“Barb,” he said finally. “It might not feel like it, but the officers in charge really will have considered all these possibilities.”
“Not very bloody well,” Barb snapped. “They didn’t want to know. They drove over from Clyde and took one look and said, ‘Yep, another farmer gone off the rails,’ and that was that. Open and shut. I could see what they were thinking. Nothing but sheep and fields. You’d have to be half off your nut to live here in the first place. I could see it in their faces.”
“They sent a team down from Clyde?” Falk asked, slightly surprised. Clyde was the nearest big town with a fully stocked cop shop. “It wasn’t the local guy? What’s his name?”
“Sergeant Raco. No. He’d only been here a week or so. They sent someone over.”
“You’ve told this Raco bloke you’ve got concerns?”
Her defiant look answered his question.
“We’re telling you,” she said.
Gerry put his glass down on the deck with a thud, and they both jumped.
“All right, I think we’ve said our piece,” he said. “It’s been a long day. Let’s give Aaron a chance to think things through. See what makes sense to him. Come on, mate, I’ll see you out.”
Barb opened her mouth like she wanted to protest but closed it after a look from Gerry. She laid Charlotte down on a spare chair and pulled Falk into a damp embrace.
“Just think about it. Please.” Her breath was hot against his ear. He could smell alcohol on her breath. Barb sat back down and picked up Charlotte. She rocked briskly until the child finally opened her eyes with an irritated wail. Barb smiled for the first time as she smoothed Charlotte’s hair and patted her back. Falk could hear her singing tunelessly as he followed Gerry down the hallway.
Gerry walked Falk right to his car.
“Barb’s clutching at straws,” Gerry said. “She’s got it into her head that this is all the work of some mythical debt enforcer. It’s rubbish. Luke wasn’t a fool with money. Having a tough time, like everyone else, yes. And he took the odd risk, but he was sensible enough. He’d never have got mixed up in that sort of thing. Anyway, Karen did all the accounts for the farm. She would’ve said. Would’ve told us if things were that bad.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think … I think he was under a lot of pressure. And as much as it hurts me, and I tell you, it kills me, I think what happened was exactly what it looks like. What I want to know is whether I share the blame.”
Falk leaned against his car. His head was pounding.
“How long have you known?” Falk said.
“That Luke was lying when he gave you an alibi? The whole time. So what’s that, twenty-odd years? I saw Luke riding his bike alone on the day it happened. Nowhere near where you boys said you were. I know you weren’t together.” He paused. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
“I didn’t kill Ellie Deacon.”
Hidden somewhere in the dark, the cicadas screeched.
Gerry nodded, looking down at his feet. “Aaron, if I’d thought for a second that you had, I wouldn’t have kept quiet. Why do you think I didn’t say anything? It would have ruined your life. The suspicion would have followed you for years. Would they have let you join the police? Luke would have had the book thrown at him for lying. All that for what? The girl was still dead. Killed herself, realistically, and I know a fair few others thought so too. You boys had nothing to do with it.” Gerry struck the toe of his boot against the ground. “At least that’s what I thought.”
“And now?”
“Now? Jesus. I don’t know what to believe. I always thought Luke was lying to protect you. But now I’ve got a murdered daughter-in-law and grandchild, and my own dead son with his fingerprints all over his shotgun.”
Gerry ran a hand over his face.
“I loved Luke. I would defend him to the end. But I loved Karen and Billy as well. And Charlotte. I would have gone to my grave saying my son was incapable of something like this. But this voice keeps whispering, Is that true? Are you sure? So I’m asking you. Here. Now. Did Luke give that alibi to protect you, Aaron? Or was he lying to protect himself?”
“There was never any suggestion Luke was responsible for what happened to Ellie,” Falk said carefully.
“No,” Gerry said. “Not least because you alibied each other, though, eh? You and I both knew he was lying about that, and neither of us said anything. So my question is whether that puts the blood of my daughter-in-law and grandson on my hands.”
Gerry tilted his face, and his expression was lost in shadow.
“It’s something to ask yourself before you go scurrying back to Melbourne. You and I both hid the truth. If I’m guilty, so are you.”
The country roads seemed even longer on the drive back to the pub. Falk flicked on his high beams, and they carved a cone of white light in the gloom. He felt like the only person for miles. Nothing ahead, nothing behind.
He felt the sickening thud under the wheels almost before he registered the small blur streaking across the road. A rabbit. There, then instantly gone. His heart was pounding. He tapped the brake automatically but was a thousand kilos and eighty kilometers an hour too late. No contest. The impact had come like a blow to the chest, and it nudged something loose in Falk’s mind. A memory he hadn’t thought of in years slid to the surface.
The rabbit was only a baby, shivering in Luke’s hands. His fingernails were thick with grime. They often were. For Kiewarra’s eight-year-olds, weekend entertainment was limited. They’d been running fast through the overgrown grass, racing to nowhere, when Luke had stopped dead. He bent down among the long stalks and a moment later stood, holding the tiny creature aloft. Aaron ran over to see. They’d stroked it, each telling the other not to press so hard.
“He likes me. He’s mine,” Luke said. They argued about names all the way back to Luke’s house.
They found a cardboard box to put it in and loomed over to examine their new pet. The rabbit quivered a little under their scrutiny but mainly lay still. Fear masquerading as acceptance.
Aaron ran inside to fetch a towel to line the cardboard. It took him longer than expected, and when he reemerged into the bright sun, Luke was still. He had one hand in the box. Luke’s head snapped up as Aaron approached, and he snatched his hand out. Aaron walked over, uncertain of what he was seeing, but feeling the urge to delay the moment when he would look inside.
“It died,” Luke said. His mouth was a tight line. He didn’t meet Aaron’s gaze.
“How?”
“I don’t know. It just did.”
Aaron asked a few more times but never got a different answer. The rabbit lay on its side, perfect but unmoving, its eyes black and vacant.
“Just think about it,” Barb had said as Falk had left their home. Instead, as he drove down those long country roads, the dead animal still fresh under his wheels, Falk couldn’t stop thinking about Ellie Deacon and their teenage gang of four. And whether Ellie’s dark eyes had looked as vacant after the water had finished filling her lungs.
4