missing finger and he’s going to whistle a secret whistle that only dogs and Iwan Krol are attuned to and Iwan Krol will drag me out to a work shed behind Tytus Broz’s Bellbowrie mansion and there he will slice off my head with his knife and my head will still function severed from my body and I will be able to answer him when he scratches his chin and asks me, ‘Why, Eli Bell, why?’ And I will answer like I’m Kurt Vonnegut. ‘Tiger got to hunt, Iwan Krol. Bird got to fly. Eli Bell got to sit and wonder why, why, why?’
A small red Ford Meteor sedan screeches to a loud stop in front of me.
Caitlyn Spies pushes open the passenger-side door.
‘Get in,’ she barks.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Just get in the car, Eli Bell!’ she says.
I slip into the passenger seat. Close the door. She slams on the accelerator and I fall back in the seat as we speed into traffic.
‘Iwan Krol,’ she says, her right hand on the steering wheel, her left hand passing me a manila folder holding a slab of photocopied papers sitting beneath a police mugshot of Iwan Krol.
She turns to me and the sun lights up her hair and her face through the driver’s-side window and her perfect green eyes dig deep into my own.
‘Tell me everything.’
*
The Ford Meteor speeds down a Bellbowrie back road that snakes through cluttered bushland growth of old widowmaker eucalypts and suffocating lantana bushes that have knitted together across kilometres of scrub.
A street sign ahead.
‘Cork Lane,’ I say. ‘This is it.’
Cork Lane is a dirt road with large wheel divots and rocks the size of tennis balls that cause Caitlyn’s ill-suited car to bounce us up and down in our seats.
I had twenty-seven minutes to tell Caitlyn everything. She has saved her questions to the end.
‘So Lyle gets dragged away and just vanishes off the face of the earth?’ she says, her hands working hard on the steering wheel, struggling to keep the car moving straight.
I nod.
‘That fits the file,’ Caitlyn says, nodding at the folder in my hands. ‘I heard you talkin’ to Dave. I wrote down that name you said. Iwan Krol. There are only four registered llama farmers or llama pet owners currently living in the greater south-east Queensland region, your man Iwan Krol being one of them. So I called the other three and asked ’em straight up to tell me where they were on 16 May, right, the day the cops suspect the Penn family went missing. They all had perfectly believable and boring accounts of where they were. So then I go down to Fortitude Valley police station and I ask an old school friend of mine, Tim Cotton, who’s now a constable in the Valley, to dig me up anything they have on file on Iwan Krol and he passes me a brick of papers and I go to photocopy them and as I’m photocopying all these papers I’m reading all these statements from police where they’ve gone to Iwan Krol’s property in Dayboro on five separate occasions – five bloody times – across the past twenty years on cases of missing persons known or connected to Iwan Krol. And five times nothing sticks. Then, last night, I drop the file back to Tim Cotton and I’m buying him a meatball pizza down at Lucky’s in the Valley to thank him for his help and he pauses for a moment between trying to get in my pants and you know what he says?’
‘What?’
She shakes her head.
‘He says, “You might want to let this one go to the keeper, Caitlyn.”’
She slaps the steering wheel hard.
‘I mean, he actually fucking voices that shit, a fucking police officer, Eli? An eight-year-old kid’s gone missing and he says, “Let this one go to the keeper.” This is exactly why I fucking hate cricket!’
The car stops at an imposing white iron security gate built into a tall clay-coloured concrete security wall. Caitlyn winds her window down then reaches her arm out to a red intercom buzzer.
‘Hello,’ says a gentle voice.
‘Hi, Courier-Mail here for the interview with Mr Broz,’ Caitlyn says.
‘Welcome,’ says the gentle voice.
The gate slides open with a clunk.
Tytus Broz’s house is white like his suits and his hair and his hands. It’s a sprawling white concrete mansion with towering columns and Juliet balconies and a white wood double-door entry big enough to fit a white yacht through at full white mast. It’s more New Orleans