Shadow of the Osprey (9 page)

Morrison Mort knew The Rocks even if its residents did not recognise him. Not much had changed in the last twenty years or so, he thought as he casually strolled along the narrow streets. The sun was down and the night people had crawled out from under their sandstone rocks. Whores, sailors, pickpockets, a few well-dressed nervous young men seeking excitement and the surly gang members who ruled the streets.

The young toughs loitering in the dingy streets eyed the
Osprey
Captain walking amongst them. None attempted to accost him as he had the look of a man familiar with the place and its violence. Although he was a stranger to them he did not appear in any way nervous. Besides, he wore the dress of a sea captain, a man who was one of their own in a district with traditional connections to the sea. Mort had little reason to feel uncomfortable as he had come well-armed. He carried a small calibre pistol in his pocket and a razor-sharp knife inside his boot.

The stench of boiled cabbage, urine, vomit and decay were familiar scents from his childhood. Here he had learned the lessons of the street before he was ten: to steal, lie and keep one step ahead of the police who came from time to time to snatch dangerous felons for the gallows at Darlinghurst Gaol.

He slowed in his purposeful stride in an alley between the close-packed tenements spewing the noises of despair: the constant wailing of hungry babies suffering flea bites in the dirty cramped rooms shared with the flotsam from the sea of poverty; the drunken raised voices of men and women squabbling over nothing and everything, and the occasional raucous, despairing laughter of gin-soaked whores sharing a bottle with customers.

Mort felt the fine hairs of his neck prickle. Although there was a chill in the night air, as he stood and stared into the doorway of the tiny tenement house with its dirt-grimed sandstone façade he was vaguely aware that he was sweating. Why had he let his feet guide him here, he wondered with a dread chill that shivered through his body. Was it that he had a need to face the most terrible ghost of his past and spit in her eye?

He recoiled in horror.
The ghost was real!
She came silently towards him from the darkness of the doorway and was smiling as she reached for him. ‘Mother!’ he screamed as he stumbled backwards in a desperate attempt to avoid the hands reaching for him. She was going to take him to the hell! A hell to which he himself had sent her so many years earlier.

‘I’m not yer mother luv,’ the ghost said. ‘Me name’s Rosie. An’ I can give yer a good time if yer got the money? Wotcha want?’ she asked, frowning, her arms crossed over small breasts concealed under a dirty cotton dress that was little more than a petticoat.

‘You,’ Mort hissed as the colour returned to his face. No, he thought with great relief, she was not the ghost he feared.

‘Well, come in luv,’ she said, turning her back on him, in order to walk back into the house. ‘A good time will cost yer though.’

Mort followed. It was ironic, he thought, that in this very room he had murdered his mother. It was a tiny room, lit by two candles flickering shadows on a dirty well-used, straw-filled mattress in the corner. The loathing for the many times he had been subjected to the drunken sexual advances of filthy customers welled up in him. Times when his drunken mother had taken their money and laughed at his pain.

The fury was on him like a red haze when he looked down at the woman kneeling on all fours on the mattress, the hem of her dress pulled up over her hips revealing her buttocks.

‘Yer want me this way?’ she asked, looking up at him. For a second she felt a dread she had never experienced before. The pale blue eyes that looked back at her were like the windows to hell. She could find nothing to allay her sudden dread. It was as if she were in the presence of the devil incarnate.

‘How you are will suit my needs,’ the devil said as he let his hand slip to the razor-sharp knife in his boot.

No-one took much notice of the muffled screams that drifted out into the chilly night air.

Rats feeding on the body scuttled into the crevices of the room with protesting squeals at the entry of the two policemen. Sergeant Francis Farrell was a big Irishman and his bulk seemed to fill the tiny room.

He stood and stared at the pathetic body huddled in a corner in a vast pool of congealed blood. Her torn, blood-soaked dress lay in a crumpled pile beside her naked body. He felt little emotion as he stared. As a policeman of thirty years he had long come to accept that crimes of violence were as much a part of life as love and kindness were.

His presence had been summoned by young Constable Murphy who had found the body. The constable had been attending a dispute between barrow vendors at the Quay when a woman told him about a body in a room. The woman was a friend of Rosie’s and Constable Murphy knew her as one of the prostitutes who worked the docks area around Sydney Harbour.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ the sergeant quietly asked the young uniformed constable who stood beside him.

Constable Murphy grimaced. ‘Maybe it might be that I believe in the Little People, Sergeant, but not ghosts, unless you include the Banshee.’

‘Well, a ghost did this,’ Farrell said, aware that his comments concerning the world of the supernatural were confusing the young policeman. ‘You see Constable, I have been here before. I was about your age and The Rocks was my beat. Old Sergeant Kilford and I got a call to this very house one morning, and in this same room found a body mutilated in the very same way as this poor colleen. That must have been over thirty years ago.’ Farrell frowned as the incident swirled back from almost forgotten memory to clear recollection. ‘There was a boy at the time,’ he continued slowly. ‘A young lad no more than ten years of age. It was his mother who had been murdered.’

‘Was not the murderer brought to justice?’ Constable Murphy asked out of idle curiosity.

The sergeant shook his head. ‘Thought it might have been one of her customers at the time,’ he said. ‘Some sailor, long gone on a ship by the time we found her. It’s like that around here.’ He stood in reflective silence as he tried to recall the boy. A blond-haired boy, he remembered. A boy who had stood in sullen silence in one corner of the room watching he and old Sergeant Kilford that morning. ‘Always wonder what happened to the boy,’ he muttered. The constable gave him a quizzical look and Sergeant Farrell returned his thoughts to the present. ‘Start making notes on everything you see,’ he said, without looking at the constable. ‘Make a note of the poor colleen’s wounds.’

Murphy wet the end of his pencil and commenced to try and describe in writing the hideous slashing of flesh, the frenzied mutilations to the mouth and private parts. So much blood that it splashed every wall of the room.

The Irish sergeant was reading the room with the many years of experience he had in such matters. What he read caused him to shudder, his first real emotion since entering the domain of death. ‘He made her suffer,’ he muttered as his eyes followed an invisible path around the room. ‘Cut her and held her until she bled to death. It took a while and she tried to fight.’

Murphy glanced at the big sergeant. ‘How do you know Sarge?’ he asked, awed by the older man’s perceptive observations.

‘The blood marks tell me,’ he replied. ‘Over there on the mattress he inflicted the wounds, you can see from the way the blood is.’ Murphy followed the sergeant’s invisible chronology of events and began to see what his experienced colleague was unravelling from the blood trails. ‘If you follow the blood you can see she tried to get away. But he held her and they ended up against the wall there,’ he said, pointing to the body. ‘She struggled in her pain and fear but he held her until she died from the loss of blood. He sat behind her and had his arms around her. Her blood soaked his lap.’

‘A crime of passion,’ Murphy commented.

Farrell shook his head. He was puzzled. He had seen many crimes of passion over the years and this was not one of them. Something very strange pervaded the room. The girl’s killer had methodically inflicted the wounds to cause extreme pain and fear and then had remained to gloat on what he had caused. ‘Not a crime of passion,’ he finally said. ‘The bastard who did this is a son of the devil himself.’ He sighed, wanting to be out in the alley where human sounds pervaded the air. ‘Time we informed the detectives. It’s their job to make the investigation.’

‘Think they will catch the bastard?’ Murphy asked as he put away his pencil and notebook.

Francis Farrell bit on his bottom lip. The question was reasonable enough and his reply far from flippant. ‘Only if they believe in ghosts, Constable Murphy.’

Returning to the police station Sergeant Farrell kept remembering the young boy who had stood silently in the room the day they had discussed his mother’s killer. He wished he could remember the boy’s name. Not that it really had any bearing on the events of the current murder. Just something about the boy had haunted him for a long time after.

Ahh, but the old records would tell him who the boy was, he realised with a small amount of satisfaction. Maybe he would have a look at the file next time he was at the Darlinghurst lockup.

T
wo weeks out from the Palmer on the track to Cooktown and the journey was thankfully uneventful. Kate had decided to take a longer route as the Hell’s Gate Trail was not a suitable track for wagons. The location of the attack on the armed gold escort was aptly named. A dangerously narrow defile on top of the Great Dividing Range overlooking the Palmer River, it was for many miners a tantalising glimpse of the River of Gold that was the closest they would ever get to their dream. For many, Hell’s Gate would end in the nightmare of a spear or stone club.

During the journey a change came over Jenny. The gauntness in her face and haunted look in her eyes dissipated with the distance the lumbering wagons put between herself and the past horrors of the goldfields. The beauty that was her inheritance blossomed like a beautiful tropical lily on a northern billabong.

She also proved to be a capable companion on the slow journey east. She would cheerfully prepare the evening meals while Ben and Kate went about the end of day routine of unyoking the bullocks from the big wagons, and hobbling the beasts for the night. Jenny was an imaginative cook and the teamsters would return to stews seasoned with wild spices. Jenny explained how her father, who had been a gardener for a Mister Granville White, had taught her the use of herbs in cooking. She had found a discarded parcel containing dried herbs left by some weary miner on the side of the track. The lucky find proved better than the discovery of gold as far as Ben and Kate were concerned as they sat down each evening to a meal by the campfire.

During those times Kate noticed that Willie rarely left his mother’s side. He hardly spoke unless it was necessary. She could see how jealously the boy guarded his mother, even against Ben whom he had befriended in a strange way. Kate guessed that the boy had witnessed many terrible things happen to his mother during the horrific months of the Wet on the Palmer. Although Willie had a distrust of men he would follow Ben like some faithful dog. Ben would give him meaningful tasks and the taciturn boy would do them with a begrudging gratitude.

The boy was a strange one! Kate reflected as she watched him help Ben hobble the big bullocks that were as good as any watchdogs. The scent of prowling tribesmen would cause the big beasts to become restless. Only once in the two weeks that they had been on the track had the animals alerted them that they were not alone.

It had been just on piccaninny dawn during the previous night when the bells around the beasts’ necks had jangled more than usual. As the animals bellowed nervously both Kate and Ben became instantly alert. Weapons clutched in hands they had peered into the gathering dawn anticipating a deadly shower of spears. But a warning shot from Ben’s revolver soon dispersed whoever lurked in the last shadows of the night and the spears did not fall.

When the sun rose that day Ben decided that Jenny should learn how to fire a gun. At a midday stop he decided to teach Jenny how to use Kate’s rifle and chose a creek a hundred paces or so from the campsite. Kate allocated to Willie the task of finding firewood and issued him the obligatory warning not to stray far from the wagons in his search. The previous early morning incident had reinforced the vital need for alertness deep in hostile territory.

Standing close to Jenny by the creek Ben could smell the musky scent of her perspiration and fresh smell of her clean hair. It was now a familiar scent that he was acutely aware of whenever he was close to the slim young woman. A scent he had come to know ever since Kate had called a halt by a creek where both women had indulged themselves in the luxury of lathering with soap and washing in the creek. Ben had stood guard at the wagons a short distance away and had paused in his task of greasing the wagon axles to listen to the two women splashing and giggling with an uninhibited girlish delight. He could hear Jenny’s laughter – like the sweet sounds of the butcher-bird in the first light of the day – and sighed for his unrequited desire to touch her. He imagined what it would be like to kiss those secret shadows beneath her breasts. Turning, he saw Willie scowling at him, as if the boy understood his lustful thoughts. Guilt flooded him and he had tried to think of something else.

After they had bathed Kate had presented the young woman with a clean dress. It was one which she had carefully packed for any occasion that might warrant its wearing. Not that any such occasion arose on the grinding, torturous trek along the track to the Palmer. But it was a small vanity that reminded Kate that she was still a woman, despite working in the gruelling man’s world of the bullocky.

Jennifer had burst into tears at the simple gesture. No-one had ever given her a present in all of her eighteen years and the simple cotton dress without the rigid stays clung to the slim body in a provocative way that did not go unnoticed by Ben. Nor was it unnoticed by the miners who they occasionally passed on the track. Although Jenny preferred not to notice the miners’ unabashed stares Ben had experienced twinges of jealousy for the attention Jenny was unwittingly provoking.

Despite his sometimes less than subtle interest in her he had remained aloof. He was afraid that if he showed any interest he might be rejected. And besides, Kate had spoken to him a couple of days out of the Palmer, and had explained that the girl might need time to adjust to the attentions of a good man. Indeed his boss had explained with such a knowing smile that it caused him to blush.

But now, standing next to Jenny and holding the heavy rifle into her shoulder, he was close enough to catch her scent and even touch her smooth flesh. The same disturbingly secret thoughts were back in his mind as he placed his hand self-consciously under the young woman’s, gripping the wooden forestock of the rifle. Her long hair brushed his face and he had an overwhelming urge to hold her and kiss her on the lips. He was afraid of his feelings as he had never known a woman in the carnal sense. Kate had been like a surrogate mother keeping him away from the tempting fleshpots of Cooktown. Although he knew she was acting in his best interests the invitations from the painted ladies were hard to ignore.

Jenny was more acutely aware of Ben than he realised. He was not like the other men she had known in her life. He was kind and gentle in a shy way and had a wonderful laugh. But she did not consider herself beautiful when she remembered the strawberry birthmark. What man would ever want a woman with such a disfigurement?

Mister Granville White had not cared about the mark, she remembered bitterly. All he ever wanted was her prepubescent body. She still remembered the depraved things he did to her. Willie had been a product of those terrible times. But he was now a part of her in a way that had brought only joy to her lonely life. Sometimes she shuddered when she looked at the boy and saw a part of Granville White looking back.

With the rifle butt in her shoulder she could feel Ben’s big callused hand under her own. As they stood at the edge of a shallow, stony bottomed creek she found herself wishing that the moment might go on for ever. She sighted the rifle at the fork of a drooping coolabah tree on the other side.

‘You just let the gun rest in this hand and hold it steady with your other,’ Ben said as he lowered his head to look down across her shoulder and along the sights. ‘Remember,’ he explained as his face pressed into her soft hair, ‘when you squeeze the trigger do so with a gentle but even pressure.’

Jenny nodded as she closed one eye the way Ben had taught her. She was suddenly aware of a disturbing change in him. He was tense, something had distracted his attention from the shooting lesson. ‘Jenny, I want you to walk back to the wagons with the rifle,’ he said quietly but firmly.

She turned and gave him a puzzled look. ‘Is something wrong?’ she frowned.

‘Maybe not,’ he answered quietly. ‘Just something I want to have a look at. Just go back to Kate and make sure Willie is at the wagon.’

She walked nervously away. On her right the rainforest marched up the craggy barrier that was the hilly spine between the Palmer goldfields and the ocean to the east.

The hairs on the back of Ben’s neck stood erect. He was acutely aware of a pounding in his ears and only when he could hear the distant sound of Jenny’s voice engaged in a conversation with Kate did he walk cautiously with the Colt in his hand a short distance up the creek which flowed gently through a plateau of tall grasses and stunted trees. The swirling little eddies of mud in the clear waters had caught his eye whilst he had stood behind Jenny. And now he stared down the creek line at the other eddies of mud in the water.

There were hundreds of them! Footprints!

Prints so fresh that the creek had not had time to wash them away. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes old, Ben thought with rising fear. Either a very large war party or a peaceful tribe moving across the trail behind them. But it was not usual for the tribesmen to allow their women and children so near the track. No provocation was needed for the miners to indiscriminately shoot at any Aboriginal sighted in the bush. The idea that the only good black was a dead one prevailed amongst many of the white men of the frontier. Ben could only conclude that he was staring at the footprints of a very large war party stalking them.

He could see that the Aboriginal crossing had been made behind them when they had stopped for the midday break. The warriors had probably circled them and were now moving into an ambush position in the thicker scrub that edged further along the track towards Cooktown. His stomach churned. He was afraid and he had very good reason for that fear. Somewhere deeper in the scrub the painted warriors were moving silently into position with their spears, wooden swords, clubs and broad shields.

He could still hear Kate and Jennifer talking softly in the distance. Water burbled over the pebbles of the creek while in the thick scrub the little song birds shrilled. The serenity of the bush was deceptively mesmerising.

Ben edged away from the creek and began walking towards the wagons. He was acutely aware that with the next step he might hear the bloodchilling, black cockatoo war cry, as painted warriors rose up out of the ground wielding their weapons. The hundred paces to the wagons felt more like a hundred miles.

Kate saw the gun in Ben’s hand as he approached and instinctively knew that something was terribly wrong. As he stood peering intently up the track to the stands of scrub she cast him a quizzical look.

‘I think we are being watched,’ he replied to her unspoken question. ‘Saw signs of a big myall party that has crossed behind us when we stopped.’

Jennifer paled and with a stricken expression clasped Willie to her protectively.

‘How many?’ Kate asked calmly as she poured tea into an enamel mug and passed it to Ben.

‘I don’t know.’ The mug shook in his hand. ‘Maybe hundreds from the signs I saw back at the creek.’

Kate turned to scan the surrounding scrub. The heat of the midday sun high overhead caused the scrub to shimmer with an uncomfortable haze. ‘I think they will be in the bush up ahead on the track,’ she said calmly as she shaded her eyes against the glare.

‘That’s what I think,’ he replied as he sipped the hot tea. ‘I think they are just waiting for us to move on. Wait until we are well and truly within range of their spears. A short rush and they would be on us before we could get off many shots. The bloody grass helps hide them. We could just about step on one of ’em before we could ever see ’em.’

‘Then we sit and wait here,’ Kate suggested. ‘Or we turn around and go back, or someone will come down the track and walk into their ambush. Then hopefully we will have extra guns to help us,’ she added optimistically, wishing that she had purchased one of those American repeating rifles. She had been offered one by an American prospector who had been down on his luck and prepared to part with his Spencer for the price of his fare home.

Ben could see that Jenny, although pale and still frightened, was quickly regaining her calm. Willie stood protectively holding his mother’s hand. He vowed silently that no man would ever again hurt her. Although he was not fully aware of what the tribesmen might do he did know that he would fight back somehow to protect her. Ben only wished that they had an extra rifle for Jenny. But all she carried was Kate’s little pepper box pistol. It might get one warrior, but little else.

‘Will the savages attack us here?’ Jenny asked in a frightened voice.

‘I don’t think so,’ Kate answered as she gazed up the track. ‘At least not in broad daylight. They know that they would lose a few if they had to attack us across open ground. No, they will wait until either someone else falls into their trap. Or try to get us tonight.’

‘What do you think we should do Kate?’ Ben asked. He had a great respect for his boss’s decisions. She had not accumulated a fortune without a sharp and perceptive mind.

Kate turned and walked across to one of the wagons where the boxes of cartridges were kept for the rifle. ‘We fortify the wagons and wait,’ she said as she opened the box of cartridges. ‘If they come they will have to get at us under the wagons which should help stop their spears. And if we can keep up enough fire from under the wagons then it might be just enough to discourage them. From what I’ve been told it’s not usual for them to keep up an attack against guns for very long.’

Ben was not so sure. Had not the tribesmen attacked a well-armed police party on its way back to Cooktown? Surely they were less prepared than the police who were trained and equipped to repel attacks from the myalls. But they had no other options. Although not very religious, Ben said a short and silent prayer for their deliverance.

‘I think we should unhitch the bullocks,’ Kate said hefting the rifle on her shoulder. ‘And get them down to the creek.’

Ben agreed and Jenny stood guard while they hobbled the bullocks down to where they could graze on the grass and have access to the water.

~

The afternoon passed with an interminable slowness while the bells around the bullocks’ necks jangled softly with a reassuring and soothing sound. The group kept an anxious vigil in both directions along the deserted track as surely there would be a traveller before sunset.