Читать книгу Flush - Jane Clifton - Страница 6

Some days a drop of water can kill you, some days it can save your life.

In the early hours of Thursday, February 3, 120 millimetres of rain fell on Melbourne. Enough water to flush out a murderer.

The Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers had swollen and in some places had split their sides. Sedate, well-behaved Kerford Road beach disappeared beneath heavy surf. Boats flipped and tossed like God's own rubber duckies. Roofs leaked, carports groaned, gutters choked, and parked cars drowned at the roadside. Century-old trees in the Botanical Gardens keeled over like drunks, their parched roots suddenly losing their footing in the blistered soil. A city that had craved a good soaking for more than eight years took an unscheduled bath.

Who knew? Not the weather bureau and not the man who dumped Inga's body at the building site. How was he to know that the concrete pour scheduled for nine fifteen that morning would not take place? Sure, the wind was up when he parked the ute next to the works shed. The temperature had plummeted while the atmospheric pressure was building to a suffocating crescendo, but that did not necessarily mean it was going to rain.

The city famed for its ability to produce four seasons in one day had lost the plot. Melbourne housewives no longer shook their heads at a sky full of purple clouds before bringing the washing in. A flash of lightning here, a burp of thunder there? Phooey! All the signs were skewed. Water storage levels continued to plummet, cottage gardens ran to seed. There were school kids who didn't know what an umbrella was for, and could make no sense of that nursery rhyme about the old man who `went to bed and bumped his head and couldn't get up in the morning'.

Heavy rain was the last thing on the big man's mind as he dragged Inga's body off the tray of the ute. It took less than a minute to pack her in between the wooden slats, and tuck her under a corner of black plastic lining.

`Sorted' was what he said to himself as he drove off into the cover of a sudden shower and switched the wipers to intermittent. An hour later, worried as hell and stymied by traffic chaos, he was back. As he stood at the top of the hill overlooking the site, the rain battered his brains and pissed down his neck, and he cursed through his teeth, trying to figure out what to do next.

The site was under water and the access roads impassable. There was no way of knowing how long the rain would last or how long it would take for the floodwater to subside. He had no way of knowing that he was already too late. Inga had left the building.

The water, brown and creamy as caffe latte, had churned its way around the site like a Worksafe inspector, poking its nose into every nook and cranny. The plastic bag with Inga's body in it had popped up from its hidey hole half an hour ago and taken a river cruise. It had bobbed all around the building site like a cheerful, blow-up cushion from the $2 Shop. The body had floated up and over the rim of the man-made lake and spun into the boiling cauldron of the Maribyrnong in flood. The river played water polo with it, the deluge hammered it with bullets of rain and the current hustled it along towards the maw of Port Phillip Bay.

In the howling wind at the top of the hill, the big man clenched his brows as if trying to shit an idea through his forehead, while the downpour reduced visibility to the hand in front of his face.

He shouldn't have worried so much. Half an hour later the rain came to an abrupt and astonishing halt as if someone had turned off a tap. The sun peeped through the vanishing storm clouds with an embarrassed brilliance on its cheeks. It had been caught napping and had slept through the alarm, maybe, or had reached for the snooze button and hit the sprinkler system by mistake. The white-noise of downpour was replaced by a roar of cataracts sluicing the city's clogged drains.

Sunlight glinted off flooded golf courses, the windscreens of gridlocked cars, and the pink, polished toenails of a foot poking out of a blue plastic bag. Snagged in the branches of a tree that had surfed its way down from Avondale Heights, the bag had hitched a ride just past Flemington Racetrack and come to rest beneath the railway bridge arching over Newell's Paddock.

There would be no dreary, concrete grave for Inga. She believed in happy endings and a big finish, and by George she'd got it. She had turned one last, posthumous trick that would have made Houdini proud.