by Tina Clough
‘I think we might have come down slightly further on,’ I say to Sinclair. ‘I don’t remember it being such a struggle.’
Suddenly the shape of the container materialises a few metres ahead of us; a moment ago we could not see it. Sinclair holds out her arm like a barrier. ‘Let’s stop here for a moment.’
This late in the day the slanting light does not reach the dark bulk of the container. The outer door is half open, and we can just make out the inner wall and the black outline of the open door inside.
‘Stay here, please.’
She fishes around in her pocket and pulls out a pair of white shoe covers before she disappears into the dark box.
Light illuminates the outer space and then dims as she goes through the connecting door.
She comes out and takes the device the forensics guy gave her from her pocket. Its little screen lights up and she writes the GPS fix on a slip of paper from her notebook and hands it to me.
‘Can you call this number when you get up to the high point of the track? You’ll be talking to Allan. Give him the coordinates I have written down and tell him we put the tape up on the track as a marker. Ask him to send a man up here, two if he can spare them, with flashlights. I have to stay here now in case Browning comes back. I’ll be in touch tomorrow about a formal statement.’
‘I bet he won’t come near this place,’ says Dao. ‘If it was me I would avoid all the commotion as soon as I noticed and cut through the bush to the road and walk out. Have you got a light, or was that your phone you used?’
‘I borrowed a little torch from the chap who gave me the GPS locator,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine, Dao, but I can’t leave until we can secure this place.’
We struggle up to the ridge and Dao stops to look down; dusk is setting in and the container is now invisible. ‘We know he won’t come back and harm her,’ she says and pulls her hood up. ‘I just wanted her to know we were worried about her safety. I mean, she’s been very nice really, don’t you think? Just walking away would feel a bit mean.’
The dichotomy between Dao’s pragmatic ruthlessness and her kindness is as interesting as ever.
I make the call from the top of the ridge before we trudge down to the road again, tired and hungry. Five minutes uphill from the point where the tracks join, we meet a police officer. He carries a case in one hand and a torch in the other. ‘I’m on my way to that container you found,’ he says. ‘I hope I won’t walk right past the place where I have to go off the track.’
‘You can’t miss it. That strip of police tape is really visible and if you call out from there Sinclair will hear you,’ I say. ‘You probably won’t spot the container in this light.’
He thanks us and continues uphill; it gets rapidly darker and we make ever slower progress. Now there is another police van and yet another car parked on the road; it’s getting crowded.
We walk along the road and Dao looks up into the bush on our left and stops for a moment and shakes her head. ‘Isn’t it strange? We know what’s going on up there, all those people working and bringing in equipment, but you can’t see a thing. It just looks like a dark hillside. Only the police cars on the road back there show something is wrong.’
I reverse out from between the trees and drive away, relieved to be leaving this place. The interview was a mental balancing act and we both know that the formal statement tomorrow will be more thorough and harder to handle.
‘She’ll have a lot more questions then,’ says Dao tiredly. ‘She’s sure to want more detail about everything, particularly where those rumors came from. What are we going to say?’
‘I don’t know. We have to talk to Tama. We can’t refuse to answer – and we can’t avoid the issue either, like we did today. Call Tama and see if he can come around tonight. I need to talk to Willow too.’
Talking to Willow is urgent. The police will tell Noah they have found Hope’s body and she needs to know what has happened, but not the details of how we managed to find her. I stop in Papakura and call her. It takes a good twenty minutes; she keeps asking difficult questions and seems to sense when I am leaving something out. This conversation is as much a balancing act as our talk with Sinclair. I am glad that Noah never heard what Tama told us during his second visit. Willow has no idea that he is contemplating a serious breach of confidentiality.
‘Noah will try to paint Tama black,’ I say to Willow. ‘Try to tone down his viciousness a bit. Tama doesn’t deserve any hassle from the cops. Without him we would never have found Hope.’
I can see her in my mind; she will be running her free hand through her hair, as she always does when she is working something out, eyes narrowed in suspicion. I end the call and think of tomorrow’s interview. Can it get any more difficult than this?
Dao has stood outside the car talking to Tama, but she gets back in again long before I finish talking to Willow. The moment I end the call, she fills me in, the relief in her voice obvious.
‘He is going to tell them everything. He said we can tell the police where the rumours came from. He doesn’t want us to get into trouble and he’s going to hand over all the evidence he has now – the access log from their system and the deleted video of the first abduction, everything. He said if he gives it all to them now it will make everything easier and they won’t have to battle through the red tape to get to the confidential stuff. I’m sure he’s right. If they get the lot right away, they’ll accept that Stuart is the one who took her. It will save a lot of time.’
‘Great. Much easier for everyone, including us. And he can tell them the details about that other missing woman too. Is he coming over tonight?’
‘No, he said he’ll come and see us another day. He’s going to spend tonight writing a statement for the cops, absolutely every detail of how he monitored Stuart and how he followed Hope around. He wants Sinclair’s phone number, if we have it.’
‘It’s at the bottom of that note she gave you with the email address. Stick your hand into my sweatshirt pocket, it’s in there somewhere.’
He is doing the right thing, I think, as we drive onto the motorway and head north. I hope they don’t penalise him in any way. They should reward him instead. But I know from experience that the authorities don’t work by the same principles of practical justice that I do. We sit in silence until we are nearly home. The car is warm and Scruff snores beside Dao’s feet.
‘Did we kill him?’ she says suddenly. ‘I can’t make up my mind how it happened. I couldn’t see anything, and things just happened – you grabbed my arm and he pulled from the other side. Did you know the water was there?’
‘I had just realised what it was, a moment before he stepped sideways, dragging you with him. When I took hold of you, he was already overbalancing – his foot was going into the water and he was about to fall sideways. I’m really sorry I hurt you, but the only way I could make him let go of your hands was to use you to push him hard, take him by surprise.’
‘Thank you,’ she says politely. ‘That was very clever of you – he had such a grip on the rope around my wrists. I tried to pull away from him earlier, but he just hit me over the head and told me he could stab me any moment. I suppose you could say he nearly killed himself. We didn’t save him, but that’s a bit different.’
I will not tell her of my suspicion that he probably knew the pond was there and meant to drown her. We need no more material for Dao to have nightmares about.
We sit by the balcony window and eat left-over pasta and ice cream. I remember seeing missed-call notifications when I called Willow and pick up my phone to check them. Two calls from Benson and a voice message. I play it on speaker, so Dao can hear it: ‘I tried to call a couple of times. You must be out of range. John will not get bail – we regard him as a serious flight risk. He’s in a police cell over the weekend and by tomorrow night he’ll be safely behind a locked door in prison. And there he will stay until a trial gets under way. Sorry, Dao – we’ll exp
ect you to be our star witness again.’
‘Oh well,’ says Dao tiredly. ‘I’d rather go through all the court stuff again than have John on the loose.’
But a few minutes later she looks up from her laptop, in a burst of energy. ‘It’s marked on Google Earth – the pond! Come and have a look.’
And there it is, with one of those photo markers to indicate that someone uploaded a photo of the place. It is the only photo for that whole area of the Hunua ranges. On the satellite image you can’t see much detail; uninhabited areas seem to have lower resolution. The open area is just a narrow, pale streak in the bush and the fence is not visible at all, but the uploaded photo is perfectly clear. It shows the fence and the flat surface of the scum-covered pond behind it. The person who uploaded the photo has given the place a name: ‘The Scum Pond’.
‘I bet it’s where hunters dump parts of animals – heads and carcasses – if they cut them up where they shoot them rather than carry them out. If it’s been there for years, there might be a lot of stuff slowly rotting on the bottom.’
‘And that’s why it stinks, and all the scum has formed. Horrible!’
I stand beside her vacantly staring at the screen and try to imagine how that pond works. Perhaps someone drove a little digger up there years ago and dug an offal pit and it has filled up with water from rain and run-off. That clay would make a nice lining and stop the water draining into the ground. But there is no water leaving it in the form of a stream, so probably it just overflows when there is heavy rainfall.
‘Imagine what’s down there,’ says Dao with ghoulish glee. ‘Bones and skulls, everything covered in slime.’
‘And now Stuart is there among the bones,’ I say. ‘Not a great place to end your days. And think of those poor cops, if they have to drag everything out of the pond.’
‘They’ll have to use those suits, like in England when they were looking for the nerve-agent poison.’ She points to the photo. ‘And look, when they took that photo there was a sign on the fence.’
By increasing the size of the image, we can read it. Handwritten on a piece of board and tied to the fence with twine are the words: Warning – dangerous pond!
It is not until we go to bed that I remember the personal alarm gadget I bought for Dao in JayCar.
‘You could have used that when you were lost with Scruff. I would have heard it from miles away.’
‘Yeah, I know. I thought of it at the time, but it was in my jacket pocket and I left the jacket in the car.’
‘Sod’s law, just like when I came out of the pizza shop and those heavies jumped me. The Glock was in the car and all I had to defend myself with was a pizza box.’
She shoots me a black look. ‘That’s not funny!’
Chapter twenty-three
Very early in the morning Dao’s phone buzzes. We both sit straight up in bed before we even register what the sound is; our level of alertness still on the maximum setting. Dao grabs the phone.
‘Text from Tama, Are you awake, can I call you? I’ll say yes.’
He calls immediately, and Dao holds the phone up so I can hear.
‘I’m going in to work early, at seven.’ He sounds energetic and decisive. ‘I’ll get all the material together and email it to myself from Stu’s account. Once I have it in my personal emails, I’m calling DI Sinclair to say I want to see her. I wrote the statement last night, every last detail of how I got alerted to Stuart’s obsession with Hope and what I did. It nearly turned into a novel, took hours to get it right. And then we’ll see what happens.’
Dao pulls the phone a bit closer. ‘We are supposed to make a proper statement today some time. Do you want to come over tonight?’
He says yes and asks what he should bring. ‘Icecream,’ says Dao decisively and Tama laughs. ‘Do you mind if I bring someone? A friend?’
Dao make a question mark face at me and I say, ‘No problem.’
Dao lies down again and tucks the phone under her pillow. ‘Do you think he’s got a girlfriend?’ She is delighted. ‘I wonder what she looks like. Do you think she’ll be as gorgeous as he is? But we can’t tell them about Stuart or the pond. We need to be really careful when we talk about yesterday. Not just with Tama, with everyone. We must remember that we never met Stuart and we don’t know what he looked like or how old he was.’
‘And you have to wear long sleeves until that cut has healed. Let me have a look at your arm.’
She holds it up; the cut is healing, but the edges are red.
‘Does it hurt when I touch it?’
‘Just a little, not too much.’
‘OK, get into the shower and clean it really properly and we’ll get some antiseptic cream on it. God knows what he cut you with – could have had a million bacteria in it.’
Dao shakes her head at me and makes a face. ‘It’s only a cut! I washed the blood off last night. I’m sure it’s fine. You’re being fussy.’
‘No, I just want to make sure. You have the first shower and we’ll get it tidied up.’
She sings in the shower. I lie in bed and listen to her lovely mezzo voice, thinking how surprising it is coming from such a small body. It’s a relief that our troubles are behind us, at least the difficult and dangerous ones. There will be tedious interviews, another court case when John comes to trial – and probably more media attention, but at least the worst is over.
I have never been so wrong.
One of Sinclair’s people calls and asks us to come in tomorrow afternoon. ‘Things are very busy, but DI Sinclair wants to conduct the interview herself,’ he says. ‘She can see you any time after half-past one tomorrow.’
I say we will be there at two and end the call, wondering if something she has just got from Tama has raised alarm signal about our role.
Midmorning I get an email from Tama with the statement he sent to Sinclair attached.
‘I’ve got Tama’s statement,’ I call upstairs to Dao, who is trying out some complicated hair style she saw on YouTube.
She comes racing down the stairs with an intricate braided effect on one side of her head and her normal dead-straight hair on the other. ‘I’ll finish it later. Do you like it?’
‘It’s very clever,’ I say diplomatically. ‘Is it hard to do?’
‘Very hard and I’ll probably never get it to look the same on both sides. Do you really like it?’
‘I’m not sure. I think I like you best with your hair down.’
‘I knew you’d say that, but I don’t mind. I think you’re right. It isn’t me, makes me feel I’m pretending to be someone else. Could you please print Tama’s thing? I decided to have a paper day.’
Dao reads it on paper and undoes the braiding one-handed while she reads. The statement is long and very detailed. He has set it out chronologically, entering dates, times and locations and what he did or found out. Either he has a fantastic memory, or he started making notes as soon as he got concerned about Hope. In some places he has added quite long paragraphs of explanations, the technical details of what he did and where the police will have to look for the evidence, if they manage to get access to the IT system. There are paragraphs about his colleague Rob’s comments that started him on his personal surveillance of both Hope and Stuart, and how he knows about the second missing woman.
It reads like a thriller; one thing leads to another. The final paragraphs are about the young woman who disappeared earlier, Rana. Tama has included details of her identity and connections and the date when she was last known to be alive. He has in fact put together a perfect case for the prosecution, but that will not happen, of course. When he relates things we found, there is an asterisk and a footnote: ‘Refer to Hunter Grant for details.’
On the last page is a note about a USB stick he is giving Sinclair. He lists what it on it: screenshots from his work computer of the report he set up in their server to record how often Stuart watched that video clip of Hope dancing. At first I
don’t understand why he bothered with this; all of it is detailed in the statement already. I think it is probably his way of making doubly sure they believe his evidence. A printed report of Stuart’s video-watching could be a fake, compiled ‘by hand’ so to speak, but the screenshots prove where it came from. His thoroughness is impressive. Once again, I worry about his future: he should have a great career, provided this doesn’t ruin his prospects.
We have just finished reading it when my phone goes. I look at the screen; it’s Noah. I wish I didn’t have to take this call, but I might as well get it over with. I’ve been steeling myself to call him since I woke up this morning.
‘Hunter,’ he says in a voice dulled by sadness. ‘They found her. She’s dead.’
‘I know, I am so sorry, Noah.’
‘You knew? How did you know? Her name hasn’t been released yet.’
Oh shit, I think, I shouldn’t have said that, but I thought he called because the cops had told him we found Hope. He will find out sooner or later; I might as well tell him now.
‘Dao and I found her.’
He explodes into instant fury. ‘What! You knew where to look? And you didn’t tell me? The police said they think they know who killed her and they’re looking for him now. Do you know who he is?’
I try to sound reasonable and sympathetic at the same time, possibly not my best performance. I understand his anger and his grief, but as always with Noah it is difficult to predict his reactions.
‘It’s a long story, and I don’t know how much the police want me to say. Tama came back with some information and we worked out who he might be – and I say “might be” deliberately, Noah. Nothing has been confirmed yet, as far as I know. Dao and I put a tracker on this man’s car and when he headed into the ranges yesterday, we followed. We probably broke several laws, but we have told the police what we did. It wasn’t something I had time to call you about. We were tracking him and lost him in the bush and then we found Hope by chance. It all happened just like that, one thing after another. There was no way of alerting you in advance.’