Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(19)

I noticed the farmer, Jace, standing nearby when he spat on the ground. He was watching me from the shadows beneath his hat. All of him was browned by the relentless sun, black freckles and moles standing up on his arms like cracked pepper. He had a foot propped on the stone front step of the farming supply store next to the pub.

‘Was there much of Soupy Campbell left?’ he asked.

I considered the question. It was odd. Not only deeply inappropriate, but slightly voyeuristic, too.

‘ It was a terrible scene,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why you’d want to know.’

‘Well,’ Jace said, shrugging, ‘out here we have pretty simple beliefs about justice. The blackfellas, they have their ways. They’ll have the elders sing to the spirits about you. Bring down some bad luck. Sometimes they’ll have a ceremony. Spear you in the legs. Depends on what you done.’

He looked me up and down, as though assessing my life’s worst deeds.

‘Then there’s the white man’s bush justice,’ he said. ‘An eye for an eye. Sounds like Soupy’s woman won’t have much left to bury. Whoever did this, it should be the same for their family.’

‘Look.’ I let my head loll. ‘That’s very impressive and scary, and believe me, I understand your way of looking at things. I’ve encountered a number of predatory scumbags in my particular line of work who I’d have loved to torture slowly with a barbecue fork. But that’s not the way the world works.’

I was mildly uncomfortable at my own words. I had, in my time, tracked down and beaten a couple of sex offenders who had escaped justice. I had relished in hearing that violent child-sex predators got the old ‘Long Bay Welcome Tea’ – a bucket of scalding water thrown over them on their first night in prison. That was the violent part of me. The beast inside. But this man didn’t need encouragement to go out and punish Theo Campbell’s killer with his little band of sunburned cronies. The men I’d punished had endured full, fair trials. I’d known they were guilty. The farmer before me was itching for a suspect to hurt. And there was no way he was going to wait to make sure he had the right guy.

‘Any suspects yet?’ he asked, as if on cue.

‘ No. But if we find some, and anything happens to those suspects before we can get them locked up, I’ll be looking at you.’ I pointed at Jace’s eyes. ‘So take your white man’s bush justice and fuck off.’

He laughed at my bravado, gave me another long visual assessment, his eyes wandering right down to my boots, back up to my face. I stood sweating in the sunlight as he wandered away.





Chapter 26


ZAC TABY WASN’T hard to find. Snale picked us up in her four-wheel drive and drove us, not to the school but away from the town. Along a dirt track that rattled the car windows almost out of their frames, we came to a shaded gully at the foot of a tall cliff face covered in spray-painted tags. I got out of the truck and stared at the peppering of cigarette butts at my feet. Somewhere in the shady brush someone was playing music, a whiny peal from phone speakers.

A large black-and-grey dog rushed to the car to intercept us, barking in a decidedly unfriendly manner. Its stride jangled with the string of Coke cans tied to its tail. Snale sighed, exasperated.

‘Digger,’ she snapped. ‘Come here. Come here, girl.’

The dog gave up its vicious charade and allowed itself to be freed.

‘Whose dog is that?’

‘It’s the town dog.’ Snale ushered the dog up onto the back seat of the four-wheel drive. ‘No one really owns her. Everybody feeds her. Which is probably why she’s so fat.’

A stringy, dark-skinned teenager emerged from the brush. I noticed others scuttling off through the trees, a couple of girls and a tall, lanky young man in a huge black trench coat that was ridiculous in the heat. Zac must have known we’d come looking for him after hearing about Theo Campbell’s death. There was laughter on the wind as the teens took the back route into the bush, a couple of defiant cries of ‘Fuck the Po-lice!’

Zac had a practised surliness well beyond his fifteen years. I might have wondered what it took to become this angry at life so young, but I had been exactly the same kind of kid. I never slept. I smoked like a chimney. I swore at strangers and hung out in the wrong places. One of my foster dads had nicknamed me ‘Bitch face’ because he said I always looked like I wanted to scream at someone. This kid thought nobody cared about him, and he was probably right.

‘You got some friends, Vicky?’ the teen asked, eyeing Kash and me. ‘That’s a first.’

‘We need you to come with us, Zac,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get your parents so we can chat about an incident yesterday morning.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Oh yes you are.’

‘Suck my dick, bitch,’ he snapped at me. ‘I don’t know anything about what happened yesterday. So you can go and annoy someone else, because I ain’t no terrorist, and I don’t keep a diary. Diaries are for little girls.’

‘We just want to talk,’ Snale said. ‘Maybe you can tell us something that will help. You and Soupy were … well acquainted. You might know someone else who had a major grudge against him.’

‘ Whoever it was deserves a fucking medal.’ Zac drew a cigarette packet out of his jeans. ‘Dude was an A-grade fucktard. I heard the bomb blew his head right off. Is that true?’