Whitt started texting me at midday on a new number. I didn’t ask why.
The account you set up for Sam is empty. I visited. He’s nervous.
I eased air through my teeth. I’d known, as soon as my brother was arrested, that this was going to be an expensive time in both our lives. With his permission, I’d sold almost all of Sam’s possessions immediately after his arrest, and taken charge of his bank account. I’d sold my apartment, my car, and some collectibles of my own, and unlocked some term deposits of my personal savings. Within a week of his arrest, the spending started. I put some money into Sam’s commissary account at the remand centre so he could buy snacks and sundries, toothpaste and the like. Then, like clockwork, the threats on his life began. I started feeding protection money into his account, as slowly as I could manage, just enough to keep his enemies satisfied. I knew they’d want more in time. But all I had to do was keep Sam alive until the end of his trial. I’d take out a loan if I had to. Get a second and third job. Whatever it took.
I’ll deposit some more now, I told Whitt. You and Tox OK?
There was a lengthy pause. I’m not sure we’re the most suited of partners. He’s an unsettling person with an unsettling reputation, and I worry about his actual plans for the killer if we find him.
I smiled at that. Tox was, indeed, unsettling. Whitt had likely heard by now the rumour on the police force that Tox had murdered a mother and her son when he was a kid. I was one of few people who knew the real truth – but I wouldn’t divulge Tox’s secret behind his back.
I texted Whitt, tried to stem his curiosity.
Five days and I’ll be home. Tox is good people. Trust me. You’re safe with him.
He smells like a wet dog, Whitt replied.
Chapter 44
I BORROWED SNALE’S car and took a drive out into the desert to clear my head while she and Kash worked on the package of gold from Olivia Campbell’s house. When I had left Snale’s place the two were dissecting it, weighing the gold and using lifting tape to secure any prints from the wrapping. Kash was rambling about how the difficulty of tracing precious metals made them perfect funding for terrorism.
I understood Kash’s way of looking at the world. I knew officers who had worked in Sex Crimes so long they let it divide their minds clean in half, so that all men became potential predators and all women their potential prey. To stay away from men was to be, by definition, safe.
I’d called Tenacity on the hands-free without asking myself why. I guess I was curious to see if it was indeed the Tenacity whose case I’d solved years earlier.
When she picked up, she sounded like she was clattering around the house, moving pots and pans.
‘Oh my God, Harry,’ she laughed. ‘What a surprise.’
‘Just checking in on my tenacious friend,’ I said. ‘How’s things?’
A little guilt rippled through me as she sighed and started complaining about how her mother couldn’t find a job, her brother was getting sued, she couldn’t keep her house clean. She told me she’d been doing great in counselling, though. I didn’t know how to get around to the topic of Kash, or even if I should. I’d decided that it was totally inappropriate of me to even think of talking to her about him.
‘I’m in the middle of a divorce, though,’ she said.
‘Oh dear.’
‘I’ve been with Elliot sixteen years,’ she said. ‘We were high school sweethearts.’
I made an awkward noise. Tenacity paused.
‘What?’
‘I think I might be on a case with him.’
‘Who? Elliot?’ The clattering in the background of the call stopped. ‘Elliot Kash? Jesus!’ She gave a humourless laugh. ‘Small world.’
‘I feel very ashamed,’ I said. ‘I heard him say your name, and I thought –’
‘You thought, “How many fucking Tenacitys could there possibly be in the world?” I get it all the time. Let me guess, you want me to drag him home and out of your hair.’
My face was burning. I tried to focus on the road.
‘Well, you listen to me, Harriet Blue,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if you have to chain him to the front fence of the town hall. You keep him out there as long as you can. I need a break, you understand?’
‘A break from what?’
‘From feeling like I’m going to get held hostage every time I walk into a bloody airport!’ She was ranting now. ‘From looking at every person on the bus like their bag might be packed with explosives! From waking up every morning to Voice of the Caliphate on the radio, copies of jihadi recruitment magazines spread all over the kitchen table! My friends think he’s a fucking nutcase. Elliot’s obsession with Islamic terrorism is driving me nuts. I thought I had problems.’
‘Well, it’s his job,’ I reasoned. ‘I mean –’
‘It’s not his job,’ she snapped. ‘It’s his life. When I met Ell he was a laid-back surfer type. He was a bricklayer. Hard hands. Brown as a nut. Then everything changed. He went to Bali on a surfing trip with four of his mates and they all went to the Sari Club on the first night.’
My heart sank. I knew where this was going. In 2002, two hundred and two people, including eighty-eight Australians, had been killed by a suicide bombing in Kuta conducted by an Islamic terrorist group called Jemaah Islamiyah. One of the bombs had gone off outside the Sari Club, which was full of tourists having a good time.
‘Three of his friends died that night,’ she said. ‘The fourth died in hospital the next day. Elliot applied for a fast-track uni degree two weeks later. International relations, security major. Before I knew it he was interviewing for position with ASIO. And ever since then it’s been this.’ I imagined her standing in her kitchen gesturing angrily around the countertops laden with stacks of books and papers, aerial shots of tiny Afghan villages. ‘I can’t keep doing this. Elliot is not going to stop terrorism all by himself. He’s going to end up as their next victim, by destroying everything and everyone he loves with his fixation.’
Chapter 45
I’D TURNED OFF the highway onto the faint tyre tracks in the hard earth that led towards the scary old man’s house. The land was sparsely populated here with spiky desert plants. Inhospitable brush led to distant clumps of trees dotting the horizon like approaching armies, shimmering in the heat. Last Chance Valley seemed like an oasis compared with this endless dead zone of shadowed valleys and hazardous cliffs. There were no landmarks to guide the wanderer. Mobs of grey kangaroos lounged in the minimal shade, eyeing the car as I passed.
Snale had briefed me on Jed Chatt while she stood over the dining room table, marking out the tiny speck that was his house on his vast property in the empty space west of Last Chance. There had been a dispute between Jed’s people and Dez’s nearly two hundred years earlier, apparently over land within the valley that both parties seemed to want. Snale didn’t know much more about it than that, but she told me that the resentment ran deep. Jed hardly came into the town at all, but when he did people shied away from him. He would be dependent on Dez for his mail services, and on the town for his food and supplies, the occasional visits of fly-in, fly-out doctors and dentists. Jed seemed like a hovering black eagle, the townspeople in the valley uneasy mice.
The house sat perched on the side of a low hill facing back towards the valley, only the gentle slope of Last Chance Valley’s crumbly ridge visible in the distance. I got out at the bottom of the hill and looked up towards the property, saw no one. The place was very bare, functional. Shutters closed against the raging sun. A porch that hadn’t been painted in years. There was a small awning where a person might host barbecues, but there were no chairs suggesting anyone ever did. Instead the thing stood rusted, propped up on sandstone blocks. There was a collection of rusty gas bottles under one table.
I walked up onto the porch. Jed was sitting so still that I must have stood in his presence for a good twenty seconds before I noticed him. The man lounged in an old mustard-coloured armchair in the shade of
a floral sheet nailed to the rafters, a makeshift screen trying and failing to block the sun. I was wandering along when I noticed him, the gun in his hand trained on me.
Chapter 46
‘THAT’S FAR ENOUGH,’ the man said.
I’d expected someone older, more decrepit looking. But Jed Chatt wouldn’t have been sixty, or if he was, he carried it well. Even from the way he sat, I could see he was a tall, slender man with broad shoulders and strong arms. Black curly hair streaked with grey, dark brown skin. The sawn-off shotgun sitting along his leg was a well-oiled thing with a duct-taped handle.
I put my hands out slightly from my sides, froze with one foot out, the heel up, mid-step.
‘I’m a cop,’ I said.
‘I thought so.’ He nodded to a huge rifle sitting on a table to his left, pointed at my car. There was a long scope mounted on it. ‘I had you in my sights not long after you turned off the highway. Saw you talking while you drove.’
I glanced towards the road.
‘I figured you were either a crazy person talking to yourself, or a sane person talking on a phone. The only person out here
so stressed they’ve got to talk and drive at the same time would be a cop.’
‘Good guess,’ I said. ‘Now put the gun down.’
‘You put yours down first.’
I reached slowly behind me and took my pistol from the back of my jeans, set it on the ground at my feet. Jed responded by shifting the aim of his gun from my belly to my knee.
‘I assume you’re Jed Chatt, terror of Last Chance Valley.’
‘You’ve got the right guy.’
‘I’m Harriet Blue,’ I said. I felt a small measure of relief when he didn’t show any recognition of the name. ‘I just want to talk.’
‘Is this about the boy?’ he asked.
‘What boy?’ I said. He didn’t answer. We stared at each other, neither daring to be the one to show their cards first. It was only when a thin, pealing cry sounded from inside the little house that the expression on his face changed, softened for an instant, before hardening again.
I cocked my head. ‘Is that … Is that a baby?’
Jed put the shotgun down and emerged from his chair, even taller than I had imagined. He walked past me and disappeared into the house. I followed him and stood in the doorway. It was dark and cool inside. Pushed up against the back of the couch was a battered wooden baby’s crib. There was almost no other furniture in the room. The big man took an infant from the stark cotton sheet and lifted it against his chest.
I was shaken and confused by Jed’s transformation from menacing armchair spider to whatever he was now, holding the child. I stepped closer. The baby was brown-skinned as he was, gripping at the tired blue cotton of his old singlet.
‘Nobody invited you in,’ he said.
‘Is this the boy you were talking about?’ I asked. Jed glanced sideways at me, said nothing. I watched as he tried to hold the baby and retrieve the child’s teething ring from the crib at the same time. I bent down and got it for him. Our fingers brushed. Jed’s skin was hard and warm.
‘No one in the town told me you had a kid out here.’
‘I’d be surprised if anyone knew,’ he said. ‘It’s none of their business.’
‘Whose …’ I struggled. ‘I mean, you’re a bit … mature … to have a newborn.’
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘If you’re not here about the child, then it’s none of your business, either.’
The baby played with the teething ring. I sat on the arm of the sofa and watched the man taking a bottle of formula from the fridge, boiling the kettle, pouring the water into a bowl. He rested the milk bottle in the bowl, turned it slowly, the baby grizzling against his chest. The hand that held the baby’s bottom tapped it gently, a soft, steady beat. This man had raised children before. But as I looked around the walls, there were no pictures of them. The baby’s arrival seemed to have been an unplanned thing. There was a small bag of children’s clothes by the door and not a toy in sight. The infant and the man were alone out here. There was no sign of a woman’s touch about the place. I spied a handgun on the counter beside some old books full of handwritten notes.
‘What are you here for?’ Jed asked.
‘I’m part of the investigation into Theo Campbell’s death.’
‘His what?’ Jed was testing the temperature of the milk on his hairy forearm. ‘Theo Campbell’s not dead.’
‘I’ve got a Forensics team who begs to differ.’
‘What happened?’
I noted the question. What happened? rather than Who killed him?, a question that might have suggested he knew Theo Campbell had been murdered. The tension in my chest was starting to ease.
‘That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I stay out of the town as much as I can.’
‘People down there don’t seem to like you.’
He snorted a small laugh. Bitter, and tired. ‘I don’t fit into the narrative.’
I was beginning to think he didn’t fit into my narrative either, that I was wasting my time out here. It didn’t make sense that this man would have been setting up bombings, planning to terrorise a town full of people with a baby strapped into the passenger seat of his dusty old ute. I found myself hazarding a few steps closer to the man and the child, a strange desire stirring in me to see the baby’s eyes.
I was knocked out of my spell by the sound of barking coming from outside the house. Jed and I turned towards the sound, and I saw Digger the dog crossing in front of my car, sniffing at the wheels.
‘That bloody dog,’ I said. ‘It sure gets around.’
‘You can take it back to town before I shoot it,’ Jed said, slipping out from between me and the kitchen counter, taking the baby out of sight. ‘I’ll give you a thirty-second head start.’
Chapter 47
SNALE WAS WAITING for me outside John Destro’s beautiful, sprawling mansion just down from the schoolhouse on the northern side of Last Chance Valley. Dez had organised the dinner with Snale – the officer agreed he had the best relationships with everyone in Last Chance, would know things about them that she didn’t. Dez seemed somehow to have secured all the best grass in the small town. To the right of the double garage I could see an extensive green lawn softening to sparse fields inhabited by slow-moving cows. The animals made long shadows as the sun lingered on the edge of the valley rim.
‘Where did you go?’
‘I went out to see Jed Chatt,’ I said.
‘What!’ Snale slapped my arm. ‘By yourself? Are you crazy?’
‘I don’t think he’s as scary as you all make out.’
‘He’s plenty scary,’ she said. ‘It’s not right, him living out there all by himself with nothing to do. Creeping into the town to buy his supplies, not talking to anybody. It’s weird. I wish he’d just go off somewhere else. He gives me the willies.’
I don’t fit into the narrative. Jed’s words came back to me. I don’t fit in.
‘Is he the only member of the Chatt family living nearby?’ I asked.
Snale nodded. ‘All his people moved on years ago,’ she said, walking me to the front doors of Dez’s house. ‘They were all scattered around, and it was tense, you know, because of the fight between the two families way back when. Some were in the town, but they didn’t seem to belong. They all went their separate ways eventually, but he stayed. Making us all feel bad for the way we live down here in the valley.’
‘Do you know much about his family?’ I asked. ‘The ones who moved on?’
‘No.’ Snale shrugged. ‘I don’t think they keep in touch.’
I didn’t want to mention the baby. Jed had been right to suspect that, as a non-local cop, I’d probably come out to check on the welfare of the child in his care, concerned about the inappropriateness of the environment for raising a baby. I knew plenty about child custody from my time as a foster kid. There was no way the authoritie
s would condone the arrangement out there, Jed and the baby alone in the desert, the guns and the blistering isolation.
I thought about my mother. When child services had come and taken my brother and me away from her, we’d been covered in cigarette burns and rashes, malnourished, and bruised. The one-bedroom apartment where we lived with her, her pimp and another man had been raided on suspicion of drug dealing the week before by police, the door splintered and duct-taped back together from being kicked in. A cop in the raiding party had probably reported my brother’s and my condition to child services.
I wasn’t going to be the cop who brought child services down on Jed Chatt. But I knew I wanted to go back, to understand what was happening out there. To discover if the man was a danger to himself, the baby, or the town.
Chapter 48
WE ENTERED THE high-ceilinged hall of the house. There were pictures lining the walls, framed landscapes of the sun hitting Last Chance Valley at different romantic angles, some vintage blueprints of the town pub and the post office. I stopped by a charcoal sketch of a bunch of European settlers standing by the edge of the empty valley, shovels and pickaxes on their backs, their bonneted wives hugging children nearby.
‘This was done by my great uncle,’ Dez said, coming up beside me. He smelled of aftershave and was dressed crisply in a stark white shirt and tie. ‘Beautiful artwork, right? The family camped up there on the ridge for two months while the men went down and prepared the valley.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘It’s nice.’
‘There are more here.’ He led me into the living room. ‘Make yourself at home. Can I get you a glass of wine?’
Kash was standing on the porch looking at the cows in the field, a small glass of what might have been Scotch in his hand. I could only see a slice of his profile, but he looked sad. I wondered if he’d spoken to Tenacity while I’d been out with Jed. He noticed me through the window, glanced a little guiltily at his Scotch. I smiled.