Read Laughs, Corpses... and a Little Romance Page 19

My dad is Ted Farley, skipper of the ‘Lady Annabelle’, and I’m Jack, his eldest son. We run a sort of ferryboat-cum-river postman service on the Hawkesbury River, and we’ve got a very snug operation going; dad at the helm, my kid brother Tim doing the routine jobs like maintenance and cleaning, and me taking care of the management side of things, like collecting fares and looking after the cash. Some people say I’m a deckhand, but I regard myself more as a ship’s purser. As the excitement of me and the police capturing the murderer Neville Sneider faded away we settled back into our normal routine, doing the same old trips and seeing the usual string of passengers coming and going.

  The people along our river are a pretty average bunch, working men and women, a few hairy hippies, quite a few senior citizens, and people on social security. Occasionally a new face appears. Recently a guy called Zilga Marzetsky moved into a house a couple of kilometers upstream from the railway bridge, and soon we started dropping off mail at his jetty. The river is getting silted up along that bank and it’s hardly deep enough for Annabelle to get in there, especially at low tide, so it’s a bit of a challenge for dad at the helm. Sometimes Annabelle touches bottom and the propeller churns up great whirlpools of brown mud as we back out. Zilga’s an elderly man with receding curly hair like steel wool, grey eyes, and a doorknocker of a nose. He speaks with a foreign accent, can’t pronounce ‘th’ and ‘w’ properly. Every time I’ve seen him he’s been wearing a dark suit with a waistcoat and tie, even in the hottest weather when everyone else is wearing shirt and shorts. Soon he started to walk along his jetty to meet us, and he obviously liked to have a bit of a chat. I asked him one time how long he’d been in Australia. “I first came here in August of 1968.” “D’you like it here?” “In my homeland everyzing is very formal. You vould be Mister Farley and I vould be Mister Marzetsky. Here everyzing is free and easy, so you are Jack and I am Zilga.” He chuckled to himself. “Yes, I like it here vell enough.”

  Soon we started dropping off parcels at his jetty, then boxes and wooden crates that took two of us to lift, and then we started to pick up similar goods to take back to the harbour for collection by a courier. “What’s in all these crates?” I asked him. “Pieces of fine art. I am a dealer in zem you know.” “What’s fine art?” “Paintings, sculpture, bronzes, zat sort of zing.” “How do you sell stuff like that from up here on the river?” “Oh I do all my dealing over zee Internet zees days. I take photos of all my pieces and put zem on my veb site. I don’t have a gallery any more, I have customers all over zee vorld so a gallery is no use to me.”

  I’d heard of the Internet of course, but I’d never had a chance to use it, so I went off and chatted to a few mates round town about it. They talked about megabytes and stuff like that, and how Zilga must be using a broadband mobile phone connection, because the phone lines on that side of the river couldn’t carry ADSL, whatever that was. It was all a bit like Greek to me.

  The next crate for Zilga after that was delivered by a security service to the wharf, and two armed guards came with us to make the delivery to Zilga. They looked all over Annabelle before they carried the shipment from their security van to us. The guards weren’t young guys; I reckon they were both around fifty. They wore dark blue uniforms with security badges on the sleeves and ‘Security’ across the back, and pistols on their belts. Dad seemed a bit nervous about them. We delivered the crate and Zilga signed the delivery docket. On the return trip the guards had nothing to do, so I was able to chat to them about their job. “Reckon you guys have a pretty easy job.” “Well it’s not bad, but you have to be on your guard all the time.” “Does it pay well?” “Not particularly, but it’s a living.” “Have you ever used your guns?” “Only in practice.” “They are loaded then?" “Well they wouldn’t be much use if they weren’t would they?” “What’s in the crate to make it so valuable?” “We don’t know, and if we did we wouldn’t tell you.” I think they were telling me to go away and mind my own business.