Drainland by Iain Ryan

Author:Iain Ryan [Ryan, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780994312129
Published: 2016-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

20

Thursday, September 9, 2004

Romano arrived at the station at dawn. She read the Bachelard kid’s notebook and dragged on a cigarette. Smoking in her office was definitely a perk.

Bachelard looked like a mess on paper. His scrawl screamed anxiety, addiction, madness. In the early pages, he switched interchangeably between an Asian dialect and English—sentences started in English and turned, lists included both—but later, there were long, more orderly sections purely in the foreign language. Romano couldn’t read a word of it.

Her gut told her:

Letters.

Memos.

Prose.

She made her own notes. At the back of Bachelard’s book was the list Harris mentioned, the phone directory.

As soon as nine o’clock hit, she started running the numbers. To a person, they connected to the media. Someone from the Courier Mail answered one number, an editor from The Australian Magazine answered another. An intern from a news desk picked up, then a fact-checker for a politico website, then a freelancer, an editor, a proof-reader. None of them had heard of Thomas Bachelard. One of the numbers looked a little different—not a phone number but something else. She searched around. Same digits and arrangement as an Australian business number. The tax office had a directory for those and she looked it up. The rest tumbled out.

Bachelard was a sole trader, registered three years back under the business name David Marshall. Romano tried the pen name online and there he was: David Marshall, freelance poker writer. Marshall/Bachelard travelled all over the world writing about gambling. The kid worked extensively in Macau, China. He was smarter than he looked. A lot smarter.

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