‘Yes.’
‘And Marian Richley?’ I gagged. Swallowed. Put a hand to my mouth. Had to speak through it. ‘Was she the same?’
‘She was a pub girl from Wisemans Ferry. We all used to drink there. I followed her home one night, watched her for a while. Came back a couple of weeks later.’
‘Dad.’ I heard my own voice. The voice of a child. ‘Dad.’
‘The ingratitude that you are showing me right now is staggering, Evan. It really is.’
‘No amount of gratitude is going to rub this out.’ I broke through my tenuous calm. My voice came up, high and, yes, hysterical. ‘Three women are dead! They’re dead!They’re dead!’
The old man nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘Oh my god.’
‘They’re dead, and you’re going to fix it all for me, Evan.’
‘What?’
‘That’s why I brought Chrissy along this time,’ Dad said. ‘As a failsafe. Because I knew this was all going to come out. As soon as I saw that first email from Lutz, I knew. The clock was ticking. Eventually, no matter how carefully I did it, I was going to need you to pay me back and help me through this. I’m an old man, and times have changed. I knew I wouldn’t get it exactly right.’
‘You …’ I breathed. ‘You took Chris along?’
‘I needed to have someone there to throw to the dogs if it came down to it.’
RUSSELL
Dodge was standing in the steep driveway outside his house, at the open driver’s door of his Hilux. He was simultaneously trying to manhandle his phone into his pocket, stop the door closing on him and keep himself upright with a shoulder bag on one arm and an aluminium crutch braced under the other. I pulled up at the roadside and watched for a half a minute, thinking about the time I sat in my patrol car watching a nodding meth addict trying to cut through a bike chain with a pair of barbecue tongs once in broad daylight on King Street in Newtown. Then I got out and walked up. Dodge froze like a boy caught with his hand in his dad’s porn stash. I took the bag off his shoulder and shut the driver’s door, dealing with two of his problems for him before I’d said a single word. I nodded towards my car. ‘I’ll drive.’
‘I’m not sure I’m supposed to be working.’ Dodge turned to me. ‘But I’m pretty damncertainyou’re not.’
‘Yeah, well, too bad. I want to tell you some things about what Chloe Lutz was working on.’
He started down towards my car, hobbling on that aluminium crutch. A woman who I assumed from her age and nosiness must have been the mother-in-law came out of the front door of the house. I was caught not wanting to walk off on her without saying anything, but not having Dodge there to introduce me. She frowned at me, a little shrivelled person with one of those light bulb–shaped haircuts you can only get at country hair salons, the ones theyrefuse to give you until you can prove you’re over eighty. I nodded a polite hello and she folded her arms and glared up at me.
‘Get him back in one piece this time, will you?’ she said.
‘I will,’ I promised, noting silently that I hadn’t even said who I was, nor claimed responsibility for the state of her son-in-law.
‘We need him here.’
‘I’m not surprised by that.’ I gave my warmest smile. ‘He’s a good man. Everyone could do with a Louis Dodge in their life.’
Her eyes narrowed even further at me. ‘Not you, though. He’s a happily married man, and he’s staying that way.’
The little woman went back inside the house. Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I walked down to the car and wished with all my soul that Bridie had been with me for the past fifteen seconds of my life to witness my hypothesis about old women and their gaydars proven.
‘I would have thought you’d gone back to Sydney with the kid.’ Dodge groaned as he sunk awkwardly into the seat next to me in the Mustang, hauling the injured leg up and in with him.
‘I’m about as enthused about running out on this case as you obviously are,’ I said. I waved at his trouser leg. ‘Show us the damage.’
He pulled up the end of his trousers on the left-hand side. The whole leg was an angry blue and swollen from the knee down, the calf cut through with tightly wrapped bandages where the bear trap had sunk its teeth into the limb. ‘The leg’s okay. I’m supposed to stay off it, but I don’t know if I believe in that. I think it should have movement and blood flow, don’t you?’
‘No idea.’
‘The real annoying thing was all the needles. The bear trap was rusty, so the doctor shot me for everything from tetanus to diphtheria. In the arm I sleep on, of course.’
‘Diphtheria?’
