‘Anything?’ Spencer asked, interrupting Dave’s thoughts.
Dave shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to put the curious interaction with Shannon to the back of his mind, and followed Spencer back into the detectives’ office. ‘Pen, keys and a watch.’ He then told him about the scratch marks and approximate time of death and age. ‘Still not much to go on, really.’
‘Hmm.’ Spencer walked over to a map on the wall with three pins stuck into it. He held a ruler to measure the distance between one pin and another and jotted a note on the whiteboard beside him. ‘Murder?’
‘Can’t be sure yet. Shannon said there were no obvious signs but, as you know, she has to do the full lot of tests.’
‘The question here, Dave, is what was a man doing out on a property which wasn’t his, near a mine shaft which wasn’t his, and how did he end up down the bottom, dead?’
‘All good questions,’ Dave answered. ‘Shannon did come up with something interesting, though.’
‘Hmm?’ Spencer said distractedly.
‘Spencer?’ Dave said sharply, wanting his full attention. ‘Three gold nuggets.’
Spencer didn’t move for a moment, then slowly turned around. ‘Nuggets?’
‘Yeah. Three. Shannon said they came out of his pocket. Not in a canister or plastic bag or any container at all, just loose.’
‘Unusual.’ He frowned, then turned back to the board. GOLD he wrote in capital letters then ringed it three times. ‘Might be nothing. He could be a prospector who found something that day or days before. Might not be murder, he could have just fallen down the shaft.’ He tapped at the whiteboard.
‘But he didn’t have any gear,’ Dave said suddenly. ‘There wasn’t a detector found, was there?’
Spencer shook his head. ‘Nothing in the shaft or within a five-hundred-metre radius. Still, just because there wasn’t any prospecting gear with him doesn’t mean he wasn’t a prospector. It might be at his camp…if we could find it.’
‘Bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. We’ve got a backyard of a million acres and the rest to search!’
‘Ah, don’t be despondent, Dave. We’ll turn up something.’
‘We’ve still got the footprints,’ Dave said.
‘Yep, we do. Did you ask forensics to make casts?’
‘I did that when we came back in from the scene. But we don’t know which way the vic came from. The tyre tracks Tim told us about couldn’t have anything to do withthis body because they were in a different section of the lease. We have footprints, which start at the road, but no car tracks. He had to have walked in. But how did he get to that part of the road in the first place? Do you think these tracks are even involved? Could they be some random tracks? Has he parked a vehicle a long way away and walked?’
Spencer stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he thought. ‘Yeah, and yeah. Long distance walking might be the answer. Or, it might not. Could certainly have been a prospector moving through—especially with all the reports we’re getting about people straying onto areas that aren’t theirs. However, it may be too coincidental. My question is, if the vic was by himself, how did he get there? There weren’t any vehicle tracks and footprints don’t appear out of nowhere unless you’re a ghost or alien. And if he wasn’t by himself, who was with him?’
‘I think I’ve just solved it,’ Dave said in a serious tone.
Spencer frowned. ‘What?’
Dave nodded to emphasise his point. ‘Mary.’
‘Who?’
‘Mary, Oakamanda’s resident ghost. Obviously, these are her tracks—she followed him, pushed him down the mine and disappeared. You said yourself, it had to be a ghost or an alien. I’d rather go with ghost scenario, because aliens aren’t my thing at all.’
Spencer laughed loudly. ‘Get away with you, cheeky bugger!’
The humour faded from the room as they both continued to look at the map.
‘Identification,’ Dave finally said.
Spencer pointed the whiteboard marker at him. ‘Correct. We have to identify him before we can do anything else. Maybe the autopsy will turn up a barcode we can scan and it’ll be easy.’
‘Ha! Every detective’s hope. Or at least arrive in the morgue with a wallet and driver’s licence. I’ll check the missing persons reports. What are you doing here?’
‘Okay, this pin is Tim’s mine and here,’ he slid his finger over the map, ‘this is the Oakamanda Pub. There’s twenty kilometres between the two. I was trying to work out if there was enough time to get to Tim’s place and back through Oakamanda Pub within that thirty-minute time frame.’
‘Going back to the red vehicle that Dee heard? What do you think?’
‘It’s possible, but the driver wouldn’t be able to do much there. Unless he already had a body in the back of the car and he pushed it down.’
‘Different nights, though,’ Dave pointed out. ‘And Shannon seems to think that he wasn’t unconscious or dead when he went down, but certainly was by the time he hit the bottom, so a body in the back of a car probably isn’t what we’re looking for.’
‘Agreed, but Dee also said she’d heard vehicles frequently over the past couple of months, didn’t she? On that, a body in the car doesn’t have to be dead. Held against their will maybe, or unconscious, but not necessarily dead.’
Dave nodded his agreement. ‘Mmm, so you think
