‘This is fantastic. Where did you find it?’
‘Library. Thanks to my tightly honed archiving skills.’ Whitlam grinned. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of research on Kiewarra’s sporting history. For my own interest really, and I came across that. Thought you’d like it.’
‘It’s great. Thank you.’
‘Keep it. It’s only a copy. I can show you where to find the original one day if you want. There’ll probably be other photos from around the same time. He might be in more of them.’
‘Thanks, Scott, really. What a great find.’
Whitlam leaned against the desk. He pulled one of the crumpled anti-Falk fliers out of his back pocket and screwed it up. He chucked it at the bin. It went straight in.
‘I’m sorry about Sandra,’ Whitlam said. ‘She wasn’t finding it easy to adjust to life here anyway. The idea of a relaxing country escape hasn’t quite worked out like either of us thought. And this terrible business with the Hadlers has made everything worse. We thought we were moving here to get away from anything like that. Feels like a frying pan–fire scenario.’
‘What happened to the Hadlers is so rare, though,’ Falk said.
‘I know, but –’ Whitlam glanced at the door. The hallway outside was empty. He lowered his voice. ‘She’s hypersensitive to any kind of violence. Keep it to yourself, but I was mugged back in Melbourne and it ended – well, badly.’
He looked again at the door, but having started, seemed to need to unburden himself. ‘I’d been at a mate’s fortieth in Footscray and took a short cut through a laneway to the station, you know, like everyone does. But this time these four blokes were there. Still kids really, but they had knives. They blocked the way and me and this other man – I didn’t know him, just some other poor sod taking a short cut – we were stuck. They did the whole routine, demanded wallets and phones, but somewhere it went wrong.
‘They got spooked, lashed out. I was beaten up, kicked, fractured ribs, the works. But the other guy took a knife to the guts, bled out all over the asphalt.’ Whitlam swallowed. ‘I had to leave him there to go and find help because the bastards had stolen my mobile. By the time I got back the ambulance had arrived, but it was too late. Paramedics said he was already dead.’
Whitlam looked down and fiddled with a paperclip for a long moment. He shook his head as though to clear the thought.
‘Anyway, so there was that, and then this. So you see why Sandra’s not happy.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘But you could probably say the same about almost anyone in town right now.’
Falk tried to think of a single exception. He couldn’t.
Chapter Twenty-two
Back in his room, Falk stood at the window and stared down at the empty main street below. Whitlam had driven him back to the pub and given him a friendly wave in full view of passers-by. Falk had watched him go, then walked around to the carpark to check if his paintwork looked as bad as he remembered. It was worse. The words scratched into the car had shone in the fading light, and for good measure someone had shoved a handful of the Falk fliers under the windshield wiper.
He’d slipped up the pub stairs unnoticed and spent the rest of the evening lying on his bed and going through the last of the Hadlers’ files. His eyes were stinging. It was late, but he could still feel his nerves tingling from Sandra Whitlam’s bottomless cup of coffee. Outside his window, he watched a lone car cruise by with its lights on and a possum the size of a small cat scuttle along a power line, her baby on her back. Then the street was quiet again. Country quiet.
That’s partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought. The quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle; a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing wholesome glow when it was weighed up from the back of a traffic jam or while crammed into a garden-less apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh clean air and knowing their neighbours. The kids would eat home-grown vegies and learn the value of an honest day’s work.
On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, they gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.
Soon, they’d discover that the vegies didn’t grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prised from the reluctant soil, and the neighbours were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute but there was also nowhere much to drive to.
Falk didn’t blame the Whitlams. He’d seen it many times before when he was a kid. Arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing.I didn’t know it was like this.
He turned away, remembering how the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids’ paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes. Billy Hadler’s pictures had been happier, Falk thought. He’d seen them dotted around the farmhouse, colourful and stiff with dried paint. Aeroplanes with smiling people in the windows. A lot of variations on cars. At least Billy hadn’t been sad like some of the other kids, Falk thought. He almost laughed out loud at the absurdity. Billy was dead, but at least he wasn’t sad. Until the end. At the end he would have been terrified.
Falk tried for the hundredth time to imagine Luke chasing down his own son. He could conjure up the scene, but it was hazy and wouldn’t quite come into focus. Falk thought back to his last meeting with Luke. Five years ago, on an unmemorable grey day in Melbourne. When the rain was still a nuisance rather than a blessing. By then, Falk had to admit to himself, in a lot of ways he’d felt he barely known Luke at all.
Falk spotted Luke immediately across the Federation Square bar. Harried, damp and straight from work, Falk was just another grey man in a suit. Luke, even freshly liberated from a lengthy suppliers’ convention, still had an energy that was hard to miss. He leaned now against a pillar with a beer in his hand and an amused smile on his face, surveying the early evening crowd of British backpackers and bored youths dressed head to toe in black.
He greeted Falk with a beer and a slap on the shoulder.
‘Wouldn’t trust him to shear a sheep with a haircut like that,’ Luke said without lowering his voice. He pointed his drink at a skinny young guy sporting a style that was half-shaved, half-Mohawk, and almost certainly expensive. Falk smiled back, but wondered why Luke felt he had to trot out the country-boy comments every time they met. He ran a complex six-figure agribusiness in Kiewarra, but played the country-mouse-in-the-big-city card without fail.
Still, it was an easy shorthand excuse for the gap that seemed wider to bridge every time they met. Falk bought a round of drinks and asked after Barb, Gerry, Gretchen. All were fine, apparently. Nothing to report.
Luke asked how Falk was coping since his father had died the year before. OK, Falk said, equal parts surprised and grateful his friend had remembered to ask. And that girl Falk had been seeing? Again, surprise. Good, thanks. She was moving in. Luke grinned. ‘Jesus, watch out for that. Once they’ve got their throw cushions installed on your sofa, you never get them out.’ They’d laughed, the ice broken.
Luke’s son Billy was one now, and growing fast. Luke pulled up photos on his phone. Lots of them. Falk scrolled through with the polite forbearance of the childless. He listened as Luke reeled off anecdotes about fellow suppliers at the conference, people Falk had never known. In return, Luke feigned interest as Falk spoke about his work, playing down the desk work and ramping up the entertaining bits.
‘Good on you,’ Luke would always say. ‘Bang up those thieving bastards.’ But he said it in a way that implied, very gently, that chasing men in business suits wasn’t real police work.
