‘His own private hideaway,’ Angus looked sickened. ‘Anything else I should know about?’

‘No sign of Bianca’s laptop, but we found a PC in the back of the van. It’s had the sun glaring down on it like a laser beam for most of the day so I’m not sure what kind of nick it’ll be in. It’s on its way to Central. Also found camping stuff and enough food supplies for about a month in the wilderness.’

Angus gazed at the enormousness of the vista. ‘Looking at this place, I’d say he might have got away with it too. How are the others going?’

‘Stevie’s visiting Mrs Kusak, breaking the news about Miro’s death and returning the dog, and Barry’s conferring with the Mundaring police. Wayne wasn’t doing much except whinging about jock itch, so I sent him with some uniforms to start questioning Kusak’s neighbours.’ He paused, gave Angus a faint smile. ‘And I’m supervising the crime scene.’

‘The press are gathering at the lookout. Want me to give them a statement?’

Monty nodded gratefully, took another pull on his water bottle and watched as Angus made his way back up the track. He felt like shit, his toothache had become a headache and his stomach churned. The last time he’d felt this lousy was when he was a kid when he’d been out all day on the mustering at Stevie’s family station and got heat stroke. He poured some water from the bottle over his head, rubbed it into his scalp and attempted to lose himself in the activities of the crime scene investigation.

The photos had been taken, the pathologist long gone.

But the body snatchers seemed to be taking their time. It should have been a routine job, but for some reason they seemed to be discussing the body’s removal at length.

From where he still sat under the tree, Monty saw Henry Grebe beckon to the probationer, Constable Nagel. After a few moments, Nagel nodded and walked with hesitant steps to the Toyota. Monty hauled himself to his knees and squinted through his aviation sunglasses. As far as he knew SOCO guys wearing breathing apparatus had thoroughly searched the back of the van, photographed and removed the camping gear. It was hard to believe the body snatchers had noticed something in the Toyota the experienced searchers had missed.

The SOCO team had worked their way in a radius away from the Toyota and were now out of sight in the bush. The police divers had not yet arrived to search the surrounding waters. A group of local police were positioned at the lookout, holding the media and the curious at bay. As far as Grebe and his assistants were concerned, there was no one in their immediate vicinity. They don’t know I’m sitting here under the tree, Monty thought.

Nagel opened up the back door and stepped inside. Right behind him, Grebe closed and latched the back door, then skipped over to rejoin his men who were laughing themselves stupid a few metres away.

Monty had seen enough. Heat exhaustion forgotten he leapt to his feet and strode towards the Toyota. He could hear the blows hammering upon the doors from within, and the anguished cries from the constable trapped inside. He turned the handle and wrenched the door open. Through the sickening miasma of methane gas the hapless constable all but fell into his arms.

‘It’s okay, son, it’s okay,’ Monty said, guiding him away from the vehicle and into the shade. Tears ran down the young man’s face as he gasped and choked down his anger, humiliation and fear. Monty handed him some water, which he promptly threw up.

‘You’re fresh meat, that’s your problem,’ Monty said, turning his back on the kneeling, puking kid. If he wasn’t careful, he’d soon be joining him. ‘But this is above and beyond.’

When the constable had recovered, Monty handed him the evidence bags containing the bullet and case. ‘Take this up to the lookout and get the exhibit officer to make a record of it, then I want you to take it personally to the ballistic lab in the city, lights and siren, top priority. I’ll ring and tell them to expect you.’

Nagel wiped his mouth, flicked Monty a grateful smile and headed up the track.

The body snatchers were scowling around the Toyota when Monty returned, at last getting on with the job in hand. They’d laid the body bag open on the Stokes stretcher and two of them were struggling to remove Miro Kusak from the car seat. Henry Grebe watched the proceedings from the shade of a nearby tree, still smiling, hands on hips.

Monty walked over to him and met his arrogant glare head on.

And then he punched Henry Grebe, smack on the end of his long beaky nose.

14

Mrs Kusak nodded and dabbed at her eyes with a lace hanky. This was the second round of bad news Stevie had had to break in forty-eight hours, but this time, her sympathies could not have been less stirred. Mrs Kusak’s eyes streamed, and her plump fingers traced the cross at her neck, but her beady black eyes conveyed no sense of grief.

The knock at the front door came as a welcome reprieve. There was an unpleasant odour about the place of rancid oil and stale cheese and she was glad of an excuse to escape. She found Wayne on the front step, patting the head of a white concrete swan.

The day was cooling, but Wayne’s thin hair stuck to his head like a helmet, feathery sideburns plastering his cheeks like beached seaweed. He wore herringbone flares and a floral nylon shirt bright enough to give you a headache. When he lifted his arm to give his head a scratch, Stevie caught an unpleasant whiff and stepped back, making an obvious point of fanning herself. Wayne couldn’t have cared less; Stevie even detected a slight smile on his craggy features. She suspected he enjoyed the distaste he stirred in others. Here was another one who followed a carefully rehearsed act. But given the choice, she’d take Wayne’s BO over the cloying cheesiness of the Kusak house any day.

He pointed to the Christmas lights threaded through the porch eaves and the melting ‘Merry Christmas’ written in fake snow on the window.

‘It’s weeks past Twelfth Night,’ he said. ‘Miro’s certainly had his dose of bad luck. What about her?’

‘I’m not sure if she regards this news as bad luck or heaven sent,’ Stevie said.

Wayne had gleaned some interesting information from the neighbours. As he made his report Stevie wondered if Tash had discovered the same when she’d visited yesterday.

She returned to the small, black-frocked woman in the cluttered lounge room, and couldn’t help but think of Rosemary West, Catherine Birnie, Myra Hindley. Was it the dog, or could Mrs Kusak have been the figure in the passenger seat when Bianca Webster’s body had been dumped? And if she wasn’t an accomplice, how the hell could she have been so oblivious to her husband’s activities?

She offered to make Mrs Kusak the traditional cup of tea, keeping her voice as gentle as possible, struggling to resist falling into any kind of judgemental trap.

Mrs Kusak shook her head and reached down to pat the dog at her feet. Bonza seemed exhausted from his harrowing experience at the weir; he twitched as he dreamed. Stevie wondered what he had seen, wondered if dogs suffered from nightmares too.

‘When the police first told you that your husband was a suspect in the murder and abduction of a child,’ Stevie said, trying to keep the accusation from her voice, ‘why did you tell them that you had been separated for over a year?’

The woman spread a puffy hand over her mouth and said nothing.

‘You see, we’ve been given reason to doubt that,’ Stevie continued. ‘Apparently on the day after the child’s abduction, your neighbours spotted you with a trailer load of things, believed to be your husband’s possessions, and then another neighbour saw you at the dump with them. These same neighbours said they’d seen your husband’s four-wheel drive parked outside the front of your house many times over the past few weeks.’ Stevie let the silence linger. ‘Can you see what I’m getting at Mrs Kusak?’