Force of Nature

by Jane Harper

  ‘All right,’ Jill said finally. ‘Let’s split what we have and we’ll let that be the end of it.’

  ‘Fine.’ Beth turned her back before she could be drawn into a discussion about sanctions or punitive portions. ‘Do whatever you want. I’m going to bed.’

  She could tell they were watching as she pulled off her boots and climbed fully clothed into her sleeping bag. She burrowed down, pulling the hood over her head. It was barely warmer in than out, and the ground jabbed and prodded her through the thin material.

  She could hear strains of muffled discussion as she closed her eyes. She wasn’t comfortable, but sheer exhaustion pulled her towards sleep. She was on the cusp of dropping off when she felt the gentle weight of a hand on the top of her bag.

  ‘Thank you.’ The voice was a whisper.

  Beth didn’t respond and a moment later felt the weight disappear. She kept her eyes closed, ignoring the faint sounds of arguing, first about the food, then about a fire.

  The next time she opened them, it was with a jolt. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but it must have rained at some point. The ground around her bag was soaked and her limbs were heavy with cold.

  Beth lay shivering as she listened. Had something woken her? She blinked, but her eyes were as good as blind in the dark. She could hear nothing but the rustle of man-made material around her ears as she breathed in and out. There was something in the neck of her sleeping bag and she recoiled, then prodded it with a finger. It was a wedge of cheese sandwich and a slice of apple wrapped in damp plastic. Beth couldn’t tell if it was her own fifth or her sister’s quarter. She considered not eating it, but her hunger was shouting louder than her principles. Different rules applied out there, anyway.

  Beth wasn’t sure if the others had sensed it, but earlier she had felt the faintest stirrings in the atmosphere. Something base and elemental and almost primitive, where a bit of stale bread and cheese became a prize worth fighting for.

  There was a movement outside her sleeping bag and Beth stiffened. She couldn’t tell what had made it – woman or wildlife. She lay still and by the time it disappeared, the word she’d been searching for had formed on the tip of her tongue, so real she could almost taste its residue. Feral.

  Chapter 13

  Carmen’s room was inky black. Falk handed her his torch and heard her swear softly as she stumbled her way to the window and opened the curtains. The emergency lights from the grounds were enough to give form to the furniture in the room.

  ‘Grab a seat,’ she said.

  Like in his room, there were no chairs. Falk sat on the edge of the bed. Carmen’s room was exactly the same as his, small and sparsely furnished, but the air smelled a little different. Something pleasantly light and subtle that reminded him vaguely of summer months. He wondered if Carmen always smelled like that, or if he just hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘I ran into Lauren outside the lodge,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Carmen passed him a towel and sat across from him, tucking her legs under herself. She pulled her hair across one shoulder and rubbed it dry while Falk filled her in on their conversation. About the cabin, about the argument, about Alice. Outside, the rain pounded against the window.

  ‘I hope Lauren’s underestimating Alice,’ Carmen said when he’d finished. ‘One of the rangers was telling me that even he would struggle out there in this weather. Assuming Alice did actually walk off of her own accord.’

  Falk thought again of the voicemail. Hurt her. ‘Are you thinking something else now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Carmen pulled the scrapbook between them and turned the pages. They were filled with newspaper clippings, the edges wrinkled where the glue had dried. ‘I was flicking through this while I was waiting for you. It’s a community history for tourists.’

  She found the page she wanted and turned it to face him.

  ‘Here. They’ve glossed over the Kovac years – not surprising – but I guess they couldn’t ignore it completely.’

  Falk looked down. It was a newspaper article about Martin Kovac’s sentencing. Jailed for life, according to the headline. Falk could guess why that article had been included rather than any others. It was a full stop. A line drawn under a dark period. The article was a feature piece, recapping the investigation and the trial. Near the bottom of the page, three dead women smiled out from three photographs. Eliza. Victoria. Gail. And the fourth one, Sarah Sondenberg. Fate unknown.

  Falk had seen pictures of Kovac’s victims before, but not recently and not all together like this. He sat opposite Carmen in the darkened cabin and shone his beam over each face. Blonde hair, neat features, slim. Definitely pretty. All at once, he saw what Carmen had seen.

  Eliza, Victoria, Gail, Sarah.

  Alice?

  Falk met each of the dead women’s eyes, then he shook his head. ‘She’s too old. These four were all in their teens or twenties.’

  ‘Alice is too old now. But she wouldn’t have been back then. How old would she have been when this was all happening? Late teens?’ Carmen tilted the book to better see the photos, the newsprint skin ghostly grey in the torchlight. ‘They’d all be about the same age if they’d lived.’

  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 hand
ful 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 vanishe
d 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.’