Page 99 of Down the Track

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She shrugged. ‘I’d be happy to show it to you sometime if you want to have a look. The file is thorough. The copper in charge back then kept detailed notes and explored every angle I would have thought up. I know it’s no comfort. But I can at least assure you that the police work when your sister went missing was thorough and rigorous.’

‘Thanks,’ he said.

He showed her the bottle top first. ‘It’s from a beer bottle manufactured in Port Moresby for local consumption. It’s also not bearing any signs of age, like sun damage or rust. I’m no forensic expert—’ he chose to ignore the acting senior constable’s snort ‘—but it’s of recent date. How recent, maybe your lab could determine. I found it on the slope between the rock cairn where Charlie dropped Dave off on the Sunday morning and the plateau of the jump-up.’

‘The jump what?’

‘The geographical rise. Mesa is the other name, but around here the locals call them jump-ups. There’s a whole geological evolutionary story behind why it’s there but I’ll bore you with that another time. The point is … it’s quite steep. Why would you walk part way up a steep hill? On a hot day? If you didn’t have to?’

She cocked her head. ‘Because you weren’t walking part way up. You were walking the whole way up and you stopped to neck down abeeron the way?’

‘Yeah, okay, when you say that it does sound less than convincing, but maybe you rearranged the heavy duffel bag you were carrying on the way. I’m thinking the zip was buggered and a bottle top that had been floating around in there from the beer you’d been necking down when you were in PNG fell out.’

‘Okay. Let’s agree that’s possible. We still haven’t explained why you’re going up there. We flew over it in the police chopper and it looked pretty barren to me. What’s up top?’

‘Nothing. It’s a dead flat slab of cement-like silica with barely any grass or shrubs growing on it.’

‘You know, this way of giving me information in little dramatic bursts is reminding me of this crime writer whose books I really hate.’

TYSON: Wow. Tough crowd.

‘Okay. Sorry. Old habits and all that. Anyway, after I found the bottle top I walked up the jump-up to see why anyone would have gone up there—if at all—and I found these marks in the surface.’ He pulled out his phone to show her the original photos he’d taken. ‘I was showing them to Jo—you know, the palaeontologist who was working on the dig there? And she suggested that the three divots were all connected in some way.’ No need to say she’d hoped they were pterodactyl tracks. ‘After a little process of elimination, I think I know what they are.’

Clifford frowned at him and he remembered her warning about the dramatic delivery she hated and hurried on.

‘I haven’t been out to get the precise measurements, but from the photos I took, and from memory, each of the rear divots is about eight and a half inches wide, which is the width of the tyres a lot of small aircraft use. Especially aircraft anticipating a dirt-strip landing.’

Acting Senior Constable Clifford wasn’t looking like she was hating his dramatic delivery now. On the contrary, she looked as keen as a front-row fan at GenreCon. ‘Holy shit,’ she breathed.

‘Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. And Jo had the bright idea to measure between the rear divots, and triangulate to the inner, smaller one, and check the measurements against specs of popular light aircraft.’

‘And?’

‘At some time between when I climbed up that jump-up and the previous rain fall out there—which was, what, early November?—I reckon a Cessna 172 landed on Corley Station’s jump-up. Which is not, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, a designated airstrip.’

TYSON: Tell her that means it was illegal. Tell her that means Dodgy Dave was a frigging crook. Tell her that means Charlie can’t have been involved because Charlie doesn’t need to cruise around anywhere in a Cessna because he’s got two perfectly good helicopters to mosey about in.

Hux was pretty sure Clifford would be able to connect all those dots for herself.

The police officer was staring in a vacant way at the chalkboard menu on the bakery wall.

‘What do you think?’ he said at last.

‘I think that’s excellent work, Gavin. I’m also thinking I’ve heard of another story involving a light aircraft at a similar time. I wonder …’ She stopped abruptly. ‘The jerrycans. Charlie loaded two jerrycans and a duffel bag on board with Dave. We thought they were fuel for a genset, but only because that’s the explanation Dave gave. Could they have been avgas?’

Hux blinked. ‘Oh, this is starting to make a lot of sense. Damn right they could have been avgas. I’ve been wondering how Dave lugged two full jerry cans from the servo to the airfield … but he didn’t. He fuelled up here. It’s a pay-as-you-go bowser. We need to check what credit cards were used and—’

‘Way ahead of you there. We’ve been chasing down a black flight—a Cessna—that aborted a landing at Karumba Airfield. The plane had drugs on board from Indonesia via PNG then inbound to Queensland. We’ve been trying to figure out where the plane landed when it veered off from Karumba.’

‘The jump-up could fit.’

She grinned. ‘I’ll go work the timeline. Pass your information on to the team working the black flight case. And I’m going to need that bottle top.’

He handed it over.

‘My shout next time, all right?’ she said, pointing to the coffee and pastry flakes.

‘You mean, next time we solve a mystery together?’