‘I just don’t want to have a gun on me right now,’ I said. I unwrapped the snack and bit a hunk off as I pulled out of the property. ‘I want to stop and talk to Evan at the end of the road leading to my father’s house. The temptation to go there and put a bullet in his head will be overpowering. You may have to handcuff me to something.’
‘Noted.’
‘I’m going to call the lab,’ I said. ‘And tell them to get ready for us. I want to be top of the queue.’
Bridie was ahead of us on the road past the pub. I glanced at the activity there as someone picked up at the lab.
‘It’s Detective Inspector Russell Powder,’ I said. ‘I want—’
‘Urgh!’ the lab tech, Snelling, made a disgusted noise. I could tell it was him immediately from the huskiness and breathiness down the line. ‘Youagain!’
I was so stunned by his sudden brazenness that for a moment I was silent. ‘Uh, yes. I want—’
‘You know, Detective Inspector Powder, I’m getting a little tired of hearing about whatyouneed, and about whatyouwant,’ Snelling barked. ‘This phone line is for officers to use to make polite and reasonable enquiries about the samples they’ve submitted andtheir place in the queue. It’s not your personal hotline for harassing and bullying the staff of this facility into skipping that queue entirely, like you’re King Shit of Turd Island!’
‘Well—’
‘I was trying to say something important to you this morning, Detective Inspector Powder, and you cut me off,’ Snelling blasted. ‘It’sincredibly rudeto cut people off. Did you know that, sir? Is that something anyone has ever enlightened you on?’
‘I—’
‘Whenyou cut me off’—Snelling paused to delight in his manoeuvre, which I’d fallen for, hook, line and sinker—‘you denied me the chance to tell you that your completely inappropriate verbal spray was directed inentirelythe wrong direction. Because your submitting officer, one Senior SergeantEvanPowder, was here when the discovery of the notebook was made. Soheshould have told you about the notebook, and it was quite reasonable for me to assume that hewouldtell you about the notebook, so abusing me because I didn’t tell—’
‘Wait a minute.’
‘Did you just cut me off?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. The words felt like rocks in my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Snelling. I’m an arsehole. Just go back for a minute for me, would you? You said Evan wastherewhen you made the discovery of the notebook?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the room with you?’
‘Yes!’ Snelling yelled. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘He was standing in the room with you. And you pulled out a notebook from the handbag. And he saw that.’
‘That’s what I said, Detective Inspector Powder.’
I hung up on Snelling. Which probably sent him into a murderous rage somewhere south-east of where I was driving, but it wasn’t yet another intentional insult to the man. My mind was whirring. That same eerie discomfort, the one that had begun at John Special’s house and continued to build, brick by brick, was becoming so weighty I couldn’t focus on the phone or the road.I pulled over, and Dodge seemed to know to just sit there quietly and let me think, based on the content of the phone call and the look on my face. I hung on to the steering wheel and stared at the road. Then I plucked up my phone again and called Snelling back. He must have seen my phone number in the phone’s incoming call screen, because he was already spewing abuse when the line connected. I had to cut him off to get a word in.
‘Evan took the preliminary DNA results from you, and he said there wasn’t a match in NCIDD,’ I said. ‘Is that true?’
‘I provide the profiles; I don’t do the matching, yougigantic ignoramus!’
‘Can you send me that profile again?’ I said.
Snelling grumbled something fast and incomprehensible, and then he hung up. I got out of the car and stood by the field, looking at a distant row of trees that were frosted all over with cockatoos. Dodge got out of the car and stood by me. His hard, downturned mouth told me he was probably thinking exactly what I was thinking. Knew, before I spoke, what I might be about to say.
‘Listen,’ I said. The words started tumbling out, freefalling, my mind barely planning them or following their implications. ‘My father was a cop in Maroota in the 1970s. That’s, what—half an hour from here? Chloe emailed him, saying she wanted to come out and talk about the murders. Now I’ve got Evan hiding the fact that his son was at the pub.Andhiding the fact that Chloe had a notebook.’
‘He couldn’t have hidden the fact that the notebook was there,’ Dodge said. ‘Not forever. All he could do was delay you finding out about it. And maybe that was by accident, sir. Maybe he was tired and distracted and—’
‘No. No. It’s not that. I feel like there’s something here.’ I could hear the horror in my voice. The knowing. ‘Jesus Christ, Dodge, I can feel it.’
‘We could check the police reports for that time, I guess,’ Dodge said. ‘But … I mean, mate. Are you really accusing your own father of … of something likethat?’
‘I don’t know.’ I thought of Evan. Of the weirdness. The fact that he was the one to tell me that Linda and Marian’s evidenceboxes were empty. Were they really empty? Had he found them empty? Had anyone seen it? I tried to push the thoughts away. But they kept coming back. ‘Dodge—my nephew, Chris, was at the Redbelly pub with someone. He came back for two drinks. Two very different drinks.’
