Ash Island Read online

  ‘I’m fine, Deb. And you?’

  ‘Oh,’ she shrugs and pulls out a chair, ‘there was a big shake-up after Crucifixion Creek. I’m sure you know.’

  Actually he doesn’t, and he feels his isolation. He sits opposite her.

  ‘Harry, Marco Ganis was the cousin of Stefan Ganis, ex-member of the Crows who we witnessed being killed in that siege at Crucifixion Creek four months ago. You remember that?’

  Of course he bloody remembers. She’s talking to him as if he’s lost his wits. Marco Ganis also ended up in possession of the tow truck that forced Harry’s parents’ car off the road on Thunderbolt’s Way on the orders of the Crows president, Roman Bebchuk. But Deb doesn’t know this. Nor that Harry subsequently shot and killed Bebchuk. So Harry holds his tongue and just nods.

  ‘The Drug Squad had a red flag on Marco’s name as a possible small-time dealer, low in the food chain. This changes things. We’ve also had a call from the Feds. It seems they had a tip-off from China about the possibility of the Jialing being involved in drug smuggling into Australia, so naturally they’re interested in Cheung’s death. Possible that Cheung and Ganis were involved in trafficking drugs from China to Sydney through the port of Newcastle.’

  Harry thinks of the coal chain, the relentless flow of coal from the Valley to China, and of this other flow, equally remorseless, of the drug chain in return.

  ‘So the serial killer angle…?’

  ‘Probably a non-starter, but we’re going to run with that until we find out more, because the AFP are anxious to protect their source in China.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘None of the rest of the team below the rank of chief inspector are aware of this, Harry. You have to keep it to yourself.’

  ‘Sure, but why are you telling me?’

  ‘Because I want someone with their feet on the ground here keeping an eye on things, looking for any more Sydney connections.’

  Harry nods.

  ‘And because I know you, Harry.’ She smiles at him. ‘We’ve missed you. It’s been much quieter since you left. How’s Jenny?’

  ‘She’s good. She’s got a dog to take care of her now. It’s working out well. How’s Pete?’ Deb’s partner is a sergeant in the Tactical Operations Unit, the black ninjas.

  Deb’s face goes stony. ‘Oh. You don’t know about that? Everyone else does.’ She seems disinclined to go on, then sighs. ‘I started getting these phone calls at work from this mad-sounding woman. She’d ring the switchboard and they’d say I was unavailable, until she finally exploded and told them that I had stolen her husband and if they didn’t put her through to me she’d go to the papers. So they rang me and I spoke to her. She asked me to stop ruining her life. It seems she’s been married to Pete for ten years and they’ve got two kids. I thought that was crazy until I remembered how he was always going on TOU training courses at weekends. Turns out there hadn’t been any: that’s when he’d go and live with them. During the week he told them he was on secret undercover police business and couldn’t come home.’

  ‘Hell, what did you do?’

  ‘I went back to our place and gathered up all his stuff—the clothes, the signed Bulldogs shirts, the CDs, the Star Trek memorabilia—and dumped it on the nature strip outside. By the time he got home most of it was gone.’

  ‘Jeez, I’m sorry, Deb.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ She shakes her head as if annoyed with herself for talking about it. ‘Anyway, you’d better get over to Ash Island. Sounds like a fun place.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  In fact it seems an almost magical place when Harry gets there. The sky is heavy with dark storm clouds, but a gap directly above Ash Island allows a shaft of brilliant sunlight to fall upon the scene of toiling people, to make the damp trees and grasses all around them sparkle and the water shimmer and glisten. The slightly sinister theatrical effect is heightened by a backdrop of lightning flashes from a big electrical storm out to sea.

  They have established that the third corpse is as badly decomposed as the second and smells much worse, choking the still air with a sweet putrescence that makes people turn away and clear their throats in disgust. As with the other two, several fingers have been severed, but, unlike them, the skull has been smashed beyond recognition, as if it’s been crushed by a great weight.

  22

  Jenny immediately smells it when Harry returns that evening, and so does the dog, following him around, sniffing his trouser legs. He strips off and puts what he can in the washing machine and packs his jacket and trousers into a plastic bag for the dry cleaners in the morning. As she puts the plates into the oven to warm, Jenny hears him in the bathroom taking a long shower. She took advantage of the break in the rain to go on a longer walk today with Felecia, exploring the streets of Hamilton, and now feels pleasantly tired. On their way back she called in to the supermarket at Marketown where she’d been a couple of times before with Harry, memorising each aisle from his descriptions. Now she enjoyed the challenge of doing it on her own, using her phone app to distinguish each type of apple or brand of spice. There was one point of confusion where they had rearranged the dairy section and she had to ask for help, but she’s been able to find the ingredients for a moussaka, and assemble them—lamb, eggplants, tomatoes, bechamel sauce—without incident.

  She also spent an hour on her computer working on Harry’s problem with the mobile phone numbers. Over dinner she tells him what she’s discovered.

  ‘One of the phones McGilvray called was used to take a photograph.’

  ‘Yes? You have the picture?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t get that.’

  ‘Oh. No help then.’

  ‘Well, it might be, because when the phone takes a picture its GPS data is automatically recorded, and I was able to get into that. So I don’t know what the picture was, but I know where it was taken.’

  ‘Can you show me?’

  She brings up the image on the screen, a map of central Newcastle with the coordinates marked. Harry zooms in and switches to street view. ‘That’s Sammy Lee’s restaurant. I bought takeaway from there on Saturday night, remember?’

  ‘Yes. So the person with the phone was probably eating there that night.’

  ‘Do we have a date?’

  ‘Yes. If you go back to the map…’

  The date and time are recorded with the map coordinates. Saturday October 20, 8:46 p.m.

  ‘Will that help?’

  He says yes and thanks her, sounding pleased. With any luck Sammy will have a record of his diners that night.

  After the meal they listen to the radio for a while, Harry reading the papers. He seems restless, but whatever is on his mind, he doesn’t want to talk about it. They go to bed and she lies for a while, thinking. Then she feels something, a light tremor deep in her belly. It takes her a moment to realise what it is—the quickening, the first movement of the baby inside her. Twenty weeks now, and according to what her computer has told her, he—for she thinks of it as a boy—now weighs about three hundred grams and is about fifteen centimetres long. She imagines his tiny hand reaching out and touching the wall of her womb. She turns to tell Harry, but he is deeply asleep. She smiles to herself and closes her eyes.

  She dreams of a high dark interior, a hallway, a grand flight of stairs of polished timber, the smell of roasting lamb. She hears the tramp of boots on a timber floor and follows the sound out onto a broad veranda with a view over paddocks, white-railed. She goes down the steps to the gravel drive and hears the whinny of horses, the clump of hoofs. Looking back, she sees a red roof. A horse has come to the rail in front of her and shows huge yellow teeth.

  She wakes abruptly, feeling Felecia rubbing her nose against her hand. The clock says 1:52 and she rolls over, but Felecia keeps nudging her, lifting a paw to push against her back. She’s never done this before.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks her. ‘Is it the lightning, Felecia? Is there a storm?’

  The dog is panting, agitated,
and Jenny gets up and goes out to the kitchen to see if there’s water in the dog’s bowl. But Felecia is at the front door, scratching to be let out. Jenny opens it, but instead of going out the dog returns to the bedroom and tries to rouse Harry.

  He sits up, rubbing his face. ‘What’s the matter? What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s Felecia, she’s unsettled. I think she needs to go out.’

  ‘Okay,’ he mumbles. ‘I’ll take her.’ He gets up. Slips on a pair of shoes and puts a jacket on over his pyjamas. He clips a lead to Felecia’s collar and heads for the front door. But the dog pulls back, tugging him towards the harness that she wears for Jenny.

  ‘She wants me to come too,’ Jenny says. ‘Hang on.’

  ‘Chrissake, Felecia,’ Harry grumbles. ‘You don’t know what you want.’

  Jenny pulls on a raincoat and boots and they go out, the three of them, into the glow of the streetlight in the narrow lane. The atmosphere is humid, close, and there’s no sound of traffic in the still air. Jenny slips her hand into Harry’s arm and they set off.

  ‘I was dreaming of the homestead,’ she says. ‘The red roof, the horses. I saw the inside of the house. There were portraits of the Nordlunds on the walls.’

  ‘You remember it?’

  ‘Probably not. I was looking them up today. It was on my mind. Probably just my imagination.’

  As they walk Harry describes the flicker of lightning he can see out beyond the grain silos. They circle the block and return to their street. Jenny can picture the view of their cottage ahead of them. She doesn’t see the dazzling white flash and blazing cloud that erupt out of it. Instead she feels a sudden heat and then a numbing silence as the shock wave hits her. When her hearing returns there is a sound of roaring and crashing, of the rattle of debris falling on tin roofs, muffled by Harry who has covered her with his body and forced her down, crouching against a wall.

  23

  People begin tumbling out of the houses, dark figures emerging into the glow from the burning building. Harry checks his coat pockets. He picked up his wallet, keys and phone when he came out, and he makes a triple-0 call. Turns back to Jenny, drawing her gently to her feet, checking she isn’t hurt. Felecia is beside them, sitting on her haunches watching the flickering ruin of their home as if she expected it.

  He recognises the young man next door running over to them. He and his wife are okay, he says, but Harry is worried their house may catch fire too. As he’s asking if the man has a hose, they hear a siren. A fire engine is clearing the people off the street as it rushes in. Helmeted figures jump out and start unfurling hoses.

  An ambulance arrives and a police car, and one of the ambos comes over to Harry and Jenny. Harry gets the man to check Jenny. Tells him to make sure their elderly neighbour on the far side of their block is okay. He doesn’t know either of the uniformed cops. He introduces himself and gives them a quick account, tells them to call it in as a possible crime scene. He feels helpless and ridiculous, standing there in his pyjamas. He is in an absurd dream.

  More uniforms turn up with a detective Harry also doesn’t recognise. He stands with Harry, gazing at the ruin, shaking his head. The fabric of the building has largely gone, blown into matchwood. Only the sheets of corrugated metal roofing are recognisable, scattered precariously over the neighbours’ roofs.

  ‘Jeez, you were lucky, Harry. How come you weren’t inside?’

  ‘The dog got us up, wanted to go for a walk.’

  ‘That’s a bloody miracle. Maybe he smelled the gas.’

  ‘She,’ Jenny says. ‘And there was no smell of gas.’

  ‘Yeah, but dogs, they have this amazing sense of smell. It was probably building up under the floor and then something sparked it off, boom. Could’ve happened anytime, these old houses.’

  But ten minutes later the senior fire officer comes over. He pulls off his glove and shakes their hands. He says to Harry, ‘Given someone the shits, mate?’

  ‘He didn’t pay his gas bill,’ the detective quips.

  The firie shakes his head. ‘That wasn’t gas. That was ANFO. I’d stake my life on it—ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. It’s got a smell. I know because I worked in the mines.’

  ‘The mines?’ Harry says.

  ‘Yes, they use it all the time as a general-purpose explosive. It’s cheap and easy to make when you need it, just mix up some ammonium nitrate granules with a bit of diesel. Needs a primer to set it off, Tovex or pentolite usually. The forensic blokes’ll find out.’

  ‘Hang on,’ the detective says, ‘you’re telling us this was a bomb?’

  ‘Too right.’

  The detective turns to Harry. ‘Jeez, this is your lucky day, mate. You should buy a lottery ticket.’

  24

  Jenny finishes the tea and wonders what to do with the cup and saucer; there must be a table or shelf in here somewhere. She gets to her feet and begins to explore, her left hand stretching out for obstacles. She bangs her shin against a low table and swears softly to herself, puts down the cup and saucer and returns to her chair.

  From time to time people look in and ask her if she’s all right. They’re kind and she thanks them, but they have that tone in their voice as if they’re talking to an invalid and it makes her angry, not with them but with herself. She’s in the middle of a crisis and all she can do is sit around and be useless. Somewhere else in the building Harry is talking to his people and one of the things they’ll be discussing is what to do about her, if that really was a bomb. She still finds the idea preposterous, out of the blue like that, so dramatic. But then it’s happened before, hasn’t it? With Harry’s parents. Murderous violence coming out of nowhere. In her darkest moments it makes her wonder if she has been a catalyst of some kind. Even a cause.

  Felecia stirs at her side and nuzzles her hand. Sometimes she even catches herself hating the dog, a symbol of her helplessness.

  25

  Deb Velasco stares at the floodlit scene as dawn begins to glimmer in the east. She wanted to see it for herself.

  ‘There’s quite a crater,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’ Harry’s been trying to visualise the plan of the house. The short brick piers that supported the timber floor form a shattered grid on the scorched earth. ‘It’s directly beneath our bedroom. The kitchen, where the only gas outlet was, was over there, and the gas meter beyond it. You can still see it.’ He points to a blackened box, still intact.

  ‘So you go with the bomb theory,’ she says.

  ‘It seems possible.’

  ‘Motive? Who hates you that much?’

  Harry hesitates. All he can think of is McGilvray, but that seems absurd. He tells her anyway.

  ‘He’d have to be psycho,’ she says. ‘And he’d have access to detonators?’

  ‘Maybe, in the mines. I’ll go up there and check.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Someone else can do that. I’m thinking we should send you back to Sydney.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that, Deb. I want to get this sorted.’

  ‘But it isn’t just you at risk, is it, Harry? There’s Jenny, and she needs you to look after her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  As they turn to go they inspect Harry’s car, still standing at the kerb. Its paintwork is blistered and discoloured on one side. It is all they have here now. Everything else—clothes, books, TV, household stuff, Jenny’s computer—has gone.

  ‘You don’t think your Pete could have got the idea you were shacked up here with me, do you, Deb?’

  She looks shocked for a moment, then realises he’s joking and laughs.

  When they get back to the central police station they find Ross Bramley sitting with Jenny. She looks very tired and Ross says he’s booked a room for them at a nearby hotel. He’s brought some clothes for Harry and arranged for his sister, an ex-cop who lives in the East End, to get some for Jenny. There’ll be an incident briefing with Fogarty and Superintendent Gibb later in the morning.

  Jenny and Harry, fee
ling like two vagrants with a dog, check into the hotel and try to get some sleep. After an hour, when Jenny has fallen into an uneasy slumber, Harry rises, showers and shaves, pulls on Ross’s clothes. The suit is baggy but the shoes fit. He goes to Jenny’s bedside and she stirs, reaches out a hand for him.

  ‘I want to go to the briefing,’ he says. ‘Will you be okay?’

  She nods and tells him to go. He takes the lift down to the lobby and walks out into the street. A southerly has cleared the rain clouds away and sunlight sparkles on the waves, as if everything dark and foul has been banished with the night. He gets some breakfast at a little surfers’ café overlooking the beach then walks back up to the police station.

  Fogarty has spoken to the fire chief, who has personally inspected the site of the explosion. He reads in a monotone from his notes. Although it’s far too early for test results, the fire chief is confident that they will support his officer’s earlier suspicions. He was present when scrapings of a chemical residue were taken from the brickwork of one of the piers. It closely resembles the remains of unburnt ammonium nitrate prills or pellets. If so, they appear to be of the lighter, aerated form of explosive-grade ammonium nitrate, rather than the denser form used as fertiliser. It seems likely that the residue survived the explosion because it had been affected by the damp conditions: ammonium nitrate is highly hygroscopic, absorbing moisture from the air.

  Fogarty puts down the sheet of paper and looks at Superintendent Gibb, who shakes his head and says, ‘Dear God. It’s a miracle there were no fatalities. What are we telling the press?’

  ‘So far, only that emergency services were called to a mystery explosion in Carrington at twelve minutes past two last night. There were no casualties, but extensive damage to one cottage and secondary damage to neighbouring properties.’

  ‘It won’t take them long to find out that a police officer was living there.’

  ‘No. I suggest we withhold the name.’

  Harry says, ‘The neighbours know our names and so do the local shopkeepers. My wife is kind of conspicuous.’