The Dry (Aaron Falk #1)(12)

“Yep. Although there was no sign of that in the household rubbish or his truck. And believe me”—Raco gave a short laugh—“I’ve checked.”

“Where haven’t you searched yet?”

Raco nodded at the missing weatherboard.

“On this property? I think this officially makes everywhere.”

Falk frowned. “It’s a bit weird.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought too.”

Falk said nothing, just stared at him. Raco was sweating hard. His face, arms, and clothes were covered in grime and dust from scrabbling around in the baking heat of the sheds.

“What else?” Falk said.

There was a silence.

“What do you mean?”

“All this effort. Down on your hands and knees all morning in a dead man’s barn, in this heat,” Falk said. “There’s something more. Or at least you think there’s more.”

There was a long pause. Then Raco breathed out.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s more.”





5


They’d sat for a while by the side of the house, backs up against the wall beside the loose panel and grass prickling the backs of their legs. Making the most of the thin slice of shade while Raco ran through the facts. He started with the slightly detached air of someone who’d said it all before.

“It was two weeks ago today,” he said, fanning himself loosely with the crinkled porn mag. “A courier with a delivery found Karen and made the emergency call. That came in at about 5:40 P.M.”

“To you?”

“And Clyde and the local GP. The dispatcher notifies us all. GP was closest, so he was first on the scene. Dr. Patrick Leigh. You know him?”

Falk shook his head.

“Anyway, he was first, then I turn up a couple of minutes later. I pull up and the door’s open, and the doc’s crouched over Karen in the hall, checking her vitals or whatever.” Raco paused for a long moment, staring out at the tree line with an unfocused gaze. “I’d never met her, didn’t even know who she was then, but he knew her. Had her blood all over his hands. And he’s yelling, kind of screaming at me, you know: ‘She’s got kids! There might be kids!’ So—”

Raco sighed and flipped opened Luke’s aged pack of cigarettes. He put one between his lips and offered the pack to Falk, who surprised himself by taking one. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smoked. It might easily have been in that very same spot with his late best friend next to him. For whatever reason, taking one now felt right. He leaned in as Raco lit the ends. Falk took a drag and immediately remembered why he’d kicked the habit easily. But as he breathed deep and the smell of the tobacco mingled with the tang of the eucalyptus trees, the heady sensation of being sixteen again hit him like the rush of nicotine.

“So anyway,” Raco picked up. His voice was quieter now. “The doc’s yelling, and I bolt off through the house. No idea who’s in there, what I’m going to find. If there’s someone about to step round a door with a shotgun. I want to call out to the kids, but I realize I don’t even know their names. So I’m yelling, ‘Police! It’s OK! Come out, you’re safe!’ or something, but I don’t even know if it’s true.” He took a long drag, remembering.

“And then I hear this crying—this sort of wailing—so I follow it, not knowing what’s waiting for me. And I go into the nursery, and I see that little girl in her cot, screaming blue murder, and honestly, I’ve never been so glad to see a kid bawling her eyes out in all my life.”

Raco blew a plume of smoke into the air.

“’Cause she was fine,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. She was scared, obviously, but not hurt that I could see. And I remember thinking at that moment that it might all still be OK. Yes, it was sad about the mum, tragic. But thank God, at least the kids were OK. But then I look across the hall, and a door’s ajar.”

He carefully ground his cigarette butt into the dirt, not looking at Falk. Falk felt a cold dread seep through him, knowing what was to come.

“And I can see it’s another kid’s room. All blue paint and car posters, you know? Boy’s room. And there’s no sound coming from that one. So I go across the hall and push open the door, and then it definitely wasn’t OK at all.” He paused. “That room was like a scene from hell. That room was the worst thing I have ever seen.”

They sat in silence until Raco cleared his throat.

“Come on,” he said, pulling himself to his feet, shaking his arms as if shedding the memory. Falk stood and followed him toward the front of the house.

“The response teams arrived from Clyde shortly after that,” Raco went on as they walked. “Police, paramedics. It was nearly half past six by the time they got there. We’d searched the rest of the house, and there’s no one else there, thank Christ, so everyone was desperately trying to phone Luke Hadler. At first people are worried—you know, how are we supposed to break this to him? But then there’s still no answer and his car’s not there and he hasn’t come home, and all of a sudden you could feel the mood start to shift.”

“What was Luke supposed to have been doing, then?”

“A couple of the search-and-rescue volunteers, mates of his, knew he’d been helping a friend cull rabbits on his property that afternoon. A guy called Jamie Sullivan. Someone rang, and Sullivan confirmed it but said Luke had left his farm a couple of hours earlier by that point.”