So why was Alistair here?

Alistair. He’d asked her a question. She needed to concentrate. What had he asked? Did she know what had happened? She did. Or part of it.

‘I’ve read a brief report. I was told that there was a plane crash here yesterday.’

‘That’s it.’ He still wasn’t looking at her, but concentrating instead on the track, as if he feared more wallabies. Which was probably reasonable. But it certainly augmented the tension.

‘So what do you know?’ Sarah probed, and despite the atmosphere there was no choice for him but to answer. The only way through this was to be businesslike.

‘A Cessna took off from Cairns yesterday afternoon,’ he told her. ‘The pilot lodged a flight plan that was pretty vague. As far as the authorities have figured the plane made an un-scheduled stop somewhere north of Cairns-no one’s quite sure where-and then came on over to this side of the peninsula. The plane crashed into the rocks on the beach just south of the town. One of the local fishing crews saw it go down, but if they hadn’t seen it then it might well never have been discovered. It’s wild country out here. But they were seen. The local police sergeant took a team out-including me-and we found the pilot. Dead.’

She nodded. ‘You reported that he probably wasn’t killed by the crash?’

‘That’s the odd thing.’ He shrugged, still carefully not looking at her. ‘Oh, sure, he’s been knocked about a bit, but it seems he tried to make a crash landing on the beach and he darn near succeeded. There’s a rock sticking out from the sand that he couldn’t have seen from the air. The plane’s wing caught and spun the whole thing into the cliff. So the aircraft is a bit smashed up, but not completely. He must have slowed almost to a stop before he hit.’