Blood Junction (35 page)

From the beach, India walked down The Corso, amazed at how quickly Sydney returned to normal after an all-night party. The
pedestrian street was immaculate. Not a bottle or paper cup could be seen. When she neared the Esplanade, there seemed to
be more people cleaning up than there was rubbish. She estimated that within two hours nobody would believe the city had even
held a party, let alone such a momentous one, the previous night.

She turned right and crossed over Whistler and into Belgrave Street, heading for the Manly police station. Part of the council
buildings, it was two-storey and built from purple-hued brick. She paused on the bottom step and looked at the blue and white
plastic sign on the door:
WELCOME
. Two female police officers brushed past her and clattered up the steps. Both gave her a smile.

She followed them through the glass and wood door, and felt the sweat break out on her body. She might be determined to fight
Knox, and to win, but it didn’t lessen her terror.

The atmosphere inside was busy. Behind the counter she could see two desks, both manned by policemen who were on the phone.
A woman in a pink dress walked briskly past. India could hear music playing and the sound of people speaking into radios.

There was a uniformed policeman at reception, typing on a computer keyboard to the left of a wood counter. He gave her a friendly
smile. Her knees were weak, but she managed to smile back.

“Can I help?”

“Yes,” India said. “I want to report two possible murders.”

The policeman looked startled.

“Yesterday I was kidnapped with a friend of mine by a man called Roland Knox. He shot my friend in the knee and was going
to shoot me when another friend, an ex-policeman called Mike Johnson, rescued me.”

“Yesterday?” He was frowning.

“It took me a while to get my courage up to come here.”

“Can you hang on for just a second?” He cleared his screen and tapped some keys. “Could you give me your name?”

“India Kane.”

He tapped some more. The computer beeped. He stared at the screen. Then back at her.

Her heart began to pound.

“Is something wrong?”

He looked at the screen. “No,” he said, “nothing’s wrong.” He swallowed.

She tried to control her breathing, but adrenaline was coursing through her veins.

He cleared the screen, looked up at her. “I’ll get someone more senior to take your statement.”

Someone more senior was about fifty with iron-gray hair and a wary look in his eyes. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Senior Sergeant
Llewellyn. You say you are India Kane.”

“Yes.”

“And you’d like to make a statement.”

“That’s right.”

He was inching closer.

“How about I get Lee here to get us some coffee, and we go to my office and talk?”

Lee was edging towards the door.
If he looks like blocking my exit
, she thought,
I will run
.

“That sounds fine,” said India, but she didn’t move.

Llewellyn was really close now, and Lee halfway to the door.

The iron-gray cop reached for her elbow and she slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

Lee was nearly at the door. He was definitely going to block her exit.

Llewellyn moved quickly, gripped her arm hard. Instead of jerking away, she plunged straight for him. Broke his grip. Broke
into a run, crashing past Lee and into the bright light outside.

They were shouting as they chased her. She raced down the street, trying to dodge the council cleaners and their black plastic
bin liners, crashing against people and sending bags flying. India’s legs pounded, her mind fixed on nothing but putting distance
between herself and her pursuers.

She swung left past the council chambers and raced over the road. A horn blared. She dived right down a narrow alley flanked
by tall buildings. It looked like a dead end.

Please, God, don’t do this to me.

She pelted along the alley. The right wall gave way to a small cafe. She burst inside, knocking over a chair. A man stood
there with a broom, his mouth open. India raced past him and into a car park. She could hear a row behind her, men shouting,
something crashing.

She tore along another alley and onto the street, swung right and hared towards the harbour and Manly Wharf and its ferries
and buses and taxis.

She ran across East Esplanade. She saw a bus by the bus stop. Its doors were closing.

“Wait!” she screamed.

She didn’t think she’d ever run so hard. She heard the doors hiss, spring open. India sprang inside. The bus driver was shaking
his head and smiling.

“Jesus, when’s the baby due?” he said. The doors hissed shut.

“Soon,” she panted, digging in her jeans for some change. She paid her fare. The bus moved off. She stumbled to the rear of
the bus. Gulping convulsively, she peered outside. Nothing but a smattering of people. The bus turned the corner. Her lungs
continued to bellow in and out. India collapsed onto the nearest seat, buried her face in her hands.

She was on her own.

Scotto Kennedy’s guard was awake and alert when Mikey padded down the corridor. Ahead of him, a doctor marched out of a room
on the right and spoke to a nurse. The air smelled acrid and pungent, of things Mikey couldn’t identity, didn’t want to identify.

As he neared Scotto’s room the guard looked at him. He frowned. Mikey kept walking. He turned the corner and saw the guard
was still watching him. He was speaking into a radio.

Mikey left the hospital. No point in hanging around and getting banged up, he told himself. Yesterday he’d gone to North Sydney
PD and seen his cop friend, who had warned him to get the hell out. India was wanted by the police. And anyone who had anything
to do with India Kane was up for grabs as well. Keep your head down, his cop friend said, so low you can see your ass, okay?

Mikey ran a hand over his face and exhaled noisily. At least they hadn’t found her yet. He thanked God for that, if nothing
else.

May as well face the next hurdle. Break into the Karamyde Cosmetic Research Institute again, but this time with a gun for
the dog and a handful of Semtex for the lift door. Mikey knew the answers lay in floor B2 of the Institute.

Two hours after being chased by the Manly police, India was in the public toilets of the Queen Victoria Building. She rummaged
in a carrier bag on the floor and pulled out the items she’d bought from the only shop open, a chemist near Town Hall station.
The scissors were sharp and it didn’t take long to hack her hair reasonably short. She swept it up and flushed it down the
loo then picked up a packet of hair colorant and read the instructions. They seemed relatively simple, but she wished it wasn’t
New Year’s Day, and that she could go to a hairdresser.

“Maroon tint,” the packet read.

Just do it, she told herself, and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. She stuck her head beneath the tap then drenched her
scalp with treatment cream.

She didn’t think Knox’s men could possibly track her to the public toilet, but when the door opened she spun around, adrenaline
surging.

An Asian girl came inside. “Looks like you lost the bet,” she remarked, and went and locked herself in a cubicle.

India looked in the mirror. Her hair had definitely changed color. She waited until the Asian girl had left then quickly rinsed
and blow-dried it beneath the hand-dryer in the corner.

She blinked several times when she checked her appearance. She looked as though she was wearing a shaggy woollen cap. It made
her face longer, more haunted.

Her hair was purple.

So much for trying not to draw attention to herself.

India spent the night in a small, dirty hotel near Central Station. The train didn’t run until the next day and although she
wanted to leave Sydney immediately, it would take her less time to take a direct route a day later than leave today.

At midday she left her room and walked to Central and bought her ticket, coach class, for a hundred and eight dollars.

She had some time to kill until the train left, so she went to the Grand Central bar and bistro. India sat on a stool beside
a man in a cheap suit at the bar and ordered a coffee. She craned her neck to cheap suit’s newspaper who obligingly turned
it so they could both read.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No worries.”

The headline read: “Flu epidemic hits Darwin—23 dead.”

“Lousy news,” said her neighbor after a while.

Not good, India agreed. The only people suffering from this new virulent strain of flu—that scientific and health experts
seemed to think came from Indonesia—were Aborigines; whites appeared to be completely unaffected.

“Reminiscent of when us whites first came here with our new diseases,” he remarked. “The Abos got wiped out by the common
cold, measles, chicken pox. You name it, they died of it. I remember an Abo called Billy Muran dying of flu back in the eighties.
My dad said he remembered a whole bunch of them getting wiped out in the fifties. Looks like it’s happening all over again,
poor buggers.”

Absentmindedly, India finished her coffee, less concerned at the flu epidemic five thousand kilometers away than whether Knox’s
men would be waiting for her in Cooinda. Over the loudspeaker, a man with a nasal voice made a crackling announcement about
the departure of an Indian Pacific train to Broken Hill. She set off through the echoing hanger-shaped terminal, stopping
at the newsstand to buy a copy of
The Fatal Shore
. It might help her understand Australia, she thought. And it would certainly last the seventeen-and-a-half-hour train ride.

She didn’t want to hire a car, leave a trail for Knox, so she hitched out of Broken Hill from the Silver City Highway. Her
lift was a Toyota Amazon, a huge four-wheel-drive with leather interior and icy air-conditioning and tinted windows. Her driver,
a bulky man called Larry Thomas, owned two sheep stations outside Tibooburra. He sang along lustily to his collection of Neil
Diamond CDs as they flew northwards. In the blinding sun it wasn’t possible to tell where the desert or the sky began; the
heat haze made it seem as though there was a shimmering lake between the two. They overtook trucks, several pickups, passed
a couple of road trains packed with cattle travelling in the opposite direction, and gradually the sandy terrain turned to
a vast rock-strewn plain.