‘What did he want?’
‘I have to go to Redbelly.’ I drew a breath that hitched in my chest. ‘And I need you to—’
‘Evan!’
‘—I need you tonot start with me, Delle.’ I lowered my voice. Some of Chris’s friends had taken their eyes off the gift unwrapping and were watching us. ‘It’s exactly what we need. It’s a murder.’
Turmoil in her eyes. The long-held desire to lift us out of the shame of our scandal with a good, solid case, something that might bring my rank back up, get me a posting somewhere out of Mangrove Mountain. She swallowed her anger so hard her throat constricted. A little came out anyway. ‘I’m going to be stuck with these weird-ass teenagers all day, alone.’
‘You want to go solve the murder instead?’ I asked. ‘We can swap.’
Chris dropped the wrapping paper on the table and turned over the gift.
‘Oh ho ho!’ He lifted up a box. Posed with it for another photo. ‘Shit! Aw, this is fuckingsick! Thanks so much, guys!’
Chris leapt out of his chair and came over to show the gift to us. The voices in the room were bumbling and tumbling around in my brain, coming in and out of sharpness as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to tell Hayley Twitcher. I glanced at the design on the front of the box. Couldn’t bring myself to read the words.
‘Oh, fun.’ Delle smirked. She was never angry for long, Delle. More than half the reason I’d married her. ‘It’s one of those ancestry kits.’
‘A what?’ I asked.
I felt Chrissy bump into my shoulder as he huddled in. ‘A DNA swab kit. To find out your genealogy. Marty did one.’ He pushed the box into my hands. I knew he was searching my distant eyes for validation. ‘He found out he’s seven per cent Norwegian.’
A sinking feeling hit my already churning stomach.
‘You spit in a test tube and, like, send it off to the company,’ Chrissy insisted. ‘And they give you, uh, an assessment of your genetic ancestry. You know? Dad?’
‘It’s awesome, isn’t it, Evan?’ Delle poked me.
You want to know more about our family line?I thought.Are you insane?
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘It’s really awesome.’
Chris took the box back and the kids returned to their huddle. Delle went into the kitchen. I stood alone in the corner of the verandah, trying to make sense of the strangely heavy blanket of dread that had wrapped itself around me in the wake of Dad’s visit. On the face of it, I should have been happy. A murder in the region was a morbid kind of win for me. Okay, so Dad would have his hand clamped on the back of my neck for the next few days, pushing me to not screw this up like I did everything else. And Delle was going to be exhausted and resentful by nightfall, run ragged by Chris and his friends, and she wouldn’t be subtle about letting me know it. But even accounting for these things, the feeling wouldn’t lift that I’d just taken a first step down the wrong path.
As I packed a bag, said my goodbyes and stepped out the front door, already dialling my boss, I had the growing sense that these were the waking moments of what was to be a living nightmare.
RUSSELL
There was a woman in the men’s locker room at Maroubra Police Station. I heard a thrilled whooping coming from the direction of the showers, some generalised dickheadery I couldn’t quite make out, then the horse-clop of those awful court shoes Superintendent Gail Caplan wore everywhere ringing between the rows of lockers and the concrete walls. I pulled off my stinking white business shirt and tossed it into my locker, a problem for Future Russell. I was slipping on a black T-shirt as the short, sharp-edged woman in her sixties came around the corner of my row.
‘I heard you were still here.’ Gail looked me up and down. She was always looking people up and down. ‘Rus, we need to talk.’
‘Uh-huh. I know the drill,’ I said. ‘Your office, Monday morning.’
‘No, not Monday. Now. We’re talking about this now.’
‘I know you’re pissed at me, but we can sort it out later. I need to get out of here.’
‘Russell—’
‘The home invasion on the waterfront. Two bludgeoned to death. I just heard about it. That’ll be Paddo’s case. I’m leaving before he pins me down, wanting to know a strategy for it. I don’t have five hours to teach the guy how to run a crime scene.’
‘The waterfront situation isn’t the only murder case we took in overnight.’
I pulled on my shoes. ‘Huh?’
‘I just got off the phone with central command. They’re assigning us an out-of-area job,’ she said. ‘A girl in her twenties, killed out in the sticks. Place called Redbelly Crossing. It’s up past Wisemans Ferry.’
