The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller

by Gregg Dunnett

  “He was probably busy.” I was tired and stoned and I glanced at Angel, but she didn’t seem to be interested.

  “Yeah. Probably busy with his film star girlfriend.”

  Darren grabbed the poker from the fire tools set and started stabbing at the logs.

  I ignored him and looked again at Angel, but she was watching now with more interest. She swung her legs off me and pulled herself more upright on the sofa.

  “So is it really true then?” She asked. “You two properly knew John Buckingham when he lived here?”

  We’d never properly talked about John by then, but most people in the village knew about him by now. People who didn’t really know him I mean. They saw him in newspapers with his film star girlfriend. People were proud that he came from around here.

  “We still do know him,” Darren said.

  “Obviously,” she said. She rolled her eyes.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Obviously you know him really well. That’s why he’s here with his whole entourage.”

  I just watched the fire eating through its meal of logs.

  “We do know him,” Darren said. “We know him better than anyone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We know things about him that no one else knows.” Darren said.

  Angel laughed. “What like the time you all wanked onto a digestive playing soggy biscuit?”

  “No, like…” Darren started to say, but I cut into him.

  “Hey, Darren, put another log on the fire will you?” I stared at him, a warning to shut up.

  “Go on then,” Angel said, after he’d thrown the log on and a million sparks had spiralled their way up the chimney. “What do you know about John Buckingham? If there really is something, you could sell it to the papers. It’s pretty clear he’s not really your mate after all. You might as well make some money out of him.”

  Darren glanced at me and kept quiet.

  “Come on Darren. Either you know something or you’re full of shit. Which is it? What’s the big secret?”

  Darren didn’t look at her when he replied. He dropped his head and mumbled, something. He spoke so quietly I barely caught what he said.

  “We went surfing together.”

  Angel heard it though. She raised her hands to her face like she’d seen a ghost.

  “Oooo. Big fucking story Darren. Hold the front pages.” She looked at me for encouragement and I could see Darren opening his mouth to say something else. It worried me what he might say, so I jumped in.

  “Fuck’s sake Angel, will you just leave it? It’s not really the night for this.” This pissed her right off, and she snatched her legs away from my lap, then grabbed her dope from the table and announced she was going to bed. From the way she said it, I wasn’t welcome to come with her, so I let her go.

  “I don’t get you sometimes Jesse,” Darren said when Angel’s banging upstairs had stopped. “Don’t you ever feel betrayed?”

  “What?”

  “Betrayed. We help him out like that, and then he just disappears. The next thing we hear he’s some big shot with no time left for us. Doesn’t that piss you off a little bit?”

  I sighed. “A little bit.”

  “Sometimes that pisses me off.” Darren said.

  “Yeah well there’s nothing we can do about it.” I wanted to change the subject. Or just sit there staring at the fire.

  “Especially since it wasn’t even an accident.”

  “What?”

  “At Hanging Rock. He made us help him out like that and it wasn’t even an accident.”

  “Course it was.”

  “No it wasn’t.” He shook his head.

  “You didn’t even see it happen,” I said.

  “I didn’t need to. I thought about it. You don’t stab someone like that by accident. It’s obvious.”

  “John said the guy lunged at him. It was slippery. John said it was an accident.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said. But I don’t think what he said added up. At least not to me.”

  “He was in shock about what he’d done. He’d broken his fucking arm Darren. He wasn’t saying much at all.”

  “Well what about when you went to see him? Before he went to London. That we all just had to be apart for a little bit. That was bullshit too. He didn’t even bother coming to see me.” He shut up for a bit and I thought he might drop it, but he didn’t.

  “It’s not fair Jesse. It’s not fair what he’s doing with his life and what we’re doing with ours. Not with what we know about him.”

  I could get a sense with Darren sometimes. This wasn’t something he’d just thought of. He’d been working up to this for some time. A long time. I was glad that Angel had gone to bed.

  “Yeah well like I said. I didn’t really see it either. I was looking at you when it happened, so I don’t know.”

  “But you do now, because I’ve told you.”

  I said nothing and for a time I thought he’d dropped it. We had a few drinks and watched the fire. But all the time I could feel Darren watching me. Then he started again.

  “It wasn’t no accident Jesse.”

  “What does it matter anyway now? It’s not like we can do anything,” I snapped.

  He leaned forward, swirling his drink around in his glass.

  “He stitched us up. Making us help him like that. Making us drag the guy’s body over the rocks, driving his fucking car down to Cornwall and blowing up the Hanging Rock. We couldn’t go to the cops after that. We didn’t do anything and he made us as guilty as he was.”

  “Well… There’s nothing we can do now.”

  “And then he couldn’t even be bothered to come for your mum’s funeral. We help him out and he couldn’t even come for that. Didn’t even send a letter to say he was sorry. No flowers, no…”

  “Maybe he was busy.” I cut in.

  Darren considered this for a good while, nodding his head gently the whole time.

  “Yeah, busy. Probably.”

  “I don’t get why you don’t see it Jesse. He owes us. He owes us big time.”

  He looked at me, his little eyes all hard.

  “He owes us Jesse. And I reckon we should do something about it.”

  He told me his plan that same night. It wasn’t sophisticated. It didn’t even make much sense. We were supposed to write him a letter, telling him we’re going to the cops unless he paid us. Darren didn’t know how much. Just enough money so we could go and do whatever we wanted.

  At first I didn’t think he was serious. It was so stupid, but I knew him too well. It made sense to him.

  “How can we go to the police? When we were involved? They’ll put us in prison too.”

  He shook his head. “Not if we both tell them the same story, that we saw John do it, then they’d put him in prison. We’d be on the witness protection scheme or something.”

  I looked at him, sitting there leaning forward over the table. “So you want to blackmail John?”

  He looked surprised by this, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that what he was suggesting might have a name. Then he nodded.

  “Blackmail. Yeah. That’s right.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “And he’ll do it, he’ll pay us Jesse. He’ll have to, cos of all the things he would lose.”

  Still I didn’t answer him.

  “And just think what we could do with money Jesse. We could go away. We could move out to Indonesia or something, just you and me. We could open a bar by the beach. Just you and me Jesse.”

  But I just got up and went to bed.

  forty

  I SHOULD TELL you something about Darren’s bar. According to him, that’s what we were saving for. He’d read a story in a magazine once about two guys who moved to Indonesia and opened a beach bar. They went surfing in the days, and they worked at the bar every night. He’d been going on about it for years. How we’d surf these tropical waves, and serve cold beers to beautiful girls
all night. Sometimes he’d even adjust the daydream to allow Angel to fit in with it. In his fantasy she wasn’t allowed behind the bar, but he could just about cope with the idea of her wiping the tables down.

  Sometimes I went along with the daydream, but other times I told him to get real. You had to have loads of money to do something like that. I never had any money, and even though he was working, he never actually saved anything. Whatever he got paid from the garage he spent right away in the pub or in the off-licence. Darren’s Indonesian bar fantasy was just that, a fantasy, and at first I figured his blackmail idea fell into the same category.

  But I also figured that with Mum gone, quite a lot was going to change. It’s not like I wanted Mum to die or anything, but now she was gone the campsite was mine. Which meant I could sell it and do something else. Don’t think for a minute I ever seriously considered Indonesia, but I did think I could do something with my life. Maybe I could follow John’s path and go to London. Anything to get me out of Llanwindus. But I got a nasty shock a few days later. I looked through the accounts of the campsite. And even though I wasn’t great at maths I could see it wasn’t that good. I finally understood why Mum had climbed into her overalls to sort out the drains instead of phoning a plumber for all those years. Ten years after she’d bought the place, we still owed more on the campsite than it was worth.

  If that was depressing, it quickly got worse. With Mum gone the work began to pile up pretty quick. For a while I did what I could, but it was impossible. I was running the shop and checking the campers in and out, while Angel was padding round in her bare feet, puffing on a joint and helping herself from the shelves. There was the grass to cut, all the stock taking, the fucking showers that never ran hot. And you’ve got to remember I was the owner of the site by then. I wasn’t going to be the one cleaning the toilets too. Anyway, we seemed to get a run of people who just complained all the time, so one day I just closed the gates and didn’t let anyone else in.

  Except Darren. He kept coming. And whenever Angel was out of earshot he never let up on his new idea.

  He tried to draft the blackmail letter. He showed it to me and I could see it was hopeless. He wasn’t completely illiterate, but writing wasn’t his strength, and this wasn’t the sort of letter where you could get help at the local library. But even allowing for all the mistakes he’d made, there was something convincing about the letter. When I managed to understand Darren’s points at justifying why John owed us so much. I had to admit, it made sense. We had helped John a lot that day, and it was all John’s fault. And unlike him for some reason we hadn’t been able to shake it off so easily. It had affected us. We’d both fucked up our exams soon after it happened, it’s hard to concentrate on history when you’re worried the police are going to arrest you for murder any minute. John did owe us something for that. And now John had so much. And we weren’t asking for a fortune. Just enough to get us set up somewhere. Make a fresh start. Then John could forget about us. He wouldn’t have to worry about how we were getting on. It made sense when you thought about it.

  And on top of all that I also figured out that if I didn’t help Darren write his letter, then he’d eventually get someone else to help him. He’d promise someone from the garage or the pub a share of the money, cos he was easily stupid enough to do that. And if I let that happen we could lose control of the whole situation real quick. And I suppose I thought that if Darren was going to get some money, then I should get some. That was only right. That was only fair. After all I drove the car for John. I helped him more than Darren did. So in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. I guess that’s how I ended up helping Darren to write his blackmail letter.

  Darren agreed to have it all done in his name. He even wanted it that way. Since Mum had died it was like he wanted John to know how much he hated him. He really wanted John to believe it was just Darren screwing him over. Like he was smart enough to do that. That was fine with me, but when I looked John up on the internet and found out how much he was worth, I told Darren we had to ask for more money. And he was OK with that too.

  It felt quite exciting the night we finished the letter and put it in the envelope. I wrote his name on the front and then added strictly private and confidential, to be opened only by Mr John Buckingham underneath. I underlined the only three times to make sure it went right to him. We took it to the postbox in the village and bought eight cans of beer to celebrate. Darren spent the night talking about how we were finally going to Indonesia. For a little while I started to believe it too.

  The letter was pretty simple. It told John to pay the money directly into Darren’s account, a one-off payment to buy his silence for helping to cover up his crime. If John didn’t pay, Darren would go to the police and tell them everything. But we were convinced he would pay. And when he did, Darren would give half to me. I’d tell Angel the money came from the campsite. She didn’t know it was in debt at that point.

  Every night that week we checked Darren’s account on the internet, each time expecting to see the money showing up, but each night it was the same, a few hundred quid in credit, and just a few transactions. Twenty quid at the off-licence or at the Spar. Darren thought the letter might have got lost in the post. I started to worry something else might have happened.

  Then John made his move. One night Darren didn’t come around. He practically lived at the campsite by then, so I had to phone his house to see where he was. His mum answered the phone. She was in tears but she managed to tell me. Darren’s brother had been killed. He’d got into a knife fight near a club in Cardiff. A knife fight for fuck’s sake. Darren’s brother the pacifist. The vegetarian. The biggest pussy you could ever meet. There was no way he’d got into a knife fight. It was John. This was John giving his answer to Darren. He must have slipped out into the city night and stalked Darren’s brother until he left some night club, then pulled him into an alleyway and stabbed him over and over again.

  But that wasn’t enough for John. I got a message too. Since I’d been a bit closer to Darren for a couple of weeks Angel had been a bit pissed off with me and she’d gone back to her flat. The same day I heard about Darren’s brother I got a call from Megan, Angel’s housemate. She’d never called me before so I knew it had to be bad news. And it was. There was a scummy little park near their flat, and sometimes people used the toilets there to inject. Not Angel, she was never into heroin. She wasn’t a junkie or anything like that. But that’s where they found her anyway. She was on the floor in a cubicle, the needle was still stuck in her arm, the plunger pressed in. For once her blue lips were nothing to do with make up.

  There was nothing to connect the two deaths. At least nothing we could tell the police. But we knew it was him. The knife he stabbed Ben with had an eight inch blade. It was a hunting knife, just like the one John had used at Hanging Rock all those years ago. I don’t know, maybe it was even the same knife. There were no fingerprints, no other evidence, no witnesses. He must have gone from there straight to see Angel. We never told her what John was really like so it would have been easy for him to get her to follow him. I don’t know how he got her to take the drugs, probably he just forced her. The toilet cubicle was open at the top, so once he’d done it he could have just climbed out. But the police didn’t accept that, they said that because the door was locked it must have been an accidental overdose. They didn’t care really. Good riddance. To them she was just another fucked up junkie kid from a care home. To me she was my only chance of ever getting away from John.

  forty-one

  “THAT WAS SIX months ago. It was when I finally realised what John was. The kind of person he really was. He’s not like other people. He doesn’t have the limits other people have.” Jesse shook his head, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. “It’s like something out of the movies.”

  The others said nothing, and after a moment Jesse went on. “I still think the guy at Hanging Rock - your husband,” he glanced at Natalie, “I still think he was t
he first, but I know he’s killed others since then, not just Angel and Ben but others as well. He likes it. It’s how he gets his kicks. If you go after him you’ll make yourself a target. He’ll hurt you too.”

  Jesse sat back against his chair and it took them a moment to realise he’d finished.

  “Well?” Dave spoke finally. He still sounded angry. “Is that it?”

  “Yeah. That’s about where we are.”

  “Well I’m sorry. I’m sorry to hear about all that’s happened to you, but this doesn’t change anything. We still have to call the police. Right now.” But as sure as he sounded, he didn’t touch the phone, instead he glanced over at Natalie. She didn’t look back, her eyes seemed to be focussing on a small point on the far wall.

  Jesse sighed, even rolled his eyes a little bit. But he sounded defeated.

  “OK. Whatever. I guess it’s your choice. I’m only trying to help.” He gave Dave a weak smile.

  “Whatever he’ll do, maybe you can deal with it. You know?”

  Dave glared at him and picked up his phone but he hesitated again.

  “I just thought she’d want to know. What with her sister’s kids and all.” Jesse went on.

  Dave’s head snapped back around to Jesse. “You say that again I’m going to wring your filthy neck.”

  “Christ man, calm down. Shoot the messenger and all. I’m just trying to explain it to you.” Jesse had his hands out in front of him, palms up.

  “Sometimes I want to tell the police too. I want to find a way to end this nightmare. But then I think a bit more and I know I can’t. The police won’t believe me, they won’t do anything to him, and he’ll just punish me more. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll just kill me. Maybe it won’t even hurt too much. But there’s other people. Darren, his mum and dad. John knows all about them. And if he wants to hurt me more, there’s plenty of ways. And he won’t hesitate. He doesn’t fuck around. Don’t you understand what I’ve been telling you?” Jesse’s eyes were staring at Dave. Pleading with him, it calmed them both down.