Jack had declared that they must collect more wood in the morning, to keep the fire alight. But he could tell that his message was falling on mostly-deaf ears. The urgency seemed to have gone out of everything, now that they had the lake and shelter. Nothing to do now but wait for rescue. Nowhere to walk tomorrow.
Rachel was tucked up in her sleeping bag on one of the hard wooden bunks. Callie checked on her regularly, and had pledged to continue doing so every half hour all night. There was no way to predict what the night would bring.
They lingered around the fire, strangely reluctant to sleep. There were a couple of chairs in the hut, but they didn’t seem to know how to sit on them after weeks in the wild, so they lounged around the floorboards on their sleeping bags instead.
“We’ve really won lotto with this place,” Callie murmured. “So very glad we followed your hunch and came down this valley today.”
Jack smiled. “Not sure I’d call it lotto, but I’m glad too.”
Erica said, “Probably better not to talk to me about lotto. We’ll be back in the land of scratch-its and slot machines any day now.”
“Oops, sorry,” said Callie. “How did you get sucked in to that stuff in the first place? I don’t remember you being into it at school.”
Erica sighed and stared at her feet. “It was after Kain dumped me, back at uni.”
Callie inhaled sharply. “You used to go out with Kain before? I never knew that.”
Erica raised her eyes to Callie’s face in the dim light. “Yes, for more than a year.”
Callie shook her head, and looked away. “I’m such a bitch.” Her tone was full of regret. “I had no idea you had history with him. I thought you were just...”
“You thought I was a slut.” There was no judgment in the statement. They all seemed to be beyond recriminations—except perhaps against themselves.
“Well, no, it wasn’t that. It was...” She sighed. “Yes, I guess that is what I thought. Did you love him?”
Erica merely nodded.
“I’m so sorry.” Callie’s eyes looked moist.
“I pretty much had the bridesmaids’ dresses picked out.” There was self-hatred in Erica’s tone, and her gaze slid away from Callie’s face to the shapes of light flickering on the floor. “I thought he loved me too, but then it turned out a simple nurse wasn’t really prestigious enough for the future he was designing for himself. He dumped me for another law student. No idea what happened to her. When I saw him again here, I thought maybe he’d realized his mistake, and wanted me back. So stupid of me. I was just convenient. Liana is probably the only woman he ever really loved, and she fancied him too, but she loved Bryan’s money more.” She crossed her arms and hunched her body close to her knees. “Being in that tent with Kain was like a prison by the end.”
There was a pause before Callie spoke again. “You must feel horrible now he’s dead.”
Erica nodded, fighting back tears. “How dumb is that?” Her voice broke on the words.
“It’s not dumb at all. Your grief is based on your feelings, not his.” Her voice took on a bitter edge. “And I’m not going to judge you for falling for a man who was totally absorbed by himself. I’m just trying to recover from the same thing myself.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah. I work with him too, so it’s even worse. I have to see William every day, and everyone else has to see me seeing him.”
“You went out with William Green?” interjected Jack. He’d been keeping out of the girlie chat, but surprise brought him into it suddenly.
Callie looked at Jack, and nodded. “Yes. The King of the Newsroom bestowed his favors upon me, if only for a short time.” She glanced back at Erica. “I wasn’t quite glamorous enough for him in the end. So he moved on to a sassy little blonde. I was the last one to know about it, of course.” She snorted. “She was a bit like you, actually, Erica.”
“No wonder you hated me then. Why do we do it to ourselves? Break our hearts over these men who are all style and no substance, and ignore the really nice blokes who might actually make us happy.”
Jack was interested to hear the answer to this one, but none was offered. Callie just sighed and nodded. After a longish pause, he gave up waiting, and asked the question that had been left hanging earlier. “So, the breakup started you gambling?”
Erica hauled her mind back from wherever it had gone. “I went out and got drunk that night. I played the poker machines, and I won big. Three thousand dollars. It made me feel so much better. Powerful. Free. So I went out and did it again.” She shrugged. “Before long, I was dropping into pubs for a quick play of the pokies, or stopping by the casino on the way home from a shift at the hospital. Always a secret from my family and friends. It just grew and grew. A bit at a time. It took over my life.”
“I’m so sorry.” Jack’s tone was compassionate.
“You don’t gamble at all, do you Jack?” Callie said. “Not even the Melbourne Cup sweep, if I remember rightly.”
He shrugged. “It was the way I was brought up. No raffles or anything. I guess it was the Protestant work ethic thing—that it’s wrong to want something for nothing.”
“But isn’t that actually the core of your belief, getting something for nothing?” Callie’s tone had become suddenly intense, but it didn’t seem disrespectful. “Don’t you get forgiveness without having to earn it, according to your religion?”
Jack pondered the question. It was quite insightful, actually. “In a way I suppose you’re right. Forgiveness is a free gift that I don’t deserve. It costs me nothing.” His tone became earnest. “But it cost Jesus everything—even the love of God for a short time. And you don’t take lightly the sacrifice of someone you love.”
“It really is real to you, isn’t it?” Callie seemed mystified, and yet intrigued.
“It’s the anchor of my whole existence,” he replied simply.
“Can you believe in forgiveness for me?” Erica said, her voice small.
“Yes. I can.”
A fat tear slid down Erica’s cheek. “I’m not sure that I can believe it.”
“What about Kain?” Callie said to Jack. “Can you believe in forgiveness for Kain?” There was a challenge in her eyes.
Jack sighed. “Yes, even for Kain. I’ve been thinking about it on and off all day in fact. If only I’d reached out to him, shown him kindness instead of judging him and trying to catch him out, maybe he’d still be alive. But the fact is, I’ve always hated him simply because you loved him.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that out loud, and he looked at it hanging in the air between them.
Callie turned her head away.
Jack had more that he needed to say. “If I’d helped him to hope that he could go home, do his time for Sharon’s death, and then start again… maybe the despair wouldn’t have overcome him.”
“You might need to forgive yourself for that,” Erica said.
“Yeah. But that’s the hardest one of all to do.”
55
Peter fought to keep the frustration out of his voice. “Every hour matters for the diabetic. We could retrieve her as much as six hours sooner if you send it tonight.”
“You can’t be sure she’s there, and we can’t risk a gunman taking potshots in the dark. But we’ll have it there at 5.00 a.m.”
Peter resisted the urge to slam the phone down. It made sense. They couldn’t risk several lives on the off-chance of saving one. Even if that one belonged to someone who’d become important to him.
***
He found Ellen sitting in the hotel lounge listening to the pianist, a half empty glass mug on the coffee table in front of her. Hot chocolate, at an educated guess. Her posture in the enfolding armchair was supple and relaxed. But from only one week’s acquaintance he was certain there was an iron discipline forcing her to release the tension in the muscle fibers, distract the brain synapses from the endless circuit of worry worry worry.
When he entered her peripheral vision
he saw her detect him instantly, sitting forward in the chair, alert and focused, shedding the air of relaxation like an unwanted overcoat. “Peter.”
“Ellen.” He nodded in greeting, and took the chair at right angles to hers. He didn’t toy with her by using euphemisms or empty encouragement, but he wanted to start on a positive note. “We may have a result in the morning. I’d like you to be ready.”
“Of course.” She nodded, and waited.
“Two more bodies were found today, both male. We believe the relative location of those bodies has shown us the direction the group was heading. If they’ve taken the better option, they may have reached the lake this evening, at a point where there is a backcountry hut they could have taken shelter in.”
She considered this a moment. “How certain can you be of their direction?”
“Not certain. But we’ve narrowed it down to two valleys of the hundreds out there, which is very positive. We’ll start at that hut first thing in the morning, and we’ve been able to secure a medivac helicopter, with a specialist doctor and paramedic on board, due to arrive here about five in the morning.”
Ellen’s eyebrows went up. “So you really do think she’s alive?”
“At this stage, I have nothing to indicate otherwise.”
“It’s just that your body language is telling me some negative things. I was wondering what you’re hiding from me.” It wasn’t stated as a verbal challenge; she was just puzzled.
His face split in a grin. “Tell me, if I put a paper bag over your head so you couldn’t see me, would it help you to believe what I say?”
She laughed, a spontaneous lightening of her heavy mood, a fleeting relief. “It might work. Or you could put it over your own head.”
“Probably the better solution.” He became serious again. “One of the men we found today had been shot, and I don’t know what that means.”
“Shot?” She was shocked, and it showed.
“Yes, it was a shock for us too. How do they come to have a gun, and how do we interpret it in light of the fact that they had a locator beacon and didn’t switch it on? It’s different to the smothering of Sharon Healy—that could have been simply an opportunistic killing, based on her ‘drag’ on the team if she wasn’t well. This looks more deliberate. Planned. I don’t know if they’re being marched at gunpoint. Or if they’ve turned into an outlaw gang. I don’t know if they’re trying to be found, or hiding out from us. Or even lying in wait for us. It’s a puzzle, whatever way you look at it.”
“Do you know if any of them owned a gun?”
“Bryan owned both a rifle and a small handgun. We couldn’t find either one at his house.” He shouldn’t be telling this woman everything about his investigation, but with Tom off the team he needed the sounding board, and there was no point shutting the stable door at this late stage. That particular horse had bolted days ago, and probably joined the circus by now.
“So it’s probably Bryan’s gun. But who’d be using it, now that he’s dead? Who would he have given it to?” Light dawned. “Kain Vindico, I suppose.”
“Perhaps. We can’t be sure. Since Bryan had Tom as backup out here, he may well have had another plant in the group itself. And Vindico is now dead, unfortunately.”
“Oh! How awful.” She stared at him. “But not the one who was shot?”
“No. Probably a fall. Perhaps Vindico shot the other man, and then the others pushed him off a cliff. Who knows? I’m hoping for post mortem results by morning.”
A waiter came by at that moment, asking Peter if he’d like coffee. He looked at Peter’s police uniform with the open curiosity of a seasonal worker who doesn’t need to keep his job for long. In this little town, you had to be dead or senile not to know about the big search that was underway.
Peter was going to refuse, but Ellen gave him what could be termed “an old-fashioned look”. “You might as well,” she said. “Have you eaten tonight, by the way?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” He felt a need to be scrupulously honest, and added, “Thanks only to Hemi, of course.” And to the waiter, “Can you do a caramel latte?” He kept his face deadpan.
As the waiter withdrew with the order, Ellen spoke, a smile in her voice. “I wonder if you’ll regret that, once you taste it.”
“The worst thing would be if I found out I liked it, and had to order it all the time.”
She smiled and got back on topic. “So, what if there’s an ambush waiting for you at that hut?”
“That’s one of the questions on my mind, and one that you’ll need to make a decision about too. The invitation is there for you to be on my chopper in the morning, but you have to know the risks. The medical crew will follow us up there. They’ll keep their distance until we’ve established it’s safe to land. I’d have a difficult time wangling a seat for a member of the public on the medical chopper, but there’s a spare chair in mine. Once you’re up there, it’s a different matter to persuade them to give you a seat on the chopper taking your daughter to Invercargill. You’re just a member of the public right now, but once Rachel is their patient, you become a relative.”
She pondered a moment, and he could sense her desire to resist a hasty decision. “I’d like to go. My feeling is that we won’t get shot at, and I’d like to be there for Rachel, either way.”
“You need to be ready for the fact they may not even be there. We could be wrong about the whole thing. We could be wrong about lots of things.” He didn’t need to say: your daughter could be dead after all.
“I understand that. You are making no guarantees. I appreciate you sticking your neck out for me and my daughter in this situation, and I won’t be taking that privilege lightly, no matter how it all works out in the end.”
***
Despite the depths of sleep, he was awake before the second ring, grabbing for the phone in the dark. It must be the post mortem results. “Peter Hubble.”
“It’s Hemi.” Peter’s brain backpedaled, rearranged itself for different news. “There was a tiny metal pin in that beacon, mate. I reckon someone put it in there deliberately to stop it activating. It would have stopped the switch sliding. It’s sheared off—probably in the fall.”
“Wouldn’t they have seen it?”
“Nah. Especially not if they hadn’t seen a PLB before. They wouldn’t know what it was meant to look like, would they? And it was a strong little pin. You’d need to belt it with a hammer to try to break it. It’s not the sort of thing you could do with bare hands, especially if you didn’t know what was wrong.”
He thought a moment. “Would Bryan Smithton have been able to figure out how to do this?”
“Too right, mate. Real geek he was, always getting into the works of things.”
So that accounted for the beacon. Sabotaged by the owner. But it still didn’t explain the gunshot wound.
***
When the phone rang the next time, it was harder for Peter to fight his way up from unconsciousness. Disorientated, he fumbled around for the phone in the dark and stabbed at the illuminated answer button, but the beeping continued. He rose and headed towards the doorway, tripped heavily on his discarded shoes, swore liberally, stumbled into the wall and finally found the light switch.
It was his wake-up alarm that was beeping. And the call was live. So the caller had heard the whole charade. He only hoped it wasn’t Invercargill.
“Peter Hubble.”
“Nice to hear New Zealand’s finest are on top of their game as usual.” It was Jonesy the pathologist, appallingly chipper for four o’clock in the morning. “I hate to interrupt your beauty sleep. I know you need it more than most.”
“Very funny. How many energy drinks have you had tonight?”
“I never have more than four in one night,” he said, his tone prim.
“So, what did you find?”
“Contestant Number One, Adam Andersson. Died of a gunshot wound to the head around forty-eight to sixty hours ago. Small caliber. A lot
of general bruising around the time of death, and some significant compression bruising to the right side of the body caused after death.”
“We found his body next to a landslide.”
“A lot of the injuries are not inconsistent with being crushed in a landslide.”
“Could any of the bruising be punches, or being belted over the head with a log, that sort of thing?”
“Hard to be sure, they’d look much the same.”
“Can you tell how close in time the gunshot and crush injuries were?”
“Very close, some of it. If I were a betting man, I’d say almost simultaneous. The compression bruising took place over several hours.”
“Who shoots a man who’s about to get cleaned up by a landslide?”
“Someone who hasn’t seen the landslide coming.”
Peter paused and thought about that. “Or possibly even someone who had a gun in their hand when they got hit by the same landslide. It could have been a threat that turned into an execution. Okay. And the other one?”
“Contestant Number Two, Kain Vindico. Died about twenty-four to thirty-six hours ago.”
“So he’s more recent.” That meant Hemi’s interpretation of the trampers’ trajectory was correct. It increased the likelihood they’d entered the Altham valley, and Peter’s plan would work.
“Fatal injuries consistent with a fall from height. Broken spine, broken neck, broken head—his skull was pretty much flattened on the back. Died almost instantly. The most likely explanation for the injuries I’m seeing is that he fell backwards while wearing a rucksack, and landed arched across the rucksack.”
It was an uncomfortable mental picture, and Peter wriggled his shoulders. “No way to tell if he was pushed, I guess?”
“Nothing obvious like finger marks on the shoulders. But that doesn’t prove anything.”
“No, of course.”
“He also had a belly full of tutu berries.”
“What?!” Peter swore. Another complication. “I hope they haven’t all been eating them. Was it enough to kill him, if he hadn’t fallen?”
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