by Jude Knight
Ethan followed him over to the board and wrestled it off its remaining nail. It was a bit narrow, but stained rather than painted with a good gripping surface even in this rain. “We’ll jump. Have you done any jumping?”
“A bit.” Quite a bit from the almost smile he caught on Rhys’s face.
With Rhys’s help, Ethan soon had the board lined up with the path beyond the entrance, the remaining nails helping to anchor the upper end on the top rail of the inner fence. “Right. Line up straight on the board. Gun it. You’ll need some speed to drive you the distance after your tires leave the ground.” Rhys probably knew all this, but Ethan wasn’t taking any chances. “Once you’re airborne, look at the spot you plan to land, not at the ramp. Once you’re in the air, look beyond, up the path. Don’t brake. Let the slope of the path slow you down.”
Rhys sailed over easily, and braked thirty or forty yards up the track. Ethan followed, passing him without stopping, keeping the speed up so his wheels didn’t slide on the muddy track.
Jack didn’t stop in Barnsley, but turned towards the coast. So, Ethan was right again. Raising her voice as much as she dared, though Jack wouldn’t hear anything less than a shout over the noise of the engine and the wind and rain, Claudia said “The road to the coast.” If Jack heard, he didn’t care, and whoever was listening now knew which road they had taken. She tucked her chin into the coat, keeping as much out of the wind behind Jack as she could. Through the arms he’d insisted she wrap around him, she could feel his tension. Could his words be trusted? Was Ethan even now speeding towards their daughter?
She had a sudden image of Ethan’s bike slipping in the mud and tipping him over a cliff or into a tree or a rock. “Please, God, let him be careful.” But Abbie. Her little girl was up in the hills, locked in a tramper’s hut, frightened and alone. “Please, God, let him be quick.”
The route proved to be clearer than they expected. Another bike had been there earlier in the day and left plenty of signs of its passage—deep ruts here, a spray of dirt across a rockface there, broken swathes of muddied undergrowth somewhere else. Ethan grinned as he leapt the evidence of a particularly nasty wipe-out on a rocky outcrop that was slick with mud. Coming out, not going in, so after the bastard had abandoned Abbie. Not bad enough, evidently, to keep Quinton from picking his bike up and carrying on, but at the very least he had some nasty bruises.
Behind him, the school teacher was managing well for a hobbyist; more cautiously than Ethan, but that wasn’t a bad thing in these conditions. His fans from the old days wouldn’t believe it of him. He used to throw himself at every obstacle, and the only speed that counted was flat out. But a combination of hare and tortoise was what Abbie needed now.
The trail led down a slope towards a stream that would be fordable in ordinary conditions, but that now raged in an ungovernable torrent. A flat rock around halfway down offered a launching point, and Ethan took it, judging his speed and angle just right to drop onto the track on the other side of the gully, gunning the engine to lift him out of the way before Rhys followed.
Rhys’s landing wasn’t as smooth, but he crashed into undergrowth which at least broke his fall. He was on his feet before Ethan could ride back to check, testing that the bike was unharmed, waving Ethan on as he remounted.
Over the next ridge and down the other side, and repeat. The track led into a stand of regrowth rimu, the trunks nearly half a yard across and the branches starting well above their heads. Ethan, intent on the marks left by the Triumph, would have worn the full brunt of a rogue low branch if Rhys hadn’t shouted, “Look out!” As it was, he ducked too late to prevent the outer twigs and leaves from striking him.
No matter. In moments they were out the other side of the forest and climbing again, this time snaking back and forth across the hill face, always climbing towards one of the higher peaks in the range.
The hut was beyond a gully between this peak and the next. As the zig-zag climb ended and the track straightened out to round the peak, Ethan expected to see the swing bridge that was marked on the map. Just a few more minutes, Abbie.
The swing bridge was there. Dangling into the gully from the supports on the other side, just a few twisted remnants of concrete and steel remaining of the supports that had tethered it to this side.
Rhys pulled up beside Ethan where he sat on his bike examining the ruin.
“Now what?”
11
Fifteen minutes out of Barnsley, Jack pulled off into a layby, stopping the bike next to a parked car; a red hatchback.
“We do the next bit in comfort,” he told Claudia. He dismounted, gesturing her to do the same, then pressed the button on the door handle. “Your chariot awaits.”
“I thought you had a white sedan,” Claudia said. “Not a red—what sort of car is it?”
He narrowed his eyes. She felt the blow before she saw it coming—not one of the pinches or twists he’d dealt her so often in the past, but a full-on punch that sent her flying. She sat, dazed, where she had fallen while he ranted at her.
“You have a bug, you bitch. You’re telling them where we are.”
He dragged her up by one arm, and began patting her down, continuing to berate her until he found the bug under her wristband. He whistled into it and giggled, suddenly cheerful again as he dropped it and ground it under his boot.
“It doesn’t matter. I have you for safe passage. But you’ve missed your chance for your daughter, you bitch. I know where she is and I’m not telling. Better hope this weather lets up so they can find her, ’cause we’ll be far away before anyone can get to her. Is she nervous, Claudia? Does she have nightmares? About the accident, maybe?”
Claudia let him manhandle her into the car, and stayed silent, grateful that Trent had a writer’s devious mind. The second bug—the one sewn into the top hem of her tee-shirt—would be catching the whole tirade.
Not for the first time, Ethan checked to the network indicator on his phone. Nothing. “Going ’round will take hours. I’m jumping.” Fifty yards across, and ten down, with unknown terrain on the other side. But what choice did he have.
Rhys blanched at the thought. “I can’t do it, man. I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t even try,” Ethan told him. “You’ve got three daughters to go home to. This is my family; it’s my job to do.” Give the man a crumb for his ego, and Ethan had one ready. “I need you this side, anyway. I’ll get over okay, but it’s downhill. There’ll be no way back. Wait for me here, and when I know Abbie is safe, I’ll come and tell you. You’ll need to ride out on your own and let Claudia know. Search and Rescue, too, so they can come and get us. Be careful, Rhys. Take your time. We’re counting on you.”
Ethan was less confident about the jump than he wanted Rhys to know, but Claudia was depending on him, and so was Abbie, though she didn’t know it.
He planned it out carefully. How far back along the track he needed to be to get up the speed he needed to have. With Rhys’s help, he cleared possible obstacles. Then the two men shook hands. “Good luck,” Rhys said, and Ethan returned the wish, before heading back along the track for his run.
A deep breath and another. A whispered prayer, which surprised him because he would have called himself an unbeliever. But if there was a God, then surely that Being would want to save Abbie?
He was riding today for the highest stakes of his career. He put that thought to one side. The incessant rain. Gone, except as it affected the contact of tires to dirt. Claudia, and the hope in her eyes. Not significant. His fear of another crash, one he was unlikely to survive. Not a helpful thought.
He revved the bike. Took another deep breath. Exhaled all his cares and gunned the engine, racing down the track and straight over the cliff’s edge. For a long blissful moment, he was weightless, drifting across the gully, his senses on such high alert that the handful of seconds seemed much longer. Then the other side was rushing towards him, much too fast, the lip he needed to reach much too high. He s
hifted his weight, trying to bring up the front wheel, feeling it jar onto the bank, throwing his whole body forward to drive the bike up onto the track to safety, grateful even when it spun out of control and hurled him into the mud, because what was a spill when he had made the crossing alive?
The bike was okay and so was he. He waved to Rhys and remounted. Now for the hut.
The road to Valentine Bay was suspiciously empty of traffic. What had the police done? Stopped all vehicles from both ends? Jack, full of the plans he’d decided to share with Claudia, didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve planned it all,” he kept saying. “Just you and me, Claudia, like it should have been all along. What a piece of luck having your scumbag ex wander into town. An ex-convict? A mechanic? With a Triumph? The police will have a field day. That’s why I used the Triumph for part of our escape. Not mine, of course. That’s waiting for us at the boat. I stole one off your boyfriend the teacher.”
Their escape by sea-going boat was his main theme, but woven into it, constantly repeated, was a threat and a complaint. “If I can’t have you, no one will. If you won’t come with me, I don’t care if I live or die, but I will make sure you’re dead before I kill myself.”
Then he would remember that he had her in his power, and begin gloating again. “Everything I’ve done is for you. You kept putting that brat—his brat—first. You’ve been a very, very naughty girl, Claudia, and you will need to be punished.”
He proceeded to detail the punishments he had in mind, occasionally asking Claudia for a response. She managed a meek ‘yes’ or ‘no’ while imagining all sorts of horrible punishments for him. If he succeeded in getting her onto the boat, and she was determined he wouldn’t, she would wait for him to sleep and have her revenge, whoever else was aboard, whatever the cost to her. She was never again going to be his victim.
12
A few more minutes controlling the bike on slick mud up a narrow track, and Ethan arrived at a small hiker’s hut; the usual Department of Conservation wooden building. Four walls with a window and door letting on to the small covered porch that ran the length of the front; a stove pipe at one end, and undoubtedly bunk beds around the other two sides.
He was off the bike and up onto the porch before the motor had cut out. The bolts that shut the door from the outside screeched as he drew them back, first the one at the top and then the one at the bottom.
“Abbie?”
He stepped inside into gloom. “Abbie?” He kept his voice low and friendly. She was nowhere to be seen, but someone had been eating crackers straight from the packet, which had been abandoned on the rumpled nest of a sleeping bag on the floor near the iron pot belly stove. No heat radiated from that end of the room. If Quinton had left Abbie with a fire, it had burned out long since.
“It’s Ethan Stone. Remember? We talked at the parade.” He stood in the doorway. No point in dripping all over the floor, and stripping off his wet weather gear would have to wait until he’d reported to Rhys. The first order of business when he got back would be to start a fire using the logs piled along the wall outside the door.
“Your mother asked me to come and find you.”
Abbie’s head appeared from the shadows of one of the upper bunks. Her scowl suggested she didn’t trust him an inch. Good girl.
“Where’s Mummy?”
“She couldn’t come,” Ethan explained. On an inspiration, he added, “That bastard Jack cut down the bridge, and I had to jump the gully on Mr Phillips’ motor bike.”
Abbie giggled. “You said a bad word.”
If insulting Jack was all it took to win her trust, he was happy to oblige. “He’s a bad man,” Ethan insisted, and she nodded vigorously and wriggled closer to the edge of the bed.
“Sweetie, can you be brave just a few minutes more while I let Mr Phillips know I’ve found you? Then he can go and tell your mummy. She’s very worried about you.”
Abbie’s eyes welled, but she nodded. “Okay.”
“Unless… Do you want to come? I can tuck you inside my jacket to keep you dry.”
He held his breath while the dark eyes so like his own examined him thoroughly. At last she nodded. “Okay.” She shifted to put her legs over the side, feeling for the ladder, and he restrained the urge to rush to help. Still, he was poised to leap to her rescue, his breathing once more suspended until she’d made her careful way down to the floor.
He unzipped his jacket and squatted down.
“Put your arms around my neck, Abbie, and I’ll do up the jacket to keep us both dry and warm.”
The child obeyed, but expressed her displeasure with the arrangement once he had her zipped in and was carrying her to the bike.
“I wanna see, Mr Ethan.”
Of course, she did. He’d have been the same at that age, and he’d lay odds Claudia was, too. He straddled the bike and loosened the zip enough that she could turn around before he zipped up again, to just under her chin. “All comfy, Abbie?”
“Yep. Go!”
Half way between Barnsley and Valentine Bay, where the road ran straight through Whakatami valley, they were overtaken by a sports utility vehicle, and Claudia had to lower her eyes for fear Jack might glance her way and see her glee. Carly’s father’s SUV had been locked away while they were overseas, so there was no way Jack could know about it, but for sure Trent at least and probably Carly too were inside and on their way to join in the rescue.
Jack was paying no attention to her, instead complaining bitterly about the lack of guts in the hired vehicle as he pushed his foot further to the floor, trying to catch up with the SUV. The road wound up into the hills again, and the SUV left them far behind, but Jack turned his irritation on another car that came up behind them and made several attempts to pass.
Speeding up on the straights and nudging the centre line to deny the car its opportunity cheered Jack up again. “Can’t drive for tuppence,” he chortled. “You’ve got to make your opportunities. You can’t just hang back and wait for them to be handed to you. Like you and me, Claudia. I took you, and you’re mine. It’ll be good. You’ll see.”
Claudia said nothing, and suddenly, as they came through the gap in the hills that led to the coast, he put his foot to the floor, leaning grimly over the wheel. “Say it. Say you know it’ll be good or I swear, Claudia, I’m driving straight ahead.”
Over the sea wall onto the rocks? No. It was full tide, and they’d be straight into the sea. “It’ll be good.” She put all the enthusiasm into the words she could fake, and he eased off and turned into the curve.
“That’s right. We’re good together, you and I. We don’t need anyone else. Just you and me, alone.”
“And Abbie?” She dared, and then screamed as he jerked the wheel, so they swerved towards the sea wall, once again correcting, this time so much at the last moment that the side of the car scraped along the concrete.
He screeched louder than the tortured metal. “Don’t say her name. Don’t even think about the little bitch.”
Claudia sucked both lips into her mouth, stiff with the effort not to react. As they came in sight the first houses of the little seaside town, he broke the silence. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shouted. You make me so angry, Claudia. Haven’t I always been good to you? Haven’t I given you everything you needed? But still you won’t do what I tell you. I can be kind. You know I can. Just be nice to me, Claudia. Love me. Everything will be fine if you love only me.”
“Where are we going, Jack?” He’d detailed the plan for their escape, but not their destination.
“Far from here. I’m leaving everything, and it’s your fault.” He returned to his grievance. “Why did you run away, Claudia? Didn’t you know it was for the best?”
He had slowed down as they approached the shopping area that sprawled along the street leading to the port, and she wondered briefly whether she could wrench the door open and leap out.
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “But first I need you to te
ll someone how to find my daughter. Do that, and I won’t struggle or call out or disobey you in any way.”
The car surged forward in a sudden burst of speed, and someone sauntering across the road in front of them had to jump to avoid being knocked down. “I told you not to talk about her.” It was a grumble rather than a shriek. He was silent, thinking her offer over, she hoped.
He confirmed it when he asked, “You won’t try to get away?”
“I won’t.” Did she sound sincere? She hoped she sounded sincere.
“You promise?”
“I promise.” Did promises made to madmen count? She crossed her fingers in the old childhood habit to turn aside the ill effects of lying.
They were entering the port, driving past the working boats belonging to local fishermen and tour guides and taking the road to the marina and its pleasure craft.
“Okay,” Jack conceded. “Once we’re on the boat and out at sea, I’ll give you the hut… the location, and let you phone your friend. But you promise, right? You’ll come with me. You’ll be mine again, the way it is meant to be.”
“I promise,” she repeated, her heart lifting at the slip of his tongue. The hut. Ethan was right. Even now, he might be with Abbie.
She waited obediently in the car until he’d retrieved a bag from the trunk, got out when he told her to, and walked meekly ahead of him in the direction he indicated. Let him think her completely cowed.
Near the end of one of the docks, a sleek ocean-going motor launch was moored. Jack frowned at the man waiting; a burly fellow with too many years of good living on his girth. “Who are you?” Jack demanded.
“Mr Quill?” The man returned Jack’s nod. “Bruce Watson, the harbour master here. Andy asked me to do the boat handover, and I have a few questions. Just regulations.”