DETECTIVE CONSTABLE BILL WEBBER eats dinner alone in a Chinese restaurant on the high street of Caloundra. Amy snaps photos of him from across the street. She picked up his trail an hour ago, coming off shift at the Surfers Paradise police station. From the get-go, Webber isn’t what she expected. He’s lean. A tall Māori bloke in his early thirties. Good-looking for a copper, or would be under better circumstances, because he is up to something. Something bad. Amy can see it all over him: half a beard, slumped shoulders, a blank stare. He’s a walking ruin.
After dinner, Webber hits a nearby squash court where he plays loose and angry, talking very little during the games.
Amy returns to her car for a smoke. She turns the radio on and off. Reads a few pages of a paperback: If There Be Thorns.
She avoids the rear-view. Knows she looks just as ruined as Webber.
Amy casts her mind back to earlier in the day: Allan used to pal around with your father. That’s what Colleen said.
A couple of hours of walking around with it has settled the thought in Amy. She can approach it in her mind without her nerves acting up. There’s a grim satisfaction about this ability to mute herself. She can usually quash her thoughts. What happened in Adelaide—the hotel suite, the gun pressed under her chin in the mirror—is an outlier, a weird surprise. Normally, this is who she is. A woman who can see the centre of the problem, can watch the black hole spinning, and feel absolutely nothing.
It’s what Colleen pays her for.
Bill Webber lives in a high-set brick place, built into the incline of San Michele Street, Tugun. Amy watches him go inside. The house lights come on one at a time. It’s too early to peep his windows. Cops are security conscious—even when they’re walking around in a daze. She can’t go anywhere near the place while he’s home. This is a waiting game.
Tonight, it pays off. Webber isn’t inside an hour before he comes back out, dressed head to toe in black, carrying his squash bag. He gets into his personal car and backs out.
Amy tails him through the coast and out onto the late-night highway. It’s quiet this time of night, so she hangs back. He heads north for half an hour, then turns off at Ormeau, halfway to Brisbane. It must be way out of Webber’s jurisdiction.
They drive into the rural gloom, away from the highway and the streetlights, and into the scrubland of Cedar Creek. Amy loses sight of him—his tail-lights disappear—but she keeps driving, scanning the road shoulder.
Come on.
Cursing, she spots his car, her headlights illuminating Webber as he steps out from behind the wheel. She passes, keeps moving before circling back with her lights off. She spots the car again and pulls into a nearby driveway.
Webber is parked in front of a lonely, dark farmhouse.
She hears shouting inside, echoing through the empty night.
Amy grabs her camera and runs towards the house.
Over the fence.
Delicately up the stair.
More shouting.
She rounds the verandah and creeps to a dimly lit window.
Takes a look.
A vacant room, curtains half-drawn. Through the doorway, in an adjoining kitchen, she can see Webber, white pupils beaming out of the eyeholes of a balaclava. Amy lifts her camera, winds the lens, years of muscle memory quelling the adrenaline, keeping her hands steady.
The camera clicks.
A naked old man at Webber’s feet. Must be mid-seventies, at least.
Click.
The old man is bleeding. Webber straddles him and punches him repeatedly, bright blood spraying the side of the oven.
Click.
He keeps going.
Click.
Webber doesn’t speak, doesn’t question the man.
Click.
He just beats the shit out of him until he’s unconscious or dead.
Click.
Webber gets up.
Amy can hear him walking straight along the hall to the front door and down the steps.
Footfall in the gravel.
His car engine turning over.
Amy creeps to the edge of the house and watches Webber pull a swift U-turn—headlights washing over her parked car—but he doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down. He just gets the car pointed the right way and floors it.
She waits a minute before making her own exit. On the way out, she pinches mail from the old man’s letterbox. Back in the car, she drives the opposite direction to Webber.
That’s enough for one night. She doesn’t help the man in the house. Can’t. If he’s dead, or dying, then he’s dead or dying, because that was a Queensland copper back there and this changes everything. She’s already overexposed. There’s no telling how dangerous this is now.