Free Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland Page B

again? Snowman Theory…’
    â€˜Snowball!’ piped the girl from her mother’s arms.
    â€˜Snowball, Snowman, whatever. Doesn’t look like it’s gonna revolutionise outback geology. I’m a practical bloke and I don’t know about those things. But I do know that he was a brother to me when I needed one, and the world’s a poorer place for his passing.’
    He paused for a moment, glanced at his family. ‘Tiffany?’
    The little girl with the big mouth frowned, then stepped forward and placed an obsidian crystal on his coffin. It sat there, a mess of intersecting lights and dark flash.
    â€˜So long, brother.’ The surveyor’s face was like stone as he watched the coffin sink into the ground. The rest of the crowd formed a jagged line, shuffled forward. Fistfuls of hot red earth rained down into the hole.

    Half an hour later I was rolling down the road, Wishy Ozolins’ oration ringing round my brain. He’d painted a portrait of the Doc I remembered: a decent man. Full of enthusiasms and surprises.
    Maybe he’d been overwhelmed in the end, but we’re all overwhelmed sooner or later. Most of us by things a lot worse than our own zeal.
    I felt I owed him something. We all did. If nothing else, we owed him more than the poor excuse for an investigation into his death carried out by my colleagues.
    Had Wireless really killed him in some drunken argument about Greek philosophy, or had Doc been getting on somebody else’s goat? Who’d rifled through his books and papers? Who’d been up on the cliff top, spying on his shack? And why could I not shake the image of that man-made rock formation from my head?
    His head was full of questions. That was what his brother had said. They were the centre and the circumference of his world.
    Had he asked one too many?
    I’d been like a caged tiger ever since we got back from Green Swamp, rattling round the office, doing the filing, making tea. Reading Cockburn’s stupid little post-it notes. Maybe it was time I started asking a few questions myself.
    Doc’s brother seemed like a good place to start.

A bird on the ground
    THE TRANSPORT AND WORKS depot was on the outskirts of town. The front entrance was neat and green. Urban, urbane, with a number one cut and a battery of sprinklers tossing out loops of water.
    The compound out back was a more honest manifestation of your whitefeller approach to the bush: huge and brutal, an armada of yellow earth-moving plant and equipment encased in barbed wire. The air was thick with diesel fumes and testosterone, the yard hummed with the hiss of pumps and guns, the rattle of running motors and men.
    When I asked for Wishy Ozolins, a jaunty receptionist directed me through to the Regional Manager’s office. There sat Ozolins himself, as out of place in an office as a camel at a cat show. He was an outdoors man if ever I saw one. That was where he’d been the first time I’d seen him: striding across the gravel with the sun on his face and his loved ones around him.
    His office window looked out onto the yard, and from the angle of his desk and the grimace on his face as he contemplated the pile of paperwork in front of him, I suspected Ozolins spent a lot of time looking at it as well.
    The cadaverous fellow standing alongside him had the rarefied air of someone who’d consecrated his life to the absolute mastery of something very, very small. He was peering down as Ozolins waded through a sea of numbers, nibbled pencil in hand.
    â€˜You still haven’t updated and reconciled your accrual and usages over the last quarter,’ grumbled the cadaver.
    â€˜Sorry?’
    â€˜The accruals! The usages!’ The fellow sniffed through nostrils that must have given him hell on windy mornings. ‘And you haven’t applied the tax entry depreciation percentage rates to the assets register.’
    â€˜Was I supposed to?’
    â€˜The Audit