15

ALICE

The Subaru reappeared an hour after Alice started driving again. It had been gone for so long that Alice had thought she’d thrown it entirely, but when there were enough other cars around to use as a buffer, she slowed down to check, and the Subaru, unlike the other cars, did not overtake her. This time she could read the numberplate. But the windows were too tinted for her to see inside, which meant she did not know if the car contained one person, which she could handle, or two, or five.

Alice steadied her hand on Valkyrie’s door, feeling the safety of the car under her. They’d avoided bad things so far; this would just be another one.

She dictated the numberplate in a voice-to-text to Rusty, and took a moment to think. It was another forty minutes, at least, until she would reach Darwin’s cousin Toby’s house, just inland of the ocean, in Warlington. There was a turn-off coming for the forest road, which her hand-drawn map told her to take, or she could ignore instructions and turn onto the coast road. She wondered: did she want more people around, or fewer, if there was a confrontation? She had two guns, a knife, and a body to protect. They might have a gun as well. But there had been a lot of quiet road between the city and where she was now, and a lot of time for them to strike. Maybe they were just following. Maybe it was fine. Or maybe they had driven past her at the general store the night before after all, and tried to break into her room.

Five minutes later, the Subaru had dropped further behind her, a car now between them. Alice’s phone beeped a message, and the robot voice read it out: Journalist, freelance, bylines in the Herald Sun but mostly with the Chronicle. Lives in Brunswick, nobody likes him, yells at everyone online.

Ah, the Chronicle. Alice pretended to not exist on social media because Teddy was so vehemently opposed to how it represented the world, but she was still online a lot, figuring that one of the two of them had to be across all the memes and jokes everyone was always referencing; you couldn’t come across as not paying attention in this job. The Chronicle, she knew, had opened in right-wing opposition to some of the new liberal weekend papers that had come out in the previous years. The majority of articles were bluster; a minority had nuance and insight. She felt looser now. A journalist alone, Alice could handle.

She took the coast road; it was faster, prettier, and she thought she might need to make up some time she’d lose if this asshole pulled her over. When the water first appeared in the distance, she felt the tug of her family, hundreds of kilometres away from her, near the water too, waiting for her to come home. But it was only a small pull, and she was adept at folding that love away into a box for later, when she returned to being Mother, and not Driver.

She watched the ocean come closer as the road dipped before it. The view was spectacular: an expanse of blue, sharp cliffs, and the pines that were starting to dominate the landscape. Around here, she knew, bats took over the pines at certain times during the year, making chaotic sounds that were at odds with the austere beauty of the spectacular tall trees, planted by colonisers decades before. Only the hardiest of those pines had survived this close to the sea.

The journalist must have agreed with her that the view was worth a pause; he had started flashing his headlights. Alice supposed that, finally, he wanted to talk with her.

Alice waited until she found a layover, and pulled in. She put the gun in her pocket, checked the knife in her boot, and didn’t put the park brake on until he got out of the car, alone.

She stood just next to Valkyrie’s door, leaving her running. The journalist walked over to her, a camera around his neck, hands loose in his pockets, in thin pants and a shirt that had probably been very neatly ironed before he’d had to drive for hours to find her. He had voluminous hair and pale skin, with eyes so big and blue they belonged on some wide-eyed child in a skincare campaign, and not on a grown man.

‘Nick van Dreven,’ he said, taking his hands out of his pockets and going in for the shake. ‘I hear you’ve got an important body in there.’

Neither palm was injured. Alice took a moment in her relief.

‘In my line of work,’ she said, ignoring his hand, ‘all bodies are important.’

‘Cut the shit,’ he said. ‘I know it’s Darwin Weiss.’

Alice did not blink. ‘You’re kidding, right? I haven’t heard anything about him being dead. If he is, there’s nothing out there about it.’

Nick reached back into his pocket; Alice moved her hand towards her gun, but he only brought out a cigarette. ‘Yeah,’ he said, lighting up. ‘That’s not suspicious at all, is it?’

‘Not really,’ Alice said. ‘Are we supposed to be suspicious of everyone who’s not reported dead?’

Nick blew the smoke out towards the ocean, then clamped the cigarette in his teeth and took a few pictures of the view. The clouds were low, and the light dimmed, making everything look slightly dangerous. ‘Darwin hasn’t been seen for days.’

‘Neither have you, I guess,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’ve spent the last twenty-four hours following me. Is there a reason we should be worried about your life, too?’

She took a step forward, primed.

He took the threat, and stepped backwards.

‘Jesus. This is who he’s got driving his dead body around?’

‘So you don’t know who I am?’

‘You’re not important,’ he said. ‘But I know that’s Darwin. So you should probably help me out if you don’t want to come across badly.’

She thought for a moment. ‘Tell me your source, and I will.’

‘No way.’

‘So you’ve got nothing, then. Okay.’ She went to get back in the car, then said, ‘Either you stop following me or I’ll pull into the next police station, all right?’

‘I’m just driving on the same road you are,’ he said.

‘Not for long,’ she said. ‘If you keep following me, I will stop you.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve threatened me.’

‘You’re lucky I haven’t called the police already. You’re a stalker, and an asshole, and the absolute last thing you are is a victim. I don’t feel sorry for you in the least. Now fuck off.’

‘I can as soon as I get what I need,’ he said, leaving the view and coming towards her and Valkyrie. ‘Just one picture of the coffin.’

‘You take a picture of that and I’ll grind your camera to dust.’

‘That’s the third threat.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ she said, and went for him: hands on the camera around his neck, foot to the chest, push.

The camera broke from its strap as he fell into the dust, shrieking, ‘Hey!’

Her shoe had made a perfect print on the front of his shirt.

‘You do not know how to negotiate,’ she said, then deleted the picture of her – hair in her face, but still clearly Alice – from his camera.

‘The picture of you is already on my phone,’ he said, scrambling away. ‘I’m sending your picture right now to my news desk.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll take that too.’

He jumped up and ran to the Subaru, and she followed him at speed, slammed into his back and pinned him against the car.

He pushed her off – bigger, stronger – and said, ‘You’re not going to win this fight.’

Alice backed off, leaving him shaking, and returned to Valkyrie. Out of sight, she looked down at his iPhone in her hands, snaked out of his pocket the moment she had made contact with him at the car. It was still unlocked, and she was fast, messaging Rusty: It’s Alice, I need you to get me into this phone before I hand it back.

She was still listening to Nick’s heavy breathing when Rusty responded with a link. She pressed it, then went back to Nick’s messages, deleted her conversation with Rusty, found his pictures, and deleted the one of her face, growling, angry, leaping towards him. To finish, she turned the phone off and on, then began typing in random numbers.

‘Hey!’ he yelled, finally realising. ‘You took my fucking phone!’

He ran for her. The phone was locked now, and she had it in her outstretched hand by the time he arrived.

He took it and cursed at the screen. ‘I’ll need that back,’ he said, pointing to the camera, tucked under her arm.

‘You point that fucking thing at me,’ Alice said, ‘and I’ll run you off the road.’

She thought for a moment she should throw the camera into the bushy scrub on the other side of the road; as it was, she didn’t have the arm, so she tossed it to Nick instead, deliberately short, so it landed lens-first in the gravel and scraped to a stop before him.

Her phone pinged. It was Rusty, sending her some pictures from Nick’s camera roll she would have been happier without seeing. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘here’s the deal. You fuck off, and I won’t put your dick pics online. How’s that for a deal?’

He spat at her feet. ‘You call me a stalker and you’re pulling this shit?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘because I really need you to leave me alone. Now, are you going to fuck off back home or do I have to slash your tyres?’

He sneered.

She reached down and got her knife, shiny clean, etched with Teddy’s name, out of her boot. ‘If you don’t answer, I will make your mind up for you.’

For the first time, Nick looked fearful. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, picking up his camera, and walking – with a new, pained, slowness – back to his car.

She watched him peel away before she got back into Valkyrie, her engine still purring. That would probably be the end of him and his goddamn Subaru. A waste of her time.

How did he know she was here? How did he know about Darwin at all? What was somebody getting from telling a journalist? She was only hours away now from Darwin’s final resting place – almost nobody else could get all the way here from the city to do anything about it before he was buried, unless they had a helicopter. Which, of course, the Chronicle’s owner almost certainly did.

‘Darwin,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘You make everything a lot harder than it should be.’