Buns! As if he didn’t have enough on his plate.
“Buns,” she had said, cooing over the phone. “Nice buns, Kim!”
“Sweet,” he had replied.
“No, darling. Sour. Sourdough. You remember?”
“Of course. Sourdough rolls, some infant painkillers, and some adult painkillers. A nice red.”
“Yes, Kim, that would be lovely. We’re having minestrone tonight. Something simple.”
“Love you, Lee.”
And he did. She might not be exciting, she might have changed from maiden to maternal in a year, but she still satisfied his needs. Put food on the table, wiped up the messes the twins made, kept a tidy house and warmed him in bed. What more did he want in a partner?
Passion would be nice. Lee didn’t dance through his mind the way Zoe did. She didn’t blow in his mind’s ear at inappropriate moments like Zoe, her breath stirring him to electric fantasy in a droning meeting.
Hell and Maria! That consultant archaeologist, once he had been reminded about the official secrecy provisions of the Crimes Act, had been as dry as the dust on his jacket. You’d think that discovering a body, and the surprising artifacts interred with it, would have stirred a scientist, but this fellow might have been listing the ingredients for well, sourdough rolls and minestrone.
Stace had set out sticky buns and tea in the boardroom. The three stammering security guards had been the opening act, making their reports about shots fired, fruitless searches, plausible excuses, and then hiding themselves in the tucker, slurping their tea and looking forward to a day off with their girlfriends.
HPL had jumped on that.
“We’re watching you. One word about last night’s activities and you’ll be guarding the car park at Pine Gap. All three of you. Got it?”
They had been marched out and the expert marched in. Digital presentation on the big screen as he talked. Tarpaulin lifted off the excavation, now sealed inside a tent borrowed from nearby Duntroon, portable lights poking in through the dawn’s early gloom.
Shadows and odd shapes as he brushed the dirt off, then steady excavation, cold daylight as the winter sun rose. The skeleton grew clear, beads and baubles on the bones as the orange-brown dirt was trowelled away. Measuring sticks in the photographs, the archaeologist’s dry voice describing each step. Finally the sad little shape was packed away in a box and the camera peered into an empty hole.
CAS broke the silence. “Bottom line? Foul play?”
“The body was interred with some ceremony, given the objects associated with the burial. A shallow grave, but not a hasty one. No coffin, of course, but given the time and place and the nature of the subject would make that unlikely. However, given the massive injuries to pelvis and spine, certainly not natural causes.”
“Let me put it another way. Do we need to call in the police to launch a murder investigation?”
“Given the age of the subject, any murderer would most likely be long dead. You’d be looking at someone pushing a hundred at the very least. But no, it looks to me like an accidental death and a quick burial by family.”
“If that’s the way your report reads, then I think we’re all done here.”
“I’d like more time in the lab before giving a full report, but I should be able to hand the remains back on Monday. You’ll have to look for relatives, I guess.”
“We’ll handle that end of it. Anything else?”
“Just one thing. She had brown eyes.”
Wanker nerd, Kim thought. How could he possibly tell eye colour from a pile of bones?
CAS and HPL and Kim had done the official business once Stace had lured the scientist off. Signed the forms, filed them away. The burial site would very quickly have to be explored fully because it was going to end up as part of one very big hole for the basement car park, but if it was archaeology rather than a crime scene, then that was it.
That was that. Now Kim’s major concern was the twins, both too sick with sudden colds to be taken out on a bitter day.
And Zoe hadn’t messaged him or chatted or phoned. There was still timings to be worked out. Zoe naked, hot and sweaty. Zoe naked, in a shower. Zoe naked, in his arms. Would he be able to fit her in as well as attend the planned protest meeting?
Time for lunch. No time for lunch itself if he was to drive over to Campbell for Lee’s supplies. Why couldn’t she load the twins into the Range Rover and pop down to the shops for the goods? It made no sense.
He was glad of the new roundabout at the Bowen Drive intersection. The old crossroads had been confusing, and more than one idiot tourist looking for the National Gallery had come to grief there. There were plans to remove the roundabout at the other end of the Kings Avenue Bridge, presumably a scheme thought up by the same people who had added the one at this end.
Driving in Canberra meant coping with roundabouts. Full stop.
Kim expertly slid the BMW around, past Bugs Bunny, and up Monash Drive, noting that work had resumed on the ASIO site after this morning’s delay.
There was a crush at the Campbell shops carpark. Always was nowadays at lunchtimes and after work. The small shopping centre was the closest available to the big Defence office complex at Russell Hill and while many workers chose to walk up Blamey Crescent to have lunch, visit the chemist or grocery, post a letter or whatever, it was far easier to just drive up.
Kim eventually gave up and parked around the back of the shops. There was a second car park here which overflowed onto what had once been a grassy expanse, but was now windswept dust.
Chemist for the painkillers, bottle shop for the red, Heartbake for the sourdough rolls. He bought half a dozen from the ridiculously handsome shop assistant – they were fairly small – and as he tucked them under his arm he caught sight of the BookCrossing.com shelf at the back of the café section.
Funny. There was a hardback book on the shelf with an image of a ticking bomb on the cover. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was the very same book which had featured prominently in this morning’s security bulletin, along with a photograph of a section of SAS snipers sliding down ropes from a helicopter hovering over Canberra Airport.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Quint set down his mugs, sliding one across the counter to Ann. She was looking at him, looking at his cheek. “I got..” he began. “I was… Ah… I hurt myself.”

“So I see,” Ann replied. “Sorry to hear it. And Harley here cut himself shaving, maybe.”

Quint considered the other man in the shop. A taxidriver he’d used previously, bearing a bandaid on his cheek and a mug of coffee in his hand. Odd. He’d left Heartbake just before Quint, carrying two mugs. Where was the other one?

The other man extended his hand. “Harley. Cabbie. Booklover. Careless shaver.”

Quint shook hands briefly. “Am I interrupting anything? You wanted coffee, Ann.”

“Thanks, William. You’re a sweetie. Harley was just telling me about BookCrossing.”

BookCrossing. Giving away perfectly good books to strangers. Quint couldn’t understand it at all, but Ann took a strange amount of fun from the disease, often closing the shop for weeks at a time while she travelled to conventions where fellow-sufferers gathered to discuss their symptoms.

“Not my cup of tea, Ann. You tried to sign me up, remember?”

“You either get it or you don’t.”

Quint nodded. “Like a cold.”

“I caught it off Ann,” Harley said. “Anyway, I was on the airport rank yesterday, and I had a couple of spare seconds, so I whipped out and released a book against one of the pillars. This book.”

He held out a book. Quint took it. A hand-scrawled note stuck onto the dustjacket, the endpapers defaced with numbers and another sticker, more marks on the fore-edge. He winced at the wilful destruction.

“That makes a Very Good book into Fair. Might have been worth maybe three dollars originally, but now you couldn’t give it away.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it. Anyway, last night I got pulled over by the cops, and they asked me about this book, and told me to come in to the main cop shop this morning. Which I did, on top of everything else.”

“They arrested you for littering,” Quint guessed. He didn’t like litterbugs,

“Cops don’t care. I was awake all night worrying about it. And other things. So when I gave my name at the counter, and they took me into a room full of blokes in suits, I was shitting myself.

“They all stood up and had a go at me. They took turns. First cab off the rank was the police commissioner. In full uniform. He said that I was responsible for closing down the airport for two hours, and did I have any idea of the trouble I’d caused?

“Then there was the airport manager, and he really laid into me. He was spraying spit at the end, and he looked like he was going to punch me. Trouble is, everyone else was egging him on. You could see it.

“Anyway, he sat down, and the Qantas bloke stood up and asked if I knew how much it had cost to divert flights. Then the Virgin manager said exactly the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was going to get a bill from them. Then another policeman from bomb disposal blew me up. Said I was putting the lives of his best men at risk. The Urban Services Minister was there too, and he had the hide to tell me I was an idiot. I started to give him a serve about his useless bloody roadworks but the Ambulance manager sat me down again.

“The army guy got up and looked at me and asked if I knew how much it cost to put a helicopter in the air and would I like to apologise to the SAS guys yanked away from their training on a wild goose chase. But I lost it when the construction company boss asked if I knew how much it cost to pull his road crew off.”

“Uh-oh,” Ann groaned. “What did you do?”

“I told him I could arrange a group booking. Then the police chief made this weird noise, told me not to do it again, and to get the hell out of his sight.”

Ann snorted.

“Yeah. Like that except lower.”

Quint wasn’t sure if he liked this taxi driver. But he could see that Ann had made up her mind. And she’d been drinking his coffee, after sending Quint out for a mug.

“All that for you?” she said. “Poor Harley!”

“They were having a security conference,” Quint said. He’d read it in the paper. The airport terminal was being upgraded and it was going to have the most comprehensive security in Australia.

“They didn’t tell me that,” Harley groaned. “I thought it was just for me, and I’d never get out of jail long enough to pay out the fine.”

“How did they know it was you?” Quint asked.

“They have a security camera on the taxi rank. They make sure we pay our two dollars to get through the boomgate out of the cabyard. So they knew it was my cab. And then they put the numberplate into the police computer. They have this high tech camera that looks at numberplates, and if it’s a stolen car or you haven’t paid your rego, they flag you down.”

Quint liked this. Good system.

“At least they gave you the book back,” Ann pointed out. “They could have blown it up”

“I’m going to leave it at the train station next.”

“Train drivers can’t read,” Ann twinkled back. “Not timetables. No way!”

“You could put it on your Official BookCrossing Zone shelf.” Harley said.

“Would you be a sweetie and do that for me?”

“I’m at your command, Ms Ounce!” Harley drained his mug, gave a mock salute and marched out.

Ann gazed after him. Quint set his cup down and pulled over the spreadsheet listing the books he’d bought from Violet Campbell. He had to be careful here.

“I need to talk to that old lady with the books. Have you collected yours yet?”

Ann sighed. “I’ve got a friend with a van. She helped me load them last night. Is there a problem?”

“You might want to check through them for personal items. Bookmarks, photographs. I found a few things last night she might want back.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay