It was well after midday, later than Harrigan had hoped it would be, by the time he was on the road to Coolemon. His first stop had been the underground car park at the Macarthur Square shopping centre at Campbelltown. While he was driving around, a parked car flashed its lights at him. He pulled into the nearest empty bay and walked over. Ralph got out of the car to meet him.
‘Hi, boss. It’s all ready to go.’
They swapped keys. Harrigan slid into the driver’s seat of the new car. Ralph took the suicide seat. He opened the glove box and took out a shoulder holster and a gun.
‘Here you go,’ he said, handing them to Harrigan.
‘Just call me the fashionista,’ Harrigan said, covering the whole kit and caboodle with his light summer jacket.
Ralph grinned. ‘Marvin knows nothing about these arrangements, boss. Trevor kept him out of the loop like you asked.’
‘What about putting a guard on my son?’
‘He’s got that in motion. Shouldn’t be a problem.’
This was more a precaution on Harrigan’s part than the expectation of a real threat. He was being careful. Cotswold House was a secure environment; no one could just walk in there off the street. Harrigan’s family had been threatened more than once in his career and Toby had had guards put on him before. Trevor had been obliging; doing what Harrigan had asked of him without asking too many questions.
‘Tell him thanks from me. I’ll be in touch as soon as I get to Yaralla.’
‘How’d you go with Elena Calvo? What’s she like?’
Harrigan had already spent time considering how much of his meeting he should conceal and how much reveal.
‘Tough and ruthless,’ he said. ‘She won’t be easy to deal with. She’s got her own agenda. Keep her in view. Everything you can find out about her—her corporation, her father, their connections—dig it up. She’s a significant player.’
‘We’ll handle her. Okay, boss. See you later. Good luck.’
Ralph would wait another half-hour, then leave. Harrigan drove out, the tinted glass of the car’s windows providing him with some anonymity. He hit the road with a sense of freedom.
Coolemon was in the south-west of the state. Grey nomads travelling through the town were sometimes heading south-west to Adelaide and then across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth; or turning north to Broken Hill and from there, going north or west into the red heart of the continent. Their caravans trundled along the desert tracks as if they were native to the landscape.
Harrigan followed the Hume Highway south, stopping for fast food not far past Yass. Not long after, he turned off the highway onto the back roads and began heading west into the sun. The road was a single carriageway lined with old eucalyptus trees, their leaves gleaming in the hot afternoon light. Cattle trucks and local farmers were the only hazards. He drove through the old rural towns that had followed on white settlement, their main streets making up the highway: vistas of old courthouses, abandoned bank buildings and closed stores. Silent pubs stood with their doors open and their high verandas shadowing the footpath. In these towns, the war memorials stood in the main street, silent stone soldiers mourning over their guns.
As the hours passed, the road grew more straight. Flocks of grey apostle birds foraged in the red dirt either side of the bitumen. Crows, their densely black feathers glistening in the sun, settled on the roadkills. The dry, empty pastures were sapped by the drought, reduced to a scraped and pale gold marked by scattered trees and low bush-covered hills against the horizon.
The kilometres passed without incident. Despite this, he felt a sense of unease. It had been too simple, almost effortless, swapping cars and getting out on the road. But even if there was something wrong, all he could do was drive on.
Some five hours after he had left Campbelltown behind, Harrigan drove into the large, straggling town of Coolemon. He stopped at the police station. The duty sergeant had known him during his time there and was welcoming. The backup was on standby; they would be waiting for his call whenever they were needed. Harrigan accepted the sergeant’s invitation to a meal and spent the occasion talking about the cricket.
By the time he left the station, it was growing dark. About a kilometre out of town, a state forest lined the roadside, the casuarinas closing in like thinned-out human figures. Eventually open pastures took their place. Harrigan opened his window to the quiet outside. Stillness stretched to the horizon. There was a full moon, scorching the surrounding paddocks to an incandescent ash. Driving in this solitary moonlit darkness, Harrigan felt a free man. In a rare moment of equilibrium, he was at ease with himself.
Eventually, he turned off the bitumen road onto dirt. Pausing at the turn, he thought he heard a car in the distance ahead of him. A farmer on his way home. He went on, his headlights illuminating the roadside scrub. Ahead, he saw the shadows of the red gums lining Naradhan Creek. He crossed the narrow bridge and drove through Yaralla’s open gate, startling an owl roosting on a fencepost. It disappeared into the scrub with the slow, silent beat of its powerful wings, its pale feathers luminous in the white light.
Harrigan drove up the track and into Harold’s yard. A frantic barking greeted him when he got out of the car. A light was shining brightly above the farmhouse’s back door. Harold was standing on the veranda, washing his knives at an outside sink.
‘Quiet!’ Harold ordered the dog and she sat down. ‘Don’t mind Rosie. She gets excited.’
‘She doesn’t bother me. How are you, mate? It’s good to see you.’
‘Could be better. My hands are a mess. I just killed a lamb. I’ve had this fella in the shed for a couple of days, calming him down. I was going to share the meat with Ambro, but I thought you might want a roast dinner while you’re here.’
‘What’s wrong with your hands, Harry?’
For an answer, Harold held them out, palms upwards. They were still covered with the transparent antiseptic dressings. Even where partly hidden by the lamb’s blood, they were badly burned and blistered deep into the skin.
‘How did that happen?’
‘It’s what Stuart’s growing here. The tobacco did that to me. Come inside and I’ll show you. I’ll just wash the blood off and get cleaned up.’
‘Can you work with those hands?’
‘The doctor gave me some tablets. They help. I didn’t do anything much today. I took some sleeping pills the doc gave me last night. They knocked me out till almost midday. Killing the lamb was okay. It’s quick, and I’ve just taken some tablets. Driving’s not fun.’
‘Your tatts, mate.’
Harold had taken off his bloodstained shirt and was standing naked to the waist. The bright light intensified the deep colours and intricate patterns marked on his skin. Harrigan hadn’t known that Ambrosine was using Harold’s body as a canvas.
‘Do you like them?’ Harold asked.
‘You could win a few awards with those. She’s signed them. Ambrosine only signs her best tattoos.’
Harold put on another shirt and the tattoos disappeared. He wrapped his slaughtering and butchering knives in a leather pouch.
‘She likes working on me. I don’t have much bare skin left now. Come on, girl.’
He led Rosie out across the yard to her enclosure. Once inside her kennel, she settled down on her blanket.
‘Do you want to put your car in the garage? Who knows? Maybe it’ll rain.’ Harold laughed.
‘Times are bad, Harry.’
‘Wait till you see the place in the daylight. It’ll break your heart. Come into the kitchen once you’ve put your car away. Have you had anything to eat?’
‘Yeah, I ate back in town.’
‘We’ll have a beer then.’
The farmhouse at Yaralla had the sense of time stopped. The kitchen was a large room with a window that looked out to the north-east. An ancient wood stove stood next to an electric one, now almost as much a museum piece as its companion. When Harold’s mother, a woman from a family of wealthy Victorian graziers, had cooked here she had always had others to help her do it; sometimes young Aboriginal girls sent from the home at Cootamundra, sometimes white girls from other homes. They had slept in the room beside the washhouse and spent the rest of their time cleaning the house and washing basketloads of dirty laundry.
Harold put his knives away in a drawer. He opened two beers and then sat at the table without speaking. Harrigan had come to know Harold well during his years out here and he knew there was no point in rushing him. Tonight, he was tense, fatigued.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do really,’ he said at last. ‘Every day you wake up, there’s no rain. You wonder if it’s ever going to end. Then something like this happens.’
He looked at his hands. Harrigan could only sidestep something so uncontainable as despair.
‘What’s going on out here, Harry?’
Harold’s tobacco lay on the table. He picked it up, rolled a cigarette and lit it.
‘Come with me. I’ll show you something.’
They walked through to the front of the house. Pale incandescent lights lit the hallway. Worn carpet runners covered the floor. Harold led him to the front sitting room where he turned on the light. The furniture in this room was old and in its time had been expensive, from the years when the property had been profitable. The windows looked onto the veranda and, beyond, to the gardens that Harold’s mother had once cultivated but which were now mostly dead.
‘You see this room.’ Harold looked around as if peopling it. ‘This is my house. I’ve lived here all my life. A bit more than a week ago, Stuart was sitting in this room with this Jerome and that Edwards woman, drinking my whisky and treating me like I was dirt. They were going to do things with my property without even talking to me about it. Next thing I hear, they’re both dead.’
He went to an old writing desk and opened it. He took out four plastic bags containing crop specimens and put them on the coffee table.
‘I thought this was as good a place as any to keep them,’ he said.
‘Is this the one that burnt your hands?’
‘I’m pretty certain it was. Be careful. I put some air holes into the bags. Make sure you don’t touch it.’
Harrigan could see nothing out of ordinary about any of these four crops, among the most commonly grown food and cash crops in the world.
‘Where are these being grown?’ he asked.
‘In this enclosure Stewie had built—I call the Cage. It’s huge. It’s got greenhouses, water tanks, fences around it you can’t climb over. Stewie even had his own access road put in right up to the gate.’
‘He didn’t tell you about it?’
‘He just went and did it. After that it was too late. It was built and there was nothing I could do unless I went to the law. I can’t afford to do that and he knows it. He never let me in that Cage, not once. People would come and go all the time. But not me. He’d locked me out. Then the same day I hear on the news that those people are dead, this comes to me by courier.’
He handed Harrigan the small box containing the keys and note. ‘That’s that Jerome’s keyring,’ he said. ‘I saw it on the table the day he was here. The people who killed him sent me this stuff, didn’t they?’
‘They must have done. They would have taken it off him when they killed him. Did these people know what touching that tobacco would do to your hands?’
Harold could only shrug. He rubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray already dirtied with ancient stubs.
‘Come outside. I’ll show you something else.’
Yaralla stood at the top of a low rise in the lightly undulating landscape. They walked through the silhouettes of what had once been ornamental trees and shrubs, then through the gate and into the house paddock. The night noises were muted, the silence all pervasive. The scattered trees in the landscape were dark shadows, the distant houses small nubs in the moonlight.
‘It’s quiet,’ Harrigan said.
‘Too quiet. It feels like everything’s dead. Sometimes I think there’s only me and Rosie left alive out here. And Ambro and her kids of course.’
Harrigan looked upwards. The moon was at the high arc of the sky, bright and small, the stars dimmed by its light.
‘That’s the Creek Lane down there,’ Harold was saying. ‘Standing out here, you’d say everything you could see was peaceful. About fifteen minutes before you got here, Rosie started barking. She’d heard a car. Whoever it was, they didn’t come across the creek the way you did. They kept going along the Coolemon Road. Now that road crosses the creek about three miles further on from here and then goes on around the back of my place. At first, I thought it was you. Then I knew it wasn’t. For one thing, they were going too fast. This is what’s happening to me, mate, and I don’t like it. You hear a car at night. Why shouldn’t it be someone going home? People live out on that road. Why should it make me so fucking nervous just to hear a car?’
‘Did it come back?’
‘No. It’ll be miles away by now, the way it was travelling.’
‘Did you hear or see any other cars come along here this evening?’
‘I saw Barry on his way home about seven. That’s it.’
‘It’s lonely out here, mate,’ Harrigan said after a pause. ‘Ambro’s cottage is over in that direction, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. You can see her.’
Harold pointed across the moonlit darkness to the hard and dark outline of a small cottage on the Creek Road. A faint light gleamed from one of the windows.
‘Did you tell her I was coming?’
Harold grinned. ‘Yeah, mate. I’m not going to repeat what she said in reply. She uses a few words I don’t.’
‘I can guess. Harry, I don’t feel right about this. I’m going down there now. I want to get Ambro and her kids back to Coolemon as soon as I can. I’ll feel safer when I do.’
‘Let me take you in my ute. We’ll go across the paddocks. It’ll be quicker. You don’t want to take your car over there. It’s too rough.’
‘If the man in that car you heard just now is who I think it could be, he’s a killer. He shot dead an ex-policeman yesterday. I ought to tell you now, I’m armed.’
‘Then I’ll get my shotgun. I’m sick of people walking all over my property doing what they want to do. They can pay attention to me for a change.’
‘You can’t drive with those hands. Tell me where to go and I’ll drive.’
‘I took a couple of tablets a little while ago. They’re still working. If it gets too bad, I’ll let you take over. But I’m not going to sit around. I’m not having all this turn me into something useless.’
Before they left, Harrigan rang through to local police asking for backup. He needed an escort to bring a woman and her three children into Coolemon, he said. They would be on their way as soon as possible, the duty sergeant said: half an hour to assemble and hit the road. Harrigan told them to hurry.
Outside in the yard, Harrigan stopped to look at the garage, next to Rosie’s enclosure, where he had left his car. The door had a lock, but one that was so easy to break it wasn’t worth securing.
‘Harry, that car you heard earlier,’ he said. ‘Is there any other way it can get on to your property from where you think it went? What about the road Stewie put in?’
‘Yeah, they could come in that way. But that’d just take you up to the Cage. You’d still have to know how to get from there to here across my paddocks.’
‘What if he came back here through the main gate while we were gone?’
‘We’d see him if he had his lights on. He couldn’t be that close. I’d have heard him if he was. You can hear things for miles around here.’
Uneasily, Harrigan got into the ute. Rosie’s disappointed barking followed them out into the night. They drove directly across Harold’s pastures. The roar of the engine and the glare of the headlights must have carried for miles.
‘If anyone’s out there, they have to see us coming,’ Harrigan said.
Harold grinned in a way that surprised him. He realised how angry the man was. ‘Maybe we’ll scare them off,’ Harold said.
They pulled up at the back of Ambrosine’s cottage. The lights had been turned off. A sense of urgency took hold of Harrigan. Without waiting, he was out of the cabin and pounding on the back door.
‘Ambro? It’s Paul Harrigan. Are you in there? Open the door. Open it now or I’ll break it down!’
The back door was opened. Ambrosine stood there, dishevelled and sleepy-eyed. A smell of dope wafted past her.
‘What the fuck are you doing out here at this time of night?’
Harrigan pushed past her into the kitchen. Harold followed him, carrying the shotgun.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What are you doing with that? What’s going on?’
‘It’s okay, mate,’ Harold told her. He spoke to Harrigan. ‘I’m going back outside. I’ll keep a watch to see if that car comes back.’
‘What fucking car?’
‘Just wait,’ Harrigan snapped.
Used plates, the remains of a meal, were stacked on the bench. A tiny mouse scurried down to the floor and out of sight. Harrigan looked around at the walls covered with Ambrosine’s paintings. Their luminescent colours and obsessive details crowded in on him. One of them showed the cottage isolated between a vast sky and a bare red ochre foreground. Harrigan felt the sense of vulnerability powerfully. Out here, there was nothing to protect a person other than the huge distances. He should never have brought Ambrosine and her children here in the first place.
‘What do you want?’ Ambrosine interrupted him. ‘For months you don’t fucking bother getting in touch with me or coming to see me. Now you turn up in the middle of the night talking about some fucking car! What is it?’
‘I’m taking you all back into Coolemon now. Get your kids and let’s go.’
‘You don’t think I’m safe here any more? Why?’
Leaving her unanswered, he walked into the hallway. The front room had its door open. He could see it was her bedroom. There was another room opposite with its door shut. He guessed this was where her children slept. He looked through into the lounge where the moonlight cut silver-white patches onto the cracked linoleum. It was empty. He went to the front door and opened it. The dark tree line of Naradhan Creek was visible on the other side of the road. He walked outside and looked along the lane but saw nothing other than the curve of the empty road, whitened to grey by the moon. He went back inside to the kitchen.
‘Did the Ice Cream Man find you out here before he went missing?’ he said. ‘I asked you that question once before and you said no. You can tell me the truth now.’
‘It’s a story, mate,’ she said. ‘If you’re in a hurry, you don’t have time for it now.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because right now, I think he’s out there. He didn’t come here for you, he came for me. I’ve got something he wants. But now he’s here, he won’t mind finishing you and your kids off as well.’
‘Fuck!’ She hit the table. Her fingers were stained with nicotine. ‘I knew he’d fucking come back for us.’
She pushed past him, opened the door to the second room and switched on the light. There were the confused sounds of children crying.
‘Get up, all of you. Get your shoes. We’re getting out of here right now. Laurie, get your little sister. Come on, hurry. No, Little Man, don’t pick that up. Come on!’
They tumbled out of the room, still pulling on their clothes and shoes. Laurie, a boy of eleven; Jen, a tiny girl of eight; and the youngest, Little Man, five years old and golden-haired like a cherub. They were sleepy and frightened. Most of their lives, they had been pushed from one bit of makeshift accommodation to another. Quickly, Ambrosine took them outside. Harrigan sat them all in the cabin of the ute.
‘Mate,’ Harold said quietly, ‘I didn’t hear or see a car on the Creek Lane. But I did hear something in the distance. Sounded like it was coming from the north. On the other side of the house. I thought I heard Rosie barking as well.’
‘We’re all getting out of here as soon as we can,’ Harrigan said. ‘I’ll take us to Coolemon in my car. Drive straight back to your garage, Harry. Give me your shotgun. I’ll ride in the back.’
He climbed onto the tray of the ute and pounded on the window for Harold to go. The ute roared across the paddocks, bouncing over the ground, forcing Harrigan to hang on for dear life. They had driven through the last open gate before the house when the ute suddenly lurched to the right, almost upending itself. It shuddered to a halt with its right front wheel snagged deep in the ground. Harrigan was rolled hard against the side of the tray. He lay against it for a few moments getting his breath, then scrambled out, the shotgun in hand. They were on the edge of the old garden beds at the front of the house.
Immediately, Harrigan went to the cabin door on the passenger side. Before he got there, it was pushed open by Laurie. The boy climbed out. Harrigan leaned the shotgun against the ute and lifted out the other two children. Little Man was bawling loudly enough to wake the dead. Jen tried to comfort him but he pushed her away. Ambrosine was next.
‘You’re heavy,’ Harrigan said.
‘I’ll be heavier if I’m dead.’
Harold had got out the other side and was leaning on the vehicle for support.
‘We’re lucky we didn’t go all the way over,’ he said, one hand on his forehead. ‘I cracked my head.’
‘Cracked your head?’ Ambrosine laughed loudly and went and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Fucking Christ, Harry. Can’t you drive?’
‘It was my hands. They were hurting too much.’
‘Keep it quiet! Get your kids in the house now.’ Harrigan spoke as quietly and urgently as he could. ‘Harry, take your shotgun. I’m going to get my car out of the garage. I’ll drive it to the back gate and pick you all up there.’
Harold took the shotgun and went towards the front door with the others. Harrigan walked quietly to the kitchen end of the house, past a thick-trunked old sugar gum whose branches extended above the veranda over the roof. Suddenly, he heard a scuffle behind him and turned to look back. Harold was gesturing to him. Before Harrigan could work out what he meant, he laid the shotgun on the edge of the veranda and sat down abruptly as if too shaky to stand. Ambrosine began to help him to his feet. Harrigan waved at them to get into the house as soon as possible.
The night air was warm. Harrigan stepped up on the veranda, staying close to the house and moving carefully in case the wooden boards creaked. Just before the corner, he stopped and took out his gun. From here, he could see Harold’s ancient rotary clothes hoist, the house fence and beyond that the garage and the yard. Everything was still. It was deeply silent. Too silent. At once, he realised what Harold had been trying to tell him. Rosie wasn’t barking. She should have been barking from the time the ute had arrived at the house. It should have been the first thing they heard. Silence is death. Someone had found a way of silencing her.
In the darkness, Harrigan almost stopped breathing. He turned off his phone in case it rang in the silence. How could you find me? Standing there, tense to every sound, he became aware of a small nugget of pain near the strap of his shoulder holster. He touched it, then reached into his shirt pocket to take out the thick gold badge he had been given at Life Patent Strategies that morning. When the ute had nearly overturned, he must have rolled onto it, pressing it into his chest. Until now, he had forgotten about it. What better way of smuggling a tracking device into his car than by pinning it to his shirt? He put the badge on the window sill beside him. Thought.
Assuming it was Grace’s gunman waiting for him somewhere out there, he would have found Harrigan’s car in the garage, which meant Harrigan was coming back. Unless he was blind and deaf, he would have seen and heard Harold’s ute coming across the fields and heard them all arrive, no trouble. He must have worked out that somehow the ute was no longer functioning.
The scenarios were these. He would either ambush Harrigan’s car on its way back to Coolemon or sabotage it beforehand so that it broke down in the middle of nowhere. In the isolation, he would pick off as many of the passengers as he could. If his purpose was getting hold of the tape, then he would try and take Harrigan alive, although not necessarily in one piece. If he was winged in the shoulder, the way the Ice Cream Man had been, he would be much easier to deal with. Or he might shoot everyone here in the backyard just as soon as they walked out of the house to the car. Leave the bodies to be found by whoever, whenever. Again, disable Harrigan so he could be dealt with more easily. An experienced gunman with the right weapon could do it.
Either way, this person would be waiting where he could see Harrigan approach the garage to get his car. In the pepper trees that lined the south-western side of the house. That vantage point would give the watcher a full view of the yard and enough of the back door to see anyone going in and out.
Leaving the LPS badge behind, Harrigan turned and silently made his way down to the other end of the house. From the front veranda, the ruined gardens were ghostly in the moonlight. He moved towards the pepper trees, the bulk of the house water tank providing him with cover while he crossed to the open space. There was too much leaf litter under the thick line of trees to walk silently. Very carefully, he moved through them to the bare ground on the other side, waiting for a shot or a blow to the head, even for Death to touch his shoulder and say ‘Time, please’. Nothing happened.
On the other side of the trees, he saw a white car parked where it was invisible to the house, under the grove of coral gums that had once been part of Mrs Morrissey’s gardens. It was too far away for him to get its registration number.
Slowly, Harrigan moved along the line of pepper trees, keeping close in to the shadows and stooping to get a view closer to the ground. Then he saw who he was looking for. On the other side of the water tank, a man was crouching in the trees where he had a clear view of the back of the house and the yard, his firearm at the ready. It had a scope, presumably with night vision. Harrigan raised his own gun. Whoever this man was, he wanted him alive.
Very carefully, he moved forward into the pepper trees, getting closer. Suddenly there was an earsplitting screeching, a furious scratching and scattering of the leaves. The man jumped up immediately, turning and firing in a single action. Harrigan dodged down and sideways, slipped on the litter and smacked his left shoulder against a tree, just escaping falling into the dirt. The bullet thudded instantaneously into the tree trunk on his right, barely missing his shoulder. It was a soft sound, a quiet gun. Harrigan fired back, a loud crack in the night. The bullet scored across the man’s lower left arm. He dropped his gun with a curse. Immediately Harrigan was there, kicking it across the dirt.
The man was on Harrigan before he could fire again, gripping his right wrist. The grip was painful, tight as a vice, relentlessly digging into a nerve. He was trying to numb Harrigan’s hand and make him drop his gun and at the same time crash him backwards against the nearest tree. With his other hand, he punched Harrigan hard in the stomach, smacking into the soft tissue over and over. Harrigan gasped, tried to yank his right hand away but couldn’t shake off the grip. He’d always had a strong left as a boxer. With his bare fist, he cracked his left hard on the man’s upper arm, then smacked him in the face and neck repeatedly. They grappled silently. His right hand was growing numb, the gun slipping from his grip.
Harrigan levered himself forward, overbalancing them both, pushing the man to the ground between the trees and the house, landing on him heavily and winding him. The force of the fall knocked the gun from Harrigan’s nerveless hand. The man tried to grab at it but it was on the wrong side for him and Harrigan managed to twist and skitter it out of reach with his foot. Still the man did not let go of his wrist. He had a powerful supple strength, it was like wrestling with an angry tomcat. Gripping his hand in Harrigan’s hair, he tried to force Harrigan over onto his left side. Harrigan knocked the man’s head hard onto the ground. The man punched his face and tried to gouge his eyes. Then Harrigan’s hand was released. It was numb. The man pushed away from Harrigan with all his strength, kicking at him and rolling back out of his grip, tearing his shirt. He staggered to his feet and ran for his gun. Harrigan rolled back and went for his own gun with his left hand. Then in the night there was the roar of a shotgun.
‘You fucking mongrel!’ Harold shouted.
The blast had propelled Harrigan’s assailant sideways. The man tried to scrabble for his firearm again, only to be driven back by another shotgun blast. He got to his feet and sprinted away, followed by a third blast. Harrigan got to his feet after him. His right hand was useless. He snatched up his gun with his left hand and ran in pursuit. The man was heading for his car. ‘Police! I’ve got backup coming,’ Harrigan shouted.
By the time he reached the far corner of the house, the man had gone into the coral gums at the end of the garden. Harrigan went after him. He heard a car starting and then roaring away. Running forward, he saw a white BMW disappearing down the track towards Harold’s main gate. It didn’t cross the bridge but turned right onto the Creek Road, driving away at high speed. Harrigan sheathed his gun in his holster and ran through the gardens into the house paddock. Harold joined him.
‘I couldn’t shoot straight, mate. My hands were hurting too much. I was worried I was going to get you.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You don’t know what you saved us all from. If I remember rightly, he can get out onto the highway that way, can’t he?’
‘He can, but he must have been here before. That road’s not on the maps. You’d have to know about it.’
Suddenly the car stopped. There was a gap in time. Then Ambrosine’s cottage blossomed in flames into the night. They heard the car drive on. It hadn’t turned on its headlights.
‘You fucking bastard,’ Harold said. ‘If that spreads to the creek, all that vegetation along there will go up.’
‘I’ll call the fire brigade.’
Harrigan’s right hand was beginning to tingle as the nerves came back to life. He ran towards the house to be met by Ambrosine running out of it.
‘My house. Every fucking thing we own. Everything fucking thing the kids had. All my tattooing gear, my books, my machine, my photographs. Jesus, fucking everything.’
The flames from the cottage flared higher, visible for miles. Her children had followed her out. They stood in a straggling line behind her. Harrigan saw a look of deep anger on the older boy’s face.
‘Mum, something’s coming,’ Jen said.
‘It’s the backup I asked for,’ Harrigan said.
Three cars were crossing the bridge in convoy. He saw one turn onto the Creek Lane and speed in the direction of Ambrosine’s cottage. They would take care of the fire one way or another, including calling out the rural fire service. The other cars continued to the farmhouse.
‘Whoop-de-bloody-do,’ Ambrosine said. ‘Too fucking late now. Come on, kids. Inside. Let’s get you out of the way. We’ll think about what we’re going to do next tomorrow. We’ve got nothing now. Just a rust-bucket car and that’s it.’
‘Mum, Harry said that man must have shot Rosie. Why did he do that?’ Jen asked.
‘Not now, sweetheart.’
‘But why?’
‘Baby, I don’t know. It’s too hard for me right now. Because he’s a cunt. Come on.’ She took Little Man by the hand and they disappeared inside the house.
‘Can you take my shotgun, mate?’ Harold said. ‘I’m going to have a look at Rosie.’
‘No worries.’
Harold turned and walked quickly to the end of the house. Harrigan followed. At Rosie’s enclosure, Harold unhooked the gate and squatted down in front of her kennel. She lay on her blanket, shot once through the head.
‘At least it was quick,’ he said.
After this, he did not speak. Then Ambrosine was there at the gate.
‘Do you want a cigarette, mate?’ she said to Harold. ‘I rolled you one in case you did.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
She lit two cigarettes together, one for her and one for him, then turned and went back to the house.
‘I’ve got to get rid of the carcass. I can’t leave her here till tomorrow.’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Harrigan said.
‘No, I’ll do it myself. Your mates are here. You’d better go talk to them.’
Shotgun in hand, Harrigan went to meet the arriving police. Looking back, he saw Harold lodge the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and drag Rosie’s body from out of her kennel on her blanket. He carried her away behind the brokendown poultry sheds. Against the dark, the old struts and chicken wire were as fragile as torn cobwebs. Harrigan watched him disappear, wondering how much it had hurt him to pick her up, how heavy she was in his arms. He checked his watch. It was after midnight and the night had hardly begun. As usual, he had work to do.