Read an extract from The Bluff by Joanna Jenkins.

Read an extract from The Bluff, the new book from the bestselling author of How to Kill a Client.
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1
BEA
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Bea
A Wednesday night in June.
The night’s a thick black; the moon a sliver of silver.
Bea Baulderstone moves away from the house, across the lawn, her eyes adjusting to the dark. The roar of the football crowd from the TV fades, subsumed by the rustles and hoots of the bush. She heads for the shed, its hulk silhouetted against the Milky Way.
A wet nose on the back of her knee. She stops to pat the kelpie on the head. ‘Go back, Bryan,’ she whispers. ‘Back to the house. I’ll be okay.’ He sits. When she moves again, he stays with her.
The shed smells of hay and diesel. She feels her way along the wall beside the ute, past the saddles and bridles hanging over rails.
Well inside now, it should be safe to turn on her phone light for a moment. She needs it to choose a bike. Mountain bike. Heavy but sturdy.
Phone light off, she walks the bike out of the shed.
That’s right. They keep a rifle in a locked box on the back of the ute. Better she has it than them.
She lays the bike on the gravel farm track, carefully so there’s no clatter, opens the driver’s door, feels in the centre console, pulls out some keys. Phone torch back on, the third key opens the metal gun box behind the cabin.
Is the rifle loaded? Probably not. She feels around and finds the bullet box, unlocks it, puts some in her pocket, and slings the rifle over her shoulder.
A yell and a roar of ‘Yesss!’ from the house. The Blues must have scored a try. Great. They’ll be watching the replays for a good five minutes and yelling at the TV and the video ref. If she makes some noise as she rides past, they won’t hear her.
She mounts the bike and takes off with a wobble, past the LandCruiser parked outside the house. In the dark, she can just make out the difference between the grass and the track. Bryan trots beside her.
At this pace, the cattle grid at the fence by the road is at least five minutes away. Downhill, so she doesn’t have to pedal much.
Dark shapes mill ahead on the track. Are they cows or bulls? The bike won’t be fast enough to outrun a pissed-off bull. She calls out, as loud as she dares, ‘Scat.’
With an ungainly bound and a low moo, they jump out of the way. Cows.
A shout from the verandah, ‘Bea, Bea, where are you?’
She pedals, her breath loud and uneven.
A roar as a four-wheel-drive diesel starts and heads down the track towards her. The paddock lights up. Spotlights, one on each side of the vehicle.
The cattle grid is only a few metres ahead. She stands on the pedals as the vibrations reverberate through her, then brakes to a stop on the other side, dumps the bike in the ditch, and lies down in the long grass. The rifle is hard against her hip. She unstraps it, places it beside her, puts her arm over Bryan who has lain, tensed, against her other side and whispers, ‘Shhh’.
The vehicle drives past slowly, blaring light.
She stays still, in case they turn back.
Her hands shake as she yanks her phone from her pocket so hard it flies from her grasp before she can check whether the bars on the phone indicate she has coverage.
She spots it in the grass, the screen lit, Bryan’s red face and tongue illuminated as he looks to her for reassurance.
The car approaches again, slow, spotlights shining over the side of the road.
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2
RUTH
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Ruth
June, the following Monday.
Ruth was jiggling a teabag in a chipped mug in the lino- and laminex-encrusted space that passed for a kitchen when the bell jangled on the old cedar door. Someone had just entered the office from Myddle’s main street.
She ran her fingers through her hair. She was still getting used to the wavy layers after years of a sharply delineated bob. Shaggy dog. That’s how she felt, too: like an unkempt dog looking for a home.
Deb on reception didn’t stop the person. Whoever it was would be in front of Ruth in a moment, unvetted. Could be anyone. Wanting anything. With some wacky idea of what lawyers do. Ruth had only been filling in for the local lawyer for two months but she’d already refused some weird requests (kidnap a labrador from an ex-spouse; clean out a hoarder’s home).
She made a dash for her office so she could shut the door before they saw her.
Too late. In the hall, Ruth found a woman, wispy, like a frayed scrap of beige cotton.
The woman looked familiar. Ruth struggled to place her.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
‘I’m here to report a missing person.’
‘Who’s missing?’ said Ruth.
‘My daughter.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that.’ Ruth softened her tone. ‘But you should go to the police.’
‘I’ve tried that,’ the woman snapped. ‘He won’t listen.’
‘How old is your daughter?’ Ruth asked.
‘Seventeen.’
Ruth had met a lot of people since she’d first arrived in Myddle six months ago and their faces had blurred together in her mind: a conga line of fleeting acquaintances. She held out her hand. ‘Sorry. I should have introduced myself. I’m Ruth Dawson. I’ve taken over Harry Dunstan’s office while he’s on sabbatical.’
‘Victoria,’ said the woman, proffering limp fingers. Her accent jarred as it didn’t correlate with the shabby person in front of Ruth. It was affluent, redolent of black-tie dinners in designer frocks. This was rural Myddle—a tiny town in the verdant hinterland of the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, not Sydney’s Bellevue Hill.
‘And your daughter’s name?’ Ruth asked.
It was a long, romantic name: the first syllables a languorous ‘Bayart’; the second a clipped ‘riss’.
‘Beatrice?’ Not a name Ruth had heard in Myddle. ‘How were you thinking I could help?’ Ruth asked. She kept her voice distant, to repel any idea that she was capable of conducting a search for a missing girl.
‘You’re a lawyer. You could talk to the police about their obligations.’
‘Did they say why they wouldn’t look for her?’
‘He thinks she’s run away from me,’ Victoria said.
‘How long has she been gone?’
‘I last saw her on Wednesday morning.’
Today was Monday. So five days.
A seventeen-year-old girl had been gone for nearly a week and the police were doing nothing about it? Why would that be?
‘What do you think happened to her?’ asked Ruth.
‘I don’t know.’ Victoria’s eyes darted sideways. ‘She did hang around with some bad people. Shouldn’t someone be asking questions?’ The woman’s anger was rising and she was struggling to control the shape of her mouth.
Victoria was right. If it was Ruth’s son Jack, there would be more than questions.
Ruth made a decision she hoped she wouldn’t regret. ‘Let’s have a chat in my office,’ she said, pointing to her door.
‘Deb, can you get Victoria a cup of tea?’ Ruth called out. She moved closer to the receptionist and whispered, ‘And can you ask Troy to come into my office?’
Deb’s eyebrows shot up. But she slowly stood and walked down the hall in the direction of the kitchen.
‘What did the police say exactly?’ Ruth asked when Victoria sat down.
‘He told me she’d turn up. To stop worrying.’ Her rage seemed to rear up again, like a stallion, lashing out.
Ruth was sure she had met this woman before.
Victoria paused. She seemed to understand that if she wanted something from Ruth, she should assuage her fury. ‘I waited for her to turn up. She’d been gone longer than usual. One of the reasons why I waited so long to go to the police in the first place.’
‘What’s the other reason?’
Her foot was jiggling. ‘He doesn’t like us.’
‘The policeman? Why do you say that?’
Victoria waved the question away.
Ruth tried another tack. ‘Does your daughter have a job?’
‘She works in the chemist.’
Then it struck her. ‘Not Bea?’ Ruth said. ‘From the pharmacy.’
Finally, she realised why Victoria looked familiar. Ruth had seen her at the chemist when she’d first arrived in Myddle, just before Christmas.
‘I told her to get a better job, but she won’t.’
Poor Bea. It must be hard work having to handle this barrage of negativity.
‘And the pharmacist hasn’t seen her?’
‘She didn’t turn up to work.’
‘Who was the policeman you spoke to about her?’
‘Constable Parker,’ said Victoria.
‘Gazza?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve met them both,’ said Ruth. She’d seen Bea and Gazza at a party together, and not in a good way. She kept that to herself.
‘You don’t need a lawyer, Victoria, but I’d be happy to talk to the police if you think that would help.’
‘Thank you.’ Victoria looked down at her writhing hands. ‘I appreciate it,’ she added, almost surprised.
‘There’ll be no charge. You’re not my client. I’m not opening a file. There’s not much I can do apart from mention it to him.’ This was a community service to help a distressed woman whose anger made it hard for her to communicate with the world. Ruth stood, to make it clear to Victoria that their meeting was over, and escorted Victoria to the door to make sure she left.
It would be a simple matter to sort this out. Surely if Bea was actually missing, someone other than her mother would notice.
‘Where’s Troy?’ Ruth asked Deb.
‘Dunno,’ said Deb. ‘Gone walkabout probably.’
Deb could be depended on to drop a snide remark.
Ruth walked back to her office. She’d taken Troy on to get some work experience but, as he liked to say himself, he had a tendency to smoke-bomb. Like a magician in a disappearing act.
Ruth had seen Troy with Bea several times. He might know where the girl had gone.
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Extracted from The Bluff by Joanna Jenkins.

The Bluff
by Joanna Jenkins
An unputdownable thriller of deception and greed, The Bluff reveals an enmeshed web of family and community loyalties, set in the lush rural hinterland of east coast Australia.
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