Tremble (15 page)

By the time the sheriff and the mayor reached the church, word of the double murder had spread across town like a virus. The officials pushed open the iron gate with some dread. Jeremiah hated homicide cases. Luckily he hadn’t had to deal with many, but they were enough to scar a man’s soul for life.

By the time they reached the door of the church the two men sensed something was amiss. The door was wide open, the altar smashed, the plaster hands of the Lord Jesus had been hacked off.

As Jeremiah bent down to pick up one of the miniature hands, a creak came from the belfry above them.

The preacher’s body hung from a rafter beside the huge brass bell, suspended by a metal chain. The body slowly swung around and the darkened, swollen face came into view. It was ravaged, pecked to pieces. On the floor below lay a single owl’s feather.

T
he tramp stank of piss and some unmentionable human filth Gavin couldn’t even bear to imagine. His leathery face loomed out at the property developer from under the canopy of snaking vines that still clung to the decaying wooden verandah.

“Forest come un twisty up your soul, you have nothing, boyo, seep into yer DNA then zap! Dead meat scum.”

He spat what looked like the last of his teeth at the property developer’s feet. Gavin, a big-boned man, who moved with the lolling grace of an individual who knew his own strength, was not a sentimentalist. He was also convinced that everyone was responsible for their own destiny and that poverty was quite likely contagious. He stepped back and regarded the squat, ragged figure with open disgust.

“Get the fuck off my site before I arrange for the Salvos to come and pick up a corpse, comprende, you psycho schizo? I’ll give you the grace of ten minutes to fuck off, starting from…” Gavin pulled up the sleeve of his Zegnitti suit, chosen especially because it was woven entirely out of synthetic fibers, and studied his Gucci watch, “now.”

The old man clutched a battered leather medicine bag to his chest. His matted locks crawled with lice; his eyes, kaleidoscopes of crazed delirium, fixed unerringly on Gavin. He lunged forward and tugged at his suit, his stench washing over the developer in a nauseating miasma.

“I know. Forest talk through concrete. Forest crack roots into your skull. Believe. You must.”

Gavin’s patience snapped. Pulling his sleeve away, he grabbed the collar of the tramp’s filthy coat and hauled him to the edge of the vacant lot. The vagrant’s legs, blue-veined sticks, knocked against the broken bricks that were scattered over the thick undergrowth, but he still clutched the medicine bag to his chest.

The property developer reached the gate, kicked it open, and dropped the itinerant. He fell heavily, rolling to rest in the gutter.

“You cursed. You no longer living. Flitter, flitter,” the old man muttered, blood mixed in with the spittle flying from his mouth, his skinny arms held above him as though he was expecting to be kicked.

His leather bag had split open to reveal ten green cuttings inside. Incongruously their roots were all neatly bagged like scientific specimens. Thinking they might be marijuana, Gavin leaned down. At closer inspection the plants looked odd, like primitive facsimiles of plants he
would normally recognize. Great—a fucking environmentalist, he thought, some old hippie who’s lost his marbles.

“Catch you here again,” he said, jabbing his finger in the tramp’s face, “and my boys will have your balls.”

With that he slammed the gate. By the time he reached the wooden shed he’d had erected that very morning—a sentry box for his site manager—Gavin had managed to forget the encounter. At least, he thought he had.

At forty-three Gavin Tetherhook was an impressive individual, both materially and physically. A staunch atheist, he prided himself on being self-made. He had grown up with his younger brother, Robert, on a sugarcane farm in northern Queensland and defiantly called himself a country boy. The Tetherhooks had been sugarcane farmers for five generations, until the 1970s when the sudden influx of cheap American sugar sent his father broke in less than two seasons. Devastated, his father had gone out into the cane field, strung his clothes over the unfurling tender-green leaves to make a tent, then sat, stark naked beneath it, weeping into the furrowed dirt. His two sons had found him six hours later, his exposed feet burned raw from the midday sun. The farmer had never recovered mentally, leaving Gavin’s mother to sell and rescue what she could after the bank had been through.

The family was forced to move to a cheap boardinghouse on the outskirts of Tully, a frontier town famous for being one of the world’s top locations for UFO spottings and for its marijuana crops—two facts not entirely unrelated.

After months of complete silence Gavin’s father eventually secured a job as a bus driver while his mother turned to religion for solace. The stoic fifteen-year-old, determined to haul himself out of the never-ending cycle of poverty and resignation, apprenticed himself to a builder of dubious reputation involved in the first local real-estate boom. Meanwhile his thirteen-year-old brother, Robert, began increasingly to depend on Gavin for the guidance his father was now utterly incapable of. It was a role Gavin relished and soon the two boys were inseparable.

Gavin’s first job was to assist in the harassment of long-term residents who were reluctant to move, harassment that involved dog turds
through letter boxes, mysterious fires, and the odd knee-capping. It was terrorism that got results. By the age of twenty, the last vestiges of morality erased from his personality, the entrepreneurial youth had purchased his first house. He bought his second at twenty-two—a shack that he demolished to create a parking lot. A year later he broke with the builder and set up his own property development company; six months after that he bought out his employer.

Yep, Mr. G. P. Tetherhook Esquire was an impressive man. So Gavin reminded himself as he adjusted his balls then zipped up in the men’s toilets at the Brisbane RSL Club after lunch, the day he had evicted the tramp. If it wasn’t for the divorce, he thought, tucking a thick gray lock behind one ear, if it hadn’t been for that fucking little bitch upsetting his wife, he’d have a perfect record financially
and
emotionally.

Cathy. He still couldn’t say her name without a ripple in his stomach walls, which he vaguely understood to be grief. Cathy, his wife, mother of his three children: Aden, twelve; Irene, nine; and Jonathan, four. Their names were imprinted on him like an epitaph.

After checking behind him for witnesses, Gavin leaned against the wall of the urinal, momentarily overwhelmed by the sense of failure his divorce evoked. The marriage had been part of the plan, part of the vision he had of himself at fifty: wealthy and retired, with his groomed blond wife glistening beside him forever. Gold Coast mansion, private yacht, sons he could take fishing. Now that fantasy had evaporated overnight. Bugger them. Bugger them all.

Gavin steadied himself then stood up straight: six foot four inches of fairly well-maintained male flesh. He hadn’t gone to pieces; he hadn’t suddenly developed cancer like his mate Wayne did after his separation. No, he was okay, he still looked good. So maybe he was drinking a little too much, and fuck knows he was over the promiscuity, however exciting it’d been at the beginning. Now it was just the money, the golden scaffolding, that kept him upright, that kept him
hard
.

Whistling defiantly he rinsed his hands and stepped out of the bathroom, leaving the door swinging.

The structure was going to be a ten-story block of service flats—chic units to maximize the constant stream of businessmen and tourists that
passed through Brisbane. Gavin had waited until the dip in the housing market then bought the heritage bungalow in Fortitude Valley before auction after checking he could cash in a few favors with the local member to fast-track a planning permit.

It was a formula that had worked over and over, and, as Gavin leaned against the iron scaffolding and gazed across the Brisbane River from the fifth floor, he felt a familiar roar of adrenaline, almost akin to a sexual rush, sweep through his body.

Maybe it was a reaction to the devastation the natural world had inflicted upon his father, combined with a hatred of the oppression and tyranny of a farmer’s life as he battled the unmanageable—the weather, the seasons, the lack of rainfall. Whatever the cause, the idea that he had conquered nature in a way his father had never even imagined thrilled Gavin profoundly.

This obsession against nature manifested in a variety of ways. First there was his choice to wear only synthetic fibers. Gavin went to extraordinary lengths to purchase the latest fashions in fabrics that incorporated nylon, polyester, or artificial silks. The property developer loved the scratchy sensation of polyester against his skin, the way his nylon sheets caught at his toenails, the unnatural way his body heated up under them. Then there was his tenacity in annihilating all vegetation on his construction sites before they began building. He was notorious for it, and fiercely proud of the fact that he was the prime target of the local environmental movement. Finally, his abhorrence of nature and his desire to control it translated to his sexual aesthetic. In the early days of their marriage he had demanded that Cathy remove most of her body hair. He loved combing the neat pubic triangle of fine blond hair once his wife’s long-suffering beautician had imposed some order onto Cathy’s otherwise unruly bush.

Lately, since the divorce, he’d found himself going further, demanding that his young mistress rid herself entirely of body hair. The imposition of hegemony upon her body gave him the illusion of order—something he craved increasingly since his departure from the family home and routine.

Not that Gavin Tetherhook was going to admit that to himself, let alone anyone else. He pulled his mind back to the present: prime real estate at prime prices. The slogan was pounding out a rhythm in his mind—
Prime real
…—when suddenly the scaffolding collapsed and the ground rushed up to meet his falling body.

“You were lucky, mate,” his site manager told him as he hauled him to his feet. “Thirty-foot drop and you land on a pile of sand. Broke yer fall real nice, eh?”

Dazed, Gavin blinked into the sun, then brushed the sand from his trousers. “I think I might have blacked out for a second or two,” he replied slowly, squinting as the blurred landscape pulled into focus.

The property developer ran his hands across his body feeling for pain. The knees seemed all right, his back ached slightly around the shoulders where he must have landed, and there were two large bruises already beginning to form on his forearms, but apart from that everything seemed normal.

“Want a lift to the hospital? They could run a few checks.”

Remembering that he’d failed to insure the site for work-related accidents, Gavin shook his head. “Nah, I’ll be all right. Now what were those alterations you wanted me to look at?”