Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(30)

Kash knelt beside me. I could smell the sweat on him. That morning, I’d woken to the sound of him huffing back and forth across Snale’s lawn, stopping, dropping and pumping out push-ups to timed beeps from his phone. Snale had been standing at the windows to the porch, enjoying a coffee, watching the show. Kash’s bare chest glistening with sweat in the new pink light of sunrise.

I slipped a small bag out of the package. A heavy, dusty brown rock about half the size of a golf ball. I opened the bag and took out the rock.

‘ Brown rock heroin,’ Kash said. ‘I’ve seen it over there in northern Africa. Dirty stuff from back-shed kitchens. Goes cheaper than black tar.’

‘Guess again,’ I said. I spat on the rock in my palm. ‘This rock’s only brown on the outside.’

I rubbed the top layer of dirt from the nugget. The gold shimmered, dull yellow and porous in the light.

‘Whoa!’ Kash snatched the gold from me. I rolled my eyes and took another rock from the package. ‘That is one massive piece of cheese!’

‘That’s about two ounces you’re holding,’ I said. I crossed my legs and took out my phone, looked up a converter on Google. ‘About a thousand bucks on the market right now.’

We looked at the bag between us. I weighed it in my hands. I guessed I was holding about two kilos, or seventy ounces. Approximately eighty thousand dollars’ worth of precious metal.

‘What. The. Hell.’ Kash looked at me. ‘You think it’s legit?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘You can’t buy it like this. This is right out of the ground. So, what? Campbell’s taken it out of the ground, or someone he knows has? This is not his retirement nest egg. I’m betting it’s not even declared as a personal asset for tax purposes, if he’s got it squirrelled away like this.’

‘How does he have so much of it?’ Kash asked. ‘You couldn’t find this much all in one go. It must represent years, decades, of fossicking with a metal detector.’

‘Maybe he did find it all in one place,’ I murmured, losing myself in thought. ‘Maybe that’s why it’s hidden.’

‘We’ve got to put this back.’ Kash took the nugget from my hand and tucked it back into the package. ‘There’s nothing to prove it doesn’t legitimately belong to Theo Campbell. He might have hidden it in case of a break-in.’

‘If Theo found it legally, Olivia would know about it, right?’ I stood, holding the package against my chest. I pulled a strip of tape from the dispenser Theo kept beside his monitor and sealed the package shut. ‘Olivia, can we borrow you for a minute?’

Theo Campbell’s wife heard my call from the living room and came in. She’d been crying again, probably urged on by Snale’s kind, accepting face, her warm hands.

I stood holding the package under my arm in full view. I even stepped aside so that Olivia could see that the secret panel in Theo’s desk was hanging open.

‘We were just wondering if Theo had a … a diary?’ I asked casually. ‘A calendar or something? We just wanted to check out his forecasted appointments.’

Olivia ignored the package in my arms, the door of the desk. She went, bleary eyed, to the laptop screen.

‘He used the desktop calendar,’ she sniffed, waking the little machine with a tap of her finger. She opened the calendar and pointed. ‘Here.’

I put the package on the desk, right beside her hand. She glanced at it, uninterested.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘Oh, forensic stuff. Tools. They keep them packed up in little baggies. Keep them sterile.’

‘This bloody desk.’ Olivia bent and popped the little panel at the front of the desk shut. ‘It’s a million years old. Theo’s father’s.’

She sighed and made for the door.

‘ Well, that answers that question,’ I told Kash, hefting the gold off the desk again. ‘She had no interest in it. She’s never seen it before. I’m convinced.’ I offloaded the package to Kash. ‘We’re taking this with us. I’m going to make a bet Theo Campbell wasn’t the only person who knows about it.’





Chapter 40


DETECTIVE INSPECTOR NIGEL Spader was the God of Gotham. It was one of his only hobbies, constructing his dark city, a place where good and evil clashed violently over hand-painted sidewalks and green flocked grass. The sprawling table in the centre of the concrete garage barely contained the complex miniature model city. Artistically warped and leaning buildings crowded over a long, narrow headland jutting into a model harbour filled with black waves. The miniature city had everything. Uptown, the narrow streets held neat brownstone townhouses and apartment buildings lined with tiny fire-escapes. Downtown, he had constructed the imposing city hall with hundreds of steps, homeless people glued in and around its buttressed sides with their trolleys of garbage. Men in suits with long black coats froze mid-stride on the sidewalk, briefcases swinging, passing the tiny models of prostitutes on the corners.

Nigel sat on a leather stool by the sprawling Wayne Manor, gluing the side of the ancient building to the front with the careful strokes of a nail polish brush. The battery-operated subway train emerged from the tunnel at the side of the harbour and wound around the corner by his elbow, then over an ornate gothic bridge that had taken Nigel four weeks to create. He felt happy. The world beyond the reach of his garage light, the wet Sydney streets, was nothing. He was the lord of this place, and at this moment, in his universe, everything was well.