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grieving for my mother. Lincoln had twigged to me at once, paired me up with Hazel, drawn me into a world strong enough to sustain me until my father gradually emerged from his own despair.
    And how had Lincoln drawn me into this world? By stories. Stories and songs. With Lincoln a journey of any description was a rolling dialogue with the country. A track by a waterhole or an unusual rock, a tree shaped like a woman or a circle of stones, the subtlest change in the landscape, any of these things was enough to get him going: he’d tell you the tale of the ancestral beings that had made it, the songs they’d sung, the paths they’d carved in the Dreaming. For a wide-eyed five-year old he’d made the country come alive.
    Now those stories were gone, that sonorous voice forever silenced.
    Four hours, Emergency Services had told me, before the cops could get out from Bluebush. I gave them five, then headed back, not up to communicating with anything other than a white, official face. But when I did come crawling back into camp it was more of a red face than a white one that had arrived to oversee the scene of the crime. A big red face on a big red head above a big red body inside a police sergeant’s uniform.
    A police sergeant whom, on closer inspection, I recognised.
    ‘Tom McGillivray?’
    He turned away from where a couple of ambos were loading the body onto a stretcher and looked in my direction, florid eyebrows arcing down suspiciously. There was another jowl or two under the chin, more of a droop in the moustache, but it was the same Tom McGillivray who’d whiled away all those melancholy summer nights drinking my old man’s home brew and listening to Charlie Bloody Pride on our front veranda. One of Jack’s many mates. He’d been a sergeant then, and he was a sergeant still. The career path for a copper who chose to remain in Bluebush was clearly not a steep one.
    I dismounted, hitched the horse to a post, walked towards him. He glared at me.
    ‘Who are you meant to be? Calamity Jane?’
    ‘Looking a bit that way.’ I took my hat off, dusted off my cargo pants, shook his hand. ‘I’m Emily Tempest.’
    The eyebrows shot up. ‘Jack’s kid?’ He peered in at me. ‘Shit, so you are. Only you aren’t a kid anymore. What the hell are you doin out here, Emily?’
    Jesus, I thought. How long have you got? ‘Come out a coupla days ago,’ I said. ‘Wanted to catch up with the mob.’
    ‘Jack always reckoned you’d end up back out here.’
    ‘Who said anything about ending up?’
    He shrugged and pushed his hat back, ran a palm across a sweaty brow. What had been a fine head of hair was turning into a fine head of skin. ‘Outstanding fuckin day you picked for it.’
    I took a look around the camp. The Moonlight mob huddled among the humpies, their distress settling down into a mournful chant. They looked grey, unhealthy, moulding, like an overturned Salvation Army bin at a suburban railway station. Somewhere in the middle of the mob a boomerang was thumping earth. Two kids began fighting. Gladys rushed out, clipped them across the ears, threw them back into the huddle.
    A couple of white cops had the young men corralled up against the shed, where they were trying unsuccessfully to get some sense out of them. Ronnie Jukutayi was clearly the chief suspect. With a face like that he’d always be the chief suspect. Freddy Ah Fong sat miserably tearing at a piece of yellow-streaked meat. A third copper was taking photographs of the hollow from which the body had been removed.
    ‘Poor old bloody Lincoln,’ McGillivray said. ‘Dunno that I’ve ever seen one quite this bad…’
    ‘Dunno if I have either.’
    ‘We’ll have to wait for the PM, but the ambos reckon—well, his neck’s broken, for a start. But it looks like one of his kidneys was cut out.’
    I felt a surge in the guts. Suddenly it was all too much, the tension and shock of the last two days. I’d thought a few hours out at the waterhole had