by Tina Clough
‘Yes, I just thought of something. We must check if those guys who picked up Hope from the road noticed the number plate or anything about the pick-up truck. They might have a dashboard camera. Dao, can you ask Benson who they were? I’ll ask Willow to follow up too.’
Dao turns to Noah and her tone makes it clear she expects an answer. ‘And now you can tell us what happened to Hope’s husband – and why.’
As usual Noah hesitates before he starts, as if he needs to make some crucial decision about how to start the first sentence. He is tapping his forefinger on the rim of his coffee cup and his legs are jiggling. Any minute now I will tell him to sit still; he is driving me crazy.
‘It’s a long story. The marriage was a disaster. She met him – Buster – through some friends and before you could say “snap” they were in a relationship. Everyone raved about what a great-looking couple they were. She was besotted. The family had reservations, nothing specific but we didn’t warm to him. Dad thought he was self-absorbed and vain, Mum used to say he had an inflated sense of entitlement and I just disliked him right from the start. They got married in a registry office. Dad thought they got married without telling us because Buster was worried we would try to talk her out of it. Probably true.’
‘Why didn’t you like him?’ I ask. ‘Anything in particular?’
He hesitates, taps his fingers on the edge of the table. ‘There was just something about him. Nothing obvious, but something hiding behind the good looks. Anyway, they lived in Christchurch and I was here in Auckland. I didn’t see her often, but each time she had changed a bit more. She was not herself – less open, less cheerful, slightly cowed somehow. I was seriously worried about her and so were our parents. Then Mum heard some stuff about him from someone she met, a guy who used to work with him – he was a journalist too. He said Buster was a very heavy drinker, probably an alcoholic. We hadn’t seen enough of him to realise and he hid it well when he wanted to make a good impression.’
He stares past my shoulder at something only he can see and sits silent for a minute.
Neither Dao nor I say anything and eventually he picks up the thread again.
‘Somehow, he dominated Hope in a really weird way, manipulated her mind. Everything was always her fault, didn’t matter what it was – even things he did. And this is the scary part – she took it. As if she actually believed she was the one causing problems or wasn’t good enough. As if she made him aggressive. You know what she said once? She said, “Poor Buster. I make him so angry, even though I don’t mean to.” I should have abducted her there and then. It was awful, drove me crazy.’
Telling us about it is making him stressed again; his twitchy mannerisms return, his voice takes on a higher pitch. I keep my fingers crossed that the story will not turn into anything similar to the abuse Dao experienced. Noah is too absorbed in the telling of it to think of how it might affect someone who has been victimised herself.
‘Someone told me it’s called gas lighting after a film called Gaslight made decades ago, about someone who makes his wife think she is losing her mind, but it seems to be used when someone is doing this sort of controlling thing too, playing mind games. Anyway, Buster died several years ago. They were in the car and he slapped Hope hard across the face. She was driving, normal open-road speed. The car went across the hard shoulder and hit a concrete power pole. Front left corner hit hard, the pole snapped and fell across the car. Buster’s head was crushed. There were no brake marks at all, no swerving.’
He has been speaking faster and faster; he is nearly breathless. He stops and sits quiet for a moment and I wonder if this is it. But just as I am about to say something, he starts up again.
‘An oncoming driver, who hadn’t seen Buster hitting Hope, said she had her eyes closed and appeared to steer straight at the pole. She was charged with manslaughter. People speculated that she was so at her wits’ end that she tried to kill them both, deliberately, but only he died.’
‘What did you think at the time? And what do you think now?’
‘In court she said exactly what she said to us after the accident. First, he back-handed her across the face and then he threw the whisky from his paper cup at her. She got it all over her face and in her eyes. He often drank in the car. Not from a bottle, but from a paper cup so it would look normal. The car stank of alcohol and so did Hope. To start with they thought she’d been driving drunk, but she had no blood alcohol at all. His was sky-high.’
He stops talking and waits. Dao just looks at him, says nothing.
‘Very tragic,’ I say. ‘Poor Hope. It explains a lot from those stories of hers. I didn’t understand her reluctance regarding relationships that she wrote about in the story about Willard. I knew there had to be something traumatic behind it.’
Dao says nothing much until Noah leaves shortly after. When we are in the bathroom before going to bed, she looks at me in the mirror and speaks around the toothbrush in her mouth. ‘We have to do this, Hunter.’
Chapter eleven
At half-past seven the next morning I drop Dao at the police station where Benson works now. I hope she will get something out of him, but I am not optimistic. He is a very sharp guy who knows when to keep a lid on things. His only weakness, as far as I know, is his affection for Dao.
I’m hoping to snatch a bit of time with Willow, before her day gets busy, but it is too early. I sit in the car outside her office and consider what we know. I try to picture how the guy with the bin did it when he knocked on Hope’s door. She said in her story that he stood politely back from the door. If he stood to one side, she would have looked at him. If he put his bin at the other end of the landing, she wouldn’t notice it. When she went to look up the number, he had time to pull the Spiderman mask on. Then he trundled his bin inside and had the pad of chloroform, or whatever it was, ready in his hand.
What we did not discuss last night was why he put on the disguise at all. It can’t have been that he wanted to be anonymous when he dragged the bin down the stairs. Wearing a mask would have drawn attention to him instead of the opposite. Anyone sane who met a man in a mask pulling a heavy wheelie bin down the stairs would run screaming for the nearest policeman. It can only be that he knew the camera was there and did not want to be recognised. So he stood to one side when she opened the door, to be out of camera range. If he knew about the camera, he must be part of whatever organisation installed it or some other unit with close links to it. I realise I don’t know the difference between the GCSB and the Security Intelligence Service; there could be others I have never heard of, not to mention those private firms Willow speculated about.
The bin man was a careful planner. So why was he so careless with how he put the bin on the truck? It could easily have fallen off, even if Hope had not rocked it to the edge. Did he leave it lying across the deck of the pick-up truck, because he suddenly had to leave quickly? I would have made it lie lengthwise, if I had loaded it. But when I replay Hope’s story in my mind, the penny drops. She had heard a loud metallic clang just beside her. Perhaps bin man’s truck did have a tailgate and he closed it, but he was in a hurry and didn’t do it properly. The clang could have been the tailgate falling open. It would have been awkward to get the bin up on the deck; maybe it attracted unwanted attention and he wanted to get away as fast as he could. How did he manage to load a bin with an adult inside, on his own? Tilt the top of the bin against the edge of the truck’s deck, I think, and then bend down and lift from the bottom edge. Lift and push, shove it sideways if you’re in a hurry, probably easier and faster than pushing it further in along the deck. Then close the tailgate and drive away.
Willow drives past and turns into their underground car park. I know from experience that she takes pride in being on time for appointments and breaking into her day is easiest first thing in the morning, before she becomes busy. I give her a minute before I go inside and up to the second floor. She is talking to the receptionist in the foyer
and turns around, surprised, when I come in and ask, ‘Have you got any time today when I can tell you what we’ve found out about Hope?’
She consults the girl behind the desk. ‘Right now, for about half an hour until my first client arrives. Might be a bit longer. Come along.’
First up I give her the stories from the USB drive that we printed out last night. ‘Don’t read them now. If we haven’t got a lot of time, I’d rather tell you the basics first. You can read the details later.’
She sits absorbed and silent while I give her a brief outline of the stories and our meeting with Willard.
‘Oh my God, that poor woman. What are you going to do? It’s too soon to chase up that information request I filed – they can take ages. I will certainly get back to the police and point out that they already had a file on Hope, when Noah reported that she had gone missing. They never told either of us that they did or that they knew about the abduction. It’s outrageous.’
I tell her what we are doing, keep the details minimal. When I say that Dao has gone alone to see Benson, she smiles.
‘Can’t you picture it? She’ll be sitting there looking like a little Vietnamese orphan girl and draw things out of him before he knows it. Maybe he’ll say no, he can’t tell her anything and then she’ll do that thing she does. You know, when she looks at you with her black eyes and it’s like being pinned to the wall. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars he’ll cave in and tell her something he would never tell me.’
I smile at the picture she paints. ‘He’s very fond of her. He teases her, and she likes it. There might not be any need for that look.’
‘I’ll ask the police about those men who rescued Hope from the wheelie bin. There’s no saying if that investigation went any further – it might have been flagged for no action straight away, but if they found something out, before it got closed down, it would be useful to know what it was. I haven’t come up against this kind of block before, so I’m not sure of the process.’
Her secretary buzzes her to say her clients have arrived and I leave.
I sit in the car and call Louise Barlow on the number Noah found on Hope’s phone. Five minutes later I end the call none the wiser. I say nothing about the abduction but let Louise continue to think that Hope had an accident. She is very concerned to hear that Hope can’t be found and wants to ask a thousand questions, but she had noticed nothing strange about Hope’s behaviour.
‘I did wonder why she had no shoes,’ she says as an afterthought. ‘But isn’t that what happens in accidents? People lose some of their belongings.’
‘Did she have her bag?’ I know her bag was in the flat; I want to hear what Louise will say.
‘Oh no, she didn’t. I never thought of that. God, she must have lost that too. How inconvenient. Perhaps she called me because she had no money for a taxi. Don’t you think?’
That is the sum of it. She questioned nothing, noticed nothing odd in the flat. There is no point in wasting time on her. I have no idea what her job is and can only hope she is not in charge of anything important.
Next up is Spencer, who is willing to talk, but has nothing useful to tell me. He is very upset.
‘I still can’t believe it! How could she disappear? It’s incredible! Noah seems to think she’s been abducted, but it seems so unlikely. I don’t understand it – it’s very worrying. Why would anyone take her? But she would never leave like that, without anyone knowing. Surely not.’
I have just started asking him something, when he interrupts. ‘I recognise your name, Hunter. It’s unusual. You found that girl a couple of years ago, didn’t you? And ended up in an abandoned factory with a homicidal maniac?’
No one from the media ever managed to sum up the vital facts of the story with so few words; it is a model of brevity.
‘That’s right. And now I’ve agreed to help Noah. We’re trying to winkle out any little detail the cops might have missed.’ I don’t tell him the police are doing precisely nothing. ‘Can you recall anything that Hope told you about her trip – anything that could possibly be linked to this? If she was asked to do something or bring something back from Pakistan for example, or if she witnessed something unusual while she was there. I don’t know what we’re looking for, but there must be something.’
‘Let me think,’ says Spencer. I hear him moving around and some noises I cannot identify. Then he says, ‘No, no, wait your turn.’
‘Sorry, what was that?’
‘Not you, the hen. I’m dishing up the cats’ food and she gets a bit pushy. But I can’t recall anything of the kind you mentioned. It seems to have been pretty straightforward, apart from a few difficulties finding some of those safe houses. You know, vague addresses and street numbers not being in place everywhere.’
I thank him and ask him to call me if he remembers something. It seems to be my day for talking to rather frustrating eccentrics.
A call to Dao confirms that she has not seen Benson, who is out on a case. ‘They don’t know when he’ll come back. But I’ve got my book. I’ll just wait.’ She sounds quite cheerful.
Samantha’s phone has a recorded message that she will be back in her office after lunch, so I call Noah and say I want to have another look at Hope’s flat, if he is OK with that. He is talking to someone further down Hope’s street and says to come right away; he will be somewhere close by and can let me in.
‘I’ll leave you here,’ he says, when he has unlocked the door. ‘Just call me. I mean, when you want to leave so I can lock up. I’ll not be far away. I took the morning off. Trying to catch people as they arrive for work, or to go to work. I’ll tell you about it later.’
The last time I was in the flat we cut the visit short, when I saw the camera. It looks different in daylight: the room is huge, as big as a decent-sized two-bedroom flat. There are three very long windows at chest height, evenly spaced along the wall opposite the door. The hole in the window frame is bigger than I remembered. Why did Hope not notice it, even if it had only been there since she got back from Pakistan? But I recall the picture Dao showed me: Hope was short compared to the others. I saw a reflection of light in the recessed lens, but someone a head shorter might not have been able to.
I go back to the front door and stand on the landing looking in. One step to the side and I can no longer see the camera hole. I picture someone opening the door and looking in my direction. They wouldn’t notice anything in the other corner of the landing; the door would screen it. I walk around the long room and try to work out what the camera could see. As far as I remember the lens was set only a couple of millimetres into the wood, but the edges must have restricted its view somewhat. I search the kitchen drawers and find some tin foil, make a small plug, rub the front surface shiny smooth and push it into the hole. I try to get it just the right distance in from the edges of the hole, so I can see it clearly as I move around. After a couple of minutes, I know that a wide-angle lens would have captured nearly the entire room, even with the lens slightly recessed. The corner of the kitchen, as far as the bedroom door, would be out of the camera’s view and so would the corner at the other end of the room where Hope has her desk. Hope’s life would have been like a shop window display for whoever put the camera there. I think of her coming out of her bedroom in the morning, possibly undressed, or sitting in her armchair watching TV in the evening – unaware that someone was watching her. It makes my skin crawl with distaste.
Noah returns a few minutes after I call him. He has finished working his way up and down the street, asking if people have seen anything.
‘I’ll tell you tonight. I’ve got to go back to work at lunchtime. I might work quite late to catch up. Had to do this first thing. I’ll write up the notes I’ve made of people’s names and addresses and send them to Willow. Not just the names, what they’ve told me too. She can pass it on to the cops. Not much of value so far, but a couple of things. The woman who owns the café down the block saw him loading the bin
. And one of the people on the first floor here heard the bin bumping down the stairs. Nobody saw anything strange a couple of days later either.’
Samantha sits me down in one of the 1960s armchairs and gives me coffee in a 1950s cup with a saucer, and a biscuit. ‘Now, how can I help you?’
‘I’d like to hear about anything Hope said that might have a bearing on this. What Noah didn’t tell you when we were here is that there is more to this than Hope disappearing. She was abducted from her flat while you were away, but she got away from the man who took her. Noah found a quite detailed message she had written for him – about how it happened. She said that she would stay in her flat until he returned from Australia two days after she wrote it. She was going to lock herself in and not open the door for anyone. She was very frightened. We presume the same man took her a second time, it’s the only explanation – but we don’t know how he did it or who he is.’
Noah had interrupted Dao when she was about to tell Samantha about the camera; I don’t know why. I think he is jealous of people Hope feels close to; but why Samantha? In my opinion Samantha is a valuable person to cultivate. Hope regards her as a close friend and she might share things with her that she would not share with her brother. After she got back from Pakistan, she seems to have spent more time with Samantha than with anyone else, at least as far as we know. A trade-off is called for; by telling her more and asking more questions I might get her memory working on details.
I tell her everything we know about the bin man, describe how he got in and his disguise. When I tell her how Hope rocked the bin off the back of the truck on the motorway and how she was rescued, Samantha is visibly shocked, her eyes wide and fixed on my face. She inches forward in her chair and sits up straighter.