‘Where was the bomb placed, do you know?’

He walked over to an intact sidewall, bricks peeping through torn plaster, and pointed to the ground. ‘You had a cupboard here, right? It looks like the bomb was placed on one of the lower shelves. We’ve found explosive residue on the ground.’

‘A cupboard?’ Stevie queried, her mind racking to what was here before. ‘No. Monty’s fish tank was there.’

Aubin looked to be assessing her for shell shock. ‘No way was that bomb in a fish tank.’

‘The tank was on top of a cabinet with doors and shelves for the pump and other paraphernalia.’

Aubin relaxed. ‘That makes sense, a good place to hide it.’

Someone had been in her house, poking around in the cupboards, violating her home. The nausea rippling through her stomach was the same as when she’d found the porn magazine in Izzy’s bag. She gritted her teeth and prayed she wouldn’t throw up.

‘We think it was an incendiary bomb,’ Aubin continued, ‘but can’t be certain until the chemical tests are back.’

‘Incendiary?’

‘We’ve found fragments of a metal tube which had been filled with a chemical mixture. An inverted glass vial of sulphuric acid is put in one end and its hole blocked up with cork or paper. The acid eventually eats through to the mixture of chemicals, resulting in a very hot fire. It’s a crude device, but effective never the less, often favoured by Special Forces or arsonists who don’t care for the high tech alternatives.’

‘Old school?’ said Stevie.

‘Possibly. Or cocky to the point of stupidity. It’s an inexact science.’

‘And the explosion?’

‘Gas cylinders, wiring, aerosols, pool chemicals, paint tins ... there’s all kinds of household things that could have exploded on contact with such a hot fire.’

‘But how did the guy know when I’d be home?’

‘Maybe he knew you wouldn’t be home, it wasn’t meant to kill you, just warn you.’

Or play with me, Stevie thought; it was the kind of thing The Crow seemed to enjoy doing, and there was more than one way of being burned alive. There was no denying it now. The attempt on their lives in Fremantle, the magazine in the backpack—they knew exactly who she was and that she was on to them. Mamasan and The Crow, it had to be them. ‘They’ve attempted to kill me before,’ she said quietly.

‘Well then...’

‘Look,’ her voice rose, she gripped Aubin’s arm. ‘It’s very important that this isn’t mentioned to the press. Have you given them a statement?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘We can’t have the offenders thinking we’re onto them, can we? When you do speak to the press, tell them that it was most likely faulty wiring which caused the fire and explosion—it’s what the people in the street seem to think, anyway.’ Her grip on his arm was too tight, she realised. She quickly let him go. Right now she couldn’t have cared less what the offenders thought; it was Monty’s reaction that worried her. She couldn’t hide the fire from him, but she would sure as hell try to prevent him from finding out what had really caused it; for the moment, anyway.

She picked her way to the edge of the crater and stood on the edge, gazing across at the blackness of her back garden. Something was missing, but she couldn’t work out what. She pointed helplessly into the void. And then a thought struck her. ‘It’s gone,’ she said shaking her head and gazing around with wonder. Aubin moved to stand next to her. ‘What is?’

‘The lean-to: the most ugly, jerry built structure you could ever have imagined. We were going to knock it down...’ Stevie laughed. Aubin gaped back at the tears of anger, shock and mirth rolling down her face. (Image 24.1)

Image 24.1

FRIDAY

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

From the bus window Mai watched the spring green of the city slowly merging into the dustier colours of the bush. Then they came upon a swathe of wildflowers, like jewels scattered by a giant’s hand, stretching for kilometres along the roadside. The bus followed the path of flowers as they slowly dried and turned to red dust.

Lin dozed and fretted at Mai’s side, unable to find a comfortable position, her cheek hot and red from resting against the sticky bus window. Mai changed places with her, gently pulled the girl’s head into her shoulder and stroked her hair. When Lin finally settled, her hair tickled Mai’s face like a silken net.

The girls in the front of the bus were singing a song by Pumpuang, ‘Love is Like Bitter Medicine’. Rick yelled at them to shut up, but the sad melody remained in Mai’s head. She found she could recall every word of the song as she sat there, jolting along in the bus.

It was a hit song played frequently on the radio when she still lived with her family. Her mother would bring the battery-powered radio into the rice field and together they would sing the popular songs to distract them from the ache in their stooped backs. She closed her eyes and thought of everything that had happened to her since then. A lot of it was bad, but there was still plenty of good, too. With the Chinaman she’d sampled a world she’d never known to exist outside her father’s movies: French champagne, the rustle of silk against her skin, luxury yachts and expensive cars. This was life as it could be, and to this she aspired with a passion almost as desperate as her need to find her son.

No, she thought as she clenched her jaw, blocking the song from her mind. She didn’t miss her old peasant life; not one little bit. She hated what she had now, but she hated what she’d left behind even more.

Their stops were kept to a minimum, with just enough time to fill up with petrol and use the toilet facilities. The roadhouses became smaller the further north they travelled, and less busy. Theirs had been the only vehicle outside the pumps at the last one. Rick and Jimmy Jack veered from the main road whenever possible. The drive would take longer, Mai had heard the men say, but it meant they would have less chance of the rusty old bus being stopped by the police. The men carried the fake IDs in a hold-all by Jimmy Jack’s feet. Although they were good forgeries, they still didn’t want them scrutinised by over-vigilant cops.

Rick had played the fool for most of the journey, his stupid chatter interspersed with crazy laughter and Mai could see he was getting on Jimmy Jack’s nerves. A while ago the smaller man had unsheathed his knife, now he blew on it, polished and fiddled with it, muttering obscenities and shooting Rick dark looks.

Oblivious to his companion’s sour humour, Rick continued to rehearse what he’d say to the police if they were stopped. He threw a pill into his mouth and snapped his jaws around it like a dog.

He altered his voice, attempting to make it sound less rough.

‘Good day officer,’ he practised, slurring his words, bouncing up and down in his seat as he drove. ‘Yeah, this is a tour bus and these girls are all members of a touring Thai netball team ... You wanna examine their papers? Sure can. Yeah, that’s right, we’re going to Hell-an-Back ... You want your dick sucked, officer?’ He laughed uproariously at his joke.

Jimmy Jack didn’t flicker a smile; seemed absorbed with cleaning his nails with the long knife. He’d told the girls that if they spoke to anyone outside the bus, or tried to escape, he’d slit their throats and leave them in the desert for the dingoes.

They stopped at another roadhouse. Mai, being the most trusted, received permission to take a short walk on her own. She scuffed along the red dusty road until the roadhouse generator became no more than a distant throb. The air seared her lungs; the wind on her face scorched like a hair dryer. She’d never imagined that air could feel so dry, the earth look so red or the sky appear so huge and blue. The baked ground felt like concrete under her tender feet, yet all around her, the clumps of grass looked as soft as cotton wool.