Drainland (Tunnel Island Book 1) (4 page)

H
arris looked
down past the phone in his hand at the timber deck beneath his feet. The breeze pushed debris around: the bark husk of a nearby gum, leaves, and possum shit.
For Don. Fucking O’Shea.
It echoed in his head.
For Don
. It was a complicated lie, one of O’Shea’s specialties. No one did anything for Donald Marr. No one needed to. Don made a career out of looking after himself. It was almost all he did. O’Shea knew that. O’Shea was prodding.
For Don
really meant
For Silvie
, his daughter. Harris had known her once.

Every ghost, every mistake. No distractions.

It wasn’t much of a retirement. It wasn’t long.

H
e went
to the hotel and ran down the Marr girl’s room. Her boyfriend was back from the mainland;
Thomas Bachelard,
that was the name they gave him at the desk.
Bachelard
sounded familiar. He phoned it over to Dev. “Reach out to the Gold Point people, see if you can get me sound on room 405. Yeah, fourth floor.” Sienna Plaza was up the road. A room on the same floor gave him visual access. He set up the camera and tripod. He scoped the viewfinder and watched. For a whole day, Sophie Marr and Thomas Bachelard didn’t do much more than eat and fuck with the blinds open. They had an eight-ball of coke in there, weren’t super careful with it. Every now and then Bachelard worked on a laptop. When he did that, Sophie Marr paced back and forth with the television on.

As night broke, they headed out. Harris picked them up an hour later, up in the Gold Point’s high roller’s room. They weren’t up to much. They sat at the bar looking for all the world like young honeymooners. Sophie’s arm draped over Bachelard’s shoulder. His head coming in close to hers every minute or two. It made Harris sick.

E
arly that morning
, not long before dawn, Harris got sound. The Gold Point had every room rigged for it. A handful of people knew. People had died for that secret. He listed in to 405:

A woman’s voice, Sophie Marr: “From one end of the island to the other. All the way to Drainland. All the way back. I…It’s been happening for years. No one gives a fuck.” She paused, then: “You can’t. Someone will find it.”

“This?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll write it in Canto,” said Bachelard. “You know anyone who can read Cantonese?”

She laughed. “No.”

“Okay, then.”

O
n the second day
, a Thursday, Harris followed them down to Arthurton. There was a primary school down there. They had an appointment, by the look of it. The principal met them out in the car park, took them through to a building out behind the main one. Harris waited it out. He jumped the school fence and took a chance look through a window: records, row after row of school records.

He kept following them. From the school, they drove out into the suburbs on the outskirts of Arthurton. Bachelard looked to be interviewing people. Harris watched each stop from the car. On the last one, Harris got in nice and close. The boyfriend sat across the dining room table from an old woman. There were tea and biscuits out on the doilies. The old woman started crying. Sophie Marr reached out for her hand.

Later, back in the Gold Point, Harris sat in his post and listened to the wiretap. They washed the day down with cocaine and beer and didn’t talk much. Not a fucking peep about what they’d heard down in Arthurton. Harris opened his notebook and wrote,
paranoid or smart.
He looked at that for a moment and added:
tired.

T
he following day
, it rained hard. Bachelard spent the day on the phone, notebook in hand. He used his mobile so Harris could only hear one side of it. Sounded like money talk. Bachelard was running down something on the Catholic Church. That didn’t scan. Tunnel hadn’t had an active church in years. The Protestants knew a rigged market when they saw one. The Catholics and the Seventh Dayers didn’t gel with the other rackets, and while Hillsong was talking to the Chans, Harris couldn’t see that working either. But Bachelard was talking recent money, very recent: transactions dated in the last couple of months.

Meanwhile, Sophie came and went. Harris saw her up close that night, as he followed her. She brushed past him in the convenience store up on Point Burgess. She had her sister Silvie’s nape. Sophie’s hair was tucked behind her ear like it was Silvie’s hair and Silvie’s ear. The physical contact worked on him like a trigger.

Silvie was good.

She was measured. She was strict.

She never undressed, she never worked on the clients that way. She just wore her suit and swung the whip, and when it was over she would kiss you on the mouth.

He saw the track marks on Silvie about a month before she disappeared. The dotted discolouration in her hands. That was how bad it had gotten. He was with Lean then, the madam, Silvie’s boss. It was a relationship of sorts. A real train wreck. Nearly killed him. Nearly killed them both. Lean used to watch through a two-way mirror sometimes.

“She’s strong,” Lean would say. “You like that, don’t you?”

Harris told her, “The kid’s using.”

Lean reached out.

Silvie refused any kind of help. She chose to vanish.

She was dead within the year.

So many doubts.

Lean could be cruel. She ran The Theodor Club like a sociopath. Had to, she said. He never felt entirely right about what happened with Silvie. There was something unsaid, unknown. His gut was sure of it. And over time, he found he couldn’t trust Lean, either. That was when it really unravelled with them. Lean always played the angles, even in love.

Lean was a type of corruption.

She was still around.

Sophie took her groceries off the clerk and walked out. Harris stayed in line. He watched her walk off into the dark, trailing a plume of smoke, like it was any other night on the island.

O
n Sunday
, they brought people up to the room and interviewed them. Harris recognised some of the faces: rent boys, hookers, junkies, ex-croupiers. All perps or victims at one point or another. These introductions were Sophie’s doing. These were her people. Harris snapped pictures until they started drawing the blinds. Bachelard played music and did the interviews in the bathroom. The tap was a bust, except for a fragment:

Sophie saying, “They call him The Fox, over here. What does he want? There’s always a fucking deal with them. Always. Be careful. You gotta be careful with him. You shouldn’t go.”

“What? I shouldn’t meet with him?” says Bachelard.

Harris looked at them through the telephoto. Bachelard checked his watch and stared out into the landscape. Harris focused hard on Bachelard’s face.

“What are you playing at?” said Harris.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked it. O’Shea, as if summoned.

He answered.

“Anything?” said O’Shea.

“Yeah, they’re doing something. I’m still not entirely sure what.”

“The Agriolis are ropable. They want it shut down, ASAP.”

“Interesting,” said Harris.

“What is so fookin’ interesting about that?” said O’Shea.

“Leave it with me.”

“No, wha—”

Harris snapped the phone shut.

H
arris followed
her up along the boulevard and around the point to Robinson Beach. Sophie parked by the surf club and got out, walked the path down to the rocks, and then scaled the rocks down to the beach. Harris stepped out of the car. It was a cold morning. The wind had a harsh chill in it. It was early and grey, no one around. He walked after her.

Down on the sand, Sophie stood there with her arms wrapped around herself. If she heard him approach, she didn’t show it. She stayed fixed on the ocean in front. The ocean foamed and roared.

“Sophie?” said Harris.

She turned.

Harris grabbed her by the arm and pulled her in close. He wrapped a hand around her jaw, bringing her eyes level with his.

“You feeling suicidal, Sophie?”

“Who, uh—”

“Quit this business with the senator’s kid.”

She struggled. Harris let her go and pushed her back. She landed in the sand and sat there.

“Enough,” he said. “You’ve been warned.” He walked away.

“I know you,” she shouted after him. “You’ll go down with the rest of them, you fucking piece of shit. You’re all going—”

Harris stopped. He looked back.

Sophie swept hair from her face. “You killed my sister,” she said. “And now you’re all going down for it.”

“I never…”

Sophie Marr stood up. Sand rained down off her clothes.

“I’m coming for you, this time,” she said. “Not the other way around. So go tell whoever you’re working for that this is fucking it. It’s over. Go and tell them.”

Harris started back up the beach.

“You can’t run from this,” screamed Sophie.

She was still calling out to him as he started the car. She was running toward him, silently shouting through the glass like a banshee. Harris put the car into reverse and slammed the thing back. The woman had lost it.

H
e went back
to the office and called O’Shea: “This nonsense with the girl, I’m out. Don can look after his own kids.” And for four weeks, that was the end of it.

B
y the end of August
, winter was a distant memory. Romano took to drinking in the yard behind her house. She sat with the radio on and stared at the split sky, half blackened void and half smudged pink by lights of The Strip. This was the yin and yang of Tunnel. She spent hours wincing through every echo of the recent past, seizing every detail and anecdote.

Will.

The boyfriend.

All the boyfriends before him.

The lot. All the turds of one type or another. She refused to say they names, even to herself. They went well with the drugs and the drinking. It all went parallel. The perfect match: bad habits and bad people.

Romano filed further back.

She remembered giving up.

And the realisation she’d given up.

And then the reason behind giving up: the Taradale bust, the compound. The victims they found there. The punishments handed out. The violence. The overwhelming horror of it, of the whole fucking job: all the
routine
policing between Tradable and Tunnel, all the burnt-out hookers and overdosing teens, the vehicular collisions and suicides, the bodies of old men and women found dead, alone. Decaying lives. Stupid actions. Utter waste. All abetted and protected by dickhead cops. All rats gnawing on an arm, the lot of them.

She was worn down. She felt it now.

Each night—bottle after bottle, cigarette after cigarette, one boring station house hangover following the next—Romano listened to herself and it haunted her. The past rang out like a bell and it kept ringing.

It rang until the call:

A near-dawn morning.

Denny’s half-asleep voice on the receiver.

“You’ve got to go up to the Gold Point, they’ve got some sort of emergency.”

She knew immediately.

Romano put down the phone and smiled.

The big distraction.

Here at last.

S
pring
rain thudded hard against the windscreen. Denny put the wipers on and pulled into the Gold Point drive. He was nervous. On the drive over, he’d kept quiet, constantly fastened and unfastened his hands around the wheel. As they moved through The Strip, the Gold Point rose up. It stood between the road and the beach, nestled in a carefully manicured canopy of trees.

Romano had heard the locals call the place
The Lighter
, due to its gilded gold exterior. It was true. From a distance the Gold Point looked like a tall Zippo sitting in grass.

At its base, the tree-line opened up to a lavish square courtyard, and Denny steered the police cruiser across it to a small service car park. “The staff in here are a real pain in the arse,” he said. “They almost towed me last time.”

Three men stood waiting at the hotel entrance. They each wore crisp black suits and held umbrellas despite the awning overhead.

Romano stepped from the car.

“You three waiting for us?”

They all bore similar features. Jet black hair. A hard jaw. Dark eyes. One was slightly taller than the others. Another smoked a cigarette. Romano noticed his hand was bandaged, the tip of a finger missing.

The taller one spoke first. “We’ll take you up.”

In the lift, Romano asked, “Who found them?”

The taller one answered. “A cleaner.”

“She still here?”

He nodded.

They followed the three of them out the lift and down a long carpeted hallway to a room in the hotel’s beach-side face. “This is one of our deluxe suites,” said one of the shorter ones, unlocking the door with a card attached to his belt.

Romano did not enter immediately. Instead, she waited and listened. She could hear voices inside. At least two males. She took her notebook out, checked the time, and marked it down.

“Okay, your names?” she said to the staff.

“Simon Alo.”

“Charles Alo.”

“Leo,” said the taller one.

“Leo Alo?” said Romano.

“Yes,” he said.

“You all brothers?”

“Cousins,” Leo said.

“You touch anything in here?”

“I’ve had a look, just to make sure, before I called,” said Leo. “Our security notified us.”

“How about you two?”

The other men shook their heads.

“Right,” she said. “I’m gonna get you two to stay out here. Leo, you stay with me. It sounds like you’ve got half the hotel in here. Denny, you stay put. No one comes in behind us, okay? No one.”

Romano stepped inside. Watching her feet, she walked the suite’s hallway, passing a laundry, then a bedroom. An older woman sat on a bed in the second room. She held a glass of water in one hand and a small ball of tissue in the other. The woman was completely still, as if in a daydream.

“This the cleaner?” whispered Romano.

Leo nodded.

“Stay here,” said Romano to the cleaner. “I’ll come back to you in a minute.” She closed the door. At the end of the hallway, the lounge opened up; it was full of people. Romano counted five, all hotel staff by the looks. On the ground, in a clear part of the carpet beside two white couches, were two bodies. Both deceased, blood on their clothes. Romano did not let her eyes linger there for too long. Instead, she took note of the scene around them: two younger women, in neat fitting black pantsuits (cleaners, probably) stood in the kitchen. Across the marble benchtop was an older man, wearing a suit jacket, but not well (security) and standing directly over the bodies were two men in suits (management).

“Okay, everyone stand right where they are,” said Romano.

They all looked at her.

The big man by the bench said, “Constable, I’m—“

“No,” said Romano. She pointed at the men closest to the bodies. “You two first, who are you?”

“Simon Reynolds, I’m the shift manager,” said one.

“Barry Nash, guest services,” said the other.

“Who was in here first?” said Romano.

“Linda,” said one of the women.

“In the bedroom there? Okay, who was next?”

They all looked at each other.

“Me, I guess,” said the big man by the bench. “Carl Yates. I do security.”

“You stay there for me, Carl. Everyone else, I want you to carefully go out into the hallway outside this room and give your details to Constable Denny out there. Watch your feet. I don’t want anyone to touch anything, or drag anything out of here, right? Okay, let’s go. Come on, out.”

One by one, they walked. The two managers seem to tip-toe around the bodies, as if suddenly realising their presence might interfere with things.

“Denny?” shouted Romano.

“Yeah,” he called back.

“Names, contacts, and full descriptions of how they got in here, when, why, the lot. Write it down.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said.

“Write it down,” she repeated.

“Okay.”

“And get someone to tell you who checked into this room as well. Names, contact details, the lot.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I can tell you that,” said Carl Yates.

“In a minute,” she said.

Romano took a moment to grid the space out in her mind. She checked the carpet between herself and the bodies. It looked clear enough, so she approached. Both of them were on their backs, both were white, a man and a woman, both young. The man had some sort of puncture wound in his head, beside his ear, almost definitely a gunshot, but there was no gore or residue. The woman had a blue tint to her skin, wide pupils—classic overdose symptoms. Beside her head lay the remains of various plastic wrappers and a rubber glove.

“Yeah, the ambos were here,” said Carl.

“Where are they now?”

“They left.”

“What?”

Carl shrugged.

Romano noted it down.

She tried Chandler on her radio.

No answer.

“Okay, Carl, where were they when you first saw them?”

Carl went to step away from the kitchen.

“No, don’t move. Just tell me.”

Carl pointed to the bedroom. The bedroom looked to be the same room, sectioned off by a small cast iron railing and a curtain. Around the bed, the walls were painted a metallic bronze, and there were matching floor-to-ceiling drapes pinned on the gold-trim runner, almost like a hospital suite. The drapes were drawn. Romano went over and looked inside.

Blood spatter. Sheets caked black. Rot.

Romano felt her body push a long breath out of her.

“Okay, time to go, Carl. Thanks for your help. I’m sure someone will be back to have a chat with you today.”

Carl nodded.

“Time to go,” she said.

He walked.

Romano followed him down the corridor, back to the second bedroom and the cleaner. She crouched down in front of the woman.

“I’m Detective Constable Laura Romano,” she said, out of habit. “Did you find those people?”

The woman shifted her stare to Romano but didn’t speak. Her name was embroidered on her uniform.

“Rosie? Did you find them? Just give me a little nod.”

The woman did it. She seemed to come back to herself. “Yes, I found them.”

“Where they on the bed or on the floor?”

“On the bed. The other one was down beside the bed, against the wall.”

“Was it the woman or the man down beside the bed?”

Romano could tell that this question was testing the limits of how much Rosie wanted to remember. “The man,” Rosie said.

“You’ve been a big help, Rosie. That’s all I need for the moment,” she said
.
She helped the woman up and took her out to Denny. He looked flustered. He had the guard and the two other cleaners lined up against one wall while he scribbled furiously in his notebook.

“Denny, this is Rosie. She discovered the bodies. Take her details next, then find somewhere for her to sit down.”

“Where?” he said.

“Somewhere close. You need to get everyone out of the hallway.” She came closer and whispered to him, “I just tried Chandler, you need to get him up here as well. I need an extra set of hands. We’re going to have to seal the whole place off. I’ll phone the mainland on the way downstairs.”

Denny kept writing. “Okay but…”

“But what?”

“Why are you doing all this?”

Romano went back inside and closed the door.

T
he following hours
involved a lot of walking around the hotel. After she was done with a preliminary write-up of the crime scene, Romano took herself down to the front desk to speak with the head concierge, a manicured man who managed to be both flamboyant and icy at the same time. The concierge and all of his staff refused to identify the deceased or any other guest. They would not seal the hotel either. There was
simply no way
to stop visitors checking in or out of the hotel without the advice of another manager, who eventually turned out to be one of the men from the room, Barry Nash. Barry told her he needed to consult an executive assistant manager, who in turn immediately insisted that they seek the advice of the Gold Point’s General Manager, a man named Jeff Bruno.

Bruno was on the mainland. Over the phone, he refused every request Romano made. He was polite, but during the two minutes Romano could speak with him, he gave no consideration at all to police procedure. There was, he said, another procedure.
Island procedure.

“Our guests come here, and stay with us, and trust us with their privacy. That doesn’t change because they’re no longer with us. And we absolutely do not shut the hotel down because a guest has passed. That’s ridiculous. Our security men are well trained. I believe emergency services have visited. The hotel is under no obligation—not with any previous law enforcement body I know of—to go into lock-down or to tender information. We’ll do what we can to assist you, but I won’t punish our other guests—or our future guests—for what my staff tells me appears to be an unfortunate accident.”

“Listen here, sir, the specifics are a police matter and the protocols I’m following are the only thing I’m interested in,” said Romano. “In the next couple of hours, you’re going to have homicide detectives from the mainland, a forensics team, the whole box and dice, trawling through your place here. If you—”

“Am I?” said Bruno.

“Are you what?”

The man sighed into the phone. “Put Barry back on.”

Barry Nash took the phone. He rested a hand on his barrel stomach and said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. Okay.” He rang off and turned to the staff around them. “Back to work, everyone. And you”—he frowned, levelling his eyes with Romano—“No go. You do what you have to, but this is the extent of our cooperation.”

“Are you joking?”

“’fraid not,” said Barry.

As she rode the lift back up to the scene, Romano took a call from Chandler on her mobile. He sounded worse than usual, angry almost. “I’ve got every dickhead in hospo calling me while I’m out on the boat, Romano. What the fuck is happening up there?”

“Two dead, and the scene looks like a dog’s breakfast. The hotel is fucking me every which way. State Crime are going to string me up by the tits when they see this mess.”

“Wha…did you call it in?”

“Of course I fucking called it in. Christ.”

An engine roared on Chandler’s end.

“This is bullshit,” he shouted. “I’m coming back.”

Romano fumed. She paced around in the elevator.

She hated lifts.

She hated the mirrors in them.

“Fuck,” she screamed.