Peter quirked an eyebrow. “We might not get you to star in the next tourism ad then.” He went back to his sorting.
Callie grew quiet as her tears ran their course, and she sat back and started fishing for her t-shirt underneath her fleece, looking for something to wipe her face that didn’t have too much blood on it. “I’d lend you the team hankie,” Jack said, deadpan again, “but I don’t know where it is. I think Erica had it last.”
Callie stifled a giggle and looked at the dried blood on her hands. “You know what, I think I’m going down to the lake to wash this lot off.” She looked at the policeman, inquiring. “Is that okay?”
“Sure. Anything in your pockets before you go?”
She turned them all out, both pants and fleece, and all she found was two curly fern tips. She placed them carefully on the edge of the bunk near the policeman, and gave him an impish look. Her spirits were reviving. “You can have one of those if you’re peckish, but you have to leave the other one for me.”
Jack did the same with his pockets, then followed her down to the water. By the time he’d crunched his way across the gravel beach, she’d already shed her boots and walked shin deep into the clear frigid water, and was sluicing water up her arms, and then her face. She paused a moment, and then immersed her scalp in the water and began washing her hair, even though the cold water must have been agony for her scalp wound.
By now, Jack was alongside her, joining in with gusto, washing his hands and face, and then his hair. The cold was both numbing and exhilarating. He then hauled both t-shirt and fleece off over his head and plunged them into the water, scrubbing with his fingers at the blood, and all the other stains.
Somewhere along the way it stopped being about hygiene and became a ritual, a symbol—washing themselves free of much more than blood and sweat.
She watched him, considering. “Won’t you get cold if your clothes are all wet? We’re still a couple of hours from civilization.”
“Have you forgotten already what Ranger Bryan told us? Merino t-shirts, polyester fleece, so they dry fast and keep you warm even if they get wet. That doesn’t just apply to rain.”
“Well then. You’d better look the other way or pretend we’re at the beach.” She quickly stripped down to her bra and began to wash her own shirts.
Jack flushed to his hair follicles. He didn’t know where to look. But he knew where he wanted to look. So he definitely must be feeling better.
They washed and scrubbed and wrung and laughed, and then made their way back to the hut, their clothes damp, their faces clean and shining, their spirits more alive than they’d ever been.
***
The medivac helicopter was loaded with its precious cargo. Two patients, both stable now. Two lives that would always carry scars, but would nevertheless go on from here. Two futures retrieved from the cliff edge of death.
Ellen’s duffel bag was stowed, and she turned to Callie and Jack, finally able to give them a moment’s attention after the long minutes of tunnel vision while Rachel was being treated. “Thank you for getting my little girl out of there.” She reached for a hand of each one, squeezed hard, and gazed into the eyes of first Callie, then Jack. “We’ll talk more before long, but I can’t leave without saying thank you. From the depths of my soul.”
“You’re so welcome, Mrs C,” Callie said, a schoolgirl again, addressing a friend’s mother, her voice thick with emotion. Jack just smiled sheepishly and returned the squeeze of her hand.
Ellen turned to thank the rescue team. A quick peck on the cheek for Hawk, who looked awkward but pleased. Another one for Hemi, who said, “Aw, come on,” and turned it into an enveloping hug.
A long, speaking gaze for Peter, her eyes full of relief, thanksgiving, hope, even forgiveness. She held out both hands to him, and he took them, squeezed her fingers, and then enfolded her in a fierce hug. It wasn’t a very professional thing for a uniformed police officer to do, but he could count on Hemi and Hawk to be discreet. “Let us know how you get on,” he muttered as he released her.
“I’ll tell you all about it over a caramel latte one day,” she said, with a teasing smile. “Soon.” She turned and stepped aboard the helicopter, and the others moved back as the engine began to hum.
58
The launch chugged down the lake, cutting a widening white trail through the upside down hills and peaks sealed into its mirror surface. The sun was well up in the sky now, but the wind had not yet risen. The mountains clustered around to watch them go, whispering. When they were lost and fearful, Callie had struggled to keep hope alive with thoughts of civilization, a square meal, a hot shower, a soft bed. But now she felt a strange reluctance to go back to the hum of traffic and the buzz of machines, the glow of her laptop, the burble of her phone, the ceaseless workplace obsession with trivialities and beat-ups and prying into other people’s traumas. Whatever else these last few weeks had been, they had been utterly real. After week upon week of numbness after William’s defection, she had felt something again, really felt it, more than she’d probably felt anything in her life. It could be addictive, that sort of intensity.
The big tall sergeant who seemed to be just a little bit sweet on Mrs C had sent the pilot home—not enough room for all of them in the helicopter. He’d brought the amiable paramedic with them on the boat, even though they’d already received first aid for their cuts and bruises and muscle strains. At first Callie had feared he was present in case the pain in her side turned out to be more than just broken ribs. He’d said a full medical check later in the day would be soon enough, after a shower and some clean clothes, but was he secretly concerned? But she became calm again as the realization dawned that they were probably going to be questioned, informally at least, and the policeman would need a witness to whatever they said.
She was content to sit next to Jack opposite the other two, and quietly nibble sultanas from the ration pack she’d been given—slowly, as instructed, so as not to overtax her unaccustomed stomach. She didn’t need to control or guide anything now. Things could just unfold.
***
Jack had no desire to be passive. He could eat cold oat porridge out of a bag with a plastic spoon, and be blunt at the same time. “So I guess you’ll want to ask us some things,” he said, feeling only mildly silly in his one-armed jacket. It’s missing arm, soaked in Erica’s blood, lay on the floor at Altham Hut awaiting a cleanup team. “You should get the details before we get among other people. Otherwise we’ll hear rumors, make wrong connections, get confused, forget.”
Peter nodded, his expression wry. “Have you done this before?”
Jack shrugged. “I interview people for a living too.” And there’s quite a lot of things I’d like to ask you.
Peter said, “Do I need to say that this conversation is ‘off the record’?”
Jack laughed. “Anything that would be sub judice is obviously off the record anyway.”
Peter apparently caught the implication, and so did Callie. “Are you thinking of writing about this?” she asked, curious.
“Not today. But I reckon I’ll want to eventually. Won’t you?” He looked at her, and his face darkened. “People have to know how toxic money can be when it’s used to manipulate people. What’s happened to us will be a quick blip in the news, forgotten tomorrow. But the lives of Sharon and Adam—and even Kain and Bryan—can’t mean so little as that.”
***
“So you see it as being all about money?” said Peter, interested. He had a hunch he’d get better results if he discarded his professional persona and just conversed with these two.
“No, money was just the tool. The problem was bitterness. Unforgiveness. At first I thought Bryan was acting as some sort of impartial judge and jury because he was nuts and he blamed us for Liana’s death. Do you know about Liana?” Peter nodded, and Jack continued. “But he wasn’t quite as deeply nuts as he seemed, and he definitely wasn’t impartial. I’m convinced he dressed it up as the scales of
justice to make himself feel righteous, but really he just wanted good old-fashioned revenge. Revenge on Kain and maybe Adam for sleeping with his girlfriend, revenge on the rest of us in case we knew about it all along, revenge on us and the world for being friends with his money instead of friends with him. If he could have forgiven us and himself for failing Liana, and gotten on with his life… none of this would have happened. His wealth was the best weapon he had, and it turned out to be a powerful one. Erica didn’t take the bait quite the way he’d have liked her to, but he was a good judge of character with Kain.”
Callie said, “I’m not sure if that’s completely true. I think Kain had trouble deciding how to respond to what happened. And then he regretted what he did.”
“When did you become aware Kain was involved in Bryan’s plans?”
“We didn’t know for sure until we found that survival gear in his rucksack after he was dead.”
“Why did you leave the locator beacon behind?”
“It didn’t work,” Jack said. “I wrestled with it for a couple of minutes.”
Callie looked at Jack. “I think they might be telling us it did work.”
Jack stared at the two men opposite, then sighed and leaned on his knees, his head in his hands. “You’ve got to be joking.” His voice was muffled. “I probably should add that I’m terrified of heights, and I was about to wet myself on that ledge. Perhaps it interfered with my fine motor skills, or just, you know, my general sanity.” He looked up again.
Hemi grinned at him. “I’m not scared of heights, mate, and I was about to wet myself on that ledge.”
“The PLB activated yesterday afternoon,” Peter said. He smiled. “We weren’t best pleased when we found it with no one beside it, I have to say.”
“Yesterday afternoon? But we were miles away by then.”
“We think some keas got at it.”
“Oh great. So a parrot could turn it on, but not me.”
“A parrot and a seven hundred meter drop,” Hemi said. “I took it apart last night. It’d been sabotaged. A strong metal pin straight through the mechanism. You’d never have managed to activate it. Not without a sledgehammer.”
“And it’s just as well you left it behind for a parrot to drop, as it happens,” added Peter. “A survivor from a rock fall once waited seven days at Altham Hut before a boat came by. We found you today partly because the beacon helped us work out where you might be heading.”
“Oh. Well that’s a good thing then.” He thought a moment. “So why torment me with it?”
“Didn’t mean to do that. But we were curious why you left it and kept the other gadgets, if they weren’t working either.”
“They’re a bit more complicated. I didn’t know if I might be doing something wrong and the others could get them to work. The instructions on the beacon were so simple a trained monkey could have followed them.”
Hemi grinned. “Or a parrot.”
Jack laughed.
Peter handed the satellite phone and GPS to Hemi from a bag at his side. “Can you tell what’s wrong with them?”
Hemi looked towards the bag, expecting more. “Got the battery for the phone?”
Peter in turn looked at Jack, and Jack frowned. “Isn’t it in it?”
“Nah, mate. This is an old model. Has a separate battery about the size of a house brick.”
Jack looked at Callie and raised one eyebrow. “More of Bryan’s mind games.”
“Looks like it. That’s definitely the way the phone looked when Bryan showed it to us that first night and told us how wonderful it was,” she said. “There was nothing else with it.” She sighed. “I guess he could count on us not to know what it was meant to look like. We were so passive in so many ways. We put ourselves completely in his power.” She shook her head, rueful and reflective.
Jack said, “Yes, but we weren’t to know how he was going to use that power.”
Hemi was fiddling with the buttons of the GPS. “Completely stuffed. It’s like there’s a virus in the software. I can have a closer look at it when I get home if you like.”
“No doubt it will turn out to be sabotaged too,” Peter said. “So it seems Bryan gave a set of survival gear to Kain that didn’t work. Any idea when Kain found out it didn’t work?”
“We’re not sure, but it may only have been in the past couple of days that he tested it, after Adam turned up with a bullet in his head. Kain would have suddenly realized Bryan must have had a Plan B, if there was someone out there with a gun. And then later he realized Bryan might know he’d slept with Liana, and whatever Bryan had promised him took on a different light.”
“Bryan did know he’d slept with Liana,” Peter said. “He’d checked the post mortem report a few months ago. The blood type of the baby didn’t match Bryan, but it matched Kain.”
“I see. And you probably know Bryan asked for our blood types on the emergency information form he sent with the invitation.” Peter nodded. “Well, not long before Kain died he found out we suspected him of killing Sharon.”
“So you knew she was murdered?”
“Not straight away, but Callie realized later what the bruises on her face meant. I assume that’s why you’ve taken all our gloves.” Peter nodded and Jack told him Erica’s fears about that night and what she’d seen.
Callie took up the tale. “Our gloves were one of the things Bryan supplied when we got here. And we all had the same brand and color except for Kain. Bryan said the shop didn’t have enough pairs in that brand. Kain joked about how his were better than ours—the lining was softer. I bet he thought he was getting special treatment. Imagine how he must have felt when he realized Bryan was just creating an evidence trail in case Kain did anything criminal with gloved hands.”
“As a lawyer, it’s surprising he didn’t think about that,” Peter said.
“When you’re in that situation out there, it gets very primal,” Callie said. “You start to feel as though none of the normal rules apply.”
“Callie also thinks Kain might have committed berry suicide when he realized Bryan had set him up, and he wouldn’t be able to get away with it,” Jack said. “The more I think about it, the more it explains the way Kain looked and acted that afternoon. You know, it was Bryan who recommended those berries in a private chat with Kain back at the beginning of the hike. Told him they were ‘almost a perfect food’.”
Peter looked grim. “That’s an especially sick thing to do. They’re probably the only deadly plant out there.”
There was a lull in the conversation while each member of the group absorbed the new information they’d learned.
Callie said, “Have you found out how much Bryan offered Kain for being his henchman?”
Peter made a quick decision to be open with them, even about this. “Kain had a copy of a will in his house leaving Bryan’s estate divided equally between the seven of you who went on the hike, or however many of you outlived Bryan by thirty days.”
Callie and Jack stared at him as they processed the implications, then looked at each other. “No wonder he wanted to get rid of the rest of us,” Jack said. “Although it’s strange he wasn’t more proactive about it.”
“Maybe he didn’t have the stomach for it, after Sharon,” Callie said.
“Or it might have dawned on him that the will would make him a suspect, so the other deaths had better be natural.”
Callie said, “But it was a fake will of course. Another trick.”
“Not fake,” said Peter, “just superseded. He made another one a few days later.”
“Leaving it all to Greenpeace.”
“No, not Greenpeace.” He weighed up whether to tell them, what to tell them, and how to tell them. “Leaving it to the six of you, excluding Kain, and if none of you outlived Bryan by thirty days, it all went to a little girl called Lily Granton. She’s the daughter of the bloke who shot Erica this morning, and she’s dying of cancer.”
Jack and Callie stared at their feet a
s a few more pieces slotted into place.
“It doesn’t justify Tom’s actions,” Peter said, “but I’ve known him eight years, and he’s always been a good guy. He thought there was a treatment in the States that might save Lily, but he couldn’t afford it. And Bryan told him you lot had murdered a girl ten years ago and got away with it. I think he lost the plot.”
Callie shook her head sorrowfully. “I can see how someone could get sucked into a thing like that, especially when they’re desperate. And now he won’t even be around to help his daughter.”
Jack’s voice when he spoke was low with anger. “Bryan really knew how to tap into the weakest and the worst in everybody. I felt sorry for him you know, but some things are just plain evil.”
“The puppet master,” Callie said. “He pulled the strings and everybody danced.”
Jack said, “Strings with hundred dollar bills twitching on the end of them.”
“So what will you do with the money?” Peter said, watching closely for their reactions. “If you live a few more weeks, you become two of the four heirs.”
They stared at him, shocked. It was obvious that neither had comprehended that part of the situation.
“As if we’d want his money.” Callie almost spat the words.
“Speak for yourself,” Jack said.
She swung on the bench seat to face him. “You’re not seriously going to take his filthy money?”
Jack’s expression was mild, as was his voice when he spoke. “It might help Sharon’s little boy. And there’s Adam’s fiancée. They had a business together. How will she cope in the next little while? Plus there’s the organizations that helped search for us—I imagine they run on donations. And there’s the little girl with cancer.”
Poison Bay Page 28