‘ You guys have got your own school down there?’ I looked at the tiny town below us. It hardly seemed to have enough buildings.
‘Of the town’s seventy-five residents, twelve are kids,’ Snale said. ‘There’s a little schoolhouse behind the post office. Two teachers. Five seniors and seven juniors.’
‘And those guys reckon this Taby kid’s written the diary?’ I said. ‘Makes sense. The book’s full of praise for idiot teens. So they think they’re looking for an idiot teen. Who are they, anyway?’
‘They’re just local farmers.’ Snale glanced back at them. ‘They say they’ve seen Taby around the junkyard over in Tibooburra playing with engine parts. He’s basically everybody’s first suspect when anything happens around here. I have questioned Zac but I wasn’t convinced he had anything to do with the diary.’
‘What made you so sure?’
Snale shrugged. ‘He’s been in and out of the station a lot, and I’ve always had him write statements of what’s occurred. Zac hates writing. Why would he spend hours upon hours constructing a handwritten diary?’
‘If a kid’s interested in something, they’ll put in the effort,’ I said.
‘What’s Taby’s religious background?’ Kash asked.
‘Oh, I’m not sure. If you want to go to church around here you’ve got to drive all the way to Fowlers Gap. That’s Catholic. There are no mosques out here.’
‘So he might be Muslim?’ Kash had perked up, like a dog catching a scent.
‘ I don’t know.’ Snale shrugged again. ‘He’s Pakistani. His is the only non-white family in the valley. People have always given the Taby family a hard time. Problem isn’t just whether the Taby kid is responsible for this. It’s that people think he is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Once things get reported as fact in small towns, they remain fact. And people decide facts for themselves out here. There was a rape over in the next town last year. Everybody decided it was the local plumber who did it. He had an alibi and everything, and the DNA didn’t match. But once people had decided, that was it. They ran him out of town.’ Snale already looked stressed. She walked back towards the men on the side of the road.
Kash beckoned for the diary on the seat beside me.
‘Probably better give me that,’ he said. ‘It’ll be safer in my custody. I’ll do an analysis of the content and draw up a report.’
I didn’t move to hand him the diary. He raised an eyebrow, his hand out, waiting.
‘I’m not playing this game,’ I said.
‘What game?’
‘This one.’ I pointed to his chest, mine. ‘This territorial crap. This stupid dance, where you tell me to step off, wave your dick around, puff your chest out. That shit doesn’t work on me.’
‘It doesn’t?’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you why. I’m looking at you and I’m guessing you’re about … what? Thirty years old?’
‘I’m thirty-three.’
‘Right.’ I nodded. ‘I’m thirty-six. My brother and I were removed from my mother’s care when I was two years old. She was a prostitute. A drug addict. I spent sixteen years in foster care,’ I said, watching his face. ‘I don’t know how many homes we were shuffled through. Sometimes Sam and I were together. Sometimes we were apart. We never stayed anywhere for more than a year. But in each and every family, the kids would tell me the same thing as soon as I arrived. This is my house. Those are my parents. You don’t touch my toys. You don’t hug my mum. You don’t belong here.’
Kash’s defiant frown had softened a little, if only with confusion at my candidness. I leaned forwards so that he could see that I meant every word I was saying.
‘People have been telling me to fuck off out of their territory since before you were born,’ I said. ‘And for all those years, my answer’s been exactly the same.’
He waited.
‘This is my house now,’ I said.
Chapter 18
WHITT SQUEEZED ALONG the packed aisle and settled near the middle of the row of spectator seats to the left of the courtroom. Above him, the press gallery was all looking at their phones, updating their editors before the morning’s session began.
As Harriet’s brother was escorted into the huge space in his crumpled suit, a hush fell over the crowd. Whitt tried to catch the man’s eye, but Sam’s stare was on the back of the courtroom.
Today, expert witnesses would testify about Sam’s mental capabilities. The frail, big-nosed Doctor Hemsill had taken the stand, and avoided eye contact with Blue as he read from his report.
‘We can infer that much of Samuel Blue’s troubling history is directly attributable to developmental issues caused by his mother’s use of illicit substances during her pregnancy,’ Hemsill said. ‘His tests show low patterns of stimuli reaction in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which we know are areas of the brain affected by substance abuse in utero. The prefrontal cortex controls a lot of our civilising, inhibiting behaviour. It’s what stops you lashing out or acting violently, for example, when you’re experiencing rage.’
Whitt thought about Harry as he made notes. The times he’d seen her kick down doors, throw things, charge forwards with her fists balled when the stress of her situation became too much. He tried to shake her out of his head.
‘Impulsivity is something we see often with these kinds of brain activity patterns,’ Doctor Hemsill sighed. ‘Reactions to emotion, rather than logic. Blue’s social abilities are also greatly hindered by his neurological patterns. He has trouble with empathy. He can be abrasive. Hard to relate to. He naturally finds it difficult making friends at all, but when he does make them, his loyalty endures beyond reason.’
Whitt had accidentally written ‘Harry’ instead of ‘Sam’ in his notes. He crossed out the name, but circled the word ‘empathy’, tapping his pen thoughtfully on the page. Harry shared her brother’s wild, unpredictable personality. She was abrasive and hard to relate to. But she did not lack empathy. Whitt had spent a couple of weeks in the desert with her, watching her toss and turn in her sleep, watching her struggle under the almost physical weight of her worry for whomever the Bandya Mine killer would target next. She’d been broken-hearted after a spider in their cabin had been found unceremoniously squished. She felt things for others. In fact, sometimes Whitt thought she felt them too keenly. She would take the crusades of others on as her own responsibility, fight for people who didn’t want or didn’t deserve it.
Whitt had lost himself in dreaming. He rubbed his eyes, looked around. At the end of his row, a man with a closely shaved head was sitting with his hands on his knees. Whitt didn’t know what it was that drew his focus to this man. Perhaps it was his attentive presence in the distinctly sparse seating area reserved for supporters of the accused. Whitt and the man were alone on the bench, and the bench behind them was empty. But no, it was something more. Whitt realised that almost every set of eyes in the courtroom was focused on the large screen behind the witness stand, where Doctor Hemsill was pointing at parts of the human brain lit up with different colours.
But the shaven-headed man’s eyes were on Samuel Blue. The man was not just staring; his gaze was locked on Blue, like a cat with its attention fixed on a bird. The hairs on Whitt’s arms were beginning to stand on end. Something told him to commit this man’s face to memory. He looked at the notebook before him. Perhaps he could make a sketch. He took up his pen. But when he turned back to examine the man again, he was gone.
Chapter 19