Hermit Page 16

  ‘So, little Nate. Yeah, ’course I remember him.’ There was a slight smile around Rufus’s mouth. ‘Quiet little thing. So damn conscientious. Never really got to grips with any idea of time management. He’d fuss over some little thing for ages, when he should have been on to gluing the joints, or whatever. Steady as, mind; nice kid. Young.’

  ‘Young?’ Rainer was fond of the one-word prompt.

  ‘Young for his age, always.’ Rufus stopped, found a throat lozenge from a pack hidden behind some paperwork. When he spoke again, it was quieter and half an octave lower. ‘Probably due to his brother. Piece of dirt, that one. You arrested him yet?’

  Rainer hedged. ‘Early days, Mr Pringle. I’m only collecting the background on Nate.’

  Rufus harrumphed and picked up another pencil to occupy his fingers. Rainer imagined Rufus couldn’t go long without touching something; feeling it against his skin, working it in some way. Rufus’s life was defined by what his hands could shape.

  ‘Yeah, okay. So Nate came to work for me straight from school. Nice to find someone who wanted to, if I’m honest. He sought me out – said he wanted to learn a trade, a craft.’ Rufus tugged at his ear, leaving a smudge of sawdust that drew Rainer’s eye. ‘Everyone else at that school either took off for some university as fast as possible or joined the smelting company. Better pay, see? Either way, they blew town the moment they could. Nate was on minimum wage with me, but he seemed okay with it.

  ‘Yeah, so Nate used to walk here each day, even though it was six kilometres. I offered him an old bicycle, but he was as stubborn as all that. I think it stretched his time out of the house, if I’m honest.’ Rufus shook his head and paused, as though the recollection was becoming painful. ‘Nah, walking was fine, he said. Kid was like that – got something fixed in his head and nothing would shift it. Nothing. Anyways, he was working fine for me – a little slow, like I said, but thorough. Definitely thorough. Always left the workshop nice and tidy, too. So his big brother, what was his name, now?’

  ‘Jeb?’ Rainer was surprised he could recall the name.

  ‘Yeah, that was it. Jeb. Older than Nate, way bigger. Head like a buffalo; nasty attitude. Acting like the king of the world all the time. I know he used to sneer at Nate for his job, you know? Jeb was more the quick, easy-money type. Wheeler-dealer, corner-cutter. Bully.’

  ‘Bully?’

  Rufus tapped the pencil against a blotter. ‘Uh-huh. You could see it if they were ever in the same space. Not that Jeb came here much: this was all too slow and steady for him. But if you ever saw them together, it was like watching a croc and one of them little birds that cleans off the insects for ’em. I mean, Jeb rolled around like he owned everything in town; Nate was flicking around in the shadows, here and there, quiet, trying not to draw attention. Every now and then Jeb would lift his hand – scratch his head, or whatever – and Nate would flinch: like it was coming, you know?’

  Rufus stopped, leaned in. Rainer felt compelled to come closer, and their heads were barely half a metre apart when Rufus resumed in a conspiratorial tone, ‘And I tell you, that carried through to here. If you ever had to walk behind Nate for some reason – get a tool or whatever – it was like you’d already doused him in petrol and he was waiting for the match. Yeah, spooked real easy. Real easy. That kind of thing, well, it’s in the grain, if you get my drift.’

  Rainer nodded. ‘The period before he left, was there any indication he was going?’

  The old man chuckled as they drew back. ‘Oh hell, yeah. He came to see me. Ah, when, now? Spring. Would be late spring. He flew in the autumn, but this was late spring. I’d emptied out a section of that little place over there.’ He pointed to a boxed-in corner, maybe three metres square, which Rainer had guessed might be the toilet.

  ‘Hmm, he noticed me clearing it out and asked how long it would be empty. Well, I was going to use it to store some wood burners, but they were being hand-cast in Hobart, wouldn’t be arriving for months. So I said he could use it if he needed. The next week, little camping things started appearing. A tent, groundsheet, sleeping bag, and so on. It crossed my mind he was going to camp out right here, hide from his family. So I asked him straight out, said he couldn’t actually live here. He laughed.’

  Rufus pointed with a stubby, spatulate finger. ‘I distinctly remember that, because I don’t think I ever heard him laugh other than then. Anyways, he said he was planning a long trip, but he had nowhere to store the stuff at home. Well, that was crap and I knew it – his folks had about fifteen hectares, and a couple of barns. Right there, I knew he was planning to fly, and I thought, “Good for you, son.” Coz that family, they were . . . hmmm . . . awkward.’

  ‘How so?’

  Rufus folded his arms and splayed his legs out: Rainer’s girlfriend called it ‘manspreading’. ‘Well, Jeb I’ve told you about. He was about a metre ninety when he was twelve. Little bugger was hard to control once he got big enough. Sly thing, too. Good at sniffing out weakness, I reckon. But then, bullies are, right?’

  Rainer blanched at a schoolyard memory.

  Rufus continued. ‘The parents – I wanna say Pamela, but that might be wrong; can’t recall his name – they were real God-fearers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anything against the Church. Just that they, I dunno; it felt like they took it to extremes. They always looked like, what’s those people? Amish, yeah, Amish or Quakers, or whatever. That real old-fashioned thing, like another century. Didn’t see them too often, but they always seemed spooked by the real world. I got the feeling their farm lived about eighty years behind the rest of us, you know? Poor Nate, what a waste.’

  Rainer couldn’t bring himself to leave Rufus in ignorance any longer. The old man was talkative enough: there was no need for any more leverage.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Pringle. Maybe you got the wrong impression there. Mr Whittler isn’t dead. He’s alive: at the station, in fact.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rufus looked up, eyes shining. He swallowed and put down the pencil shakily, as though he no longer trusted himself to hold anything. He took a moment. ‘That’s . . . that’s good. A relief. Well. Hmmm. Is he okay? Is he in trouble or something?’

  Rainer nodded, touched. ‘He’s being looked after, yes. But we’re trying to piece together some of his past, Mr Pringle. You mentioned Mr Whittler was bringing camping gear into the store?’

  ‘Mmm, he’d go to the old outdoor store used to be over on Bramston. Behind the cinema that closed? Yeah, once a week – bought something for his trip. Compass, penknife; usually something small. Maybe his family would have spotted him spending anything more. I used to ask him where he was headed. I thought he had a destination in mind – some place he’d always wanted to see, photo he’d cut out of a magazine, or whatever. But he didn’t seem to know. Knew he was going, but not where.’

  ‘Did he have any friends? Someone he might turn to, or travel with?’

  Rufus puffed his cheeks. He flickered when a phone rang downstairs but brought himself back to the conversation. ‘Oh Lord, no; he didn’t do friends. Never saw him with anyone but family. Not sure he was allowed friends, as such. I don’t think anyone would have been welcomed on the farm, that’s for sure. No, he was, uh, what’s the word, “self-contained”? Yeah, I think that’s it. Self-contained. He was his own friend, that kind of thing.’

  Rainer had run out of questions, for now. He felt the need to check with Dana; she might have follow-up. He put his hands on his knees. ‘Well, that’s a great start for us, Mr Pringle. Thank you.’

  At the foot of the steps Rainer turned and, as he always did with everyone he interviewed, shook hands. Rufus held on a beat longer than needed.

  ‘Nate: if he needs anything, I’ll stand for him. Will you tell him that? Supplies, whatever; will you tell him?’

  Chapter 17

  Dana joined Bill in looming over Mike’s shoulder. She was trying not to shake, nervous about what Nathan Whittler’s home would be like. She didn’t want it to look bad
for him: squalid, somehow, or amateurish. She found herself hoping the others would look at Nathan’s efforts with admiration. It was proprietorial on her part, and maybe inappropriate, but she felt it nonetheless. It had only been a few hours since she took the call at sunrise, but she was so drawn in that the Whittler case now drowned out almost anything else.

  Almost anything.

  ‘Where’s this feed from?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Dakota Line,’ replied Dana.

  ‘Why’s it called that?’

  ‘Oh, I know that one,’ interjected Bill. ‘Didn’t you do it at school?’

  Mike held his hands open in ignorance.

  ‘Right, so the Dakota brothers owned all this stretch of land: the chain of lakes, and about a click either side, down towards the Old Mill Road. This is, oh, well over a hundred years ago. Eighteen nineties, I think. One day, one of them discovers a few crumbs of gold in the river. People are finding gold all over Australia around this time, so they think it’s a new rush. One wants it for himself, but the other Dakota says, “Share.” Well, they can’t agree like two adults so they split the land in two, with the boundary running down the middle of the river. That way, they each have an equal shot at further gold – which, ironically, neither ever finds. They hammered spikes into the middle of the riverbed all the way down, to mark the border – hence, the Dakota Line.’

  Mike shrugged. ‘Cool story, bro.’

  The video had been emailed: an initial edit that was simply streaming the footage from Stuart’s helmet cam. It was barely thirty minutes old. The audio was scratchy and sometimes the images broke up or jammed for a second. The flaws gave the evidence a retro feel in an age of high-definition digital, as though it had regressed to match the era when Nathan had begun his new life.

  Stuart was at the front of the inflatable canoe, the helicopter nowhere to be seen. Ahead of them Piermont Lake narrowed sharply to the north; bubbling white water glided towards them from green folds of thick foliage. The current didn’t look that strong, but they could hear Stuart’s grunts with each paddle stroke. Overhead they got occasional subliminal flashes of silver from a blue sky as the small drone flew back and forth in a rudimentary search grid.

  Now the canoe was simply holding station; small half-paddles kept them around twenty metres from the bank. Stuart took a slow sweep in either direction to show the context. The lake appeared maybe two kilometres long. On one side, forest-cloaked low hills slid to the shoreline. Pines curled outwards and upwards over the water, their reflections flickering. On the other side the shore was mainly reeds seething in the breeze, with a couple of small areas of grass further south. Some black swans and a couple of herons prodded and nodded in the shallows. Not a soul and, when Stuart looked up to locate the drone, no sign of any jet trail, either. To Dana, it seemed bucolic and beguiling. She thought back to Nathan’s quest for ‘nothingness’.

  There was an indistinct shout, and then a mixture of static and chatter on the radio attached to Stuart’s shoulder. He gave a little commentary.

  ‘So, Al’s picked up something on the drone. Thinks he can see a canoe, might be tethered. He’s going to guide me in. This might be it, boys and girls: a hit first time of asking.’

  The canoe zigzagged, the current faster the nearer he came to two large rock formations, each about nine metres high, rounded at the top like an elephant’s profile. They appeared to be jammed together, with a faster flow of water around the right edge. The drone shivered directly above them.

  Stuart found some deeper, darker water under the first rock’s overhang. He abandoned the paddle and started to hand-walk along the rock’s surface, effectively dragging the canoe with his fingers. On the audio they could hear the steady rush of fast water – it wrenched Dana back to sunrise and she had to swallow hard. She glanced across to Bill, who, thankfully, hadn’t noticed her anxiety.

  The footage juddered as Stuart fought the current. ‘Gotta be a way in . . . somewhere. I don’t think our man’s doing kayak rolls to get in; must be a way that leaves him dry.’ The three of them twitched and leaned in unison with the camera.

  ‘Ah, gotcha! Oh man, that’s clever, that’s really clever.’

  The folds of the two rocks parted slightly in an ‘L’ shape. The tail of the ‘L’ allowed the canoe to float through with about twenty centimetres to spare above it. The vertical part of the space, while it curved a little, allowed Stuart to ride through by turning sideways; they saw the camera bounce slightly as it nudged the rock and heard the rustle of Stuart’s back against the wall as he passed through the gap.

  The entrance had enough arc that Stuart could no longer see back to the lake. He emerged into a pool of quiet water lit by a vertical breach – almost a natural chimney – about four metres in diameter. Sunlight bounced down and on to the surface of the pool, reflecting back in a series of shimmering gold lines on the overhangs. Stuart grabbed at the camera – they could see his fingers swamp the lens. He held it in front of him and swept a 360. The little landing area to the right held a Canadian canoe: originally red, it had been carelessly painted with some kind of dark paint, possibly a waterproof primer. The paint might have been simply to break up the shape for camouflage rather than change the colour itself.

  The canoe was tethered against a flat rock, a natural stepping stone. Beyond this was the entrance to the cave itself, which was around two metres high and just as wide. The floor looked like stone giving way to sand. The rest of the 360 was sheer rock face, sweeping upwards. Except for another gap to one side, starting at head height. Perhaps fifty centimetres wide, it was plugged by several heavy branches: Dana guessed that might be a land entrance.

  ‘Yeah, I’m going to get out of the canoe and step around for you. The picture might not be ideal coz I’ll need the torchlight to see anything, but I’ll give you a guided tour. Back in a moment. Don’t touch that dial.’

  Mike turned and gave a grinning thumbs-up to Dana. ‘Your guess was right. Score one for the Russo.’

  She nodded. ‘Looks that way.’

  It was a strange mix of elation and trepidation. Dana was thrilled to have found Nathan’s cave and she knew this provided the rich mix of information that would change her strategy completely: it was the break she needed to open him up some more. But she knew him well enough to understand his intense humiliation when he found out everyone had seen inside his little world. She knew what she’d feel if anyone was broadcasting from inside her home: Nathan would suffer even more acutely.

  After some shuffling, the video restarted with a view of Stuart’s boots. He tugged the camera upwards until it showed a view of the pool.

  ‘Ah, welcome, one and all. So, this water entrance. It’s genius. You wouldn’t find it unless you were right by it and searching for this kind of thing. If Al hadn’t seen the canoe from the drone, I probably wouldn’t have found the way in. May be tricky in flood, or in winter with any ice – the water’s fairly calm here, so it would ice up before the lake itself. But unless you actually witness anyone coming or going, you’d never find it.’

  The camera swung vertically in a drunken loop. ‘Up there he has daylight, and about . . . two, three hours of sunlight; more in summer. Again, any kind of height and all you’d see looking down is rock and water. It’s only because the drone was so low it had the angle to see the canoe.’

  Bill nodded at no one in particular. ‘Your guy’s smart. That’s impossible to find, even from a helicopter. No wonder he stayed hidden for so long.’

  Dana felt a bizarre swelling of pride. It actually felt, in a strange way, like her guy. She reminded herself he was almost certainly a killer. Ingenuity in his hiding place was hardly exonerating evidence.

  ‘So, in the entrance here we have a flysheet. These cords under it – I’m guessing this is where he dried his clothes after he washed them in the creek. Or got water on them. Speaking of which’ – he moved sharply over to his right and pointed at the end of the flat rock by the canoe – ‘yeah, in the
corner. That gush of water coming through the gap is probably his fresh-water supply – moving nice and quick, and he doesn’t really have to leave the cave to get to it. It’s also an entrance by foot, I reckon.’

  Stuart moved to give them a slow sweep of the land entrance. There were a series of steps crudely carved out of the rock’s incline; effectively a ladder up and over the artfully placed branches. From outside, it would simply look like shrubs growing in a shady crevice. Like the water entrance, it would be impossible to detect unless you witnessed anyone using it.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dana, suddenly comprehending. ‘I’d been wondering why the canoe was there, if he’d been to Jensen’s Store. But I get it now.’

  Bill looked across quizzically.

  ‘I mean, he used that land entrance and walked cross-country to Jensen’s Store. He didn’t need to canoe to the southern end of the lake and go on foot. The store is west, on that side of the lake. He could walk it. That’s why the canoe is still in situ.’

  As Stuart made his way back to the entrance, Mike pointed at the screen. ‘Did you see the poles on that flysheet? Same paint as the canoe. Why paint the poles?’

  It came to Dana. ‘Sunlight. Glinting off the metal poles. He’d be paranoid about being seen from above. When I talked about his home not being visible from the air, and that’s why he wouldn’t use a tent, he smiled. That’s what he meant. He is using a tent, but it can’t be seen from the air, not even if the sun caught it.’

  Stuart was now back at the entrance. There were two metal spikes, also painted, driven into the threshold wall, with water bags suspended from them. A canvas camping chair was parked in the sand, next to a milk crate that served as a table.

  Stuart moved in close. ‘Just for you, Dana. His reading habits.’

  Several books were piled perfectly on the crate – Clavell, Hammett, Dostoyevsky.

  Dana grunted. ‘That’s ironic. I was going to give him Crime and Punishment to read here, but I thought it was too cruel.’