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

by Gregg Dunnett

  Elaine thought of her own body and felt a sense of mourning for what she had been. But she forced herself to smile. We’re all animals, she repeated to herself. We all have our needs. And she accepted that it was probably happening again.

  forty-four

  DAVE AND ELAINE’S party was just about the last place Natalie wanted to go, four days after learning how her husband had died, and that the man who killed him continued to pose a threat to her and her family. But since she could tell no one, she had no reason not to go. She considered faking sickness, but a text message from Dave changed her mind.

  Are you coming tomorrow? I have to speak with you.

  Natalie walked through the house in a daze. Most of the guests were gathered on the patio, outside the kitchen. A band were playing and the garden was strewn with chairs and loungers, many occupied and pulled into smaller circles. Natalie knew most of the people there, at least by sight, it was the same crowd each year. She nodded to a couple, but didn’t go over to speak to them. She saw her sister further away, where the lawn gave way to the kidney shaped pool, shouting at the boys not to splash people. Normally she’d have joined them, but she’d spotted Dave, by the BBQ, a little out of the way by the fence, Dave with his back to the party.

  He turned and saw her, then watched as she walked over. He looked like a man incapable of smiling.

  She saw what he was grilling, strips of marinated steak, skewers of vegetables and prawns, thick sausages.

  “Hi. You want something?” He said.

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither. Kind of hard to get in the party mood isn’t it?”

  She smiled, the same weak smile she had earlier, but with Dave it had more understanding in it.

  Dave turned back to the grill. He gripped one sausage with his tongs and gave it a quarter turn, then worked his way down the rest doing the same. When he’d finished Natalie was still there. Watching him.

  “Have you thought any more about what you want to do?”

  “I’ve thought about nothing else,” Natalie said. “I still don’t know.”

  There was a table next to the grill, a heavy concrete plinth supported by a wall of bricks at each end and inlaid with terracotta tiles. Dave’s drink rested on one of them, a tumbler of something, the syrupy swirl of its alcohol evident even though Natalie couldn’t tell what it was. He lifted it now and swirled the ice around before taking a sip.

  “Get you a drink?”

  “I’m driving.”

  “I’ll get you one anyway. We need to talk.”

  By the time he’d handed her a tumbler of strong gin and tonic the food on the BBQ was ready, and a raggedy, jovial queue formed. Natalie picked at a plate of salad for the sake of it and joined her sister at the pool. The boys were diving. They’d come prepared with goggles and could swim the length of the pool underwater. She sat astride a sun lounger and nursed her drink, glancing over at Dave. When all the food was cooked he looked for her, nodded, and then disappeared inside.

  “I’m not sure I can keep this up. Nothing seems real anymore.” They were upstairs where Dave had a small office, its window overlooked the back garden. The decoration was all Dave, presumably since it was hard for Elaine to get up there. Natalie was sitting in his chair, a leather high-backed executive model festooned with adjustment levers. He was leaning against the plain white wall, a drink in his hand. It was her that had spoken.

  “I can’t talk to people. They don’t even seem real. It’s like I’m living in a bad dream.”

  Dave breathed heavily. “I know.”

  A silence drew out between them.

  “And if that wasn’t bad enough, I think Elaine suspects we’re having an affair or something. She keeps staring at me.”

  “I know.”

  “So what was it you wanted to say?” Natalie asked.

  He gave another sigh. Then he rolled his head back and looked at the ceiling. He stared at it for a very long time before he began to speak.

  “I don’t know a way to say this,” he said at last. “Once these words come out I can’t take them back. And I’ve thought of a dozen ways to begin, but every one seems wrong.” Dave didn’t go on but he turned to look at her. The expression on his face was ominous. It scared her.

  “You want to do what Jesse says don’t you?” She shook her head away from his gaze. “You want to bloody kill him.”

  “No. Of course I don’t,” he said quickly. “I don’t want to. There’s nothing I want less. But…” Dave stroked his chin. He’d shaved for the party. It made him look even more tired.

  “Look, the way I wanted to put it is like this. The law allows a person to… to kill,” he lowered his voice on the word, “to kill another person if it’s in self defence. And that’s the situation we find ourselves in. Through no fault of our own, that’s just the truth of it. Our lives and the lives of entirely innocent people are at risk if we don’t act. Now normally the correct course of action would be to go to the police, but in this case, we can’t.”

  “I agree with you.”

  “I simply cannot believe I find myself saying this out loud, but… What?”

  “I agree with you. If we could do it, it would be the only way out of this.”

  Now Dave turned around to look at her.

  “It would be?”

  “If we could, yes.”

  Dave checked her eyes, confusion had edged into his expression.

  “I think, Natalie.” He stopped. Breathed hard for a moment. “If we’re seriously going to consider this… option. We need to talk in certainties. It can be done.”

  She didn’t answer but she kept her eyes on him.

  There was a small leather sofa on the back wall and he walked over and flopped down in it, his head back. He talked to the ceiling above her head.

  “I need to tell you something. I need to tell you a story. Will you hear me out?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. OK.”

  “You know when I really worked out that life is unfair? Really fundamentally unfair? It was after Elaine’s accident. Not the accident itself, that was just bad luck. But afterwards. The police hardly even looked for the driver. Did you know that? It was before the days when everything was covered by CCTV I suppose. Maybe it would have been different if Elaine had remembered more of the car. Maybe if there’d been a witness. But there wasn’t. It was dark, it hit her from behind. The bastard never stopped. And once the police realised there were no clues. When no one turned themselves in, that was it. But he’d have known of course. You don’t drive straight through someone on a pedestrian crossing and not notice.”

  Dave glanced down to check Natalie was still listening.

  “They gave up on the case before she even came home from hospital. They moved onto things they could solve. It didn’t even matter who her father was. She would never walk again, she couldn’t have children. That didn’t matter to them. The driver got away with no punishment at all. Maybe a dented bumper. A few sleepless nights maybe.” He glanced at her again.

  “For years I thought about the man driving that car.” At this he dropped his eyes from the ceiling and stared at her. “Or the woman, it might have been a woman, but for some reason I always pictured him as a man. And I fantasied about what I would do if I ever found him. Not if I ever had proof of what he’d done. I never once fantasied about reporting him to the police. That wasn’t the kind of justice I wanted. My fantasies were always about what I would do to him. At first it was more about doing to him what he had done to Elaine. Something to do with all those Catholic masses my parents made me sit through I suppose, an eye for an eye. A baseball bat for a hit and run. But that never seemed practical. Actually it never seemed fair. All that would do was land me in prison. I’d lose again. Elaine would lose again. So I began to think instead about removing him. Killing him I suppose.” Again his voice quietened on the word. He stopped again and this time he stared down at his hand. It was resting on the arm of the sofa but still holding h
is drink, but his hand was shaking so violently the ice was rattling against the glass. He leaned forward and set it down.

  “It seemed harmless, helpful even, these fantasies. An outlet for my frustrations. I never thought it was real. I never thought I’d actually find him, how could I? But even so I’d work out how to do it, so I wouldn’t get caught.” Dave began to smile now. An ironic smile.

  “And it’s entertaining, it’s like a puzzle. Working out how you might do it. A puzzle with an infinite number of right answers. I could spend hours thinking about it. I whiled away many a long flight thinking how it might be done. And once it’s done in cold blood, once your victim doesn’t even know you’re coming for him - it’s not so hard. Not once you commit yourself. So it’s not a question of could we do it. The question is should we?”

  Now that Dave had sat down, their heads were at the same level. Natalie blinked several times before answering. The only response which came to her was a professional one.

  “It’s not an uncommon response,” she said, her voice was flat, as if she’d switched off from anything emotional. “Fantasies like that. Everyone has an inner world that’s kept private, where we explore options that we’d never actually consider doing for real.”

  Dave nodded, then when she didn’t continue, he answered.

  “There is no chance with Elaine. The man who wrecked her life is long gone. But the man who killed your husband isn’t. He’s all alone on one of our helicopters next week.” Suddenly Dave stopped and bit hard on his knuckle. He screwed his eyes tight shut for a second.

  “I’ve been skirting around the subject so I’ll just come out and say it. I think we have no choice. I think we have… The moral right to take this matter into our own hands. The moral necessity. I think we should take him out Natalie.”

  They stared at each other for a long while until Dave went on, now his voice was much quieter. “And I know how we’re going to do it.”

  Natalie, already shrunken into herself, felt her body shrivel even further. She felt the blood drop from her head and her vision began to close in, she wondered if she was going to faint, and she didn’t care, she wanted to. Anything but this. Anything but being here in this room listening to this. But then her body began to recover. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest but her eyes slowly regained everything around her, Dave’s pokey little office, the distant sounds of the party below. When she finally felt able to open her mouth she felt cornered. There was no way out of this, apart from this one horrible chink of light.

  “How?” she said.

  Once he’d told her she had just one question.

  “What about Elaine? She already suspects something. How are we going to explain us being together?”

  “I thought that too. But I think it helps us. You understand we cannot get caught doing this. We cannot ever tell anyone. So this becomes our alibi. If the police seem in any way suspicious when we explain it to them, I’ll tell them that we were having an affair. It’ll explain it if we look strange at all. It’ll make us look innocent.”

  Natalie stared at him with a look half way between amazement and disgust.

  “You’d risk your marriage on top of everything else.”

  “I already did that, a long time ago.” He gave her a look she didn’t understand and she turned away.

  “Natalie, I don’t want to do this, but we have no choice. We just have to do it in a way that we can never get caught.”

  She stared at him, angry now, but then she looked away and dropped her head into her hands.

  “What about Jesse? Have you been in touch with him? Does he know about this?”

  Dave paused. “He’s phoned. He’s phoned several times. He knows about the flight, I think he guessed from something he read in a gossip magazine. He’s desperate to help. But I haven’t told him.”

  “Oh Jesus Dave. Is there really no other way?”

  When his eyes met hers there was a pleading in them. He shook his head.

  “There isn’t.”

  forty-five

  THE FLIGHT JOHN Buckingham had booked with the firm was from his home in the west of London direct to Ireland. It was the second such flight he was taking, and like the first it was to visit his girlfriend Sienna, who was in the final weeks of shooting a movie over there. She was playing the romantic interest lead in an IRA thriller.

  It hadn’t been easy for the director to find a location which allowed for the beautiful wide open shots of the 1980s landscape minus the many wind turbines which had popped up since then, and which they were allowed to blow up as comprehensively as the script demanded. The spot they chose also had to house the nearly one hundred people who were working on the film in decent accommodation. Sienna’s Hollywood-based co-star demanded a house of his own. In the end they found somewhere perfect, and the only caveat was that it was a three-hour drive, down twisty roads, from Dublin International airport. It was for this reason that John had the helicopter booked. Or more accurately, that his PA - a woman called Carol - had booked it for him. Dave knew all this from her rather chatty email, and he also concluded that over the years John’s reason for using the firm’s helicopters had shifted from primarily a means of monitoring them, to a habit born of convenience. If you can afford to travel by helicopter, the speed, comfort and point-to-point nature of it really is very handy. At least that was what he was counting on.

  He checked the logs. During John’s first trip, nearly three weeks previously, the chopper had flown from London to the film set, picked up the actress and then the pair had spent two days flying around Ireland, first visiting the Ring of Kerry for one night, and then heading north for a second night on an island in Stangford Lough. Damien had been the pilot. Carol’s instructions this time around, which assumed Damien would once again be flying them, were that he should pick up Sienna from the same location but this time head to Dublin, where she (Carol) had reserved a suite at the Hilton Hotel.

  Thus Dave’s first task was to tell Damien he wasn’t needed for this trip. He got lucky with the excuse. A late job had come in, a corporate hospitality golf gig that Dave would have had to fly since there were no other pilots available. It was plausible enough that Dave preferred to fly the Ireland trip himself, and Damien didn’t sound surprised when he was told of the change in plans. The only thing that did surprise him was when Dave also mentioned that he would take the Eurocopter, but it wasn’t a big surprise. The Eurocopter was the largest helicopter they operated, capable of taking seven guests, and too big really for the two clients who were booked to use it. But it was also the newest, and Dave mentioned to Damien, as casually as he could, that he just wanted to spend a bit of time getting to know her. Dave didn’t mention that Natalie would be coming with him. It would have sounded odd to do so.

  Actually Dave knew the chopper very well, he’d spent enough time researching it before signing the payment schedule to add it to his fleet. And he knew it was the only chopper they operated which would allow them to carry out his plan. What made the Eurocopter unusual was its interior layout. The two seats up front faced forwards, for the pilot and co-pilot. The paying passengers travelled in a separate rear cabin where six white leather seats - armchairs really - were arranged facing each other around a low table. Below its beautiful cherrywood top were two glass-fronted cabinets, one was a small keep-warm oven, the other an ice box. When clients booked the Eurocopter they could choose from a range of light meals to eat onboard, each prepared by a ground-based team of Michelin-starred chefs and designed to stay at their best for a flight of up to three hours. There were no cabin crew, the passengers had to serve themselves, but if this was a hardship, there was complimentary champagne to sooth ruffled VIP feathers.

  Dave advised Carol of the upgrade to the aircraft by email, noting that it was complimentary, and attaching the menu and drinks list, along with a request that she let him know ASAP so they could ensure his order was ready for his flight. Then Dave had waited nervously for four hours unti
l she replied, during which time he had begun to fret that the man might suffer from airsickness, or eat at unusual hours, or even that there had been something in his email which somehow raised her suspicions. Dave’s heart beat faster when her reply had pinged into his inbox. He needn’t have worried. She was brief but enthusiastic:

  “That’s no problem! John loves an upgrade! Please no food, but Champagne would be perfect!”

  She even added a smiley face after her name.

  That done, Dave moved onto the next stage of the plan. It was harder than he imagined to force the needle of the hypodermic through the bottle’s cork. He had to take it out to his workshop, place the bottle in a vice (swaddled in a towel so as not to mark the label), then load the syringe into his table-mounted drill. He broke two bottles and three needles before he tried heating the needle with a blowtorch. Once it was red hot it burnt its way through the foil and cork. It left a mark but it was so small it was hard to find even if you looked for it.

  It wasn’t easy either to know what to inject into it. He knew a little about pain killers from living with Elaine for so long, and he had a medical cabinet full of options. Natalie had some expertise too, but neither of them knew how to adapt their knowledge to be certain of how to knock a man unconscious, nor how well their concoction would be disguised in a glass of Moet and Chandon. This was complicated since they didn’t know how much their victim would drink, nor how quickly. They knew enough not to risk using the internet to check, and they realised that a certain degree of caution was necessary. It would make the final job more difficult, and a great deal more unpleasant, but ultimately less risky.