The Summertime Dead Read online

  The Summertime Dead

  Robert Engwerda

  A Mitchell Mystery

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Text copyright © 2016 Robert Engwerda

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are imaginative creations or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN: 9780994595607

  Cover design by Pier Vido. Cover photograph Pixabay.

  Formatting and file conversion by Pier Vido.

  Publisher: Robert Engwerda

  robertengwerda.net

  For Pam

  Special thanks also to: Mark Biss, Rod and Di Case,

  Dianne Diamond Walford, Jo Ride, Maggy Saldais, Roger Shelton,

  Pier Vido, Nick Walford, Liz Waud

  Also available at Amazon.com: Whistle Down The Wire

  (A Mitchell Mystery, Book 2)

  VICTORIA, 1966

  Chapter 1

  They had only been missing two weeks, but two weeks is a long time when there’s a hot sun burning over the Northern Plains.

  It was summer, the height of the fruit-picking season, and the town of Mitchell, sun-beaten, weary and irascible, sweltered under a mantle of heat. Shoppers gathered in the shade of store verandas talking hopefully of rain as an old Labrador dozed at their feet. The dog was briefly disturbed by a window blind being drawn, and then by the greengrocer hosing down the footpath outside his shop, but little else stirred and it returned to its slumber.

  Across the road outside the Union Hotel two men in stained shorts and blue singlets sat on a bench telling tales and flicking cigarette ash at the still air. Inside the hotel more of their like perched at the bar red-eyed and taciturn while downing glasses of beer as though a shortage was imminent. It was Saturday and too hot to work, even as heavily laden pear trees wilted in parched orchards beyond the town.

  For all their disorderly habits these footloose itinerants were indispensible to the town in summer, men who camped in the back of vans or in fruit pickers’ huts or in dingy hotel rooms in between sporadic bouts of work in the cannery or on orchards. Their possessions scant, their disturbances frequent, they also became the first port of call when police wanted to inquire about a lawn mower that might have disappeared from a backyard, or when cigarettes were shoplifted from Potters general store, or as women’s underwear went missing from clotheslines.

  So it came as no surprise that when the local boy and girl vanished attention naturally turned toward this drifting, raucous scrap of humanity. At the Lions Club’s district meeting its governor was adamant that feral fruit pickers were holding the teenagers prisoner in an orchard somewhere for various nefarious purposes. And if it wasn’t that, he continued, the idea growing in his head even as he said it, the Mafia had planted them six feet under for stumbling onto an illegal drug crop.

  But the truth was elusive. A common tale – to smiles all round – had the pair eloping in the first flush of love. They would turn up in their own good time, people said, married and full of remorse when they realised the fuss they had caused. According to the proprietor of the town’s tyre store, however – and he had heard this from someone in the know – the boy had made the girl pregnant before they’d both been bundled out of the state by her parents. Yet others still had them taking off with the pop group in town that night, in a modern day equivalent of running off to join the circus.

  To many others, however, the couple’s disappearance represented nothing more than the usual summertime comings and goings. And if the suspects didn’t happen to be itinerant workers, some believed the police had to look no further than to the missing teenagers’ parents, who remained holed up in their houses with their curtains drawn, as if they had something to hide.

  Except that near the end of that long fortnight a high school boy out shooting rabbits near the Waranga Basin dumped his bicycle by a dirt track. Shielding his eyes from the sun, and with a good-sized buck limp in the old school bag slung over his shoulder, he squinted over a bleached paddock to where a warren had been dug among a clump of acacia trees. As he soldiered his way toward the burrows dead grass tangled high about his legs. He felt the sun’s sting on his back. And then on passing a great, solitary eucalypt he walked right into a crippling stench. He checked his step and scanned the ground around him but saw nothing and dismissed the smell as rotting carrion, probably a dead sheep, he supposed. He was in a hurry anyway because of the rabbits, especially when he saw a young one slip through a fence ahead of him. He chased the rabbit beyond the fence to the acacias, the smell stubbornly chasing him.

  The boy’s shirt clung damply by the time he entered the acacias meagre shade. Eager to start shooting, he took up a position with a clear view of a burrow entrance. If I had nets, he thought, and ferrets, this would already be over.

  But as he lay in the dirt with twigs pressing against his belly, and after an hour or more had passed and he’d fired two shots at nothing in particular, he knew the napping rabbits would have to keep for another day.

  As he retraced his steps through the fence and across the paddock the earlier stench waylaid him again. He searched for where it might be coming from but the grass here was thicker than anywhere else he’d walked today – dried out and snakey, yellow, ripe to be set fire to if he had a box of matches handy – and at first glance he couldn’t spy anything other than a flock of thirsty grass parrots wheeling by overhead.

  Thinking he would cut a course directly back to the track, and again conscious of the buck’s soft weight in his bag, he quickened his step until the smell blew his way again, too powerfully to ignore this time. Like a hunting dog he raised his nose trying to sniff a trail across the paddock and after turning full circle he thought he’d worked out where it was coming from. He watched his feet push a path through the yellow grass, the odour rising stronger and fiercer until he knew he was close.

  And then it came upon him like thunder; a crumpled mess sprawled at his feet, the smell overpowering and horrific. Having expected a decaying animal he couldn’t make sense of it at first. He gagged on the stench as he too
k in what he was looking at: a matted clump of brown hair, a filthy white top and then, as he peered closer with forearm pressed against his nose, what had to be someone’s bare backside and legs. Someone face down. A girl.

  He didn’t want to look, but couldn’t stop staring either. Until he took a step backward, dumbfounded by what he was seeing. It wasn’t true, he began panicking. What would someone be doing out here? A real body, dead, just laying there like that?

  And then he hurried away, thinking he might be blamed for it somehow. He stumbled and blundered his way across the paddock, suddenly disoriented as his mind turned in all directions as he raced through the tall grass so he couldn’t remember where the track was, or where he’d left his bloody bike.

  It was only when he neared the great eucalypt again that he almost ran over the second body, leaping in fright to avoid it.

  Chapter 2

  The sixteen-year-old girl found dead in the paddock was Rosaleen Faraday. The nineteen-year-old boy found a hundred yards away beneath the tall eucalypt was Max Quade.

  It was late afternoon when two senior officers from the Mitchell police station arrived at the scene and reluctantly made their way across the paddock, the enormity of the murders beginning to sink in. Senior Sergeant Lloyd Cole, with two weeks to think about it, had been dreading this moment. There was already the stench.

  ‘Twenty-odd miles from where they were last seen,’ he remarked to his offsider, Sergeant Terry Holloway. ‘You wouldn’t think they made it here under their own steam. Let’s take a look at the girl first.’

  Holloway nodded as they moved carefully through the long grass toward the first body, pausing by a neat cairn of clothing: underpants, skirt and black shoes, the clothes folded meticulously.

  ‘Odd that they’d be left like this,’ Cole said, noting the position. ‘The boy who found the bodies. Did he see this, too?’

  ‘If he did, he didn’t say,’ Holloway answered. ‘He was just a lad out shooting rabbits, or trying to. I’d be certain he didn’t have anything to do with it.’

  ‘Boys and their rifles, hey? Rabbits or magpies or swallows nests under bridges, anything living. Pull out the old rifle and have a shot. That’s what boys do.’

  ‘It was no boy that killed these two, though.’

  ‘No,’ Cole agreed. ‘Only an adult could do something like this.’ They stood near where the girl’s body lay, handkerchiefs to their faces. ‘If you don’t want to look I can manage on my own. Terry?’

  ‘No, I’ll help,’ his sergeant insisted.

  It wasn’t just the smell, the badly decomposing body, or the protesting flies. It was when they carefully turned the girl over and Holloway began retching that Cole was left examining the body on his own. He’d half-expected and understood Holloway’s reaction. He wasn’t that mad himself about what lay before him – a blackened, suppurating mess of human carcass.

  Whoever had killed the girl had done awful damage to her face, Cole now saw. And probably bashed her skull in with something heavy. He returned the body to its original position and moved slowly about it without disturbing it further. Whether it was the bludgeoning or something else that had killed her would be for the coroner or someone else to determine. But there was something obscene about the way she sprawled naked from the waist down with her legs apart. He wouldn’t need the coroner to tell him the detail of what had happened.

  Cole covered her with one of the blankets they’d brought with them and they walked away in shocked silence, treading as lightly as they could manage as they searched the ground further away from the body. They found nothing else that might help them.

  ‘The grass has been trampled here and there, but after all this time it’s not going to tell us who’s come and gone, except for the boy shooting here earlier. But the second body is over by that tree. Don’t expect him to be in any better nick than the girl, either,’ Cole warned.

  But the second body, lying on its back, wasn’t as badly decomposed as the first, shade from the towering eucalypt having spared it the worst of the sun.

  ‘Shot,’ Cole quickly saw. ‘Right here. See?’

  He pointed to where blood had darkened and dried at the young man’s temple, saw where it had run down his face. Beside him they discovered a spent shell and examined it where it lay.

  ‘A .22,’ Holloway said. ‘It won’t be easy whittling down the owner around here. Are you certain it’s them?’

  ‘Given the state she’s in I couldn’t be absolutely certain about the girl, but I’ve seen young Max before. There’s no doubt it’s him, so I guess there’s no doubt it’s her, too,’ Cole said, still staring at the bullet wound as he leant closer to it. ‘It’s a cruel thing isn’t it?’

  ‘Worse than cruel,’ Holloway mumbled.

  They lay their second blanket over Quade and drove back to Mitchell leaving a constable to keep watch.

  *

  With several of the station’s staff away on leave, secretary Janice Fullbright was run off her feet answering queries at the front counter and helping out with paperwork and telephone calls.

  ‘The busiest time of the year and everyone’s on holidays. Now these poor kids killed. So tell me again why I’m doing this job?’ she asked Cole in exasperation as she added a sheaf of correspondence to an absent sergeant’s already overflowing in-tray.

  ‘I suppose mainly for the generous pay and holidays,’ he answered drily, grateful for a moment’s distraction.

  ‘Thanks for reminding me then. I’ll let you know when either of them happens to show up.’

  ‘Have we heard when the Melbourne boys are arriving?’

  ‘As soon as they can get here.’

  ‘Which might be …?’

  ‘Anyone’s guess. ’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It could even be in the morning, they said.’

  ‘Great,’ he said ironically. ‘Hopefully the word won’t spread too quickly. I wouldn’t want half the town knowing before the parents do.’

  ‘They won’t be able to look, will they, before the Homicide people have come?’

  ‘Exactly right, Janice.’

  Holloway volunteered to prepare a brief for the homicide squad while Cole pulled out the teenagers’ file from the cabinet and sat at his desk.

  Over the last two weeks he’d gotten to know their families well. Gotten to know the boy’s mates and the girl’s friends. At the station they’d already formed one or two opinions about the cause of the pair’s vanishing, only to have them contradicted now by the discovery of their bodies.

  He read the case notes and then put the file away again.

  The sequence of events leading to their disappearance was clear enough to him. Friday night two weeks ago Rosaleen Faraday and her best friend Tracey Piper had been dropped off at the Civic Centre by Rosaleen’s father. A pop group from Melbourne was playing. Noisy, twangy electric guitars, Cole remembered. But the girls didn’t go straight inside, instead meeting two boys outside the venue, one of them Max Quade. The quartet had hung around the Centre waiting for Faraday’s boyfriend Lee Furnell to arrive but when he didn’t they got into Quade’s car, a green FJ Holden, and drove to the lake just outside of town.

  According to Piper and the other boy’s account, Quade produced some alcohol from the boot of his car and the group began drinking. The girls quickly became affected by it, especially Faraday who had insisted on her and Quade going into the backseat. According to Piper – and they all knew Lee Furnell was Faraday’s boyfriend – there was sexual activity between the pair and she and the other boy insisted on being driven back to the Civic Centre. They didn’t want to be dragged into whatever trouble was certain to erupt later when Furnell discovered what had happened. He could have a temper, they conceded.

  So Quade drove them back to the dance. After checking again for Furnell and being told he was working late at his f
ather’s garage, Quade and Faraday told Piper they were going back to the lake.

  And that was the last anyone saw of them.

  When Mrs Faraday woke at two the next morning and found her daughter’s bed unslept in she roused her husband and he went out looking for her, growing first concerned and then agitated as he drew a blank with every door he banged on. The police were called soon after.

  Max Quade’s Holden was found by the lake not long after, but there was no sign of the missing couple or any indication of what might have happened to them. Cole and Holloway’s interviewing began that same day and first thing Monday morning the pair was put on the missing persons list.

  Inevitably it was Faraday’s boyfriend, Lee Furnell, who became their first person of interest. Maybe he had gone looking for his girlfriend after finishing at the garage, Cole thought. Maybe he had found her and Quade in the backseat of Quade’s car. Maybe things had boiled over after that. He could see how it might happen.

  He went to the window and listened for trucks grinding down through the gears on their way to the fruit cannery. He thought of the Saturday night fights outside the town’s hotels and how he wouldn’t be sorry to see summer’s end. He thought of his wife Nancy and what was happening to her, and how he couldn’t seem to do anything to stop her drinking.

  But then, didn’t he have his own faults, too?

  Chapter 3

  The following morning a troop of newspaper and television reporters parked themselves outside the police station, loosening their ties and poking at their cameras. Cole made a brief appearance and confirmed the discovery of two bodies without revealing where they were found. He told the reporters the Homicide Squad was on its way, and that all inquiries should be directed to them from now on.

  So the word was already out, Cole thought. It was too little, too late, from him so far as the parents were concerned. Quade’s family was Anglican, the girl’s Catholic, so he called the priests and asked them to alert the parents about the possibility of the dead being theirs. The parents would be asked to make a formal identification at some point during the afternoon.