Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(5)

‘ So the papers said …’ She licked her lips, hesitated, as most people do. ‘They said that the lawyer made some derogatory remark towards you?’

‘My brother,’ I answered. ‘He made a joke about my brother being raped in prison. I work in Sex Crimes. Rape jokes aren’t funny.’

‘Struth! You’re right, they’re not. Plus, it’s your brother,’ the cop sympathised. ‘I mean, it doesn’t matter what he did. He’s still –’

‘He didn’t do anything. He’s innocent,’ I said.

I realised miserably that I didn’t even know this officer’s name. My mind was so tangled up in my personal life that I’d completely forgotten it as soon as she’d introduced herself. I reached down for the case file at my feet and pretended I was shifting it to the back seat so it wouldn’t get damaged. I glanced at the name on the cover. Senior Sergeant Victoria Snale.

‘I’ve got to say,’ – Snale’s voice was irrepressibly cheerful – ‘it made an amazing picture for the front pages. You standing over the lawyer. Him all splayed out on the concrete. It must have really been some punch.’

I felt microscopically uplifted. ‘It doesn’t have to be hard if it’s on target.’

‘And now you’re here,’ she sighed brightly. ‘I can’t say I’m sad about that. It’s pretty lonely out here, to be honest. It’ll be good to have some more cops around. Someone who can relate. You know?’

‘How many cops are there in town?’ I asked.

‘Active officers? I mean, we have one retiree …’

‘Active officers.’

‘Just me.’ She looked over, smiled. ‘Just us.’

I didn’t want to burst Snale’s bubble, but I didn’t plan on being out in the desert long. Nine days of ‘us’. Then it’d be back to Victoria Snale: Lone Ranger.

The moment Prosecutor Woolfmyer’s AVO expired, I’d be back – back in that jerk’s face, fighting him and the state’s crack team of lawyers about my brother’s innocence.

The empty desert around me was familiar. I’d been shoved aside when Sam had first been arrested, shipped out into the middle of nowhere, away from the public eye, away from my distinctly uncomfortable colleagues and their guilty looks after months of lying to me. Back then, I’d succumbed to the journey. I’d felt such shameful pleasure at having something to think about that was not Sam and what he was facing. Now was no different.

I squeezed my folder of notes on Sam’s case against my chest. A thick binder of papers detailing all the leads I’d tried to chase down. Most of the work I’d done was hopeless, dead ends I’d pursued over the months searching for something, anything, that might set my brother free. The binder was battered and bruised, but it was my lifeline. I wasn’t leaving it behind. I wasn’t putting it in my bag. I was hanging on to it. As long as I had the binder, I wasn’t abandoning Sam.





Chapter 9


‘LET’S CHECK OUT the view before we go down,’ Victoria Snale said, beaming. ‘You’ll love it.’

The officer pulled the four-wheel drive off the side of the highway and let it rumble to a stop. I climbed out and breathed the desert air, felt the warm wind ruffle my hair. The great domed sky was heavy with stars. I felt so far from where I belonged. Wonderfully small.

‘Come this way,’ Snale beckoned me, kicking up dust in the car’s headlights. ‘This is it.’

I stood with her on the edge of a rocky cliff in the dark. ‘This is Last Chance Valley,’ she said.

She swept her hand dramatically across the landscape, indicating a less-than-impressive collection of gold lights clustered at the bottom of a moonlit rise. I nodded, made an interested noise. I felt bad for being so distant for the whole trip towards the town.

‘You can’t see it very well right now, but the town is actually at the bottom of a massive crater.’ She pointed to the curve of the rise we stood on. ‘Biggest crater in the Southern Hemisphere. This ridge is just the edge, it runs all the way around. It’s sort of egg-shaped, with the town right in the centre and properties spreading out around. The first family settled down there two hundred years ago. There are seventy-five residents now.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They’re not sure what formed the crater, but it may have been a volcano. A meteorite. Every now and then somebody comes out and runs a study on the place. Very exciting stuff. I usually get to brief the town on their visits, tell everybody to behave themselves.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘I guess the settlers thought the crater might shelter us from the desert dust storms,’ she mused, rolling a rock under her boot. ‘It doesn’t. In fact it makes things worse. We get about ten centimetres of dust when the summer winds roll in. It also floods real bad, and the floodwaters hold beneath the earth. When it floods, we get green grass. We can grow wheat here. There’s plenty of cattle. But, being the only grass around for thousands and thousands of kilometres, we get locust plagues.’

I was glad Snale was the local cop and not the tourism director. I tried to maintain a serious face.

‘Locusts?’ I said.

‘Yeah, we’re just getting over the last plague. Here’s one right now, in fact.’