The Hadlers’ farm looked different as Falk pulled up. The tattered yellow crime scene tape had been removed from the front door. On either side, the curtains and blinds were pulled wide and every window was propped ajar.
The mid-morning sun was already fierce and Falk reached for his hat as he stepped out of the car. He tucked the box of Karen’s and Billy’s school things under his arm and walked up the path. The front door was open. Inside, the smell of bleach had eased a little.
Falk found Barb crying in the master bedroom. She was perched on the edge of Luke and Karen’s queen-size bed, the contents of a drawer upended onto the pale green duvet. Balled-up socks and crumpled boxer shorts mingled with loose coins and pen lids. Tears slid from Barb’s cheeks onto a piece of coloured paper in her lap.
She jumped when Falk knocked gently, and as he went to her he could see she was holding a handmade Father’s Day card. She wiped her face on her sleeve and flapped the card in Falk’s direction.
‘No secret’s safe from a good clean-out, is it? Turns out Billy was as bad at spelling as his father.’
She tried to laugh but her voice broke. Falk felt her shoulders heave as he sat down and put his arm around her. The room was stiflingly hot as sweltering air seeped in through the open windows. He didn’t say anything. Whatever the windows were letting out of that house was more important than anything they could let in.
‘Gerry asked me to come by,’ Falk said when Barb’s sobs subsided a little. She sniffed.
‘Yes, love. He said. He’s clearing out the big barn, I think.’
‘Did he say what it was about?’ Falk said, wondering when, if ever, Gerry would see fit to confide in his wife. Barb shook her head.
‘No. Maybe he wants to give you something of Luke’s. I don’t know. It was his idea to do this clear-out in the first place. He says it’s time we faced it.’
The final sentence was almost lost as she picked up a pair of Luke’s socks and dissolved into fresh tears.
‘I’ve been trying to think if there’s anything Charlotte might like. She’s pining so badly.’ Barb’s voice was muffled behind a tissue. ‘Nothing we do seems to help her. We’ve left her with a sitter, but Gerry actually suggested bringing her with us. See if being around her old things calmed her. There’s no way I’m allowing that, I told him. There’s no way I’m bringing her back to this house after what happened here.’
Falk rubbed Barb’s back. He glanced around the bedroom while she cried. Apart from a layer of dust, it was neat and clean. Karen had tried to keep the clutter under control, but there were enough personal touches to make the room inviting.
Framed baby photos stood on top of a chest of drawers that looked of good quality but was probably second- or even third-hand. Any money for decorating had clearly been channelled towards the children’s rooms. Through a gap in the wardrobe, Falk could see rows of clothes suspended on plastic hangers. On the left, women’s plain fitted tops hung next to blouses, work trousers, the odd summer dress. Luke’s jeans and t-shirts were crammed with less thought on the right.
Both sides of the bed appeared to have been slept in regularly. Karen’s bedside table had a toy robot, a tub of night cream and a pair of reading glasses on top of a pile of books. A phone charger was plugged in on Luke’s side, next to a dirty coffee cup, hand painted, with the word ‘Daddy’ spelled out in spidery letters. The pillowcases still had the shadows of dents in them. Whatever Luke Hadler had been doing in the days before he and his family died, Falk thought, it hadn’t been sleeping on the couch. This was definitely a room for two.
An image of Falk’s own bedroom flashed into his mind. He mostly slept in the middle of the bed these days. His bedspread was the same navy blue he’d had as a teenager. No-one who had seen it in the past couple of years had got comfortable enough to suggest something more gender-neutral. The cleaning service that came to his flat twice a month often struggled to find enough to do, he knew. He didn’t hoard, he didn’t keep much for sentimental reasons and he’d made do with whatever furniture he’d been left with three years earlier, when his two-person flat had become home to just one.
‘You’re a closed book,’ she’d said one final time before she’d left. She’d said it a lot over the two years they’d been together. First intrigued, then concerned, finally accusing. Why couldn’t he let her in? Why wouldn’t he let her in? Did he not trust her? Or did he not love her enough? His response to that question hadn’t come fast enough, he’d realised too late. A fraction of a moment’s silence had been long enough for both of them to hear the death knell. Since then Falk’s own bedside table traditionally held nothing more than books, an alarm clock and, occasionally, an aging box of condoms.
Barb sniffed loudly, bringing him back into the room. Falk took the Father’s Day card from her lap and looked around in vain for somewhere suitable to put it.
‘See. That’s exactly the problem,’ Barb said, her red eyes watching him. ‘What on earth am I supposed to do with all their things? There’s so much and there’s nowhere to put anything. I can’t fit it all in our house, but I can hardly give everything away like none of it matters –’
Her voice was high-pitched as she started snatching up odd items within reach and clutching them to her chest. Underpants from the bed, the toy robot, Karen’s glasses. She picked up the books from the bedside table and swore loudly. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, and these are bloody library books. How overdue are these going to be?’ She turned to Falk, red-faced and angry.
‘No-one tells you this is how it’s going to be, do they? Oh yes, they’re all so sorry for your loss, all so keen to pop round and get the gossip when it happens, but no-one mentions having to go through your dead son’s drawers and return their library books, do they? No-one tells you how to cope with that.’
With a flash of guilt, Falk pictured the extra box of Karen’s and Billy’s belongings he’d left outside the bedroom door. He plucked the books from Barb’s hands, put them under his arm and steered her firmly out of the bedroom.
‘I can look after that for you. Let’s just –’ He ushered her straight past Billy’s room and emerged with some relief into the bright kitchen. He guided Barb to a stool. ‘Let’s get you a cup of tea,’ he finished, pulling open the nearest cupboards. He hadn’t the slightest idea what he might find there, but even crime scene kitchens usually had mugs.
Barb watched him for a minute, then blew her nose and climbed off the stool. She patted his arm.
‘Let me, I know where everything is.’
In the end they had to settle for instant coffee, black. The fridge hadn’t been emptied in over two weeks.
‘I never thanked you, Aaron,’ Barb said, as they waited for the kettle to boil. ‘For helping us. Opening an investigation into what happened.’
‘Barb, I haven’t done anything like that,’ Falk said. ‘You understand that what I’m doing with Sergeant Raco is off the record, don’t you? We’re just asking a couple of questions. Nothing official.’
‘Oh yes. Of course, I completely understand that,’ she said in such a way that he could tell she didn’t. ‘But you’ve got people wondering. That makes all the difference. It’s stirred things up.’
An image of Ellie flashed through Falk’s mind, and he hoped Barb wouldn’t come to regret that.
‘Luke was always so grateful to have you as a friend,’ she said as she poured boiling water into three mugs.
‘Thank you,’ he said simply, but Barb looked up at something in his tone.
‘He was,’ she insisted. ‘I know he wasn’t good at saying it, but he needed someone like you in his life. Someone calm, with a sensible head on their shoulders. I always thought that’s partly what attracted Luke to Karen. He saw the same sort of qualities in her.’ She automatically opened the right drawer and found a spoon. ‘Did you ever meet Karen in the end?’
Falk shook his head.
‘It’s a shame, I think you really would have liked her. She reminds – reminded – me of you in a lot of ways. I think sometimes she worried that she was a tiny bit . . . I don’t know, dull, maybe. That she was the only thing standing between Luke and his big ideas. But she wasn’t. She was steady, and really bright, that girl. And she was exactly what he needed. She kept my son grounded. You both did.’ Barb looked at Falk for a long moment, her head cocked to the side a little sadly. ‘You should have come back for their wedding. Or any time. We missed you.’
‘I –’ He started to say he’d had to work, but something in her expression stopped the words on his lips. ‘Honestly, I didn’t feel like I’d be welcome.’
Barb Hadler took two large steps across the kitchen that had once been hers, reached out her hands and pulled Falk into her arms. She held him firmly until he felt a tension buried deep inside him start to waver.
‘You, Aaron, are always welcome in my family,’ Barb said. ‘Don’t ever let yourself think otherwise.’ She pulled away and for a moment she was the Barb Hadler of old. She placed two steaming mugs of coffee in his hands, tucked the library books under his arm and nodded to the back door with a matriarchal glint in her eye.
‘Let’s take these out to my husband, so I can tell him that if he wants this house cleared he can stop hiding in the barn and do it himself.’
Falk followed Barb out of the back door and into the blinding sunlight. He narrowly avoided sloshing coffee on his wrist as he sidestepped an abandoned toy cricket bat.
Is this what his own life could have been like? Falk wondered suddenly. Kids’ cricket bats and coffee in farmhouse kitchens? He tried to imagine it. Working side by side with his dad in the open air, waiting for the moment when his old man would shake his hand and pass him the reins. Spending Saturday nights in the Fleece with Luke, eyeing up the mostly unchanged pool of talent until one day his eye stopped wandering. A brisk but beautiful country wedding, the first baby arriving nine months later. The second a year after that. The fatherhood role wouldn’t come entirely naturally to him, he knew, but he would make the effort. They say it’s different with your own.
His children would be friends with Luke’s son, inevitably. They’d all have to take their chances at that shambolic country school, yes, but they would also have acres and acres of land where they could stretch their legs.
Days working on the land would be long, of course, but the nights at home would be warm and full of noise and chaos and laughter. Love. There would always be someone waiting for him with the light on. Who could that have been? he thought. Ellie?
Straight away, the image started to blur and fade. If she’d lived. If he’d stayed. If everything was different. The idea was a complete fantasy. There were too many lost chances for that vision to have played out.
Falk had chosen his life in Melbourne. And he was happy with it, he thought. He liked being able to walk down the street, surrounded by people but without a single soul recognising him. He enjoyed work that taxed his brain rather than his back.
Life was give and take. His flat may be quiet and empty when he returned at the end of each day, but he wasn’t watched by curious eyes that knew every last thing about him. His neighbours didn’t judge him, or harass him and spread rumours about his family. They didn’t leave animal carcasses on his doorstep. They left him alone.
He knew he had a habit of keeping people at arm’s length, collecting acquaintances rather than friends. But all the better should one of them ever again float bloated and broken to the surface of a river, a stone’s throw from his family home. And yes, he battled the daily commute to work, and spent a lot of his days under fluorescent office lights, but at least his livelihood didn’t hang by a thread on the whim of a weather pattern. At least he wasn’t driven to such fear and despair by the blank skies that there was even a chance the wrong end of a gun might look like the right answer.
Luke Hadler may have had a light on waiting for him when he came home, but something else from this wretched, desperate community had seeped through that front door and into his home. And it had been rotten and thick and black enough to extinguish that light forever.
Falk’s mood was low as they reached Gerry, who was leaning on a broom outside one of the barns. He looked up in surprise as they approached, and cast a nervous glance towards his wife.
‘I didn’t know you’d arrived,’ he said as Falk handed him one of the mugs.
‘He’s been inside helping me,’ Barb said.
‘Right. Thanks.’ Gerry sounded uncertain.
‘There’s still plenty to do, when you’ve finished messing around out here.’ Barb gave her husband a small smile. ‘It looks like you’ve made even less progress than I have.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s harder being here than I realised.’ Gerry turned to Falk. ‘I thought it was time we came and faced it. Confronted things.’ He looked towards the house. ‘Listen, is there anything in there you’d like? Photos or anything? You’d be welcome.’
Falk couldn’t imagine wanting to take a single souvenir from that terrible house into his own life. He shook his head.
‘I’m good, thanks Gerry.’
He took a large gulp of coffee, swallowing so rapidly he nearly choked. He felt desperate to get away from this place. He wished Barb would leave so he could speak to Gerry alone.
Instead they all drank in silence, watching the horizon. In the distance, Falk could make out Mal Deacon’s farm sitting squat and ugly on the hillside. He remembered the barman’s comment about Deacon’s property going to his nephew.
‘What will you do with this place?’ Falk asked. Gerry and Barb looked at each other.
‘We haven’t really decided,’ Gerry said. ‘We’ll have to sell it, I suppose. If we can. Put the money in a trust for Charlotte. We might have to bulldoze the house though, sell it as land only.’ Barb made a small tutting sound and Gerry looked at her.
‘Yeah, I know love.’ A defeated note had crept into his voice. ‘But I can’t see anyone round here wanting to live in it after all this, can you? And it’s not like outsiders are lining up to move here.’
‘Have Deacon or Dow mentioned anything about joining forces?’ Falk said. ‘Parcelling up both properties for Asian investors?’
Barb turned to him, her face a picture of disgust. ‘We wouldn’t sell those two a five-dollar note for ten bucks, let alone team up with them. Would we, Gerry?’
Her husband shook his head, but Falk suspected he had a more realistic view of the state of the Kiewarra property market.
‘We’ve had nothing but thirty years of grief from that side of the fence,’ Barb went on, her voice a little louder. ‘We’re not about to help him now. Mal used to sneak out in the night and move the boundaries, did you know that? Like we’d be too stupid to notice. Helped himself to anything he could find that wasn’t nailed down. I know it was him who ran over Luke’s dog all those years ago, no matter how much he denied it. Do you remember that?’
Falk nodded. Luke had loved that dog. He’d been fourteen and had cried openly as he’d cradled it by the roadside.
‘And he always had a houseful of town blokes hanging round until all hours when he was younger, didn’t he, Gerry? Drinking and tearing up and down the roads in their trucks. Blasting their music when he knew we had to be up at the crack of dawn to keep the farm going.’
‘That was a while ago now, love,’ Gerry said, and Barb turned on him.
‘Are you defending him?’
‘No. God, no. I’m just stating a fact. He’s not been able to get up to much like that for a while, has he? You know that.’
Falk thought about his strange encounter with Deacon at the pub.
‘Sounds like he has some sort of dementia.’
Barb snorted. ‘Is that what they’re calling it? A miserable lifetime of bad deeds catching up with the drunken bastard, if you ask me.’
She took a sip of coffee and looked up at Deacon’s land. When she spoke again Falk could hear the regret.
‘It was Ellie I felt most sorry for. At least we could shut the door on him, but the poor girl had to live with it. I think he did care for her in his own way, but he was so defensive. Remember the upper paddock, Gerry?’
‘We couldn’t prove that was him.’
‘No, but it was. What else could it have been?’ Barb turned to Falk. ‘It was when you kids were about eleven, not long after Ellie’s mum did a runner – not that I blame her. The little girl was forlorn, wasn’t she, Gerry? She was so thin, she wasn’t eating properly. And she had this look in her eyes. Like it was the end of the world. Eventually I went up there to tell Mal that she wasn’t right and he needed to do something, or she’d be making herself sick with all that worry.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Well, he showed me the door before I could barely get the words out, as you’d expect. But then a week later our upper paddock died. No warning, nothing. We did some tests and the soil acidity was all wrong.’
Gerry sighed. ‘Yeah. It can happen, but –’
‘But it happens a lot easier if your neighbour dumps a round of chemicals on it,’ Barb said. ‘It cost us thousands that year. We struggled to keep afloat. And it never properly recovered.’
Falk remembered that paddock, and he remembered the tense conversations around the Hadlers’ dinner table that year.
‘Why does he always get away with it?’ he asked.
‘There was no proof it was him,’ Gerry said again. ‘But –’ He held up a hand as Barb went to interrupt. ‘But you know what it’s like here, mate. It takes a lot for people to be willing to stand up and rock the boat. It was the same then as it is now. We all needed each other to get by. Mal Deacon did business with a lot of us and we all did business with him. And he collected favours, let the odd payment slide so he had a hold over people. If you fell out with Deacon, it wasn’t only him you fell out with. Suddenly doing business and having a peaceful beer in your own town become a hell of a lot harder. Life was already hard enough.’
Barb stared at him.
‘The girl was so unhappy she drowned herself, Gerry.’ She gathered their empty mugs together with a clash of ceramic. ‘Stuff the business and the beer. We should all have done more. I’ll see you inside. There are a thousand jobs waiting when you’re ready.’
She turned and stalked off towards the house, wiping her face with her sleeve as she went.
‘She’s right,’ Gerry said, watching her go. ‘Whatever happened, Ellie deserved far better.’ He turned to Falk, his eyes drained of emotion. Like he’d burned through a lifetime’s supply in the past few weeks. ‘Thanks for sticking around. We heard you’d been asking questions about Luke.’
‘Started to.’
‘Can I ask what you think? Did Luke kill Karen and Billy?’
‘I think,’ Falk said carefully, ‘there is a possibility he didn’t.’
‘Jesus, are you sure?’
‘No. I said possibility.’
‘But you do think someone else might be involved.’
‘Maybe, yes.’
‘Is it connected with what happened with Ellie?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Gerry.’
‘But maybe?’
‘Maybe.’
A silence. ‘Christ. Listen, there’s something I should have told you from the start.’
Gerry Hadler was hot but not unhappy about it. He tapped a light rhythm on the steering wheel, whistling to himself. The evening sun warmed his forearm through the window as he drove along the empty road. They’d had a solid rainfall that year, and out on the farm these days he liked what he was seeing.
Gerry glanced at the bottle of sparkling wine lying on the passenger seat. He’d popped into town to pick up some supplies and had spontaneously nipped into the bottle shop. He was taking it home to surprise Barb, who he hoped at this moment was making her Friday night lamb casserole. Gerry turned on the radio. It was a song he didn’t recognise, but it had a deep jazz beat he liked. He nodded his head in time, and pressed his foot to the brake as a crossroad appeared ahead.
‘I knew you and Luke were lying about your alibis for the day Ellie Deacon died.’ Gerry’s voice was now so quiet Falk had to strain to hear it. ‘The thing is, I think someone else knew it too.’
Gerry was still twenty metres from the crossroads when the familiar figure flashed across on a bike. His son’s head was down and he was pedalling furiously. From that distance, Luke’s hair looked slicked back and shiny in the low sunlight. It was a change from his usually floppy style, Gerry noticed vaguely. It didn’t really suit him.
Luke sped through the crossroads without as much as a glance in either direction. Gerry tutted under his breath. He’d have to have a word with that boy. Fair enough, the roads were usually empty, but that didn’t automatically mean it was safe. Behaving like that, Luke would get himself killed.
‘He was coming from the south, from the direction of the river. Nowhere near the paddocks you boys said you were in. You weren’t with him. He didn’t have his shotgun.’
‘The river’s not the only thing to the south,’ Falk said. ‘There are farms, for one. The bike trails for another.’
Gerry shook his head. ‘Luke hadn’t been on any bike trail. He was wearing that grey shirt he loved at the time. You know, that awful shiny button-down one he always saved for best. My impression was that he looked pretty fancy that afternoon. Like he was dressed for a date or something. His hair was slicked back. I told myself at the time he was trying a new style.’ Gerry put his hand over his eyes for a long moment. ‘But I always knew his hair was wet.’
Luke was well through the crossroads by the time Gerry pulled up. As if to prove a point, Gerry brought his truck to a complete stop and checked both ways. To the right, his son’s shadowy figure grew smaller. To the left, he could see only as far as a bend in the road. All clear. Gerry eased his foot onto the accelerator and moved through. As he cleared the crossroads and pulled away, he glanced in his rear-view mirror.
The image in the reflection was there and gone in less than a second. It had disappeared almost as soon as he saw it: a white ute flashing through the crossroads. From the left. Following in the direction of his son.
Falk was silent for a long moment.
‘You didn’t see who was driving?’ Falk watched him closely.
‘No. I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t paying attention, and it went by so fast I couldn’t see. But whoever it was, I bet they saw Luke.’ Gerry wouldn’t look at Falk. ‘They pulled that girl’s body out of the river three days later, and it was the worst day of my life.’ He gave a small strange laugh. ‘Well, until recently. Her photo was everywhere, do you remember?’
Falk nodded. It had felt like Ellie’s picture had stared blank-eyed and pixelated from newspaper pages for days. Some shops had put it up as a makeshift poster, collecting money for the funeral expenses.
‘For twenty years I’ve lived in fear of that driver coming out of the woodwork. Knocking on the door of the police station and saying they saw Luke that day,’ Gerry said.
‘Maybe they really didn’t see him.’
‘Maybe.’ Gerry looked at his son’s farmhouse. ‘Or maybe when they finally decided to knock, it wasn’t on the police station door.’