The crowd stirred. The bartender slammed a pint glass down.
‘Because of my specialist experience,’ Kash said, ‘I can tell you the kind of thing we’re looking for. You need to keep an eye out for someone you know who’s been acting strange lately. Maybe spending more time than usual on their own or on their computer. Ask yourself if someone in your household has gained a sudden interest in organised religion, particularly Islam, or if they’ve been making aggressive political statements. Have they withdrawn from their circle of friends? Are they making or receiving private phone calls in the middle of the night? Hypervigilance is the key here, people. Be aware, and if you see something, say something.’
‘Terrorists,’ someone at the back murmured. ‘I bloody knew it.’
‘That Taby kid’s always on that laptop,’ someone else said. ‘You see him around town with it. That’s how they radicalise them. The internet. The videos. The chat rooms.’
I all but yanked Kash off the stage as he tried to wrap up. He seemed confused by my fury. I pushed him out the pub door and into the shade of the awning.
Chapter 24
‘YOU ARE GOING to panic the people of this town.’ I shoved his chest. ‘There is no evidence of organised terrorism in this case so far. None!’
‘Maybe not to your eyes,’ Kash said. ‘You don’t have the training, or the experience. This is how lone wolves operate. They hide out in small regional towns where their activities don’t raise suspicion, and they experiment, honing their skills, until they can move on to bigger targets.’
I tried to breathe evenly. Snale exited the pub, shoulders hunched, embarrassed by the public display of antagonism. I had to salvage this situation, if not for the case, for the town’s perception of city law enforcement. Threatening Kash, shouting at him, wasn’t working. His skull was too thick, trapping messages outside his tiny brain. I needed to be calm. Reason with him.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘my training is in Sex Crimes. I live it. I breathe it. I spend my every waking moment dealing with it. So when a victim or a witness comes to me and tells me their story, my natural instinct is to believe what I’ve been trained to believe – that a crime has occurred.’
‘I don’t see where this is going,’ Kash broke in. I took a moment to visualise myself punching him in the face, then closed my eyes and carried on.
‘But sometimes,’ I said slowly, ‘very rarely, a crime hasn’t occurred. Someone is lying, or they’re mistaken. I have to make sure that I approach every situation with an open mind, and look at the evidence, before I form any conclusions.’
‘So?’ Kash shrugged.
‘So you’ve assumed there’s a terrorist in this town without any evidence to support that. And worse, you’ve just warned these people to look out for someone acting strangely, who’s withdrawn, moody, and who gets phone calls late at night. You know who that sounds like? It sounds like every fucking teenager I’ve ever met.’
‘Radicalists often target teens,’ Kash said. ‘They’re usually already despondent, disenfranchised. Vulnerable to the ideas of terrorist organisations.’
I turned to Snale, who was watching Kash with the kind of confused awe reserved for audiences of the truly mad.
‘Find me Zac Taby,’ I said. ‘We need to get to him before someone else does.’
Chapter 25
I STOOD FUMING while Snale went back to the house to get the four-wheel drive. I couldn’t so much as look at Kash, who was now talking to Mayor Dez, probably giving him a run-down of covert surveillance tactics in the rural environment. I was steadily becoming exhausted. It seemed the further I got from the city, my home, the harder it was to breathe. Already the midday sun was baking the air, making it feel like steam in my lungs. Seven days, I thought. It’s only seven days.
I noticed the farmer, Jace, standing nearby when he spat on the ground. He was watching me from the shadows beneath his hat. All of him was browned by the relentless sun, black freckles and moles standing up on his arms like cracked pepper. He had a foot propped on the stone front step of the farming supply store next to the pub.
‘Was there much of Soupy Campbell left?’ he asked.
I considered the question. It was odd. Not only deeply inappropriate, but slightly voyeuristic, too.
‘ It was a terrible scene,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why you’d want to know.’
‘Well,’ Jace said, shrugging, ‘out here we have pretty simple beliefs about justice. The blackfellas, they have their ways. They’ll have the elders sing to the spirits about you. Bring down some bad luck. Sometimes they’ll have a ceremony. Spear you in the legs. Depends on what you done.’
He looked me up and down, as though assessing my life’s worst deeds.
‘Then there’s the white man’s bush justice,’ he said. ‘An eye for an eye. Sounds like Soupy’s woman won’t have much left to bury. Whoever did this, it should be the same for their family.’
‘Look.’ I let my head loll. ‘That’s very impressive and scary, and believe me, I understand your way of looking at things. I’ve encountered a number of predatory scumbags in my particular line of work who I’d have loved to torture slowly with a barbecue fork. But that’s not the way the world works.’
I was mildly uncomfortable at my own words. I had, in my time, tracked down and beaten a couple of sex offenders who had escaped justice. I had relished in hearing that violent child-sex predators got the old ‘Long Bay Welcome Tea’ – a bucket of scalding water thrown over them on their first night in prison. That was the violent part of me. The beast inside. But this man didn’t need encouragement to go out and punish Theo Campbell’s killer with his little band of sunburned cronies. The men I’d punished had endured full, fair trials. I’d known they were guilty. The farmer before me was itching for a suspect to hurt. And there was no way he was going to wait to make sure he had the right guy.
‘Any suspects yet?’ he asked, as if on cue.
‘ No. But if we find some, and anything happens to those suspects before we can get them locked up, I’ll be looking at you.’ I pointed at Jace’s eyes. ‘So take your white man’s bush justice and fuck off.’
He laughed at my bravado, gave me another long visual assessment, his eyes wandering right down to my boots, back up to my face. I stood sweating in the sunlight as he wandered away.
Chapter 26
ZAC TABY WASN’T hard to find. Snale picked us up in her four-wheel drive and drove us, not to the school but away from the town. Along a dirt track that rattled the car windows almost out of their frames, we came to a shaded gully at the foot of a tall cliff face covered in spray-painted tags. I got out of the truck and stared at the peppering of cigarette butts at my feet. Somewhere in the shady brush someone was playing music, a whiny peal from phone speakers.
A large black-and-grey dog rushed to the car to intercept us, barking in a decidedly unfriendly manner. Its stride jangled with the string of Coke cans tied to its tail. Snale sighed, exasperated.
‘Digger,’ she snapped. ‘Come here. Come here, girl.’
The dog gave up its vicious charade and allowed itself to be freed.
‘Whose dog is that?’
‘It’s the town dog.’ Snale ushered the dog up onto the back seat of the four-wheel drive. ‘No one really owns her. Everybody feeds her. Which is probably why she’s so fat.’