by Jaye Ford
He followed her to the bathroom. ‘Maybe we should wait for Uncle James. He said he was on his way.’
Rennie pulled a small first-aid kit from a cabinet and stuffed it into her pack. ‘No.’ There was a chance James was trying to help Max. There was a chance he wasn’t. But he was family and she wasn’t taking any risks.
‘I could wait for him.’
If James was on his way, she didn’t have time for another discussion with Hayden so she squared up to him. She only had a centimetre or two on him but figured the words would be enough. ‘Someone found my bag at the back of a wardrobe, went through the contents, left a large amount of money behind and took my gun. No one does that unless they’re prepared to use it. They’ve already let themselves into the house once. I will not let you stay here.’
A tremor of fear passed through his eyes. Good. It was better than cockiness and resentment.
‘You made a promise in the car. Now it’s time you came good on it. Do what I tell you, okay?’
His Adam’s apple slid up and down as he swallowed hard. ‘Okay.’
‘No more questions. Your job is to keep your eyes open and your brain in gear. Have you got that?’ Her mother’s words. Rennie never expected to use them on another child.
He nodded.
‘Good. Let’s go.’
Flicking lights on over the porch and driveway, banishing the creeping grey of twilight, Rennie scanned up and down the street before leading Hayden out to the carport. She heaved up the door to the dilapidated garage and stepped into its musty, oily air. Her old hatchback was there, the one she’d bought for a pittance after Joanne left Haven Bay in the car they’d shared, but she didn’t plan to drive it. It was the tools on the workbench she was after. They were Max’s tools and it took some ferreting about to find what she wanted. When she was done, she shoved a couple of screwdrivers, a hacksaw, short crowbar and mallet into the backpack and threw boltcutters onto the back seat with it.
She drove with the headlights on, taking a lingering look over the lake, wondering if it’d be her last opportunity, hoping there was some other explanation than the one taking shape in her imagination.
One that involved spilt blood and broken trust, family and friends.
Money, assault. James, Pav.
She didn’t want it to be that. For Max’s sake. For her own. Even for Hayden’s.
He didn’t speak in the car, just stared out the window, face turned away, hands clenched into fists on his thighs. She prayed it wasn’t resistance.
She took the main street and turned into Garrigurrang Road, following it out to the last street before the reserve, taking the hill up to the gate. It was probably locked but she knew the way to the gun emplacements from there and it was closer to the road – less distance to run, if it came to that. She stopped beside the track, killed the lights but not the engine.
‘You know the gun emplacement near the track, the one with the big bunker?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Go there and I’ll meet you in about five minutes.’ It seemed the best place to start: easy to find in the encroaching darkness and if Max had come here at night, willingly or otherwise, the closest one seemed the obvious choice.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to park the car and run back. I can do it faster on my own.’
He nodded, didn’t move.
‘Stay off the path where you can. If you need the torch, hold it down low and try to minimise the glow. And stay out of sight when you get there. If the gate is open, don’t go into the tunnel. Just wait for me. If it takes me longer than five minutes, stay put. Don’t wander around.’
He frowned. ‘Aren’t we just looking for Dad?’
She’d sounded like her mother reeling off hasty, urgent instructions. She eased it back a bit. ‘We are. Let’s just do it safely.’
She watched him to where the rutted tracks began to rise. What was left of the light was fading quickly now and he’d probably need the torch by the time he got to the top of the hill. She drove a few blocks, turned right then right again, hiding Max’s work car between neighbourhood vehicles. It might be overcautious but caution had kept her alive.
The tools weighed the pack down so she dumped everything of its original contents except the cash and the second mobile – she hoped she wouldn’t need either but if Max was up here in a tunnel, she might have to leave in a hurry again, with or without him, and there might not be time to go back to the car. Then she hitched it onto her back and took off at a jog, torch in one hand, boltcutters slung over the other shoulder.
The sky was a deep grey when she reached the end of the four-wheel drive track, the glow from street lamps was well behind her and she could barely make out the ground under her feet. The gate was locked but it was to keep out vehicles, not humans, and she stepped around it, flicking on the torch as her shoes sank into long native grass. She played the beam briefly around. Dense bush filled the space on either side of a narrow walking trail. A soft whisper of wind in the brush was all she heard over her puffing breath.
Treading carefully on the uneven path, she passed the first gun emplacement, its position only obvious by the large gap in the bush further off the trail. A minute later, she saw the second clearing off to the right, not far from the track, the torch beam bouncing over tree trunks and tangled branches and sprays of sharp spikes.
She stepped high through the scrub until she was standing on the edge of a low wall that ran around a sunken, cracked and overgrown circular pad of concrete. It was about six metres across, half a metre deep and made her wonder briefly about the size of the gun that’d sat there more than sixty years ago. There was no sign of Hayden.
It was probably four years since she’d last had a tour of the installations with Max, so as her feet crunched around the outside, she kept the torch trained on the edge, not sure where to find the opening to the bunker underneath.
‘Renée. Over here.’ Hayden’s voice was a whispered shout from around the other side. ‘The steps are over here.’
‘You okay?’ she asked when she reached him.
‘Yep.’ He seemed more pleased to see her than ever before. She felt the same way.
The entry was little more than a hatch: three steep downwards steps one way, four the other, leading into an underground cube of concrete, not high enough to stand completely upright. The floor was covered in a thin layer of mush – soil and leaf mulch washed in through the single opening on one wall, high and narrow enough to be designed for eyes only. The air was cool despite the warmth earlier in the day and smelled of damp cement and rotting leaves. The dank, confined space made the dread sing in her gut.
‘Where’s the tunnel?’ Rennie asked.
‘This way.’ His voice echoed softly off the hard surfaces as he shone his torch down another set of steps hidden by the ones they’d come in on.
Thick layers of spider webs lined the ceiling and corners and she ducked her head more than necessary to avoid them, the short walkway just wide enough for her shoulders, the boltcutters scraping on the mortar.
Six steps straight down, coming out in another chamber, smaller than the first, rectangular in shape. Hayden’s torch beam moved jerkily across the walls. There was nothing here but shadows and a doorway in the centre of the concrete opposite.
She hesitated, heart beating hard, breath short. Why would Max be in there? It didn’t make any sense. He’d been buried alive in a coalmine; he still woke in the night sweating and edgy from the memory. He would never in his right mind go in a place like that. It was no wonder he never talked about the tunnels.
Rennie didn’t want to go in there, either. Claustrophobia had never been a problem but this place would test anyone’s nerve. And a tunnel felt like a trap waiting to happen. But she came here to look for Max; she wasn’t leaving until she had.
She crosse
d the floor, aiming her torch at the metal gate that covered the opening. It looked like a panel from a prison cell – thick, square bars running top to bottom. In the void beyond was a wide tunnel cut into rock, graffiti on both sides as far as she could see. Past that, the beam was engulfed by solid black. There could be a monster sleeping down there and she wouldn’t know. Maybe there was.
Running the beam over the gate, she saw it was secured on one side with hinges held by flush-set rivets – no chance of moving them. The other was attached with a heavy-duty slide bolt and padlock. The bars were raw galvanising, aged to a dull, pitted grey. The padlock was smooth and clean and unscratched.
New.
41
Death might take a while but unconsciousness felt close. Max wanted to switch the memories off and find an old one that might keep him warm at the end but then he’d never know why he died in a hole. So he watched them stagger on, hoping there was something to come that wouldn’t send him to hell.
James was his usual arrogant self. He tried the patronising blow-off but Max had already figured out why there wasn’t enough money to help Pav. He’d calculated they were short at least . . . How much? He couldn’t . . . Oh, yeah, five hundred thousand plus ‘expenses’ on company credit. He took a punt on the affair. Turned out James, his self-righteous, socially inept cousin, had bedded and lost his fucking heart to the uptight, straitlaced, cold fish financial controller of one of their biggest clients.
The argument ran for days, went well past business issues and made Max groan and writhe on the dirt with the memory. James needed the money to support his new life. He was going to stay until the baby was born because he wanted to see it. Like some kind of amoral moron, he had no guilt. Didn’t care that Max was his cousin, that Naomi’s life would be ruined, that she was carrying his child. It all made sense to James: the only reason he went into the business was because everyone told him Max needed him; Naomi was an attractive woman, she’d find someone else; Max would fall on his feet, he always did.
When Max saw Pav again, he wanted to purge himself of it, regurgitate every word his cousin had said. He’d spent years flagellating himself for ruining his own marriage and James was doing it without a second thought. But Pav was rattled by his own problems so all Max told him was that he could give him ten thousand. He’d take it from the remains of MineLease; it was finished anyway. Tainted and foul. Max had been broke before and Pav’s supplier was making nasty threats – Pav needed it more.
*
Rennie pressed her face to the bars and yelled.
‘Max!’
The sound reverberated in front and behind, down the tunnel and around the bunker. There was just silence in its wake.
Hayden stood beside her, hands clenching the metal rods like a prison inmate. ‘Dad? It’s me, Dad. It’s Hayden.’ He shouted it as though Max had extra reason to answer if he knew it was Hayden. When there was no reply, he tried again. ‘Dad! Are you in there, Dad?’
‘He might be too far away to hear us,’ she told him, unhitching her pack. Or injured or unconscious. Or dead. ‘Can you hold my torch? Shine both of them on the lock.’
‘The padlock is on the outside.’ The low ceiling amplified Hayden’s murmur. ‘How could he lock himself in?’
The slide bolt and padlock were attached to the wall, probably impossible to reach with a key from inside the tunnel. ‘Maybe he didn’t. Maybe somebody else locked him in.’
His face was little more than a shadow in the low light but she saw the reluctant comprehension in it and the uneasiness that followed. Hefting the boltcutters in both hands, she wished Hayden had gone to Cairns, that he didn’t have to understand anything more than an argument with his mum and a phone call with his dad.
The padlock was huge: the lock casing was as large as the palm of her hand and the shackle as thick as her pinkie. She opened the cutters to their full width, set the mouth against the curved metal and knew before she tried that the tool was too small for the job. She heaved anyway and the cutting edge slipped straight off. She got closer, changed her angle, teeth clenched, arms shaking with the effort.
Nothing. Not even an indentation on the shackle.
‘Let me have a go,’ Hayden said.
His muscles were no bigger than hers but she handed him the tool, held the torches, watched him go through the same process with as much success.
‘Shit!’ He smashed a foot on the gate in frustration.
The reverb hummed on her eardrums. ‘Okay, let’s try this.’
Pulling the hacksaw from her pack, she set to work on the metal but it was old and blunt and would exhaust them both before it cut through anything. As Hayden took his turn, filling the chamber with the shish-shish of sawing noises, she propped her torch on the floor underneath him and paced.
‘We could call Uncle James. He keeps tools in his car,’ Hayden said, the hacksaw now dangling from his hand.
What should she tell him? That his uncle might be the one with her gun? That a man he loved couldn’t be trusted? She didn’t want another argument or to give him a reason to disobey, not when they were finally working together. ‘Not yet.’
She found the crowbar in her pack and tried it on the padlock. It didn’t move, didn’t bend, but the tension felt taut and strong. She got her weight over it and tried again, sweat beading on her face and gathering under her arms.
‘Put the torch down and give me a hand,’ she told Hayden. They spread their hands along it, heads almost touching. He grunted. ‘Keep going,’ she ground out, willing it, wanting it, needing it to . . .
With a crack, the shackle snapped, the crowbar clattered to the concrete and they toppled into each other.
Hayden whooped.
Rennie laughed out loud as she reached for the gate. It didn’t move: the slide bolt had bent. ‘No, no.’ She shook the bars, spun away, stalked the length of the chamber, anger building and burning inside her.
What the hell was she doing down here? It was a waste of time and energy. There were a hundred places Max could be. A thousand. Whatever had happened, there was no way he would have gone into that tunnel voluntarily. Not even in the middle of a bright day with all his friends and a swathe of floodlights. She doubted he’d do it bound, gagged and at gunpoint. He’d have to be out cold and dragged in.
She crouched in a corner as Hayden bent his head over the slide bolt with a torch. Why would Max be brought here? Where it was difficult to reach, hard to manoeuvre around and only five minutes from the main street?
‘It’s bent pretty bad. It won’t move,’ Hayden said.
She stared at the blackness beyond the bars. It was dark and dank, isolated by bushland, a metre underground and silenced by thick layers of concrete. Why not here?
She stood decisively, drained, sweaty, pissed off – by the gate, by the last forty-eight hours, by the thought that someone might have dumped Max in a place that would scare him to death.
‘Let’s just see.’ She dragged the mallet from her pack, fronted up to the bars, pulled her arms back and swung. The high-pitched crash shattered the air and as she smashed again and again, it became a continuous roll of sound, no distinction between the thunder of the hammer and the replay that bounced and rebounded and ricocheted around her and through her. When the bolt slid free, she stepped away, breathless and shaken, skin and muscle vibrating, urgent intent pressing hard.
‘Yesss!’ Hayden swung the gate open and took a step over the threshold.
She grabbed his arm. ‘Wait.’
‘But Dad might be in there.’
‘Right, so let’s not rush in and stumble about in the dark. It might be how he got in there in the first place.’
He looked at her over his shoulder. ‘Like he went in and someone locked the gates on him by accident?’
No, there was no chance of that. Given a moment to think about it, Hayden woul
d figure that out but right now, she guessed he was still working on a happy ending. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. But let’s make sure that doesn’t happen now. Tell me what it’s like in there.’
‘I’ve never been in. I only know what Dad told me.’
‘Did he say how the tunnels work? Is it one long passage that goes by each bunker or are they linked pathways?’
‘I don’t know but there’s definitely more than one. He said the soldiers that were stationed up here gave them names. Newcastle Street, Rathmines Road, Haven Bay Hall, like that. They carved them into the walls like street signs so they’d know where they were even when it was dark.’
Her eyes flicked to the ceiling, imagining the gun emplacements on top. They were scattered through the bush, probably two kilometres between them if she walked a zigzag line to connect them all. How many kilometres of tunnel were underground? How far would someone drag him? Which bunker had they started at?
‘Okay. It’s just me going in, Hayden.’
A flash of anger. ‘But I want to find Dad.’
She turned the torch so it shone between them. ‘I know you do so I’m going to be honest with you. He’s been missing for two days; if he’s in there, he might be in a bad way.’
‘I can help him.’
‘He might be dead, Hayden.’
His face snapped away but she caught the sheen of a tear. It was better than what would be there if he saw Max’s lifeless body in the filth of a tunnel. She’d seen her mother before Evan dragged her to the patrol car. Lying in the doorway of the caravan they’d rented. On her side, her skin grey, drained of colour by the knife wound in her belly, the one responsible for the blood that covered her dress and pooled in a lake around her torso. She had other memories of her mother but for a long, long time that was all she saw when she thought of her.
Rennie laid a hand on Hayden’s arm. ‘You don’t want to see that. It’s a bad memory to be left with.’
He glanced back, not meeting her eyes. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ve seen lots of things. One more won’t make much difference,’ she lied.