The Cradock Porch

The manifest directed them to 27 Bettong Road, New Norfolk, and neither sister recognised the significance of the address until the street name was spoken aloud. Lance Cradock — Wendy Cramer's older brother, estranged from the family since a Christmas gathering eighteen months earlier had detonated into a confrontation whose casualties included the pavlova, the front door wreath, and every relationship in the room. Wendy's ruling had been absolute: no contact. The sisters had complied with varying degrees of conviction, Gladys maintaining a single covert visit after the birth of Lance's daughter Isabel, Beatrix severing ties with the thoroughness she applied to everything she had decided was finished. That the manifest — retrieved from the pocket of a murdered delivery driver by hands that would never be clean of the act — now required one of them to stand on Lance Cradock's porch and perform the final hours of a dead man's working day was the kind of coincidence that felt authored rather than random.

Beatrix parked the truck several houses short of the address. The decision was operational — a delivery vehicle outside a relative's home during a murder cover-up constituted the precise category of connectable detail that investigators built cases from — but the distance also served Beatrix's private need to remain absent from the encounter. New Norfolk itself was a town she had been navigating around since the repossession of Timeless Treasures, and every street carried the residue of a life she had invested in and lost. She was not going to walk up Lance Cradock's path. She was not going to perform pleasantries on a porch in a town that had already taken everything she had been willing to offer it. Gladys would deliver. Beatrix would wait.

What Gladys deposited on the porch at 27 Bettong Road was not merely a parcel but a small catalogue of forensic liability. She dropped the box on approach, denting one corner and embedding gravel into the cardboard. She vomited on the doorstep — triggered by a dirty nappy left in a plastic bag beside the door, the smell breaching whatever threshold her body had been maintaining since the roadside saltbush — and the vomit splashed the package she had just dropped. She left a dented, stained parcel beside a bag of infant waste on the porch of a house where a baby cried inside and no adult appeared, and she fled without knocking or confirming delivery. The manifest's purpose — to create the impression that Joel Gibbons had completed his route — depended on deliveries that appeared professional and unremarkable. What Gladys left behind was neither. If Lance Cradock examined the parcel closely enough to notice the damage and the staining, if he thought to mention it to anyone, if the delivery company's investigation ever reached this address, the evidence on his porch would raise exactly the kind of question the entire exercise was designed to prevent.

In the cab, Beatrix's phone delivered a complication the morning had not yet produced. Leigh Trogaris — the man whose fragments of Guardian knowledge had been Beatrix's private framework for understanding Clivilius, the relationship she had not disclosed to Gladys and did not intend to — sent a message whose brevity carried more weight than its two sentences warranted. He wanted to meet. Urgently. The usual place, two o'clock. No context, no explanation, no indication of whether the urgency related to Joel, to the Portal, to threats Beatrix could not yet map, or to something entirely outside the crisis she was currently embedded in. She responded with the careful neutrality of a woman who understood that text messages constituted evidence and that every word she committed to a screen was a word that might later be read by someone she had not intended to receive it. She typed "Danger?" and deleted it before sending. She sent "Okay" instead — a single word that committed her to the meeting without committing her to anything else.

The summons from Leigh operated on a different axis than the morning's events, and Beatrix recognised this even as she sat in a truck containing cargo she was delivering on behalf of a dead man. Leigh's knowledge of the Guardian network preceded and exceeded anything the Cramer sisters had encountered through Luke Smith. His urgency might connect to Joel's murder, or it might connect to something else entirely — another thread in a system whose scale Beatrix was only beginning to apprehend. The text sat in her phone like a second manifest, directing her toward an obligation she could not share with Gladys and could not defer without consequences she was unable to calculate.

Gladys returned to the cab flushed, unsteady, and insistent that they reverse direction rather than drive past the house. Beatrix did not ask what had happened on the porch. The request to avoid the address carried the same quality as Gladys's lie about Cody in the Branscombe Road hallway — a concealment whose specifics were less important than the fact of its existence. The sisters were operating in parallel modes of secrecy now: Gladys hiding whatever had occurred at the delivery, Beatrix hiding Leigh's summons and the meeting it demanded. The manifest sat between them on the seat, three addresses reduced to two, its purpose slowly being fulfilled by women whose capacity to fulfil it diminished with every stop.