Before It Breaks (23 page)

As for the case, he didn't think there was anything he could do at this point that Graeme Earle couldn't. He called Scott Risely and found him on the golf course. Risely gave him his blessing to go, his one concern being the warrant for Karskine's house and car. He expected to have it within the hour.

‘Graeme can handle that. Basically we're looking for an axe, clothes, shoes, blood in the car.'

Risely wished him luck.

Clement filled in Earle. ‘The boss will have the warrant ready soon. You can handle that with the techs. I'll call you between flights. If I can organise Rhino, I'll stop off in Perth on the way back to catch up about the case but whatever happens I will be back tomorrow evening ready to go Monday.'

Earle wished him all the best. Clement shrugged hopelessly.

‘There's nothing I can do really. Keep trying to find that bikie, get some eyes on Marchant, he knows something. If you find a blood-stained axe at Karskine's, leave a message.'

Forty minutes later, the shimmering heat from the tarmac barely registering, Clement trundled behind an eclectic bunch, Asian tourists, a few families, kids bent over electronic handsets, elderly couples, young mining bods. The wealthier tourists wore new akubra hats, the mining rats workboots and singlets. This is fun for you, he thought watching tourists cram bags into overhead lockers. This journey is about all the good things you will discover.
He considered how often he'd flown and how many times there must have been somebody on the plane feeling like he was now, apprehensive, alone.

The flight was full and he found himself beside a couple of young miners. They put us single men together where we can only offend each other, he speculated, but wasn't sure if airline staff really were that thorough in their planning.

It was twenty minutes into the flight, after the miners had ordered some can mix of spirits and coke and the various children were immersed in their computer games, before his thoughts bore down and focused on his father. Who ever knew their father? Sure he knew his habits, hobbies. He'd been a pretty fair tennis player in his day and had continued playing competitively well into his sixties. Wimbledon on tele was the highlight of his year. He preferred beer to wine, liked hot English mustard on his steak, cooked medium. So far as Clement was aware his father had always loved his mother. There had been squabbles but no huge domestic where somebody had moved out or run off with the neighbour for a fortnight. But what did he know of his dreams as a young man? Did he play jokes on his friends, was he a wag? Was he a studious, serious kid?

Clement hadn't really seen any of that in him but you changed when you were a father, you lost individuality and you morphed into the status. Clement had, anyway. Once Phoebe came along his life reduced to only two modes, work and family, and this he saw as a continuation of his father's modus operandi. As a kid Clement had not been exposed to many of his parents' friends, who were all left in Perth when they'd come up here to run the caravan park. Very occasionally some old pal would drive up and spend a few days at the park. There'd be laughter, beers, but no stories he could recall. His father was one of five kids and had grown up in the wheatbelt. He should check with Mal Gross, see if they were from around the same neck of the woods. Clement did not remember his grandfather who ran a store and died of a heart attack in his fifties when Clement was two. Clement imagined his father, Alan, driving back to the hometown for the funeral in the old Kingswood, reliving his childhood. Alan Clement had finished high school, not all that common in those days, especially in those parts, and had found a job in the public service somewhere for a few years before joining the Roads department. His parents had met, married, Tess born first, then Dan and then that life had ended for whatever reason,
presumably opportunity, and they'd headed north when Dan was six. As a boy in that wheatbelt town, what had been his father's dream? To play in the Davis Cup, sail the high seas, feel the spray, the wind, chasing down the America's Cup, to own his own pub, to fly high over the flat brown earth as Clement was now? Surely it can't have been to run a caravan park in the Never Never. On occasion as a kid, Clement would flip through black and white photos in the family photo album. A handful were of his father's childhood. They were small with serrated edges and Clement could still remember his thrall as he sat on the floor, or the grass under a shady tree, confronted by these strange physical things that represented a mysterious and foreign world. He pictured them now, farm life, his father with his brothers and a sister all standing against a water tank or propped against a farm ute. Clement's uncles he couldn't even name he'd seen them so infrequently but his aunt Meg he knew, being the only girl. She was the only one besides his father still alive. There were only a few photos, maybe a dozen in all. In the 1940s and 50s, cameras and printing a luxury; they didn't own a fridge until his father was fifteen. The frugality had continued after his parents married and very few snaps chronicled the years before Tess and he came along. Most of those that did exist, a youthful Clement had committed to memory, flipping through the creaking album up here on hot oppressive days with no television and a surfeit of boredom. The courting years of his mum and dad featured group shots of people he had never met, holiday snaps, a wedding or christening. There was little of everyday life. In attempting to capture what they thought was extraordinary, all people had done was replicate the same uninspiring scenes of smiling faces looking at a camera. There was no photo of his parents sitting on their chairs gazing into a strand of distant trees, a solitary bottle of beer between them.

One group of photos always caught his attention though. It was well before his sister was born, his mother and father at a tennis club New Year's Eve fancy-dress party. His mum was Little Red Riding Hood, his dad a musketeer. The table was littered with large bottles of Swan Lager, the only beer available then. The snap that particularly intrigued him showed his father lunging with a foil—it looked like real one with a button on the end—at a jolly friar. In his father's eye was a gleam and his youthful body was taut with a theatrical hand caught in a mid-air twirl. The friar was doing a good job affecting wide-eyed surprise at his own ‘death'. This was
a side of his father Clement could not recall in the flesh. In that split-second there was a man dashing, theatrical, full of life. Was it simply the booze talking? Or was it a moment where his father's spirit broke to the surface and ran?

This same man could be on his deathbed and Clement still had no idea of who he was underneath the shellac of fatherhood. There had been times he'd attempted to get closer, inquiring about his dad's schooldays, his mates, their holidays, the first car he owned, but his father would make a one sentence comment and turn his attention to something practical like unblocking the septic tank or fixing a window. Clement understood the barrier. Parents want to live every aspect of their children's lives but don't want their children to know them. He didn't want Phoebe to know how he felt about himself. Hell, he wasn't even sure how he did feel about himself. You could say there was a sense of failure and a little guilt, like the draft prospect who never delivered big-time, but that wasn't quite right. There were moments he was proud of his work, proud even of the fact that at some point Marilyn had been in love with him, proud to be Phoebe's father, yet that did not mean he wanted Phoebe in on this. Ultimately he assumed the real him would be a disappointment and yet he did not attempt to cultivate a ‘fake' him, he simply chose to restrict aspects of his old self, to present what he wanted. He was sure that in this he was following a family tradition.

The plane touched down in Perth. Even though the sun clung to the sky only by its fingernails it was still hot, the Doctor thin and wan today as its patients. He had to scoot over to a separate terminal for the flight to Albany. En route he called Earle and listened to his report.

‘I'm at Karskine's now. Nothing yet but we've only been here forty-five minutes or so.'

‘How was he?'

‘Not too bad. Told us we were wasting our time and was not impressed we were impounding the vehicle. Apparently Mathias Klendtwort called the station and left a contact number, sounds like he speaks good English. You want me to follow up?'

‘You're busy, I'll do that.'

Earle gave him the phone number and Clement wrote it on his hand.

‘Shep have any luck with those vehicles in the CCTV?'

‘No. Three of them belonged to people working in the shops. Nobody saw the biker.'

The Albany plane was boarding by the time Clement reached the terminal. It was a smaller craft but most of the twenty-odd seats were claimed. The passenger list this time was more homogeneous, ninety percent locals heading home. He edged down the narrow aisle and squeezed in next to a man with ruddy cheeks and nose, and a full crop of snow-white hair, probably in his sixties. The remnants of skin cancers burned off the man's face suggested outdoor occupation. Odds on he was a farmer. They nodded politely to each other and that was it.

On this leg, Clement dwelt only on whether his father would survive. He had long steeled himself for the death of his parents so he was not shocked to find himself in this situation but he did not want his father to die, not now, not ever. Practical considerations began to pepper him. If his father did survive would he be mobile? Would he have to go to a home? Could his mother cope? No highlights announced themselves, just varying degrees of unpleasant realities that other people were dealing with every day and once more he felt vaguely guilty. Had he earned more money maybe he would have been able to afford nurses and private facilities. He had settled for an acceptable existence, not a good one.

The female flight attendants barely had time to scoop up the tea and coffee cups before informing them they would soon be landing. Clement had taken a sip of his tea, felt his tooth twinge and decided not to tempt fate further. He pressed his face to the porthole and through gloom saw thick forests below. The contrast between where he had come from and here could only have been more powerful with snow on the ground. They landed and deplaned, as the Americans like to say. It was dark and much cooler than Perth, but mild not cold. Whereas the north air was full of desert dust, down here it was clean and invigorating, something to do with negative ions from the Great Southern Ocean, Clement had heard, though he could not remember where. Albany had been a whaling port into the 1970s but a century earlier had been more internationally famous than Perth, for besides the whaling it acted as a gateway to the Kalgoorlie goldfields.

The taxi driver was overweight, with a form guide folded on the dash, simple pleasures. Clement thought of cautioning him on the dangers of stroke but held his tongue. Before entering the hospital he called Earle again. They had finished up at Karskine's. No axe,
surprise, surprise. Mal Gross had been overseeing the biker lead, getting the uniforms to do the legwork. Nothing had turned up yet and they were sending patrols by regularly to keep an eye on Marchant.