Doom Creek

by Alan Carter

  He’s right. My timing is out, fuzzy logic. ‘But it must have been useful to you anyway.’

  The gun barrel prods deeper. His spare hand is on my left shoulder. ‘Shhhh.’

  ‘Something about Havelka linked him to you. That’s why you took more care with his disposal.’

  I’ve now realised where we are. Just over the hill, maybe a few hundred metres away, is where Latifa was found in the snare. That’s why he attacked her. He thought he’d been discovered.

  ‘The rest of Havelka. He’s somewhere around here isn’t he?’

  ‘All those people thinking he was a good man. You can’t serve in places like Angola or Vietnam and stay good.’

  ‘What came first, the bullet or the gutting?’

  ‘The bullet. He was a comrade of sorts.’

  ‘Brothers in arms, huh? That’s why you couldn’t resist copping a feel of Latifa? You had her completely to yourself. Not like Lucy, eh?’

  ‘Life isn’t black and white. Quiet now.’ The gun barrel shifts, I squeeze my eyes shut. Bracing.

  ‘Stop, Dad.’

  The pressure eases. ‘Jen? Go home, love. Stay out of this.’

  ‘You told me all this was to honour the memory of Francis. But it wasn’t, was it?’

  ‘Whose idea was it to pin it on Francis?’ The throbbing has started up at the base of my skull. I must be under stress or something. ‘Yours? Havelka’s? Batty’s? It wouldn’t have been Darren the Dupe for sure.’ Take a guess. ‘Havelka, I reckon, but you were happy to go along with it.’

  ‘Dad? Is that true?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Jen. Go home. Be with Mim.’

  ‘You’ll be wanting to keep Mim away from Grandad in a couple of years, Jen. Seriously.’

  I’m pushed facedown into the mud. ‘Is this how you want to die?’ He snarls. ‘A dog in a ditch?’ He’s got a strong grip. All that time on the land, setting snares, gutting prey. My arms flail uselessly and I’m drowning in a three-inch puddle.

  ‘Dad. Stop.’

  Muddy water in my nose and throat. Head pounding. Stars burst behind my eyes. These migraines. I’m weak as a baby.

  ‘Dad. Please.’

  ‘Yeah, Michael. Give it up.’ There’s the tearing of velcro. An exhalation of air. Latifa loosens another strap on her Kevlar vest. She took advantage of his distracting temper tantrum to make her move. I can’t see but I imagine she has the shottie at Walton’s ear.

  It doesn’t bother him. The grip on the back of my neck is as firm as ever. He’s stepping into that big fucking meaningless void he talked about and taking me with him.

  ‘Michael,’ Latifa says. ‘Stop. Now.’

  But he doesn’t and I can’t struggle anymore. It’s all gone: Vanessa, Paulie, all our cares and worries. I relax into his grip. Those stars in my skull settle and fade. The fireworks have finished and all that’s left is sweet release.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘I’d never have touched her, Jen. Never.’

  ‘I know.’

  He drops his weapon and lets me go.

  37.

  The aerial GPR scan is postponed until the weather clears. There’ll be all sorts of bodies buried out there. Miners from the gold rush too poor to warrant a headstone. Maybe other victims of the infamous Doom Creek bandits. Word is the film will be released this summer with a special preview screening at Canvastown community hall. So far the response is underwhelming; real life seems to be providing more than enough melodrama for most folk in the valley. The GPR will probably pick out plenty of pig and deer carcasses. No doubt Georges LeBlanc too. And I’d bet my last dollar on the bottom half of Karel Havelka being unearthed on the far side of the hill behind where I used to live. The track from Pelorus Bridge over to Butchers Flat branches off north past our place where, if you climb a hundred more metres, you’ll be in a great position to shoot out the neighbourhood water tanks. And it branches off south and west past Butchers Flat to connect with the Doom Creek Loop and the Wakamarina track over the Richmond Ranges to Wairau Valley.

  We don’t know for sure yet but we think Havelka merited special treatment in his disposal because he was the ringleader of the three men who preyed upon Lucy McLernon. Maybe he and Michael knew each other in a previous life. Fiends reunited in a war vets chatroom, maybe, and leaving faint traces of their relationship in cyberspace. Whatever. It was Havelka’s idea to try to divert suspicion onto Michael’s son-in-law, Francis Stilton, an otherwise blameless, devout and good man. He was on the verge of exposing the cabal’s misdeeds at Whakakitenga and bringing too much scrutiny upon them all. Francis was framed by his own father-in-law with some help from Stuart Batty. Too innocent, weak and naïve to fight it, he took his own life. Forced into a devastating family tragedy by his own complicity, Michael went about righting some wrongs and covering his tracks. But Havelka must have known his accomplices were dropping like flies and that his days were numbered. Had he been keeping a low profile in the intervening years?

  ‘Maybe that’s why he punched out Morgan Hopu’s son,’ mused Latifa. ‘Prison must have looked safer.’

  Or maybe it was pure coincidence and he just had a temper on him. News of the incident alerting Michael as to Havelka’s whereabouts.

  Havelka was no pushover but Michael’s black ops work with NZ special forces in Vietnam would have given anyone pause for thought. As a raw, keen twenty year old he used his Kiwi back-country hunting expertise to snare and gut the enemy, spreading fear where he operated and creating a buffer zone of relative security for his compadres. ‘I was good, even if it didn’t warrant a medal,’ he’d told us on the way to the cells at Blenheim. Then one day he came across a young female Viet Cong fighter caught in one of his snares and something in him went from bad to worse. ‘Never looked back after that,’ he said. He’d recognised a kindred spirit in Karel Havelka, a mercenary veteran of the Angolan civil war who’d partaken in whatever atrocity was going. Now Michael’s daughter knows the truth about him, he’s happy to be buried alive in the New Zealand prison system.

  ‘Happy to oblige,’ said Latifa. She’s agreed to some professional counselling for his attack on her. She doesn’t want anything clouding her prospective marriage to Daniel.

  There’s snow on some of the higher peaks today. I can see it from my window on the top floor at Nelson hospital. They’ve put the operation back a day. My blood pressure was up even further, I’d had another migraine, and broken the fast by accepting a warming cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich when we handed Michael over. Above all, though, I was two hours late for the surgeon’s knife, and doctors of her high regard hate to be kept waiting.

  While in here, Maxwell phones me to say that we’ve closed the book on Bryant, Cunningham, the Doomsday militia and Māhana Wellbeing Centre.

  ‘We’ve got a result on Gelder and Jaxon,’ said Maxwell. ‘Keegan wants to call it a day. In return nobody is pushing too hard on the shooting of that kid at the Lodge.’

  ‘No FOI on what the US prosecutor has on Bryant?’

  ‘Nothing, but unofficially via Keegan’s contacts there are whispers of unexplained disappearances of migrant workers from some of his Californian fruit plantations. Mainly young women. Nasty goings-on in the packing sheds. Maybe witnesses or victims will be brave enough to speak up one day. Maybe not.’

  ‘I’d lay a bet those steel rings were Bryant’s idea all along and that’s what LeBlanc had on him. You won’t need to dig too deep. Look at the online company he keeps: eugenics, misogyny. Look at the Balkan Wars. Look at Islamic State and the Yazidi. They’re going to use that place for sex slavery. We need to boot those freaks out.’

  Maxwell sighed into the phone. ‘Any weird shit Bryant and Co might be dreaming up out at Māhana isn’t illegal right now. It might be their fantasy but they’re not acting on it so far. If they do have sinister plans for after the Apocalypse it’ll probably be too late to worry anyway.’

  It’s a vision of hell but by then hell will be a relative concept
. Doing it by the book really isn’t ever going to work with these people. I shook my sore weary head. ‘Fingers crossed for a happy ending, eh?’

  Speaking of which, it turns out that Morgan Hopu couldn’t buy Charlie Evans’ farm outright because he’d left it to Denzel Haruru, the young helper who once worked there to make up for shooting one of the old man’s alpacas. But Denzel likes being a bricklayer and is happy to onsell to Hopu, figuring he and Cunningham deserve each other as neighbours. He’ll donate the proceeds to the iwi. Charlie probably would have seen the funny side. Latifa certainly does. She can’t stop laughing. ‘Morgan Hopu over your back fence. That’s what I call restorative justice.’

  No such good fortune for Thomas Hemi. Ruth has packed her bags and gone, taking the youngest with her. For her their marriage was always an article of faith which she cherished. Faith no more. Thomasland, on the wrong side of the broken bridge, population now just one. I can’t help but feel for him. God knows I’ve made some pretty stupid decisions in my life too.

  Vanessa comes into the room. Leans down and gives me a kiss. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Good as gold.’

  She examines the bed frame. ‘I suppose I could always handcuff you to the bed to stop you gallivanting.’ A wicked grin. ‘There’d be other advantages too.’ She’s happy to have me with her for at least one more day. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We’ll prepare and hope for the best and let the worst take care of itself.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The first draft of this novel was written before the horrific Christchurch mosque shootings on 15 March, 2019. Rather than rewrite to take account of these events, I chose instead to foreshadow the inevitable consequences of toxic ideology and the ready availability of military style weapons. Living in rural New Zealand, you can’t help but be aware that guns are everywhere but, unlike the US, there does not seem to be the unhealthy fetish around them. For the most part they were, they are, tools plain and simple. But somebody sometime was going to take advantage of that. It is to New Zealand’s immense credit that politicians and community alike have united to deal with the problem, to change the ownership laws, and to set the global standard for how to respond to acts of hate with genuine compassion and resolve. Now that I’m back living in Australia again, I’m acutely aware of the cultural and political differences between the two countries. Suffice to say I miss NZ big-time.

  The translation of the old te reo Māori saying: Ka pōrangi ki ngā maunga ki ngā wai matatiki, ki ngā rākau, ki ngā manu: kāhore hoki i kitea he wahine māhana was sourced from Māoridictionary.co.nz/word/15039.

  As always a huge thankyou to my editor Georgia Richter for her guidance and words of wisdom along the way and to the team at Fremantle Press for continuing to have faith in me. Thanks also to my agent Clive Newman and his ongoing efforts to promote me to the world at large. Thanks also to readers Tracy Farr, Amanda Curtin and Gaby Brown. Special mention to the indefatigable Craig Sisterson, a true champion of Kiwi ‘yeahnoir’ crime and of antipodean crime writing in general.

  Finally, of course, my wife Kath – muse, early reader and love of my life, without whom none of this would have been possible.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  NGAIO MARSH AWARD WINNER

  Sergeant Nick Chester is working for the Havelock police in the Marlborough Sounds, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. If the river isn’t flooded and the land hasn’t slipped, it’s paradise. Unless you are also hiding from a ruthless man with a grudge, in which case, remote beauty has its own kind of danger. In the last couple of weeks, two locals have vanished. Their bodies are found, but the Pied Piper is still at large.

  A gripping story about the hunter and the hunted, and about what happens when evil takes hold in a small town.

  ‘There’s nary a hitch in Marlborough Man. The characters work, the plot is cleverly executed and the sense of place is visceral. There’s touches of humour and self-inflicted jeopardy which are perfectly justifiable … an absolute stand-out book …’ Australian Crime Fiction

  AVAILABLE FROM FREMANTLEPRESS.COM.AU

  ALAN CARTER’S CATO KWONG

  AND FROM ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES

  First published 2020 by

  FREMANTLE PRESS

  Fremantle Press Inc. trading as Fremantle Press

  25 Quarry Street, Fremantle WA 6160

  (PO Box 158, North Fremantle WA 6159)

  www.fremantlepress.com.au

  Copyright © Alan Carter, 2020

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover photographs from unsplash.com, www.istockphoto.com.au and www.shutterstock.com.

  Cover design: Nada Backovic, nadabackovic.com

  ISBN 9781925816815 (paperback)

  ISBN 9781760990039 (ebook)

  Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.

  Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.