Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Farm

He went back in 2017. In a hire car, alone, on a Tuesday. After the ban, when there was nothing else in the diary and Australia had become a country where every second phone call went unreturned.

The sign was still there. It needed paint.

Neville was eighty-one and didn't come out of the shed for ten minutes, which Jamie understood.

Gail made tea. The three of them sat in the kitchen where the man from the bank had sat, and nobody mentioned the Federal Court of Australia.

Then his father said, out of nowhere, halfway down the second cup:

"You right for money?"

And Jamie McIntyre — described in Hansard as a conman, seven million dollars gone past five schemes into places Deloitte could not follow, a man who had paid a seven-figure fee to stand next to a film star for five minutes — looked across the table.

"Yeah, Dad. I'm right."

"Because we've got a bit put by. Not much."

"I'm right."

That night he stood at the bottom of the driveway in the cold with the hire car ticking behind him and looked at the sign for a long time.

W-E-S-T.

If you call it that for long enough, love, people start to believe it.

He was on a plane to Denpasar nine days later.