An Isolated Incident Read Online Free PDF Page B

put the kettle on and then listened for the twentieth time to Craig’s voicemail and almost, almost deleted it this time. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,’ she said to him and herself and the slow-boiling piece of shit plastic kettle. She started to dial into her message bank again, but the kettle clicked off and saved her. She dumped four of the hotel’s coffee sachets in her travel mug, filled it with water and headed back to the car.
    She drove past a pub whose car park was a quarter full despite it being not yet 11 am, a car rental office, a service station with a single fuel pump. Next to the service station was a preschool and across the road Strathdee Medical Centre. From there both sides of the road were lined with fibro houses with front yards twice the size of May’s Sydney terrace house. As she got closer to the centre of town, every third, then second house was brick, then she clunked over a railway crossing, noted the sign indicating the police station was one left and one right turn away, drove past a takeaway chicken shop and a Salvation Army store and was abruptly in the town centre.
    It was like the centre of every Australian country town she’d ever visited. An immaculate park with drought-defying green grass and seasonally impossible purple and yellow pansies peeking from the edges of the winding cobblestone path leading to a war memorial cenotaph in the centre. Across the road a TAB, a small pub advertising ‘Counter Meals, KENO and Historic Murals’, a Chinese restaurant, a ye olde tea shop attached to the Strathdee Local History Museum, a bakery and a newsagency. There was no one on the footpath except a water-delivery man in tight shorts and sweat-soaked t-shirt backing into an unmarked shopfront and a teenage girl pushing a double stroller past the TAB.
    Although she had a green light, she stopped briefly at the intersection. There were no other vehicles in sight, only the spires of three churches, a Woolworths sign with an arrow pointing left, a sign directing travellers to the Happy Stay Inn (the motel too expensive for May’s tight-arse employer) and, already, the sign pointing the way to the exit onto the road to Melbourne.
    After a few minutes on the highway heading south, a flash of unnaturally bright colours to the left caught her eye. She pulled to the side, checked for traffic behind her and reversed back to the bursts of pink and yellow. Surprising that there was no other media there, given the police press conference wasn’t until one. Possible that no one outside of the region was bothering with anything other than phoners. That’s all she’d be doing if her unprecedented disaster of a love-life hadn’t prompted her to insist on driving down to this fly-shit-speck of a town to report first-hand on the story. The fact her own hastily written, phone-researched piece on the body’s discovery had been the site’s most shared that day made it an easy sell.
    But that meant, of course, that the competition’s stories on the body were probably just as popular and that they, too, had sent their best crime reporters/most-desperate-to-get-out-of-town fuck-ups to get on-the-ground colour. In which case, the lack of media at the body-dump site meant that they’d been and gone and were now back in town talking to – and alienating for all future reporters – the dead woman’s family and friends, in which case, shit.
    May slung her camera over her neck, grabbed her notebook and strode out towards the shrine she’d seen from the road.
    A secluded field , she wrote. No. It was neither a field, nor particularly secluded. Cars zipped by at the rate of ten to twelve a minute. There was no fence, just a gappy line of ghost gums close to the road and then patchy grass and the odd spindly tree for seventy metres or so, before another line of gums battled against being absorbed by fair-dinkum, deep and dark outback bushland. She