“Your two o’clock,” the receptionist calls, “Sergeant Beech.”
There is a pause and then a slender middle-aged woman appears in the doorway. “Ah, William, please come through.”
The thick-set police officer runs a hand through his greying, close-cropped hair, flicking a glance at the young receptionist. She smiles back at him. Beech screws up his face, then goes through the door into the little office. He’s too old for all this shit.
“Dr. Luck.”
“William. How are you?”
Beech takes a seat without waiting to be asked, crossing his legs, leaning back and eventually meeting her gaze.
“I’m good. But if we both thought that, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Okay.”
“Shall we get straight down to it? I know we only have an hour booked, and you probably have other people to see.”
Dr. Luck settles behind her desk and makes a show of opening her laptop, bringing up his file. Her eyes scan across the screen for a few moments, then she stops.
“Oh.”
Beech doesn’t comment, remaining taciturn on the chair opposite her, waiting.
“It seems there’s been another incident, William. Would you care to discuss it?”
“Not really. Routine.”
“I think we should discuss it. You’ve been making progress.”
Beech lets out a long sigh, leaning forward, running his hand through his hair again.
“That’s the promise though, isn’t it? The carrot. Each time, a little more progress.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“Forgive the directness, but you pick that up after twenty years in this job. Your comment would sound much more sincere if the Department wasn’t paying you by the hour.”
Dr. Luck rises from her seat, rounding the desk to take the chair next to him. Removing the desk between them is a nice touch, the rapport thing, he thinks to himself. He watches her, letting the silence lengthen.
“Let’s talk about the incident, William. Why don’t you walk me through it?”
Beech stares back at her, but then relents.
“Sure, anything to kill the time. Young white male, twenty-two, intoxicated outside the Barringer Hotel at quarter past midnight. Call came in, disruption, drunk and disorderly, I arrived on the scene and gave him a move-on order. That’s it.”
“The report says a little more.”
“Does it? Okay.”
“Let’s talk about what happened after.”
“Fine. Public nuisance, indicated intent not to comply with the order.”
“What did he say to you, exactly?”
“Exactly?”
“Yes.”
“I believe it was ‘fuck off pig, go get your snout in the doughnut shop’.” Beech raises his eyebrows. “Since there isn’t a doughnut shop open at that time of night anywhere between Darwin and Karratha, I took it to be an insincere response and I reissued my directive to move on.”
“Then what happened?”
“He attempted to instigate an altercation. I restrained him on the ground, handcuffed him and then called for additional officers to transport the offender to the station for further processing.”
“It says here he had a shattered cheekbone.”
“He did hit the ground hard, yes.”
Dr. Luck sets the laptop down on her desk, turning her attention back to him.
“That’s a third complaint of excessive force.”
“Gravity sucks.”
Beech detects a hint of frustration in her expression and he smiles. Dr. Luck folds her hands on her knees, returning his gaze. “Look, why don’t we try and talk again about the anger?”
“Sure. Talk.”
“No, I’d like you to talk. I’m really trying to help you here. Do you see that?”
“Are you?”
Dr. Luck sighs, glancing over at her laptop again, considering her words carefully.
“I could put in a report, you know that, don’t you?” she begins. “I could say that you aren’t making progress, that if anything you seem to be deteriorating.”
“You mean give them a story.”
“No, I mean tell them the truth. Would you like me to do that? Or would you like me to keep telling them that we’re working through things? You know what happens if I tell them what I really think, right?”
Beech scowls at her. Dr. Luck’s face is flushed a little as she speaks. She means it. “Do you want to be dismissed from the Force? Is that it? Is that what you’re aiming at?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Here? In this office, you mean? Wasting time when I could be out there doing my job.”
He can tell that she’s trying to remain composed, and there’s a little part of him that is delighted to see it.
“That’s just it, William. If you carry on like this, you won’t have a job. If you get discharged, you won’t even get the pension.”
“Then I guess my life is in your hands, Doc.”
Dr. Luck’s eyes narrow and she leans forward, closing the gap between them.
“Is that what Claire would have wanted?” she asks, softly.
“Leave my wife out of this,” Beech snaps, “You have no idea what she would have wanted.”
“What would she have wanted then, William? Would she have wanted you to be angry all the time? Or would she have wanted you to be happy?”
Beech surges forwards, face to face with her, making the psychologist flinch with the sudden movement.
“You have no idea,” he rasps, getting to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“We’re done, right? You’ve probed the patient’s deep-seated anxieties, you’ve reopened the wound. Job done, and it didn’t even take the full hour.”
“I want us to talk about what happened with your wife.”
“Read the notes. It’s all there. You don’t need me to fill you in.”
Beech strides to the door. “See you next time,” he grunts, and then he’s gone.
—
The sun lights his face as he walks down the street. The sky is blue and the temperature mild for the time of year. Claire would have loved it.
She loved living in Broome: the quietness of it, nestled between the red desert and the endless blue of the Indian Ocean. On a day like this they would maybe have decided on a picnic, skipping dinner to pack up a little basket and go up on the headland overlooking the red sandstone and the beach. She always loved the beach.
His phone pings and he checks the message. It’s from his boss, asking him to come into his office when he gets back to the station. Beech grunts, looking up again at the blue sky, feeling the sun on his face. He turns towards the police station.
Patrick Clements is waiting in his office, shuffling through a stack of papers. He looks up as Beech knocks.
“Yeah, sit down. We need to talk.”
Beech takes a chair, replying, “Okay, what do you want to discuss?”
Clements grunts, eyes flicking up to meet his at last. “How did it go with the shrink?”
“You’re asking the question, which means you already know the answer. Did she call you?”
“Shit, just pull your head in. Do yourself a favour. She’s not the bloody enemy.”
“You think?”
“Neither am I. You’re heading in one direction and it’s not a good one.”
“But….”
Clements doesn’t let him finish. “No, let me bloody speak, and how about you actually listen? That kid, they fixed his face up, but there’s gonna be a follow-up. You did not need to go that hard on him. He was off his head, he couldn’t have landed a punch even if he was capable of aiming for you.”
Beech closes his mouth, sitting quietly as his boss continues.
“That’s better. Look, bare minimum you get a reprimand. Maximum, it’s police brutality and then that’s a whole other pile of shit. At this point, I literally can’t afford to have you out on patrol. If you drop another guy, even if he came at you full tilt, it’s going to look like a pattern. I can’t risk it.”
“So, you’re suspending me then?”
“I’m bloody considering it.”
Clements isn’t the same as the psychologist, he doesn’t have to rein it in. Beech can see that he’s furious. There’s a part of him that cares a lot that Clements is angry at him, the part that remembers them starting out together decades ago, on the streets, side by side. Clements knows all about Beech’s wife. They’d been at the funeral. Clements’ wife had been friends with Claire.
“Will,” Clements growls, “If this was anyone else pulling this shit, I’d have pulled the pin. I know what you’re going through, I organised Dr. Luck specifically, because she specialises in grief counselling. We’re all just trying to help you. How about you meet us halfway?”
Clements looks at him, seemingly lost for anything else to say. Beech knows what he needs to tell the man on the other side of the desk, what the right response is. He needs to show he’s trying, even a little. That would be enough, everyone would get off his case, rally around. A simple thank-you would be all it takes, but the words that come out of his mouth are different.
“You done?”
Clements’ expression darkens, and Beech knows he’s blown it, pushing him too far. There is a little awful twist in his guts to see it, the feeling of absolute depravity at snubbing a man he’d counted as a friend, throwing it all back in his face. Clements grinds his teeth, sucking in a long breath.
“I’m going to reassign you. Highways.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
“It’s all daylight hours. Just sit by the side of the road and issue tickets. Take some time.”
“When do I start?”
“Immediately,” Clements grunts, “That’s all I wanted to cover off. Get over to the pool, get a vehicle sorted out.”
Beech gets up and walks out. He doesn’t look back.
—
Beech checks the time and gets out of the patrol car, carrying his laptop. The rest area has a set of picnic benches in the shade under a line of stately eucalypts and he settles himself down on one of them. The place is deserted, quiet save for the occasional roar of a car or the rumble of a roadtrain passing by on the highway.
It’s hot, even in the shade, a parched, dry heat coming in from the desert, all the way from the baking heart of the continent. Beech can feel the perspiration soaking through his uniform, but he isn’t going to do this in the car. He needs some separation. Checking his phone for a network signal, he flips the laptop open and connects.
The screen is blank for a full minute, then it resolves into the face of Dr. Luck.
She opens with, “William, good to see you. How are you?”
“Good, thanks,” Beech replies.
She looks down, checking through her notes.
“I see you’re on patrol duty,” she remarks.
“Yeah. I’m on the highway about an hour east of town.”
“How’s that going?”
“Let’s call it what it is. Clements has assigned me all the way out in the middle of nowhere because he reckons I can’t cause any trouble here. I’m on the naughty step.”
“You feel like it’s a punishment?”
Beech shrugs. He’s already tired of the chat. It’s always the same, with Dr. Luck chipping away at the edges. He’s been stuck in the desert for weeks, and aside from occasional interactions with the Western Australian speedster community on the long, lonely stretch of highway, the scheduled sessions with Dr. Luck are just about the only conversations he’s having. He’s certainly not having conversations at home, in the silent house that he comes back to after dark every night.
“It is what it is,” Beech says.
Dr. Luck nods, like she knows she’s going to have to earn her money. Beech just wants the session over with.
“I don’t imagine he’s doing this to punish you,” she says.
Beech draws a long breath and cuts to the chase.
“I’m out here because I can’t cause trouble. Let’s just say it like it is. He’s trying to keep me out of trouble because one more incident and he’s going to have to reprimand me. He’s doing this because we’ve known each other since we started and he’s trying to save me from myself, so he thinks.”
“Why do you think he’s doing that?”
“Because he thinks he owes it to Claire.”
Beech is expediting, sliding the name of his dead wife into the conversation so that Dr. Luck can get to the crux of it. But she surprises him.
“Perhaps he thinks he owes it to you,” she counters.
“He’s pissed off with me. I really don’t think that’s accurate.”
“Have you considered that he might be trying to help you, as a friend? Tell me something, do you believe you’re worth helping?”
Beech doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he runs a hand over the back of his neck, feeling the moisture beading there. Despite everything, she has managed to cut through.
“You seem surprised that people would want to help you. That people would care about you.”
“I don’t need them to care about me.”
“I’m not sure that’s correct. Perhaps you don’t want them to care about you, but that’s a very different thing.”
Again, Beech stalls. It’s so ridiculous, to be sitting on a picnic table in the middle of nowhere on a video call talking about his innermost feelings. He looks out across the sunbaked, red landscape. There is nothing moving under the relentless beat of the sun, barely a breath of wind.
“If they cared, they wouldn’t have stuck me all the way out here.”
Beech looks back to the screen.
“Is it really the best thing for my mental health, do you think, to put me out here on my own all day, every day?”
“Maybe it gives you valuable time for reflection on….”
“I sit by the side of the road waiting for someone to come past. I just clock them with the radar unless they’re really hauling it, and then I chase them down. Just me on my own in the desert with the Holden Commodore. It’s a 2017 SS-V Redline, one of the last ever built, a real beauty, doc. They’re taking them out of commission now, but the old girl has been chasing hoons for years on this stretch of road.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Me sitting out here in the Redline, in the car that’s about to get scrapped and replaced? She’s true-blue old school, the last of the V8 interceptors.”
Beech laughs to himself.
“You probably don’t get the reference.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t….”
“No need to be sorry. Everything gets replaced, eventually. Look, everything eventually gets too broken to last.”
Dr Luck is silent now, sitting in her air-conditioned office in Broome.
“Did you read the coroner’s report?” Beech asks her. “I mean, you have access to it, right?”
“I do,” Dr. Luck concedes. “And I did read it.”
“How closely?”
“Close enough. I understand what happened.”
Beech laughs sourly. “About her fingernails?”
“I don’t recall anything about fingernails.”
“So, you just skimmed.”
Beech lets the statement sit between them, an accusation. The woman on the screen is trying to work out what to say next, and it stirs an unexpected glee from within him. He leans towards the screen.
“At five o’clock, Claire rang me at the station. We talked for a few minutes. I put the phone down and finished up work. At half-past I clocked off, but instead of going home, I went over to the pub. I had a couple, got back to the house around half seven. I had trouble opening the front door, so I went around the back and found her in the hallway. I couldn’t get in the front because she was right up against the door.”
The moment flashes before his eyes: his wife’s naked body, the trail of blood.
“I called for an ambulance and began to administer first aid. One of the emergency doctors later was kind enough to let me know that she’d already passed at the scene.”
Beech is staring at the screen now.
“That was good of him. To know that there was nothing that I could have possibly done to save her.”
Dr Luck is silent, watching him.
“But, back to the coroner’s report. It concurs with the doctor’s assessment, that she had already bled out in the hallway. It mentioned the cuts across Claire’s wrists, but it also details the cracked fingernails.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, and that’s the trouble, you don’t. You think you’re helping, but you don’t understand the first thing.”
“I want to. Tell me.”
Beech stops, suddenly choking up. There’s a rage deep inside that threatens to rise up, to make him hurl the laptop into the bush. Instead, he directs the anger towards the screen.
“She cut her wrists in the shower. She would have done it a few minutes after the phone call. The cuts she made were across the wrist, not down. Know what that means? Claire did. We’ve been battling this for years. She knew exactly the difference. She knew how to cut herself so that there would be no helping her, and she didn’t do that. Why?”
“Please, tell me,” Dr Luck responds, her voice quiet now.
“She didn’t intend to go through with it. It was another one of her episodes. She had a plan, see? She did it just before I was due home.”
“And you didn’t come home.”
“No, I went for a drink. I went for a drink because I just couldn’t face it. I’d had a bad day at work and then Claire on the phone. While I was having a beer to myself in the pub, she was waiting for me at home.”
Beech grits his teeth. He continues grimly.
“The blood trail went from the bathroom, down the hall to the front door. Her fingernails were ripped up. There were paint flecks in them.”
He paused, seeing the realisation dawning on Dr. Luck’s face.
“She was trying to get out, to get help from someone. She was trying to claw her way through the door because she didn’t want to die,” Beech told her, flatly.
“William, I’m so sorry.”
“So was she, I’m sure, right there at the end, wondering why I hadn’t come home.”
“She had a history. It isn’t your fault.”
“I’m sure she forgave me.”
Beech punches the call button, cutting the doctor off. He closes the laptop and gets up from the bench. His heart is pounding, reliving it again, the cascading avalanche of terror as he walked into the house, following the blood from the bathroom, seeing his wife’s pale body. Two beers had cost him his wife. He hadn’t been there when she needed him. In sickness and in health, he’d promised her on the happiest day of his life, and he hadn’t been able to fulfil that promise.
Beech walks away from the rest stop, boots crunching over the dry earth until the road and the patrol car and the laptop are a long way behind him. His gun is in its holster.
The desert is empty, all the way out to the horizon, an ancient sunburned land. Old man Magee had done it the same, and it had caused a mess for everyone, sending out search parties to find his body when his daughter had reported him missing from his property out in the bush. It would be a shame to put the boys through it, transferring the guilt of not having done enough from Claire, through Beech, to Clements, like it was some kind of disease.
Beech turns back towards the car, an alien feeling twisting his guts. It might be anger, or it might be love. It might just be cowardice.
He has another four hours until his shift finishes. He needs to get back to work.