Authors: Des Hunt
That evening Tony sold both of his crab creations. He brought them into the lounge before dinner and passed them around. He’d decided that twenty dollars would be a fair price.
It was probably a bit cheap, for he could have sold them several times over—they were very popular. Tomorrow he would collect some more and try to sell them before Christmas. That was two days away. For the first time that he could remember, he was looking forward to Christmas. He had some money to buy gifts, and he had some friends to give them to. This Christmas was going to the best ever.
After dinner, he sat at the computer to begin his detective work. First thing was to find when the French tourist went missing. That proved to be easy. He did a Google search for “missing backpackers”, restricted it to New Zealand and got five hits. The best was a site on unsolved crimes which had a whole section on missing tourists. Over the years several had gone missing. Sometimes a body was found, more often not. Most of them were women.
Monique Lafleur had been twenty-two when she went missing on New Year’s Day five years earlier. She had been travelling with a group of other French people, but had split from them to visit Charleston. Apparently some ancestor had come to the district during the gold rush and never returned. She was hoping to find something about him, somebody who recalled the name, something in the records, or even a gravestone.
She was listed as missing when she failed to rejoin her friends in Queenstown on the arranged date. Police traced her movements to Charleston where she was reported to have had lunch at the pub. There, she had studied the old photos and questioned the drinkers about a certain name. Nobody could quite remember what that name was, except it sounded French. One of the drinkers pointed her in the direction of the Catholic cemetery, and she set off up the road with her pack on her back. That was the last anybody saw of her.
At first the police were very hopeful of getting more information because she was wearing a distinctive, brightred dress. A dress was considered unusual wear for a backpacker. Yet the police had got no further information. She had walked up the road, and seemingly disappeared.
Despite ten days of searching, not a single clue was found. Eventually, the police abandoned the search. They had found nothing to suggest foul play. The general feeling was that she had fallen down a pit or water ditch, and the chances of ever finding her were remote. However, the file was still open and the police would welcome any new
information. The site had file and telephone numbers if anybody wanted to make a call.
Tony wasn’t yet ready to call the police, but he was mighty suspicious. The woman had last been seen walking in the direction of Duggan’s shop. What if she had left the cemetery, and continued walking up the road? The only things further up the road were Tree Frog Lodge and Duggan’s shop. The shop could have been her next stop. If she’d gone in there and Duggan was by himself…
But Duggan’s shop might not have been there. That was the next thing to find out—when did Jamie Duggan arrive? Fred or Lofty were sure to know. He would ask them tomorrow. In the meantime he entered “Jamie Duggan” as a Google search and got hundreds of hits. He then added Charleston and got nothing. Next, he replaced the Charleston with French—hundreds again. This was getting nowhere. Yet he had a feeling that Duggan might have left his mark somewhere in the world. He tried “James Duggan” + “French Polynesia” and bingo he had a single hit. A newspaper report listed James Duggan, vanilla farmer of Mangareva, as being convicted of rioting in Tahiti. He was one of many arrested during a protest against French nuclear weapons in September 1995. The article said that France had just resumed testing bombs on Mururoa atoll.
Tony was well pleased—it had to be the man, and it supported the idea that Duggan hated the French. The next thing was to find out if this Mururoa was anywhere near Mangareva. A map site soon gave him the answer—they
were two hundred kilometres apart. On the scale of the Pacific Ocean, they were next-door neighbours.
Tony had another visitor that night. It arrived at about two in the morning and danced on his roof for the next hour.
As he lay in bed trying to sleep, Tony wondered what sort of animal it was. It could be a possum, yet it could also be something much more interesting. It could be an escaped circus animal that had lived in the scrub for years. Maybe it was a man-eater. That would explain why so many people went missing from the area.
His mind continued like this for a while before admitting that it was probably just a boring old possum. The next question was: why would it climb onto his caravan? There was no food up there, it didn’t lead anywhere, and there was nothing warm for a bed. Perhaps it hadn’t chosen to be there; perhaps it had been placed there and the racket was the thing trying to escape?
He was still awake when it finally found a way to get down. The peace didn’t last long before the most awful scream split the air. It went on and on. Tony looked out the window. He saw nothing. He tried another window and still could see nothing. He would’ve liked to have seen what was happening, but he sure wasn’t going outside. Again his thoughts returned to the circus animal—maybe he hadn’t been wrong, and it was now attacking some other creature.
Eventually the screaming stopped. Seconds later, a weka called three times:
Weeeeka, weeeeka, weeeeka.
Tony smiled to himself as he realised what had happened. The possum had escaped from the top of the caravan only to meet up with the weka family. It had been hit by the Butcher brigade. No wonder it had screamed: those beaks and feet could damage any animal. He wondered how much would be left by the morning.
The answer was most of it, though it was in a sad state. There was fur and blood everywhere. The gut had been opened and some of the organs removed. Otherwise only the eyes were gone.
When he investigated the caravan he found scratches and blood marks all over the roof. The animal had been injured before it got up there. Which prompted the question of how could an injured possum climb up the slippery walls of a caravan? The answer was it couldn’t. The thing must have been planted there, and Tony was certain he knew by whom.
While he was having breakfast, Duggan arrived with the daily delivery of fresh vegetables. ‘How are you this mornin’, Mrs B?’
‘Much the same as yesterday, thanks Jamie. What have you got for me this morning?’
‘Och, just the usual. But I’m goin’ oot to do a wee bit of fishin’ today. Would you like a nice bit of fresh kingfish in the mornin’?’
‘Yes, please. That would make a lovely Christmas Eve dinner.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. I’m tryin’ out some new lures and I’m hopin’ they’ll work a treat.’ Then he left without even a nod to the boy, almost as if he intended to ignore him.
Rose couldn’t go into the mine until she’d TXTed all her friends, so Tony headed to the shed to get the gear ready and have a chat with Fred. He asked about Jamie Duggan.
‘Oh, that’s going back a bit,’ said Fred, thinking. ‘When did young Jamie arrive? Must have been about ninety-six, I think. He’d just arrived when I turned seventy.’ He chuckled: ‘I know he was the life and soul of the party. Everyone took to him straight away. He fitted in really well. Jamie’s been good for Charleston. Most of the kids get their first job up at that place of his.’
‘Was his wife with him?’
‘Nah. She’d died not long before, so he said, anyway. She was an island woman, I believe.’
Nineteen ninety-six, thought Tony, that fitted in well with the arrest. Maybe they even chucked him out of Tahiti.
‘Did you ever show him the mine?’
‘Yeah, soon after he bought the property. See, most of it is under his land. By rights, he probably owns some of it, though he can’t access it from his place. Also, that dam overflows into the limestone.’
‘Is there a stream down there?’
‘Yeah. There’s a small limestone pit where all the sand’s washed out. There’s even glow-worms in there.’
‘How do you get to it?’
‘Ah now. I wouldn’t recommend going in there. It’s a dangerous climb down to it. But if you take the left-most fork at the wagon you can get to the top and you’ll see a few glow-worms. Don’t you go past that though.’
Tony led the way with Rose following.
‘You’d better not fall over,’ warned Rose, ‘because I won’t pick you up. I wouldn’t want to touch you.’
Tony smiled, thinking back to their first meeting, just a couple of afternoons before. Then, he’d thought she was a silly, moaning, little child. Now, he knew differently. The way she’d held the weka without screaming showed another side to her—one he was beginning to like.
The earthquake had dislodged lots of sand to cover more parts of the track. That made it harder walking, but it also exposed more of the objects embedded in the sand. At the first fall Tony collected three concretions. He put them in a pile beside the tracks to pick up on the way back. While there were lots of pebbles in the exposed bank, none of them were greenstone.
It wasn’t until the fourth big fall that Rose picked up an uninteresting, dull-white rock. ‘Do you think this is what Fred was talking about?’ she asked, doubtfully.
Tony pulled a hammer from his school bag and chipped away at the end. He held it up for Rose to see. ‘There you are,’ he said, smiling. ‘Your first piece of greenstone.’
‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ exclaimed Rose. And it was. The light from their lamps shone into the stone, revealing the world within. The darker veins of jade looked like threads of plants growing in a sea of green.
With the stone clutched tightly in Rose’s hand, they continued. At most falls Tony found a concretion or two. They were well into the mine when he first noticed the footprints. Thinking about it, he realised that they had been there all along: a single set of prints pressed into the new sand, leading into the mine. He pointed them out to Rose.
‘Somebody’s in there,’ she said, with a touch of fear in her voice.
Tony nodded. ‘Do you want to go back?’
‘Do you?’
‘No. I want to find out who it is and what he’s doing.’
‘Then we’ll continue. But don’t you get away from me.’
‘You can hold onto me if you like.’
She gave a little nervous giggle. ‘I’m not
that
scared.’
Tony led at a brisk pace. They gave up all thoughts of searching for stones. All they could think of was what they might find when they got to the end.
The footprints were still there just before they got to the wagon. Yet where the mine branched in three it was difficult to tell, as there were so many prints in the old sand. Tony took the path to the uranium.
Silently, they crept along the ancient limestone pathway. Tony could feel his heart thumping in his chest. Every now and then Rose would touch his arm for reassurance. He could hear her quick, irregular breathing—she was as fearful as he was. He did consider turning off the lamps, but the thought of being in the dark soon expelled that thought.
The last part was the scariest. Now the person must have seen the light coming down the tunnel and could be lying in wait. He could even have a weapon. As they edged through the last narrow space, Rose’s hand found Tony’s and gripped tightly. He returned the pressure, hoping to show a confidence he didn’t feel.
In the end the grotto was empty. It was both a relief and a disappointment.
Rose was the first to speak. ‘He must be in one of the other parts.’
‘Yes, but he’s been here. See, a lot more of the crystals have gone.’ The blank area they had found earlier was now several metres across. There were signs of new chipping, maybe as recent as today.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Rose.
‘Check the other branches,’ he replied, grimly.
They backtracked to the wagon. Tony took the left-most branch, the one that led to the glow-worms.
Not far along, they came to a recent sand fall showing footprints. There were two sets: one leading in and one leading out—whoever it was had left. Tony quickly went back to the wagon to check the last place where they had
seen the prints in the main tunnel—there was now a set heading out.
‘He’s gone,’ he said when he got back to Rose.
‘Good,’ was all she said, but Tony could see her body relax and her breathing settle.
‘C’mon. Let’s have a look at these glow-worms.’
They had not gone far before tiny pinpricks of light could be seen on the roof. The tunnel was now only limestone, with muddy tidemarks showing where it sometimes flooded.
Not much further on, their torches picked up a wall of limestone seemingly blocking the way. Tony was gazing at the glow-worms as he walked when Rose yelled out in alarm. ‘Watch out!’
He stopped dead, just centimetres short of where the path disappeared into a black hole.
They stood shining their lamps into the hole. The bottom was several metres below.
Then they heard the talking—a murmur of conversation, distorted by echoing from the rocks.
‘I’m going down there,’ said Tony.
‘No! Tony, no.’
‘I’m going down,’ he said, loudly, as if trying to convince himself. ‘I want to know what’s going on.’ Then more gently: ‘You’ll be okay. You’ve got a light. Just scream if anything happens.’
‘I’ll be able to do that all right,’ she said with feeling.
The way was steep but not difficult. The layered nature of the limestone provided plenty of foot and handholds.
At one stage he paused and looked up: the hole continued up past the path to a roof covered in thousands of glow-worms.
All the time the talking was getting louder, yet not loud enough for the people to be directly below him. They had to be up some sort of side passage.
The bottom was a tiny beach of sand, trampled with footprints, yet only a few people could have fitted on it. At one side was a small stream. The murmuring came from where the water flowed into a hole in the rock. Tony moved to investigate, his heart almost beating in his mouth. He shone the light into the hole—nothing—except more limestone and the talking.
Maybe there was another chamber; one with a different entrance. There was just enough space to squeeze along a little, and he did so, as far as he could. There was still nothing to see, but the noise was very loud as if it were right by him.