Again he looked up for some form of confirmation. Chandler nodded, though he wasn’t sure he agreed. If Heath’s intention was to kill then why not spill details. But it did tell him one thing. The fact that Heath was confident enough to converse freely with his intended victim warned Chandler that he had done it before, that he was relaxed enough to take charge and assured enough to be open with his victim: number fifty-five. A feeling of excitement and dread swirled around his stomach, butterflies the size of eagles. This could be big. He needed to weasel out more details before his victim clammed up.

‘Did he tell you anything about who he was?’

‘Only that he lived around here.’

‘In Wilbrook?’ Chandler couldn’t recall any Heaths in the area, though he supposed it could have been an alias. His attention turned to who around here could kill that many people. Wilbrook wasn’t short on crazy people but none with enough gumption to pull it off. Probably.

‘No . . . I dunno . . . just around here, he said. His accent was from across east I’d say. Anyway, he seemed friendly enough. I was looking for a lift, not a soulmate.’

Chandler nodded for him to go on.

‘I told him I was from Perth. When he said I was a long way from home, I told him that I had to go where the money was, that everything up here was barren but had a certain beauty.’ Gabriel shrugged his shoulders and grimaced. ‘That’s a lie but I’ve found it’s always best to flatter the ride in some way. Like a hooker would, I suppose.’

Chandler studied him. The grimace suggested that this wasn’t a joke, but a philosophy he obeyed.

‘An hour in we passed a couple of turnoffs for farms. I told him that this was good enough for me but he said that everyone dived into them. He said it was like stopping off at the first watering hole you come across, the big one, the one where the animals have already muddied the water. He said that they paid shit and that those further in were better. I asked him if he had worked them before, in case I could get a name or a slide-in, but he didn’t answer. I thought that maybe he had but something had happened that he didn’t want to talk about.’

Chandler made a note to check with some of the farms for a Heath; see if anyone remembered him working for them.