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    Reveal.
    Reveal.
    Reveal.
    Ebook522 pages8 hours

    Reveal.

    By Bill Reed

    ()

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    About this ebook

    ‘I
    f you are a famous-enough author long presumed dead and you keep sending notes to your Publisher through some far-off precocious teenage girl who says she’s never heard of you – and the frightening predictions in those notes keep coming true -- then you can’t be dead. Can you?

    For one, the mother of Jimmy Massey knew nothing of you walking into the sea off southern Sri Lanka, or your predictions of the murders of all sorts of priests across Asia and Australasia – nor a thing about the woman-child making them. Nor did she have a clue as to why her little Jimmy, a simple taxi-driver, got slaughtered along with the priest in Cairns Cathedral that Easter. But she did know Dr Valentino Sebastian kept coming and literally sniffing around her tribe people’s little chapel, even if she couldn’t know what he could do with birthings, seemingly at will.

    The mother of Jimmy Massey knew that, no matter how much sniffing around her and hers went on, or what all the police and all the nosey-parkers in the world might say, she could see in her mind that-there black shore your notes kept going on about. She could hear the nearing howling. She sensed the coming. But not one thing ever was going to come anywhere near what she held enclosed unto herself as dearly as life itself. Nuh huh. You and all the others can take your prophecies and predictions and shove them all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBill Reed
    Release dateAug 7, 2014
    ISBN9780992556730
    Reveal.

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      Book preview

      Reveal. - Bill Reed

      Published by Reed Independent, Melbourne, Australia

      A Smashwords edition

      Available from Smashwords.com and all leading e-stores. Also available as a paperback from retail outlets worldwide.:

      paperback: ISBN 9780648175681

      ebook: ISBN 9780992556730

      Copyright Bill Reed 2018

      National Library of Australia data services entry:

      Author: Reed, Bill/ author.

      Title: Reveal./ Bill Reed.

      ISBN: 9780648175681 (paperback)

      9780992556730 (ebook)

      Subjects: Australia fiction/murder mystery/mythologies/Australian indigenes/Sri Lanka fiction/ colonialism

      Dewey Number: A823.3

      'Are you a human being?'

      (question in the ordination of monks in Theraveda Buddhism)

      That which sages may attain, the Firm State very hard to reach, a woman with two fingers' worth of wisdom cannot win.

      (Mara -- the Buddhist and Hindu personification of evil and lust -- ridiculing the 'saint' Bhikkhuni Soma while she meditated)

      Contents

      The First Revealing

      That Easter in Cairns

      Around That Easter in Galle

      That Time at Throsby

      Postscript

      About the author

      Also by Bill Reed

      The First Revealing

      Solitary, and near upon the striking of the new millennium, in far north Queensland in the tottish town of Kuranda, the wife of embryologist Dr Valentino Sebastian sat down to the deck of cards with the morbid thankfulness of one feeling confused and lonely yet finding her husband had at least thought of her enough to leave out something for her to go on with.

      His suggestion of a game of Solitaire seemed appropriate.

      She was alone in the Queenslander, itself nicely isolated by rainforest against the river so that it would always stir some memory of her childhood in Sri Lanka, and she didn't know why she was or why she should be alone.

      He should have been there to pick her up from the hospital. Whatever had called him and their son away had no right over her needs. After all the physical difficulties of producing again after so many years, and then finally giving her husband the boy-girl twins he had wanted so much, you'd think there'd be something upward of a suggestion from him to play Solitaire alone in the house.

      Twins. More than doubled the extension of their roots in Australia in one go. Two newly-weds migrating alone and then coming up North here to really rough it for the first few years. Now a family of five with her son Rob and the twins. Not many friends. Never, really, even a friend or two when she thought of it. And now her mind was racing and she had no idea whether it was being too excited for being able to come home, too disappointed for coming home to an empty house, or just still too feverishly agitated to be able to go straight to bed.

      It was only when she opened the pack to the cards that she found his letter folded neatly inside. He was such a meticulous man that even if she had gone straight to bed, she would have found a photocopy of the letter under her pillow. He had written:

      'My darling brave little wife and welfarer,

      ‘You are so welcomed back to our home. I so wanted to be leaning over your dear shoulder as you read this.

      'The first thing is: I have had a premonition that your time is soon to come. I do not mean maternity time. So, before that happens, there is something you should be thinking about.

      ‘You might need to have a dictionary handy.

      'Remember how the stage that you are at now began a year ago, when I put you under those two sessions of laparoscopy on account of those bad abdominal pains you kept having, as in supposed to be having?

      'Those abdominal pains were merely the result of the emetic I kept giving you, in order to make you think the laparoscopic procedures were necessary. Unfortunately for you, fortunately for me, they weren’t.

      'In the first operation, I played fun-parlours -- you know, you keep an object if you can pick it up with the mechanical arms? I got quite good at plucking out the secondary oocytes exactly at any stage of their meiosis I wanted. Then I got each of your own two eggs to start dividing -- without being fertilised.

      ‘If you knew about these things, you might know ova cleavage without fertilization is pretty much impossible, but I've found I have a bit of a natural knack for making it happen. You've seen magicians waving their hands over things, like rabbits in a hat. If that’s too appropriate bad-taste-wise, maybe I should have said a sort of waving of green fingers? It's something like that anyway. It just happens when I am around. I say that modestly. Let's just say it's a gift I've just simply known I’ve had but needed to prove on somebody – and you have to admit you were pretty handy.

      'So, as I was saying, from two of your eggs I got dividing auto-selves, I took two separate blastomeres – only then did I actually put them through an additional so-called normal fertilization process. How at this normally too-late stage you ask, or would if you had any idea what I was talking about? Well, simply like whipping up soup I suppose. By popping them into a petri dish and smothering them with sperm – and, well, me just being there as well.

      ‘Remember, they had already begun growing and dividing without the sperm nudge anyway, so, before the ‘soup’, there they were two healthily-growing eggs with only your female genetic characteristics, no?

      ‘So then when I got them in that soup, I let one get into a real night out with the boys’ Y genetic material so it got all confused and popped up to be a XX male -- a really rare beast, that.

      ‘That other eggy-weggy I let get just a sniff of the Y male chromos so it got all a bit wall-flowerish, if you like, staying with your female side mainly but just a bit polluted with the Y-side of things from the sperm.

      ‘And how, may you ask did I do that? Well, it’s in the flick of the old green fingers while you’re stirring that soup pot, is probably the best way of describing it.

      ‘I think it all works like that, but let’s not go all technical, shall we? If it doesn’t… you know me: if I think it, it does, it will.

      ‘Anyway, away your little eggy poos went, dividing happily away. The upshot is you came to carry a coming boy with girl characteristics and a coming girl with boy characteristics. Yes! Lucky, you! And the exciting thing about that is, since there’s won’t be any puberty for either of them, you have now given birth to a hermaphrodite and an androgyne. But it’s probably going to be nice for them if you call them genderqueer. It’s more de rigeur calling them that these days.

      ‘Goodness, not just any old hermaphrodite or androgyne. Don’t think that! They are what the medical profession calls true forms. Clever old you have produced absolutely thoroughbred ambi-genders, my darling. I couldn't be more thrilled, especially for you.

      'Embyrogenetically-speaking, each of your children has the gondal tissues of both sexes. If you were able to put them under a microscope, ha ha, you’d see how I neatly arranged them so that each has an ovary on one side and a testis on the other. ‘Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them’ and all that, eh? Both sides, need I humbly say, perfectly healthy.

      ‘But, wait, as they say on the best sales pitch, that’s not all. Since you know how much I love you, my darling wife, you know I would love to be able to say our twins, rather than your twins. Regrettably I can't. You see, the horny little buggers of sperm I use in the fertilising dish were our son’s. Yes! The your twins are yours and our son Rob's. Well, I couldn’t go using my own little sods in some mere experiment, could I? I mean, one has one’s standards, and all that.

      'So, using the singular second-person ‘you’ now and not ‘us’... you have just given birth to your own grandchildren, in a sense. Nothing unusual in that, my darling, given it was actually an incest pregnancy of mother-with-son. But true hermaphrodism and pure androgynism... well, that's you really hitting the medical jackpot. You have! You could say you either gave birth to your own grandson or granddaughter and granddaughter or grandson. Or any combination of those. And, literally, from out of your own loins too. How compensating for you is that!

      ‘That’s my educated guess, anyway.

      ‘But don’t take a bow just yet. There’s even more!!! Since I ‘green-fingered’ your eggs into dividing by themselves, before your son’s little horny spermies started fooling around with them, well... and get this and wow!... your babies are actually, provably and definitely, virgin births. Yes, like Our Lady. Yes, the first parthogenesis in 2000 years! Little old you!

      ‘And still more, more, more!!! With a gonad to the left and a testis to the right... in each of their own bodies, your kiddie-poos have inbuilt their own parental chromosome lines. Each is perfectly able to impregnate him- or herself. Thrown in for free! All they need is for someone like yours truly to plumb one to the other and then away they go... your new line without all that messy jumping-into-bed stuff. Then, if they live long enough -- and a couple in ten, say, might be lucky -- they will even pass this inbuilt self-fertilization on to their children and their children’s children, and so on.

      ‘Forget 2000 years of virgin-birth dearths, my darling. You’ve just started up a whole conveyor belt of ‘thanks-but-I’ve-got-my-own-sauce’, my darling! Isn't that exciting?

      'Now don’t you go imagining I'm going to abandon them, just because I'm not their father. I plan to set up my own little place somewhere for them and their self-offsprings. It won’t be right here in our happy home, of course, not where you committed incest with your own son. How sick would that be?

      'I think I'll call it The Sebastian Home for Asymptomatics or SHA or, ‘Take a Gander of the Genders with their Denders up themselves’ and it’ll be in memory of you. Would you like that?

      'Ain’t you a clever little thing?

      ‘Oh, I would have picked you up at the hospital but of course I couldn’t be seen dead with you now. Frankly, you’re too disgusting for decent company now, don’t you think?

      'Go well, won't you?'

      The wife of Dr Valentino Sebastian finally rose to get a glass of water to take to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She never got to play Solitaire to fill in the void. She found another way that was a lot quicker.

      She had closed the bathroom door, and as neatly as it would be finally, behind herself.

      Part 1:

      That Easter in Cairns

      1.

      She liked to joke about it, loved to keep saying it, that a dead author who is still writing was the only good author. Had the Publishing Director of Publishing International, Katrina Koslik. She was saying it again that month before Easter.

      But the irony was that this time it was proving no joke, she herself pondered, especially if the dead author who is still writing, as it were, was apparently in Sri Lanka and not lying in a cemetery where she could get her hands on him. Sri Lanka she had thought of as only full of old bomb craters and palm trees and beaches healing themselves, and certainly not a pond in which Australian publishing might fish.

      At the bottom of it all was that she had got to the stage now of not knowing what to do about the jagged slices of paper that kept on coming through the post from Sri Lanka. Spewed-out lines supposedly again from Pieter Garel Swensen, long declared deceased. The jagged slice of paper she now held was a particular case in point. Only fifty or so lines this time, yet they presented a moral dilemma, even without her having to believe the event they foretold might come true.

      Have an independent witness verify the date they came in, hold them back for the good of the forthcoming book as proof that Swensen could foretell the future? Or try to prevent what these relatively few lines were saying would happen, and in so doing perhaps reduce the commercial punch of the book?

      Her fellow directors had gone along so far with the two underlining rules she had set for publishing the Swensen book: the first was that they assume all this was some sort of mucking-around by Swensen. The second was that to do anything necessary to ensure the company wouldn’t get hurt if rule number one proved right and Swensen came up from the grave when the lure of publicity got too much for him to resist.

      Now Katrina Koslik was a pleasurable woman who eagerly looked forward to the immoral freedom of her nearing menopause with a relish that she knew would remain just that, a relish. She had a high-pitched voice of the old-quality BBC accent that echoed the desperation with which she threw herself into copying it as a teenage migrant from Poland in late Fifties. The high pitch of her voice, its tortured correctness, had seemed to others to be coming from her heavy lips, always heavily carmined, as endearing self-mockery. Tall with more-than-slightly thickening ankles, hippy and nateful, bellied and loving to emphasize it with dress materials, boyish in bust, bright red of hair, freckles, appearing liver spots, she exuded a forthrightness which even her women friends were worried about being consumed by.

      And now, yes, regarding the scrap of paper, she made her decision, faintly dissatisfied with it. As always pleased her no end, she shouted out to call her secretary in, and had this latest Swensen scrap sent off to police headquarters in Sydney. She didn’t know why Sydney; she supposed in her own mind it was nearer Cairns about which Pieter Garel Swensen seemed to be writing than Melbourne was. She could think of none other than to address it to the Public Relations Officer, Commissioner’s Office.

      Easter was still a month away after all, and even if the murder predicted was a true prediction, there was still time to prevent it. Her problem with that as a publisher was that what was on the scrap of paper wouldn’t be a prediction.

      That’s why the irony had long ago proved to be no publishing joke, really.

      ##

      Easter itself.

      The head of the priest was still smoking when, some three hours after the estimated time of the slaying, Detective-Sergeant Chou Lee Yuen, pretending to be chewing gum when he was only chewing his cud so and living up to his nickname of Chewie Gum or Chewie Glum, arrived at the cathedral.

      The head was smoking on the second altar step that the priest's congregation must have knelt in droves for the sacrament over the months he had been assigned to the Far North Queensland diocese.

      At three in the morning, Chou's heels clicked solidly upon the floor of the Cairns cathedral. From the other end of this modernist's cavern of dull, dun-coloured bricks left exposed, one supposed, by someone who wanted to keep the Christian god as tormentor in sight, came the sound of whispered voices and movements so missing in the line of being hushed that someone near deaf and blind could have discerned what was going on from the road outside They were the trappings of the uniform police, of the ambulance team excited about being able to get their hands on something not mashed up in the wreckage of some once-car, and of the forensic guy -- a part timer who delighted himself by always beating the lead detective to any scene by always keeping near at hand his CB radio tuned to the police airwaves. There were also the Bishop and a cropping of the hardier nuns who were cowled enough by what they didn’t want to see as to appear medieval visitors ranged against the cathedral’s rough walls and looking like they were waiting for the self-mortifications to begin.

      At this hour, as he klonked on down the aisle, nothing much was in Chou Lee Yuen's thoughts, except the overbearing sound of his own heels stone-flagging along. Usually he was too quick thinking, especially for his own taste, and incongruously light on his heavily bandied legs bowed to the vertical by malnutrition as a Cantonese slum orphan. He had already stepped over the dead man lying absolutely spread-eagled on his back on the pretend moonstone at the main entrance to the cathedral Chwissakes, some welcome mat. He had not stopped by that body, since there was only one constable yawning beside it. The humming of those many more people from deep inside, sounding also as though it was group confessional going on, meant there was a worse, and more important, ex-someone inside.

      A double murder. Did they or didn’t they mentioned only one corpse?, he had wondered for a disinterested moment before he had begun on his noisy way towards the altar. Never good at churchgoing; a man ought to know how to approach God more discreetly. Near the altar, he was blocked by appalling early-morning energy in the form of Acting Constable Ryan Jones, who fidgeted with impatience to be asked something. He was stopped in silence though by the detective-sergeant despite his best endeavours not to be, until Chou had scanned his surrounding, apparently without finding anything interesting, and:

      'Jonesy. what's doing,' the detective demanded and tasted the sourness of his own dawn’s-clogged breath, 'with all that smoking?'

      'That isn't our sort of smoking, Dee Ess.' Dee Ess, detective-sergeant, chwissakes. Dead cert, private school, an initials user. Few years ago, he would’ve been using only the surname. Times a-changing. 'That's steam.'

      'Spray that again?'

      'That smoke you think's coming out of the priest is steam, Dee Ess. The brain can't burn. It can only boil, see. Only looks like frying, but I made the same mistake too.'

      Chwissakes, exoneration from a nineteen-year-old, tops. Light brown wavy hair like that used to make you mousy, not mouthy.

      Father Joseph McClain, the dead priest, was sitting bolt upright as though he couldn't move after going bum down onto the four steps to the altar. His arms were cast in a penitential position that suggested he might have been abused by a sharp metallic swear word in God’s house -- the left forearm across his lower face and the right arm held out in full extension of take-that-back. This was the first thing that struck the detective sergeant as weird; the arms could not have remained like that while it took, what?, chwissakes maybe half an hour, give or take, for rigor mortis to set in. No way.

      And when Chou finally used the side of his hand to lift the babyish face, he would have bet by the expression of horror-leer that Father McClain had seen his death coming, alright, but slow and so inexorably that it was pointless to try to fight back.

      From his time-frozen arms, it looked like the Father was trying desperately to stop himself from saying something to upset it... Chou was meaning the death-coming... and could only motion it to maybe stop the killing frenzy before it hurt him.

      Chou Lee Yuen stood rooted on the spot before the face that he had upturned. He had never seen fixed horror like that. Not much more than an hour ago, it would’ve just been able to start relaxing after given solace to hundreds of worshippers. Surely, this terror could not be placed. Surely, this, not in a cathedral. Not in Cairns. Not on Easter. Not on Chou's duty, and a long holiday at that.

      The heavy odour of methylated spirits mingled with a sort of cabbage boiling was almost overwhelming so close up. The last vapours were curling out of the Father McClain’s ears, eyes, nose, mouth and somewhere around the back of the head.

      Chou Lee Yuen heard, 'Dee Ess?', knew who it was kneeling close enough to inspect the back of the head of Father McClain, and took a very long time to get around to looking around in response, trying to make it look as wearied as he could, but Acting Constable Ryan Jones’s energy was proving ubiquitous. Chou found him pointing at a sickening injury at the back of the Father's skull, the blood around it looking like a gross scab.

      ‘The flies,’ came dramatically from the acting constable, knowing immediately he was being unacceptable, ‘won’t know what they’re missing’ and so had to narrow his eyes almost to the point of shut-down in the hope it came out sour enough and therefore acceptable enough to the detective. Not that this was anywhere near enough to stop him from enjoying a bit of lecturing on:

      'Here, Dee Ess.'

      Jones was pointing to it with an extraordinary long and notch-jointed digit that would have been a real weapon at his private school when dobbing in someone.

      Chou nodded he was getting there, wasn't he?, and did so. He knew enough about the human body in a newly-expired state to know the left trapezium muscle, that superficial one at the back of the shoulders and neck upon which Hollywood hairs stand up brightly, had been rudely ripped away from its holds as if by one massive grab-and-yank. If that wasn’t ample enough for the cause of death to end right there, there was the boiling coming slowly to steam-engine rest. And there was the priest’s monstrous expression surely saying heart stops beating from this moment on.

      How many times do you kill a guy?

      'Spweak to me,' Chou commanded drearily past Jones’s shoulder to the part-time forensic wallah, but Dr Julian Sobers wasn't going to fall for that. He deliberately ignored the bandy case officer, and merely carried on with taking his own photographs with his own non-U baby Minolta that, if organic, wouldn’ve have been called a baby anymore. And anyway, the Acting Constable either thought Chou was referring to him or he wasn’t going to be shaken off so easily by any throw-off appeal to forensic science. By raising his young voice ever so slightly, he became very pedantic with it, going:

      'Dee Ess, regardez. You'd almost think rigour mortis set in straight away with the arms. You’re asking yourself how’s that possible. Same with how gooseflesh dominates the skin, eh? So, we’re saying looks like he got scared to death. Who’s buying that’s only a look of surprise on his face? Not us. Then we shoofty around the back, and what do we have here? Only the neck muscle cut in two by something massive, sharp would have to be right, so you don’t have to arrive here after the coroner to know one thing that’s going in his report, right? At the same time, we are jotting down about the steam. You’d think they’d fix the smell of methylated spirits. You could ask how many times do you kill a guy?'

      'I already asked.'

      Now, out of all, this was confusing to the Acting Constable:

      'Asked who?'

      Chou vinegarly grunted him off so he could nail this surly fowensic bugger Sobers hiding behind that ancient camera of his. Almost hear its gears grinding. He knocked lightly on its plastic casing that hung down from Sobers’s neck:

      'Speak, you're allowed, doc.'

      'Haven’t finished yet.'

      'Yes, you have.'

      'Not properly.'

      'Stuff properly. Let the chicken bones fall where they will, doc. The metho and this stuff steaming out.'

      'I suppose you get the trapezium out of the way and then inject methylated spirits up through the brain stem and into the hypothalamus region. No idea why you’d want to get the trapezium out of the way, but.'

      'Only the trapezium worries you?'

      'That your way of asking about the hypothalamus region, is it? Chewie, it’s only the body temperature control, that’s all. Methylated spirits is mainly ethyl alcohol. You whop it in there; it would heat up the brain to boiling point and, bingo, bubble, bubble, boil and trouble or whatever. You could call it chain reaction or you could call it spontaneous combustion. You can do it on rabbits. Try it sometime.'

      'Some doctor or something?'

      Before moving off towards the corpse still neglected on the steps outside the cathedral, Dr Julian Sobers was happy enough to divulge his opinion on that at least:

      'Oh, anyone with a big syringe, commonly big, but big, maybe not common big, but gettable big, like an elephant vet, and wondering what to do with it, might think of it, but only if he was also thinking about what to do with some spare metho he had lying around.'

      For a moment, Detective-Sergeant Chou Lee Yuen thought the chubby hair-hag'd doctor had the presence of mind to be cracking a joke in the appropriate bad taste, but one waits for the appreciation if so, not just turn and walk away towards another corpse outside you hope hadn’t upped and gone somewhere else more attentive to it.

      Chwissakes, a man should really kick Caucasoid arse for distorting mankind’s sense of humour. But Chou found, instead, the front of the Bishop of North Queensland blocking his way. The bishop was sporting completely inappropriate and disconcerting Japanese kimono and rubber thongs over and under blue flannel pyjamas. He had white talc filling the rings of his neck, as though he had thought of deodorising first after being roused from his sleep about one of his priests being murdered. There might have been sleep in his voice but the pulpit in it hadn’t been too nullified by that:

      'Detective-Sergeant, I don't mind waiting just to say I heard and saw nothing, but you must realise this is Easter. Some of us have jobs to do.'

      'Good morning, I think, Bishop.'

      'One was trying to be cooperative.'

      'Look, sir, posswible to get those lady nuns tucked in, too, what say? Hate to say it but they’re not giving the place a good look.’

      As the Bishop seemed to enjoy doing that as something he could do leisurely without becoming too involved in things, Chou Lee Yuen took a moment to watch the flock being re-mustered, before slothfully following Dr Sobers out to the front steps to the body out there. As he approached he was ever so slightly rebuking himself for not trying hard enough to get the image of the body-as-doormat out of his mind. He could have been more mindful, for example, at the clatter his heavy issue shoes were making on the flagstones of the aisle. After all, the nuns had hush-puppied away under the shepherding of the Bishop, and there were five of them.

      Out there, and besides Dr Sobers, like two recalcitrant worshippers, Chou knelt to inspect the man. The body’s T-shirted showed violence, but the perma-press trousers still respectfully creased, but rubber thronged like the Bishop. Someone should write a book about the Japanese geisha influence on how North Queenslanders plaffer-plaffer their walk into history. Call it Flipped and Flopped.

      As a body, the man was sprawled face down, but there was something dreadfully wrong with the whole shoulder region. Each shoulder was trapped unnaturally under the weight of the man. His neck seemed three times even a Sumo-wrestling size; it was so disproportionate that it overshadowed the shattered end of bone sticking upwardly out of the back of it. Above this, at that moment, was Acting Constable Ryan Jones going:

      'Who we don't know yet, Dee Ess. He was cleaned out.'

      Chwissakes, how did Jones get here without me seeing?

      ‘Okay,’ Chou dusted his hands as he stood, paused for a long look back down the nave, then around the front entrance. He hoped it looked sour enough.

      'Okay, move them out, whenever.'

      'Dee Ess...' Ryan Jones was about to point out that the police photographer hadn't even arrived yet, when, an hour late, the police photographer did arrive. He was a short, vigorous man, life beanful, but such an obvious heavy sleeper he still could not seem to get his legs to coordinate with his upper regions and that his hair was taking all the spikes of annoyance that came from that. His camera hung from his right hand, attached, it looked in that light, only by magnetic attraction. There was no apology for being scandalously late and none asked for. You learn what they teach you after years in the Force, not in the first weeks.

      Chou and Jones stood back in bad grace to let the fellow get on with what he should have long ago got on. They waited. So did the police photographer. In the dawning of what was going to be a damp dawn, in that time in which no clock ticks, the three stood around the body, looking down, their thoughts drifting beyond where they could be reined in, beyond coinable thought itself.

      It was left to Forensic Sobers to give a heave against the police photographer.

      'Get on with it, Cleary. Even the bishop's had a good gawk and gone.'

      Cleary managed to move his camera upwards against gravity; his voice thick still with a half-night's disuse:

      'No film.'

      'You what?'

      'It's Easter,' he whined froggily.

      'Here, here,’ Dr Julian Sobers railed despite it being just what he expected; he recovered a roll of film from the back pocket of his Tall Boy shorts.

      But Cleary came to remember he was a professional and needed to show some perkiness when all was said and done:

      'This been on ice?'

      'It has been,' gave out Forensic Sobers with a practised clinical retort that showed why he stayed part-time, 'refrigerated.'

      'Chwissakes, you two.'

      'Say cheese.' Cleary, already caught them in a frame with at least half the corpse; his party trick had always been to show how fast he could load a camera and how some cops who won’t be mentioned are slow on their feet. And cameras not even being guns.

      'Chwissakes.'

      Detective-Sergeant Chou Lee Yuen washed his hands of any further to-do with any of this. It was an appropriate gesture for the day after the pain of Good Friday. He walked back across the short lawn, through the elegant wrought-iron gates the cathedral's architect must have forgotten to maul out of their original condition, and back to his car. He did so, only needing to throw at Jones:

      'Cordon off. Did you bring cordon?’

      ‘Did I,’ the Acting Constable was so confused he showed confusion, ‘bring cord, Dee Ess?’

      ‘Chwisssakes.’

      Detective Sergeant Chou Lee Yuen drove away. He was cutting through the cold light of that day to get back to the station where he could give some sour though to Father Joseph McClain and the unknown body on the man’s doorstep.

      ##

      The first thing that Chou Lee Yuen did when he awoke four hours later and well into Easter Saturday was to lie as quietly as he could without screaming until the first of the tides of pain passed through him.

      Then he swung his legs off the cot of the empty cell that he preferred sleeping in to the station common room. He painstakingly wound up to his trademark of a whippish jerky walk to make it to his desk. On the way, he grunted good mornings like strewing soft maundy to any beginning their day who might or might not have said good morning to him, unlikely as that was. It doesn't cost to grunt.

      That which he had requested from Records before completing the preliminary paperwork and heading off for shut-eye in the cell was on his desk. Easter; he would have to thank God-the-Crank upstairs who filed away this crank stuff, and was an even bigger crank for working all Easter Friday night for the love of it as to how it wiled away his otherwise total loneliness in the world outside through being such a crank.

      The thing Chou had wanted retrieved from Records had come a week ago, attached to a letter from some sort called Katrina Koslik, a publisher or whatsit in Melbourne. It was addressed to The Commissioner’s Office in Sydney, attention The Public Relations Officer, for chwissakes. The letter had by then been reduced to the usual police photocopying machine needing toner. All this hi-tech today and no toner tomorrow; that’s what made office paperless, not computers. On top was a terse swab of handwriting in gashing red going 'Cairns' -- and an arrow pointing to the top of the letterhead, as though the top of the page was always going to be magnetic north.

      This publisher's letter and attachment had been circulated around Chou’s domain the week before. Chou had remembered it because it was wackier than the usual whacky stuff – and therefore commanded more than the usual attention as being worth it -- yet despite itself looked professional on the surface, not because whackos didn't use publishers' letterheads, but more because his own Chief had shown his ninth-grade school-departure by scrawling additionally on it, 'Staff to keep their eyes looking out'. For chwissakes.

      Chou remembered clearly how this Katrina Koslik claimed what she enclosed came anonymously to her from Sri Lanka, which he had been sure was not in Chinese territory, at least not now. He sipped coffee until he could stand its equally-unsigned acidity no longer, then swung his attention from the window full of yachts beating out to the Reef to the no-longer scrap of paper she had attached: It rendered:

      ‘The priest with the Scottish name does not know why he is called from his bed to the church. He rises groggily, automatically crossing himself. He thinks of the phrase The Guide of the World as he moved down the staircase, the cool banister to the Cairns muggy night a rail line to his going. He registers the heaviness of monsoon clouds that would be over the mountain. As he nears the outer vestry door, he stops with a heavy foreboding. His Christ has been crucified that day. It is just after midnight on this Easter Friday. All his life he has only remembered the torn suffering of being adrift from his fellow man. Such self-pity he has never been able to stop himself feeling. As he moves from the vestry, his heart swells with stabbing grief. The pain he feels shocks him. Yet the priest with the Scottish name, his hair as sandy as the Galilean plains, his skin deathly pale and the same 35 years of age just has time to kneel at the shrouded crucifixion and ask the reason he has been called, when he hears the obscenity of the laughter.

      He turns from his knees towards a stench which claws his throat. His mind hears the vibrato of the dark side of the moon. From out of the black ocean of the night, he sees emerging on his shore the black figure of the-It he now knows has come to consume him now. He feels himself shatter in the path of its overwhelming rage and hears the mocking sarcasm from far away and yet uppermost to him below a thousand explosions in his mind:

      'How can you say you're coming

      When you're leaving so sooning?'

      In the early hours, they are finding him.

      In the new dawn, the policeman looks down on him.

      He is a policeman of the narrow-cornered eyes.

      He is watching a good man's thinking boil away.

      There is steam in the air.

      Everything good boils down to this.

      Chou Lee Yuen had thought there had been a smirk on the face of the young rosser who had passed it on to him but for the life of him couldn't see why there could be a smirk at the time. Reading it now, he saw how it would have been a smirk. The policeman with the narrow-cornered eyes. Chwissakes, don’t these buggers ever let go? Chwissakes, forget that, concentrate.

      From Sri Lanka, yes. Confirmed. Sailed in on the twenty-twenty vision of future seeing. Yeah, wight. Give it to the Chinee-looking guy. All that rice brain chow as a starving kid they think makes a smart guy’s blood goes thin. What have you got? Church not cathedral. ‘Kay, moot point. Priest with the Scottish name. How many Macs are there lurking in the Cloth, outside of the first million? Steam in the air; maybe this writer character thinks Cairns is in the Arctic Circle, hot breaths in the dawn of the morning and all that. All wight, all wight, give in and say it’s the Big Lead, swing it. The Foretelling. Where’re the details? Like the little thing of the second body. How come he’s seeing ‘It’ come out of the sea and on the shore when the cathedral’s, like, ten blocks away from the harbour? How come ‘It’ sneaks up on him when there’s just been merry hell to play outside on the cathedral steps, as in only a bloody murder to match his coming own? And ‘It’. Can’t be more specific than that, wight? Yeah, wight. Who’s the author? Well, this Koslik wouldn’t say, would she? Sure, she wouldn’t.

      Let’s title it, ‘Priest Gets Easter Egg’d. By Who Knows What.’

      Chou was going to mark it back to Records as his attempt at least at good detective work, but he was holding back on that if only by remembering the knowing smirk on the face of the young rosser who’d pass it to him a week ago. ‘The policeman of the narrow-cornered eyes’. Now that, that would amount to a small hill of beans. How could some Who Knows What in Sri Lanka imagine that? Yeah, well... hand that to forensics as hard evidence and see the look in Sobers’s round eyes.

      Before he succumbed to the temptation of crumbling Katrina Koslik’s letter and the attachment so show at least any future pullers of it out of Records what he thought of it, Chou gave into the temptation to ring the Melbourne number of the International Publishing Company. There was no answer, of course. Still, nobody could say he hadn’t tried, Easter Saturday or no Easter Saturday. He couldn’t help it if not every such coincidence makes lighter work. Yet wistful, Chou was. Here it was, halfway to Christ’s resurrection as billions of people prayed for, yet who would dedicate their prayers that poor Father McClain, on the morrow, or that poor joe out on the steps, might do the same? Didn’t it look the same senseless violence?

      After thinking so sleepily-dopey like that, the next almost-inevitable thing was he deciding the Koslik material would be safer in his pocket than Records which was already often referred to as Golgotha because not many human eyes up there found what they wanted to see. And even if he forgot that they were in his pocket, his wife would fish them out when she did the laundry and went searching for money to compensate for the valuable time she wasted on him.

      ##

      'Yeah?' he said sourly after being jump-started at his desk by the phone ringing.

      'Can't we answer the phone with a simple good morning or hello?'

      Only the Chief, that’s all.

      'Sworry, sir. Last night just a bit spooky.'

      'How is it going, Chou?'

      Chou glanced sourly out the window at the civilian world knowing no answer would be waited for, 'Just had a call from the Bishop. How would it be if I’d picked up the phone and said Yeah on him?'

      'Wotten, weally wotten, sir.'

      'Don't do that Chinese thing on me, Chookie the Chew. This is serious.'

      'The Bishop not pleased?'

      The Detective-Sergeant was feeling a bit guilty about treating the venerable gent the way he had anyway. No doubt a behaviour vestige from being pulled by the arm by the Church of England in the orphan camp in old Hong Kong, even though the wrong religion. Or maybe it was the Bishop of North Queensland touting a kimono with dragon motif over rubber thongs to his feet in church.

      'He is not. I am having to speak over my own breakfast table.'

      'Here or at home, sir?'

      There was a tart pause. Chou could hear, almost smell, toast being munched hard then gulped. Hope he chokes. There was a small choke-cough as well, then slurps over something liquid and hot which Chou could definitely taste. Better fill the air in with nothing-but-work this end:

      'Forensic's reporting by midday, latest, sir. Pics by eleven. Reports of the uniform boys by that time, but wouldn’t like you to expect anything like some big juicy fwingerprint,' he couldn't help that one and hated his tongue even more palatably, 'or whatnot lying around. No body disturbed, ha ha. If you like, sir, right this arvo I’m off to placate the bishop. Chits all made out; aware of it being double-overtime weekend and your budget warnings but be sure, sir, I feel guilty about it. All this and more on your desk by Tuesday morning, sir. Maybe even the killer-diller himself.'

      ‘Have you finished now?'

      It was a child's, a menarche girl-child's, voice, and it was cheesed off because her father must have given up and handed the phone to her while he got on with his hot buttered toast or something. That’s

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