Catherine Jinks TheRoad (70 page)

‘He wasn’t there,’ Alec growled. ‘Look – we tried, all right? He could have been anywhere.’

‘We did try,’ Ross assured someone – possibly Linda. ‘We gave the dog a T-shirt, but he’s not much of a tracker.’

‘That kid must have been all over the place!’ Del protested. ‘It was confusing for the poor old bugger!’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Alec sighed. ‘But like I said, he could be anywhere. You could search for a week and never find him. He might be in Sydney, for all we know.’

‘Unless he’s hiding,’ Linda observed, worried. ‘He might be hiding. Deliberately. If we bring other kids to the place, he might realise it’s safe to come out.’

‘Linda,’ Ross interrupted, ‘the phone’s dead. Apart from anything else –’

‘I know the phone’s dead, you already told us.’

‘– apart from anything
else
, Linda, you’d be cut off out there. And you don’t know . . . well, you don’t know who might come back...’

‘To the scene of the crime? Is that likely?’ Linda protested.

‘They might have left something,’ came Verlie’s querulous contribution. ‘Something that might identify them. It’s possible.’

‘The kid,’ said Del.

There was a pause – perhaps the faintest murmur. When his mum said, ‘What?’, Peter realised that someone else had been speaking, very quietly.

It turned out to be Alec.

‘I
said
, there’s no one gunna move those bodies,’ he declared. ‘No way. They’d fall apart. They’re goin off. The whole place smells bad.’

‘Oh
dear
!’ Verlie exclaimed, reproachfully.

‘Well, there you are, then!’ There was a note of triumph in Linda’s voice. ‘What good are they going to be to the police anyway, if they’re so badly decayed? We might as
well
move them.’

Verlie uttered another feeble remonstrance. Alec advised Linda that
she
could move the corpses, if she was so keen on it; she might think differently when she actually saw them. Noel pointed out that the question of whether or not anyone should take up residence at Thorndale was secondary. The most important consideration for them now was what they ought to do in an attempt to extricate themselves from the unfortunate impasse into which they had apparently strayed.