The Broken Shore Read Online Free Page A

the house to the far hedge and watched it settle on the paddock, a hard surface, a dry autumn in a dry year. The local male medic was waiting. Three men got out, unloaded a stretcher. They went around the stables and into the house through a side door.
    ‘Take offence?’
    Hopgood, behind him.
    ‘At what?’ said Cashin.
    ‘Didn’t mean to be short,’ said Hopgood.
    Cashin looked at him. Hopgood offered a smile, yellowing teeth, big canines.
    ‘No offence taken,’ said Cashin.
    ‘Good on you,’ said Hopgood. ‘Draw on your expertise if needed?’
    ‘It’s one police force,’ said Cashin.
    ‘That’s the attitude,’ said Hopgood. ‘Be in touch.’
    The medics came out with the stretcher, tubes in Bourgoyne. They didn’t hurry. What could be done had been done. After the stretcher was loaded, the local woman said a few words to one of the city team, both impassive. He would be the doctor.
    The doctor got in. The machine rose, turned for the metropolis, flashed light.
    Cashin said goodbye to Carol Gehrig, drove down the curving avenue of Lombardy poplars.

 
    ‘CAUGHT him yet?’
    ‘Not as far as I know, Mrs Addison,’ said Cashin. ‘How did you hear?’
    ‘The radio, my dear. What’s happening to this country? Man attacked in his bed in the peaceful countryside. Never used to happen.’
    Cecily Addison was in her after-lunch position in front of the fireplace in her office, left hand waving a cigarette, right hand touching her long nose, her brushed-back white hair. Cecily had been put out to graze in Port Monro by her firm in Cromarty. She arrived at work at 9.30 am, read the newspapers, drank the first of many cups of tea, saw a few clients, mostly about wills, bothered people, walked home for lunch and a few glasses of wine.
    On the way back to the office, she dropped in on anyone who wasn’t quick enough to disappear.
    ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Don’t know what the world’s coming to. Read the paper today?’ She pointed at her desk.
    Cashin reached for the Cromarty
Herald.
The front-page headlines said:
    ANGER MOUNTS
ON CRIME WAVE
Community calls for curfew
    ‘Curfew, mind you,’ said Cecily. ‘That’s not the way we want to go. Can’t have Neighbourhood Watch calling the shots. Old buggers withnothing better to do than stickybeak. Neighbourhood bloody Nazis.’
    Cashin read the story. Outrage at public meeting. Call for curfew on teenagers. Epidemic of burglaries and car thefts. Five armed robberies in two months. Sharp rise in assaults. Shop windows broken in the Whalers Mall. Lawless element in community. Time for firm action.
    ‘Aimed at the Abos,’ said Cecily, ‘always is. Every few years they get on to it again. You’d think the white trash were all at choir practice of a Saturday night. I can tell you, forty-four years in the courts in Cromarty, I’ve seen more Abos fitted up than I’ve had hot dinners.’
    ‘Not by the police, surely?’ said Cashin.
    Cecily laughed herself into a coughing fit. Cashin waited.
    ‘I hate to say this,’ Cecily said, taking the newspaper. ‘Don’t mind telling you I’ve voted Liberal all my life. But since this rag changed hands its mission in life is to get the Libs back in Cromarty. And that means bagging blacks every chance they get.’
    ‘Interesting,’ said Cashin. ‘I want to ask you about Charles Bourgoyne. I gather you pay his bills.’
    Cecily didn’t want to change the subject.
    ‘Never thought I’d say something like that,’ she said. ‘Hope my dad’s not listening. You know Bob Menzies didn’t have a house to live in when he left Canberra?’
    ‘I didn’t know that, no. I’m a bit short of time.’
    A lie. Cashin knew how hard the ex-Prime Minister had done it because Cecily told him the story once or twice a month.
    ‘Paid for his own phone calls, Bob Menzies. Sitting up there in the Lodge in Canberra, when he rang his old mum, he put a coin in a box. Little money box. When it was full, he gave it to Treasury.