Quota (6 page)

INTERVIEW SUSPENDED.

DETECTIVE SERGEANT NEIL ROBERTSON:

THIS IS CONTINUATION OF A TAPE RECORDED CONVERSATION BETWEEN DETECTIVE SERGEANT NEIL ROBERTSON AND TOBY JAMES MURCHISON OF 22 CASPIAN STREET, DAUPHIN IN THE STATE OF VICTORIA, CONDUCTED AT ST KILDA ROAD POLICE COMPLEX ON MONDAY 24 AUGUST. ALSO PRESENT IS DETECTIVE SENIOR CONSTABLE BRYAN GOODALL.

DAUPHIN

HE COULDN'T GET comfortable until he was well onto the Geelong road, set up in one of the left lanes so he could let the Saab find its own rhythm. He drained the last of the coffee he'd brewed at chambers before he left, and threw the cup on the passenger floor. The coffee grit sat dry on his tongue. Fantastic. Furry teeth and four hours of panic coming up.

He fed a CD into the stereo, fiddled with the cruise control. Aircon for a few k's, then open windows. Anna had made one of her welfare calls before he left. She'd been quite specific—don't drive straight from work. It'll be hell on that road, everyone headed down the beach for the long weekend, she'd said. And you'll be driving into the evening sun. But now there was a heavy bank of cloud rising from the western horizon. The sun was beaten, reduced to a brilliant rim on the cloudbank after the sticky heat of the day. Charlie leaned forward to air the small of his back and wished he'd changed shirts.

The old workers' suburbs, red and orderly and flat in the tired light, gave way to the steel flanks of the factories, giant signs telling him who to fly and where to merge.
I'm supposed to be in the conflict business
, his head was saying.
I'm not an advocate, I'm a long-haul babysitter
. The factories yielded to tilt-slab housing—boxes, boxes, boxes. Neo-Georgian, faux-Victorian, pseudo-warehouse-conversion. No trees. Off the plan, on the block, financed by the collective debt of swooning young punters.

Anna would call him a snob and ask him by what accident of history he had been set up in judgment, but there they were, hand in hand: gazing up at the anaemic eaves of their little palaces, gym-honed and pouring westwards over the paddocks of old Italian sharecroppers, with their home theatres and courtyard pavers. Plasma screens for the long evenings, jetskis for the weekends.

Dusk fell around him and headlights streaked in the oncoming lanes. The storm cloud, lit by faraway lightning, had crept up to fill the whole windscreen. The housing estates were gone now and he was well into the paddocks. He closed the windows, opened the fresh air vents and was immediately struck in the face by a stream of airborne grit. He found a square of chocolate in the console somewhere, greasy with the heat and inexplicably hairy.

The road narrowed and grew rough. The choices presented by the outlying towns were behind him: now it was just a matter of keeping the car on the road until it got to Dauphin. He had nearly four hours to work through the whole Annie situation, and yet he was filled with childish resistance. With effort, he constructed a couple of good sequences. Annie had never been in love with him: she was just
determined
about him, like she was about everything. He was there to be mastered, grappled with and brought to heel. He pictured her friends, watching their toddlers on a plastic slide somewhere, silently thanking their lucky stars that they hadn't settled for such a maudlin prick.

What he suspected, however, was less easy.

She was probably good. Not in a churchy, virtuous way, just good in her bones. The type of person who was capable of doing the right thing when no one was watching.

His eyes felt sticky. Two towns and a radio news bulletin had passed without him noticing. The engine was screaming; he'd left the car in third as he emerged from the second town. Two-thirds of a tank gone. He slowed down to eighty for a place called Regent, watched a servo go past on his left and a war memorial on his right. They were just lights now, downlights, uplights. An avenue of honour, skeletal outlines against a dark and angry sky.

They weren't connecting, that was it. Not even when he'd faced her over some café table, wherever, locked his eyes onto hers. They were always ten degrees off square, just like the other night. Maybe it's a natural state, he thought, to be dissatisfied but plugging on, grimly trying to make each day slightly more honest than the last. One day, if they'd kept going, and found out what would hold them together by sheer attrition, he might've closed the void between them.

Tennis courts, a footy ground, third, fourth. He hit fifth as he passed the 100 sign. A green sign listing towns he didn't know. Then, the souvenirable yellow sign with the black kangaroo, and almost immediately—a second later? A minute?—in the dull compression of road time there was a flash of movement on the road and a loud bang.

The seatbelt bit. Charlie felt the car drift left, grip briefly, start spinning. As it floated through its arc he had time to imagine the savage finality of the tree, the pole, the oncoming B-double, whatever hard object was about to shatter this weightless world. He tried steering, in the expanded seconds of the spin, and knew it was futile. He couldn't tell if he was braking or not. Half-clenched, half-resigned, he waited.

But the car just faded into silence. Momentum gone, it juddered and bounced once before coming to rest in a cloud of smoke. The front wheels had found a culvert of some sort on the grass. The rear end sat out in the roadway. He'd stalled it.

Somehow the stereo had given up in fright, leaving silence. He could taste the coffee, smell the burnt rubber. The headlights daubed light on a paddock fence. Insects drifted in the smoke, lurching pinpoints in the sick yellow glow.

He got out and wandered around to the front of the car. The drivers headlight was gone, leaving a gory smashed eye socket. The front quarter was caved in almost to the wheel, and a streak of something fleshy led back towards the drivers door. There was a clump of fur lodged in the battered bodywork. He walked an aimless circle around the back of the car, heard the first, fat raindrops striking the hot metal.

Doonk…doonk
. Slowly at first and then in a rapid staccato, fizzing and popping, whacking the asphalt. For a brief instant, every drop missed him entirely, as though he wasn't part of this night. Then he wore one on the right eyebrow, another two on the top of his head. They jabbed into his shirt, again on his face, and again, then they were at him in squadrons; face shoulder ear head chin head chest shoes, and the storm came roaring down on him, drumming on the car and pattering on the road, leaving him deaf and insensible to anything other than one thought. He'd hit something. He needed a reckoning with the object, it must be an animal, that had strayed into his path.

In the distracting curtain of rain, he was at first only aware of the wide, unfocused sound. And then another noise. Thumping, dragging, scraping. On the roadway, back towards the car, his eye snagged it in the arc of the headlights. A big roo, tilted over its left flank and lurching to keep a distance. As he approached, the dark eyes followed him, big and soft and wounded. Fresh, sticky blood was raised to a ghastly froth on its snout, and its heaving breath crackled like fire through twigs. It was wrecked, shattered. Watching him quietly.

What happens now? asked the eyes.

It would be all right to get back in the car and go. Thousands of these things out here…they're pests in some areas, he'd heard. It's not a person, it's not your fault.
Let nature take its course
.

The roo made a movement, lurched again, exposing its other flank, and Charlie flinched. The left leg was snapped, hanging only by matted fur. He backed away, wanting more than anything else to escape those eyes. The animal tried to hop away and the mangled leg flailed around in a deranged circle as it overbalanced. Pedalling madly with the good leg, it stood again, heaving and wobbling. Continued to watch him.

Charlie went to the boot of the Saab. His potential weaponry comprised a suit carrier, a soft bag of clothes and six boxes of ring binders. Trading as he did in the aftermath of violence and not its delivery, he was a traveller without blunt objects.

But not quite. He reached into the tyre well and felt around until his fingers closed around a thin steel rod. The winder for the jack. He brought it out and gave it an experimental swoosh. It clanged into the back bumper of the Saab, jarring his hand and sending the damaged roo scuttling into the shadows.

He changed his grip on the jack winder. As he approached, the roo broke cover and tried to bolt, breaking the leg off entirely and dragging the exposed end of the bone along the asphalt. It left a chalky yellow streak on the wet road. The roo's breath was tight and hissing now, its gait jerky, futile. Charlie dropped to his haunches and threw up. He rested with both hands on the wet road, staring into a puddle of vomit pocked with raindrops. Waited for his fingers to stop their mad buzzing.

The animal had retreated to the shadows again. The eyes were harder to discern, though he could feel them still, imploring him. If it wanted deliverance, then his conscience was clear. The use of the rod would be right and good. But did it? Was it hoping for mercy? Help?

He crawled forward. Curled and uncurled his hand on the wet steel. He was within reach of the animal now. He braced, left hand extended for balance. Pictured the soft brown fur at the top of the skull and thrashed downward as hard as he could.

Whatever he'd expected in a lifetime of never having tried to kill anything, he did not expect the dull, damp thud he heard now.

The kangaroo's one good leg seemed to buckle, and the ungainly prop of splintering bone gave way. The animal collapsed on the grass, gagging and twitching, and Charlie struck it again and again, feeling the strain in his shoulder as he brought the rod up for the third and fourth times and the sharp sting in his wrist as the rod met bone, again and again. The rain was hammering down on him now, and flecks of blood spat upwards at him as he struck.
Just be gracious and die
, he thought.
Please stop twitching now
.

It persisted, though, and Charlie felt a flash of irrational fury. He pushed the knowledge away. Nobody flogging a wounded animal wants to own up to anger. For a mad second, he thought of Harry in a fishing boat, watching with him as a little flathead flapped away against the hull. It's just the nerves, Charlie, he'd said.
The nerves
couldn't feel sorrow or pain. There was no panic or fear in them, no frantic desire for escape.
The nerves
didn't cling desperately to life. They were an abstraction of sorts. Surely the insistent kicking of the busted legs was just nerves. Surely the soft-eyed animal had left long ago.

It wasn't until the head was a misshapen, purplish mat that the animal was finally still. In the places where the fur was not caked with blood, it bowed beneath the attentive raindrops. Charlie stood there, heaving for breath, before running the rod through the wet grass a few times until all the blood was gone. He then carefully replaced it in the spare wheel cavity, slammed the boot and slumped into the drivers seat. He gripped the wheel, staring dumbly at his spattered knuckles for a long time, and began to cry.

THE FIRST THING that struck Charlie about the Normans Woe was the smell. Even as a gust of the brutish southerly wind whipped in the doorway behind him, he caught a waft of old cooking oil, boiled cauliflower, something slightly rancid.