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  ‘Nice to meet you, Detective,’ she said, extending her hand, which I shook. ‘And congratulations on your work in the centre. It must have been tough, given our losses. I didn’t know Coombs or Bain, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about them.’

  ‘I didn’t get to know Coombs well,’ I said, ‘but I was with her long enough to know she was intelligent and she believed in her job. In the end, that meant sacrificing herself for me, and I’m eternally grateful to her for that. But I hated having her as my shadow and I’ll hate having you shadow me just as much. It goes against the grain. So, if you detect attitude on my part, it’s not aimed at you in particular — unless I say it is.’

  ‘That’s comforting, Detective,’ said Trainor, a half-smile parting her lips, ‘that I’ll know when you’re targeting me. Now, why don’t we go into my little retreat? I’ve got hot tea with modest trimmings. Please, be my guest for a cuppa.’

  She gestured at the corridor and stepped through the doorway, and I followed her inside. The dirt floor had seen plenty of recent traffic, and the corridor’s roofless walls were topped by blue sky. We emerged into a large shell of a room where a beach umbrella shielded two fold-out chairs and a card table from the morning sun. The seating had been set up in front of a huge rectangular hole in the room’s eastern wall, which took in the view of the cliff’s edge and the ocean beyond.

  Trainor sat down in one of the chairs and rifled through a canvas bag and produced a thermos, a couple of mugs, and a packet of Anzac biscuits. She set the mugs and biscuits on the card table and poured the tea. I slipped under the umbrella, sat in the vacant chair, took a tea, and helped myself to a couple of biscuits.

  ‘Thanks, Lieutenant Commander,’ I said, raising my mug. ‘Very civilised.’

  ‘Is there any other way?’ she said, raising her mug to me. ‘We’re partners, you know, so you should call me Zoey, and I’ll call you Darren.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ I said. ‘So, what’s the deal, Zoey? Do I sleep at the flat my people have found me in Vincentia, or do you guys lock me up each night at Creswell? How tight are the reins?’

  ‘You’ll stay at your flat, of course,’ she said, almost chuckling. ‘As for marching orders, you had one overarching order when you were with Coombs, and it remains the same. You’re to stay away from everything to do with Sheridan. Another team is handling it. And your involvement in the Stevens case is now subject to stricter conditions.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘You’ll work only when I’m with you. Your warrant card is active only when I’m present. Pursue any element of the case without me, and you’ll be breaking the law. It’s been agreed.’

  ‘I’ll bet it has.’

  A multi-propped drone whizzed along the edge of the cliff and dropped over the side and out of sight.

  ‘Pretty heavy security, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The drones. The troops. And whatever else you’ve got going on out of sight.’

  ‘Despite this being an exclusion zone,’ said Trainor, ‘and despite it being cordoned off and signposted, we’ve apprehended eight intruders in the past thirty minutes. And we’re expecting more. So, the level of security is warranted.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the patrols do look busy.’

  ‘Getting back to the case,’ she said, exhibiting the tiniest hint of irritation, ‘you’ll take the running. I’ll intervene when I see fit. If I intervene, you’ll follow my orders. Our services don’t have equivalences in rank, but for our purposes, I’ll be your superior officer.’

  Trainor’s passive delivery didn’t blunt her words. Her mob and mine had agreed to curb my natural instincts.

  ‘McHenry’s explained everything,’ I said, lying. ‘My question is: Why don’t you run the Stevens case? I’ll stick around for appearance’s sake and help where I can. Or, better still, why not ask your bosses if you can combine the two cases? Sheridan and Stevens. The murders are obviously linked, and this false demarcation between the two is holding everything back. Especially Stevens. So, what do you think? Are you up for getting your hands seriously dirty?’

  ‘I think you anger too easily, Detective,’ she said. ‘Though I know you have reason to be out of sorts — the situation with your partner, Ms Acheson.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no,’ I said, ignoring her reference to Jean. ‘Situation unchanged. The cases will not be combined. Okay, then tell me, have the people with the truck found anything yet?’

  ‘They’ve found what looks like a tunnel running through the cliffs,’ she said, instantly grabbing my attention. ‘They think the entrance is near the water, but the rock face down there is so full of holes it’s proving difficult to find. They’re looking up here, as well, for another entrance. I was sitting here before, imagining how it’d be if it came up inside this place. Talk about Miss Marple! Secret trapdoors and all that.’

  ‘Will we know today? About these entrances?’

  ‘We’ll know soon, I hope. But it’s a waiting game. So while we wait, tell me — you’ve been on the Stevens matter for a while — where are we at?’

  ‘Before we cover that, can I just say, if there is a cave, or a tunnel or whatever, going down to the water, it’s likely to have significance to the local Aboriginal people. I assume that’s why a lot of them are still waiting out on the road. If and when you find these entrances, how will you deal with those people? Because if you expose one of their secret places without reference to them, it’ll not only be the wrong thing to do, they’ll react very badly, and it might not be pretty.’

  ‘The navy values good relations with our local Aboriginal people,’ said Trainor, mouthing a phrase learnt by rote. ‘I’ll convey your thoughts up the line, and we’ll see what comes of it. I’m sure we can keep things respectful. If and when we find the entrances. Now, your observations?’

  ‘The best I’ve got is a long list of questions, really,’ I said. ‘Most of them are pretty basic, and each of them assumes a different line of inquiry. Like, did Kylie Stevens do something to someone? Is that what got her killed? Or, did she have something they wanted? Or did they want her to do something for them? And, if so, what was it? Or did she refuse their demands, so they tried brutal persuasion, which went too far? Or did they always mean to kill her? They’re all basic questions, as I say, and that fact in itself indicates how little this case has progressed.’

  ‘You’ve interviewed Jade’s mother, Daisy, and her uncle Ken Bynder,’ said Trainor. ‘Who’s next?’

  ‘Kylie’s parents,’ I said. ‘Her mum’s in Taree. Her dad’s wherever he is. But, before them, I’d like another word with Bynder, when he turns up. As you’d have seen from the file, Bynder and his associate Phil Manassa have gone to ground since their meeting in the desert. And I’d like to talk to Manassa’s boss, a local contractor called Dave Calder.’

  ‘Do you think Bynder’s more than a spruiker?’ said Trainor.

  ‘If he could click his fingers and disappear every whitefella in this country,’ I said, ‘he’d do it. And if you’re looking for someone with a motive, he’s got one. But exactly what that makes him, I don’t know yet. We’ll learn more when we talk to him again. Once we find him, or he re-emerges.’

  ‘We’re working on a warrant for him.’

  ‘What are the charges?’

  ‘That’s what we’re working on.’

  Bringing Bynder in on a bogus charge would waste time and resources and make him crankier and less cooperative than ever. As I considered this, an idea that’d been percolating through me rose to the surface. I studied Trainor for a moment, anticipating a sceptical reaction to what I was about to propose.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘there might be a way of circumventing your search for the entrances.’

  ‘And how would we do that?’ she asked.

  ‘What if we gave the local elders a chance to show us where the entrances are? It’d
save your people a lot of messing about, and if the elders agreed, and it turned out not to be a productive crime scene, we could hand it back to them with little harm done. I reckon they’d go for it. And your people might like it too.’

  Trainor’s eyes narrowed. She took out her phone and began to compose a text. It took her a while, and when she’d finished, I presented another argument I thought might fly with her superiors — at least, the ones with an eye on history and their place in it.

  ‘You know the best way to advance the Stevens case?’ I said, leaning in towards her. ‘Give me everything you’ve got on Sheridan. Because if we don’t get traction soon, when this case is reviewed in, say, five or ten years’ time, they’ll point to this moment and they’ll say, “That’s when they should’ve shared with him.”’

  ‘We know that bird, Darren,’ she said, ‘and it doesn’t fly.’

  ‘And what about getting the elders involved?’

  ‘I’ve sent a message up the line, so we’ll see what they say. In the meantime, I’ve told the sonar truck to take a break.’

  Trainor returned to her phone, and I stood up and pulled at my shirt where it had stuck to my back. I was hungry. I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. I picked up another couple of Anzac biscuits and walked around the edge of the room while I ate them. The walls were mostly intact, except where rising damp had stripped the render from the stonework close to the ground. It would have been a grand place in its time. I imagined family groups posing for an antique camera in front of the collapsed fireplace. It was such a pity the building hadn’t been protected.

  ‘So, what happened here?’ I said, gesturing at the walls. ‘To this place and the lighthouse? How did they get so trashed?’

  ‘Believe it or not,’ said Trainor, looking up from her phone, ‘our ships used the buildings on this headland for target practice about a hundred years ago.’

  ‘What? How come?’

  ‘The original site for the lighthouse was chosen for its ease of access rather than because it was a suitable place for a lighthouse. But the builder rejected the site, anyway. Too far from his quarry, he thought! So he decided to build the lighthouse here instead, on Cape St George, four miles north of the approved site.

  ‘No surprise, then, that when they finally turned the light on here, it was invisible from the northern coastal approach and barely visible from the south. As a direct result, thirty-four ships went down in the thirty years the Cape St George lighthouse operated. They finally built a replacement on the other side of the bay, which made this one a danger to shipping, so it had to go.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Yes. When we seafarers stuff up, it’s usually on a grand scale.’

  I was pondering that notion when someone called out to Trainor from the front of the ruins. It was a woman’s voice. We turned to the sound of footsteps coming down the corridor. The tech with the red hair slipped into the room.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Trainor, ‘how can I help you?’

  The tech shot me a look and cleared her throat.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Trainor. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, eyeing me doubtfully. ‘We’ve halted all work, as ordered. But I thought you should know that, just before we stopped, we identified a void that bypasses the lighthouse and goes straight up the rise to the place with the fence around it. The Steeple. When we resume work, we’ll only need a couple of hours to pinpoint the entrance up there. We just thought we’d let you know.’

  11

  Trainor’s phone buzzed with a text. Her face widened with a smile as she read it. She put the phone down and looked at me, so I knew the text related either to my insistence that I be given the Sheridan material, or to my belief that the local elders should be invited to show us the entrances to the tunnel.

  ‘Sometimes they surprise you,’ she said.

  ‘How?’ I said, intrigued, but ready to be disappointed.

  ‘We’ve been given the go-ahead to ask the Steeple Bay elders to show us the entrance to this tunnel, if it exists. And, depending on their response, we have authority to ask them to take us through it.’

  ‘That is very surprising. But enlightened, I must say.’

  ‘Correct on both counts. So, we’ll maintain the exclusion zone and separate the work into discreet units so that only a few of our people will get the full picture of what we’re doing. Regardless, there’s a better than even chance that if we do discover something, it won’t remain a secret for long.’

  ‘And that’s an enormous pity. Anyway, let’s get out to the road. There’s someone there who can identify the elders we need to talk to.’

  We sat on chairs in the middle of the lighthouse road, twenty metres past the police barriers. There was Davey Spencer, a fit-looking bloke in his fifties who co-owned the Steeple Bay General Store. Next to him was Alice Spratt, a sharp-eyed woman who ran the Steeple Bay after-school program. Father Radcliffe sat next to Alice — he’d assembled the elders for us. Next was Alf Morris, a sixty-something bloke with a full grey beard who worked as a ‘general hand’ on the airport road. And next to Alf was his younger brother, Peter, a member of the community council. Trainor and I completed the circle.

  Trainor began by telling the elders that Kylie’s phone had been located on a rock ledge below the lighthouse ruins. From their muted reaction, it seemed this was old news to them. But when she told them what the sonar truck had found, they looked around at each other in obvious surprise.

  Trainor said the truck had been put on stand-by while we asked them about an underground route between The Steeple and the water below. If such a route did exist, and if they agreed to show it to us, she said, they’d avoid an overly invasive search of The Steeple, and they’d also limit the number of people involved in the operation. It sounded like a threat, and it was blackmail at best, but it was also the truth.

  Trainor and I left the elders with the priest and walked back to the barrier and waited. I checked my phone for news on Jayapura, but there was nothing new — just the same old war of words between Jakarta and Canberra — so I put the phone away and focused on the discussion on the chairs. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but it seemed like a respectful meeting. No one got overly animated, they seemed to listen to each other, and everyone got a turn to talk. After ten minutes, Davey signalled for us to rejoin them.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, after we’d settled back on our chairs, ‘we know you’re gunna find the place you’re looking for, and it’s not good. But we’ll have to bend with it, I guess.’

  ‘We’re sorry about that,’ I said, and I was. ‘But we’ve got no choice. Our job is to find Kylie Stevens’s killer, and this tunnel, or whatever it is, might help us do that. But you should know that, while Zoey and I will tread lightly on the place you show us, others’ll go through it later, and we’ll have no control over what they do. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘There’s nothing to wreck in there, anyway,’ said Davey, shaking his head. ‘It’s all rock inside.’

  ‘So, is it a sacred place?’ I said, hanging on his response.

  Davey eyed each of his fellow elders in turn. Seeing no objections, he turned to me.

  ‘The Steeple’s sacred,’ he said. ‘You only have to look at it to work that out. And underneath’s important, too, but it’s not sacred. One of Alf’s family found it in the 1920s. That’s right, isn’t it, Alf?’

  ‘My Uncle Billy,’ said Alf, in a solemn tone. ‘In 1923. No one knows how he did it, because it’s fairly hard to find.’

  ‘Is it inside The Steeple?’ I said. ‘This tunnel, or whatever it is?’

  ‘Sort of, but not really,’ said Davey. ‘You’ll see. Alf’ll show you. He looks after the place, poor him. And I’ll come, too.’

  When we reached the fence around The Steeple, we were all drenched with sweat, and Trainor was the only one of us not
in obvious need of a rest. We sat on separate boulders, catching our breath and taking a drink. Trainor handed out bags of some sort of trail mix, and I ate mine studying the four pillars which rose, impossibly high, on the other side of the fence. From underneath, they looked like giant sausages, and the undulating base rock that supported them was unusually thick with vines and bushes. It had me thinking that someone with a green thumb was giving the plants a helping hand.

  I turned around on my rock and looked down at Cape St George and its ruins, then north and south along the coastline. Even with a bluish haze hanging over the cliffs, it was clear that several headlands, in either direction, had a far better line of sight along the coast than the site directly below me.

  Alf said the word, and we set off again, walking single file on a narrow track that shadowed the security fence. Davey broke off a sprig of bush and waved it in front of his face and around his shoulders to unsettle the flies.

  We’d walked fifteen minutes when Alf stopped at a bend in the fence and took a small screwdriver from a pouch on his belt. He used the tool to remove a metal plate attached to the fence post, a flap of cyclone fencing swung open, and he slipped through the hole. I went through next, Trainor followed, and then Davey. Alf reattached the fence flap behind us, and we followed him across hard ground and onto a worn gravel path skirting the pillars. Davey used his sprig to smooth the barely visible marks we’d made while moving between the fence and the path.

  We headed off again and were halfway around the rock formation when Alf slowed and stopped. He stared into the middle distance for twenty seconds, listening. Then he stepped off the path onto a slightly elevated rock with a top as flat as a paver. He stood there for a moment, then stepped onto another flat rock next to it, and then onto one next to that. He moved with such care, it was as if he were using stepping stones to cross a pond full of piranhas.