‘You keep telling yourself that, and you might eventually start believing it.’
Ford took out his phone and found the number again. When he got no reply he stared at the screen as if waiting for it to provide an answer.
‘I have no right to keep my daughter from her mother,’ he said.
‘She seemed to have no problem keeping your daughter from you. If we hadn’t stopped her at the airport, Grace would be in Macau now.’
‘I have to move past that,’ said Ford. ‘When Diane and I separated, I shut down, and Grace bore the brunt of that. I had to learn how to open up again, and now that I’ve learnt to do that I need to keep myself open to every possibility.’
‘She’ll hurt you again.’
‘When I look at Grace I see her mother’s face. The eyes, the smile. It’s not something that you can deny.’
‘She didn’t get your wife’s red hair, lucky girl.’
‘Sure she did. If you catch her in the right light, you’ll see the strawberry. Mostly she got my colouring though. My hair, my skin, my love of the sun.’
‘What about that toughness, that stubborn streak? That yours or your wife’s?’
‘Kids are resilient, what she’s been through.’
‘But I saw it in that hangar, when you shot Roth. It didn’t faze her. No kid should have to see that.’
‘Maybe she gets that from her mother.’
‘Stone cold she was.’
‘That’s not fair on either of them.’
‘There won’t be any happy families with her.’
‘It’s way beyond that. You can work at a relationship but, if the underlying love has gone, then it will finally break and you have to admit to yourself that it was always going to go that way.’
‘So you don’t love her?’ Kavanagh asked.
‘Grace does. I can’t decide who Diane loves.’
‘But you’re picturing some kind of future for her?’
‘Something better for Grace? Sure. Anything is better than this. The only constant for her is change.’
‘You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.’
‘All children scare their parents. You’re forever expecting to meet yourself. However you imagine your kid will turn out, they turn into something different. Something that is you, but not you. Maybe the bits of you that could’ve been better.’
‘You go looking for redemption like that again, you’re going to get shot. You were not to blame for anything that happened at the mine, or afterwards. McCann set up the fraud, Diane wrote the fake geo report. Roth arranged the robbery and set you up as the fall guy. You did what you had to do. Get over yourself.’
His eyes flared. ‘That job of yours, did you ever worry it might twist you? Leave you with no sense of what’s normal? Do you only see the world in polar opposites? Black and white, victim and perp?’
Kavanagh put her hand under the bandana and rested it on the pistol, then stared at him. He could see her pale blue eyes flashing under the shadow cast by her brows. ‘You should go indoors and curl up next to your daughter. Get some sleep,’ she said. ‘Let the girl with the gun stay awake all night out here in the world of good and evil.’
NINE
Ford was woken by his phone ringing, a persistent trill that had entered his dreams before it woke him. He sat upright, thinking it was some strange bird trapped in the room, and was disoriented by the overhead light bulb shining in his eyes. He caught a flicker of movement through his squinting eyes, tried to focus them on the light, and when his vision cleared he saw that there was no bird, just a fat blowfly circling the bulb, its wings buzzing in harmony with the phone.
When he shook off the last of his dream and recognised where he was, he saw that Grace was sitting at the end of the bed, dressed in clean clothes: blue dungarees and a candy-striped red and white T-shirt. Kavanagh stood behind her, pulling back Grace’s hair and weaving the strands together in a French plait. Her fingers moved with the same graceful movement she’d used on the pistol.
Ford rubbed his eyes, trying to remember where he’d left his phone. He looked for the bedside table but it had gone, leaving only a tide mark on the wall where the light had faded the wood panelling. He rolled across the bed and hung over the edge, searching for his pants on the floor. He felt the cold blast of the air-conditioner on his bare legs and became aware that he was dressed only in his boxers. He glanced at Kavanagh and pulled the sheet around himself. He found his pants and rummaged through the pockets until he found the phone. He looked at the screen but his eyes still stung from the bright light and the numbers were a blur. He pressed to answer and put it to his ear.
‘Hello?’ he said. There was silence on the other end. He looked at the screen again and could now read the number.
‘Diane?’ he said. ‘I tried calling you last night. I was worried.’
There was a long pause before she spoke. ‘Where are you now?’ she said.
‘I’m still in Newman.’
‘Then I’m glad I caught you before you left.’ Her voice was still hesitant. Kavanagh continued to plait Grace’s hair, her back to Ford, but he could tell by the angle of her head that she was straining to hear the voice on the phone. Ford stood up and went to the door, pulling the sheet with him. He opened it and felt the warm air outside hit his face. He meant to step outside, but it was still dark.
‘What time is it?’ he said, shutting the door. ‘You woke me.’
‘Nearly six,’ said Diane. ‘Have you found that detective?’
‘Yes,’ said Ford. At this Kavanagh raised her head and looked at him and he knew she could hear it all. He moved the phone away from his ear so she could hear more clearly. ‘DC Kavanagh will be travelling with me to Broome.’
‘You can’t come here,’ said Diane, her voice urgent. He started to speak but she cut him off. ‘Someone’s here in Broome. Looking for me. I’ve seen them. Chinese guys.’
‘Have they seen you?’
‘No. I changed my hair. I wear hats, dark glasses. I walked right past them and they didn’t see me.’
‘But you recognised them?’
‘Maybe. At the casino.’ She sounded short of breath.
‘We can be there in ten hours, mid-afternoon. Can you keep out of sight until then?’
‘I’ve left Broome already. I’m scared. I hired a car yesterday. I left last night. My phone wouldn’t have got a signal out on the road.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Sandfire Roadhouse. Three hours south of Broome. Is Grace with you?’
‘She’s right here.’
‘I want to see her.’
‘That’s what we’re trying to sort out here,’ he said. ‘You can come to us.’
Kavanagh shook her head, her eyes wide. She leaned in close and he put his hand over the phone. ‘We need to stay away from those two in town,’ she whispered. Ford nodded.
‘Meet me halfway,’ said Diane. ‘That would be quickest. Marble Bar. That’s about the same distance from you as it is from me.’
‘I know the road,’ said Ford. ‘It’s unsealed all the way from here. Four hours maybe. We can be there by lunchtime.’
‘Is that detective with you now?’
He looked at Kavanagh and she shrugged.
‘You want to talk to her?’
‘No. I’ll tell her everything in Marble Bar. Please hurry.’ With that she hung up.
Kavanagh checked her watch then nodded at Ford. ‘We’d better get on the road before the sun comes up,’ she said.
Grace was looking up at him, her eyes wide. ‘Was that Mummy?’
He was so used to the tone and pitch of her voice that sometimes she caught him unawares, her voice as small as her body, reminding him how young she was. He wondered how much she had understood. He tried a limp smile. ‘Yes, that was Mummy.’
‘I want to speak to her,’ said Grace.
‘We’ll see her soon,’ Ford said.
Grace’s face fell. ‘D
oesn’t she want to talk to me?’
‘Of course she does. She wants to see you.’ Grace started pulling at her hair. ‘Don’t mess it,’ said Ford. ‘I like your hair like that.’
She ran a hand over the neat plait, from where it started on the crown of her head down to the elastic tied around its tip. She tilted her head and gave him the broad smile she had learned from some princess movie on TV. ‘Rose did my hair,’ she said.
‘I watched her do it,’ said Ford.
‘It’s pony hair,’ said Grace. ‘Rose has a pony.’
Kavanagh looked from Ford to his daughter and hesitated before she said, ‘I used to have a pony. Years ago now. In the country. I would wear my hair like this when I competed at country shows. Point to point mostly, show jumping sometimes. My mother would plait it for me.’
‘I can’t imagine you with long hair,’ said Ford.
‘I don’t believe that for a minute.’
‘Then maybe I can’t picture you as a child.’ Ford picked up his shirt and thrust his arms into the sleeves.
‘I wore it long until my mum died,’ said Kavanagh. ‘After that I got it cut by the same barber as my father. This old bloke in town with one of those hydraulic swivel chairs that he’d pump with his foot. Then I’d sit on the bench reading old fishing magazines while my dad got his hair cut in the same style, giving the barber all the gossip from the police station. I was fifteen before I plucked up the courage to ask him to drive me to the next town. There was a ladies’ hairdresser there.’
‘But you still wear it short,’ said Ford.
‘Makes it easier on the job.’
‘Still the tomboy,’ he said.
‘Because my dad didn’t know how to dress me,’ she said, pulling at the straps of Grace’s dungarees and adjusting the length. ‘This is how a man dresses a little girl.’
‘I’ve tried girly clothes but she won’t touch them,’ he said. ‘I put her in a pink tutu and fairy wings for a party once. She came back with it ripped and covered in dirt. These clothes last a little longer.’ He knelt down next to Grace and put her shoes on, then tickled her as he stood up, listening to her laugh.
Kavanagh had the door open, looking out at the sky for the approaching dawn, and Ford felt the warm air flood into the room. She pulled on her leather jacket, then picked up her backpack and Grace’s bag and stepped through the door. Grace padded behind her and when Kavanagh let her hand drop to her side, Grace took it in her own and they stood together on the verandah under the flickering bulb, waiting for Ford. He pulled on his pants and stumbled barefoot on to the verandah, shutting the door behind him and leaving the key in the lock. He sat on the chair, pulled on his boots, then marched off towards the car, his boot laces trailing behind him.
He was in the driver’s seat with the engine running before Kavanagh caught up. She buckled Grace into her seat, then climbed in the back next to her. Kavanagh slammed the door and jammed her backpack against the window and laid her head on it. Ford looked over his shoulder at her and without opening her eyes, she said, ‘Get moving. I’ve got some sleep to catch up on.’
He closed his own door and the internal light went out. He listened to them trying to get comfortable in the back seat, the car rocking gently on its springs as they settled. The light in the east was visible through the trees, the sky turning pink, and Ford leaned forward in his seat to look up through the windscreen to catch the last stars. He turned on the headlights and they disappeared.
He reset the trip mileage counter to zero, then looked at his watch. Just after six, and two hundred kilometres of dirt road to Nullagine. They could be there for breakfast and Marble Bar was only an hour beyond that.
He drove slowly between the trees and out on to the forecourt, studying all the vehicles lined up in front of the roadhouse. They were all trucks, most with lights showing behind the curtains pulled across their windows, their drivers awake and readying themselves for the journey ahead. A road train passed on the highway, ranks of coloured bulbs along its flanks, its headlights flooding the road. Ford waited until the highway was empty and dark as far as he could see before he pulled out and turned north.
After passing the airport he checked his mirrors to make certain his were the only lights on the road before he took the right turn signposted to Marble Bar. The road went east into the rising sun, hovering just above the horizon and forcing him to reach for his sunglasses. The road then swung north to pass through the gap in the Ophthalmia Range, the sun now hitting the front of the ridge, painting it orange and lighting the sky behind it a deep blue.
As he passed through the gap he adjusted his mirror to look at the girls in the back seat. Kavanagh had found his picnic blanket and spread it over them both, so he could only make out their hair spilling over the edge of it.
As the road levelled out on to the broad rocky plain, the tarmac stopped and the road became a broad strip of red gravel, corrugated and dotted with potholes. He felt the car snaking on the loose surface, so he dropped his speed. The road stretched straight to the horizon ahead of him and, in his mirror, through the cloud of dust boiling behind him, he could see it stretching out to the shadow of the ridge. On all that stretch of road, maybe thirty kilometres, he was the only thing moving. He allowed himself to relax. He turned the radio on and hit the scan button, but could only find scraps of music fading into static. He turned it off and let the rhythm of the road take him, the rumble of the wheels on the corrugations, the vibration passing through the steering wheel into his fingertips, the quiet whirr of the air-con. He let his thoughts drift and his mind wander as the rocks and spinifex drifted past.
He thought about the last time he had seen his wife, watching her walk out of the hangar to the plane, leaving her daughter behind. He pictured the expression on her face, and not for the first time he tried to decipher it. For the first few days after she had gone, those nights alone with Grace in his bare apartment, clinging to each other in his bed, he had thought that Diane’s tears had been brought about by despair. He decided she had boarded the plane under duress, McCann with a firm grip on her arm, guiding her up the steps to the plane, whispering threats in her ear.
After that first week he changed his mind. He decided her tears had been remorse for what she had done to him, leaving him at the mercy of Roth and his men. He had expected to hear from her soon after she left. He knew she was in Macau with McCann, and thought about trying to contact her there, for Grace’s sake, but as the weeks stretched into months he changed his mind again. He had heard the evidence at the inquest, learnt how meticulously she had presented the fraudulent geological report at the Gwardar mine, had seen how complicit she had been with McCann in using the report to boost the share price, and came to know how thoroughly she had covered her tracks and pointed the finger of blame at her business partner, Matthew Walsh.
Now that Walsh was dead he had reinterpreted her actions in the hangar, and he knew he could not allow himself to be blinded again. He remembered this, along with all the other mistakes he had made, and promised never to make again. Promises were easier now. He had made a lot of them when he’d been drinking and none of them had been worth much.
As the sun rose higher the temperature climbed and he could feel it radiating off the windows. The sky was now a pale bleached blue. The flat mesas of the Chichester Ranges were visible ahead and signs showing the distance to Nullagine had appeared. From habit his eyes went to the instrument panel and he checked the fuel, the engine temperature and the distance travelled since he had reset the trip counter. It would be wise to refuel at Nullagine when they stopped for breakfast and a toilet break.
The road wove through the ranges, lonely flat-topped hills rising from the plain. He could see the bare hills ahead, scarred by shallow strip mining of iron ore, a column of dust rising almost vertically, no breath of wind to disturb it. The readout on the dashboard told him the temperature outside was thirty-five degrees.
The trees clustered in a hollow between th
e hills showed him where the town was, and soon he saw the first tidy weatherboard houses. The road crossed the dry river bed and he came to a stop at the junction that marked the centre of town. On the corner stood the group of squat buildings that made up the Conglomerate Hotel, its roof a harlequin patchwork of mismatched corrugated-iron sheets of different colours, its low verandah strewn with antique mining equipment assembled for display. He followed the sign to Marble Bar and as the road started rising to the ridge out of town, he saw the petrol station, a featureless concrete block with the word ‘ROADHOUSE’ painted on the end wall in metre-high block letters. A single eucalypt clung to life next to a telegraph pole in the broad expanse of the bitumen forecourt, and a simple steel roof stretched out from the building to cast a small rectangle of shade over the fuel bowsers.
He stopped the Toyota in the shade beside the diesel pump and left the engine running while he got out to stretch his legs. A wave of oppressive heat and humidity hit him, bearing down on him and squeezing a long yawn from his chest. He opened the back door and found Grace peeking at him from over the top of the blanket.
‘We’ve stopped for breakfast,’ he said.
She caught his yawn as if it were infectious, stretching her jaw before she said, ‘I want pancakes.’
‘I doubt they’ll have them here,’ he said. ‘It’s only a roadhouse.’
‘I want you to make me pancakes.’
He sighed. ‘I make pancakes on a Sunday. What day is it today?’
When Grace didn’t answer, Kavanagh said, ‘It’s Saturday.’ Her eyes were still closed.
Ford had to think carefully, count back to when he had been at work. It felt like days but it had only been one night. Time seemed to have slowed.
TEN
Ford stood by the fuel tank, pumping diesel into the LandCruiser. Kavanagh opened the rear door yawning, squinting against the bright light. She stepped down and looked around through narrowed eyes until she saw the door to the roadhouse and then shuffled off in that direction, putting her hands behind her head and stretching as she went.
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