Then he hears it: a cry, a stifled cry. It’s not close, not too close. His mind makes the leap, informed by his last visit. He guesses either the guest lounge, with its empty beer cans and bloated ashtrays, or the room of the dead cat. He moves quickly again, into the main corridor, along it, barely pausing to check before turning the right-angle corner to head along the front of the pub. He’s creeping forward when he hears something new. He pauses again. Someone singing. A lullaby? Jesus. He gathers his guts, threatening to turn liquid, summons the vestiges of his courage, and walks, purposefully and without pause, down the corridor.
How long does it take him to walk those twenty-five metres? A few short seconds or half a lifetime? It’s impossible to say. He passes the stairs leading down into the pub, sees the brass runners on the carpet, notes the watery English light in the foxhunting picture, sees the blazing Australian light through the French doors leading to the verandah. He sees other things—the ornate yet dusty chandelier hanging above the stairs; the veneer lifting ever so slightly on the antique dresser; a painting of mountains, blue ranges with the anvil clouds of a summer storm above them. Smells come to him: dust and blood and mothballs and cigarettes. And fear. The smell he endured for three days and three nights and an eternity in the boot of a battered yellow Mercedes abandoned somewhere in the Gaza Strip. The smell has followed him across the oceans, seeking him out inside a shuttered hotel in the Riverina. But the smell doesn’t stop him. Nothing will stop him. He walks through it, wades through it, pushes through it. The singing is telling him where to go, to the room of the dead cat.
He walks in, treading softly, but not trying to hide. Jamie Landers is sitting on a chair by the window, naked from the waist down. He stops singing. He has a knife in his hand. A long knife, its point wet and red. Liam is on the bed, one arm and the opposite leg tied to the corner posts, a gag in his mouth, eyes wide with terror, tears and snot all over his face. He’s naked and there’s blood smeared across his tiny torso from a cut to his chest.
‘So it’s you, reporter man. I wondered who it’d be.’
‘Jamie, you can’t do this. You have to let him go.’
‘It’s all right, reporter man. I’ll make it quick. They don’t last long, you know. Not the little ones. You’ll last longer, old man, I promise you. Much longer.’
Martin edges forward, arms wide, as if somehow he might counter a knife thrust. Robbie must be on his way; has to be on his way.
Jamie stands, with a smile splayed across his face. ‘You want to watch me do it? Watch the lights go out? It’s quite a sight.’
Martin freezes, is frozen, as the blur comes past him on the left. White and blue and so very swift, hitting Jamie Landers in the chest with a force so fast and fearless that the teenager doesn’t have time to turn the blade. It’s Mandy Blonde, slamming him into the wall, knocking the wind from him, pulling the knife from him.
‘Mandy, no.’ It’s Martin’s voice, a distant, disembodied plea, beaming in from some other universe. But it’s no good. She’s not listening. She glances at her son, struggling and distressed, and then she looks directly into the mad eyes, the face no longer smiling, the smell of fear now filling his nostrils and his alone. She raises the knife, its tip touching his neck. She moves it slowly, drawing blood. ‘I’m going to gut you here and now,’ she whispers. But his hands are up in surrender, and she hesitates. Robbie Haus-Jones bursts through the door, gun in hand.
HOURS PASS AND MARTIN IS STILL AT THE POLICE STATION. THE SAME COUNTER, the same pamphlets, the same useless hands. He looks at them, studies them. The hands of a witness, the hands of a note taker, stained by time but unblemished by achievement.
On some few occasions, in Asia and in the Middle East, he had been present during dramatic events, the stenographer of history, but such heights were rare and, even then, not truly his; they would have unfolded in exactly the same fashion had he been absent. The rest of his career, the rest of his life, he’d been curating history’s footnotes, not dictating its narrative. He’d been objective, licensed by his profession to be both present and not present, standing apart, behind the cameras and the headlines, not in front of them, a voyeur with a notepad, the ghost in the room. That is, until he climbed into the boot of a Mercedes in Gaza and unwittingly became the story and not the conveyor of it; part of events and not just recording them. And now it’s happening again: he’s involved; profoundly, if unintentionally. He has saved a man—the town leper—from a bushfire, and saved the life of a teenage boy—a killer—in a car crash. He stands accused of driving a policeman to suicide, been pilloried on national television and posted bail for a woman accused of perverting the course of justice. And now he’s saved the life of a small child. He has become the antithesis of the dispassionate, objective reporter he once was. Somehow, accidentally, he has inserted himself into the very centre of events, into the vortex of a story sucking in the attention of the nation, pulling in talkback and Twitter and satellite trucks, dragging them in like a tornado across the empty plain.
Max had sent him here to reconcile with his past, to recover from the trauma of Gaza, to rediscover his mojo. But the past has come stalking him: the reality of a life lived on the outskirts, always watching, always recording, never participating. He thinks of a girl, a pretty girl, long ago at university. She had loved him, he realises now, wondering why it has taken twenty years for him to recognise the fact. After all, she had told him so, had said the words, but he had never reciprocated, and they had drifted apart. Where is she now? Happy, no doubt. Married with children; loving and loved. Married to Scotty the dentist, perhaps. And where is Martin? In a one-officer police station in the last town on earth, with no family and no friends and no career. He thinks of Mandy. What passed through his mind, just below the surface, when he first met her in the Oasis: gorgeous, available, transient. Pliable, vulnerable, disposable. He is, he realises, some kind of arsehole, an incomplete man. He came to Riversend to escape his past, but it isn’t the past he needs to escape, it’s not the present, it’s something missing inside of himself. He doesn’t need to escape it; he needs to acknowledge it. He looks at his hands: old and young, sullied and innocent.