There was nothing out of the ordinary about this particular morning. It was a Wednesday and the colour of the sky matched my grey Toshiba laptop, which was six or seven years old and still ran Windows 7 because I tried Tash’s once, which ran on 8, and couldn’t manage it at all. I hate updating anything but especially computer stuff because everything you finally figured out counts for nix with the snap of a keystroke. That’s what was great about swimming. It’s the same Indian Ocean, same sky, same distance from North Cott to Cott and back. All that changes is the price of the coffee afterwards. Seventeen years before, at the beginning of the new millennium, my cappuccino cost me three bucks. It had gone up fifty percent. The group I swim with had probably changed by fifty percent too over the period but you don’t notice. It’s not like everybody disappears at once. But one day somebody brings in an old photo, the kind you used to get in little wallets from the chemist, and that’s like a frypan in the face. You hope you haven’t aged as badly as the rest and then realise that half of those in the snap have moved out of your life without you even noticing.
Anyway, it wasn’t actually overcast, it was just early morning mid-August, spring was dusting itself off and so was I after three big glasses of red the night before. I’d reached the point in my life where I drank less than your average pensioner after an expired Happy Hour. Tash and Grace were in Spain, however, so for the first time in twenty years I’d been left to my own devices and the cheap red had caught my eye right around the same time I’d been salivating over my takeaway Tibetan. Goodness knows what was in the dish I’d ordered. I doubted yak, it was too cheap, they’d have to import but it tasted fine and the rice was excellent. Naturally I hadn’t bothered to turn on the dishwasher after eating, figuring I may as well wait till breakfast. Such indulgences of the single man had become as foreign to me as available street parking. I think it was probably goat in the dish, something I’d never be able to eat with Tash who considers herself pretty much vegetarian because she only eats chicken, fish, and sausages at the netball. Unfortunately there’d not been much of that lately. Grace, who showed a bit of sporting potential in that area, had recently broken her father’s heart by saying she was concentrating on her Spanish. I sat back on the couch and cracked the red. Skype had been a disaster – like Control’s Cone of Silence in Get Smart. Either the girls couldn’t hear me or I couldn’t hear them, and we’d resorted to phone calls in the end. Barcelona was brilliant apparently. Tash was doing some work thing that involved photographing stylish ideas and eating at exciting restaurants, while Grace studied at some special class. I could have bought a case of the red for the price of the twelve minutes we talked about nothing in particular, so I made rectifying the Skype problem my highest priority. They’d be gone another ten weeks and the way it was heading it would have been cheaper for me to have gone with them and let the adulterers and petty thieves of my great metropolis get away with their misdemeanours.
Yes, I missed the girls, a lot, but the bachelor life had compensations: stacking the dishwasher half as often, not having to watch gym bodies on TV in some lame reality show, leaving clothes in the dryer till I needed them, playing vinyl albums on the old stereo – not even Grace got Toots and the Maytals. I retained some self-discipline though, hauling my arse out of bed and down to the ocean to join the pack of like-minded swimmers. There were about ten of us today. Somebody, usually Camo, who had a few years on me but was a better swimmer, would wade in and start off and the rest of us would casually follow. Our only competition was against our personal times and I knew in my condition I would be challenging my worst rather than my best, so I lobbed along and let my mind drift to everything from digging up the roots that kept blocking our sewage pipe, to football, to renewing my car insurance. The water and my even breathing relaxed me. Before I knew it North Cott loomed on the return leg and I managed a token sprint over the last fifty metres, then began to wade in to shore.
I was contemplating how much extra my car insurance would be with Grace driving, when a scream of ‘Shark!’ gatecrashed its way in. I don’t know who yelled it but now I was looking at bodies charging towards the shore, dimly aware that there was something thrashing, churning water just to the right of the evacuees. Like one of the many horses I had backed, I stood flat-footed, my obstinate brain not wanting to admit the reality. Turk Stanbridge also hadn’t moved and was still in thigh-high water near the spume. My brain was trying to sort packages on a too-fast conveyor belt but my body was inert. Then Camo, who had been drying himself off, dropped his towel and charged back into the water. My muscles came alive. I ran back out behind Camo, fearing Turk had been attacked until he began screaming, ‘It’s Craig, it’s Craig!’
By now I could see dark ink in the water and a bare torso, Turk’s body blocking a full view. The shark must have already run. Camo joined Turk who I now saw was supporting Craig Drummond’s head and shoulders. Camo screamed to shore to call an ambulance but Barbara was already onto it. By the time I reached Camo and Turk, they had already started in, walking backwards carrying Craig Drummond whose face was waxen with shock. I helped lift him out of the water, and saw that his right leg was severed below the knee. Somebody else, one of the women, joined in, and Murray Hurst splashed into the ocean with a towel and tried to tie it as a tourniquet but there was so much blood it was sodden in the blink of an eye.
Carrying him, we ran halfway up the beach towards the steps. Swimmers swarmed with towels and their own windcheaters to wrap around Craig. Somebody ripped their towel into strips for a better tourniquet. It was too early for the lifeguards but people were calling on phones and yelling to the restaurant up above the steps. I was looking at Craig Drummond’s face, the skin grey now, the light in his eyes faded. I had stood there when a man put a gun to his head and killed himself: the digital experience, life–no-life with the flick of a switch. But I had never seen this, the cliché of life draining away from somebody before my eyes. And for the first time I understood the trauma of those soldiers who came back from the battlefield, and of survivors of train wrecks and bus crashes who sat with fatally injured passengers as they slowly left for another realm. Camo started CPR. He worked furiously. His face was red, he was sweating. He exhorted Craig to hang in. But Craig was gone.
A fortnight later I stared out over the same patch of sand that had been soaked rust red with Craig Drummond’s blood. I was sitting at the café above sipping tea. I hadn’t ventured anywhere near the area for a week, not till after the funeral, but the last week I’d managed to sit myself here and stare out at the shiny ocean, running the same dumb thoughts over and over again like a coach uselessly trying to improve a team that actually belonged in a lower division. If I had not made that last stupid sprint attempt, would I have been the one taken? Could I have reacted quicker, got back out to Turk a little faster, or thought to tear strips for a tourniquet there and then so the rescue might have been successful. If Camo hadn’t raced past me back into the water, would I have dared? Did I only act out of a blind shame and, if I did, was that more stupid than staying safe on the beach? Until something like this happens you don’t have to ever assess your action or inaction. But it was real. One part of me said I owed it to Tash and Grace to be here for them for as long as I could; another said that’s a coward’s excuse – that the only true question is what would I expect one of my cronies to do for me if I’d have been the one attacked. When I could face that question, which wasn’t too often, I honestly couldn’t answer it. I liked to think that I’d be magnanimous and say, it’s just bad luck, it’s just fate, you can’t risk your life to protect me. But then I would imagine the terror of knowing for an instant that a savage wild creature had, from all the humans on the planet, targeted me, and in that instant, as I began to shut down and go into shock, would not my silent plea be ‘Somebody, help’?
Truthfully, I was grateful that Tash and Grace were away. It wasn’t something I could share, not because I might have felt tainted as scared, but because it was a sacred moment I had shared. Scared, sacred … the realignment of one letter changed everything, just like that day, that hour, that minute. The only people I could open up with were the others who had been with me, and even then it was a case of feeling my way along a reef in bare feet. Camo wore his heart on his sleeve. He was a big, bluff open guy. He cried at the funeral but then he was released, over it. Turk was a mess, he’d not made it down here at all. Helen, who it turned out was the woman who had helped me carry Craig up onto the beach, was the most like me, confused, upset, guilty.
The funeral was a large affair held at the Christ Church chapel. Craig had been an old boy of the school and many of his former schoolmates, now pushing sixty, turned up. Among the mourners mingling on the green lawn outside the chapel beside Stirling Highway was the O’Grady family – well, Gerry and Michelle. Apart from an odd news grab on TV, I hadn’t seen them since the death of Ian Bontillo, prime suspect in the Autostrada abductions. The significance was not lost on me. We were standing within a kilometre of where their daughter had disappeared. Bontillo’s flat, where he had been found dead, could have been reached with a wind-assisted torpedo punt. I made my way over. Gerry grasped my hand firmly. Michelle smiled and clasped my hand in hers. The years had glanced off her like a zephyr. Sometimes you say somebody doesn’t look a day older. In her case it was true. Later it occurred to me that her grief back then had accelerated her ageing and since then things had balanced out. Gerry was more typical. He still looked fit but he was broader in all zones except his hair, which was thinning noticeably. We exchanged the usual stuff you do in this kind of situation. I asked after Nellie, Caitlin’s younger sister, then for a terrible moment dreaded something tragic might have happened to her too. Thankfully Nellie was fine, now working in New York. While I knew that officially Caitlin’s case remained open, unofficially the police considered it closed with Bontillo’s death. The fact there’d been no similar series of abductions or murders since, not just in Perth but the whole country, reinforced this notion. Even I, sceptic that I am, had to admit I had probably been wrong but that doesn’t mean Bontillo’s guilt sat comfortably with me. There had to be a chance the real guy was simply smart enough and strong enough to quit while he was ahead, or he was dead or in jail for something else. But I wasn’t going to raise any of this with the O’Gradys. If they’d finally discovered a measure of acceptance about their daughter’s fate, then who was I to stir it up? And so we talked briefly of Craig Drummond, their friend who had personally paid my fees when I’d been on the case. I’d swum with the guy many mornings for a couple of decades but I didn’t really know him. I had never met his wife or family, nor he mine, but we’d floated in the same salty water and dried off under the same clinical sun. Gerry knew him from school and told me Craig had been a really good squash player. We avoided talk of Caitlin. I wished the O’Gradys all the best and went off to express my condolences to the Drummond family. I left, with an emptiness in my stomach that reminded me of that emotion on a long flight home after an extended absence when you have abandoned your past but not yet attained a future.
The weird sense of dislocation had persisted. I was steaming through my fifties in a mundane job, in a world that was more foreign to me by the day. They no longer played the football I’d grown up with; now it was all corporate boxes and prepaid memberships and footballers on every channel who fancied themselves as personalities as they fed us the same dull chaff as every other professional sportsperson. If a player gave somebody a whack on the field he was treated like a child molester – and those predators too seemed be to growing in number by the hour, to such an extent that if a little kid fell off their bike and you helped them up, you had a dozen fingers poised to dial 000. Nobody went to church anymore. The closest that people got to organised worship was when they gushed over the release of new Apple products. There were no dark cool pubs either, everywhere was open and noisy, the sound of cutlery reverberating through atriums like a twenty-one-gun salute. My mechanic’s workshop was quieter than most restaurants. And in the middle of this world sat Snowy Lane who couldn’t do a thing to save his friend from bleeding to death on a beach and whose last contribution to making this state a better place had been thirty-five years ago. I sipped tea, staring out an implacable ocean, brooding.
‘G’day Snowy.’
Smile lines creased his face. It was weathered but women might still dub it rugged. There was the odd bit of pigmentation too and his hair was thinner but only a little, and still sandy. Barry Dunn was a good fifteen years older than me but seemed only one or two years my senior. Even with the collapse of his empire he’d obviously still had enough collateral to invest in a fountain of youth. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite. He was wearing a polo shirt and shorts with sandals.
‘How you doing?’ I asked to be polite.
‘Ah, I long for the time PSA meant Public Schools Association and not a gloved finger up my date, but it’s alright. You?’
‘Getting by.’
A coffee arrived for him, macchiato by the looks. The young dark-haired waitress smiled at him and vice versa. I doubted he had to place an order. In Perth’s Jurassic age, Barry Dunn had been the T. rex, and that still carried clout. He sipped his coffee.
‘Married? Kids?’
I gave him bare facts on a wafer: wife, eighteen-year-old daughter.
‘I never married again.’ He gazed wistfully over to Rottnest as if thinking about where his mistress had met her demise. If he harboured a grudge because I’d been sleeping with her too, he never showed it. ‘I’ve recommended you to a friend.’
Hard on the heels of my surprise came suspicion. He read it.
‘You’re still in the PI game?’ Asking it like he wasn’t sure.
‘Of course. But I have a few things in train.’
This amounted to an exaggeration. I had one case, a simple adultery.
‘Drop it or hand it off. I’ve quoted two thousand dollars a day plus expenses on your behalf, which is what he pays his legal counsel. If you think I’ve underquoted you can take it up with my friend.’
I didn’t think he’d underquoted. I’d never earned that kind of money.
‘I draw the line at shooting someone.’
The eyes crinkled and his chuckle seemed forced. ‘I’m serious, Snowy. His daughter is missing.’
‘The police …’
‘Waste of fucking space. I told him he needed you. You in?’
What was I going to say? ‘On the face of it, sure.’
‘It’s Nelson Feister’s daughter, Ingrid.’
This rocked me. Feister was rich as Croesus. I looked around to see if anybody was listening in. There was an elderly couple – from the long socks on the husband, I guessed English visitors. A trio of young mothers with bored children strapped in strollers, and a Brazilian beach bum fiddling with his phone, made up the balance of the clientele. No obvious threat but I lowered my voice. ‘I haven’t heard anything about that.’
‘Course not. You got a phone?’ He gestured for it.
As it happened, I did. I handed it over. He popped on some glasses that had been hanging on his shirt, grunted in disapproval at my low-tech appliance and dialled. It must have been answered quickly.
‘Nelson, Barry. I’m with the guy now. He’s in. When do you want to see him?’ He looked over his glasses at me. ‘Twenty minutes?’ I wasn’t sure which of us he was asking but I nodded. ‘Text your address to this phone. Yep, no worries, China.’ He ended the call and slid my phone back to me. ‘Done.’ He sat back, proud he could still make a deal talk.
‘How long she been missing?’
‘Not sure. Two or three weeks. Ingrid’s the wild child from the second marriage, so they weren’t worried. But there’s a loser boyfriend. Anyway he can fill you in. Good to see you again, Snowy.’ Delicately he placed his empty cup on its saucer and stood up. My phone pinged with a text.
‘Thanks, Barry.’ I reckoned it was the first time I’d called him by his first name.
Dunn had taken a step but paused and some part of me wondered if he was about to take me to task for the familiarity. ‘Watch out for the daughter.’
‘The older one from the first model.’ He could have been speaking literally or figuratively, I wasn’t sure what line of employment the two Mrs Feisters were in prior to marriage. The family had always been exceedingly private and I wasn’t one to follow the movers and shakers of Perth society. ‘She likes older men.’ He winked and exited with a wave to the waitress, who smiled generously.
I studied my phone. The address was premium: Jutland Parade, Dalkeith. I was in shorts and t-shirt, underdressed. I had to hope it lent me some kind of cache.
If somebody were to ask me what I wanted to come back as in the next life I’d answer: a lawn on Jutland Parade. The houses varied. A few Californian bungalows remained but there were also the kind you see on American TV shows, belonging to Beverly Hills personalities, or plantation owners, with long driveways usually ending in white stone columns. The lawns though were always pristine, superior to your average public golf green. The parade was on the crest of a hill so the backs of the houses sloped down to the Swan River. Over the years, lots had been sold and houses developed on the hill slope but a few properties had maintained land all the way down to the river, ending there with boatsheds and private jetties. My guess was the Feisters’ property might be one of these. The front of the house was fenced and gated. Trees ran down both sides, pencil pines, in close formation. I presumed they hid fences to the neighbouring properties. I pulled up the short entrance way and pressed the intercom.
A woman’s voice answered. ‘Yes?’
‘My name is Richard Lane. Mr Feister is expecting me.’
There was a click and the gates began to swing inward. Clearly whoever was on the other end of the intercom already knew about me. The driveway was a good sixty metres and ended in a circle. A separate garage to the right was open and the rear ends of twin Mercedes gleamed like the teeth of a cartoon villain. I left my car as close as I could to the front door and climbed out in my shorts with the guilt of a dog owner whose pooch had just left a steaming turd on the footpath. The house itself was more modest than I had expected. Tudor in style, it ran only a third wider than your average stockbroker’s, but gables hinted at height and depth to the rear. Waiting for me at the door was a woman, thirty-five to forty, with the kind of sexy haircut, expensive suit and shoes that suggested a bottle of Pol Roger in a fridge stocked with yogurt and greens and little else. No ring on her hand. I wondered if this was the elder daughter.
‘Dee Verleuwin. I’m Mr Feister’s private secretary.’
She extended her hand and I shook it. There was a time that slender arm and delicate hand would have had me thinking all kind of things but I was married and my flirting days as ancient and foreign to me as cuneiform. I followed Ms Verleuwin into a cool entrance hall and tracked her pert backside along parquet into a wide-open area with marble tiles and three sets of staircases. We avoided all of these and continued along a narrow wood-panelled corridor that made you think you were on a ship. We passed three closed rooms, two on the right, one on the left. The corridor ended in a massive sunken open living room with a bar and kitchen area and copious views of the Swan below. It seemed the Feister block didn’t extend all the way down for I could see rooftops angling down the hill to the river. To my surprise we did not enter the room but turned sharp right, the narrow and panelled corridor continuing to a large jarrah door which had been left ajar. Ms Verleuwin preceded me to push the door open further, then stood back and announced me to those assembled in what I guess was the den but was exactly how I imagined one of those posh gentlemen’s club’s reading rooms would look: dark wood, green leather sofas and armchairs, a large desk, a hint of brass and some discrete technology.
‘Mr Lane: Mr Nelson Feister, Mrs Kate Hayward, and Simon Feister.’
We mumbled greetings. Dee Verleuwin asked if I would like a refreshment of any sort.
‘Thanks, I’m good.’
She withdrew. Feister was standing at the side of his desk. The other two were seated on one of two sofas. I’d been hoping Feister might have been in some casual man-about-the-house clobber so I wouldn’t feel quite so out of place but he wore a dark suit with an ochre tie. He was trim, the kind of man who thinks exercise a virtue. I put him around twelve years older than me. There was something in her eyes that made Kate Hayward a Feister. I presumed she was the elder daughter and bore her married name now. She was carrying a kilo or two more than optimal but had the curves to compensate and a posture that spoke of years competing in high-grade equestrian events. Unlike his dad, Simon Feister didn’t emanate authority. His chin was slightly weak and his forehead high but he was closest to me in dress sense with slacks and a short-sleeved shirt worn out, not tucked.
‘Take a seat, please.’ Nelson Feister had a deep voice. I sat on the same sofa as his daughter. ‘How much do you know?’
‘Basically nothing. I was having a cup of tea at the beach and Barry Dunn approached me. He told me your daughter, Ingrid, is missing. He thought for about two weeks.’
‘Two weeks exactly.’ It was Kate who spoke. There was a rasp to her voice and I wondered if she smoked.
‘Ingrid left Perth with her boyfriend to go for a holiday up north,’ her father said. ‘They stayed at Port Hedland. The police tracked them as far as the Sandfire Roadhouse. Then they just disappeared.’
I knew the Sandfire Roadhouse from forty years ago. It used to be run by a one-armed misanthrope who worked whatever hours he pleased. You could be stuck for hours waiting for the place to open to get fuel. The first time I ever pulled into the roadhouse a truck driver was upending the servo bin. ‘Serves the prick, right,’ was all he offered before climbing into his truck and driving off. At that time I had no idea who he was talking about but I quickly came to learn.
I looked over all three of them. ‘No word from them at all?’
‘Typical of Ingrid.’ Like the rest of him, Simon Feister’s highish voice measured badly against his father’s.
‘I’m still not certain there’s a problem but her sister and brother convinced me to look into it.’ There was something almost more machine than human about Feister. It put me in mind of a locomotive slowly rolling away from a platform, barely tapping latent power.
Kate said, ‘Ingrid took six thousand dollars out of her bank account before they left. Max is a no-hoper.’
‘Max?’
‘Coldwell, her boyfriend.’
I was regretting having come straight here. My habit was to tape and take notes. I asked if I might borrow pad and pen. Nelson Feister handed me a document with plastic binding.
‘We did up this to help.’
By ‘we’ I intuited he meant Dee Verleuwin. I accepted the dossier and flipped it open on a large photo of Ingrid Feister. I knew this because it had her name in large print with salient details beneath, like her birthday, passport number, Facebook, Instagram, car registration, driver’s licence and favourite foods. A quick calculation told me she would be twenty-one in a couple of months. If I had to sum up in one word what the photo told me about the subject, I would say defiant. Physically, Ingrid resembled the inevitable model girlfriend of a rock star, a mane of unruly hair and the Fuk U attitude unable to camouflage the aesthetic beauty of her high cheekbones and slender neck. She was wearing a t-shirt with writing on it. It might have said Pussy Riot, which I think was the name of the female Russian punk band that got arrested for slipping Putin the finger. I flipped the next page and there was a photo of Max Coldwell. It was blown up from the cover of his CD and showed a young guy with requisite goatee beard, long black hair and soulful but not intelligent eyes. Okay, I know you can’t tell all this from a photo but if we were playing that game where you describe a person as an animal, Max would be a cow. Again Kate pitched in.
‘He produced the CD himself.’ With the inference that no record label would be dumb enough. ‘There’s a copy at the back.’
Which there was. Her brother waded in. ‘We’ll email you the electronic files of all this.’
I was feeling my way with all the information. ‘When did you notify the police?’
Kate was now defined as the spokesperson. ‘Three days ago.’
‘That’s not an awful long time.’
‘There was no sign of them having reached Broome,’ Nelson said with the kind of detached air that he probably employed negotiating with the Japanese. ‘They had a four-wheel drive so they could have gone off-road. We have some mining operations in the area and it’s even possible they might have gone for a look.’ His son’s derisive snort gave this option as much credence as making razor blades sharper by sticking them under a glass pyramid. His father ignored him. ‘We put up a couple of light planes and they’ve been searching but have come up with nothing so far.’
‘Is there any history of violence from Coldwell?’
‘He’s an inveterate drug user.’ Kate Hayward made it sound as inevitable as night following day.
‘Hard drugs?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably.’
Her father shot her a look that said ‘steady on’. He turned to me, measured. ‘He was arrested for marijuana four years ago.’
‘They do one, they do the other,’ his daughter snapped back at him.
I didn’t want to be involved in a family spat. ‘Okay, so the way I see it, this is not a kidnap for ransom or you’d have long heard from any kidnappers.’
‘The police said the same thing,’ said Simon Feister.
‘So there’s four possibilities. They both met with foul play, Ingrid has met with foul play at the hands of Max, they’ve had an accident, or else they’ve gone to ground for whatever reason.’ I was thinking of the attitude in Ingrid’s photo. I addressed Simon Feister directly. ‘From how you’ve reacted, I take it the last possibility isn’t out of the question.’
‘Two years ago she flew to the Philippines and cut off all contact with us. Four months later she turned up here as if nothing had happened.’
His sister qualified. ‘Yes, but she kept posting on Facebook and used her credit cards. This time she’s just vanished.’
‘If she had six thousand dollars in cash she wouldn’t need her cards for some time.’ I was trying to be even about all this. There was an odd vibe in the room I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Kate seemed extremely anxious about her half-sister’s fate, yet dismissive of her at the same time.
‘Has Coldwell contacted his family?’
Nelson Feister said, ‘The police say his mother has heard nothing.’
‘Probably too drunk to remember.’ Kate with that cutting tone. I wondered how her husband coped.
I trod carefully with my next question and directed it straight at Nelson. ‘Has her mother heard from her?’
‘No. She’s visiting family in Sweden. We haven’t let on yet that Ingrid is missing. I don’t want her worrying.’
‘How long since you spoke with Mrs Feister?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘I suggest you inform her of the situation. It’s possible Ingrid will contact her.’
‘It’s possible pigs might wear parachutes.’ Kate checking her watch like each second was costing her a kidney. I expected Nelson Feister to make some comment but he let it go and I was forced to ask if there was any problem between Ingrid and her mother.
Feister shook his head. ‘No, they could be closer but it’s just a phase she’s going through.’
I asked if Ingrid lived on the property. I thought it would be important to check her room.
‘She has a flat in Fremantle. There’s a key in the folder.’ Simon Feister pointed.
‘In that case I think I’m done for now. I’ll go home, get changed, and start work.’
I stood. Nelson Feister had not yet extended his hand to me and still did not. I understood I was a hireling, no more.
‘Dee will take care of you. She’ll be your point of contact.’
Dee Verleuwin appeared at the door as if she had some telepathic link to her employer. Maybe she’d been waiting outside the whole time or maybe the room was miked. I nodded a farewell and exited, following at her heel. She turned and handed me a cheque without stopping. I saw it was for three thousand dollars.
‘I hope a cheque is acceptable. Mr Feister still prefers cheques and paper invoices. He says one day some computer bug will erase everything.’
In that regard, at least, Nelson Feister was a man after my own heart. We came from an older generation that had seen too many astonishingly bad things happen to place our trust in a remote server and a satellite. We reached the front door. Ms Verleuwin unbolted it. I went out on a slim limb.
‘I wonder if you can help me?’
She ushered me out into a glorious spring day and walked to the end of the porch. In for a penny …
‘I couldn’t help detecting some vibe in the room.’
‘You mean with Kate and Simon?’
‘Partly. It’s like they are pushing their father …’
‘If Ingrid dies, they split her share of the family trust. Nelson would probably have waited a bit longer. Ingrid is a wild kid, she’s disappeared before.’
No wonder they were interested to know what might have happened. If their sister were dead they’d be even richer. We’d reached the end of the porch.
‘You know Ingrid, what do you think?’
‘I’m not paid to think.’
‘I am. Is this like the other times?’
She seemed to give it great consideration. ‘I think it’s fifty-fifty. They could be meditating in the middle of the desert smoking pot, or they could have been taken by crocodiles. I think Ingrid and Max are both stoned most of the time. You know if you ever repeat this to anybody Mr Feister will sue the white ants where your house once stood?’
‘Of course. That’s why you hired me, because Dunn told you I’m a vault. So you don’t think Max is violent?’
The way she checked me out hinted at how she evaluated shoes: as if she was attracted but was weighing the downside. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Not like some men.’
And I just knew she was talking of me but I couldn’t tell if that excited or repelled her. I lifted my folder as a farewell. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘I’ve texted my details to your phone,’ she said before turning on her heel. Yes, a younger Snowy Lane might have got into considerable strife there.