I looked up, the letter open in my hand. He was leaning forward, staring at me, the long leathery face hard and a muscle twitching, anger blazing in those big eyes — anger, and something else, something I couldn’t place.
‘The mine’s closed,’ he said, speaking very slowly, very emphatically. ‘If it’s ever opened again, it will be opened by me. Is that understood?’
‘But he’s only trying to help,’ Janet cried. ‘And if it’s worth anything at all …’
‘Daughter, please.’ The sharpness of his voice, the edge in it — it was as though he’d slapped her in the face.
‘Oh well, to hell with it then,’ she said brightly, and began to talk of other things while her father sat there brooding in silence and I read Kadek’s letter, my hopes dashed in the first paragraph. No offer of a job, only the vague outline of a proposition that left me with a feeling of helplessness. And then I was reading the last paragraph, scanning it quickly, absorbing the information with a sudden sense of excitement, wondering what it meant. I read it through again, slowly this time, and as I read I heard Ed Garetty’s voice saying, ‘Only this morning there was a Toyota through Lynn Peak with two men in it asking about Golden Soak.’ And he added, ‘It’s bad enough having a mine that’s marked on every map, but if we put it up for sale we’d have half the prospectors in the State tramping over the property, driving their trucks through our fences.’ And Janet saying, ‘Well, it wouldn’t make much difference — our fences are in pretty bad shape anyway.’
There was a sudden silence and I looked up to find her staring at me. ‘Well, what does your friend say?’ she asked with frank curiosity.
‘He’s not interested in Golden Soak.’
I saw the light fade from her eyes and I turned to her father. ‘Do you know where Lake Disappointment is?’
He didn’t say anything for a moment, a stillness settling on the room, his eyes watching me. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What else does he want to know?’ The bleakness of his voice was chilling.
I hesitated. But his reaction, my own curiosity — I felt impelled to ask him. ‘Does Mcllroy’s Monster mean anything to you?’
The silence deepened, his face frozen. It was as though I’d dropped a bomb hi the room.
‘McIlroy was your father’s partner, wasn’t he? Does his Monster exist, or is mis talk of copper just a prospector’s dream?’
He shook his head, frowning, a puzzled look in his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly.
‘Is it true he was searching for it when he disappeared?’
The stillness was absolute then, a silence so complete that I could hear the sibilant sound of the Alsatian breathing in her sleep as she lay sprawled by the entrance.
‘But that’s ages ago,’ Janet said.
‘Before the war — hi 1939.’ His voice was controlled now, very quiet. ‘McIlroy was lost on an expedition into the ulterior.’ He leaned a little forward. ‘What’s the name of your correspondent?’
‘Kadek.’
‘Why does he want to know about McIlroy?’
‘It’s just bar talk,’ I said. ‘A rumour he’s picked up.’ I folded the letter and put it away in my pocket. ‘I imagine Kalgoorlie is full of rumours right now.’
He nodded slowly. ‘It was all hi the papers at the time. A lot of speculation — most of it nonsense.’ And he added. ‘All our troubles here stem from that man McIlroy. His expedition was a desperate, hairbrained attempt to make good all the money he’d lost.’
‘Gambling?’ I asked.
‘He was playing the stock market — our money, and a lot of other people’s too.’ And he added, coldly and with an intensity that was almost violent, ‘Pat McIlroy was a crook. He destroyed this station and he destroyed my father.’
‘You never told me that,’ Janet said.
He shrugged and got to his feet. ‘No point. As you say, it all happened a long time ago now.’ He looked down at me, still frowning, his eyes bleak — ‘Lake Disappointment is just below the Canning Stock Route, between the Great Sandy and the Gibson. They found his truck abandoned there, and east of Disappointment mere’s nothing, only desert.’
He went out then, leaving me with questions still unanswered and the feeling that there was more to it than that. Janet also disappeared, and shortly afterwards we had lunch. It was a cold lunch — cold beef, salad and cheese. The bread was borne-made. ‘Lucky your visit coincided with the monthly supply,’ Janet said. ‘We try to be as self-sufficient as we can, but things like cheese and flour, salad dressing — oh, lots of things … ‘
‘And beer.’ Her father paused in his carving. ‘Jan drinks a lot of beer, and we don’t brew that.’
‘I don’t drink much.’ She was opening a can, and she passed it to me with a glass. ‘Help yourself. Anyway,’ she added, reaching behind her for another beer, ‘I need it to keep my strength up.’
He smiled at her. ‘You realize it’s making you fat?’
‘How could it, riding that camel day after day? Just because you don’t… ‘ She stopped there. ‘Besides, it’s good for me. Gives me a fine healthy sweat.’
It was a quick meal, none of us talking very much, and afterwards she took me over the house. Her father had gone off in the Land-Rover to have a look for cattle, over by Deadman Hill he said.
The rooms were larger than I had expected and there was actually a drawing room, not pretentious, but nevertheless a surprisingly stately room with two portraits in oils over the open fireplace and a cut glass chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling. The portraits were of a man and a woman. The man was bearded, a heavy, formidable face, the blue eyes large and compelling. The woman wore a high-necked dress, her hair long and piled on her small neat head. But it was the snub nose and the freckles that caught my eye and I turned to Janet. ‘Your grandmother?’
She nodded, smiling. ‘We still have some of her dresses, including that one. I tried it on once.’ She giggled. ‘We’re as like as two peas.’
The furniture, shrouded in dust sheets, appeared to be of good solid mahogany and the walls were panelled from floor to ceiling with that same patterned zinc. It was painted a pale shade of green and the flower pattern was so delicate that it looked like wallpaper.
The bedrooms all led off that same dark passage and had french windows opening on to the verandah. ‘We often sleep out here,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful when it’s cooler. Daddy won’t have a dogger on the place, so we’ve plenty of dingoes. Sometimes, out here, I’ll lie awake listening to their calls. I’ve counted as many as a dozen calling at one time, all round the house and quite close.’
‘Doesn’t your Alsatian see them off?’
‘Yla? No, of course not — she likes them around. But we have to lock her up when she’s on heat. She got away once and you can see the result, that dingo cross. Butch. We don’t worry much about him. He spends most of his time roaming the Windbreaks, and when he does come back he’s worn out, just skin and bone, and serve him right. He’s a womanizer.’ She laughed, glancing up at me as we moved back into the dimness of the passage, where she opened the door opposite and took me into a room facing north, which was part study, part office. ‘My father’s den,’ she called it. Bookcases crammed with books and magazines, a rack of guns, and everywhere rock samples, most of them tabbed with a map reference to indicate where they had been picked up. There was a big mahogany desk, bare wood showing through the worn leather top, and a black upholstered swivel chair with the stuffing visible in patches. The desk was littered with papers held down with pieces of rock and on the floor beside it was a large steel canister, dome-topped and painted cream. It caught my eye because I hadn’t expected to find such a modern instrument in a house that didn’t seem to have changed in fifty years.
‘That’s Daddy’s microscope.’ She took the dome cover off so that I could see. ‘It’s Swiss.’
I nodded. ‘A Wild Heerbrugg.’ I was puzzled because it was stereoscopic, the sort geologists use for examining core samples. ‘Does he know much about mineralogy?’