Opal, p.1
Opal, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Also by Patricia Wolf
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Outback
Paradise
About the Author
About Embla Books
Also by Patricia Wolf
The DS Walker Thrillers
1. Outback
2. Paradise
3. Opal
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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Bonnier Books UK Limited
4th Floor, Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1B 4DA
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden Copyright © Patricia Wolf, 2024
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Patricia Wolf to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781471416569
This book is typeset using Atomik ePublisher.
Embla Books is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK.
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
Prologue
Kanpara, Queensland
Sunday night
It’s gone 8 p.m. and fully dark when Mark knocks on Karen’s door. He’s nothing more than a shadow in the gloom. The street lights are sparse – one at the junction with the highway half a kilometre away and another, slightly closer, at the junction with Victoria Road. Once night falls, the only real light comes from neighbouring houses, each one sitting on its half-acre block, strands of gum trees between them and Karen’s place. The block behind her house is vacant and the place on the left already in darkness, the truckie who lives there either on the road or early in bed. The artist who lives on the right is awake, his house ablaze with light, but thanks to the shadow of the trees even that nosy git would struggle to see a man arriving, much less name him.
He can hear the TV on inside, the upbeat voice of a male presenter, the lift in volume as an ad break kicks in. He knocks harder and this time she hears him; the TV goes off, he hears her footsteps approach. She opens the door, stands silhouetted behind the screen, the light behind her. He steps forward and she opens the screen door, a smile travelling from her lips to her eyes.
‘Hello, you,’ she says. She waits until he’s closed the door before she reaches her arms up around his neck, and he pulls her close, kisses her. They stand like that, entwined, close, warm, kissing for a minute before he pulls away, strokes her hair off her face, sees the swollen cheek and eye, the red mark that will bruise to blue and purple.
‘That fucker,’ he says. ‘I should fucking kill him …’
Her smile fades. ‘Please, let’s not talk about him,’ she says, turning away so he can’t see the bruise. He pulls her back, close to him, and she leans into his chest.
‘You have to leave him,’ he says.
‘I know.’ Her voice is muffled against his shirt.
‘Why don’t you leave right now? You can stay in my caravan at the workshop. I’ll take you there, right now, and then you can decide what you want to do in the morning.’
She looks up at him. ‘What? Stay there with you? The two of us? What about Vero?’
He hesitates; that’s not exactly what he’d meant.
She sees the indecision in his eyes and steps back. ‘Not so easy, is it,’ she says, her voice not bitter, just resigned. ‘Look. It is what it is. I’ll be OK. I just needed some company tonight, that’s why I texted. You don’t have to fix this, I just didn’t want to be alone.’ A thought occurs to her: ‘You didn’t bring your car, did you?’
‘No, course not,’ he says. ‘I left it down the road at Blair’s. I need to see him later.’
‘I thought he was leaving?’
‘Yeah, tomorrow morning. But someone told Dean Wilson that we found opal, and Wilson started hassling me at the pub about selling it to him. Must have been Blair, mouthing off.’
‘But you haven’t been finding anything …’
‘Yeah, nah, I guess Blair was big-noting himself. And then Stewie Charles had a pop at me. Pulled a knife, threatened to kill me …’
‘Oh my god!’ She looks at him, eyes wide. ‘Are you OK? Did he hurt you?’
‘I’m fine. Some cop broke it up.’
‘Was Todd there? In the pub?’
Mark nods. ‘Yeah. Halfway pissed already.’
‘I figured,’ she says. ‘He’ll be there all night. He always feels like shit after we have a fight, gets pissed. He’ll be apologetic as hell tomorrow. I’ll be OK.’ She pauses, steps closer to him again, pulls his shirt out of the waistband of his jeans, runs her fingers along his bare stomach. ‘Todd won’t be back till late, if he comes home at all. He usually sleeps it off in his vehicle. Why don’t you stay for a while …’
Afterwards, Karen asleep, her head on his shoulder, her arm flung across his chest, Mark suppresses a sigh. He’s lying in another man’s bed, with another man’s wife, a man who was once a friend, maybe even his best friend. He owes Todd no favours – the bloke’s a drunkard and a wife-basher and he’s pretty sure that when they were mining together Todd stole from him too. But still, he doesn’t feel good about it.
And then there’s Vero. Marrying her was a mistake. They’re too different, want different things from life, and he’s working up to telling her that it’s over. She can sense it – that’s why she’s up here this season, not living it large on the coast as usual. And he knows that one reason he hasn’t actually gone through with the advice his divorce lawyer gave him is that Karen might expect the two of them to get together, and though he likes being with her he doesn’t want that either, doesn’t need the aggro of it.
He suppresses another sigh. He doesn’t understand why he isn’t happy. Last week he’d found a huge opal, the kind of stone he’s been looking for all his life. He’s kept it quiet, told only Blair, a bloke he’d thought he could trust. But now Dean Wilson knows about it. Wilson wasn’t even due in town but he can smell opal from a hundred miles away. And it must be Blair who opened his trap, probably trying to sell the opal himself, take what isn’t his, which means he can’t trust him and needs to reconsider his plans for the stone. He’d thought the plan he’d cooked up was the best possible solution, keeping everyone else out of it. But now – well, he’s already told Blair that he wants the stone back, is going to sort this himself. He’ll drop by Blair’s after he leaves here.
This opal is the stone that means he’s set for life. If he keeps it quiet, then when he divorces Vero she won’t take everything he’s worked for away from him. The opal is perfect, but he can’t find the kind of joy in it that he’d expected. Maybe he’s lost his passion for mining, for this life. Used to be a time when as early as January he’d be itching to leave the city and get back out bush. He’d be making plans and studying maps and counting the days till the worst of the heat was gone, the wet done for another season, and he could be back out here, living in the camp, working long days, looking for opal.
He’d always said that, no matter how much money he made, you’d still find him here. Not just because of the spine-tingling pleasure of breaking open a nondescript boulder to reveal the veined iridescence of an opal, but also for the peace of being out here. The romance of it. The timelessness of it. Of surviving the elements, of communing with the land. No one bothering him, no one breathing down his neck telling him what to do, just wide blue s
But now, coming up on fifty, the heat and the dust are wearing him down. The old-timers like his grandad are all dead and gone and he doesn’t like the blokes who’ve taken their place. They’re either crims hiding out from cops or other gangsters, or chancers and cheats, no idea about opals and likely to snort any money they make back up their noses. No stories, no love for it, just bullshit and aggro. Nah, he can’t see the poetry out here anymore.
He thinks back to the day he’d found the opal, trying to feel the passion, the old magic. He’d bought the claim from the Charles brothers at the end of last season, getting a good deal because they were neck-deep in shit. They’ve got no clue about mining – he’s got no idea why they’re out here. Running from trouble, is his guess. He’s never asked, and they’ve never said, but he can smell trouble on blokes a mile off, he’s seen that much of it on the opal fields, even back in the day. Last winter, the two brothers had been running out of cash so fast they couldn’t afford fuel for their drills and excavator, let alone booze or drugs. They’d been happy enough to sell the land to him. Had spent the money on coke and women, no doubt, then crept back this season looking as thin and broke and rough as ever.
He’d had a look at the site, quietly, on the sly, long before he’d offered to buy it from them. Given the chance, it would have been the first part of their claim he’d have mined. The curve of the land, the way it rises and falls, the faults and seams, the way the rock and clay layers. All of it screamed opal to him. But the clueless Charles brothers had started mining in a gully closest to their camp, probably out of convenience as much as anything. They hadn’t been finding any colour and by Mark’s reckoning they’d have been lucky to hit pay dirt there. But this ridge … He’d been certain, really certain, that it would yield.
They’d been working the site all season, him and Blair, day after day, week after week, putting down drill holes, starting a cut, working methodically from left to right, digging out boulders, crushing them and seeing nothing but red dirt and dust. Endless red dirt and dust. The clay was wet enough, the shape of the land was right, the depth was right, but they hadn’t found even a glimmer of colour. He’d set himself a target of the end of the month before he wrote the cut off. He was about as deep as he would ever go to find opal and it’s not worth throwing good money after bad.
He’d been sitting in the excavator, digging out shovel after shovel of red earth on autopilot, mired in gloom, when he’d felt the digger judder and slow as it hit stone. Boulder’s a good sign, especially at this depth. He’d dug in and under, and when the rock emerged he’d been vindicated. It was shot through with colour: blue, green, red, the palest of yellow, all shimmering in the sun.
His heart had caught at the sight. Even after all these years, opal still has the power to move him. Out in the heat, among the dirt, the dust, the flies, comes this beautiful gem, this rainbow captured in stone. Formed over millions of years, and him the first human being to ever see it. He’d climbed out of the excavator for a better look, and up close it had stopped him dead. He could tell that he’d found a huge one. Not yet broken from its stony shell, not yet cut, not yet cleaned, but he could tell. He’d excavated an enormous stone of beautiful harlequin-like colours. The size of it gave him a tremble of something in his stomach. He’d felt his mouth stretch into an incredulous grin. The find of a lifetime. A million dollars. That’s what he’s looking at: a million fucking dollars.
He’d wanted to shout out to someone, ‘I’ve found a stone that means I’ll never have to work again!’ But he’d been alone, deep in the cut, the sun ferocious, the air still. The walls of rock and clay climbing high above his head, a hawk turning lazy circles in the sky above, perhaps attracted by the bright colours of the opal he’d uncovered.
His mind was racing to match his heartbeat: he’d already cut the stone, seen the buyers lining up, spent the money. A second later, other implications came to him. This was a find that could attract envy and greed and potentially violence. An opal this size, a gem like this, could turn anyone to covetousness – it was the kind of stone people would kill for. Vero couldn’t know, she’d only take half of it when they divorced; he hadn’t even told Karen, he’s not sure why. Told himself it was best to keep it on the quiet.
But when Blair had announced that he’d had enough, was quitting for the season, Mark had decided to confide in him. Had asked Blair to take the stone with him. To keep it for a few weeks until he could get Vero on a plane home and come and collect it. He’d trusted the bloke. Blair’s the quiet sort and he’d thought of him as honest. He’d promised Blair a cut if he kept his mouth shut and helped him out. Blair had been more than happy, even a small cut of a million bucks enough to set him up.
But, somehow, the news has leaked out. First the camp was turned over, reinforcing his desire to get the stone out of here and far away. When Blair was insistent that it had nothing to do with him, he thought it might have been chance timing, the Charles brothers trying their luck while he wasn’t around. But now Wilson knows about it – even Vero’s heard rumours and is getting suspicious. And Stewie Charles is upping the aggro, trying to scare him into giving them more dough, spreading stories that he found it on their claim, that he didn’t pay them enough, has stolen it from them.
All of it can only mean that Blair has opened his big trap. Been big-noting himself or worse, getting greedy, getting envious, trying to take more than the share he’s been promised. It proves what his dad and grandad always said: You can’t trust anyone around opals.
The gloom that he hasn’t been able to shake returns. The highlight of his career, of his life, and not one person he trusts enough to celebrate with. Everyone out to backstab, to steal from him.
At the thought, the sigh he’s been holding finally slides out of him. Karen shifts at the sound, turns to face the window, pushes her back against his torso, wraps her legs around his. He should go, collect the opal from Blair, get out of here before Todd comes home and he has to leg it out the back door like a guilty teenager. He’s lying on the side of the bed closest to the door; he could easily slip out and leave without waking Karen. But he’s exhausted from a long week, and the beers he had at the pub – drinking to make the night go faster – are making him sleepy. The bed is comfortable, and Karen is warm beside him. He turns towards her, pulls her close, puts his arm around her, closes his eyes. Just five more minutes, he thinks.
He wakes with a start sometime later. He’s not sure how long he’s been sleeping but the room is pitch-dark. Karen must have switched off the bedside lamp. And something is wrong, he can feel it. He’s about to move, to turn on the light, when he hears a terrible thwack and Karen makes an unnatural gurgling sound. He flings his arm out, touching the base of the bedside lamp to switch it on. It casts a murky pool of light across the bed. He doesn’t have time to think, to even properly register the shape of a person, dressed all in black, standing at his side of the bed, arm raised. He catches the light glittering on the blade of a hatchet as it descends, instinctively puts his arm up to block it. It plunges into his forearm, the pain instant and overwhelming, and he falls back in shock, screaming with pain. The hatchet comes down again. It’s the last thing he ever sees, his mind too confused for any clear thought, just terror and pain as the hatchet crashes into his head, a blow struck with such force that his skull splits like a ripe melon.
