Closing her eyes, she imagined the bustle of the office: Lachy yelling instructions and phones ringing off the hook. Here it was quiet. Even the galahs had stopped screeching. She’d forgotten how silent the country could be; the stillness was almost unnerving. She took a deep breath and picked up her dinner and wine and moved into the office. The removalists had put the office desk under the window that looked out onto the backyard and placed the three boxes marked ‘office’ in the middle of the room. A bookshelf was pushed up against one of the walls and her filing cabinet was next to it.

Setting down her food and drink on the desk, she sat and took a mouthful of the curry. It was delicious and before she knew it she had eaten the whole lot. She hadn’t realised how hungry she was. Turning to the boxes, she tugged at the sticky tape holding the flaps down. Inside were folders stacked neatly; she grabbed the top ones and started to place them on the bookshelves. One of them held all her stories for the Farming Telegraph. She flicked through it quickly and saw the last one she’d written on the court case involving the death of Colin Grawd. She stopped and looked at the photo she’d snapped of Gerard Hooper as he was walked to a police van. Her eye was caught by a man standing at the edge of the frame, looking intently at the accused. In fact, now she looked carefully, the two men were staring at each other.

Opening her computer, she went through her photo file until she found the one she was looking for, and enlarged it. She was certain it was the man who had attended court every day, the one with the deformed eye. Cloudy Eye. Who was he?

Changing screens to the Google search engine, she typed in ‘man with milky eye, Melbourne’.

Good one, Zara, she thought. You won’t find much with that.

The internet was much slower than in the city, and in the end she drank the rest of her wine and went back into the kitchen for a refill before the page had loaded.

She looked at the hits that Google had come up with.

Listeria infection.

‘Ugh,’ she said.

Crazy contact lens—great idea for Halloween.

‘Interesting thought.’ She scrolled down but couldn’t see anything useful.

There was something about this man, she just knew it, but clearly she wasn’t going to find out who he was through some random Google search.

Flicking through the rest of the folder, she thought with pride about the stories she’d written over the last three years. She really loved her job and meeting people through it: the federal agricultural minister, the president of the National Farmers’ Federation, and many other leaders in the agricultural industry, Nuffield Scholars included. She’d even made friends with some of the people she’d encountered through work. Tammy and her husband, Stu Warren, were innovative pig farmers making waves across the industry with their forward-thinking practices. She met them when she was covering the new system they’d implemented in their shed. They’d installed a computer program called ‘PigAmation’, which could do everything from monitoring the climate inside the shed to controlling and recording the amount of feed eaten by each sow. Stu and Tammy had been the drivers behind the program, telling the software company what they had needed to measure and manage, and supplying some of the initial funding. The program had revolutionised the way feed was distributed, and streamlined measuring the progress of the pigs. All this had helped them understand their bottom line much more and showed where they could make adjustments and cost savings.