circumstances?’
‘He was well fixed.’
Maxwell drained the gin and leaned back in his chair. ‘I leave you to draw your own conclusions.’
I thought about it on the drive back to the city. All circumstantial, but it added up: Arch Merrett ratted on his fellow conspirators and got away with at least some of the money and his hide intact. Frankie Bourke went looking for him up north and didn’t come back. Arch had left me the files for my ‘education’, but I think the lesson he wanted to teach me was one I had learned a long time ago.
Gone Fishing
The ‘back beach’ on the east coast of Fraser Island is a wide strip of white sand that runs for 125 kilometres from Waddy Point in the north to Hook Point in the south. The best time to see it is after the tide has wiped out the thousands of 4WD tyre tracks that turn the beach into a kind of temporary two-lane highway. The worst time is in the middle of the day with the sun beating down and the Toyotas and Land Rovers roaring along, scaring the birds and leaving behind fumes and traces of oil and rubber.
I’d seen it at both times and at all times in between for the past four days. I’d put ‘fishing’ on the Application to Camp form I’d lodged with the Parks and Wildlife people in Hervey Bay. I had the permit and all the gear-rods and reels, lines, hooks, sinkers, knives, buckets, net in my Land Cruiser. I also had a portable generator that ran a fridge to make ice for the esky. The equipment had come with the vehicle and I hadn’t touched it, apart from the ice and the esky. My idea of catching fish is to go to Doyles and put a fork in a couple of grilled fillets. I was a fisher of men.
Simon Bucholtz and his brother Alex, nineteen and eighteen respectively, had disappeared in July. They’d gone backpacking to Queensland, taking a break from their university studies after the first semester. They’d called their father from Maryborough to say they were pushing on to Bundaberg, and hadn’t been seen or heard of in the ten weeks since. The police had done all the usual things, including giving up the search. The boys’ father, Horst Bucholtz, had come to me- on the recommendation of a satisfied client- with his slender thread of new evidence, his straw to cling to, his piece of floating wreckage.
‘My friend saw them, Mr Hardy. Eight weeks ago. He was getting a plane on the beach on Fraser Island and he saw the boys just as he got on board. He flew to Brisbane and then to the States. He did not know the boys were missing until he got back yesterday. Even then Bucholtz was a big man, fifty plus and looking it around the eyes and in the way he carried himself. His wide shoulders had a defeated slump that looked unnatural with his trim physique and athletic grace. He sniffed, pulled the shoulders back and got himself under control. ‘Even then, he only mentioned seeing them as a casual afterthought. He was amazed at my reaction. He thought I had gone mad.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘He knew the boys well by sight?’
A sharp nod. ‘He knows them, yes.’
There’s not much you can do when a desperate parent gets into that positive mode, but you have to try. ‘Even so, eight weeks is a long time for them to be out of touch. I’m sorry, but you have to expect…’
He was all systems go now, imperious. He stopped me with a raised clenched fist. ‘Foul play. No. When I told him what had happened, Claude immediately phoned someone he knows on the island. This man was present when Claude spotted the boys. He says he has seen them in different parts of the island.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Fishing, camping, walking.’
‘When did he see them last?’
The shoulders slid forward. ‘He thinks a month ago, maybe six weeks.’
‘You should go to the police, Mr Bucholtz. They…’
‘No! I can’t understand why they would stay there. They must be in some kind of trouble. The police could make it worse, whatever it is. I want you to find them. Please, find them and find out what’s going on. Then I’ll decide what to do.’
It sounded screwy but interesting. I was upfront with Bucholtz. I told him that before I’d take him on I’d run a check on him, talk with the police and his friend Claude and his contact on the island. He agreed.
I did all that and found nothing to deter me. Bucholtz was a builder and prosperous. His wife had died two years before. Nothing remarkable about the boys-Simon doing Arts at Sydney, Alex doing Environmental Studies at the University of Western Sydney. Missing Persons in Brisbane faxed me a selection of their file which told me nothing useful. Claude Tolbeck, motor mechanic and fisherman, confirmed Bucholtz’s account.
I mugged up a bit on the island during the flight to Brisbane. It was basically built of sand carried north from the rivers of New South Wales and deposited by peculiarities of the currents and waves over thousands of years. It had rainforest and lots of other vegetation, magnificent beaches, crystal-clear springs and was free of rats, mice and all feral animals except the dingo. Timber-getters and mineral sands miners backed by Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been happy to chop and mine it into a moonscape but conservationists, led by John Sinclair of the Fraser Island Defenders Organisation (FIDO), had stopped them. It was now a number one tourist destination.
After I’d spoken briefly on the phone to Tim Driberg, Tolbeck’s contact on the island, and learned that I’d need a 4WD to get around, I gave Bucholtz an estimate of the money he was looking at. It was pretty high-fares to and from, vehicle hire and insurance on top of my daily rate. He couldn’t write a cheque fast enough.
I’d flown to Hervey Bay, hired the Land Cruiser and taken it on the ferry to the island. I’d heard about Fraser Island for years of course, but wasn’t quite prepared for the strangeness of it. There is something weird about all those trees sprouting out of pure sand and the lakes that just sit there, not being fed by streams or springs. Once I got used to driving on the sand I began almost to enjoy the place. As much as circumstances and my city habits permitted.
Tim Driberg had lived on Fraser for thirty years, had been a logger and a sandminer, and claimed to know every inch of it. He moved around by land and sea between the couple of small freeholds he owned, fishing, winching out bogged 4WDs and taking photographs for sale to travel magazines. He was about sixty and looked it although he was still lean and muscular. A long white scar on his right leg that almost glowed against the tanned skin came, he said, ‘from goin’ six fuckin’ rounds with a chainsaw’. His faded blue eyes crinkled in the lean, leathery face when I asked him about the boys. We were on the balcony adjacent to the bar of the Cathedral Beach Resort and drinking Crown Lager. I was on my second, Driberg was one ahead of me.
‘Handsome lads, very handsome. But shy. I turned a camera on them once and they ran like rabbits.’
‘Where was this?’
‘I forget. As I told Claude, I spotted them here, there and everywhere.’
I got out a map and pinned him down, confirming what he’d told me on the phone. Dilli Village, Eurong, Happy Valley, Cathedral Beach, Waddy Point on the east coast; Lake Boomajin, Central Station, Lake McKenzie and Lake Allam inland; near the Kingfisher Resort and at Massey Point on the west coast.
‘I’d say they were headed for the ferry back to Hervey Bay last time I saw them.’
‘But you didn’t see them board the ferry?’
‘No.’
By this time I’d already checked at some of these locations, showing photos of the boys to campers and fishermen and getting no response. Driberg seemed happy to have me pay for his drinks.
‘You don’t have a lot of information, Mr Driberg.’
He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out over the rail towards the fringe of dense bush that ringed the resort. ‘I’m an old Fraser Island hand. We keep ourselves to ourselves. I leave it to the fuckin’ greenies to worry about the outside world. Rwanda and all that shit. What did the outside world ever do for us?’
After driving the Land Cruiser over the sand and through the creeks, I’d been dry and had drunk the beers quickly by my standards. They’d run through me and I went to the toilet. When I got back Driberg had gone. The barman signalled me.
