Bone Lands

by Pip Fioretti

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

'Isn't it your job to stop people being murdered?'
1911, on a winter's night in arid New South Wales wool country, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins discovers the bodies of three young people. They are scions of the richest family in the district, savagely murdered on a road that Hawkins should have been patrolling, had he not been busy bedding the local schoolteacher.
Detectives arrive from Sydney and the disgraced Hawkins, a traumatised veteran of the Boer War, comes under fierce scrutiny. With his honour and sanity at stake, he becomes hell-bent on finding the murderer. But as ever darker secrets are revealed about the people he thinks of as friends, Hawkins is forced to confront an uncomfortable question: who is paying the price for the new nation's prosperity?

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 384

Sample

1

Few men out this way need an excuse to drink, or to fight, for that matter. But celebrations were scarce, so when the new king, George V, was crowned, coronation balls and dances appeared like flies around a corpse. I’d fought for Georgie’s old grandma, Vicky, in South Africa. Oh yes, I had a long relationship with our kings and queens, always drinking their health and singing about how long they might reign for and killing their enemies and drinking and singing some more. But tonight, my job, as a mounted trooper, was to keep the peace.

I was sent to police the coronation dance held in Larne, three hours north of my post in Calpa. The Larne trooper, Parry, and I put a stop to the odd fracas, threw some drunks in the lock-up and hung about on horseback looking suitably grim, coat collars up, faces in shadow, horses breathing out plumes of steam. Every man jack in that dance hall who came out for a piss at the edge of the light was guilty, and we’d find ways of proving it if they so much as turned a bleary eye our way.

By midnight, the new king was christened and his people staggered out of the hall, stained with piss and splatter, and trying to recall how they got here and why. Soaked in rum, reeking of carbolic and hot shearer’s armpit – a stench so ingrained you’d have to chip it off with a chisel – some fell in the dirt and some on each other. I’d been in that state myself more than I care to admit and found nary a laugh in it, just tar-black shame, some of which still held fast to the inner walls of my skull.

Finally, the last of them set off and the words ‘God Save the King’, accompanied by screeches of laughter, faded into the silence. Cleaning the hall wasn’t our job so we just locked up and grunted at each other. Parry set off to patrol the road north and I set off for Kitty’s house on the edge of town to try my luck. She tossed me out an hour later. The punt man was still up, albeit in a filthy mood, but he took me across to the west of the river and I set off on the long ride south.

Silent forks of lightning flashed in the west. Rain was coming in, driving the dust before it. It would be a long ride before I reached my bed but I didn’t mind all that much, sleep being a difficult pastime for me. My horse, Dancer, picked his way along the rutted road. I lounged in the saddle, pulled my oilskin closer as the rain hit, fat drops pelting down, then settling into a steady downpour. Soon my boots were full of water, my feet numb. Dancer was fed up, ears back, plodding along with his head down, sticky mud cleaving to his hooves. Water rushed along a ditch at the side of the road, rain hitting the parched ground loud as a train.

Out of habit I took notice of the fenceline, looking for breaks. Through the rain I noticed a whole section down, sagging wires and a fencepost uprooted. It looked fairly recent. No dead roos tangled in the wire. What could have been fresh wheel tracks led across the fenceline, over the sagging wire and up a low rise. No stock around, just saltbush and the odd clump of mulga.

I saw the cart on top of the rise, no horse in the traces. No people. The rain continued its steady pace. I dismounted, took my rifle out of its holster, stomach clenched tight, and walked over to what looked like a pile of wet washing.

A young woman, sprawled on the ground, her skirts torn and her legs twisted. Rain fell on her face, washing the blood away and leaving a mask of jagged bone, tendon and muscle. I felt for a pulse and then lurched away and vomited, glad no one was with me. I’d seen death many times as a soldier, but I’d never seen a woman so brutally bashed. Still shaking, I turned back to her, fairly certain I knew who she was, but the state of her face left some hope I was wrong.

With the cloud cover the night was dark, and in the back of the cart I found a lantern. I took it out and crouched under the cart, trying to get a match to strike, hand shaking. Once it was lit I straightened up, then walked over to another crumpled pile and held the lantern aloft, the raindrops glittering as they smacked into the body of a girl, a blanket tangled around her feet.

I squatted beside her. She was facedown in the mud, her hair loose and flowing in the rivulets like shining seaweed. There was a small hole in her back which had to be a bullet wound. I couldn’t tell if she’d been raped and I didn’t want to go looking. I checked her pulse. People sometimes take a while to die, but she was gone. Her skin was as cold as the mud she lay in.

Lantern shadows danced like spirits of the unshriven dead. Back at the cart I found a young man slumped by the rear wheel, the side of his head caved in, his hands in his lap, water and blood dripping from his face. I recognised him, and fought off the urge to throw up again. It was James Kirkbride, and the girls were his two younger sisters, Nessie and Grace.

God in his wasteland of a heaven – who would kill these three?

Rain hammered my face, trailed down my back, dripped from my hat. I wiped my eyes, blinked as my mind galloped around in useless circles. Three dead. Two females and a male. Three in the morning. I needed a doctor, I needed a tracker, more troopers. I needed a slug of whisky. I heard a noise and swung around, ready to shoot.

Nothing.

Thunder rumbled in the clouds above. There were four Kirkbride siblings – another sister, Flora. I searched, frantically pushing aside scrub, holding the lantern aloft, shouting her name, my words drowned by the rain. If she was here I couldn’t find her, but I couldn’t keep looking. Complete the mission first – that was a rule the soldier lived by, and it was still deeply embedded in my brain, despite frequent flushing with alcohol.

I checked my watch – ten past three – put the lantern back in the cart, went back to Dancer and mounted up. He didn’t have much left in him but I set him at as fast a gallop as could be managed in the wet. I needed to raise the alarm, get telegrams off to Bourke, find the doctor and get back to the scene of the crime as fast as I could.

~

The rain kept up, a relentless drumbeat. I remembered the ripple and snap of the Union Jack over our camp. The Butcher’s Apron, as it was known. The call to violence, the thrill of it. Until it was done unto you. The Boer who attacked me cut my face in two with a bayonet, from hairline to jaw, then went at my chest, my arms, anything he could get at, scything my flesh like wheat.

I was fighting because I was young and foolish. He was fighting for his land. That’s why he went for my face, I reckon. But it wasn’t even his land – it belonged to the Zulu. I was an Australian, fighting to take it back from the Boer and give it to the British, after the Zulu had been knocked out of the game. Make of that what you will.

~

I galloped the twelve miles into Calpa like the devil was on my tail, dragged the postmaster from his bed and watched him falter as I dictated the telegram to my boss in Bourke. I couldn’t officially name the dead, not yet, so I just said ‘bodies’. Next I woke the town doctor, Joe Pryor. I saddled a fresh horse, Felix, threw a blanket over the exhausted Dancer, then set off back up the road to the dead.

I heard a shout and looked over my shoulder. A dark-hooded figure on a black horse riding at me, on its way to the apocalypse. Dr Pryor, huddled under an oilskin.

‘How far?’ he shouted.

‘An hour.’

By the time we got there the rain had stopped, the sky cleared, the cold winter night closed in, crickets clicking in the darkness. My uniform stuck to me, clammy and cold. The three bodies lay there in the mud, exactly as I’d left them, pitiful and full of reproach.

Joe, holding a lantern, walked from corpse to corpse, breath misting, his boots squelching in the mud. ‘You know who they are,’ he said, glancing up at me.

‘James, Nessie and Grace Kirkbride.’

‘Who the hell would do this?’

‘Just declare them dead so I can cover them.’

‘Should have sent for Reverend Hickson too, because by God there’s been some evil done here.’

‘He can wait. Start with Nessie. If you can.’

The black, silty mud dragged at our boots, and we floundered about, destroying evidence, but there was no help for it. The rain had already washed away so much of what would have been useful. The chatter of birds and the glow on the horizon signalled dawn, and we were still waiting for somebody, anybody, to come and assist. I checked my watch – nearly seven – and made a note of it. Joe sat wearily on a log and lit a cigarette.

I had to know if Flora was lying out here, dead or dying. I headed off into the patchy scrub, silently begging a God I had no time for to spare her and take me instead. My shouts raised no answer.

I heard Joe call out and froze. He’s found her. If I stayed by this mulga long enough, the universe would right itself and Flora would come to me, pushing through the saltbush, a smile in her eyes, some broken bird cupped in her hands.

I hurried back, heart in my mouth. ‘Flora?’

‘No. Just … yeah, it’s eerie out here.’

The men who’d done this were long gone, but I was armed and he wasn’t. He held out a lit cigarette and I took it, inhaling a lungful of smoke with relief. As I sat beside him I noticed a circular, dirt-covered sliver in the mud. You don’t see perfect circles in nature that often. Picked it up, wiped it on my breeches. A coin, thruppence.

‘It’s like the Breelong massacre,’ Joe said.

‘It’s usually white raping black, not the other way round,’ I said, sticking the coin in my pocket.

‘True, but it happens. Were they at the dance in Larne?’

‘I didn’t see them.’

‘Why the hell were they on this road? I would have thought they’d go to the ball in Cobar?’

Robert Kirkbride, their father, owned the biggest station in the districts, and was rich and influential, so his four children were like local royalty. Attending a stockmen’s dance was unheard of for such a family. Joe was right: the Coronation Ball in Cobar was where they should have been. Cobar was a fairly wealthy mining town to the east, and you didn’t get there travelling the western road along the Darling.

A couple of wallabies, raindrops on their fur sparkling in the light, watched us from a distance then slowly hopped away. Rabbits ran about. The sun glinted on puddles of water, steam rose off the wet horses, water dripped from the leopardwood. Three people dead on my watch – except I hadn’t been on watch. I’d been fucking the Larne schoolteacher.

‘Can you tell what time they died?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say … maybe seven or eight hours ago.’

‘Around midnight, then?’

‘Or a bit earlier. Impossible to get an accurate time of death, unless you have a witness.’

We sat smoking in silence. I slipped my hand under the oilskin and inside my shirt. The tangle of knotted and raised scar tissue covered my chest from armpit to midline. In idle moments, my fingers always sought this gristly map, plucking and rubbing, tracing each welt from one end to another, as if still unable to grasp what had happened.

Joe got to his feet. ‘Someone’s coming.’

2

Birds fell silent. Rabbits disappeared, the sound of the hoofbeats, two horses maybe, louder. I took my pistol out of its holster. Sergeant Ernest Martin and Constable Mick Lonergan cantered over the rise.

‘Hawkins,’ Martin said, with a brisk nod. ‘Telegram said you had some bodies.’

‘Informally identified as James, Nessie and Grace Kirkbride, sir.’

The sergeant’s mouth fell open and he looked past me to the cart on the rise. ‘Was it an accident? Cart overturn?’

Martin, a knobbly man in his forties with a brain too small for even the mounted troopers, lifted the sheet from Nessie, saw her face and replaced it quickly, swallowing hard, and then looked at the other two. Lonergan had his rifle in his hands, scanning the scrub. The ferrous stench of blood filled the air. The horses whickered softly, nosing the ground.

My heart was pounding so hard I expected it to punch through my chest any moment. ‘I’ll get a couple of the trackers up here,’ I said, appalled at the shakiness of my voice. ‘They might be able to find something.’

Martin blinked, an unlit cigarette in his fingers. ‘It’s like Breelong.’

The Breelong massacre happened near Dubbo in 1900. Two women and three children, axed to death by a black tracker called Jimmy Governor. I’d been in South Africa at the time but the story had come up often during my training. People in the bush didn’t forget events like that.

‘The bodies will have to go to Cobar,’ Joe said. ‘They’ll have to bring the coronial surgeon from Dubbo, so he’ll need to be notified. Better talk to the Kirkbrides fast, before word travels. They’re in Cobar too, for the ball.’

Martin nodded. Kept nodding, because if he stopped he’d have to do something, poor bastard. Telling parents their child was dead was a hell of a job, but telling them three of their children were dead, killed by some person or persons unknown – well, I actually felt some sympathy for him. But we couldn’t stand around waiting for him to fire the starter’s pistol. People had been murdered and we needed to crank up the great mechanism that turned the wheels of justice.

‘Lonergan, go to Calpa, fast,’ I said. ‘Telegram Trooper Hardy in Cobar asking him to find Mr and Mrs Kirkbride and saying Sergeant Martin is on his way to speak to them. Tell him to organise a doctor too. And to check the whereabouts of Miss Flora Kirkbride. Urgently.’

‘A doctor?’ Martin said.

‘Mrs Kirkbride might need sedating.’

Once he was back on his horse, Martin got a grip on himself. ‘You wait for the ambulance van, Hawkins. There should be some troopers with them. Get them to guard the scene until relieved, then find the trackers and set them on this. And make sure they’re not armed.’ Then he set off through the mud.

Joe looked over at me, eyebrows raised.

‘I wouldn’t go looking for the bastards who did this without a gun,’ I said. ‘Why should the black trackers?’

‘You weren’t here when Breelong happened. The Mawbey women were just the first victims – Governor and his brother went on killing. People are going to be jumpy as cats when this gets out.’

He was right. It wouldn’t take long for accusations to start flying. It was the blacks, it was Queenslanders, it was monstrous, and everyone was going to be killed in their beds. We resumed smoking, one fag after another, hands shaking. Cockatoos screeched and carried on above us. Sunlight shining on the puddled water.

I should have been there to save them. The shame almost took my breath away, like a punch to the guts. Police the roads and keep travellers safe, that was my job when in uniform. If I hadn’t taken my uniform off to slip into Kitty’s bed, I’d have been there to protect the Kirkbrides. Or I’d be dead alongside them, and at this moment, that looked to be the better option.

Finally the ambulance van came trundling down the road, accompanied by a several troopers. Once everything was loaded, Joe, white-faced and shaky, rode after the van. I put the troopers on watch and left them to it.

~

Chilled to the marrow, hungry and exhausted after being up all night, I rode back to Calpa feeling like a beaten old dog, eyes gritty, filled with a sense that I’d passed through a terrible dream. The sight of the whitewashed stone police station, with its ramshackle stable and yards, raised my spirits. Sleep or write a report first? The place would be swarming with police wanting details at any tick of the clock, so that settled it.

I’d been derelict in my duty and people had died. That was a detail hard to get past.

In the business part of the police station there was a chest-high bench, where the incident book was kept and all paperwork was laboriously carried out. Behind the bench and below the side window was my desk, where I composed reports no one read, then there were shelves of files no one looked in. Out the back to the right was the lock-up and armoury, and to the left was the door to the private quarters.

I stabled Felix and went in the back door, through the laundry to the kitchen and the station proper, sat at the desk and found a fresh sheet of paper, and put my head in my hands. Then I went back out across the muddy yard to the stable, buried my face in Dancer’s warm neck and wept.

~

I must have fallen asleep on the straw because that was where I woke several hours later, stiff and aching, the stable cat curled up on my chest and the scent of fresh horse shit prodding me to wakefulness. Sleeping in a damp uniform on the cold floor of a filthy stable was only marginally better than sleeping in a ditch, and I cursed myself for a fool.

Aching and filthy, I trudged back across the yard and let myself in through the laundry door. I found a half-full whisky bottle behind the mangle, took a few gulps and felt the liquid course through me, soothing and numbing.

Trooper Lonergan was in the second narrow bedroom making a dog’s breakfast of his bed. If he was here then it was real. The Kirkbride siblings were dead, and it was not some horrific dream. Lonergan was currently stationed at Bourke, a trooper for about two years. At twenty-one, he was ten years younger than me, although he looked about fifteen. Swarthy black Irish, of medium build, noted for being a capable horseman but dragged his feet on paperwork. Typical for a mounted trooper – we were catch and coerce, not thinkers, you could say. Give us a herd of camel to cull and we were off, merrily riding and shooting and to hell with your apostrophes.

I did not want Lonergan here, did not need him here. I’d run this one-man station for three years and, apart from the trackers, never needed any help from anyone. I certainly didn’t want him in my private quarters, watching me drink, touching my books, messing up my woodheap and leaving his filthy footprints on my clean floors.

‘Corcoran’s posted me here, sir,’ he said, giving me a wary glance. ‘I’m to run the station while you escort the detectives from Sydney. Sir.’

‘Run my station?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What detectives?’

‘Here’s the orders, sir,’ he said, passing me a couple of telegrams.

The first telegram said that Mr and Mrs Kirkbride and Flora had been found safe in Cobar. Tears welled up and I quickly turned away, shamed by how easily they came these days. The second telegram confirmed what Lonergan said. Detectives from Sydney were on their way.

~

While I’d been conked out in the stable, Mrs Schreiber had made breakfast and left it in the kitchen. A pan full of her best sausages, all fried up and sitting in their own grease. I cut a hunk of bread, wrapped it around a sausage and put a pot of coffee on, then reheated the remaining sausages. Lonergan, sniffing the air like a dingo, waited by the door.

‘They do a reasonable breakfast at the Royal,’ I mumbled through a mouthful of sausage.

‘How come you get a cook, sir?’ he said, venturing closer.

‘I pay for her, that’s how. Share her with Dr Pryor.’

‘Is she German, sir?’

‘Related to the kaiser. So watch yourself. And don’t make extra work for her.’

Lonergan scuttled away and I inhaled several more sausages. Mrs Schreiber, a heavy, big-boned woman, was a miner’s widow from Cobar who’d raised ten kids and run a boarding house. She was so used to hard work, she told me, that she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she stopped. She called me Herr Kapitän, as that had been my rank in the army – being a German, she had more respect for that than the mounted troopers. She made rice pudding with poached quince when she was in a good mood. When she wasn’t, I got jelly with nothing. So it paid to keep her happy.

I drank another coffee, closing my eyes as it went down. Flora was safe. I felt better with a full belly, and I went to my room and stripped off, hurling the damp shirt and breeches at a chair and hanging up the tunic to dry, again giving silent thanks for Mrs Schreiber and her domestic skills. The navy wool tunic and its brass buttons took a beating out here, but the army discipline of immaculate turnout was deeply ingrained in me.

I splashed my face with warm water and looked in the mirror. Hair and beard the colour of dried grass, red-rimmed eyes gritty with lack of sleep, dark circles under them like empty waterholes. And the scar, running from the top of my forehead across my nose and cheek and ending at my jaw. My heavy beard hid some of it, but it remained a confronting sight, even to me.

A Chinese bloke I met at the Sofala gold diggings sold me a jar of ointment that he swore would make the scar better. Smelled like cat piss but I rubbed it on religiously. I turned my head this way and that, examining the scar from all angles. Fading to white now, the scar looked like someone had penned a line across my face, marking me absent.

~

Mounted trooper stations functioned in remote areas as government administration outposts as well as being the coercive arm of the law. The bushranger days were nearly over so manhunts were rare. We tracked down sheep and horse thieves, maybe an escaped prisoner here and there, locked up the drunk and disorderly, issued permits and licences, hauled in mad bastards from out bush for the Master of Lunacy, registered guns, rounded up truants, ran pests out of town, conducted inspections under the Diseases in Sheep Act and a hundred other government functions. I’d done them all, and much of the time did them with Wilson Garnet, the senior black tracker. But we’d never had to look for men who could kill like they’d killed the Kirkbrides.

I rode downriver to Wilson’s camp. Puddles of water glittered in the sunlight. Ducks swarmed the river, squabbling and taking advantage of the rainwater. Wilson was a Barkandji man, a police tracker like his father had been. He was at his campsite by the river, what they called the Barka, along with the rest of his mob. Their land stretched north and south along the river to Wilcannia. Legend had it the Barkandji tribes were ferocious defenders of their land. Now it was Kirkbride land. They only lived there and not on the reserves because they were useful to Robert Kirkbride as a source of cheap labour. Wool growers were not given to sentiment.

The scrappy camp under the redgums, corrugated-iron huts with bark roofs, was full of dogs and kids who ran alongside my horse as I rode in, laughing, teasing. Mud stuck to everything, the women’s skirts and the kids’ legs. Woodsmoke wafted around. Women tended fires, baking damper, tea boiling in the coals. A couple of them had slabs of wallaby meat, bloody and bright, fur singed away, cooking in the coals. The smell of it stirred a mighty hunger that even sausages and coffee could not touch.

I found Wilson sitting by a fire with a mug of tea. The kids made a racket and Wilson looked up and saw me.

‘Hey, boss. Thought you be sleeping off the new king.’

‘No chance of that. I was too busy watching everyone else on the scoot up at Larne.’ I gazed around at the camp; it was business as usual with no tension in the air. ‘Been an incident out on the Larne Road. Looks like …’

It was hard to say it. Murder. Three people murdered. It would make the newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne. All over Australia, probably.

‘Three of the Kirkbride children murdered on the western Larne Road. We need you up there.’

His face gave nothing away. ‘Breelong massacre again, eh, boss?’

‘Except it’s not. Unless you …’

He shook his head and threw the remains of his tea at the fire.

Most of Wilson’s sons worked for Kirkbride as stockmen, and the women from the camp worked as laundry maids or domestics. He had relations all over the place. If there was anything to know, he would know it.

He found Frosty, his eldest, who was learning tracking. We went back to the station, where they saddled the spare horses. I issued them with rifles and sidearms, and we rode back up to the scene.

‘Look for anything that might … ah, just look for anything.’ They knew what to do. I was finding it hard to put two thoughts in a straight line.

The Garnets examined the ground, then roamed around, pointing, conferring, slowly walking. The air was thick with the low buzz of flies. I stared at the bloodstained mud, churned up by Nessie’s struggles.

Last time I saw Nessie, she’d been laughing with Flora on the homestead verandah. The four siblings were like puppies from the same litter: warm, familiar, inseparable. Now only Flora was left. The jaws of hell had opened, she was falling towards the flames and I’d let it happen.

I dragged my gaze away from the mud, and in the bright daylight noticed what could be a large bloodstain on the wooden boards of the cart tray. I made a sketch of it and noted the time. I also noted the absence of the horse that’d pulled the cart. Wilson and Frosty joined me and I tucked my notebook away.

‘How many men, d’you reckon?’ I asked.

Wilson shrugged. The scene was a hell of a mess. ‘Have to keep looking.’

‘All right, I’ll leave you both to it. I’ll be back at the station. If you see anyone suspicious, do not approach – report back quickly. Weapons to the ready at all times.’

Sergeant Martin could go fuck himself.

I made a note of the order and watched them return to the eastern edge of the clearing and vanish into the saltbush.

3

The Darling River is fed from smaller rivers in south-west Queensland, which in turn are fed by rainfall in the far north gulf country. These smaller rivers, like the Culgoa and the Barwon, cross the border into New South Wales around Brewarrina and converge into the Darling River. The river snakes its way past Bourke, a big tr. . .