Croc Country Page 3

  ‘No point,’ he said when she looked up. ‘Your head ain’t in it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Matt.’ She hadn’t wanted to play but now she felt bad about spoiling it for him.

  ‘’S’okay.’ He was setting the pieces back on their squares, removing some and shifting others about the board. ‘I can nut out problems instead.’ Cradling his chin in one hand, he became rapt in contemplation as Tilly rose and left him. Everybody had their little quirks, she thought, and Matt’s was chess. He knew all the famous end-games by heart and often worked them through, trying to find alternative moves to those the masters of chess had played.

  By nine o’clock the lights were out, but Tilly’s thoughts kept her wakeful. As a rule, physical tiredness had her falling asleep the moment her head touched the pillow but tonight she tossed and turned, unable to forget DS Burns’ suspicions. He couldn’t just have plucked the idea out of the ether, she reasoned, so something, somewhere, must have started him questioning the accepted account of Gerry’s death.

  Had some look-alike involved in criminal activity been wrongly identified as her late husband? Didn’t they say that everyone had a double? Tilly had never met her own, but there had been two instances she could recall when she had herself mistaken someone in the street for another person, so it was possible. Much more likely than Gerry having survived that night. Unbidden, her mind returned her to it, to that instant on the edge of darkness when she had asked him to watch their toddler because she was going below for a moment.

  ‘Okay, babe.’ She could see him at the wheel, the rakish, handsome face glancing from the binnacle to the child near his feet, his body silhouetted against the low smudge of mangroves looming ahead, and the two buoys that marked the entrance to the channel into the river mouth. Had it been as much her fault as his? She had known, hadn’t she, that he was concentrating on steering the boat? But it was only a minute of his time she had asked for – three at the very most. Was that too much to expect? She had been quick, her returning feet clearing the companionway a scant two minutes later, just in time to see Francie tumble overboard, like a chick falling from the nest.

  Tilly had screamed her daughter’s name and heard Gerry’s startled, guilty cry, ‘Christ!’ – or was that the moment she had loaded her own guilt upon him? And a second later he had dived after the toddler while the Esmerelda had lost her forward motion and began wallowing in the darkness and the outrushing tide.

  Chaos had ensued then so that now, in the aftermath, it was hard to disentangle the actual events from the terror that had surrounded them. She had rushed to the rail as he surfaced and he’d yelled something – ‘Get the wheel!’ perhaps – as he was swept sternwards. But she had ignored him, screaming her daughter’s name. She had seen him slash free the painter of the small boat they were towing, and a part of her gibbering mind understood that when he reached Francie he couldn’t hope to both hold her and swim against the tide. Straining her eyes, she had glimpsed the yellow of the bobbing life jacket and had breathed, ‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’ as Gerry reached it.

  He’d lift her into the boat. She’d be safe. Until that moment she had forgotten that a far greater danger than drowning lurked in these muddy, offshore waters. But her relief was short-lived, for the unmanned Esmerelda chose that moment to heel sideways and she had lost sight of them. They’d be all right though, both safely aboard. It wasn’t the easiest thing to climb into a boat from the water but Gerry was strong – he would manage. All she had to concentrate on was driving the Esmerelda to a point where she could pick them up without running them down.

  Would it have made a difference if she had remembered and activated the EPIRB, the emergency beacon, right then? Or put a call through on the radio? She had been desperate not to lose them and when it became plain that she had, precious time had already ticked away. Help had come but by then it was too late.

  The night and the ocean, or something worse, had swallowed her little family and the endless litany of once upon a time had begun.

  The fishing fraternity had rallied to her wild distress, quartering the seas about the islands until dawn. Rough, kindly men with salt-scarred skin plotted where the tides would carry a small boat, forced thermos tea upon her and organised a search of the islands’ shores. The police had arrived at daylight, and a light plane owned by a local charter pilot had flown a grid pattern over the waves. He was later joined by a small helicopter borrowed from some station muster. Together they had crisscrossed the Gulf waters around the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands and further out into the vast soulless blue where the plane reported no sightings beyond a prawn trawler, whom the police had immediately co-opted into the search. The helicopter pilot, however, who was young, and new to the north, brought back an excited description of the many big crocs he’d seen hauled up on the silty banks fronting the mangroves.

  Tilly’s nightmares had started then, peopled with scaley monsters devouring her child. Two days later her mother had briefly appeared, crying as she held her sobbing daughter, but Elaine Williams couldn’t stay. Her husband suffered from dementia; he had slipped away mentally from his family several years before and needed constant supervision. She had placed him in respite care for the brief duration of her visit and both of them knew she must return.

  ‘They’re gone, love. There’s nothing more you can do here, so come home with me,’ Elaine had pleaded.

  Tilly had refused. ‘I can’t leave them, Mum. I can’t. There’s a chance still,’ she cried fiercely. ‘There is! There must be!’

  That was when Sophie, contacted by Elaine, had stepped in instead. And now, when her life had shakily resumed its imperfect rhythmn and the scar over her injury was beginning to heal, the day’s visitors had torn it open again, bringing back the full horror of the event – along with the unanswered question she had been too angry and confused at the time to even think of, let alone ask.

  Why were the police looking for a dead man?

  Chapter Three

  The morning came with its wakening chorus of birdcalls, and when Tilly stepped out onto the verandah to view the brightening east, she found Mickey waiting on the balustrade, his throat pulsing with song. ‘You clever thing! How did you get up there?’

  As if to answer her, he flapped his lopsided wings and glided down to her feet, cocking his head to look at her with a bright dark eye.

  ‘All right, food’s on its way. Just let me get the kettle on first.’

  She fed him before starting on breakfast. The others were up; she could hear the shower running and one of the men had gone to start the pump, for water suddenly shot from the sprinklers dotted across the grass, startling a flutter of finches off the basin. Mostly double-bars and a few crimsons, she noted: no Gouldians this morning. Breakfast ready, she made lunches for all three, for they would, she knew, be working at the campground today, preparing it for the influx of visitors scheduled from the middle of the month onwards.

  Binboona was designated as bush camping, which meant basic showers, fireplaces and compostable toilets. No dogs, cats or generators allowed. The rangers kept the long grass cut around the camping area, supplied firewood and serviced the hot water boilers in the showers. Customers could also book a walking tour with a ranger. These varied from bird-watching strolls beside the river to serious treks into the bush along the edge of the escarpment. Though she had never seen them, Tilly had heard there were springs and caves in the area as well, a vast section of rocky pinnacles known as the Lost City and some rocks where Aboriginal paintings could be seen. These had been fenced off, Sophie had told her, to protect them. They were very old, the ochre in places faded into no more than a shadow on the sandstone.

  ‘I’d like to see that part of the place – the caves and the City – one day,’ Tilly had said, but so far it had never happened. Everyone was busy during the dry season and in summer there was the heat, the insects and boggy roads to dampen one’s taste for exploring. Last summer had been her first in the Gulf and she ha
dn’t enjoyed it. Perhaps this year she would go home to Mallacoota to see her parents – well, her mother; her stepfather had travelled so far from them he might as well have been in another country.

  Tilly had no siblings and, as a child, had found her stepfather incomprehensible. An enigmatic man, he was given to bouts of depression followed by fervent but short-lived enthusiams as unsettling, by their frenetic nature, as his previous gloom. He had been an unreliable parent, his path strewn with broken promises and sudden rages. She had learnt early not to depend upon him, and they had become as strangers long before dementia claimed him. But her mother loved him – or she had. Perhaps it was only duty that held her now. Tilly sighed, wondering in her secret heart if she still loved Gerry. If he were to turn up on the doorstep now, after all the anger and grief and heartache she had suffered, would she be able to forgive him and fall into his arms? She honestly didn’t know.

  Sophie’s arrival from the joeys’ pen put an end to her ruminations. Her cousin was frowning as she rinsed and sterilised the bottles.

  Tilly slanted a look at her. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘The little feller’s scouring a bit. I’ve put him in a new bag. Maybe you could mix an egg through his next feed? See if it helps.’

  ‘Will do. But you said he was fine yesterday. Is the Pretty Face okay?’

  ‘Seems to be. Course the little one was always weaker. Well’—she dumped the last teat in the sterilising fluid—‘if he makes it, he makes it. We can only do our best.’ But she would feel it if the joey died, Tilly knew. For all her tough, no-nonsense approach to living, Sophie loved the orphans they raised and took every death as a personal failure.

  Luke came in then, dark hair damp from the shower. ‘We gonna need the chainsaw today, boss?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sophie filled her cup from the teapot and sat down. ‘Both whipper snippers too, and plenty of fuel. You can’t even see where the firepits are. We might take the paint as well and give the stones a touch-up.’ The campground sites were marked by whitewashed rocks that faded over summer. ‘Do you want a job, Tilly?’

  ‘Why? What do you need done?’

  ‘The airstrip markers. When the mail plane’s been, I wondered if you could drive along the strip and chuck ’em on the back and bring them in? If we’re going to paint, they’re due a coat as well.’

  ‘Yes, of course. If there’s another brush I could do that this afternoon.’ She made a rapid assessment of the day’s tasks. ‘I haven’t much on once the baking’s done.’

  ‘Luke can have a look before we leave. There should be an old one in the supplies, and there’s turps in the shed. You don’t have to be too particular, just so long as they’re visible from the air.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tilly said, pleased by the idea of doing something different.

  After breakfast Luke vanished into the big shed next to the engine room and reappeared with a cobweb-infested brush and tin of white paint with a much-battered top.

  ‘I loosened the lid,’ he said. ‘You’d never get it off, else. And it’s water based – you won’t need the turps.’

  Tilly rolled her eyes at him. ‘I’m not quite useless, you know, but thanks anyway. Just leave it on the verandah.’ She was on her way to feed Harry and the possum, and for no reason, save that the morning was fresh and blue-skied, with a waft of wattle blossom in the air, her heart lifted. It was suddenly good to be alive and part of a team, with tasks to perform and animals to care for. She hummed a little as she placed the possum’s dish inside the dark box Matt had made for him within the netted shelter.

  ‘Wake up sleepyhead. Here’s your breakfast.’

  Tilly was painting when the vehicle arrived. She was in the big shed, squatting beside the last of the airstrip marker tyres and applying a second coat to it, when the rumble of the engine broke into her concentration. Her immediate thought was that the bullying Sergeant Burns had returned and her heart jolted uncomfortably. Cravenly she wished Sophie was around for support, but a moment later caught herself on the thought and stood up, paintbrush in hand. She had nothing to fear from the man; it was he who was in the wrong, badgering her as he had, and she would tell him so – before giving him his marching orders.

  Jamming the lid on the paint tin, Tilly stalked from the shed, forgetting the brush in her hand, and was brought up short by the sight of a totally different four-wheel drive parked near the house. The driver was standing with his back to her at the foot of the verandah steps gazing upwards. ‘Hello, the house,’ he called. He was tall and lanky, clad in the sort of multi-pocketed khaki that Luke wore, with a felt hat topping blond hair that curled over his shirt collar. He wore flat-heeled boots of the type that Bruce Hansen, manager of Spadgers Creek Station, used for driving, and one of his tanned forearms sported a bandage.

  ‘Were you looking for me?’ Tilly asked.

  He wheeled about in surprise and she made a small grimace. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Are you him – the botanist who rang? Sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I didn’t get your name.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Connor. Connor Doyle, and you must be Ms Barker?’ He looked momentarily confused, apologising in turn. ‘You don’t – I mean, I was expecting someone older.’

  ‘She is. Older. I’m Tilly, not Sophie. I’m the cook housekeeper for the ranger station. We didn’t know what day you were coming, but I made up your room in case – there is just you, I take it?’

  ‘Just me,’ he agreed. He had a pleasant-enough face, somewhat long-nosed, she thought and his brown eyes seemed incongruous with his light hair. He was very tall – what her mother would have described as ‘six foot up’. ‘What were you painting?’ he asked and Tilly glanced down in surprise at the brush she held.

  ‘Oh, just some old tyres for the airstrip, but I’ve finished. Come in and I’ll make you a cuppa. There’s nobody else home, I’m afraid. They’re all out at the camp, setting things up for the early tourists, you know.’ She gestured towards the house and he followed her up the steps. ‘Here we are. Make yourself at home, Connor, I’ll be back in a tick.’ She went out to the laundry to slosh water into an old feed tin and dump the brush. There was paint on her hands and her jeans; she scrubbed the former, decided there was nothing to be done about the latter, and feeling strangely shy, for it had been a while since she’d entertained visitors, returned to the kitchen.

  Connor was standing at the window with the binoculars to his eyes. He turned as Tilly entered, saying, ‘Brilliant idea, the bird basin. The little ’uns’ll feel so much safer there than drinking from the river.’

  ‘That was Luke’s intention. One of the rangers – he built it. He told me he caught a big catfish once that had a bush canary in it. He must’ve snapped it down from the surface when it came to drink. We see all sorts on the basin, finches, flycatchers . . . Would you rather tea or coffee, Connor?’

  ‘Oh, tea please, if it’s no trouble. So Luke’s keen on birds?’

  Tilly smiled. ‘Keen on everything that swims or grows or flies. The environment, and protecting it, really matters to him. Well, it does to Matt too, and Sophie of course, but Luke’s still young and his enthusiams tend to bubble over. But I understand botany’s your field?’

  ‘Yep, field work and research. What about you?’ His gaze, she noticed, had fallen to the wedding ring on her hand. ‘Is the other chap your husband?’

  ‘Matt? No,’ she said composedly. ‘I’m widowed. I am related to Sophie Barker though – she’s my cousin. I got the job through her.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’re very young for that.’ He laid the binoculars aside and drew a chair to the table where Tilly had poured his tea. ‘Thanks. So how do you find it here? Not too quiet for you?’

  ‘No.’ Sitting down, she offered the cake she’d cut and stirred her own tea. ‘I’m used to it and I love caring for the animals the others find – injured ones and orphans. We have a couple of joeys at present, a possum that Matt found with its foot jammed in the crack of a hollow tree, a brolga and a b
utcherbird who broke his wing somehow. I expect we’ll never get rid of him.’

  ‘No, real opportunists, they are,’ Connor agreed. He had a friendly smile and seemed to be enjoying the cake. Tilly took a piece herself to encourage him. ‘Was the brolga a chick?’

  She frowned. ‘Full grown but damaged. The poor thing’s lost half his beak. He nearly starved before they found him. Luke thinks it was a dogtrap that did it. I suppose it’s possible – there are any number of dingoes about and I understand that their scalps are worth quite a bit. Poor Harry will be a permanent resident, I think.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘It’s what I call him.’

  ‘And he’s doing okay? How long have you had him?’

  Tilly moved her fingers counting the months. ‘September last year, I think. When the tourists were still about anyway. Which is why they couldn’t work out who could’ve set the trap. Too many people camping and coming and going, and it’s a big place. There are just three rangers after all, so there’s only so much they can patrol what with the tours and the talks . . . Education is part of Binboona’s remit,’ she explained conscientiously. ‘But honestly, some people! They’d cut down the last living tree if you let them, and kill the last creature if it brought in money.’

  ‘So you’re a conservationist too?’ he said with a faint smile.

  Realising that her voice had risen, Tilly flushed. ‘I suppose I am,’ she said stiffly. ‘Look, I have to get on. I’ll show you your room, shall I, and leave you to settle in and look around? Dinner’s around six-thirty if the others are back then, later if not. I expect you carry your own, but there are reference books on the local flora and fauna in the lounge, and a very good map of the property on the wall in Sophie’s office. It shows all the roads, and where both the river crossings are. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you want to check it out.’