Last Drinks Read online

  What would Charlie be doing up here? If it was him, if it was really him.

  And I still couldn’t believe it was.

  We drove. Highwood fell behind, and we followed the road past dairy farms and plantations and the smaller subdivisions with their cement-brick huts, some with their chimneys already smoking. I caught a glimpse of a candle flickering in a window, and a woman’s face over a sink. Her water would not be warm.

  The police radio broke into life. ‘Graham, it’s Tony here.’

  Graham picked it up. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The two detectives from Brisbane have arrived. We’ve shown them everything.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘They’re not too happy that you moved the clothes.’

  ‘The power workers moved them, not me. They weren’t inside the substation anyway.’

  ‘Just letting you know.’

  Graham clicked the microphone back. ‘It was a fuck-up,’ he said to me. ‘But when the boys from the power company got there, the first thing they found was the clothes, so naturally enough they went through them.’

  He still seemed unnerved, pulling hard on his cigarette. I watched out the window. The houses and farms were thinning the further we got from town, and I wondered where it was we were headed.

  ‘What’s all this about a substation?’ I said.

  He glanced at me, hesitant. ‘An electrical substation. The town’s substation.’

  I looked up. Powerlines ran alongside the road. I’d thought the blackout was just another line down, another transformer blown. It happened often enough up in the hills, and the repairs were never quick.

  ‘This has something to do with the power failure?’

  He nodded, but that was all.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Wait. You’ll have to look at it anyway. Let’s just say for now he was electrocuted.’

  I thought about that, and about the clothes back at the police station. A night as cold as the one we’d just had, and Charlie wasn’t wearing his clothes? If it was him, of course, if it was really him.

  ‘What was he doing at a substation?’ I asked. ‘Why was he there?’

  Graham thought some more, then rolled down his window a little to toss out his cigarette butt. It was not a responsible thing to do in a forested area, but then no fire would ever start on a morning like this. Cold air sank around my feet as he wound the window up again.

  ‘I don’t think he went there by choice,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Leave it, George. We’re almost there.’

  And we drove into a black tunnel of trees.

  I stared about, confused. Highwood lay high in the great ring of mountains that made up the Border Ranges, two hours south-west of Brisbane. There was only the one road that ran through the valley. It came winding up into the hills from the north, crossed the actual border just south of the town and then descended again into New South Wales. It was not much travelled, for the major interstate highways crossed the ranges further east or west. Up in the mountains there was no destination apart from Highwood itself, and here at the northern end of the valley the forest closed in tightly, crowding the driver for a mile or two. After that there was only the steep drop in the road, and then the long climb down, six or seven hundred metres, to the foothills. Where were we going?

  Graham slowed the car. The forest was shadowed, as if dawn was still hours away, not minutes. Mist seeped from between the trees, rolling across the road. Finally Graham braked and turned off onto a narrow track that I’d never even noticed before, let alone driven down. It was damp and rutted, and the trees hung over it possessively, dripping moisture onto the windscreen. Graham flicked on the wipers. A fire glowed up ahead, at least I thought it was fire. After we’d run a hundred yards, however, I could see that it wasn’t. It was the slow flash of police lights.

  This was it, then. Something tightened in my stomach. I hadn’t eaten since waking, couldn’t have eaten. I felt hollow and cold and didn’t want to leave the warmth of the car.

  The track terminated in a clearing. Within the open space was a squat brick structure that had a door but no windows. Behind it was a fenced-off area which held a tangle of power lines and poles and things the name of which I didn’t know. There were big signs on the building and the fences—warnings about trespassing and about dangerous voltages. And off to one side, a giant sentinel rising out of the trees, stood a naked steel tower that bore high-voltage powerlines away into the grey sky, off towards the mountain’s rim and the descent.

  Graham stopped the car and looked at me, his hand on the door handle.

  ‘You ready?’

  I was staring at all the vehicles and people crammed into the clearing. The other district police car was already there, its lights revolving steadily, plus one other car that was unmarked. There was an ambulance with its doors open, a dim light spilling out. There was a large truck with ladders and other gear on the back and the name of the power company written on the side. People were standing around in the gloom, some in uniform, some in hard hats. Someone was stretching police tape across a gate, although I couldn’t see why—there would be no crowd here to keep away, no one would ever come here, surely, not to this little brick hut in the forest.

  I gripped my own door handle, summoned the lie.

  ‘I’m ready.’

  THREE

  It was cold again, outside the car, and faces everywhere were turned towards us. A man broke away from the group and came our way, buttoning his suit jacket against the morning.

  ‘I’m Detective Kelly,’ he said, shaking Graham’s hand. Then he took mine. ‘You’re here to make the identification?’

  ‘If I can,’ I said.

  Graham told the detective who I was, and the man studied me for a moment, as if somewhere the name meant something to him. ‘He’s already identified the licence photo,’ Graham went on, ‘but then, the person in there doesn’t really look much like the photo. Not now.’

  A shrieking erupted in the bush, and in a flurry of leaves a large white bird flapped from high in a tree, then soared off into the morning like a departing soul. We all paused and watched until it was gone. In the distance another chorus of bird calls rose, then fell away. Silence settled, apart from the mutter of voices, and the dripping of water.

  ‘Strange place for something like this,’ was all the detective said.

  He was young, much younger than me, early thirties maybe, and that was disturbing. There was a time when I associated with police detectives, and back then they’d all seemed to be older, tougher, more capable men. This one wasn’t like that. Maybe he thought he was tough and capable, maybe he really was, but to me his calm voice, his professional air, looked like an act, something learned in training. He was younger than me, that was all. He wasn’t fat and he wasn’t swilling free beer and grappling the women without bothering to pay. And I was older. Ten years older.

  ‘You came up from Brisbane?’ I asked. ‘How long ago did this happen?’

  He nodded towards the truck. ‘The power boys say the substation blew about one a.m. The crew got up here about an hour later, from Boonah. They called the Highwood police and I’m told the sergeant here arrived about two-thirty. He put the call through to Brisbane and here we are. We don’t know time of death yet, of course, but it’s reasonable to assume it was connected to the power failure. A forensic team shouldn’t be far behind us.’

  One a.m. I’d been in bed only half an hour by then. And by Highwood standards I was almost nocturnal. The rest of the town would have been sleeping fast.

  ‘George,’ Graham said, ‘we don’t have to go in there right away.’

  The three of us were walking towards the substation now. There was nothing to see apart from the vehicles and the men. But the door to the small brick building was open, and no one was looking that way. Whatever it was, it was in there.

  We reached a group of three power workers. T
hey were talking with another man in a suit, and we paused by them. ‘So it was a lucky thing,’ one of the workers was saying, and he stopped, looking at me.

  ‘This is Detective Lewis,’ Kelly said, and I shook another firm young hand. He was heavier, though, almost baby-faced, and seemed determined to be cheerful.

  ‘I was just asking these guys,’ he said to his colleague, ‘how they got up here so quickly.’

  The power workers glanced unhappily between the two detectives.

  ‘We had a problem down at base that extended the afternoon shift through till after midnight,’ the first one said, ‘so we were still at the depot when the alarm went off.’

  ‘Otherwise we might’ve had to wait till normal working hours, right?’ Lewis said. ‘I know you guys don’t do a regular night duty outside of Brisbane any more.’

  They shuffled their feet. ‘It’s not our fault. There’s no money for overtime.’

  Kelly wasn’t interested. He was looking at the brick building. ‘What exactly does this place do?’

  The man shrugged. ‘It’s a substation. You got power coming out of the big generating stations, okay? They can send it out in any sort of voltage they want, but the lower the voltage the more resistance you get in the wires, so over hundreds of kilometres you’d lose a lot of power, just in heat. So instead they send it out high voltage, very high. The problem is, your average household or business can’t use power at that voltage. So when the main line gets near a town, say, you put in a substation. It’s basically a series of transformers, which scales the power from high voltage down to low. Then you can send it out to the consumer, and resistance isn’t a problem because now the consumer is close by. The voltage is usually still a bit too high, though, so you have smaller substations and transformers street by street, which gets it down to 240 volts, or whatever you need.’

  ‘But this is a big substation, right?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Right. This is for the whole Highwood area.’

  ‘So what sort of power have we got coming in?’

  ‘240 000 volts.’

  And silence fell again as everyone pondered the figure.

  ‘Do you think he was hit with all of that?’ Graham asked.

  The worker thought, then shook his head. ‘It’s unlikely. But someone’s been mucking around with the switchboard in there. The wires are all over the place. It could’ve been anything.’

  And it seemed no one else had anything to say. I stared at the brick building. A substation. If I thought about it, I’d seen them everywhere, hundreds of them in cities and towns and along country roads, square and bland and forgettable. And yet they were like sewage pipes. Modern life revolved around them. A secret network, and this one most secret of all, hidden away on the mountains’ edge.

  The power worker tipped his hard hat upwards, and then back down. ‘Um . . . you gonna get him out of there soon? Only with morning coming, we should get the supply back on.’

  ‘Not until a team has been over it,’ Kelly replied, official. ‘And besides . . .’

  He was looking at me. Graham took his meaning and laid a hand on my arm, and then it was just the two of us walking towards the brick building. Behind us the others remained, silent. The two ambulance men, over at their vehicle, dragged on cigarettes and looked away. They’d already been inside, of course. Everyone had, except me.

  ‘What you’ll see in there,’ Graham said, his voice low, ‘is pretty awful. But all you have to do is look at his face and tell us if you recognise him. Then we get straight out, okay?’

  A sense of unreality was flowing over me, my feet didn’t seem to be hitting the ground. The metal door to the substation hung open, and a soft glow came from inside. Another gas lamp. Even here, at the very source of power, there was still no electricity. Up close the building loomed larger, thick and windowless, like a blockhouse, surrounded by mist and darkness and cold. There was only the one narrow doorway, and the light flowing out seemed almost red. I could see nothing of what was inside. And then we were at the door, and going through.

  I looked at the floor. I was ready for a body, and bodies were supposed to be on floors. But there was nothing on the floor, only naked concrete. The room was about fifteen feet square, the walls lined with equipment and panels. There was a desk and an old, tattered chair. And there was a smell, high and strong. For a sickening moment I thought—and maybe I’d almost been expecting it—but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the smell of burning. Instead it was something familiar. Painfully, sweetly familiar. Something from a life lived years ago. It was that special mixture that all drinkers know, but only the old and hardened come to live with, to ignore, and finally to need. It was the ripe scent of alcohol and urine, inextricably fused, the one always leading to the other. Usually you smelt it in bars, or in back alleyways, or in boarding house rooms. Not on frozen mornings in concrete bunkers. Not unless they were prison cells. And then, to the right, I saw it.

  ‘Is that him?’ Graham asked.

  I stared. And stared.

  ‘Well?’

  My mouth worked, got words out. ‘I can’t really tell.’

  Graham cleared his throat. He took me closer, to within a yard of where the man stood, so that I could see the face more clearly, turned, as it was, away from the door. So I could see the right-hand side of the face . . .

  ‘Well?’

  And whatever doubts I’d had, now I knew. Charlie was marked, like Cain, and would always be instantly knowable. Even when he was like this.

  ‘It’s him,’ I said.

  Graham nodded. ‘That, um, major injury to his face. It’s not like the other wounds. It looks old and healed up, but it wasn’t on his licence photo, so we were wondering . . .’

  ‘It’s old. He got it years ago. That’s how I know for sure.’

  ‘All right, that’s all we need, George, we can go.’

  But I couldn’t go. I hadn’t even made sense yet of what I was seeing. It was Charlie, sure enough, but it wasn’t Charlie at all, not this thin scarecrow of a person, strung up against the wall. Not this old, old man. He was my age, Charlie, not even fifty, but this man . . .

  He was naked and had his back to us, his chest to the wall. Only it wasn’t a wall. It was a bank of power equipment, a switchboard. Metal doors had been opened and inside was a confusion of switches and coils and cables. His chest was pressed up hard against it all, his feet tied with wire to the panels, and his hands as well, above his head, so that he was spreadeagled against the switchboard, and even though he was dead, he couldn’t fall. He looked like a convict ready for the whipping—no, like a convict already whipped, for his back was livid with small red marks. But they weren’t from any whip. Lying at his feet were several cords which snaked back into the panels. The ends of the cords were stripped down to naked wires. Electrical wires.

  And it was Charlie. His face, turned to his left, looked blank and stupid, with none of the life or thought that had worked within it once. I didn’t know if that was death, or if that was how he’d looked ever since . . . light retardation, they’d said. Some loss of motor coordination. And his body looked ravaged by more than just electricity. So old, so thin.

  Graham had a gentle hold of my arm. ‘C’mon,’ he was saying, pulling.

  ‘But . . . but why this?’ I said. ‘Why would anyone do this?’

  I was babbling. I wasn’t looking at Charlie any more, I was staring all around the room, searching for someone else, for whoever did this, as if they might still be there, ready to explain themselves. And it was all crazy, what I was seeing now. Details stood out. There were beer cans everywhere. Empty, lying on their sides, a few dribbles of froth at their mouths. And there were bottles. Vodka bottles, two of them. Empty as well. A few puddles of alcohol, or urine maybe, on the floor. It was as if there’d been a party in there. And the smell, now that I knew its source, was fresh and strong as if someone had just gone out for another round. It was the sort of thing kids might have left behind, teenagers
hiding out from their parents, drinking furtively. Just kids. Except for what was tied up against the wall.

  ‘Why now?’ I heard myself saying. ‘Why would anyone do this now?’

  But Graham wasn’t listening. He was dragging me away and we were outside again and everything seemed brighter. The sky was a weak pink and the police lights had faded so that they appeared like toys. No one would look at me, and everywhere birds were screeching in the trees, thousands of them, greeting the day.

  FOUR

  Light always came late to Highwood, deep in its valley. Even so, by the time we all got back to the police station the sun had lifted high above the treetops and burnt away the mists in the gullies, the main street was flushed golden, and the townsfolk were up, driving and walking, going about their business. People chatted on the footpath. The power failure, that’s what everyone would be talking about. At least until the real news spread. And it would spread. Faster than the power would be restored. The electricians had been kept waiting, and waiting. The forensic team and the photographer had spent over two hours with Charlie in that small, cold room before cutting him down.

  And finally, too, Detectives Kelly and Lewis were catching on.

  ‘Charles Monohan,’ they were muttering, going through his clothes and staring at his licence. ‘Charles Monohan.’ We were all in Graham’s office. I’d been dreading this, all through the long business out at the substation, while the light grew in the sky and the memory of what I’d seen took hold inside me. The detectives had been preoccupied, but Graham already knew, and the other two would remember, sooner or later.

  ‘Charles Monohan,’ said Kelly, turning my way. ‘Why do I know that name?’

  I didn’t want to answer. For friendship’s sake, possibly. But if it was an act of friendship, then it was ludicrously too little, and far too late.

  ‘I don’t know if you’d remember,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in the police force?’