Exiles （Aaron Falk #3）
Jane Harper
For the readers, who make these books what they are
PROLOGUE
Think back. The signs were there. What were they?
They all asked themselves the same questions afterward.
How did it come to this? Could we have stopped it?
That was the key one, Aaron Falk knew. And the answer was probably yes. Even with no warning—and there were warnings—the answer was almost always yes. A million decisions paved the road to a single act, and a single act could be derailed in any one of a million ways. But choices had been made—some conscious and considered, some less so—and of all the million paths that had lain ahead, this was the one they found themselves on.
The baby was asleep when she was discovered. She was just short of six weeks old, a good weight for her age, healthy and well, other than being completely alone. She would have been warm enough deep inside her bassinet stroller. She was swaddled carefully in a clean wrap purchased from the state’s leading baby-wares retailer, and tucked in with an artisan wool blanket, thick enough to have the effect of flattening out the bundle of her shape if placed in the right way. It had been placed in exactly that way. A casual glance toward the stroller would inevitably first see the blanket rather than the baby.
It was a spring night and the South Australian sky was clear and starry with no rain forecast, but the weatherproof hood had been pulled over to full stretch. A linen square normally used as a sunshield was draped over the opening between the hood and the stroller. A casual glance would now not see the sleeping girl at all.
The stroller was parked alongside a few dozen others in the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival’s designated stroller bay, fighting for space in the shadow of the ferris wheel with a tangle of bikes and scooters and a lone tricycle. It had been left in the far corner, the foot brake firmly on.
The contents of the bay were collected one by one over the next couple of hours, as families who’d been mixing wine, cheese, and carnival rides decided they’d celebrated local produce enough for one night. By a little after 10:30 p.m., only the stroller and the assistant electrical technician’s bike were left.
The technician paused as he undid his combination lock. He looked around. The festival had officially closed half an hour earlier and the site was mostly clear now, with only staff still around. The technician put his lock in his backpack, swept his eyes once more over the rapidly darkening grounds, then walked over to the stroller. He bent and peered under the hood, then straightened and pushed it all the way down. The swaddled bundle stirred at the rush of cool air as the technician pulled out his phone and made a call.
The baby’s name was written on the label of her onesie. Zoe Gillespie. Her family wasn’t local—not anymore, at least—but the festival director and the responding on-duty officer knew both her parents by name.
Zoe’s mother’s phone rang from the diaper bag stowed in the shopping holder underneath the stroller. The tone trilled loudly in the night air. The zipped bag also held a set of car keys and a purse complete with ID, cards, and cash. The technician ran out to the visitors’ parking lot. A family sedan matching the make on the key ring was one of the few remaining vehicles.
Zoe’s father’s phone rang a couple of kilometers away, in the foyer of the Marralee Valley’s better Italian restaurant. He’d waved off his own parents in a taxi and was now paying the meal bill while chatting to the owner and her husband, who both remembered him from school. He was showing them pictures of Zoe—his firstborn, and already six weeks old on Sunday; he could hardly believe it—and the owner was insisting he accept a celebratory bottle of sparkling wine on the house, when his screen lit up with the call.
The restaurant was a fifteen-minute walk from the festival grounds. The restaurant owner broke the speed limit that she herself had campaigned for to drive him there in just over three, slamming on the brakes right outside the main gate. He ran from there past the closed and darkened stalls, all the way to his daughter’s side.
The site was searched. Zoe’s mother, thirty-nine-year-old Kim Gillespie, was not found.
Volunteers were assembled and the area was combed again. Then the parking lot, then the vineyards on either side. The stroller had been parked facing east, toward the back of the festival site and the overflow exit. Beyond the exit lay bushland and a small track that led only one way. The search moved along that track, following it all the way down to the reservoir. Then along the broad leisure trail that circled the water—empty at that time of night of walkers and service vehicles—to the highest point along the rugged embankment: a steep rocky ledge known locally as the Drop. Far below, the reservoir stretched deep and wide.
Two days later, they found a shoe. Kim Gillespie’s white sneaker, waterlogged and streaked with sediment, was recovered more than a kilometer to the east, jammed in the dam’s filters.
Specialist divers were called to broach the crack in the base at the center of the natural reservoir. They went as deep into the cavernous void as they could, while searchers swept the perimeter on foot and in ranger vehicles, and volunteers combed the shallows in their weekend boats. The search continued for another week, then two, then slowed and finally stopped altogether, with promises to return when the water level dropped. Spring turned into summer and autumn. Zoe grew out of her stroller, took her first steps, needed shoes of her own. Her first birthday came and went.
What did I see? Those who knew and loved the family were left with their questions. They asked themselves and each other, What did I miss?
But Zoe’s mother did not come back for her.
1
ONE YEAR LATER
Someone else was already there.
Aaron Falk felt faintly, if unreasonably, annoyed as he pulled up next to the other car. The turnoff had been as hard to spot as he’d remembered, almost swallowed by the bushland towering over both sides of the road. It was so well concealed, in fact, that Falk had blithely assumed that what was waiting at the other end of the track would be his alone. Not so, he could see now as he touched the brake and suppressed a sigh.
Falk hadn’t been alone there last year, either. Greg Raco had been in the passenger seat then, Falk following his friend’s directions as they neared the end of their eight-hour drive. Raco had ignored the sat nav, especially after they’d crossed the Victorian border into South Australia. His high spirits had been infectious and they’d chewed through the kilometers, taking turns trading news and picking the music. Raco’s newborn son was being christened that weekend, in the same church where Raco and his brothers had been themselves several decades earlier. His wife and two kids had already made the trip and were waiting at the other end, but Raco’s sergeant duties had held him back. He was clearly keen to be reunited with them, so Falk had been surprised when he’d suddenly leaned forward in the passenger seat, peering at the empty road and pointing to a patch of trees. “You see that break ahead? Turn there.”
They had still been a good thirty minutes out of town and Falk could see nothing. The stretch of bushland had looked identical to the rest lining the route. “Where?”
“There, mate.”
Falk had still missed it, and had had to illegally reverse several meters before he saw the single-lane track. He’d eyed his car’s suspension.