CHAPTER ONE

      JARROD took the new exit off the main Brisbane to Ipswich highway and approached the roundabout. There weren’t many people about but he remembered that at certain times of the day this area could become chock-a-block with local traffic.

      The small shopping centre had mushroomed in the four years he’d been away and he grimaced. It was hardly the sleepy little town it had been when his father had first brought him here when he had been a troubled thirteen-year-old.

      He accelerated out of the turn and took the right fork past the Honour Stone. On his right was the small group of businesses that used to constitute the sum total of the village’s commercial centre. Groceries. Fruit shop. Drapery. Bank.

      A car shot out of the parking area in front of the shops and sped up the hill. That much hadn’t changed. Disaster Alley they’d half-jokingly called it. One car tried to leave and other shoppers vied aggressively for the vacant parking space.

      He followed the winding road lined with houses that ranged from the wooden Queenslanders with their wide verandas to the aesthetic angles of architectural designs in brick and tile. Rolling paddocks had now well and truly become sprawling suburbia.

      At least the fifty acres around his father’s home would still be intact. His father would never sell his land. Apart from the one block he’d sold to his best friend, Geoff Grayson. And his wife. Why wouldn’t his father want Geoff Grayson’s wife nearby? he asked himself bitterly.

      Pushing a surge of painful memories out of his mind, he increased the speed of the car, for the first time wanting to see the large old house that had been home to him for his adolescence. And that need overcame his reluctance to revisit his father and stepmother-the family he had turned his back on four years ago.

      His father. He’d never managed to call Peter Maclean that. And yet Peter Maclean was his biological father. A mere accident of conception, one of nature’s jokes, he reflected wryly. without bitterness.

      He’d learned the truth about his parentage just before his mother died of cancer. She’d told him of the brief affair she’d had with the handsome Queenslander. Peter Maclean had been visiting Western Australia as a consulting engineer and his mother had been the temporary secretary assigned to him.

      Three weeks later Peter Maclean had left for home, unaware that the young woman he’d spent most of his time with in Perth was pregnant. His mother had had no inclination to contact his father and had decided to raise her son alone.

      And she’d done her best to do so. When he’d questioned his mother about his absent father she had told him his father was dead, killed in a construction-site accident before he was bom.

      The construction-site accident had been partially true, he’d learned later. The accident had happened after he was born but his father had not been killed: Peter Maclean had returned to the west some years later only to be very badly injured when a mobile crane collapsed on a building he was working on.

      At first he’d been blazingly angry when his mother had told him the truth-that his father was alive. He’d been angry with everyone, especially with his mother for lying to him and for getting ill. And he’d been angry with the man he’d seen as shirking his responsibilities.

      His anger had driven him to reckless behaviour. He’d played truant, become wild and uncontrollable, and he’d had a run-in with the local police. It had been the local police sergeant who had contacted his father when his mother had died.

      In retrospect he had to admire Peter Maclean. It must have come as something of a shock to discover