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slammed into reverse and back off the road, into a stand of tall fescue grass, praying the vehicle wouldn’t go right because then they’d have no chance of staying hidden.
    â€œWhat—” Maddie began.
    â€œShhhhh!” Anne hissed as if they might be heard, laying a finger against the girl’s lips. When the other car turned left with barely a tap of the brakes, Anne sighed. She turned the key in the ignition, keeping the lights off, and followed. Ten minutes, and her quarry took another left, and Anne continued on for a kilometre. When she pulled over, she nosed behind a cluster of dwarf banksia shrubs. She closed her door quietly, knowing how sound travelled at night. Maddie copied her.
    â€œThis way,” said Anne, and the little hand returned to hers, and this time, she squeezed back.
    Deadman’s Mount sat roughly in the middle of the north paddock of Hanrahan’s farm. It rose like a burial mound, twenty-odd feet high, dotted with rocks and sheep droppings, scraggy grass and bindi-eyes. Even if her sense of direction hadn’t been so good, Anne would have been able to navigate from the silhouette it made against the night sky, blotting out the stars. Unspeaking, they walked carefully, attentive to the ground pitted with animal tracks, the holes cattle had made during the wet season, and which had dried, hardened into an obstacle course that could break an ankle or twist a knee.
    They had to circumnavigate half of the tumulus before they found him, Maddie’s little nose sniff-sniff-sniffing all the way.
    Anne watched a little while as he dug a hole in the side of the Mount, a small hollow, not quite a tunnel, just a niche where a child might be hidden, nestled, cocooned. He’d parked the police car, one of its back doors open, so the headlights were directed to where he worked. She could see patches of sweat dark against the light green T-shirt. He’d wiped his forehead at some point and left a smear of dirt across it.
    â€œWhy, Jasper?”
    He stopped at the sound of her voice but didn’t drop the shovel.
    â€œI’m sorry, Annie.” And she thought from his tone he probably was. “Normally, I don’t take from home, not from Finnegan’s Field, but … I’d driven around and around; I’d tried all the towns near and far, and found no one. Time was running out, and I couldn’t fail. I saw Maddie walking home from school. I’m sorry, Annie. I would never have hurt you if I’d had a choice—and I had no choice.”
    She marvelled that he didn’t try to deny it; she wondered if he thought she’d just shrug and say, Well, that’s all right, then, if you had no choice . Or did he think it wouldn’t matter if he told her everything because she and her daughter wouldn’t last long this night? She’d been pondering, since she’d woken in the hospital, how he’d not been to their house since Madrigal came home, but only ever phoned. He’d been on leave when she was found and not seen Maddie at all, not then and not since. At the time, Anne thought perhaps he’d been embarrassed by his failure, but maybe, somehow he knew … sensed … Had he lain awake at night, wondering if the little girl would name him? If his own constables would arrive at his door to ask questions that would destroy him? As the days and weeks dragged on, did he fear less or more? Anne thought of him with his career as mindless and repetitive as a hamster wheel, his trophy wives who never stayed, the emptiness of the power he’d claimed as a reward from the Fae in return for all these tiny lives …
    There was too much inside Anne; she thought she might burst, that the cyclone of sadness and rage would corkscrew up and tear her apart. She swallowed and swallowed again, forcing all the emotions down, forcing them not to hurt and not to burn, making them hibernate, until at last she could bring