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  The House of Books is an eloquent collection

  of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  Blanche d’Alpuget is the author of seven books, including four novels—Monkeys in the Dark (1980), Turtle Beach (1981), Winter in Jerusalem (1986) and White Eye (1993). These works earned her a number of literary prizes including the PEN Golden Jubilee Award, the Age Book of the Year Award and the South Australian Government’s Award for Literature.

  d’Alpuget’s first book, Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby was published in 1977 to critical acclaim. Robert J. Hawke: A Biography (1982) was both a national bestseller and the winner of several awards. She is also the author of On Longing and Hawke: The Prime Minister.

  She has served on the boards of the Copyright Agency Ltd and the Australian Film Commission, and was the Chair of the Australian Society of Authors in 1991. She lives in Sydney with her husband and son.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  BLANCHE

  d’ALPUGET

  White Eye

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Viking Penguin Books Australia in 1993

  Copyright © Blanche d’Alpuget 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 224 7 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74269 919 6 (ebook)

  For Mario and

  My Dear Fraters and Sorors,

  with Love

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty one

  Chapter Twenty two

  Chapter Twenty three

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  From the sky above Mount Kalunga the landscape stretched in an autumn plaid of stubbled fields and sheep pasture. A lake, like a long splash of quicksilver, washed the base of the mountain and continued north for another ten kilometers, its eastern shore dotted with islands of lignum, where waterbirds nested. At this time of day, birds would swim on the lake: little flotillas of pelicans and swans; ducks dabbling in the bulrushes around the foreshores; and flocks of coot, water hen, and darters. But there was no life on the surface of the water this afternoon. Duck-shooting season had opened, and for two days the quietness of mountain and lake had been a rumpus of explosions. Before lunch on Sunday, the shooters had packed up their tents and four-wheel-drives and left, their route marked by a fading trail of dust. The waterfowl, however, were still too nervous to venture out into the eerie stillness.

  On the southern foreshore of Lake Kalunga, the land looked green in comparison with the surrounding brown and yellow paddocks. This patch of ground, enclosed by a Cyclone-wire fence, had once been the heart of an old wheat and sheep farm but was now a scientific research station. The original homestead had been the largest structure for forty kilometers; these days, its green iron roof seemed quaint and unimportant beside the station’s big new buildings with their telecommunication dishes and antennae. A tar road ran north from the homestead to the laboratory complex, then continued in a straight line past a small house before curving west and ending at the airstrip. Beyond the strip was the wire fence, and beyond that a narrow stretch of no-man’s-land from which rose the dark, pine-covered flank of the mountain.

  The body of a woman lay in the grass of this common ground. Swarms of flies and other insects had already laid thousands of eggs in the mouth, nostrils, and eyes. In another few hours the eggs would hatch, and the second stage of the cleanup would begin. The corpse was stiff, for the woman had been dead since early morning.

  From first light, a female wedgetail eagle had been observing the foreshore of the lake, and the body. As Sunday wore on, she watched the men with guns drive away and followed their vehicles with her eyes for a hundred kilometers.

  When the bird was sure there were no men hiding in the bulrushes, she descended. She was hungry. She knew from the great swarm of flies and the tense, cawing ravens that the body was food.

  The eagle circled lower. On the Cyclone-wire fence the ravens moaned excitedly; they needed the eagle to cut the belly for them before they could feed.

  She relaxed her shoulders, so her wings rose from the horizontal, and let herself slide slowly down the air. It slipped under and over her dark, layered plumage like water slipping over a fish. As she descended, she steadied herself by flexing and easing her shoulder muscles, employing her underwing feathers as brakes. She sculpted her element, now using her long, broad tail, now with subtle movements of the primary feathers on her wing tips, fingering the air into the contour she wanted for landing.

  Chapter One

  In the heat of the day, when eagles soar highest, Diana Pembridge drove to the camping ground near the lake. All summer she had observed a family of wedgetails hunting over the wheat fields and the mountain, and sometimes seizing ducks from the bulrushes. A huge, dark-phase female eagle had claimed this district as her territory more than twenty years ago, when the Pembridges grew wheat on the flat land south of the highway and ran sheep on ground that was now the Exotic Feral Species and Microbiology Research Centre. During January and February, the female, her young mate, and their newest offspring had sailed together through the tall blue days, but now two had vanished. Which two Diana did not yet know, for on the autumn thermals the wedgetails rose to amazing heights, too far from the ground to identify.

  As she looked toward Mount Kalunga, she saw the one remaining eagle coming down. From the way it was flying, in slow spirals, she could tell it was curious about something it could see on the ground on the other side of the airfie
ld, but from where she was standing she could not work out if the eagle would alight outside or inside the Cyclone-wire fence. Beyond the fence, near the base of the mountain, was the land where Diana exercised her falcons.

  She focused her binoculars on the bird, holding her breath with excitement: it was the wily resident hen eagle, and Diana had never seen it so close. The huge wings measured, she estimated, three meters across.

  The eagle hovered lower and lower, her big pale feet extending like airplane wheels. Suddenly there was a shot. The bird jolted, then cartwheeled to the ground.

  The road between the shore of the lake and the Cyclone-wire fence ran due west for half a kilometer, then petered out on no-man’s-land. Diana looked for the injured eagle as she drove, but the ground was uneven. When her van rounded the edge of the fence she could see no one, only a bit of bright-red clothing hanging on the wire. Maybe there’s a rabbit tied to it, she thought: the lure that tempted the eagle down.

  Up ahead, the big bird floundered along the ground, its right wing broken and flopping out, unfoldable. Diana jerked on the handbrake and reached into the back of the van. She grasped a slide-action rifle and her fowling net.

  As soon as the eagle saw her, it made a desperate effort to fly, jumping away on its big, black-feathered legs, left wing pumping, right wing trailing over the grass. Diana dropped the rifle and sprinted after it.

  She netted it on her first try, only to realize she was a fool to have forgotten her gloves; as she pulled the net tight, tipping the eagle onto its side, the bird’s taloned feet thrashed free. It was like a panicking horse. She grabbed at the legs and, with her face averted, held on, her arms jerking in their sockets from the eagle’s kicks. It curved its body up and, through the net, struck her leg with its beak—but suddenly the fight went out of it and it collapsed in a heap of loose feathers. Diana held tightly to its legs, then turned to look at what she had caught.

  The eagle was lying on its back, glaring at her from beneath pale, almost white, eyebrows. For a moment she was bewitched by the power of this mysterious, other life, then a movement at the edge of the tree line caught her attention.

  She squinted at the spot. The figure stepped forward a pace so she could see him, then vanished again among the Aleppo pines.

  “Morrie!” she yelled.

  There was no answer and no movement from the trees. Had he forgotten how to speak?

  “Why did you shoot the eagle?” she shouted. Her words fell into the silence of the afternoon.

  The eagle kicked, jerking her attention back to her task.

  One-handed, she unbuckled the belt of her jeans and dragged it through the loops. She folded the eagle’s broken wing flat against its side. The bird was lying still again, and she was able to slide the belt around its body and wings and secure them. With both hands around its legs, she lugged the bird, upside down, to her van. She needed to drive to the vet’s—an hour away, in town—before the eagle had a stress fit.

  Instead of seats, the van had poles in the back for birds to perch on, but they were all too small for the wedgetail’s feet. With her pocketknife Diana cut a strip off an old blanket and wrapped it securely around the largest pole. When, wearing gloves this time, she picked up the eagle and stood it on the perch, its massive feet gripped with ease. With eyes bright as suns, it stared past her as if she were invisible, fixing its attention on something far in the distance. It was still terrified—Diana knew from the way it flattened its feathers—but she was almost certain it had no injuries apart from the broken wing. She pulled the black curtains that encircled the rear section of the van and quietly closed the door. In the dark, the eagle would probably go to sleep.

  As she walked around to the driver’s seat she glanced toward the mountain.

  He was back again.

  He had moved farther forward and was standing near the gray fence post that had once marked the western boundary of the Pembridges’ property. Morrie looked as sinewy as dried meat, his only clothing a string tied around his waist, with a bit of rag hiding his genitals. A rifle rested across his shoulder. Diana turned to see what he was pointing at, over near the fence, but there was only the piece of red cloth she had glimpsed earlier.

  She looked back at him, her hands raised in inquiry. He gave an emphatic, almost impatient, jerk of his chin, then motioned for her to follow him.

  Diana did not try to get too close but let him walk past her, and when he was about two meters in front, she fell in behind his easy loose-kneed stride. The land closer to the fence dipped and rose from the erosion of water running off the mountain, but when Diana saw the cloud of flies, she knew what was there.

  The body lay on its side in the creekbed, facing the fence, hands tied behind its back, bare buttocks a pale blue-gray, the legs a slightly darker color from suntan. Diana’s heart jumped: it was Carolyn Williams. Carolyn had unhinged her jaw, screaming at whatever had been done to her.

  Diana flinched away. “Morrie …?”

  “I never kill anyone! They tell lies. They shut me up wrong.” He was quivering with agitation. “Last night. Lights comin’ here. Then, goin’ again. This mornin’, early, it was there.”

  Diana interjected, “For God’s sake! She was shouting for help! When you heard her, why didn’t you—”

  He shook his head. “No noise. She make no noise.”

  His mind had lost the power to dissemble, she realized, leaving his face a mirror of his thoughts.

  “The police will have to question you.”

  “No! No!” he wailed. “No policemen!”

  Diana took a step back to the corpse. Now that the first shock had worn off, she realized she was seeing details she had missed before: a mole on Carolyn’s back she remembered from childhood; brown roots showing through her scarlet-tinted hair; the scuff marks of a row of toes inside a gold sandal. Again and again her glance was drawn to the mouth, silently screaming out flies. One for every time I wished you dead, she suddenly thought. In the next moment she realized she must be very careful of everything she said and did from now on.

  “Morrie, you must …”

  But when she turned to look at him he had vanished again. She squinted at the trees and saw him standing between two pines; he was invisible unless you knew he was there.

  She ran back to her van and climbed into the cabin, where a faint alkaline stench of bird mutings was ever present.

  With the lake behind her, the road ran south, still parallel with the fence, past an outlying house, the laboratory complex, and the administrative and residential buildings of the research facility. It had been a private road when this land belonged to the Pembridges, but now it was public, like the paddock on its other side, which was used as a campsite by duck shooters. As she drove past the camp she noted the forty-four-gallon drums brimming with rubbish and the crates of empty bottles and cans in unstable towers. There were piles of duck feathers around spots where plucking machines had been set up. Just twenty minutes ago she had been walking around here, checking that fires were properly smothered, picking up bits and pieces—more cans, a dirty sock, a digital watch, a condom. She’d found a stick, carried the thing to the garbage, and flipped it in, feeling a twinge of loneliness.

  The memory of the condom made her brake sharply. There had been an ornamental pink hair comb nearby, she recalled, the sort of junk Carolyn loved. Diana had thrown the comb into the garbage too. As the van slowed, she realized she had been driving at ninety kilometers an hour along the rutted dirt road.

  Had Carolyn been shot? Or was she stabbed?

  She could not remember seeing any blood.

  Maybe it wasn’t murder. Maybe she committed suicide. The moment this idea was out of her head, Diana knew it was ridiculous. Carolyn’s hands were tied behind her back, as if she had been a prisoner.

  She was already passing the lab complex where Carolyn used to work, BIOHAZARD signs were attached to the doors of its low, white buildings and fixed to the Cyclone wire every hundred meters.
The signs had red broken circles with skull-and-crossbones painted above them.

  Up ahead was the T-junction where the unpaved road to the lake met the highway. She could turn right, drive to the main gates of the research facility, and report to one of the guards that Carolyn Williams’s corpse was lying over near the mountain. Or she could turn left and drive straight to the vet in Kalunga—and have time to think of an explanation about how and where she had found the eagle and who might have shot it. She stopped as a truck thundered toward her. When it had passed, she idled for a while, then shoved the van into gear and turned left, following the truck into town.

  Chapter Two

  Diana thought that Jason Nichols might be catching up on some sleep after having spent much of the weekend attending to injured birds and the neglected animals from a scruffy little circus on the outskirts of town. She was relieved to see, when she pulled up at his clinic, that the front door was ajar.

  The eagle lashed at her—first with its beak, catching her on the face, then with its foot—when she tried to lift it off its perch, so in the end she threw the torn blanket over its head and dragged it out of the van. As she barged into the vet’s clinic she almost trod on his receptionist and another woman, both huddled over a spread of tarot cards. Jason was looking on, bemused.

  “Go straight through,” he said, and after a glance of apology to the women, who stared at Diana and her extraordinary bundle, he followed her into the examining room.

  “It’s a wedgie,” Diana said. “She’s been shot. She needs a general anesthetic while we X-ray the wing, then something for pain when she comes to.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  There seemed to be nothing damaged except a couple of tail feathers and the wing, but it was too soon to be sure. While the eagle was still unconscious, Diana braced both wings flat to its sides with thin leather thongs and Jason injected the bird with a painkiller. They carried her out to the laundry, where he had a big cardboard box in which his computer had been delivered. Diana held the eagle upright until she regained consciousness and could stand on her own. As soon as the bird woke, however, she showed signs of distress again. She twirled her head around and flared her long, blade-shaped hackles until they stood out from her neck.