ROB
It was the blood on the doorknob that caught his eye.
There wasn’t an all-body plunging sensation, his animal instincts alerting him to the horrors that lay in wait beyond the door to room number four; the smell of death in the air and the darkness within didn’t yet make all the hairs on his body stand on end and his stomach swan dive to the pit of his bowels. All that would come later. For now, Rob Winter, publican of the Redbelly Inn, simply stopped and looked at the smear of red and knew his morning routine had been disrupted.
It was a strict routine. At a march, Rob exited his car at precisely seven o’clock every morning, leaving it in the gravel space by the keg room door understood by locals to be his spot. He went directly to the beer garden, where he lifted the lid off a steel bin and scooped out a half-litre of birdseed and poultry pellets, using a cut-down plastic milk bottle that lived in the bin. If he didn’t feed the peacocks first, they followed him from room to room issuing their ear-splitting cries, now and then tapping at the windows with their beaks, waking the guests at the inn. One had even come into the office once. Annoying, bossy birds. Rob didn’t know who had originally owned the peacocks. Two had simply shown up in the beer garden, and before he could settle on whether to have them carted off by the council or scour the internet for someone who might adopt them, there were six. Not a simple task, getting rid of six peacocks.
After turning on the coffee machine, starting the pumps, clearing the keg lines and opening the basement doors to clear out the stink of spilt and ancient beer—some of it had first seeped into the sandstone one hundred and fifty years ago—Rob made his coffee and sat down to emails. Having completed that infuriating technological kerfuffle and being well into his walk-through of the inn’s accommodation floor now, he was on his way to the blessed terminal step of the morning routine—sitting for a quiet moment in the front window of the empty bar and watching the river across the street, whispering to himself his daily prayers.
Now that goalpost had shifted into the distance. Was invisible, almost. Rob stared at the blood on the doorknob, then noticed more beneath it, splashed on the bottom of the door. He scratched at his thinning orange hair and sighed.
This wasn’t the first time there’d been blood in the hallway outside the guest rooms. Punch-ups and drunken accidents were as ubiquitous in rural pubs as Akubras, high-vis and oversized schnitzels. Rob raised a fist and knocked on the door of room four, gently, so as not to wake the guests in other rooms. There came no answer. The second, third and fourth rounds of rapping produced no movement, no sound.
Rob went out of the hallway, down the stairwell between the accommodation building and the pub proper, and into the office beneath the guest rooms. He wrangled the computer into displaying the account for room number four, and instantly remembered the ponytailed young woman with the laptop and the polite if aloof demeanour who had checked in the previous afternoon. He took out his phone and dialled the phone number listed for the account. The call went straight to voicemail. As he dialled twice more and got the same result, thoughts occurred to him about the internet problems he’d had that morning. About the valley in which the pub sat, with its temperamental allowances and denials of contact with the outside world. Rob took the spare key card for room four that was attached to a lanyard and hung on the rack on the wall just inside the office. It was his instinctual noting of the time on the clock above the door, and the hard rectangle of the key card in hispalm, which issued to Rob the first murmur of warning from deep inside his soul.
On legs made slightly unsteady by nerves, the small, bespeckled publican went back up the stairs and again to the door of room four. He knocked, louder this time, the noise drawing out the man staying in the first room along the hall. The scruffy guy in his thirties was already dressed in high-vis gear and yawning, offering no greeting as he stood outside room one, just staring in curiosity at Rob’s activities. The publican rapped his loudest, then put his mouth close to the crack of the door.
‘Ms Lutz?’ he called.
No answer.
He swiped the key card against the panel and knocked once more, before turning the knob and opening the door as he called out, ‘Ms Lutz, are you awake?’
Rob pushed the door fully open.
He stared at the blood on the floor, and felt the plunge.
EVAN
Iwas loading dishes smeared with maple syrup into the sink when the knock came at the front door of the house. The sound sent a bolt of dread through me.Dad’s here.My father always knocked. Thumped, rather. The doorbell was right there. Eye height. Dad knocked, because a man knocks.
I walked through the kitchen, stiff, edgy. Glanced out at the gaggle of kids that had arrived not long ago, eager to spend the day with my son, Chris. They were clustered on the back verandah now, some of them still tucking in to the pancakes I’d carefully laboured over only to be issued with a painfully awkward ‘Thanks’ from about half of the ten kids present. I tried not to take it personally. These were kids for whom all social interactions were hard. Shy, pimpled, greasy nerds who felt at home in the library, who loved their teachers, who still had sleepovers. Chris’s tribe. Some of the boys were wearing eyeliner, and one of the girls showed up wearing a velvet corset. She was going to gopaintballingin avelvet corset. Jesus.
The old man was standing there with his hands in the pockets of his filthy jeans when I opened the door. He didn’t say hello. Just locked his dead-fish eyes on me and said, ‘We need to talk.’
Cancer, I thought.
Because I’m a piece-of-shit son, I always thought that when Dad turned up or called unannounced.Come ooooon, lung cancer!
‘Can it wait?’ I asked. ‘It’s Chrissy’s birthday.’
‘That was yesterday.’
‘No.’ I sighed. ‘It’s today.’
‘It can’t wait,’ Arthur grunted, pushing past me into the hall. ‘Your office. Now.’
I shut the door, turned and got ahead of him in the hall, wanting to cut him off before he had one of his classic interactions with Delle or one of the kids. Delle came into the hall, a doe hearing the footfall of hunters. ‘Oh, hi, Arthur. We weren’t expec—’
Arthur grunted as he turned into the home office. I gave Delle my best placating wave before closing the door.
‘This’d better be quick,’ I said. We arrived in a room the family shared, shelves crammed with Chris’s PlayStation games and werewolf novels, boxes of Delle’s art supplies, some police files I had printed and brought home. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘There’s been a murder in Redbelly overnight,’ Arthur said. ‘And you’re going to get yourself on it.’
I felt a tingle of energy in the centre of my chest, reached for the phone in my back pocket. Dad wasn’t a cop anymore. Hadn’t been active in more than two decades. But somehow he always had his finger on the pulse of the region, knew when there’d been a drink-driving arrest, an assault, a drug raid, long before the jobs showed up on official police channels. Sure enough, I opened the New South Wales Police Active Incident app and found a listing that was only seventeen minutes old, for a town on the other side of my region:REDBELLY CROSSING, CRITICAL INCIDENT, 1 DECEASED. ‘Right. Jesus. Okay. Technically it’ll be Louis Dodge and his crew on that, from Wisemans.’
‘You think I give a rat’s arse whose case it istechnically?’ Arthur widened his eyes. ‘It’s amurder, Evan. It needs to be yours. The body’s not cold yet. There’s still time. And I need you to get assigned to it, because—’
