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‘I thought this was as good a place as any to keep them,’ he said.

‘Is this the one that burnt your hands?’

‘I’m pretty certain it was. Be careful. I put some air holes into the bags. Make sure you don’t touch it.’

Harrigan could see nothing out of ordinary about any of these four crops, among the most commonly grown food and cash crops in the world.

‘Where are these being grown?’ he asked.

‘In this enclosure Stewie had built-I call the Cage. It’s huge. It’s got greenhouses, water tanks, fences around it you can’t climb over. Stewie even had his own access road put in right up to the gate.’

‘He didn’t tell you about it?’

‘He just went and did it. After that it was too late. It was built and there was nothing I could do unless I went to the law. I can’t afford to do that and he knows it. He never let me in that Cage, not once. People would come and go all the time. But not me. He’d locked me out. Then the same day I hear on the news that those people are dead, this comes to me by courier.’

He handed Harrigan the small box containing the keys and note. ‘That’s that Jerome’s keyring,’ he said. ‘I saw it on the table the day he was here. The people who killed him sent me this stuff, didn’t they?’

‘They must have done. They would have taken it off him when they killed him. Did these people know what touching that tobacco would do to your hands?’

Harold could only shrug. He rubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray already dirtied with ancient stubs.

‘Come outside. I’ll show you something else.’

Yaralla stood at the top of a low rise in the lightly undulating landscape. They walked through the silhouettes of what had once been ornamental trees and shrubs, then through the gate and into the house paddock. The night noises were muted, the silence all pervasive. The scattered trees in the landscape were dark shadows, the distant houses small nubs in the moonlight.

‘It’s quiet,’ Harrigan said.

‘Too quiet. It feels like everything’s dead. Sometimes I think there’s only me and Rosie left alive out here. And Ambro and her kids of course.’

Harrigan looked upwards. The moon was at the high arc of the sky, bright and small, the stars dimmed by its light.

‘That’s the Creek Lane down there,’ Harold was saying. ‘Standing out here, you’d say everything you could see was peaceful. About fifteen minutes before you got here, Rosie started barking. She’d heard a car. Whoever it was, they didn’t come across the creek the way you did. They kept going along the Coolemon Road. Now that road crosses the creek about three miles further on from here and then goes on around the back of my place. At first, I thought it was you. Then I knew it wasn’t. For one thing, they were going too fast. This is what’s happening to me, mate, and I don’t like it. You hear a car at night. Why shouldn’t it be someone going home? People live out on that road. Why should it make me so fucking nervous just to hear a car?’

‘Did it come back?’

‘No. It’ll be miles away by now, the way it was travelling.’

‘Did you hear or see any other cars come along here this evening?’

‘I saw Barry on his way home about seven. That’s it.’

‘It’s lonely out here, mate,’ Harrigan said after a pause. ‘Ambro’s cottage is over in that direction, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. You can see her.’

Harold pointed across the moonlit darkness to the hard and dark outline of a small cottage on the Creek Road. A faint light gleamed from one of the windows.

‘Did you tell her I was coming?’

Harold grinned. ‘Yeah, mate. I’m not going to repeat what she said in reply. She uses a few words I don’t.’

‘I can guess. Harry, I don’t feel right about this. I’m going down there now. I want to get Ambro and her kids back to Coolemon as soon as I can. I’ll feel safer when I do.’

‘Let me take you in my ute. We’ll go across the paddocks. It’ll be quicker. You don’t want to take your car over there. It’s too rough.’

‘If the man in that car you heard just now is who I think it could be, he’s a killer. He shot dead an ex-policeman yesterday. I ought to tell you now, I’m armed.’

‘Then I’ll get my shotgun. I’m sick of people walking all over my property doing what they want to do. They can pay attention to me for a change.’

‘You can’t drive with those hands. Tell me where to go and I’ll drive.’

‘I took a couple of tablets a little while ago. They’re still working. If it gets too bad, I’ll let you take over. But I’m not going to sit around. I’m not having all this turn me into something useless.’

Before they left, Harrigan rang through to local police asking for backup. He needed an escort to bring a woman and her three children into Coolemon, he said. They would be on their way as soon as possible, the duty sergeant said: half an hour to assemble and hit the road. Harrigan told them to hurry.

Outside in the yard, Harrigan stopped to look at the garage, next to Rosie’s enclosure, where he had left his car. The door had a lock, but one that was so easy to break it wasn’t worth securing.

‘Harry, that car you heard earlier,’ he said. ‘Is there any other way it can get on to your property from where you think it went? What about the road Stewie put in?’

‘Yeah, they could come in that way. But that’d just take you up to the Cage. You’d still have to know how to get from there to here across my paddocks.’

‘What if he came back here through the main gate while we were gone?’

‘We’d see him if he had his lights on. He couldn’t be that close. I’d have heard him if he was. You can hear things for miles around here.’

Uneasily, Harrigan got into the ute. Rosie’s disappointed barking followed them out into the night. They drove directly across Harold’s pastures. The roar of the engine and the glare of the headlights must have carried for miles.

‘If anyone’s out there, they have to see us coming,’ Harrigan said.

Harold grinned in a way that surprised him. He realised how angry the man was. ‘Maybe we’ll scare them off,’ Harold said.

They pulled up at the back of Ambrosine’s cottage. The lights had been turned off. A sense of urgency took hold of Harrigan. Without waiting, he was out of the cabin and pounding on the back door.

‘Ambro? It’s Paul Harrigan. Are you in there? Open the door. Open it now or I’ll break it down!’

The back door was opened. Ambrosine stood there, dishevelled and sleepy-eyed. A smell of dope wafted past her.

‘What the fuck are you doing out here at this time of night?’

Harrigan pushed past her into the kitchen. Harold followed him, carrying the shotgun.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘What are you doing with that? What’s going on?’

‘It’s okay, mate,’ Harold told her. He spoke to Harrigan. ‘I’m going back outside. I’ll keep a watch to see if that car comes back.’

‘What fucking car?’

‘Just wait,’ Harrigan snapped.

Used plates, the remains of a meal, were stacked on the bench. A tiny mouse scurried down to the floor and out of sight. Harrigan looked around at the walls covered with Ambrosine’s paintings. Their luminescent colours and obsessive details crowded in on him. One of them showed the cottage isolated between a vast sky and a bare red ochre foreground. Harrigan felt the sense of vulnerability powerfully. Out here, there was nothing to protect a person other than the huge distances. He should never have brought Ambrosine and her children here in the first place.

‘What do you want?’ Ambrosine interrupted him. ‘For months you don’t fucking bother getting in touch with me or coming to see me. Now you turn up in the middle of the night talking about some fucking car! What is it?’

‘I’m taking you all back into Coolemon now. Get your kids and let’s go.’

‘You don’t think I’m safe here any more? Why?’

Leaving her unanswered, he walked into the hallway. The front room had its door open. He could see it was her bedroom. There was another room opposite with its door shut. He guessed this was where her children slept. He looked through into the lounge where the moonlight cut silver-white patches onto the cracked linoleum. It was empty. He went to the front door and opened it. The dark tree line of Naradhan Creek was visible on the other side of the road. He walked outside and looked along the lane but saw nothing other than the curve of the empty road, whitened to grey by the moon. He went back inside to the kitchen.