The parched landscape brought Harold’s words back. Wait till you see it. It’ll break your heart. Clear and overarching, the blue sky offered no possibility of rain. Harrigan saw Harold and the two constables at the edge of the old garden beds, standing near the snagged ute. With one back wheel hanging just above the ground, it looked like some bizarre dead bug. Harrigan went to join them.
‘Morning,’ Harold said. ‘Do you want to give us a hand? I can’t help out too much because of my hands. This is why I almost overturned us last night. I got too close to the paving.’
The garden’s ornamental paving stones had subsided over time and last night they had given way under the weight of the ute. The ground beneath had collapsed into a series of deep cracks, revealing an extensive network of ants’ nests. With its right wheel caught in one of these cracks, the ute had overbalanced on its side, then become lodged. In the hot morning sun, ants were swarming out of their nests and over the ground, climbing up on the ute’s body in an angry mass.
Using the police car, one of the constables towed the ute out of the crack while Harrigan and his colleague righted it from the back. It hit the ground with a thud. Even more agitated and angry, the ants flowed into the cabin and onto the tray. The constable towed the vehicle away from the nests to open ground where Harold ruthlessly sprayed the ants with what looked like homemade insecticide.
‘Have you had any breakfast?’ he asked Harrigan. ‘We can go out to the Cage whenever you’re ready.’
‘In this?’ Harrigan watched ants falling to the ground in dead clusters while others disappeared into the ute’s bodywork. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll get us a car. I’ll drive and give your hands a break.’
He couldn’t take his own car; it had to be examined by the forensic team to see if it had been tampered with. Still, there had to be some advantages to being the boss, including asking for another car to be made available for him as soon as possible. He went back inside to shower, to sustain the body. On his way to the bathroom, he looked in on Ambrosine and her children. They slept in what had once been Stuart’s and Harold’s bedroom: Ambrosine with her smallest son on one bed, her other two children side by side on the second. Harrigan closed the door on them quietly. Peace. Order. It was a wild ambition he had. As rare out here in the remote countryside as in the heart of the city.
A replacement car arrived later in the morning with the senior sergeant from Coolemon. He drove into the yard followed by a contingent of uniformed police drawn from other towns around the district. Harrigan sent them down to secure the remains of Ambrosine’s cottage, then search along the creek bed for a makeshift grave. The other two constables, relieved from their night shift, went home.
Following Harold’s directions, Harrigan drove out across the property in the opposite direction. Their drive took them along a pathway of open gates and, in some places, gaps in Harold’s fences where the gunman had simply cut his way through the wire on his way to the farmhouse.
‘He did come in on Stewie’s private road,’ Harrigan said, when they’d stopped to look at another hole in a fence.
‘But how did he know what direction to take across my fields?’
Harrigan reached into his pocket and took out his LPS badge.
‘This,’ he said. ‘It’s a tracking device.’
‘That thing? Is it working now?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. But I don’t think our gunman will be anywhere near here given the number of police around. And I’m still armed. I was given this yesterday. I was played for a fool.’
‘We still got the better of him when it mattered, mate.’
Harrigan drove on until in the near distance they saw the glint of steel fences. He drove past piles of dead trees and pulled up outside an open gate. Harold was out of the car even before Harrigan had stopped.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘All that water. What a waste.’
It was a scene of devastation. A wide gap had been punched in the high steel fence. Every structure inside the enclosure had been demolished. The tanks against the far fence had been torn open and their tens of thousands of litres of water had poured out, turning the ground just outside the fence into a swamp.
‘Is this what you wanted to show me?’ Harrigan asked.
‘It wasn’t like this the last time I saw it. I don’t know when this happened.’
They walked past heaps of debris. Broken glass sparkled in the sun.
‘I’ll never be able to use this piece of land again,’ Harold said.
‘Take it back to the beginning, Harry. What used to be here?’
‘Before? Seven months ago, this whole area was covered with grey box. Those are the trees lying outside the fence. If you mean what Stuart put here, there were three greenhouses in a line, right there. Big ones.’
Harrigan saw the indentations in the ground, now filled with smashed glass and twisted steel, where the structures had stood.
‘Over there,’ Harold turned and pointed to a bare area behind them, scraped clean, ‘that was a small field of wheat, the kind I used to grow myself. Everything’s gone. They’ve even taken the soil. Over there is the access road they put in. The road was fenced off from my paddocks and there was a locked gate where it met the Coolemon Road. That fence is gone now, and my guess is the gate has too.’
Harrigan looked along the broken fence line that had once marked the dirt road. Deep serrations were scored in the ground where the bulldozers had come in.
‘When were you last here?’ he asked.
‘Two days ago. It must have happened the night after I burned my hands. I knocked myself out that night. I wouldn’t have heard a thing.’
‘It’s a fair distance over to here from your place.’
‘They would have had their lights on. With that and the racket they’d have made, I would have noticed something.’
‘Lucky you didn’t,’ Harrigan said grimly. ‘Otherwise, you might have ended up face down in the dirt.’
He looked around. Torn and twisted pieces of irrigation equipment lay broken into the ground. Near the fence, he saw the generator that had once driven the system smashed to pieces.
‘Did you ever see people come out here?’ he asked Harold.
‘All the time. People would come in from the Coolemon Road. I never spoke to them, never really saw them close up. There was a place to sleep in one of the greenhouses so they must have spent time out here.’
‘This must have cost a fortune to build. Whoever did this put a bulldozer through it without thinking about it.’
In the debris, Harrigan saw the carcasses of small animals and birds.
‘Have you told anyone you took those specimens or that you’ve still got them?’ he asked.
‘No one but you, mate.’
‘I think we should keep it that way for the time being. My officers are going to take your statement sometime today. Bring them out here and show them this. Give them the keys. Tell them everything you’ve told me since I got here. But don’t tell them that one small detail.’
‘What do I tell them about my hands?’
‘That you went in there, you looked it over, you handled what you found,’ Harrigan said.
‘Can’t you trust your people, mate?’
‘Some I can and some I can’t. I’m not sure which is which at the moment.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m not. I don’t want any more people dead, including you or me. Let’s go and see where they came in.’
They followed the indentations in the ground until they reached the Coolemon Road. The gate that had once secured the private road from intruders was smashed and lay half across the road, while a gap had been torn in Harold’s fence. Working together, they managed to drag the gate out of the path of any traffic. Harrigan stopped to look down the empty road. In the distance, he heard the sound of a crow.
‘The gunman had to know there was an entry point here. Otherwise, it’d just be any other gate,’ he said.