Cafe loyalty card in pocket with water damage need to chase down logo—labels cut off clothing?—body spent time in Diamantina River? Old water tank?—cannabis residue in donger he’d rented (visit next time in Winton and check if locals bother locking up in town)—tyre print in oil leak—police (Lana and her constable) refusing to release time of death—go back and change age of victim to fit juvie timeline—
The ringing cut off. Hallelujah; Number Four’s call can’t have been that urgent.
Hux gave his shoulders a roll to ease out the kinks. He was a thousand words short of his best ever daily word count, and had this vague idea in his head that, if he cracked it, he could reward himself with an afternoon trip down to Point Arkwright to try out his new longboard.
He was barely into a new paragraph when the tinny ring started up again.
‘Far out,’ he muttered, and even the comatose dog under his desk grunted in annoyance. Hux resigned himself to answering, but switched the phone to speaker so his fingers were free to do their thing.
‘Sal, hey. Can I call you back?’
‘Hux. The police are here.’
He blinked. He’d probably typed the word ‘police’ a dozen times already that day, as per normal, but Number Four wasn’t one of the characters in his fictitious world. She was fourteen hundred kilometres northwest of him in the dot on the map of outback Queensland that he called home nine months of the year, a place so small it had a one-officer police station about the size of an outhouse. Police work in Yindi Creek was mainly attending to truck rollovers and gathering scattered sheep or watering the barely alive geraniums outside the station door; nothing that required backup. Not always, of course. But years had passed since then, decades in fact, and—
‘Did you hear me?’ Sal sounded hoarse and whispery, like she’d been crying.
‘I heard you. Sorry, I was just—’ He took a breath and focused. The pregnancy. Something had happened and it wasn’t as though Yindi Creek had an ambulance, so that’d explain the police. ‘Is it the baby?’
‘No, it’s—’
Of course it wasn’t the baby. If something had gone wrong with his sister’s pregnancy she’d be more than crying; she’d be devastated and in no fit state to be making phone calls. ‘Are Charlie and the kids safe? Mum and Dad and the Numbers?’
‘Yes, of course, stop interrupting me and I’ll tell you,’ she said, gabbling so fast he had trouble keeping up. ‘Charlie was out on a charter yesterday morning to pick up some guy from an opal lease out in the middle of nowhere, but there was no guy, and he searched and searched, but then the caravan turned out to be some piece of junk, and I think he had some sort of breakdown, Hux, because Phaedracilla said he tookagesto come home and so he missed his next charter and the Ferrises aresopissed off because they missed out on a ram they were wanting to bid on. He—Charlie, not Len Ferris—already went to the station to report the guy not turning up, because it’s, like, effing hot out here at the moment, and youknowhow tough that must have been for Charlie, and now he’s hating on himself because …’
Hux waited through the thick, gulping sounds of his sister pulling herself together enough to tell him the rest.
‘And now the police aren’t happy with whatever he already told them and have turned uphere. In ourhouse.’
‘The police … as in Merv?’ Merv Penny had been the senior constable manning the Yindi Creek station for just about as long as Hux had been alive. He must be about six minutes away from retirement and was about as threatening (and fleet of foot) as a hairy-nosed wombat. Merv couldn’t be the reason that Sal was upset.
‘No, you moron. He’s driving around Australia; you know that. It’s the new chick. The one no-one likes—’
Oh, yes. He had heard something about Merv taking longservice leave.
‘—and there’s this other officer with her from Longreach who’s snooping and she—the Yindi Creek one, not the Longreach one—has a notebook out and she’s writing stuff down.’
Was that so bad? Maybe having a surprise baby in your late thirties after needing IVF to conceive the first two messed with a woman’s hormones. Not that he’d say that within earshot of any of the Numbers; he wasn’t a complete idiot. ‘Sal, I don’t think I quite heard that last bit right. Speak up.’
‘I can’t speak up,’ she said, but she must have moved her mouth closer to her phone because he could hear her better even though she was still whispering. ‘I’m in the linen cupboard; I could see Charlie was about to lose it and that made me start to cry because you know I’m like a wet week at the drop of a hat at the moment, but the kids were there looking at me, so I said I needed to blow my nose or something so they wouldn’t know I’m a mess, and I ran out.’
Charlie was the most sensible person Hux knew. He wasn’t the type to lose it … although, the news a third Cocker kid was on the wayhadcome as a shock to the bloke. Hux and Charlie had needed to have a frank talk about the business finances and work out just how far Charlie’s income could stretch. Maybe he was more stressed than he’d been letting on. ‘Why don’t you just ask the policewoman why she needs more information from Charlie? Maybe this is just some procedural thing she needs to do, and you’re—’
‘Yeah, yeah, she said that, it’s all just routine questioning or whatever after someone reports a missing person. But as soon as she said “missing person” in that, like,tone, I got a real bad feeling.’
Hux knew that feeling, but he asked anyway, just to be sure. ‘What do you mean? What was the tone?’
‘Suspicious. Mean. Scary.’
Hux sighed. ‘Maybe you’re projecting.’
‘Or maybe I’m fuckingright, Gavin Gunn Huxtable.’
He knew a plea when he heard it, even when it was delivered with all the subtlety of a cricket ball to the gonads. ‘What do you need me to do?’
‘Help!’
‘How, exactly?’
