driveway ran for about thirty metres, ending in a gravelled area in front of the buildings. On either side of the drive, a formal garden had been attempted and long ago given up on. Only the winter rain was keeping the surviving plants going.
I walked down the drive. It had been planted with poplars but they’d never got beyond infancy. Near the house, I could hear the sound of piano music, something classical. The front door was open. The music was coming from inside. I knocked loudly and said, ‘Anybody home?’ Nothing happened. I tried again. Only the music. Then it stopped and a voice said, ‘One of Chopin’s loveliest. And now for a complete contrast in composing style…’
The front door led into a long sitting room, furnished with stripped pine country-look pieces. The room was cold and unkempt, as if people had been dossing in it. In a stone fireplace, ashes were a foot deep. There were newspapers everywhere and all the surfaces held empty beer and soft drink cans and dirty plates.
I said my ‘Anybody home?’ again and went through into a big kitchen. The radio was on a shelf above the workbench, which was covered with the remains of meals long past.
I didn’t look at the rest of the house. I went out the way I had come and walked over to the cinderblock building. Nothing happened when I knocked and called out.
I opened the door. A wave of warmth hit me. The air was moist and smelled of chlorine. Chlorine and something else. It was dark inside, the venetian blinds at the slit windows closed. I found a light switch. Two fluorescent tubes flickered, then lit up a sort of reception area, with canvas director’s chairs and a glass coffee table holding stacked magazines.
I called out again. Nothing. I crossed the room to a half-open door. Beyond was darkness. I groped around and found another light switch just inside the door. I was looking down a corridor with two doors on either side and one at the end, all closed. The smell was stronger here. The air was also steamier.
My shoes made no sound on the grey felt-like carpet as I walked down the passage. I opened the first door on my left.
It was empty except for a pine upright chair and a large, deep coffin-like object against the end wall. There were pegs on the wall to hold clothes. The smell in here was salty. I guessed the giant coffin was a flotation tank, a bath filled with salt water for experiencing weightlessness.
The hatch on top was closed. Without thinking, I walked across and slid it back. It was empty. I felt foolish.
The room on the right held another tank. I didn’t look inside. The next door down on the right opened to reveal a room set up for massage: table, shelves with small bottles. There were posters of Nordic scenes on the walls. Pine forests, snow, frozen lakes.
I didn’t enter the room. As I turned to the door across the way, my eye caught a ghost of steam coming out from under the door at the end of the passage.
I went down the passage and put my hand on the door handle. Then something made me knock. No reply. I waited, knocked again.
Then I turned the handle and pushed the door open.
The smell came out on a great cloud of steam, the smell of stock made with chlorinated water, a pungent, medicinal smell that filled my sinuses and made my eyes water.
I retreated down the passage to the entrance and watched the steam billow out of the room. Just turn around and go home, my inner voice said. Just walk out of this building, down the drive and find your way back to the man putting in the pole. Stop and tell him thanks for giving you shitty directions, you couldn’t find Long Gully Road, so bugger it you were giving up. Go back to Daylesford and buy some bullboar sausages from the butcher. Tell Les you couldn’t follow his map and it wasn’t important. Drive home and have a shower. Forget about Danny and Ronnie and anybody else whose name ended in a diminutive.
But I didn’t listen to my inner voice. When the steam thinned, I went back down the corridor.
I’d left the door only half-open.
I pushed it fully open.
The room was still dense with steam but I could see that it was like a large bathroom, tiled floor to ceiling. In the corner to my right, I could dimly make out a large spa bath, above the ground.
I took a step inside the room.
A man was in a sitting position on the floor in the corner to my right. He was wearing a loose pink garment. His left arm was at his side. His right was on his lap with a revolver in his hand. Something long-barrelled.
At first I thought he was wearing something on his head, a kind of big mask. Then I realised his head was twice its normal size, a bloated, suppurating mess.
I felt vomit rise in my throat, but I took another step into the room.
There was something in the spa bath. I couldn’t see what. Steam was rising from the surface. The water was much hotter than any bath should be.
I wiped my eyes. Something insubstantial was bobbing gently on the hot bubbles. It was clothing, I thought.
I took another step. And as I did, trapped bubbles turned the clothing around and I saw the skull of a body cooked down to its bones.
The whole spa bath was stock made from a human being. I was going to be sick. I held off until I got outside and then the cold air took the smell out of my nostrils and the urge went away. I stood out in the weak sunlight for a while, thinking. Finally, I took a deep breath and went looking for something to wipe off fingerprints.
You should report crimes to the police. I didn’t want to be the one to report this crime. Instead, I drove back to the man putting in the pole. He was tamping with a big metal post. This time I didn’t get out of the car. I wound down the window. He looked up.
‘You said turn right at the T-junction, didn’t you?’
He looked at me with contempt. ‘Left,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Well, fuck that for a joke, I’ve wasted enough time on this bloody call. I’ve got better things to do than fuck around in this wilderness.’
I took off with the wheels spinning. About two kilometres down the road, I found a signpost to Daylesford. This time Les was in the front of the butcher’s shop. Going into a place filled with meat now was an act of sheer will.
‘Thanks for the map,’ I said, ‘but I got lost and I had a flat.’
Les looked mortified. ‘Map was okay,’ he said.
‘Not your fault. I reckon I missed the second turning and took the third.’
Les thought about this, eyes roofward. Then he nodded. ‘That’d be right. Then you’d turn into Kittelty’s Lane and then you’d be stuffed.’
‘Stuffed,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I want to sell a copier to anyone lives out there. I’d rather do service calls to King Island.’
I bought some bullboar sausages and set off for the city. In Bacchus Marsh, I went to the post office and found the number for the Daylesford RSPCA. A woman came on. There were some animals in shocking condition at the health place in Long Gully Road, I told her. ‘You’d better send someone today or they’ll be dead.’
‘Long Gully Road,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the health place?’
‘You’ll see the sign,’ I said. ‘Look in the cinderblock building.’
I was reasonably sure they didn’t record calls to the RSPCA. Almost everywhere else seemed to.
On the way back, I thought about Vietnam. In my time there I’d seen a fair number of dead and dying people. It puts another layer of skin on you. I should have been in shock at finding the bodies. Instead, I was feeling mildly elated. My instinct to pursue the trail of Ronnie had been right. Unless this matter was even more complicated than it appeared, one of the bodies was almost certainly his. The other man could be his old pal ex-doctor Paul Gilbert. I thought about the revolver in the man’s hand. Had he shot himself? Had he shot the person in the spa first? I tried to remember the colour of the water in the spa. I hadn’t registered it as any particular colour. Would it have been dark if the person had been shot in the bath? But the person might have been shot dead earlier and put in the bath.
But even if I had found Ronnie, that didn’t advance things much. All I knew now was that the man accused of running down Anne Jeppeson ten years before had died violently, followed shortly by his accuser. I knew that Danny had believed he was innocent of the crime and that his wife said he had been told this by a woman conveying a message from her dying husband. I also knew that Danny McKillop had left messages for Ronnie Bishop. Then
