On one of his long evening walks with Chief, Baxter decided to head across to the old dairy building. This dated back to Riverview’s origin as a dairy farm with a noted Jersey herd. When the farm had been subdivided, decades ago, Harry Carpenter—who’d married the daughter of the adjoining dairy farmer—had acquired fifty acres.
The old dairy building was still quite sound, with a solid concrete floor and its roof in fair condition. Possums played in the building at night, and it was occasionally visited by a masked owl in search of mice.
Baxter climbed the small rise between his house and the dairy building. From this vantage spot he scanned the river and the surrounding countryside with his binoculars. There was another jetty farther upriver that he picked up clearly, but he couldn’t see a single boat out on the water—well, not unusual for this time of night.
He left the rise and walked across the paddock towards the old building. He’d inspected it a couple of times and had been pondering how he could utilise it. He decided to take another look, but Chief’s low growl checked him.
Baxter stiffened. He knew for certain now that Chief never growled for nothing. The shepherd was infallible. Baxter looked at his dog, whose eyes were fixed on the old dairy. ‘Steady, Chief,’ he muttered under his breath.
The dairy was divided in two: a long room where the cows had been milked, and an adjoining room where the milk had been treated and stored in big vats. When Baxter stepped into this room, he saw that someone had been using it—a swag, a portable stove and a lamp sat in one corner, and the windows had been bagged over.
Chief growled again, louder now, as a tall, dark-haired man stepped through from the other room. He put up his hand and smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s okay, Mr Baxter. I’m with Ian Latham. The name’s Lester. Tell your dog I’m on your side.’
Lester was dressed in dark jeans and a khaki shirt, and he too was carrying binoculars. Baxter took him to be a fellow not much older than himself.
‘It’s okay, Chief,’ Baxter said, rubbing his dog’s ears. ‘So you’re the one keeping watch over me?’ he asked Lester.
‘That and other things. And there’s two of us—we take it in shifts. Ian reckoned you wouldn’t mind us using the old dairy.’
‘It’s all right, though I would’ve preferred to be kept in the loop. So what’s doing?’
‘Things are finally coming to a head.’ He sounded optimistic. ‘We reckon they’ll transfer the big drug shipment in three or four days. What we don’t know is where they’ll drop it. We do know that it won’t be at your place, and now we’re thinking it may not be anywhere along the river.’
‘I noticed there’s a jetty farther along.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ve got them all pinpointed. The road in to that one is bad—virtually unusable in wet weather.’
Baxter nodded, relieved. ‘But have they got anyone watching my place?’
‘Not that we know of, and I doubt they could do it under our noses. But there’s other things on their minds right now . . . like several million dollars’ worth of drugs.’
‘I hope you can keep those bastards from getting their hands on a cent.’
Lester grinned. ‘That’s the idea.’
‘You need anything?’ Baxter asked, casting his eyes around the room again. ‘This is a pretty rough camp.’
‘It goes with the job,’ Lester said and smiled thinly. ‘I’ll manage. I don’t expect to be here much longer.’
‘You could always come to the house and I’d cook you a decent meal.’
‘Thanks, but you can’t watch things from inside a house. Ian would have my hide if I slipped up on this job. We hope to put Campanelli away for a good long stretch.’
‘That’s a worthy goal, but he and his ilk exert influence even from inside prison.’
‘True enough. The Mr Bigs are a constant concern for us, and the lure of big money will always ensure that there are Mr Bigs. But we do what we can.’
‘Too right. And I appreciate you looking out for me.’ Baxter glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better be getting back. Ian calls me every night.’ He grinned fondly. ‘He can be a bit of a mother hen, but he’s all right.’
‘He’s a top man,’ Lester said with an answering grin. ‘One of the best. And you know, he’s got a personal stake in the drug business.’
‘What’s that?’ Baxter couldn’t remember Latham mentioning anything.
‘He might not like me telling you this, but I think it’ll help you fully trust him. When he was a boy, his older brother died from an overdose. It nearly killed Ian’s parents. Cost them their marriage, too. So Ian’s real crooked on drug pushers.’
Another tragedy caused by the rotten stuff. Baxter felt sick to his stomach. ‘How awful. What a great bloke he is to be taking them on like this. And of course I’ll keep it in confidence—no worries on that score.’
So many lives lost to drugs: Julie and Jane’s brother, Andrew. Rosa. The undercover policewoman and her sister. Latham’s brother. Then there were the lives of their loved ones, forever marred by their deaths.
Just as Baxter was about to say his goodbyes and go, he turned back.
‘Something else worrying you?’ Lester asked.
‘Did they do any good with my boat? I mean, did they lift any fingerprints?’
‘One good set. They belong to Yat Lee, one of Campanelli’s hoods.’ Lester crooked a smile. ‘He wasn’t too careful. I suppose he reckoned that when the boat blew up, there wouldn’t be any fingerprints to lift. So we now have clear evidence of his involvement in a crime, and it’s unlikely he can slip through our net, whatever happens.’
‘Yat Lee, eh. I’ll remember that name,’ Baxter said grimly. He looked forward to the day when he could meet up with this creep.
‘He’s a bad egg, Mr Baxter.’
‘Aren’t they all?’
‘No, really,’ Lester insisted. ‘If you meet up with him, don’t give him any slack. He’d shoot or knife you and not think twice about it.’
Baxter nodded. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ As he walked out the door, Chief at his heels, he said, ‘When this is all over, you should come and have a meal with me.’
‘I’ll keep you to that. See ya, mate.’
Walking back to the house over the lush paddocks of mixed grasses, Baxter took deep breaths of the fresh night air. It felt very strange that a member of a massive police investigation was living in Riverview’s old dairy.
Baxter remembered Latham’s words: You’re going to cost me a lot of money, Greg. That made him think about what it was costing taxpayers to try and control the drug problem. It seemed no matter how much effort the authorities devoted to drugs, they would never eliminate them. Human inventiveness knew no limits, and Australia’s vast coastline made things even more difficult.
But this time, at least, the police appeared to have the upper hand. That creep Yat Lee had incriminated himself, and he and Campanelli and all of their associates would soon be going down.