Chapter One

There was a sign at the bottom of the driveway and the sign said WEST BROADVIEW, and that was the first thing Jamie Neville McIntyre ever learned to read.

It was a good name. That was the thing about it. It was a name that sounded like considerably more than it was. West suggested frontier. Broad suggested acreage. View suggested you would be standing somewhere high, looking out across something worth the looking.

In fact the property was eight hundred and forty hectares of tired granite country between Glen Innes and Inverell, where the topsoil gave up and went to rock at forty centimetres, where the frost came in April and stayed till October, and from the house you could see precisely one thing, which was more of the same.

His father had not named it. His father's father had not named it. Some optimist in the 1890s had hammered that sign into the ground and every McIntyre since had lived inside the gap between the name and the land.

Jamie understood that gap before he understood anything else.

He was four, sitting on the front step in shorts that had been Dennis's and before Dennis somebody's cousin's, and he sounded the letters out the way his mother had taught him. W-E-S-T.

"What's it mean, Mum?"

Gail McIntyre was hanging washing. She had a peg in her mouth, three children under ten, and a husband in the machinery shed with a broken header and a bottle, and she did not have a great deal of patience that afternoon.

"It means this is our place."

"But it's not broad."

She took the peg out of her mouth and looked at her youngest, and for the rest of her life she would remember that she laughed.

"No," she said. "No, it's not. But if you call it that for long enough, love, people start to believe it."

Fifty-one years later, at four o'clock in the morning, in a rented villa in Canggu, with rain coming down on a tin awning and a line of cocaine on a glass table and an Indonesian police file open with his name on it, he would finish her sentence for her, and it would be the only honest thing he ever said out loud.

But that is the last chapter.

First the sign, and the boy on the step, and W-E-S-T.