140871101X

by Jane Harper

  Falk didn’t say anything. Next to the four faces was a large image of Martin Kovac taken shortly before his arrest. It was a casual shot, snapped by a friend or neighbour. It had been reproduced hundreds of times over the years, in newspapers and on TV. Kovac was standing by a barbecue. A true blue Aussie bloke in his singlet, shorts and boots. The obligatory stubbie in his hand and the grin on his face. Above that, his eyes were narrowed against the sun, and his curly hair was a mess. He looked thin but strong, and even in a photo the muscle tone was visible on his arms.

  Falk knew the image, but for the first time now, he noticed something else. In the background of the shot, sliced in half by the edge of the photo, the blurred rear of a child’s bicycle was visible. It wasn’t much. A small bare leg, a boy’s sandal on a pedal, the back of a striped t-shirt, a glimpse of dark hair. The child was impossible to identify, but as Falk stared, he felt his skin prickle. He dragged his eyes away, from the boy, from Martin Kovac, from the long-ago gazes of the four women staring up at him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Carmen said. ‘It’s a long shot. It just struck me.’

  ‘Yeah. I see why.’

  She looked at the bushland outside. ‘I suppose whatever’s happened, at least we know Alice is in there. It’s a huge area, but it’s finite. She has to be found eventually.’

  ‘Sarah Sondenberg wasn’t.’

  ‘No. But Alice has got to be somewhere. She hasn’t walked back to Melbourne.’

  Thoughts of the city nudged something in Falk’s mind. Out of the window, he could just make out the space where Daniel Bailey’s car had been until today. A black BMW, spacious. Tinted windows. A large boot. A four-wheel drive was parked there now.

  ‘We’re going to need to talk to Daniel Bailey again,’ Falk said. ‘Follow him back to Melbourne. Find out what he said to Alice on that first night.’

  Carmen nodded. ‘I’ll call the office, let them know.’

  ‘Do you want me to –?’

  ‘No, it’s all right. You took it last time. I’ll do it tonight. See what they have to say.’

  They managed to share a smile at that. They both knew exactly what would be said. Get the contracts. It’s crucial you get the contracts. Understand that it is imperative you get the contracts. The smile faded from Falk’s face. He understood. He just didn’t know how they were going to do it.

  As the wind howled outside, he let himself ask the question that had been eating at him. If Alice was still out there because of them, was it worth it? He wished they knew more about the bigger picture of the operation, but he also knew the details didn’t really matter. However it was painted, the bigger picture always showed the same thing: a handful of people at the top of the tree feeding off the vulnerable below.

  He looked over at Carmen. ‘Why did you join this division?’

  ‘Finance?’ She smiled in the dark. ‘That’s a question I usually get asked at the staff Christmas party, always by some drunk bloke with a confused look on his face.’ She shifted on the bed. ‘I was invited to join child protection, back when I first started. A lot of it’s algorithms and programming now. I did a placement, but –’ Her voice was tight. ‘I couldn’t handle the frontline stuff over there.’

  Falk didn’t ask for details. He knew some officers who worked in child protection. They all spoke in the same tight voice from time to time.

  ‘I stuck it out for a bit longer but started to do more on the technical side,’ Carmen went on. ‘Chasing them down through the transactions. I was pretty good at it, and eventually ended up here. This is better. I wasn’t sleeping by the end, over there.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘What about you?’

  Falk sighed. ‘It wasn’t long after my dad died. I was on the drugs team for a couple of years when I started. Because, you know, you’re fresh and that’s where all the excitement is.’

  ‘So they tell me at the Christmas party.’

  ‘Anyway, we’d got a tip-off about this place in north Melbourne being used as a warehouse.’

  Falk remembered pulling up outside a family bungalow on a run-down street. The paintwork was peeling and the grass out front was patchy and yellow, but at the end of the driveway sat a hand-made post box carved in the shape of a boat. Someone had cared enough about living in that house at one time to make or buy that, he had thought at the time.

  One of his colleagues had banged on the door, then broken it open when there was no answer. It had gone down easily, the wood had aged over the years. Falk had caught a glimpse of himself in a dusty hall mirror, a dark shadow in his protective gear, and for a second had barely recognised himself. They’d rounded the corner into the living room, shouting, weapons raised, not sure what they’d find.

  ‘The owner was an old bloke with dementia.’ Falk could still picture him, tiny in his armchair, too confused to be frightened, his grubby clothes hanging off his frame.

  ‘There was no food in the house. His electricity was off and his cupboards were being used to store drugs. His nephew, or a bloke who he thought was his nephew, was heading up one of the local trafficking gangs. He and his mates had free run of the place.’

  The house had been stinking, with graffiti scrawled across the floral wallpaper and mouldy takeaway cartons littering the carpet. Falk had sat with the man and talked about cricket, while the rest of the team had searched the house. The man had thought Falk was his grandson. Falk, who had buried his dad three months earlier, had not corrected him.

  ‘The thing is,’ Falk said. ‘They’d drained his bank accounts and his super. Taken out credit cards in his name and run up debts on things he never would have bought. He was a sick old man and they left him with nothing. Less than nothing. And it was all right there in his bank statements, waiting for someone to notice. Everything that was happening to him could have been picked up months earlier if someone had spotted the problem with the money.’

  Falk had said as much in his report. Weeks later, an officer from the finance division had stopped by for a friendly chat. A few weeks after that, Falk had visited the old bloke in his care home. He’d seemed better, and they’d talked some more about cricket. When Falk had got back to the office he’d looked into the transfer requirements.

  His decision had raised a few eyebrows at the time, but he knew he’d started to become disillusioned. The raids felt like a short-term fix. They were putting out one fire after another when the damage was already done. But money made the world go around for most of these people. Cut off the head and the rotten limbs withered and died.

  At least, that was what he’d always thought about, every time he targeted someone in a white collar who thought their university education made them smart enough to get away with it. Like Daniel and Jill and Leo Bailey, who he knew probably believed they really weren’t doing anything all that bad. But when Falk looked at people like them, he saw all the other old blokes and struggling women and sad kids, sitting scared and alone in their unwashed clothes far away at the other end of the line. And he hoped that in some way, he could stop the rot before it ever reached them.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Carmen said. ‘We’ll work something out. I know the Baileys think they’re good at this stuff after all these years, but they’re not as smart as us.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. Even sitting down she was as tall as him. No need to tilt her head upwards for their eyes to meet. ‘For one thing, you and I know how to get away with laundering money.’

  Falk couldn’t help but smile back. ‘How would you do it?’

  ‘Investment properties. Easy as. You?’

  Falk, who had once written an in-depth study of the topic, knew exactly how he would do it, with two decent backup plans. Investment properties was one of them.

  ‘I don’t know. Casino, maybe.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’d have something more sophisticated.’

  He grinned. ‘Don’t mess with the classics.’

  Carmen laughed. ‘Maybe you’re not that smart after all.
That would involve regularly kicking your heels up at the tables, and anyone who’s met you would see through that in a second. I should know. My fiancé puts in the hours down there. And he’s nothing like you.’

  Truthfully, that was one reason why the casino wasn’t even in Falk’s top three. Too much legwork. But he just smiled. ‘I’d play the long game. Establish a pattern of behaviour. I can be a patient man.’

  Carmen gave a small laugh. ‘I bet you can as well.’ She shifted on the bed, stretching out her legs in the pale light. All was quiet as they looked at each other.

  There was a rumble and a hum somewhere deep in the lodge and without warning the lights flickered on. Falk and Carmen blinked at each other. The confessional atmosphere evaporated with the darkness. They both moved at the same time, her leg brushing against his knee as he rose from the bed. He stood. Wavered.

  ‘I suppose I’d better make a move before the lights go again.’

  The briefest pause. ‘I suppose so.’

  Carmen stood and followed him to the door. He opened it, the cold air hitting him with a blast. He could feel her eyes on him as he made the short walk back to his own door.

  He turned. ‘’Night.’

  A heartbeat of a hesitation. ‘’Night.’ Then she stepped back inside, and was gone.

  Back in his room, Falk didn’t turn on the light immediately. Instead he went to the window, letting the thoughts running through his head calm and settle.

  The rain had finally stopped and he could make out a handful of stars through the few gaps in the clouds. There had been a time in Falk’s life when he hadn’t looked at the night sky for years. The lights in the city were always too harsh. Nowadays, he tried to remember to look up when he had the chance. He wondered what, if anything, Alice would see if she did the same now.

  The moon hung luminous and white with silver threads of cloud suspended in the glow. Falk knew the Southern Cross must be hidden somewhere behind them. He’d seen it a lot as a kid in the country. One of his earliest memories was of his dad carrying him outside and pointing upwards. The sky bright with stars, and his dad’s arm tightly around him, showing him patterns that he said were always there, somewhere in the distance. Falk had always believed him, even if he couldn’t always see them.

  Day 3: Saturday Morning

  The icy wind blew in from the south and didn’t let up. The women trudged along wordlessly, their heads down against the gale. They had found a tight path, something that was almost a path, at least, something perhaps used by animals. By mutual unspoken consent, no-one pointed out when it vanished under their feet from time to time. They simply lifted their boots higher through the undergrowth and squinted at the ground until something that was almost a path appeared again.

  Bree had woken hours earlier, fractious and freezing, unsure how long she’d been asleep. Nearby, she could hear Jill snoring. The woman was a heavy sleeper. Or perhaps simply exhausted. She hadn’t even woken when their makeshift canopy had blown apart in the night.

  As Bree lay on the ground staring at the pale morning sky, her bones seemed to ache deep in her body and she felt thick-mouthed from thirst. She could see that the bottles Lauren had put out to collect rainwater had toppled over. They’d be lucky to get a mouthful each. At least the food Bree had left tucked next to her sister’s head was gone. She was both relieved and disappointed.

  Bree still wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t told the others about her uneaten meal. She’d opened her mouth but some long-buried lizard part of her brain had stopped the words from coming out. It scared her a little to think why. Survive was something she joked about doing at her desk until Friday night drinks rolled around. In any other context, the word felt alien and frightening.

  She’d tried to talk to her sister that morning as they rolled up their soaked sleeping bags.

  ‘Thank you.’

  It had been Beth’s turn to brush her aside. ‘Forget it. But I don’t know why you’re so scared of them.’

  ‘Of who?’

  ‘All of them. Alice. Jill. Daniel, for that matter.’

  ‘I’m not scared. I just care what they think. They’re my managers, Beth. And yours, by the way.’

  ‘So what? You’re as good as any of them.’ Beth had stopped packing and looked at her then. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t be clinging too hard to Alice’s coat-tails if I were you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. But be careful around her. You might do better finding someone else’s arse to lick.’

  ‘For God’s sake, it’s called taking my career seriously. You should try it.’

  ‘And you should try to get some perspective. It’s only a bloody job.’

  Bree didn’t say anything, because she knew her sister would never understand.

  It had taken twenty minutes to pack up their makeshift camp and another hour to decide what to do. Stay or go. Stay. Go.

  Alice had wanted to move. Find the campsite, find a way out, do something. No, Lauren had argued, they should stay on high ground. It was safer there. But the wind was wilder there too, slapping against their faces until they were stinging and flushed. When the drizzle started again, even Jill stopped nodding patiently when Lauren spoke. They huddled under a canvas, trying to drip rainwater into a bottle while Alice walked around, waving her phone in the air for as long as they dared. When her battery hit thirty per cent, Jill ordered her to turn it off.

  They should stay put, Lauren had tried again, but Alice unfolded the map. They’d crowded around, pointed at paper landmarks as the wind threatened to whip the sheet away. A ridge, a river, a gradient. None matched exactly. They couldn’t agree which peak they were on.

  Along one edge of the map ran a vehicle road in the north. If they could bush-bash their way to the road, they could follow it out, Alice said. Lauren had almost laughed. That was so dangerous. So was hypothermia, Alice had replied, staring at her until she’d looked away. In the end, the cold won the argument. Jill announced she couldn’t stand still any longer.

  ‘Let’s find the road.’ She handed the map to Alice, hesitated, and passed the compass to Lauren. ‘I know you don’t agree, but we’re all stuck in this together.’

  They’d shared the mouthful of rainwater collected in the bottle, Bree’s allocated sip only making her thirst worse. Then they had started to walk, ignoring their twisting stomachs and sore limbs.

  Bree kept her eyes on the ground, putting one foot after the other. They had been going for nearly three hours when she felt something land with a gentle thump near her boot. She stopped. A tiny egg lay shattered on the ground, its core leaking out, clear and gelatinous. Bree looked up. High above, the branches were rocking in the wind and among them, a small brown bird peered down. It twitched its head. Bree couldn’t tell if it understood what had happened. Would the bird miss its little lost egg, or had it forgotten it already?

  Bree could hear her sister approaching from behind, her smoker’s lungs giving her away.

  Get some perspective. It’s just a bloody job.

  It wasn’t, though. Bree had been twenty-one and four days away from graduating with honours when she’d realised she was pregnant. Her boyfriend of eighteen months, who she’d known had been secretly browsing rings on the Tiffany website, had said nothing for ten minutes while he paced around the kitchen of their student flat. That was one of the things she remembered most clearly. Wishing he’d sit down. Finally, he had and had placed his hand over hers.

  ‘You’ve worked so hard,’ he said. ‘What about your internship?’ His own internship in New York was due to start four weeks later, followed by a place on a post-graduate law degree course. ‘How many graduates a year does BaileyTennants take again?’

  One. BaileyTennants took one graduate a year for its development program. He knew this. That year it would be Bree McKenzie.

  ‘You’re so excited.’ That was true. She had been thrilled at the prospect. She still was, surely. He had added his o
ther hand at this point, cupping her palm in both of his.

  ‘It’s mind-blowing. It is. And I love you so much. It’s just –’ His eyes showed true terror. ‘Bad timing.’

  At last, she had nodded, and by the next morning, he had helped her schedule the necessary appointment.

  ‘Our kids will be proud, one day,’ he’d said. He had definitely said ‘our’. She remembered that distinctly. ‘It makes so much sense to get your career under your belt first. You deserve to make the most of your opportunities.’

  Yes, she had told herself later, many times. She’d done it for her career and for all those great opportunities lying in store. She had definitely not done it for him. Which was lucky, because he had never once called her again after he left for New York.

  Bree looked down now at the smashed egg. Above, the mother bird had disappeared. With her boot, Bree swept some dried leaves over the broken shell. She couldn’t think what else to do.

  ‘Stop here.’ Jill’s voice floated forward. She was trailing the pack. ‘Let’s rest for a minute.’

  ‘Here?’ Alice turned and looked back. The trees were still tight, but the path had grown a little wider and no longer disappeared underfoot.

  Jill dropped her pack without answering. She was red-faced, her hair sticking out in tufts. She was reaching for something in her jacket pockets when she stopped, her gaze snagging on a broken tree stump at the side of the path.

  Without a word, she moved towards it. A pool of rainwater had collected in the bowl of the stump. Jill, who Bree had once seen refuse a herbal tea because the leaves had infused too long, suddenly dipped her cupped hands into the stump, lifted them to her lips and swallowed deeply. She paused to pick something black from her mouth, flicking it off her finger before dipping her hands in again.

  Bree swallowed, her own tongue immediately swollen and dry, and stepped up to the stump. She plunged her hands in, the first scoop sloshing over her knuckles as her arm collided with Jill’s. She went in again, lifting her palms to her lips more hastily this time. The water tasted dank and coarse, but she didn’t stop, dipping in again, now jostling for space with four other pairs of hands. Someone pushed her hands out of the way, and Bree shoved back, ignoring the pain as her fingers bent backwards. She plunged in again, fighting for her share, the sound of grunts and swallows loud in her ears. She kept her head down, determined to cram as much into her mouth as possible. Before she realised it, the water was gone, and her fingernails were scraping the mossy bottom.