It’s Saturday morning. Elise has thrown some clothes into a battered suitcase with no apparent consideration for the weather, and left to take Guppy to the kennel. Kiara stands in front of the wardrobe, a hanger in each hand.
This was supposed to be a relaxing minibreak, so she’d like to take her hiking clothes and walking shoes. But she’ll need at least one suit, because she’ll have to drive straight to work after dropping Elise off on Monday morning. And Elise made it clear that visiting a crime scene isn’t her idea of a holiday. She only agreed to come because Kiara needed help with the case. That makes it a work trip, so she should only pack suits. Sighing, Kiara puts the walking clothes back in the closet—then changes her mind and packs them into the suitcase. Defiantly, she adds an avocado-green scarf. She still can’t find her lucky ring, but she puts on a couple of silver bangles for extra sparkle.
Kiara makes a cup of tea while she waits for Elise to return. As the kettle hisses, she picks up an Aldi catalogue off the bench, then tells herself she doesn’t need a standing desk or an electric bike and tosses the catalogue into the bin.
Moving the catalogue has revealed one of Elise’s bank statements on the bench. Elise is like that: she leaves jumpers on the couch, reading glasses on piles of books, and coffee mugs everywhere. This isn’t always unpleasant—even when she’s not here, Kiara feels surrounded by her.
As the rumble of the kettle becomes a roar, Kiara’s gaze falls on a particular line. Cash withdrawal. $800. That’s the largest sum Elise’s bank will dispense from an ATM in a single transaction.
On a hunch, Kiara turns the page and sees another eight-hundred-dollar withdrawal from the previous week. And then another, the week before that. Has someone stolen Elise’s card? But no—the other transactions are legit. There’s her hairdresser, and the pet store, and the meal they shared at Kingo’s.
Kiara remembers seeing Elise walk past the real estate agency when she was supposed to be at the hospital. There’s an ATM nearby.
She thinks of the mysterious calls to Elise’s phone. Kiara has been assuming it’s the sort of harassment Elise is often subjected to, but what if it’s not? What if someone in town is blackmailing her?
Kiara checks Elise’s account balance. She had less than four thousand left in savings when this statement was printed. In Kiara’s experience, blackmailers ask for more and more until their victim is cleaned out. Elise isn’t far off.
The door opens. Kiara drops the statement and snatches up the kettle, so fast she burns the pad of her thumb.
‘Hey, babe.’ Elise comes in, brandishing a running magazine. ‘Got some holiday reading. Are you good to go?’
Kiara looks for signs that Elise has been somewhere other than the kennel and the newsagency. She seems out of breath—why, if she drove? The newsagency and the kennel are in opposite directions, so maybe she dropped Guppy off, brought the car back and then ran to get the magazine. That would fit with the amount of time she’s been gone, but what about her sore knee? And why did she go to the newsagency before they left for the mountain, instead of making a stop on the way?
‘What’s up?’ Elise asks.
Kiara realises she’s been looking at her partner the same way she looks at suspects. She can’t go on like this.
‘Nothing.’ She pours the hot water into the travel mug. ‘Let’s go.’
The mountain is formidable—Elise’s little Suzuki is unlikely to make it to the top. Kiara asks Elise to drop her off at the mechanic’s, waving as her partner zooms off to park behind the railway station where the car will be safe over the weekend. Or, at least, that’s where she says she’s going.
‘How’s my Navara, Bill?’ Kiara asks as she walks in.
He holds out her key with oil-blackened fingers. ‘I have good news and bad news.’
She isn’t sure she can handle any more bad news. ‘Go on.’
‘The bad news is that the Blu Tack didn’t hold.’
‘What Blu Tack?’
Bill peers over his glasses at her. ‘Or chewing gum. Whatever it was you used to plug the hole in your coolant tank. It’s completely dry.’
‘I didn’t try to fix my car with Blu Tack, Bill,’ Kiara says.
‘Well, whichever clown you hired last time did. Next time, come to me, eh?’
‘What hole are you talking about?’
‘There was a crack at the bottom of the coolant tank. Could have happened a while ago, I suppose—you wouldn’t notice it if you were just driving to the shops and back. But I’ll tell you what, you wouldn’t have made it up that mountain.’
Kiara’s heart sinks. ‘How did it happen, the crack?’
‘Beats me. You weren’t mucking around in there with a screwdriver, were you?’
‘No. Can you fix it?’
‘A part like that has to be replaced rather than fixed, and usually you’d be waiting a couple of weeks to get one. But that’s the good news—I had a spare tank on hand from a Nissan that was written off last Tuesday. It’s installed, filled, and ready to go.’
‘Wow. Thanks, Bill.’
He looks pleased with himself. ‘No worries.’
‘How much do I owe you?’
He smiles. ‘Nothing. Just promise me you ladies will have a nice time.’
She opens her mouth to tell him she can’t accept that, because she’s a cop—and because it’s creepy. Then she hesitates. ‘You ever seen a cracked coolant tank before?’
‘After a crash, sure. But not in an undamaged vehicle. Why?’
‘And your first thought was that someone might have done it with a screwdriver? And then tried to fix it with Blu Tack?’
‘Well, yeah. That’s what it looked like.’
‘Can you show me the crack?’
He leads her to a blue wheelie bin at the back of the garage. Rummaging through blackened paper towels, he eventually pulls out a plastic cylinder that reminds Kiara of the vaporiser her dad used to set up in her room whenever she had a cold.
‘See?’ Bill points to the crack at the bottom.
She examines it. There are scratches on either side, as though someone stabbed it a few times before breaking through. ‘What’s right next to the coolant tank?’
‘The brake fluid reservoir. Why?’
A chill runs down her spine. ‘Show me that.’
He pops open the bonnet of the Navara, and points. The reservoir looks a lot like her new coolant tank. She can easily imagine someone trying to sabotage her brakes and wrecking the tank instead, particularly if they were working in the dark. But why would they try to fix it afterwards?
Bill’s police training finally comes back to him. ‘You’re not thinking someone did this on purpose?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking.’ Kiara is already running a mental list of recently paroled criminals. The home addresses of police officers are kept secret, but Warrigal is a small town. Her house wouldn’t be hard to find, and the Navara is usually in the driveway, unguarded.
‘Well, for starters,’ says Bill, ‘that would never work in real life. You’d notice the brakes weren’t working as soon as you backed out—you’d crash into your own letterbox at about two kilometres per hour, and that would be it. No one could kill you that way.’
‘Maybe it was a warning, then.’ Kiara peers into the engine, as though it’s a criminal’s brain. ‘Someone trying to scare me off a lead.’
‘Is there much mafia activity in Warrigal?’ Bill asks doubtfully. ‘Because unless you’re a major organised crime group, threatening a cop just gets you arrested quicker. It’s a dumb plan.’
‘Well, I know some dumb crooks.’ As Kiara turns back to the broken coolant tank, something else occurs to her. ‘If they’d punctured the brake fluid rather than the coolant—’
‘They didn’t,’ Bill says.
‘Say they did. Would the Blu Tack have held?’
‘Not for long. We’re talking about a lot of pressure. If you were going slow and tapped the brakes you’d probably be okay, but …’ He seems to realise what he’s saying.
‘But if I was going fast, and braked hard?’
Bill has gone pale. ‘You should call this in.’
‘Hi, Bill.’ Elise strolls into the garage, back from the railway station. She puts her arm around Kiara’s waist. ‘Call what in?’
‘Your girlfriend’s car,’ Bill tells her. ‘It’s been—’
‘Fixed,’ Kiara interrupts, slamming the bonnet. ‘Thanks, Bill.’
Bill looks at the two of them. ‘But shouldn’t we—’
‘No.’ Ignoring Elise’s suspicious look, Kiara gets out a credit card. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Nicer than I expected,’ Elise says, getting out of the Navara.
‘What were you expecting?’ Kiara asks.
‘Dunno. Broken windows, cobwebs, maybe a weathervane. A haunted mansion vibe.’
Kiara is a little offended that Elise thinks she’d invite her to a place like that. Then again, ‘murder house’ would conjure that image for most civilians. Police know homicides happen more often than not in well-lit, friendly-looking dwellings.
Kiara can’t get the ATM withdrawals out of her head, but can’t ask Elise about them without implying she’s hiding something. Kiara spent the whole car ride up the mountain talking warmly about other things, hoping Elise might open up. But Elise seemed distracted, staring through the windscreen at the forbidding peaks ahead.
‘Guess we should take a look inside?’ Elise says.
‘Guess so.’
Kiara slips past her to get in first. It’s cold in the hallway. One of the doors leading to the back deck has been left ajar, maybe to help flush out the odour. It hasn’t worked—Kiara can still smell death in the place. Maybe she’s imagining it. She switches on the extractor fan in the kitchen and runs to check the bedrooms. They’re clean, thank God. Jennings has collected all the evidence tags, and there’s no blood or fingerprint powder anywhere. The crime scene scrubbers did their job.
Elise enters behind her, looking amused. ‘Clearing the rooms for me, Officer Lui?’
Kiara smiles. ‘Of course, Madam President.’ She opens some windows to flush out the bad air.
Elise crosses her arms. ‘Are you crazy? It’s freezing out there.’
‘It’s mountain air. It’s good for us.’
‘Even Canberra wasn’t as bad as this.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Kiara closes the windows.
She paid for the same luxury package Dom did, so Basking’s cleaner was supposed to leave a welcome hamper on the kitchen bench, with crackers, olives and quince paste. But the bench is bare. Kiara pulls out her phone to call Basking about the missing hamper, then remembers there’s no coverage up here.
‘Do you have reception?’ she asks Elise, who’s with a different carrier.
Elise checks. ‘Nope.’
So Kiara can’t complain to Basking about his cleaner. She would feel bad about doing that anyway—during the interview, Chantelle seemed overworked, underpaid and exhausted. At least the black spot means Elise can’t be harassed over the phone, which was the point of the trip.
They walk through the house together, Elise checking out the two downstairs bedrooms and the bathroom in between. A rat or a possum is scratching inside the walls. Kiara pretends not to hear, hoping Elise won’t notice.
When they go upstairs, Kiara sees the door she kicked in has been fixed so perfectly that it’s as if she’s gone back in time. She has the surreal feeling that when she opens it, she’ll find Mrs Kelly pointing a knife at her husband.
She goes in. The room is empty.
On the night of their argument, Kiara realised that coming here might upset Elise rather than relax her. It’s only now dawning on Kiara that it might mess with her own head, too.
She notices a faint whistling from the ceiling. Looking up, she spots the hole she thought was from a champagne cork. Now she sees a trailing wire—a light fitting must have been removed. Luckily, the big windows brighten the room.
Elise admires the view. ‘Wow. How much of this is part of the property?’ She gestures at the endless expanse of trees.
‘A little over twenty thousand acres. You could get very, very lost.’
‘You think that’s what happened to the missing woman? Madden?’
A wedge-tailed eagle wheels through the grey sky.
‘Maybe,’ Kiara says, looking into the bushland. ‘But Ms Dubois managed to follow the trail all the way to the road, at night.’
‘So if Madden got lost …’
‘Then she probably did it on purpose,’ Kiara finishes. ‘The search party has cleared a forty-kilometre radius around the house. It’s been a week, so they’re probably—’ Kiara stops herself from saying, looking for a body ‘—not going to find anything.’
‘Hard to survive out there.’ Elise’s eyes are fixed on the eagle.
Kiara agrees. Even with a torch, a sleeping bag, a tent, a phone and a box of matches, the prospect would be daunting. Still, her ancestors managed just fine.
‘Shall we take this bedroom?’ Kiara asks. ‘It’s the biggest.’
Elise is looking at the bed. ‘The first victim died at 9 p.m. last Saturday, and you found him in the bed—’
‘Not this bed,’ Kiara says quickly. ‘That was downstairs. The west bedroom, closest to the kitchen.’
‘But up here there was …?’ Elise makes a stabbing motion, like the famous scene in Psycho.
‘Right,’ Kiara says, feeling gloomier by the minute. This was a terrible idea. ‘How about the east bedroom, with the door to the deck? No dead bodies in there.’
‘Ooh, romantic,’ Elise says. She’s clearly joking, but Kiara is hurt.
Downstairs, they unpack their things in silence. Kiara notices that the sheets in this room are rumpled—hopefully because they were changed inexpertly, rather than because they haven’t been changed at all. She surreptitiously smooths them out.
She wants to ask Elise, Who’s blackmailing you? What do they know? How much money have you given them? The longer she holds the questions in, the more uncomfortable they become, like coughs.
Elise finally speaks. ‘I’ve never been on a holiday like this.’
‘A murder house holiday?’
‘A house holiday. My family usually went camping.’
‘Mine too,’ Kiara says. ‘Always Dad’s idea. Mum wasn’t a fan. She said if she’d wanted to bathe in a river, she would have stayed in Haiphong.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for plumbing,’ Elise agrees. She meets Kiara’s gaze.
It strikes Kiara that Elise doesn’t often do this. She’s willing to make eye contact with people she doesn’t like—she’ll shout at them, get right up in their faces—but with her friends and family, she gets uncomfortable.
‘Anyway, thank you,’ Elise says.
‘For what?’
‘For taking me on my first house holiday.’
Kiara forces a smile. ‘You’re welcome.’ But it’s hard to quiet the storm in her gut.
They get the fire going, though it doesn’t warm the house much. Remembering what the agent said about heating costs, Kiara raps her knuckles on the walls. They sound hollow—no insulation. If the fire dies, the heat will leak out soon after.
There was supposed to be food in the fridge, but there isn’t. Luckily, Kiara brought bread, cheese, ham and relish, thinking they’d have a picnic lunch tomorrow. She still doesn’t like the faint ammonia smell in the kitchen, so she assembles the sandwiches at the dining table.
‘Who decided that sandwiches had to be a lunch food?’ she asks as she sits down.
‘The rules are oddly strict.’ Elise takes one of the triangular slices. ‘Cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pasta for dinner. If you mess with the order, people think you’re a maniac.’
‘Mum sometimes reheated a stir-fry for our breakfast. I loved it. But when I started having sleepovers with friends, they thought it was weird, and I got embarrassed. After that I refused.’ Kiara takes a bite. She hasn’t thought about this for twenty years. She can see it from Mum’s perspective now, and she feels a prickle of guilt.
‘I like your bangles,’ Elise says.
Kiara rattles them. ‘Thanks. I couldn’t find my ring, so I brought these instead—you haven’t seen it, have you?’
Elise already seems distracted again. ‘Seen what?’
‘My mum’s ring,’ Kiara says impatiently. ‘The one with the opal.’
Elise lowers her gaze. ‘No, sorry.’
Silence falls. This was what Kiara wanted—just the two of them, no distractions. Why does it feel like she’s wading through treacle?
‘I’m sorry about the sandwiches,’ Kiara says. ‘I tried to buy you a hamper.’
Elise looks surprised. ‘You did?’
‘Yeah. I ordered figs, and goat’s cheese, and fancy olives. There was supposed to be food in the fridge, too. But the real estate agent’s cleaner must have forgotten to leave it for us.’
‘You did well to pull this together, then.’ Elise gestures at the sandwiches. ‘Maybe the hamper will turn up tomorrow.’
Kiara sighs. ‘I wouldn’t count on it. Seems to be a habit with this agent—according to the suspects, the fridge was supposed to be fully stocked when they rented the place, but it was empty then, too. Cole, the gym owner, had to drive back into town for groceries on the first day.’
Elise stares at her.
‘What?’ Kiara asks.
‘Nothing,’ Elise says, but her eyes are wide. ‘Anyway, what are we going to do tomorrow?’
‘I’ve been looking at a map of the walking trails in the area,’ Kiara says, ‘but given the weather …’
Elise dips a finger into the jar of relish.
Kiara laughs. ‘What are you doing?’
Elise’s face is grim. She uses the relish to trace a message on the tabletop.
‘Well, whatever we do, I’m sure it will be nice,’ Elise says, her voice loud but a little shaky.
She’s written: are we alone?
A chill creeps from Kiara’s tailbone to the top of her head. She thinks of the missing food, and the rumpled sheets in the downstairs bedroom.
They both look at the ceiling when they hear a distinct thump.