Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(12)

Whitt had lost himself in dreaming. He rubbed his eyes, looked around. At the end of his row, a man with a closely shaved head was sitting with his hands on his knees. Whitt didn’t know what it was that drew his focus to this man. Perhaps it was his attentive presence in the distinctly sparse seating area reserved for supporters of the accused. Whitt and the man were alone on the bench, and the bench behind them was empty. But no, it was something more. Whitt realised that almost every set of eyes in the courtroom was focused on the large screen behind the witness stand, where Doctor Hemsill was pointing at parts of the human brain lit up with different colours.

But the shaven-headed man’s eyes were on Samuel Blue. The man was not just staring; his gaze was locked on Blue, like a cat with its attention fixed on a bird. The hairs on Whitt’s arms were beginning to stand on end. Something told him to commit this man’s face to memory. He looked at the notebook before him. Perhaps he could make a sketch. He took up his pen. But when he turned back to examine the man again, he was gone.





Chapter 19


I SAT AT Snale’s kitchen table with my head in my hands, listening to the officer rattling around the kitchen, scraping food together for her two city guests. It had been a long day, and when Snale showed us to our accommodation, my space a single fold-out bed at the end of her large enclosed porch, I felt the desire to fall into the sheets and bury my face in the pillow. It was a struggle to keep my mind on the diary that lay open in front of me. Snale came to the table with her notebook in her mouth and two wineglasses in her hands.

‘Don’t drink it all at once.’ She put a glass down before me. ‘Wine’s expensive out here. They only do a supply run every two weeks.’

Without warning there came a grunting, scraping sound. I almost spat out my first sip of wine when an enormous grey creature emerged into the narrow hall from the front room. The pig was at least a metre and a half long, covered in a fine black fur and a smattering of speckles. It trotted lazily into the room, looking me over with little interest.

I felt the first smile of the day crack my face. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Look,’ Snale sighed, ‘there are thirty-three adult men in this town. Thirty of them are married. One’s seventy years old. And the other two aren’t interested. It gets lonely out here.’

I laughed. ‘You could have got a dog.’

We watched the enormous pig sprawl out on a blanket by the door, giving a long, guttural groan as it flopped onto its side.

‘Jerry is a real presence in the house,’ Snale said. ‘His footsteps are heavy, and he snores really loud all night long. It feels like there’s someone here.’

Kash finished a phone call and joined us.

Forensics had arrived that afternoon and completed a once-over of the diary for DNA and prints, so we could touch it now. We’d also handed off the plain red backpack the book had been found in. The backpack looked new, and nothing else was in it. That was odd. Why not just carry the notebook by itself? Was the red backpack meant to attract attention from the roadside? Did the diarist want the book to be found?

I perused the pages quietly while Kash and Snale chatted. The writer had indeed done some extensive investigation of bomb-building options, focusing on explosives that could be made from everyday household objects. The idea seemed to emerge out of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’s failed attempts to blow up their school cafeteria with gas-bottle bombs before they went on their rampage.

‘Let’s get the handwriting analysed against all the handwriting samples we can collect from the town,’ Snale suggested.

I made notes, a list of to-dos.

‘ So this is the preliminary breakdown of the Campbell scene from Forensics today?’ I asked, pulling Snale’s notebook towards me.

‘Yes, classic propane bomb,’ she said. ‘Seems to the team that Theo would have been sitting with the gas bottle either between his legs or wedged under the chair when it went off. He was sitting facing the town.’ She sighed long and deep. ‘His wife, Olivia, is in tatters. Just beside herself.’

‘Does she have any ideas about suspects?’

‘She wasn’t very coherent,’ Snale said. ‘Says Theo was over in the next town fixing a mate’s roof – someone called David Lewis – and then was going to stay for dinner. When he didn’t answer his phone she figured he must have stayed the night. I’ll go back to her for suspects in a day, maybe. Give her time to get over the shock.’

‘Let’s go talk to David Lewis. See if Theo was acting weird.’ ‘Right.’

‘Any sign of someone else at the crime scene?’ Kash asked.

‘Maybe,’ Snale said. ‘There were footprints. Smeary, hard to tell the tread, but looks like an ordinary old workboot. Size seven men’s, nine women’s. Looks like a person pacing back and forth not far from the blast site. But they can’t really date the prints. Could have been a day or two before. Theo’s service weapon is missing, so someone must have got hold of it, used it to coerce him into the chair.’

‘Where did the chair come from?’ Kash asked. ‘Surely the killer didn’t bring it with him.’

‘There’s a bunch of junk up there on both crests, on the roadsides in and out of town,’ Snale said. ‘Kids go up there and smoke and throw things off the cliffs. Every Saturday night I go and do a sweep through the bush there and down in the gully, make sure they’re not doing anything too naughty. The chair was probably from one of their little campsites. The duct tape, I don’t know.’