The tea was welcome, as was the folding seat Connor had set out in preparation for her. Tilly, with the mug warming her hands and her face turned up to the early sunshine, drew a satisfied breath. ‘Lovely. Funny how you forget how chilly the nights and early mornings are.’

‘You should try the desert in July. I camped at Chambers Pillars once and woke up with frost in my eyebrows. God, it was cold! So, this vehicle that went through last night – did anyone see it, or did they just notice the tracks?’

‘I was up.’ Tilly told him about her indigestion and what it had led to, adding, ‘Luke didn’t seem that concerned, and Sophie’s concentrating on her plan to get another section of the country opened to camping – she’s been burning up the phone lines for days costing things. Anyway, whoever sneaked in set me thinking.’ She told him about her visit to the springs and discovering the chainsawed tree. ‘It just seemed a bit too pat where it had been felled. I mean, right beside a gully with no way across with the road blocked? Of course, we had the winch and just pulled it clear, but your average camper would’ve had to turn back. And I wondered if maybe that’s why it was felled?’

Connor frowned. ‘But you got through and went to the springs, and presumably Luke didn’t notice anything different?’

‘If he did he didn’t say.’

‘Okay, so does the track end there or . . .?’

‘It goes on to the caves, Luke said. And back behind them’—she waved a hand in the general direction—‘are the old mining tracks that run into the sandstone formations they call the “Lost City”. It’s half a kilometre of rock pinnacles, or so they tell me. But that’s beside the point, which is that these same tracks can take you south into the national park, or east to link up with the Savannah Way, the highway that runs across the top all the way to Darwin. Of course the tracks are terribly rough and overgrown in places, but it is doable, and the wildlife traffickers apparently know it. They could,’ she said, frustration plain in her tone, ‘be stripping the place of anything – birds, reptiles, possums – and we wouldn’t have a clue about it.’

‘I didn’t see any caves marked on the map,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it’s something I should be investigating. How far away are they?’

Tilly drained her cup. ‘Luke didn’t say, only that there wasn’t time to go on the day we went to the springs because the track was rough, and it was well past noon at the time.’