I SAT AT Snale’s kitchen table with my head in my hands, listening to the officer rattling around the kitchen, scraping food together for her two city guests. It had been a long day, and when Snale showed us to our accommodation, my space a single fold-out bed at the end of her large enclosed porch, I felt the desire to fall into the sheets and bury my face in the pillow. It was a struggle to keep my mind on the diary that lay open in front of me. Snale came to the table with her notebook in her mouth and two wineglasses in her hands.
‘Don’t drink it all at once.’ She put a glass down before me. ‘Wine’s expensive out here. They only do a supply run every two weeks.’
Without warning there came a grunting, scraping sound. I almost spat out my first sip of wine when an enormous grey creature emerged into the narrow hall from the front room. The pig was at least a metre and a half long, covered in a fine black fur and a smattering of speckles. It trotted lazily into the room, looking me over with little interest.
I felt the first smile of the day crack my face. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Look,’ Snale sighed, ‘there are thirty-three adult men in this town. Thirty of them are married. One’s seventy years old. And the other two aren’t interested. It gets lonely out here.’
I laughed. ‘You could have got a dog.’
We watched the enormous pig sprawl out on a blanket by the door, giving a long, guttural groan as it flopped onto its side.
‘Jerry is a real presence in the house,’ Snale said. ‘His footsteps are heavy, and he snores really loud all night long. It feels like there’s someone here.’
Kash finished a phone call and joined us.
Forensics had arrived that afternoon and completed a once-over of the diary for DNA and prints, so we could touch it now. We’d also handed off the plain red backpack the book had been found in. The backpack looked new, and nothing else was in it. That was odd. Why not just carry the notebook by itself? Was the red backpack meant to attract attention from the roadside? Did the diarist want the book to be found?
I perused the pages quietly while Kash and Snale chatted. The writer had indeed done some extensive investigation of bomb-building options, focusing on explosives that could be made from everyday household objects. The idea seemed to emerge out of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’s failed attempts to blow up their school cafeteria with gas-bottle bombs before they went on their rampage.
‘Let’s get the handwriting analysed against all the handwriting samples we can collect from the town,’ Snale suggested.
I made notes, a list of to-dos.
‘ So this is the preliminary breakdown of the Campbell scene from Forensics today?’ I asked, pulling Snale’s notebook towards me.
‘Yes, classic propane bomb,’ she said. ‘Seems to the team that Theo would have been sitting with the gas bottle either between his legs or wedged under the chair when it went off. He was sitting facing the town.’ She sighed long and deep. ‘His wife, Olivia, is in tatters. Just beside herself.’
‘Does she have any ideas about suspects?’
‘She wasn’t very coherent,’ Snale said. ‘Says Theo was over in the next town fixing a mate’s roof – someone called David Lewis – and then was going to stay for dinner. When he didn’t answer his phone she figured he must have stayed the night. I’ll go back to her for suspects in a day, maybe. Give her time to get over the shock.’
‘Let’s go talk to David Lewis. See if Theo was acting weird.’ ‘Right.’
‘Any sign of someone else at the crime scene?’ Kash asked.
‘Maybe,’ Snale said. ‘There were footprints. Smeary, hard to tell the tread, but looks like an ordinary old workboot. Size seven men’s, nine women’s. Looks like a person pacing back and forth not far from the blast site. But they can’t really date the prints. Could have been a day or two before. Theo’s service weapon is missing, so someone must have got hold of it, used it to coerce him into the chair.’
‘Where did the chair come from?’ Kash asked. ‘Surely the killer didn’t bring it with him.’
‘There’s a bunch of junk up there on both crests, on the roadsides in and out of town,’ Snale said. ‘Kids go up there and smoke and throw things off the cliffs. Every Saturday night I go and do a sweep through the bush there and down in the gully, make sure they’re not doing anything too naughty. The chair was probably from one of their little campsites. The duct tape, I don’t know.’
‘Yes, the duct tape. Where were Theo’s handcuffs?’ I asked.
‘I’d be surprised if he had them with him. Neither of us have ever really bothered with them,’ Snale said. ‘I haven’t cuffed anyone in the ten years I’ve been out here. Things never really get that out of control. And I know every single person who lives here. There’s nowhere to run, so why try to get away?’
I turned to Kash, who was staring at the wineglass in my hand. ‘Propane bombs. Are they hard to make?’
‘Not at all. They’re the terrorist-in-training’s favourite improvised explosive device,’ he said. ‘Simple design, easily obtainable ingredients. Any idiot can make one. You get a gas bottle from a backyard barbecue, duct tape a can of petrol to the side of it. Take the cap off, put a wick in, light it up and run away. Boom.’ He threw his hands up.
‘So we could literally make one right now?’ I scoffed. ‘With Snale’s barbecue gas bottle?’
‘You could make a bunch of different bombs with stuff lying around here.’ Kash took out his mobile phone, showed it to me. ‘I could crack this open, find the wire that connects to the ringer, expose it so that it’ll spark. Dump it in a bottle of something. Make a call to it. There you go. Mobile phone–activated bomb.’
‘But where does a person get the knowledge to put these things together?’
‘The internet,’ Kash said.
‘Surely people send up red flags with your agency when they search for stuff like that,’ I said.
‘If every teenage boy in the country who ever searched for how to blow something up earned a file with ASIO, the department would cease to be operational.’ Kash was eyeing Snale now as she drank her wine. ‘We don’t identify terrorists by their Google searches. That’s amateur hour.’
‘Let’s get all the IP addresses in town anyway.’ I made a note. ‘Check everyone’s internet activity.’
‘Why Soupy?’ Snale’s lip quivered. She sipped her wine to cover it. ‘Why pick him? He was an absolute doll. Someone’s pacing back and forth. They’ve got him taped to a chair with a bomb between his legs. Facing the town. It’s a good view from up there. You can see everybody. All the houses.’
‘Everybody can see you, too,’ I said.
‘It’s very … showy,’ Snale said. ‘A demonstration. Either for Theo or for us, down here. A spectacle. Only the timing wasn’t great. No one awake to see it. Was it a practice shot? Or was Theo the audience – was he supposed to see the town spread out before him just before he died?’
I liked Snale’s musings. I wanted her to continue, but Kash spoke up.
‘Look, I don’t mean to interrupt. But are we going to be making drinking a part of our ongoing investigative practice? Or is this a one-off drinking session?’
Snale and I looked at each other.
‘Don’t get me wrong. You’ve both had interesting lines of inquiry so far. But we’re shooting the breeze about this case over a bottle of red in a dining room like a bunch of old ladies.’
‘Would you like to move to the garage?’ I snorted. ‘Should we appoint a chairman? Let me guess. It should be you.’
‘ There is a violent terrorist in this town.’ Kash took the diary from in front of me and waved it in my face. ‘Is the seriousness of the situation escaping you?’
‘We are taking it seriously,’ Snale huffed. ‘We’re just cooling off, that’s all. It’s been a long day. I had to go tell a woman her husband was blown to pieces all over a hillside today.’
‘Well, I’m sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess I’m just not on the same page as you two. When I was on assignment gathering intel in Afghanistan, I was seeing guys being blown to pieces all over hillsides every day. And it only toughened my resolve. I think we shouldn’t drink on the job.’ He got up and traipsed away into the living room. I let my eyes wander to the shell-shocked Sergeant Snale.
‘That was hilarious.’ I took a sip. ‘I think my wine actually tastes better now.’
‘Let’s look through this diary.’ She pulled the book towards her. ‘We’re going to catch this killer, with or without him.’
Chapter 20