Wire and Bone

Chapter 1

When Ella ran past him to take the lead again, André knew it was her grief talking.

A wilderness run was always on the cards during the bereavement-filled visit they expected to last a week or so — two weeks tops. Sombre reality prevented either of them from making the suggestion out loud, but each packed their gear in any case. For committed adventure runners, not slotting in a training session was never an option. In normal circumstances, they’d be gleefully animated at the prospect of having endless Mallee desert on their doorstep. That, and André’s brand new ultra-light twin hammock tent — which of course meant their workout would be an overnighter.

What André hadn’t counted on was the emotional distress driving Ella into the red zone. Her overexertion was threatening training efficacy, as well as doing bugger-all for her headspace. A two-person adventure-racing team relies on both runners sharing responsibilities as well as the hard slog, especially when crossing uncharted desert scrub. What they didn’t need was a lopsided skill base because one of them hogged the all-encompassing lead runner’s role — setting the pace, zig-zagging over sand dunes covered in a spikey understory of hakeas, spinifex rings and brittle fallen Mallee branches — all the while having to chart the least taxing route.

Ella had made the call on the day of the funeral; they would set off the following day. If André thought that was too soon, he kept it to himself. He was fearful of Ella’s pain spiralling even further if she hung around Rosenfeld, the homestead where her mother had died suddenly of a heart attack.

Now, for the seventh time that day, and the fourth time in a row, Ella resumed the lead-runner role way ahead of the agreed changeover point. André let it pass … again. He continued to embrace it as a way for him to help. His attempt to make her hurt his own.

He settled in for a nonetheless welcome breather at the back of their two-person peloton. The pace rose a notch but he was no longer glancing at a compass, his watch, the map, or fixing on navigation attack points in the landscape. The change to concentration-free running quickly settled into autopilot rhythm. He stopped being aware of his physical body now that it connected to Ella via an invisible length of elastic. Best of all, his brain was free to ponder whatever question came into his head. I reckon I’d do all right on Survivor. Did I pack my toothbrush? What else can I do to get Ella through this?

He tried but couldn’t stay focussed on her sadness — his own grief was not in the same ballpark. As much as he really liked and admired his prospective mother-in-law, Miriam had somehow kept familial closeness at bay with an air of affability. Now there was no knowing whether that barricade would have fallen if, or when, he solemnised the mantle of son-in-law. He fell back to the default focus of his internal running monologues: pain and pace.

Oh shit! That feels like a blister. I should have broken in these shoes for heaps longer. Are we going too fast? It feels like she’s still leading way faster, but fuck it — I’ll check it later — this is my respite, my no-thinking time.

For a brief while, that’s exactly what happened. No conscious thoughts formed in his brain — not until the view ahead revived an old favourite.

It really is a great bum. It’s perfect. I mean, in black Lycra it looks even better than in the flesh. Is that counter intuitive? Maybe I could google it. Maybe someone has done a PhD on the phenomenon.

It was the same view of Ella that greeted him the first time he laid eyes on her, three years earlier during a race on Queensland’s Bribie Island. On that occasion, he was steadily making his way past a string of runners who’d gone too hard too early. He reeled them in, one by one, until only Ella lay ahead. Then, in that barely perceptible way, the gap between Ella and him began to widen. He panicked to retrieve lost ground and hang in at a sustainable viewing distance for the remaining eight kilometres of the race. The stimulus to remain in lockstep with her bum earned him his best time ever.

Post-race, he sought Ella out to thank her for unknowingly pacing him to his PB. Then boom! Adventure racing romance ignited into a thing before their flights back to Victoria. Thereafter, he liked telling their how-did-you-guys-meet? story, right up until the time Ella chimed in with, Was it really me pacing you, or just you perving on my bum? His stammered response told her the answer she already knew.

Nothing had changed since. The same view ahead and his same reverie was being transposed to the Mallee in a silent movie re-run.

It really is a perfect bum …

And then, everything did change. The bum blasted into orbit.

It played out before him like Ella was running hard within a mammoth see-through balloon and unsuspectingly slammed into its inside wall. The impact launched her rearward towards him in a flailing, upright frenzy of air-backstroke and air back-peddling.

‘E-u-u-u-u-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-h-h-h!’

In André’s trance, the upheaval played out in muffled slow-motion, shattered only when he burst back to life to avoid crashing into her. Noise rushed back in and he found himself clasping her shuddering, sleeveless shoulders from behind. She had landed, unfathomably, over two metres back from grinning, near-skeletal, human remains. The tread-print of Ella’s shoe was imprinted across a half-buried tibia.

He peered over her shoulder expecting no less than a threatening sand goanna or the glossy armour of a deadly brown snake. The toothy corpse stared back instead, its head raised slightly, seeming to have burst from beneath the desert floor to gasp for breath. Tufts of detached blond hair appeared to grow from the sand that held it in place around the skull.

‘Fuck me! How did that get here?’

‘It’s a woman, isn’t it?’ Ella murmured shakily through fingers held over her mouth. Her unblinking gaze remained fixed on the spectacle.

‘Yeah. Probably. But how did it get here?’

Ella managed a small jerky shake of her head.

‘Hey, come away. That’s a trauma magnet.’

She shook his hands from her shoulders.

‘What’s left of a trauma magnet,’ she clarified with regained composure.

Ella unclasped the waistband of her backpack and slid it from her shoulders. Its ventilated harness had not prevented her blue singlet top darkening with sweat. She pulled her unyoked shoulders back in stretching motions.

‘Are you all right then?’ André asked.

She removed her cap to wipe her brow and looked around for shade in the Mallee scrub.

‘Yeah. I’m okay. Skeletons in the drift aren’t uncommon growing up on a Mallee farm. Never usually human though. It’s the teeth that threw me … set in a sneer like that. Kinda cartoonish really. Like something in a ghost-train ride.’

‘I suppose, but it’s been here a while to be in that condition,’ André observed thoughtfully.

Ella pulled her black pony tail back through the cap adjuster, donned it, and began studying the remains again with her hands holding her hips.

‘If dead sheep are anything to go by, then she’s been here about six months. And how did she get here? This is the dead centre of nowhere.’

The dead centre of nowhere was the middle of Wyperfeld National Park in the Mallee country of northern Victoria. Wergaia Country. One of those enormous patches of green on the map that looks large enough to be a small country — or several countries if you count the likes of Monaco, Malta, and Liechtenstein. Most of the park is the furthest you can be from human impact in Victoria, be it an actual human, a road, windmill, shack, burnt out Datsun, drink can, KitKat wrapper, iPad, or anything else that passes as civilisation. As obvious as that may appear on the ground or on a map, someone still found it necessary to formally designate big chunks of the park as remote or wilderness. In a similar statement of the obvious, the park lay within the much larger Big Desert, which the desert undoubtedly was, despite not cracking a mention on the list of Australia’s ten biggest. Nor is it a treeless desert. The sea of endless dunes is cloaked in an astonishing diversity of flora, all ingeniously adapted to subsist in the brutal climate of infinitesimal rainfall and a pittance of soil nutrients. The peculiarly Mallee form of eucalypt barely grows as high as the kitchen ceiling. The closest gatherings of humans are in surrounding hamlets, like Hopetoun and Walpeup, which vie for the state’s hottest temperature on the nightly-news weather reports.

André followed Ella in shedding his cap and backpack to enjoy the freedom of his quick-dry trekking tee-shirt. He too wore Lycra longs and knee-high Gore-Tex gaiters as a defence against the spinifex and snakes.

‘She didn’t walk here in those clothes and shoes,’ he said, ruffling his black cap-hair free.

Windblown sand and leaf litter had not completely covered the body. It was late spring and tattered bits of skirt and blouse were weathered crisp by the extremes of a desert winter, and torn by eager eagles, crows, foxes or feral cats vying for flesh. All had long finished their banquet. The near complete collection of exposed bones was bleached white against clinging remnants of flesh, now dried hard, thin and black. The ants had also given up and moved on. A white sandal with a sharp heel hung around the skeletal left foot poking from the sand. Wire protruding from her bra had rusted, although her belt remained intact. Its large chrome buckle gleamed defiantly.

‘"Wire and bone appear in the drift" indeed,’ Ella observed. ‘That’s a lyric by a local songwriter.’

‘Spot on … even prophetic,’ André nodded.

‘Maybe there’s an unmapped track around here. Maybe she came in a four-wheel drive,’ Ella speculated.

‘I’ll have a look, but we’ll need to be careful. This is a crime scene. How will it look with my footprints all over the place?’

‘Hey, no heading to the bat cave to start solving this, detective,’ Ella said. ‘You’re on leave — compassionate leave — or at least I am.’ she qualified.

It was a vain hope that Detective Sergeant André Marshall’s day job would not kick in automatically. The homicide detective nonetheless struggled with the incongruity of randomly stumbling over a dead body and its confluence with his partner’s still anguished loss.

‘Sorry, El. This is so … ’

He gestured with his arms at the arrangement of sand, bone, hair and clothing remnants before them. There was something of an artistic composition about it.

‘This is no sheep El. This is someone, and, you know, after your mum died just down the road … you don’t need something like this in your head right now. The whole thing is so friggin’ freaky. What it is. Where it is. Me finding it. Us finding it. That’s not supposed to be a thing.’

He put his arm back around her shoulder and they both looked thoughtfully at the remains.

‘It’s okay, A. Really.’ A was her pet name for André. ‘You’re a homicide cop. If anyone knows how to deal with this …’

‘Yeah, but that’s when someone else finds it. They phone it in and I come along and deal with it like any other case, however bizarre, they’re all different. But finding the actual body is someone else’s job. The same with reporters, you’re not supposed to become part of the news either, are you?’

‘What do you mean, part of the news?’

‘Well, you’re a witness now. You’ll need to give a statement at some stage. I’m a witness.’

‘But I can still write the story, can’t I? Right now, we’re the only two people on Earth who know about this. This is so newsworthy, not to mention an exclusive. This will be mega for me.’

‘What?’ André stood back from her to give a questioning look.

‘What, what?’ she responded.

‘You just had a go at me for putting my cop hat on. Now you’re a journalist writing an exclusive?’

‘And you weren’t the one who dubbed it a crime scene?’

Her glare floored him. Their impasse had arrived in a flash. He backed off.

‘All right. I did slip into work mode … briefly. That was autopilot kicking in before I’d had time to think. But I thought work would be the last thing on your mind. The way you’ve been running with such vengeance is scary. I can see the raw pain still raging in your head … and you’re keeping it all locked up. All I can do is just be here for you. Jesus, El. I’m sorry. Neither of us needs this right now.’

He had slowed to a stop, panicking when her lower lip began to quiver.

‘That’s all I meant,’ he added nervously.

Crying took hold where she stood on the spot, invading her face, then taking over her body. A big ugly, bawling crying that eclipsed every hitherto bout — the initial phone call, the funeral, random moments. André stepped over and held her. She couldn’t return his embrace; every part of her was bereft of responding. He clasped her shaking frame and hanging arms nonetheless, not lessening his desperate grip, even when her gulps eased and stuttering sniffs crept in. She sensed his alarm and let her forehead fall to his shoulder. When she was ready, she stepped out of his embrace and managed a bashful grimace. She set about wiping her face every which way.

‘I know how stupid and selfish it sounds but I’m just so angry at Mum. For dying when she did. Can you believe that? God, she was only sixty-six. I wasn’t ready for that. I mean, we’d hardly spoken to each other all year, let alone seen each other. And nor should I be ready for that. It’s not like I was avoiding her or anything. It was just how things fell as we both went about our lives. How was I supposed to know?’

André put his arm around her shoulder again and leant his forehead against hers with a pained look of empathy. She stepped away again, not ready to be consoled.

‘And Lila, my own sister, being a no-show at the funeral, the same as at Dad’s. You’d think there’d be a point when stuff like that can be put behind you. She’s all the family I’ve got left and she still can’t show her face. Not even when her own mother dies. Now. Look at me. Here. Thirty years old and alone in the middle of nowhere with no one. Sorry. I know you’re here, A and I’m grateful, but as far as family goes, how more alone could I be? It just shits me. It really shits me.’

She wrung her arms in frustration.

‘But I am here, El. We’ve got this. Us. That’s not nothing as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not going anywhere.’

‘I know, A. But your life’s connected. And I feel such a dick even thinking like this but I can’t help it. You’ve still got a mum … and a dad. And sisters and a brother. That’s been shitting me too. How fucking fucked up, hey? I’m sorry. That’s not your fault. What am I saying? It’s not a wrong thing that’s anyone’s fault. That’s exactly how the world’s supposed to work, but I still let that shit me. How fucking fucked up indeed.’

She stepped away from him shaking her head and turned to look across the desert. André kept his gaze on the tiny pink heath-myrtle flowers at his feet. Their silence stretched.

Ella spoke first.

‘It is beautiful here, isn’t it? I always thought this was the best part of living in the Mallee.’

Andre looked up, and studied her back. He spoke calmly.

‘You’re not fucked up, El. You’re grieving.’ It was the first time he dared say the G word to her. ‘It’s what you’re supposed to do, whether you want to or not. It takes time. It’s going to take a lot of time. You know that.’

Ella turned to give him a sheepish smile. He continued.

‘And you couldn’t be less lonely, right here, right now — unless you’re giving me the flick. If that’s what this is about.’

Her smile turned wry.

‘Yeah. As if.’

He waited. She moved her arms slightly forward to invite a hug. A true sweat on sweat hug.

‘Hmm,’ he said, mid-hug.

‘Hmm yourself,’ she replied.

They stepped apart and gazed at the skeleton.

‘So, what are we going to do about Grinning Gretel?’ she asked.

‘Buggered if I know. We can’t continue the trek now, and it’s too late to go back. Let’s just find somewhere to camp. It’s not like she’s gonna sneak off anywhere.’

‘Okay. But maybe over the next dune, hey? That’s another thing homicide cops aren’t supposed to do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Sleep with the corpse.’

Chapter 2

Marathon runners race a Herculean 41.195 kilometres. They joke that they do it because it’s like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer — it feels so good when you stop! So, based on a pain per kilometre comparison, what greater form of self-brutalisation would adventure racers rejoice in stopping?

Sometimes, the length of their rugged courses only come to an end when they reach the sea and there’s literally nowhere else to go. Like the 243-kilometre coast-to-coast race in New Zealand, so far tackled by over 20,000 competitors. Tasmania has its own coast-to-coast event covering a whopping 435 kilometres. On the mainland, the Coast to Kosci race stretches 240 kilometres from the port of Eden on the NSW south coast to Mount Kosciuszko, the highest peak they could find on the continent. It would have been a race from the very bottom to the very top, except that the centre of Australia dips sixteen metres below sea level. Teams navigate their way unsupported on these non-stop events, the only respite — if that’s not the wrong word — being a change to equally backbreaking stages tackled by bike and kayak. And then there’s expedition racing.

If adventure racers are from another planet, then expedition racers are from a quasar galaxy. These events extend the voluntary masochism to three to eight days on end, and for well beyond 500 kilometres. The more remote, the more rugged, the better, although many fail to finish.

A few rules have been introduced since the country’s first non-supported expeditions headed into the wilderness — like that of Burke and Wills. For a start, it’s now mandatory to carry a GPS tracker/emergency communications device — something that might have been handy in those nineteenth century saddlebags.

These days, Australia has clocked up over a decade of national championships, attracting as many as eighty teams at a time. Striking, high-resolution website galleries show fit thirty somethings like Ella and André can’t get enough. Most remarkable is the absence of competitors looking as buggered as normal mortals would after a mere ten minutes of bulldozing themselves up a mountainside. Competitors in full flight typically look keenly intense, relaxed, smiling, sometimes even laughing — but rarely in pain. They show up at events beaming, obviously elated to finally be among their own kind and free from continually having to rationalise their obsession to others. Beyond the finishing line, the fervour is no less contagious. It remains un-extinguishable for days.

Ella and André had worked their way up to compete in half-course expedition events for which two-person teams are still eligible. Their upcoming challenge was a 180-kilometre event in the Flinders Ranges — on Andyamathanha Country. What better lead-up than a training run through Victoria’s Mallee.

André, being an adventure racing gear junkie, had taken a punt with their camping setup. He packed the brand new two-person hammock tent he was dying to try out, but he did so without being certain the Mallee scrub could throw up a pair of suitably strong and suitably spaced trees to hang it between. Because Mallee eucalypts were too raggedy and fine to do the job, André had put all his money on finding a pair of native cypress pines that weren’t too short. They grew far more sparsely than the eucalypts and, in some patches of scrub, not at all. The risk was, if they couldn’t set up the hammock tent, they’d be spending a miserable night sleeping in the open on the ground.

The hammock tent on its own offered a weight and bulk advantage over carrying a ground tent and two sleeping mats. André argued they could use that extra capacity for the luxury of his micro espresso coffee pot.

‘This is training, not competing. So why not shout ourselves the comfort of a real coffee?’ he rationalised.

‘Great. That’ll be just what I need to keep me dry when it rains, keep the mosquitoes at bay and, stop the ground from being hard and cold.’

After voicing her view on the matter, Ella didn’t have it in herself to do more than acquiesce. That left André feeling the heat until he did find two ideally spaced stout cypress pines in the sandy lee of the adjoining dune. It offered pleasing shade and a windbreak. And it was a good 150 metres from the dead body.

‘I like this sand. It’s like camping on the beach,’ he said once the tent was hung and the first shot of coffee was safely brewing on the micro ultralight titanium gas camping hob — further proof that adventure racer camping setups are a NASA-like world of high-tech innovation and materials.

‘It probably was a beach, about half a million years ago when the massive Murray Gulf penetrated this far inland. Wouldn’t that be something? Sitting here looking out over the Southern Ocean,’ Ella replied.

They both pondered the ocean that was no longer, listening to the small blue flame roar as coffee brewed. André sat on the side of the hammock, Ella on their tough lightweight cross-linked polyolefin groundsheet. Nothing less would do the job for adventure racers.

‘So, what’s the plan now, detective?’

André didn’t need to ponder the question.

‘I’m not gonna call it in until we get back to the car at Wonga camping ground. We’ll have proper mobile reception there. I know I can send a short message on the inReach GPS now, but how many questions would that raise? And you know how painfully slow and tedious it is entering a reply message on the thing. Besides, the subscription we’re on has a ten-message limit, plus a character limit like Twitter. Hardly ideal for a text conversation about a complex police investigation.

‘I’d have a go if it was life threatening, but according to your expert opinion, Grinning Gretel has been lying there for six months. In any case, Glenevis is not going to believe what we came across, and how it happened … and where we are. I really do need to speak to the boss directly.’

The coffee spluttered through the espresso pot and André poured a small cup for each of them.

‘How do you reckon she died?’ Ella asked as he passed her a cup and joined her on the groundsheet.

‘Too hard to tell in that state. It’ll need a post mortem, and they won’t have much to work with. I’m gonna have a better look around.’

Ella sipped and savoured the short black, a tad smugly, André noticed.

‘I’m wondering if she fell from an aeroplane,’ he mused.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Well, we’re here because it’s the most track-free part of the state. I haven’t had a good look yet but there’s no sign of any vehicle having bashed through the bush from wherever. And you’d be flat out getting here on foot without the specialist training and gear we have. How else could it happen?’

‘But wouldn’t people be looking for her if she did fall or jump out of a plane?’

‘Not if she was pushed.’

‘What? Murdered?’

‘What better place to hide a body. You wouldn’t get odds if they ran a book on which bit of Victoria people were least likely to ever set foot in — or allowed to set foot in if it comes to that. We’ve probably passed into the proclaimed wilderness area. It’s possible we’re the first Europeans to ever set foot right there.’

‘Hmm,’ Ella thought. ‘Do you realise we wouldn’t have seen her if we had passed ten metres either side?’

‘Yeah. Maybe less than ten metres. That makes it all the more amazing. If it is a dumped body, the murderer is going to be more than a tad surprised by its discovery.’

‘If finding the body at all is so improbable, then the odds of the finder being a homicide detective must be incalculable,’ Ella said as they kept talking up the marvel of their find.

‘Hmm,’ she added, and stared harder at the landscape. ‘It’s such a speco story. You couldn’t make it up. I mean really speco. You’re gonna have to play for time so I can get some copy lodged.’

André looked hard at her.

‘What?’ she responded. ‘Mum dying doesn’t change any of this. The cop wheels are still turning in your head, and you’re lapping it up. Nothing wrong with that. And I’m a journo with The Age. You think I should ignore a front page that’s fallen into my lap? That I should just let them find out about it from your media unit and let one of my colleagues cobble together whatever they can? I’m here. Now. I’m living it. I own this as much as you do. Maybe more.’ Then she resorted to her childhood clincher for sealing an argument. ‘I saw her first!’

André’s stare morphed to stunned, then to wry head shaking.

‘And here’s me worried you’d be in shock. Well apart from all the emotional stuff I’ve watched churning within, a working farm has landed in your lap. Have you thought about that? Because, buggered if I know where you’d even begin. And all your Mum’s will and estate stuff. Those are no small matters facing you as soon as we get back from this training session. Are you really sure you want to run with this as a story? Are you sure you can with all that stuff hanging? I mean, I’ll do what I can to help but do you really want to add to the load right now?’

Ella mulled his words as they sat side by side, staring vacantly at the wilderness. She