‘I haven’t eaten in two days.’

  ‘Well, we’ll get you a sandwich.’ He texted Kim, asking for something good and hearty, and put his phone away. ‘Do you know why we’re looking for you?’ he asked as Mia put a strong coffee in front of Charlie.

  Charlie ignored the question and lifted the cup to his mouth. Dave had to look away as he saw his shaking hands. This man had his spirit broken, and Dave was furious for him, after what he had just read on the text messages.

  They waited and finally, after five sips straight after one another, Charlie put the cup down. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I came for Alex’s funeral, but I don’t know why you’re looking for me.’

  ‘Charlie,’ Dave said softly, ‘do you know that Danny has passed away as well?’

  The man stared at him. ‘Sorry?’ he asked, swiping at the hot tears. ‘Danny’s dead? I hadn’t heard that.’

  ‘Yeah, there was an accident—’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Charlie cried. ‘It couldn’t have been.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’ Dave felt the thrill of the chase run through him. The reminder he needed as to why he was a police officer.

  ‘Because Alex’s death wasn’t an accident. I was there when it happened. Hiding. We’d organised to catch up. I wanted to talk to him. We’d already been communicating via text message.’ He fumbled in his pocket and brought out his phone, waving it at them. Then he swiped at the screen. ‘See here, I’d asked him for a job, then hitched a lift out in the hope that I could talk to him. We’d been organising to catch up, but initially without anyone knowing. There was unfinished business we needed to talk about before anything else.’

  ‘What unfinished business?’ Mia asked.

  Charlie looked at them steadily, then shrugged. ‘Don’t reckon it matters now, if Alex and Danny are both gone.’ He slumped at the table, looking down. ‘They were good mates to me, until they were turned against me.’

  Dave and Mia looked at each other above Charlie’s head, and then Mia picked up his cup and went to refill it.

  ‘I reckon it would be a really good thing for you to tell Mia and me what’s happened in your life, Charlie. We can help you.’

  ‘Bit late for help now,’ he said. ‘Could have done with that back in 2017.’

  Deciding to start with the easy parts, Dave asked, ‘What did you do when you first got out of gaol? That was a couple of years ago?’

  ‘Yeah. Bummed around for a bit, tried to get work. Pretty hard to do that when you’ve got a record like mine. No one wants you near a woman, which is understandable. Except I didn’t rape anyone.’

  The smell of hot coffee reached them as Mia came into the room. She put the cup down on the table and pulled out a chair. On her knee, she rested her notebook and waited for Dave to start talking again.

  ‘Pretty tough not to be able to get work,’ Dave said.

  ‘Yeah, it is, but I’m patient, you know. You have to be when you’re in gaol for something you didn’t do.’

  ‘If you didn’t commit rape, then who did?’ Dave asked.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘I don’t want to go into it. Like I said, if Alex and Danny are dead, it doesn’t matter. You haven’t told me why you want to see me.’

  Drumming his fingers on the table, Dave thought about the text messages, then got up and left the room. Moments later he was back.

  ‘Charlie, I’m going to read some texts to you and I’d like you to tell me if they’re true or not. Okay?’

  Shrugging, Charlie picked up the mug. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Right, here we go. “I’ve got a massive apology to make to you.” Text answer: “Yes, you do.”’

  Charlie’s head came up and looked at the phone in Dave’s hand. Slowly he put his cup down and picked up his own phone.

  ‘“Can we meet somewhere?”’ Dave read.

  Flicking open the messaging app, Charlie answered: ‘“Yeah, I’ll come to you. Send me a pin drop to your closest watering point.”

  ‘“There’s been a pin drop sent.”’ He turned the phone around so Mia could see it.

  ‘Then the message says,’ Dave continued, ‘“I know it wasn’t you who raped that woman.”’

  Charlie’s face became red and his eyes bright as he read. ‘“How do you know?”’

  There was a silence and Charlie’s face came up to look at the police officers as Dave started to speak.

  ‘“Because I was there.”’

  ‘Did you get to talk to Alex?’ Dave asked, putting the phone down.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘No, we didn’t get the opportunity to speak.’

  The door banged and Kim came in holding a dish of roast lamb. Dave could tell by the smell. He waved her in and thanked her, giving Charlie the plate.

  ‘Eat,’ he said to him. ‘We’ll talk when you’re finished.’

  He and Mia walked out, leaving Charlie to his meal.

  ‘We’ve got who we want over there in the footy club rooms,’ Dave said. ‘Get two of the connies to bring Tom and Mick over here. Put one in each cell and call off the STAR squad.’ He turned to Kim. ‘You need to go home and stay there,’ he said. ‘Lock the door and ring as many people as you can. Tell them to stay inside with their doors locked. I’m not anticipating any trouble, but if Tom and Mick realise we’re coming, we might have a fight on our hands.’

  Kim’s eyes widened but she didn’t say a word, just left to do as she was asked.

  ‘They’re not armed,’ Mia said.

  ‘We didn’t check,’ Dave replied. ‘So, we can’t be sure.’

  Mia nodded and headed out of the station.

  ‘Thanks for the feed,’ Charlie called.

  Dave put his head around the corner. ‘Good bit of grub?’ he asked.

  ‘Tops,’ Charlie answered, his mouth full.

  Dave came back into the room and sat there, waiting for Mia to return. She needed to be in this because it was her tenacity that had got them to this point. A man would have got away with two murders, manslaughter and rape if it hadn’t been for her.

  He was incredibly annoyed with himself. How had he missed the signs? Was he so tired of policing that he hadn’t wanted to dig that bit further as he would have twenty years ago?

  Moments later, Mia appeared, and he heard the commotion of Tom and Mick being dragged to the cells, protesting.

  ‘Take your hands off me.’ That one sounded like Mick.

  ‘I’m calling my lawyers.’ Tom, for sure.

  Dave indicated for Mia to sit down then turned to Charlie, who was wiping his plate clean with the bread Kim had put on the side.

  ‘Do you know how Alex found you?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Not really and I don’t care. I’d seen the family was looking for a farmhand and I was going to apply, but he got in contact with me first. Told me about the job when we were talking on text.

  ‘Still, he said I needed to apply properly because the applications were going to his mum and dad,’ he said. ‘I’d gone to the library to apply—they’ve got internet in there, see? And while I was there I had a read of a few copies of the Stock Journal. Just so happened that Alex was in the social pages with his wife, so I read a bit about them.’

  ‘So you had texts but you didn’t get to speak to him?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘No, he died before I could, and then I hightailed it away from the bore. Didn’t want anyone to know I was around. I was scared.’

  ‘Why were you scared?’

  Charlie stared Dave straight in the eye. ‘I’d just watched Alex die. That was enough to frighten me. But also, I’ve spent too much time on the inside to want to be near anything bad ever again. For all I knew, I could get framed for Alex’s death and I certainly had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Fair call,’ Dave said and paused before asking, ‘Charlie, who was at the windmill other than Alex?’

  Charlie looked at Dave. ‘Tom. He pulled the rope and made the platform Alex was standing on fall.’

  CHAPTER 28

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Tom said as he sat down at the table in the interview room. ‘I’m glad you’ve found Charlie, but what he’s telling you is a heap of crap.’

  Dave pulled out a chair and sat down, too. Mia settled next to him.

  ‘We were as surprised as you are, Tom. But you understand, we have to go through the protocols. Charlie has voluntarily come forward and then made a fairly serious accusation, so bear with us while we clear you.’

  Tom relaxed into the chair and held up his hands in a go figure–type gesture. ‘What do you want to ask me? Let’s get this over and done with as quickly as we can. Poor Hallie and Maggie need to bury their husbands. This is very unfair on them.’

  ‘Sure.’ Dave leaned forward and put his elbows on the table to look straight at Tom. ‘Where were you the night that Charlie was accused of rape?’

  ‘We were all at the party. You know that.’

  ‘Okay, where were you at the time that Charlie was accused of rape?’

  Tom laughed. ‘I don’t know how you expect me to know the answer to that after so many years.’

  ‘Have a go.’

  ‘Probably either passed out in my room or busy, if you understand my meaning.’

  ‘And when did you first hear that Charlie had been charged?’

  ‘First thing the next morning. It was all over the college and the police had been there asking questions, looking for people who might have seen the accident, but as for an exact time …’ He spread his hands out again. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What was your relationship with Charlie like?’

  ‘We were great mates. He was a typical Pom, always had something to say about something, but he was good value.’

  ‘Why did you move to Singapore?’ Mia asked.

  His eyes slid to Mia and then to Dave. ‘Because that’s where my job took me.’

  ‘Would I be right in saying you know a woman called Leah Tack?’

  Tom frowned. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘That name doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  Dave looked surprised. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I am!’ Tom was huffing, annoyed now. ‘That’s not a name I recognise.’

  ‘Interesting. Because when I rang my counterparts in Singapore, I found there’s an outstanding warrant for your arrest, which is dated two days after you left Singapore for Australia. Ms Tack has made an allegation against you for rape. Now from those dates, I can establish you arrived in Adelaide a week before Alex’s death. Would that be right?’

  ‘Not sure of the dates, but I remember thinking it was fortuitous that I was here when it happened.’

  Mia wrote the dates in her notebook and resisted the urge to smile.

  ‘Yet you told Mick that you were flying in as soon as you could get a flight,’ Dave said.

  ‘Mick didn’t need to know I was here. I had business meetings.’ He fixed Dave with a glare. ‘And I do not know a Leah Tack.’

  ‘Why did you need to kill Alex?’

  ‘What? I didn’t do anything of the sort. If you’re going to ask questions about ridiculous stuff, how about you put them in some sort of order I can follow?’ He crossed his arms and glared at them.

  ‘Here’s my theory,’ Dave said. ‘And I’m going to admit, some of this is guesswork, because Alex isn’t here to verify anything. Somehow Alex knew it was you who raped that young woman.’

  ‘That’s preposterous.’

  ‘Then Alex approached you about coming clean and you decided you needed to get rid of him so he couldn’t tell anyone. I believe, after speaking to the police in Singapore, that you are a serial rapist. Your MO is to drug, rape and leave. You use a condom, so there isn’t semen to connect you, yet you’re sloppy enough not to realise that everything you touch leaves traces of contact. You’ve been lucky so far that there’s been nothing to connect you to your victims.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’ Tom snarled.

  ‘Because there’s one thing you don’t know. Underneath the fingernails of that young woman was some skin. It was found during the autopsy, yet we couldn’t match it to Charlie and, back then, the police didn’t DNA test the whole of the agricultural college.’ Dave gave a stern smile. ‘You were lucky, because if they had, the match would have been to you.’

  ‘Load of rubbish.’

  ‘You willingly gave Mia a sample of your DNA. Now again you seem to have Lady Luck smiling on you because I haven’t received the results of that test yet, but’—Dave checked back to his notes—‘Singapore have your DNA on file and that has been matched to the 2017 rape. I wouldn’t have to be a detective to realise who was the offender here.’

  He pushed a piece of paper over towards Tom. ‘You’re cooked, mate. You’ll stand trial here, do your time and then you’ll be tried in Singapore. I hear their gaols are pretty unfriendly.’

  Mia leaned forward now. ‘Why did you kill Danny? That’s the bit I don’t understand.’

  Tom weighed up his options and seemed to sag. ‘I thought Alex had told him all of this,’ he finally said. ‘When I saw Danny underneath the ute, I just acted. I had arrived as he was wiggling underneath and I pushed the ute and it fell onto him.’ Tom looked down at his hands, then up at the two police officers. ‘I was scared they were both going to turn on me and that would be the end.’

  Dave shook his head. ‘I reckon you’ve ended yourself, Tom.’

  EPILOGUE

  Two funerals and many weeks later, Hallie hugged Dave and then Mia.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for everything.’

  ‘It was all Mia’s doing,’ Dave said, glowing with pride that his constable had cracked a case. ‘She was the one who had the tenacity to keep going, keep digging.’

  ‘We think you’re both wonderful, don’t we, Maggie?’

  Maggie, her eyes wet with tears, nodded. ‘At least Tom’ll get his just deserts.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why he did any of this. I mean, look how pretty Kaylah is. It’s not like he couldn’t get a girlfriend,’ Hallie said.

  ‘Unfortunately, some men like power,’ Mia told her. ‘Tom is one of those.’

  ‘Not that that is any excuse. I hate him and I always will, but maybe, in time, I might be able to have some kind of empathy towards him.’

  ‘You’re a better person than me, Hallie,’ Maggie said.

  Mia agreed with Maggie but she wasn’t allowed to say that.

  ‘It’s nice to see that Nicole and Rod have allowed you to stay on,’ Mia said to Hallie.

  ‘I don’t know how long for,’ she said. ‘Something has changed for Rod, too. He thinks Ruby should be able to grow up there and see if she at least likes the station. Of course, she’s far too young to know now, but in time she will.’

  Dave smiled, knowing the stern conversation he’d had with Rod had paid off. ‘That’s great to hear. Maggie, what are you going to do?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Guess I’ll try to go back to life as it was before, except without Dan.’ She cleared her throat, giving them a wan smile. ‘I wasn’t on the station a lot, was I? I guess moving to town won’t be as difficult as I thought it might be while Dan was still alive.’

  ‘I hope everything works out for you both,’ Mia said. ‘You can call me anytime you need.’ She hugged both women again.

  Hallie tooted the horn as they drove away, back towards their different homes. It was nice that the two women were such close friends. They would need each other even more when the trial for Alex’s and Danny’s murders came around.

  Mia turned to Dave. ‘Right, so you’re off? Western Australia, here you come!’

  In the distance she saw Kim outside their house, two suitcases on the ground.

  Dave looked at his watch. ‘Yep. Got five hours before we need to be at the airport and, if I know anything about my wife, it will take us all of that time to get there.’ He grinned. ‘I’m so proud of you, Mia. You’ve done a great job.’

  Mia kicked the ground, hiding her flushing cheeks by lowering her head. ‘Who would’ve thought I’d be doing this one year ago,’ she said.

  Dave leaned against the fence and looked out over the main street of Barker. ‘I came back here ten years previously,’ he said softly. ‘Ten years. That time has gone so bloody fast and I never thought I’d say it, but you’re just starting and I’m on the way to finishing. We’re at opposite ends of our careers.’ He looked at Mia. ‘You’ve got a great future ahead of you; don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.’

  Mia frowned. ‘You’re not retiring, are you? There’s nothing you haven’t told me, is there?’

  Dave smiled and shook his head. ‘Just reflecting.’

  ‘Are you excited to see Bec and Alice?’

  As she spoke, a car indicated into the police station and pulled up next to them.

  ‘To be honest, I’m as nervous as all get out. I want to see them and I’m looking forward to catching up with Mum … but Melinda? Too many wounds. However’—he tipped his head to the side—‘that’s life. I’m sure we’ll cross paths. Ah, look, here’s your offsider for the next few days.’

  A smile spread across Dave’s face as Kim walked down the street towards them. ‘You know what, Mia? Whatever happens this weekend won’t matter, because I’ve got Kim. She’s my life.’ Dave held Mia’s eye. ‘You should have a think about that. Fellas like your mate, Chris, don’t come along very often.’

  He turned to the young constable getting out of the car. ‘G’day, Chris. Thanks for filling in for me.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A massive thanks to everyone at Allen & Unwin—those who have left, those who are no longer with us and those who are there now. Fifteen years of fun and laughter. Of learning and teaching. Of gratitude. There is and always will be a special place in my heart for every single one of you.

  Special thanks to Christa for your careful edits and patience.

  To Gaby Naher from Left Bank Literary—I’ve always been in good hands with your care of my career. With deepest thanks.

  Rochelle, Hayden and the ever-ageing Jack. With love.

 

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