by Tina Clough
Thank God he wasn’t with us, I think. I can imagine how out of control he would have been, touching her, destroying evidence, impeding the police. I could never have constrained him in that situation. I don’t want him to know exactly how the timeline played out. Adding to his feelings of anger and frustration will do him no good at all. But he surprises me.
‘Thank you. I should have trusted you.’
This is generosity of a kind I have not come to expect from him and it makes me feel slightly guilty. ‘I am very sorry, Noah. I did hope we would find her alive. How are your parents?’
‘Devastated, and so angry. They can’t stop thinking that we might have found her much sooner and saved her, if only the police had acted when I first told them she was missing.’
Should I point out that even if they had acted then, there are many factors that the police might have taken a very long time to pull together? Or should I let him rage and grieve and maybe come to the same conclusion himself? Sooner or later he might acknowledge the important role Tama played in this drama. I have told Willow that Tama came back with crucial information, so Noah knows that. If the police had acted and Noah had not come to me, Tama would not be involved now and Hope’s disappearance might never have been solved. I want Noah to see that the person he should give credit to is Tama, but he will have to reach that conclusion himself. I think of his parents who have heard everything up to now through the filter of Noah’s jealousies and obsessions. There is nothing I can do to give them a more balanced overview.
The conversation becomes increasingly difficult. Noah wants to know every detail: what Hope looked like, how she lay on the ground and what she was wearing. What was the expression on her face? Were there any visible injuries? The cops have told him very few details and now he is fixated on trying to find out more from me.
I interrupt him after a couple of minutes, having told him nothing much. My focus is on avoiding saying anything the police might not want immediately known. I have no experience of how much they share with a victim’s family while they still think they have a suspect to track down and evidence to protect. Eventually the police will tell him what they think he needs to know.
‘Have you met with the police?’
‘Yeah, this morning. I’ve just been to the morgue to formally identify her. She looked so dead, Hunter. So cold.’
He starts to cry, and I wait; after a couple of minutes he calms down. ‘Can I come and talk to you? I want to know more, so I understand what happened to her, why she died. And how.’
I have to make some sort of decision very quickly or this will get out of hand. If he has already seen her body, he either knows about the cuts or they were covered up somehow. And if they were, was it because the police did not want to upset him? Or because they did not want him to see what had been done to her and talk about it?
‘We haven’t had a formal interview yet, Noah. I can’t discuss anything until the police say I can. I’m very sorry. I know it’s hard for you. What I can say is that she looked completely peaceful and there was no sign of why she died.’
Dao is sitting up straight, staring at me as I talk. She has understood most of the conversation and the expression on her face is agonised. As soon as I manage to end the call, I text Tama and warn him, in case Noah manages to find out his number. It is unlikely, but I give him Noah’s phone number, so he can ignore the call if it comes. Talking to Noah is hard enough for me; I am used to him and have some understanding of how to divert him from a topic, but Tama might find it harder.
Dao and I spend some time discussing how to deal with future conversations with Noah without lying, but without revealing too much. I don’t want to deceive him, but there are details that will only make things harder for him, things he does not need to know, at least not yet. Later on, when the inquest takes place, a lot more will emerge; for now we can spare him the worst.
‘He doesn’t know where Tama works – well, let’s face it, neither do we,’ says Dao. ‘And I don’t think we told him Tama’s surname. I hope the police won’t tell him who he is. And he won’t find out later, because there will be no trial to make Tama’s name public. And that’s another thing we must remember not to say! Particularly not to Willow. Imagine having to explain that one away. Did you finish reading Tama’s statement?’
‘Yes, literally seconds before Noah called. It’s very impressive. Imagine Sinclair reading it and then she reads the log report and watches the video of the first time Hope was abducted. An amazing amount of evidence handed to her on a plate.’
‘I’m glad we’ve read it before our interview, so we know exactly what he told them, much easier.’
I hope Dao won’t ask Tama if we can see the video evidence he gave to the police. He warned me that something disturbing took place after Stuart knocked Hope out. After thinking about it for a moment I text him, hoping I am not being over protective: If Dao asks, please imply cops don’t want you to show the video to anyone. Thanks.
He replies: No way am I showing it to her. As I said, it is totally gross. Sinclair has already asked me not to talk to anyone about the details. See you tonight.
‘Lunchtime!’ Dao gets up and so does Scruff. ‘No, Scruff, I said lunch. You don’t have lunch, you only have breakfast and dinner.’
I am just about to join them when my phone goes again; now it’s Willow. This will take another half-hour, I think, and nearly don’t answert. Then I remember all the things she doesn’t know yet and relent.
It takes a long time. She has talked to Sinclair on Noah’s behalf and now she is fired up with questions about our involvement. By the time we finish I am sick of talking about it. She is smarter than Noah; she knows how to draw things out of people. She also knows how to draw conclusions from what you leave out, which is disconcerting and nearly trips me up once or twice.
Dao abandons the idea of lunch and sits down again to listen to my end of the conversation. Willow is very persistent; not because she suspects anything as dramatic as the Scum Pond incident, more that she senses I am hiding things from her.
‘You’re not telling me the full story, Hunter. It makes no sense. You can’t possibly expect me to believe you went to the Hunua ranges on a hunch and just happened to find Hope’s body! You say this Tama fellow told you of certain rumours about the killer – but how did he know? I hope to God you’re not going to lie to the police, Hunter. If this comes to trial and you lie, you risk a perjury conviction and prison.’
Ever since I had to bend the rules a bit to protect Dao a couple of years ago, Willow is convinced that I will go too far one day and end up in jail.
‘I don’t think so, Willow. There are things I haven’t told you – the cops have asked me not to talk about some of it. And you are Noah’s lawyer – you told me yourself that if I tell you things, you can’t withhold them from him. You just have to live with the fact that there are some things you might never find out, unless the police tell you.’
We end the call on reasonably good terms. There has been no mention of the intelligence services and she has no idea how we knew to go to the Hunua ranges. I know she appreciated the detailed debrief I gave her and Matt after the final chapter of the ‘saving Dao from being killed’ saga. Then we had nobody else to consider, no slightly unbalanced relative who might feel a need to apportion blame or demand retribution. I am well aware that, despite her protests, she actually enjoyed hearing the blow-by-blow tale of what happened that night in the abandoned factory. But this time it’s different.
Chapter twenty-four
Eventually we have lunch and go for a walk on the beach with Scruff. We don’t mention yesterday’s events and return to the house feeling more normal than we have for some time. Tama calls and says he will be with us after dinner. We are in the kitchen making dinner, when Dao suddenly says, ‘Why don’t we argue?’
‘Are we supposed to?’
‘You know, how people on TV and in films argue – or they
talk about people arguing. And that book I just finished, those people argued all the time. I mean, other couples argue. Even Matt and Willow sometimes. And you argue with your mother. But we never do.’
‘It’s because you can’t argue with me.’
‘Why not? What if you said something and I argued about it?’
‘Because I won’t argue with you and you can’t argue on your own. It doesn’t work. When did we ever have a situation that could have caused an argument?’
‘Oh, probably never. Or maybe when I refused to use your money and wanted to take a cleaning job. I don’t want to argue, I just think we seem to be unusual.’
‘We are unusual, Dao. And lucky.’
Just before eight I go down to answer the door and find Tama outside with a ginger-haired giant beside him. ‘Hunter, this is Tyler.’
I open the door wider. ‘Nice to meet you, Tyler. Come in.’
Dao is going to be disappointed: not a girlfriend after all. And then I notice the white cane.
‘One step up,’ says Tama. ‘Now flat, seven steps towards one o’clock, then a staircase.’
Tyler’s cane feels for the bottom step and they make their way up. Tama watches Tyler’s feet.
‘One more’ – and Tyler walks onto the floor or the living area without hesitation. They have done it many times; no words wasted and no hesitation from Tyler.
Dao has been standing at the top of the stairs watching, eyes wide.
‘Dao, this is Tyler. We are flatmates and he wanted to meet you and Hunter.’ He hands her a bag. ‘Ice cream as ordered, home-made.’
He watches Dao take the bag to the kitchen and says casually, ‘If we are trying the ice cream now, we should sit at the table. Much easier for Tyler.’
Conversation is on hold while we taste the ice cream. Dao has no idea what it is, but says it is ‘super amazing’ which makes Tyler laugh.
‘Think of vegetables,’ he says, and turns his head towards Dao at exactly the right angle. ‘Something red, obviously.’
Dao and I look at each other. We have played this game before; Dao sometimes picks something in the supermarket and conceals the packaging and makes me guess.
‘Beetroot!’ I guess after another mouthful. ‘And something else. I should have guessed earlier – that intense red colour. And beetroot is sweet.’
‘Beetroot and a little bit of sweet basil. Tama told me about the fabulous ice cream he had here, and we bought an ice-cream maker. We’ve been experimenting.’
When the ice-cream tasting is over, I tell them to go and sit in comfortable chairs while I take the bowls to the kitchen. I put nibbles and drinks on a tray and listen to their voices from the end of our long room. From the kitchen I can’t hear the words, but their voices sound happy and relaxed. It is a striking difference from recent evenings in this room with tension and worry colouring everything.
‘Don’t worry about Tyler, he knows all about it,’ says Tama, when I join them. ‘He works from home and I used to come home and start raving about things before I even closed the front door. First it was how hostile Stuart was, then the strange goings-on with Hope and it escalated from there. Tyler’s like an oyster, he’s kept all my secrets since we met at school when we were ten.’
‘Have you been flatmates for years?’ asks Dao, looking at Tyler. He hears her voice coming directly towards him, knows she is talking to him and answers. He doesn’t need people to use his name to alert him. I never thought of it before, but it’s obvious now I sit here and listen and watch.
Tyler nods in Dao’s direction. ‘Since we left high school and went to university in Wellington. We both studied computer technology, but I didn’t complete my degree. I was hit by a car in Courtenay Place one night in our second year and landed on my head, which made me blind.’
‘Then I got the job up here,’ says Tama, ‘and Tyler came with me. He’s a trained counsellor and does phone counselling for a youth crisis charity, so it doesn’t matter where he lives. He had to get used to a new neighbourhood, of course, but he thought it was worth it.’ Tama grins at Dao. ‘People sometimes think we’re a couple, but believe me, Tyler is a demon for pretty girls. I tell him they’re pretty and he does the rest.’
They both laugh; it’s an old joke between them.
Dao is fascinated. ‘Do you lie to him sometimes? Do you say someone is really pretty when they’re not?’
‘He did once,’ says Tyler and raises his big fist in Tama’s general direction. ‘Once!’
‘How did you know?’
‘By touch,’ says Tyler straight-faced. ‘If they feel pretty, it’s all good.’
We spend a couple of hours discussing all that has happened since we last saw Tama. The fact that Scruff found Hope is of great interest. Tyler has not realised there is a dog in the house and Dao brings him over for Tyler to pat.
‘You should have a dog,’ she says. ‘You can train a dog to do all sorts of things. I’m going to teach Scruff to count soon – he knows everything else. Didn’t they offer you one?
‘I could have had one, but at the start I was determined to cope on my own. Well, with Tama as a flat-mate, of course. I suppose I could trade him in for a dog.’
‘Tell me how you found that container, Hunter. Sinclair said it was miles away from the place where Hope’s body was.’
‘It is a long way and through difficult terrain too, if you don’t stick to the tracks. We’ve been discussing how she got there, but we might never find out. She had nothing much on, no shoes. I guess she must have walked down the track, which is pretty smooth, or her feet would have been more damaged. They were just dirty. But how did she get away? I’m sure he didn’t let her go.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t walk from the container,’ says Tyler. ‘Perhaps there is another hide-out up there, closer to where you found her.’
I tell them about the fresh apple in the container and the plastic bag outside with what looked like fresh rubbish.
‘Someone has been staying there recently. The cops might find out from the recordings. I think that perverted creep locked her up with the other woman and went up there at intervals. Perhaps he left the door unsecured and she got away. And then she died for some reason.’
Tama stares at me. ‘What other woman? Was there another one?’
‘Didn’t Dao tell you? Yes, a dead woman. She was in the container. She had been there a long time.’
‘Rana!’ he exclaims. ‘Well, Sinclair knows about her now, so they’ll be able to confirm that.’
‘Did I forget to tell you? Sorry! I was so tired,’ says Dao. ‘I can’t stop thinking of her, the other woman. It was so strange. She looked dusty. It was very dark in the inner room and we didn’t go in, of course. But she looked as if she was covered in a layer of dust. Hunter thinks she looked kind of mummified. You know, dried out. Not something Stuart did.’
We describe how she sat in the corner, as if she had been overcome by exhaustion and sat down to rest. ‘Like you would put a doll down, leaning against something with her legs straight out. She had something on her lap’, says Dao sadly. ‘It might have been a bunch of very old dried-up flowers. Perhaps he put them there after she died, like you do on a grave.’
We say nothing about our encounter with Stuart or the Scum Pond.
When I tell Tama how impressed I was with this statement he shrugs. ‘It got a bit too long, but I thought I should give them every single bit of evidence, including my reasoning at various points. The more they see how many details confirm it was Stuart, the better. We listened to the news in the car coming over, but they haven’t found him yet. Sinclair said they’ve had people up there all the time and no sign of him. He never returned to his truck.’
‘He wouldn’t, not with the police there,’ says Dao, straight-faced. ‘I suppose he could have walked away and got a lift, but he’s probably still up there somewhere.’
When they leave we say we must get together agai
n, and Tyler promises that Tama will cook us dinner one night. I walk up the stairs, thinking of the police searching that big expanse of hilly terrain covered in bush. Would they use a helicopter with heat-sensing equipment? Will they find out about the Scum Pond – and if they do, will they search it?
Chapter twenty-five
At two o’clock the next day we sit in an interview room and wait for Sinclair. She arrives fifteen minutes late and sends a constable away to get coffee for us all.
‘Busy day. There’s a lot going on. We haven’t found Browning yet. He’s not at his home address and his other car is still there, so we assume he’s either hiding in the ranges or he hitchhiked out. We have a man posted at his house. It’s going to be a big task searching that area.’
She opens the folder in front of her and looks at me. ‘I imagine Tama Robinson has been in touch with you? And that you know he gave us a statement and came in for an interview?’
Gently does it, I think. Unless she asks, I’ll not tell her we have read his statement. Dao and I decided on the way in that we will answer questions, but only volunteer information if it seems vital to the investigation.
‘Yes, he told us he had given you an account of what he did and what he found.’
‘He has been very helpful – and very honest. A lot of what I was going to ask you to explain is perfectly clear now. Like how you heard of Browning and found out where he lives and so on. And Mr. Barber told us about the camera you noticed when he took you to Hope’s flat. Why did you go there?’
‘It was his idea. As I said earlier, he came to us and asked us to help him, but we sent him away. Then he came back and after some hesitation we agreed. It’s not what I do and not what I want to do either. Then a couple of days later he invited us to come and see the flat. His lawyer was there too.’
She nods and looks at her folder again. ‘He said you all went there because he thought seeing it would convince you she must have been abducted. Is that what you thought at the time, before there was any other evidence to back that theory?’