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  ‘May I ask some questions about the practicalities of your living arrangements, Mr Whittler?’

  She was offering him firmer, more neutral ground. He took it.

  ‘Yes, you may, Detective.’

  ‘Thank you. We’re unaware of any movements in your bank account. What did you use for money?’

  Nathan’s face reddened. For a moment she thought it was anger. But then she recognised the emotion and felt the irony that she, of all people, hadn’t picked up on it straight away. It was shame.

  ‘I . . . I had no need of money, Detective. I wasn’t paying rent, or things like that, you see.’

  Dana considered backing away, coming at it later. But no, this was a legitimate line to take. ‘I can see that it would be possible to live frugally, if you so wished, Mr Whittler. But you would still need to buy food. Wouldn’t you?’

  Nathan stared icily at the edge of the table. There was a quick glance at the mirror, as though his conscience were glaring at him from beyond it. The shame brought forth a flash of anger.

  ‘Why are you asking me that, Detective? Why? What business can it be of the police what I eat? In what way is that relevant?’ He raised his voice but studiously avoided eye contact. ‘You’re the police, not doctors, isn’t that so?’

  She shuddered, grateful that in his fuming belligerence he didn’t see her reaction. She’d anticipated frustration, but this was raw anger, and she hadn’t expected that. She and Mike had discussed whether Nathan had the high emotion in him to commit a crime as potentially passion-led as stabbing. She considered the possibility as she listened to Nathan’s breathing. But this was, surely, an opportunity.

  Dana dug into her training. He’d lost his temper – albeit for a few seconds. She knew – simply knew – that he would now be contrite and embarrassed. She held the moral high ground for the first time and he would feel obliged to repay her. She could make use of his need to atone, if she held her nerve.

  He scratched his head and rubbed his face sharply with his palms. His breathing slowed. ‘I’m sorry, Detective. I apologise.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, Mr Whittler. Police interviews are always stressful.’ She moved some papers around needlessly and turned to a fresh page in her notebook, simply to show him there was a break with what had gone before.

  ‘I wonder how you managed in this cold weather, Mr Whittler. In your camp.’

  He inclined his head once, to acknowledge her good grace, before replying. ‘Many layers, Detective, many layers. You have to understand the importance of insulation. And you have to develop a system – of when you’ll be awake and when you sleep.’

  ‘How so, Mr Whittler?’

  He steepled his fingers, like an aged teacher imparting wisdom. ‘Most people sleep at night, but that’s when it’s coldest. The coldest time is just before dawn, and that’s when most people have been asleep for many hours. Their metabolism is slowest; they’re at their most vulnerable. The trick is to do it the other way around: wake up hours before it’s coldest and move about. Then you can sleep in the afternoon, when it’s safer to do so. You see.’

  Never in her life would Dana sleep outdoors, so in that sense the information was utterly irrelevant. But it was the first freely given insight he’d offered.

  ‘Ingenious. I can see how that would work. Did you have this kind of survival knowledge before you went into camp, Mr Whittler?’

  ‘No, no. Trial and error, really. You need to think it through, is all.’

  ‘And this week – with the very low temperatures – was that especially hard for you?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I haven’t felt that cold in quite a while. But you get through it. You get through it. Everything can be survived, if you go about it right.’

  This new silence felt different. Nathan had pulled inside himself again – his speech tailed off to a whisper near the end, and Dana sensed he was tired. She wanted to push but knew she shouldn’t.

  ‘Perhaps we should give you some rest, Mr Whittler? And some food?’

  ‘Thank you, Detective. And an aspirin, please, if you can find one.’

  As she closed the door Dana saw Bill approaching. She made a T-sign with her hands, indicating she needed to recalibrate. He nodded and turned his attention to Lucy as she passed in the corridor.

  Chapter 9

  The foot bridge over the train lines passed about twenty metres above the track. These days, the freight was largely imported foreign goods headed to the city, which in reply exported only garbage, washed-up politicians and patronising day-trippers. The rails went through a natural gorge at this point: the bridge had wire fencing up and over, making it feel like an elongated aviary. It was to stop suicides, she reminded herself with a shudder.

  Like most mining areas, the region’s progress – and the location of the two main towns – was dictated largely by geology and wind direction. The geology meant that development in Earlville cascaded down three snug river valleys, clutching the coat tails of coal and tin, spilling and tumbling along whatever was near-horizontal. The valleys trapped the foul air, the people and their ambitions. Tight communities with narrow horizons and fierce loyalty; they still clung to a notion of duty to each other. Some early philanthropic money-throwing produced the requisite library, school and church, but little else after that. Now, with the coal gone and religion’s bindings loosened, the town festered and grumbled – disappointed to be left behind but secretly wallowing in it.

  The wind direction chose the location of Carlton. Ten kilometres from Earlville on a shallow slope, upwind from the industrial belching in the valleys, Carlton was a place of clean air, strong limbs and the spoils of others’ labour. It was initially built in a grid pattern around a central square, before a trend for crescents began to hold sway. All the municipal buildings for the region were located there, along with a proprietorial air that said Carlton knew what was best for Earlville. The result was broad, tree-lined streets, with most houses stemming from a golden pre-war era: verandas, widows’ walks, hanging baskets and a studied but aloof and time-frozen affluence. The poorer districts were merely scrunched and hunched versions of the same. Too far from the city to be commutable, Carlton grasped its heritage tight and left economic development to others. Dana liked it.

  Some schoolchildren were being ferried from their classes to the nearby swimming pool. They crocodiled in bashfully linked pairs, then stopped to point excitedly down an alleyway between a carpet store and an office block. The buildings sandwiched a large water butt: the water’s silky dark surface held three bright yellow rubber ducks, grinning in the shadows.

  When Dana was taken for compulsory school swimming lessons there had been a craze for ‘mushroom floating’. It involved cramping into a tight, foetus-like ball and surrendering to buoyancy. After a while, the coiled form would softly roll on to its back, allowing it to unravel in the light like an emerging bloom. Except Dana didn’t. Her ferocious knee-hugging would not be weakened. She would not rotate gently, nor even float serenely; instead, she remained face down, slowly subsiding to the floor of the pool until she ran out of breath. Then she had to fight her way to the surface, thrashing through the bubbles. No one could explain why she didn’t float; no one comprehended her body’s wish to fall to the depths and remain there.

  She walked down a recently resurfaced lane: New Walk was four hundred metres of dry-stone walls, punctuated by large metal gates bracketed by columns. Carlton always looked after those who had shaped its past, rather than those who might lead the future. Old school, old money: the homes were impressive yet strangely unemotional. People had hired other people with exquisite taste.

  The owners would be gone by now – into the city for business or shopping. They set the tone for local elections; they were the ones who needed to be impressed. Without their fickle patronage, the foundations of every public service buckled. Entitled, one-eyed, privileged and ignoring anything that disquieted them, they treated the police as bespoke security guards.


  St Vincent’s Church was tucked into a corner at the end of the lane, hunched below a beautiful copper beech. In the day’s sunlight the beech presented filigreed shadows, flickering gently across the clapboard exterior. In summer, the congregation stood below its branches in welcome shade, sipping the lemonade sold to pay for the ever-atrophying roof. The roots slithered away below tufted grass to the small car park and burrowed under the church to prop it up.

  She’d been brought here when she was eight years old: a port in a storm, a place of responsible adults. Somewhere that could wash the cut and ice the bruise; a location the cops knew; people who’d fuss and make tea for an hour, who’d bring biscuits and sweeties to her. They’d meant well, those Samaritans rescuing her from her own garden. But really: the idea that this place was any better than home. It was less visceral, but ultimately proved just as dangerous. The ripples still slid outwards, even now. Twenty-five years wasn’t enough to still the waters.

  She stopped at the threshold. It was an achievement to be here at all – a marker of progress, but at the same time a necessary evil. For Dana, this was still something to be pushed through, to be accomplished and rewarded later. She could have met Timms elsewhere, but she knew she had to keep crossing this Rubicon every few weeks. If she didn’t, it would build even more in her mind and become another crippling obsession.

  ‘Bless me, Father, even though I haven’t sinned.’ Dana’s voice struck the stone floor, her steps echoing in the icy space. Churches made her shiver regardless of temperature, drove her backwards in her mind. She always felt she was scrabbling for grip, fighting to stay in the present despite a brutal dragging force. She looked up at Christ, bleeding and suffering.

  ‘Red! Wasn’t expecting you today. Of course. Well. Anyway. What have you to confess?’ Father Timms looked up from a stack of paperwork and pushed his spectacles up so he could focus. His voice shimmied off the stone walls and fluttered past her, out into the crisp air.

  ‘Uh, nothing. At least, I think I’ve been blameless.’ She dropped her bag by the door and stepped forward tentatively. ‘Does it count as a sin if you didn’t know it was a sin?’

  ‘ “Sin” ’s an over-used, emotive word. Try “cock-up”, “screw-up”. Something like that.’

  They grinned and hugged. Timms stepped back to look at her properly. It had been only days since they’d had coffee, but he sensed a change in her. It wasn’t only setting foot in here – though that was part of it. There was a gnawing uncertainty around her eyes and a bashful reluctance to meet his gaze. Notwithstanding the date, he thought he recognised Case Face; he’d seen it in her a number of times. She’d be sublimating everything to focus on a crime, but some things couldn’t be held down.

  ‘What was this sin that isn’t really a sin, then?’ He motioned to a nearby pew and they sat, legs facing front but bodies corkscrewed towards each other.

  Dana coughed into her scarf, more to buy time than anything else. ‘Was hubris a sin?’

  Father Timms waved a hand dismissively. ‘Ah, we had lots of odd ones back in the day. Coveting: coveting was big for a while. We’ve had to invent a few to keep up – taking selfies, that kind of thing.’ He nodded. ‘I think hubris was fashionable at some point, yeah.’ He paused, and his smile faded. ‘Not one I’d associate with you, Russo.’

  ‘Yes, well. Me neither. Although, if I was actually hubrissing, I’d be the last to know, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘That’s very true. If only the word existed, it would be true. Tell.’

  Dana looked at the organ, which skulked by a velvet curtain in the corner. She could almost see her mother playing it still: the hunched back of a weaver, the dancing fingers, leaning her flimsy weight forward because her legs alone wouldn’t move the pedals. A spindly, gimlet-eyed spectre of a woman. Interminable hours after school: Dana scrawling in notebooks and reading novels while her mother worked herself into rapture. Then the scrubbing; the endless scrubbing.

  That was after, of course.

  And before, of course.

  ‘Well, all this feels . . . pre-emptive. I mean, I might be jumping the gun, but I need to get ahead of it now, before it causes real problems. I feel like I’ve taken on a task I don’t know how to complete. And there are very real implications if I don’t manage it.’

  ‘Imposter syndrome again? We’ve talked about that before. You have very keen self-preservation skills, Dana, but they come at the price of underestimating yourself. You know where all that comes from, don’t you?’

  Yes, she knew. It was where everything came from: good or bad, useful or self-destructive. All from the same locus.

  ‘We have someone in custody for the Jensen Store homicide. You’ve heard about that?’ This place was not quite a confessional, but almost. She knew he would respect the sanctity of this discussion just as much: their friendship had reached that plane a while ago.

  Father Timms nodded. Soon the local newspaper would clatter against his porch, sodden by morning dew at the first bounce. There would be lurid details and ill-informed speculation, but he already knew the bare bones. Carlton was still a small town with a hive mentality. ‘Yeah, I heard. Poor guy. So, you’ve got a suspect?’

  ‘Yes . . . technically speaking.’

  ‘But?’ he prompted.

  Dana looked away, struggling to frame it right. Father Timms was smart – sometimes too quick for her own good – but her problem was mainly professional, not pastoral.

  ‘But . . . it doesn’t feel right. This, uh, suspect. He’s off-beam. Not in a mental-health way – at least, not that we can ascertain. But something . . .’ She paused. Saying it out loud made it seem even more nebulous. She couldn’t really explain what felt wrong. ‘There’s a big “something” I’m missing.’

  In the mist beyond a car alarm sounded for two seconds then switched off. Father Timms flipped a hymn book over and over, like a card sharp idly toying with the pack. ‘You rely on your intuition, Dana. Why doubt it in this case?’

  ‘Not sure. Bill gave me a run at this guy and I think – no, I know – that I’m getting more from him than someone else would. But still I feel I’m falling short. We have twenty-four hours – crap, less than that now. But maybe four hours of actual talking to him. We might not get enough for a murder conviction without this guy opening up – confessing – and I’m the only person who’s getting anything from him; it’s all on me to break through and find the truth.’

  ‘Lot of pressure.’

  ‘Yes and no. There’s always pressure to close a case, especially one like this. But no, I wasn’t moaning about that bit.’ She scratched her nose. ‘I thought I could do it. I thought – since he seemed to trust me a little – I could get through his defences. Hence – the hubrissing thing.’

  She faced the organ again, stuttered at the memory, and recovered. ‘Because I’m not sure I can. I feel like I can’t really get through to him. All I’m doing is getting little slivers off the corners, you know? Bill would say it’s early days, but it seems to me like a window that’s closing. This guy will lawyer up and clam up at some point, I’m sure of it. I need to be right in the guts of it by now, but I’m out in the margins. I’m going to run out of ideas and out of time.’

  She squeezed the bridge of her nose and rubbed her eyes. ‘He keeps saying he doesn’t want a lawyer and we can maybe get extensions, but our luck can’t hold for ever. Sooner or later a judge is going to call “enough”, whether this guy agrees or not. Then we’ll be properly screwed. Father.’

  Timms turned slightly and leaned back against the hard wood. ‘So where’s the logjam, Red? There’s always a logjam of some kind when you show up here.’

  She shook her head. ‘Ah, sorry. Feels too much like cupboard love?’

  ‘No, no.’ He dropped an octave and looked up at her. ‘Although you’re welcome to participate, spectate, or just plain donate . . .’ He smiled. ‘No, it’s more that if we meet away from church, it’s not the same thing driving you. I know w
hat it costs you to meet here, instead of anywhere else.’

  In the silence that followed Dana’s eyes were drawn back again to the organ in the corner, to the pipes reaching for heaven, to the black pedals with their scuffmarks and ingrained polish. Their walks home had been silent – scuffing steps and the hissing backdrop of her mother’s fuming breath. The walk gathered her mother’s desperation, built the momentum, raised steam. While little Dana – she knew what was coming but could do nothing but clack her patent shoes obediently on the pavement.

  ‘I’m hardly likely to view this place as sanctuary, am I, Father?’

  He gave her a sidelong glance and hastened to cover his tracks. ‘No, you never will. And I respect your courage, still setting foot in here. Especially today. That’s all true, but you do come here to clear away something that’s blocking you. We do serve some purpose for you, Dana.’

  She thrust her hands into her coat pockets, to keep finger from thumb. ‘Okay, we’re currently grappling with where this guy might live. Have lived. Since 2004.’ She looked back at Timms, noticing a wrinkle on his forehead that she’d have sworn he didn’t have last week. ‘He’s adamant it’s been his location since then. But he’s not on any database; he’s not showing up anywhere at all. We’re stuck: he’s been living in some kind of camp, but we don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on.’ Timms frowned. ‘For fifteen years, he’s been camping? What, winter as well as summer?’

  Dana could see that, once again, they were on the same wavelength. It was simultaneously reassuring and spooky that he did this so often. ‘I know. Surely he’d find shelter in winter? He doesn’t look like he’s been camped out that long. He’s got short hair, decent skin, soft hands; he’s clean.’

  He leaned forward and rubbed his ring finger absent-mindedly. ‘You’ve considered, Detective, that he may be – oh, I dunno – lying to you?’

  She smiled at the altar. ‘Ha-de-ha. Yes, I thought about it. But my instinct tells me he isn’t.’ She put up placatory palms. ‘Might be way off – he’s so unusual he could be throwing my radar. But no, I think he’s holding back something fierce, but he’s not actually lying. I’m not asking the right questions.’