Ash Island Read online

  Harry gets to his feet. ‘Shall we go?’

  When they get outside to the car park, Deb says, ‘That sounded like a threat, Harry.’

  ‘Did it? The interesting thing, though, is that Kylie’s carer is a niece of Maram Mansur. It was their family took Frank and Kylie in after their mother left. They lived next door, in Lakemba.’

  ‘Have I heard of Maram Mansur?’

  ‘Course you have. Went to Jakarta with Oldfield and the others. His company is redeveloping Crucifixion Creek.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. That Maram Mansur. The property developer. So how does that help us?’

  ‘Connections, Deb. It’s all about connections. What we need is a great big computer tracking everyone’s connections from birth. Failing that, use Facebook and Friends Reunited.’

  ‘Is that how you found Kylie?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘How about the two thousand a week to the carer?’

  Harry smiles. ‘Just a guess.’

  43

  On the way back to Newcastle Harry gets a call to say he’s required to attend a meeting with Superintendent Gibb at four. Harry checks his watch; they should just make it. A moment later Gibb’s office makes the same call to Deb.

  ‘Don’t they know we’re together?’ Harry asks.

  ‘Seems not.’

  ‘What do you reckon, another body on Ash Island?’

  But it isn’t that. They are directed to a meeting room, where Ross Bramley and Fogarty are already waiting. Fogarty gives Deb a brief nod, then goes back to studying the thick file in front of him. Ross looks at Harry and shrugs. Kevin Colquhoun comes in next, talking on his phone.

  Finally the superintendent bustles in and takes the seat at the head of the conference table. He turns to Fogarty. ‘Ken? You’ve called this meeting. What’s it about?’

  ‘Sir, I apologise for taking your time, but we need to straighten a few things out, and I thought it best to do it in this format.’

  Gibb looks as puzzled as everyone else. ‘Very well. Go ahead.’

  ‘I’d like to ask Sergeant Belltree a couple of questions.’ He stares hard at Harry. ‘Logan McGilvray switched off his phone at two-fifteen last Sunday morning and hasn’t been heard of since. Do you know anything about that?’

  ‘I’ve no idea where he is.’

  ‘That isn’t exactly what I asked. Did you see McGilvray last Saturday night?’

  A camera, Harry thinks. There must have been a bloody camera. Or an unmarked car I didn’t spot.

  ‘Yes.’

  Fogarty gives a chilly smile and eases back in his chair, spreads his hands on the table in front of him as if he’s about to leap at Harry. ‘We don’t seem to have any record of that meeting.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t productive. I was on leave at the time.’

  ‘Tell us about it.’

  ‘I spotted McGilvray leaving the Cambridge Hotel late on Saturday night. I went over to see him as he was getting into his ute. He was obviously over the limit, so I offered to drive him home.’

  ‘And he consented to this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I didn’t take him directly home. I drove around for a while, trying to get him to talk.’

  ‘And how did you do that?’

  ‘I told him this was off the record, I had no means of recording his words. I put it to him he’d been involved in the bombing of my house, and he eventually confirmed that he supplied ammonium nitrate and a detonator from the mine where he works to the people who made the bomb.’

  ‘He just confessed this? Did you threaten him, assault him?’

  ‘No. He seemed pretty pleased with himself. He’d had a good few drinks.’

  ‘Who were these people?’

  ‘Two men. He said he didn’t know their names, but they belonged to a group, like bikies only without colours, not attracting the attention of the police. He said they were involved in running drugs from the ships coming into the port, working with the Crows in Sydney.’

  ‘What?’ Colquhoun is leaning forward in consternation.

  ‘Yes. He said they called themselves the Dark Riders, and their leader was someone called Tyler Dayspring. I checked those names later and couldn’t find anything on our databases. I reckoned he was spinning me a yarn.’

  Colquhoun is on his phone, growling to someone on the other end, repeating the names. They wait until he’s finished, then he says, ‘What else?’

  ‘McGilvray claimed he distributes drugs for these Dark Riders, through a restaurant belonging to someone called Sammy. It was Sammy who put him in touch with the two bombers. That’s about it.’ Harry is aware of Ross staring at him.

  Fogarty takes over again. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He became a bit ropeable, so I drove him back to his car and let him go.’

  ‘And how long did all this take?’

  ‘Maybe an hour? The last I saw of him was about two a.m. I haven’t heard from him since.’

  Colquhoun says, ‘How were these Dark Riders supposed to be getting drugs off the ships?’

  ‘He said he didn’t know.’

  ‘And this “Sammy”?’

  ‘He wouldn’t give me any more details, but I reckoned maybe Sammy Lee. He has an Asian restaurant.’

  Colquhoun shakes his head, looking pained. ‘We all know Sammy Lee’s restaurant.’

  His phone beeps and he puts it to his ear and listens. ‘Comics?’ he mutters, and listens some more, then rings off. He turns to Superintendent Gibb, who by now is looking bilious. ‘It seems the Dark Riders were a group of comic book supervillains, published by Marvel Comics in 1991. They were mutants and “inhumans” apparently, and one of their number was called Tyler Dayspring.’

  Harry says, ‘As I said, I thought he was spinning me a yarn. Which is why I didn’t think it worth reporting.’

  ‘In fairness, sir,’ Ross speaks up through clenched teeth, ‘Sergeant Belltree did ask me about Sammy Lee. It seems he is the providore to many of the Asian ships, including the one that Cheung Xiuying came in on. I was going to take that further, but there were more pressing matters.’

  Gibb checks his watch. ‘I’m short of time.’

  Fogarty says, ‘Perhaps if Belltree and Bramley leave us, sir, we can wrap this up.’

  When they get outside the room Harry says, ‘Sorry, Ross. I didn’t want to get you involved.’

  Ross spins round on him and moves in close. ‘You could have put me in the picture, Harry. All that bullshit at Sammy Lee’s place.’ His voice drops to a hiss. ‘You didn’t top McGilvray did you? Tell me you didn’t take him out to Ash Island and bury the bastard.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then where the bloody hell is he?’

  The silence that hangs in the air is broken by the sound of raised voices from inside the meeting room.

  The door opens, and everyone comes out except Superintendent Gibb. They all avoid his eye except for Deb, who regards him with a sad shake of her head as she passes. She says, ‘Go in, Harry.’

  Gibb is standing staring out of the window. He turns and says, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, Belltree. You’ve succeeded in muddying the waters of two strike force investigations and alienating all of your colleagues up here. Detective Inspector Colquhoun is incensed that you failed to report information that could be material to Strike Force Colyton, while Detective Chief Inspector Fogarty is similarly furious that you ignored his direct order to keep away from Logan McGilvray. I don’t know how you do things in Sydney, but we don’t work that way up here. Your colleagues here feel they can no longer trust you. Have you really been completely open with us about the reasons that your house was bombed? We don’t know. We can’t be sure, just as we can’t be sure that you’ve told us the truth about your meeting with McGilvray.

  ‘So take this as a formal disciplinary warning. I shall be making a report to the Northern Region Commander, who will no doubt be in touch with your senio
r officers in Sydney. You are supposed to be on compassionate leave in Sydney. Go back there and stay there.’

  44

  When he tells Jenny about this she seems unfazed. ‘You’re a free agent, then.’

  Without thinking he says, ‘Free, but running blind.’

  She replies, ‘I’ll be your eyes, Harry.’

  ‘Yes…yes, okay.’ He settles down. He’s in the bar of the Marine, a beer in front of him and one eye on the footy on the screen in the corner.

  She says, ‘I found out that your Dark Riders and Tyler Dayspring are characters in a comic strip.’

  ‘Yes, it took them two minutes to work that one out. Pretty dumb, eh?’

  ‘Not necessarily. In the story Tyler Dayspring liked to disguise himself as another identity, a weapons dealer who wears a rubber mask.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘That character’s called Tolliver. You know there was a Jason Tolliver on your list of diners at Sammy Lee’s? He booked a table for eight people.’

  ‘I know that name. I’ve met him. He’s head of NRL security at the port.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out about him, shall I?’

  45

  It’s a hot night, and Harry stirs in his bed, dreaming of a helicopter coming down over the ocean. He wakes to the sound of its rotors throbbing, and realises it’s the motorbike again, passing beneath his window. He checks the time. One-thirty, same as before. Someone coming off shift from the docks maybe.

  There really is a helicopter, sleek as a fish, waiting for him when he arrives at the heliport at ten. As he gets out of his car he sees Amber Nordlund emerging from the demountable that serves as the heliport office, accompanied by a young man with a clipboard who looks as if he should still be at school. She introduces him as their pilot. They walk towards the machine. When they get close Harry sees the words Nordlund Pastoral printed in small letters along its flank.

  They strap themselves in, put on headsets and dark glasses, and rise into the air. Ash Island unfurls beneath them; Harry sees the police tents and small figures still working among the trees. In the other direction is the port, the black fields of coal, the crawling machines and the mouth of the Hunter, and on its other bank the cathedral on its hill above the city centre and the suburbs spreading away towards the distant sparkle of Lake Macquarie.

  They follow the dark ribbon of the river, its undulating curves, its tributaries, a great writhing organism reaching back into the green-brown hinterland. Amber says little through the deafening chatter of the engine, and Harry just sits and waits for whatever revelation she has.

  After twenty minutes he sees first one, then a chain of enormous black lesions hacked into the green mat of the wide valley floor. She points them out, giving them names and listing their dimensions. The chopper drops lower and Harry makes out tiny trucks—each as big as a mansion, she tells him—crawling along the contours of the vast pits. Further along the chain they see paddocks and farms teetering on the rim of black cliffs that have been gouged out of the land.

  After ten minutes circling over this panorama, her voice comes over the headphones. ‘Got it?’ He assumes he has, whatever it is. What is the message? The vast, earth-changing power of the Nordlunds? The curse of coalmining? He waits for the polemic, but she says no more. They wheel away towards the hills that contain the valley to the north.

  The landscape beneath them changes. Farmland gives way to the duller, darker green of untouched forests rising into the Barrington Tops. He peers down at the unrelenting canopy, broken here and there by the grey eruptions of rocky cliffs like the stumps of ancient teeth. It is up here, he knows, that the lost wreckage of flight VH-MDX and Amber’s father’s remains lie hidden, but she says nothing.

  They see the dome of Cackleberry Mountain clear ahead, and the helicopter drops lower until Harry can make out the pale grey trunks rising beneath the crowns of the trees below their feet and feels that they might brush against them. Then the forest drops abruptly away, falling down the reverse slope of the range towards a green valley, in which the red roof of Kramfors can be made out. The helicopter banks away from the homestead, towards the forest that bounds the far side of Cackleberry Valley, and drops towards a field at its edge.

  As the rotors whirr to a stop they unstrap themselves and get out onto the solid earth. Amber asks the pilot to wait. She leads Harry towards a gate in the fence along the tree line and onto a rough track that leads up into the trees.

  ‘There are snakes,’ Amber calls back over her shoulder.

  ‘Aren’t there always?’

  The track becomes steeper. They clamber over large roots and eroded gullies, the foliage closing overhead, until they reach the base of a rock wall, shearing upward through the forest. Amber leads him along the base of the cliff until she comes to a break where a worn trail leads up through a cleft in the stone and they resume their climb, harder now.

  When they reach a broad shelf Amber pauses, panting, and points at a faded black circle on the boulder in front of them. ‘That’s Nayantinla, the all-seeing eye that guards the approach to sacred sites.’

  The way ahead now forms a series of rough stone steps, which they mount until they reach a level platform sheltered by the broad sweep of a rock overhang. It forms a natural shallow cave, almost like a performance shell, facing out over the forest treetops. They turn and take in the view, a broad vista across the valley towards the dome of Cackleberry Mountain.

  ‘Kuppoee–Yoongoo,’ Amber says, ‘Egg Mountain. Now look at this.’

  She points back at the rear wall of the cave, and as Harry’s eyes adjust to the shadow he makes out paintings on the rock face. In the centre, dominating the wall, is a large red ochre figure of an eagle, the guardian of the valley, Amber explains. Around it are the shapes of other animals in black charcoal and red ochre—goanna, turtle, snake—and prints of hands. They are all quite faded.

  ‘We don’t know how old these are,’ Amber says. ‘Some of them hundreds of years old, and beneath them the faint traces of even older paintings. The people who made them didn’t own the land, they didn’t fence it and seal it up in legal deeds. They just lived in it, and cared for it, and then passed it on to the people who came after them. It’s like the opposite of what we just saw from the helicopter—carving up the land to make a quick buck.’

  She pauses to catch her breath and fix Harry with a fierce glare. ‘Those black holes we saw will never be restored. They’ve shattered the water table and ruined the rivers and when all the coal is gone the holes will be filled with dead rubble that’ll be sterile forever. It’s not even as if we make a lot of money from it. A few, a very few of us do, but eighty per cent of the wealth is taken abroad, by foreign companies who have no connection with this land at all.’

  Harry watches her. Where is this leading? She is becoming more and more agitated, stopping and taking a deep breath before she goes on.

  ‘Not far beneath the surface of Cackleberry Valley there’s over fifty metres of high-quality black coal seams, maybe five or six billion cubic metres in all. You can work out what that’s worth—hundreds of billions of dollars.’

  He says, ‘And you own the valley?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But in Australia the owner of the land only owns the surface. What lies beneath belongs to the government. And the government can sell the mining rights to anyone they like—particularly the people they like—big multinational miners. And their Australian cronies.’

  That last word comes with a sneer and a significant pause, as if she expects Harry to know who she means.

  ‘When my great-grandfather came to Australia he went to Kalgoorlie and dug holes in the ground and pulled out lumps of gold. He was lucky. He moved over here and used the gold to buy this valley and become a pastoralist. That’s what we’ve been ever since, nurturing the land from generation to generation. But my grandfather Carl needed stone to build a road, so he dug a quarry, over on the other side of the hills, and began to sell the stone to othe
r people as well. Then he bought into a mining business, just a small affair. When Carl died my father took charge of the pastoral business, and his younger brother, my uncle Konrad, ran the smaller mining and quarrying interests. He was a very good businessman and that side of things grew quickly, so he expanded into construction and real estate. Formed Nordlund Resources Limited for the mining, and Nordlund Investments for the rest, and he moved to Sydney, where his business contacts were. And the politicians. He became very wealthy and influential, and he donated a lot of money to his political friends and their parties, and in due course they awarded him the mining rights to Cackleberry Valley.’

  ‘Your uncle wants to dig up the valley?’

  ‘Yes. He says it’s progress. And the politicians love it—they’ll get their mining royalties without the usual political fights. No longstanding farmers or residents to embarrass them like they have over in the Hunter Valley. Here the devastation will be invisible to the outside world. There’s only one landowner—me—and I’ll bugger off with my compensation blood money, and that’ll be that.’ She’s rigid with fury.

  A family feud, Harry thinks. He sighs and says, ‘Why are you telling me this, Amber?’

  ‘There’s a snag, you see. To mine the valley, NRL will have to build a highway and a railway through the forest. And the forest was the subject of a native title claim a dozen years ago and now belongs to the local Aboriginal land council, which is governed by a board elected by the traditional owners. So NRL made them a generous offer for the right to drive a corridor through their forest. The council walked the route, and then came up here. Konrad made a big presentation, tried to sell it as a choice between the past and the future. And they were split. The money would transform their lives, start up new businesses, build special schools, send their kids to university. But the valley would be destroyed forever.

  ‘Painful choice. So in the end they decided to get the advice of a wise man, someone they respected, one of their own.’