‘Have you still got it?’ she asked, choking in the dust.
‘We’re good,’ said Rispoli, his voice strained. It didn’t fill her with confidence.
With the roof angle and the space closing in, she got flat onto her stomach, dragging herself over an old, bone dry wooden stanchion that tore at her blouse as if trying to stop her from venturing any further.
From behind, Barker ordered her to hurry, backed by muted grunts from Rispoli and Anand, the tin oscillating above her now, brushing the crown of her head.
She had crawled to the middle of the building now. Her eyes scanned the darkness and she reached out for the brush of clothes, flesh, anything. She found nothing.
‘I’m coming out,’ she announced, backing up rapidly, her head scraping the rusted tin, tasting the flakes of oxidized metal in her mouth. An awkward and hasty retreat back into the light.
The instant she was clear, Rispoli and Anand, supported by Barker, dropped the sheet roof with a crash, turning away from the cloud of dust.
‘Anything?’ asked Barker, flexing his arms, his hands a fiery red.
Emmaline shook her head, enduring a mixture of relief and disappointment. The family had not been crushed by the collapsing building. But they were still missing.
* * *
The search resumed. A couple of plots along from the collapsed house, Emmaline pushed a piece of sheet metal aside and entered another crumbling building. There the inner wall had partly collapsed turning the ground floor into a single room. There was no furniture inside. No bodies either, but she could see that it had been one of the fancier houses in its time, with a kitchen that had been gutted apart from an old yellowing refrigerator. She checked inside. The family weren’t entombed within.
‘How was the caravan?’ asked Rispoli as they made their way to the next dwelling.
‘It looks and smells like a smoker’s lung,’ said Emmaline.
‘Webster was a sixty-a-day man.’
‘Was?’
‘There’s a reason it was available on such short notice.’
That ended the conversation. Briefly.
‘I went into Hurton last night,’ she admitted.
‘A hive of activity, I bet.’
‘I found out a few things.’
‘Such as?’ asked Rispoli as they entered the next building. It was wooden but the walls remained solid. It was also better furnished than most of the others as if the occupants had recently vacated, much like the Maguires.
‘The family were rarely seen together. Spotted on their own in town mostly.’
‘While the other remained here?’
‘I assume so. The father also met with someone apparently. In Wisbech.’
‘Family?’
‘No.’
‘So who?’
‘We need to find out…’ said Emmaline. The sentence tailed off. She moved to one of the abandoned cupboards and looked at the floor.
‘This has been moved,’ she said.
‘I’m sure it got moved all the time,’ said Rispoli, peeking into the kitchen.
‘No, it’s been moved recently. Look at the marks in the dust.’ Underneath the low-heeled legs of the cupboard were marks indicating lateral movement, the fading brown of the wood underneath exposed. ‘Help me,’ she said as she dragged the cupboard to the side following the path of the marks. It revealed a hole in the floor, neatly cut into the wood and rounded at the edges.
Using her phone to cast a light she made out a set of roughly hewn steps. It reminded her of basements she had read about in newspapers. Ones where the products of incestuous relationships were kept. Or kidnap victims.
‘Call Barker and Anand. We’re going down.’
25 Emmaline
Progress was as slow down here as it was up top. They first had to make sure that the buttresses planted along the tunnel were sound. Emmaline comforted herself that they had been standing for maybe a hundred years, so she and Rispoli would have been mightily unlucky to have them fall on their heads at precisely this moment. But anyway, each was checked as they moved along.
The question had been floated as to whether to bring in a specialist team, but consensus was that getting in specialist miners or cavers would take too long. Besides, there might be nothing down here but lost hopes from a century ago.
That theory was revised somewhat by the discovery of the supplies. Cans of soda, bags of crisps and snacks that most definitely did not exist a century ago. Including a number of Chunky Peanut Butter KitKats. Someone had been down here. Recently.
Emmaline, with Rispoli following, increased her pace, calling out the names of the family but getting nothing but an empty echo in return. There was a chance that they had stumbled upon the tunnel and decided to go for a stupid and reckless adventure. But that didn’t account for the fact that the cupboard had been replaced over the entrance.
From behind her, Rispoli called out again. His heavy voice bounced straight back at them. They had reached a dead end, but a dead end littered with empty chocolate bar wrappers, metal detectors and a pair of ear-defenders. And something else. Two machines that although ingrained with soot and dust, were very much modern in design. One looked like a red bin with a short conveyor belt underneath it; the other some sort of grinding machine with wheels and a hammer. Both were attached to a small generator. It was a processing line of some sort. The bin was full of small rocks.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘Looks like a mining operation. Small scale. Load the rocks to crush them and then feed the material into this bin using the looped hose to wash and recycle the water.’
‘Looking for gold?’
‘Probably given the area we’re in.’
‘There can’t be much.’
‘Enough to warrant trying. Enough to warrant leaving the machines behind.’
‘Unless they’re planning to come back,’ said Rispoli.
‘If they do they are in for a surprise,’ said Emmaline. ‘Get Forensics in here. Check the equipment, check the rubbish left behind. Let’s find out who these people were.’
‘What if it was the family?’
‘It means we still have the same question to answer. What happened to them?’
26 Lorcan
He slept in the ute all night. It gave him space to breathe. That was the irony of Kallayee. All this space but still he found it claustrophobic. He was trapped in his own head, his past misdeeds holding him hostage.
Naiyana was ignoring him too. She’d cooked breakfast for herself and Dylan only. If this was her chosen method of punishing him he was happy with that. No shouting, no screaming. Especially given his simmering hangover. He had always found silence the easiest punishment. For a short while anyway. Let the storm pass. Besides, if she continued not to talk to him he could always do something worse that would make her scream at him. You don’t stay together for eight years and not know what triggers the other person’s fuse. A skill learned by all humans from an early age. Where are the boundaries? What can I get away with before my parents – or spouse – are forced to intervene?
She didn’t even have a go at him for not getting to work immediately. A weird feeling of tranquillity hung over everything this morning. As if he went away for one night and she had been turned into a zombie.
At least Dylan wasn’t ignoring him. So after lugging the cement and bricks into place to start work on repairing the gable wall, he took a break with his son, learning how his mining operation worked. The digger filled the truck, which left for town for the gold and diamonds to be removed before returning, the hole getting slowly deeper and deeper, the lorries trailing dirt out by the tonne. It was amazing what the boy had picked up from television and books, his mind like a sponge.
‘It’s a big-time operation, son, isn’t it?’
‘Very big. And it will get bigger once you buy me more trucks.’
Lorcan smiled. ‘For that you need to help Dad.’
So he bribed Dylan to he
lp mix the cement, shovelling in the sand as he turned it over and over, instructing his son to add water when necessary. It was hard but gratifying work, the cement making a satisfying wet slop as it fell onto the sheeting.
He glanced in the kitchen window. Nee was busy at the table still ignoring him. The edge of a large plaster sneaked out from underneath the shoulder of her top.
‘Dylan? Did something happen yesterday? To Mum?’
The boy was easing water into the hole in the centre of the wet cement creating a muddy lake. He stopped and looked away. A telltale sign of guilt.
‘What is it, Dylan?’
‘We had a fight. Mum was doing her video and I wanted to be in it but she said no and so I ran off.’
‘Where?’
‘Home. I waited but she didn’t come back for ages. I fell asleep, but I heard her come in.’
So that was why she was distant, thought Lorcan. She had been terrified she’d lost Dylan and he hadn’t been there to help. Hurt herself doing so. She was recovering from the shock. And the anger towards him. She was right to be angry at him.
‘I had another nightmare too.’
‘The rumbling again?’
The boy nodded. ‘Mum wasn’t there.’
‘She probably went back to her own bed,’ said Lorcan. ‘You’re a growing boy. It’s a tight squeeze both of you on one bed.’
‘No, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the house.’
Lorcan stopped shovelling, the grey mixture settling into a shapeless blob on the metal he had scavenged from a collapsed building across the road.
‘I don’t know where she went, Daddy.’
‘I’m sure she was just getting some air, Dyl,’ said Lorcan, though he wasn’t sure at all.
27 Emmaline
More officers were dragged in – requisitioned from Kalgoorlie and Perth – and the whole town thoroughly checked, building to building right to the outskirts. Fourteen other tunnels had been found. All either empty or collapsed. And not recently.
At the end of it, the conclusion was that the family, or their bodies, were nowhere in town.
A fresh KLO4 for the family or their vehicle was reissued statewide and a plane was sent up to check the major thoroughfares for any crashed utes.
As those were out of her hands, Emmaline’s focus switched to finding out who Lorcan Maguire had met in Wisbech. She started with questioning the people at his former job.
INK Tech was based in an industrial park in Welshpool, a short skip south of Perth Airport. It was a basic building with grey prefab walls and an all-encompassing dreariness. All of the capital had clearly been spent on the hardware inside, rows of state-of-the-art computers and servers droning in the background.
She first met with Nikos Iannis, the joint owner. His brother, Georgios, the co-owner, was unavailable as he had been confined to hospital for the last three months with a particularly virulent type of bone cancer. The prognosis wasn’t good. So Nikos was in sole charge and immediately she could see that he had enough personality and bulk to command ten businesses, the giant of a man unable – or unwilling – to rise from his desk as Emmaline was led inside by his secretary.
She took a seat. Introductions were forsaken. She had done that already over the phone.
‘You recently made Lorcan Maguire redundant, didn’t you?’
At the mention of his name, Nikos’s self-satisfied smile vanished. Emmaline continued. ‘What can you tell me about him?’
‘That he was a snake,’ spat Nikos.
‘You said “was”,’ she noted. ‘Do you know something we don’t?’
The smile returned. There was a calculating menace behind it. ‘I probably know a lot of things you don’t, Detective Taylor.’
‘That’s not an answer, Mr Iannis.’
‘Should I have my lawyer present?’
‘This isn’t a formal interview but if you wish—’
‘I said “was” only because he was my employee. Now he isn’t.’
Emmaline ran with it. ‘What was he like?’
‘I told you what he was like.’
‘When he was employed with you. Before he was made redundant.’
Nikos drew a breath that struggled to enter lungs crushed by the fat weighing in his chest. ‘From what I hear, he had been underperforming for the last year. As if he was bored of the work. Then after a warning his work had picked up again. Probably because he wanted to stay in the job while stealing my information.’
‘What was the information?’ asked Emmaline.
‘Client data. Numbers.’
‘Financial information?’
Nikos’s face turned to stone. ‘I don’t think I need to answer that.’
‘No, but it might help.’
‘What makes you think I want to help?’
There was a pause as they stared at each other.
‘Why was he let go?’ asked Emmaline.
‘Business pressures. We needed redundancies. He just missed the cut. I actually had sympathy for the bugger. We gave him to the end of the month and another month’s wages on top. Pretty generous I’d say. Then we found that we had a chunk of data missing.’
‘Why do you think he stole it?’
‘Only a few people had access to it. It was him.’
‘The court didn’t agree.’
‘It couldn’t be proved for certain,’ said Nikos. ‘But that works both ways.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Reasonable doubt.’ Again the dark eyes flashed menace.
‘Did you see him again?’
‘Lorcan? No. Not after court. We were too busy warning our rivals off purchasing stolen information. In case he tried to sell it to them. Now they’re all over us.’
Emmaline had seen the newspaper reports. INK Tech was under intense media fire for losing sensitive client data.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to court,’ said Emmaline.
Nikos didn’t respond, the cold stare suggesting he didn’t need to be reminded. Maybe his lawyers had even warned him against it at the time but in a throwback to earlier years, he couldn’t let a slight pass. But now, as a proper, law-abiding businessman it was a reputation rather than a body that took a hammering.
‘I’ll need to question some of his colleagues.’
Nikos frowned. ‘Be sure and let me know if they know anything.’
* * *
A check of the comings and goings of the employees in the last two weeks revealed nothing of interest. After that she interviewed the rest of the employees on an informal basis and got blank faces from them all. The overall consensus was of Lorcan being a colleague rather than a close friend, none of them offering any new information and that they didn’t socialize outside of the office.
As she sat there afterwards packing up her notes, she watched the office in crisis mode, phone calls with tense clients, desperate reassurances offered that their data was safe and that all steps would be taken to ensure it stayed that way. She wondered just what effect the loss of the data and the ill-advised court case had on the company. Nikos – and the stricken Georgios – would have lost a lot of money. They might even lose more in lawsuits and claims should the stolen data ever leak. Was that enough to threaten Lorcan? Or worse?
For the moment it was another dead end.
28 Naiyana
She rounded them both up in the living room. A family meeting. She had an announcement that had taken her all day to work up to.
‘I want to make a go of it.’
‘Our marriage?’ spat Lorcan. The grimace that followed suggested that he regretted the comment immediately. She hadn’t spoken to him all day. He knew better than to wade in with a joke. The situation was delicate. More now than it ever was.
‘This move. We should make a go of it.’
Her husband’s grimace turned into what looked like a slightly reticent smile. ‘Are you sure?’
She raised an eyebrow as if to warn him not to push it.
; ‘Dyl, go and play in your room for a bit,’ said Lorcan. The boy looked at both his parents before scuttling off, content to be dismissed from boring adult talk.
‘What brought this change of heart?’ asked Lorcan.
‘Are you upset at it?’
‘No, it’s just… sudden.’
She moved closer to him, taking his hands in hers.
‘It’s—’ she started, looking around the plain living room, her attempts at scrubbing the walls clean having left a number of unsavoury holes in the plaster. ‘I don’t want to quit this like we had to quit Perth. It’s time to gut it out. Stay away from the city for a while.’
‘What do we do about Dyl though? He’s still having nightmares.’
‘He had nightmares sometimes in Perth, too. They aren’t going to suddenly stop now we’re out here.’
‘But he didn’t wake up every night. They seem to be worse out here, more vivid.’
‘He’s just moved to a strange, new place so of course he will have strange, new dreams. Just give it time. We have to give this place time.’
She touched her husband’s face, offering him the demure, shy smile she knew he couldn’t resist.
29 Emmaline
If there was intrigue surrounding Lorcan’s departure from INK Tech, there was scandal with Naiyana’s. He had been accused of stealing data, which had adversely affected a small company temporarily. Her machinations on the other hand had nearly taken down a national institution.
Brightside Foods – with the slogan ‘Always look for the Brightside in Life’ – was a legendary Australian brand manufacturing everything from TV dinners to ‘Brightside’s Best’, their luxurious, top-of-the-range offering. And it was their product that Naiyana had forced off the shelves.
The company had created a new range of baby food for the mass market, something that was going to revolutionize the product. Not that the babies would much care or notice, thought Emmaline.
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