The Beauty Is in the Walking by James Moloney Page B

Monday that was all it needed for the biggest headline I’ve ever seen.
    POLICE TO
    INTERVIEW
    SUSPECT
    The front page didn’t name Mahmoud Rais, describing the suspect as ‘a student at Palmerston High School’ instead, but everyone on Facebook knew who he was. It did name Mrs Bagnold. I’d been wondering all weekend why she hadn’t gone to the police earlier and here was the answer: she’d left Palmerston on Monday for kidney dialysis and didn’t hear about Charlotte until she returned on Thursday night.
    I never read The Advocate ; it was for olds like Mum and Dad and for that very reason everything it said seemedmore considered and legitimate than the bullshit all over the Net. When I sat down at the kitchen table Mum looked across at me with a smart-arse look on her face.
    â€˜What?’ I said.
    â€˜Is that the boy you stood up for on Friday?’
    â€˜It doesn’t prove a thing,’ I snapped at her in a tone that would have earned a clip over the ear if Dad had been there.
    At morning tea, when I complained to my group about jumping to conclusions and getting the wrong idea about religion, I was calm, I was logical, I laid out the facts. Svenson would have applauded from the background if he’d been there.
    â€˜You should be one of those nerds on the cop shows,’ said Dan.
    â€˜He’s not good looking enough for TV,’ Mitch said with a shove at my shoulder.
    Amy jumped to my defence. ‘Jacob would look good in a lab coat,’ and she winked at me, letting the others see, even though none of them would understand what lay hidden behind it.
    I was serious, but they didn’t take me seriously, except Amy who sensed how important the whole thing had become to me, even if she didn’t know why. Did I even know?
    At lunch, the guys went straight to the oval and Amy had a social committee meeting. I sat at the picnic table, now dragged into the shade because the summer was hotting up, and wondered if I should just leave theMahmoud thing alone. I’d never said a word to him and the only connection I’d ever made with the guy was because of the fight.
    I was still making up my mind when Chloe slipped onto the seat opposite me and it wasn’t hard to guess what she wanted to talk about.
    â€˜You’ve seen all that stuff on Facebook, I suppose,’ I said.
    â€˜It’s pathetic,’ she snapped. ‘Soraya rang me yesterday. Jacob, she’s so upset. Her parents have had to turn off their phones. She’s not at school today, either, and you can understand why.’
    She paused to let me take in the news. What could I say?
    Straightening in the seat she said, ‘Mahmoud had been at the soccer field on Sandy Creek Road. It’s the only place in town with goal posts, apparently. His little brother was with him, Jacob, only that woman didn’t see him ’cause of the fence. It wasn’t even properly dark.’
    â€˜But Charlotte was killed after midnight. It was in the paper.’
    She glared at me across the table. ‘Exactly.’
    After school, I left my bag on the rack and walked round to the lane where Mahmoud had been seen. The Bagnold’s house was halfway along and sure enough, it had a fence that came up to my shoulder. It was the school fence on the other side that grabbed my attention, though. It had to be three metres high and, with no crossbar, climbing overwould mean wobbling precariously on the floppy cyclone wire. I walked further, all the way to the corner, with eyes peeled for holes in the wire, but it was a new fence – the Ag farm especially had to be careful about sheep finding a way through. Mahmoud couldn’t have entered the farm from this side and what would he have done with his brother, anyway?
    Time to move on. The same high fence stretched all the way across the back of the farm and the only gate was off a dead-end street with a couple of houses on it. The gate