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DENNIS DOUGLAS AN OLD MATE OF HER EX-HUSBAND'S Harry Dover heard of Merle's death in the pub at Nelia on New Year's Eve, 1957. He had come into town—what there was of it, a pub and a general store beside the railway line—thinking he might pick up a quid or two at the picnic races, but there were too many dicks in the paddock. Every copper in the state seemed to be on to him these days. He stayed out of harm's way at the end of the bar through the afternoon. In the six o'clock crush he overheard three men he had never seen before talking about an accident in the bush. It was a pretty gruesome story. Bloke and his de facto out in the mulga dropping trees for sleeper logs—accident with a motor- powered saw—bloke driving eighty miles on bad roads—dying woman wrapped in a blanket, unconscious, on the passenger seat. Stories like that were common enough, but this one had an edge to it. It was her hair had killed her. Her long red hair had caught on the blade of the circular saw and the scalp was ripped off. They only said her name at the end. Harry didn't know what to think at first. He remembered her the last time he had seen her, in the courtroom, how she hadn't looked at him, hadn't spoken. He had wanted to go up to her at the end, when they let her off, and tell her that it wasn't her fault. It was just that rotten day, the day nothing went right. But there was no opportunity. She stayed talking to the Solicitor and the sergeant. He had a train to catch. The story came back to him late at night. He woke up sweating, with a sour stomach, and made it in a rush to the tiny wash-basin in the corner and spewed his guts up. When he turned on the tap the foetid smell of the local bore-water invaded his senses. Rotten back-country grog. His system couldn't take it these days. Then the car-horns started blaring outside and the noise of somebody belting a corrugated-iron tank with a heavy 137 shifting spanner and through the doorway opening onto the verandah he saw the lights of rockets shooting up over the showgrounds the other side of the railway line. It was 1958. Harry Dover fell back on the bed and closed his eyes. Merle Mclvor was dead. Life was a bit hard on some people. Nothing had gone right the day of Harry's visit to theMc- Ivors' place. Harry had got off the train at Charters Towers, in the caver- nous station shed at 10.15, with a sense of relief. A country town at last. Somewhere you wouldn't get pinched for carrying your own suitcase up the street. As he was handing his ticket in he looked back up the plat- form and saw the big sandy detective from Townsville ease his way into the station manager's office. He must have come down on the same train. Harry's brow creased. Had there been a tip- off? Easy now, he thought. There were any number of other reasons why a plain-clothes cop might come down the line. He took a taxi to the pub. Fred's blonde blousy daughter, Beryl, was in the office. When Harry asked for her dad she looked at him oddly. 'Didn't you hear, Harry?' she said, 'Dad died six weeks ago.' Harry started to apologize. 'It's alright Harry,' she said. 'You couldn't have known. He took a powder one night and passed out on big Alan's front verandah. We were all having a drink in the kitchen. We loaded him into the car. We didn't think anything of it. We brought him back here and put him to bed. He didn't wake up.' She came out of the office and led him up the stairs. 'Mum's taking it pretty hard,' she said. 'She's a bit crook herself.' In the room, as Beryl's heavy body clumped down the stairs, Harry put the suitcase on the bed. He was getting nervy. First the dick at the station, then Fred knocked off by a powder. Get a grip on yourself, he thought. How would she know anything? Inside the suitcase were some clothes, some letters, a roll of sticky tape, a Zane Grey western, a glossy issue of Man full of 138 cheesecake and suggestive cartoons and an old dark brown glad- stone bag. Harry didn't have a key to it. He didn't want to know what it contained. Aman he ditln't know and would never see again had asked him to take a bag down the line. The less you knew the less could be got out of you. Harry Dover's apprenticeship had consisted of four years in the backstreets of Melbourne, six years in a Commando unit during the war, and a spell in King's Cross afterwards. He had learnt to be watchful but not inquisitive. Death interested him, and what was going on. He knew better than to let his interest in such subjects affect his feclings. He had a hunch that the bag contained a parcel of white powder, which could be coke, or benzedrine, or even castor sugar. There was a rumour that the opening of the National Ser- vice camp just outside this hot and dusty country town had created a market here for stuff that would normally have circu- lated through the night clubs in Brisbane and the odd outlet up the coast. A network of carriers and distributors had sprung into being, obscure, anonymous people, who stayed out of sight. Harry had been asked to carry a bag down the line. He wouldn't be asked again. The powder that fInished Fred off hadn't come out of this load. That was for sure. Harry slipped the sticky tape into his pocket, took the glad- stone bag, and went downstairs. He rang a taxi from the public phone hanging on the wall, and waited for it, standing outside on the hotel verandah. After the muggy air of the coast the dry shining sunlight on the bluemetal comforted his eyes. Tall spear-grass lined the road and the unused shunting line in the middle of the street. The fence of the small general store opposite the hotel carried a brown and orange-painted advertisement for Kinkara Tea. There was nobody about except an old lady, diminutive in height but fat, and stoop-shouldered with her weight of years, who waddled contemplatively through the heat-waves towards her shopping. Harry got out of the taxi two blocks behind the house he had been told about, and walked to it, as he had been directed, by side streets. He opened the gate in the tall fence and crossed the yard with the lemon tree to a lean-to garage. 139 The door of the garage was open. A door and a window in the side-wail of the house opened into the garage. The window was slightly raised and the door was ajar. Against the back wail of the garage was a gladstone bag like the one he was carrying. He went in and changed them over. Everything was going fine. Then the cockatoo shuffled side- ways around the door and said 'Polly want a cracker!' There was a sound of doors opening and bare feet on lino. At the same time the voice of an old woman said angrily 'Piss off.' The barrel of a sawn-off .22 slid across the window-ledge. The old woman Harry could not see at the window said to him, 'You. Bugger off.' A hand came round the door and seized the cockatoo, which screeched indignantly and flapped its wings. Harry made himself scarce. Down towards the main street he went into a pub looking for a toilet cubicle. In the bag he had just picked up he found an envelope con- taining the halves of four fifty-pound notes. He had been given the other halves of the four notes in Townsville. He laid them out on the closed lid of the toilet-stool and pieced them together with the roll of sticky-tape. Beats working for a living, he thought with the two hundred pounds tucked into his top-pocket. It was time for a drink. In the bar, with a beer in front of him, the episode in the garage rankled a bit. Harry didn't like people having the drop on him, and old ladies with horse pistols always reminded him of Squizzy Taylor's end, being mown down in an upstairs room in Carlton by his own old lady with a .38. Because she was his mother she had got off. No Melbourne jury ever believed that a woman would knowingly shoot her own son. In the garage, at the time, it had amused him. Why had they panicked in the house when the cockatoo came out? Either they were amateurs or they thought he was one. The thought of incompetent amateurs pointing a-gun at him annoyed Harry. That was the kind of situation in which accidents happened. 140 The two coppers were inside the doors before Harry realized they were coming in. Harry studied the bottles on the wall be- hind the bar. It would take about fifteen seconds for their eyes to get accustomed to the shady interior after the glare outside.

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