Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

Shadow People by Rex Burns

Constable Leonard Smith had been temporarily attached to the Broome Police Station for the purpose of locating a runaway white youth. The three-day search sent him on a thousand kilometer circuit of the monsoon-soaked Kimberley outback. Now, on this hot and rainy Monday afternoon, he splashed his well-used Toyota 4Runner down the Cape Leveque Road to report a successful outcome to Senior Sergeant Dougald.

Between walls of thick brush, the long stretch of red mud was mostly empty. Broome’s white population sought refuge from the rain in the town’s taverns, where pool tables and alcohol helped them ignore the steady drum on corrugated iron roofs. The coming of the Dry in autumn meant sunshine. It meant money and the new faces of increasing numbers of tourists. It meant talk of a world beyond the vacant line of the Indian Ocean or the equally flat horizon of the Roebuck Plains.

Most Aborigines — Yawuru and remnants of other skin groups — called the town “Rubibi,” and did their drinking under trees scattered in its small parks. Wet season or Dry, you could see them sitting, lying down, passed out, like shadows in the shadows. Shadows on the earth, shadows on the soul. Shadow people. That’s what crossed Leonard’s mind as he jounced toward a woman whose wooly hair was streaked with gray and whose cotton dress was painted to her skinny shape by rain to show that she wore no undergarments. She lurched drunkenly into the track and Leonard swerved, fighting the wheels’ slip in the mud.

Suddenly, he recognized her and pulled the Tojo onto the grassy shoulder. Rolling down his window steamed by the humidity, he called after the woman. “Miss Daisy — Bibi Daisy!”

The figure, swaying slightly in the warm rain, paused to stare back at the vehicle with its police decals half buried under mud. She was a distant cousin through Leonard’s mother’s family, and when he had been orphaned, she had gathered him among her brood until he was sent to the state home. Leonard still referred to her with the Yawuru word for his mother’s sister. He felt a spasm of guilt that his visits to her home had slowed to almost nothing. Now her bloodshot eyes bulged slightly as she tried to make out his face in the overcast gray light. “Leonard? You Leonard-the-copper?”

“Hop in — I’ll give you a ride home.” Her twenty or so kilometer walk up the Manari Road past Cape Latrille would take the old woman well into darkness, if she were sober enough to make it at all. Leonard could drive there and back in an hour or two, though he shouldn’t — S. S. Dougald expected his report directly. But the sergeant always preached greater initiative to the Aboriginal constables, and Leonard could say he took the initiative to check for vehicles stranded in the mud of the lonely road. She grabbed for the handle of the door and lurched in, bringing with her a musty smell of smoke, plonk sweat, and something indefinable but rooted in childhood memory. She sat without speaking and stared through the misty window screen. Leonard reversed and turned and headed back north. After a proper silence he said, “You come to town a lot.” It was the polite way of asking a question without asking a question.

A jounce or two more and the spray of wiry gray and black hair nodded. “Get money now.” Her black face split into a wide grin and she shrugged. “Every fortnight, jinjie bring money for me.”

The word wasn’t Yawuru; the woman used the Nyungar language for “ghost.” It was a trick to confuse the spirit and keep it away from her, since even a ghost that brought money could also bring harm. And, Leonard thought wryly, given that any money always went for plonk wine, it brought more harm than good.

He groped on the floor for his rucksack and pulled out the remainder of his ham sandwich. “You eat this tucker, okay?” She would not have wasted the money on food.

“Ah — okay — good boy. You copper but good boy anyway!”

The white teeth, gapped here and there by empty spaces, flashed again as she tore into the sandwich.

Leonard turned up the air-conditioning and churned into the deeper mud of the Manari track. After a while, the woman snored, her breath spreading the odor of sour wine and her head thumping occasionally against the window. When the vehicle lurched onto a path marked faintly across the grassy verge, the woman awoke.

“My house now, eh?” Her lips smacked with dryness as she blinked and stared out. “Okay to let me out here.”

“It’s a ways yet.”

“Too much trees down. Big wind come — no track now.”

“No worries. I’ll take you as far as I can.”

The grayness thickened with enveloping brush. Leonard eased the lurching vehicle past the scrape and drag of branches. The dark blur of a kangaroo bounded away into the shrub. Ahead, where a fallen tree blocked the road, a grassy patch offered space to turn around. He pulled up and shut off the motor.

“Come on, Bibi. I’ll walk you home.”

“No need. I be okay.”

“You do me this favor, Bibi. It’ll make me feel better to see you home safe.”

The bloodshot eyes stared at him for a long moment. “You part waijela — jinjie no fuss up waijela, so okay.”

Waijela — an Aboriginal pronunciation of “white fella.” He wasn’t certain that jinjies respected that half of him. But his general ignorance of Aboriginal beliefs seemed to protect him from the many dangers of the spirit world — or so he liked to believe.

They stepped over the thick trunk of the fallen tree, following a long bend toward the old station house. It had reverted to Daisy when the Native Title Claimants Act returned Aboriginal land illegally seized by squatters. The square, single-story cottage had deep verandas formed by the overhang of the rusty iron roof. Beneath the verandas, a scattering of tattered folding chairs brought memories to Leonard of the sense of family he had briefly experienced here. Thick bougainvillea vines writhed up the posts to form a living fringe along the veranda’s edge. Half a century ago, the squatter who originally seized the land planted them and the surrounding grove of palm trees that made the grounds parklike. The trees, the cottage, and its name — Wignall Station — were all the squatter left when he disappeared, some said south to Perth, others said north to Darwin. Leonard remembered the clerk at the state home enrolling him as “Smith, Leonard (mix) from Wignall Station, near Barred Creek.”

Leonard gazed around. “You live alone, now.” Through a screen of mulga, he glimpsed the sea where he used to roam on the sandy beach below the bluffs.

She nodded. “Babas all gone.” Her long fingers flapped at the surrounding world into which her four children had wandered. Her bare heels clumped up the two wooden steps and across rattling porch boards. She seemed more sober now, almost on guard. When she opened the unlocked door it was with caution, and she paused to look around the small front room before crossing the threshold.

Here and there, bare stone blocks showed through missing plaster. Cracked glass in the windows had been mended with cellotape or replaced with squares of pressed wood. The fireplace mantel showed black where the chimney had ceased to draw properly. But the sooty cooking pans were stacked clean and neat on the stone of the hearth, and the bare floorboards were swept. Both corners of the fireplace were broken, the structure stepped where bricks were missing. Through an open door that led to the single bedroom, Leonard could see a fresh gouge in the wall. Three large, squared stones sat crookedly without masonry, and on the floor beneath was a fresh scatter of cement dust.

The woman drew her breath and stared at the gouge. Then she looked at Leonard, bloodshot eyes bulging. “He come again,” she whispered.

“The jinjie?”

Her lips clamped at the word as her eyes searched the dark corners of the house. She pointed at the broken corners of the fireplace. “Other times there. Outside too. Digs around house.”

Leonard studied the fireplace, the scarred wall. “I can give you a ride back to Rubibi.”

She thought about that, then shook her head. “No. My house. Boss paper say this be Aboriginal land!” She added loudly as if ears might be listening somewhere, “This my family house — I stay!”

He waited for the woman’s anger to abate, waited in silence while the breath in her flared nostrils became normal. But she said nothing more. Instead, she squatted on the scarred planks in front of the fireplace and rocked gently forward and back, chanting something to herself. Leonard did not know if it was a prayer or a spell — the elders had denied him knowledge of many ceremonies because of his white blood.

“I have to go back,” he said finally. “Sergeant’s expecting me.”

It was as if she did not hear him, and perhaps she didn’t. Her voice rose and fell in a whispery croon and she rocked, eyes half closed and fixed on the sooty back of the fireplace. Leonard said good-bye, but she did not answer. The thin chant followed him down the overgrown path toward his vehicle.

It was no jinjie. Leonard’s hands steered the Tojo through the deep mud, but his mind was on Bibi Daisy. Even if it was a jinjie, it wouldn’t have to run around digging holes in the walls — jinjies could see into places people could not. Or so it had been whispered to Leonard. But there were no jinjies. So it was pretty clear that somebody searched for something. But what? What could be hidden there?

S. S. Dougald was waiting. Leonard, even if he was only half Aborigine, could smell the man’s anger the moment he swung the rain off his hat and rapped on the door of the OIC’s office.

“Damned glad to finally see you, Smith.”

“Likewise, Senior Sergeant,” he said cheerfully. A little cheer went a long way to irritate the man. “You tell Mr. Anders his boy’s safe up at Stony Hill?”

The teenager, following a raging argument with his father, had flung himself out of his house. After twenty-four worried hours, a frowning father and weeping mother had come to the Broome police station to report him missing. A few words from the boy’s mates, and S. S. Dougald had called for the district’s Aboriginal Liaison Constable to visit the outback. More words from local Aboriginals had led Leonard to the isolated Stony Hill station where the boy had found work as a jackaroo.

“Of course I told them — after you called in two days ago. Where the bloody hell have you been since then?”

“The Jowalenga Road washed out at Fraser Crossing. I couldn’t get back to the Great Northern Highway, so I came around by Country Downs Homestead. Stayed there overnight. They send their greetings, by the way.”

“They have a radio there, Smith. You could have used it.”

Leonard smiled more widely. “I didn’t think you’d worry about me, Sergeant.” In fact, he knew the S. S. would be happier if he did disappear into the bush. One part of the man’s irritation was that bureaucrats over two thousand kilometers away in Perth had imposed the Aboriginal Liaison Program on the Kimberley District without any consultation at all. Nor did it help that Broome, like the other six police stations in the Kimberley District whose budgets were already tight, had to donate toward what they considered bureaucratic bull dust. In Dougald’s eyes, they got damn little for it.

The older man stared for a long moment at Leonard, then at the litter on his desktop. In the cold fluorescent light, his face looked even more haggard. He wagged his head in slow disgust. “Bloody right! Got plenty else to fret over than a bludger like you.”

“You’ve been busy, eh?”

“Up half the night with the Karenji brothers — Albert cutting Edgar, it looks like. Somebody, anyway, came damn close to doing him in permanently. So you earn your bleeding keep while you’re here: Write your report on the Anders boy, and then go find out if Albert’s sober enough to tell you what happened. The arresting officer couldn’t get bugger-all out of him last night.”

Leonard, taking a sheet of paper and settling at an empty desk, figured it would be a bad time to ask Sergeant Dougald if he could first have his afternoon smoke-oh.

Constable Jones took Leonard’s sheath knife and let him into the lock-up.

“Bit of a dust-up, I hear.”

The stocky Welshman nodded. From Cell Two came a loud snore. “Sleeping like an angel, now.”

“A bit pongie for an angel.”

“Yeah, well, he does smell—” Jones started to say more but stopped. Leonard figured it would have been a comment about stinking Abos. But it didn’t bother him: he was neither one, nor the other, and both halves showered. “What happened?”

“Albert and Edgar were down off Streeter’s Jetty, howling like cats in heat. When Lathrop got there, he found Albert passed out and Edgar sliced like a wild pig.” Jones drew a hand across his chest and stomach. “He wouldn’t say who did it, but the sod’ll have a good scar to show off.”

“Pissed?”

“What else? Here,” Jones unlocked the cell door, “he’s all yours.”

Leonard thumped the iron cot with his hand. “Oi — wake up. Wake up now — oi!”

One eye, mapped with veins, slitted open.

“You, Albert Karenji, what you do in here?”

“Who says my name?” The man struggled to sit, grunting against the throb in his skull.

“Constable Smith.”

“Eh? Gubbmint man Smith? Swank-about-man, wear-collar Smith? Burnt-potato Smith?” The sourly grinning man repeated Leonard’s name, “Smith-Smith-Constable Smith?”

Both men knew that the repetition of a person’s name was an insult. It singled that person out from the clan, it drew the jealous attention of evil spirits, it was a dig at the whites’ lack of manners. Sometimes Leonard wished he knew even less than he did of the Kriole dialect and its tapestry of insults. But then he wouldn’t be an AL officer. He shook his head sadly. “You think maybe you kill your brother a little bit. But maybe what you done, you killed him proper. You do a shame job on your brother. Maybe now your brother come back for you, eh?”

Behind the tangle of his dark hair, Karenji’s bloodshot eyes blinked. At first the man tensed, alert for something he would not name. Then anger sharpened the glitter of his eyes. “Who you think you be, try to talk Kriole. You talk rubbish Kriole. You stay in flash talk, Jack-o!”

“Constable Jack-o. And don’t humbug me that you’re a barefooted blackfella grew up in the camps.” Karenji held anger at white blood even when mixed with black, Leonard knew, held anger at a half-caste who pretended to view the world as pure-bloods did. The anger reinforced the almost universal hatred of authority in general. Well, ‘let them hate as long as they fear’ — Leonard didn’t remember where he had read the phrase, but for too many, white and black, it held truth. And if Albert Karenji wanted to keep his Kriole from contamination by someone he considered an enemy, no problems. The aim was to get information about the injury and its cause. “Your brother’s in hospital. Looks bad for him. You tell me about it — why you two fought.”

Worry replaced anger. “How bad?”

“Don’t know,” Leonard said truthfully. “It’s a big cut. Maybe infection sets in, maybe he lost too much blood to make it. Try to find out when I leave here.”

The man thought that over, then his thick lips twisted in an ironic smile and he gave a John Wayne drawl. “That’s mighty black of you, Constable Smith.”

Leonard could not help a laugh, and its sound evaporated the anger that had filled the cell. He sat on the other bunk and leaned back against its rolled mattress. “Tell me about it, Albert,” he said quietly. “What set off you two blokes?”

“Ah — who knows. Grog — flagons.” He shrugged. “Can’t remember clear. We drank so much, something started a fight. Can’t remember.”

“Drank up your day’s pay?”

“No. No work — didn’t have any. Rode on a ute from the Reserve. Saw Miss Daisy going foot-Falcon along the road and gave her a ride, and she gave us some money.” His eyes widened. “She okay? We fight with her too? She get hurt?”

“She’s not hurt. Plenty plonked, but she’s home now.”

A nod, and the man’s torso sank back in a slouch.

“You cut your brother.”

“Think so. Maybe a bottle cut. Don’t remember what for. Maybe a long-ago thing, some fight from before.” He shrugged again with a mix of resignation and self-disgust. “Drunk.”

It was Leonard’s turn to nod. “Miss Daisy say where she got money?”

He had to consider for a moment. “Ghost money, she said — money left on her verandah. Share some good luck, she said, and gave us a bleeding tenner!”

Ten dollars for the Karenji’s and enough left to pay for her own drunk. Leonard asked a few more questions, then used Constable Jones’s telephone to call the hospital.

The ward clerk said Edgar Karenji’s wound was serious but not life threatening and he was resting under sedation. “He should be discharged in seventy-two hours, but he will need to avoid exertion and see a physician regularly for a few weeks.”

Leonard thanked the woman and used a corner of Jones’s desk to write his report on the fight for Sergeant Dougald.

Looking up from the sheet of paper, he asked Jones, “You live here in town or further out?”

“In town. Over on Stainton Place.”

“Like it?”

“Price is right and I walk to work, kids walk to school. Save bloody-all on petrol and the missus has the car. But the cost of housing’s bloody well insane now, and not much new being built.” He explained, “Most of the land that’s left belongs to traditional owners who don’t want to sell.”

“Some new motels and development are out near the airport.”

“Right — but that was the last open land. Broome’s a big tourist place now, and unless somebody figures out how to free up more land for development, prices are going higher than anybody can afford. So don’t get your hopes up about moving here.”

Leonard shook his head. “Got a caravan up in Derby. Don’t see much of it, though. Usually on the road.”

Jones grunted. “The Kimberley’s a big district.”

It was: 421,000 square kilometers. Three times the size of Britain, Leonard had read in a training manual. And there was a lot of it he hadn’t yet visited. “Was Miss Daisy drinking with the Karenji brothers?”

“Not when the fight took place. She usually gins it up over by the courthouse.”

“Usually?”

He nodded. “She’s there every other weekend, it seems. Sometimes a bunch of them, sometimes just her.”

Leonard thought. “Hear any talk about somebody searching for something?”

“What kind of something?”

“Buried treasure, like. But small. Something easily hidden maybe at an old station house around here.”

The Welshman shook his head. “There are stories. You know, the perfect pearl someone stole sometime from some diving boat somewhere. That airplane full diamonds that was shot down by the Japanese back in the forties. Aunt Tillie’s old map to her grandpa’s gold mine. But anything like that,” he lifted his hands in dismissal, “if it happened at all, the swag wouldn’t be hid around here. Any bugger taking it would have sold it long ago and be living the life of Riley in London or New York. I mean, what the hell are you going to spend that much money on around here?”

Jones was right. The whole idea of stealing was to get the goods and run someplace to sell it, not hide it here. He finished the brief report and stopped by the cell to let Albert know that his brother would live. Then he dropped the report in Sergeant Dougald’s box and sloshed through puddles to the Roebuck Bay Hotel.

When in Broome, Leonard liked to eat at the Rowie. Unlike many restaurants in the town, it welcomed any color of skin as long as that skin could pay. The dining saloon, separate from the main bar, was usually quieter. Tonight he sat at the almost empty saloon bar rather than at a table. It gave him a view past the bottle cabinet into the larger, raucous barroom, with its ranks of heavy wooden tables, plank floor, loud, thumping music, and the adjoining billiards room filled with the glare of fluorescent lamps and tobacco smoke. As usual this late in the day, the main bar was crowded with red, brown, yellow, black faces all with their mouths open in talk and laughter. While he waited to be served, Leonard noted the faces he recognized.

One of the barmaids, looking somewhere between thirty and forty, but actually in her late twenties, came around the bottle cabinet from the main bar. “What would you like, Constable?” She wiped a hand across her forehead to push damp bleached hair out of her eyes.

“Swan middy with fish and chips. Got you hopping a bit tonight, eh, Shirley?”

“Like a tree frog in a frying pan. Be right out.” She turned back to the main bar.

A figure settled a couple of stools away and called after her, “The same gargle for me, Shirley — ta!” Then to Leonard, “Hot’s the word. Radio said Nullagine hit forty-eight degrees today. Set a bleedin’ record for this late in the summer. It’s that global warming, it is.”

Leonard nodded agreement. “How you doing, Barry?”

“Keeping above water. Just.” Beneath a fringe of tobacco-stained white mustache, the man’s wrinkled lips squirted a stream of smoke. He ground out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray.

Like much of Broome’s longtime population, Barry had drifted into town because this is where the continent ended. For as long as Leonard could remember, the man worked odd jobs in the area, made enough to live on, and absorbed far more about Broome than Leonard would ever know. And that gave Leonard an idea. “Shout you for a game,” he said.

White eyebrows lifting into the pale flesh above his hat line, Barry accepted in true Sand Groper fashion — bet first, question later: “Done. What are we playing?”

“Association. Trying to think of all the occupations in Broome that have to work on Sundays during the Wet. First one treed buys.”

“Broome and environs, or just Broome?”

“Environs — ten kilometers. Any business. Go ahead.”

“Environs. During the Wet. Sounds bugger-all silly to me, but it beats listening to the rain.” Barry wagged his thumb at the dining room. “Restaurant staff.”

“Petrol stations.”

“Airport workers.”

“Taxi drivers.”

“Hotel staff.”

They went quickly through the service industry jobs and moved to official duty stations: fire brigade, hospital, police. Shirley brought a second round and the bet became double or nothing. Pale blue eyes glinting as the contest sharpened, Barry grinned, “The Crocodile Park — Sunday’s feeding day year round!”

That was one Leonard hadn’t thought of. He searched for an occupation not yet named. “The deep water port — that’s open on Sunday, right?”

Barry shook his head. “Not regularly in the Wet — and only if a ship comes in. Can’t let you have that one.”

True, there weren’t many ships anymore. Leonard thought again.

“Give up, Constable?”

“Preacher — works every Sunday!”

“Bloody hell! All right: the bird sanctuary watchman.”

“The what?”

“You heard me. It’s over on Roebuck Bay and within ten kilometers. Have a ranger there everyday.”

Shirley brought another round and it crossed Leonard’s mind that what seemed at first a fun and lighthearted contest was turning bloody serious. Especially since he couldn’t think of another suitable occupation. “Roadhouse staff.”

“No — that comes under restaurant staff, and I named that right off. Give up yet?” Cheeks almost scarlet with drink and victory, Barry leaned forward. “Still got more!”

Leonard sighed. “All right — my shout. What have you got?”

He held up work-knotted fingers and counted them off. “Camel feeder. Damned beasts have to be fed Wet or Dry. Watchmen at the sewage treatment plant and at the oil tank farm — twenty-four seven. Meteorologist takes readings every day. Laundromat clerk — three of those in town, open Sundays. Chemist, one on call every weekend.” Barry slapped the bar in triumph. “Thanks for the shout, Constable!”

Later, in the cramped motel room reserved by the District Police for Temporary Attachments (Junior Grade), Leonard went over Barry’s answers. The man would skite all over town about winning his bet. But Leonard hoped that anyone listening to Barry’s brag would hear it as a triumph over authority rather than an official interrogation, the subject of which might send someone running. And even though the drinks had cost Leonard his entire per diem for this trip, Barry had told him where to get started.

The answers he could not get by cell phone he sought in person. His first stop Tuesday morning was at the Fluffy-Lite Laundromat near the Short Street Carpark. A heavyset woman behind the counter folded clothes from a plastic basket onto a sheet of wrapping paper as she kept an eye on several humming machines. “No, Constable. Manager’s the same every weekend — Sarah Klein. Saturday and Sunday both.” The story was similar at the two other laundromats.

At the aerodrome, staff either had regular duty every weekend with weekdays off, or rotated once a month. Neither pattern fit the one Leonard looked for. The two camel safaris and the crocodile park reduced help during the Wet — “Don’t make enough to pay an extra hand, weekend or weekday. Do it all meself, mate.” The Bird Observatory was manned by Shire Rangers, who rotated Saturday and Sunday watches among half a dozen staff, though the schedule was flexible. Leonard put a question mark behind that entry. Fortunately, many shops and services were closed on weekends during the Wet because of few tourists. Still, after telephoning or talking with taxi dispatchers, the managers of half a dozen hotels, operators of the several car hire businesses, the oil tank farm, the sewage plant director, and the hospital’s personnel director, he ended up with two men and one woman who could fit the pattern: a maintenance worker at the Mangrove Hotel, a taxi driver, and a clerk at the hospital’s Emergency Department. He would have to interview each person, but already the day was half gone and Senior Sergeant Dougald waited.

When he entered the station, the S. S. speared him with an angry glare. “Don’t you believe in reporting to morning muster, Smith?”

“Thought I had some time off for working the weekend, Senior Sergeant.”

“You have time off if I give you time off! And in my shire, you request time off through proper channels, is that understood?”

“Yessir. Sorry, sir.”

“Sorry be damned. Get over to hospital and take Edgar Karenji’s statement. If he’s been discharged, you find him!”

“He won’t be discharged yet.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s on seventy-two hour hold — due out tomorrow.” Leonard, relieved to be escaping, smiled. “Ward clerk told me last night.”

The sergeant’s voice chased after him. “I want his statement this afternoon, not next week!”

It did not take long. Edgar winced as he shifted beneath the sheet on the hard mattress. His eyes avoided Leonard and focused on the plastic cup of green jelly that sat beside his empty lunch dishes on the bed tray. “I didn’t see it happen.”

“You didn’t see it happen? You were there!”

“Yeah, I was there. Wouldn’t’ve got cut, otherwise. You think I’d be there if I saw it coming? Didn’t see it.”

“Who else besides your brother was with you?”

A shrug, a wince, an evasion: “Don’t know. Too drunk to know.”

“Was Daisy Williams there?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“But she gave you blokes money to get drunk.”

“Yeah. She’s all right People. Not like some of these other ones — claim to be People and don’t even look at you.”

“Okay, read this and sign.” Leonard held the clipboard while the man scrawled his name under the few sentences. He would have been surprised if Edgar had named Albert as his assailant. The score between the brothers would be settled later, and without the involvement of mistrusted police. Maybe it would be via an apology or a gift from Albert. More likely, Leonard knew, both would shrug and file it under “drunk time,” and then, when alcohol once again twisted their minds, Edgar would recall and lunge into bloody revenge.

Leonard checked his watch. He had time for some interviews.

The Mangrove Hotel overlooked Roebuck Bay. The manager looked over Leonard and wondered why the police wanted to talk to one of his employees. “Just background on another investigation, sir. Nothing at all to be concerned about.”

Howard Benjamin, in his forties, squinted through the smoke of a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “You want to see me, Constable?”

“Just need to know your whereabouts this past weekend, Mr. Benjamin.”

The man’s dark face became a mask. “Why?”

“Might help with a case I’m working on. Do you know Daisy Williams?”

“Miss Daisy?”

“Yes.”

“See her around and about. What kind of case?”

“Trespassing. Can you tell me where you were Saturday and Sunday?”

“Around town. And I bloody well wasn’t trespassing anywhere.”

“I don’t think this involves you, Mr. Benjamin. But maybe someone you saw.”

A cautious curiosity replaced defensiveness. “Where at?”

“Near Cape Latrille.”

“Up the Manari Road in the Wet? Man, I got no reason to go there in the Dry, let alone in the bleeding Wet! I been here the whole weekend. Saturday, I had a few drinks at the Rowie and watched footy. Sunday, I messed about the house, then took the wife and kids out for a bite — you can ask them if you think you need to.”

Leonard’s next interview was off Djaigween Road on a small dirt spur leading to a parking lot and taxi office. Kumar Banerjee was waiting for him.

“Yes, Constable, it was my weekend off.” The slender man’s white smile held something of apology and he shrugged. “Almost every weekend is off, in the Wet.”

“Every weekend?”

He nodded, straight glossy hair catching the fluorescent light overhead. “Supposed to work every other weekend, but now no work. We make up for it in the Dry. But in the Wet, not so much airplanes coming in, not so much people going to hotels.”

“So you were home this past weekend?”

“Oh yes. With my family.” He smiled widely. “It was my oldest boy’s twelfth birthday. We had a party and watched Bollywood films.”

The hospital personnel officer had earlier told Leonard on the telephone that the only staff regularly alternating weekend duties were ward clerks in the Emergency Department. Like the hotel manager, he was worried. “Is there something we should be aware of, Constable?”

“No, no — routine interview. She may or may not be a witness to an event, that’s all.”

A plain woman, perhaps thirty, dark hair bobbed for efficiency, looked up from her computer screen. The small nameplate on her desk said “R. W. Elder.” “Yes, I’m Roberta Elder. Why?” With a wide smile, Leonard said he just needed to ask a few questions. Yes, she alternated working weekends with the other clerk, Linda Pataki. Yes, she had been off this last Saturday and Sunday. She spent the time painting her living room and bedroom. She lived alone. No, she did not know a Daisy Williams.

Leonard nodded and thanked the woman and then sat in his Toyota, half-listening to the rain on the metal roof while he thought. After a while, he used his cell phone to make a call, asking a few questions, listening intently to the replies. Then he made a shorter, second call to Perth. He checked his watch, sighed, and waited for the end of the hospital’s day shift.

The woman paused in the rear entry to open her umbrella before walking quickly into the parking lot.

“Mrs. Elder?”

She looked around. “Yes?”

“Constable Smith again. I have a few more questions.”

“But—”

“May I buy you a coffee? Captain Murphy’s is just around the corner.”

The woman stared at him, eyes wide.

“It would be better than going to the police station to talk.”

The eyes blinked and she nodded.

They sat at a quiet table away from the bar. Leonard ordered a stubby, Mrs. Elder a coffee. He smiled at the nervous woman. “You do know Daisy Williams, don’t you?”

Holding the cup in both hands, she said nothing. The black liquid quivered.

“You go out to her home when you know she won’t be there, because you’ve left money for her to get drunk. Every other weekend — the weekends you have off.”

She did not move. Leonard was reminded of a wallaby caught in the headlights of an approaching car. “You divorced John Elder three years ago in Perth, is that right?”

She nodded.

“Your maiden name is Wignall. Roberta Wignall Elder.”

Finally, “Yes.”

“You began working at the hospital six months ago. Is that when you came to Broome?”

“Yes.”

“What is it you’re looking for at Wignall Station?”

Her shoulders rose and fell on a deep breath and she sipped at the coffee. “Papers. They show that the station was bought and paid for by Rupert Wignall in 1951. He was my great-uncle.”

“But he was a squatter.”

A twist of irritation crossed her face. “That’s a lie! There are papers. The bill of sale is hidden at the station house.”

“Any change of title would have been filed.”

A shake of her head. “He never filed. He was going to. He just never got around to it, and then it was too late.” She set the cup down loudly on its saucer. “He paid money for that land!”

Most squatters didn’t — they simply took. And any money paid, Leonard guessed, would have been far less than the value of the land, even that long ago. “Has anyone else in the Wignall clan looked for the bill of sale?”

Her voice lost its defiance. “No.”

“Why now? Why you?”

“Because the station’s worth money I can damn well use! Money that belongs to me!”

“How much?”

Another deep breath. “A lot. Broome’s growing. A lot of people want land to build hotels and resorts on, and they’ll pay for it. Pay a fortune for that land.”

Leonard remembered the beach and the palm grove surrounding Daisy’s home. Mrs. Elder was right: It would be a beautiful site for a resort. But it was not hers. Leonard explained that even if there were a lost bill of sale, it had not been legally filed, and such a claim would at best only complicate any sale of the property. As he spoke, he saw the woman’s shoulders sink as if losing strength.

“I at least deserve something.” He scarcely heard her whisper. “My uncle settled it, he built it. It was stolen from him.”

“But it was taken from the Aboriginal owners. And you’ve found nothing to say otherwise. You have no claim at all to that property.”

She stared into her cup again. “You sound like the bloody judge, the bastard that gave half my life savings to my ex.”

“It was returned to the people your uncle took it from.”

“He bought it!”

“But you have no proof of that.” He studied her face. So this is what it came down to: sell the stolen land, take the money, and run. Bring in more hotels, more tourists, more restaurants that brought service jobs for the Aboriginals but would not welcome them at a table. “You can be penalized for trespass and for damage to the property. And enticing Daisy Williams to get drunk is a violation of the Aboriginal Protection Act.” He hoped there was such an act. It sounded good, anyway. “Do you know that you could face prison?” He again waited until, still staring into her coffee, she nodded. “Stop bringing money so Daisy Williams can get drunk. Stop damaging her house and frightening the woman. I will tell her about you, and if anything ever happens again, I will know who to look for. Is that clear?”

“I didn’t mean to frighten anyone.”

“It will stop right now!”

“Yes.”

She did not drink any more coffee. Leonard called for the bill and escorted her to her car. After one more warning, he watched her drive away into the gloomy Wet. Then he headed for the police station.

S. S. Dougald looked up as Leonard entered. “What’s this I hear you’re asking questions around town? What the bloody hell are you up to, Constable?”

“Looking into an Aboriginal matter, Senior Sergeant. It didn’t turn out to be anything worth writing up.”

“From now on, you bloody well inform me of all matters — Aboriginal or not — that take your official time. And you write it up. We are required to keep records of any and all complaints as well as our activities. In my shire you will comply with proper procedures!”

“Yessir. Were my reports satisfactory, Senior Sergeant?”

The grayhaired man grunted. “At least you can do that much.” He pulled a slip of paper from one of the slots of his inbox. “Argyle Police have asked for you. Something at the Warmun Aboriginal Community. Don’t know why the hell they want somebody who doesn’t know proper procedures.”

ALC Smith stifled his smile. “I’ll be on my way then, sir,” he said, and saluted smartly.

In the station parking lot, Leonard checked the back of the Toyota for his emergency gear: swag, cooking pot, tarp, water bags, tools, and tinned dog. The Senior Sergeant could have the proper procedures. Leonard knew his mission from long-ago times: shadow crimes called for shadow procedures.

Author’s Note: The author thanks Terry Thornett for his research.