Harold was a cautious man. He didn't seem it from the outside, always taking risky chances with his money. But the truth was he had never once bet a sum of money that he couldn't afford to lose, and he was usually working with more information that other people. He made friends easily and though he talked a lot, he never told a secret, and it was this quality that made people trust him. Harold had long fingers in the communities he lived and worked in, a dozen places scattered across desert towns and cities, stretching from Brisbane to Broome.
He did a lot of things. He represented boxers, he sold pokies machines, he owned a logistics company that drove road trains up and down the Stuart Highway. He got in between people who were in disputes, he ran some illegal gambling operations. Not everyone is built for a life on their wits but it was how Harold was engineered. His younger brother was a cautious man in a completely different way. Their youth in Portsmouth had not been one of luxury. The hot, red earth of Australia felt like home Harold, from the moment he got here. He didn't like cities much, but he loved the empty desert and the endless sky. He liked the remote cattle stations, and the falling down pubs, and the people who lived there. So he kept mostly to Cracow, Katherine, Alice Springs and a dozen tiny locations in between. He spent a great deal of time on the road, and that was how Harold liked it.
He was on the road once again now. He had to reach his nieces. He had chidden of his own, four of them. He saw them all regularly, and sent money every week. But he felt a sense of responsibility to his nieces that was another level beyond that which he felt to his own children. His own children were safe, always. They were with their mothers, who were strong women that never saw a husband in Harold, and who were more than capable of life without him. They weren't like Phillip or Eloise. Harold loved his brother, but he was a man not capable of connecting with his children on an honest level, and Eloise had the emotional warmth of a soap dish. Her mother was alright, a venomous old hawk but at least she had the kind of backbone that could keep a family alive through hard times.
No, Samantha and Elaine had never had a mother like his children had had. They had raised themselves for most of their childhood, and had been raising Kane since he was four. Tommy's death was a lifetime ago now, but in Harold's mind he was still there. An angry young man with no one to tell him he was worth a damn. If someone was going to get Samantha and Elaine out of the almighty mess they were in now, it was going to have to be Harold. Thousands of kilometres away, he knew more than Phillip and Eloise ever would about the situation that was unfolding. He knew that, by now, Samantha was in custody. A friend of his at the local paper had called him. She had heard from her policewoman friend that Kelly had told all to one Detective Wakefield, and that Samantha would be enjoying the hospitality of Wacol before too long.
So Harold had gotten back in the car. It had been weeks since the memorial, but it was still too soon to be making this drive again. He had a Land Rover, which he never washed because the red dust was an endlessly renewable resource and it just appeared again anyway. Harold was a patient man, but washing a car in the outback calls for a kind of patience he did not possess. He had a set of fuzzy dice that Samantha had given him at Christmas swinging from the rearview mirror, and it was two in the morning when he watched them lurch to life in the soft backwards glow of the headlights. By some struck of cosmic luck, he had been in Emerald, and would arrive in Gympie before ten in the morning if he didn't stop anywhere.
He hit the road, the FM radio quietly burbling in the background. One day, he supposed, Harold would have to give up this lifestyle. He would surely get too old to keep moving like this. He pushed the thought aside, thinking idly to himself that if the day came that he had to stay in one place, he would sooner drive off Carnavon Gorge. The Capricorn Highway leapt up to meet him in the endless glare of the headlights, as Harold slowly closed the distance between himself and his nieces. He had a plan. It wasn't a good plan, but it was all he could think of in the circumstances. Samantha could choose. He could at least offer her a way to not end up in a green jumpsuit. The sun would rise just before six in the morning. Harold pressed down on the accelerator, and the landscape flew by around him.
