“As soon as they were inside Shanks began protesting loudly. Then came a short, dull sound, after which he fell silent, at least he uttered no more words, only gulps or groans. I guessed that Paul had inserted a gag of some kind into Shanks’s mouth, an onion as we found out, secured with heavy-duty tape across the lips and right around his head. He must before that have been attached to a seat of some sort. Paul then initiated his own tirade of insults. He began, ‘Am I so changed, Old Fart, that you do not know your son?’ in clear tones, but after that in a mumbled voice, so that I could not recognize every word, but the gist was Paul vehemently rebuking Shanks for pain and shame inflicted in some former time, with beatings never deserved, and accompanying this there was an irregular rumble of grunts due to the jabs Shanks was getting, kicks, too, judging from the sounds. I dared not use my mobile phone since he would surely hear me, as he would if I tried to climb out of my coop of old boards.
“There was a pause of almost a minute, then Paul started speaking again, now in a louder voice — I could catch all his words. ‘Say, dear father, do you see this board? Remember? It’s the one you busted my hip with, in memory of which I have cherished it through the years. I’ve kept it for you, just for you, right now.’”
(Only then did I let myself steal a look at Margot. She had turned her back to us.)
“I heard a loud smack, then Paul’s voice. ‘And now, Daddy-o, you are to take leave of this valley of perpetual dreams. Slowly, though. So best I help you get started. Just keep your eye on the board.’ Several blows made a new crunching noise. When we examined the corpse, we deduced that Paul had struck Shanks with the edge of the board until the bridge of the nose and the neighboring sockets were crushed. Shanks’s bleats were hard to bear. I felt myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I was making a mistake. But I remembered the rule and Paul’s gun, a large automatic pistol, the kind that could take a Maori’s arm off. The bleating ended when Paul started bashing the skull. Shanks quickly lost consciousness, but it took considerable time to sunder the cranial bones.”
Captain Kipper again broke in. “Thank you, Mr. Kerr. Let me tell the rest.” Poor Kerr was visibly relieved; he had turned white with nausea.
“The Sergeant clambered out of his hiding place as soon as Paul’s boat, with Shanks dragged aboard, had started down the ways. It disappeared northwards, its motor idle, on the current known as the Hawing Drift. Sergeant Kerr alerted our headquarters at once on his portable phone, then ran all the way there to give us a summary report. I ordered a pickup van carrying six men and one of our little patrol boats to join us in covering the shoreline north of Paul’s shed. We dropped two men at the shed with orders to cordon it off with police tape and guard it until they were relieved.”
Andreas broke in: “Captain Kipper, what is the Hawing Drift?”
“It’s a current that’s active only at this time of year. It rises off the bottom of our main street and follows the shoreline north at a distance of about twenty yards until it reaches an insignificant prong of land called The Chicken’s Beak. There it makes a grand swing of 110 degrees to the southeast and maintains that direction as far as The Droppings, a pile of giant submarine blocks in the middle of the bay, and there it disappears. No one has been able to explain the course of the Drift or even how it came to exist.” Andreas nodded his acknowledgment.
“We found Shanks off The Chicken Beak in about ten feet of water. He’d had two bricks sewn into his belly to keep him under water, but the job was bungled, the seams hadn’t held. Poor Z. Shanks! That’s how he figured in our file.” Sergeant Kerr: “What time shall we assign to his death?” “Seventeen hours forty-six minutes.” The hour of sunset? I thought.
The Sergeant briefly took up the tale. “We found him floating twenty-some yards from the beach and brought him straight ashore.”
The Captain continued, “Immersion in seawater had cleansed the remaining gristle of blood. Yet the top of his head was a pitiful ruin. The Sergeant took one look at it and tossed his cookies.”
“That I did.”
“Surely, Sergeant, you’d seen worse during the war — in Burma, if I’m not mistaken?”
“Oh, yes, sir, what with fragmentation shells, shrapnel, rifle grenades. But that was impersonal damage. This was deliberate — years of embottled fury being vented. He didn’t do it with no old board, neither. Not to tear up skull bones. I did later manage to jimmy the onion out of his mouth. As big as a small grapefruit.”
The Captain: “A number of bystanders had gathered on the strand to watch. Sergeant Kerr walked towards them and waved them back. He explained, ‘Please leave us space to do our work. We’re bringing a man ashore. The man is laid flat — he’s bung.’ I admonished the Sergeant, ‘In plain English, please.’ ‘Forgive me, sir. I fear it’s the situation’ — meaning that for that one dramatic word, he’d slipped back into Australian lingo. Turning back to the crowd, he clearly cried, ‘The min is did.’ I
