Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment. The solution is a posting away from Sydney and a quiet life in Newcastle.
Or maybe not so quiet. A body’s been found buried just offshore on Ash Island; there may be more. There’s also Harry’s unfinished business. The car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife happened not far from Newcastle. And Harry knows it was no accident.
The other unfinished business is Jenny’s longed-for pregnancy. Which means that now the stakes are higher than ever.
Release date:
November 1, 2016
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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ON A NOVEMBER NIGHT in 2013, two kilometres off the coast of New South Wales, a helicopter rises from the deck of a Chinese bulk carrier ship. It has just delivered a pilot to guide the 260-metre leviathan into the port of Newcastle, where it will take on 150,000 tonnes of coal.
The helicopter pilot banks away toward the coast, his last flight for the night, and checks the time. 2:16 a.m. Ahead of him he can see the white figure of the lighthouse on Nobbys Head marking the mouth of the Hunter River and the entrance to the port. To the left are the lights of the city—the city of people, mostly asleep now—while to the right lies the floodlit city of machines that never sleep. Gantries, towers, crawling scoops, and humming conveyor belts, all of gigantic size, gathering up the long ridges of coal that the trains have brought down from the valley and pumping it into the bellies of the ships.
Beyond the machines and their coal mountains the pilot can see a curious blank darkness in the general pattern of lights. It is Ash Island, an uninhabited place of saltwater marshland lying between the two arms of the river that converge in the port basin. As he turns toward his landing ground, the pilot notices one single bright point of light in Ash Island’s darkness. Puzzled, he turns back towards it. There is a three-quarter moon in the cloudless sky and as he gets closer he can make out the paler forms of pools and lakes reflecting its light—Wader Pond and Swan Pond and the meandering line of Fish Fry Creek. And there, in the crook of the stream, he sees again that unlikely spot of light. As he approaches it is abruptly extinguished. He blinks, staring into the darkness, and as he passes over the place thinks he can make out the pale rectangles of two vehicles, down by the edge of the creek.
TWO
KELLY POOL STARES DOWN into the darkness to the glow of white wave caps breaking against the base of the cliff below her. She shivers in the cool wind of Sydney’s late spring. The boom of the surf rises up to her like the rhythmic chant of some primeval chorus, the chorus of the dead.
She really has had enough. For a while she thought she was coping pretty well, brushing off the sympathy of colleagues when she returned to work at the Times; telling them that no, everything was fine. She wondered what version they’d been given. When she asked the trainee journalist under her, Hannah, told her Catherine Meiklejohn had spoken to each of them. Kelly had been savagely attacked, she’d said without going into detail, while fearlessly doing her job. She was an example to them all of what an investigative journalist should be. But that wasn’t how Kelly felt, and as the weeks and months passed her energy and will began to leak away.
The nights were her undoing. Joost Potgeiter had been killed—she’d seen it herself—but each night he visited her again in her dreams. Shredding her sleep, convulsing her in sweaty horror, her own voice screaming NO-NO-NO-NO as she struggled back to consciousness.
And so the days deteriorated too. She found it hard to concentrate, avoided leaving the office. She sat hunched at her desk staring at her computer screen, lost for ideas.
It didn’t help that her flatmate, Wendy, was in much the same state. Wendy walked with a stick now, and they were both seeing therapists, but so far that didn’t seem to have helped. They spent their evenings and much of their nights together locked in their apartment, and drank too much.
And now Kelly really has had enough. Sleep, release, oblivion. Just one step away.
She thinks of Donna Fenning, the pleasant, housewifely woman who drugged her and delivered her into Potgeiter’s hands. Donna has vanished, seemingly without a trace; the police seem to doubt that she ever existed. And she thinks of Harry Belltree, who has also disappeared. She visited him regularly in hospital while he recovered from his wounds. Then one day he was gone, no one could tell her where.
Just one step.
She takes a deep breath, lifts up her chin. Raises her foot.
As she feels her weight tip she hears a male voice behind her roar, “NO!” and her body is checked by a tremendous jerk on her arm which brings her stumbling backwards onto her rump.
Harry! she thinks. Harry!
But she looks up into an unfamiliar face. He looks furious, his saliva sprays as he shouts at her, “What are you fucking doing? Don’t be so bloody stupid!”
He is very agitated, shaking his head and waving his arms. She sees a dog lead in his hand and a small terrier dancing around behind him.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and subsides onto the damp grass. “I’m sorry.”
“For goodness sake!” He takes hold of her arm again and lifts and drags her away from the edge. “That’s so stupid! So bloody stupid!”
“Yes,” she gasps. “Yes, it is,” and begins to laugh and cry.
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