‘Shit!’ I gasped as I studied the photo more closely: Ace was in handcuffs, being led down the steps of a plane and surrounded by a load of men in uniform.
I bought the paper, knowing it would take me a long time to decipher what the paragraph beneath it said. It was also ‘continued on page four’. I turned tail and walked back to the hotel. It was pointless to carry on to the internet café – my brain was incapable of multi-tasking at the best of times, and this really wasn’t the moment to investigate Albert Namatjira as well.
Back upstairs in my room, I realised how much I’d depended on Star to translate the gobbledegook of newsprint, emails and books for me. And even though she had texted me a couple of times overnight to check I was okay, and I was sure she’d be happy to help, I felt it was important that I proved to myself that I could cope alone. So I sat cross-legged on my bed and did my best to decode what the newspaper said about my Ace.
Anand Changrok, the rogue trader who broke Berners Investment Bank last November, flew home today from his Thai hideout and gave himself up at Heathrow. Changrok refused to comment as he was led away by police. Berners Bank, one of the oldest banks in the UK, was recently bought for ￡1 by Jinqian, a Chinese investment bank.
With news of Changrok’s arrest, crowds of angry investors surrounded the entrance to the bank on the Strand in London to protest at their lost funds. Many had their pensions invested in funds run by Berners and have lost their life savings. David Rutter, Berners’ Chief Executive Officer, has declined to comment on what level of compensation investors will be offered, but the board of directors announced that a full investigation into how the situation was allowed to develop unnoticed is being carried out.
Changrok has meanwhile been remanded to Wormwood Scrubs prison and will appear in court next Tuesday on charges of fraud and document forgery. Sources say it is unlikely he will receive bail.
So, Ace was currently locked up in a cell in a London prison. I chewed my lip in agitation, thinking that if I’d never asked Po to take that picture, maybe he would have joined me in Australia and the two of us could have become outlaws in the Outback together. Maybe I should go and visit him, try to explain the truth in person . . . like, he could hardly run away, given where he was. But it was a long way to go if he refused to see me.
I checked my watch and saw it was past eleven o’clock and the Broome Historical Museum should be open.
I set off with the tourist map of Broome in my hands. As I walked along the wide avenue, I peered through the shop windows and saw trays of pearls – not just white ones, but black and pink pearls strung together on necklaces, or fashioned as delicate earrings. An almighty racket struck up in one of the trees as I passed it.
To my left, across a strip of dense mangroves, was the vast ocean that seamlessly joined the sky at the horizon. Eventually, I spotted the Historical Museum. It looked like a lot of the other buildings in Broome: single storey with a corrugated roof and a veranda running along the front.
Once inside, I felt immediately conspicuous as I was the only visitor. A woman sat behind a desk at a computer and popped her freckled face up to give me a tight smile.
I wandered round and saw that everything in here seemed to be about the pearling industry. There were a lot of model boats featured and black and white pictures of people sailing on them. My eyes glazed over the plaques with descriptions written on them in tiny letters, and I headed for a corner full of ancient-looking equipment. There was another suit identical to the one that featured in the bronze astronaut sculpture, the round holes in the metal helmet staring at me like empty eyes. I squinted at the card below it, and finally twigged that this was a pearl diving suit, long before the days of neoprene.
On the next display, pearls sat on red velvet cushions in little wooden boxes. A lot of them looked misshapen, like glistening teardrops that had just splashed to the ground. I had never been a jewellery girl, but there was something about these creamy orbs that made you want to reach out and touch them.
‘Can I help you?’
I jumped back from the display guiltily, even though I’d done nothing wrong.
‘I was just wondering if you’d ever heard of someone called Kitty Mercer?’
‘Kitty Mercer? Course I have, love. Doubt there’s a Broome local that hasn’t. She’s one of the most famous people to ever live here.’
‘Oh, that’s good then,’ I said. ‘Do you have any information on her?’
‘For sure, darl’. Are you doing a school project or something?’
‘Uni, actually,’ I improvised, insulted she thought I was so young.
‘I have a lot of female students who come in here to research Kitty Mercer. She was one of Australia’s great female pioneers. She more or less ran this town during the early twentieth century. There’s a biography of her up there on the rack – it was only written a while back by a local historian. I read it and found out all sorts of things about her I didn’t know. I’d recommend it.’
‘Oh yeah, I think I’ve got that one already,’ I said hastily as I saw the biography Ace had bought for me. I wondered if this was the only source of information about Kitty; maybe I’d ask if there was a TV documentary on her I could watch because it would literally take me years to finish the book by myself. Then my eyes fell on a table next to the rack, which offered a small selection of audiobooks. I recognised the cover on the front of one of them.
‘Is this a CD of the biography?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great, thanks, I’ll take it,’ I said, relief flooding through me.
‘That’ll be twenty-nine dollars, love. You’re not from round here, are you?’ she said as I counted out three ten-dollar bills.
‘No.’
‘Come back to research your own history?’ she probed.
‘Yeah. That and the uni essay.’
‘Well, any further help you need, you just let me know.’
‘I will. Bye, then.’
‘Bye, love. Glad to see one of you got to uni.’
I left the museum gratefully, because there was something about the way the woman looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and discomfort that I didn’t like. I tried to push it from my mind as I nipped into a discount store I’d seen on the way and managed to buy a portable CD player and a pair of cheap headphones, as I was pretty sure the other residents of the hotel wouldn’t be interested in hearing endless hours of Kitty Mercer’s life story being played through the thin bedroom walls.
I grabbed another burger from the café for lunch, and as I walked back to the hotel, I noticed a few black-skinned kids squatting on the green. In fact, one was lying down flat and seemed to be asleep. One that was awake gave me a nod, and I watched another take a slurp out of a beer bottle.