As many of you may already know, when I am not trying to right strata wrongs as JimmyT, I am writing crime novels under the name James Dunbar (my actual first two names).

My latest novel Twisted River came out last month and I have managed to secure a special deal for Flat Chat readers. First, there is an extract below, to give you a taste of the book. Then you can get a 20 per cent discount if you order it through Booktopia and use our special code.

Twisted River is a dark psychological thriller in which a young middle-aged couple return from holiday to find their dog-sitter and dog have disappeared, their phones have been cut off, their credit cards cancelled and their bank account emptied. Oh, and their flat has been rented on Airbnb.

Who would set out to destroy them in such a deliberate fashion. And why? As they start to untangle the mess their lives have become, things get worse – a lot worse – until the very foundations of their relationship, friendships and careers are undermined.

There’s also a dog and we occasionally get brief glimpses into what she’s thinking. The extract below will give you a taste of the style of the novel which I have to say may be the best thing I have ever written. But it’s just the very start of the story.

If you like the book, you can buy it by clicking on the link HERE or on the ad on this page and save yourself 20 percent off the cover price by putting in the code TWISTED20 at the Checkout.

NB: You log into Booktopia and register (which is free) then order the book at their store discount price ($26.99) then at Checkout, add the code and get an extra 20 per cent off, so instead of paying $32.99, you are paying $21.99 – effectively getting free postage and a bit more.

And here’s a bonus – If you want to give a copy as a Christmas present, send me a note (to ma**@**********on.com) with the name of the recipient (and their favourite crime writers or TV shows) and I will email you a personalised letter that you can slip into the book.

Now, sit back and enjoy this extract … and see if you can do so without the urge to check your bank account, credit card or phone.

TWISTED RIVER (EXTRACT)

WARNING: There is some VERY strong language in this extract.
If you are likely to be offended, please don’t read.

PROLOGUE

Nothing has gone right since Rory and Cate Porter stepped off the plane at Sydney’s International Airport this morning. More than that, everything has gone wrong.

But now, as they drag their overloaded suitcases up the three flights of wooden stairs to their flat in Kiama, at least they are home and can sort out the toxic, tangled mess their lives have become. Their dog-sitter, Celine, didn’t turn up to meet them at the airport and hasn’t been contactable all day.

Reaching the top landing, Cate listens for their dog Iris’s barks and yelps, more in hope than expectation. She knocks on the door because it feels weirdly like they are intruding even though it’s their home. More nothing. Rory feels the knot in his stomach take another twist. Cate raises her eyebrows and proffers the keys that she’s held ready from the second set of stairs. Rory nods his agreement.

‘She’s probably out with Iris,’ Cate mutters. Then, ‘It won’t turn.’

‘Wiggle it.’

‘I have wiggled it. This isn’t even the one that needs a wiggle.’

‘Let me try,’ Rory says, nudging Cate aside gently, putting his hand on the key. He twists it, pulls it back a fraction, tries again. Decides it needed a little more oomph.

He looks closely at the new, shiny, unscratched keyhole. ‘She’s changed the locks.’

CHAPTER 1

Nine hours earlier

Going with the flow of disembarking passengers at Sydney International Airport, Rory Porter feels sick. It’s not the airline breakfast, which is never great regardless of which carrier you fly with. It’s not the bumpier than usual descent; he’s endured worse and suffered no ill effects. No, this deepening unease was first felt back in Paris when their emails stopped working and their computer log-ins didn’t log in. Since then, this feeling, not exactly panic, more a low-burn anxiety, has been gnawing at Rory’s gut. It has a name: dread. And it’s not a feeling you want to combine with international travel. Would he look nervous passing through all the check-in and security scans? Would the tension in his neck and jaw mark him out for special attention? Rory has known this combination of fear and experience before, although it’s been so long, it hits him like an angry word from an old friend.

Maybe he’s overreacting. He’ll soon know; certainty awaits at the end of the long walk from the plane, down the airbridge, into the bleakly clean, endless corridors of the terminal.

He joins the converging rivers of grim determination, shoulder to shoulder with other travellers who are doubtless calculating the time it will take to get their passports checked by a machine; ‘click here if you are carrying a deadly disease and wish to be deported before you have even arrived’. Then they’ll add however long it will take to choose 2.25 litres of duty-free alcohol, times two if you are travelling with a friend or mutual enabler. Any well-travelled drunk’s spouse will know this ritual well, where the need to drink less alcohol after an indulgent holiday meets the lure of a bargain.

Then there’s the self-serve immigration gates and the queues forming behind unseasoned travellers who didn’t know you needed a pre-check ticket, or an Australian passport, or to take your hat and glasses off. Subtract all that from the time it takes for your luggage to spill out on to the carousel, and you still have to wait for your bags.

Rory is worried. In the jostling queue for the first-step immigration machine, he’s in front of a stocky man dressed in a full matching tracksuit, which would make him look like a member of the Australian national football team if he wasn’t a bit too old and way too fat. The man seems to be trying to edge past, as if he has a more urgent need to get to the empty, static luggage carousel, nudging his holdall along the floor with his foot until it passes Rory’s carry-on bag. Rory turns around and stares, thinking about his current predicament.

Although the knitted brows and narrowed eyes of his thinking face combine into an expression that would pass for suppressed rage on any other human, Rory’s actual angry face is almost blank: cold, expressionless and still, like a grim emoji. But his involuntary glower does the trick and the wannabe Socceroo takes half a step back. Then, having been rewarded with the slip of paper that will allow him to access an automatic passport control gate – wasn’t it quicker when they had humans armed with rubber stamps and supercilious stares? – Rory now turns to the question of whether his and Cate’s credit cards, which stopped working in Saigon, will be revived by being back on Australian soil.

He grabs a bottle of overpriced Japanese whiskey as a token purchase in the unavoidable duty-free shop and looks over at Cate, who is stabbing angrily at the screen of her mobile phone, as if more violent prodding will dispatch its signals farther and faster.

This is not a good sign. The burning bubble in Rory’s gut twists and surges like the blob in a lava lamp. They’d been about to leave Paris when incoming emails had dried up and outgoing messages bounced back or refused to leave their laptops. The hours most travellers spend in Charles de Gaulle Airport lounges, hoovering down tiny croissants and free wine, he and Cate had wasted on unanswered lost password requests to their internet providers, website hosts and email platforms. Then they arrived in Saigon to discover their overnight hotel booking had been cancelled, leading to, among other hassles, the non-arrival of the promised car transfer from the airport.

Cate, the eternal optimist, said there must have been a glitch in a system somewhere, all for their own good. One little password misidentified and there had been a domino effect as, one by one, all the things they depended on from the cyberverse had been shut down and closed off to them. All it took, she said, was one failed log-in and an overzealous system puts you into quarantine. ‘The internet doesn’t trust us,’ she’d added. ‘We can fix it when we get home.’

Rory knows it’s more than that. He’d checked his phone as soon as the plane landed. He thought they might get a signal as soon as they were on terra firma but had known in his heart that they wouldn’t.

‘Nothing?’ he mouths as she looks up from her screen. She shrugs and shakes her head.

The cashier at the end of the duty-free pay queue coughs theatrically. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, pointing at the screen on the credit card reader, which announces, Transaction Failed.

Before Rory can feign surprise, the machine zips out a slip of paper that confirms the non-payment and adds an accusatory Invalid Credit Card.

‘Here we go!’ he mumbles, beckoning Cate over.

The cashier looks at the queue that is lengthening impatiently behind Rory and sighs, then forces a smile.

‘What’s up?’ Cate says, joining Rory at the checkout. She sees the warning signals. A brief tightening of the jaw, the slightest flaring of the nostrils, an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes, followed by a deep breath in through his nose and a long slow exhale through clenched teeth. Anger has been quelled in his well-practised routine.

‘The card is invalid,’ the cashier says.

Cate nods ‘no worries’ but the cashier’s already strained smile is fading fast. Cate reaches in her uber-fake designer bag, purchased for a lot less than the real thing but still at a rip-off price from a street market in Florence. She passes another credit card over the terminal and it responds with the same refusal.

‘Have you been using the cards overseas?’ the sales assistant asks.

‘Only a dozen times every day for the past six weeks,’ Cate says.

‘Well, there you go, then,’ the checkout woman says, a tilt of her head emphasising the obviousness of her conclusion. ‘Maybe the banks spotted some suspicious transactions and closed them down, to be on the safe side.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Cate says as she waves the bottle away.

The woman doesn’t look at her as she places the spirits on a side shelf and says, a little too loudly, ‘Next, please!’

‘Think of this as a boost to your plan to drink less,’ Cate says to Rory as they walk towards the immigration gates.

‘Just when I need it more,’ he replies. ‘Heard from Celine yet?’

‘No phone service,’ Cate says. ‘No texts or emails.’

‘There must be coverage. It’s a fucking airport.’

‘Oh, there’s coverage, but no service. Just a message from the phone company telling me to contact them – number provided, which I can’t call because there’s no service.’

‘Try using their app. It might connect via the airport wifi.’

Cate silently chides herself and makes the call, her side of which descends into a series of confused, irritated and occasionally outraged responses.

‘No, I can’t give you another f . . . credit card number,’ she finally says into the phone, glares at it, and ends the call. Rory looks at her.

‘My mobile has been cancelled. And we owe a shitload on overseas calls and data.’ She pauses, gathering her breath. ‘You were supposed to set up that global thing.’

‘Global roaming,’ he says. ‘I did.’

‘Well, it was switched off and now we owe a ton of money and I have no phone.’

Rory pulls his own phone out of his bag. Turns it off and on and waits till its screen comes back to life. He taps a few keys.

‘Hmm,’ he says, suspicions confirmed.

Before they left, they’d declined, albeit half-heartedly, when their dog-sitter Celine had said she’d pick them up in their own car when they got back.

‘We can take the train,’ they’d protested unconvincingly, in unison. The twenty-minute ride to Sydney’s Central Station followed by two hours–plus travelling south to their home in the small seaside town of Kiama made logistical sense, but not so much for people who were pre-exhausted by a long flight.

‘Three hours in the train after twenty-four hours in a plane,’ Celine had scolded in her alluringly persuasive French accent. ‘C’est foux . . . crazy, non?’

Rory and Cate had conceded with relieved smiles that it was, indeed, foux.

Later, standing in the short-term pick-up area for an hour after collecting their bags – nowhere near first off – Rory and Cate have rehearsed every excuse on Celine’s behalf, including the simple fact that she wouldn’t have received their reminder emails, telling her when they were arriving. She could be waiting at home now, wondering if they’d decided to extend their trip.

***

This is not our car. There are front seats, back seats, but then the back is open and empty. Sleen usually makes me ride out there when she’s driving but now she’s gone away and locked me in here. Locked inside. I don’t like this. I don’t like her but I won’t bark too much because that makes her angry. Angrier. Sleen is angry a lot. Sniff through the gap at the top of the window. Is that . . . Rory? Rory and Cate? Okay, now I’m going to bark.

***

There’s no reason Rory and Cate should notice the young woman sitting on a bench near the café outside Sydney Airport Arrivals, even though her eyes are fixed firmly on them as they wrestle their suitcases back through the doors to the Arrivals concourse. For a start, she’s wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, which may be obscuring her features but attract no undue attention; they’re almost a uniform as the recently landed adjust to the Australian sun. Even if her features weren’t hidden, they probably wouldn’t recognise her. Her hair is short and blonde rather than long and black. Her face is different too. She looks like just another girl, waiting for someone or something, watching the world go by on a streaky early morning.

She jumps to her feet as they turn towards the airport terminal and follows, cautiously, at a distance, curious to see what they do next. They stop and look at their wallets. She can’t stop too. That would be too obvious. They turn and now they are walking back, directly towards her. They look sad and confused. This is a challenge, a real test. She forces herself to relax but they barely notice her, beyond manoeuvring their suitcases to let her pass.

She smiles to herself as she strolls. If they’d kept going, like her, they would have been able to hear the distant sound of a dog barking from inside an old crew-cab ute.

Her ute. Their dog.

***

‘We’ve probably missed her,’ Cate says. ‘We shouldn’t have stopped to buy booze.’

‘Getting duty-free would have made zero difference,’ Rory replies. ‘Or not getting it. We had to wait for our bags anyway. At least they arrived. I’d have bet against that.’

‘You always catastrophise everything,’ Cate says. ‘There’s probably a simple explanation.’

‘There is. The emails, the credit cards, the phones, now this. We’ve been fucked over.’

‘Coincidence. It’s always a conspiracy with you.’

‘No such thing as coincidence,’ Rory says. ‘Seemingly random acts are the result of someone’s conscious or subconscious decision, and they all have consequences that are entirely logical.’

‘What fortune cookie did you get that out of?’

Rory lets it go, putting her liverish response down to a combination of their predicament and her new policy of not eating or drinking anything except water while flying, to ward off jet lag. He catches their fleeting reflection in a sliding door. They could not have looked more forlorn if they were on the cover of a magazine called Thirty-Something Weary Traveller.

Cate’s travel clothes are a jumble of practicality. Yoga pants for the flight, a thick woolly cardigan in case it got too cold, an anonymous T-shirt in case it got too warm, slip-on trainers that could easily be slipped off. But her clothes, while unmatched, are top quality, as if she’s kitted herself out in a charity shop in an upmarket suburb. About five foot six in old money, or 168 centimetres in the new, she has a heart-shaped face with the kind of cute nose Hollywood stars would (and do) pay big bucks for. Her generous though natural lips are ever ready to smile. It’s a combination that’s stunning in its subtlety. She can, as she does now, look a hanging thread away from approximating a bag lady. But Rory calls her a shape-shifter, and for good reason. Give her ten minutes with a small make-up bag, a brush for her thick, auburn-tinted, shoulder-length hair and a tight dress that enhances what it doesn’t hide, and she could have stepped off a catwalk (albeit for short models).

Rory’s clothes, by way of contrast, hover between military combat and earnest hiking, the key characteristics being multiple pockets and comfort. That means he always has on his person anything they might need. It also means he frequently can’t recall which pocket holds his keys, wallet or phone, an irritation almost compensated by occasionally finding a stray banknote or packet of mints that he’d long forgotten. Somewhere in this backpacker’s jumble sale of sartorial inelegance, there lurks a fit and firm man in his prime, sporting a tangle of shortish, unevenly cut brown hair. When Cate first met him, he was muscly and cut; now he’s strong but smooth.

‘You should start doing weights again,’ she’d once chided, hankering for the body she first found in her bed after a hard night’s clubbing.

‘Done more than my share,’ he’d said. ‘In the army,’ he’d added as an afterthought.

Cate glowers at her phone, threatening rather than willing it to ring, buzz, burp or flash. No service. No emails. No texts. Nothing incoming nor outgoing.

‘OK, Uber to the city, sort out our phones and credit cards and then get the train home,’ Cate says and it is Rory’s turn to prod his phone, hoping that this time the airport’s wifi will come to their rescue. He stops, looks hard at the screen and pokes it again.

‘What?’ Kate demands.

‘It says the account has been cancelled.’

‘Credit card?’ she asks.

He nods.

‘Can you uncancel it?’

‘I can try, but . . .’

‘You’ll need a credit card,’ she says.

***

Rory and Cate are standing at the turnstiles above the airport train line, having discovered that their Opal travel cards are also no longer working. They consider using WhatsApp to contact friends who might rescue them but it’s way too early in the morning to expect anyone they know who also has WhatsApp to have woken and switched off their ‘do not disturbs’.

‘Hey, don’t you always have an emergency fifty dollar note in that fancy wallet of yours?’ Cate asks.

Rory thinks and smiles. ‘My secret surprise fifty.’ He extracts the compact pop-up credit card holder from his combat pants leg pocket and unfolds it to reveal the banknote tucked inside.

‘How could you have forgotten that?’

‘It’s because I forget it that it’s still there,’ he replies, as she plucks the bill from his hand and heads for the ticket machines.

‘At least we know Iris is okay,’ Cate says, breaking the awkward silence that has landed on them as they wait for the train back to the city.

Rory wants to say, ‘Do we?’ but chooses not to raise the spectre of what might have happened to their dog, if – judging by her non-appearance at the airport – Celine has proved to be less reliable than they’d hoped. A lot less reliable.

‘We got that video of her playing in the park,’ Cate says. ‘She seems happy.’

Rory thinks, Seemed, not seems, but he says nothing. The video had arrived a week ago.

A couple of young lads get on the train at Mascot. One is tall and rangy, the other short and emaciated. Both are in their late teens to early twenties and wear ripped jeans – a smug insult to those who can’t afford new clothes, in Rory’s book. The tall one sports a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Dip me in honey and feed me to the lesbians’. The smaller one wears a food-stained muscle shirt, only without the muscles to justify it. They peer at the screen of a phone; judging by the sound, they’re streaming a standup comedy special by a comedian who specialises in obscenity, misogyny and combinations thereof. Cate senses Rory tensing and squeezes his arm. Rory sighs, reaches into a pocket and pulls out the cheap earbuds they’d been given so they could hear the audio commentary when he and Cate took an open-topped bus tour of Paris by night.

‘Guys!’ he says, offering the earbuds to the comedy fans.

‘The fuck?’ the taller one says.

‘The fuck?’ his smaller companion repeats.

‘Use the earphones or turn the volume down,’ Rory says. ‘Show a bit of respect.’

‘Fuck you, old man,’ the tall one says. ‘What are you? The fucking phone police?’

‘Phone police?’ the small one repeats with a laugh.

‘No, I’m not any kind of police,’ Rory says. ‘I’m just a guy who thinks people should show consideration to other people, especially passengers on a train.’

‘Well, I’m just a guy who thinks old fucks like you should mind their own business and keep their fucking mouths shut,’ the tall one says.

‘Fucking mouth shut,’ the smaller one says as Rory processes being called ‘old’ when he’s only halfway through his thirties.

A late middle-aged Asian woman, knitting in the corner of the carriage, does an excellent job of not seeing or hearing any of this.

‘Mind your tongue,’ Cate says.

‘I wouldn’t mind your tongue round my dick,’ the tall one says, again with an echo from his chortling companion.

‘We should change carriages,’ Cate says.

‘Let’s get off at Museum,’ Rory replies.

‘With those stairs and these cases?’ Cate protests. ‘We can get off at Town Hall, it’s nearer the bank and . . . well. Everything.’

‘Museum,’ Rory says. ‘I’m not putting up with any more of this.’

‘Yeah, better do what your old man says,’ says the tall one. ‘You got a real pussy there.’

‘Pussy there.’ The smaller one giggles. His older companion turns up the volume on the phone and stares at Rory defiantly as the tinny obscenities briefly draw the attention of the knitter.

Rory returns the stare.

Cate squeezes his arm again. ‘Breathe,’ she says.

At Central Station, a couple of people get into the carriage but quickly move away when they pick up on both the aural assault and the prickling tension between Rory and the two yobs. At Museum, Rory and Cate heave their bags on to the platform.

‘If you ever want a real man,’ the tall one calls after Cate.

‘Stay here,’ Rory says. ‘I forgot my hat.’ He jumps back on the train just before the doors close. The train moves off and Cate sees Rory through the window as he moves inside the carriage, retrieves his baseball cap and pulls it down over his eyes. Then he and the train are gone, into the tunnel.

Cate checks her phone again, just in case. Rory has picked a great time to leave her, looking every bit like an abandoned lover. She has two large suitcases and two carry-on bags to wrangle, and no way of calling for help, so she doesn’t have any choice but to wait for him. However, it’s barely five minutes before a train going in the other direction stops then pulls away to reveal Rory standing on the other platform. He grins and waves, then jogs off towards the stairs that will get him to her safely.

Twisted River, by James Dunbar, is published by Echo Publishing and is available from all good bookshops with a recommended retail price of $32.99 or a special discount through Booktopia for $21.99 using the code TWISTED20.