Shooting Star

45

We didn’t go to the impressive front doors this time. We went around the house, going fast on the dirt, making a noise, took a hard right at the back of the sprawling building, another mudbrick building to the left, braked to a stop, came out of the car at a fairly efficient speed, not in condition for this kind of thing, crossed the space, ran over the terrace towards the back door.

Not an old door this time, an ordinary door, four panels, also saved, scrounged from some other life, tried the doorknob.

It opened.

A kitchen, huge, smelling of bacon, the scent of bacon fat, the smell of morning.

A man was sitting, leaning a little to the left, at a long table, a wooden farmhouse table, a shearers’ table, built to seat twenty people. He was in his fifties, strands of grey hair combed back over a freckled scalp, a nice face. The plate in front of him held scrambled eggs, bright yellow. Free-range eggs.

Eric, the man Lennox Guinane adopted. Eric, who could fix anything.

The hole was in his temple, just in from the ear, a small hole, not even a hole, just a dark dent.

We didn’t pause, went through a door into the wide passage, me first. The electronic humming of computers, otherwise silence.

Victor Guinane lay over his keyboard, shot from behind, upwards from the base of the skull, his brains on the wall above the monitor, still moist.

Keith Guinane was in the shrine to Cassie.

He had been on his knees in front of the table, the table that held the candle, when he pressed the muzzle of the pistol into the soft skin under his chin.

The flame in the candlestick on the lace-covered table was flickering in the last of the wax, guttering. It would die soon, no one left in this house to replace it, to keep the flame of remembrance alive.

TWO-AND-A-HALF hours’ drive from Brisbane, we parked the hire car on a green hill beyond Maleny, got out and stood in the sunlight looking over the landscape. Below us, in a paddock bordered by hoop pines, grazed a herd of Jersey cattle, stomachs full as blown-out cheeks.

‘Pretty country,’ said Orlovsky. ‘I could live out here, grow avocados.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘You’re an urban creature, an expert on coffee. Besides, they don’t need legal drug distributors around here. They grow their own. Time to go.’

The farmhouse was at the head of the valley, a handsome white timber building on stilts, verandahs on three sides, an elaborate portico. Behind it were outbuildings, all painted white, a water tank tower, not high, and a stand of trees.

We drove over a juddering cattlegrid and triggered some kind of alarm because I could see the white front door of the farmhouse go dark. Someone had opened it and was watching us come. Then the door closed, the space went white again.

The long driveway led past a pond, a big pond with an island and rushy banks and a jetty where a rowboat was tied up. Four horses, one a yearling, watched us from their post-and-rail paddock beyond the water.

As we neared the house, I could see into an outbuilding with horse tack on a rail, saddles, bridles, see a fowl run beyond that, washing on a line, a garage with three vehicles, a Mercedes, a four-wheel-drive, and a ute with a flat tray, two bales of hay on it.

‘Park at the front door,’ I said. ‘There’s someone waiting.’

We drew up on the gravel, got out.

The front door opened again and a man came out onto the verandah, a tall man in his sixties, country clothes, close-cut grey hair and a handsome face, a handsome sardonic face.

‘Frank,’ he said.

‘Nice place this,’ I said. ‘Nice country.’

A woman came through the door, also handsome, late thirties, a few strands of grey in her dark hair, dressed for riding, checked shirt, khaki breeches. She went to stand next to the man, put an arm through his, looked at us, not smiling.

No one said anything. I heard footsteps on gravel and a girl, a young woman, came around the corner of the house carrying a saddle. She was lovely, very like her mother standing on the verandah above us, but with a trace of her father in the mouth.

‘Hello,’ she said, friendly, a country person. She hadn’t noticed her parents on the verandah, saw them out of the corner of her eye, looked up in alarm.

‘What’s wrong? Dad?’

‘Nothing, Mel,’ said Tom Carson. ‘Just surprised to see our guests. Frank Calder, Michael Orlovsky, this is my daughter Melissa.

Come up, gentlemen, come inside, time for a drink.’

For a moment, I didn’t move, stood there looking at Melissa’s mother, holding Cassie Guinane’s eyes, hearing Christine Carson’s voice:

Stephanie found her father screwing her school friend in the tennis pavilion at Portsea, did you know that?

Then I said, ‘Just a quick one, we’re just passing through, a plane to catch.’