Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(28)

‘It might have been a one-off,’ Kash mused. ‘Make one big batch, take it to the city, sell it and make a fortune. Pay off your debts. Theo found out and was trying to talk them down, so they killed him.’

‘And the diary?’

Kash stared at his feet.

‘Maybe it was a decoy,’ he said.

I hadn’t thought about that. That someone might have constructed the diary to throw us off. It wouldn’t be hard. A few late evenings sketching, doodling, noting down tidbits from what was perhaps a passing interest in spree killers. Maybe the diary had nothing to do with Theo Campbell’s death. Maybe his was a straight-up drug-related killing.

A guilty little zing of excitement ran through me. If I could wrap this case up as quickly as that, I could go home to Sydney. Sure, I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near my brother or the courthouse, but I would at least be closer to him. All of that was calling me. Conduct a raid on Robit’s place. Find something. Anything. Lock up him and his cronies and be done with it all. Ignore the possibility that the town was in further danger, that someone here was planning a day of reckoning. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am – some quick arrests and the six days I had to wait to go home would become zero.

I realised I was shuffling idly through the objects in Theo Campbell’s desk drawer. Pens and little notepads. I shoved the desk drawer closed and a plastic ruler wedged itself in the gap. I tried to yank the drawer back open but it stuck, the plastic biting into the wood. I threw my weight backwards and the drawer shunted open, rattling the desk, causing a flush wooden panel at the front to flop open.

Kash and I looked into the cavity the panel had revealed.

My hopes of leaving dissolved.





Chapter 39


I KNELT AND peered into the dark slot in the side of the desk, ten centimetres wide, crammed with black plastic. I pulled out a package. It was as big as a shoebox, wrapped tightly in duct tape to form a lumpy rectangle.

‘Christ, she was right,’ I breathed. I took a pair of scissors from the desktop and began to carefully slit open the side of the package. ‘What do you think it is? It’s heavy. Might be black tar.’

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.