The Lost Man(29)

‘I know. But you and I knew yesterday, and we still missed it. We’d even been here once with Bub and we still got it wrong when we drove the other cop out. How did Harry know which gap to take?’

‘Because he knows this whole area like the back of his hand. He knows it as well as anyone. He would have been able to guess.’

At the bottom of the slope, Harry’s car roared to life. Nathan shook his head and turned Cameron’s keys. The car started perfectly, as it had yesterday. Slowly, with his foot poised on the brake, he eased the car into motion and began to follow Harry and Bub towards the grave. Harry stuck to the fence line, retracing the journey they’d made the day before. Nathan could see shadowy heads moving in the car in front as the two men spoke to each other.

‘He would’ve just worked it out,’ Nathan said again.

‘Yeah,’ Xander said finally. He slumped back in his seat. ‘Yeah, probably. Sorry. It’s been a weird couple of days.’

‘I know.’

Harry’s car started to pull ahead and Nathan pressed the accelerator to keep up. He couldn’t see Harry and Bub moving anymore. Perhaps they’d said everything they wanted to say. Nathan watched the car pull further away and felt a tiny prickle. Like the start of a rash, small and manageable but the wrong side of comfortable. He told himself to damp it down. This was Uncle Harry. Nathan had known the man literally his entire life. If anyone could read the land, it was Harry. It was not unreasonable at all that he could make an educated guess.

Still, a tiny voice whispered in Nathan’s ear. It was a big land, and it was a good guess.





Chapter 10



Cameron’s abandoned food was starting to smell in the back and Nathan wound down the window a crack.

‘We could dump it,’ Xander said, clearly thinking the same thing.

‘Yeah.’ Nathan nodded, but didn’t slow down. The stuff in the back was Cameron’s survival gear. For reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, it felt strangely reckless to discard any of it now.

Xander was still watching the shadows of Harry and Bub in the car in front. Nathan frowned to himself. He trusted Harry, he honestly did. With his life probably, if it ever came to it. Still, as Harry turned his head to say something to Bub, Nathan found himself replaying that minute before they’d reached Cameron’s car.

‘It’s interesting that Glenn could see Cam’s car from outside your boundary,’ Xander said suddenly. ‘It was pretty well hidden otherwise.’

‘Yeah. But you could say the same for lots of places. Cam could’ve dumped it in the middle of the road in broad daylight and there’d be a good chance no-one would find it for ages. How often does anyone come along there? Once a week? And then, it’s only us or the Atherton lot.’

‘I suppose,’ Xander said. ‘It’s just so flat around here, if I didn’t want my car seen, I’d leave it around the rocks, too.’ He looked out at the empty land. ‘It’s shit that no-one drove or flew by earlier. Even if Thursday was too late, Wednesday might not have been.’

Nathan didn’t reply, but Xander was right. If the car had been found sooner, the alarm would have been raised immediately and help called to hand. Nathan suddenly wondered – he tried to stop himself, but couldn’t – whether the same would be true for himself. If it were his car found abandoned and him in trouble or missing. Would the local passer-by call it in? Or would all those people who still turned their backs on him discover that, actually, when push came to shove, they were no better than he was? He honestly didn’t know.

It wasn’t Ilse’s fault, not even a little bit, but Nathan wouldn’t have even been in town that day if it hadn’t been for her. It had been his third weekend visit in a row to the pub. He’d stopped pretending to himself that he had business in town that made the trip worthwhile and had gone anyway.

On his second visit, they’d sat across from each other in the empty bar and he had found himself telling Ilse about his divorce and his son living fifteen hundred kilometres away. In turn, she had told him how she’d had to put her degree on hold and become a full-time carer when her mum’s cancer prognosis became terminal. She’d been engaged, but the daily grind of end-of-life care had proved a bit too much for him, and by the time her mum died, Ilse wasn’t engaged anymore.

They had had another drink and somehow, Nathan wasn’t sure how, they’d ended up smiling and finally laughing. Not about what had happened, but about other things, lighter things that made everything else seem more bearable. He couldn’t stop staring at her. He liked the way she looked and the way she looked at him. He told her about the sand dunes. She smiled and said she’d love to go with him one day.

On Nathan’s third visit, he’d stayed again until closing time and Ilse had reached out for his hand after he helped her lock up. The road had been deserted in both directions. She’d let him lead her away from the only streetlight so they could see the glorious night sky more clearly and he’d found himself, as hoped, in a dark corner pressing her hard against the side of his four-wheel drive, with her mouth warm against his. In a heady mix of delight and disbelief he’d thrown open the rear of his car where his sleeping bag was rolled out and waiting for him. Her skin was soft and hot as he’d reached under her shirt and felt her hands on his jeans. Then he’d held her tight and listened to her fast rhythmic breath as the stars shone down on them through the dusty windows.