Cane Toads And Chameleons

15

Cane Toads And Chameleons

    Things had improved tremendously at Trethewin. The senior Forrests had departed for their retirement unit, Fred at the last moment wringing my hand and muttering an agonised: “Sorry.” Huge relief spread over his wide face when I responded with a grin and a wink. Perry was spending most of his time down at the winery, still apparently pitching in, Ben and Mike were still pleased to have him, and the wines and lunches were selling like hot cakes at the cellar door. Junie and dear little Tanya were not doing very much but potter round the place, usually escorted by Fifi, an occupation, or lack of it, which Junie described as “Blissful”. Corey Mincey and his merry men—well, a couple of them, the rest being still on holiday—had returned and were hammering, sawing and “Gyprocking” enthusiastically in the burnt-out half of the house (some sort of plasterboard), and Cassie and I, with or without Gavin—“Aw-wuh! You could of woken me up!”—were getting out on the horses every morning before it got too hot. Nirvana.

    I admit I deliberately wasn’t thinking about much at all, certainly not about getting back to England and ABC Freight, and most certainly not about the possibility of Cassie and me ever becoming a couple, though the example of Peter and Lalla did keep recurring now and then…

    Then, about midway through January, something happened to shake me out of my state of happy suspended animation.

    It was still quite early, and we’d just finished breakfast—Perry and his family were now having it with me in Trethewin’s roomy kitchen.

    Fifi returned from a foray in the grounds with a hunk of gent’s trousering in her jaw.

    Perry shot to his feet. “Jesus! Good dog, Fifi! Show me, girl! Seek!” They dashed out.

    I looked frantically at Junie.

    “They’ll be going very fast,” she said. “Don’t try to run after them, Alex.”

    “Er—no. Very well.”

    “Has Fifi caught a bad man?” piped Tanya.

    I bit my lip, but Junie merely replied calmly: “Well, she’s had a go at him, dear, but it looks like he got away. I expect he had a car and he’s driven off in it.”

    This supposition proved to be correct. Perry returned, frowning, to report: “Tyre tracks in the dirt down by the gate, looks like ’e took off like a rocket. Too vague to see what make, not that that woulda done us much good. –Yes, good dog, Fifi!”—patting her.

    “Can Fifi have a treat now?” asked Tanya.

    “Yeah, I guess so. You wanna give it to ’er?” He dug in his pocket for it and Tanya passed it solemnly to the big dog.

    “At least she chased him off,” said Junie with a sigh. “But why was he hanging round the place at this hour? I mean, you’d think he’d come at—uh—N,I,G,H,T,” she spelled cautiously.

    “Maybe he did, and whatever it was took him this long,” said Perry grimly. “Okay, check out the lot, eh? No telling what sort of sabotage he’s progressed to, if he’s capable of deliberately setting fire to a house with a bloke asleep in it.”

    “Perry, do you really think—” I began.

    “Yes,” he said flatly. “You pop out and keep an eye out for Corey and his blokes, Junie, darl’, don’t let them inside until I’ve checked out that side of the house. –Coming, Alex?”

    “Yes,” I agreed.

    Perry really had meant the lot. He rang Ben, gave him the news and got him and Mike going on checking in and under everything at the winery, rang Miranda, ignoring my point that she might panic, and got her to check at the cellar door, stressing that if there was anything suspicious not to touch it but to ring him immediately, and not to to turn on any electrical appliances at all, including the stove, and headed for the campervan. From it he produced a large round mirror on a long handle. I gaped at it.

    “Very useful for checking underneath cars for cane toads,” he said neutrally.

    “What?”

    “No kidding. They’re pests all over Queensland. The other states don’t want ’em, but they’re already spreading into the NT. They got border patrols that check anything coming over from Queensland.”

    “Very well, Perry, by all means check under all of our vehicles for cane toads.”

    “Yeah, I will,” he said stolidly. “You wanna ring Ben and warn him not to use theirs until I’ve checked them, as well? I forgot, before.”

    He wasn’t joking. I rang Ben.

    “Was it him?” he asked fearfully.

    “We don’t know, Ben. I think Fifi might have gone for anyone creeping about suspiciously, myself, but Perry seems to think it likelier that it was him and that she’d just have chased off anybody else.”

    “Goddit. Well, Mike’s checking the vats now. I don’t think ’e coulda got into the cellars, they’re locked, of course, but… Might of added lock-picking to ’is other handy skills.”

    “Yes, quite,” I agreed tightly.

    The checking took the rest of the morning. Funnily enough, though Corey himself volunteered to help check out the burnt-out side of the house his men were quite happy to sit round in the kitchen letting Junie make them relays of tea or coffee.

    Perry didn’t think Andrews would “have a go” at Cassie’s place but nevertheless we warned her, with the expectable result. Boots and all.

    “Hey, what if he got up on the roof?”

    “What if you fell off and had another bout of concussion?” I returned swiftly.

    “Yes, exactly,” Cassie agreed with a sigh. “No!” she cried as Gavin reiterated his suggestion. “That time we had a possum on the roof it made a noise like the end of the world: what on earth do you think a man would sound like? –It’s colour-steel, Alex,” she explained.

    “Yes,” I agreed. “Fred told me. ‘Clongs like buggery’ was his expression.”

    “It would be,” she admitted. “Well?” she demanded in steely tones.

    Gavin scowled. “He might of been really quiet.”

    “Bullshit. Go and see if the horses are okay.”

    Brightening, he rushed off at top speed.

    “Cassie,” I said uneasily, “he wouldn’t, would he?”

    “What?”

    I swallowed. “Andrews. Have a go at the horses,” I croaked.

    “I don’t think so. He did genuinely like them.”

    Mm. That was before they belonged to me.

    “He never hurt any of your horses in England, did he?”

    “No, that’s true.”

    We waited, uneasily in my case.

    Gavin rushed back, panting. “They’re—fine! Hey, c’n I ride—”

    “No. I think we’d better all stick together, just for today,” said his aunt firmly.

    “Yes,” I agreed. “Come on, come up to the house, we’ll need to look in and under everything, in case he let himself in somehow.”

    Immediately Gavin put forward the Ben Purdue theory, to wit, that Andrews had learned to pick locks. As a matter of fact the more one thought about it the likelier it seemed…

    We went up to the house and began checking in and under everything. Thank God most of the furniture had been disposed of as unusable. I’ll admit Stella had done her best, but in the time available we’d only managed a couple of sofas, strictly speaking sofa-beds, and two armchairs for the sitting-room, in addition to the beds.

    “If there is anything, it won’t look like sticks of dynamite like on the television,” I warned Gavin. “Any sort of package is what we’re looking for, or any wires or, um, anything electronic that’s out of place, really.”

    By this time we were in the sitting-room. He looked hard at the extraneous cushions his grandmother had provided. “He could of like, disguised it, like in a cushion!”

    “Ugh!” gasped Cassie, recoiling.

    Okay, take the cushions—they were all hideous—outside, well away from the house, and blow them up?

    “Do they all look familiar to you, Cassie?” I asked heavily.

    “Dunno, really!” she gulped.

    Quite.

    We eyed the cushions uneasily…

    “Ring Perry?” she suggested.

    “Er—yes.” Feeling ten times of a fool, I rang Perry. The word was hang on. This, I thought grimly, as we hung on, could go on all day.

    Perry and Fifi appeared. “Seek, girl!”

    She sniffed her way carefully round the room and returned to his side, tail wagging.

    “Clear,” he said. “Come on, we’ll check out the study.”

    We proceeded to the study. That was clear, too.

    “I wish I was a dog,” said Gavin glumly.

    Quite.

    The rest of that side of the house also proved clear.

    “The other side’s okay: the blokes have gone back in,” said Perry as the voice of the electric drill was heard in the land.

    “Good. And the cars?”

    “Nothing in or under them, far’s I can see, and she couldn’t smell anything. You wanna come down to the winery?”

    “Yeah!” cried Gavin.

    Perry eyed him tolerantly. “If you come, matey, you do exactly as you’re told, you don’t go anywhere unless I say so, and you don’t touch anything. Goddit?"

    “Yeah, ’course!” he replied indignantly.

    We drove down to the winery in Perry’s ute, Cassie and I crammed in beside the driver. Gavin was allowed to go in the back—that was, the tray—with Fifi. Well, one of them had sufficient nous not to fall out, I reflected.

    We were flagged down at the cellar door by a very white-faced Miranda. “Mike thinks he’s found something!” she gasped. “Under the big cooling tank!”

    At this point a middle-aged Mrs Johanssen from the village who helped out in the kitchen in the busy season surfaced from the back regions, part avid excitement, part semi-hysterical fear. “It’s terrible!” she gasped. “We could all be blown sky-high!”

    I heard Cassie take a deep breath. “I think I’d better stay here with Miranda, Alex.”

    “Good idea.” As she got out I took another look at bloody Mrs Johanssen. “Gavin can stay with me. I’ll see he doesn’t get into trouble.”

    Her thanks were drowned by an indignant: “I won’t!” from the back of the ute.

    And we headed on down to the winery. In my case, wondering fearfully just how much damage a “cane toad” could do…

    The two men were waiting for us outside Ben’s office.

    “It’s under the big cooling tank,” Mike reported tightly. “I haven’t touched it.”

    “Good,” said Perry. “Call the cops, we won’t take any risks. That the only one you’ve found?”

    Mike was getting his phone out. He nearly dropped it. “Uh—yeah. Shit, ya don’t think—”

    ‘Better safe than sorry. We’ll let Fifi have a sniff round.”

    “Will she be safe, though?” faltered Ben.

    Perry gave him a sharp look but merely said mildly: “Yeah. Trained to sniff and indicate, but not to touch. You stay here with Ben, Alex, oke? The cops’ll want to talk to you.” He got out, lifted Gavin down bodily from the tray, and called to Fifi. She leapt out eagerly.

    “They’re coming,” reported Mike. “They said not to go anywhere near it.” He swallowed. “It could be on a timer.”

    Or activated from a distance, or anything at all, really. I didn’t say so.

    “What would be the consequences if you did lose that tank, Mike?” I asked.

    “Is it full of wine?” panted Gavin.

    “No, ya nana, at this time of year? It’s not a storage tank!” replied the winemaker. “The whole process’d break down, Alex. It’s our main cooling tank. We have to cool the grape must directly after crushing, it allows us to control the fermentation process.”

    “I see.”

    “And before you ask, yes, the bastard does know that. Took a friendly interest in the whole process,” Mike added bleakly.

    “Smarmy,” said Ben with distaste. “Um, the office seems to be okay, Perry, can I go back in?”

    “No,” he said heavily. “We’ll just let Fifi take a decko, oke?”

    “Um, yeah. Thanks.”

    We waited…

    Perry and Fifi resurfaced. “It’s clear,” he said. “No guarantee he hasn’t read all them passwords you’ve got taped under yer desk drawer, though.”

    Ben went very red and gaped at him in dismay.

    “She did get a bit excited when she was sussing out the desk,” he explained.

    “You—you mean she smelled him on it?” he faltered.

    “Yep.”

    “Oh, Christ,” he said in a shaking voice.

    Perry gave me a warning look. “Take him inside, Alex, and get a belt down him.”

    “Right. Er—the computer?” I muttered.

    He looked dry. “It won’t go bang from any form of high explosive, mate. That’s all I can guarantee.”

    Oh, boy. I grabbed Gavin with one hand, and steered Ben inside with the other. He collapsed limply onto his desk chair. I found a bottle and opened it.

    “That’s the Reserve Bin Shiraz,” he said weakly.

    “All the better.” His coffee mug seemed to be clean so I poured some into it. “Drink.”

    He drank, and sighed.

    I opened cupboards and found a glass. “Not bad,” I said, sipping.

    This was pretty much damned with faint praise, but it failed, alas, to rouse him. “Duh-do you think he has done something to the computer?” he faltered.

    Yes.

    Gavin agreed with me. “I bet he has!” he volunteered excitedly.

    “We can only try it and see, Ben,” I said temperately.

    He looked at its blank screen limply. “I can’t.”

    “I will!”

    “Shut up, Gavin. See if you can find some spring water, or, well, something,” I finished on a weak note.

    “Just one glass of wine wouldn’t hur—”

    “No.”

    I looked without enthusiasm at the computer. It wasn’t that I was afraid that Andrews might have wiped it, so much, but we didn’t know how much electrical knowledge he had, and though Fifi was doubtless to be relied upon when it came to such substances as Semtex, Perry wasn’t an electrician any more than she was, and theoretically the thing could have been wired to electrocute the user.

    “Just hang on,” I said heavily. I went over to the wall and looked hard at the computer’s plug. As with most offices, it and five thousand of its friends and relations were connected to a power-board of the sort which has a failsafe device to prevent overloading or surges affecting one’s devices. Theoretically. It all looked okay, but what did I know? I had done a very elementary bit of electrical engineering in the first year of my degree, but any young apprentice would have known more than I did. I could strip down the engine of my little Cessna, but that wasn’t going to help here, was it?

    “Ooh, has he sabotaged the plugs, Alex?”

    “Not as far as I can see. What’s that you’ve found?”

    He glared. “Just a packet of Tim Tams!”

    I didn’t ask. “You can have two.”

    I returned to the desk and switched the computer on.

    “That’s okay!” gasped Gavin, breathing biscuit fumes all over us.

    “Um, it does look okay,” Ben agreed cautiously as the screen filled with the usual Windows crap.

    “Uh-huh. Check your files.”

    Well, fancy that. All his files had been wiped. Ben went chalk-white.

    “Have another drink,” I said heavily.

    He swallowed Shiraz as if it was water and croaked: “I’m sorry, Alex! I never dreamed…”

    “No. None of us did, Ben. It’s okay. It’s no worse than what happened to the stables’ accounts.”

    “Puh-Perry said I oughta back them up to an outside server, only I… I mean, it’s our busy time of year, and…”

    Mm. Incapable of prioritising: right.

    “We’ll get a computer expert on the job. I read somewhere that files are never lost, deleting them just removes their start and end delimiters—words to that effect. They may be recoverable.”

    “Buh-but there’s the projections and everythink!” he gasped.

    “I’ve got the paper copies of everything you gave me.”

    “Yeah, but I was working on…” His voice tailed off.

    “Yes. What about your back-up files?” He was supposed to back up every evening to a removable drive which was then stored in the safe.

    “Um, in the safe,” he said in a small voice. “But I—I got a bit behind.”

    “Never mind, at least that’ll be something. At least—” I broke off as a nasty thought dawned.

    “What?” said Ben fearfully.

    Oh, God.

    “Ben,” I said carefully, “I’m not getting at you, but is the combination of the safe on that piece of paper with your passwords?”

    “Um, yeah. Aw, shit!”—as it dawned.

    Even at ten years old Gavin was more than capable of grasping the implications of that one. “Heck, really? Heck, that was dumb! I bet he’s nicked everythink!”

    “Shut up, Gavin,” I sighed. “I dare say you’re right, but that’s the sort of thing no-one wants to hear: get it? –Open it, Ben, it we’d better know the worst.”

    “There isn’t any money in it,” he offered on a hopeful note.

    I was NOT worrying about— I took a deep breath. “Just open it.”

    Ben removed an out-of-date phone book from his second desk drawer, pulled the drawer out and turned it over.

    “Gee, anybody could of found that!” pronounced the resident doomsayer.

    I read out the combination.

    Ben went over to the safe, a heavy old upright thing in a corner of the room. It was bolted to the floor, but an acetylene torch would have opened it easily. It had been an old one that Mr Crozier had thought would be okay for the winery because they never needed to keep anything valuable, unquote. Nothing valuable except the last six months’ accounts, mm. Ben hadn’t thought paper copies were necessary, with the computer. Along with most of the technologically-indoctrinated world, quite.

    At ABC Freight we kept paper copies of everything. In triplicate. Not all stored in the same basket, no. The maintenance staff had resented this bitterly until we’d had a wastepaper-bin fire in the office attached to the main maintenance shed. It had run up the curtains and proceeded to gut the said office. Oddly enough after that no-one smoked in or around the office. There was already a no-smoking rule in the big sheds, but from then on it was strictly enforced by the chaps themselves.

    The IT staff had not only bitterly resented keeping paper copies, they had instituted a sort of passive resistance to it, not copying anything until forced. This lasted up until the day when there was a huge power surge which wiped out the mainframe and anything else that was plugged in that day, from light bulbs to small electric fires. We now had an emergency generator for the entire building and a back-up mainframe which was not physically connected to any other machines and worked off its own small generator. And lots and lots of printouts. Two of the programmers had dissolved in tears over the loss of their work, serve them right. I hadn’t sacked anybody, though I’d felt like it, and let them know it. One idiot had tried to say: “But nobody ever prints out their stuff these days!” I just looked at him.

    My current idiot discovered that his back-up drive was missing and just about passed out. Serve him right.

    I poured him another glass of Shiraz, saying nothing.

    “Sorry,” he muttered eventually.

    “Spilt milk,” I replied grimly. I poured myself another belt of the admirable Shiraz and sat down with it. “We’ll just wait for the cops, shall we?”

    We did that. I let Gavin have two more “Tim Tams.” It wasn’t every day that you discovered you’d had a computer saboteur cum bomber on the premises, after all.

    … “Is that the bomb-disposal man? Far—out!”

    Outside Ben’s office I gripped the kid’s skinny shoulder tightly as the man was fastened into the hefty suit that looked like a deep-sea diver’s outfit and then helped into the unit’s van.

    “They’re taking him down there!” Gavin reported, tiptoeing. “He’s getting out… There he goes! Heck, he’s brave, eh?”

    That or foolhardy, mm. “Very,” I agreed.

    Cassie had joined us, reporting that Miranda had closed the cellar door and she and Mrs Johanssen were busy tidying up. Further up the driveway the police were turning any would-be customers back, though really there was no need to, the cellar door itself was clear and serving them would at least have given poor Miranda something to take her mind off what was going on down here. Oh, well. Routine, or some such.

    “I don’t know how he can,” Cassie said faintly, with a shudder.

    “Me, neither,” I agreed.

    “Do you think he’s as brave as Fifi, Alex?”

    “Yes, definitely, Gavin.”

    “Heck!”

    Something like that, mm. We waited…

    There was no explosion. Gavin began to fidget. “What’s he doing? Why’s it taking so long?”

    “They have to be very, very careful,” said Cassie faintly.

    We waited…

    Finally the man reappeared. He seemed to be holding something. We peered.

    “Wires!” cried Gavin.

    “Yeah. Be the detonator wires. That’ll be that,” said Perry mildly.

    “You—you mean it’s safe?” faltered Cassie.

    “Deactivated, love. Yeah. See, once the detonators are out Semtex won’t explode, you can chuck it on the ground or jump on it or set fire to it, safe as houses. The modern terrorist’s explosive of choice,” he said with a grimace.

    “So was it like a bomb?” asked Gavin.

    “Same set-up, yeah.” Kindly Perry explained how a bomb was only a casing filled with high explosive, it needed some sort of detonating device to set it off, too.

    “Don’t, Perry,” said Cassie weakly. “I know you mean well, but next thing he’ll be looking it up on the Internet and ASIO’ll haul us all off to gaol.”

    “Who?” I groped.

    “ASIO. Like your MI5, mate,” Perry explained. “Yeah—sorry, Cassie. Look: the guys are going in now, Gavin: they’ll grab the Semtex and check out everything else, just in case.”

    “But Fifi already checked it out, didn’t she?”

    “Yeah, but that’s their job, see: they gotta make sure and report back to their HQ that everything’s secure,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

    “I getcha. Where is their HQ?”

    “Downtown,” he said briefly.

    “Aw, right.” He stared avidly in the direction in which the police officers had disappeared but nothing seemed to be happening.

    “Er, Perry,” I ventured: “do you think that I’d better phone Inspector Wilson?”

    He rubbed his lean chin. “Well, theoretically their toy computers are supposed to flash up anything of relevance, and I should think the name ‘Trethewin’ has been flagged, but on the other hand, what sort of twerp has been deputed to watch the screen?”

    Oh, Lor’; that was about what I’d thought.

    “It’ll turn out to be all my fault again, you know,” I sighed, hauling my phone out.

    “Natch,” he agreed, unmoved.

    … It did.

    I don't know what meal it was that Junie, bless her, provided that day—we’d well and truly missed lunch—but we all fell on it voraciously. Mountains of potato salad, sliced ham, cold sliced chicken, a salad of real sliced tomatoes, not cherry, with lettuce and a wonderful vinaigrette dressing, and an incredibly delicious dish that I can only describe as a cold ratatouille. Well—aubergines, bell peppers, courgettes, onions, tomatoes; aromatic herbs cooked in with it in plenty of olive oil; fresh basil scattered generously over it… Yum! And lashings of crusty fresh bread: how had she managed that? She’d bought it the other day and frozen it, she explained, all smiles.

    We washed it down with more of the Reserve Bin Shiraz, we needed it. Gavin and Tanya were awarded some sort of mixed juice that Junie admitted on a guilty note did have sugar in it, but it was just for once, and it was lovely, it was Tanya’s favourite. Well, mango and pineapple mainly, with passionfruit, Alex, she elaborated. Gosh.

    The feast was only very slightly spoiled by the presence of the resident death’s-heads—no, not Gavin, for once! Inspector Rowntree of the bomb squad and my old friend Inspector Wilson. They knew each other but didn’t exactly appear to like each other. Without actually voicing the thought Rowntree managed to make it apparent that Wilson should long since have tipped them off that Andrews might go further than arson and Wilson likewise made it clear that Rowntree’s lot should long since have spotted Andrews as a potential threat and kept tabs on him.

    They both, however, ate their fair share—more than their fair share—of Junie’s wonderful meal. So did their stolid sergeants. Non-speaking rôles but the motion of the mandibles nonetheless not impaired.

    After the meal we adults took our coffee into the sitting-room. Junie decided the two children could watch a video in the campervan, with Fifi to guard them. Gavin was allowed to choose the video from the small selection she’d brought. Naturally he rejected anything that looked like it might have fairies in it, but pounced upon some cartoon thing about a panda.

    Junie joined us in the sitting-room, smiling. “I’ll pop in on them in a little while. It’s my bet Tanya’ll be dead to the world after ten minutes.”

    The policemen, having drained their coffee, then disappeared into the study.

    “That’ll be their incident room,” drawled Perry on a snide note.

    “I don’t see what more they can possibly ask us,” sighed Cassie.

    “You’d be surprised,” he returned drily.

    “Um, Alex, do you think I should go back to the cellar door?” ventured Miranda.

    “No, I don’t think they’ll let you open up today.”

    “No, but there’s still odd jobs to do…”

    “I think we’d better all stay here until they tell us we can go back,” said Ben uneasily.

    “The bastard won’t come back when the place is overrun with cops,” noted Mike heavily.

    “No, not today,” I agreed. “Mike, can you think about what sort of alarms and, er, well, locks and so forth it might be possible to put on everything?”

    “I don’t see how ya can alarm a ruddy great tank, but okay. Well, easy enough to wire up the cellars. Just like an ordinary house alarm, I s’pose.”

    “Running off what, mate?” asked Perry heavily.

    “Eh? The power,” the winemaker replied blankly.

    “Yes, all right: don’t say it, Perry,” I said hurriedly. “We’ll work something out.”

    “Uh-huh. Ya might spare a thought for the vines, too,” he noted.

    “The vines?” gasped Ben.

    “Yep. How hard would it be to drive a truck up here in the middle of the night and spray them with weedkiller?”

    True, this nasty thought had also occurred to me, but I had to swallow a sigh. “They’re not accessible from the main road, Perry: we can block off the access roads.”

    “More or less, yeah. The parts that have got fences; have you really looked at them, mate?”

    “Yes. If you like to brave the study, there are some notepads and pens in the top desk drawer, you can start making a list of things to do, if you like.”

    He got up. “A list is all very well, but you’ll need to hire a dozen hefty blokes if ya really want to put fences in. You ever done fencing?”

    “Don’t, dear,” said Junie with sigh. “Of course he hasn’t. –It’s a very heavy job, Alex,” she explained. “It’s putting the posts in, you see. And then you have to know how to use the fence-tighteners for the wires.”

    “Oh,” I said blankly. “Can’t one just, er, ring a firm?”

    The Australians were all looking slightly stunned. Finally Cassie, swallowing, said: “It’s not like putting up a fence for a suburban house, Alex. You have to think in terms of kilometres of wire, really.”

    Perry sighed. “Yeah. Look, I’ll contact the Territorials, they might be up for it. Probably want permission to use your grazing land for their exercises, mind, but there’s plenty of it.” With this he headed for the study.

    He didn’t immediately return. After quite some time Miranda faltered: “Oh, dear; do you think they’re interrogating him?”

    “Whaddelse?” replied her husband sourly.

    Silence fell.

    … “Bad, was it?” said Jim sympathetically.

    I sighed. “Super-bad, Jim. They questioned us for hours… I came in for particular blame because I’d known Andrews before, in his Anson persona.”

    “I won’t ask why,” he decided.

    “No, don’t,” I sighed.

    “Did anything come of it?”

    “Not to my knowledge, no.”

    “No, well, me and Clarysse both think it’d be worth our while to find out more about Andrews, Senior. I’ve rung Lisbet Hall but her Uncle Bruce that knew the bugger dropped off the twig a bit back, so that’s a dead end. I’ve asked Gary Brownloe to come in today.” He looked at his watch. “In about ten minutes. –I’m not saying he’s got guilty knowledge, Alex, but at least he should be able to fill in some of the background.”

    “Very well. Er—Perry mentioned your Territorials when we were talking about fencing off the vines and securing the road access. I asked him about them later, and it seems that they more or less take on any active younger men and train them in the basics of soldiering.”

    “Yes, that’s right. Think their employers have to let them off to go and do their stint, think that’s the story. They run round the place dressed up in camouflage gear waving guns. Mindjew, lots of young blokes these days, they prefer that paint-gun crap. –Why, Alex?”

    “Well, I was wondering if perhaps Andrews might have been one. Er—learned about explosives, you see.”

    “It’s possible… Is he the sort, though? I mean, running round with a mob of gung-ho types waving guns, all boys together, male bonding shit plus bloody vigorous exercise?”

    “Er… you have a point. I certainly can’t see the man I knew as Broderick Anson doing any such thing, but the bloody fellow’s a chameleon, isn’t he?”

    “Eh?”

    I made a face. “Changes his colours, so to speak, to suit the occasion.”

    “Aw—I getcha. Chameleon, eh? Seen ’em on David Attenborough. Fascinating the way they stick out them great long tongues, eh?”

    “And inevitably catch and consume their prey: yes,” I replied grimly.

    We looked at each other a trifle weakly.

    “You’re not wrong, mate,” Jim conceded. “Cute-looking at first glance, but underneath they’re ruddy well predators, aren’t they?”

    “Quite.”

    Tightly he concluded: “That’s him, all right, the bastard. A bloody chameleon.”

    We were still glumly contemplating this image over a couple of cold beers when Lorrae rang through to announce that Mr Brownloe had arrived.

    … “Well, he was the older generation, of course,” he faltered, looking uneasy. “My uncle. Mum’s brother. Dad always said he was a bit of a crook, to tell you the honest truth, and then, um…”

    “We know about the art forgeries, if that’s what’s on your mind,” said Jim, unable to keep a grim note out of his voice.

    He reddened. “Um, yes. Well, Uncle Harry was quite young, of course, back then…”

    “Yeah. Now, can ya tell us more about his background? Did he go to uni, for instance?”

    “Um… Well, I was only a kid back then. Um, well, he’s quite a bit younger than Mum. She always said he was spoilt because he was such a pretty little boy… I dunno if you’d call it uni, exactly. Dad reckoned he started an art course only they chucked him out.”

    Jim and I exchanged glances. “That right?” he said easily. “So then what did he do, do ya know?”

    “Um, well, he was in the Vietnam War, of course.”

    What? I had to swallow. Jim was only just capable of croaking: “Yeah?”

    “Um, yeah, but I dunno if it was before or after… Um, prob’ly after… Anyway, he wasn’t over there for long, he was wounded.”

    Jim had recovered himself. “In the foot, was this?”

    “Um, no. I do remember Mum and me and my sister, we went to see him in hospital. He had his arm in a sling, that’s right. She said not to tell Dad. I didn’t understand why at the time, of course, but later on I heard Dad saying he was sure it was self-inflicted, and Mum burst into tears and said you couldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to be in a horrible war.” He swallowed hard.

    Jim was unmoved. “Right. Any idea what sort of unit he was in?”

    Mr Brownloe was blank. “Just the Army,” was all he could come up with. No, well, that was enough, really. Andrews, Senior, could clearly have had experience with explosives.

    Jim questioned him further, but that was pretty much it. He had no idea what had become of his Uncle Harry after the scandal over the art fakes had broken: his mother had always refused to talk about it and all he could recall his father saying was “Serve the bastard right.” Well, it wasn’t really surprising: Gary Brownloe himself, according to Jim’s digging, was fifty, born in 1960: he would have been in his late teens when his uncle went to gaol and his parents were certainly of the generation that wouldn’t discuss anything shocking or scandalous in front of their offspring. And by the time the man got out of gaol he’d have left school and been working, absorbed in a new life.

    He asked him whether his cousin Brodie had ever been in the Army or the Territorials but he hadn’t, and had “never been one for joining in, if you know what I mean.”

    … “I dunno about you,” Jim concluded, “but what ’e said about ’is bloody cousin never joining in sounded to me pretty much like the definition of a flamin’ sociopath.”

    “Mm.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “A sociopathic chameleon?”

    “Hah, hah,” he said weakly. “No, well, actually, Alex,” he decided, rallying, “that’s pretty much him, when ya come to think about it! A sociopathic chameleon.”

    Heavily I agreed: “Right. A sociopathic chameleon given to setting cane toads.”

    “Cane to— Aw!” he said with a guffaw. “What you said about Perry’s mirror! Yeah.” His amiable face grew grim. “Ya not wrong, though, Alex. My God. Why can’t the bloody cops pull their fingers out and catch the bugger?”

    Quite.

Next chapter:

https://deadringers-trethewin.blogspot.com/2025/06/historical-detail.html