Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

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Constable Leonard Smith had been temporarily attached to the Broome Police Station for the purpose of locating a runaway white youth. The three-day search sent him on a thousand kilometer circuit of the monsoon-soaked Kimberley outback. Now, on this hot and rainy Monday afternoon, he splashed his well-used Toyota 4Runner down the Cape Leveque Road to report a successful outcome to Senior Sergeant Dougald.

Between walls of thick brush, the long stretch of red mud was mostly empty. Broome’s white population sought refuge from the rain in the town’s taverns, where pool tables and alcohol helped them ignore the steady drum on corrugated iron roofs. The coming of the Dry in autumn meant sunshine. It meant money and the new faces of increasing numbers of tourists. It meant talk of a world beyond the vacant line of the Indian Ocean or the equally flat horizon of the Roebuck Plains.

Most Aborigines — Yawuru and remnants of other skin groups — called the town “Rubibi,” and did their drinking under trees scattered in its small parks. Wet season or Dry, you could see them sitting, lying down, passed out, like shadows in the shadows. Shadows on the earth, shadows on the soul. Shadow people. That’s what crossed Leonard’s mind as he jounced toward a woman whose wooly hair was streaked with gray and whose cotton dress was painted to her skinny shape by rain to show that she wore no undergarments. She lurched drunkenly into the track and Leonard swerved, fighting the wheels’ slip in the mud.

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