I walked off, feeling a burning in my cheeks, at being told to hustle by my child. At having what could be a major, case-saving avenue of investigation pointed out to me by my child. This was a person whose shoelaces I was still tying for them only a decade and a bit earlier. Why had I been about to leave the property without thinking that there was probably a secret road at the back that led into town? I found myself palming my forehead, told myself not to in case the kid was watching me. The thought occurred to me, with painful clarity, that I wanted Bridie to be a cop. I saw her talent. Ienviedher talent. And that hurt, because my father had raised Evan and me to be cops. It was just a given. There hadn’t been a choice. That I could want the same thing as a man I despised so badly left me shaken and confused.
The road was visible from the field not for its shape, but for the absence it created, an interrupted density of trees and bushes. I walked over a part of the barbed-wire fence that was down and started looking at the trees for a wireless camera, spotted it almost immediately, a white thing shaped like an elongated egg cable-tied to a tree branch. With no knife on me, I stood on tiptoe and snapped the thin branch, wrestled the camera off the end of the limb and carried it back across the field to the car.
Bridie was sitting in the back with the animal’s swathed head in her lap. The car already stank so much I had to roll down the windows, but I didn’t say anything about it.
EVAN
He called as I was heading back through Glenorie, past the big pie. There was some kind of Sunday market on in a field off the main road. Traffic. Kids. A Mr Whippy van. Normal people carrying on their lives, while I weaved in between them like a hideous black eel passing between pretty fish, making my way back out into the bush to continue covering up a series of murders. The horror of it all was a handful of rocks rolling around the bottom of my lungs, making everything rattle, making it painful to breathe. There’d been missed calls and messages from Russell on my phone as I left Pemulwuy. He would have to be answered eventually. Everything would have to be answered: why I’d neglected to mention the notebook, what was in it, how that connected to the cold cases. In time, they were going to get a full DNA profile of Chloe’s attacker, and that profile was going to link to Russell and me. It would all be pinned down: that Chris was there that night, that Arthur was there with him, that it was Arthur’s DNA that was on the girl.
But as a killer, and the son of a killer, my best friend was time. I still had some. Establishing that Arthur and Chris had been at the pub would take days. Days in which my father’s body rotted in the car in the river, and his house yawned, empty and still, and where he had gone and how and when he had left and what had happened to him became more and more difficult to pinpoint. Maybe he would stay hidden long enough that the fish and turtles and otheraquatic life came for his body and his bones, and establishing his cause of death would be impossible. I could hope.
There was time, still, to find a reason to get onto Stephen Branch’s property, and plant Chloe’s phone and laptop there somewhere, and do what I could to direct the efforts of those around me towards sewing this all up neatly as being a spur-of-the-moment thing perpetrated by a clear and obvious madman. Time, ticking away steadily, climbing up and up and up, lengthening the case, drawing it out, so that it became a matter of memory exactly who had handled the traffic camera data, and why Chris’s Uber ride had been deleted from it, if that was ever discovered at all. Maybe it was Fry who’d handled that. Maybe it was Lee. Maybe it was just a case of a weird file conversion, and my son had fallen off the list by accident; who knew? Who cared?
All that mattered now was that no one connected my father to Chloe’s cases. The ones she was investigating. Linda, Marian, the girl in Womerah. That connectioncould not happen. Because if they did, there’d be motive. There’d be questions. They’d come looking for Dad, and they wouldn’t accept that they couldn’t find him. If he was just an awful old man who’d been in the wrong place on the wrong night, a loose but unimportant thread left hanging, he’d be allowed to quietly disappear without there being panic and urgency to find him.
But if he was a serial killer, they’d look and they’d look and they’d never stop.
And if they found him too early, it was over. They’d get me somehow. I knew they would. Because it would be Russell leading them. Russell wanting to know.
And Russell always got his man.
Blood ties wouldn’t matter to him.
I was at the top of the mountain, coming down the winding, sunbaked and truck-scraped road towards the ferry, when Russell called again, and I relented and pulled off and answered.
‘Yeah.’
‘Tell me you went over to the lab after you were done at evidence holding,’ he said. His voice was like acid. ‘Tell me you photographed the pages of that notebook.’
‘I did,’ I said, putting him on speaker and navigating to my pictures. ‘I’ll send them to you now.’
‘I could strangle you for not spotting that notebook in the handbag at the Wisemans Medical Centre, Evan, I really could,’ my brother said. ‘We could have kept it back from the lab and had it in hand to refer to. Atechfound it! Atech! Honestly, who did you have to fuck to get your policing badge?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about it immediately?’
‘I wasn’t there. I’d left, and the tech found it, and I had to go back.’
‘What’s in it? Did you even look?’
‘A bunch of indecipherable stuff about podcasts,’ I said. I selected all the notebook pages I’d photographed, except the one that mentioned the Ford Capri. ‘Okay, they’re sent.’
‘What did you find in the Special and Richley boxes?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘You know how it goes,’ I said. ‘The cases are fifty years old. Somebody retires from the force and decides they’ll take a box of evidence home to fiddle around with between games of lawn bowls and wanders in the garden. They die and their kid throws it out with all the rest of their personal junk.’
‘Bothcases, though?’
‘The boxes were empty, Rus, I don’t know what to tell you.’
‘Fuck,’ Russell seethed. ‘Fuuuuuck.’
‘I know.’
