The Parable of the Mustard Seed Read online

  “Drive safe.”

  John was halfway back to his car when he heard the whistle blow.

  Go the mighty Magpies.

  The alarm went off at 8 p.m., jolting John out of sleep. For a moment he struggled to remember where he was, what day it was, what time it was, then it fell into place. Saturday night. He was on night shift. He had two hours to get himself showered, shaved, fed, and into work for another night of chasing shithead fucking teenagers around Logan. Kids who didn’t know how good they had it, and wouldn’t until they turned seventeen and suddenly realised that prison was a whole lot different to juvenile detention. By then, most of them had left it too late to turn themselves around but there was no good telling them. John told them anyway, because for every hundred smartass know-it-all fuckers, there was one who listened. And he had to pretend that one made it worth it, or he’d go mad.

  Shit. John hoped he’d wash away his bad mood in the shower. Nothing made a shift go slower than really not wanting to be there.

  He showered, he changed, he ate, and picked up a coffee on the way into work. When he walked into the station, every light was still on in the office, and there were people there who should have finished at 2 p.m. Fuck it. That was never a good sign.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Aaron.

  “We’ve got a homicide.” Even Aaron looked worn out, but that was probably because he’d trekked the Himalayas during his lunch break.

  “What’s the go?” John asked, setting his coffee down. He saw Liz heading into the inspector’s office and gave her a quick wave.

  “Six-year-old victim,” Aaron said. “Foster mother’s in custody.”

  “Shit.” So much for getting rid of his bad mood.

  Aaron nodded wearily. “Yeah. We’ve been interviewing the other kids for most of the day. Me and Clare got the four-year-old.”

  No wonder he was wrecked. Nothing like interviewing little kids who couldn’t understand what had happened, let alone articulate it.

  What did Daddy say then?

  Where did the man touch you?

  How often does Mummy fall down?

  It’s okay if it’s a secret. You’re allowed to tell me secrets.

  Sometimes John wanted to get the hell out of Child Protection, but what else was there? Criminal Investigations? That was just more of the same, with a higher age bracket of offenders or victims. Something in HQ? No, as much as he sometimes hated shift work, 9 to 5 in an office would bore him to tears. Back to General Duties? Yeah, right, because getting vomited on by drunks in the Valley every Friday night sounded like fun.

  Sometimes emails came through about vacancies in places John had never even heard of: tiny one-man stations in the middle of nowhere, population two hundred, not including the cows, where you were never really off duty, but you were also more than just a number. You got to be a part of a community in those tiny towns, except John couldn’t leave his family. If he left, Mary and David could probably handle Jess and her dramas for a while. But it wasn’t just John’s family. He was Caleb’s cornerstone, wasn’t he? And Darren’s. He was needed here.

  John sat at his desk and read his emails. A few minutes later Liz came and found him.

  “How’s Craig?” John asked.

  “He has some very unattractive bruising,” she said. “He’s got the night off, he thinks.”

  “He thinks?”

  “Harry’s teething.”

  John grinned at that. “Hey, what’s going on with this homicide? Does the boss want us for anything?”

  “They’ve got it covered,” Liz said. She wasn’t quite frowning, but a tiny vertical line had appeared above her nose.

  John knew that look. “Spit it out.”

  “Yeah,” Liz said. “Let’s not do this here. Bring your coffee into the lunchroom.”

  Shit.

  John followed her out of the office and down the hallway. The lunchroom was empty. Magazines and newspapers sat piled on the long table. There were dishes in the sink that could have been there for days.

  John pulled up a seat. Liz sat down opposite.

  “Come on,” John said. “What’s going on? Have I fucked something up?”

  “No,” Liz said. She sighed. “The boss wanted to see me because he got an email from Corrections about the latest bunch of parolees.”

  “Oh, fuck,” John said. “Which one?”

  “Ethan Gray,” Liz said. “He’s out at the end of the month.”

  Fuck. No fucking way could that asshole be out. Not with all the good behaviour and rehabilitation in the world.

  “Gray, and Leon Harrison, and Ben Quartermain, and Analise Fletcher.”

  “Fuck. Were they having a fucking throw-out sale?” John raked his fingers through his short hair. “This is fucking bullshit! Bullshit!”

  Liz didn’t even flinch as John sent a pile of magazines to the floor. “Yeah, it is.”

  John clenched his jaw and waited for his rage, and his shock, to pass. And wondered in the meantime how the hell he was going to break it to Darren and Caleb.

  “So they’re not allowed contact,” Liz said. “With Caleb, or with each other. If they breach their conditions, we’ll come down on them.”

  “I don’t think Caleb will be able to deal with this right now,” John said numbly. He didn’t think he could either. How the fuck could you do what those people had done and be out in eight years?

  Mostly, John knew, because the investigation hadn’t been able to prove half of what they’d done.

  “Where’s Simon?” Caleb had asked him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. “What happened to Simon?”

  John stared down at one of the magazines on the floor. It had fallen open at some celebrity’s new bikini body. “This is fucked up.”

  “I know,” Liz said, regarding him steadily.

  John closed his eyes. He’d known this day would come, of course he had. It just couldn’t have come at a worse time for Caleb. Not after last night. When he opened his eyes again, Liz was still watching him. “So, what now?”

  “I can talk to Darren if you want.”

  “No.” John sighed. “I should do that. Maybe we’ll run it by Caleb’s shrink before we break it to him.”

  Liz smiled.

  “What?”

  “You and Darren,” she said. “You’re a team, aren’t you?”

  “I guess we are. He’s got no-one else to help, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  All of them, John thought, had at least one case like that. One case they never really walked away from. Liz’s, he knew, was Amelia. Two months old, dead in her cot, a meth lab in the room next door. Liz had been trying to fall pregnant at the time, and thinking it would never happen for her and Craig. After the investigation and the autopsy and all of that shit was done, she’d gone shopping for a pretty pink outfit and a teddy bear for Amelia’s burial. There was an older sister as well, eighteen months old when it had happened: Ella.

  There was something wrong when a kid that age didn’t cry, even in the middle of the night, even getting passed around by strangers. Ella had a good foster family now. Liz was still in contact with them.

  There were just some cases that didn’t let go.

  They sat in silence in the lunchroom for a while.

  “So,” Liz said at last, “while I’m wearing my PSO hat, want to tell me about your love life?”

  “Shit, no.” John couldn’t help his smile.

  “Well, you know I’m getting no action.”

  “I’ve seen the living proof you got laid at least once not that long ago.”

  “Immaculate conception,” Liz told him.

  “You are so full of shit.”

  “You are so full of shit, Acting Senior Sergeant Grant,” she corrected him sternly.

  He laughed, despite himself.

  That was the best thing about Liz. She could always make him laugh.

  “You know I was joking about the coconut slice,” Liz told him two h
ours later as they pulled up in front of his mother’s house. The lights were still on.

  “You were not,” John said, killing the engine.

  His mother was still awake. John wondered if she’d even slept properly at all since his dad had died.

  “Is Jess home?” John asked once he was inside, peering down the hallway.

  “She’s asleep,” Sepela said. Her tired face split with a smile. “David and Tee brought her back after lunch.”

  His mother might have been glad, but John wasn’t done with Jessie yet. As soon as he was off night work, they were going to have a talk and she wouldn’t like it one bit.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” Liz offered, heading through to the kitchen.

  Sepela wrapped her arms around John. She didn’t even come up to his shoulder. “Thank you, baby.”

  “It was David and Tee you should thank, Ma.”

  “I already did.” Sepela let him go and cast a critical eye over him. “Are you eating? You look skinny.”

  John snorted. His mother had a strange definition of skinny. “I’m fine.”

  “How is Caleb?”

  “He’ll be okay. He’s in the hospital.”

  Sepela clicked her tongue. “Poor boy. It’s good that he has you.”

  John sometimes thought it didn’t make a difference. Caleb was unreachable in so many ways.

  They went into the kitchen.

  “You remember when we first came here?” Sepela asked him. She took a container out of the pantry and put it on the table. She batted Liz’s hand away. “No, those are for you to take to work. I’ve got more here.”

  Liz beamed.

  “There was a boy in your class,” Sepela continued. “A skinny little boy. Tyrone.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, one day you asked me to make more sandwiches, so you could share them with Tyrone.” Sepela set a plate of coconut slice onto the table. “I asked you why. Do you remember what you said?”

  “Because Tyrone’s mother didn’t give him anything for lunch.”

  Sepela nodded. “And you’d been giving him yours and going hungry instead. Did you know that when I told your father that story, he was so proud of you that he cried?”

  A lump rose in John’s throat. “No, you never told me that.”

  “You were always like that,” Sepela said. “Always looking out for the smaller ones, always making sure nobody got hurt. Like a mama bird, a little fafa.”

  “Ma,” John said, and shook his head.

  Liz looked at him curiously.

  John ignored her and ate his slice.

  Was that why he was still working in Child Protection? Because there was some part of him that still needed to watch out for the smaller ones? Maybe it was. And maybe, just like with Tyrone, he couldn’t walk away from Caleb until he’d fixed the problem. Except it would take more to fix Caleb than some spare sandwiches.

  Jesus, he still couldn’t believe they’d got parole. Why did that have to come now, on top of everything else?

  Sepela set a coffee down in front of him and patted him on the shoulder. “You work too hard, John. You too, Liz.”

  Right on cue, John’s phone rang. He went into the hallway to answer it. “Faimu.”

  A chink of light appeared under Jessie’s closed door, then vanished again. She was still awake too, and obviously didn’t want to see him.

  “John, it’s Aaron.”

  “What are you still doing there?”

  Aaron sighed. “Yeah, we’re about to knock over a search warrant for a secondary crime scene. Want to help us out?”

  “Where do you want us?”

  “We’ll meet you at the Hungry Jack’s on Wembley Road and go in together from there.”

  “Okay,” John said. “We’re about ten minutes away. See you there.” He ended the call and leaned in the kitchen doorway. “Liz, we have to go. Search warrant for the homicide.”

  “Thanks for the slice, Mrs. Faimu,” Liz said. “I’ll get the container back to John.”

  Sepela gave her a quick hug. “You be careful, both of you.”

  John kissed her on the top of the head. “Try and get some sleep, Ma.”

  They headed outside to the car and hadn’t even made it to the main road before Liz asked what she’d been dying to ask inside.

  “What’s a—” Liz made a face. “I want to say falafel.”

  John kept his eyes on the road. “Fafa. It’s short for fa’afafine. It’s a Samoan thing.”

  “Well, durr.” Liz snorted. “Seriously, don’t make me Google it because I would never be able to spell it.”

  John sighed. “I don’t consider myself fa’afafine.”

  “What is it?” A serious note had crept into Liz’s voice. “If you want to tell me. You don’t have to.”

  “A fa’afafine is a boy who is like a girl,” John said at last.

  “Like trans?” Liz asked.

  “No,” John said. “Not necessarily trans, or even gay, though they can be. Mostly these days I think they are. Traditionally, it was a boy who was raised to do girls’ work, and who acted like a girl. It’s like a third gender. There’s not really a word for it in English, but I guess it corresponds best with non-binary.”

  “Huh.”

  John could almost hear her brain ticking over. “It’s not like it’s Samoan for camp.”

  “Lucky,” Liz said, “because you are so far from camp we’d have to send out a search party.”

  John snorted. “My dad’s cousin back in Samoa is fa’afafine. Six days a week he dresses like a woman, and on Sundays he smashes heads together when he plays footy. It’s not like he wears drag, though, because he’s not a man wearing a woman’s clothes, he’s fa’afafine. Some wear women’s clothes, some don’t. Some sleep with men, some don’t.”

  “Is he gay?” Liz asked. “Wait, scratch that. He’s a fafa…shit.”

  “Fa’afafine,” John said. “He doesn’t identify as a gay man, even though he lives with a man, because he’s not a man who is attracted to men. He’s a third gender.”

  “But you’re not?”

  “I’m a man who sleeps with men.” He shrugged. “Maybe if I’d been raised in Samoa I would think differently, I don’t know, but I’ve always felt like a gay man.”

  “Well, at least I can spell that one.”

  John shook his head at her and rolled his eyes, and concentrated on driving.

  One search warrant, one cold cheeseburger and six hours later, John finally fell into bed and slept like he hadn’t for days.

  Five nights down, two to go.

  Chapter Four

  One of the nurses had given Caleb a radio. John had to take it off him to get his attention, and even then his gaze kept fixing on the radio instead of John.

  “Caleb. Look at me, mate.”

  He lifted his face. Sticking plaster, bruises, and a knot of black stitches in the corner of his lip.

  “Caleb, your dad is here to see you.”

  “My dad?”

  John put a hand on Caleb’s arm. “We talked about this, remember?”

  Jesus, Darren Fletcher would have broken down walls to get here, but he’d waited. Twelve long days he’d waited for a moment he’d never really believed would come.

  “He’s just going to come in and say hello,” John said.

  The door, left open a fraction, squeaked as Darren came in.

  “Hello, Caleb.” Darren’s voice shook on that unfamiliar name.

  Caleb grabbed for John’s hand. “I don’t know who that is. Don’t make me go with him.”

  “It’s okay,” John told him. He couldn’t look at Darren. “Nobody’s going to make you do anything.”

  On Tuesday afternoon John drove down to the Gold Coast hinterland to visit Darren and Caleb. Their house was a large renovated Queenslander relocated from Brisbane and raised to legal level. It was built in downstairs with a bar and entertainment area that Darren rarely used. The upstairs was hugged by a wide v
eranda. Wooden plantation shutters let the light and the breeze into the house from the veranda. It was a hell of a nice house, way out of John’s budget even if he lived a dozen lifetimes at his current rate of pay, and the views from the front veranda reached all the way to the coast. It was somewhere John usually liked to visit but he wasn’t looking forward to it today, and not just because Caleb was always so off-kilter after an episode.

  Darren met him at the front door and put a beer into his hand.

  “I shouldn’t,” John said, but it was a weak protest.

  “You can crash in the spare room, John. You’re always welcome here.”

  “How’s Caleb?”

  “Sleeping,” Darren said. He frowned slightly. “You okay?”

  Shit. There was no good way to say it, so John dived right in: “Ethan Gray is out on parole at the end of the month.”

  Darren blanched. “Where?”

  “He’ll be living in Toowoomba,” John said. “I can’t tell you where.”

  “No,” Darren agreed, his face slack with shock. “He was supposed to get ten years, John.”

  “I know.”

  Gray’s good behaviour behind bars counted for shit as far as John was concerned, in comparison to the behaviour that had got him sent there in the first place.

  “He’s recanted,” John said. “Renounced, whatever. And if he tries to make contact with anyone who gave evidence against the group, or anyone from the group, he’s straight back in prison.” He sighed. “And it’s not just him.”

  “Who else?”

  “Leon Harrison,” John said. “Ben Quartermain. And Analise.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Darren said.

  “Yeah,” John said, and followed him inside, because what else was there to say?

  They walked quietly through the sunlit house. The casement windows were all open, letting in the breeze, showing off the view down the hills toward the distant glittering sprawl of the Gold Coast.

  Caleb’s door was shut.

  They went out onto the back deck.

  John had spent a lot of time on Darren Fletcher’s back deck; a lot of long days that had stretched into afternoons and then into evenings. It was almost dusk now. The late afternoon light was golden, burnishing the back lawn and painting the narrow eucalypts in a glowing haze. As John looked down toward where the lawn gave way to brush and scrub, searching for the narrow track that cut through to the creek that ran along the bottom boundary of the property, a flock of rainbow lorikeets wheeled across the pink, cloud-streaked sky.