‘Well, Louis, I sure am hoping not to have to do it all myself while someone prattles on at me,’ I said, raising my voice, and one eyebrow, at him. He got the hint and beckoned for the saw. I handed it to him and climbed out of the hole.
The mountain behind the house was quiet as we packed up the Hilux. In all, I took two A4 evidence bags of wooden blocks from the joist under John Special’s house. I bagged, sealed and labelled them as Dodge took photos of the handling. John came in from the back of the house as I was nailing the boards I’d lifted back down into a temporary bit of pine Dodge had found in a woodshed. I’d cut the pine to size, filled the hole in the joist and returned everything to where it belonged. The old man watched me work with a distant look in his eyes, like this was just one in a long series of mistakes and mishandlings that had opened a crevasse between him and the New South Wales Police.
I wanted to tell him so many things. That I didn’t know the police who’d handled Linda’s murder back in 1974—this Herman Grey and his men—but I could assume with good authority that they’d been rural cops in over their heads with this kind of thing, the same way Dodge and his crew were now, and all their good intentions couldn’t make up for a lack of training, support and technology that would have made this case easier to solve. I wanted to tell Mr Special that I was sorry about whoever had lost or hidden his wife’s evidence, whether they’d deliberately done so or had been taking a shortcut by slitting the box open to retrieve the evidence and hadn’t returned the items to their proper place. I wanted to apologise on behalf of whomever had been kicking around this case across the past fifty years, which was almost certainly a series of half-invested, over-worked and under-appreciated homicide cops with crumbling marriages and pent-up trauma. Detectiveswho had ten to fifteen more urgent, more contemporary cases on their hands at any one time, and who were expected to chase down Linda’s killer on their lunch hours or weekends. I wanted to say I was sorry that another young woman had had to die just so someone would look into his wife’s death with any real interest or optimism again. But the truth is, I didn’t have the guts to say all that. I was just too ashamed. So I said nothing at all as I swept up the dust and wood splinters in the hall with a dustpan and brush I found under the sink.
Dodge and I drove back towards town in silence, the rumble of the road and the mid-afternoon light flicking across the bonnet. I’d offered to drive, but Dodge said he wanted to work the leg. My phone started ringing, and I looked at the number and felt a whump of fear in my stomach that made me groan out loud. I almost asked Dodge to pull over so I could take the call in private, but was so nervous to answer I didn’t have time.
‘Georgia,’ I said. ‘Hi.’
It was the first time we’d communicated verbally in a year and a half.
‘Whythe fuckam I seeing your face on the national news?’ she snarled.
‘Urgh.’ I rubbed my brow, glanced at Dodge, who was steadfastly watching the road. ‘It’s a long story. I caught a murder maybe an hour before I was supposed to pick Bridie up.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Georgia snapped. ‘No, you didn’t, Rus. What you did was you smacked a junkie and got sent out of town on a wild goose chase so Gail Caplan could enjoy a break from you and your bullshit. I’ve spoken to the boys at Maroubra Station.’
‘I did say it was a long story.’
‘Return our child to Sydneyat once.’
‘Look,’ I said carefully, ‘Bridie is a legal adult. And she made the decision to come out here with me.’
‘I don’t give a deep-fried, coconut-encrustedrat’s arsewhat she decided! The whole point of you being together this week was so you could reconnect—not so you could chase murderers and she could sit alone in a hotel room!’
‘Bridie and I have actually been communicating really well,’ I said. ‘We’ve answered some really hard questions for each other.’
‘She’s not riding along with you on this, is she?’
‘I’m talking about the downtime. Which—I mean, there hasn’t been as much as there could have been—but it’s been good.’
‘How nice,’ she said. I remembered Georgia’s expression when she used to say these words, ‘How nice’, which she did with a kind of iciness that could freeze your balls clean off your body, make them hit the ground and shatter into a million pieces. Times when I’d come home after big nights out with the boys when we were newly married: 3 a.m., stinking of bourbon.Oh, you’re home finally. How nice.
‘She’s in danger there, Rus. There’s a fucking madman running around that tiny town killing young women. And if he’s not the undies-stealing freak that you killed—which I’m guessing he isn’t, because you’re still there—then there’s a whole separate fucking maniac on the loose! Whatisthis place? I cannotbelieveyou would take her to this backwater hellhole!’
I chewed my tongue and thought about telling Georgia that, undies-stealing weirdos aside, far more young women were murdered in the safety of their own homes by madmen or, more often, by their boyfriends and husbands, in perfectly large and populated cities. But because I don’t have a death wish, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Georgia.’
‘Fuck your sorries.’
‘To be honest, I wish Bridie had been riding along with me on this the whole time,’ I ventured. ‘She flagged something super early that I think might actually pan out.’
‘If you convince that child to become a cop, Russell, I will turn you into liquid fertiliser and hose you all over my lawn.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Send. Her. Home.’
Georgia hung up. I slid the phone back into my pocket. Dodge and I met eyes for the briefest of seconds.
‘Ex-wife,’ I said.
‘Ex …wife?’
‘It’s another long story,’ I said. Now it was Dodge’s turn to take a phone call. He answered by picking up the mobile rather than putting it on hands free, which vaguely annoyed me. He listened for a few seconds, then glanced at me.
‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling off the road. I guessed it was the wife, couldn’t think of anything he was trying to keep private from me specifically. He got out and went to the edge of a sprawling green field. A horse got curious about him and walked over. Dodge listened to the call, head down, patting the horse’s nose absent-mindedly. He seemed nervous when he came back. Looked through me, like he was trying to figure out how to soften the blow of bad news.
‘What is it, Dodge?’
