Page 87 of The Meaning Of You

I merely grinned.

“I brought Shirley up to speed on the drive over,” Jerry told everyone.

“Fool girl thought she was gonna leave me out of this.” Shirley huffed angrily as she made her way into the lounge. “Madigan ismynephew. She soon changed her mind.”

Jerry shot me an exasperated look and mouthed the wordsorry.

Samuel pinched my chin between his fingers and turned my head from side to side. “Fucking hell, Nick. You sure you don’t need an ambulance?”

“I’m fine” I pulled out of his hold. “Gazza fixed me up.”

Samuel didn’t appear convinced. “As soon as we’re done talking, I want you properly checked out, understood?”

I agreed, as long asfinishedmeant that Mads was back safe and sound. I wasn’t going anywhere until then.

“This is Detective Ian Barrow.” Samuel introduced the forty-something blond man. “Ian will be taking lead on this. But don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere, much to his delight.”

Detective Barrow cast Samuel a wry look. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved cream polo, his hair tightly cut to frame an unremarkable but pleasant face, his dark eyes steady and assessing as he shook hands around the small group.

Samuel continued, “I’ve run Ian through the basics but he’s gonna want to hear it all again from you, in as much detail as you can manage, starting with exactly what happened inside so that forensics can prioritise their work.”

I swallowed hard and looked around the room, my gaze lingering on the pool of blood on the floor and the chair where I’d last seen Madigan. “They took him, Samuel,” was all I could manage, my voice cracking as reality suddenly overwhelmed me.

Samuel’s expression softened and he laid a hand on my arm. “I know, mate, and we’re gonna need you to go over everything again more than once, but right now we need to know what happened today so we can brief forensics where to focus.”

I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Okay. Well, we just got back from the accident site?—”

“The accident site?” Samuel frowned.

I shrugged. “I wanted to show Mads, and we both wanted to see where Justin’s house was in comparison to where it all happened. Anyway, we’d only been back five minutes—the alarmhad been on, by the way—when Mads sat in that chair and started work on the code.” I pointed to the chair. “While he was doing that, I went to the laundry to get us a cold drink. When I came back, there was a man standing behind Mads’ chair with a gun pointed at his head.”

I went through the rest in as much detail as I could, including the mysterious person on the phone. “I should’ve done more,” I finished, sounding as desperate as I felt. “But I didn’t, and now he’s gone.”

Samuel shot Ian Barrow a look and laid a hand on my arm. “You did exactly the right thing. Pushing harder might’ve got you both killed. Now let’s head outside and give the team some room to work.”

Before we took our seats on the deck, I pulled Jerry aside and shoved a rolled-up set of the photocopied code and key into her hand, along with a pencil. “Keep working on this. You remember what Mads said about how to do it?”

She nodded and grabbed a seat off to one side while Samuel settled in the chair opposite me and Ian Barrow took the one beside him.

Samuel scrutinised me. “It might be best if we talked with you alone.”

“No,” I said flatly. “We all know the story. Next question.”

His jaw ticked and his lips pinched together as he eyeballed me with a look that would’ve set most criminals quaking in their boots.

“Do you know what a pain in my butt you are?” he commented drily.

I stared him down. “Like I said, next question.”

He held my gaze for long enough to let me know just how pissed off he was and that a reckoning was coming before he finally relented. “Fine. Have it your way. To start, we’ve looked into both Justin Leonard and Lachlan King.”

I was all ears. “And?”

“Lachlan King checks out pretty much as he told you. When we called him, which he wasn’t happy about by the way, he had nothing to add from what he’d told you last night. Or that he waswillingto add, put it that way. But since we didn’t know about Madigan then, I’ve instructed a colleague to pay him a visit and see if he can rattle something more out of him.”

I could only imagine how that was going to go.

“Next, we contacted the Waikato Police and I spoke to the detective who’d worked with King. He said that King was cooperative and useful, even if he refused to tell them the name of his source, who we now know was Justin. But trying to find any information on Justin himself drew a blank. He doesn’t appear to exist, so you were right about that. But the existence of someonelikehim was well known to the police at the time.”

---