They’d sat for a while by the side of the house, backs up against the wall beside the loose panel and grass prickling the backs of their legs. Making the most of the thin slice of shade while Raco ran through the facts. He started with the slightly detached air of someone who’d said it all before.
‘It was two weeks ago today,’ he said, fanning himself loosely with the crinkled porn mag. ‘A courier with a delivery found Karen and made the emergency call. That came in at about 5.40 pm.’
‘To you?’
‘And Clyde and the local GP. The dispatcher notifies us all. GP was closest so he was first on the scene. Dr Patrick Leigh. You know him?’
Falk shook his head.
‘Anyway, he was first, then I turn up a couple of minutes later. I pull up and the door’s open and the doc’s crouched over Karen in the hall, checking her vitals or whatever.’ Raco paused for a long moment, staring out at the tree line with an unfocused gaze. ‘I’d never met her, didn’t even know who she was then, but he knew her. Had her blood all over his hands. And he’s yelling, kind of screaming at me, you know: “She’s got kids, there might be kids.” So –’
Raco sighed, and flipped open Luke’s aged pack of cigarettes. He put one between his lips and offered the pack to Falk, who surprised himself by taking one. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smoked. It might easily have been in this very same spot with his late best friend next to him. For whatever reason, taking one now felt right. He leaned in as Raco lit the ends. Falk took a drag and immediately remembered why he’d kicked the habit easily. But as he breathed deep and the smell of the tobacco mingled with the tang of the eucalyptus trees, the heady sensation of being sixteen again hit him like the rush of nicotine.
‘So anyway,’ Raco picked up. His voice was quieter now. ‘The doc’s yelling and I bolt off through the house. No idea who’s in there, what I’m going to find. If there’s someone about to step round a door with a shotgun. I want to call out to the kids but I realise I don’t even know their names. So I’m yelling, “Police. It’s OK, come out, you’re safe,” or something, but I don’t even know if it’s true.’ He took a long drag, remembering.
‘And then I hear this crying – this sort of wailing – so I follow it, not knowing what’s waiting for me. And I go into the nursery and I see that little girl in her cot, screaming blue murder, and honestly, I’ve never been so glad to see a kid bawling her eyes out in all my life.’
Raco blew a plume of smoke into the air.
‘’Cause she was fine,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe it. She was scared, obviously, but not hurt that I could see. And I remember thinking at that moment that it might all still be OK. Yes, it was sad about the mum, tragic. But thank God, at least the kids were OK. But then I look across the hall and a door’s ajar.’
He carefully ground his cigarette butt into the dirt, not looking at Falk. Falk felt a cold dread seep through him, knowing what was to come.
‘And I can see it’s another kid’s room. All blue paint and car posters, you know? Boy’s room. And there’s no sound coming from that one. So I go across the hall and push open the door and then it definitely wasn’t OK at all.’ He paused. ‘That room was like a scene from hell. That room was the worst thing I have ever seen.’
They sat in silence until Raco cleared his throat.
‘Come on,’ he said, pulling himself to his feet, shaking his arms as if shedding the memory. Falk stood and followed him towards the front of the house.
‘The response teams arrived from Clyde shortly after that,’ Raco went on as they walked. ‘Police, paramedics. It was nearly half past six by the time they got there. We’d searched the rest of the house and there’s no-one else there, thank Christ, so everyone was desperately trying to phone Luke Hadler. At first people are worried, you know, how are we supposed to break this to him? But then there’s still no answer and his car’s not there and he hasn’t come home, and all of a sudden you could feel the mood start to shift.’
‘What was Luke supposed to have been doing then?’
‘A couple of the search and rescue volunteers, mates of his, knew he’d been helping a friend cull rabbits on his property that arvo. A guy called Jamie Sullivan. Someone phoned and Sullivan confirmed it, but said Luke had left his farm a couple of hours earlier by that point.’
They’d reached the front door and Raco pulled out a set of keys.
‘When there was still no sign of Luke, and no answer on his phone, we called some more of the search and rescue team in. Paired them up with officers, sent them out looking. It was a terrible couple of hours. We had unarmed searchers tramping through paddocks and bushland, not sure what they would find. Luke dead? Alive? No idea what kind of state he’d be in. We were all panicking we’d find him holed up somewhere with a gun and a death wish. In the end one of the search guys stumbled across his ute more by luck than anything. Parked up in some crappy clearing about three kilometres away. There was no need to worry after all. Luke was dead in the back, missing most of his face. His own gun, licensed, registered, completely legit, still in his hand.’
Raco unlocked the farmhouse door and pushed it open.
‘So it seemed like that was that. Pretty much done and dusted. This –’ he stepped aside so Falk could see right down the long hallway, ‘– is where it starts to get strange.’
The entrance hall was muggy and stank of bleach. A side table piled with household clutter of bills and pens sat askew against a far wall, shoved from its original position. The tiled floor was ominously clean. The entire hallway had been scrubbed down to the original grout.
‘The industrial cleaners’ve been through, so there aren’t any nasty surprises,’ Raco said. ‘They couldn’t save the carpet in the kid’s bedroom. Not that you’d want to.’
Family photos covered the walls. The frozen poses looked somehow familiar and Falk realised he’d seen most of them at the funeral. The whole scene felt like a grotesque parody of the warm family home he’d known.
‘Karen’s body was found right here in the hallway,’ Raco said. ‘The door was open so the courier saw her straight away.’
‘Was she running for the door?’ Falk tried to imagine Luke chasing his own wife through their own house.
‘No, that’s just it. She was answering it. Shot by whoever was standing on the doorstep. You can tell from the position of the body. But tell me this, when you come home at night, does your wife answer the door to you?’
‘I’m not married,’ Falk said.
‘Well, I am. And call me liberated, but I’ve got a key to my own house.’
Falk considered. ‘Catch her by surprise, maybe?’ he said, playing out the scenario in his mind.
‘Why bother? Dad comes home waving a loaded shotgun, I reckon they’d still be pretty bloody surprised. He’s got them both inside the house. Knows the layout. Too easy.’
Falk positioned himself inside the hall and opened and closed the door a few times. Open, the doorway was a rectangle of blinding light compared with the dimness of the hall. He imagined Karen answering the knock, a little distracted maybe, perhaps annoyed by the interruption. Blinking away the brightness for the crucial second it took her killer to raise a gun.
‘Just strikes me as odd,’ Raco said. ‘Shooting her in the doorway. All it did was give that poor kid a chance to piss his pants and bolt, not necessarily in that order.’
Raco looked past Falk. ‘Which brings me to my next point,’ he said. ‘When you’re ready.’
Falk nodded and followed him down the bowels of the hall.
As Raco snapped on the light in the small blue bedroom, Falk’s first dizzy impression was that someone was renovating. A child’s bed had been shoved against the far wall at an angle, stripped back to the mattress. Toys were piled in boxes and stacked haphazardly beneath posters of football players and Disney characters. The carpet had been ripped out, exposing untreated floorboards.
Falk’s boots left patterns in a layer of sawdust. The boards in one corner had been heavily sanded. A stain still remained. Raco lingered by the doorway.
‘Still difficult for me to be in here,’ he said with a shrug.
This had once been a nice bedroom, Falk knew. Twenty years ago it had been Luke’s own. Falk had slept there himself many times. Whispering after lights out. Holding his breath and stifling giggles when Barb Hadler called through to them to shut up and go to sleep. Wrapped warm in a sleeping bag, not far from those floorboards with their awful stain. This room had been a good space. Now, like the hall, it stank of bleach.
‘Can we open the window?’
‘Better not,’ Raco said. ‘Got to keep the blinds down. Caught a couple of kids trying to take photos soon after it happened.’
Raco pulled out his tablet computer and tapped it a few times. He handed it to Falk. On the screen was a photo gallery.
‘The little boy’s body’s been removed,’ Raco said. ‘But you can see how the room was found.’
In the photos, the blinds were wide open, spilling light onto a horrendous scene below. The wardrobe doors were flung wide open and the clothes had been roughly pushed aside. A large wicker toy box was overturned. On the bed, a spaceship duvet was rucked up on one side as though tossed back to check what was under it. The carpet was mostly beige, except for the one corner where a rich red-black pool seeped out from behind a large upended laundry basket.
For a moment Falk tried to imagine Billy Hadler’s last moments. Huddled behind the laundry basket, hot urine dribbling down his leg as he tried to silence ragged breaths.
‘You got kids?’ Raco asked.
Falk shook his head. ‘You?’
‘One on the way. A little girl.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘We’ve got an army of nieces and nephews, though. Not here, back home in South Australia. A few around Billy’s age, couple a bit younger,’ Raco said, taking back the tablet and scrolling through the photos. ‘And the thing is, my brothers know every one of their kids’ hiding places. You send them blindfolded into their kids’ bedrooms, and they could find them in two seconds.’
He tapped the screen.
‘Every possible way I look at these photos, it looks like a search,’ Raco said. ‘Someone who didn’t know Billy’s hiding spots methodically working his way through. Is he in the cupboard? No. Under the bed? No. It’s like the kid was hunted down.’
Falk stared hard at the dark smudge that had once been Billy Hadler.
‘Show me where you found Charlotte.’
The nursery across the hall was decorated in yellow. A musical mobile dangled from the ceiling above an empty space.
‘Gerry and Barb took the cot,’ Raco explained.
Falk looked around the room. It felt so different from the others. Furniture and carpet still intact. No acrid bleach stink in there. It had the feel of a sanctuary, untouched by the horror that had unfolded outside the door.
‘Why didn’t Luke kill Charlotte?’ Falk said.
‘The popular money’s on conscience and guilt kicking in.’
Falk walked out, back across the hall to Billy’s bedroom. He stood at the bloodstain in the corner, turned 180 degrees and strode back across the hall into Charlotte’s room.
‘Eight steps,’ Falk said. ‘But I’m pretty tall. So we’ll call it nine for most people. Nine steps from Billy’s body to where Charlotte was lying like a sitting duck. And Luke would’ve had the adrenaline going, blood pumping, red mist, the works. So, nine steps. The question is, is that enough time for a total change of heart?’
‘Doesn’t sound like enough to me.’
Falk thought about the man he’d known. What had once been a clear picture was now distorted and fuzzy.
‘Did you ever meet Luke?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘He could change his mood like flipping a coin. Nine steps could be eight more than he needed.’
But for the first time since he’d returned to Kiewarra, Falk felt a pinprick of genuine doubt.
‘It’s supposed to be a statement, though, isn’t it? Something like this. It’s personal. He murdered his entire family. That’s what you want people to say. Luke’s wife of seven years is bleeding out on the hall floor and he’s spent – what, two minutes? Three? – turning the bedroom upside down to murder his own son. He’s planning to kill himself when he’s finished. So if it was Luke –’ he hesitated slightly on the word if, ‘– why does his daughter get to live?’
They stood for a moment, both looking at the mobile hanging still and silent above the empty cot space. Why slaughter a whole family bar the baby? Falk turned it back and forth in his mind until he could think of a few reasons, but only one good one.
‘Maybe whoever was here that day didn’t kill the baby because they just didn’t need to kill the baby,’ Falk said finally. ‘Nothing personal about it. Doesn’t matter who you are, thirteen-month-olds don’t make good witnesses.’