by Bowes, K T
Odering took out his notebook slowly, flipping it open in a motion rather like the other cop, but not quite so annoyingly. He stared at the pages silently before clearing his throat and looking up at the couple. “The man we found injured at Achilles Rise,” he said and Hana held her breath, “sustained a broken leg and concussion and has been released from the hospital into our custody.”
Hana inhaled deeply and looked at her husband with wide, frightened eyes. “I didn’t mean it!” she said instantly and looked like she might cry again.
Logan shook his head and smiled at her. “You did good, babe. You got yourself and Pete out of there and nobody’s saying any different.” He cuddled Hana and stroked the side of her face, staring with obvious challenge at Odering. The cop ignored him and pushed on with his story.
“The injured man is charged with kidnapping and assault causing Actual Bodily Harm. He won’t be going anywhere soon. He’s identified the other man who fled the scene and we will be apprehending him shortly.” The detective paused for breath. “Everything which has happened in the last few months since February is linked,” Logan rolled his eyes impatiently but the speaker ignored him, “and the link is definitely Michael Laval. We believe all the people who have been sent after you are in some way indebted to him, owe him something, which is why it’s been a range of people, apart from a couple of occasions when it’s been the same men.”
Odering flicked his pages. “The blonde man known as Flick and the Asian gentleman seem to be permanent employees of Michael Laval. Laval has been convincingly linked to a murder in the far north and a couple of hefty frauds involving widows and lonely middle-aged women.”
Hana interrupted sadly, “Is that why he got involved with me? Because I was a widow?”
The detective shook his head with certainty. “No. That’s a red herring, I’m sure of it. Way back in February, of the two people who mugged you at the school, the male was an ex-pupil.” He peered at his notebook, “A Gwynne Jeffs identified him. He was locked up for a series of other crimes but was unforthcoming on the incident with you,” he indicated Hana with a nod. “We think he was responsible for hiding something on or around your vehicle. Obviously by the time we came to that conclusion, your vehicle had already been stolen and was no longer able to be looked at by our forensic guys. Again. I’m aware they already looked at it once, but without knowing what they were looking for.” He looked up and eyed Hana and Logan curiously, “None of this appears to be news to you.”
Logan snorted and shook his head. “We worked that out months ago. It’s a pity none of your lot took us seriously. There were marks under the van where one of those magnetic boxes had been stuck, but it looked as though grit got underneath it and after it moved around a bit, it fell off. We didn’t find it until Hana was moving house and picked it up off her garage floor. She didn’t connect the two things and…” the detective began to look so hopeful and expectant, Hana felt embarrassed. She used Logan’s pause to carry on the tale of woe.
“I put it in my handbag and then…well…I gave it to my grandson to play with. I thought it was something my son made. We’ve since found the little metal box, but the stuff inside is lost.”
Detective Sergeant Odering exhaled loudly and with such force his notebook rustled in the breeze. He looked fed up.
“I’m sorry,” continued Hana defensively, “but we’ve been telling Bodie and he’s been telling your lot.”
“Yep,” interjected Logan, “three guesses who he’s been telling!”
An awkward silence descended on the room and Hana noticed yet again the fingers of her good hand strayed to her mouth. Nail biting was a habit she indulged in as a small girl and managed to kick as a teenager. It raised its ugly head again when Vik died and the fact that Hana was resorting to it now made her realise how stressed she had become. She took her hand away. Easier not to start, than to try and stop later.
Odering’s jaw continually flexed and he appeared decidedly beyond fed up. Finally, he looked at Logan and Hana, sat quietly huddled together on the bed. “Right then, sorry about this. From the beginning. I want to know everything and I mean everything!”
Hana Du Rose
Chapter 33
It took quite a while in the retelling. They started to recount it all, interrupting each other as events got out of sequence or there was some dispute about times, but eventually it all spilled out.
The detective filled numerous pages of his small notebook in scrawling shorthand, which presumably made sense to him. “I’ll get it typed into a statement and you can both sign it. It’ll form part of the evidence of the case, should it ever be resolved enough to come to court.” Odering sounded doubtful on the last point.
He left as Hana confessed she really needed to use the bathroom and Logan stood up to help her push the drip stand into the ensuite. “I’m exhausted,” she sighed as Logan helped her with her clothing. “Turn around!” she insisted. “I can’t pee with you watching.”
“Don’t be scared, Han,” Logan said softly. “I can see it’s upset you.”
Hana sighed. She had become distressed as recounting the events caused painful emotions to resurface and when the string of them were put together chronologically, it displayed how under fire she and Logan had been over a prolonged period of time. There was quite a catalogue of bungled attacks and misadventures. Logan cunningly thought of a solution. “I think you should recuperate at the hotel.” He turned his head slightly to gauge his wife’s reaction.
Hana held her breath and resisted the urge to stamp her foot whilst yelling, over my dead body! “Turn around!” she wailed at her husband and Logan’s body became rigid with impatience.
“Hana, see sense!” It was well meant, but Hana would rather take the risk of meeting up with Laval himself than being held captive by Miriam.
“No!” she insisted as she washed her hands and looked at her reflection in the mirror. She quenched the instant grimace as she tried to work out a politer retort. Nothing sprang instantly to mind. The Expo presented a ready-made excuse for her need to be in Hamilton and at work for the next few weeks at least, or be responsible for Sheila’s imminent nervous breakdown and throttling of Pete. “I have to be at work,” Hana stated stubbornly. “Pete will be his usual unhelpful self like he is every year.”
“Yeah. Fair point.” Logan slumped down onto the closed toilet seat lid.
“Last year, he was only responsible for taking photographs of the stallholders and interested boys milling around. But he managed to drop the expensive departmental camera from the balcony in the main hall. At least the memory card would have been retrievable, had it not plopped into a glass water tank which Mighty River Power brought along as one of their props.” Hana sighed. “Sheila went mental.”
An audience of around thirty were soaked and subsequently stained with the blue dye, which gave the water its fake crystalline appearance and did not come out of whites. Apparently. “I don’t want to make a row of it,” Hana sighed. “I don’t have the energy.”
As sleep fought for dominance, she asked Logan to fetch her the next day and tell Sheila she would be in work as soon as possible. Logan was unhappy but made up his mind to forcibly remove Hana to the hotel as soon as the Expo was over, without any warning. If Hana suspected, she was too tired to care.
Logan left the hospital and went straight round to Amy’s house in Claudelands. As he hoped, Bodie was minding Jas and reluctantly let him in. Bodie obviously did not want to do his emotional dirty washing in front of Logan but found it increasingly hard to dislike the older man, who sat quietly at the kitchen table drinking a cup of very stewed tea without complaint and said little. Bodie was good at interrogation but had to admit Logan was easily as skilled at getting what he wanted. He had no fear of silence but wasn’t going to leave until they reached an understanding, however long it took. Bodie, on the other hand, struggled with the sound of his own heartbeat, the occasional clatter of Jas playing in his room and the tick of
the kitchen clock as the earth shifted slowly on its axis.
By sheer willpower, Logan sat immobile, until Bodie cracked first. “Do you fancy a different sort of drink?”
Over a can of beer, he finally loosened up. Logan asked him some questions about work and managed to get enough out of him to ascertain the bits he loved and the parts he didn’t. Logan talked about school and the boys and how he got into teaching.
“Is my mum going to stay on at school after the baby?” Bodie asked.
Logan shrugged, “I don’t know, but ultimately it’s up to her.”
A realisation dawned slowly on Bodie. Jas had been a complete surprise to Hana and yet she responded without guile to the little boy. Bodie began to see he would have to do the same. Logan appeared to understand something of the young man’s dilemma, although he didn’t even try to talk about the issue. Much as he resented the fact, Bodie knew he was beginning to like the man.
Amy was completely sold on his mother’s new husband. Not only did she think he was incredibly hot in an-older-man-kind-of-way, but she also told Bodie in no uncertain terms he was being an idiot. That morning she told him he looked ‘unwell’ and sent him home to cool off. Then she later phoned to ask him to pick up Jas, who was being sent home from kindy with a sore throat. Bodie obeyed, but without telling her Jas had a ‘fake’ sore throat and was absolutely fine, albeit a budding actor who demanded, but didn’t receive, McDonald’s on the way home. When Jas eventually fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, Bodie and his stepfather used the time wisely. They pulled apart his bedroom completely in the hunt for the elusive paperwork, last seen as the plaything of the rather overweight cat. “Hana rang you days ago about this,” Logan grumbled as he dragged a four drawer cabinet across the floor boards without emptying it.
“Yeah but I have to admit, I thought she was just grasping at straws. I didn’t realise there actually were papers.”
When Amy got home, Jas was made a big fuss of for the pristine condition of his bedroom. Every skirting board had been washed, the rug and floorboards vacuumed, even under the bed and the furniture moved around. His bed was under the window and the cupboards shifted, giving him much more play space on the floor. Jas was livid. “I’m not impressed!” he sulked, hands on rigid hips and his undies poking out of the top of his trousers.
The Action Man firing range and assault course, which he made out of egg cartons and Happy Meal boxes was no more. And ‘someone’ put Action-Man-Bungee-Jumper into a tutu which Barbie-Prisoner-Of-War liked to wear when she was being tortured. Jas was distinctly ‘off’ to say the least and Amy thought she might need to run him to the doctor’s surgery in the morning, despite what his father said.
Bodie seemed better for cooling his heels at Amy’s place all day and she was relieved. Pulling rank on anyone was unpleasant, but especially when it was the father of her child.
By the time Logan returned to the Bramwell Hospital, Hana had finally managed to drum up some food having missed breakfast, slept through lunch and woken up ravenous. “I might as well starve at home,” she complained to Logan and he smirked over the top of her head.
“I get it, ok? You want to go home, I’ve got the message, babe.” He pushed his hands up through the back of her hair and massaged her head. Hana groaned in pleasure and then glanced at the door and clapped her hand over her mouth. The colour returned to her cheeks and although her arm was painful, she moved around much easier. The troublesome drip was gone and she was still determined to leave the hospital the following day. She even splatted some lipstick on in an attempt to display ‘good health and high spirits’ which was a complete fail, as she did it left handed without looking in the mirror. Logan stroked her face and told her she looked beautiful, meaning every word of it but secretly hoping as he left, that someone in authority talked her out of leaving so soon. Not that the insurance company would share his expensive sentiments.
On the way home Logan pulled over to answer his cell phone. It was Odering responding to Logan’s earlier visit to the station. “The stuff’s in the evidence lock up. The lawyers have gone through it.”
“Yeah. No thanks to you clowns.” Logan sounded snippy and he heard Odering sigh down the phone. The documentation from the magnetic box was discovered, dusty and ripped, stuck between the skirting board and a gap in the floorboards underneath Jas’s bed. Had the papers not been folded so tightly making them quite wide, they would have disappeared down under the house forever. The box itself, which Jas used to keep all manner of odd things in, including a rather bloody looking tooth that hadn’t made it to the Tooth Fairy, was also confiscated. Once discovered missing it would be responsible for the biggest meltdown of Jas’s entire childhood, but that joy was yet to come.
“Have you given anymore thought to what I asked?” Odering said and tutted in the ensuing silence.
“No, get stuffed,” Logan replied. “You’ve got everything out of me you’re getting. Leave Hana out of things for now please until she gets over the incident in the garage.” Logan sounded determined and Odering agreed.
“Forensics went through the Achilles Rise house and found the fingerprints of the man in custody and his accomplice. Apparently they needed to be quick because this fat bird followed them round with a vacuum cleaner.”
“Henrietta. She volunteered to get the house straight for the tenants to come back to.” Logan allowed himself a smirk and a chuckle at the image of Pete’s girlfriend herding the cops from room to room at speed.
“The documentation appears to be land deeds,” Odering said.
“Yeah, me and Bo worked out that much, but those things transfer online every day of the week, so they were hardly worth killing over. And what the hell was that thing with the deeds? All the pictures and pen strokes looked like a creative drawing Jas might have done, but for the official looking stamp at the top.”
“They think the drawing’s some kind of engineer’s report,” Odering ventured. He couldn’t see Logan’s shrug of disinterest. The other man just wanted it all over and didn’t care how it happened. “There’s also a handwritten will on a standard do-it-yourself form. Sergeant Johal thought he recognised the name of the person the will belonged to, but couldn’t remember where from. He’s checking it out. The papers make no sense. Yet clearly they have importance to a number of significant people.”
“Yeah, whatever. Just catch the jerks now,” Logan said gruffly. “I’m not doing any more of your damn job for you. I’m an English teacher not a detective. I think you’ll find our salaries reflect that fact.” Logan hung up without saying goodbye.
As he drove home, checking in his side mirrors every few seconds for anyone following him, he wondered how the safety of the documents made any difference to him or Hana. They no longer had what Laval wanted. Would the danger of their situation increase or decrease? Only time would tell.
Tiger wrapped himself around Logan’s feet. He didn’t usually but in the absence of his favourite person, his stomach dictated anyone would do. Logan stood in his socks in the kitchen looking out of the window as the sky darkened above the mountain. Monday seemed to come around so quickly nowadays. At the start of the year, Logan struggled to fill the space that weekends left in his working week, taking long rides on the bike and setting and marking homework at the dining table at the Gordonton house, willing Monday to come around. Even running was unable to kill more than a few hours. It was an all-pervading loneliness, insatiable and cruel, causing Logan to wish away his days and nights without regard.
Now with Hana, his life seemed full to bursting, every moment filled with another person’s thoughts and needs. He could have found it suffocating and yet didn’t. It was refreshing to be first in somebody else’s world, to have dinner thoughtfully made for him and his shirts ironed. Logan loved how Hana stopped giving him peas on his dinner plate. He’d never complained, but she must have noticed he didn’t eat them with the relish he bestowed on other food groups and started giving him sweetcorn or ca
rrots instead. It was such a little thing, so minor on a world scale, but it showed she was tuned into him in a way he never experienced before. His mother didn’t show such care over small things. She was perceptive in an eerie, mind reading sort of way but never sweated other people’s small stuff. Maybe, he concluded, she had enough of her own problems to worry about. “Here you go, cat. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”
Logan poured biscuits into the cat bowl and wandered into the living room. He debated lighting the fire, but it seemed pointless for one person so he drifted down to the bedroom. He ended up staying there, lamps comfortingly lit and the overhead lights on in the canopy over the bed. He turned on the oil heater to warm the room, closed the curtains and spread out the internal NCEA assessments for his Year 12 class on the bed covers. Working solidly for four hours, he caught up with his marking and even managed to start invigilating the marked assessments of the probationary teacher who was making a decent job of Year 11 Shakespeare.
Logan woke suddenly around eleven sprawled across the bed. He felt cold and his bones ached. A rustling near his face made him put his hand to his cheek, finding a student’s work stuck to it. He peeled it away, wiping the small dob of dribble off and smudging the ink. He swore softly to himself. Tiger crept onto the bed and snuggled down on Hana’s pillow. Logan tried to shoo him off and when he hissed and spat, resolved to change the bedclothes before he brought Hana home again. “Damn cat. She doesn’t want your fluff on her pillow!” He padded down to the kitchen, his old friend, Loneliness taunting him quietly and dispelling its imaginary face with a wave of his arm, he made himself a cup of tea and went back to bed.