Jackie had spoken to her father about it, complaining about how crime seemed to be spiralling out of control. Stanton Rose had been an undercover cop in Kings Cross in the eighties, so if anyone knew the score, he did. He argued that things weren’t worse now; just different. Back then organised crime did their business discreetly. If they had a problem, someone quietly disappeared. The new lot were less subtle. They killed in broad daylight and didn’t care who saw them do it.

  Meanwhile, at work, things were tense. Police Commissioner Janine Liddell was under fire and fighting for her professional life. A woman, after all, and the drive-bys were taking place on her watch. To make matters worse, Liddell’s people had handled communications badly. Vultures, in the shape of deputy commissioners, circled overhead. Unless Liddell had a win, and soon, she’d be gone.

  So today the Hawks were mounting surprise raids on targets all over the city. The idea was to give the crims a shot of the same aggro they handed out and keep pressuring them until they backed off.

  The enhanced strike force gathered on Level 14, home of the Raptors. There they were divided into crews of five. Jackie’s partner, Detective Sergeant Jason Kinsella, had been allocated to Phil de Bruin’s group. When Jackie arrived Kinsella was already there, hidden behind his helmet, goggles and gloves. Jackie was assigned to another group. Although she was senior – as acting inspector she was filling Nick Galanis’s chair while he detoxed up the coast – today she’d be one of the guys, deferring to a tactical expert.

  Kinsella gave Jackie a boy scout salute and climbed into his van. Jackie kitted herself in full attack regalia. She adjusted her bulletproof vest, put on a helmet and mask and joined a minibus headed for Penrith.

  The sun was just coming up when they got there. Two of the guys, one carrying a steel battering ram, banged on the door of a red-brick house fronted by a ragged lawn dotted with a tricycle and swing. They didn’t need the battering ram. The door was cracked open by a wildly bearded man, name Younis Mansour, whose pale, hairy belly peered out from between his T-shirt and Y-fronts.

  ‘What the fuck?’ was all he could manage.

  Two cops stayed with him and a third went inside. He came back out with a woman and two small boys in tow, the woman wailing, the kids silent, bowed. They waited on the lawn while Jackie and another cop, a Raptor guy she didn’t know, went exploring.

  They found what they were looking for in a cavity behind a panel in the kid’s bedroom, a mess of Lego pieces and Minion-patterned sheets on a tubular double bunk. The cache yielded guns, big plastic ziplock bags of pills, a couple of sports bags. Jackie took an armful of guns and pills, carried them out to the van, came back for the sports bags.

  When she got there, she saw her fellow searcher bending low over the bottom bunk. His back was to her and his big body, made bulkier by the riot gear, was obscuring what he was up to, but Jackie could see he was busy with one of the sports bags. He’d unzipped it. It was filled with cash.

  ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’ she said.

  He jumped as if he’d been shot, swung around. His face shield was lifted, his mask pulled down, and Jackie could see he was pale-skinned, stubbled, his jaw underslung, protruding. It made him look stupid.

  His cheeks were mottled with red. Guilt? Anger?

  Jackie didn’t wait to find out. ‘I’m going to report you,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘People like you give us a bad name.’

  ‘I wasn’t –’ he began, hoarse. ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

  She didn’t believe him. Everything, her cop’s instinct, told her he’d been about to pocket some of what they’d found.

  ‘Listen,’ he said now, ‘I was checking for explosives.’

  ‘Yeah, right. You’re talking to Inspector Rose. Your name?’ Raptor members were identified by number only. His was 13.

  ‘Check my pockets. Have a look if you don’t believe me.’ He lifted his arms, said with desperation, ‘Jesus, this’ll end me right here.’

  What to do? Yes or no? She knew cops who would join in, take the money. Payoff for the grief of the job and no skin off anyone’s nose. But that wasn’t what being a cop was about, not as far as Jackie was concerned. Yes, policing had its grey areas, something she’d learned over the years. There were times you looked the other way. This, however, was something else. What this guy was doing was straight-out illegal, and being a cop meant living by the law.

  She considered her options. If she did take this further, how would she prove his intention? She’d shown up before he had a chance to steal anything, and it would be her word against his. For a long moment she teetered, then she said, ‘Okay then. Zip it up. I’ll take the other bag and follow you out. Name?’

  ‘Lindsay Gillespie. Senior Constable.’ He’d taken his gloves off, yet still his fingers fumbled with the zip.

  Jackie said, ‘Come on, constable. I’ll follow you out.’ She let him pass. She’d have a quiet word later with de Bruin, leader of the strike force and Gillespie’s supervisor. Let him know.

  They went outside and slung the bags into the bus. The rest of the crew were exchanging high-fives, planning celebratory drinks. Invited Jackie, who said she’d see. Constable Gillespie took care to look the other way.

  ***

  She was on her way back when her phone rang. The screen told her it was Chief Inspector Brad Harwood, her boss while she was filling in for Nick Galanis. Harwood said, ‘Where are you?’ He sounded tense.

  ‘With Strike Force Hawk. Heading back now. What’s up?’

  A moment’s silence, as if Harwood was weighing up whether to answer. But he couldn’t contain himself. ‘Keep this quiet, but they just found Belle Fitzgerald.’

  On the tip of Jackie’s tongue to ask him if he was kidding, but she bit it back. Harwood, from what she could see, liked to be taken seriously. He was new, young, a shooting star imported from South Australia. Clever, but looking for glory and keen to impress. They’d only worked together a couple of months and she felt he was wary of her, of her greater experience and, of course, her father behind her. She didn’t know whether he was for or against her, so better to defer, at least until she got his measure. She said instead, ‘How do they know?’

  ‘They’re not sure,’ Harwood said, ‘but it looks right. They found a skeleton in a grave – I mean on top of the coffin. There were remnants of a coat. The coat was orange and apparently Fitzgerald was wearing something like it when she went missing. They wouldn’t have made the connection except for TV, that unsolved crimes thing.’

  Jackie knew what he meant. Great Australian Mysteries was a ten-part series. Each part focused on an unsolved crime, usually murder, usually stressing how police in the state in question had failed the public. The show was a sore point with homicide divisions everywhere.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Harwood, ‘a couple of weeks ago they ran an episode on Belle Fitzgerald. As if the country hasn’t heard enough about her. One of the locals watched it and put two and two together.’ Then, as if he realised he was having a conversation when he should have been giving orders, he switched. ‘I came in when I heard. My office, soon as you get here.’

  ***

  Level 8, the open-plan area that was Homicide’s HQ, was almost deserted on a Sunday, but still Harwood’s office door was shut. Jackie knocked. He said, ‘Come.’ Must have got that from a cop show.

  Harwood was waiting behind his desk, tapping his fingers, looking as if someone had gone over him with a polishing cloth. Gym-fit and clear-eyed, he could have auditioned for the role of junior SS officer in a World War II film. His tightly wound, nervy energy had earned him the nickname Energizer, after the battery bunny. Work-wise, he had a mixed reputation. He’d earned his stripes in policy, not on the street. Rumour was he’d been brought in to streamline Homicide and was spending time in the job to see what could be got rid of. People were wary.

  Now he half-rose, decided against, motioned Jackie to the visitor’s chair and clasped his hands as if to keep them still. He didn’t mention the raid, instead said, ‘I’ve been on the phone with the big guns. The commissioner.’ He paused for dramatic emphasis. ‘The Fitzgerald thing. We’re giving you the case.’

  ‘Belle Fitzgerald? But she went missing what, forty years ago? It’s for Unsolved.’

  ‘Thirty-seven.’ Harwood shook his head. ‘Not Unsolved. Not politically advisable.’

  He had a point. The Unsolved Homicide Team was in disarray. They were swamped beyond belief, with at least four hundred unsolved cases on file. They were also on the nose. A revival of interest into gay hate crimes dating back to the seventies revealed documents lost, evidence disappeared, investigations ignored. Given TV shows like Great Australian Mysteries, dropping Unsolved under the radar was hardly surprising. Still, it didn’t explain Harwood’s choice. ‘Boss,’ said Jackie, trying to stay respectful, ‘why me? We’ve got the drive-bys, as well as everything else.’

  Harwood’s hands were busy rubbing together. He caught himself, stopped. ‘Rose. My observations are you’re a professional and reliable officer. You take your work seriously and I feel this very public project will empower you to step up to opportunities hitherto unavailable.’

  Empower you to step up to opportunities hitherto unavailable? What sort of bullshit management-speak was that? Harwood’s bureaucratic background was showing, and he must have realised it. He met Jackie’s straight, clear gaze and, to his credit, lowered his eyes.

  ‘Listen, Rose,’ he said. ‘Belle Fitzgerald’s disappearance is one of the biggest cases this country has ever known. Up there with the dingo, but because it’s never been solved, it hasn’t gone away. Once the media hear we’ve found her – if it’s her – all hell will break loose.’

  Harwood’s eyes shone. He forced himself to slow down, poked his head forward and said, tone confidential, ‘You’re right. This happened nearly forty years ago. Everybody knows Belle Fitzgerald was murdered, probably by organised crime, maybe even by the cops working for them. Most of the people involved are dead or missing. So while we’ll have a good look at the case, we don’t have the resources to go at it forever. We have to be seen to be doing something, and I need an officer who can walk a tightrope between what the media expect and what’s possible. I think you can handle it. Plus …’

  Jackie waited. She guessed what was coming. ‘Plus your father was a cop at the Cross at the time.’ He screwed up his face. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Yes, Jackie knew. To describe her father as a cop at the Cross was more than an understatement. It was blasphemy. Stanton Rose hadn’t just been a cop. He’d been Australia’s supercop, the cop who’d busted the Cross wide open.

  Kings Cross, once a bohemian, raffish neighbourhood, had long ago morphed into the Soho of Sydney, a 24/7 magnet of entertainment, strip clubs, restaurants and fast-food outlets. It was the city’s epicentre of vice, a network of corruption held together by criminals and politicians and businessmen of various stripes. And cops, oiling the way for them. Everyone knew how corrupt the Kings Cross cops were, but enquiry after enquiry failed to make a dent.

  Then a keen politician got on people’s backs and the Feds, the National Crime Authority, sent Stanton ‘Rosie’ Rose in, undercover, to Kings Cross Police Station. On the surface he was one of them, another crooked cop. In reality he was gathering evidence, preparing the ground for the Royal Commission that eventually cleaned the place up. Stanton Rose worked in the Cross for four years, and every day of those four years he walked a tightrope between life and death. One false move and he would have been history.

  No false moves. He succeeded. They gave him the Commissioner’s Award for Valour, the National Police Service Medal and, later, topped those off with an Order of Australia. There were books about him, a documentary. He featured on podcasts, in recruitment drives, even did some motivational speaking.

  There were rumours, of course. Every so often someone would claim Stanton Rose was as bent as the rest of them, only cleverer. General opinion disagreed. Stanton Rose was a hero, even after all this time. Jackie sometimes felt she spent her whole life either defending him or living in his gigantic shadow.

  As, for example, now. A beleaguered commissioner, looking for a PR win, something bright and shiny to divert attention from her failure to stop the drive-bys. And wasn’t this a perfect solution? A case they didn’t even have to solve, a case where they could trot out their showpiece, Stanton Rose. Jackie was there as bait, to hook him in.

  Harwood was too impatient to wait for her reaction. ‘The commissioner thinks it’s a great story. Father and daughter working the same case, all these years later.’

  Jackie sighed mentally. Her first instinct was to push back, but she couldn’t find the argument. It wasn’t unprecedented to rope in retired cops on unsolved cases, and Stanton, not averse to the spotlight, would love this one. Why not? It might be fun to be involved in some policing together, the two of them, a team.

  On the other hand she wanted, just for once, to be valued for herself, to come up and out of the shadow of her famous father. So how to respond? She could hardly refuse the commissioner. What grated wasn’t so much them using her to land Stanton Rose, but Harwood’s assumption that she’d go along with a smoke-and-mirrors exercise. She was a detective, after all, not some public relations flunky. If what they’d found really was Belle Fitzgerald then maybe, working with her father, she would uncover something leading to who knew what? The killer? Imagine solving this case, of all cases.

  Bugger Harwood and his need to be seen to be doing something. If they were going to make her do this, she’d give it her best shot. What’s more, she’d make her father take it seriously too. After all, it would bring him more glory. Glory for her as well, she couldn’t deny it. And at the same time she’d make him proud, show him what she was capable of.

  Even more important, she realised, getting excited now, if she solved this case she’d get justice for Belle Fitzgerald, whose murderer had been unnamed for so long.

  Meanwhile, Harwood was talking. ‘We agreed, me and the commissioner, that you should approach your father in the first instance, gauge his interest. We’ll contact him as soon as we confirm identity.’ He started making end-of-meeting movements, added, ‘Given the publicity, I want two officers on this.’

  Jackie said, ‘I’ll take Kinsella.’

  Harwood tightened his lips, making them disappear. He didn’t like Kinsella, who enjoyed teetering on the edge of acceptable. ‘Thought he was seconded to Strike Force Hawk?’

  ‘Yes, like me. But it means we don’t have any homicide cases on the go. Gupta’s taken some of mine and Robertson and Kaur have got the rest.’ Gupta was Inspector Sylvia Gupta. Kyle Robertson and Cathy Kaur were Jackie’s other two sergeants and they were juggling Kinsella’s workload as well as their own.

  Harwood conceded. ‘Okay. Get down there. Talk to your father and let me know if there are problems with him coming on board. I’ll word up the commissioner, and we’ll contact him more formally tomorrow. And phone me as soon as you know something. Anything.’

  ‘On my way.’

  ***

  Kinsella, back from his strike force raid, drove them to the site. Dark-haired and loping, he’d been Jackie’s partner for three years. He was a good cop. Could be moody, but he was smart and dependable, and he and Jackie were close.

  When you worked with someone every day you got to know all about them, but with Kinsella there were gaps. He had no-go zones, and one of them was his love-life. He was open about his divorce and his daughter, who was on the autism spectrum, but it ended there. Kinsella was an attractive man and, as far as Jackie knew, straight. She guessed he had a steady run of girlfriends, but he never mentioned them. In response she kept to herself her own casual flings, as well as her affair a few months ago with Schalk Lourens, the visiting South African cop. Kinsella must have seen what was going on, but she’d felt a tension between him and Schalk and hadn’t wanted complications.

  Now she turned to look at him. ‘Kinsella? You know what happened to Belle Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Belle Fitzgerald? I know she disappeared, but long before my time. More your generation.’ He grinned at himself in the rear-view mirror. Kinsella was seven years younger than Jackie and gave her grief about it.

  She rolled her eyes at him and said, ‘Okay. It goes like this. Belle Fitzgerald was a rich girl from the North Shore who decided to live in the Cross. To slum it with the locals. She bought a house in Catherine Street.’

  ‘I know about Catherine Street,’ Kinsella said. ‘Wasn’t that where the green bans took off?’

  ‘Nope. That was ten years earlier, in the mid-seventies. Victoria Street. You know, just down from the Coca-Cola sign. It was a poor area then and most of the people there rented. A developer decided the street was perfect for high-rise blocks and all he had to do was get rid of the renters. But the locals and the unions banded together to stop him. It was pretty fierce. There were riots, sieges, a kidnapping even. And yes, that’s where the green bans started.’

  Kinsella, stopped at a traffic light, murmured, ‘Interesting. Will there be an exam?’

  ‘Shut up. In Belle Fitzgerald’s time, in the eighties, another developer came along, this time in Catherine Street. He wanted to put in a fancy hotel and gentrify the street. Like before, it would mean evicting the people who lived there. There was another protest movement to stop this development. I think Belle Fitzgerald started it, and it didn’t endear her to the powers that be.’