The river was slow-moving and not much cooler or wetter than the surrounding air. We stripped to our togs and rushed in, thrashing and splashing and laughing.
Half an hour later, rock-hopping our way upstream, we disturbed a full-grown brown snake. In a single fluid motion, it slithered across our path, long as a broom-handle, flicking its tongue. Watching it go to ground in the fissure between two boulders, Red backed against me. ‘Wow,’ he whispered, awed and not a little afraid. ‘Tark will be pissed he missed this.’
A tad more respectful of our environment, we pushed on. Red was still keen, if a little less gung-ho. Even when he charged ahead to blaze our trail, he kept me in sight, looking back over his shoulder to make sure I was keeping up. It grew darker. The clouds were engorged eggplants, roiling and stewing, close enough to touch. A dry stick of lightning forked across the sky.
We waded out of a narrow ravine onto the dry sand-bar downhill from Giles Aubrey’s place. Red, spying the rope where he and Tarquin had played reckless Tarzans, ran ahead.
Halfway there, he pulled up sharp, eyes riveted to the ground. ‘Dad,’ he called sharply, poised between backward retreat and stark immobility. ‘Come quick. Snake attack.’
A man lay face-down on the exposed river-bed beside the eroded wall of the bank. One arm was bent behind his torso, the other twisted behind his neck. It was not a natural position and he wasn’t moving.
I took Giles Aubrey by the shoulder and rolled him over. He was as light as balsa and dead as a dodo. His face had been pressed flat against the dry quartz sand of the river-bed and was flecked with grains of mica, diamond dust against the blotched pink parchment of his skin.
How long he had been lying there was impossible to tell. He wasn’t warm but neither was he particularly cold. How he had got there was easier to determine. A small avalanche of leaves and pebbles lay scattered around his sandalled feet. He had come tumbling down the near-vertical incline of the riverbank, a drop of perhaps ten metres. The fall had been a nasty one and from the ungainly contortion of the limbs, I guessed that death had come on impact.
Red had found a stick and mounted guard. ‘Can you see the snake?’
‘He fell.’ I pointed up towards the vegetable patch, showing what had happened.
‘Yuk,’ said Red, disappointed. ‘Gross.’
Gross indeed. Leaving Aubrey’s body where it lay in sand scuffed and churned from the boys’ play the previous day, we climbed the embankment and back-tracked to where his descent would have begun. The old man’s duck-headed walking stick lay on the ground at the top of the bank. His prostrate form lay immediately below. Picking up the cane, I silently pointed out the skidmarks that traced a path down the slope. Red nodded gravely, as though absorbing some important moral lesson. This is what happens if you go too close to the edge.
A crack like a gunshot split the air, the temperature dropped ten degrees and the atmosphere condensed itself into raindrops. One by one they began to fall, so slow you could count them. They were as big as golf balls, so fat and heavy they raised craters in the dust. Then all at once it was pouring. Rain churned the earth, turning it to mud.
We dashed for the shelter of the house. Red beat me. We were both already saturated. When I came through the door, he was at the phone, offering me the handpiece. I assumed it had been ringing when he burst inside, the sound drowned in the downpour. I put it to my ear. ‘Hello,’ I said.
There was no-one on the line, just a ringing tone, terminating abruptly in the faint hiss of an answering machine tape. ‘Thank you for calling,’ announced a patrician voice. ‘Regretfully, I am unable to respond personally at this time. Please leave a message.’ Short, to the point, polite, confident. Phillip Veale.
I hung up slowly, my brow furrowed into a question. ‘Last number re-dial,’ Red explained to the family idiot. ‘They always do it on Murder She Wrote.’
‘What makes you think it’s murder?’
Red shrugged. He didn’t. He was just following correct television procedure. ‘Now dial 911,’ he told me.
‘Triple zero in Australia,’ I informed him, dialling. ‘It was an accident. He was very old and he fell over. And don’t touch anything else, okay?’
As I finished giving the emergency operator the details, I became aware of a noise. A repetitive thunking. A low-pitched pulse, barely audible over the drum beat of the rain on the roof. Hanging up, I cocked my ears and tracked the sound. It was coming from the stereo, one of those Bang amp; Olufsen jobs like an anodised aluminium tea-tray. Aubrey must have had a thousand records, the edges of their covers squared off in perfect order in a set of custom-built timber shelves. I lifted the stylus arm onto its cradle and picked the record up by its edges. Faure’s Requiem, von Somevun conducting. A little light listening for a sticky Sunday arvo. I slipped the record into its sleeve.
In Aubrey’s wardrobe, I found a gaberdine overcoat. By the time I’d scrambled down the bank, it seemed like a pointless gesture. His clothes and hair were drenched and little rivulets of rainwater were forking and branching around his twisted limbs. The correct procedure, probably, was to leave him where he lay. Let him lie there, open- mouthed amid the puddles until appropriately qualified people arrived and did what appropriately qualified people do.
But I’d taken tea with this man, eaten one of his ginger-nut snaps. Not to have picked him up out of the dirt would have felt like a calculated act of disrespect. Of myself as much as of him. Besides which, the river was beginning to rise. Rain-pitted water was inching towards the body. The cause of his death was patently obvious, written in the clearly visible trajectory of his fall down the riverbank. I stood for a moment looking down at the second wet body I had seen in as many days. Then I draped the coat over Aubrey and carried him up to the house. I think the coat weighed more.
‘What you told me yesterday,’ I asked, as we trudged together through the smell of wet earth and the drumming of rain on leaves. ‘What was true and what was lies? And what did you talk about with Phillip Veale?’ But Giles Aubrey made no answer.
If moving the body was a problem, nobody told me. Nobody told me much at all, really. I’d only just finished laying Aubrey out on his bed when the ambulance arrived. The two-man crew ignored the rain which had eased to a steaming drizzle. I didn’t really know the man, I explained. My son had found the body.
‘These old people,’ said the driver, not unsympathetically. ‘They do insist on living alone.’
The label on a bottle of pills on the bedside table bore the name of a local doctor known to the paramedics. She was phoned and agreed to come immediately. She would, I was told, sign as to cause of death. A nearby undertaker was also called. Procedures were in motion. Red and I were superfluous. We’d walked halfway back to the Charade before I realised that they hadn’t even asked my name.
Our drive back into town was subdued. My attention was focused on Sunday drivers, poor visibility and slippery roads. ‘You handled that well,’ I told Red. ‘Not many kids your age have seen a dead body. How do you feel?’
He fiddled with the radio, unfussed, immortal. ‘Life’s a bitch,’ he said. ‘Then you die.’ The catchphrase in my mind remained unspoken. ‘Did he jump? Or was he pushed?’
We made it to the movies, after all. Not Die Hard but Moonwalker. First we ate cheap Chinese, then we sat side by side in the dark and watched Michael Jackson scratch his crotch for ninety minutes. My mind floated free, searching for a thread to cling to in the maze of possibilities, to bind the fragments of fact and conjecture together.
Marcus Taylor makes a minor scene at the Centre for Modern Art. What were his words? ‘This edifice is built on a lie.’ Six hours later, he’s dead. A note found in his pocket raves about corrupt hands on the levers of power. ‘You do not know what you are buying.’ A picture vanishes from his studio.
Salina Fleet, my lucky break turned sour. She claims to be Taylor’s lover and blames herself for his suicide. Then she plays down the relationship and accepts without surprise the proposition that his death was accidental. Volunteering the information that she was selling his ‘appropriations’ and demanding protection, she realises she’s said more than she should and clams up. Then she flees in fear. Not from me. Her bag was half-packed before I arrived. From Spider Webb.
Spider, me old mate. The hot-shot bodyguard warning me off. Off what? The sixty thousand dollar question. Or the six hundred thousand dollar question? The common link between Salina and Spider-Taylor’s vanished painting, Our Home Mark 2. And Lloyd Eastlake? Where did he come in to the picture? Or didn’t he? And Giles Aubrey, with his incredible tale of undetected fakery. Was he, literally, the fall guy?
By the time Michael Jackson transmogrified into a flying saucer and went into orbit, I knew one thing for sure.
