Arrival at the War Memorial Camp

The Silverton War Memorial Youth Camp occupied a clearing on the town's eastern edge where the built environment surrendered to the scrub with the particular abruptness that characterised settlements whose existence had always been provisional. The camp's infrastructure — cabins with corrugated roofs, khaki tents pitched in regimented rows, a mess hall whose weathered timbers darkened against the pale sky — had been serving the youth organisations of the far west for decades, its facilities evolving through incremental improvement rather than planned development. The ground on which it sat was the same red earth that constituted the entire region's surface, compacted by years of foot traffic into something firmer than its surroundings but still capable of producing the ochre dust clouds that any disturbance — a bus arriving, thirty pairs of boots hitting the ground, rucksacks being dragged from overhead racks — immediately generated.

The bus shuddered to a halt in a plume of this dust, the engine's final cough replaced by the sounds it had been masking throughout the journey: cicadas, the calls of magpies establishing territorial boundaries, the clang of pots from the mess hall carried on a breeze that smelled of woodsmoke and eucalyptus and the dry mineral tang of Outback earth heated past the point where moisture could survive.

The doors hissed open and the bus disgorged its contents — thirty girls in various states of readiness, their voices rising in the particular cascade that arrival produced in groups of teenagers encountering a new environment simultaneously. Windows had already been opened during the approach, faces pressed against glass, the first assessments of the camp conducted from the mobile vantage of a vehicle that was still in motion. Now, on solid ground, the assessments became physical — boots on gravel, eyes sweeping the layout, the rapid calculation of which cabin was closest, which bunk would be claimed, which features of the camp corresponded to the promises that the advance information had made.

Parents were absent. They had been left at the Trades Hall in Broken Hill, their farewell gestures — the final waves, the tightened straps, the instructions repeated for the third time — already diminishing in the memories of daughters whose attention had shifted from departure to arrival with the completeness that youth brought to all transitions. The leaders who received the girls at the camp were women — khaki-shirted, whistle-bearing, carrying the brisk competence that camp leadership demanded and that the girls would either appreciate or resist depending on their temperaments.

Mrs Thompson, the head camp leader, strode forward with the upright posture and genuine warmth of someone who had been managing camps for longer than any of her current charges had been alive. Her grey-streaked hair was tucked beneath a khaki brimmed hat, her smile producing creases that the sun and the years had established as permanent features of her face. Her welcome was delivered with the volume and clarity of a voice trained to reach the back row of any group, and the girls responded with the collective enthusiasm of people who were happy to be where they were.

Violet stepped off the bus into the heat. The transition from the bus's interior — warm, vinyl-scented, vibrating with the residual energy of the journey — to the camp's open air was immediate and enveloping. The sun struck her skin with the full weight of a September afternoon in far-west New South Wales, and the dust that the bus had displaced settled around her boots with the democratic indifference of particles that coated everything equally.

She stood with her rucksack on her shoulder and the accumulated weight of twelve days pressing against her from the inside, and she looked at the camp that had been the destination toward which every discovery, every warning, every sleepless night had been carrying her. The Silverton War Memorial Youth Camp. Silverton. The name that had threaded through the anonymous letter and Sally's journal and Barry Glasson's maps and Clarke's evasions and Ethan's warnings — all of it converging on this clearing, this collection of cabins and tents and mess hall and corrugated iron, this place where Sally Harlow's body had been found posed on open ground less than a kilometre from where Violet now stood.

The camp did not acknowledge its proximity to the murder site. Its infrastructure offered no memorial, no marker, no evidence that anything had occurred in its vicinity that might give a visitor pause. The cabins presented their weathered surfaces with the cooperative blandness of structures that served their function regardless of what occurred beyond their boundaries. The tents rippled in the breeze with the neutral compliance of canvas responding to air currents. The mess hall produced its sounds and smells with the institutional reliability of a kitchen that had been feeding groups for decades.

The camp was ordinary. The ordinariness was what made Clarke's presence extraordinary.

He stood by the cabins with his arms folded across his chest and a clipboard tucked under one arm, his posture carrying the quiet authority of a man who was accustomed to occupying institutional spaces and who had positioned himself within this one with the deliberate placement of someone who intended to be seen. He was not in uniform — his usual shirt and slacks, the clothing of a teacher on informal duty — but his presence amongst a camp of girls and women registered as anomalous regardless of the clothing he wore.

Ryan Clarke had volunteered for the camp in his capacity as a teacher associated with Broken Hill High School, whose students constituted a significant portion of the Girl Guides attending. The volunteering was documented, approved, unremarkable in the administrative record. Teachers accompanied school-affiliated camps. The practice was established and the paperwork was complete.

Clarke's reasons for being here operated on a level that the paperwork did not document.

He had been tracking the investigation's progress through channels that Barry Glasson's notebook had established — the network of mutual awareness that connected the people whose names appeared in the detective's personal records and whose shared interest in containment provided the institutional framework within which information was managed and threats were assessed. Violet Dallow had been identified as a threat. Her visit to his classroom had confirmed what her questions in previous weeks had suggested: she possessed information that exceeded what a sixteen-year-old student should have access to, and her willingness to confront him directly indicated that her pursuit of that information was not being governed by the caution that self-preservation should have imposed.

The camp placed him in proximity to the threat. The proximity was not designed to produce a specific outcome — Clarke was not a man who operated through physical confrontation, his methods being institutional and psychological rather than direct — but it ensured that his awareness of Violet's movements and contacts during the week would be maintained at a level that distance could not provide. Whatever the girl discovered or communicated during her time in Silverton, Clarke would be positioned to observe, to assess, and to report through the channels that the network maintained for exactly this purpose.

He watched the bus empty. He noted the faces he recognised — the four girls whose friendship constituted the investigative cell he had been monitoring, each one carrying different portions of the information the network needed to contain. Mandy Glasson, whose proximity to her father's work provided access to intelligence the detective had not adequately secured. Michelle Richards, whose older brother's fascination with the supernatural added a variable Clarke could not fully assess. Rebecca Monk, whose analytical intelligence made her the group's most capable processor of whatever information the others gathered. And Violet — Violet Dallow, whose persistence and courage and fundamental inability to leave dangerous subjects alone had placed her at the centre of everything.

His eyes found hers across the dust and distance. The contact lasted a fraction of a second — long enough for recognition, too brief for interpretation by any observer who was not looking for it. Clarke's expression maintained the neutrality he wore for all professional interactions, the mask indistinguishable from his face through years of practice. What the mask concealed was not anxiety or guilt but calculation — the continuous assessment of variables and probabilities that constituted his contribution to the network's operations.

Violet felt the contact. Her skin prickled with the particular frequency that Clarke's attention produced in her since the classroom confrontation — the involuntary response of a nervous system that had been conditioned by a specific encounter to react to the stimulus of a specific person's gaze. She looked away. The looking away was deliberate, a conscious override of the urge to hold the contact and return it with the defiance she had demonstrated in his classroom. The defiance was still present. The context had changed.

The friends gathered. Michelle's enthusiasm — the top bunk claimed with a vault, the theatrical groan at the mention of rules — provided the surface energy that the group required to function as ordinary campers. Mandy's contraband snacks emerged with their predictable flourish. Rebecca's dry commentary supplied the counterweight that kept the enthusiasm from tipping into performance. The dynamics were familiar, reliable, the particular chemistry of a friendship that had been running these routines for four years and that could execute them under almost any conditions.

Cabin Three received them at the bend of the track — squat, sturdy, its weathered timbers sun-bleached, its tin roof catching the afternoon light. Inside, the bunks waited in their rows, mattresses dressed, the scent of woodsmoke and canvas hanging in the still air. Sunlight entered through slatted windows and illuminated the dust motes that every movement disturbed. The cabin had hosted hundreds of girls across its decades of service, each cohort leaving traces too subtle for subsequent occupants to detect but that the timber had absorbed and retained in its grain.

Violet chose a lower bunk near the window. The sill beneath her fingers carried the grooves and knots of years of use — imperfections that previous occupants had traced during their own weeks of residence, their own whispered conversations, their own moments of looking out through this window at a camp that was simultaneously familiar to every group and unique to each one.

Through the window, across the camp, Clarke's figure was visible near the main lodge. Clipboard in hand. Posture relaxed. His head turning with the particular economy of someone whose awareness of his surroundings was conducted through peripheral vision rather than direct observation — the technique of a man who monitored without appearing to monitor, who watched without being seen to watch.

Violet let the curtain fall. The cabin's interior closed around her. Her friends' voices filled the space with the sound of girls unpacking and claiming territory and conducting the negotiations that communal living required. The sound was warm and present and belonged to a September afternoon in a camp in Silverton where nothing, from the outside, appeared to be anything other than what it was supposed to be.