‘Well, mate?’ the voice from outside was back. ‘It’s been five. Can’t be that hard to work this out, can it? I know you’ve got a little girl in there. You’re scaring the shit out of her for a dog that needs to be put down.’
Silence as the man waited for an answer. Delilah met Frank’s eyes. Neither of them spoke.
‘Suit yourself then, mate. Think fast.’
Huddled in the storeroom, as the smell of piss hung in the air and the metal shelf dug into his back, Greg thought about Keith Echols. Cocky, smiling and polite every time Greg had shouted an order across the office, but always in a way that felt off, even if you couldn’t put your finger on why. It was impossible to define, impossible to catch him in whatever act Greg was sure he was guilty of.
At first, he had brushed if off. Keith wasn’t as senior as Greg, and was probably just a bit of shit-stirrer. But after a while, he couldn’t. Not when he saw the averted eyes, heard the snatches of giggles that ceased whenever he entered a room. Greg had always thought he was in control. In the office, in his home, he’d been in charge, made the decisions, been firm but fair, commanded respect, even admiration. The situation with Echols, however, was something else. Keith never made a mistake, never tripped up, never said or did anything that would give Greg the excuse he dearly needed to fire the smug little fucker.
When Jane – lovely, gentle Jane who Greg thought about more than he cared to admit – stopped laughing at his jokes and started sounding pitying every time he asked her to do something, he knew it wasn’t just in his head. He stopped sleeping. Things that he had managed to ignore, things that he had been able to look away from, started to loom large in his peripheral vision. Seeing those first grey hairs. Feeling the beginnings of a tiredness that made him give up on ever going to the gym. Looking at Phillipa and wondering when she had started to look so worn down. Knowing that he looked even worse.
He had started drinking more. He’d always loved a beer after work, but soon it became two, then three, then Phillipa was asking if everything was okay and even her expression turned pitying when he snapped that he was fine. And still Keith beamed and joked and twisted the world that had once been Greg’s around his little finger.
That gnawing emptiness in his gut that took the form of a horrible, persistent question: Is this really it? At what point had he gone from alpha male to a middle-aged, fat joke?
Greg was already tipsy when he turned up to the staff party. Not enough to be obvious, but enough to make him want to drink more when he saw Keith and Jane cosy in the corner together. And drinking more made him feel braver, and the braver he felt the greater the certainty in his gut that he could fix this, that all it would take was a decisive gesture to put Keith in his place and everything would go back to normal.
He hadn’t planned on doing anything, though. Not until Sam suggested he get a cab, not until he saw Keith and Jane were getting closer, whispering to each other, their knees touching. Greg shoved Sam away. He swaggered over and made a crack about Keith’s suit, the one he always wore to work, the cheap one. Said something about the bastard being paid enough to afford better, or did he think the job wasn’t good enough for him to at least be presentable? After all, Greg said, voice louder and more confident by the second, Keith was never going to get Greg’s job if he couldn’t dress for it. But then, he was never going to get Greg’s job, full stop.
And then – fuck, even the memory made him seethe. That patronising smile, the pat on the arm, the gentle suggestion. ‘Maybe it’s time you headed home, mate.’ So Greg hit him.
And for a moment, just a moment, the pity was gone and it was replaced by the contorted fury that Greg had known was there all along as Keith lunged at him. Greg was ready, so ready to put him on the floor and see everyone wowed back into realising who was in charge.
But that didn’t happen. Greg told himself he had got another hit in before Keith took him down, but he couldn’t remember for sure. What he remembered with too much clarity for a hundred bottles to wipe out was how easily the younger man had held him down, how Greg’s full-bodied attempts to throw him off had done nothing, like his muscles were water. It didn’t matter how much he snarled and struggled and spat, Keith just held him down, not even bothering to hit him again because he wasn’t worth it and everyone was watching, either horrified or openly filming.
He did what he could, after that. Pulled the right strings, made sure Keith was gone, managed to hang onto his own job. He had to mine all the capital he’d earned over the years to make the whole thing go away. And while none of his colleagues ever mentioned Keith or what had happened again, they also wouldn’t even look at him. Responses to his questions were monosyllabic. The laughs at his jokes were short and forced.
The decline didn’t stop. More grey hairs in his comb in the morning. His renewed determination to work out yielding five sit-ups that left him wheezing and light-headed. Phillipa rarely coming home after ‘girls’ nights’, and when she did it was stinking of cologne she didn’t even bother to hide. And his children, who once had at least tried to look up from their phones when he spoke to them, now rarely mustered a grunt. He had become completely irrelevant in his own life.
He had felt for so long like he was rotting from the inside out, like he was just pretending to be Greg McRae. But he had told himself it was a phase, just a bad patch that he would come out the other side of.
This – this dusty storeroom in the middle of nowhere – felt like the cruel punchline to a vicious joke. His desperate, last-ditch attempt to take control, to show them all by burning everything down and seeing how they liked a world without him, had led him here. That whole drive he had looked for whatever it was that would let him feel like Greg McRae again, hoping to find some semblance of what he had missed for so long. Instead, the opposite had happened. Greg McRae didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t give a shit about Greg McRae. All that mattered was getting away from this nightmare as fast as he could.
He got to his feet. He had taken one step towards the back door when he heard movement and turned.
The girl, Delilah, had entered the storeroom; she glanced from him to the back door. Her brow furrowed.
‘Just . . . just checking if it’s locked,’ Greg said.
‘I don’t know how much difference that’s going to make,’ Delilah said. ‘But sure, go ahead.’
Greg walked over and placed a hand on the doorknob. It would be so easy to turn it now and slip outside. Throw himself to the lions and hope for mercy.
He twitched it then walked back to his spot. He could see the damp patch left by his piss-soaked trousers and a deep, ugly shame reared up in place of fear.
‘How are you doing?’ Delilah asked.
He didn’t know how she could sound so calm. Her voice was steady, despite her pale face. Maybe only he was this pathetic. He looked at the patch again.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Delilah said. ‘At least you pissed yourself for a good reason. I’ve done it plenty just because I was drunk.’ She shot him what was supposed to be a conspiratorial smile.
‘What’s this all about?’ Greg asked.
The smile faded. ‘There was this . . . this girl. Turned up here, badly hurt. Covered in mud and blood. Her leg was pretty much torn to pieces. We took her back to Frank’s house, behind us, then these pricks came looking for her.’
‘They want you to turn her over.’
Delilah nodded.
Greg swallowed. ‘Listen—’
Delilah shook her head. ‘Frank already said no.’
‘And he’s the boss?’
‘It’s his house.’
‘It’s our lives.’
Delilah looked at him for a long time. ‘There’s no guarantee they’ll leave us alone even if we give them the girl. We’re witnesses to something fucked up. If they did that to her . . .’ She shrugged. ‘We’re better off with the leverage.’
‘We’re outnumbered,’ Greg said. ‘How long are we supposed to be able to def
end ourselves?’
Delilah said nothing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Then
Maggie knew how to keep still, how to ignore the itches and the aches and resist every urge to do something about them. She’d spent much of her childhood squeezed into wardrobes or else trying to be invisible, eyes closed tight, hugging herself as she’d waited for the next bottle to slow the crashing and yelling from outside as her father’s hoarse rasp demanded she come out, to be the moving target her mother’s departure had denied him. The tears would inevitably come and, with them, the desire to scream, to burst out and attack – for all the good that would do. Even back then, she had known there was no point: that silence and stillness were her best bet and so she had held a lid down on the fire and waited.
This was no different, she tried to tell herself. Even though it was. Even though the cost of capture here was a lot worse than some bruising she’d have to explain away at school. Maggie concentrated on keeping her heart rate slow and her breathing steady, never once letting go of the knife, trying to push away the spikes of panic that threatened every time she heard a voice nearby. But nothing she could make out sounded the alarm; people asked for cigarettes, offered beers and talked about such mundane things that it was hard to believe there was a shed of rotting human corpses just metres away.
It was only after what felt like a couple of hours that the tone changed. She heard faint yelling and snapped retorts.
‘—can’t have fuckin’ gone far. I want that house torn apart.’
‘She wouldn’t still be in the house, but.’
‘That was the last place she was seen, right? Pull your fucking head in.’
Breathe.
‘What if I find her first?’
‘Rules are different, you dopey cunt. We share this one.’
Her hand tightened around the knife.
There were more yells, more snatches of arguments followed by the slamming of car doors. Once or twice her breath caught as she heard footsteps nearing the ute, but noone pulled the tarp away. No-one would think she would be stupid enough to hide in the middle of it all, buried beneath a sight they saw every day. Game ran when it was threatened.
She was sore and thirsty. She needed to go to the bathroom, but she refused to let herself move. Not until, even through the tarp, she felt the temperature drop and the last of the voices fell away. Finally the evening became still and the only sounds were the occasional harsh calls of birds. She wondered if that was a bad sign. If she should have been hearing chaos and rage. But no. If the boar gored a well-loved hunter, everyone didn’t go out to track it down. That would alert the boar, especially at night. No, you sent the best and let them do their job.
She closed her eyes. Still quiet. Eventually, she raised the knife and pulled away the tarp.
The street was empty. She looked in every direction, then, forcing her stiff limbs into action, she jumped out of the ute’s tray and landed light on the dust of the road. Crouching, she listened, waiting for an opening door, a sliding window, a yell. Nothing. Terrified by how exposed she felt, she crossed the road swiftly and ran down the side of her house, to where whoever had been looking for her earlier had gone. She watched the ground, taking care to miss twigs or leaves. Her footfalls were dancer light, just like Ben had taught her. Ready, not rigid. She reached the back of the house and paused. It was a cloudless, starry sky above and her visibility was good, but that would change as soon as she passed the first few trees. She gave herself a moment before hurrying for the thick trunks and the darkness beyond. Within seconds, her pace slowed and she was moving tentatively in the inky black, hand outstretched, ears straining for any suspicious sounds. The ground below her was uneven, dropping off and rising up in unpredictable shifts that she had to be careful not to be tripped up by. She wanted to run, but she forced that instinct down, crushed it away and made herself stay steady and quiet. A night shadow, nothing else.
She moved like this for a while, pausing any time she heard a cracking twig or a rustle of bushes. But even as her eyes adjusted, it remained hard to be sure of what was in front of her, what was a trunk, a branch, an arm holding a gun. There was a small comfort in that. For all that they were evil, the men hunting her were human too. They would be facing the same limitations she was, and the thought gave her a surge of defiant hope.
The deeper she moved into the trees, the more she became aware of the smells: of eucalyptus leaves and animal shit and, above all, her own odour, hot and sweaty. Would that be obvious to her hunters? She was basing all her assumptions on speculation, but some things she just had no idea about. She wanted to believe that this was an uncommon situation for them, but then maybe assuming that was arrogant. Maybe every one of the bodies in that shed had tried to be clever. That thought threatened to blow away any sense of control she thought she had. She pushed it down.
She stopped, hand resting against a trunk, trying to quell away her trembling. She took a deep breath and smelt water.
She wasn’t sure she had ever noticed how it smelt before. But there it was, somehow fresh despite the accompanying scent of mud. Shuffling slowly, she moved towards it, feet inching until they felt a slight decline. She crouched down and moved on hands and knees until the dirt turned soft and damp then became mud, then water.
She drank without worrying about the taste, before stopping and listening again, unsure how loud she had been. There didn’t seem to be any sounds out of the ordinary.
The mud had enveloped her right hand and she winced at the loud sucking, squelching noise it made as she pulled it free. She reached forwards to wash it off in the stream but hesitated. Her eyes were getting better, but even with the snatches of moonlight from the gaps in the canopy her muddied hand vanished into darkness.
There was no point in being too meticulous. It was an imperfect disguise at best, but she was careful as she covered every inch of herself in mud. It was cold and uncomfortable and the taste seemed to infiltrate even her tightly shut mouth. Once she was done, walking felt strange and almost indecent, like she should shower before going any further. She looked down at her hands; she could see movement, but not much else. She was as dark as the night around her.
And so, still slow and deliberate, she moved on through the trees. She could feel the mud drying on her skin, the warm air turning it hard and brittle – this cover had a time limit. She wasn’t one hundred percent sure what direction she should be heading in, but she knew where the town was and knew she had to head away from it. She kept listening for gunshots or shouts, scanning for beams of torchlight or the gleam of some stray moonlight reflecting off the barrel of a gun, but the night and the trees remained undisturbed. She kept moving.
When she saw the car she ducked behind the nearest tree before she had quite registered what she was even looking at. There had been no attempt to hide it, but in this kind of thick darkness it was almost unnecessary. She was less than two metres away when she noticed it. Her eyes went immediately to the windscreen, looking for the shapes of people inside, but it seemed empty. And familiar.
A horrible swooping feeling in her stomach came with the recognition. Simon’s station wagon, abandoned in the trees. She gave herself a few more minutes until she was convinced there was no-one here, then she made her move, circling round and approaching the rear of the car. In a tiny snatch of starlight that pushed through the leaves and branches above, she saw something thick and glistening on the ground. Her heart like a drum, she knelt and reached out a hand. Blood had soaked the dirt all around the car. Something in her chest contracted.
Her own words then, clear in her ears, certain and assured and hateful, one of the last things she had said to Simon before he ran.
Are you always this melodramatic?
And then, echoing from years earlier.
But he’s harmless. Ignore him and he’ll get bored.
Her fault. Then and now.
She punched the dirt. She allowed just a moment of shaking before
she stood and headed for the driver-side door.
She knew as soon as she reached for the handle that something was wrong, the instinct confirmed a second later by pain, pain like nothing she had ever felt before, a slicing, tearing burning in her right leg that made her crumple and bite down on her wrist, drawing blood before she would let herself scream. She fell hard against the metal of the car. She tried to move but something held fast, something that wrenched at her leg. Her ears rang. She reached down and felt her ankle. That was a mistake. The pain seared again as she felt the metal jaws and jagged teeth that had snapped shut on her leg. A trap, left for anyone trying to use this car to escape. And she had been stupid enough to try.
Gritting her teeth, her eyes streaming and the occasional whimper escaping no matter how hard she tried, she pulled apart the trap. She felt metal tearing at flesh and even the smallest effort to rest weight on her leg made her want to collapse. The trigger mechanism she’d stepped on raised and clicked back into place, the trap an open circle of serrated metal again. She moved clear, pulling herself up on the car, then she heard snarling and grunting that seemed to come out of nowhere. She saw the bulk of the dog barrelling forwards, saw its wild eyes gleaming in what little moonlight there was. She fumbled for the knife as its jaws clamped on her injured leg and the pain exploded, white hot and blinding.
She tried to regain her balance but fell to the ground; then she was being dragged backwards. The knife. She could feel the hilt in her white-knuckle grip. She twisted around, her eyes found Blue’s, and then she brought the knife down and into the dog’s jugular, slamming it home again and again before the dog could make another sound. She kept stabbing until the animal was limp, its blood mingled with the mud that coated her.
She crawled back towards the car. Avoiding the trap, she managed to get the door open and pull herself inside, but running a hand around the steering wheel told her what should have been obvious: the keys were gone. She willed herself to ignore the pain – just a few more seconds, give me just a few more – and checked the handbrake. Off. Either they had rolled it off the road, or Simon had left it here.
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