Before It Breaks (48 page)

The police car was a godsend and he meant that literally. Dear Hilda mumbling in the dark room, liver-spotted narrow fingers sliding over her rosary, so long cut adrift by those to whom she prayed perhaps her devotion had been rewarded through this gift to him? The rain was easing but still potent, his feet squelching into pools. He had to travel all the way to the car and pull open the door. No keys. The cop must have them on him. He swung back but could not see the cop's body now.

‘Give it up, Peter. You can't get away.'

The cop was sitting on the ground behind him, his back propped against a thin tree, both hands pointing the gun at him, he looked pale and his breathing was laboured.

Clement was trying to make himself sound much stronger than he was. A minute before he'd felt water pinging off his cheek and blinked his eyes open again. He had sense of time having skipped a beat and supposed he must actually have passed out. He turned and caught sight of Bourke breaking for cover to the car and realised this was his one chance but dragging himself closer back towards his car had sapped all energy from him.

‘Come on Peter, don't make me shoot you.'

‘You won't shoot me because you want to know where Osterlund is.'

They were shouting but every word was audible at this close range.

‘Where is he?'

He caught it then, Bourke's reflexive glance down. He's buried him thought Clement. He was sure of it.

‘Where did you bury him?'

There it was, a momentary look of shock, then Bourke's jaw set. ‘That animal cut my grandfather in pieces and chucked him in the river.'

‘Don't ruin your life. Think of your grandmother.'

He screamed at Clement, ‘Who do you think I did this for?'

‘Consider her, Peter. Tell us where Osterlund is. People are on your side. They understand. You can rebuild your life.'

‘That's bullshit.'

Clement tried to read him, it was difficult anyway but he was weakening again and he felt control slipping away. ‘So what, Peter, we kill one another? Your grandfather was a policeman. You think he'd approve of you killing me?'

‘It's too late.'

‘Too late to get away, that's all, not too late for another …'

He wanted to say ‘chance' but it stalled like a pool ball stuck in the tray. Clement could hear his own shallow breathing, his words slurring.

‘Come on. Let's both get back to our families.'

‘You will have to shoot me.'

Clement raised the gun, hoping to instil some urgency, but he could not keep it steady.

‘You buried him alive didn't you? Otherwise you'd just kill him on the beach. Where?'

‘Sorry.'

His plan was to shoot Bourke in the leg but the gun was waving around. Even if he could just keep him talking a little …

He felt his eyes closing, he was terribly feeble now. He fought with all his strength to stay conscious and that sucked power from his limbs. His hand dropped to his thigh. Bourke walked forward and gently prised the gun from him the way a father prises a toy from a sleeping child. He could barely keep his eyes open. He felt Bourke's fingers in his pocket and saw his keys dangling like a small fish. Bourke took a step back and regarded him he thought at first with contempt but then realised: no, it wasn't that, it was pity.

The policeman had stopped talking and his head just lolled to one side. Peter remembered bringing ice-cream to the little girl who had sat with her father, recalled her face rippling with pleasure. He had not wanted to orphan her. Tears began to muster in his eyes but were they for the girl or himself? For so long he'd had to be strong, at school, managing to avoid the subject of his father with the deftness of a bomb technician disengaging the trigger mechanism. Later as he grew older the questions about his oma, the implicit query of what had happened to his parents, the delicious anticipation of young women wanting to mother him, their red lips circling the straw of a shared milkshake, the way he'd had to bite his tongue when they slagged off their own ‘helicopter' parents, a cheap pejorative lingo coined by those who would farm out their children to friends or other relatives while they doused themselves in suntan lotion on a Spanish terrace scanning magazines rather than cramped over a Monopoly board with their children, telling themselves it was really for the kids' benefit, it was making them independent. Well he was independent now. With his bow and axe he had slain the three-headed monster that had devoured his childhood. So what did it matter if he cried? Who was there to witness it?

The car had a quarter tank of fuel. He would drive till it ran out or something presented itself. He had no qualms abandoning his plans for Asia. In fact, he felt he belonged here. There were remote communities, indigenous people he could hang out with, learning their ways. They would have no reason to hand him in.

He drove north through bush cutting over rough ground. The two-way radio buzzed, another cop.

‘Clem, where are you?'

He kept on. The bush gave way onto a cleared track, wet and muddy. He decided to take it, hoping it would circumnavigate any roadblocks they had out for him, confident nobody else would be
out in these conditions. It had been a long, long journey and he was all of a sudden unbelievably tired but there would be time to rest soon enough. The storm was lightening finally and with it, his mood. He had traversed darkness and had emerged washed by the waters, baptised anew, woken, healed.

The world softly faded in on him again. Rain splashing off the bridge of his nose, Graeme Earle looked down at him, distressed, as if he were already dead; Bourke, his gun, the car gone.

I've only got maybe half a dozen words left in me. The thought was surprisingly deliberate, like a thief moving fast but without haste, knowing what he wanted.

‘He buried him alive.'

‘Where?'

He could only shake his head. Graeme Earle was shouting at him but he was muted.

Black.

The ocean was pale blue, a very small gum tree hovering dead centre, and it struck him as odd but for the first few seconds he couldn't fathom why. No, as his eyes focused he saw it wasn't the ocean it was a wall and at its centre was a small watercolour in a cheap frame, no glass. It was the smell, that weird co-mingling of sickly pre-warmed meals and antiseptic that told Clement this was hospital.

‘About time, mate.'

Clement turned to his left and through a little fairy-forest of plastic tubes saw Shepherd, beaming, an apple poised half-eaten in his hand. Only then he realised he was wearing an oxygen mask. The clock on the wall indicated it was one ten.

‘It doesn't work. It's five thirty in the morning. Welcome, back.'

He tried to smile but wasn't sure if he managed it, the white fell too quickly.

Later, the mask off, breathing unaided but with difficulty, his right side aching with every breath, Clement sat alone in his hospital bed listening to faint sounds in the corridor, a trolley clanking, a raised voice, a fading laugh. He had the room to himself, privileged he supposed. Elevated on the pillow he stared directly ahead at the gum tree print. Who chose those paintings, one of the staff here? Or was it an actual job? Somebody in Perth buying prints for hospitals all over the state, matching thematically the region to the print: gold prospectors in Kalgoorlie, whales in Albany. What had been on the wall of his father's hospital room? He tried to remember. It seemed an age ago. That single contemplation prised open a whole cupboard-full of responsibilities that tumbled out: calling his mother back, Phoebe, interviews about how he came to lose his gun and police vehicle. Marilyn had not visited. For that matter she hadn't even called but Shepherd assured him Risely had notified her. His mother had rung a couple of hours ago. Tess was with her now. He'd managed to reassure them he was okay but had told his mum he was tired and would call her back, which was only half true. The fatigue had left him now, it was pure physical incapacitation confining him to bed but he did not reveal that to her, it would only have taken explanation. How he came to be lying in a hospital bed in Derby with a large dressing on his right side instead of the arrow shaft that had been there last time he'd looked, was relayed to him by Shepherd a couple of hours after that first brief phase of consciousness.

Worried about blood loss and hypothermia, Graeme Earle had bundled him into his car and driven hell for leather back to the main road calling for help while debating, should he drive to Beagle Bay where there were some rudimentary medical facilities or try and get all the way back to Broome where he might still need another ninety-minute race to Derby? This was some of the most isolated country in the world, one of the worst places to find yourself at the centre of a medical emergency. In the end, the army came to Clement's aid. The worst of the winds had moved through and though it was still hairy, they'd had a chopper standing by for evacuations. They directed Earle to Beagle Bay where a chopper was waiting on the football oval with oxygen, fluids and drugs. They evacuated Clement direct to Derby. All of this, Shepherd related in his rather high voice with an edge of rapture so that Clement had the sensation of listening to an amateur calling a football game.

From his surgeon Clement had learned he'd been rushed straight to surgery where for more than two hours they had worked on him, removing the arrowhead, repairing his right lung and then stitching him back up.

‘The main concern was blood loss and infection. We've got blood into you and hopefully there'll be no infection. You also have a fractured rib from the arrow; can't do much about that except tape you up, I'm afraid.'

Graeme Earle had been forced to stay at Beagle Bay to pursue Bourke. To Shepherd's annoyance, the three Perth detectives had been sent off to join him.

‘All the glory to them, us locals get to look for Osterlund, probably drowned by now if he wasn't dead already,' he offered without cheer.

Risely was overseeing the Bourke operation but it would be another three or four hours before the weather permitted aerial surveillance. Earle was at Beagle Bay and the detectives on their way to join him.

‘So what happened? How'd he peg you?' Shepherd asked it with complete insensitivity but Clement preferred that to somebody pussy-footing around. Clement told him as he remembered it but his mind was already moving forward to the question of Osterlund and he ended the story about himself abruptly. ‘Lisa must check Bourke's car for soil, anything that might tell us where he went.'

‘She's onto that, been onto it pretty much since they brought it in.'

‘Keep looking for CCTV footage of his car. He's probably been out to wherever he buried him since he snatched him. Check the records, when he wasn't working, when his roommates say he was out, that's when he would have been on his way to him.'

His mind was running now. Shepherd dutifully took notes.

‘It can't be too far away because he'd have to drive out and back. I bet he filled his tank on the abduction day.'