Read An Isolated Incident for Free Online Page B

here, mate. Or you can take off, if you like. We can get someone to drop Chris home later.’
    â€˜I’ll wait.’ Nate stepped back to the bench without taking his eyes off Brandis. I was overcome with a sense of protectiveness. It’s always been that way. The more he acts like a goddamn macho bikie sergeant the more I worry about him being smashed up and broken.
    â€˜Good-o,’ Brandis said. ‘We’ll try not to keep her too long.’ He led the way back through the door, pushing it shut as soon as I was in the dim hallway. An invisible lock clicked loudly and I flinched in recognition. The smell back there was familiar too: wet dog and mildew underneath a sharp chemical scent like floral toilet cleaner. We turned a corner into a windowless room cluttered with four or five wood veneer desks. A whiteboard on the far wall was mostly covered with a red felt cloth. HROAT scrawled in green marker peeped out from the bottom left corner.
    â€˜Chris! Thanks for coming down.’ A young bloke with blond hair, thick blond eyebrows and a scaly pink nose rushed at me, placed a meaty hand on my upper back and pushed me towards a door to the right of the whiteboard. We stepped through into a small office which I recognised, but like it was something from a movie I’d seen once rather than a real-world place where I’d sat and talked and cried. The table, chairs, tissue box, blue plastic rubbish bin, black plastic laptop with attached oversized microphone all familiar but seeming to have nothing to do with reality.
    â€˜So how you doing, Chris?’ the young one asked when I was seated. His face was all creased up, like he’d been practising concern in front of his mirror all morning.
    â€˜I’m okay. How are you doing? You got someone yet?’
    â€˜Chris, I gotta tell you, we’ve got nothing.’ Brandis opened his hands up as though I might not have understood what ‘nothing’ meant otherwise. ‘Jack. Bloody. Shit. No leads. No sightings. No theories. Nothing.’
    â€˜Okay. But this thing this arvo, the press thing, that’ll help right?’
    â€˜It will, it will. Get the public mobilised. Hopefully someone saw something, heard something. But we can’t rely on tips from strangers to solve this for us. We need the people who knew Bella to dig deep as well. Hard as that is for you, it’s what we need to do.’
    The young fella sighed, his own personal heartbreak, it was. ‘Is there anything else you can think of that we should know about? Might seem something real small, not even worth mentioning. ’Cause, you know, sometimes it’s stuff like that which busts things open. Small stuff.’
    â€˜I could tell you small stuff about Bella all day and all night. All month, probably. I can tell you how she did at school. What she got for her last birthday. I mean . . .’ I heard my own voice going all shrill, the way it usually went only when I was fighting with Nate. I wished they’d let him come through, but then he’d get riled up by their questions and my voice and it’d all be much worse. I took a breath. ‘I’m serious. I don’t know what you’re asking me. You want to know about how clean she kept her car? Where she bought her undies? What?’
    â€˜Nah, nah. I guess, Chris, we just want more of an idea about who Bella was outside of work. Like, what did she get up to on a weekend, say?’
    I told them about her friends that I knew, said they should talk to them about what exactly went down at the movies or bowling alley or bloody karaoke on a Saturday night. They were barely listening, I could tell. There was something they wanted me to say that I wasn’t saying and I had no clue what it was.
    â€˜One thing we were wondering,’ the younger one said, after I’d run through the name of every person I’d ever known Bella to speak to. ‘Is it possible that Bella