Bingham Detective Stories – serie

"My failure to find that little girl will haunt me to the grave." Bingham looked at the speaker and gave his old friend a sympathetic smile. Neither spoke but each shared the same thought. What had happened to Natalie Beddoes? Little girls deserved better than to disappear at the age of six, never to be heard of again; a flash of anger appeared in Bingham's eyes. Thinking about her and remembering the photograph that had dominated the front page of every newspaper in the country for weeks, and thereafter occasionally for years, as the fruitless search took place, Bingham felt guilty at his own good fortune.

Bingham shared the feeling of exhaustion he saw in the youth's face as he relived the day his mum ran away, and that was what Bingham wanted. Soon, he hoped, memories would be stirred, old loyalties and disloyalties restored: the passing of time and the slip of the tongue. Slowly, a picture of this woman was forming in his imagination. Bingham wasn't one to be hurried. 'There will be time ... to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet'. Eliot's phrase came back to him as he sat in the family's kitchen pondering and watching the son of Helen Sanders.

On holiday in Australia, Bingham and Lina come across a stranded motorist, his car hung partway up a tree, the result of avoiding a kangaroo. Their act of kindness takes them to Yulara, the staging post for the sacred rock, Uluru, where they meet Nellie Doolan, an Aboriginal of mixed race, and, eventually, her father. While there, they are told that Helen Lewis, who runs the local Aboriginal art gallery, has gone missing. Arriving in Alice Springs, they visit a similar gallery where the owner, Marjory Fink, has also disappeared. Talking with the locals, particularly the woman’s son, Henry, and her former lover, Ben Evans, they find little cause for concern. Bingham, however, takes the view that coincidences are for Russian novels and he begins asking questions that leads to an investigation by him and Lina that takes them back and forth along the Stuart Highway, visiting the roadhouses as they go. Their search is marked throughout by an awareness of the strange and startling Aboriginal culture which leads Lina, alone in the region of the sacred rock, along the Pathways of the Dreaming and a simple truth. This is the sixth in the Bingham series of novels and the first in which he and his wife, Lina, are both involved in an investigation from the very beginning.

The couple had moved to Spain when they retired and were 'odd' in as much as they never came home. They seemed quite content in each other's company, 'always locked in each other's arms', as one of their children said to the newspapers... They were expecting friends round, but when the guests arrived at the villa there was no one to be seen. The place was completely empty, but a meal had been prepared. Various salads were waiting in the kitchen and a rabbit casserole was simmering on the stove...