Dave had the good grace to look embarrassed, but finally he nodded. ‘We’ll see where that takes us,’ he said. ‘But I’ll try.’

‘Hang on.’ She jogged back to the car and pulled her camera out of the bag and switched it on. Scrolling through the photos as she walked, she deleted the ones of Jack.

Cloudy Eye appeared in a shot and she stopped. ‘There.’ Her finger stabbed at the image. ‘Do you know who this is?’

Dave took the camera and peered at the screen. ‘Can you make this any bigger?’

‘Not unless I download it to my computer and zoom in. Do you want me to?’

‘Can you do it here?’ He looked around at the dirt track. ‘Don’t you need to be back at the office or something?’

‘I can do it here.’ She put the computer on the bonnet of her car, opened it up, tapped a couple of buttons and set the camera next to it.

‘How do you do that without an internet connection?’ Dave wanted to know.

‘I’m hotspotting from my phone,’ she answered, looking at the screen. Tapping a couple of icons, she made the photo they had been looking at come up. A couple of clicks later and Cloudy Eye’s face took up the whole screen.

‘Why have you got an interest in him?’ Dave asked.

‘I’ve seen him before and I couldn’t ever work out who he was. Do you know?’

Dave shook his head. ‘I can’t say I do.’ He studied the photo. ‘Where have you seen him? At protests?’

‘What am I going to get in return?’ she asked, crossing her arms. ‘Come on, Dave, you know how this works. I give you what you want and you give me something I want.’

‘You know, for someone so young, you drive a hard bargain.’ He grinned as he said it.

‘I learn quickly.’

‘How about when this whole operation is over I give you an inside running on the story? Although there may not be any story. It’ll just depend on what happens and how things go.’

‘I understand that.’

Dave looked at her expectantly.

‘I covered the Hooper manslaughter trial. I don’t know if you remember it? Maybe you wouldn’t, because it happened in Victoria. I was sent to cover it.’

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘It was Voices for Animals which started the protest—they were trying to stop logging and therefore the animals losing their homes.

‘Actually, on a side note, these blokes weren’t just members of VFA, it came up in the trial that they were on the membership list for a few different activist groups.