8.30 a.m.
Walker looks at the destruction in the cutting room and office. ‘Given the mess they’ve made, it doesn’t look like they found what they were after,’ he says.
‘There’s nothin’ here to find,’ says Blair. He hesitates, and Walker gets the feeling he wants to say something else, but the silence stretches on. Eventually Walker says, ‘So Dean Wilson was here, was he?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Reckon it might have been him? How does he know where Mark’s workshop is, if Mark isn’t one of his suppliers?’
‘Well, it’s not a secret and he knows the town pretty good. He must have visited Mark here, I suppose.’
‘Hmm,’ says Walker. ‘Wilson turns up asking about some mega-opal the same night Mark and Karen are killed, and now this.’ He gestures at the workshop. ‘Reckon I need to have a chat with him. You better leave this the way it is – Stones and his lot will want to check for fingerprints and maybe forensics.’
Walker picks up a bacon and egg roll and a large flat white from the servo for breakfast, and leans against the ute, eating and thinking about the case, absent-mindedly feeding Ginger – sitting in the ute’s tray – pieces of bacon as she snuffles against his shoulder. It’s possible, he thinks, that the motive for the double murder wasn’t passion, wasn’t the betrayal of a marriage, but was all about money, the huge opal Mark was supposed to have found, the stone Dean Wilson is so interested in. Taking advantage of Mark’s affair to make it look like a crime of passion would be a clever way to cover your tracks.
He finishes his coffee and drives to Wilson’s opal shop just down the street. The little store was shut the day he and Grace arrived and still looks closed, but an ancient boxy Toyota 4x4, dented and unwashed, streaked with the red dust of the bush, the driver’s-side wing mirror secured with duct tape, is parked outside. The shop looks half-abandoned, and the display in the window – a simulated piece of bush covered in boulders with one turned to show a streak of opal – is dusty and unlit. But even in the dust and behind the smeared and dirty glass of the window, the shimmer of opal in the display is eye-catching. With its shots of blue and green, the colours changing and shifting in the light as he looks at it, he concedes that opal is undeniably a special gem.
He knocks hard on the door, shouts out ‘G’day?’ and sees a light come on in a back room. A few moments later Dean Wilson, his Hawaiian shirt lurid under the fluorescent light, comes to the door and pulls it open. It sticks a little on the dusty floor and Walker can smell the musty air of a room that has been closed for a long time.
‘You come to buy some opal, Officer?’ says Wilson as he waves Walker in.
Walker smiles. ‘Nah, wanted to have a chat with you, get a bit of background about opals and opal mining.’ He looks around the store. Directly ahead is a counter, a waist-high glass case topped with wood, the glass shelves inside empty. Glass shelves to shoulder height, also dusty and empty, run along the wall to the left of the door, and a big poster of different types of opals hangs to the right, the colours faded and pale.
‘You haven’t been open for a while,’ he observes.
‘Yeah, nah, not worth it anymore. Used to be a few tourists came out this way but after they sealed Highway 75, that more or less stopped. The road here is a shocker so tourists go that way now, through Wulina to Longreach. I’ve got a store in Longreach and one in Winton – they catch most of the tourists. And then in summer I go overseas to the big markets in the US. What is it you wanted to know about opals?’
‘Hard to make a living from it?’
‘Not really. Good opal walks out the door.’
‘You buy a lot from the miners round here?’
‘Here and other places.’
‘They doing alright, are they, the miners here?’
Wilson shrugs. ‘Some better than others. Mark always found colour. He worked hard, had a good system, and he knows the country better than most. He grew up on opal fields – his grandad was a miner in Coober Pedy, his dad in Lightning Ridge. And he’s obsessed with ’em. Anything there is to know about opal, he knows it.’
‘You bought a lot from him, then?’ asks Walker.
Wilson shakes his head. ‘Nah, he wasn’t interested. He’s got a big store on the Gold Coast. Got cutters he works with down there, makes jewellery, sells direct. Got a fancy house down there too. He’s definitely doing alright.’
‘The others? Todd Mullins, for example?’
‘Who can say. I only know what they tell me and that’s not bloody much. Todd especially. Opals are a trust business. People have to trust you to sell to you, to tell you where they’re camped and what they’ve found. I did a five hundred K round trip the other day to say g’day to the miners I sometimes buy from. At the last place, just as I got there, they found colour and I bought it right off the excavator. Wouldn’t have got that if I wasn’t there. And wouldn’t have been there if they didn’t trust me.’
Walker nods. ‘You probably heard about Mark Bailey and Karen Mullins?’ he says.
Wilson prevaricates for a second, then decides on the truth. ‘Yeah, I heard last night. I had a couple of beers at the pub. Everyone was talking about it. Terrible business.’ He shakes his head.
Walker looks more closely at the buyer. He’d known Mark was dead, but he’d gone to the workshop anyway. Or perhaps that’s what had taken him to the workshop in the first place, searching for the opal he’s been asking about.
‘Do you think Mark might be dead because of something related to opal?’
‘If he found the kind of stone that I heard he found, then yeah, abso-fucking-lutely. Opal mining, the chance to make big money, the isolation of it, it attracts dysfunctional blokes. Mostly they’re broke, a few of them are crooks. And most of them need more money than they’re making to pay for their bad personal habits. A lot of them are desperate, and a life-changing size of stone like the one Mark found, yeah, I reckon blokes’d kill for that, no doubt.’
‘Who told you about this stone?’
Wilson dodges the question with the ease of a politician. ‘In my line of work, you have to talk to people, listen to them. A lot of what they tell you is bullshit but some of it isn’t. And I heard from a reliable bloke, not a bullshitter, that Mark found a fantastic stone. I believe him. The better question is: where is it? Apparently, no one knows about it, no one’s seen it. I reckon that bloke he’s partners with, Blair, he’s hiding something …’
Walker must look sceptical, because Wilson starts up again.
‘You reckon because they were partners, he wouldn’t do it?’ he says. ‘It’s easier to find opal than to find a good partner. When you work with each other day in day out, live rough like they do and there’s a lot of money involved, there’s plenty of ways to fall out. People get delusional. All those hot days working in the dust, in the heat. They find colour, one of ’em thinks he’s gonna be rich, that he’s going to be a millionaire, but then it’s worth less than he thought and the trouble starts. And Mark wasn’t an easy bloke …’ His voice trails off.
‘People didn’t get on with him?’ asks Walker.
‘Nah, yeah, look, he was difficult. He worked hard but he didn’t like to share. Him and Todd, they worked together for a few years but they fell out because Mark would buy Todd’s share uncut, dirty. He’d cut it and then sell it. Problem was, he’d give Todd twenty K for his share, have it cut and then sell it for a hundred K. After this happened a couple of times, Todd came to me, asked me if I thought Mark was rippin’ him off. I didn’t want to get involved, but I looked at the numbers and to be honest, it was a rip-off. Anyways, they haven’t been mates since.’
‘You told Todd that Mark was ripping him off?’ Walker gets the sense that Wilson is a shit-stirrer, one of those blokes who likes to mess with other people’s minds, destroy friendships. Maybe because he hasn’t got any mates himself.
‘I only told him the truth,’ says Wilson.
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, reckon about four years ago now.’
‘And they stopped working together after that?’
‘Yeah,’ says Wilson. ‘Todd’s been working on his own since then. He’s had a bit of luck but nothing to write home about. What he had that Mark wanted was Karen. Her and Todd were real sweet on each other until Todd started drinking the whole time. She’s always lived out here, really supported him. That wife of Mark’s is much harder work, high-maintenance city sheila. I reckon he slept with Karen to prove he could have her. He was like that, Mark. Had to be top of the heap all the time.’
Walker looks around the empty shop and studies Wilson again. He’s got a big mouth and is happy to dish the dirt but he’s hiding some secrets of his own. The shirt he’s wearing, the only one Walker’s ever seen him in, is crumpled and marked with sweat lines. He has broken capillaries across his nose and cheeks and the gut, too, of a big drinker. And he doesn’t look prosperous: his jeans are faded, his boots need replacing, the car outside is ancient and the shop all but empty. For all his claims of selling abroad, of shops in other towns, there’s a desperate edge to him. He’s turned up here on a rumour, looking to buy a life-changing stone, to buy himself out of trouble maybe.
Walker takes a punt: ‘I heard you were on hard times yourself. That that’s why you were so desperate to buy this stone of Mark’s …’
Wilson looks at him, a flush rising to his cheeks. ‘Who told you that? Fucking cheek. None of ’em got a brass cent to rub together, what would they know.’
‘So it’s not true?’ says Walker, pushing. ‘If I do a search on ASIC, call in your bank statements, your business is rosy, all doing well?’
‘Look, yeah, righto, it’s been a tough couple of years. But I’ll be alright, I’ll pull through. I always do.’
‘What were you doing at Mark’s workshop earlier this morning?’
Wilson’s shoulders sag. ‘The mess out there hasn’t got anything to do with me. It was like that when I got there. I went to talk to Mark’s partner, that Blair bloke, see if I could convince him to sell now that Mark’s gone. But he wasn’t there and the place had been turned over, someone had been through it and made a right mess.’
‘Well, we’ll be running fingerprints and forensics out there, so if you had something to do with it, you’d be better off telling me now. Could be the mess was made by the same person who killed Mark …’
‘No fucking way, none of this has got anything to do with me!’ Wilson’s face is getting redder. ‘If you’re looking for people who wanted to kill Mark, I’m not on the list. You want to talk to Todd. Or to Stewie and Brett, Mark ripped them off too. Or Blair, he’d have reason. No one could work with Mark. He never stopped working, had that twenty-four-seven energy and he was tricky. If Mark found a stone like that, he wouldn’t want to share it. No way. I could see Blair didn’t know about the stone when I turned up the other day asking about it. He coulda got the shits, went to confront Mark and then lost it. Killed ’em both.’