BOWMAN WOKE LATE, wondering if he was stalking Riley in her sleep the way she was creeping into his. It had been his crawling dream, rippling with rats like the delirium tremens. Swamp things dragging Chick under. And then there was Riley, watching from the trees. Beside her stood Sarah Green.
He sat up, bilious, naked, alone. He reached for his glass with a shaking hand and drank his lemon water. Citrus: good for the liver. He’d gone a bit hard last night.
New Year’s Day. He felt the dead air of the house, nothing stirring. He needed a cat or a dog, something alive in the place. A flatmate, a partner, a wife, a child, a hamster on a wheel. He was more of a dog person, he could take a dog to the pub.
He bent for his sarong. He had a hangover that would kill a brown dog. He’d had a hamster as a child. Rodney. He hadn’t had a flatmate since … Lodge Street in Glebe after university? No, Tooting Broadway in ninety-nine. That had worked out well, his journalism career in London. He’d got a job on Fleet Street—at The Pig and Olive, serving warm pints to chinless Oxbridge hacks. In a year of international ‘freelancing’ he’d sold one story, to a wildlife magazine in Kampala, about the repopulation of bloats of hippos in Uganda after Idi Amin had shot them all out from his helicopter gunship. He’d spent months in Africa: Harare, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam.
Looking back, the hippopotamuses had been a highpoint. He’d leveraged the story into a copy-boy job on The National … and it had been downhill ever since. The glamour rounds on the paper were federal politics or defence or national security—Bowman had been put on education, then real estate, and then shovelled onto the late shift.
And here he was at the start of another year, childless in his empty house. Never have children: his father’s favourite line.
He came into the kitchen. He’d cleaned up before bed as he always did, bottles in the bin, his glass washed on the sink. Last night, full of truth serum, he’d resolved to write the drone story today and not be dictated to by Riley. Now, in the acid light of morning, he put the coffee on and thought, Maybe not. He didn’t have the footage, only the news that there was footage. But that was just his mind finding a loophole, the same way it justified another drink. The truth was if he defied Riley she would cut him off and he’d be working on his own.
Sipping coffee, he pulled up the paper online. His story on Tom Green and Craig Spratt finding the body was leading the site. He realised he’d forgotten to read it to the Greens first and hoped he wouldn’t need them again. Diamond had written a piece and Bowman skimmed it: there was nothing new in it, no quotes from O’Neil. It was just a reheat, a holding story saying the investigation was continuing.
His phone rang on the bench. Alexander, calling him first thing on a Sunday morning, New Year’s Day. The times they were a’changing.
‘Good stuff with the kid,’ the editor said. ‘What’ve you got for today?’
If he mentioned the drone footage, Alexander would demand he write it straightaway. ‘Not sure,’ he said.
‘Listen, there’s a bit of shit flying. I’ve had a couple of calls,’ Alexander said. ‘From the old man.’
Bowman turned his mug on the bench. ‘Fair dinkum?’ It was company lore that the old man in London always backed his editors and never interfered with The National’s coverage.
‘He’s cagey,’ Alexander said, ‘like someone’s got to him. It must be coming from the school … buggered if I know how. A teacher couldn’t even breathe at this altitude.’
Bowman’s hangover shifted and slung a poison dart through his brain.
‘Must be a parent with some clout,’ Alexander said. ‘I’ll get Business to have a look.’
‘I could try and interview the headmaster. No one’s spoken to him yet.’
‘Yeah, good. Feel him out about who’s who in the old boys and the parent body, the heavy hitters. But be careful. If I’m getting calls from London, then Mahogany Row’s hearing it too. We fuck up, they’ll skin us alive.’
Bowman showered and dressed and drove to the school. The police at the gate waved him through. Riley must have cleared his plates. He drove up past the headmaster’s house and parked at the administration block. It was a short walk back to Preston’s. The Nissan was the only vehicle in the carpark, and the venetians on the admin buildings were down, the slats angled shut.
He remembered his visits here to the staff room as a child, drinking cold water from the refrigerated bubbler and the sign above his father’s desk: Golding was right. You learnt that pretty quick at a place like Prince Albert in the seventies: Lord of the Flies was a teaching manual. Never have children. Bowman’s life was the punch line to a dad joke. He’d shirked raising kids, shelved the biological imperative of existence.
His hangover was getting metaphysical. The idea of an interview with Philip Preston was not enticing.
It was humid, the whiff of rain coming. The CSIRO had invented a word for that smell. Petrichor. Bowman remembered it from an education story he’d written. Before they invented wi-fi, the CSIRO had invented a word.
Studying his face in the reflected glass of the administration building door, he saw movement behind him and turned. A man was approaching, manila folder under one arm, clad in shades of elegant grey: tailored shorts, polo shirt, felt shoes with orange laces.
He crossed the forecourt and stopped to face Bowman. ‘Are you with the police?’ he said.
Rotting fish. Petrichor. Bowman had never seen him, but he knew who he was.
‘No,’ Bowman said. ‘You?’
With a tilt of the chin Philip Preston deflected the question. ‘May I know who you are?’
‘Journalist. With The National.’
The headmaster’s head lifted another degree. ‘Do the police know you’re here?’
‘They let me through.’
‘I see,’ Preston looked down his nose. There was a slow whine to the voice. North American—or just pretentious? ‘You must be Adam Bowman.’
The stench of history hung between them.
‘Tell me,’ Preston said, ‘are there things the police tell you that you can’t report?’
Bowman paused. ‘Not much, really.’
‘I see.’ Preston ran a thumb along the edge of his folder. ‘Everything seems to fit with BMK. The plastic, and so on. But one thing puzzles me.’ His lips formed a vile smile. ‘The creek. It’s strange he didn’t put her in the creek.’
Bowman blinked as Preston splashed the creek in his face.
There was the sound of a vehicle. Bowman turned and watched a white Hilux pull up. Craig Spratt had an elbow out the driver’s window. He killed the engine and looked at Preston. ‘The gardener that’s done the bolt,’ Spratt said. ‘Cops want his file.’
Preston held up the folder and gestured sharply. ‘We might discuss that inside.’
Spratt got out, nodded at Bowman, and trailed Preston into the administration building.
Bowman dug for his phone and checked the news sites: nothing on a missing gardener. Could be good, but how to stand it up? Preston would be inside sewing Spratt’s loose lips shut. Riley? The danger was she would just put the kybosh on another story. He dialled anyway.
‘Yeah?’ she answered.
‘Just writing a piece on a missing gardener. Any comment?’
He could almost hear her mouthing an obscenity.
‘My comment is we’d rather you didn’t write that,’ she said.
‘My maths isn’t very good, but by my count that’s two stories I’ve found, and you won’t let me write either.’
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I gave you Spratt and the kid and the run of the school grounds. You play by the rules, you get everything, but you have to come along with us.’
‘What’s with the gardener?’
‘He’s AWOL. We need to find him. We’re releasing an image of him for the six o’clock news.’
‘Oh. Goody gumdrops. Thanks for everything.’
‘C’mon. We need his face all over western Sydney. That means TV and The Mirror. If we give it to you now, they’ll get the shits and downplay it later.’
Bowman knew she was right but saw some wiggle room. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m gunna write a story saying the cops are about to request help from the public in locating a gardener who’s disappeared from Prince Albert. Police would like to interview the man in relation to the slaying of Marguerite Dunlop by the killer known as BMK at the school on Thursday night. How’s that grab you?’
‘No name, no picture,’ Riley said. ‘Go your hardest.’
Bowman hung up. He’d been walking as he bartered and now he’d come into the main quadrangle. Buildings designed to flow with life stood deserted around him. He found a shaded corner, sat down and bashed out the piece. The National put it straight online and Bowman washed his hands of it: Diamond would cover the afternoon police briefing on the gardener.
He put his laptop in his bag and groaned to his feet. Everything was still, the abandoned campus heavy around him. He arched his back and rolled his neck and became conscious of something his body already knew: he was being watched. The limbering and stretching became a display, his spinal cord pinging as it processed surveillance. He scanned the rows of classrooms while pretending to dig for something in his bag. No movement. Get moving. He walked clear of the quad and started down the hill, away from his car, his skin prickling with atavistic unease as if he were deep and alone in the Australian bush.
Somebody had got at the old man in London. That might mean pure power, or it might be more banal, a personal relationship with someone linked to the school. His aunt’s cousin’s daughter might have a kid here. Or it could be blackmail. Bowman still felt eyes on him. Spratt? Preston? He did a three-sixty as he walked, but there was no one he could see. Maybe it was a professional, a private investigator. Maybe Riley had a tail on him. Maybe it was BMK, returning to the scene. Maybe he had a paranoid hangover.
He was on a service lane between the back of the kitchens and the laundry, near where Riley had nabbed him on Friday morning. He recalled Scott Green, out for a stroll with his robotic gait, a mustachioed rooster. Where had he been going? Bowman followed the route Green had taken, down the drive and behind the maintenance building. He came into a clearing with a jumble of pipes and bricks and Besser Blocks, a pile of builder’s sand on a sheet of plastic, broken pallets, a rusted water heater stranded in the middle of it all. He walked to the edge of the site where it ran into scrub and turned. No one had followed him. Up to his left were the single-storey flats where the workers lived.
Picking his way back through the debris and long grass, he stood over the pile of sand on its bed of black plastic at the base of the building. He heard Alexander’s Queensland twang over the Bluetooth in the Nissan on Thursday: He’s used the black plastic again.
A length of plasterboard was propped against the wall and Bowman squatted and squinted into the gap. He sucked in air, stood, took out his phone.
‘I think you’d better get out here,’ he said when Riley answered.