by Tina Clough
As he turns to leave, I realise I have completely overlooked something. I can’t believe I missed something so obvious.
‘Benson, wait! The whole thing tonight will have been recorded. Dao will have triggered the camera by walking to the letterbox and it takes in a wide-angle image and across to the other side of the street. I’ll send it to you and you can forward it to your mate who’s looking for the barrel.’
The garage door is closed, and the alarm is off, just as I left it. Scruff is in the courtyard in his new doghouse; he doesn’t come out when I turn the lights on in the house. I put some food outside for him, refresh his water and go back inside.
The camera has captured the whole scene, lit by the security light on the wall and the light spilling from the open garage door. I watch it twice, hoping to understand what Dao tried to communicate without using her voice, but the camera is filming from an angle and only shows part of her face.
The way he threw her into the car makes me furious. I send the two videos to Benson and to the address on the card I was given. The daytime picture of Will from his first visit is very clear and the car is in the picture, but side-on; the number plate is not visible.
What can I bring that will cheer her up? Apart from Scruff, what will make her smile the moment she sets eyes on it? And suddenly I know: the red-and-gold Vietnamese-style jacket, the first present Kristen gave her. Dao loves it and often wears it when we go out for dinner.
There is no way to get into the Assessment ward via the main entrance in the middle of the night. I go back to the Emergency Department. The nurse at the desk tells me I can’t get to the unit at this time of night ‘unless it is an urgent emergency’. I take this to mean ‘if someone is dying’.
I wander around the public areas and find a passage leading to various areas, including the Assessment Ward. The doors are locked, and you need a swipe card to get in. I lean against the wall and after a while a man with a trolley comes through from the other side. I manage to get my foot in the gap before the doors close behind him; he doesn’t look back and I go through. The doors to the ward are locked. I sit down on the floor in a corner and wait; the bag with the red top lies on my knees.
Sometime later, a doctor comes out and spots me sleeping in the corner. ‘Are you waiting for someone? You shouldn’t really be here, you know.’
‘I know, but I can’t go home. My partner is in there. I have to be here in case she wakes up.’
‘Who is the patient?’
‘You probably have her under her proper name, Susan Johnson, but she’s usually called Dao.’
‘OK, let me check.’
He goes back into the unit and is away for longer than I expect. I get increasingly nervous, my mind tormenting me with images of Dao dead or being kept alive by a ventilator. I am on my feet now, ready to push past him if need be, but he opens the doors and beckons.
‘Come in for just a moment so you can see she’s all right. I’ll give you an update here before you see her. There’s probably nothing much to worry about. She is sleeping, all her obs are fine. She was unconscious, woke up in ED and was sedated lightly for the scan. She has woken since and talked to us, but she’s asleep now. We have her hooked up to monitors, so we’ll know if anything changes. She’ll be moved to a regular ward later this morning, just for a day or two.’
Dao lies on her side, her normal sleeping position. They have washed the blood from her hair, but there is no dressing on it. The grazes are not as bad as I thought. I touch her hand and her eyes open, she says, ‘Hunter, my head hurts!’, and closes her eyes again. I put the red top on the rail at the end of the bed; the doctor makes no comment.
‘It’s a good sign that she recognised you right away,’ he says on the way out. ‘I don’t think you need to worry. You’ll have to make sure she doesn’t get any more knocks to the head for a few weeks. Repeated concussions aren’t good, even light ones. She will probably have headaches for some time.’ We part at a side door and I drive home, mentally compiling a plan.
My alarm goes off at half-past eight and I call the hospital. A nurse with a Welsh accent tells me that Dao is awake and will be moved to a medical ward straight after breakfast. I send an unalarming group message to my sisters, to Charlie and Kristen, Benson and Tama: Dao seems to be OK after a concussion yesterday. Will be in NS hospital for a couple of days. Update later when I have seen her.
They all get back to me while I’m having breakfast. Matt is home on five days’ leave between flights, so I ask if he can have Scruff for a couple of days. I promise him that I will send a proper update to everyone as soon as I’ve seen Dao.
Next, I call Charlie, who is polishing her helicopter.
‘No flights today or tomorrow, so I’m doing the housework,’ she says. ‘What happened to Dao – did she fall down the stairs? It scares me stiff the way she runs down those wooden stairs in her socks.’
I say, no it’s a bit more complicated than that and I’ll tell her later. I ask her to meet me and she says there’s a café just by the main entrance at the hospital. She promises to be there no later than eleven.
Dao is sitting up in bed. She grabs my hand and her voice is urgent. ‘Did you get him?’
‘I don’t know where to find him. I brought your PJs.’
‘Isn’t he with his car? Did you check?’
I have no idea what she is talking about. She is getting agitated, which can’t be good for her.
‘I don’t know where to check, Dao.’
‘On the app. Check the app, of course!’
Is she talking about Stuart? Has she lost track of what has happened? You hear about people who have been concussed and can’t remember the period leading up to the accident.
‘Don’t worry about Stuart. He drowned.’
‘Oh, not him!’ She is frantic now. ‘I mean the man who took me. Did you check the app?’
My blank face tells her everything. ‘Oh no, didn’t you check? I told you I left the tracker in his car.’
‘You what?’
‘I told you in the middle of the night!’ Her face creases in concentration, then doubt. ‘Or maybe I was dreaming. I picked it up from the letterbox and then there he was, right beside me and I screamed. I had it in my hand and when he chucked me in the car, I put it in the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. I thought I told you. Have you got my phone?’
I get her phone out of the bag and watch as she finds the app. There’s nothing wrong with her brain. Her right arm is deeply bruised and scratched. In my head I see her throwing herself from the car, landing on her right side, where the grazes on her scalp are. Thinking of her sliding along the asphalt makes me cringe. I wonder what the doctors made of the cut on her other arm; the one in the night mentioned it, but nobody has asked me about it.
‘Your poor arms – they’ve taken a beating lately. Did they ask about the cut?’
She pays no attention, just holds up her phone for me to see. ‘Here, look! You’ll be able to see it on yours too.’
‘Who would believe this?’ I say, elated. This changes everything; it’s perfect timing. I need to think fast. ‘My God, Dao, this is great. I never thought of that tracker after he took you. I didn’t even check the letterbox. Now, I’ll get him!’
I ask her to text those I messaged earlier, to tell them she’s all right. It will be far better coming from her – they will all relax if they see she is well enough to send a message. They will ask how she is feeling, and she can tell them herself.
It feels as if I have only been there a couple of minutes when a nurse comes in to remind me the ten minutes are up. She says I can come back after lunch during proper visiting hours. Dao kneels on the bed, so I can hug her properly before I leave. I go for a walk around the parking lot to get some fresh air and clear my tired brain. The hour I spend in the café waiting for Charlie seems like minutes; my mind is in overdrive. The tracker Tama left in the letterbox was the one he took off
Stuart’s BMW and it shows on the app on my phone too. Now I know exactly where Will’s car is. I order a second coffee and sit back and work through possible scenarios.
Charlie arrives on time with a bunch of red and yellow flowers that don’t look real, but she assures me they are. She also has a shiny yellow carrier bag and a silver balloon on a stick.
“I hope they’ll let me in even though it’s not visiting time. I promised Kristen I would deliver these personally first thing.’
‘They might. I’ll let you go on your own – they’re sick of sight of me trying to get in when I shouldn’t be there. Can you take her phone charger? I forgot to get it out of my pocket when I saw her. She’ll want to keep her phone operational.’
She takes the charger, puts it in the yellow bag and leaves. I watch her walking away and smile. The combination of her usual army-like appearance and the shiny, yellow bag is incongruous enough; the addition of a silver balloon on a stick makes it perfect. I am still deep in thought when she comes back.
‘Look at this – I just sent it to Kristen. She’s going to love it.’ She holds up her phone. The picture is of Dao sitting in bed with three little parcels on her knees and the flowers and the balloon on the bedside table. The red-and-gold jacket hangs on an empty IV stand beside her bed.
‘I asked why that top was there and she said she didn’t know, but it was on the end of her bed when she woke up, so she knew you had been there. Did you bring it with you?’
‘I did, in the middle of the night – I wanted her to see something she loves as soon as she opened her eyes. And she would know I had been there. They wouldn’t let me stay.’
Over coffee and chocolate brownies I tell her what happened and how I have just found out that Dao planted a tracker in Will’s car. For a moment she stares at me in disbelief and then she bursts out laughing.
‘What a damn thing! They say timing is everything and it certainly was. If she hadn’t had time to get that thing out of the letterbox, we’d have nothing to act on.’
I tell her what I want to do, she asks a couple of questions and nods. ‘Sounds good. But we might need a plan B, so we don’t have improvise in an emergency.’
Willow calls and wants to know exactly what happened. It takes ten minutes, she wants the whole sequence of events in minute detail. At the end of the call she says, ‘And I’ve just heard that they are releasing Hope’s body for burial in a couple of days. Sinclair called and told me the lab results are back.’
‘That sounds unusual. Is it so you can tell the family?’
‘No, they do that. They and the victim support people are meeting with the family as we speak. She said she thought you would like to know, but it felt better doing it via me. They found needle marks on her body and traces of a drug called propofol in her blood. It’s a powerful drug – used in surgery to sedate people, I think. I must look it up. I wrote down what she read out to me. Hang on.’
There is a brief pause and I hear her turning pages. ‘Here it is, and I think she quoted from the forensic report: “a steep dose-response curve makes it a very dangerous drug, as it suppresses breathing and can lead to death”. Did you know they found that Browning guy? In some kind of nasty pit where hunters dump the remains of animals, way up in the wilds. He must have been trying to get away from all the police activity and fallen in. And by the way, the forensic details are not for public consumption.’
I end the call and try not to think of that pervert injecting women with drugs and cutting them and God knows what else. The Scum Pond seems like fate punching back.
I have a voice message from a number I don’t recognise and for a moment I wonder if it is from Will, but it’s Benson’s colleague in the Organised Crimes unit:
‘Hi Hunter, just a quick call. Something urgent has turned up and I can’t meet today. We have filtered out a rumour on the street that the barrel of drugs has been voluntarily surrendered. The person we used is sure to share this widely. We have used him before – he owes us a few favours. I hope that will prevent any further problems. They will either think that you got the wind up and handed it over to us or that someone else did. Please let me or Benson know if you have any further problems.’
I reply and thank him; surprised at how helpful he has been.
Charlie and I get in her car and drive to the place where the app tells us the SUV has been since seven this morning. Canaveral Drive in Albany is lined with large modern buildings housing various businesses. The one we are looking for has the initials GBA in stylish white font on the grey metal cladding, with no indication of what kind of business it is. There are no cars outside, but the app tells me the tracker is there. It must be inside the big sliding doors. There are only two windows facing the street; one each side of a door near the corner, probably an office.
Charlie parks at the back of the block and gets out. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
I fall asleep, but wake up when she gets back in, panting. ‘Jeez, I haven’t jogged that far for a while,’ she says. ‘It’s a very long block – I’m getting unfit. There’s no sign of life. CCTV cameras and lights both at the back and the front and only one entrance you can drive a vehicle through. There’s a loading dock at the back, but it’s a platform at truck-loading height. He can’t drive out that way.’
We have already discussed what the options are. He might not be alone in the building, so we won’t go in. If he has another car, he could have left the SUV locked up and gone off somewhere else; we will wait until the SUV moves. Charlie drives me back to the hospital for visiting time.
Dao looks a lot better than she did this morning. The moment I walk in she asks if we have found him yet. I tell her what we are going to do, and she gets her phone and checks the app while we talk.
‘I wish I could come – I’d like to be there. Promise you’ll let me know what happens – straight away!’
On the way out, I meet a nurse and ask if she knows when Dao will be discharged. She’s the one I talked to this morning, the Welsh one, who let me sneak in for ten minutes.
‘I don’t know for sure,’ she says, ‘but possibly late afternoon when the doctor has had time to read the notes and check her over again. Do we have your number?’
I steal a roll of wide elastic bandage from a trolley parked in the hallway and manage to squeeze it into my back pocket. I get a text from Dao as I walk towards Charlie’s car: Check app! The SUV has left Canaveral Drive and is heading in our direction. I run to the car and tell Charlie to start driving. We catch up with him on Forrest Hill Road and stay three cars behind.
‘He’s indicating right,’ says Charlie suddenly.
He swings across in a gap in the traffic and parks outside Forrest Hill Physiotherapy.
‘Turn at the next corner,’ I say. ‘We’ll go around the block and park outside the physio clinic and get him when he comes out.’
‘Did you bring the Glock I lent you?’
‘It’s in the holster, on my belt.’ I’m very uncomfortable, with a gun behind my right hip and a roll of elastic bandage in the back pocket on the other side.
‘I brought the other Glock just in case. It’s in the glovebox.’
We angle park one space along from the SUV and wait.
Chapter twenty-nine
Will comes out forty minutes later and Charlie is ready. She hails him when he is nearly at his car; leans out the driver’s window and starts asking for directions. I come up behind him while they are talking and stick the gun into his side, just below the ribcage.
‘Stand very still, there’s a gun in your ribs, level with your liver. Do not turn around.’
He stiffens and turns his head very slightly. ‘Well, well, I wasn’t expecting that,’ he says, still jovial and seemingly unconcerned.
‘We are going to step away from this car, two steps back.’
I don’t want him to make a run for it, so I add, ‘And don’t think I wouldn’t shoot you here in broad dayl
ight, because I don’t give a fuck after you killed Dao.’
We checked the media while we were having coffee this morning and there has been nothing about anyone falling out of a car. Charlie listened to the radio while I was visiting Dao and heard nothing. Telling him she is dead will make him believe I mean what I say, that I am so furious I won’t hesitate to kill him.
He says nothing more, no reaction at all. We take a couple of steps back and Charlie gets out. She holds her gun down alongside her leg and makes sure he sees it. Between us we get him into the back seat. Charlie closes the door and stays beside it while I get in next to him on the other side. Both rear doors are set to ‘childproof’; now neither Will nor I can get out without help from the outside. Charlie pulls out and heads towards the nearest motorway access. Nobody is staring or pointing; the whole thing took no more than a minute and there was no disturbance.
We cruise straight through Auckland, out the other side and peel off one stop before the Papakura exit. Charlie pulls over in a quiet spot. While she covers him with her gun from the front seat, I wind the bandage around his head, round and round. Now he can’t see a thing; he looks like a mummy on his way to a film set. Charlie laughs and says, ‘Shit, Hunter, this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.’
I hope nobody will report us as suspicious. If we get stopped, I’ll say we are taking him home from hospital after surgery and keep the gun in his ribs while I say it.
I get my phone out and text Dao: Got him. Heading off into the wilds now. Tracker still in his car, will pick it up on the way back. Love you, clever girl.
I direct Charlie to the Hunuas by using ‘left’ and ‘right’ only. By the time we have wound our way through a couple of suburbs and out into the country he will have no idea where we are. Charlie is humming quietly to herself and glances at me in the rear-vision mirror now and then. There is no conversation in the back seat.