Before It Breaks Read Online Free PDF

think so, but maybe he just wanted the high ground. It was eighteen months since they’d split. It took him eight months before he slept with another woman and it was strange, not unpleasant, not earth shattering, but like wearing new shoes. He slept with two other women in quick succession and knew he shouldn’t compare them to Marilyn but couldn’t help it. He resented this weakness in himself. She’s not coming back; even if she did, it would be a mistake so you’re more the fool for protracting the inevitable. Karen is right, he thought, but she’s wrong too. Marilyn and he were a conundrum, a circular square, yet he was still unable to move on with his life. As aboy he’d been fascinated by the story of Scott of the Antarctic who must have known he was pushing on to his doom. Clement had not meant it to act as a template for his behaviour but sometimes he felt it did.
    The buzz of the flies drummed in his ears, the bored or weak ones who couldn’t get to the blood were attracted to his sweat.
    Clement made his way back to his vehicle through the same unwelcoming bush and the same over-friendly flies. They crawled up your nose and were in the back of your throat before you could blow them back out. En route he tried Graeme Earle. As expected the call went dead. Earle was the kind of bloke who loved this life, fishing, drinking, blue skies, wide open space and malevolent heat. You could never reach him on a rostered day off. Clement didn’t rate him highly as a detective but to be fair it wasn’t like he was basing this on a great sample. They’d worked assaults, rapes and one tribal spat that turned into attempted murder. Earle’s work was solid, he wasn’t incompetent. It was more that while this might be a massive region of thousands of ks, the crime garden was very small and there was nowhere to hone real detective skills so they stayed unborn or undeveloped. Earle had lived here fifteen years and in him Clement saw the traits more of a small-town sheriff than a detective. He dialled Shepherd next. The detective constable answered his phone promptly.
    â€˜Guilty. Course the beak’s given him a slap on the wrist. Three months.’
    Shepherd couldn’t finish a speech without some complaint. On this occasion Clement sympathised. They’d gone after an inveterate wife-beater. Those cases were hard to get to court and when they got a sentence lighter than a cicada shell you felt you were in the wrong job on the wrong side of the planet. The women looked at you like you were the one who had given them the black eye or split lip.
    Clement explained where he was and what he’d found, or rather hadn’t. He told Shepherd they’d be setting up a crime scene.
    â€˜Bring Jared. And those guys who trapped the Callum Creek crocs. See if they’re available.’
    He opened his car and risked his bum on the scorching seat. He tapped the Pajero’s plates into his computer. Bingo. Dieter Schaffer. DOB 14.04.48. As Jill had warned, the address was a lot number on Cape Leveque Road, a strip of bitumen that ran a hundred k north-south in a wilderness of mainly low scrub. The only phone numberwas the mobile he had. He did all this while Shepherd whinged about how hard it was going to be to do each of the tasks set. He ignored him. ‘See you soon, Shep.’
    Clement called the station and asked Mal Gross if he knew a Dieter Schaffer. Of course he did. Gross knew most everybody in the Kimberley.
    â€˜Dieter. They call him “Schultz”. Used to be a cop in Germany.’
    So far as Gross was aware Schaffer lived alone in what was little more than a bush shack. Gross said he would get a car out there to look over the house but it was a good hundred k so Clement should not expect anything for a while.
    Typical.
    Clement fought his way back to the locus of his investigation. The missing outboard worried him but he began constructing plausible