Poison Bay

by Belinda Pollard

  “I was just checking the gun, and Adam walked up and saw me... and the landslide... and it went off... and I didn’t know what happened... and then we couldn’t find him.” Erica’s voice broke into shards on the last words and she fell again into sobs, deep and grating, her eyes squeezed closed, her face awash with tears, her nose a dripping mess.

  Jack looked at Callie and inclined his head towards Erica. She took it as a signal to follow her earlier instincts. She moved alongside, and wrapped her arms about the other woman. Erica turned into the embrace and clung like a small child, her weeping becoming even more visceral for a time, and then slowly subsiding.

  Jack rummaged in his pocket and fished out a handkerchief, the same one he’d been washing out in streams and drying on a rock ever since they’d entered Fiordland all those eons ago. It was not a pleasant looking square of cloth, and he quirked his mouth at Callie, his eyes questioning. She grinned briefly and reached for it, offering it to Erica. “It ain’t beautiful,” she said to Erica, “but it might be better than turning into a glazed donut.”

  Erica snorted a quick laugh despite her distress, and took the proffered hankie gratefully, wiping the worst of the mess off her face, then blowing her nose lavishly. She sat back weakly, her grief spent. “I can’t believe you guys are still sitting here, after what I’ve just told you.”

  “What else would we do?” Callie asked. “Walk off and leave you?”

  Erica raised her eyebrows. “Or throw me in a lake.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s stop talking that sort of rubbish,” Jack said. “How about you tell us how you came to have a gun.” Callie moved back to her own rock, so she could see Erica’s face better, but leaned towards her in wordless support.

  Erica sighed. “Bryan gave it to me.” She rested her forehead on her right hand, still clasping the sodden hankie, staring at the ground near Jack’s boots.

  “When?”

  “The day before he jumped. He told me to put it in my pack, and use it ‘to make sure I was the only one’—and then he’d make sure that I got the money I needed. I had no idea what he was talking about—the only one what?—but I just put it in the bottom of my rucksack. He was completely off his trolley and I figured we’d be in a hotel the next night. And then after he died it dawned on me what he wanted me to do.” She shook her head slowly. “Man, that was one crazy guy.”

  Jack said, “Did you tell him you needed money?”

  She nodded. “After I got the invitation, I thought, well... he’d got in touch, and he had money, and, you know, maybe this was a way out of my problem. So I rang him in New Zealand, and asked him to help me. I have... gambling debts. Really big gambling debts.”

  “How big?” Callie said.

  Erica glanced at her face. “About a hundred and thirty thousand, give or take.”

  Callie inhaled sharply. “Wow.”

  Erica replied with an ironic tone and a roll of her eyes. “Yeah, tell me about it. At least I excel at something.” She stared at the ground again. “And I didn’t borrow it from a bank.”

  “Who then?”

  “Some low life I met at the casino. Acted like my best friend. But he wasn’t.”

  Jack pulled the discussion back to the first topic. “So what did Bryan say when you phoned him?”

  “He told me he’d think about it, and then he called me back a couple of days later, and he gave me these specifications for a particular type of gun. I had to go to a gun club—he even gave me the details of the club—and practice firing this particular gun. It seemed really creepy at first, like it might be something to do with Liana’s death, but it was a completely different kind of gun. So I thought it must be so we could shoot food or something.” She rolled her eyes. “I had no idea what it would be like out here, so that seemed the best explanation. And Bryan was always asking us to do such crazy things. Anyway, I had to learn to use the gun and then I had to come on the hike. And then he said he’d give me the money. Or ‘that I would be provided for’ were the words he used, I think.” She raised her hands in a helpless shrug. “I had no idea what he was on about, but I was desperate, so I figured, just do what the rich loony says, and you’ll get your money, and everything will be okay.” She shrugged again. “And here I am.”

  Jack said, “So, what exactly happened yesterday?”

  Erica sighed. “I’d been trying to figure out if I should tell everyone I had the gun, so we could use it to shoot some food or something. I’m not a very good shot, but I figured Adam would be able to use it. But I just didn’t know how to tell everyone why I had it in the first place.”

  “Had you been tempted to do what Bryan said?” Callie’s tone was not judgmental, just curious.

  “Well, no... but then there were moments in that first day or so when I wondered if I really could do such a thing...” She looked from Callie to Jack, and shrugged her shoulders again. “I was just so desperate. The guy who lent me the money… he was a very scary guy, and he was getting pretty intense. He told me I could either pay up immediately, or he’d send the boys round. Or I could work it off in his brothel.”

  “Oh!” Callie was horrified. She reached across and squeezed Erica’s arm in sympathy.

  “I told him I was expecting money soon, and he gave me a few more weeks, and then when this all happened… I wondered… But after Sharon died, and I saw her lying there so cold, and I thought about her little boy and her parents seeing her off at the airport, I knew that I could never take a life no matter what I had to face back home. I knew it right inside my bones. And so then I had this piece of metal burning a hole in my rucksack, wondering and wondering what to do with it.”

  “But you’d taken it out, just before the landslide?” Jack pressed for the full details.

  “Yes, I’d almost decided to tell everyone, and Adam had gone on ahead, and Rachel was somewhere behind me, so I took the chance to get it out, and I was leaning on a log and I just had it in my hand, looking at it, and I’d been slipping the safety catch on and off, kind of fidgeting with it, and Adam walked up, and it was pouring rain, so it was hard to see very far, and he suddenly saw what I had in my hand, and the look on his face, the look on his face... and I was about to explain, and then suddenly the ground just gave way and something hit me in the back, a tree or something maybe, I don’t really know, and the gun went off and everything was chaos, and I just couldn’t find Adam, or the gun.” She was silent for a moment, staring into space, ambushed by remembered trauma. She pulled herself together. “I kind of surfed down the landslide, on the top of it. My rucksack landed quite close to me when everything stopped moving, thankfully, or I’d never have found it again, but I don’t know where the gun ended up. It’s somewhere back in that horrible mess. And I didn’t even really look for it because I didn’t ever, ever want to touch it again. Oh, poor Adam. And his girlfriend!” She began to weep again.

  Callie moved back alongside Erica and put her arm around her.

  But Jack hadn’t finished. “Erica,” he said, and waited till she looked up. He looked her full in the eye, but spoke gently. “Did you kill Sharon?”

  “No!” Her answer was violent. “No way!” She began to splutter and the words got stuck. “I didn’t… I couldn’t.” She shook her head repeatedly. “I tried to save Sharon. I tried so hard.”

  “Back when we found Adam, you wanted us to believe the same person had killed them both.”

  “That was so you’d look for Sharon’s killer, and not be looking for me. I was so shocked at first, when you said she’d been murdered. But then I realized…” She shrugged. “It could work to my advantage. Stop you finding out about what I’d done. If you thought there was just one killer.” She looked him full in the face again. “Because I definitely did not kill Sharon.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “Do you know who did?”

  She looked away. “How could I know who did?”

  “I had a feeling you might have seen something that made you wonder. That
’s all.”

  “Well I did. But I don’t really know. And I wouldn’t want to accuse someone when it might be quite wrong. It just seemed odd, that’s all. And then with everything else that’s been going on…” She sighed.

  Callie said, “What did you see?”

  “Well… I woke up that night, when Kain went for a pee. I mean he sometimes goes for a pee in the middle of the night. But…”

  Jack said, “Yes?”

  “Well it’s stupid. I mean, it was freezing that night. The snow had stopped, but it gets even colder when the snow stops.”

  Callie frowned. “So what did he do that seemed strange?”

  “Well, he put his gloves on. That’s what woke me up actually, because he was rummaging for them. It’s been in my head since you told us, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it last night.” She shrugged. “I mean, I know it was cold. It’s just…” She looked at Jack, questioning, almost hoping he could refute what she was thinking. “Well, you’re a bloke. Would you wear gloves, if you were popping outside for a quick pee?”

  “Well, no. I wouldn’t,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “They’d, um, hinder dexterity, shall we say. It’s odd. Suspicious even. But it’s not proof. I’d suggest we be wary of Kain. But keep our minds open. Assumptions can be deadly out here. If someone else is following us, we don’t want to miss it because we’re all looking at Kain.” He nodded, suddenly realizing something. “But it’s good to know there’s no sniper after us.”

  Callie said, “Yes! That’s one less complication for us to deal with. But then,” she glanced at Erica, “you already knew there was no sniper.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a comfort to me. You can’t begin to understand what it feels like to know you’ve taken someone’s life. And they can never ever get it back.” She shook her head slowly and sighed. “I hardly slept at all last night. My head was just full of this horrible emptiness where Adam used to be. And pictures of that hole in his head. I tried so hard not to look, but I saw it, and I can’t stop seeing it. And it’s all my fault. Just because of worthless money.”

  ***

  “That was quick,” said Peter, when he picked up the phone. He’d been surprised when Amber told him the pathologist had called—he couldn’t have had the body more than half an hour at best.

  “I haven’t done the post mortem yet. But I thought you’d like to know straight away that this girl didn’t die naturally.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “She has bruising on her face that you only get when someone uses their hands to hold your mouth and nose closed and suffocate you.”

  Peter swore, his tone fierce. “So now I have to figure out who did it, and find a way to prove it. Unless they’re all guilty somehow. And if not, I wonder if they knew she’d been murdered when they packaged her up.”

  “Not necessarily. The bruising doesn’t come out straight away. Even if any of them could have recognized what it meant. She was found in snow wasn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “They could have thought it was just hypothermia. Her gear isn’t very good. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had some trouble staying warm, the poor little sweetheart.”

  “And now I’ve got a murder investigation to run as well, in the middle of the biggest search we’ve ever had.”

  ***

  “I wish we could find that knife,” Jack said. He looked at Kain’s pack, resting against a rock only a few meters away.

  “You think it’s in there?” Callie said.

  “Don’t know.” He swung to look at Erica. “Have you got the knife?”

  “Absolutely not!” Erica was affronted by the question.

  “Don’t be precious. You just told us you had a gun until yesterday. We need to be totally open with each other if we’re going to survive. And you were the last one to use the knife last night. I didn’t see you use it because I was quite busy sulking at the time…” He shrugged in self-deprecation. “But judging by the results, you must be pretty good with a knife. All that medical training perhaps. You could have taken the knife for security, not necessarily to use it on anyone.”

  Erica’s temper flared. “So now that I’ve told you the truth about Adam, you’re going to suspect me of everything else as well, are you?”

  Jack wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, and stayed quite calm. “Well, wouldn’t you do the same if the positions were reversed?”

  She thought about that for a moment, and her anger subsided. “Well, probably, yes I would. But I seriously didn’t want to kill Adam, and I didn’t kill Sharon, and I don’t have the knife. Truly.”

  Callie was now staring at Kain’s pack. “Do you think we could?”

  Erica said, “Could what?”

  “Search Kain’s pack.”

  She swung round to look, and now three pairs of eyes were fixed upon it. Wondering.

  “How would he react if he knew we’d done it?”

  “If there’s a knife in there, and we get it back, I don’t really care how he reacts,” Jack said.

  “No, me neither,” Callie said. “Although… we probably should think about what he might do. He’s pretty strong, even without a knife. If it does turn out that he’s dangerous, and we confront him, what might happen?” She looked at Jack, but it was Erica who spoke.

  “If we found the knife, we could just take it, and not say anything. He wouldn’t even know until he went looking for it later. And he could hardly say anything about it, could he?”

  Callie laughed briefly. “Yeah. Who stole the knife I stole earlier? But it might make him a bit weird, when he realized it was gone.”

  “But would he realize?” Erica said. “It’s so hard to find things in these stupid packs. They’re so long and narrow. Whatever you want, it’s never on the top. He might just think it had slipped down to the bottom. He’d have to take every single thing out to be absolutely sure it wasn’t there.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” Jack said. “I’d rather be honest about it with him. But then you know what I’m like. Blundering in and just saying what I think.” He shook his head. “But think about when he’d be able to check the contents of his pack without us seeing. When he’s alone in his tent. At night when we’re all asleep, and vulnerable. Surely it’s better to get his reaction at a time that we control, when we’ve got the best chance of managing it.”

  Callie nodded and sighed. “Of course, we’re assuming the knife is in there. What if it’s not?”

  Erica gasped. “You’re right. It might not be Kain at all. It might be someone following us. This whole thing is making me so paranoid. He’d probably be able to tell we’d been through his stuff, and imagine how that would make him feel. He’s already feeling left out as it is.”

  “Has he told you that?” Callie said.

  “Not in those exact words. But yes, he feels it.” She glanced at Jack. “He knows you don’t like him.”

  Jack felt the rebuke, and it was justified. “I’ve been trying a bit harder with him since last night.”

  “Yes, I know,” Erica said. “I think he’s been trying a bit harder too. What do you think?” The question was for Callie.

  “He’s been a bit different since the plane,” she agreed. “Something changed.”

  Jack was alert. He’d noticed a difference too. “What did you think it was?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe the conversation about Liana,” Callie said. “Or the plane itself? The thought of how hard it is to get rescued out here, and the fact that we need each other if we’re going to survive. But he was thrown by my question about whether Bryan knew he’d slept with Liana. The look in his eyes. It was like I’d hit him with a taser.”

  “I saw that too,” said Erica. “I’ve been wondering, the last couple of hours… Well, you know how Bryan spoke to me before we left Australia? I was part of Bryan’s plan somehow, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. What if I wasn’t the only one? What if he spoke to Kain as well? If he had, what might h
e have promised Kain? It would make all the difference in the world, if Bryan knew about Kain and Liana. You can’t trust a man who knows you’ve betrayed him.” She sighed. “But then, it’s probably just more paranoia.”

  Or maybe not. Jack felt the suspicion flower within him all over again, and longed to search that pack. But, looking up the mountain, he saw Kain returning. Still about twenty minutes away over rocky moraine, but the little group would be fully visible to him. They couldn’t search his pack now.

  44

  Erica’s confession had to be shared, and there was no easy way to do it. At least, not one that Jack could think of.

  He said, “Just before you tell us about the route, Kain, we need to tell you and Rachel something important we’ve just found out.”

  He looked at Rachel. The rest seemed to have revived her, but she was definitely weaker than on previous days. Then again, aren’t we all?

  “The good news is, there’s no sniper following us,” he said. “The bad news is, Erica shot Adam. Accidentally. With a gun Bryan gave her.”

  Rachel gasped in shock and turned towards Erica. “No. You didn’t! You couldn’t!”

  Kain stared at Erica, his eyes narrowed. “Why did Bryan give you a gun?” He emphasized the word “you”.

  Callie gave Jack a look that didn’t seem entirely supportive.

  Erica struggled under their scrutiny. “It was just… I asked Bryan for money, and he said… Well he gave me… I didn’t understand… and then there was the landslide and the gun went off…” She became incoherent and trailed off miserably.

  “Money!” Kain exclaimed. “So, you killed Adam for money!”

  “I didn’t! It was an accident. You don’t understand…”

  “And you slept with me and said you loved me and all the time you had a gun under your pillow, did you, thinking about how to kill me for money?”

  “No! It wasn’t like that.”

  “And you let me hunt for Adam and worry so much about him, and all the time…” Rachel trailed off and stared at Erica, her eyes brimming with tears. “How could you make us all search and wonder, when all the time you’d killed him yourself?”