‘I know, I know. But we’re all drinking a bit. We’re not alert. Next time––I’m just saying––one of us should be at the station.’

Sharon looked at her police force, saw Robert’s story had done its job. And well it should. Her reasons for keeping them at the pub were shameful. She wanted to do it right, for once, tell them to head out to the spot where the Cahills traded their weed. Arrest them. Lock them up. To hell with the consequences. She’d taken beatings.

Instead she said, ‘Well, that wouldn’t be exactly fair.’

‘I’d do it.’

Sharon finished her beer. Looked at the others’ pints, still nearly full.

Trevor said, ‘What happened to them anyway? The woman? The bloke in the car?’

‘Well, I got them on the ground and the ambulance came. You know how crashes work.’

‘Was the bloke alive?’

‘Oh yeah, he come to pretty quick. She was okay too, in the end, besides the baby. Just a bad dust-up.’

Jack said, ‘What about the kids?’

Robert looked serious. ‘What kids are you talking about? They didn’t have any other kids.’

‘The kids throwing rocks.’

‘Oh, them. Never found ’em. No idea about them.’

‘But wasn’t that why they crashed?’

Robert tilted his head. ‘For the life of me, you know, I can’t remember.’

‘Come on.’

‘I can’t remember. This is going back thirty-odd years now. You remember what happened thirty years ago when you hit my age and I’ll buy you the beer.’

‘You’ll be bloody dead by then,’ Trevor said.

Sharon went to the bar with her empty glass and when the publican looked at her she nodded and was soon greeted with a full pint, froth sloshing over the side. As she turned, instead of immediately walking back she watched the men, the two too young and the one too old. Even Robert was enjoying himself. But she had only taken them out tonight because of Ernie Cahill. Try as she might there was no way she could enjoy herself.

TEN

SIDNEY CAHILL

The back roads of Newbury ran through large pastures, blankets of empty dark, sporadic trees lonely against the starry horizon. As he drove the headlights shone on fenceposts and old farmsteads. One was dilapidated, had been since Sidney could remember. He had played with his brother there until their mother found them out. They’d ducked in between fence palings. Brendan would sometimes use them as cricket bats and Sidney would throw clods of dirt and cow pats at him, which he fended with a skill Sidney envied. It was always just the two of them when they were little. Even after Brendan found his friends he still didn’t bring them out here. As the headlights struck it there was only shadow, all definition lost in the ghostly light.

He turned the corner and arrived at the drop-off point. Down an old dirt road for a kilometre. He slowed the car and stopped it beside a tree. He turned off the lights. Melbourne had chosen this spot because it was only ten minutes from town, but any old bugger from Newbury or Devonshire or Trenton knew this spot. Melbourne, in their arrogance, didn’t care about his father’s protests.