Feeling too exposed to think properly he retreated back to where Stevie lay. Anger boiled his blood. He needed to release it. To hurt Lorcan. Looking at the quad the bastard had just purchased, he pulled out his penknife and slashed the tyres, cursing Lorcan to hell as he crippled it.
It was time to consider his next move. He could return to the house and wait for an opportunity to shoot Lorcan, maybe even threaten him with the fact that he could testify to him killing Stevie to lure him out. Now, for the first time, he held all the cards. But the cost had been too great. His friend’s death. He squeezed off the tear that leaked from his eye. This was no time to cry. It was time to decide.
Another option was to wait for Ian to return. Use their numerical advantage against Lorcan. But that had already failed once. Tragically.
In the end there was really only one choice: make a run for it. With the gold.
He glanced at Stevie’s body in the bloody dirt, the sun already cooking his dead flesh. A tremendous guilt coursed through his veins for what had happened but there was something else. Something that had been brewing inside him ever since he agreed to this bloody scheme: a cold determination to profit from it. It was time for the living to stay alive.
Fishing the security box key from Stevie’s pocket, he loaded up the rest of the gold into Lorcan’s canvas bag. The three-way split was now two, half and half, so he didn’t feel bad about taking it all. Fuck lan. Where was his protection when they had needed it most? He was meant to stop the bullets. Or take them. But Stevie had instead.
He filled the bag, threw in the rifle and lugged it onto his back. It was manageable but awkward, the short straps biting into his shoulders. He needed to get out. Looking at the quad he cursed himself. He regretted slashing the tyres now. Another fuck-up in this town of fuck-ups.
104 Mike Andrews
He added some bottles of water to his haul of gold. And the rest of the Chunky Peanut Butter KitKats. His two-bars-a-day habit. He affixed the load until it was more comfortable on his back then climbed onto the quad and turned the engine. It spat into life, buzzing underneath him. If he took it steadily he might be able to use it to get out of Kallayee. Far enough so that he could swap it for another mode of transport. All that mattered right now was getting the fuck out of Dodge.
Using his foot to click it into gear he tried the throttle. The engine roared, trying to drag the bike like a donkey-owner at the seaside, but the flat tyres failed to rotate. He gave it more throttle but there was no progress, the engine spluttering frustration at being unable to go anywhere.
With the rising stench of burning oil, he shut it off. His rash temper had foiled his best chance of escape. Now he was wasting time. If the quad wasn’t going to help him, he needed to set off on foot. He didn’t know how much time until—
‘What the fuck?’
The voice and the disruptive weight of the bag on his back almost caused him to fall off the quad. He turned towards it. Amidst the struggle and roar of the engine, Ian had returned, his truck and the Maguire’s Toyota parked neatly on the road. Ian was staring at him; Naiyana was staring at Stevie’s body.
He scrambled off the bike. From the bag he pulled out the rifle. Ian took up a defensive stance, his head cocked.
‘Mike?’
‘It wasn’t me. It was Lorcan.’
Ian narrowed his eyes at this, glancing at Stevie’s body.
‘Lorcan wouldn’t do this,’ said Naiyana, shaking as she spoke.
‘He did,’ said Mike, hearing nothing but fear and guilt in his voice, his mouth drying up without gum, the companion that steadied his nerves.
‘So what’s in the bag?’ asked Ian, flicking his eyes towards the coal bunker. ‘Where were you going?’
Mike tried to straighten up and look threatening but still felt tiny compared to Ian.
‘Fuck you! You were meant to be protecting us. You got Stevie killed!’
‘Put down the gun, Mike. Let’s talk.’
‘Fuck talking!’
‘That gold is ours. It’s not yours to take.’
Mike laughed. A single, cold laugh that was as dead as the air. ‘There’s only two of us now. You were selling half this morning, weren’t you? Take that money, I’ll take this. I’m getting out,’ he said, the rifle swinging towards Naiyana.
He didn’t think that he squeezed the trigger. Maybe it was the waving of the gun that did it. Or the pressure. Or his fingers swelling up. Whatever it was, the rifle went off.
He heard the scream and the report, frozen to the spot as if all his momentum was consumed within the bullet. Then he felt the barrel being nudged out of the way and a fist strike his jaw, causing his world to deafen in shock and pain.
105 Naiyana
She heard the bullet. She even swore that she could see it in slow motion, but that was her eyes and brain adding falsities to the storyline, filling in the gaps. It zipped past her, the echo deafening her moments after.
She staggered back a couple of steps but watched Ian leap forward, punching Mike in the jaw. They both went down, fighting over the rifle.
In truth it wasn’t much of a fight. Mike was too out of shape and looked as if he had never traded blows in his whole life. He took a catalogue of brutal punches as Ian tried to rip the rifle from his hands. A blow to the gut caused one of his hands to release its grip. Another forced the second away. Scrambling to his feet, Ian gasped for air, aiming the rifle at Mike who was wheezing in the dirt, coughing and moaning.
Ian glanced at her.
‘Are you okay?’
She nodded. Her heart was thumping like a bass drum in her chest but yes, she was okay. There was even something else. A warmth, a glow that welled up inside her that someone had stood up for her in a time of crisis. Over the past week she had been standing up for Lorcan. He’d used her as a human shield. His own wife. Now the crucial decisions were in Ian’s hands. It felt good to not be in charge. At least for the moment. She didn’t know what would happen next. Things couldn’t go back to how they were but she hoped he had a plan. Or that they could come up with one. A way out. Maybe Lorcan could fill in for Stevie, make as much money as they could and then she’d leave. With Ian. Not Lorcan. That ship had sailed.
Ian was now gazing at Stevie’s body, the rifle still aimed at Mike. She watched as he squeezed his eyes tight as if coming to a decision, before squeezing the trigger and shooting Mike in the head.
He turned to her. Her brain went into scramble mode. Was he going to kill her next? Remove her from the equation. And then her family? Did she mean that little to him? Was she a fool to think she did?
He began to walk towards her. She glanced around but there was nowhere to go. She had made her choice. The wrong choice. A fatal choice.
‘Please. Ian, I—’
But he just wrapped his arm around her, holding her close, drowning out everything that had happened in the last few minutes, enveloped in the damp darkness of his chest. He kissed the top of her head.
‘It’s okay, Nee. It’s okay.’
106 Naiyana
13 Days Ago
Curiosity had briefly taken over but without the safety of the moonlight, the darkness made her tense. The brick-walled, tin-topped shack was in disrepair, the humming causing the roof to gently rattle like a one-note orchestra. Again she chided herself for prowling around alone at night. Whatever the noise was, Lorcan wasn’t the cause. It would do until tomorrow. She put her hand out feeling for an inner wall to guide her way out but only found a wooden stanchion.
Which immediately gave way.
Followed by a terrible screech. From all around. The building was collapsing.
On her.
She dropped to her knees, throwing her arms over her head and neck. An instinctive reaction. And entirely useless. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for impact. Disjointed thoughts of Dylan alone in bed flashed through her mind; then Lorcan; then her family and her last bitter words to them. Love, hurt and anger bubbled around her skull
as if trying to construct an emotional shell to shield her from the upcoming pain. It wouldn’t help. She was going to die out here, alone, victim of her own stupidity.
Something caught hold of the back of her jumper. Suddenly she was in the air, dragged from the building and dumped with a thud on the ground outside.
Her eyes remained closed, absorbing the shock of the landing. She heard the squeal of tin against brick, twisting and bending as it fell, reaching a thunderous crescendo. Then silence. Only now did she dare open her eyes. The first thing she saw was dust, fluttering absently towards the moonlight. Then the building she’d just been inside – the front wall caved in, the tin roof broken and bent across the rotten wooden beams that had supported it for so long, resting at a low angle against the back wall. If she were still inside, she’d be dead. Crushed. She had no doubt about that.
‘Are you okay?’
A breathy voice came from behind her, startling her. Heart still racing, she scrabbled away, back towards the collapsed building. A single thought arose; the house might have killed her, but whatever had saved her might be worse. At what she hoped was a safe distance, she turned to look back, arms reflexively held in front of her, to ward off attack.
The moonlight revealed a tall, bearded figure, not an ounce of fat on him, nothing left to waste, his angled jawbone set tight. Whereas she was petrified, he looked assured. As if this was his typical nightly gig. Saving unknown women from collapsed buildings. In the middle of nowhere. What was he doing here? In Kallayee. At night. Her thoughts, still adjusting to surviving the near-death experience, were scrambled. Was he someone from Hurton? One of Nikos’s or Chester’s buddies searching for her and Lorcan? Maybe someone who wanted to go off-radar like they were. Or someone on the run. He could be anyone.
He could be dangerous.
She needed to go back to the house, lock herself inside and wait for Lorcan to come home. Though she had lowered her hands, they were still shaking. Her legs too, as if the collapse of the building had generated some sort of mini-earthquake inside her. She made to stand up but although her heart was pumping furiously the oxygenated blood failed to reach the necessary muscles.
‘Are you okay?’ the stranger asked again, his voice soft, concerned.
He inched closer, as if approaching a wary animal. She finally caught sight of his full face: handsome, all angles as if cut from stone, his eyes blue but wondrously pale in the moonlight. She was drawn to something powerful in them. In him. Powerful enough to drag her from a collapsing building. A shiver ran through her as if by looking into them she had become caught in his trap, frozen into inaction.
‘I’m okay,’ she replied, though she felt far from it.
‘You need to watch out in these buildings.’
That she agreed with. But the questions remained. Who was he and why he was here? Questions she wanted to voice but couldn’t. As if some inner sense of survival was preventing her. The intractable fear that warned her that, if she asked, she would learn the horrible truth. That she hadn’t escaped the building at all. That he was in fact Death, come to lead her away. The Grim Reaper in jeans and a shirt stained with dust.
He held his hand out to her. ‘Can you stand?’
She looked at his hand, the tendons pronounced, crawling in the moonlight. She wanted to but felt unable to refuse.
She held out her own. After what seemed like for ever, their hands touched, sparking another wave of fear coursing through her that eventually settled deep in her stomach, hollowing her out.
The hand was not cold. It was warm and calloused. Very human.
Then suddenly she was on her feet, hoisted as if an expert puppeteer had brought a marionette to life. Though now upright, her legs felt wooden, the knees unable to lock, on the verge of collapse.
‘I think we need to get you home. See to that cut shoulder,’ said the stranger, wrapping his arm around her, practically holding her up now. Naiyana did nothing to prevent it. The fear that had invaded her stomach had suddenly turned to warmth. She suddenly felt safe. In a way she hadn’t felt since they’d come to Kallayee.
And if she was honest, for a long time before that.
‘Thank you for…’ Naiyana felt her legs turn to jelly again, his arm bearing her weight. She couldn’t finish the sentence. What she had been saved from suddenly hit her hard.
‘It’s okay. You’re just lucky I was there.’
‘But why were you there?’
With her concentration focused on staying upright and brainpower dealing with the near miss, the question slipped out.
The night turned silent again as if the whole world was awaiting the answer.
None came. He looked away, back towards the crossroads for a brief moment, the moonlight accenting his high cheekbones, before his powerful gaze returned to her, trapping her in its beam once more. Again her heart began to pound, fear taking over, the fear of knowing and not wanting to know, his arm tightly clasped to her side, his entire body seeming to envelop hers and arousing the warmth in the pit of her stomach that she now recognized as having been alien to her for years. Igniting a desire that she had considered a lost teenage memory. His scent, a fusion of sweat and a hint of bitter oil tingled her nostrils. It was earthy and raw, imbued with a danger and desire that bound itself to every atom of her being.
Still he stared at her, his answer conveyed by the clarity in his eyes rather than words. She wondered if it was mutual. She found herself hoping that he was experiencing the same rush, the same spark, she was. A spark that now raged within her, reawakening the memory of what it was like to be out of control, reawakening the yearning to rip up the rulebook and do what she wanted. Her mind cautioned her that maybe it was simply a high from having cheated death, basking in his protective hold, his urgent scent or the continued pounding of her heart, but she felt an inexorable pull towards him, complete and unmistakable and undeniable.
Once again she let herself get drawn into the magnetic pull of his eyes. She watched his gaze slide from her eyes to her mouth, then back. Locking onto hers. She knew that he felt it too.
Words couldn’t express it.
They should never have met. It was in neither of their plans.
But they had met.
They came to an agreement. To see each other again.
107 Emmaline
An illicit affair between Naiyana Maguire and Ian Kinch was her preferred theory. But it was by no means proven. Oily found it hard to believe that someone like Naiyana would have involved herself with a petty criminal like Ian, whereas Barker thought that there was some other source of foul play involved that they hadn’t yet discovered.
Over the video-conference DI Moore was adamant, her face too close to the camera, looming like a worried spectre of an old oak tree, that she wasn’t to publicly accuse Naiyana Maguire of having an affair and of wittingly or unwittingly having a hand in the death of her husband. Certainly not without any solid evidence to back it up. She summed it up in a few sentences, the subtext being for them all to say nothing.
‘Imagine you and your child have been kidnapped and put through hell, your husband murdered, only to find out that the police believe you were in on it. How would that make you feel?’
Emmaline understood her point. But she also understood what lay beneath it. Without a body, without any strong indication that she was dead – the blood on the mirror and traces on Lorcan’s clothes wasn’t considered strong enough evidence – then Naiyana Maguire could still be alive. And worse yet, she could sue for defamation. Nothing worried the boss more than the purse strings. Another reason for Emmaline not to seek promotion. The higher you climbed, defending the budget mattered more than defending against crime.
So they needed evidence that Naiyana Maguire was either dead or alive. Finding Ian Kinch might help in that.
To that end, the town of Hurton was interviewed again. Previous statements were re-examined for anything that might have been missed. A photograph of Ian Kinch was put in fron
t of Bobby Marley but the kid couldn’t say for certain that it was the man he’d seen with Naiyana.
Anand and Barker were sent out to Ulysses Hitchens for a second time but he had nothing to add aside from the extensive number of shooting stars he’d observed last night.
The net widened to include Leonora and Kalgoorlie but drew a blank there too. As if Naiyana, Dylan and Ian had disappeared into thin air.
Their former colleagues were re-interviewed but this added nothing other than more speculation, worry for Naiyana’s and Dylan’s well-being, and sympathy and shock at the murders.
Another major news story had broken overnight too, bumping the Kallayee Killings – as they were now known – to the bottom of the front page. The connection between Chester Grant’s family and Brightside Foods had been revealed and plastered all over the papers, questions now being asked about his conduct in parliament, his lobbying record, his private life, with some even drawing tentative links around the disappearance of Naiyana and Dylan Maguire and the death of her husband.
Emmaline decided that it was a good time to question him again.
* * *
Chester Grant’s office was under siege from reporters, a ring of security guards posted on the doors as if the prime minister himself was barricaded inside. Emmaline waved her credentials at the door. Zhao and Oily followed her in.
Chester Grant’s secretary didn’t even attempt to stop her from entering his office, too busy on the phone placating callers.
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