FROM THE ROAD, the house was hidden by a stand of gums and, beyond that, shrubs ringing the lawn. Bowman turned and started up the drive, its curve a timebend into his past. He parked and got out.
The ordinariness of the place dismayed him. Plain, long, red brick with a tin roof—utilitarian 1960s Australia, built to accommodate the workers. The persimmon tree still stood, and the frangipani his mother had planted, but the enchantment was gone. The lawn was green and raked and manicured. In a foul flash of sepia, Bowman saw Chick’s tricycle, capsized under the eaves, a wheel spinning slowly in the air.
There was a flicker in a window as he walked up the path. The front door opened and a man stood, his moustache as clipped and edged as the grass. Behind him stood a teenage boy, head down but eyes on Bowman.
‘I’m Adam Bowman.’
The man stared at Bowman’s outstretched hand. ‘I know who you are.’
He turned and went into the house. Something robotic … Bowman realised where he’d seen him. He had been the figure walking by the road when Riley had driven up yesterday.
The boy was still there. Bowman crossed the threshold and chanced his arm again. ‘I’m Adam.’
Tom Green had the limp handshake of a child yet to grasp the mores of a place like Prince Albert. They’d squeeze that out of him. Bowman looked around the hall and its doors to shrunken portals—guest toilet, study, dining room, sitting room, family room.
He followed the boy through to the open-plan family room and tensed as the narrow kitchen rushed in on him. He saw spectres from long ago—burn marks up the wall behind the stove, the ivory coin jar, the chunky wireless … A dingo stole my baby …
Tom was gone and a woman was standing by the table.
‘Excuse me,’ Bowman said.
She wore a haunted look.
‘You knew my parents,’ he said.
‘I knew your mother.’
There was a dark spot in her mouth, a dead tooth.
‘I’m Sarah. I met you—here.’ She gestured. ‘There were always lots of people. I was in my twenties. You were just a teenager.’
They swapped a furtive glance. Bowman didn’t remember her.
‘The police said you want to talk to Tom?’
‘If I could, just a few words about what happened.’
‘Scott’s not happy about it, he doesn’t like the media. But you’re here now. I’ll see.’
She walked into the back hall, towards the bedrooms. Bowman waited a moment and then crossed to the patio doors and went outside. The backyard was swept, the rockery weeded, a black cat was curled in a patch of sun. In the carport, things were labelled and lined up on shelves. He was a bench wiper, compulsive, so he knew what he was looking at. Was it Sarah Green or the husband? Or the two of them together, a perfect sterile boot-camp marriage?
Back in the family room, a television was mounted in the corner where one had always been. Rick Bourke, Larry Corowa, Prisoner, Doctor Who. Chick was everywhere, bouncing off the walls. Bowman had known joy here, in these very rooms. Shut the gate, the horse has bolted.
Sarah reappeared.
‘Scott’s coming.’
Bowman sat at the table with his notebook and Sarah and Scott Green. There was no sign of the boy. They waited. The Greens were going to make him beg. He was a journalist, good at begging.
‘I know it’s unusual’—he gave a cough—‘to involve a child. But I was hoping to speak to Tom. Just to get an outline of what happened.’
‘Would you show us the story?’ Sarah Green said. ‘Before you publish?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t do that.’
Scott Green made to stand and Bowman put his hand out. ‘But in this instance … as Tom is a child’—he widened his eyes—‘I could read it to you over the phone.’
Scott Green sat down. ‘Shitty job you’ve got.’
Bowman gave a frowning nod. Morally indefensible.
‘If it was my child they’d found, I’d run you off the property,’ Scott Green said.
There was nothing to say. ‘How is Tom?’ he said.
Scott Green’s face was like a curtain had come down. The moustache twitched in encore. ‘You want him to talk,’ he said to his wife, ‘you can babysit.’
Sarah watched her husband’s back as he departed. She was careworn, etiolated in a chambray shirt buttoned at the wrists and collar. The room felt lighter with Scott out of it. Bowman sought common ground. ‘The only time I liked living at the school was in the holidays,’ he said.
‘We never go away,’ she said. ‘Sam can use the pool without being ogled. Tom likes it too.’
‘Sam?’
‘My daughter.’
‘It must be hard for her,’ Bowman hesitated, ‘growing up in a boys’ school.’
‘It’s the men that piss her off.’
‘Really?’
She met his eye. ‘Have you spoken to Preston yet?’
Bowman shook his head.
‘He knew your parents, he was here before they left,’ she said and looked away. ‘Before you lost your brother.’
A change on the air. The nape of his neck prickled.
He turned. The boy waited silently behind him. Bowman stood to greet him.
‘Mum said you used to live in this house.’
Bowman nodded. ‘Until I was your age.’
‘I think you left something.’ Tom started for the rear hallway. ‘Come and look.’
The boy ushered Bowman into his room as Sarah stood at the door. They went to the built-in timber bench alongside the wardrobe and Tom pointed to the front edge. Carved into the wood were the letters AB.
Bowman whistled. ‘That’s me.’
The boy looked pleased. ‘That’s what mum said. That a family called Bowman lived here. And that you were called Adam.’
‘You’ll have to leave your mark there, next to mine.’
‘I will,’ the boy said. ‘Got a good knife for it.’
A laptop sat open on a desk under the window and next to it was a drone. ‘That looks fun,’ Bowman said.
‘It’s a Phantom 3.’ Tom paused in homage. ‘It can go up, like, a hundred metres.’ He looked uncertain. ‘The police took the footage.’
Bowman’s head went on an angle. ‘It takes pictures?’
‘Video.’
‘And the police took the video?’
‘Um—the memory card. And the hard drive.’ The boy looked at Bowman. ‘They’ll give it back.’
‘What’s it video of?’
‘Um. The school. From, like, The Flats. You know, the playing fields?’ Tom swallowed. ‘I was trying to fly it before … before I found her.’
Bowman took a knee at the desk to scribble down the make of the drone, and to note The Flats, the memory card, the hard drive. Tom sat on his bed watching, Sarah Green still in the doorway. Bowman gazed across the floorboards, every notch in the pine familiar. He heard Riley again at The Bald Rock: staging, leaving his mark. AB, carved in the wood. He was short of breath, stifled by intimacy, kneeling in his childhood bedroom, interviewing a boy about a dead girl. Chick was here too, spliced with Marguerite, a compound ghost. Dead boys and girls.
‘Could you tell me what happened,’ he said, ‘on Thursday evening?’
The boy recounted his movements. He had been on his bike, riding past the Hay Stand, when he saw a black bundle on the exposed raised floor. The account dovetailed with Spratt’s.
Tom finished and Bowman chewed his pen. He had more than he needed. In fact, he had two stories. The first would detail how Tom Green and Craig Spratt had found Marguerite Dunlop’s body. The second would say the police had seized drone footage of the school and were analysing it for clues. Riley wasn’t going to like it—the drone footage would be a holdback for sure.
He stood and thanked Tom. Sarah saw him out.
The afternoon blazed with cicada in dry gum. Sorrow stole up the strange bend in the drive. He’d been buoyant this morning, his success on the job outweighing the horror of the crime, but the visit to the house had triggered a slide, a warning not to use Marguerite as a spark for his stalled career. Bowman knew to heed the message—it wasn’t just the school the dead girl could haunt.
His phone rang.
‘Heard you got to Spratt,’ Riley said.
‘Yeah. Thanks for that.’
‘When will you publish?’
‘Dunno. They’ll probably hold it till tomorrow.’
‘Don’t you just slap stuff up twenty-four seven?’
‘New Year’s Eve—it’d be wasted.’
‘Wasted on the wasted.’
‘That’s it,’ he said.
‘Don’t s’pose you can send it through to me early?’
‘Why?’ He couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.
‘Come on, keep up. Why did we facilitate the interview?’
‘He’s a suspect?’
‘Everyone’s a fucking suspect. Tell me again, what were you doing on Wednesday?’
‘She was killed on Wednesday?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘How’s the drone footage?’
It was a direct hit, a laser-guided bunker buster. He waited for her to stumble from the rubble.
‘Christ,’ she managed at last. ‘Never work with children or animals.’
‘Could be a story.’
‘No way.’
‘Could be a story that you’re even looking, that you have footage. Might rattle someone’s cage.’
‘Not one word, not yet. Got it? You rat-fuck me on this, it’s big trouble in little China.’
‘The year of the rodent,’ he said. ‘Happy New Year.’