When he signed off, I sat there for a few more minutes, thinking. Somewhere in the mass of information I was gathering was the golden thread that tied it all together, but for the life of me, I couldn’t see it. I considered a number of keys for cracking the code but in the end could come up with only one: Nash. How did he get involved? How was he connected to the Hawleys? I returned to my phone, entered his and the Hawleys’ names into the search bar and skimmed the results. There were items about Nash’s trial and conviction, his sentence, his incarceration. I read his doctor’s opinion, the comments of his senior officers. I found a good deal about Nash, but nothing that intersected with the Hawleys.
Until I opened an article from The Age by the crime reporter, John Silvester, a man with a sharp eye for the eccentricities of human behaviour. His piece mentioned that Nash had been raised in a cult led by John Patmos. That much I knew, but then Silvester went on to say that Patmos was a bullshit stage name. The original John of Patmos was the early Christian author of the Book of Revelation, the playbook of charlatans and religious grifters for millennia. The man who came to be known as the Revelator had been born Claude Hawley, in 1930s Marysville. ‘No surprise that he changed it,’ Silvester wrote. ‘Claude Hawley was hardly a name to galvanize the masses.’
Hawley’s name change came in the fifties, around the time he took to calling himself a pastor and married Guin Wilson. Guin’s father was a fire-breathing church elder-cum-cattle farmer, her mother a woman who spoke to ghosts in the street and who spent the latter half of her life in the state asylum.
I remembered Starcy telling me there’d been a couple of offspring. I’d met them both now: George and Craig. They were staging a comeback, taking over the family business, stripped of the religiosity bullshit.
I felt that old, familiar stirring in my brain as the fragments flew together, driven by some centripetal force. That force was something I’d never understood, something I’d been born with.
What was going on? Various scenarios ran through my head. Were the brothers staging a comeback, taking over the family business, stripped of its bullshit religiosity? Maybe. What had Carina said about Leon Glazier? He was a hacker with a fascination for cults. Had he discovered that the Revelators were back in town? That they’d never gone away, they’d just gone underground. That they’d resuscitated a family-owned company and gone back to all the business was really ever about: power and wealth. Whatever Leon had found, it was enough to get him killed and Nash framed. They’d neither forgotten nor forgiven the thirteen-year-old boy who brought their fiefdom down about their ears. These people were astonishing: so efficient, so ruthless. They never made a move without covering their tracks, making allowances for cock-ups and setbacks, deflecting blame, diverting the authorities. And they moved fast. I remembered Starcy’s story of how the Patmoses had fled the country at a moment’s notice.
I had to move faster. Maybe it was too late. Nash could already be in a shallow grave down some lonely track.
A light shower – a foretaste of the imminent storm – drifted in as I made my way down the tree. I crawled around the eagle’s nest, took a deep breath and swung over into the wattle. I crashed through the branches for a metre or two, but managed to get a handhold and resumed my descent at a safer pace. A few minutes later I was back on solid ground.
I returned to my car then set out in the direction of Satellite.
I pulled over when I reached Craig Hawley’s property. The front gate was locked and there were no signs of life: no lights, no movement, no vehicles to be seen. That didn’t mean much, of course. They were a quiet family, any cars could be in the garage, any lights round the back. The horses moved about the front paddock, the white one skittish in the wind.
I climbed over the gate and walked up the drive. I knocked on the door, rang the bell. No response. Should I risk a surreptitious little poke around? Why not? But a quick search of the area surrounding the house revealed nothing of interest: a gravelled yard, an in-ground pool, a high-quality equestrian arena. All quiet. Nobody home.
As I walked back to the gate, I remembered Craig Hawley’s comment the night I dropped into his house. He’d said he had family in the area.
My mind slipped back to my moment of epiphany in the mountain ash: the outcrop on the opposite side of the Wiregrass Valley.
Who else had said something about a land formation like that recently? My father. He’d been fossicking about the hills, had come across an outcrop on a spur that sparked his curiosity. When he asked permission from the owners to enter the property – he described a long, ominous house, like a fortress – they told him to sod off, set the dogs onto him.
Why were they so protective of that patch of bush?
I returned to the car, pulled out my map and scoured the locality, trying to pinpoint the formation I’d seen from the tree. Eventually I came across a geological feature that tallied with Dad’s description. It was called Thunderhead Rock, and it was twenty kays to the north, about a kilometre in from the road.
I started the car and drove up towards the Wiregrass. Was this wise? Of course not. If I had any sense, or if there was any justice in the world, I’d be kicking the doors down with a Critical Incident Response Team at my back. But I’ve never had much sense, and justice is as rare as bunyip shit. I certainly didn’t have enough evidence for a search warrant. The other thing I didn’t have was time. I was racing against a clock I couldn’t see.
I didn’t know what had happened to Nash, but I was going to have to find out on my own. Quickly.