Dead Fall Lake

by S. R. White

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

'A rising star of Australian crime fiction' SUNDAY TIMES
'S. R. White is the real deal' CHRIS HAMMER

Deep in the Australian wilderness, a famed sinkhole renowned as a stunning freediving spot attracts people from all over the world. But there's a dark, puzzling mystery when a local sports hero - and the glamorous face of a high-adrenaline video channel - is found dead far beneath the surface.

Despite diving the sinkhole hundreds of times, his lifeless body is discovered dressed in normal clothes, handcuffed to a supply line. With no witnesses - and evidence submerged 30 metres underwater - how can Detective Dana Russo unravel such a shocking case?

Praise for S. R. White:

'A taut, beautifully observed slow-burner with an explosive finish' PETER MAY
'Original, compelling and highly recommended' CHRIS HAMMER
'Gripping' THE GUARDIAN
'A fascinating case' SUNDAY TIMES
'It draws you in - and rewards with a truly powerful ending' HEAT
'This slow-burn novel catches light' THE SUN
'The story takes place over less than 48 hours but the pace is slow-burn, relying on considerable psychological depth...the denouement hits like a knockout punch' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
'A dark and compulsive read' WOMAN & HOME

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Outskirts of Turvey. Wednesday, 20 May 2020, 1540hrs

Someone, or something, or one thing, had sucked the life out of the world she knew. Quickly, abruptly, she’d shifted from her default of too many people and too much noise; now, she found the lack of those things disconcerting. It wasn’t the kind of peace and solitude that had been sought out. It was an absence, a hole, a vacuum where people and life should be. There was no real concept of how this ended, let alone when. That frightened people and the frightened made mistakes; they withdrew, held back and mistrusted. This was the new normal.

Dana Russo hated how she felt. And hated how quickly she’d come to feel it.

It spoke of an embarrassing lack of resilience. She was being kept safe: that politician’s mantra bounced in her head. She was aware that everyone was having to adapt and it was understood that others had it tougher than her, with more dramatic consequence. Dana was one of the lucky ones – she still had a well-paid job and was still allowed out to do it.

But that was it, she’d reflected on the one-hour drive from Carlton to the crime scene. She was allowed out to do it: like a child asking to play in the park. Someone, somewhere – and no one could say who or where – thought that they should hold judgement over how ‘essential’ her job was, and whether the personal liberty of free movement should be granted or withheld. It was a power that reached way beyond any of her senior officers, extending past every working hour and into every waking hour. She couldn’t help but resent it deeply. No one would prove for months, maybe years, whether her current reaction was appropriate or selfish, scientifically correct or totally wrong. She felt it, nonetheless.

Getting to the crime scene involved two checkpoints. There was no whitewashing that; they were checkpoints. On the outskirts of Carlton officers verified her pass, double-verified her medical status, noted her reasons for daring to move more than five kilometres from her work address. After forty minutes’ drive across a landscape so bereft of human life that it resembled a zombie apocalypse, the same process again outside the small town of Turvey.

It was bad enough, in her eyes, to be treated this way – the underpinning assumption that she was a criminal until she could prove otherwise. But beyond the mere mechanics of the process was a deeper, longer concern. She was staggered by the lack of contrition from everyone involved. No one apologised for what they were doing, or even shrugged their shoulders. They’d fallen quickly and seemingly willingly into the rhythm of demanding to see papers and looking for reasons to keep people held indoors. Her view, it seemed, was hugely out of kilter with everyone else’s idea of appropriate and proportionate. Yet she couldn’t believe that she was the outlier.

Her admin officer, Lucy, was working from home, knitting together data and running processes below the waterline. Needing her to be based in her apartment, in the past few weeks they’d tied in more systems to her home computer – she already had many and an internal investigation had eventually cleared her of inappropriate use allegations. The smear – that she’d gained some unreasonable access and had misused date – had been political shenanigans unconnected to her, but she’d been hit by the shrapnel. The same investigation had finished Dana’s previous boss, Bill Meeks, while simultaneously erasing all suspicion. He was slowly trying to put himself together again: it was a salutary reminder that what the organisation really wanted, it always got. The whole episode had shaken Lucy to the core, and only now, eight months after it began, was she recovering from it.

Despite that professional recovery, Dana knew that Lucy was emotionally flailing. Her father, Tubs Delaney, in a coma for several years now and tended in Lucy’s apartment by a nurse, was going downhill. The spectre of Covid loomed over every hour and his dire situation drove Lucy’s acceptance of the restrictions it brought. There was only so long that science could defy the gravity of his circumstances. Lucy’s focus now was on a dignified conclusion – but that endgame was smashing her.

Dana checked in by text with her temporary – for this case only – district commander, Andrew Leavy. Her real commander from Carlton station, the dreaded Anton McCullough, was stuck in New Zealand, which wasn’t letting anyone in or out of the country. Not even All Blacks. The word was that he’d been advised not to travel there but did anyway – the amoral prerogative of a man with six months until retirement. McCullough had started his exile by demanding emails and files and pretending he was working from his brother’s vineyard on South Island. Within a fortnight he’d abandoned any pretence and simply said he was on indefinite – but fully paid, natch – leave. Always a fifth wheel at the best of times, his absence was the one good thing to have emerged from Covid so far. Meanwhile, Leavy, who was based in this district’s focal point of Dayton, told Dana to proceed with the investigation. He’d added that resources over and above Turvey’s handful of uniforms was not the go. She’d have to use her own detectives, search teams, forensics, budget . . . and initiative.

Turvey was a scrubby little town in a flat part of country that was once fertile pasture. Increasingly it was pockmarked by gas wells that were gradually making someone richer but, it was often claimed, polluting the groundwater. It appeared impossible to get a definitive conclusion on that, though: she’d read in newspapers of at least five different studies that each contradicted the other four. What was clear, however, was that sheep farming was declining here. Dana couldn’t see evidence of any nascent industry – except gas – picking up the slack.

The Volvo’s satnav directed her through the centre of Turvey. The police station was down a side road and she made a mental note of the junction. The main street was wide, with diagonal parking and large bump stops to prevent that process ending in a shop window. Not that there were many of those. The post office was conjoined with the TAB: the latter looked set to devour the former. There was a small IGA which had two hedges of witches’ hats directing customers in through one door and out of the other. No doubt there were taped arrows and footprints inside, just in case a customer got any ideas above their station. The state government was considering blocking off shelves that had ‘unnecessary’ or ‘non-urgent’ items such as shoes, clothing, magazines. Sooner or later, a newspaper would show an image of a small child staring at a display of toys ruthlessly covered in plastic sheeting and warning signs, the kid wondering what the hell happened.

Dana had spotted a servo on the way in – though it was empty and could have been closed – but every other ‘shop’ in town was a phantom. It was easy to see – past the desiccated curtains, dusty shelves, dead insects and dulled glass – what had once been. The corner building with an old-fashioned porch out to the gutter was surely the old milk bar; she could picture a kid’s bike left carelessly outside the door, a customer discarding bubblegum wrappers as they walked off, the cheery colours advertising ice cream on a creaky A-sign on the pavement. The place with curved glass by the door would have been a clothes shop; the soot-riven spot with fractured transom windows would have been the hairdresser’s. The former launderette still had the skeletal wooden frames that once housed washing machines and dryers – she got a glimpse of the redundant rubber hoses as she slowed to turn. Turvey had once provided everything that people needed, day in, day out. Now it was a large clapped-out motel of a place; people arrived home, watched TV, slept, left. It hung on as a dormitory background to scuffled lives and commutes to Dayton, Carlton or Earlville; a place to become stuck in. This town had died before anyone had even heard of Wuhan.

Now, Turvey had a murder. A very particular murder in a very particular place. With only six uniforms covering this area, they’d called Dana and her colleagues, Mila and Mike, across from Carlton. Once they’d all navigated the checkpoints, of course.

Dead Fall Lake. Wednesday, 20 May 2020, 1600hrs

‘Mask.’

The duty officer, obliged to guard the metal gate that offered access to the crime scene, gave the muffled order as Dana approached. He hitched his pants at the same time, punctuating the instruction. The pants sagged back to muffin-top height. Just in case she was as stupid as he thought, he pointed at his mask.

Dana lifted her ID. She hated the way masks obscured basic expression, the fundamentals of interaction. They dehumanised people. But she saw the eyebrows raise and the eyes widen.

‘Sorry, boss,’ he muttered. ‘All the same, masks are, uh, mandatory.’

Dana pointed to her lapel badge. ‘Medical exemption. You’d best get used to recognising these, no?’

Flustered, the officer stood aside and watched the turf as Dana walked past.

It wasn’t her usual standard of politeness. Her anger was dragging that down; she’d resolved to try harder, but she was sick of the regulations already. A cooperative doctor – the same one who’d prescribed her a nebuliser when she actually suffered from panic attacks – had generously provided ‘proof’ that she was asthmatic. She wondered how long that would hold, since the state regulations appeared to be squeezing tighter and tighter. She felt certain that if the powers that be didn’t care that your mother was dying, or that you needed cancer screening, or that your lifelong business was going to the wall, they’d hardly baulk at someone feeling wheezy if they wore a mask.

Dead Fall Lake was one of those places that Dana held in the back of her mind without fully paying attention. She knew that it was a sinkhole and not really a lake; caused by a combination of limestone rock and a high water table. She was aware that it was something of a legendary experience in diving circles. But, since she couldn’t swim more than a few metres, she’d never read further than that. Now that it was a crime scene, she’d become a lot more interested.

Mila Jelovic had arrived ahead of her. Mila had swept into Carlton some months ago, a refugee from the city and endless vitriolic gossip about a terrifying video, sporting two crutches and an eye patch. The video was secretly filmed footage of a sadistic beating she’d suffered, which had simultaneously injured her, exposed her own failure and undermined an expensive and potentially explosive investigation. The crutches were gone now, though her legs were still rehabilitating and she took every opportunity to sit. The eyepatch remained and now looked absurd when peeking out above a medical mask. All you could see of Mila Jelovic’s face was one corner: an eye and half a frown.

She looked up from a clipboard as forensic suits milled around behind her, preparing to sweep the surrounding area. They looked, it had to be said, the same as usual. The sun was sharp and the air had been scrubbed by a southerly, which had mercifully subsided and left a crisp autumnal late afternoon.

‘How can I get one of them there exemptions, Dana?’ Mila asked, squinting into the sun.

Dana smiled. ‘Know the right people. What do we have so far?’

They both sat on a convenient log.

‘Alrighty. Mikey’s in Central today but available from first thing tomorrow. This is the famous Dead Fall Lake: I hope you weren’t expecting an actual lake. More a water-filled pit where they used to execute people, but I guess the tourism drops off if people think that. Anyway, it’s famous if you’re a diver. The Water Rescue Unit is on its way to deal with the body; they’ve been here many times. Seventy-five metres deep, thirteen across; an almost perfect cylinder shape. You could fit a twenty-four-storey building in there. Usually used by various dive fans – training for underwater rescue, as I say; also students of sub-aqua and various bods into snorkelling and freediving. Christ knows how they can afford it.’

‘Pricey, then?’

Mila puffed her cheeks and double-checked her notes. ‘Oh, Jesus, yeah. I checked the website. The owner is Brad Thorburn – him over there in the tracky-dacks. He’s only allowed to have one team a day in the water, maximum of six people. Sensitive environment, and all that: I doubt you can even spit in there. So he milks it, as you would. Four hundred bucks a day. Each.’

‘Wow. But none at the moment?’

‘Nah. Closed. Like everything else in the entire world. Never thought we’d say that, did we? Anyway. Closed for the past two months, and Brad keeps it all locked up, he swears.’

‘Hmm. He’s losing money hand over fist, though, isn’t he? That government compensation hasn’t actually kicked in yet: no money in accounts until next month. It must be tempting to let in a few divers on the quiet.’

Dana looked around. The land inside the wire fencing was flat and monotone – everything in a limited palette of tawny, the path from the gate cutting a swathe through thigh-high grass that was surely snake heaven. The landscape beyond stretched itself across a plain of mottled turf and a handful of sheep. In the distance, one metal shade had been created over a trough that angled alarmingly.

Mila followed her line of vision. ‘Yeah, I wondered if he was cheating. Guests would have to find a way to get here without attracting attention. By my basic maths, it’s around six thousand a week he’s missing out on. He swears blind he sticks by the rules, but he might have a different tune when we get him in a room. Maybe he sneaks ’em in at night, when no one’s looking? Cash in hand, screw the ATO? Out here, he’d be king of the castle.’

They both glanced at the beanie-clad monarch clutching a mug of tea and leaning against his own door frame. He looked annoyed by the intrusion, rather than traumatised by death. Brad Thorburn was weathered in the way of fishermen and road crews – part sun, part wind. He looked stocky, but the bulky clothing might be misleading: a grubby cable-knit sweater, oversized tracksuit pants and unlaced tan work boots. His mask hung limp from one ear, swaying gently with each pick of the breeze, and he held an acerbic expression that looked like a default.

‘Okay,’ said Dana, sweeping a look at the four buildings in front of her. ‘So, we have a weird location. One dead?’

‘Yup. Cory Barnes. Local man, twenty-five. Cory probably knows this dive better than anyone. Apparently he started coming here when he was fourteen, been diving here a couple of times a month since then.’

Dana’s mental arithmetic had always been quick. ‘Two hundred-plus dives? Mr Barnes is a fanatic, then? Was, sorry.’

Mila fished for her phone. ‘Lucy said you don’t use these things enough. Behold, the wonders of the internet. Here’s Cory on his video channel.’

Dana watched as the screen filled with a young, handsome, fresh-faced Cory Barnes. He looked like an ad for aftershave – scrubbed, clear-eyed, with both muscle tone and poise to burn. The camera moved back and Dana could see Cory standing on a clifftop, a blustery wind rattling the zip on his drysuit and tousling his hair. The sound was muted, but Cory pointed to the sky, the edge and the sky again.

Then he jumped.

‘He’s a base jumper?’ she asked, as a drone camera tracked Cory’s arc towards a splash in the surf, barely ten metres from the rocks. He bobbed up again three seconds later, a fist in the air.

Mila swiped right and Cory disappeared.

‘Base jumping involves a parachute, I think. More like nutter-jumping. He does other stuff besides – parachuting, paragliding, cliff climbing, all types of diving. Rides a motorbike, surfs. That’s his schtick, basically. Adrenaline events close up, with him and his pretty buddies. Danger, risk, good times and hot people. Sponsors bloody love it.’

Dana made a mental note: the others who made up his mates for video purposes might also be his fellow divers. Mila read her mind.

‘Cory lives with his brother, Andy, and a young woman, Dominique LaSalle. They appear in all his videos – they’re the basic amigos while various other hotties and Z-list celebs rotate in and out. Online chat hasn’t caught up to his death yet, but it won’t be long. The word is that Cory gets almost everything in his life for free, as long as it makes it into video.’

‘He’s an influencer, then?’

‘Yup. One of those weird things where he makes a motza by simply living his life while someone films it. Lucy’s putting together the bios.’

Dana’s last murder case had been shaped by social media in various ways, few of them good. It still baffled her as a way of dealing with people, or making your mark, or leaving a legacy. She craved privacy, while others happily discarded it as an unnecessary burden. Maybe it was a generational thing.

‘Okay. What’s the timeline so far, Mila?’

Mila checked her clipboard again.

‘Emergency call came in: 1322 hrs. Brad Thorburn rings it in from his mobile – says he’s standing on that little pier, there.’

Mila pointed towards the sinkhole. A metal pier had been built out from an area of rock about ten metres from the edge. It appeared connected to the terrain until the last few metres, then cantilevered out over the water. A hoist was attached to one side with ropes flapping in the newly gathered breeze. A steel stepladder descended vertically from the pier.

‘You can see into the water from there?’

Mila grinned. ‘Mate, this is Dead Fall Lake. You can see the bottom from there.’

Dana swivelled back to Mila. ‘Truly?’

‘Yeah, it’s one of the things it’s famous for – the visibility. Like I said, it’s a couple of hundred feet down, but you can see the bottom from the surface, the surface from the bottom.’

‘So Mr Thorburn could see the dead body without getting wet?’

‘Exactly. He rings through and says there’s a body in the water. The operator’s familiar with the area. He asks how Brad knows the diver is dead: maybe the guy’s freediving and just floating static. They do that, apparently. Thorburn says he’s timed it – he’s been watching the diver for fourteen minutes and he hasn’t moved a muscle.’

‘Fair enough.’

Dana had, in the back of her mind, articles about freediving – how some could go six or seven minutes without drawing another breath. Even so; Brad Thorburn had been around these dives for years, as the owner of the property. Seven minutes, maximum, of zero movement would be enough to warrant raising the alarm. Better yet: jump into the water and save the bloke. Why wait fourteen minutes?

To be sure he was dead was a reasoning that cut many ways . . .

‘So, then we send out the cavalry?’

‘Yup. Local uniform arrives 1331 hrs – Geoff Crowley: Mr Chunky over there by the patrol car. He confirms Thorburn’s story.’

Mila noted Dana’s sceptical look, and paused. Dana tapped finger and thumb together.

‘All right, Mila. So, they know they have a dead body because it’s been in the same spot underwater for fourteen minutes and there are presumably no air tanks. I can understand that part. But why would they think it was murder? Surely the most likely explanation is that he’s dived – I don’t think they usually freedive alone, do they? – and something’s gone wrong. Aneurism, heart attack, whatever. Why would they call in the detectives?’

Mila glanced back towards the patrol car.

‘Two reasons. First off, Cory’s not in diving gear. No wetsuit, no flippers, no goggles or nose clip, nothing. He’s dived here so many times that he’d know how to prepare. Second reason? Visuals. Crowley’s dabbled in this sort of thing; scuba, not freediving, he said. But in the boot of his car he has a little underwater drone. I guess this area, all the caves and whatnot, probably a good idea, eh? Tiny thing, about the size of a saucer. He put it into the water and drove it down to the dead body. It doesn’t send images, not immediately. But it records the footage and you can load that into your phone. Don’t ask me how, Dana, you just can. Anyway, he saw the images and that was when he called for us.’

‘Because?’

‘Hmm. So there’s a rope line that’s clipped to the rock wall, there. It attaches to that hoist you can see on the pier. They use it to transport various items down and up – means they can move things around without constantly having to dive and resurface. Especially when its scuba and they have air tanks and so on.’

‘Like a supply line?’

‘Exactly. Vertical, of course; everything is, down there. So, Cory Barnes? He’s handcuffed to that line.’

‘Handcuffed?’

‘Yeah. You can’t see the detail perfectly. But it’s clipped to the line just below a carabiner. So he’s not going to rise above that point.’

Mila glanced at Dana. ‘Cory Barnes wasn’t allowed to come up once his breath ran out. And that would be murder.’

Dead Fall Lake. Wednesday, 20 May 2020, 1630hrs

From an aerial drone’s perspective, the entire compound was like an archer’s target. The dark centre of the sinkhole itself was the bullseye, surrounded by a core of snap-dry grass broken only by the pier and a gravel path to the outer areas. This was corralled by a two-metre fence that, in Dana’s view, would be easy to climb for the sort of limber, athletic individuals likely to be going deep in a single breath. Only half of it was topped by barbed wire, as though Thorburn had run out of money. Completing the fence’s circle on one quadrant was Thorburn’s house, with two outbuildings flanking it, and a metal shed. The legal boundary of the property was a loose hedge a further two hundred metres away on all sides, where it buttressed grazing land that stretched to a run of low-rise hills tufted with small groups of trees.

Dana thought security. In a normal year it would be easy to park on the outer edge, walk to the fence, climb it and get to the pier. Saving four hundred bucks each would be ample motivation. If Thorburn was asleep or away, it was child’s play. If he was home, the risk of exposure basically existed for the minute or so that the trespassers would be in sight. Once they climbed down the metal ladder into the water, they were no longer visible from the house: Thorburn would have to walk right to the edge of the sinkhole to see anyone diving. At night, he’d have the curtains drawn and anyone could go play.

In these times, however, the trespassers might not even make it here, trying to navigate checkpoints, or avoid them altogether. But, she reasoned, locals would be able to pick minor roads, ungraded tracks or fields with reliable ground. That alone pointed towards local involvement.

All this, of course, assumed Thorburn was an innocent party and genuinely had no idea who was here, when they arrived or what they were doing. The viable alternatives were that he was haemorrhaging money and could see no end to the state’s restrictions, so reluctantly took cash under the table; or, he was amoral at best and enthusiastically took plenty on the side, so this was no stretch for him; or, worse, he was involved in the murder. She made a note to ascertain whether Thorburn was a diver himself, or whether he just happened to own one of the best freediving spots on earth but hated the very idea.

Dana and Mila made their way across to Stuart Risdale, who was organising the systematic search of the property from perimeter-in. He signalled to one of his assistants on the search team before turning their way.

‘Dana. Lucky you with the exemption, eh?’ He eye-rolled as he pointed to his mask.

Dana nodded. ‘What can you tell me so far, Stu?’

‘Okay. So laughing-boy over there’ – he flicked his head towards Thorburn, who was throwing the dregs of his tea at his own wall – ‘says that no one has been in this compound, except him, for two months. Since the lockdown business started.’

‘That’s a good thing, right?’ offered Mila.

‘Not necessarily. In theory, the less – the fewer – people that have access, the easier our job is, that’s true. But in this case it means a discarded cigarette, lolly wrapper, dropped pen or whatever could be two months old, or a few days old. Besides, we only have his word for it and, well, I wouldn’t put him up there with Nelson Mandela, know what I mean?’

Dana wondered. Thorburn had reason to lie about any people he’d allowed on to the compound: state r. . .