I stared at the foot until I fell asleep with my head against the window. The sun was setting, warm on the back of my eyelids. The Chief had been right. Suddenly, blissfully, my mind was full, even if it was only because one darkness in my life had been replaced by another.
Chapter 11
‘WHAT’S THIS NOW?’ Whitt said, slowing the car.
I snapped awake.
Ahead of us on the isolated dirt road a sedan came into view, its hood popped and cabin lights on. A lanky figure stood beside it, waving his arms.
‘Where are we?’
‘We just came through Bandya,’ Whitt said. ‘Looks like this guy’s broken down.’
As we came alongside the man’s vehicle our headlights lit the bottom half of his face. A dark cap was pulled over his eyes. He stuck his head almost through my window. I smelled cigarette smoke.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Whitt asked.
‘No trouble, mate.’ The man gave a wide smile jammed with too many teeth. ‘Just get out of the car.’
From the darkness, six men appeared, surrounding us.
The tall man wrenched my door open and reached across me, unbuckling my seatbelt.
‘Hey!’ I yelled. It only takes seconds for my fight reflex to kick in. The Chief had smacked me in the face and ribs and stomach enough times in the ring to develop a kind of trigger-rage in me. Wake up, Tiger! he’d yell.
The tall man had woken the tiger.
As he pulled me from the car by my wrists, I used the momentum to surge upward and butt him in the face with my forehead. He leaned back and I hooked a leg around his knees, pushing him in the chest with both hands, sending both of us sprawling in the dirt. The reaction around us was one of joyful surprise. Someone grabbed my arms and pulled me off the man, but not before I landed a right hook into his ear.
‘Y’alright, Richie?’
‘Fuck!’ Richie got to his feet, touching his bleeding lip. ‘I didn’t see that one coming!’
The men laughed. I was shoved against the car beside Whitt. A rough hand held my head against the top of the warm vehicle. Whitt was looking at me. There was no panic in his face. He seemed almost curious. Were these guys responsible for what had happened to Danny? Had we already stumbled upon the answer to our questions, before we’d even hit the camp? I’d been about to shout that we were police officers, but Whitt’s face made me hold my tongue. Maybe we could learn something here.
‘Where are you two going?’ Richie took hold of my head and turned me to face him. ‘What’s your name, pretty?’
‘Harriet Blue,’ someone said. They had my wallet. I heard my garbage bags of possessions being pulled from the back seat. ‘From Sydney.’
‘You’re a long way from home, Bluebird,’ Richie said, leaning against the car beside me, his long arms folded. ‘What are you doing all the way out here? Is this chump your boyfriend?’
‘Back off, loser,’ I snarled.
‘Ooh,’ Richie said, smiling. ‘You’re a nasty girl.’
‘If someone had told me there’d be wild pigs out here, I would have brought my bow and arrow.’
‘But, baby, you’ve already shot an arrow, right through my heart.’ Richie grinned and clutched his chest. There was a low moan of appreciation from the group. ‘Little Bluebird and her overdressed boyfriend all the way from Sydney. What a gift.’
‘I’m from Perth, actually,’ Whitt said.
‘Well you can’t come through here without paying the toll. We own these roads, and they’re not free.’
The men had found Whitt’s suitcases in the boot. I heard them clunking onto the road.
‘I can let the boys find payment in your stuff.’ Richie licked his bloody lip. ‘Or, you and me, we can settle the tab together.’
‘Urgh!’ one of the boys in the car cried. ‘They’ve got pictures of dead feet!’
One of Richie’s cronies came around the bonnet of the car with the file on Danny, and the forensic photographs.
‘Check this out!’ someone said. He was holding up my service pistol – and police badge.
Suddenly, I was free.
‘Uh-oh,’ Richie said.
‘Yeah, uh-oh, motherfucker.’ I shoved my captor away.
I wanted to pound Richie’s face in. But I knew that arresting this lot for roughhousing us in the middle of the desert wasn’t going to get me any closer to finding out if they’d killed Danny Stanton. We needed to see them in their natural environment. Let them lead me to some evidence. Whitt took my gun back from the scumbag who’d found it. They were all backing towards their car.
‘What was that you said about a toll?’ I was advancing on Richie. He never stopped smiling.
‘Well, look, you guys can have a government service discount tonight. Free entry. Access all areas.’
‘Mate, that’s so nice of you.’
‘What can I say? I’m a gentleman.’
‘Get in your car and get the fuck out of here,’ I said. I slammed the hood of their car closed. ‘Run away, losers.’
We watched them backing their car into a turn, our things strewn all over the road in the dark.
‘What luck. First suspects,’ Whitt said cheerfully. ‘And we’re not even there yet.’
As they pulled away into the night, Richie made a gun shape with his fingers, and pointed it at my face.
Chapter 12
THE CAMP WAS a great steel monstrosity in the middle of a plateau of rocky earth. A dump of tall machinery lit up by sodium lamps reflecting on the low clouds. It was busy, with workers in fluorescent orange and navy-blue coveralls walking along the roadways even as midnight approached, some of them carrying paper cups of steaming coffee. Diggers rolled along slowly, their flashing lights rolling over a mess of demountable buildings labelled with cardboard signs.
I turned as a troupe of young girls in plain clothes sauntered past, giggling.
‘Who are they?’ I asked Whitt.
‘Bilbies.’ When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘Australia’s cutest desert animals.’
‘Prostitutes? Way out here?’
‘Three weeks is a long time for some guys,’ Whitt said. ‘It’s good money. Better than they get in the cities.’
I didn’t want to know how much more the camp girls were making than me. Whitt stopped the car at a demountable by the border fence.
‘This is our donga.’ He looked at the piece of paper we’d been given at the boom gates.
‘Bilbies, dongas. It’s all a bit R-rated out here, Whitt.’
I was about to push at the door of the tin building when a great hairy man wrapped in a towel yanked it open from the inside. He passed me with a frown. Just inside the door I was met with a cork partition on wheels, the same kind Nigel Spader had been using to build a case against my brother. The partitions made a long hall, dividing the small building into three tiny rooms.
‘Turn left,’ Whitt said from behind me.
My ‘room’ was smaller than most prison cells. There were two camp beds a foot apart, taking up almost all of the available space.
‘This is the two of us? Together?’ I said.
‘I guess so.’ Whitt was chest to chest with me in the tiny hall outside our room. ‘Partners and roomies, hey?’
I felt sick. I’d been hoping I could get some space to myself to have a small, private cry about Sam. When I cried, which happened about once a year, it was only ever for a minute, and only in complete solitude. I’d really been looking forward to this one.
I foraged through my garbage bags for my cigarettes. Beyond the partition, someone rolled over in their bed, making the cork divider wobble on its uneven legs.
I took a walk around the camp to clear my head, located the nearest shower block and peeked inside, listening to the men singing in the steam. I saw more Bilbies sitting with some miners outside a donga, smoking, hands riding up short denim skirts. As I passed a fenced-off area filled with diggers I noticed a long-haired miner sitting inside the cabin of one. He tappe
d a substance from a small plastic tube onto the back of his hand, making a rough line, which he snorted. He blinked a few times and straightened his hard hat before turning the machine on and rolling it out of the lot.
I was on my third cigarette by the time I had completed a full circuit of the accommodation side of the mine. Despite the shifts being night and day, music played in almost every donga and there was plenty of loud laughter, phones ringing, and the smell of marijuana drifting from windows. The eyes of the men that followed me as I walked by were dark, hardened by exhaustion and lonely nights in the middle of the desert, dreaming of home. In the morning, I planned to learn what I could about Richie and his crew. But if that lead failed, from what I could see, there was plenty of badness going around the camp to tap into.
Chapter 13
WARFARE OF THE mind was just as critical to success as warfare of the body. The Soldier knew this from his training days as he watched the weak fall around him, saw their minds crumble under the weight of their duty. A strong mind could outlast the yearnings of the body for food, comfort, relief from pain. It took a mechanical mentality to operate in a mechanical way.
Fear and anger were the worst diseases. In Afghanistan, crossing west through the tiny villages around Nangarhar province, he’d been ordered by his commander to go into the townships at night and take a young woman. Drag her out into the desert and let her go running back home barefoot, her clothes torn, her wailing waking the whole village. Hen-plucking, they called it. His unit never violated the girls they stole – there was no way any of them would risk the possibility of their own flesh and blood growing up in the filth these people lived in. But the crying girls served their purpose. Their abduction sent the village men into a fury, sent the men in surrounding villages into shared outrage. Angry soldiers made stupid soldiers. They are careless, heavy-handed. Blind with emotion.
The female detective seemed to have the mental strength of a worthy adversary, the Soldier thought. But he hadn’t observed much of her yet. Fear was the most potent test, and from the moment he laid eyes on her he’d wanted to see her fear.
It was 0412 hours when she rose. The horizon beyond the wire fence was only just turning grey with the coming dawn. The Soldier watched her pad across the bare earth in her towel and flip-flops, a toiletries bag clutched to her chest.
In the bathroom block, she was alone. He let a good amount of steam cloud the demountable then slipped inside. The side of the cubicle rose to the top of her small breasts. She stood for a long time with her face in the jet stream, sighing hard, looking almost as if she were going to cry. Trying to cry, even. It seemed hard to let go. The Soldier knew how that felt, how dropping the mask could become so unnatural, so terrifying. He wondered what troubled the detective. Whether he could tap into it. Secrets were a magnificent tool.
He crept to the pile of things she had left on the bench and crouched down. He looked through her phone. The web pages she had visited. Her pictures, of which there were disappointingly few. He did an inventory of her personal care items. Vitamins, and a box of diclofenac. He turned the box over. For the treatment of joint inflammation. He tucked the box into his jacket.
She had put shampoo in her short, dark hair and stood facing him, her eyes closed as her fingers raked at her scalp. He watched her pouting lips, looked at her naked body. The soap running down her hard stomach and strong legs.
She turned and he reached out, ran a finger through the wet tail of hair at the nape of her neck.
She gasped, and he ducked behind the cubicle door. He heard her rinse the water from her eyes, spit. Nothing to see. His whole body was hard with excitement. He saw her hand through the gap in the cubicle door as she reached down for conditioner. He rose slowly as she blinded herself again.
He made a fist and slammed it into the door of her cubicle.
‘Jesus!’ she screamed, twisting. In the pause before she threw open the cubicle door, he backed away into the steam then retreated into the darkness beside the demountable. He listened to her turn the shower off inside. She pushed the door open and stumbled down the stairs onto the earth, her feet immediately caked in sand.
‘Who was that? Who’s there?’ she roared. ‘Come out here, you fucking piece of shit!’
She had a dirty mouth on her.
The Soldier crouched in the dark, looked at the well-formed muscles moving in her shoulders, her lean neck. Was she shaking?
She’d be a good recruit, he decided. He would train her to die well.
Chapter 14
IT HAD BEEN a night full of noise. Snores and coughs from the other side of the cork divider. Music from the other dongas. I’d hoped a hot shower would send me to sleep, but the experience left me rattled and angry at whoever had messed with me in the dark. I’d watched the light move over the ceiling, where a huntsman spider the size of my palm sat still as a stone directly above my bed. Whitt slept with his back to me, the collar of his royal-blue pyjamas showing above the blanket.
I rolled out of bed in nothing but my underpants at seven. He choked at the sight of me, covering his eyes.
‘Whoa!’
‘They’re boobs. Get used to it, roomie,’ I said.
On the way to breakfast with our contact from the mine, Whitt edged around the subject of my troubles. Even by my standards, I’d been distinctly unfriendly with him. But what was happening in Sydney seemed to take up almost all the room in my mind now. It was an incredible effort to talk to Whitt at all. I’d lain on the bed in silence that morning, checking news websites on my phone for updates on Sam, as he re-ironed his shirts that the scumbags on the road had tossed around.
Two girls had come forward in separate incidents, accusing Sam of assaulting them on bike paths, not directly in the Georges River area but in surrounding suburbs. One of the girls said he jammed a stick into her spokes and dragged her into the brush, bleeding and screaming. She only felt comfortable coming forward now that they’d found her attacker. She was sixteen.
‘Sounded like some real dramas on the phone yesterday,’ Whitt said as we walked to the chow hall. ‘Anything I can help with?’
‘No.’
‘Is Sam a friend, or . . .?’
I stopped walking. For the first time, it occurred to me that Whitt might be a plant sent by Nigel’s team in Sydney to observe me, find out if I’d known all along about Sam’s supposed crimes. After all, how could I miss it? I was supposed to know all the signs of a sexual predator. I was supposed to be an expert in picking men with dangerous tastes. Maybe they hoped I’d get close to Whitt, confess to him that I’d known but I couldn’t give up the only family I had.
He was standing there looking at me. So considerate. So caring. It was a convincing performance.
‘Where did you say you were based?’ I asked. ‘Who’s your regular partner?’
‘Perth.’ He turned suddenly and continued walking.
‘And your partner?’
‘Ishmael . . . Carmody.’
‘What was your former department? Who’s your chief?’
‘OK, I get it,’ he sighed at me. ‘I was just curious.’
‘Do me a favour and keep your curiosities to yourself, Whitt. Alright?’
‘No problem.’ He saluted.
I followed him across the camp grounds, watching his feet move through the dirt ahead of me. The cheerfulness was just a ruse, I decided. As gentlemanly as Edward Whittacker seemed, I knew I couldn’t trust him.
Chapter 15
THE CHOW HALL was three adjoining demountable buildings crammed with fold-out tables and chairs. Groups of miners sat here and there, hunched over cooked breakfasts served on plastic plates. I went straight to the coffee urns and grabbed a handful of sachets, dumping enough sugar and coffee into my cup to give me a good morning hit.
I was aware of a presence beside me as I peeled open a milk container. He was a short, wiry man with a hard face, small eyes set in a permanent squint from what looked like years in the desert sun. A weat
hered hand reached for the coffee tub and slammed it back into its place against the wall.
‘Coffee rations are two sachets a day!’ he growled.
‘Excuse me?’ I said. His nametag read ‘Linbacher’. His uniform was different to the miners in their dusty high-vis coveralls and boots. He was wearing a white shirt with pleats ironed into the chest. I guessed he was some kind of security guard.
‘Coffee rations,’ he said slowly, as though talking to a child, ‘are two . . . sachets . . . a day. You dumb or something, are you?’
‘No, I –’
‘Mine personnel daily rations provide two sachets of coffee, two of sugar, two milk. You’re a mine visitor, so you’re not even counted in rations. You already leave us in deficit. Then here you are, just loading up whatever you want. This camp gets a food and beverage run every thirty days, on the mark. If everybody just goes around using up whatever resources they want, we run out of food. You want that? Huh?’
‘Yes. I want that,’ I drawled. ‘I want us to run out of food.’
‘Don’t be a smart-arse.’
‘Look, mate, we’re not on Mars,’ I said. ‘Can’t you just go to Bandya for coffee if you run out?’
‘That’s not the point!’
Veins had begun to rise at the man’s temples, so I didn’t argue further. If he were to have some sort of stroke on my account, I wasn’t sure the camp would have the medical rations to deal with it. I slurped my coffee as loudly as I could and left him to his sputtering outrage.
The breakfast offerings were prison food. I recognised the powdered eggs and thin bread from visits to Long Bay Correctional Centre inmates to drum up leads on rape cases. The roast tomatoes were swimming in lukewarm water, and stacked behind the buffets I could see bean tins as big as beer kegs. Linbacher watched me closely as I surveyed the options with my sad plastic plate.