grass that needed slashing. There were a few shrubs and flower beds that had become weed-choked. Jessie, the gardener, was sorely missed. The vegetable patch was in full sunlight near the stump of a wattle. Bert pointed to the left.
‘Jessie grew the vegetables over there, see. But those bloody wattles grew up and the place doesn’t get much sun now.’ He kicked the stump. ‘This bugger rotted out and blew down and I reckoned that was the spot. Lucky, eh?’
‘We’ll see.’
Bert had cleared away a few square metres of matted grass and turned the loamy soil. He had tomatoes and beans on stakes. That is, the packets were thumbtacked to the wood. No sign of the vegetables. The pumpkins were doing well though, the vines snaking over the cleared spot and off into the kikuyu.
‘Right in the bloody middle,’ Bert said.
As a reflex action, God knows why, I spat on my hands before I wielded the shovel. The earth had been recently disturbed and after taking out one big shovelful, the blade hit the box on the next thrust. I worked for ten minutes shovelling it to the sides and scraping it away until the oilcloth came in view. I scraped away the earth and pulled at the wrapping until the lid was clear. It was a medium-sized sea chest that had once had a thin leather veneer over the metal. Moisture had got in under the oilcloth and this had long since rotted away, leaving a pitted, rusty surface beneath. That was encouraging; it looked as if the box had been in the ground a fair while. Two heavy clasps held the lid down. I cleared the dirt from around them and prized them open without much effort, using the screwdriver attachment on my Swiss Army knife.
‘When did you find this thing, Bert?’
He removed the old hat he had put on and scratched his head where hair hadn’t grown for many a long day. ‘I dunno. Couple of weeks ago?’
The lid opened easily and there they were- bars of dull, yellowish metal the size of cigarette cartons. They were irregular in shape and it was no use looking for serial numbers-this wasn’t bullion in the accepted sense. I hefted a bar and couldn’t guess at the weight.
‘You didn’t take them out to weigh them, did you?’
‘No fear. I know weights, but. It’s like I said, round about 60 kilos. Take a look at the other stuff.’
What I took to be the Colt was wrapped in chamois. The photograph was in a plastic sleeve of the kind used to hold bank passbooks back when people used such things. I took both items out of the box and handed them up to Bert. ‘Got a tarp or something? Wouldn’t want all this to get wet.’
Bert looked up at the cloudless sky, laughed, and tramped off towards his storage area under the porch. I opened the sharpest blade on the knife and took a long, thick paring from one of the gold bars. I wrapped it in a tissue and put it in my pocket. Then I closed the chest after moving several of the bars and feeling around to make sure there was nothing else inside. Bert came back and we threw a tarpaulin over the whole patch and weighted it down at the corners with chunks of firewood.
‘You’re a trusting soul,’ I said to Bert as we moved back towards the house.
‘How’s that?’
‘What’s to stop me bashing you and taking off with the lot?’
He grunted. ‘If I was that bad a judge of character I’d bloody deserve it.’
Good point, I thought.
We went into the house through the back door to the cool, dark kitchen. Bert lifted two holland blinds, turned on an overhead light and put the pistol and photo under it on the kitchen table. He opened the fridge and took out two more light beers. I was sweating after the exertion and swigged the drink gratefully. We sat down and I unwrapped the pistol. It was the standard, slide-action model and still had a very slight oil sheen. The magazine and breech were empty.
‘Old?’ Bert said hopefully.
‘Can’t tell.’ I picked the gun up and looked it over. ‘Serial number’s gone, of course. That’s the best way to tell. The thing is, a well-maintained weapon like this can be quite old and a neglected one can be new but look like shit. An expert’d be able to tell, maybe.’
‘What about the picture?’
I slid it out of the sleeve. Again, it had been carefully looked after. There was nothing written on the reverse. The photo showed a youngish woman, dark with big eyes and bold, handsome features. My research into female fashion had done no good at all. The hairstyle was a short crop and there was no way to date her clothes because she wasn’t wearing any. She was quite naked apart from a wide black ribbon with a pearl set in it around her neck.
Her figure was good, neither trained-down thin in the modern manner nor robust as in days gone by. Her expression was amused and there was something about the pose and attitude that was hard to grasp. There was something sexually ambiguous about it-or was there? Who or what was she looking at? I tried to imagine the photographer and couldn’t. I sucked down the rest of the beer.
‘How old?’ Bert said. ‘The photo, not the girl.’
‘Jesus, Bert, how can you tell? She’s not holding up a copy of the Telegraph.’
‘Good-looking sheila.’
‘Right. Someone must know who she is, or was. That’s a start.’
‘Reckon she’s a pro?’
‘Could be.’
Pros, guns and gold. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
I knew what he was thinking but my mind wasn’t running on the same track. I’m as keen on money as the next man and always in need of it, but this matter was intriguing me in an almost disinterested or theoretical way. Who was she and why did she matter so much to someone? And who was that someone? The beer suddenly had a sour taste in my throat as I considered the possibility that the woman could also be buried out in Bert’s backyard. I rejected the idea, but it nagged at me.
‘What d’you reckon, Cliff?’
I rewrapped the pistol and put the photo back in its sleeve. ‘I reckon I’ll have a swim, do some thinking and then start work, probably after those flathead.’
In the afternoon, I strolled around the locality, checking on the other residents who had a view of, or were likely to have spent any time close to, Bert’s place. Apart from anyone staying in the boatsheds, they all had their own tracks to the beach and the trees very deliberately gave each block a good deal of privacy. I told the young couple in the pole house that I was looking for a property to buy in the area. They had sussed the place very thoroughly before making their own purchase, and they were happy to pass their information on. This block was swampy, that had a dodgy title, another had been the site of a council rubbish tip in the Fifties. Bert’s block was the best of the lot.