First, he had a lot of preparation. He had to get Sally to complete a new will, he had to get witnesses to the new will, and he had to establish an alibi.
13.
Philip was a bully. He had been a gigolo who worked in mental health clinics, befriending women so he could fleece them. He wanted their money to buy a farm, an ambition he had held since he was a foster child on a farm. When he understood how to use the Matrimonial Property Act he married and then separated, conning the women into parting with half of their money to avoid losing more in a legal wrangle. Sometimes he took less than his dues, which always ended with the women being very grateful to him. Although a de facto relationship was treated in exactly the same way, he found marriage lulled women into a false sense of security. The easiest prey were younger women who had divorced, or inherited money. He was still married to a rich business woman who continued to pay him each month.
Philip had a charming exterior that covered a very mean streak. Philip knew that Sally did not love him. She stayed with him out of necessity. Fed up with the kid who slept in nappies and woke each morning covered in excrement, tired of continual tantrums, the need to play guessing games for even basic requests, isolated from Greg by his absorption into the farm work, Sally was a sitting duck for Philip's charms.
He had groomed her. He had wooed her. He had seduced her. After she had left Greg, Philip played on Sally's shame, convincing her that she could never go back to Greg after the way she had treated him.
He had thought that she would be willing to throw her lot in with him, giving him half of her share in Te Kouka Flats for half of his farm but she had resisted his overtures. As he got more demanding and threatening, Sally seemed to find an inner strength.
On Sunday afternoon matters came to a head.
"Why won't you sign over half of your share of Te Kouka Flats to me?" asked Philip. "You know Greg can't go on forever on his own. And in return, the MPA will allow you to claim half of everything I've got."
They had had this conversation before.
"Don't you trust me?" asked Philip. This was dirty pool. "We've been together nearly two years now. Greg has to pay you out, which he won't be able to do. Then you can buy him out, using my money. But I'm not going to give you money unless you legally sign half your share over to me. At the moment, it's half of a half, but after I buy him out, it will be half each."
Sally could do the maths. A quarter share now then half of the half when Greg sold: that would give Philip half of the farm she and Greg had worked so hard to develop. Is that when Philip would drop her? Or would she end up like Georgina, his first wife, simply disappear into the sunset?
"What if I do nothing?" Sally countered. "I am quite entitled to hold my fifty percent of the business. I don't want anything to do with Gresham Hills. And the MPA is there to protect women, not make them slaves."
Philip flew into a rage. He swung at her. She managed to dodge the full force of the blow. It hurt, but the fact that he had used physical violence hurt her even more. Before she could recover, Philip hit her again, this time in the face, on her cheekbone. She had heard that people saw stars when receiving a blow to the head and she found it to be true, but more like expanding circled of light in her case. An icy reserve and calmness swept over her.
"I'm leaving you," she said. "Tomorrow. I don't know how long Greg and I can make it last but I do know I don't want ever to see you again."
Philip hit her so hard that she was knocked unconscious.
14.
When Sally recovered consciousness, she was in a windowless cupboard, a big store room that sat at the end of the passageway through Philip's house. It had been used to store cases and boxes and other items too large to fit into a normal storage space. Along the walls were shelves to hold the summer's preserves, not used now, so the shelves were filled with empty glass jars, hundreds of them.
When Sally had first moved in with Philip, she asked him for the key to the locked door, claiming he was manufacturing drugs inside the hidden room. He laughed and took the key off the key holder in the kitchen.
"Only used for storage," he said. "There's no window, no light. Lots of stuff in there, though. It'll come in handy sometime I suppose. Keep a thing for twenty years."
"Then throw it away before it's needed," finished Sally.
One day Sally got the key and slipped into the store room hoping to satisfy her curiosity about Georgina, Philip's wife who had just walked off one day. The room was bare. It had been swept and cleaned, the old linoleum on the floor had been washed, but otherwise it was if the room had always been empty, except for the glass preserving jars that still sat on the shelving..
That was where she lay now, with her head throbbing and every muscle aching from her beating. Her watch had been taken from her wrist. From a crack of light under the door, Sally could see that there was a bucket, a galvanised bucket , sitting in a corner with a toilet roll next to it. At the moment that was the last thing that she needed, although last night, in her diary beside the bed, she had entered the letter 'P'.
Sally felt tired and sore. This room was on the east side of the house. The sun was shining along the hallway, which meant it was late afternoon. The fight had happened after lunch so she had probably been unconscious for an hour or two. Sally knew that the best thing to do was to conserve energy, to give the body the strength to recover.
As Sally lay on the hard floor she began to think about her predicament. She imagined Greg charging through the door to save her. As she moved her arm to lift her hair from over her brow she knocked over a plastic bottle of water. Sally sat up. She needed water.
The bright crack under the door began to fade. Sally's eyes adjusted to the changing light. As her pupils adjusted, she found she could still make out her surroundings. How she wished Greg was here to comfort her.
She strengthened her resolve. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself," she thought. "That won't help at all. I'll tell Philip he can have whatever he wishes, just let me go. I can't fight him, he doesn't love me, he can have my entire share of Te Kouka Flats. I'll start again."
Sally had worked as a legal secretary in a solicitor's office before her marriage to Greg. Would they remember her? She was certain they would because she got a card from the firm every Christmas. What if she could think of some clever way of letting them know that anything she did for Philip was a coercive contract?
The dark room became even darker as the long day wore on, so Sally had to feel her way to the bucket. No sooner had she relieved herself than the key turned in the lock.
"Recovered from your outburst?" asked Philip. "Or do you want another good hiding?"
Philip was tall and good looking. He turned women's heads. As a teenager, Sally had a vision of her ideal man. Philip fitted it, but Greg didn't. Now Sally could see that Philip was mean and physical, demanding to the point of bullying. Greg was smaller, quieter, kinder, patient. Suddenly Sally realised that her vision had been just a foolish girl's dream. She would give the world to have Greg beside her now; with all his faults he was a better man than Philip.
"I asked you a question."
"Sorry, Philip. I didn't mean to argue over such a small thing," said Sally.
"The rules have changed. If you want to see your son alive, I want you to make a new will. "
"What do you mean?"
"Your idiot son. If you don't do as I say, you will never see him alive again."
Sally was not sure if Philip meant he would kill her, or that he would kill Lance.
"Greg and Ashleigh will look after him," she said.
"Not much longer. They're about to die in a house fire. Tonight, in fact. You're going to be a rich widow."
Sally was shocked through to her core.
"It's them or you and your kid, darling," said Philip. "I've filled in a standard will form from the internet. You sign it, you and the kid live. Your husband will leave the farm to you. You can stay or you can leave me when the two years are up,
at which time I get half of what you own. You are no worse off than you are now, you keep your son and life goes on."
To herself, Sally thought, "Or not. The cleanest way is to kill Greg first so I inherit, then kill me so he gets everything. If I don't sign, he'll kill me anyway. Unless I can get a message to Mr Middleton's office."
"I've arranged with Middleton and Moore to finalise matters with Greg," said Sally. She was lying. She hoped Philip would believe her. "Give me the form. You will have to send the form to them for verification that I am the signatory."
This was something Philip had not reckoned on. He knew Sally was smart and that she had worked for a law firm. Her way of doing things could have been set up to stop Greg forging a will then bumping her off, just as he would do to her in a few days. Greg had to predecease her, and the will had to be with a solicitor before Sally died. He handed her the form.
"Come out into the light where you can see," he said. "You're going back in the store room for the night and for tomorrow, while I take this will to your lawyer."
ON SUNDAY EVENING GREG and Ashleigh shared a few beers and talked about the future. In the morning Ashleigh would pick up the keys to her farm from her lawyer. Her car was packed. She would come back with stock trucks to get her animals once she had sorted things out. Ashleigh's talk concerned Michael, who had been blacklisted by Social Welfare. That put his business in jeopardy. Perhaps he could be her farmhand? Greg was full of the happenings in Court and how Sally would be returning in the morning. At ten thirty they went separately to bed. They were woken in the early hours of Monday morning.
"Wake up! Wake up!"
Greg dashed into Ashleigh's room and shook her shoulder roughly.
"What's wrong?" asked Ashleigh. "Greg, what is it?"
"Look at the ceiling!"
The ceiling was a flickering red colour.
"What's the time?"
"It's two a.m. Get the papers and get out," yelled Greg. The papers were always in a brief case inside the wardrobe. In a wooden house, fire was an ever present threat.
"It's not us, it's the cottage," Ashleigh exclaimed. "Look, the corner is alight. Just as well I hadn't moved back into it."
Greg had pulled on jeans and a shirt. With no socks, he ran to the back door and pulled on his boots. He had a tank of weed spray hooked up to the tractor, if the damn thing started.
It did. First time. The engine roared into life. Greg closed the throttle to an idle, chose his gear then drove out of the tractor shed towards what had been the labourer's cottage. Nobody lived in it. Greg couldn't afford to pay hired help.
Greg drove by the light of the fire, which was on the outside of the cottage, at the corner. Greg climbed off the tractor seat. At the tank, which was on a farm trailer, he turned on the fuel tap and started the auxiliary motor by pulling on the cord, in the same way as one would start a lawn mower. Nothing happened. In his panic, Greg had forgotten to apply the choke. With the auxiliary motor started, he returned to the tractor and drove it with the trailer behind as close as he could to the fire.
Although the fire was licking up the wall it was only slowly getting a hold on the old wooden weather boards. The spray hose was able to control its spread. Squirting the high pressure hose at the base of the flames, Greg managed to deaden the heart of the fire. Then he applied his attention to where the flames were burning the paint on the wooden wall. Greg felt someone at his side. He glanced away from the fire and saw Ashleigh with the garden hose. Although it was attached to a low pressure supply, Ashleigh's hose kept the base of the fire from re-igniting.. It got darker as they fought the blaze. Sally put her hose down and turned the tractor lights on.
"Turn them off so we can see if there are any hot spots left," said Greg.
Ashleigh clicked the lights off but left the tractor idling. Greg squirted where there were signs of heat or smoke.
"Turn the lights on again'" said Greg.
Although the timber was old and dry, the fire had not taken hold. Having water on hand had made the difference between saving the house or losing it.
"Ashleigh? Where are you?" shouted Greg. He looked around but could not see her. Leaving the tractor idling, he turned off the hose and went looking for her. He was pleased Lance was asleep in the house.
Greg found Ashleigh unconscious on the ground. He leaned over her to check her condition. He struggled to fend off his attacker but he was being held down by an arm across the back of his neck. He felt a needle enter his neck, a pinprick. His struggles lessened as the drug took effect. He fell forward on to Ashleigh as he passed out.
From the shadows, a slight figure watched the dark figure bending over Ashleigh and his father. The dog beside him stayed quiet, seeming to understand that their discovery would bring danger. The dog nudged the boy and quietly crept away with the boy holding the scruff of the dog's neck.
PART FOUR: THE EARTHQUAKE
15.
In 2010, Christchurch in the South Island of New Zealand was damaged by a severe earthquake. A series of tremors followed, both frequent and severe. The severest of the shakes occurred at 4.25 a.m. on September 4th. This resulted from a previously unknown geological fault.
Being only six miles deep, this main earthquake of 7.1 magnitude on the Richter scale resulted in widespread surface damage to the land.
Aftershocks followed, vibrating the land's surface, turning it into liquid mud called liquefaction. These thousands of aftershocks continued for months after the main event.
Although much damage occurred, there was no loss of life. Strict building codes had been enforced in recent years, while earlier buildings had stood the test of time.
A few months later, the most severe aftershock struck in the afternoon of February 22nd 2011. Although of a lesser magnitude, this aftershock devastated the infrastructure of New Zealand's second largest city, and resulted in 185 deaths. The business centre had been built on an old swamp following an earthquake in the 1880s. The business centre was razed to the ground. From within the ruined buildings, some people were recorded sending out heart breaking cell phone messages as they slowly died of crush injuries or asphyxiation.
Rebuilding was a slow and tortuous business for most people. Nearly all the insurance companies involved dragged the chain, control over the process became mired in bureaucracy, and the aftershocks continued. On the one hand the government trumpeted its successes, while on the other hand thousands of people quit Christchurch in search of a less stressful environment.
The town of Weatherston to the south expanded rapidly as insurance claims were eventually met. People reasoned that they could return to Christchurch, or even commute back to their business or work place when the city had been rebuilt.
As a railhead for inland areas and Christchurch further to the north, Weatherston was a major link to the West Coast regions, supplementing the only major road to that area. But Weatherston had no port facilities, which were desperately needed since the destruction of Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch. The geography was such that Weatherston was some distance inland, and a container port could not be built on that part of the coast.
North of Christchurch was the small port of Grantville. Its access to deep water allowed the development of a larger port. The port authorities of Tauranga, Auckland and Dunedin joined with the government to create a new container port to service Christchurch, Weatherston and the north of the South Island. Warehouses and factories were built as more money was released. Residential houses sprang up like autumn mushrooms as the government successfully managed to recovery process.
North of Grantville was the existing town of Kaikoura. Its main industries were servicing the widespread farming communities, and tourism. Like Grantville, Kaikoura had prospered in the years following both Canterbury earthquakes. It was deemed not suitable for a deep sea port facility but provided an essential link in the rail line taking freight from Christchurch through Grantville to Kaikoura and on to the Blenheim and Nelson regions.
&
nbsp; In the very early morning of February 14th, 2016 a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the district some 37 miles south of Kaikoura. The shake lasted an incredible two minutes and killed two people.
The greatest amount of seismic energy hit the Kaikoura and Mount Lyford areas. There were only two deaths because Culverden, which was inland, and Kaikoura on the coast were small settlements in sparsely populated areas.
Fractures of the earth's surface were common even though the epicentre was nearly ten miles deep. The ground was riven with fissures and cracks, mudslides were common and some mountain sides fell to the valleys below.
Among the most serious consequences was the total destruction of the South Island Main Trunk railway line. Television pictures showed the twisted rails hanging in the air, or twisted like a ball of wool.
In New Zealand, the character of the people is to just get on with it. This time, the government responded rapidly. Astonishingly, the whole hundreds of kilometres of rail line were replaced within a year, by government action and unsung heroes in the construction and rail industry.
The aftershocks continued for some time, and then there was calm. Restoration of the damage could proceed.
Earthquakes do not happen every day in New Zealand, but there had been several severe quakes in recent years. To be driving during a strong earthquake is a very frightening experience. One is not sure whether it is the car that is moving or the world around it. Because both the car and the road move unexpectedly, it is extremely difficult to control the vehicle. Consequently, people die from hitting bridges, unable to counter the huge force throwing them sideways. They die when the road itself lurches and throws the car over the edge of a drop. They die when the car is flung into a river and submerges. They die in rock and mudslides. Richard West was caught in such a mudslide while on his way back to Weatherston in the South Island of New Zealand.
Farm Kill Page 10