He looks back to the computer, startled to see it’s finished. Already. He blinks, savouring the moment, this tipping point, this culmination. If nothing else, he’ll miss the bank’s state-of-the-art tech, so much faster and efficient than the antiquated systems at his real workplace. He sits. Quickly, he imposes his own encryption on the thumb drive, then runs a purpose-built program to cover his tracks. It takes mere minutes. Then he ejects the drive, pockets it and logs off. Done.
‘Early lunch?’ he asks, pausing at the cubicle of Raff, the shift supervisor—the one person he knows won’t accept his invitation.
‘Sorry. Bit under the pump,’ says Raff, not lifting his eyes from his screens. ‘Maybe later in the week.’
‘No worries,’ says Tarquin, grinning at his colleague’s predictability. ‘I’ll be an hour or so. You want anything?’
‘No. Brought my lunch in.’
‘Okay, see you, then.’
And Tarquin Molloy walks away, his gait confident, as always; his eyes shining, as always; his smile every bit as generous and unflappable as on his first day here. But inside, his stomach is churning and his mind is bubbling with what he has achieved.
He enters the lift, hits the button for the lobby, for glory, taking one last look across the trading floor as the doors begin to close, the curtains falling on the final scene. He commits it to memory, for the recounting. Then, at the last, an arm reaches in, forcing the doors open. Tarquin Molloy beams at the newcomer, a tall man, thin and dressed in a vintage suit of coarse brown wool. The doors ease shut.
‘Morning,’ says the gentleman, inviting engagement.
‘It certainly is,’ he replies. And to Tarquin, he does look like a gentleman. The suit is three-piece, of heavy cloth, as if it’s been transported from somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, immaculately maintained despite its age. There is a patterned kerchief in the suit’s breast pocket and a Legacy badge on its lapel. The man’s face is long, as is his hair, oiled so it stays in place behind his ears. The hair oil, or something, has a pleasant aroma in the confined space. The smell, like the suit and the man’s demeanour, is old-fashioned. His complexion is touched with sepia. A smoker, thinks Tarquin. Old for a trading floor.
‘California Poppy,’ says the man.
‘Sorry?’
‘The hair oil. California Poppy.’
‘It smells very nice.’
‘Thank you,’ says the man genially. One of his teeth has a gold cap. ‘Hard to come by nowadays.’
The lift shudders to a halt, but the doors don’t open. They’re stuck between floors.
‘That’s strange,’ says Tarquin.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ says the man in the brown suit. He unbuttons his coat and withdraws a revolver. A six-gun, a prop from a Western, a massive thing, matt black and menacing, its handle inlaid with pearl shell. Tarquin’s stomach plummets and his mind begins to reel. The muzzle is pointed at his chest.
SUNDAY
chapter one
The boy is laughing with the joy of it, the sensation of it, slapping at the sea water with his hands, sending it spraying about him. Martin laughs too; Liam’s pleasure is contagious. They’re side by side, the man and the infant, sitting in a briny puddle formed when Martin scooped out sand to build a castle, now demolished. The excavation won’t last much longer either, its sides slowly collapsing as another wave rolls up the beach, the tide on its way back in. Splat, splat, splat, go Liam’s pudgy hands. Splat, splat, splat, go Martin’s as he emulates his stepson, inciting more delight. Oh, how he loves the boy’s laugh, that distinctive chortle that has always been his and his alone, pre-dating words.
Martin can hear his phone ringing in the beach bag further up the sand, below the steps to the house, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t consider answering it. Nothing is urgent here, not anymore. The days of subjugation, to the dictates of phone calls and editors, to deadlines and scoops, to egos and rivalries, are past. For sixteen months they’ve lived here at Port Silver—Martin, Mandalay and Liam—repairing their house on the cliffs above the beach, repairing their lives. Constructing a new and more robust reality, quarantined from the past.
‘Marn. Look. Marn!’
‘What?’
‘Whale! Marn, whale!’ The boy is on his feet, pointing excitedly out beyond the bar where the river meets the ocean. Martin hears it before he sees it, the exhalation of breath, the fizzing spray of a mist, the whale’s blow. And now, as if to greet them, one white fin rises from the water, waving as it catches the early afternoon sun.
‘Humpback. It’s a humpback,’ says Martin, smiling broadly, but Liam is too busy waving back to attempt the word.
The phone rings again. And again he ignores it. This mid-winter day is too perfect to lose: the sky clear, the day warm, the sea gentle. Even on the far north coast of New South Wales, winter southerlies can bite, bringing rain and cold. Days like this, the first after a week of cloud and squalls, are not to be interrupted. But when the phone rings for a third time, insistent, he knows he must answer it. Nobody rings three times unless it’s urgent.
‘Right back,’ he says to Liam as he stands. He moves up the beach, no more than twenty metres. He walks backwards, not taking his eyes from the boy. Liam is well past two, twenty-seven months, a real toddler, walking and talking. Even so, Martin is taking no chances, not with the boy close to the water. Still looking at Liam, he picks up his phone and answers the call. ‘Martin Scarsden.’
‘Martin. Long time.’
‘Max?’ Martin takes a quick glance at the screen, shading it from the sun, confirming it’s his former editor, his old mentor, Max Fuller.
‘Where are you? Port Silver?’
‘Yes, on the beach.’
‘Lucky you. How’s work?’
‘Yeah, good. The book’s doing well, the one about the killings
