“’Cause she was fine,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. She was scared, obviously, but not hurt that I could see. And I remember thinking at that moment that it might all still be OK. Yes, it was sad about the mum, tragic. But thank God, at least the kids were OK. But then I look across the hall, and a door’s ajar.”
He carefully ground his cigarette butt into the dirt, not looking at Falk. Falk felt a cold dread seep through him, knowing what was to come.
“And I can see it’s another kid’s room. All blue paint and car posters, you know? Boy’s room. And there’s no sound coming from that one. So I go across the hall and push open the door, and then it definitely wasn’t OK at all.” He paused. “That room was like a scene from hell. That room was the worst thing I have ever seen.”
They sat in silence until Raco cleared his throat.
“Come on,” he said, pulling himself to his feet, shaking his arms as if shedding the memory. Falk stood and followed him toward the front of the house.
“The response teams arrived from Clyde shortly after that,” Raco went on as they walked. “Police, paramedics. It was nearly half past six by the time they got there. We’d searched the rest of the house, and there’s no one else there, thank Christ, so everyone was desperately trying to phone Luke Hadler. At first people are worried—you know, how are we supposed to break this to him? But then there’s still no answer and his car’s not there and he hasn’t come home, and all of a sudden you could feel the mood start to shift.”
“What was Luke supposed to have been doing, then?”
“A couple of the search-and-rescue volunteers, mates of his, knew he’d been helping a friend cull rabbits on his property that afternoon. A guy called Jamie Sullivan. Someone rang, and Sullivan confirmed it but said Luke had left his farm a couple of hours earlier by that point.”
They’d reached the front door, and Raco pulled out a set of keys.
“When there was still no sign of Luke and no answer on his phone, we called some more of the search-and-rescue team in. Paired them up with officers, sent them out looking. It was a terrible couple of hours. We had unarmed searchers tramping through fields and bushland, not sure what they would find. Luke dead? Alive? No idea what kind of state he’d be in. We were all panicking we’d find him holed up somewhere with a gun and a death wish. In the end one of the search guys stumbled across his truck more by luck than anything. Parked up in some crappy clearing about three kilometers away. There was no need to worry after all. Luke was dead in the back, missing most of his face. His own gun, licensed, registered, completely legit, still in his hand.”
Raco unlocked the farmhouse door and pushed it open.
“So it seemed like that was that. Pretty much done and dusted. This”—he stepped aside so Falk could see right down the long hallway—“is where it starts to get strange.”
The entrance hall was muggy and stank of bleach. A side table piled with household clutter of bills and pens sat askew against a far wall, shoved from its original position. The tiled floor was ominously clean. The entire hallway had been scrubbed down to the original grout.
“The industrial cleaners’ve been through, so there aren’t any nasty surprises,” Raco said. “They couldn’t save the carpet in the kid’s bedroom. Not that you’d want to.”
Family photos covered the walls. The frozen poses looked somehow familiar, and Falk realized he’d seen most of them at the funeral. The whole scene felt like a grotesque parody of the warm family home he’d known.
“Karen’s body was found right here in the hallway,” Raco said. “The door was open, so the courier saw her straight away.”
“Was she running for the door?” Falk tried to imagine Luke chasing his own wife through their own house.
“No, that’s just it. She was answering it. Shot by whoever was standing on the doorstep. You can tell from the position of the body. But tell me this, when you come home at night, does your wife answer the door to you?”
“I’m not married,” Falk said.
“Well, I am. And call me liberated, but I’ve got a key to my own house.”
Falk considered. “Catch her by surprise, maybe?” he said, playing out the scenario in his mind.
“Why bother? Dad comes home waving a loaded shotgun, I reckon they’d still be pretty bloody surprised. He’s got them both inside the house. Knows the layout. Too easy.”
Falk positioned himself inside the hall and opened and closed the door a few times. Open, the doorway was a rectangle of blinding light compared with the dimness of the hall. He imagined Karen answering the knock, a little distracted maybe, perhaps annoyed by the interruption. Blinking away the brightness for the crucial second it took her killer to raise a gun.
“Just strikes me as odd,” Raco said. “Shooting her in the doorway. All it did was give that poor kid a chance to piss his pants and bolt, not necessarily in that order.”
Raco looked past Falk. “Which brings me to my next point,” he said. “When you’re ready.”
Falk nodded and followed him down the bowels of the hall.
As Raco snapped on the light in the small blue bedroom, Falk’s first dizzy impression was that someone was renovating. A child’s bed had been shoved against the far wall at an angle, stripped back to the mattress. Toys were piled in boxes and stacked haphazardly beneath posters of football players and Disney characters. The carpet had been ripped out, exposing untreated floorboards.
Falk’s boots left patterns in a layer of sawdust. The boards in one corner had been heavily sanded. A stain still remained. Raco lingered by the doorway.
“Still difficult for me to be in here,” he said with a shrug.
This had once been a nice bedroom, Falk knew. Twenty years ago it had been Luke’s own. Falk had slept there himself many times. Whispering after lights out. Holding his breath and stifling giggles when Barb Hadler called through to them to shut up and go to sleep. Wrapped warm in a sleeping bag, not far from those floorboards with their awful stain. This room had been a good space. Now, like the hall, it stank of bleach.
“Can we open the window?”
“Better not,” Raco said. “Got to keep the blinds down. Caught a couple of kids trying to take photos soon after it happened.”
Raco pulled out his tablet computer and tapped it a few times. He handed it to Falk. On the screen was a photo gallery.
“The little boy’s body’s been removed,” Raco said. “But you can see how the room was found.”
In the photos, the blinds were wide open, spilling light onto a horrendous scene below. The wardrobe doors were flung wide open, and the clothes had been roughly pushed aside. A large wicker toy box was overturned. On the bed, a spaceship duvet was rucked up on one side as though tossed back to check what was under it. The carpet was mostly beige, except for the one corner where a rich red-black pool seeped out from behind a large upended laundry basket.
For a moment Falk tried to imagine Billy Hadler’s last moments. Huddled behind the laundry basket, hot urine dribbling down his leg as he tried to silence ragged breaths.
“You got kids?” Raco asked.
Falk shook his head. “You?”
“One on the way. A little girl.”