Finding The Bones – Natalie Conyer

Margie, playing the anti-police activist of her younger days, was delighted to have company. She was a lonely old woman. Kinsella must have divined the same thing, because when he spoke his voice was warm, masculine. ‘Tell us about Belle Fitzgerald.’ Margie preened, an unhappy sight. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘all the rubbish that’s been written about Belle, and I can count on my fingers the number of people who wanted to hear from me, her best friend, the one who actually knows something. There was that cop, of course, the one who got shot.

He interviewed me. After him I didn’t hear from the cops at all. Oh, and I spoke to the guy who wrote the book, that Curran. The others? Not so much as a phone call. Not that I would have told them anything, of course.’ ‘Understandable,’ said Kinsella, who had her measure. ‘Maybe we can straighten things out at last.’ Margie blew smoke, narrowed her eyes.

‘I assume there’s reward money going. The family offered millions at one stage.’ Get Bennie to check if Margie Solon tried to claim any of it. Jackie didn’t want to break the flow by making a note. Kinsella shook his head. ‘No reward as far as I’m aware. Belle’s parents are dead. She was an only child and I don’t think there’s any family left.’ Margie shrugged, threw up an arm in a well, that’s it gesture. Kinsella went on, ‘But there’s a lot of public interest in this case.

The media will want to speak to someone who knows and we can suggest they contact you. As her best friend.’ He’d hit a sweet spot. Margie stubbed out her smoke and leaned forward. ‘Think so?’ ‘Yes,’ Jackie said. ‘We’ve already been signed to do a show with The Week on Sunday this Sunday night.’ Margie found her cigarette packet, shook it, took out another smoke, held it unlit. She was undecided, Jackie thought, whether to continue her I hate all cops routine or to cooperate.

‘Well,’ said Kinsella half-rising. ‘At least we can say we tried. The TV guys will have to find someone else.’ That hit home. Margie said, ‘No, wait. The truth should come out. What do you want to know?’

Early September in Sydney, but summer was muscling in. This Sunday morning was hot and windy, and the man with the clerical collar kept a hand on his Panama hat. He stood alone on a dirt path, watching a group of workmen dig holes with spades. Although the site was cluttered with every sort of earthmoving machine, what these men were doing had to be done the old-fashioned way.

Their labour represented the final stage of preparing for the new airport. Everything else was ready: land levelling complete, powerlines repositioned, environmental impacts sorted, heritage sites preserved. Only one delicate job left: extracting dead people from a disused cemetery and relocating them in their new home at Luddenham. Consultation about these graves had gone on for a year. Management, freaked by environmental protests, trod carefully. They gained written approval from all the descendants they could find and then at the last moment had to fend off a medium who claimed that even if the bodies were moved, their spirits would remain and would attack aircraft flying above.

Now, finally, the way was clear. They cordoned off the area, crossed their fingers and got on with the job. They’d scheduled work on the weekend because the dead should be lifted quietly, without the roar of equipment and hi-vis vests and yelling from team to team. Most of the graves had been evacuated yesterday, Saturday, and now the diggers were collecting the final half-dozen coffins. They tackled the job grave by grave, two men to a grave.

They were all locals. The contractor was Iraqi, but the Anglican Church was in charge and had insisted so he’d pulled together a gaggle of hard and mordant white guys from who knows where. All had signed declarations to say they’d completed the Certificate III in Funeral Operations. The Church might not have believed this because they’d sent a representative in a Panama hat to see the dead exhumed with respect.

The earth was softened by August rain and they emptied the first two graves without incident. Holes were dug and squared, webbing manoeuvred under coffins, the coffins lifted carefully to the surface and carried to a waiting transfer van. The third grave was different. They were a little short of a metre down when one of the diggers, a red-headed nugget in a wife- beater, gave an animal grunt. His companion, stringy, with a mullet and a tattoo sleeve, looked across.

‘Something,’ the nugget said. He used the blade of his spade to scrape away soil. Then he recoiled. ‘Fuck me dead,’ he said calmly, and crossed himself. He’d exposed a small patch of dirt-encrusted orange stuff and, angled on top of it, a skeleton hand. Both men scrambled to the surface and stood looking into the open grave. The church official, hand still on hat, strolled over.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: b49a96aaf387bc2c
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,035,735 bytes (1.941 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 238
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 445.8 minutes
• Total Words: 89,160
• Total Characters: 499,017
• Average Words per Page: 374.62
• Average Characters per Page: 2096.71

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