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

by Gregg Dunnett

  “Look, Mr… Jesse. I understand the situation perfectly. But we cannot let a threat stop us doing the right thing - this is a police matter. I mean how do you think this is supposed to end?”

  For a moment Jesse said nothing, then his shoulders slumped, and it looked like he might cry. “You’re still not getting it. It’s not just me now, is it? Her sister and the…”

  Dave cut in quickly. “I don’t think you should say that again. It’s preposterous.”

  “What am I gonna say?”

  “You’re going to spout some nonsense about Natalie’s family being in danger, but it’s ludicrous.”

  Jesse opened his mouth but didn’t speak. Instead his tongue explored his teeth.

  “He came to my house,” Natalie said. Neither of them could tell who she was speaking to.

  “After they killed Jim he came to my house and watched me. What did you say he called it? Insurance.”

  Jesse nodded, not taking his eyes off Dave.

  There was a long silence. Eventually Jesse broke it.

  “Let’s try it your way. You tell the police. What are they going to do? If you manage to convince them you’re not mad they might go and interview John Buckingham, successful businessman with a famous girlfriend. They might politely ask his side of the story. Maybe they’ll show him photographs like you’ve shown me. Does he know Jim Harrison? He’ll say he’s never heard of him, and he’ll be convincing because believe me he can be fucking convincing when he lies to you. Maybe he’ll call his lawyers, expensive lawyers. Maybe it’ll all be so friendly he won’t even need to. And when the police walk away, he’ll get to work. I don’t know that he’ll start with the kids. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he won’t fuck around this time and he’ll just kill us all. Move on. But I doubt it. I know John and that’s not the way he works. I think he’d enjoy himself. I think he’d find where they go to school. I think he’d lure them into his car, or an old van. I think he’d gag them, tie them up. I think he’d make sure they knew they were going to die, he’d show them the knife, he’d stick it in slowly and…”

  “Stop. Stop it will you? Just stop it.” Natalie brought her hands from her lap and pressed them against her ears.

  “Do you get it now? Do you get the problem?” Jesse was staring at Dave.

  For a moment the only sound in the room was breathing. The sucking in and pushing out of air like waves on a beach. It was Dave who recovered first.

  “Well if we can’t go to the police, what exactly do you suggest we do about all this? We can’t just walk away.”

  Jesse pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’m gonna make more tea,” he said and he turned to the cupboards.

  “I don’t want more tea,” Dave said, but Jesse ignored him, and began to fill the kettle. He collected the empty cups from the table without looking at them, and only when he’d dropped a fresh tea bag into each did he speak again.

  “I don’t know.” His head was bowed, his eyes on the floor. “If I knew what to do, don’t you think I’d have done it by now?” Jesse glanced over at them both and then continued. “I’ve thought about the police so much, I’ve even picked up the phone, written them letters, but I’ve always held back because I know how it ends that way. I know John. I grew up with him.”

  The kettle boiled and in silence Jesse filled the cups, then fished out the tea bags with his finger, and splashed in some milk. He put a cup in front of both Natalie and Dave.

  “You really want to know what to do? You gotta kill him. That’s the only way to stop him. You wanna go back to your lives and not worry that John Buckingham’s gonna break into your house one night and cut your throat? You go to the police you make that happen. You wanna stop him, the only way is to put him in the ground.”

  He stopped and stared directly at Natalie. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done and sorry that you’re involved, but that’s the truth of it.”

  She saw now that he had a single tear upon his cheek. It looked strange and unreal, and as it fell to the ground he sniffed and looked away.

  There was a noise outside, a low hum that Dave recognised first. He got up and went to the window as the sound clarified into rotor blades chopping heavily through the salty air. For the first time Jesse looked confused.

  “What’s that? What’s going on. You haven’t called the police already?” He said.

  “Stay here,” Dave practically growled at Jesse. “Natalie, come with me. I’m going to go and help him down.”

  Silently she followed and they went outside. The chopper was hovering over the car park, but the pilot saw Dave, who was making signals with his arms. Natalie didn’t understand the exchange, in truth she paid little attention but it resulted in the helicopter landing gently on the driveway leading to the house, where there was plenty of room. Only when it was down did she notice Jesse hadn’t stayed inside but had joined them, staring in amazement as the red and blue painted machine wound down its engines, its skids at right angles to the road. Eventually the rotors slowed so that you could make out each blade as it spun around. Then finally they stopped altogether and the only sound was the quiet whines and ticks of the machine as it settled on its perch.

  “What’s that?” asked Jesse.

  “It’s a helicopter,” said Natalie.

  “I know, I mean what’s it doing here?”

  “It’s Dave’s. We’re going to use it to fly home. Dave’s business is a helicopter firm. Jim’s was too,” she added the last part as an afterthought.

  Jesse looked incredulous. “That guy can fly a helicopter?”

  Dave was walking back to them now, but when he spoke it was directed only at Natalie. “I’ll give Damien the car. Then we’ve got the chopper for as long as we want. It’s not needed for a couple of days now.” He looked at Jesse then led Natalie away so that they were out of earshot of either the pilot or Jesse and went on. “What do you want to do about this?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s all a bit much to take in isn’t it?”

  Dave nodded.

  “I suppose, you know, since we’ve waited this long so we might as well not call the police right away. Let’s think about it first.”

  Dave said nothing and his gaze rested on Jesse. He stood half way between the house and the helicopter, unable to take his eyes of the machine. Then he gave Natalie a curt nod.

  They gave no explanation to Damien, and he didn’t even look curious. As the firm’s most junior pilot there was nothing unusual in swapping one aircraft for another, or indeed for a car to enable his employer to run the business effectively. The three of them watched as he started the car and swung out of the car park.

  And then Jesse walked up to the helicopter and put a hand out to touch its glossy paint.

  “So can we go up in this now? Cos if so I can show you where he is. Where your husband’s buried I mean. I was going to ask if you wanted me to take you there, but it’s an hour’s walk and we wouldn’t get there before dark. But I bet we could in that. I bet it wouldn’t take five minutes in that.”

  Dave glanced at Natalie and read something there that made him nod. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to land, we may only be able to look from the air.”

  “That’s ok,” Jesse said, “there’s a big open space at the top of the cliff. You could land a plane there. Easy.”

  “What do you think?” Again Dave spoke only to Natalie.

  “I’d like to see it.”

  Dave gave Jesse a look of open contempt and walked over to the aircraft.

  They put Jesse in the back seat, cooing over the leather seats and excitedly adjusting the volume levels on the ear defenders that hung in racks from the ceiling. Dave told Natalie to keep an eye on him, then turned his attention to preparing the aircraft for flight. With the engines already warm it wasn’t a long process. He glanced across at Natalie and nodded to let her know they were taking off and he pulled up on the cyclic. The helicopter rose up in a steady hover and Dave pushed it gently out toward
s the beach.

  “I’ll follow the coast south,” he told Jesse through the headphones. “You tell me when we’re there.”

  Jesse made no effort to hide his sense of amazement and delight at taking to the air above the land he was so familiar with, but Dave didn’t waste time with giving him a pleasure flight. He dipped the helicopter’s nose forward and settled into a flight three hundred metres above the sea keeping the rugged coast on his left hand side. A moment later Jesse’s voice came through the headphones again.

  “There. It’s down there.”

  Now Dave pulled the nose up to kill their forward speed and made a left turn so the aircraft was facing the land. Ahead of them was a vee shaped inlet, a bluff of cliff on one side and leading inland from it, a heavily wooded ravine.

  “There, on top of the cliffs, you can park there,” Jesse’s voice came again through the headphones.

  They edged closer until they were in a steady hover just in front of the cliffs, Dave inspecting the ground.

  “I thought you said it was flat?”

  “Flattish.”

  “You could land a plane here could you?”

  “It looks a bit smaller from up here. Looks a bit more overgrown as well,” Jesse said. But Natalie wasn’t listening, she was studying the ground.

  Dave found a bit he was happy with to set them down, and when the helicopter’s engines had quietened again she slid open the door. It was a beautiful spot.

  “That there, that’s the rockfall, you can still see it pretty clear,” Jesse said, they’d both joined her now. “There’s a path down this way where we can get down.”

  He led and they followed down a footpath that switched back upon itself several times as it tracked down the steep ground. And although the slump of rocks to their left clearly wasn’t fresh, you could see from the vegetation and the weathering on the rocks that it was recent in geological terms. It was also huge. A slew of thousands of tons of rock. Millions probably. And if what Jesse had told them was the truth, that somewhere underneath it all was Jim, it was overwhelmingly clear he wouldn’t be found. Natalie looked at it and tried to imagine a police team excavating the cliff. It was too big. It was impossible.

  “You blew this all up with gunpowder?” Dave asked when they reached the bottom.

  “Yeah. The Hanging Rock was up there,” Jesse pointed into the air above their heads. “When it came down it took a whole section of the cliff with it. The rocks went right out into the sea. It changed the wave right away, and then over the years, it’s just gotten worse. I reckon it changed the currents or something. Stopped the whole wave working.” Jesse looked humbled as he spoke.

  “I don’t really give a fucking shit about your wave,” Dave said, and then there was silence. The three of them gazed out across the slew of rocks and earth. The helicopter was still visible at the top of the slope, fifty metres above them.

  “And Jim’s under there.” Dave went on. “Somewhere.”

  “Oh yeah. He’s in there alright.” Jesse said.

  forty-two

  FOR THREE DAYS neither Natalie nor Dave spoke to anyone about what they’d learnt. They didn’t even speak to each other. Instead they tried to go back to their lives as if nothing had changed. It was easier not to think.

  But Natalie found it impossible not to think. During the day the thoughts interrupted her work. She’d find herself losing the thread of conversations with colleagues and clients. At night the first thing she did was open a bottle of wine, and when that was gone there was nothing to distract her. Nothing to deflect the thoughts. And once she began to think, her mind quickly filled itself with a strange new world of fears. Once the gears and cogs of cognition began to move, they accelerated quickly, until they were racing out of control.

  She felt once again the loss of Jim. But it was not the same hurt as when he had first disappeared. The aching hollowness of not knowing what happened to him was settled. She felt some relief that he hadn’t taken his own life. She felt a hot shame that he hadn’t felt forced to do so because of her actions. But she did not weep again for how her husband had died, too much time had passed for that.

  What she felt now was different. At first she could not recognise what it was, this ever growing sense, but as she sat alone and thought, whatever it was threatened to overwhelm her. Occasionally it exploded, a flash of emotion so bright it was like a bolt of lightning cracking through her brain. Eventually she realised, it wasn’t pain any more, it was fear.

  On the third night Dave called her and said he needed to talk to her. She found herself almost unable to answer, and at first nodded dumbly at the phone. Eventually she managed to reply, and half an hour later she heard his car pull to a halt in her driveway.

  “He checks out,” Dave said grimly, by way of a greeting. “I don’t know if you’ve searched on him, but pretty much everything that Jesse said checks out. There is a character called John Buckingham, famous girlfriend. He comes from Llanwindus, runs a string of companies. Restaurants, hotels, that kind of thing.” Dave stopped. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but you look terrible.”

  “Thanks Dave.” She half laughed, half cried.

  “You don’t look so great yourself.”

  It was true. He’d not shaved since she last saw him, his chin and jowls hung low as if pulled down by the weight of the dirty grey stubble.

  “You better come in,” Natalie said. She led him back into the kitchen and without offering poured him a glass of white wine.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry, I should have asked. How are you?” Dave asked.

  She gave a weak smile and raised her own glass to her lips, and then seemed to change her mind. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not sure I do either. This is a bit unreal isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m afraid I’m not here just to talk it through. I’ve found out something else. I think it’s important.”

  She felt her heart rate increase and almost told him she didn’t want to know. But she inclined her head onto one side in the lightest of shrugs, and Dave sighed before continuing, his voice quieter now.

  “I tried to find out about him online. There isn’t much, mostly it’s about his girlfriend. It seems he’s… secretive, doesn’t seek out the press at all. But his company still makes the news every now and then. When it does it’s usually for acquisitions. He’s got a reputation for being ruthless, in business I mean.”

  Natalie didn’t say anything, but from the look on her face this didn’t surprise her.

  “There’s more.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to believe this.” He sighed. “He’s a client.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a client of the business. John Buckingham is a fairly regular client of ours. He’s even got a flight booked for the end of next week. We’re flying him to Ireland.”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes as if the light was hurting her.

  “How? Why?”

  “I don’t know. It could be a coincidence. Most of his business interests are in London, but he also has some here, and in Cardiff.” He shrugged. “If you’re involved here and you need a helicopter, we’re top of the list. But I think we also have to consider it’s his way of… I don’t know. Keeping an eye or something. I don’t understand it though. Why take the risk of using our firm? Why would someone do that? Natalie?”

  Dave wondered if she had heard him, her eyes looked to have lost any sense of focus and she stared at nothing. But when she replied he knew she had heard him.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking too,” Natalie said. She rolled her head around as if her neck hurt her. “And some research.”

  “Go on.”

  “I looked into psychopaths. Psychopathic people. They’re not just something you see in horror films, they’re real people. Some you get to hear about. People like Ted Bundy in the States, he killed nearly forty women before they caught him. Jeffrey Dahmer, he killed fifteen. There was a
man called Gary Heidnik. He kept young women in a cellar. He took them out at night and raped and tortured them. He tortured them to death, and when they died he cooked their limbs and ate them. He fed the bones to his dogs. They’re real people Dave.”

  When he didn’t reply she went on.

  “People think they’re incredibly rare. And the ones like those are. They’re the outliers. With most psychopaths, you just never get to hear about them. We call them ‘high-functioning psychopaths’. The high functioning part just means they’re able to hide their psychopathic traits from other people. No one knows how they enjoy other people’s pain. Sixty five percent of murders are never solved. Some people have a theory that undiagnosed psychopaths account for a lot of them.”

  Dave said nothing.

  “It’s not exactly my area of expertise, but I know a little about it. Everything that Jesse described. It’s extremely plausible. Christ he might have been reading it from some of the case files I see from time to time. These people, they kill, they steal, they rape… And sometimes they get caught but most often they don’t because they’re not panicking when they’re acting, like normal people would. They don’t make lots of mistakes. When they kill people they’re enjoying themselves. So they get good at it. Us normal people we don’t expect them to behave as they do. Because normal people wouldn’t do what they do. What I’m saying is…”