SPR — Chapter 1

Kirk Conway thought, ‘the insidious old bastard’.
After a while everything just becomes different shades of grey. It was the murder of Kirk’s mother that ripped the colour from his world. And now his father was dying.
The drive down the Bellarine Peninsula to Ocean Grove was like going back to a simpler time and Kirk hated it. Out of reach of the tobacco-stained fingers of the city, driving down to the house only he and his father knew existed, Kirk’s stomach churned.
He was usually happy to make the trip to the one safe haven his father had created for them but he knew it would be the last time. Kirk was tired of having to think out each move he made three times to make sure it was the best one. He longed to relax and enjoy life but knew that day would never come. For Kirk Conway, disgraced public prosecutor and son the notorious Jimmy Stone, life had never been simple. He hardly remembered what his mother looked like anymore and he was about to lose his father.
Now more than ever he needed to make the right moves at the right time or everything they had worked for would crumble around his feet. He couldn’t let that happen. There was too much at stake. The adoration Kirk had for his father outstripped everything else. The pair had been inseparable when he was younger. Jimmy’s reputation had allowed Kirk advantages few other kids got. But somewhere deep inside Kirk despised the simple fact that he would always be Jimmy’s boy and never Kirk Conway. Decades of watching his father; helping him as a schoolboy with errands, advising him as a fledgling lawyer, then latterly sharing the burden of decisions in the background.
Kirk new how the city of Hume lived and breathed. He knew its pressure points and its Achilles heel. He knew how to entice it, to subdue it and how it could turn on you at a moment’s notice. That was the lasting gift his father had bestowed on him and it was the thing he most treasured. A shared bond. A connection deeper than words could express but one that lay in bed in an unassuming house dying alone.
Nonetheless he was an insidious old bastard.
As Kirk drove down the country road that rolled over the hills on the peninsula he saw the familiar beach yews that heralded the edge of the dormant town of Ocean Grove. Kirk remembered the first time his father brought him and his brother down to the house. He had told the two boys how the yew tree grew crooked. That they had long grown accustomed to their habitat and adapted their roots to have a stranglehold on the sandy shoreline. It was the only place he’d seen his father relaxed. Each time they’d been there he had been reminded nature always finds a way to survive because it adapts. Even after a storm that destroys houses the trees remain; bent but not broken.
Only in the last few months had Kirk truly began to understand exactly what his old man had meant. All those years he wasted, fighting back the wind, when he should have been bending. Looking like he was being pushed over but remaining stoic. Like his father. The man many feared and who now lay in the house at the end of the drive he was pulling into, dying alone. On a cold blustery day.
Kirk parked the car out of view in case anyone had managed to follow him. He let himself into the small white coastal house. It looked like something from the last century, and for the most part it was. But that was part of its charm. Unassuming reliability. In the decades it had stood overlooking the heads, all the storms it had witnessed, it hadn’t changed. It just stood silently, keeping watch over everything in front of it.
‘Dad, it’s me’ Kirk shouted as walked through the house to where the old man lay in bed.
‘In here’ Kirk’s father’s voice still held a commanding resonance even though the stomach cancer had destroyed his body.
‘You ready?’ the smell of the room made Kirk’s throat dry. He swallowed hard to get rid of the taste of decay that hung in the air.
James slid his legs out of bed. He was filthy. The thin sagging skin of his bare chest showed that once it had covered an impressive frame. ‘Are you? You’re the one that has to deal with this. You ready?’
‘I think so.’
James closed his eyes, the frustration swelling. His bony knuckles gripped the bed hard as he summoned the strength to raise his voice for one last fearful time, ‘You’d better be boy!’ The hacking cough took all but the last of his strength. James struggled to fill his lungs afterwards. Kirk stepped forward to help but the old man waved off the gesture. ‘I’ll be dead soon. If you’re not ready you won’t be far behind me.’
