The Ghost of Howlers Beach Read online

  ‘No one of that name here,’ said a man with one arm and a face with the familiar chlorine gas scars from the War. His remaining hand held a spade with a driftwood handle almost like a weapon.

  ‘We know there isn’t,’ said the sergeant shortly. ‘He died yesterday.’

  None of the watching men showed any surprise. They know already, thought Butter. Olive, Gil and Tish must have told them. He looked around. He still hadn’t seen them anywhere.

  The sergeant sighed. ‘Mate, we’re not here to cause trouble—’

  ‘Who says you’re our mate?’ called out a younger man from the back.

  Dr O’Bryan stepped forward. ‘Mr Painter died up at our house on the headland last night. Some children arrived later looking for their dog . . .’

  ‘Woofer,’ said Butter. ‘Their names are Olive, Gil and Tish Painter.’

  ‘The man was their uncle,’ said Dr O’Bryan quietly. ‘We’re just here to tell his family what happened and to offer our condolences.’

  ‘Why does it need four coppers to offer condolences?’ demanded the man with the spade.

  ‘Because some of you Unemployed Workers’ Union blokes are always ready for a stoush,’ muttered one of the policemen.

  The sergeant silenced him with a look. ‘No stoushes.’

  ‘What do you call it when you lot evict a family from their home when almost no one can pay rent these days? Throw them in the street and punch any blokes who tried to protect their families? Ain’t that a stoush? You going to throw us all out of here too?’

  ‘No,’ said the sergeant quietly. ‘We just want to talk to any relatives of the man who died.’

  The men didn’t move. Nor did they speak.

  ‘Is there a Mr Painter here?’ The sergeant raised his voice.

  Still no one spoke. Butter was conscious of faces looking out of the hut doorways, frightened children, nervous women . . . and suddenly he realised why they were all so scared. Dad owned this land, but he’d given no permission for anyone to build there. People had just come, first a couple of tents, then some huts, and the settlement had grown as more people became homeless. Even if Dad had given them permission to be there, the local council would still have had to agree to any building, and the council hadn’t been asked either. None of these people had any legal right to live there. The police really could demolish these buildings, make the people homeless, destroy the vegetable gardens they needed so badly . . .

  Butter stepped forward. ‘If the police wanted a stoush they wouldn’t have let me come. I met Gil and Olive and Tish yesterday. I want to say how sorry I am too. And my Aunts have made them a fruitcake,’ he added. There was also a leg-of-lamb bone with plenty of meat on it wrapped in greaseproof paper for Woofer.

  The men glanced at each other. At last the one with the spade said, ‘All right, we’ll talk. But there ain’t any family called Painter here. Never has been.’

  ‘I might have got the name wrong,’ said Butter. ‘Is there a Mr . . . Bainter? Or a name that sounds like that?’

  ‘No,’ said the man with the spade.

  ‘Where do Gil, Olive and Tish live then?’ Butter asked.

  ‘No kids called that here.’

  ‘But I met them yesterday: they came up to the . . . house!’ Butter was embarrassed to use the word castle, there among the ragged tents and kerosene-tin or fruit-box shanties. ‘Gil and Olive and Tish were playing cricket on the other side of the headland. They’ve got a dog too. It was grey, but we gave it a bath and now it’s white . . .’

  ‘Only dog here is Roy, and she’s a red kelpie,’ said a man with a beard halfway down his chest and scars crawling out of the beard up across his forehead. He still held his fishing line, just a round of wood with the line, a few small stones instead of proper sinkers and a fish hook attached to it, with a hessian sack tied at his waist for anything he caught. He caught Butter’s eye and grinned. ‘I reckon you might have been seeing ghosts, boy. Don’t you know about ghosts on Howlers Beach?’ He gazed up at the sky. ‘Three convict kids got lost a hundred years ago and died there on the beach.’

  ‘Stop trying to scare the boy,’ said Dr O’Bryan shortly. ‘I’ve never seen any ghosts on the beach — or heard about any lost convict children either.’

  ‘Just tellin’ you what I heard,’ said the man innocently.

  The sergeant said something quietly to the policeman next to him, obviously discussing whether they should search the tents and huts. That would frighten the kids even more, Butter thought. He moved over to the sergeant.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Butter said softly. ‘But I’m pretty sure on a nice day like this all the kids here would have been playing outside. When we came I could see all of them from the car. None of them were the ones I met yesterday. I don’t think you’ll find them inside the huts or the tents either. They wouldn’t have had time to duck in or hide before I had a chance to see them.’

  The sergeant looked at him with respect. ‘Think you’re right there, sonny. But there are other questions we have to ask too.’

  Like about the skull, thought Butter, just as his father said, ‘Sergeant, remember that . . . item . . . is at least a year old, and probably much older — though not a hundred years,’ he added with a sharp look at the man who’d talked of ghosts. ‘None of these shacks have been here for more than three years, and most not even that long. I know,’ he continued, ‘I’ve lived here all my life except when I left for the War.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘If there’s been a crime my relatives and I are more likely suspects than anyone in this camp.’

  The sergeant seemed to absorb that. Finally he nodded. He turned to the waiting men again. ‘If anyone happens to remember the Painters, pass along that Dr O’Bryan at the . . . er . . . Very Small Castle . . . on the headland can tell them anything more they want to know, like when the poor chap will be buried and where.’

  Still no one spoke. Then a voice from the back asked, ‘Just out of curiosity, where would a bloke like that be buried? Some pauper’s grave?’

  ‘Next Thursday, at eleven am, at Rookwood Cemetary,’ said Dr O’Bryan quietly. ‘My family will be there. He died in my arms, so I’ll see he’s buried properly.’

  Once again the men were silent. But the silence was almost respectful now. At last someone muttered, ‘Good on you, mate.’

  The mob began to disperse, back to the shacks, the gardens, the beach. The police got back in their car. Dr O’Bryan had just opened the Rolls Royce door when a small hand tugged Butter’s shirt.

  ‘Hey, kid!’ A dirty brown face stared at him: a girl of about ten years old.

  ‘Yes?’ replied Butter quietly.

  ‘That cake. For Tish. I could give it to her.’

  ‘You mean she is here?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl quickly. ‘She ain’t here.’

  ‘Do you mean she WILL be here?’ asked Butter, just as softly.

  ‘No. She ain’t going to be here either. But I can give her that cake.’

  Would Tish and the others really get the cake? Did it matter if another hungry kid got it instead? Butter reached into the back seat and handed over the brown-paper parcel, tied with string, and then the bone.

  The small face vanished, as did the cake and the parcel in its greaseproof paper.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dinner was mostly silent. The Aunts never did talk much after a visit to Cousin Dawn’s, except to say Cousin Merv was ‘much the same’.

  The phone rang just as Jenkins served the peach pudding with ice cream. (Auntie Cake was in love with the new refrigerator. She and Cookie made a different kind of ice cream every second day. But Esmé had told Butter that what they really made was a mess.)

  ‘That will be for me. Excuse me,’ said Dr O’Bryan. He slipped out into the hall to the phone stand. Butter waited for him to come back to say he’d been called out to a patient. It didn’t happen often these days, as his job was mostly diagnosing diseases other doctors found too difficult to identify. Instead, Dr
O’Bryan just sat down again and began to eat his pudding.

  ‘Nothing urgent,’ he said to Aunt Peculiar’s enquiring look.

  The Aunts listened to a concert on the wireless after dinner, while Dr O’Bryan worked in his study. Butter tried to listen to the concert too. But even the magic of a real live orchestra sounding over the air-waves from a box wasn’t enough to keep his attention.

  He kept thinking of the small face peering at him from the shack, reaching for the fruitcake. The thin man who’d died from hunger. The police digging in the landslide on the beach . . .

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said quietly to the Aunts and left the living room. He knocked on the study door.

  ‘Come in.’ Dr O’Bryan sat at his desk. His study was the only room in the house not adorned by Aunt Peculiar’s paintings. Instead, charts of various muscles or organs of the body hung from the one wall that wasn’t taken up with windows or bookcases. A half skeleton, whose name was George, dangled from a stand in the corner. Dad had taught him every bone in the skeleton: the tibia, fibula, phalanges.

  Butter had loved this room, the smell of hundreds of books, as if facts had a scent. You could almost hear the books whispering to you: ‘Read us. Read us. Let us teach you.’ But that had been before Mum died. He only came in with Dad’s permission now.

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry. I’m interrupting you,’ said Butter uncertainly.

  ‘It’s nothing important. Just an article on using facial shapes to diagnose diseases,’ Dr O’Bryan hesitated. ‘Thank you for not asking who the phone call was from. I don’t want your aunts to know about the bodies on the beach.’

  ‘Bodies?’ asked Butter quickly. ‘More than one?’

  ‘The call was from the sergeant. They’ve found two bodies,’ said Dr O’Bryan. ‘Adults,’ he added. ‘Don’t pay any attention to what that man said about convict children. If there’d ever been any story like that someone in the household would have heard about it. The first skeleton is several years old, as I thought from the skull. But the other is not much more than a year old, if that.’

  Butter shivered. ‘Murdered?’

  ‘I spoke to the forensic pathologist. He said it’s impossible to tell how either person died, but there are no signs of violence on either of the skeletons.’

  ‘But they could have been poisoned. Or suffocated or drowned . . .’

  ‘Butter, have you been reading my medical textbooks?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Butter. ‘But only a few times, ages ago. You didn’t say I couldn’t,’ he added.

  ‘I didn’t say you could either.’ To Butter’s surprise his father smiled, an almost proper smile. ‘I sneaked in and read my father’s books when I was your age. And he had said I wasn’t supposed to. But don’t tell your aunts about the bodies. Women shouldn’t be upset by things like that.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Butter curiously. He’d often wondered why women were allowed to know about some things that were hard to bear, like Cousin Merv, but not others.

  ‘They’re not as strong as men are.’

  The Aunts have lost the men they loved, thought Butter. They brought Dad up when Grandma died at his birth. They seemed pretty strong to Butter. But there was something more urgent to ask. ‘Dad, if the last body isn’t very old maybe there really could be a murderer loose. Maybe the murderer put the bodies on the headland so no one would find them. But then the storm came and caused the landslide.’

  Dr O’Bryan shook his head. ‘That would have made sense ten years ago, with only the castle out here. No one would see anything if they burned the bodies at night. But too many people at the susso camp are out at night now, checking their rabbit traps before an eagle or someone else gets anything they’ve caught.’

  ‘Maybe the murderer didn’t know the camp was there, if he came at night. They don’t have gaslight over at the susso camp, probably not even many lamps or candles.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Dr O’Bryan dubiously.

  ‘Dad . . . how much food do people get on the susso?’

  ‘About ten shillings’ worth a week for a married man, five shillings’ for a single man. I think they get a bit of meat, some potatoes, loaves of bread and tea and sugar. If you’re really curious, I’ll ask the sergeant if he calls again. They give out the rations at the police station.’

  ‘But that’s five miles away! A ten-mile walk every week just to get food. Why don’t the police take the rations down to the camp? The police have a car!’

  ‘Because the camp is illegal,’ said Dr O’Bryan patiently. ‘The police here ignore it — we’re the only people who might complain and we haven’t. But if the police officially admit it’s there then they’d have to evict everyone.’

  ‘But the camp people have nowhere else to go. How can the police evict people who don’t have any other homes?’

  Dr O’Bryan sighed. ‘I don’t understand it either, Butter. I won’t say things were perfect before the stock market crash — there were too many unemployed men even then, especially men who’d been wounded in the War. But when the market crashed . . .’

  ‘WHY did it crash? Why are we in a depression?’

  Dad closed his eyes in thought for a moment, then settled in to explain. Like he used to, thought Butter, swallowing. ‘I think because too many banks gave too many loans that could never be repaid — not just the War loans, but for houses and businesses or even things like jewellery. It’s hard to explain what it was like after the Armistice. We thought we’d won the War to end all wars, that things would just get better and better. People wanted to have a good time, to make money. So they threw parties and danced and spent money, and borrowed money, and then more money and more money, and then they couldn’t pay back their debts. Then when a few banks ran out of money to give back to those who put it there, people got scared and withdrew their money from the other banks or stopped buying things. More banks went broke. People lost their savings. People had no money to buy anything, so even more people lost their jobs . . .’

  ‘And that’s what caused the Depression?’

  ‘Pretty much. But the drought doesn’t help, and the low prices for wool and wheat overseas mean that even those who can grow a crop can’t afford to export it. And then there are the enormous War loans we have to pay back to England.’

  ‘Auntie Cake says we shouldn’t have to pay England for the guns we used to save England in the War.’

  Dr O’Bryan shrugged. ‘I have enough to do without getting involved with politics.’

  ‘Will the Depression ever get better?’

  ‘It has to,’ said Dr O’Bryan.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that either. Maybe I just hope it will — like I hope there’ll never be another war or that you won’t ever get sick or . . .’ Dr O’Bryan stopped, as if he’d said too much already. ‘Some things are just too big for any one person to do anything about,’ he said instead, and Butter remembered Auntie Cake’s despair. ‘It’s your bedtime. Church tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Butter. He glanced out the window. The southerly buster was blowing, as it did most afternoons and evenings, a cold wind with tiny teeth of rain, despite the day’s summer heat. The waves would be battering the rocks on the headland, sucking out the smallest stones, grinding them to sand. Even the sturdiest kerosene-tin shack couldn’t keep out a wind like this, much less the thin walls of the tents . . .

  ‘Sleep well,’ said Dr O’Bryan.

  CHAPTER 9

  Church was eighteen miles away, at Fairfield, on the new housing estate built after the War, though half the houses were empty now as owners couldn’t afford to pay their mortgages, nor tenants pay to rent them, especially now so many people had lost their savings when the Primary Industries Bank went broke, or were unable to use their money in the Bank of New South Wales while they’d temporarily (everyone hoped) stopped refunding deposits.

  Even on Sunday there were men humping their swags on the road looking for work or
at least a place that would give susso rations to strangers without making them move on the next day.

  The family always stopped for tea and biscuits in the hall after the church service so the Aunts could gossip with their friends, ones lucky enough to have inherited homes or have an income from something many could still afford, like sausages or jam.

  Sunday lunch at the Very Small Castle was always a big saddle of lamb that Cookie could put on to roast slowly by itself in its nest of potatoes and carrots and pumpkin while Jenkins drove her and the other servants to church too. That way all Cookie had to do was boil the beans or peas or buttered cabbage and make the gravy when she got back.

  But it was hard to concentrate on the roast lamb. Had the police found any more bodies? HOW had the kids vanished from the beach, and from the Very Small Castle with their dog? Where did they go? Who were they? And why were they hiding?

  Butter had to find them again. And the best place to look was probably at Howlers Beach.

  It was easy for him to slip down to the beach after lunch. Dad was in his study. Aunt Peculiar was up in her studio with the gramophone playing a Louis Armstrong record and Aunt Elephant was practising serves on the tennis court behind the Very Small Castle with Young Bob fetching the balls for her. Auntie Cake was upsetting Cookie by insisting she try out a new recipe for duck in orange sauce that she’d found in The Australian Women’s Mirror instead of the roast duck with sage and onion stuffing that Cookie had planned for dinner.

  Butter crept over the sandhills, ducking behind the last one to look down at the beach. But no one was playing cricket there. There weren’t even any footprints . . .

  Or were there? Butter slid down the dunes and examined the beach above the waves. Dog-paw prints! Of course there were dogs other than Woofer, but those looked like the kind of print a three-legged dog might make . . .

  And then he saw them. A single line of footprints leading up to what looked like a cricket ball’s skid mark. The footprints led back down to the hard sand where the waves would already have washed away any other footprints.