Never Never Read online

  I found Whitt at a table near the windows, peeling the lid off a tub of gourmet granola with dried figs. He even had his own long-life milk in a tiny box.

  ‘You’re some piece of work, aren’t you, Whitt.’

  ‘Avoid desperation with preparation,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll bet you’ve got that tattooed on your butt.’

  A miner walked to the end of our long table and slapped a copy of a Perth newspaper onto the surface. Someone must have brought a stack in from town. The cover, from what I could see, was a picture of Sam at a work Christmas party. His shy smile. The headline was a single word: MONSTER.

  Whitt’s fingers began to dance on the tabletop. Before I could discover the source of his discomfort, a big burly man in a miner’s uniform appeared beside me.

  ‘Harriet and Edward?’

  ‘That’s us.’ I stood and offered the bearded man my hand. His smile was wide and kind. He might have been early forties, handsome in the way farmers and desert people can have a kind of earthy wholesomeness to them.

  ‘I’m Gabe Carter,’ he said. ‘It’s my kid you’re looking for.’

  ‘Your kid?’ Whitt asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, sometimes it feels a bit like that,’ Gabe said. He took a seat beside me, setting a white hard hat on the tabletop. ‘I was Danny Stanton’s divisional officer. I’ve got twenty young guys under my supervision at the mine. They work for me, and they bring me their problems, personal or otherwise. Whatever they need, I’m their go-to guy. And that’s how it’s going to have to be for you two while you’re on the camp.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I tipped my head.

  ‘Well,’ he laughed, then looked more serious. ‘Because no one wants you here.’

  Chapter 16

  ‘THE MINE BOSSES are in damage-control mode,’ Gabe said. ‘Two months ago an exposé aired on 60 Minutes with a couple of ex-miners from this camp. The program was about fly-in fly-out mining and what a difficult life it is.’

  ‘Fly-in, fly-out?’ I asked.

  ‘FIFO, they call it,’ Gabe said. ‘Most shifts, or “swings”, are three weeks on the camp, one week back home. There are almost no permanent workers on the camp. It’s cheaper to set the mine up this way, with miners flying in and out from major cities, than it is to put roots down and establish a proper mining town. Everything here is temporary. When the resources dry up, the whole camp just moves on.’

  ‘So what did the program say that was so damaging?’ Whitt asked.

  ‘Well, 60 Minutes focused really heavily on the dark side of the mining world. The drugs. The Bilbies. The suicides. I mean, it’s tough out here. I’m sure you’ve had a look around and seen a few things. The mine bosses don’t want any more bad press, and they’re pretty sure you two will bring it, whether you find out what happened to Danny or not.’

  We nodded.

  ‘What do you think happened to him?’ I asked. Whitt had taken out a notepad and was jotting things down as Gabe spoke.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest clue. A lot of people around here are trying to tell me it was suicide. But I don’t see it.’ He shrugged. ‘He was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy.’

  ‘Are there many suicides on the camp?’

  ‘The lifestyle lends itself to it,’ Gabe said. ‘The isolation. The loneliness. Some of my crew have told me over the years that the job becomes a cycle they can’t find a way out of. Out here they get big money and a secure job, and they don’t have to spend a dollar in the time they’re away if they don’t want to. Accommodation, food, uniforms and everything is paid for. Many of them turn up without any kind of experience. They’re high school dropouts.’

  I looked around. He was right. Many of the miners sitting around us were still young enough for pimples. One sitting near us had a full set of braces.

  Gabe went on. ‘Some of the miners have young families, and when they see their bank accounts after their first shift cycle they go crazy. They buy big houses and big cars and their girlfriends get nice and comfortable and start having babies. After a few months, the boys start to wear out. They get tired, and they want to quit, but their families need them. They have insane mortgages and car repayments. Their parents are so proud of them for being a success. If these guys leave here, they’re looking at twice the work for a third of the pay.’

  ‘Lots of pressure,’ I said.

  ‘Oh man, do they feel the pressure,’ Gabe agreed. ‘And they don’t tell anyone they’re feeling so lost, of course, because they don’t want to look like pussies. Sometimes it all becomes too much for them.’

  Whitt seemed distracted by the newspaper at the end of the table. He reached out and flipped it over while Gabe was talking so that the back page showed; the sports page. The gesture was swift, meant to be overlooked. I didn’t overlook it.

  ‘The camp bosses didn’t want an investigation into Danny at all,’ Gabe said. ‘I kept going to them with my concerns and they kept telling me that he must have walked off the job. Gone nuts and went out into the desert. Some of the guys around here, they do go a bit nutty sometimes. If they miss a few return trips home, they start to get cabin fever. The isolation messes with their minds.’

  ‘Did Danny miss any trips home?’ Whitt asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he seem to you like the isolation was getting to him?’

  ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Not to me. He seemed like a happy, normal kid. I’m like a father or a big brother to these guys. I can tell when something’s up. I kept telling the bosses that we needed an investigation. But I couldn’t get through to them.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘We lost two more miners,’ Gabe said.

  Chapter 17

  GABE WALKED US out of the chow hall into the morning light. The camp was busy; miners were walking past us towards the main entrance where a security brief was being given.

  ‘Hon Lu actually went missing two months ago,’ Gabe said. ‘But I didn’t know until now. Like Danny, he just disappeared one night.’

  He handed me a photocopied picture of a young Asian guy sitting at a table in what looked to be an outdoor cafe. He had a shy smile hidden beneath a bright Australian flag hat, the kind given out free with the newspaper on Australia Day.

  ‘Where’d you get this?’ I asked. ‘Do you have the original?’

  ‘I copied it from a picture I found on the wall in Hon’s room. I thought I should leave the room as it was.’ He shifted, uncomfortable. ‘You know. In case we eventually find out it’s a, um . . .’

  ‘A crime scene.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Gabe looked away.

  ‘How did it take two months for you to discover him missing?’ Whitt said. ‘Was he one of your guys?’

  ‘Yes, he was one of mine. My main team are all construction guys, but I have a small group of stores personnel under my care. Hon was in charge of food storage. I asked around about Hon on the morning he should have showed up for work, and his mates on the camp just said he’d gone AWOL.’

  ‘Why would they say that if it wasn’t true?’ Whitt said.

  ‘Rumours spread around this place faster than lightning. It’s possible someone just assumed he’d taken off on his own and then it became public knowledge.’

  ‘When he didn’t turn up for work, did you check that what the other guys were saying was true?’

  ‘I sent alerts out to find him on the camp. The announcement system goes all through the place, even down into the mines. Sometimes these guys get drunk or high in each other’s dongas and they just sleep on the floor, so I wondered if he was just lying somewhere waiting to be found.’

  ‘Was Hon like that? Had he ever been late to work for that reason before?’

  ‘No. But there’s always a first time, I guess.’

  ‘So what came of the alerts?’

  ‘Nothing. No sign of him. Someone said they’d seen him go to town the night before. There are regular nightly trips there. Guys hitch rides with each other there an
d back.’

  ‘Did you check with the hotel in town to see if he’d stayed?’ Whitt tried.

  ‘I did. He wasn’t there.’

  ‘Then what?’ I asked.

  ‘I just forgot about it. I know that’s stupid, but I was so used to people taking off.’ Gabe squinted at the red desert, his hands in his pockets. ‘These young workers, they come to work for a couple of weeks or months and then they up and vanish.’

  ‘And there’s no system for chasing them down?’

  ‘It’s just like any other job, the mine’s duty of care for the workers ends when they leave the camp grounds. The bosses tell me all the time – if they’re not on the mine, they’re not our problem.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘They sound like a cuddly bunch.’

  ‘Well I guess they’re only concerned with time, and money, like most bosses.’ Gabe shrugged. ‘It eats up a lot of time, chasing the miners down. You ring their phones and they don’t answer. You leave emails. You call their wives or girlfriends, and they don’t know where they’ve gone. You start to panic. You call the police, their parents, their friends. Then, after you’ve been sweating your arse off about them for forty-eight hours, you finally find out that they’re in Darwin or Fremantle or some bloody place. Aww, I just got sick of the work, Boss. It’s not for me. I met some old mates here in Freo and I’ve been hanging out here gettin’ drunk and I’ll be home soon. The girl miners are even worse.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Whitt asked.

  ‘The guys deal with their loneliness by drinking. The girls deal with it by finding a guy to hang on to. When they break up with their boyfriends here on the camp they just run home without saying a word to anybody.’

  ‘So when were you sure Hon was missing?’ I asked.

  ‘I believed the guys when they told me that he’d just had enough and gone home. I didn’t call anyone to check up on that; I just took him off the payroll and reassigned his job and his bunk. Then all of a sudden two months later his parents ring me. They tell me he rings them every month, and he hasn’t called. They haven’t heard anything. I tried to call Hon again but the number was disconnected.’

  ‘And you’re telling us there’s a third one missing now?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Gabe handed me another photo. A small, freckly young woman with bright orange hair. ‘Tori King. Nineteen. Her sister’s here on the camp. Amy King’s been hassling her divisional officer for three days about Tori. Says her sister wouldn’t have left without telling her she was going. Tori’s divisional officer did the same thing I did when she didn’t turn up for work: he looked, couldn’t find her, and he didn’t think anything of it after that. I only found out about Tori being missing after I started asking around the other divisional officers.’

  ‘What’s the story with this one?’ Whitt held Tori’s photograph in the shade of a donga.

  ‘She disappeared from the camp. That’s all I know. She’d been to town that day, but at four o’clock in the afternoon she returned to the camp, and none of the CCTV cameras on any of the gates out of the mine caught her leaving again.’

  ‘Where on the camp was she last seen?’

  ‘In the rec room. She told the others she was going to bed and walked out the door into the dark. That was it. That was the last anyone heard of her.’

  Chapter 18

  GABE LEFT US outside Danny Stanton’s donga, driving off in a van. I’d wanted to ask him more about the kind of people hanging around the camp who weren’t miners – Richie and his crew, and the prostitutes – but he had a work day to get to, one the camp bosses wouldn’t let him sacrifice to help us.

  I watched as his van rolled away, its cracked rear window caked in dust. Whitt was already sweating in the dry heat, pulling his tight business shirt away from his chest.

  ‘The Bermuda Triangle of miners,’ he said, looking at the red horizon, which was interrupted only by clumps of spiky desert plants. ‘I don’t know where I’d like to die, but I know it’s not out there.’

  ‘We don’t know that Hon and Tori went out there,’ I said. ‘I’ll get Sydney headquarters to run a search of their bank, phone and email accounts.’

  ‘Good plan. Might as well add Danny to that search. See who he was interacting with in the days before he disappeared,’ Whitt suggested. ‘He might have announced his intentions to somebody.’

  We went inside the donga and found it split into three, the same as our own. The right and middle sections were empty of men. The cork partitions beside the beds were pinned with photographs of families, work timetables and pictures of naked women. In the left-most section we found a miner lying on his bunk with earphones in, reading a car magazine. Above his head hung a poster of a naked blonde woman, her legs spread wide and fingers trailing just above her hairless sex.

  ‘Nice!’ I said.

  The young miner sat up and yanked his earphones out.

  ‘This your sister?’ I asked, nodding at the poster.

  ‘What? No. Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Harry Blue, Sex Crimes. This is Detective Inspector Whitt, Preparation and Orderliness.’

  Whitt sighed.

  ‘Is this Danny Stanton’s bunk?’ I asked, pointing to the empty bed.

  ‘It was.’

  Danny’s bunk was exactly the same as mine, but it had been stripped bare to the canvas. There were some personal photographs on the walls, but a big hole was left where a poster had obviously been. A white plastic set of drawers, the same as was provided to every miner, sat at the end of his bed against the wall. When I pulled it open, I found it almost bare as well. There were bits and pieces left behind – a stack of safety training forms, a pencil, some elastic bands and an empty can of deodorant.

  ‘Where’s all Danny’s stuff?’ I asked his roommate.

  ‘It was like this when I got here,’ the young man said. ‘I didn’t touch nothing.’

  I waited for a second for the miner to change his tune. When he didn’t, I strode over and grabbed a handful of his hair. I yanked him off the bed.

  ‘Where. Is all. The stuff?’

  ‘Harry!’ Whitt grabbed at my arm.

  ‘I swear it was all gone when I got here!’ the young miner wailed. ‘People can take your shit when you go AWOL. Those are the rules. You leave it behind, it’s up for grabs. When the news came down that Danny was dead they cleaned the place out.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Everyone!’ He was twisting, trying to pull his head out of my grip. ‘Anyone! People are in and out of the mine all the time! They leave clothes and magazines and shit when they go home and people take it if it’s any good.’

  ‘Did you take anything?’

  ‘No! Yes! Fuck, yes! I took his iPod.’ He waved at the device on the bed. ‘And some wank mags. And a couple of T-shirts.’

  I pulled his hair backwards. ‘What else was there? What did the others take?’

  ‘His phone and wallet were here,’ the miner panted. ‘Someone took those. There was some cash and some books.’

  ‘Who took the wallet and the phone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I pushed my boot down on his foot.

  ‘I don’t know! Fuck!’

  ‘Where did everything go that no one wanted?’ Whitt asked from the doorway.

  ‘If nobody wants it, it goes into Lost Property.’

  ‘Where’s Lost Property?’

  ‘In the admin building! Stop! That hurts!’

  I shoved the miner onto the floor. There was nothing more I could gain from being in Danny’s former room. I took down all the personal photographs left on Danny’s wall and pocketed them.

  ‘Get rid of that poster,’ I told the young miner, pointing up at the woman above his bed. ‘It’s not good for you. Staring up some girl’s love-tunnel all day long. Fucking creep.’

  Whitt caught the door to the donga as I tried to slam it closed.

  ‘Love-tunnel?’ He smiled.

  ‘These people are
animals.’ I waved an arm at the miners walking by. ‘A guy goes missing for a few days and they raid his stuff like hyenas. I’m assuming Tori and Hon’s rooms were picked over, too. Which means we’ve got three missing young people and no trace they were ever here.’

  Chapter 19

  WE LOOKED AT Tori and Hon’s rooms and found the same signs of possessions ravaged. The drawers had been emptied onto the floor in Tori’s room, which she had had to herself. All that was left of her was a small pile of odd objects, hairbrushes and some scraps of paper. I gathered up Hon and Tori’s photographs and put their stacks alongside Danny’s.

  On the way to the administration building I called Pops, letting Whittacker walk ahead of me between the rows of earthmovers and steamrollers in the transport yard. I paused as the phone rang in Sydney and watched two young miners embracing in the shadows between the tall digging machines. Their hard hats knocked together as they came in for a kiss.

  ‘Blue,’ the Chief said when he answered.

  ‘I don’t know what kind of hellhole you’ve sent me to, Pops, but you’ve really outdone yourself here,’ I said.

  ‘Hello to you, too.’

  ‘I can’t decide if it’s a zoo or a high school. No one’s over the age of thirty. They play shit music all night long and they have zero interest in finding their mates. The victims’ possessions have all been raided. All the men have got their heads stuck in porn or drugs and I’m sleeping so close to my partner I could high-five him from bed.’

  ‘Any other complaints?’

  ‘The food sucks. And I’m seeing . . . I’m seeing weird shit on the news about Sam.’ My bravado faltered as my voice cracked over my brother’s name. I turned away when Whitt glanced back at me.

  I’d spent the early hours of the morning listening to Whitt breathe in his sleep and thinking about Sam. I fantasised about calling him, imagined what he would say when we finally made contact.