I put a hand out behind me and groped about. Nothing. I sat up in the swag and looked around the hide. He was nowhere to be seen. I felt a brief surge of concern, then told myself to get over it. Maybe I hadn’t sailed through the traumas of the past few weeks quite as smoothly as I’d told everybody I had, but that didn’t mean I was allowed to go jumping at shadows, imagining threats where there were none.
We’d come back up to the Wiregrass the night before. We cooked a meal, made love in the swag, talked into the night. Wilderness was good for him.
Nash had been out of hospital for weeks now, but he’d become so caught up with the investigation into what the press had taken to calling ‘The Revelator Clan’, we’d barely been able to get away from the various police stations connected to the case. I was back in charge at Satellite and Nash had morphed into a man on a mission. He’d tracked down other victims, uncovered more evidence of the cult’s crimes, stared into the abyss.
One of our most productive interactions took place a few days after Nash got out of hospital. It was with my neighbours, Rocco and Meg Teller. They came to see us at the Satellite Police Station, wanted to know everything we could tell them about the destruction of the Revelators. I got the impression they were trying to assure themselves they were actually gone. It turned out that Meg had been one of the Patmoses’ earliest victims – that was what Rocco had been referring to when he’d mentioned her bitter experiences with an evangelical church. It was also why Meg had never trusted the police; she’d heard the Revelators had connections there. She’d managed to break free, but she knew how dangerous they could be to anyone they perceived as a threat. It was why she’d lain low, kept her eyes and ears open, delivered her warnings in the guise of a soothsayer.
It was during the discussion with the Tellers that I got a glimpse of what Nash must have been like as a police investigator. He was extraordinary: sympathetic, sharp, intuitive, always encouraging, asking the right questions at the right moment. He was a different person from the man I’d met on the road at Wycliff or visited in gaol. People seemed relieved to unburden themselves to him. They knew he was on their side, that he had the resilience to lift them up and carry them over whatever barriers they were facing.
Rocco and I had sensed which way the wind was blowing and left them to it. We went and made a coffee – using the new, no-questions-asked DeLonghi espresso machine Vince had scored for our station, and hoeing into a tin of Katie’s cookies. Nash and Meg talked for over an hour. She came out glowing, gave me a hug, said I’d never have to buy another egg.
I loved Nash for what he was doing, but I also saw the toll it was taking on him. So obsessed had he become with uncovering the Revelators’ activities, he hadn’t noticed how much anger it was fomenting, how that anger was wearing him down. I had to remind him, and myself, that he’d been to hell and back. The buggers had been at him all his life. He was allowed some time out.
This little excursion up to the Wiregrass had been my idea.
‘Surely you can take a breather now?’ I’d argued yesterday. ‘The heat’s off. The villains are all in places where they can’t do us any harm.’
Which was true, as far as I knew. They’d all more or less survived our dust-up at the Thunderhead Estate, though for Kane Lochran it had been a close call. The ambulances had started arriving hot on the tails of the police. The Hawley brothers were currently in the remand centre, although Craig had spent most of the past few weeks in hospital and would be hobbling on a stick for the rest of his life. Guin Patmos was in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, where she’d been trying to convince her hard-bitten fellow inmates she was a reincarnation of John the Baptist. That had gone down well.
The Department of Public Prosecutions were confident the central figures would spend the rest of their lives behind bars. One of the murders they’d been charged with was that of Ronald Laws. A fresh examination of the evidence and the testimony of Ed Dougherty had convinced them that the Hawleys had decided their accounts clerk had become a liability and that his elimination presented an excellent opportunity to dump me a little deeper in the shit.
Dougherty, grasping at anything that might reduce his sentence, had been singing like a bellbird. Nash had been relentless with him, quickly recognising him as the weakest link in the chain. As a member of the public, Nash wasn’t allowed to participate in formal interviews, but he’d worked closely with those who were, Neville Wallace in particular, and he had enough inside knowledge of the cult to know when Dougherty was blame-shifting or bullshitting. The truth was coming out in trickles and torrents. Raph Cambric had been killed because he’d been asking awkward questions about his lover Rosa’s disappearance. Leon Glazier, seven years earlier, because he’d come across online evidence that the Revelators were back in business, had uncovered the Hawley brothers’ identities and was going to expose them. Dougherty had confessed that they’d blackmailed Neddy Kursk into carrying out the attack on me. The inspector had evidence that the tow-truck operator had been involved in the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamines and threatened him with arrest if he didn’t cooperate, but Kursk hadn’t needed much encouragement. My friend Starcy had come out of retirement for long enough to organise an operation that arrested most of Smash and Grab’s drivers, including Rev McQueen, with commercial quantities of narcotics in their trucks. Neville Wallace was revelling in it all – for him the exercise was like a game of blitz chess with whistles and party pies thrown in. He’d started looking at Nash like a teacher beaming at his star pupil.
Even Paul Burstill, the aspiring toxic waste king, was back where he belonged: behind bars, charged with a litany of offences that included fraud, tax evasion and illegal toxic waste dumping. The benevolent cousin turned out to be little more than a forged signature on a dotted line.
The psychiatrist, Damien Rush, had confessed to a pethidine addiction and was currently suspended from practice and under investigation by the police and the Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. The investigators believed he’d administered to Nash a drug called Levodopa, normally used for treating Parkinson’s but capable of causing psychotic episodes when incorrectly prescribed. The Patomoses had been worried that Leon Glazier was getting too close to their operation and was planning on reporting them to the authorities. He’d asked Nash to come up to Horse Thief Creek to get his advice on how to make the report, whom he could trust. The Revelators had been bugging his phone. For them, it was a case of two birds, one stone.
Lucinda and Bailey were in community care. The boy was travelling badly, still having trouble with anger management and mood swings. He’d been diagnosed with complex PTSD. Nash and I had been spending time with them at the farm, planned to have them come up and stay with us in a couple of days. I was pleased to see how well Bailey and Nash were getting on. They had a lot in common. They’d gone hunting rats together – with a recurve bow – at the Cambrics’ farm. They didn’t actually hit anything, but I’d heard their laughter echoing up the valley from Nash’s back porch. I nourished a hope that Nash would be able to give the boy the kind of support he’d never had from his own father, maybe turn his life around.
I glanced out the hide’s viewing window. The sky out there was a pristine blue, as deep and clear as one of Meg’s crystals. I didn’t even know they did blue down here in Victoria. I thought the state’s weather was a karmic conspiracy designed to dump the maximum amount of wind and rain possible onto the heads of anybody foolish enough to expose themselves to it.
I found a sarong and slipped into it. I began to climb down the ladder, but I’d only gone a couple of rungs when I decided the morning wasn’t quite as balmy as it looked from the hide. Spring had arrived, but it had yet to shake the snow from its boots. I went back to the hide and climbed into the cargo pants and woolly jumper Nash had eased me out of last night. Then, as an afterthought, I grabbed a blanket from the swag. Warm now, I made another descent.
I needed a drink, so I walked down to the creek, thirty metres away. I moved quietly, always a wise way to travel in this country. When I reached the water’s edge I noticed a small deer with the same idea. It was sipping at the tumbling stream, oblivious. Then it raised its head and saw me. It sprang into the air, then crumbled into a bundle of skitters and bounded away. I listened for a moment to it crashing through the undergrowth then knelt and drank from the creek through cupped hands. Honeyeaters, fairy martins and firefinches came down to join me. Whirligig beetles and water boatmen looked up through the water with interest. A distant kookaburra call purled through rivers of silver.
There was a boot print in the burned earth on the other side of the creek and another in the grass beyond it. They weren’t hard to follow: up through the ferns and acacias, the stringybarks and box greys. The first rush of spring was in full bloom: I saw spider and leopard orchids, pink bells, mosquito orchids, running postman. The flowers shone through the scrub like tiny medallions of colour and complexity in a field of grey–green. There was a scent of honey and mint in the air. I tore a strip of bark from a tree and took pleasure in its hieroglyphs and scribbled shadows, the worm trails under the surface, the rich, loamy smells that wafted up.
I followed the prints for maybe a hundred metres up the slope, then came across their maker perched on a boulder, looking out over the valley. He was wearing short pants and big boots, a blue lumber jacket and a week’s worth of beard.
The three-legged hound beside Nash wagged his tail when he saw me.
Nash had the binoculars in his hands. Studying the valley below? No, I followed the angle of the glasses and guessed that he’d chosen this location because it offered a better view of the nest in the mountain ash.
‘Morning,’ I called.
He turned around and smiled a greeting.
‘Is Pauli at home?’
‘Nope,’ he replied, then put out a hand and helped me scramble up onto the boulder.
I looked at the nest. It was a hundred metres away, but I thought I detected movement.
‘You sure?’ I asked. ‘I saw something.’
‘That’s his mate,’ he replied. ‘Old Pauli’s up there.’
He pointed at the sky.
It took me a few seconds to find him. No wonder Nash needed the binoculars. Many hundreds of metres over us was a black speck riding on high thermals, carving vast circles out of rising air.
Nash handed me the glasses and I watched, entranced, as the circles got lower. The eagle soon reached a point where I could distinguish the individual features of its flight dynamics: the extended wings, the shallow angle of its tail feathers, the subtle adjustments it made in response to unseen turbulence. It banked in front of us, displaying a bronzed belly and chest, revelling in the play of light and wind on its wings, the flashes of morning gold in its eyes. It launched one last swooping arc, head down, floating over a clear patch on the southern slope. Deep into the curve, it lifted lightly, appeared to hang motionless for a moment.
Then it plummeted.
The eagle was transformed into a missile, wings back, feet forward, body barrelling down. There was a storm of talon and beak and beating wings, then it disappeared in the grass. It reappeared a moment later, completed a series of long, wing-flapping hops during which it finished off its prey. Finally the bird lifted out of the undergrowth, a small rabbit in its talons. It soared upwards, wings working hard to generate lift. When it reached the upper level of the mountain ash it gave a final flourish and gently descended into the nest. There was a flurry of activity, then the pair settled down to enjoy their breakfast.
Nash studied them for a time then glanced down at something in his hand. I took a closer look. It was the little piece of pottery, the golden wattle I’d given him. He caught my eye and smiled. My father’s thoughts on carbon came to mind: how it quickens and revivifies, how it holds the key to the new life rising out of the ashes. How it’s elusive, eternal, impossible to destroy. There was something of that element in this man.
‘Maybe it’s time I cut myself loose,’ he said.
‘From what?’
‘The past. World’s full of people who’ve liberated themselves from some bloody thing or other. Think I’ll join them.’ He laughed. ‘Can’t be that hard, can it?’
Just for a moment I caught a glimpse of the thirteen-year-old boy who’d taken a stand and confronted the dark forces that had shaped his existence. Nash had been through the fires of every imaginable hell and come out stronger for it.
I lifted the blanket and wrapped it round us both. Took pleasure in his warmth.
‘Amen to that.’