Ash Island Read online

  He introduces himself, a young chopper pilot for the Port Corporation. Three nights ago, he says, he saw a lonely light glimmering on Ash Island.

  ‘Two flatbed trucks or utes, looked like. They turned their lights off when I got close, so I thought I’d come out and see what they were up to. Took me a while to find the place. Over there. Once you spot it it’s fairly obvious where the ground has been disturbed, but I guess in a few weeks it’d be grown over again. I sank the shovel into the mud, and that’s what I turned up…’

  They stare at the place for a moment, then Ross says, ‘Okay, we’ll back out of here now and call in the experts.’

  They reverse their vehicles along the track to a place wide enough for others to pass them and Ross reports in, calling for a crime scene team. Harry works on a statement from the pilot with dates and times. When the forensic team arrives they get him to walk them through his movements, then take his boots and shovel and prints of his tyres before letting him go.

  After a couple of hours, forensics allow Harry and Ross to follow a narrow pathway they’ve demarcated with tape from the road to the burial site, and they follow this to where a cluster of people in mud-splattered blue overalls are working. A smell hangs in the air, something sweet and sickly lacing the sour organic odours of the marsh sediments.

  One of the people is crouching over a mud-encrusted heap laid out on a stretcher. Ross introduces Harry to the senior regional pathologist, Professor Leon Timson.

  ‘Hello, Harry. Won’t shake your hand.’ He has a broad northern English accent. ‘This is interesting.’

  ‘Is that the body?’

  ‘It is, most of it. We’re still finding other bits.’

  On cue one of the other searchers lifts a muddy lump and cries, ‘Here’s another one.’

  ‘Fingers,’ Timson explains, and calls out. ‘Well done. One more to go, lads.’ He turns back to the two detectives. ‘All the fingers of the right hand have been severed and buried with the body, along with various bits of clothing.’

  ‘Anything else you can tell us?’ Ross asks.

  ‘Not much until I clean him up.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Yup. Not a tall person, as you see, maybe one-sixty centimetres, five foot five? Something like that.’

  ‘A youth?’

  ‘Could be. They tell me you know exactly when he was buried?’

  ‘Three nights ago, around 2:15 a.m.’

  Timson nods. ‘Good. Well, we’ll take all this back and clean it up and see what we’ve got.’

  There is a line of vehicles now parked along the roadway, and operational support group police wearing overalls and waterproof leggings are being briefed for a search of the surrounding terrain. While Ross goes over to join them, Harry moves away from the activity to explore on his own, striking out through the trees and grasses, trying to get a picture of the setting. The burial site is part of an archipelago of mounds and hillocks thickly matted with reeds and grasses and stunted, gnarled trees, threaded with watercourses and pools. Within a short distance from the activity of the search area he feels an abrupt sense of isolation from the wider world. He makes his way back to the car, where Ross is talking to another cop.

  Harry looks around at the scene. ‘Good place for a secret burial—close to the city but completely remote. Makes you wonder.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If there are any others buried out here.’

  ‘Are you serious? This isn’t western Sydney.’

  Harry shrugs. ‘It’s pure chance this one was turned up. We should get equipment out here, do a search.’

  ‘Jeez…’ Ross stares out at the marshes stretching away into the distance. ‘That could take forever.’

  They drive back along the route and come to a sign for the Wetlands Visitors’ Centre. It’s housed in a refurbished nineteenth-century brick building, with nursery gardens nearby for the wetlands regeneration project. Inside they introduce themselves to a woman on duty. Ross asks if they’ve noticed any unusual activity recently.

  ‘No, why? What’s happened?’

  ‘We’ve found a body in the marshes a couple of kilometres down the track to the south.’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible. Do you know who it is?’

  ‘Not yet. There’s been a report of a couple of vehicles out there on Sunday night, after midnight. We’re looking for anyone who may have seen something.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone here can help you. We’re only staffed during the day.’

  Ross asks her for a list of the people who work there, tells her to contact the police if she hears anything.

  ‘So there’s no one who lives out here?’

  ‘Only the old couple at Copley’s farm. They’re not on the main route across the island…’ she shows them on a map, ‘…but I suppose they might have seen or heard something.’

  They take the turn the woman indicated onto a deeply rutted tack. A couple of fields appear behind wire fences, dairy cattle grazing. The farm looks in danger of subsiding into the earth, the lean-to roofs of its sheds and barns pitched unsteadily against what might once have been a fine brick villa. An elderly woman answers their knock, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She’s short and plump, walks with a swaying limp on arthritic hips. She shakes her head as Ross repeats his questions.

  ‘We get boys coming out here some nights in their cars,’ she says, ‘doing burnouts and that. We can hear them, on the road out by the visitors’ centre. They leave us alone.’

  A dog growls and the two police turn to see an elderly man, thin and worn hard as a weathered tree stump, approaching across the yard with a scrawny collie loping by his side. He confirms what his wife has told them. ‘Keep ourselves to ourselves,’ he says. ‘Don’t want no trouble from hoons.’

  Harry points to a ruined brick structure among the trees beyond the paddock, and the old man explains, ‘Radar station in the last war.’

  When they leave they drive over that way and see an extensive concrete apron scattered with bricks and tufts of weed. A brick tower has collapsed in on itself, and nearby stand the only intact structures, two blackened curved humps of concrete shell huts. They get out and check them, their doorways and windows sealed with brickwork and old corrugated steel sheets, long untouched, then return to the car and drive back to report to Fogarty.

  6

  Detective Chief Inspector Fogarty is seated behind his desk, studying a large satellite image of Ash Island. He looks up as they come in and frowns.

  ‘Well?’

  Ross brings him up to date, mentioning what little they know of the victim, the probable sex and size.

  ‘A child? Teenager? Some mischief gone wrong, maybe?’

  Ross shrugs.

  Harry says, ‘They’re doing a surface search of the immediate area, boss, but I reckon we need to think about a more thorough investigation of that place.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If there’s one body buried out there, there may be more. We should do a search with ground radar, dogs.’

  Fogarty rocks back on his chair, staring at him incredulously. ‘What are you suggesting, a mafia mass grave? A burial site for Mexican drug cartels?’ He shakes his head. ‘Do you know how big Ash Island is? How long it would take? How much it would cost?’

  ‘I’m just suggesting the immediate area, boss, by way of due diligence.’

  ‘Due diligence!’ Fogarty snorts. ‘You’re the last person to be lecturing me about due diligence, Belltree. You’ve only been here five minutes and you’ve already got a formal complaint lodged against you.’

  ‘Boss?’

  Fogarty lifts a document from his in-tray.

  ‘Mr Logan McGilvray’s solicitor has lodged a complaint alleging you used excessive force against him, caused extensive unnecessary and malicious damage to his property and exploited his transgender issues to publicly humiliate him.’

  Ross laughs.

  ‘It’s not funny, Ross. He makes no complaint
against you, says your behaviour was exemplary and deeply regrets that you were injured in the fracas, which he claims was due to Sergeant Belltree’s mishandling of the situation.’

  ‘He tried to kill me, boss!’

  ‘He says not. He says that was Sergeant Belltree’s construction on the matter. Did you actually see him threaten you?’

  ‘He was round the corner,’ Ross protests, ‘waiting for me with a bloody great knife. He stabbed my hand. If Harry hadn’t stopped him he’d have cut my throat.’

  ‘That’s not the way he describes it. There’s a professional standards team on its way to interview you both. Go back to your desks and don’t talk to anyone until you’re called.’

  7

  After the crisis on the headland, Kelly Pool has decided to face her nightmares. She has come back to the neighbourhood known as Crucifixion Creek in western Sydney, to Mortimer Street, where Donna Fenning drugged her and handed her over to Joost Potgeiter. But when she arrives, pulling her car into the kerb on the perimeter road, she feels a visceral shock. Behind the high chain-link fencing that now surrounds the place, machines are grinding away at the fabric of buildings, uprooting trees, collapsing roofs, pushing over walls, breaking up concrete slabs.

  As she stares in astonishment, a huge truck loaded with rubble growls through the gates now erected at the end of Mortimer Street. They remain open, and she gets out and walks towards them. All the cottages down the right-hand side of the street, including the one owned by her elderly friend Phoebe, have vanished, leaving no more than a long mound of crushed bricks.

  On the other side the demolition is incomplete. Old fireplaces are exposed on tottering walls, windows tilt drunkenly into space. She walks down the street feeling like the lone survivor of a devastating earthquake and comes to a patch of dirt in which one cactus remains upright, coated with white dust. This is the front garden of number eleven, Donna Fenning’s house. Through the gap where the front windows used to be she sees a sheet of wallpaper curling from the shattered plasterwork. She recognises the pink rose pattern with enough force to take her breath away. She steps over the debris and tears off a section. Stares at it.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing in there?’

  The voice belongs to a man in a hi-vis vest and hard hat, gloved hands on hips.

  She steps back out towards him and apologises. ‘I used to know this street. I had no idea…’

  ‘Well, you can’t just wander in. This place is dangerous.’

  ‘Yes. So it’s all going? The bikie compound, the factory units, everything?’

  ‘Everything. Clean slate.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she says, tucking the piece of wallpaper into her pocket.

  The man escorts her back to the gate and closes it behind her.

  A clean slate. As she walks back to her car she feels a growing sense of liberation. She sees a large billboard attached to the perimeter fence, announcing a major new urban development, Phoenix Square, with a picture of gleaming apartment towers. The developer is Ozdevco. She knows that name.

  8

  Professor Timson has finished the post-mortem by the time Harry and Ross are told they’re free to go. On the drive over to the pathology department Ross grumbles about McGilvray, the professional standards officers and Fogarty.

  Harry says, ‘Do you reckon he’s got it in for me?’

  ‘Nah, Foggy’s been like that with everyone for months. Lost a good mate, a cop he knew from way back. Got killed in a shooting accident in Sydney.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Funny name…Falstaff? Wagstaff. Got shot by mistake by a couple of trigger-happy patrol officers.’

  After he put two bullets in me, Harry thinks, feeling the muscles in his chest tighten around the scars.

  Ross goes on. ‘All hushed up, of course. You ever hear about it?’

  ‘Something. And Fogarty was his friend?’

  ‘Close as, apparently. Worked together in Sydney for years. Drug Squad.’

  Harry wonders how much Fogarty knows about the real circumstances of Wagstaff’s death. He tries to recapture the image of Fogarty seated at his desk, glowering at him. Pointedly? Knowingly? Hard to say.

  They come to the entrance of the John Hunter Hospital campus and Harry follows Ross’s directions around to the detached pathology building, where they’re shown into Timson’s office. While they wait they examine the pathologist’s collection of trophies on his desk and the wall—a plaque with the dagger and motto of the SAS, a picture of the Union Jack being raised at Port Stanley.

  They’re interrupted by the sound of footsteps. The pathologist puts his head round the door. ‘Afternoon, folks. Come and see what we’ve got.’

  He leads the way to the examination room, where a pale corpse is laid out on the steel table. As they approach they see that the postmortem operation has been repaired, the long cuts to the thorax stitched up and the scalp drawn back into place over the skull.

  ‘Chinese,’ Ross says.

  ‘Mm, mature adult, probably late twenties or early thirties.’ Timson turns over the intact left hand. ‘Accustomed to manual work.’

  ‘What are those marks?’ Ross points to large dark spots on the thighs.

  ‘Cigarette burns. Poor bastard’s been tortured. I assume that’s what the severed fingers are all about. There are tape marks around the wrists and ankles where he’s been restrained. Cause of death is a massive blow to the back of the head with something like a baseball bat or a scaffolding pole, that sort of diameter. Time of death would have been not long before he was put into the ground.

  ‘His clothes are over here. We’ve taken off enough of the mud to see what we have—cheap trainers, jeans. Check shirt with a Best and Less label. And that orange woollen beanie looks hand-knitted. No identification, nothing at all in the pockets.

  ‘We were able to make a likely identification of some stomach contents, a meat pie and an apple, and he’d drunk whisky before he died. Other than that there’s not a lot I can tell you. I doubt if the toxicology tests will tell us much, but you never know.’

  ‘So the shirt suggests he was Australian,’ Ross offers.

  ‘Yep. Your people have the fingerprints and the DNA will follow shortly. You may have something on him.’

  He pauses, scratching his chin, then adds, ‘I’ll tell you something that bothers me. The nature of the wounds…’ He shows them X-rays of a hand with severed fingers. ‘They seem very clean, very efficient. Done by someone who’s done that sort of thing before. And if that’s the case you’d be wondering if they’ve got rid of other bodies out there before as well.’

  Harry nods and says, ‘Do me a favour, prof, and put that in your report.’

  ‘Yes, I think I will.’

  When they return to the car Ross radios the station, but there has still been no missing person reported within the region in the past week, and no match for the dead man’s prints.

  ‘Let’s go see Sammy.’

  It turns out Sammy is Sammy Lee, a Singaporean who came to study economics at the University of Newcastle twenty years ago and stayed to run his own, very successful, Chinese restaurant in the city. He is also, Ross says, an active figure in the local Chinese community.

  He’s unable to help. ‘Ross, I’d have heard for sure if anybody’s son or husband was missing. He must be from out of town, probably Sydney. You know, they come up here for a day out, fish off the rocks or dig up pippies from Stockton Beach. Maybe he fell out with some local fishermen.’

  ‘Or came up here to sell drugs,’ Ross suggests.

  ‘Or that, yes.’

  They thank him and go back to the car, Harry with a copy of the takeaway menu.

  ‘You’re not saying much, Harry,’ Ross says. ‘No ideas?’

  ‘If he came up from Sydney, where’s his car? We should check the rail station cameras. But there’s something else that bothers me. I don’t know any twenty-something male in Sydney who’d be seen dead in those jeans.’ />
  Ross thinks about that, then says, ‘Okay, let’s try Father McCallum.’

  He makes a phone call, then drives them towards the port and parks outside a two-storey brick building with an illuminated sign, Flying Angel Stella Maris. Inside they walk through an entrance vestibule into a large hall where Father McCallum, chaplain of the ministry to seafarers, is showing a cluster of Asian men a rank of computers set up against one wall. He leaves them with a volunteer and comes over to shake hands with Ross, who introduces him to Harry. He takes them into a small office and offers them tea, and Ross explains their problem.

  ‘Chinese, you say? Well, we have plenty of those.’ He looks at the photograph of the dead man’s face on Ross’s phone and shakes his head. ‘It’s possible he’s one of ours, but I can’t honestly say I recognise him.’

  Ross asks McCallum to tell Harry about the set-up, and the clergyman explains. ‘We’ve been here for well over a hundred years, ministering to the needs of visiting sailors. This building was purpose-built in the great days. Hundreds of seamen, British and Australian mainly, here in port for weeks at a time. They held dances and film nights in that hall out there and it’d be packed out. Local girls’d come in and quite a few met their future husbands here. But it’s not like that anymore. Now the ships are only in port for about fifteen hours and everything’s run by computers and machines. Small crews, no more than a couple of dozen men, all Asian now. Mainly Filipino and Chinese.’ He pauses. ‘Those men, well, I shouldn’t call them slaves, but they have a hard life. They’re away from their families for most of the year, living a lonely kind of existence on board ship. They’re earning maybe ten dollars a day, most of which they’re sending back to their families, maybe extended families, even a whole village who are dependent on them.

  ‘They come into port, they’ve only got a few hours and not much money. When a ship comes in we send our bus out to its berth and take on any crew that want to come out for a short visit. The main thing they want is to use the computers here, to email home, catch up with messages. Then we take them out, maybe to Blackbutt Reserve to see the kangaroos, or more likely to a shopping centre. They don’t buy much but they like to look around. They might buy fresh fruit, they miss that on board ship.’