The Dry (22 page)

“I know, but—” Whitlam glanced at the door. The hallway outside was empty. He lowered his voice. “She's hypersensitive to any kind of violence. Keep it to yourself, but I was mugged back in Melbourne, and it ended—well, badly.”

He looked again at the door but, having started, seemed to need to unburden himself. “I'd been at a mate's fortieth in Footscray and took a shortcut through an alley to the station, you know, like everyone does. But this time these four blokes were there. Still kids really, but they had knives. They blocked the way, and me and this other man—I didn't know him, just some other poor bastard taking a shortcut—we were stuck. They did the whole routine, demanded wallets and phones, but somewhere it went wrong.

“They got spooked, lashed out. I was beaten up, kicked, fractured ribs, the works. But the other guy took a knife to the guts, bled out all over the asphalt.” Whitlam swallowed. “I had to leave him there to go and find help because the bastards had stolen my phone. By the time I got back the ambulance had arrived, but it was too late. Paramedics said he was already dead.”

Whitlam looked down and fiddled with a paper clip for a long moment. He shook his head as though to clear the thought.

“Anyway, so there was that, and then this. So you see why Sandra's not happy.” He gave a weak smile. “But you could probably say the same about almost anyone in town right now.”

Falk tried to think of a single exception. He couldn't.

22

Back in his room, Falk stood at the window and stared down at the empty main street below. Whitlam had driven him back to the pub and given him a friendly wave in full view of passersby. Falk had watched him go, then walked around to the parking lot to check if his paintwork looked as bad as he remembered. It was worse. The words scratched into the car had shone in the fading light, and for good measure someone had shoved a handful of the Falk fliers under the windshield wiper.

He'd slipped up the pub stairs unnoticed and spent the rest of the evening lying on his bed and going through the last of the Hadlers' files. His eyes were stinging. It was late, but he could still feel his nerves tingling from Sandra Whitlam's bottomless cup of coffee. Outside his window, he watched a lone car cruise by with its lights on and a possum the size of a small cat scuttle along a power line, her baby on her back. Then the street was quiet again. Country quiet.

That's partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought. The quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle; a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing wholesome glow when it was weighed up from the back of a traffic jam or while crammed into a garden-less apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh, clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat homegrown veggies and learn the value of an honest day's work.

On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, they gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.

Soon, they'd discover that the veggies didn't grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to.

Falk didn't blame the Whitlams. He'd seen it many times before when he was a kid. Arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land, and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing.
I didn't know it was like this.

He turned away, remembering how the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids' paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes. Billy Hadler's pictures had been happier, Falk thought. He'd seen them dotted around the farmhouse, colorful and stiff with dried paint. Airplanes with smiling people in the windows. A lot of variations on cars. At least Billy hadn't been sad like some of the other kids, Falk thought. He almost laughed out loud at the absurdity. Billy was dead, but at least he wasn't sad. Until the end. At the end he would have been terrified.

Falk tried for the hundredth time to imagine Luke chasing down his own son. He could conjure up the scene, but it was hazy and wouldn't quite come into focus. Falk thought back to his last meeting with Luke. Five years ago, on an unmemorable gray day in Melbourne. When the rain was still a nuisance rather than a blessing. By then, Falk had to admit to himself, in a lot of ways he'd felt he barely known Luke at all.

Falk spotted Luke immediately across the Federation Square bar. Harried, damp, and straight from work, Falk was just another gray man in a suit. Luke, even freshly liberated from a lengthy suppliers' convention, still had an energy that was hard to miss. He leaned now against a pillar with a beer in his hand and an amused smile on his face, surveying the early evening crowd of British backpackers and bored youths dressed head to toe in black.

He greeted Falk with a beer and a slap on the shoulder.

“Wouldn't trust him to shear a sheep with a haircut like that,” Luke said without lowering his voice. He pointed his drink at a skinny young guy sporting a style that was half shaved, half Mohawk, and almost certainly expensive. Falk smiled back but wondered why Luke felt he had to trot out the country-boy comments every time they met. He ran a complex six-figure agribusiness in Kiewarra but played the country-mouse-in-the-big-city card without fail.

Still, it was an easy shorthand excuse for the gap that seemed wider to bridge every time they met. Falk bought a round of drinks and asked after Barb, Gerry, Gretchen. All were fine, apparently. Nothing to report.

Luke asked how Falk was coping since his father had died the year before. OK, Falk said, equal parts surprised and grateful his friend had remembered to ask. And that girl Falk had been seeing? Again, surprise. Good, thanks. She was moving in. Luke grinned. “Jesus, watch out for that. Once they've got their throw cushions installed on your sofa, you never get them out.” They'd laughed, the ice broken.

Luke's son, Billy, was one now and growing fast. Luke pulled up photos on his phone. Lots of them. Falk scrolled through with the polite forbearance of the childless. He listened as Luke reeled off anecdotes about fellow suppliers at the conference, people Falk had never known. In return, Luke feigned interest as Falk spoke about his work, playing down the desk work and ramping up the entertaining bits.

“Good on you,” Luke would always say. “Bang up those thieving bastards.” But he said it in a way that implied, very gently, that chasing men in business suits wasn't real police work.

On this occasion, though, Luke was more interested. It wasn't just men in suits this time. A footballer's wife had been found dead with thousands of dollars of cash in a pair of suitcases by the bed. Falk had been called in to help trace the bills. It was a weird one. She'd been found in the bathtub. Drowned.

The word slipped out before he could stop it and hung in the air between them. Falk cleared his throat.

“Has there been any trouble in Kiewarra for you lately?” He didn't have to specify what kind. Luke shook his head briskly.

“No, mate. Not for years. I told you last time.”

Falk felt an automatic thank-you forming on his lips, but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to say it. Not again. Instead he paused and watched as his friend stared past him.

He wasn't sure what it was that made him want to push it, but this time he felt a flash of irritation. He was perhaps just fractious from work. Hungry and tired and keen to get home. Or maybe he was fed up with always having to feel grateful to this man. Feeling that whichever way the cards came up, Luke could be relied on to deal himself the stronger hand.

“You ever going to tell me where you really were that day?” Falk said.

Luke dragged his gaze back at that.

“Mate, I have told you,” he said. “A thousand times. I was shooting those rabbits.”

“Yeah. All right.” Falk stopped himself rolling his eyes. That had always been the answer, ever since he'd first asked several years earlier. It had never rung completely true. Luke rarely went shooting alone. And Falk could still remember Luke's face at his bedroom window all those years ago. His memory of the night was colored by fear and relief, that was true, but the story had always felt plucked from the air. Luke was watching him closely.

“Maybe I should be asking you where you were,” Luke said, his voice artificially light. “If we're going down that road again.”

Falk stared at him. “You know where I was. Fishing.”

“At the river.”

“Upstream, thanks.”

“But alone.”

Falk didn't answer.

“So I guess I'll have to take your word for it,” Luke said, and he took a sip, his eyes never leaving Falk's. “Luckily, your word is good as gold for me, mate. But seems it'd be better all round if you and I stuck to shooting rabbits together, don't you reckon?”

The two men watched each other as the noise of the bar rose and fell around them. Falk considered his options. Then he sipped his beer and shut his mouth.

Eventually, they made their obligatory excuses about trains to catch and early starts. As they shook hands for what would prove to be the last time, Falk found himself struggling to remember, once again, why they were still friends.

Falk got into bed and turned off the light. He lay still for a long time. The huntsman had reappeared during the evening, and its shadowy figure now crouched above the bathroom door. The night was dead silent outside. Falk knew he needed to get some sleep, but fragments of recent and long-gone conversations jostled for his attention. Traces of caffeine zipping through his system helped prop his eyes open.

He rolled over and switched on the bedside light. The library books he'd taken from Barb earlier that day were lying under his hat on a chair. He'd drop them through the returns chute tomorrow. He picked up the first one. A practical guide to growing an eco-friendly succulent garden. He yawned just reading the title. That would almost certainly do the trick, but he simply couldn't face it. The other was a battered paperback crime novel. A woman, an unknown figure lurking in the shadows, a body count. Standard stuff. Not quite to his taste, but he wouldn't be in the job he was in if he didn't enjoy a good mystery. He lay back against the pillow and started to read.

It was an obvious story line, nothing special, and Falk was about thirty pages in before his eyes started to feel heavy. He decided to put the book down at the end of the chapter, and as he turned a page, a thin slip of paper fluttered out and landed on his face.

He plucked it off and squinted at it. It was a printed library receipt showing that the novel had been lent to Karen Hadler on Monday, February 19. Four days before she'd died, Falk thought. She'd used the receipt to mark her place, and the realization that this mediocre thriller could have been the last thing she'd read in her life made him feel deeply depressed. Falk had started to crumple the receipt before he noticed the pen markings on the back.

Curious, he smoothed out the slip of paper and flipped it over. He was expecting a shopping list. Instead, he felt his heart start to thud. He pressed the creases out more carefully now and thrust it under the bedside light to better illuminate Karen's looping cursive script.

At some point in the four days between when Karen Hadler borrowed the book from the library and when she was shot dead on her doorstep, she had scrawled two lines on the back of the receipt. The first was a single word, slightly messy, written in a hasty hand and underlined three times.

Grant??

Falk tried to focus, but his gaze was dragged down to a ten-digit phone number written underneath. He stared at the number until his eyes watered and the digits swarmed and blurred. The blood pounded through his skull with a throbbing, deafening roar. He blinked hard, then again, but the numbers remained resolutely in the same order.

Falk didn't waste a single moment wondering who the phone number belonged to. He didn't need to. He knew it well. It was his own.

23

They found Grant Dow the next morning on all fours under a woman's sink. He had a wrench in hand and his fleshy crack on display.

“Oi, will he be back to fix that leak?” the woman asked as Dow was dragged to his feet.

“I wouldn't count on it,” Raco said.

The woman's children watched in wide-eyed glee as Dow was led out to the marked police car. Their expressions mirrored Raco's just a few hours earlier when Falk had produced the receipt. Raco had paced around the station, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the adrenaline pumping.

“
Your
number?” he said over and over again. “Why did Karen Hadler want to talk to you? About Grant?”

Falk, who had been awake most of the night asking himself the very same thing, could only shake his head.

“I don't know. If she tried, she definitely didn't leave a message. I've gone through my missed calls history. No match for Karen's home, work, or cell number. And I know I never spoke to her. Not just recently. Ever. Not once in her whole life.”

“She would've known who you were, though, right? Luke still spoke about you. Barb and Gerry Hadler saw you on TV the other month. But why you?”