‘The stove’s in the backyard,’ Aubin said as if reading her mind. ‘Funnily enough it doesn’t even look damaged.’
‘Where was the bomb placed, do you know?’
He walked over to an intact sidewall, bricks peeping through torn plaster, and pointed to the ground. ‘You had a cupboard here, right? It looks like the bomb was placed on one of the lower shelves. We’ve found explosive residue on the ground.’
‘A cupboard?’ Stevie queried, her mind racking to what was here before. ‘No. Monty’s fish tank was there.’
Aubin looked to be assessing her for shell shock. ‘No way was that bomb in a fish tank.’
‘The tank was on top of a cabinet with doors and shelves for the pump and other paraphernalia.’
Aubin relaxed. ‘That makes sense, a good place to hide it.’
Someone had been in her house, poking around in the cupboards, violating her home. The nausea rippling through her stomach was the same as when she’d found the porn magazine in Izzy’s bag. She gritted her teeth and prayed she wouldn’t throw up.
‘We think it was an incendiary bomb,’ Aubin continued, ‘but can’t be certain until the chemical tests are back.’
‘Incendiary?’
‘We’ve found fragments of a metal tube which had been filled with a chemical mixture. An inverted glass vial of sulphuric acid is put in one end and its hole blocked up with cork or paper. The acid eventually eats through to the mixture of chemicals, resulting in a very hot fire. It’s a crude device, but effective never the less, often favoured by Special Forces or arsonists who don’t care for the high tech alternatives.’
‘Old school?’ said Stevie.
‘Possibly. Or cocky to the point of stupidity. It’s an inexact science.’
‘And the explosion?’
‘Gas cylinders, wiring, aerosols, pool chemicals, paint tins ... there’s all kinds of household things that could have exploded on contact with such a hot fire.’
‘But how did the guy know when I’d be home?’
‘Maybe he knew you wouldn’t be home, it wasn’t meant to kill you, just warn you.’
Or play with me, Stevie thought; it was the kind of thing The Crow seemed to enjoy doing, and there was more than one way of being burned alive. There was no denying it now. The attempt on their lives in Fremantle, the magazine in the backpack—they knew exactly who she was and that she was on to them. Mamasan and The Crow, it had to be them. ‘They’ve attempted to kill me before,’ she said quietly.
‘Well then...’
‘Look,’ her voice rose, she gripped Aubin’s arm. ‘It’s very important that this isn’t mentioned to the press. Have you given them a statement?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘We can’t have the offenders thinking we’re onto them, can we? When you do speak to the press, tell them that it was most likely faulty wiring which caused the fire and explosion—it’s what the people in the street seem to think, anyway.’ Her grip on his arm was too tight, she realised. She quickly let him go. Right now she couldn’t have cared less what the offenders thought; it was Monty’s reaction that worried her. She couldn’t hide the fire from him, but she would sure as hell try to prevent him from finding out what had really caused it; for the moment, anyway.
She picked her way to the edge of the crater and stood on the edge, gazing across at the blackness of her back garden. Something was missing, but she couldn’t work out what. She pointed helplessly into the void. And then a thought struck her. ‘It’s gone,’ she said shaking her head and gazing around with wonder. Aubin moved to stand next to her. ‘What is?’
‘The lean-to: the most ugly, jerry built structure you could ever have imagined. We were going to knock it down...’ Stevie laughed. Aubin gaped back at the tears of anger, shock and mirth rolling down her face. (Image 24.1)
Image 24.1
FRIDAY: CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
From the bus window Mai watched the spring green of the city slowly merging into the dustier colours of the bush. Then they came upon a swathe of wildflowers, like jewels scattered by a giant’s hand, stretching for kilometres along the roadside. The bus followed the path of flowers as they slowly dried and turned to red dust.
Lin dozed and fretted at Mai’s side, unable to find a comfortable position, her cheek hot and red from resting against the sticky bus window. Mai changed places with her, gently pulled the girl’s head into her shoulder and stroked her hair. When Lin finally settled, her hair tickled Mai’s face like a silken net.
The girls in the front of the bus were singing a song by Pumpuang, ‘Love is Like Bitter Medicine’. Rick yelled at them to shut up, but the sad melody remained in Mai’s head. She found she could recall every word of the song as she sat there, jolting along in the bus.
It was a hit song played frequently on the radio when she still lived with her family. Her mother would bring the battery-powered radio into the rice field and together they would sing the popular songs to distract them from the ache in their stooped backs. She closed her eyes and thought of everything that had happened to her since then. A lot of it was bad, but there was still plenty of good, too. With the Chinaman she’d sampled a world she’d never known to exist outside her father’s movies: French champagne, the rustle of silk against her skin, luxury yachts and expensive cars. This was life as it could be, and to this she aspired with a passion almost as desperate as her need to find her son.
No, she thought as she clenched her jaw, blocking the song from her mind. She didn’t miss her old peasant life; not one little bit. She hated what she had now, but she hated what she’d left behind even more.
Their stops were kept to a minimum, with just enough time to fill up with petrol and use the toilet facilities. The roadhouses became smaller the further north they travelled, and less busy. Theirs had been the only vehicle outside the pumps at the last one. Rick and Jimmy Jack veered from the main road whenever possible. The drive would take longer, Mai had heard the men say, but it meant they would have less chance of the rusty old bus being stopped by the police. The men carried the fake IDs in a hold-all by Jimmy Jack’s feet. Although they were good forgeries, they still didn’t want them scrutinised by over-vigilant cops.
Rick had played the fool for most of the journey, his stupid chatter interspersed with crazy laughter and Mai could see he was getting on Jimmy Jack’s nerves. A while ago the smaller man had unsheathed his knife, now he blew on it, polished and fiddled with it, muttering obscenities and shooting Rick dark looks.
Oblivious to his companion’s sour humour, Rick continued to rehearse what he’d say to the police if they were stopped. He threw a pill into his mouth and snapped his jaws around it like a dog.
He altered his voice, attempting to make it sound less rough.
‘Good day officer,’ he practised, slurring his words, bouncing up and down in his seat as he drove. ‘Yeah, this is a tour bus and these girls are all members of a touring Thai netball team ... You wanna examine their papers? Sure can. Yeah, that’s right, we’re going to Hell-an-Back ... You want your dick sucked, officer?’ He laughed uproariously at his joke.
Jimmy Jack didn’t flicker a smile; seemed absorbed with cleaning his nails with the long knife. He’d told the girls that if they spoke to anyone outside the bus, or tried to escape, he’d slit their throats and leave them in the desert for the dingoes.
They stopped at another roadhouse. Mai, being the most trusted, received permission to take a short walk on her own. She scuffed along the red dusty road until the roadhouse generator became no more than a distant throb. The air seared her lungs; the wind on her face scorched like a hair dryer. She’d never imagined that air could feel so dry, the earth look so red or the sky appear so huge and blue. The baked ground felt like concrete under her tender feet, yet all around her, the clumps of grass looked as soft as cotton wool.
She wondered what it would be like to just keep on walking through this desiccated landscape of stunted shrubs and red dust. Maybe if
she walked far enough, she’d come across a farmhouse where kind people would take her in, the woman plump and motherly, the man strong and protective. They would help her get Niran back, help her settle and make this place her home.
She continued to daydream as she walked against the wall of heat, slowing down in the small patches of shade and fantasising about a life that could be. A creature of the night, it was hard to imagine adapting to this country of dry, dazzling brightness.
An eagle soared above her head. It was far bigger than any she had seen at home and big enough to shade her like a parasol as she walked. The grass caught her attention again. She wanted to touch it, see if it was as real and as soft as it looked. She stooped to caress it and pulled her hand away with a sudden shock of pain. Looking down she saw a tattoo of tiny red pricks patterning her palm.
It was a sharp awakening.
In a nearby bush mischievous spirits disguised as small, finch-like birds twittered and laughed at her discomfort. The eagle dropped upon an animal nearby and the unseen victim cried out. No, she realised then, she hated this place as much as any other. Nothing would induce her to run off into it. It was too big, too empty, too dry, and like everything she had encountered since leaving home, that which looked kind invariably wasn’t.
Mai had always lived in close proximity to others. The greatest punishment imaginable to her was to be left alone. Surely, anything was better than this. Turning her back on the phantom birds and the evil pricking grass, she hurried back to the others and the safety of the bus.
The countryside changed again. Every now and then the ground would drop away on either side of the road in gradations of orange and red. The gorges here were so steep it looked as if the ogress Pantoorat had gashed them from the primeval earth with her axe.
They’d been driving almost non-stop for nearly twenty hours and no one had had much sleep. Mai’s eyes were full of grit, as were her clothes, hair and toes, and her palm still stung from the prickly grass. But however bad she felt, she knew Rick fared worse. To counter the effect of the ganja he’d smoked at the last roadhouse, he’d been devouring the small white pills as if they were sweets, rattling them down with water from a plastic bottle. Mai swapped seats with one of the other girls and sat in the single seat near the front of the bus, close behind him. He shook his head to and fro to help wash the pills down. Dandruff speckled the neck of his black T-shirt. If she had Jimmy Jack’s knife, she thought coolly, she was close enough to reach out and cut his throat.
The tension crackled and jumped between the two men as if the air were filled with goong den, dancing shrimp. Jimmy Jack kept telling Rick to pull over and swap seats so he could drive and Rick kept on refusing. Jimmy Jack shouted something and Rick swore back. Rick turned and yelled at the girls to shut up. His eyes were netted with red veins, his pupils wide as satellite dishes. No one had said a word.
Jimmy Jack raked through the bag at his feet and produced his mobile phone. ‘Pull over now fucker, or I’ll call the Mamasan, tell her what an arse-wipe you are.’
He’d already called the Mamasan, several hours ago; Mai knew that, she’d heard him talking to her on his mobile phone during their last stop.
‘Don’t be a jerk, JJ. She just wants us there fast, doesn’t give a flying fuck how,’ Rick said.
‘We won’t be getting there at all at this rate.’
‘And we’ll be arriving a day late with you driving like a grey nomad—what’ll the Mamasan say when she finds out she’s lost a day’s income?’ Grey nomad was the name the men gave to the old people who towed caravans and held up traffic. Mai had heard them say the phrase a lot since the beginning of the journey and it was usually accompanied by much swearing.
To prove his point, Rick surged forward, almost nudging the caravan crawling up the road in front of them. Leaning on the horn, he swung into the middle of the road to overtake, only just missing the gravelly shoulder and deep drop on the other side.
Jimmy Jack swore, the girls behind screamed. The open road stretched before them once more across the desert, smooth, straight and empty. Rick laughed and turned to them. ‘Scared youse, did I, girls? Don’t worry little darlings, you’re in safe hands with Uncle Rick.’
With disgust, Jimmy Jack threw his phone to the floor of the bus. ‘Out of fucking range. Pull over arsehole,’ he said. He put his knife to Rick’s throat and buried the blade in his beard, stopping just before it reached skin. Mai’s stomach lurched. Pepped up with speed, she knew Rick’s reactions would be unpredictable at best.
‘You’re a pussy, JJ, you wouldn’t dare,’ Rick growled, keeping his bleary eyes fixed on the road ahead.
Mai leaned over and placed her hand upon Jimmy Jack’s shoulder. It was all very well for her to dream about doing this herself, but JJ doing it now was a crazy idea. With her other hand she covered his on the knife and carefully tried to ease the blade from Rick’s throat. ‘Please...’
Jimmy Jack shrugged her off, swore and kept his grip tight upon the knife.
Rick slammed a heavy foot onto the accelerator. The sudden jolt of speed made Jimmy Jack drop the knife and lunge with both hands for the dashboard.
‘You want me to pull over, JJ?’ Rick shouted as he gave the wheel a sharp left turn. ‘You got it!’ The bus careered off the road, smashed through the safety barriers and commenced a flight path across a deep ravine.
Everyone screamed. For several seconds they flew through the air.
Hung there.
And then they dropped.
They hit the ground, catapulted around the bus in a tangle of arms and legs, loose luggage and shattered glass. Mai’s head hit the roof of the bus. Something slammed into her leg. The snap of bone, jarring pain, she felt as if her leg had shattered into sharp splinters. Her screams joined those of the others as the bus rolled into darkness. (Image 25.1)
Image 25.1
SATURDAY: CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Stevie gritted her teeth against the pain in her shoulder as Monty pulled her into a hug. She speared her fingers up his neck and into his russet hair and massaged his scalp in the way he liked. They stayed like that for some time until she felt the cold begin to leave her bones. As he continued to hold her she marvelled how almost everything that was precious in her life came from this man: Izzy, the life they shared as a family. The house didn’t matter. What mattered was that Monty had pulled through the operation and within a few months he would be as good as, if not better than before his health problems had started.
‘Are we going to have to start all over again?’ Monty asked.
Stevie avoided the soft brown eyes that seemed to stare straight through her. Pressing her cheek into his neck she breathed his scent, surprisingly untarnished by hospital odours. ‘I don’t know, Mont, I really don’t know.’ Who gives a stuff about bricks and mortar? she said to herself. It was only a house. She would not read anything more into it.
Nevertheless she’d still not told him about the explosion or her trip to the emergency department, only told him about the fire, what she’d told her mother and Izzy too.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said when they finally pulled apart. ‘I should have taken that first electrician’s quote instead of farting around for the cheapest. If I wasn’t such a tight-arse the wiring would all be done by now.’
Stevie forced a smile. ‘You’re a Scot. You recycle dental floss.’
‘How’s Izz taking it?’
‘She’s furious, blames me because we weren’t there when it happened. If we were, she thinks we could have put the fire out and saved your fish, our computers, her toys—she doesn’t give a stuff about anything else.’
‘Thank God you weren’t there.’ He hesitated, unusual for him. ‘I don’t seem to have much luck with fish do I?’ His last fish had been ‘murdered’ a couple of years ago by a couple of thugs who’d broken into his flat. ‘Maybe I should find a new hobby.’
She knew he felt the same as she did about their house. The flippant comment, meant
to trivialise their predicament, was contradicted by a look in his eyes she couldn’t meet. Was he thinking about their relationship too?
Surely not practical, pragmatic Monty.
She slipped off the bed and kissed his cheek. ‘I can’t stay. I need to get to Dot’s for a shower and a rest before meetings with the architect, the engineer and the insurance guy.’ And the arson squad, and Inspector Veitch and Angus, and... She wondered when this nightmare would end.
So much for the best laid plans: Stevie headed toward the MCI car yard, having only minutes ago been torn from Dot’s soft spare bed by the trilling of her phone. Col hadn’t said much; only that she was to meet him, Fowler and Tony Pruitt asap. Her stiff shoulder objected with every turn of the wheel as she pulled into a parking spot. Pushing through the unlocked gate, she found the men grouped around the battered remains of a Nissan minibus.
‘Sorry to get you out of bed, heard you had a hard night,’ Col said as she approached. ‘But I thought there’d be even more trouble if I didn’t call you about this.’
Stevie nodded a greeting to Pruitt and Fowler. ‘What’s all this about, Col?’
‘A horror bus crash south of Newman—six dead and two in the ICU, brought down here by Flying Doctor. No one was wearing seatbelts.’
Stevie regarded the concertinaed hunk of metal and wondered how anyone could have survived at all. ‘You got this wreck down to Perth quickly—when did it happen?’
‘Yesterday morning. We had it trucked down, it’s only just arrived,’ Col said. ‘The first cop on the scene was suspicious about the passengers and called me almost straightaway, suspecting the female passengers to be illegal immigrants. Only a couple of the girls survived, but they’re critical, too sick to be questioned. Two Australian men, probably travelling in the front of the bus, are also dead. We’re running ID checks on them now.’
SH03 - Take Out Page 18