He was wearing a navy-blue collared shirt with the cuffs turned up, and seeing the dressy sort of shirt gave Rob the first uneasy inkling that he wasn’t, in fact, about to be roasted alive again by the enormous detective. And ifthatwasn’t going to happen, Rob didn’t know whatwas. He glanced sideways, towards the kitchen, wondering if it was too late to simply walk away and get one of the girls to deal with Detective Inspector Powder. But Millie was frying chips and Yasmin was in the dining room, and he was on his own to face the devil at the door.
‘Mr Winter,’ Powder said with a nod, and Rob swallowed, hoping the next words weren’t going to beYou are under arrest on the suspicion of …
He couldn’t imagine what. But that didn’t matter.
Rob nodded back, gripped the beer taps for dear life, tried to say ‘Good evening’ and ‘Hello’ at the same time and instead said, ‘Good-o.’
Powder sat down at the end of the bar, only two metres or so to Rob’s right. Uncomfortably close. Although, in this situation, Rob pondered, several hundred kilometres was also uncomfortably close. ‘Can I get a schooner of the lager?’
‘Yes.’ Rob numbly took a glass from the rack. ‘Of course. Yes.’
‘And what’s your most expensive whisky?’
Rob baulked. Looked for tricks and traps within the question. Couldn’t see any. ‘Uh … my mostexpensive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, uh, well, uh, I actually … I have a bottle of Glenfiddich Grande Couronne under the counter somewhere. Twenty-six years old. But that’d be … It’d be a hundred bucks a shot, sir.’
Powder pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Rob took the bottle of whisky out, trying not to tremble, and poured a generous shot in a nice tumbler he dug up and dusted off. The detective paid for the drinks, took them and sat sipping, looking out at the puddles and the park and the river beyond, a big arm on the counter. Rob shifted around the bar, doing busywork, trying to decide when this was going to turn into whatever it was going to turn into. An ambush. A nasty prank. A campaign of intimidation. Twenty minutes passed like twenty years. The detective drank the beer and nursed the expensive whisky. People came and ordered their drinks, and nodded in acknowledgement to the man at the end of the bar without trying to engage him in conversation or stepping too close. Everyone knew who he was. The entire nation did. The son of what was being reported as one of the country’s worst serial killers had been all over the news for a solid week in the aftermath of what happened. As had his dead brother, the disgraced Evan Powder, who the papers were saying had gone a significant way towards covering up for his father’s crimes before he snapped and murdered the old man.
Rob found himself thinking, as his heart rate slowed, that, actually, it was sort of a big move for Detective Inspector Russell Powder to show up like this. To sit at this bar. To show his face to these people. A man who seemed to have slithered, from birth, from a viper’s nest and into the world. Because surely it washumiliating, all of it. Some of the less classy papers had noted that Russell Powder was a gay man hailing from Newtown, in Sydney. (Rob was so affixed to the story that, like most people, he’d read all that was written about the case, whether classily written or not.) What was Russell Powder doing here, now? In the open, and far from home. Where he was just as likely to be attacked for the homosexuality as he was to have to explain that he hadn’t known about either his father’s or his brother’s dirty secrets?
But was that, in fact, what this was allabout? Coming here, of all places. Showing his face. Sitting politely and quietly at the end of the bar, drinking hundred-dollar-a-glass whisky and passing the minutes—a decent number of them, now—without issuing a threat or insult or snide remark to Rob Winter? Was this … a gesture ofapology? Rob told himself to get real. He watched the detective from the corner of his eye as he finished up his drink, gazing now through the glass doors to the dining room, where Rob knew one of Dodge’s people was with his mates. Nathan Fry. Rob expected the detective to go in there, join the group, order dinner maybe. But instead, he pushed his glasses back towards Rob and smiled as he turned to leave. ‘Thanks. See you.’
‘Yeah, see ya, mate,’ Rob said. He watched the detective go, and felt the band of fearfulness that had been around his chest snap free.
RUSSELL
The sound of the apartment building buzzer reached me where I was sitting on the balcony, warming my ungroomed feet in the sunshine. Instinctively I stood, leant out over the rail, but there was an awning between me and whoever was standing on the steps of my little blue apartment block in Newtown. I went in and clicked the button on the panel without asking who it was, figuring it was one of the backpackers in the apartment next to mine who had forgotten their keys, something that happened almost daily. Then I came back out and sat in the sun again.
I’d been doing that a lot, especially in the early mornings when I couldn’t sleep. Sitting in the light, to get away from the darkness. Sometimes my brain was knotted with memories. Of diving down for Bridie in the river. Or running through the dark of Stephen Branch’s property. Or standing, watching the pair of officers come back up from the bushland beside the river, where they’d gone down to arrest my brother. One of them giving a subtle head-shake to his superior. The other, less subtle, looking to me for an explanation.
‘He’s dead.’
The guy had put out his arms, palms up, like it was some prank I’d set up.
The weeks since my time at Redbelly Crossing had been spent running from things like that. Memories and explanations. The news was so saturated with pictures of my father and my brotherand Chloe Lutz and myself, that for a couple of days I left and went back to Redbelly, where there weren’t TVs in windows and ads on phones and people sitting on the train with newspapers in their hands, the front pages thrust out, waiting for me to see them. The journos came looking for me at my apartment, and the old woman who owned the ground floor flat got so sick of it she threw a bucket of water at them. I stayed in the houseboat, in the last place anybody would look for me, with my phone off, waking early to work on the awning over the top deck. Dodge came some days to sit at the table with his injured leg up and annoy me with pointers and tips about my building work, and stories about the awning and the houseboat and the town and his mother-in-law and his genius psychologist wife and everything else a person could possibly think to talk about. I was better with cars than I was with wood, but I did get the awning up, in the end, and I listened to Dodge without ever once telling him to shut up, or looking at him like anything other than a friend.
While I was out in Redbelly, I visited John Special, and I told him that a male DNA profile had indeed been extracted from the sections of ancient floor joist that Dodge and I had cut from his house. I told him that that profile had been a match to my father. I showed him footage Nathan Fry had expertly pulled from the camera I’d taken from the secret road behind the drug cook’s house. How it showed my father’s Ford Falcon coming into town, and then leaving again, on the night he killed Chloe Lutz. The old man listened carefully to what I had to say, sitting in his little kitchen, uneaten Tim Tams on the table between us and his daughter’s dog glaring at me from its bed in the corner of the room. I told John that he’d never be able to look his wife’s killer in the face, or tell him how he felt about what he’d done. That my own brother had stolen that chance away from him forever. I don’t know if it helped Mr Special to know that my father had died in terror and agony, the way all his victims had. Or what he felt about me, connected as I was by flesh and blood to the two men who had caused him the most pain in his life. But as I was walking out the frontdoor, he offered his palm, and we shook hands. So that was something.
As I left the property, preparing to make a phone call to Larry Lutz and tell him the same things I told John Special, I passed a beautiful woman in a car coming up the long driveway. She smiled and waved at me as I passed, and she looked so much like Linda Special that I wondered if I’d just seen her ghost finally coming home.
I went looking for more ghosts, stopping by the house where Marian Richley had been murdered, which was a broken-down shell of construction on an overgrown slab of land to the west of the Special house. While nothing belonging to Linda Special had been found among Dad’s kill trophies, there’d been a brooch that was identified as having gone missing the night Marian died discovered among the collection. I knew, ‘in my guts’, as Dodge had phrased it, that my father had murdered that innocent young woman. The brooch was hard, physical evidence of that. But nothing drove the truth home to me more than the fact that as I wandered the ruins of the home where she’d died, the cockatoos screamed relentlessly at me. Dodge would have said I was crazy, so I didn’t bother telling him about it.
I sat in the ruins of the Richley house and thought about Marian, and the life she’d been living, and the future that was stolen from her and the people around her. I found little traces of her parents, or her, I didn’t know. A smashed plate. The cover of a paperback novel. A screwdriver. A bright floral curtain, faded with age and rain. Marian’s former home had been obliterated by neglect and exposure to the elements. But it had really been torn down, and folded in, by the hands of hopelessness. A lost hope her parents surely had, as the days and years ticked by after her murder, of ever finding peace. A wretchedness hung around me then, knowing that the man who made this altar of pain on the hill had also made me. I don’t usually talk to the dead, but I whispered to Marian and to her parents everything I’d told John and Larry, knowing they couldn’t hear me, but wishing that they could.
I’d been home at my apartment for two days now, no closer to understanding how I felt about Evan, or about Dad. The obvious way to feel about my brother was miserable, and the obvious way to feel about Dad was angry, but I might have been in a place that was beyond both of those, or still too shocked to really feel either. A lot of confusing things were going on. There seemed no way to get my balance. Georgia had invited me to dinner at the house one night, which knocked me right off the rails. Bridie sent me a picture of a pelican she’d rescued that was tied up in fishing line, and that had put me right back on the rails again. I had the urge, one night, to text Delle, so I did. She didn’t answer.
A soft knock came at my apartment door. I got up and went and opened it, and Bridie looked at my fluffy, peach-coloured robe and gave a little laugh. I don’t know what she expected me to be wearing at seven o’clock in the morning in my own home, but I guessed it wasn’t that. The exhilaration of seeing her there in the hallway made me laugh, too. Because this was how I’d dared to envision it, sometimes. Before all the horror. Bridie coming here and seeing my apartment. The two of us pretending to be a normal dad and daughter, for as long as we had to, with the hopes that one day it might become real. Once we’d stopped laughing, we hugged in the doorway.
‘Just thought I’d check in.’ She gave a noncommittal shrug, like it was no big deal. She brandished two takeaway cups from the cafe up on the corner of King Street in a cardboard carrier in one hand. ‘See how you were.’
I invited her in. Took her straight to the guest bedroom I’d done up for her, and she did all the things I’d dreamt of her doing: cooing and gasping and commenting on the wainscotting, which I’d done myself, and the sunset lamp, which I’d bought because I knew young people liked those. After a while, we went to the balcony. She sat in the wrought-iron chair there, kicked off her sandals and put her feet in the slice of sunshine that was crossing the tiles like she knew that was the good thing to do out here: warm your feet, look at the people in the street, smell the jasmine across the way.
Through the balcony doors, behind Bridie’s back, I saw Nathan Fry slip silently from my bedroom, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his feet bare and boots hanging from his fingers. He gave me a cautious look, his eyes flicking to Bridie. I hung an arm over the back of my chair, lifted the palm, making a motion that said that he was welcome to stay if he wanted to, to join us out on the balcony. He shook his head. Made his hand into the shape of a phone and put it to his ear. I gave him the thumbs up. He left without Bridie even knowing he’d been there.
‘Have you seen the news today?’ Bridie asked.
