Stiff (26 page)

In a circle around me the rooftops were smudged with a flush of luminescence, mother-of-pearl buttons about to pop open and expose the daylight hidden underneath. Not everything was clear yet but, with every passing second, more and more details could be discerned, their blurred outlines coming more sharply into focus.

I could hold the pieces together only by the greatest effort of will. The story existed only as long I kept telling it to myself. If I stopped figuring it out, even for the merest second, the whole thing would dissolve into an incoherent blur of suspicion and conjecture, the fantasy of a concussed brain. Relax, just for an instant, and none of it would make sense any more. I would no longer be able to convince myself, let alone anyone else. But if I plunged headlong into the morass, others would be forced to follow. No more the prey, I would be the one setting the agenda. Time to be proactive. I turned the ignition key and felt the Falcon’s power fill me with certainty.

Back in the house, pulling on a pair of shoes, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My hair had dried wet and sprang out on all sides, a tangle of grass and mud, a fright wig. The fright was my face, overgrown, wild-eyed, the welts peeling to reveal pink stripes. Saggy grey track pants, an old maroon windcheater flecked with paint. Le Coq Sportif. If the black lace-up shoes had been a little bigger, if I had a polka dot bow-tie, the clown outfit would be complete.

As I sneaked past the bedroom door I had glimpsed Ayisha, in my bed at last, dead to the world, guarding me against my coma. She lay there utterly vulnerable, totally impervious, her knees pressed to her chest under the covers. How I could ever have imagined her going for me was already beyond my comprehension.

But now I was heading north, my thoughts moving from darkness to light as inexorably as the widening band of grey on the horizon at my elbow. The dog was beside me, her paws kneading the passenger seat. After that piece of Gallic garbage I had been driving, that ride-on lawnmower, the Falcon went like the clappers, a veritable limousine. Even the lighter worked. I rolled one-handed as I drove. The knack was back.

The radio worked, too, and the dawn shift announcer spoke in soothing nursery tones, which was nice of him. According to the five o’clock news, police and emergency service personnel were still mopping up after last night’s record downpour. An empty caravan had been swept into Elwood Canal. Big deal. The forecast was for clear skies at least until the end of the weekend. The worst was over, or so they said.

We drove in silence from there on, ruminating. Well, I was. The dog was still squeezing the upholstery. The details were hazy but, if you stood back far enough, the big picture could be discerned. The Rolf Harris method. What had happened was this, I reasoned, guessed, extrapolated.

Bayraktar was a semi-literate thug. A payroll scam, the faking of official paperwork, would have been beyond him. Someone who knew how the place worked must have shown him how to do it. Someone who knew the place well. Someone like Herb Gardiner. Every week, a couple hours after the pay packets had been delivered, they each made separate visits to the freezer. A convenient place for Gardiner to pick up his split of that week’s bogus wages? But last Friday Gardiner changed the routine. He turned up early, and Bayraktar ended up dead.

According to Gezen, Gardiner was in the freezer a long time, six or seven minutes. More than long enough to read a meter. And when he arrived, Bayraktar had already been inside long enough to discover that he was locked in. If, as Gezen believed, Bayraktar was already dead of a panic-induced heart attack, why did it take Gardiner so long to emerge and sound the alarm? Something else had happened in Number 3 chiller. Some variation on the scam, perhaps? A falling out among thieves?

Whatever it was, Gardiner had succeeded in concealing it. Bayraktar had been carried out feet-first, successfully portrayed as an unlucky pilferer, a stiff stiff. The cops and government inspectors were satisfied and the payroll fiddle had gone undetected.

But not for long. All of a sudden there was a fly in the ointment. This Whelan character turns up asking a lot of silly questions. On the job five minutes and he trips over the one loose thread, Bayraktar’s phony pay sheets. He doesn’t know what they mean, but he’s asking a lot of silly questions. Christ alone knows what else he might discover, given time. He needs to be flummoxed, discredited, scared off. Got out of the picture, one way or another. And the evidence he has already turned up, the list of names Bayraktar has been using, has to be retrieved before he realises its value.

Fortunately, the guy is an idiot. A trusting soul who volunteers his home address and his planned movements. First his office is broken into and the list taken. The drugs are planted in his house. Then, after a pretty serious effort is made to scare him, he passes up the offer to talk. So things get deadly.

But where did the drugs come from? And why up the ante to homicide? So what if this Murray Whelan got a bit snoopy? Why were the stakes so high? Charges of fraud would be difficult to substantiate. Even more so than manslaughter. Why go to so much trouble to eliminate someone who wasn’t even a witness? Why not sit it out, see what develops? Sit it out while taking in the Pacific from the balcony of your Broadbeach condominium. Sit around soaking up those Queensland sunbeams. Why try to kill a man? Why risk the prospect of spending the rest of your retirement in a ten by twelve cell in HM Pentridge with a view of the handball court?

These were the questions best put in person. Bang on Gardiner’s door, ask him out loud, in front of the neighbours. Make a mess in Tidy Town. Put a rocket up the collective arse of the constabulary. And if I’m wrong? If good old Herb was no more than he seemed? What then? Then Murray Whelan too could be no more than he seemed —the dazed and delirious victim of a car accident, concussed, confused and in bad need of a few hours sleep.

It was nearly day. Gardiner’s house slept in the stillness behind its For Sale sign. Further along the street a solitary window showed the lights of an early riser. I stepped over the wrought-iron gate and into the space between the house and the cream brick of the garage. Behind me on the nature strip, the black dog did what dogs do on nature strips.

Through the slatted glass of the louvre window the garage interior was matt black. I cupped my hands around my face, adjusting my eyes to the gloom. Floor, walls, work-bench emerging from the darkness. Shapes floated above the bench, dark silhouettes against a white background—a hacksaw, the descending Gs of a row of clamps, the outline of tools on a shadow board. No car. The tan Corolla was gone. Across the floor a glint of diamonds caught against the pale light of the new day.

The door was locked. I kicked it open with my heel and threw the light switch. A pile of glass fragments, the remnants of a shattered car window, had been swept into a neat pyramid beside the cut-down drum of a rubbish bin. Off-cut strips of clear plastic, precise straight edges, lay heaped in the bin. On a ledge above the bench a row of jars held screws and bolts and nuts—self-tappers, counter-sunk, round-headed. Above the jars rolls of electrical tape hung on nails, red, green, blue. A damp umbrella leaned against the wall. Beside it, drying on a sheet of newspaper, was a pair of muddy brogues. Tidy Town, Tidy Shed, Tidy Man.

Up until then I had been a tightrope walker, teetering on a thread of conjecture. Now the ground felt solid beneath my feet. Here was evidence. There would be more evidence out at the plant, of the fiddle at least. Then would come motive.

I sat the ball of my thumb on the doorbell and wiggled, waking an electric Quasimodo, sending it into spasm in the darkness inside. ‘Come out Gardiner,’ I yelled. ‘I want to talk to you.’ The palm of my hand came down hard, rattling the aluminium frame of the screen door. Yapping exploded behind the door, answered from the nature strip. My dog sounded tougher.

A carriage light above the door went on and the Nextdoor’s head and shoulders appeared. She tugged at her dressing-gown cord and held herself back in the shadows, torn between curiosity and her mortification at being caught out in Gardiner’s bed. ‘What do you want?’

The dogs were going at it hammer and tongs. I had to raise my voice. ‘Where’s Gardiner?’ I bellowed. It felt good, from the pit of my stomach.

The merry widow recoiled from my certainty. ‘He’s gone to work.’

I rattled the handle. The door was locked, but the woman drew her collar around her throat defensively and stepped back, receding further into the protective dark. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind, scaring old ladies. Her hand was on the white telephone. ‘I’ll call the police.’

‘You do that,’ I said.

As I started the Falcon, the dogs were still going at each other through the barred door. Snap and snarl and gotcha. Lights were coming on all the way up the street. I swung open the passenger door and whistled. Red had been on at me for ages about getting a dog. I liked this one. I liked her attitude.

Seen distantly from the highway, the smoke was no more than an oily smudge on the baby-blue face of a new day. It was only as I neared the dozen or so semi-trailers marshalling on the asphalt apron that I could see where it was coming from. Above the tangle of huge refrigerated rigs moving in and out of cavernous apertures, a guttering black snake was uncoiling itself from the roof of Pacific Pastoral.

I left the Falcon in the carpark with the dog on the seat and loped past the deserted gatehouse. Thin grey wisps were beginning to curl around the upper edge of the entry nearest the office. As I passed though the outer door, alarm bells erupted, tripping each other off deeper and deeper into the building, loud, serious, metallic. The acrid smell of burning paint filled the air. The bundy clock read 5:23. Gardiner’s card in its alphabetical slot showed a clock-on time of 5:01.

Apps was hopping about at the bottom of the office stairs, a spluttering fire extinguisher dangling upside down from his hand. His Adam’s apple was doing the cha-cha, and other parts of his body looked like they were trying to secede entirely. The upstairs landing was belching smoke and through the windows of the lunch room I could see tongues of yellow licking the walls.

‘I told the stupid cow that radiator was a menace,’ Apps whined at the top of his lungs.

First law of management, I thought. Find a scapegoat. On the periphery of my vision, figures were running everywhere. Shouts and engine noises set up a counter beat to the unfaltering scream of the alarm bells. Apps, registering my identity, turned away from the smoke and grabbed my sleeve. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

For a moment I wondered if Apps, not Gardiner, had set the blaze. It couldn’t have come at a more convenient time for both of them. No, Apps didn’t have that much imagination. ‘You said I’d find it interesting at this time of day,’ I said. ‘You were right.’ I jerked my arm free. Apps cocked his head, straining for meaning, scandalised by my costume. He lunged for my arm again. ‘I can’t be held responsible…’

I danced out of his reach and took off into the plant. Apps could go to buggery. It was Gardiner I was here to see. But where was he? High above, an oily black haze was gathering, rubbery and noxious. The fire was spreading rapidly. An ominous hissing could be heard below the high-pitched frenzy of the alarm bells. God alone knew what lethal gases where poisoning the air. I jogged away from the fire, deeper into the complex, straining down corridors for a glimpse of Gardiner’s stocky figure.

Herb Gardiner was not only methodical, he clearly had a lot of energy for a man of his age. You had to hand him that. At this rate not just the records in the office but half the plant would be a charred ruin before the fire brigade had backed their shiny red appliances out the station door. He should have put up a sign. Herb’s Braised Beef. The arson squad would need barbecue aprons and long tongs to make any sense of this.

I jogged on, dizzy from the effort, getting disoriented. This wasn’t how I had pictured it. The idea had been to confront Gardiner, shirt-front him with accusations, create a scene. Instead, Gardiner was one step ahead, putting distance between himself and the evidence. With the records gone up in smoke, it would take a confession to convince anybody of anything. I realised Gardiner would probably be making his way to one of the exits, joining in the confusion and excitement of his fellow workers. He would mingle with them on the apron to watch the spectacle, a mask of plausible surprise on his face.

I turned towards the pale rectangle of one of the doorways. A group of figures in overalls, some white, some blue, was moving in the same direction. One of them had a lamb carcass slung over his shoulder. The things people think to save in a fire. I broke into a trot to catch the last of them up. The acrid smoke began to burn my lungs. Abruptly it started to rain. Somewhere far above, the red tracery of the overhead sprinkler system had kicked in. I bent my head and hurried forwards, concentrating on keeping my balance on the now slippery floor. I’d had more than enough soakings recently, thank you very much.

Just ahead of me, Gardiner came out of an access alley and headed towards the exit. I fell into step beside him. He glanced around. ‘Hello, son,’ he said, his self-possession never faltering.

‘Something I’ve been meaning to ask,’ I said, raising my voice against the unearthly din. ‘Where does an old bloke like you get his grass?’

Gardiner slowed and looked at me quizzically. I suddenly felt that I had made a serious mistake. The gap to the hurrying crowd ahead had widened. Gardiner said something. I leaned forward. ‘What?’

Gardiner put his hand on my elbow and his mouth up to my ear, as if he was taking me into his confidence. ‘That prick Bayraktar,’ he said. ‘He was using the place to shunt the stuff around.’ As he spoke, he shifted his grasp to my wrist and stepped behind me, twisting my right arm all the way up behind my back. At the same time, he whipped a long heavy-duty screwdriver out of the thigh pocket of his overalls and pressed its blade against my throat.

I felt a flash of pride at having my assumptions proved correct, but the vanity was short-lived. For a man his age, Gardiner was as hard as a rock. The old bastard sure must have been giving the All-Bran a nudge. He jammed the tip of the screwdriver into the soft flesh between my jaw and windpipe. One hard shove and ten inches of drop-forged steel would be sticking out the top of my skull.