Last Breath

By Greg Tuck

Sergeant Downs, or Sarge as he preferred, was minding his own business in the Cairns police station in Far North Queensland, Australia, when a stranger entered his life. Blessed with a photographic memory and a doggedness of purpose, Sarge was finally able to place the person and answer why warning bells were sounding in the deep recesses of his mind. To quell that nagging annoying noise he embarked on a journey that would take him half way across Australia to the outback town of Coober Pedy and then into outback far north Queensland. In the process he would solve the years’ old mystery of two missing opal miners. Had he in fact uncovered the real truth though?
Author’s note:
This is the first in the Downs Crime Mystery Series. Each book in the series can be read in isolation in any order. However, when read in sequence, greater understanding of the traits of the lead characters is gained.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greg Tuck
• Release date: Jan 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463585696

Greg Tuck

I am a former primary teacher and principal, landscape designer and gardener and now a full time author living in Gippsland in the state of Victoria in Australia. Although I write mainly fictional novels, I regularly contribute to political blogs and have letters regularly published in local and Victorian newspapers. I write parodies of songs and am in the process of writing music for the large number of poems that I have written.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Right place, wrong time or wrong place right time? Only time itself would tell. The cuffs were beginning to chafe on his sixty-seven-year-old wrists. He wasn’t likely to escape. When it came to fight or flight there was bugger all adrenalin on tap in his body to do either of them. None too gently he was pushed into the station and the desk sergeant just rolled his eyes and said to the apprehending officers, Really?

They shrugged their shoulders knowing that they would cop it, to make a bad pun, for all the extra paperwork they and their sergeant would find coming their way.

Really? You arrested a drunk. You could have just moved him on; taken him out of the CBD and just warned him.

He didn’t want to go. Wouldn’t go. Said he hadn’t been drinking and he knew his rights.

The desk sergeant leaned forward to take a good look at the wizened faced man who stood slightly stooped in front of him. His clothes were old but not dishevelled. He was freshly shaven and had been so for a while based on the evenness of the tan on his face. In Cairns a three-day growth when it was removed left a distinct tan line on white skinned people even if sunscreen was used. The sergeant figured that this old bloke had never even seen sunscreen.

So, you’re a bush lawyer who knows his rights, The sergeant’s sarcasm wasn’t only saved for his underlings.

I’m not drunk. In fact, I haven’t had a drink in over twelve months.

He was carrying this and staggering when we spotted him," piped up the junior of the two arresting officers, who held up a brown paper bag carrying a vodka bottle in it.

I’m not drunk. Ask them if they breath tested me. The reply came in the same hoarse whisper.

Well?

No, we didn’t because he was within walking distance of here and we could both breath and blood test him here. The same whiny officious tone from the same officer did little to endear himself to his superior.

And what about this bottle? the sergeant held it aloft showing the contents about three quarters full. The question was directed at the old man who flinched at the abruptness of the challenge.

Check it out for yourself. These idiots didn’t.

The indignant tone in the crackly voice piqued the interest of Sergeant Downs who was half tempted to check out the frailty of the old man’s bones but something about him intrigued the sergeant and he unscrewed the top and put a drop on his finger. He then did a double take and tasted it again before asking the old man to take a seat. Sergeant Downs smiled at the two officers and invited them to join him in an adjacent room. The door didn’t quite shut properly or the sergeant was extremely pissed because the old man heard the sergeant yell, It’s bloody water! You arrested a man for carrying water. He wasn’t breath tested. He’s probably not had a drink, not even of his water. Did you apply here? Were you asked to leave your previous posting? ‘Cause it’s bloody likely that you will be asked to do so here! God in heaven, why me? Why me? Get out of my sight. I will fix up your mistake and use my charm to avoid him making an unwarranted arrest complaint. Here’s a box of staples. There’s a shortage I hear at Port Douglas. Take the car and deliver them!

Staples? All that way? It will take a couple of hours at least.

Yeah, especially with no lights and sirens. You will stick ten k below the speed limit. You will not arrest anyone. You will not pass Go and you will not collect two hundred. My shift ends in just over two hours so take your time.

Outside the old man smiled. Better to have the police on your side than not. He stroked his chin remembering his beard from a few years ago and looked at the growing number of liver spots on his gnarly old hands and again cursed the ageing process. But better off alive than dead, for now. He was not a religious man. At his age work consisted on just staying alive and that was getting harder. Dust in his lungs was eating him inside out and his hacking cough was now showing more blood in his sputum. Still Cairns was a good place to end your days; as good a place as any. All his life he had worked hard with one goal in mind and he had recently achieved that. Now he just drifted from place to place, staying a few weeks here and there, camping with his four-wheel drive in out of the way places. In Cairns he might be seen as a good for nothing, but doing nothing is a practised skill which he hadn’t yet perfected. His body was telling him to try and that was why he was here at this place at this time. He looked at the metal bracelets still binding his wrists and ruefully smiled, acknowledging that indeed it was time.

Oh shit! those stupid bastards! They have left you in cuffs. I am so sorry, Mr… er... um."

Name’s Tom. Leastways that’s what they call me. The tobacco-stained yellowish teeth, those that remained did little to raise his features above what the sergeant’s fellow officers had originally perceived. He held his wrists up and the manacles were hastily removed.

Tom stood up gingerly and stepped forward to shake the sergeant’s hand but stumbled. Bloody shoelaces, he muttered. Sergeant Downs feeling very sympathetic and full of remorse bent down and retied the old man’s shoes before Tom mumbled a brief thanks and said, About the young blokes. Go easy on them. Shit happens. There was something about him that troubled Sergeant Downs for the rest of his shift. He swore that he had never seen him before but at the back of his mind he heard a tiny bell that he knew would trouble him the rest of the night. He was about to throw out the bottle that the old man had accidentally left behind, but decided against it. The old man could still come back and ask for it and if it wasn’t there a claim of theft by the police could be laid. Perhaps also the bottle may trigger the neural pathway to that annoying bell. However, the main reason was that he could have the bottle there as a simple hopefully silent signal to two even simpler fresh-faced youngsters who would undoubtedly become his superiors in all too short a time. He sat back and looked at the mountain of paperwork that had accumulated and wondered when real policing would come back into favour; probably not in his life time. Everything had to be by the book and the book kept getting bigger. He laughed as he filled out the order form to order new forms and remembered the latest memo about policing becoming a paperless institution. He had received that memo by email, fax and snail mail. Despite his dislike for forms, he was a by the book cop and got out his notebook and wrote up the incident about old Tom but as no actual arrest and charges had been laid and hopefully no complaints about police harassment; that would be all there was to it. He snapped his notebook shut with some sort of finality to the past wasted hour. It was all done and dusted. If only he’d known how wrong he was, he may have ordered more forms.

Chapter 2

It was a long way from Coober Pedy. He had stayed there a couple of years and that had been the longest he could remember being anywhere in his 67 years. There was a blur of towns, mostly mining ones where he had picked up casual work and hoped to strike it lucky when he had some money put aside to allow him to go it alone. He was never that lucky and all too often it was back labouring for someone else or drifting on to the next place. He had ratted through mullock heaps in just about every state except Tassie. Bloody cold there he’d heard and the cold was something that he could not abide.

Someone up at Ravenshoe had told him that he was entitled to a pension at his age but he had just muttered that he’d check it out, but had no intention of doing so. People may have thought it was a pride thing and that he was fiercely independent, not wanting to bludge on others and live on government handouts. That may have entered into his thought processes but it was the forms that scared him off. He couldn’t read them; couldn’t write much more than his name, and as far as address and personal history went, he wanted that to be just his own business. No, he thought, they can stick the pension. He was off the books and wanted to remain so. They had lost his details in a fire at the orphanage just after he had left. He remembered vividly the scene as the match had left an indelible scar between his toes as he dropped it onto his left foot. Shoes had been a luxury at the orphanage or rather a privilege that was quickly taken away from those who misbehaved. He had rarely worn footwear during his time there. Still the sad loss of his records meant that he was never called up for service in Vietnam. When the marbles dropped for the date, he was supremely confident he would miss out.

For years he had been on a quest that had begun just before his fifth birthday. It was a fifth birthday that was never celebrated like the others had been before. In fact, it went unnoticed and his birthdays went unnoticed for the remainder of his life. He remembered his fourth vividly. There was cake and candles and smiles and love and…. Now when he thought about it tears would well up in his eyes and so he had conditioned himself to not think of it at all. Some things were good to be dead and buried he thought and that thought brought a wry grin to his face………. Yeah, good to be dead and buried.

He was painfully aware that two lives he had lived. The time before the change and the long lonely years after the change. He hadn’t been back to Wittenoom ever after he had been sent to the orphanage. It wasn’t much of a town then and he had heard it barely had any inhabitants now. Blue asbestos kills off a lot of things and the town of his formative years was one of them. His dad had dragged his mum there just before Tom had turned four. His mum with swollen belly he could remember waddling down the street holding his hand.

Tom snapped himself out of the reminiscing. He knew if he kept going back down that path he might be tempted back to the bottle and that would really be the death of him. His stomach lining couldn’t cope with the biting acid that would rise at the first sip. Bad enough that his lungs were giving up the ghost. But then again what did it matter.

He was doomed after the change at Wittenoom. Six months of his life was spent there and that was too much for still developing lungs. Again, he smiled because he sought solace in tobacco and that wasn’t going to help except perhaps dull the pain and dull the memories. It was ironic he thought as he rolled up a cigarette made out of chop-chop, the cheap tobacco he had been smoking since he was young; his lungs were slowly killing him and his choice of medicine would hasten his death. There were times he thought that death now couldn’t come quick enough. He had achieved what he set out to do, what he had promised himself he would do as he cried himself to sleep alone on his fifth birthday.

He sat back against the front wheel of his Landrover parked in the mangroves and scrub on the edge of Trinity Inlet and puffed occasionally on his cigarette and casually stoked the small fire he had lit for company. The flickering firelight had been his company at night for most of his life and the Landrover his ever-faithful friend. It was a long wheel-based Series 1 model that he had stolen years ago from a miner who had decided not to pay him for nearly nine months of work. He had taken the miner’s vehicle as wages and didn’t much care if the miner was stuck in the outback or not. He’d been promised pay and a promise is a promise. Whether the miner made it back into a town, whether he’d flagged someone else down or whether his bleached bones were picked clean by the eagles and crows, it didn’t much matter. The theft was never reported or followed up so Tom had convinced himself that it was his. He wasn’t much of a mechanic. He could do a bit and was quite good with fencing wire but the old girl didn’t seem to mind and hadn’t missed a beat in all the time he had her. He had hidden her away when he was in Coober Pedy but when he needed her a year or so later, she started first go.

She had been decked out over the years. Originally like a troop carrier there were bench seats down each side in the back but now there was a bed with an old, probably smelly and badly stained mattress. There were jerry-cans on the back with extra fuel that he managed to fill up at various farms and properties on market days. He’d fill them up and then knock on the door offering to pay only to find no-one home so he consoled himself with the thought that at least he had tried to pay. Very few times he had been caught out but always had a good story and some money on him just in case. His rifle was kept just under the bed and on rare occasions he had had to wave it at people who came too close. He liked his privacy. He didn’t much like his own company but that was all he had. Sometimes someone would come up to his campfire and he’d offer some billy tea but the condition of the mugs and his clothes was often good enough to make it just a very brief encounter.

He didn’t have much else in her except some extra clothes, some basic tools and some condiments that he had picked up on the way. He was used to living off the land. Rabbit snares and a fishing line would see him well fed. The occasional lamb or chook from a farmer who days later would find something missing added variety. It was a simple life and he even had learned to play patience by firelight, although the deck of cards was worn quite thin. There were no keepsakes, no memorabilia or souvenirs. No photos, no maps or symbols and signs of where he had been and what he had done in his sixty-seven years. If he died tomorrow, no-one would miss him, no-one would know anything about him and no-one would probably care. As he unconsciously by force of habit squeezed the end of the cigarette to butt it out, he thought to himself that he liked it that way.

Chapter 3

Bernard Wilfred Downs was a troubled man. He hated his name. It was so prim and proper and he couldn’t cope with Bernie and had grown comfortable with being called by his position in life. He was known as Sarge to all and sundry up and down the coast from Cairns. Anyone who dared call him anything different was quickly intimidated by his 194 cm height and 110 kg frame. Those who weren’t put off were either his superiors, or were quickly shrivelled by his piercing grey-blue eyes. He was an intelligent man, although was lacking in emotional intelligence. His long loveless marriage was ample evidence of that. Promises of physical intimacy and a happy ever after never came to fruition and he didn’t have the emotional intelligence or emotional strength to get out of that marriage when he knew things were decidedly wrong. His now ex-wife, had taken everything; including the bulk of his future superannuation and left him with just his dignity and the need to continue to work. He was sadly too honest in all aspects; as proven by the fact that she had blatantly lied at court and he refused to, and also refused to contradict her lies.

He wasn’t sure where this puritanical streak came from. It had cost him dearly financially and in his career. Nowadays he would be seen as a whistle-blower but, in the times around the beginning of his career, things were different. He was a methodical thinker and detective work suited him to a T. He would have progressed very well except that he had seen fellow officers on the take. Refusing to join them and also refusing to turn a blind eye, he reported what was happening to a superior officer.

His