Vanished by James Delargy (free novel 24 TXT) 📕

the order to stay close to the letter. It had been a slow five-minute shuffle so far, ears trained for any stray noise that might indicate they weren’t alone.

‘I’m scared, Daddy.’

‘We’ll be there soon.’ Lorcan wanted to check the machine’s output. If there was gold, diamond or opal then he would be able to detect fragments somewhere. Or at least he thought so anyway. And if it was uranium or plutonium? Well the three men who’d been here last night hadn’t donned any special equipment to ward against radiation so he had ruled that out.

‘Can we go back?’

‘A little further. You can be my brave boy,’ said Lorcan. Thankfully the darkness shielded Dylan from seeing that his father’s own bravery was paper-thin.

His reassurance lasted for thirty seconds. Then the tears started.

‘I want to go back, Daddy. I don’t like it down here.’

Lorcan took another few steps and stopped. The crying bounced off the walls, surrounding him in despair. This had been a stupid idea. Bringing Dylan down here. He would have to come back alone. When Naiyana took Dylan to town next time. Tomorrow hopefully.

‘Okay, let’s go back,’ he said, nudging Dylan back towards the exit.

The light hurt his eyes for a few seconds after they emerged from the tunnel. His skin prickled with the heat and the fact he hadn’t been able to definitively prove what the men were mining.

He manoeuvred his son into the open air, the heat instantly cranking from mildly irritating to almost unbearable.

Holding his son close he gazed up and down the street to see if they had been watched. They hadn’t.

One small, green bearded dragon was perched on a rock by the collapsed fence, its tongue flicking, tasting the fear in the air. Lorcan could taste it too.

52

Emmaline

In the late afternoon, Emmaline retreated to MCS HQ in Northbridge and secured a conference room that looked out over the banks of rapidly emptying desks.

She was working on what Naiyana Maguire might have on Chester Grant. According to Leona Sanchez, Naiyana had been both excited and secretive at their meeting. It suggested she knew something important, rather than minor gossip.

Family, previous schools or employment had proven a bust. The Maguire family had never lived in Chester Grant’s constituency.

An affair between the two was possible but unlikely. Both were married – although that was not much of a barrier in Emmaline’s experience – but her determination to make BS Foods suffer had caused Chester to suffer as well. If they had been having an affair they had disguised it well.

The only thing that linked the two of them was Brightside Foods. Brightside had been founded in the 1970s by a WA farmer called Herbert Palmer who had a vision to create quickly prepared meals based on what grew on his land and create a self-sustaining business. It had worked. By the time he died in 2003 Brightside Foods had grown into a huge nationwide enterprise, no longer just supplied by the family farm but many others around Australia, branching into many different arenas of food preparation and supply. A success story. Until recently.

After Herbert’s death, and according to the newspaper reports, the rapid increase in size had forced the business to be altered from family owned to floated, allowing future wealth to be up for grabs. She wondered who owned it now.

Checking the companies register online she discovered that forty per cent of the shares were held by a company called AG Solutions. Emmaline had never heard of them and their directors were unlisted. But AG Solutions were themselves owned by AG Holdings, for which the directors were again unlisted. Down and down she followed, the rabbit hole getting ever deeper. And that’s when she found it. Under AG Holdings and another company called AG Future was AG Decade. Owned by Abilene Grant.

Emmaline’s interest was piqued. A quick search revealed that Abilene Grant was the mother of one Chester Grant. It meant his family held a significant amount of shares in Brightside Foods. A factor that would not necessarily be incriminating in court but in the papers would have been a landmine, what with Chester using his position to push their agenda in parliament. And if Naiyana Maguire had learned this during her research, she might have used it against Chester Grant.

It was now six o’clock. Given that Chester had been unavailable due to afternoon meetings and it was no longer the afternoon, she called his office again. Again she was fobbed off with a prepared response that all queries should come through the standard channels.

Emmaline wasn’t about to back down. ‘This isn’t a standard issue. It involves the murder of Lorcan Maguire and the disappearance of two other people. If you call that standard then you’re in the wrong job.’

To this the secretary spluttered a little, thrown off course momentarily before regaining her composure. ‘Let me…’

The line went quiet for nearly a minute before the secretary reappeared.

‘Can you make it to Claremont in fifteen minutes?’

Fifteen minutes was a push but Emmaline wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity.

Fourteen minutes later she found herself in another well-to-do area of Perth, on the opposite bank to Nikos Iannis, but a house that displayed all the same trappings of wealth right down to the gold-tipped gateposts and marble pillars.

The first thing she spotted was the white SUV in the driveway. A Toyota, like the Maguires’. Except newer. Again she used the well-practised key trick to study the bull bars. Again spotlessly clean. How people found the time to keep their vehicles so immaculate, she would never know. Hers was permanently covered in dust and bird shit.

Looking up, there was no mass of freshly shaved chest blocking the doorway. A besuited Chester Grant invited her inside, onto a white leather sofa that gleamed as the evening sun poked through the patio doors. In front of her lay a mahogany desk and mounted display cabinet that contained a vast number of rifles.

‘They’re all antiques,’ noted Chester