by Alan Carter
Alan Carter was born in Sunderland, UK. He immigrated to Australia in 1991 and divides his time between the beach at Fremantle and life on a farm in New Zealand’s South Island. He sometimes works as a television documentary director. He is the author of three previous novels: the Cato Kwong series Prime Cut (winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction), Getting Warmer and Bad Seed.
For Kath, my beautiful muse and soul mate.
PROLOGUE
He is well overdue for a treat. He has been very patient but temptation is everywhere. The woman in the next car looks at him a second time, not in an unfriendly way. He smiles back, rolls his eyes: chauffeurs, that’s all we are. Today? Swimming lessons. She’s waiting too. Smooth skin but the neck showing signs of those creeping years. Perhaps a little more jowly than she should be. Her fingers play with her fringe as she checks herself, yet again, in the mirror.
They’re coming out.
The parents who went inside are now zapping the locks, throwing in school bags and swimming gear, kids clambering inside, some with junk food in their plump little hands. Some whining because they’re overtired. Others nattering ten to the dozen, their faces animated, bursting with life, curiosity, wonder.
A blonde girl climbs into the next car. A serious thing, pinched face, feeling neglected no doubt, like her mother. She too will grow up needy for attention and reassurance, unable to distinguish between the good men and the bad. Mum gives him a last lingering look, hoping maybe for something more than the complicit smile of another long-suffering overcommitted parent. She wants the flash of danger and passion that’s missing from her existence. You won’t get that from me, he thinks. Loving mothers aren’t on my radar. He winks at her. It makes her day and she pulls out of the parking space to go home.
And there he is. The treat. Father is away, trying to pay their mortgage from a mining camp in Western Australia. His mother still at work in the real estate office in the city. Their only child.
Roll out of the parking space and pull up at the bus stop. The car door opens. He speaks the child’s name.
The child looks up from his daydream, not expecting anybody to be there for him. But there’s always a first time for everything. A smile of recognition.
‘Hop in.’
‘I’m meant to get the bus. Stranger danger.’
‘But I’m not a stranger, surely?’
The little boy climbs in.
PART ONE
1
It’s the third night running that car has been past. Same time, around ten. A low rumble, the occasional cough, missing a beat.
It could be pig hunters looking for the track just up the road that takes you into the forest on the far hill. People don’t come down this road for no reason or by mistake; it doesn’t go anywhere. It stops about five ks up from here at Butchers Flat. The full moon slips behind the clouds and the silhouettes of the hills fade into the background dark. I can hear the river down below, rushing over the rocks.
It could be campers heading back to their tents at Butchers after a few beers in town, but it’s too damn cold for camping. It could be scavengers after some firewood from the recently logged hills. It’s meant to be spring but it still gets down near to freezing and there’s no dry wood left in town. Besides, who’s got two hundred bucks for a trailer-load when every other bastard is on the dole, and surely it’s got to get warmer soon. In winter, the wind roars up from the South Pole across the Antarctic and Southern Oceans, dusting the Alps with snow and ice, snaking through the green fjords and lonely valleys, under the door and into your bones. It will freeze your core and consume your heart if you let it. If it wasn’t for the fact that New Zealand is so bloody beautiful, there are days when you could happily shoot yourself.
I live in a two-storey timber house perched on the side of a steep hill that plunges down to the river. In summer it’s a trickle but in winter it boils. If the Wakamarina isn’t flooded and the land hasn’t slipped, my house can be reached by a narrow road winding up the valley, but the bitumen stops well before that – we’re not just off the grid, we’re off the tarmac. The valley is a good place to hide, whether from the toils and tribulations of the modern world, or from real people and real threats. We’re adjacent to a tectonic faultline which is statistically due for a catastrophic seismic event – any day now, according to the doomsayers and geologists. That’s okay, I’ve been expecting a catastrophe ever since I got here.
It could be those weekend miners down from their day jobs in the city, here to work their claim on the hundred-and-fifty-year-old scratchings in the riverbank that never turned a profit back then either. It’s not about the gold they say, it’s about history, tradition and mateship. And an escape from whatever ails them in the big smoke.
But it’s not them. I know who it is. It’s Sammy Pritchard. He’s finally found me and this is his way of letting me know. His reach is long, even from maximum security.
‘Come back to bed.’
‘Yes, pet.’ I look at Vanessa lying there, sleep-gummed and irritable. I think of Paulie asleep downstairs. I wonder if Sammy will just come for me and let them live.
No. Of course he won’t.
The phone goes shortly after six thirty.
‘You’re wanted down at the marina, Sarge,’ Latifa says.
‘Murder?’
‘Vandalism. A boat belonging to Mr McCormack.’
‘You’re getting me out of bed at this hour for vandalism?’
‘Special request from the District Commander. Him and Mr M play squash together in Nelson.’
We all know who Mr M is, and that he owns half of Marlborough.
‘You’re five minutes away, Latifa. It’ll take me half an hour.’
‘You want to live up there with the hillbillies, that’s your business. Anyway, speed’s not the point here.’
‘What is?’
‘McCormack’s a willy-waver. He wants the top man on the job. That’d be you.’
‘Tell the DC I’m on my way.’
I grab a mug of tea and try to kiss Vanessa but she pulls the blanket over her head. It’s been happening a bit lately. She doesn’t like New Zealand; maybe she’s stopped liking me too.
The Toyota coughs into life and I back out onto the gravel driveway. There’s a blur of black and rich blue as a tui flits into a nearby silver beech, beeping and whirring. I wonder about that car from last night. Will they return and slaughter my family while I’m out?
No, Sammy would want me to watch. They’ll wait for my return.
At Havelock Marina, the sun washes the green hills across the water and glints off the rows of pleasure craft. A tall man with short greying hair is stamping his feet to ward off the chill. It’s McCormack and he’s dressed for a day on the boat. It’s only Tuesday, alright for some. His companions, a man and two women, sit in a white BMW parked nearby, sipping takeaway coffees and looking bored. The boat is big and has an extra half-berth at the rich end of the marina away from the riffraff. I glance at the damage: spray paint on the starboard hull of his treasured catamaran. Where once it said Serenity II it now says Smaug.
‘Smaug, sir?’
He looks at me like I’m a moron. ‘The evil dragon in The Hobbit. The Desolation of.’
I take out a notebook to seem interested. ‘Why Smaug, sir? Do you think someone might have some sort of grudge against you?’ Like maybe half the population of the top of the South Island? I’ve seen his handiwork on the drive down the valley road to the marina: logged hills shaved into sad submission, once-stunning landscape become devastated moonscape.
‘Try that hippie chicken farmer up your way.’
Up my way? I’m thinking. How do you know where I live?
He shoves an iPhone in my face. ‘He’
s been sending me threatening emails.’
‘Die, you rapacious cunt.’ I nod. ‘Rapacious. He knows his way around a dictionary then.’ I tell McCormack to forward the email to us, and he does so with a few finger prods. The wind changes and for a moment I catch the rotten odour of bad breath. All that money and he can’t even floss regularly.
‘What’s that accent of yours?’ asks McCormack.
‘Geordie. North-east England.’
‘Dark satanic mills and all that stuff?’
‘Not anymore, they closed them all down. Lovely and green now. Like here.’
A sniff. ‘Maybe you should have stayed there.’
‘Then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting you, sir.’
Behind me the car window rolls down. A weary drawl from one of McCormack’s travel companions, a smooth-faced man with blond hair that flops in his eyes. ‘Let’s just forget it, Dickie – back to the shack for brekkie, yeah?’
‘This has ruined our day,’ says McCormack, pocketing his phone. ‘Sort that greenie prick out.’
‘Leave it with me, sir. I’ll have a word with him and see if he knows anything about it.’
‘A word? Just arrest him.’
All around us there are cameras and signs saying twenty-four-hour surveillance. That’s the kind of service you can command when you own a big flash boat. This shouldn’t be too hard, Havelock isn’t known for the quality of its criminals.
‘I’ll keep you updated on the progress of our inquiries, sir.’
‘You know I play squash with your boss, don’t you?’
‘Yep. Me too,’ I lie. ‘I think it’s his backhand that lets him down.’
Latifa Rapata hands me a cardboard cup of coffee as I walk through the door. Two years out of police college and she has the jaded air of a thirty-year vet. ‘The DC phoned five minutes ago. He’d like a word.’
McCormack didn’t waste time whingeing to his squash pal.
‘Nick,’ says the DC. ‘What the hell are you up to?’
‘The pursuit of justice, sir.’ My coffee is good and strong, from the bakery down the road. ‘Without fear or favour.’ Try changing the subject. ‘Any news on that missing kid?’
‘Nothing. It’s been a week. Thin air. Look, Nick, give me a break, mate. McCormack’s a dick but it’s not just me he knows. He hangs out with all those government and public-service wankers in Wellington. Those people are reviewing my budget as we speak.’
There’s a memo on my desk, calls for voluntary redundancies and early retirements. I can’t afford that, not yet.
‘Three per cent efficiency dividend. You know what that means, Nick. It means station closures, rationalisations, all that palaver.’ A studied pause. ‘How is that boy of yours? Paulie? Must be eleven by now?’
Subtle, I’m thinking. Really subtle. I know he doesn’t mean it, he’s just reminding me of the quid pro quo. ‘Leave it with me, boss.’
Latifa is in the driving seat as we wind our way back up the valley.
‘So McCormack is blue blood is he?’ I ask.
She nods and changes down for a steep, sharp turn. ‘Fifth-generation Scot, and an arsehole from way back.’
‘You’re not in his fan club either then?’
‘Why would I be? His great-great-whatever grandfather stole a big block of land from mine two hundred years ago and he hasn’t said sorry yet.’
I gesture at the scenery. ‘He owns all this?’
‘Bought and paid for.’ Back up to fourth for the straight, and nudging a hundred before the next hairpin bend. ‘That hill over there is next for the chop.’
A mountain of pine heading for matchsticks. ‘It’s like the fucking Lorax.’
‘What?’
‘A Dr Seuss book, I read it to my boy.’
‘Soows, boowk. I love that accent of yours, Sarge. If you weren’t already married I’d probably find you sexy or something.’
Latifa missed the police college class about how to talk to your superiors. ‘Your turn to buy the fush and chups today,’ I tell her.
‘At least I belong here.’ She lifts her chin. ‘Charlie the Chicken Man is next on the left.’
He lives on the same valley road as me but eight kilometres away. I must have passed his gate a thousand times and we’ve never even met. We pull up at a functional – dare I say, ugly – box of a house with open paddocks either side and a half-cleared pine hill looming behind. Chickens clucking in the field – that ticks the free-range box – and a rooster cockadoodling way beyond dawn. In the other paddock some recently shorn alpacas are chewing on straw bales. In front of me stands Charlie the Chicken Man. He is short and hairy, buttoned neck to toe against the sandflies, and his gumboots are caked in grey mud. He holds his hand out, a welcoming smile on his face.
‘Charlie Evans.’
‘Nick Chester, Havelock Police.’
‘I’ve seen you around but I don’t think we’ve actually spoken.’
‘You must’ve been keeping out of trouble, then.’ I let Latifa explain the McCormack situation to him. She needs the practice on her people skills.
‘McCormack.’ Charlie snorts. ‘Piece of work.’
Latifa shows him the email on her iPad. ‘Did you send this?’
Charlie reads it. ‘Rapacious cunt: yeah that was me. And he is.’
‘Did you do this?’ She shows him a photo of the vandalism.
He grins. ‘Smaug. I like it.’
‘So did you?’
‘No.’
‘Can you account for your movements over the last twenty-four hours, sir?’ Latifa says sir like she doesn’t mean it. I know from experience.
Charlie can account for himself and does. He worked the farm, fed the chickens and alpacas, and looked after his bedridden wife who’s dying of cancer. ‘Pancreas,’ he says. ‘Anything else you wanted to ask?’
I look at his boots. ‘Where’s the grey mud from? All I can see around here is brown.’
‘Follow me.’
So we do. Trudging up the back of the paddock as the wind picks up, a bellbird chimes, and the alpacas bray. I slap a sandfly or two off my neck but I know they’ll itch like crazy later. We’re heading towards the bottom of the logged hill and a culvert channelling the run-off. Charlie turns and waves his hand at the hill behind.
‘McCormack’s handiwork. Bastards cleared this half about a month ago.’
‘Harvested,’ says Latifa. ‘His trees, his harvest, his right. No law against it.’
‘Bloody should be.’ Charlie points down into the culvert, clogged with grey mud from the hillside. ‘In the big rain a fortnight ago, this lot came down and clogged my drainage channel so the slurry spread all over my pasture and ruined the grass. Now I have to buy in straw to feed the alpacas. That’s half my income from the chickens gone,’ he snaps his fingers, ‘like that.’
‘Did you talk to McCormack about it?’ I ask.
‘Not interested.’
‘Maybe try getting in a lawyer or something?’ Latifa says.
‘His will be bigger and better. He’s got money to burn. They’re clearing the other half in the next month or two.’ Charlie gives the blocked culvert a last sad look. ‘Maybe this is what they mean by the economic trickle-down effect.’
Latifa hands him our business card. ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to damage Mr McCormack’s boat?’
‘Join the queue,’ he says, pocketing it.
The rest of the day is spent doing paperwork. Reports, budgets, circulars and such, and answering more emails than a man should receive in a place like this. Havelock, population around five hundred, is the greenshell-mussel capital of the world according to the sign just outside town. That’s pretty much the economy here: mussels, farmed salmon, sheep and logging. You could boil the population down to two personality types: those who like nature and those who would happily shoot it and skin it. Havelock is a two-cop station, a quaint little white weatherboard shack on the main street. Most of our wor
k concerns bad or drunk drivers and their consequences, or bad drinkers and their consequences. Everybody knows it doesn’t really need a sergeant in charge but I wasn’t going to drop a pay grade to come and hide here, so that’s that.
In theory, my chain of command goes east via Picton, the ferry port, then south through Blenheim, the capital of Marlborough, then west over to district headquarters in Nelson. Follow the dotted-line track and it looks like a man lost in the desert. In practice, I pretty much work to the DC in Nelson because the fewer people who know about me the better. The Tasman Police District covers the whole of the top of the South Island. It has to be one of the most spectacular beats in the world. There’s a sprinkling of small towns and a couple of places that call themselves cities. There are remote farms, vineyards, pristine beaches, a thousand coves and bays: a bonanza of boltholes and last resorts. The compact fjord-like coastline of the Marlborough Sounds adds up to nearly two thousand kilometres, that’s like two-thirds of the way across America. As befits a land that markets itself as Middle Earth, it is peopled by industrious and good-hearted hobbits, some fierce grumpy dwarves, haughty elves, and a smattering of orcs to keep the weekend patrols busy. For the most part, it’s a stunningly beautiful and peaceful place to hide.
As I turn the last corner on the unsealed section leading to our home, the sun drops behind the hill. A dun-coloured weka darts from the undergrowth out across the road. Pulling into the driveway, I see a dark blue ute with a couple of bull mastiffs caged in the back. Pig dogs. They set up a frenzy of barking and I hope the cages are locked; I’ve seen what they can do to a fully-grown hog. In the ute tray there’s a collection of guns and knives and tools, a chainsaw. Cold with dread, I unclip my Glock and head for the front door.
2
Sunderland, England. Four years earlier.
Sunderland’s motto is Nil desperandum auspice Deo, or loosely translated, Never despair, trust in God. With the unemployment statistics, real or imagined, rarely dipping below twenty per cent for the last three generations, you need something like that to cling to. Or a win on the pools. The shipyards and coalmines that once defined the place are long gone, replaced by Poundland, and Gregg’s the Bakers. But in this mock-Tudor mansion behind a tall fence in the select and secluded suburb of Cleadon, such grimy realities are out of sight and out of mind.