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APRIL, 2013

Interview – Part 1

Police interview rooms. Not the happiest places around. Windowless, starkly lit and barely furnished, they’re designed for nothing less than maximum discomfort and advertising the idea that there is absolutely no way out unless you start blabbing, which is exactly what I intended to do as soon as the cops came back.

This particular interview room, I had time to notice, appeared recently refurbished but the lingering odour of new paint did not entirely overwhelm the sweet hint of human distress that permeated its worn industrial carpet. Obviously, the renovation budget hadn’t extended all the way to the floor. Some of that stench may have been mine. I’d been here before, back when video cameras and recording devices and such were physically in the room with you. Now a single AV unit mounted near the ceiling feeds everything onto a hard drive located somewhere else. I glanced up, knowing that a couple of cops were at that moment hunched in front of a screen somewhere, probably right next door, keeping an eye on things. No fancy two-way cop show mirrors around here. Maybe we can’t afford them.

The detectives were taking their own sweet time. They had gone for coffee, leaving me to stew in my own juices for a while. I knew how it worked. It was all part of the little three-way drama we were in the process of acting out. This was serious business. Two people were dead – well, no, make that three – and I had a story to tell.

I waited, with nothing to keep me company but the quiet hum of ducted air-conditioning. I studied the backs of my hands. The trembling had subsided and the flecks of blood had dried to a hard black. Under the sharp fluorescent light, the flecks looked like tiny, dark beetles. The bloody spots on my shirt had turned black too. It wasn’t my blood so at some point, I supposed, the cops would produce a warrant to seize my clothes, bag them up and send them wherever they had to go, and I vaguely wondered what they would give me to wear instead. Maybe they would simply take me home to change. I had no idea.

I looked at my watch. There was a tiny spatter of blood on the face as well. It was almost 10pm.

My fingers drifted over to my digital recorder. I gave it a couple of spins before picking up my phone. I inspected the blank screen and put it down again. They’d asked me to switch it off. I had yet to ask for my one phone call – you actually do get one – mainly because I wasn’t under arrest for anything yet but also because I had no idea who I’d call at this time of night anyway. The only person I would call was, I assumed, at that very moment sitting in a room exactly like this one. On the way in, I’d counted six numbered but otherwise grimly identical doors leading off the corridor.

I leaned back in my chair and rolled my neck from side to side for a moment or two, shock finally giving way to exhaustion, and decided to stare up at the ceiling with my bloody hands behind my head until the detectives decided to come back.

A few minutes later the door clicked open with a tiny electronic bleep and Detective Sergeant Knight, a folder tucked under one arm, shouldered through bearing a steaming plastic coffee cup in each hand. Right behind him, Detective Tezuka also carried coffee and a folder.

Unusually (and the name may be a dead giveaway here), Tezuka was Japanese. I hadn’t seen him around before. Possibly, he was on some sort of exchange program. His black-rimmed glasses were too big for his face and he was painfully thin. He wore a plain business shirt tucked into trousers that rode way too high. So far, the skinny Japanese detective had had little to say.

Knight I had seen around, mostly on evening news bulletins, striding purposefully around this crime scene or that in front of floodlights and news crews the way he had earlier that same evening. At a guess, Knight was slightly younger than me. He wore a faded Hoodoo Gurus t-shirt, three-quarter cargo pants and runners. Coincidentally, at that very moment there happened to be a Gurus anthology slotted into the player in my car back at the crime scene.

‘White, no sugar,’ Knight said as he placed a cup on the desk and slid it over.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Did you manage to track down Harry Hollis?’

Knight eyed me as he took his chair. Detective Inspector Hollis was his boss, or one of them at least. I had asked to see him. ‘I’ve left a message for him,’ the detective said. ‘He’s in the building somewhere.’

I glanced up at the camera, imagining that Hollis may, in fact, be one of the cops on the other side of it.

I nodded and waited for them to settle with their coffee and folders. When they were ready, Knight flipped his folder open to the page of notes he’d already started. Tezuka followed his lead and took a sip of his coffee.

‘Okay,’ Knight said. ‘As I said earlier, we need you to run us through tonight’s events with a view to establishing exactly what, from your point of view, went on out there, along with anything you can tell us about the events leading up to it.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Now, forensics are still on site and they know their stuff, mate, so you will need to be completely truthful with us. Their narrative needs to match yours and if it doesn’t, well, we’ll have some problems down the line.’

I nodded and reached for my coffee. ‘I know.’

Knight opened his hands. ‘Take your time.’

Tezuka suddenly leaned forward, read something and looked up again. ‘You have no middle name.’

It was a statement more than a question and it threw me for a moment. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

Putting down my cup, I said, ‘That’s correct. I don’t have a middle name.’

Tezuka nodded. ‘Japanese people don’t have middle names, either.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ I said.

Tezuka smiled, turning to Knight, and said, ‘Sorry. Continue.’

Detective Sergeant Knight threw his colleague a doleful look before saying, ‘Thank you, detective,’ and then looked at me.

After a quick glance at the blood on my hands, I said, ‘Right’ and proceeded to tell them everything, and for the whole time the screaming woman’s words nagged at the back of my mind like bad news I didn’t want to hear.

‘What have you done?’

Jack Jackson.

Looked great in a page one by-line, that name.

But not today.

One of the political reporters had written the front-page splash. Poisonous copper concentrate had spilled all over the port while being loaded onto ships for export. According to an anonymous whistleblower, the powdery substance – containing traces of arsenic, uranium, lead and silica – went straight into Darwin Harbour during the cleanup operation. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, either. The whole thing was scandalous and the Northern Reporter was going for the jugular.

Sipping coffee, I swung my legs up onto my desk and settled in to read the day’s edition: the morning routine. Get in early, scan the news pages and wait for the day to happen. I re-read the only story I’d written the day before, a fluff piece on the hatching of a four-legged chicken, hoping the sub-editors hadn’t screwed it up. They hadn’t, which was a nice surprise.

And that’s me, the hard-bitten hack fretting over a couple of paragraphs in a nothing story on a Tuesday morning when no one else is around.

It hadn’t always been like that.

At 46, I’d been with the Reporter a little over twenty years, mostly on the police and court rounds. I was damned good at it too. Back then, I smoked two packs a day, grew a moustache and developed a beer belly, so I looked the part as well. But something happened, almost five years ago now, and the cops stopped talking to me. After that I moved over to general news. Didn’t have a choice, really. I cut down on the smokes and the beer belly went away. So did the moustache. At first I missed that good old ambulance-chasing adrenalin rush but in the end wasn’t that torn up at the way things had turned out, four-legged chickens notwithstanding. At least I could still pay the bills, and I had plenty of those.

Mind you, I had been offered better paying gigs around town, mostly in TV and radio newsrooms. I turned them down as a matter of routine. Call me a dinosaur – or worse – but I’m a newspaper man through and through. The things may be doomed but I fucking love them just the same, and it’ll stay that way until they die or I do, whichever comes first.

I love Darwin, too. Australia’s northernmost capital is home, and it’s as screwy as hell, thanks in large part to a dangerous combination of pressing tropical heat and booze. News-wise, she’s gold. As a place to live she’s not too bad either. It’s no Hong Kong or Singapore but we have swaying palms, glorious tropical sunsets and a relaxed lifestyle that allows you to mow your lawn in your underwear without fear of arrest. What’s not to like about a place like that?

I finished my coffee and looked out the window.

The view from the Northern Reporter’s editorial floor is quite something. Situated on a hill overlooking Darwin Harbour, the newspaper office sits halfway between the Central Business District and the city’s commercial fishing precinct. Beyond the trawlers berthed at the fishing wharf below, a huge LNG tanker churned through flat green water, heading for the gas plant across the way.

The phone on the front desk rang.

The general editorial line.

I peered over the top of my cubicle, across workstations piled high with old newspapers and filthy coffee cups. Sub-editors are the messiest people on earth. Thanks to them newsrooms look busy even when they’re deserted. There’s a lingering odour too, of sweat and coffee and newsprint, but after a few years you don’t tend to notice it.

The phone rang like an alarm going off. I sighed. It was only ten past eight. I glanced over my shoulder. The chief photographer was wheeling his bicycle towards his office at the back of the newsroom, ignoring both the ringing phone and my friendly good morning wave. Asshat.

I blew out air, folded the paper away, scooped up the handset, stabbed a button, said ‘Newsroom’ and almost lost an eardrum in the cannon fire of abuse that blasted down the line.

Her name was Nicky Chen and she wasn’t happy.

‘Fucking hell,’ Nicky Chen said, blowing out a dense cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘That story the cops put in the paper was absolute crap. They made it sound like I was sucking the guy’s dick or something. I had my seat belt on, so it’s impossible I’d be leaning over going the gobble unless he’s hung like an elephant or I’ve got a neck like a bloody giraffe.’

Laughing, I shifted on the barstool and waved my notebook at the mark across her chest. The notebook was mostly for show. I had a digital recorder running in my front pocket. Despite what you may have heard, the number one rule of journalism is accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. Sometimes shorthand isn’t enough, especially mine.

‘Lucky you had a seatbelt on,’ I said.

The deepening bruise ran like a nasty purple tattoo down and across from her left shoulder to the top of her generous right breast. It was almost the same colour as the lurid purple streak in her otherwise jet-black, shoulder length hair.

Nicky Chen whirled her beer bottle through the air. ‘Bloody thing almost cut my tits off.’

Scotty took another photo.

‘Aw, shit, mate,’ Nicky said. ‘That’ll look fucking great in the paper.’

She laughed. Behind her, the bearded and tattooed barman – his name was Spud, just Spud – offered us a sly wink, possibly agreeing that that would indeed look fucking great in the paper.

‘Sorry,’ Scotty said.

Scotty wasn’t sorry at all. The young photographer was enjoying this. Fresh-faced and fresh out of Melbourne, Scott Larson had been with the Reporter just two weeks and had already covered two murders and a non-fatal crocodile attack. The crocodile victim had escaped by poking that sucker right in the eyes, which Scotty thought was fantastic. Now, in a small Northern Territory town with the slightly oddball name of Mango Flat, Scott Larson was staring at Nicky Chen’s breasts as though he’d never seen anything like them.

I could understand it. Ms. Chen oozed an almost palpable carnal aura, without even trying. For Scotty, the Chinese ancestry may have added an extra exotic flavour, albeit one that evaporated completely when the absurdly broad Australian accent escaped from her mouth. She was around 30 but she may have been younger, or older. It was hard to tell. She was an out of work hairdresser, which explained the purple streak and why she was at the pub at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

Scotty and I had exchanged a quick this-is-going-to-be-good glance as soon as we’d spotted her sprawled at the bar. Dressed in a too-tight singlet and a faded sarong, she sat tearing open a packet of smokes. Spud didn’t seem to mind, despite the smoking ban. Apart from a grizzled truck driver-type devouring a meat pie at one of the tables and a leathery old man in a cowboy hat at the far end of the bar, the place was empty. The truckie and the cowboy didn’t seem to mind the smoke, either. Nicky was already on her third beer and that was okay too, because that was the way they did things out here.

Mango Flat is about forty minutes out of town, off the main highway, on the way to Kakadu National Park. It’s a service town, mostly, surrounded by five-acre blocks close in and larger farms further out. The population is a mix of proper farmers, market gardeners, retirees, dope fiends and people with quad bikes and dogs the size of ponies. Nicky Chen, despite having all her teeth, looked like she fitted right in.

The beer and smokes and laughter did little to mask her unhappiness. The local cops had issued a press release the previous morning alleging some ‘amorous activity’ may have led to a single vehicle accident just out of Mango Flat the night before. The driver, they thought, may have been ‘distracted’ by his female passenger. There was a hint at oral sex. The Reporter’s hard-arsed police reporter had re-written the release, playing it for laughs. The story had run as an inside page lead, coincidentally on the same page as my deformed chicken story.

Now, Nicky Chen wanted to ‘set the bloody record straight’, fearing it would take no time at all for the whole of Mango Flat to connect her badly bruised front end to the substantially more damaged front end of a 4WD belonging to local farmer.

‘Look,’ Nicky said. ‘I admit it may have looked a bit suspect when the cops first got there. My boobs were all over the shop and I had ten bucks tucked into my top. They probably thought I was a hooker or something.’ She chuckled and then a sudden thought seemed to strike her. ‘Ten bucks is a bit cheap for a blow job, though, don’t you think?’ She let out a hearty, smoky laugh.

Scotty laughed too. ‘For sure,’ he said.

I could almost feel the hot, lusty blush rising behind his collar.

‘And anyway,’ Nicky continued, ‘if I was giving him a blow job I’d just admit it and cop it on the bloody chin, you know.’

Now I laughed. ‘I’ll quote you on that. Is the guy a friend of yours?’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no. Not really.’ Nicky chuckled. ‘I’ve seen him around, you know. Poor bastard was just giving me a lift home. I don’t have a license at the moment.’ She winked. ‘Get it back in a month.’

‘Well, he doesn’t have one now either,’ I said, grinning.

‘Yeah, and his wife must be giving him all kinds of grief, too.’ She laughed again, shaking her head in mock sympathy.

Smiling, I felt for the recorder. This was gold, pure gold. If any of the two hundred pictures Scotty had taken of Nicky Chen’s breasts turned out okay, Murray Dowd, the Reporter’s editor, would splash them all over the front page.

‘Nicky?’ Scotty said. ‘Can I just get a couple more shots of you with –’

‘Hang on,’ I said.

Over at his table, the truck driver had frozen, the last piece of pie poised mid-air before his open mouth. He had noticed it too – a low, subterranean rumble. We all turned to look out through the doors as the first jolt thudded through the ground beneath the pub. The entire building shuddered, rattling glasses and bottles and furniture. The first bump passed quickly and settled into a deep, almost rhythmic shaking.

‘What the hell is that?’ Scotty said, blinking.

‘Earth tremor,’ I told him, getting to my feet to slap a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. We get them all the time.’

Scotty looked around, gripping his camera gear. Overhead, the whirling ceiling fans chopped from side to side, whining like rotor blades.

‘Holy snapping duck shit,’ Nicky said, hanging onto the bar.

A second large jolt, as big as the first, coursed through the building. A bottle smashed to the floor behind the bar.

Spud swore.

In a moment, the tremor subsided, rumbling away as quickly as it had arrived. I imagined I could hear it go, grinding away like a giant jet engine fading into the distance. The whole thing had lasted just ten or fifteen seconds. The truck driver scoffed down his pie and pushed his chair back, getting up to leave. The old man in the cowboy hat hadn’t reacted at all. He took a nonchalant sip of his beer.

‘Shit,’ Scotty said. ‘Is that it? It’s gone?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘That was a bigger one than usual, though.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Scotty said. ‘I knew about the cyclones and crocodiles but nobody told me there’d be bloody earthquakes.’

‘Fuck a fucking duck,’ Nicky said. ‘That was a big one. Another beer, Spuddy.’

‘Jesus, Nick, I’ve got to clean this up.’

‘You’ve got all bloody day to do that, mate.’

Spud reached into a chest freezer behind the bar. ‘I hope you didn’t piss off your ghost, Nick. I told you not to bring him here.’

Nicky shot him a look, waving her cigarette in the air.

‘Spuddy…’

I lifted an eyebrow at her.

With an unapologetic smile, Spud handed over the beer, shrugged, and made to clean up the mess. Nicky inspected the bottle briefly before looking back up.

I smiled at her like a shark.

‘What ghost?’

‘What a woman,’ Scotty said when we were back in the car.

‘Too much woman for you, my friend,’ I said, fiddling with the dashboard vents. The work car’s air-conditioning was playing up. Typical.

‘You’re the one who got her phone number,’ Scotty pointed out.

‘My interest is purely professional,’ I said. I gave up on the vents and started the car.

‘She was eyeing you off.’

‘You think so?’

Scotty looked at me. ‘You missed that?’

‘Apparently.’

He glanced back at the pub. ‘You believe any of that shit?’

‘About the blow job or the ghost?’

Scotty laughed. ‘The ghost. I believe her about the blow job.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ I peered through the windshield at downtown Mango Flat. It wasn’t much to look at. Apart from the pub, there was a service station outside of which a stood a tall fiberglass crocodile wearing a cowboy hat, a small supermarket and a bait and tackle shop, all streaky with red dust. I watched as a road-train thundered past on the bitumen, a fuel tanker hot on its heels.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ve been at this a long time and it’s not the first ghost story I’ve ever heard.’

Scotty frowned. ‘Seriously?’

‘Sure. We’re a tabloid. We love ghosts. And aliens. And babies with tails.’

‘Okay. Have you ever heard of a ghost chucking knives around like that? That’s a bit special.’

I snorted, nodding at the pub. ‘No, but that’s probably why she’s in there and not at home. Mind you, the really interesting thing is that they called in a priest. That’s the story right there. We just need to find him.’

‘Think she’ll come through with his name?’

I winked. ‘She has the hots for me. She’ll call.’

Scotty laughed. ‘Right,’ he said, gazing down the road at the cowboy crocodile. ‘I’m surprised that thing didn’t fall over. Man, this place is fucking unbelievable.’

I put the car in gear and wiped sweat from my face with a sleeve. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

‘Look, I don’t know how many more ways you want me to say this,’ the seismologist said on the other end of the line. He was starting to sound irritated. ‘The Timor Trench hasn’t moved in five million years. The likelihood of Darwin being wiped out in a tsunami, right at this moment, is zip.’

‘That’s good to know,’ I said, thumping out the quote on my keyboard with two fingers, a little disappointed the tsunami angle was going nowhere.

‘And again, as I said, the tremors you experience up there, like this one, generally originate in the Banda Sea, and the quakes there are usually quite deep.’

I knew a little about the geology of the Banda Sea. I’d written this same story a dozen times, and spoken to numerous GeoScience boffins. The earthquakes occurred hundreds of kilometres to our north, on the other side of Indonesia, at a distance that would normally make them pass unnoticed on the Australian mainland. However, the weird orientation of the fault-lines in the area allowed seismic waves to funnel very efficiently towards Northern Australia.

‘Okay, but this one was larger than usual, though, wasn’t it? I can’t remember anything over seven before. Just about everyone felt it.’ I swapped the handset to my other shoulder and continued typing.

‘Not unusually big, no. They really aren’t that uncommon. As the technology improves, we’re getting more precise readings, that’s all. And you’ve got to keep in mind Darwin is growing. A larger population will naturally lead to more people feeling these things. You’ve also started building a lot of high-rise residential towers and such up there. Tremors from a 7.1 will undoubtedly give them a fair old shake.’

‘You’ve got that right. We heard one of them was evacuated.’

‘It would certainly give you a good old rattle, that’s for sure.’

I scrolled through the notes on my screen. ‘Yeah. Listen, I think that might give me enough to go on for now. Thanks for speaking to me.’

‘Not a problem.’

‘Just to double check, it’s Brian with an i, yeah?’

‘Yes,’ the seismologist said. ‘And Smith the way you’d normally spell it.’

I smiled at the sarcasm. ‘Okay, Brian. Thanks very much for that.’

‘No problem.’

I hung up, rubbed at my forehead and looked out the window. A light haze shimmered in the heat over the harbour. I imagined the tremor may have sent some dust swirling into the air. Beyond the haze, a line of smudgy clouds hugged the horizon.

It had just turned April, which, like September, is a weird kind of month. In April, the monsoonal wet season starts to bleed away into the dry. It’s a painfully slow process but eventually the humidity drops, the skies clear, and the chances of a cyclone whirling into action somewhere off the coast get slimmer by the day. Pretty soon, Darwin would be paradise on Earth, at least for a few months. September is the opposite; the humidity begins to climb, paradise becomes a happy memory and by October people are going mad.

Seated at the cubicle next to mine, Beth Harvey swore, then laughed, then stood up. She was in her early 20s, slightly overweight and dressed badly. A swarm of pimples clustered on her chin like tiny red volcanoes. For a kid, Harvey wasn’t a bad writer. She rarely spoke to me. She’d probably heard things. Despite that, she looked at me as if she was bursting to talk and anybody would do.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

She waved at her screen and chuckled. ‘Some kid in a takeaway shop stuck his dick in a hot chicken. He’s in hospital.’

Not a lot surprises me about the good people of Darwin but that did. ‘Run that by me again?’

‘He’s paying a heavy price for having sexual relations with a hot chook.’ Harvey laughed. ‘The little sicko’s mates have posted the story all over social media.’ She laughed one more time and sat down again, abruptly ending the conversation.

My phone bleeped. It was an internal call.

‘Yep?’

‘Up front for a sec, Jacko,’ Murray Dowd said. I peered over my partition towards the front of the newsroom. By now, the place was pumping with bad coffee and worse language. Dowd waved from the front desk. He looked unhappy, which didn’t mean much. He always looked unhappy. ‘Cantankerous’ is not a word I’d use in day to day conversation very often but it suited him to a T.

Murray Dowd was on the other side of 60, short, pudgy and famously old school. He’d written the book on tabloid newspapers and delighted in telling fresh-meat journalism graduates to forget everything they’d ever heard in lecture halls because most of it was crap with no place in the real world. I liked him.

The old man’s eyebrows bristled over his sagging, bulldog face like a pair of worn-out scrubbing brushes as I made my way up.

‘You’re looking very cantankerous today, Murray.’

‘Shove your big words up your arse, Jackson,’ Dowd said. He gestured at the dozens of thumbnail images filling his screen. ‘Why have I got fifty thousand fucking pictures of this head job woman?’

I grinned. ‘I think young Mr Larson was quite taken with her bubbling personality.’

‘I bet he was,’ Dowd said. ‘Rankine’s got his nose out of joint, by the way. Just so you know.’

I shrugged. ‘What’s his problem now?’

Paul Rankine was the hard-arse who’d taken over the police round from me. He’d written the laugh-it-up story on Nicky Chen’s crash. I didn’t like him one bit, possibly due to his supreme over-confidence, which came across as a sort of casual arrogance more than anything else, but also because he reminded me, in some ways, of me. Also, he was a fierce protector of his turf and we’d had more than one explosive newsroom custody battle over this story or that. Usually, I’d let him get so close to boiling point that blood vessels pulsed beneath his forehead like alien worms before giving in.

‘He went ballistic as soon as she heard you were out there,’ Dowd said. ‘Thinks you should’ve passed it over.’

‘It’s not exactly a police story now,’ I said. ‘Do I need to talk to him?’

‘Up to you but I’m obliged to remind you we no longer allow fist fights in the newsroom.’ He waved back at his screen. ‘How are you doing this?’

‘As straight as I can,’ I said. ‘The quotes will carry it. I’ll need to censor it a bit, though. She’s a very colourful young lady.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Pic’s going across the top of one, the whole seven columns, pointing to three. Quake’s the lead.’

‘It was a tremor not a quake.’

‘I don’t care. Are we all going to die or what?’

‘Not today. By the way, you may need to re-think the front. Beth’s got a corker on a kid who stuck his dick in a hot chicken.’

‘Fuck. I’m burdened with riches today.’ The old editor flicked his hand. ‘Off you go. Get yours done. Chop, chop.’

‘But wait,’ I said with a nod at the pictures on his screen. ‘There’s more. She lives in a haunted house.’

Dowd said nothing.

I shrugged. ‘She’s sharing some farmhouse out at Mango Flat with a bunch of other people. She said they’ve had some weird shit going on out there.’ I made air quotes when I said weird shit. ‘Pots and pans moving around by themselves, shoes going walkabout, and one morning they woke up to find a carving knife stuck in a wall. It’s freaking them out so much they called in a priest.’ I smiled.

‘Fuck off,’ Dowd said, glancing down at Nicky Chen on his screen. ‘Is she for real?’

‘Apparently.’

‘You get this priest’s name?’

‘Not yet. She wasn’t there when he turned up. One of the other people in the house organized it. And something freaked him out so badly he’s refusing to go back.’

Dowd pursed his lips.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘she’s going to try to con her housemates into talking to us. This thing is already the talk of the Mango Flat pub. TV and radio could get hold of it any time.’

Dowd held up a hand for me to stop. ‘Okay. Go for it. Let Mike know what you’re doing. Please.’

Mike Cooke. The Reporter’s Chief of Staff. He was a pain in the arse but I liked him. It was his job to keep tabs on what everyone was doing. Most of the time I was doing my own thing, which sometimes sent him marching in to Dowd to complain. It annoyed him, too, that I made fun of his hair, which was so long and luxuriant he was often mistaken for an arriving rock star at the airport.

I said ‘Will do’ and headed back to my desk, via the stairs down to the staff canteen.

I needed a sausage roll.

I pulled into the driveway just after eight and parked my Toyota Yiros under the house. It wasn’t really called a Toyota Yiros, of course. That’s what Jessica used to call it. The greasy smell of petrol and freshly cut grass hung in the air as I went up the front stairs. Next door, Eric had mown his lawn again. He was a little OCD that way.

It was too late to call the kids on a school night, although I had an idea they might be all hyped up about the tremor and possibly still awake. I decided to let it go anyway. The in-laws wouldn’t be happy if I did get them up. Jessica’s parents lived a couple of suburbs away, and they had been very quick to think me capable of murder, so our relationship was not exactly a first-class one. They thought I’d killed Jessica. The cops thought so too, which is why they’d stopped talking to me.

Jessica had been missing for almost five years ago now. Ernie and Margaret had had the kids pretty much ever since. I had them one weekend a month. It was a mutually agreed arrangement, in the best interests of the children, etcetera, blah de blah. Max was 10, Susie 6. They were good kids but the once-a-month thing had already turned them into little strangers. Right then, I knew, there was not a lot I could do about that.

After flicking on the lights and ceiling fans, I locked the front door and dumped the keys, my phone and the recorder into a bowl of household detritus on the side table just inside. My wallet went into a drawer, from which I took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. I stood there for a moment, looking around.

The house was a stock standard tropical elevated: pretty much a rectangular box set on concrete pillars to catch any meagre breeze that might happen by. They don’t build them like that anymore. The bedrooms and bathroom were at one end, accessed by a hallway, with the open plan lounge and kitchen at the other. Each room featured floor to ceiling louvered windows. Downstairs, where I parked the car, were an open laundry and a small bricked-in workshop which doubled as a cyclone shelter.

Nothing appeared to have fallen over during the tremor. Jessica had done most of the interior design and I hadn’t bothered changing anything. Bamboo blinds covered the windows. Much of the furniture was teak or mango wood from Indonesia. Scatter cushions from India covered the Balinese daybed we used for a lounge. There were a couple of lamps from Vietnam and Bali, along with an assortment of Buddhas in stone and wood placed strategically around the lounge room, still standing.

The fans weren’t doing much more than pushing warm air around so I wandered into the kitchen and selected a beer from the fridge. The humidity had eased off a tad but I’d noticed lightning stuttering in the distance on the drive home. The wet season storms were still hanging around, like troublemakers who wouldn’t leave after a party.

I walked over to the daybed, hunted for the television remote under the cushions and flicked on Sky News, more out of habit than anything else. Most evenings I caught the local bulletins at work. That night, both the local commercial station and the ABC had led with the port pollution story the Reporter had broken that morning. Heads were going to roll, quite possibly starting with the one belonging to the port’s CEO.

I headed out the back, where a decaying deck overlooked a desperately overgrown palm garden strewn with rotting fronds and thick with mosquitoes. A Balinese bale stood in one corner, its thatched roof half rotted away and hanging in shredded clumps. The paved entertaining area was black with mould. The garden had been Jessica’s domain too. Now I didn’t have the time for it, or I simply didn’t care anymore. Something like that.

I had thought about selling and moving somewhere smaller. Financially, hanging on to the house was a tough gig. A large slice of my pay went on the mortgage, of course, and I slipped as much as I could to Ernie and Margaret for the kids. A cleaner came in every Friday, but that was okay because I paid her next to nothing. Cam was a Vietnamese refugee who had arrived as a young woman in the first wave of boat people to hit Darwin in the late 70s. That was all I knew about her. I’d found her through one of the sales execs at work. Cam spoke little English, which made her ripe for exploitation, the exec had assured me. Sometimes I worried about that. It wasn’t a good look. My exploited cleaning lady was a hunchback.

Despite the obvious financial burden, letting go of the house was a big call. I told myself I was keeping it for the kids and that sounded good enough. In the end, it was all I had to give them.

Slumping into one of the low teak chairs on the deck, I lit my cigarette and blew out smoke. Sirens wailed in the distance, an outboard motor burbled away in somebody’s yard, dogs barked and a lone frog abruptly piped up, hoping for rain and sex: the ambient sounds of night-time Darwin.

Next door, Eric slipped into his back yard pool with a splash and started doing laps. He was an old Navy guy, long retired, who also lived alone. He’d lost his wife around ten years earlier to a soil-borne bacterium called Meliodosis. It’s a tropical thing. It rises to the surface during the wet season to lurk in stagnant puddles and such, and waits to kill people who enjoy gardening, so I was pretty safe.

Eric and I sometimes caught up for a beer but we hadn’t in a while. As a young naval rating, he’d been on HMAS Voyager when the Melbourne had cut her in two in 1964. A while back, after years of legal stoushing, he’d scored over a hundred thousand dollars in compensation. He’d blown half of it putting the pool in. If there’s one thing you learn in newspapers, it’s that everyone has a story, even the neighbours.

Another part of Eric’s story may also have been that he was screwing my wife while my beer belly and moustache were out laughing it up with cops and lawyers every night. I never knew for sure but they were so … easy … together that I had to wonder. The kids were little. I was never around. Eric was always ready to help out, in one way or another. And despite pushing 70, he was tanned and movie-star handsome, and supremely fit in a no-Viagra-required sort of way. Throw in a slow, steamy night or two with no husband around and … well, anything could happen.

I’d aired my suspicions to the cops in the days following Jessica’s disappearance but I had no idea if they’d followed up. In the intervening years, Eric hadn’t raised it with me once, at any rate.

Listening to Eric swim, I realized there was still something in my back pocket. The beer coaster Nicky Chen had scribbled her number on. I had to admit I’d been more than a little intrigued by her bubbling personality myself. I wondered if Scotty had been right, even though she hadn’t called back after all.

Flicking my cigarette out into the garden, I went back in for my phone and entered her number under ‘Contacts’.