Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1) (14 page)

T
he water reached
Romano’s breasts before she woke. Her eyes hurt. She lifted her hand and tried to wipe her face, and felt sand gush into her mouth and nose. Then the water came again, foaming up around her. She rolled over and tried to crawl away. She was on the beach. It was morning. A murky brown tide was coming in around her. She staggered another ten metres up into the dry sand, and collapsed back down.

When she woke the second time, Jim Harris was standing above her.

“You’re scaring the families,” he said.

“Go to hell.”

She felt his hands on her and the world tilting.

“Come on.”

R
omano came
to in her bed. It was night. She was stripped to her underwear, dripping sweat, the room like a sauna. A wave of nausea hit as soon as she moved. She scrambled over and—by some miracle—found a bucket on the floor and puked into it. Then, she went back out.

T
he ceiling fan turned
.

Romano sat up. Things were better, by a fraction. She dragged herself to the shower. It took a good long while, but the water sobered her up. She found her robe. It was still dark out but the living room lights were on.

Jim Harris sat upright on the couch, asleep. A small black pistol rested on his thigh. He’d moved her paperwork around.

Romano went back to her room and closed the door.

H
e was gone
when she woke. The hangover pounded. She diced out a line of powder on the bedside table and knocked it back. The world snapped back into sharp relief. Morning, but still dark out.

Her phone rang.

“You alive?”

It was him.

Romano exhaled. “What were you doing in my house?”

“You’re welcome. Come meet me.”

“Where?”

“There’s a lookout on Point Burgess. I want to show you something.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t wear your uniform.”

“Why not?”

“Playtime’s over,” he said.

The line went dead.

S
he bought
a double-shot coffee and drove. Romano knew the lookout Harris had mentioned. She parked and took the gravel path down. It was early, an hour after dawn and not much of a day. A long grey bank of cloud rolled in from the ocean. The lookout reflected the island’s liberal stance on public safety: there was no barrier, no signposted warnings, just a set of stairs cut into the rock face leading down to a flat pad on the cliff’s edge. A huge rock formation sat in the water thirty metres off shore. The local fishermen had strung a wire between the edge of the lookout and this rock. They shimmied out along it to get to the better fishing. More madness.

Harris stood down by the lookout’s edge. He was dressed for a run: shorts, grey tee, trainers.

“You ever get across there?” she said.

Harris spun quickly.

“Jumpy,” she said.

“My hearing isn’t…” He raised a hand to his ear and stopped. He turned back to the water. “I’ve hauled enough bodies out of here to know better.”

“Why don’t you pull down the wire?”

“What do you think?”

Romano laughed. “Heaven forbid someone should be denied the right to kill themselves on Tunnel Island.”

“I thought we’d lost
you
the other night.”

Romano shrugged. She tapped out a smoke and pushed it into the corner of her mouth.

“How much do you remember?” said Harris.

“Not a whole lot. What do you want, Jim? This better not be some AA bullshit. Because you can stick that up your arse.”

There was a small canvas bag on the ground beside him. From inside, he took a pile of photocopied papers. Romano recognised them: Bachelard’s journal.

“I finally got this translated,” he said.

“So you couldn’t leave it alone either.”

“It kinda found me, I’m ashamed to say. It’s what this place is like, though. Things fester.”

“What’s it say?”

“Have a read.”

Something was really wrong. She felt it as soon as she took the journal from him. Her head started to throb. The uppers in her bloodstream raged.

"Turn to page eight,” he said.

She read it.

The Bronze Room at the Gold Point High Rollers is an impossibly private sanctum. Few have heard of it. Sitting in the shadow of the higher-league tables, the Bronze Room is something else. A long overlooked prize that eludes coverage. Yet each year, some of the world’s wealthiest gamblers descend on Turnell Island—off the coast of Tropical North Queensland, Australia—to spend their money in this exact room. These are not the best players, nor major up-and-comers. These are monied men, coming for something else, a bigger prize, and it took me months of digging to find it. Let me take you behind the curtain of one of poker’s most exclusive and, as we’ll see, most sickening games.

Island resident Sophie Marr has seen inside the Gold Point Hotel. She has lived there, worked there, and hustled there. She has known many gamblers and their appetites. With her help, I found a way into the Bronze Room. From my own investigation, from interviews collected in private ,and from records uncovered, I can now confirm that the Bronze Room offers a very particular prize. It is, in my estimation, a portal into one of the most open and monied child prostitution rings in the world—a place where innocence is exchanged for gambling chips—and it is the very tip of a long and sordid history of child exploitation, slavery, and abuse occurring just under the surface of Turnell, a place that, unsurprisingly, allows every other form of corruption and vice.

“They took my sister when she was nine and I was seven,” says Marr. She’s agreed to speak to me on the proviso that—

“Bloody hell,” said Romano.

Under those initial paragraphs, Bachelard had jotted dot points. He had more names, places. A school was listed, somewhere down near Arthurton. Whoever had translated the work had annotated a diagram. Bachelard was tracing the supply chain, trying to work back to where and how the victims were brought into the hotel. He had a lot of ideas. One branch of the diagram stretched offshore. It was crossed out.

“You know anything about this?” she said.

Harris glared. “Christ, no.”

“What, so everything else gets a pass but—”

He took a step towards her. “There’s rules,” he said. “No minors, not ever.”

Romano turned the pages. “What are we going to do, then? What are you going to do?”

“We need to make sure it’s legit. Bachelard could have been on the wrong track.”

“There’s something to it.”

“I know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stop making a mess. You’re on the verge of getting yourself into trouble again. People are noticing. Take this. If you can keep yourself steady, try and follow up some of the citizen stuff. Start with the school. I’ll call you tonight.”

He started up the stairs.

“Hey, Harris?” she said.

“What?”

“What are the other rules, over here? No minors and…”

“No tourists and no family members.”

“And this works?”

“We make it work.”

“
You
made it work?”

“For a time,” he said. He continued up. At the track, he stretched for a moment before jogging off into the bushland. He didn’t look back.

R
omano drove
to the station house and changed into her uniform. She speed-read Bachelard’s notebook and transcribed names, dates, and places. The school in Arthurton was in the street directory. On the way out, she printed off her copy of the photo from Pauline’s wall: the Marr girls with the parish. They were all school-age in it.

The school itself wasn’t much. She knew from Denny that most of the locals drove their kids across to the mainland every day. Arthurton State Primary was for the island’s lower tier, the children of hospitality staff, grounds people, and the original islanders. Romano felt an instant pang of nostalgia as she walked through the school grounds. The place looked like her own upbringing. Old buildings. Paint peeling. Play equipment in miniature. She made her way to a building marked
Reception
and asked at the front desk for the principal.

“That’s me,” said the man behind the counter. He was an oversized child himself. Collared shirt tucked into shorts, white socks pulled to the knee. “The receptionist’s sick,” he said. “What have they done now?”

“Who?” said Romano.

“The students.”

“Oh, nothing. I need a hand with some records.”

He seemed relieved. “We don’t really hand those out. Are you looking for a particular student? It depends on which particular student. There’s a couple I’m happy to hand over.”

“How long have you worked here?”

He moved his tongue around in his mouth. “I’m working on my third batch of long-service leave so…I was back and forth for a while. I think I bought my house in seventy-one. It’s been a while now.”

“How’s your memory? You remember two students called Marr? Two sisters?” She opened her folder and handed him the photo from the Mission.

His face tightened as soon as he saw it. “You better come round,” he said.

He took her through to a small kitchen where he fixed himself a coffee and rolled a cigarette. There was a small courtyard attached. He stepped out there to light up.

“I remember Silvie and Sophie,” he said. “And the rest of that year. It’s been a long time since anyone asked about it.”

“What happened?”

"They all disappeared, or seemed to. Half the class. Left the school overnight. It was the beginning of end, really.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“They stopped coming in. I saw the parents around from time to time, but their children weren’t with us, weren’t placed with anyone that I could figure. We tried to get them back in. We made all the calls. The government wouldn’t intervene. We lost more and more each year after that. It’s a bit better now but…It used to be that everyone sent their children here.”

Romano sorted through her file. She took a list of names culled from Bachelard’s notes and handed it over with the photo from Frith and Pauline’s living room wall.

“Are these the students?”

The principal took his time. He sat down and rested the photo on his knee, moving his eyes back and forth between the list and the photograph.

“A few of them are here, in this,” he said, tapping the photo. “Where did you get this?”

“You know Sophie Marr was killed, right?”

He shook his head. “I only know her sister ended up down the other end of the island. I hadn’t seen Sophie in years. These kids popped back up again later. I don’t know what happened to them. It was such a wild time. The transition, I guess. The old island falling away and this new monstrosity rising up in its place. I mean, some of these people are still around.” He pointed at kids in the photograph. “Noel here is an estate agent, I see him around a bit. Caroline has kids of her own. And little Jeffery, I imagine you’ve come across him.”

“Who? Which one?”

He pointed at the photo. A little dark haired boy, Mediterranean-looking. “Jeffery Bruno. He runs the Gold Point now. Among other things.”

“I’ve met him,” said Romano. “What do you know about Pastor Frith? This is from the wall of his house.”

“I knew him. My wife and I went to his church for a time. In my estimation, he’s a lunatic, too crazy for the island even. Virtually ran him out of town when the casinos moved in. He tells a different story now, but that so-called Mission he’s running down there is about the only place that would take him.”

“And he has a picture of these kids that disappeared on his wall?”

The principle held the photo up at arm’s length. “This is just the families that were with him at the time. Maybe a bit after. These would have been the people who helped him set up the Mission, I reckon.”

Romano squatted down beside him and stared at the grainy faces. The whole thing was closing together like a trap.

H
arris called Dev and said
, “You busy?”

Dev was home. Harris could hear the air-con shuddering in the background. He worked out of a garden shed in his back yard.

“I was reading the paper,” he said.

“I’m in trouble,” said Harris.

“How?”

"This Gold Point thing is back on the table. Romano’s been stirring things up. And the other night I got wind of some info I had on the back-burner. Looks like that Bachelard kid was onto something. I need to take care of it.”

“And you feel like you have to do it?”

“It’s getting there.”

“You want me to come round? You don’t sound so good. We could meditate, talk it through first.”

“No,” said Harris. “It’s gotten past that. The footsteps in the hall, they’re getting unbearable. And fucking Romano…It’s time for the other route.”

“What does O’Shea think?”

“I don’t know. I need Zane to give this one the okay and then…I have to come out of retirement for a bit?”

“Really? You sure?”

“Yeah, I’ve let things slide. I can see it now.”

“You’ve been so calm.”

“I know.”

“And Lachlan?” said Dev.

The nightmares. His brother.

“No sign of Lachlan,” said Harris. “Not yet. This is all me at the moment.”

Dev thought on it. He was never quick to agree in situations like this. “I’ll get Zane to call you,” he said. He had the hotline.

C
arl Yates was
in his usual spot. He dealt out of an apartment up in the Gold Point but he had a thing for Asian women and often took an afternoon trip to the Silk Dragon massage parlour. This was part of his hook-up with the Chans. The family and Yates kept the peace over traded information and discount rub-and-tugs.

Harris called ahead. Yates had an appointment. Harris couldn’t risk this at the Gold Point.

He drove over. They let him in. He sat on the massage table and listened to the piped ambience.

This is what happens when you take your hands off the wheel. Retirement. Retire from what?

Old Bill knew it.

More ghosts.

More—

Yates was on time. He opened the door, already showered and ready.

“Surprise,” said Harris.

Harris grabbed him by the throat and put a gun to his face. Yates bristled. The fighter in him was about to throw a punch.

"Think about it,” said Harris, kicking the door shut behind them and letting go of Yates’ throat.

“Fuck me. What do you want, Jim? You scared the shit out of me.”

“Good. What do you know about The Bronze Room?”

“Nothing, nothing, uh, I mean—”

Harris whipped him with gun and pushed him back into a potted plant in the room’s corner. Yates’s nose gushed. He squeezed his eyes shut and fell over himself trying to get back up.

“You know what it is, and that’s the wrong answer,” said Harris.

“What the—”

Harris put the gun’s barrel flush against Yates’ head.

Yates squirmed.

“Chris, Chris…I’m going to shoot you. This is real. Take a fucking breath and tell me what I want to know?”

It took him a few seconds but Yates got it figured. He started to weep.

“Chris?” said Harris.

“I don’t know…I don’t know anything.”

Harris’s screamed, “No, listen—”

“Girls,” said Yates. "They win girls, or boys, whatever they want.”

“Where are they coming in from?”

Yates shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Where is Bruno getting them from?”

“Look, you may as well just fucking kill me, you may as well…” Yates didn’t look far off meaning it. His face wet with blood and saliva.

“Why? How are you mixed up in it?”

Yates shook his head.

“Chris!”

Harris smacked him again. Yates kept shaking his head and Harris kept in on him, until Yates was laid out on the floor clawing at the carpet. When he stopped, Harris turned his hands and they were covered in warm wet blood. Yates finally started to spit it out.

“I just gave them the gear they needed. Tranqs, H, roofies. I just…I just gave them the stuff. They dose them down at the orphanage and…they just…”

“Drainland?”

Yates nodded.

“Don’t go anywhere I can’t find you, Chris. This isn’t over. We’re not even close to done.”

The man started to cough up bile.

Harris left him to it.

Z
ane got the message
. Harris picked up the phone. She didn’t mince words.

“Make sure you’re home tonight, Jim.”

That was it.

Harris sat in the living room and cleaned his gun.

He steadied his breathing.

“This is just me,” he said out loud.